This Week in Tech 970 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 joy this week at Tech. Oh, I have a great panel for you. Mike Masnick is here from Tech Dirt. Louise Metsakis she's got a brand new newsletter. She's starting up, but of course we remember her from SEMA for and rest of the world, and Somebody who hasn't been with us in a long time. Or Berto Baldwin is here, car guy Musician and he currently works at SAE. We're gonna talk about tiktok. Trump wants to save it, biden wants to ban it. It's all confusing. What's gonna happen? Sam Altman is told you can't bring your orb in here. The creepy AI dolls, marilyn Monroe, twitter lots to talk about. This is gonna be a fun show. Stay tuned. This week in tech is next.

00:44 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is this is twit this week in tech, episode 970, recorded Sunday, march 10th 2024. Where did jazz come from this episode brought to you by Robin Hood? Did you know that even if you have a 401k for retirement, you can still have an IRA? Robin Hood is the only IRA that gives you a 3% boost on every dollar you contribute when you subscribe to Robin Hood Gold. But get this now. Through April 30th, robin Hood is even boosting every single dollar you transfer in from other retirement accounts With a 3% match. That's right. No cap on the 3% match. Robin Hood Gold gets you the most for your retirement Thanks to their IRA with a 3% match. This offer is good through April 30th. Get started at Robin Hood comms. Slash boost Subscription fees. Apply now for some legal info claim as of Q1 2024, validated by radius global market research.

01:54
Investing involves risk, including loss. Limitations apply to IRAs and 401ks. 3% match requires Robin Hood Gold for one year from the date of first. 3% match must keep Robin Hood IRA for five years. The 3% matching on transfers is subject to specific terms and conditions. Robin Hood IRA available to US customers in good standing. Robin Hood financial LLC. Member. Sipc is a registered broker dealer. It's time for twint. This week at Tech the show, we cover the week's tech news. We have a stellar Panel for you. I know I say that every week, but, benito, you've put together one of my favorite groups of people, starting with the guy sitting right next to me. Roberto Baldwin is here, bobby, we call him from no. No one calls me.

02:44 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
No.

02:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robbie, robbie, robbie, baby Bobby. Movie. Robbie is Is a longtime car guy, worked also a TMZ and that's always fun and. And currently is sustainability editor at SAE, the standards body, yeah, but that's pretty cool.

03:06 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, it's pretty it. I have access to all the standards back to 1906 and I'll just go there and like read things. I found a thing from 19, the 1920s talking about electric vehicles, because they had electric vehicles, the same issues. They were like, oh you got to charge it, how long it's gonna charge? Everything about electric vehicles they were talking about in the 1920s.

03:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They, except they weren't using. They were using lead acid.

03:28 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, there's a lot of Edison batteries. They call them Edison better. Well, they had lead acid and Edison batteries. It's too different.

03:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay anyway, good to have you back in studio, which is wonderful also with us Louise Metsakis, who has a big announcement. Hi Louise, last time you were here we fixed the semaphore globe and got it rotating the right way, but you've moved on from semaphore. You're starting your own newsletter tomorrow.

03:54 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, you guys are sort of the first ones to get a look. Yeah, I had a great time at semaphore, but I just thought that there was a speed that was really under explored. So, as you know, you know I covered Amazon for a long time. I've covered a lot of aspects of e-commerce, so I'm starting a new newsletter called you may also like, which is sort of about the world of e-commerce, and a lot of it, as many people know, traces back to China, so a lot of my reporting is also going to be sort of about China, and I know we have a lot of tiktok news today.

04:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yes, we do, and and you have an article in the in wired, I guess, kind of a preview of what we might be seeing the influencers getting paid to promote designer knockoffs From China. Where else but tiktok right? Yeah, exactly yeah but before we get to that, let me also introduce the third on the superstar these days, mr Mike Maznik of a tech dirt. No seriously, mike, you think I'm blowing smoke, but you are no.

04:50
I'm not you're kicking it, you're knocking out of the park. You're doing great stuff. Tecturt is probably the most quoted website on our network. Just because you know what you're talking about, I look, you know. You wrote the article when Elon bought Twitter on speed running Right, which was brilliant. Speed running, the Moderation, moderation learning curve oh, it's like. You even did made a game out of it, which I love. Yes, yeah, and everything you said Elon would have to do he did was completely prescient. But what you know I want to give you credit for for being a, you know, futurist but, at the same time, was pretty obvious to everybody but Elon that he was gonna have to do all this, it's gonna say it's not not a particularly difficult call, yeah.

05:42
Yeah, but you nailed it, you got coming up to, you've got a brand new show.

05:46 - Mike Masnick (Host)
We have a brand new podcast, control alt speech. So just all about the world of online speech. It's myself and Ben Whitelaw who has written the everything in moderation newsletter for for a while now and just covering everything about Trust and safety, content, moderation Laws, court rulings, everything having to do with you know Anything about online speech. So it we just have a teaser up, but the first episode should be dropping this week if everything goes correctly. Nice, you know.

06:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
According to the podcast, gods how often do you sleep, do you?

06:28 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yes, I'm pretty good about sleeping, you know. You just sort of stop stop somewhere around 10 o'clock at night and go to bed and then get up at 3 in the morning or something. You know, yeah, so somewhere around there.

06:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, let's talk tick-tock, because this really hits the sweet spot for everybody. This is a story that's been going on since the Trump presidency. When he said it's time to to ban tick-tock and he really it looked like tick-tock was gonna be forced to sell its US users and its us operations. Oracle put in a bid we thought you know, and then Oracle started in a weird way Running the US data center for the Chinese company. Then you remember you probably remember the testimony in front of Congress In which tick-tocks CEO was asked repeatedly Are you a commie? Are you a commie? Do you do you? Are you from China? Are you from China? No, I'm from Singapore. Are you a commie? Yes, no.

07:26 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm from Singapore, the least communist nation. It was really embarrassing.

07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was really embarrassing. Well, it's well, it's back. In fact, now it looks like Congress has More than enough support to once again ban tick-tock from the United States. But get the. There's a good twist here. Donald Trump says, no, wait a minute, they're okay. Hey, perhaps this most recent change of tone comes from the fact that one of his big donors is a big investor in that Tick-tock, but I would be shameful for me to insinuate that he, that he, would be in any way influenced by that. So it's a complicated story. Let me start with you, louise, because you're covering. You cover this.

08:14 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, I mean I was looking back and I think I wrote for wired almost four years ago. The headline was like does tick-tock really pose a threat to national security? And I don't think we've really Gotten anywhere since then and I think article actually pretty much holds up. Yeah, I think what's you're seeing right now, and why this is picking up momentum, is that there's this huge Movement I think among you know are somewhat older lawmakers I that there's this belief when social media is poisoning kids brains. Right, social media is the reason that they're depressed. Social media is the reason that they're not going outside anymore. It's sort of become the speaker.

08:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That makes sense. That's where they're gonna ban Instagram and ban Facebook and ban X. They're gonna ban all of those, right, because it's it's addictive.

09:05 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, I think. I think you're seeing sort of like that mix with the other most bipartisan issue right now, which is being tough on China.

09:12 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Oh, what is the?

09:14 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
center of those two things, like the only things the lawmakers can agree upon right, which is is tick-tock right? It's an app that a lot of them don't use. It's from China and if you think that you know social media is, is rotting your kids brains or whatever like this is the perfect Intersection of those. I think when the bill in the house to ban tick-tock passed Unanimously, that was still like pretty shocking to me, but I think it totally is exactly the intersection of sort of the only two things that Democrats and Republicans agree on, right now.

09:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It passed the committee, so it was in the House and Energy Commerce Committee On Thursday 50 to nothing. They voted to move that a legislation on and that same day, former president Trump on what do you call it when you do something on Trump social, don't. Don't answer that Trump he's. The trump dump was if you get rid of tick-tock, facebook and schmuckers, uh-huh, schmuck will double their business. I don't want Facebook, who cheated in the last election, doing better. They are the true enemy of the people.

10:19
That's gonna be a tough sell because that's where all the boomers are well and, by the way, president Biden, who is also in favor of this tick-tock ban, as as the insane Kenny Britt pointed out in her Republican response to the State of the Union, has a tick-tock account for the Biden campaign. I imagine others. Facebook will still be used by politicians for campaigning and for advertising. I don't know how many of them are on tick-tock. Mike is there. Is this gonna pass?

10:50 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I Mean it. It has a real chance. There's then the question of is it constitutional, like as soon as Tick-tock and users of tick-tock challenge it, which is what happened when, when there was a similar ban in Montana, both users and tick-tock itself challenged it, and it was very quickly found to be unconstitutional, and so I but you know, certainly At the committee on foreign investment in the US.

11:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ban it because it is a foreign company. Cepheus has that power, don't.

11:24 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
So what? What Cepheus can do is that they can force a divestment. But basically, what's happened now is that we have the stalemate situation where the Biden administration wants tick-tock to sell or bite dance the Chinese parent company to sell Tick-tock to, you know, a US company or to you know, an investor that they're more comfortable with. But what's happened is that Beijing has signaled that it wouldn't allow that and that it would consider that sale to be illegal Under Chinese law. So, basically, tick-tock is in a situation where it's not really clear what they could do, both by the laws of their you know where their parent company is based and the laws of their most valuable market.

12:03
The other question to is even if you force tick-tock to sell, what would that mean like? Would it be the entirety of tick-tock, which is an app that, like you know, is used in what a hundred countries? Sure, the US is definitely the most valuable market, or would it just be the US business, right? So would there be like another version of tick-tock in the US, like everyone's like, oh, why don't they just sell it? But I think not only is that legally, but it's also like logistically complicated.

12:29 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, and it also. It also sets up a whole bunch of other questions about, you know, the, the backlash and the follow-on on that. Are we going to see other countries start to demand that the US, the US companies, divestive their Social media apps in their countries as well? I mean, china blocks most US apps. I think LinkedIn is the only major one that's that's gone now to them.

12:51 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Oh, are they gone now?

12:52 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, they pulled out, though they were blocked got it for years like that was the only major one. But you could see how other countries you know certainly India, potentially Brazil, depending on the leadership there could say well, you know the US is, is doing this in China, so obviously we can with China, we can obviously do this with the US. And can you imagine the sort of what would happen if India demanded that Mark Zuckerberg divestive Facebook in India?

13:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's it seems like a really weird mirror.

13:22 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, it's a weird thing for the US to be doing, and I think they're they're just so focused on this you know, china bad, social media bad that they're not really thinking through what the actual impact of this would be 169 days they would have if this bill passes, which is a very Sh quick turnaround.

13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A number of people have leapt into the phrasing wall by it, including shark tank investor Kevin O'Leary Sorry, I can't say that with a straight face. So actually let's really go deeper on. This is tick tock a Threat to American youth. Let's put aside the addictive part, because if that's the case in all, social media, is that's?

14:05 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
a large, that's a larger.

14:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Twitter, but because, by virtue of being Chinese, Chinese is tick tock a threat. And what kind of threat is tick tock to the American people?

14:25 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
If you're concerned about like data collection, right, like I think there is something to be said about, like Tick tock has said through this thing called project Texas, that they're only keeping you know US data within the US.

14:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that they're not part of this.

14:38 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, it's the Oracle deal. Well, they said they're not sending data back to China anymore, the bounds of sort of like what is US data right? It's like when I like a video of a user.

14:49 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Thailand like.

14:50 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Is that like US data, right like? There's a lot of questions about that, but I think, more broadly, the question is sort of like is Is getting that tick tock data, some sort of information that the Chinese government couldn't get otherwise? And I think often, no like. It would be much more valuable to, say, you know, hack into Marriott or into hotel records, which the Chinese government was accused of doing right, or to hack into a data broker and to get sort of like data that's already very sensitive and available on the public market for sale.

15:21
If I was the Chinese government, I would do that then Jeopardize, you know, one of the most successful Chinese companies to ever internationalized with like in the history of my country, right like. The logic to me if you're interested in espionage is not to go through the front door. I guess of like the most obvious thing. But but you can't deny that like. Of course there is some sort of risk, but my philosophy is to attack or to, you know, regulate on the on the attack surface, right Like. If we just stop all apps from collecting the kind of data that tick tock is able to collect and monetize, wouldn't that be a better solution than going after one app?

15:57 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Well, you think you're going after the ad sales market, and then there you know they have money right, then everyone's the saddest and yeah yeah, I'm more concerned about the ad sales. I mean China could just buy data from Facebook.

16:10 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
It's yeah, actually they were just banned from buying data from data brokers.

16:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was an ex. Actually I don't know how effective an executive order.

16:16 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, you can't buy data through beta brokers? Oh no, so we just set up a shell company in another country or in the United States out of Florida and you buy the data, and then you just and honestly.

16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if the Chinese government the CCP particularly that cares about me or you. They might care about Chinese dissonance in the United States or Chinese, yeah, national in the nationals in the United States. Maybe that's what they're worried about.

16:42 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
But I would hope the targets are always the same targets. We don't have to see those. It's civil rights. You know people who are fighting for city or civil rights or dissonance. It's you know Politicians Go ahead.

16:53 - Mike Masnick (Host)
They have ways to get that information already, not just through tick tock. So I mean, louise is exactly right. It's like if, if this is the problem that they're saying is that you know the Chinese officials can somehow get access to this information, the answer is like past comprehensive privacy legislation. It's it's been the answer for like a whole bunch of different problems for you know, the better part of a decade, and yet Congress still won't actually do it. And so, rather than doing this, which just seems more like a show trial and attacking one particular company because of where it's based, you know there's a way to fix this, and that's like have real privacy legislation that that stops data brokers, because that's where the real threat is. I mean, there was a report recently that China was just buying all this data from data brokers. They don't need tick tock.

17:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That information is for sale furthermore, if you're a Chinese national in the United States, you're probably using WeChat, because that's how you connect with family and friends back home. Well, that's Given up for a lot more information.

17:52 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Then tick tock is that's all the Chinese Communist Party needs to keep track of nationals in the US and can we circle back, though, to like the Protection of kids and like kids being addicted to this app or like other apps like this? One of the most ironic things that I keep coming back to is you see lawmakers make this point again and again, when they say oh, you know, this app is poisoning. You know the the kids brains here in the US and in China, they don't allow that. You know they limit how much kids can look at apps. They limit how much they can game. You know they've put, you know, stricter protections in place.

18:28
See, they know this stuff is bad, but the conclusion is let's ban this app rather than let's pass similar. You know rules about how much time kids can spend on these Platforms and what kinds of protections are in place. Right, it's like the Chinese government is coming to similar conclusions about, like. You know the harms of sort of like Unregulated. You know access to the internet for a 10 year old, but they're putting in place regulations and we can do that too. You know we can decide that there should be, you know, stricter rules about how much time you know Kids or teenagers can spend on this stuff, but that's a more nuanced conversation than like let's just get rid of one app.

19:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and this is where politics in the US, anyways, fails us. We, we mean, this is what you know. Trump's flip-flop is a perfect example. It's not, you know, it's probably not political. I wonder, actually, if Biden will sign a bill banning tiktok. I feel like he's running for president too, and that's gonna alienate him to a large number of people under 25. Well, there was the whole. By the way, I should accuse myself, just as Clarence Thomas, of course, recuses himself from all January 6 rulings, because my son is a tiktok Legend. I mean, he's got two and a half million followers. Wow, it made his career. So you know he's smart. He's not limiting himself to tiktok, he's on Instagram and YouTube to diversify.

19:47
Top got him started and and, frankly, the tiktok algorithm got him started. He was very careful about doing what the algorithm would promote and by promoting him, got him a lot of followers and and the rest followed and he's done that very effectively. So I have a little bit of a dog in this hunt. I don't want tiktok to go away, not for my son.

20:06 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
He's done believe your son's destroying America's years?

20:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, Other creators, young people and so forth, who can use tiktok quite effectively.

20:16 - Mike Masnick (Host)
But I was going to say that that you know. The thing that we haven't mentioned is that the other thing that happened on Thursday, when the bill was voted out of committee, was also that tiktok sent everyone who opened the app on Thursday to call their, their Congress member and they were getting absolutely flooded with calls. But it really backfired Because you know, if, if the argument from Congress is that here's this app that the Chinese government can use to manipulate, manipulate, manipulate our youth into doing things, there you go, you convince them all to call Congress, it's sort of backfired. And you know it's funny to me because there are examples of obviously doing that sort of thing and Having, you know, congress flooded with calls. That has been effective, and you know the soap of HIPAA Copyright laws from from a dozen years ago, is is one example of that.

21:06
But that was like much more well thought out and wasn't a case of like being worried about the app, you know. You know Manipulating the minds of children or whatever, and so you know it. There's an interesting question of like what is the electoral impact of trying to ban tiktok and Does it, does it harm at the at the ballot box or not? And so I do think that is a question of you know that that Both parties are probably thinking through in terms of, as as they head towards the November election, does banning tiktok actually help or harm them?

21:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's a political third rail, but that's a judgment call they're gonna have to make. Let's talk about the second thing, because you we've now touched on it that tiktok Is seen as a threat is that it could be used to manipulate an electorate or to Propagandize, or maybe even just to make people feel better about the Chinese Communist Party. Can it be used that way? Is it being used that way? Is there evidence that China or anybody has used? I mean, tiktok just shot itself in the foot by using it, using its own you know platform to lobby Congress? I guess they showed you could do it. I guess they showed that.

22:21 - Mike Masnick (Host)
That's yeah, but that's a little bit different, right. I mean the concern, like what. What happened here was just it popped up a message for everybody Telling him to call Congress didn't, didn't particularly educate them all.

22:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That well, there's a nice button though that that calls for yes. So that's nice, yeah, they made it easy.

22:36 - Mike Masnick (Host)
But that's. That's different than the larger concern that people often have, which I think is is vastly overblown that the algorithm itself is going to continually pop up like that's the food, chinese propaganda and things like that. But you know the the the evidence supporting the impact of that and sort of you know what is the real risk there is still really minimal. I think you know it's easy to say that these apps and these services are, like you know, worming their way into people's brains and convincing them of things, but that's rarely the case from from the actual studies that have been done on this.

23:10
Most of the stuff that people are finding it's like stuff that they're actually looking for, that they actually were, you know. You know, in other words, sort of it's it's more of a demand side issue. People are actually looking for this content as opposed to like, oh, this content comes to me and suddenly I believe everything that that content shows me, yeah, so I think that's that's a really sort of overstated fear. I mean, maybe at the margins there are some some concerns that you're you can present things, but I think the the idea that suddenly, like, we're gonna have a a new generation of Americans who are, you know, believe that the Chinese approach to the world is is the proper one. I think is is really overblown.

23:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe it's people my age, but I think there's a memory of a Gebels using a brand new technology radio to support Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazis. That these technologies, especially new technologies, can be used by an adept Propagandists to manipulate people, and certain people my age remember that and know that. Maybe that's where some of that's I.

24:12 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Mean there's I feel like there's more concerned about propaganda on Facebook.

24:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I have to agree with. This is something you'll rarely. I mean with President Trump. This benefits Mark Zuckerschmuck.

24:23 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
All the stuff that benefits Mark Zuckerberg, but yeah.

24:27 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I mean.

24:29 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Facebook, or meta, I guess, has had this program for a while, which was deliberately to try and play stories that were anti-tik-tok, because tiktok has been the first like real competitive threat in years. And you know, before tiktok came along, we kept hearing the story of no company would ever be able to challenge Facebook. We have to break up Facebook because nobody, you know they're, they're, they're entrenched and nobody'll ever beat them. And then tiktok comes along and shows that it is possible and and so now, like you know, it was revealed I can't remember where, but it was a few years ago it was revealed that that they set up this huge program, they hired all of these, you know, lobbyists and Government relations folks and PR folks to push the story of how tiktok is evil and dangerous because of China, because they know that that helps, that helps meta, it helps Facebook, it helps Instagram, and so, for once, trump is right. You know he's exactly correct that if, if the ban goes in, you know, goes into effect, it would help Facebook. I.

25:31 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Totally agree, and I want to say two things. One is, like there's also a great irony here, which is that in tiktok's most recent earnings, they said that Chinese companies were a huge reason that it's ad sales went up, because they're taking billions of dollars from Timu and Xi'an, which are two Chinese shopping apps. Right, so, like, on one hand, they, you know, want to raise fears about China and, on the other hand, these big Chinese companies that want to advertise to Americans are, you know, a huge benefit to meta. And the other thing I want to say is that I am sympathetic to this idea that, like, propaganda can be convincing and that, like, there are, you know, a lot of sort of like Veiled interests on the internet that are trying to convince people of, you know, different narratives for different reasons, and they're not always very forthcoming about that.

26:13
But the data shows that around the world, people are becoming more skeptical, feel more negative towards the Chinese government and so fewer people want to go there. Their borders were closed for a long time. I think even the people who love TikTok were seeing these really strict lockdowns that were scary. They were seeing these crackdowns on protests over those lockdowns. Over the last few years, fewer and fewer people are studying abroad in China because they don't want to go there. The rate of people learning Mandarin in the US is going down. I think all of that is not necessarily good for understanding and for our relations, but I think that all that shows that even if those propaganda efforts are happening on TikTok or other apps, they're not working. All the data is not going in that direction. If all of a sudden, we saw the Pugh data shooting up, that all of a sudden, all the kids in America love Xi Jinping, we would need to understand why that's happening. But there's no corresponding trend for this fear. It's not happening, not working.

27:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there we go. I think we've solved the issue.

27:16 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I think we can. Meta continues to lie to us.

27:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just send this clip to your senator and Congress critter and maybe they'll I feel like they'll walk right up to the precipice, but they will back down when the time it's just too politically risky to do this. Maybe it makes certain people happy, but their I mean your risk of alienating voters is huge. I think maybe I'm wrong. All right, let's take a little break. We'll come back with more good panel. Great to have Mike Maznick, robbie Baldwin Did I say that right?

27:54
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29:35 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I think so. How did that happen? Because it's all made up and it could go anywhere. Anything could happen, right? I covered Bitcoin for like a year and I just couldn't cover it anymore because it just made me insane.

29:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's nothing to say about it.

29:48 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, and then like and people are like well, it's secure. I'm like it's secure like a fire safe, like you can put all your papers into fire safe in your house, but guess what, someone can come in and take the fire safe and just leave and now they have weeks, months, years to break into your fire safe.

30:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh gosh, I better get a better fire If I put my fire safe in it.

30:06 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Fire safe with that Well you put a fire safe and a fire safe and a fire safe and then a safe. That's like you know what's totally secure my Bitcoin wallet.

30:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got eight Bitcoin in there and I can't get it because I forgot the password. That's secure.

30:18 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I have like random Bitcoins. I guess they're in, but because I was covering it like people send me Bitcoins so I could use it to buy things so I could test out their stuff and then like, oh, we can keep the Bitcoin, like nope, and I would just destroy the number. So there's just random Bitcoins out in the ether.

30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that whatever, I think there's a significant percentage like a third of all Bitcoin are lost. Like just Steve Gibson, a guy who hosts security. Now in the early days of Bitcoin, we were talking about Satoshi Nakamoto's paper and the math behind his stuff and he and this. In the early days you could do this. He set up a PC as a Bitcoin miner, gets up the next morning there's 50 Bitcoin in the tray. You go. That's nice At the time, you know, $12.

31:01 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
By a pizza that's great.

31:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He put it on a yeah by a pizza. He put it on a hard drive, his wallet and forgot about it. Later erased the hard drive, reused it. Now 50 Bitcoin. What is that? $3 million, that's what's. Yeah.

31:16 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
through a way, I didn't lose that $3 million. I remember the wired Bitcoin miner that we had in the little gadget lab labs Just running.

31:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just running as a little In the early days. You could do that, they did a whole article, like years later, about it.

31:27 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I think they lost it or they threw it away, I don't remember.

31:29 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, I wrote the article about us trying to find it out. There you go. Oh my God, it's coming around full circle.

31:37
I would love to see how much it's worth right now. But so, yeah, there was that miner that was bought, and then the wired reviewed the miner and the idea was like, oh, we're going to throw out the key to the Bitcoin that's being mined here because, like it's an ethical thing, right, like we can't like make money from this article. And then they threw out the key and then, by the time I wrote about it in like I don't know, that must have been 2018 or something it was worth $100,000. And so it's like a million hours.

32:03 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's worth millions. I remember Kalori was like, oh well, we can either like donate the money or we'll probably just throw away the key and I was like, all right, whatever, I'm like, what's this thing running?

32:12 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Oh, that's a little Bitcoin miner.

32:14 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
That's ethics we should be, I'm like, oh, how much is it like we don't know, we don't care.

32:17 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I think it was like a few hundred or something at the time. And yeah, nick Thompson was like I'll give you some of the money and we'll, like, we'll hire a crypto correspondent or something, if we can Wait a minute.

32:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There were a few hundred Bitcoin in there.

32:30 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
No, it was just worth $100,000. I can't remember, it was probably like 10 Bitcoins or something.

32:34 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Well, now that's, that's still. I mean you could pay for some journalists with that.

32:39 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Exactly yeah, so it was worth it to like. I talked to some, like you know, cryptologists as in like actual people working on cryptography, and they were like, yeah, that's sort of hopeless.

32:52 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's your fire safe. You're like. Well, there you go. I lost a key, yeah.

32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm hoping that maybe with hypnosis I can remember the password.

33:00 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Or there was that one guy, though, who went through the dump. Remember.

33:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Looking for a smart drive.

33:05 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I think we find it or no?

33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never heard about finding it I think they were still looking. Oh, my God.

33:11 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I just had a conversation with someone last week that they're still looking, and then the other.

33:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's like he's like gone through this stuff for two years. That's the.

33:20 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I mean, if there are hundreds of millions of dollars available, suddenly that seems maybe more worth it.

33:26 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
You know, the other story is the.

33:29 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm sorry, I was going to say.

33:30 - Mike Masnick (Host)
The other story is the Stefan Thomas who was a web designer and in the early days, designed a website for some Bitcoin person and the guy paid him like I forget. It was a ridiculous number of Bitcoin person now worth many, many millions of dollars and he completely forgot the key and I think he had it on a hard drive where, basically, you can try eight times before it erases the data and he's gone through six of them.

33:58 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yes, that's right, that's right, I read about that yeah.

34:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably on Tectert. Yeah, speaking of coins, sam Altman had his own coin. Did you know that World's Coin? And he also had a shiny sphere that you were Orb or was it an orb Orb that you were supposed to? Look into and it would scan your irises and then he would give you some world coin. Well, spanish privacy regulators have told him no, you get it, get it, get out of here with your orb.

34:29 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, no.

34:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, so I don't know what Sam was up to. Sam, of course, the CEO of Open AI, but he's also got many other investments and is looking for $7 trillion to make even more. The idea back when he founded it in 2019, some sort of blockchain based, decentralized, non-governmental authentication system. So you would have your identity, but you would control it, and then let's throw in some currency too. Mike, is that accurate, is that?

35:08 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I mean, the problem is I don't think anyone fully understands what he's trying to do with it. But yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of different things that we're driving it, and part of it is that identity systems have been sort of the bane of the wider internet forever, and if we are to have sort of truly decentralized systems, having a really good identity system that is also decentralized actually is a big and important challenge, and it's one that lots of people are kind of working on, but figuring out how to make it work is important.

35:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think that was part of it, in other words, a noble intent and a noble purpose.

35:45 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, noble is the word. There's some aspect of it that maybe is noble, but, like you know, the other aspect of it that I think is important to pull into to Worldcoin was that he's also, obviously, with all of his work on AI, was concerned about how do you identify real humans versus AI, and so part of the thinking, as I understand it, behind this whole effort was that, if we're scanning irises, you can't scan the iris of an AI system, and so, therefore, you can connect who is actually a human online versus who is an artificial intelligence, and so there is an element of the Worldcoin setup that is supposed to be in our future world, in which we have, you know, artificial general intelligence out there. It is a path to determining who's real and who's not.

36:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I don't want to say that the word noble again, because I don't want to get shouted down again. That also seems like a good idea.

36:43 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Well, this is the thing like with any of these projects right, you can, you can put a noble spin on all sorts of terrible, terrible ideas. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's probably a terrible idea and it's probably good that regulators are questioning it. But you know, yeah, you know, it's not like the whole idea was completely, completely ridiculous from the beginning.

37:04 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Well, the thing I don't get is like why, like, facial recognition is, like you know, sure, like there's a lot of like privacy concerns there, but it's a legitimate form of identification that like is being adopted by governments. It's how you open your iPhone. Why the iris? I'm just not sure.

37:21 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's cool. You remember the 80s? Every action movie had to go up to a thing.

37:25 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Right and I just don't quite get that Like it's like you know when, when the you know open your iPhone with your face, like when that feature first launched, there was a lot of really good reporting. You know, there was all those twin studies. There was, like you know, people trying to open the phone with a picture of you, and I feel like we sort of got past that and a lot of those attacks like don't work anymore, whereas, like, I'm not convinced that you couldn't open my world coin account with, like a high def picture of my eyeball. You know, I just don't know if we've really fixed that and do we want to fix that. And like I don't know, it's just looks like a magic eight ball to me and I thought it was so dystopian to see.

38:04
Like you know, one of the first things that emerged when the start started going live is these really long lines in developing countries, and I remember Sam Altman tweeted one out being like, like, look like success. You know, like this is a sign of like, look at the hype, and I'm like this is a line of people who like want their 40 bucks right, because, like you got paid in the world coin, coin or whatever, and it's like that's, I guess, like I'm glad you're giving that money out, but that's also just very dystopian that like these people are just lined up to give their iris in exchange for 40.

38:33 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
But like I just don't think people who are actually buying into this. We have to put quotes around money.

38:39 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Right, but they were able to sell it. They were able to sell it, you have people who are.

38:42 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
You know they're. These are people who don't have money and when someone comes up and say, I will give you $40 if you let me pick a, take a picture of your eyeball, essentially like all right, if someone came up on to me on the well, not me, but you know just your average person on the street said, hey, I'll give you 40 bucks if you let me take a picture of your eye, like cool, yeah, I'm gonna get some pizza.

39:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is exactly what the director of the Spanish privacy regulator, who is beautifully named, mara Spanya Marti, said. She said the agency was acting on concerns that the World Coin Initiative did not comply with biometric data laws. I want to send a message to young people. I understand that it could be very tempting to get 70 or 80 euros that sorts you out for the weekend, but giving away personal data in exchange for these derisory amounts of money is a short, medium and long term risk. So it was more. It was like 80, 80 euros. Well, I don't know if it was. Maybe it was different amounts of different countries. Either way, I bet it was. You know, if you're going to get people in Spain to give you their irises you're going to have to give them some money they need.

39:45 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
they need tapas money. Yeah, tapas money.

39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mara, Spanya. Marti says hey, that's the riceery, that amount of money.

39:52 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
The young people will sign up for a credit card to get a free change. I know, I know I used to sign up for the credit cards in college because they would have like a little thing Knowing. I could not get it.

40:01 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Like I don't care about my credit, I'm getting them on, I just want a nice cream cone.

40:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, food. I asked chat GPT, by the way, what the most reliable biometric identification method is, and it said iris recognition. Oh, due to the stability and uniqueness of iris patterns, even among identical twins. So that's the way to go, we know the trust.

40:23 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Sam Altman controlled chat GPT Exactly why I asked it.

40:28 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
There are other methods like, like and I don't want the robot to do this.

40:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Vein recognition, what the method analyzes vein patterns in the palm finger or retina, which are unique to each individual also remains stable, but it's and it's also highly secure due to the difficulty of replicating these patterns. You could pluck somebody's eyeball out and use it, but yeah, that's every movie. Yeah, but you can't. The veins are really in there. Good, you can just take their hand, they're still there. I like, I like to ask chat, gpt, everything.

40:59 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I just want to know one of those people.

41:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, hey, good news, sam Altman has been cleared by a investigatory committee run by open AI. Oh, open AI hired a law firm to invest. Remember, sam was ousted by the board because they didn't trust him.

41:20 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
How could we forget?

41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that was a wild weekend. Let me tell you we had a lot of fun.

41:25
The people cared about the law firm Wilmer Hale I would rather have Mara Spania Marti as my law firm, but all right presented the findings to the new open AI board, which then said oh well, in that case we have full confidence in Sam Altman. Sam is now on the board. By the way, he rejoined the board Three new members to board chair. Brett Taylor says we've unanimously concluded that Sam and Greg President, greg Brockman, are the right leaders for open AI. So onward and upward. I think we should talk a little bit about AI. What do you think?

42:05 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I guess I wasn't that surprised. I feel like even before this investigation was conducted, if there was something super egregious, I think that it would have come out earlier, right, like.

42:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just think that did, though something pissed off the board there's always probably a text message that involves a photo.

42:28 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I don't pay the person not to share the photo. I don't in F one. They don't pay the person enough and then the person gets fired for their job for about the text message.

42:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know right, they fired.

42:41 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
That's, that's that's so I believe that. That's right up there with the F one.

42:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good job guys. That's a formula. I know Unbelievable so.

42:49 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I think that he's a politician. I think that Sam Altman is. I think he's incredibly socially adept. I think he knows where to find allies. I think that he is good at he's clearly, you know, incredible talking to investors. Even before he got this job, he was sort of, like, you know, one of the kings of Silicon Valley, right? And I think that people who are like that I think a negative word for that is manipulative, right? I think a positive word for that is charismatic, and there's probably probably oscillates between those two, depending on the situation in the day, right, I think that's probably what the most important thing you nailed, which is he is very good at raising money.

43:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And if there's one thing open AI needs is a lot of money. And you know you apparently such an Adele was furious when they fired Alman and ran screaming to the phone, yelling you can't, you need the money, you're not going to have the research if you don't have the money to run those incredibly expensive servers. I'm going to study probably from SAE, I don't know just this weekend, that said, the open AI uses as much energy as 17,000 homes and I said that's all that doesn't. That's not even a whole town, that's not.

44:12
That's not even a small country, that's, that's like a village.

44:15 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
No 17,000 homes. It's like a village. 17,000 homes is about 100,000 people Is it?

44:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there that many people in each? Yeah, yeah, I think that's a small city.

44:24 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Okay, that's a baker's still not okay baker's still not a well.

44:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, if I sell you, okay, open AI uses as much power as vice Celia. Which would you rather have open AI or vice?

44:37 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Celia.

44:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd rather have open AI. I would just scan my iris and see what Sam says. He says maybe.

44:49 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I also think, like he wants to run a business, right, and I think that's the other thing that's going on here, Because I think one of the clear things that kept coming through with the board who fired him even though you know their explanation was always sort of very vague and muddled was that they were acting in the interest of open AI's mission, which is to develop AI that is beneficial for all of humanity, Right, and I think that on some level, Altman surely, you know, agrees with that and that's what he's trying to do.

45:17
But I think he's also a capitalist and he wants to make, you know, an incredibly profitable business, and I think you see that in sort of his initiatives, how the company's growing. You know, I thought it was so funny that this nonprofit sort of like lofty, you know we're going to build, you know, artificial general intelligence. You know, one of the very first things that they did after chat GBT was really successful is that they partnered with Bain consulting to work with Coca-Cola. Right, there's something more capitalist than that, right? And so I can see, you know, someone looking at this and saying is that AI the benefits of humanity? Like, I don't know, it's debatable, right, it's certainly AI that is trying to make a lot of money.

45:57 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Well, that gets to the Elon Musk lawsuit about open AI and whether or not it is actually living up to the non-existent contract that he thinks he signed with Sam and Greg at the launching of open AI.

46:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was really a really interesting look behind the scenes and I liked open AI's response to Elon Musk lawsuit because they brought the receipts. They literally brought the emails that pretty much destroyed Elon's already weak case. There was no written contract, mike, it was all handshake.

46:31 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, there was. Well, it's not even that. There's no agreement. Right, you can have a verbal agreement and those are still contracts. They're a little harder to enforce but they still exist. But there was no agreement.

46:41
There were a couple of emails that Sam had sent to Elon that was basically like here's kind of what we're thinking, here's our sort of overall vision of what we want. And then there's the incorporation documents and Elon and his lawyers sort of try and turn that into a contract, except he's not a party to them. He, you know, agreed to give money. But you know, if there was an agreement in which, like, if I give you this money, then you agree to do these things, that would exist. And they did not present that with the lawsuit which they would have. So there's no clear, actual agreement. So that part of the lawsuit is already weak.

47:16
And then open AI comes with the actual emails of the discussions that they had with Elon before he abandoned open AI, which showed that he was totally on board with the idea of them setting up this for profit. It's or actually, as they like to call it, capped profit. There's a limit to how much profit they can get capped profit entity under the nonprofit and he was on board, except that he wanted to control it and he wanted to merge it with Tesla, and so there's all of this weird stuff that like just doesn't look good If he's out there trying to claim that his. His real complaint is that open AI isn't open enough and isn't nonprofit enough.

47:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not against Elon, the thrust of Elon's suit even though obviously it's meritless that the point of open AI from the beginning, at least as I understood it in 2015 was we can't let big tech, particularly Google, dominate AI research. It needs to be done in the open, open source to benefit everybody, because otherwise it just makes Google more powerful. That seems that seemed reasonable. But what also seems reasonable and it becomes clear in these emails is it ain't cheap and somebody's going to have to foot the bill. Initially, elon threw in kind of a token like 50 million I can't have the number here somewhere but that they ran out of that pretty quickly. He Elon agreed with Altman that was going to take at least a billion in the long run. Elon says in an email we need to go with a much bigger number than 100 million. To avoid sounding hopeless, I think we should say we're starting with $1 billion funding commitment. I'll cover what anyone else doesn't provide.

49:00
But then, as you point out, in the midst of the negotiations, elon says well, let me tell you this I want to control the board, I want to be the CEO and we want to merge with Tesla, which is essentially saying and, by the way, I'm going to own all of this. And then, when that didn't go very well in the midst of negotiations, according to open AI, he withheld funding and they had to go to read Hoffman speaking of LinkedIn to bridge the gap to cover salaries and operations. So I support the notion that open AI should not be his real problem is that Microsoft now basically controls open AI. Right, that has to because it's so expensive. The Azure credits that they get from Microsoft are absolutely a necessity for them to continue. I understand that, but I also understand that AI should not be controlled by Microsoft or Google or Tesla or anybody, right? That's not unreasonable.

49:55 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Well, that's the thing, is that he's like well, I don't want anyone to control it, by the way, except me. I got this car company and you know it looks really good. Every time I want more money for this car company is that I come out and say something crazy, we got a robot, we got a robot with a human in the suit.

50:12 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
We got a dancing robot. We got a car.

50:14 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
that's part rocket ship now.

50:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're right. He doesn't come off as the sanest person in the world.

50:23 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I know, not exactly.

50:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have been showing off pictures of the. It's called Optimus and it can walk. Now Watch this. This is the robot that last year was just a dancer in a costume, now walking across the. Nothing scary about that.

50:41 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Is he wearing sneakers.

50:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's wearing sneakers.

50:45 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Are those vans?

50:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are those vans?

50:49 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Those Nike foot, like the ones that are formed to your feet.

50:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it that everybody in the factories is wandering around, you know, yeah, it's walking around.

50:58 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
No big deal. You know, it's cool is that Honda had this in the 90s. Oh yeah, azamo. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, you're like oh, they're making Azamo, but taller Cool.

51:08 - Mike Masnick (Host)
There was the other video of that robot folding clothes that somebody worked out was actually it was mimicking. There was somebody off screen who was actually folding clothes and the robot was just following their movements, as opposed to like seeing clothes and knowing how to fold them.

51:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually Azamo 10 years ago could run. Look at that.

51:29 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Wow, that's a really good, actually piece of context just to put right next to the video.

51:34 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, I just remember the night. I do remember the fun video of Azamo walking up the stairs and he's just falling over. And then, of course, now there's Boston. Do not?

51:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
take, yeah, do not take too much joy in the failure of these things. They may come and get you?

51:47 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
No, no, I'm on board Robots. Good job, I'm your friend.

51:52 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
And during the uprising.

51:53 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Whatever you need, I got oil. I know how to work on cars so I can definitely work on your stuff. I work at SAE so I have a lot of standards that I can help make sure that you're all working together for the destruction of humanity. Get that on record. We need to make some sort of actually this scaredy on tick talk.

52:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Peter Teal's company, palantir, which has been used for all sorts of creepy creepy things, has just won a US Army contract not a huge one, just 178 million for battlefield AI. It will be the Army's first AI defined vehicle, the Titan ground station. Titan stands for tactical intelligence targeting access node and it's designed you have to say it like that. By the way, I just want you to know that you cannot say it any other way Tactical intelligence targeting access node you, I'm tanging you. It is designed to access space, high altitude aerial and terrestrial sensors. This is the thing that scared me to quote. Provide actionable targeting information for enhanced mission command and long range precision fires. This is an AI targeting tool. That's kind of scary.

53:16 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, I think it's really scary.

53:18
I also think the fact that you're seeing this and you're seeing it so openly and you're seeing Palantir touted I think Palantir has kind of been an exception, but it is crazy to think where we were five years ago with big tech working with the military, right Like five years ago, you know, six years ago, I just remember you know thousands of Google employees revolting over the idea of just Google having a cloud contract with the Pentagon, right Like, let alone like, having their AI technology being used to actually direct weapons like this right, or being used, like you know, in in offensive capabilities.

53:56
And I think you've sort of seen and I think it's because of sort of the fear over China sort of, I think, growing isolationism in the US that you're seeing this sort of be totally cool right, like you're seeing, you know, open AI is working with the Pentagon, right, like you're seeing these companies now, I think, sort of court government, like you're seeing scale AI. You know they're the company that does a lot of the training for these big models. All of them are sort of like falling over themselves to get government contracts and that is such a difference from a few years ago. It's like you know, I think we're all sort of batting our eyes at this Palantir headline and Palantir has always been sort of, you know, like a military contractor, and that's always been their position. But to see them like bragging about this kind of thing and it just sort of be seen as normal is such a big title change, I think, than it was a few years ago.

54:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually you nailed it, because Titan's predecessor was Maven, which is the project Google pulled out of after their employees protested and said we don't want to do this kind of work. Maven was designed to tell people and objects apart for drone attack footage, and so this is just the next logical extension.

55:08 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Well, I think there was a considered effort by people excuse me, including Peter Thiel to say, when they saw that Google employees and some other Silicon Valley employees were avoiding government contracts like this, to say, like no, we're actually going to build companies and promote services that target that market directly. And so you know, it was sort of like the you know, the woke versus the unwoke companies is I hate to use the term for obvious reasons, but like that was sort of the impression. So like there were a bunch of companies that built up with this in mind, that we're not going to have these terrible employees who don't want to work with the government. So, government, come, give us, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and we'll give you the tools to kill lots of people.

55:57 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, Palantir has always been well evil yeah.

56:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They wasn't. It used for border monitoring. I think they used their recognition systems on the border. You know the name. Some of you in the discord said if I were a sci-fi writer and somebody said I want to create a surveillance company called Palantir, he would reject it, saying no, that's two on the nose, it's two on the two, it's two. The Palantir were the devices in the Lord of the Rings right that the ancients used to see what was going on, but of course, lord Soron was using to monitor the hobbits as they as they traveled, or the fellowship as they traveled across. I'm going to get it wrong and I'm going to hear from you. I also want to apologize to the people of Vysalia. I do not want to have AI instead of Vysalia. I think we can live in a world where both are possible.

56:46 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Vysalia is the gateway to the Sierras. It's beautiful. No, the Sequoias, that's what it is.

56:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sequoias Sierras. This is all. I've been to Vysalia many times on the way to the Sequoias, as a matter of fact.

56:57 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Fine city Vysalia.

56:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did anybody go to Barcelona for mobile? You used to go to Barcelona for mobile.

57:02 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I've actually never been to Barcelona for mobile. I didn't cover mobile all that much, I was mostly social and Louise did you get to go to Barcelona ever for?

57:10 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
that I've almost gone five times that.

57:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never been. I wouldn't want to go for business, though I've been there for car stuff.

57:18 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, I've been there for fun. I've been there for fun a number of times.

57:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never been there for so, speaking of AI Mobile World Congress, a Korean company named HYO doll, hyo doll showed off their chat GPT enabled companion dolls. This isn't for children, cabbage patch kids. They're cabbage patch kids for seniors. Oh, 1800 dolls that talk back to you. $1800 dolls, supposedly interactive digital pals for people experiencing loneliness or in long-term care facilities.

57:55 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I don't know I don't need it.

57:58 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I don't need it, I don't need it.

57:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dogs isn't that good. What, yeah, they have dogs for that.

58:02 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Just get a dog. A dog is a lot cheaper, at least the first year. I feel like this is too chucky. I mean I may get it.

58:09 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Okay, all right, lee here's a question for you Would you rather have this where it's like a generic you know it sounds like it's just a chat GPT 3.5 or whatever where you're just chatting with a thing, or what if you had one of these where it was like trained on the grandparents?

58:26 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
like grandkids, right, like what if it's like the?

58:29 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
personality of their kids or their grandkids Like would you prefer that to this generic thing, or is that worse?

58:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd prefer that my actual kids came to visit me, but I guess if they weren't that seems worse. Well, this is very a black mirror, right when you have you've lost a loved one. But oh, here's good news, we can create an AI that sounds and looks exactly like them. Now, what?

58:52 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I don't know I might go for that.

58:55 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I don't know. Loss is part of life. I mean we're all it's not I'm gonna get all Robbie on you, but we're all gonna die. Part of living is on the whole, I'd rather be on the whole place to be.

59:12 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I mean it's yeah, it's not, it's not. For some people it might be an interesting tool, but I do think we have that sort of creeping dystopianism aspect of it. You know that, and the orbs together, you know.

59:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am actually, contrary to what you might think, very bullish on AI. Probably contrary to all of you, I am excited about AI. I want to see a GI. I think AI, I'm using AI now, these LLMs this is the video we're looking at from the Korean. Well, at least her grandchild is visiting her and bringing her sweets.

59:48 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Oh, and a creepy doll. I'm never coming back. Here you go.

59:51 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
This is it.

59:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Last time. It's been great Last time. Bye, bye, have the sweets and here's your doll.

59:56 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm super busy. Oh dear, I just started. I just I just joined a group. I am we're doing improv. I couldn't think of the word improv.

01:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's okay, the doll will do it for you, we're doing it, we may do it and make believe.

01:00:13 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
We got it bowling, bowling league going.

01:00:15 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I just can't make it over, but I spent $2,000 for this creepy doll.

01:00:21 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Here you go.

01:00:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See you, grandma, here's the doll. I never coming back, so I use custom built GPTs. I've talked about this a lot before, but not with you guys. I use custom GPTs to do research, you know. You give it your corpus of knowledge and you can look. In my case I'm using it for coding. I have a little coding GPT. It's very helpful. I really like it. I don't let it write the code, but it gives me. It's better than it's kind of the equivalent of going through a bunch of books trying to find something instead of just finds it for me, and I really see that that the value of that. I would love to see a little plastic pal that talks in Scarlett Johansson's voice or whatever.

01:01:07
Very specifically, oh, okay, really specific I understand, but I think that would be interesting. I don't think. I don't think it's going to well. You don't want to arm them, and that's why this Palantir story scares me, you don't want to give them.

01:01:21 - Mike Masnick (Host)
You don't want to arm them, but how do we jump from the cute dolls to talk to grandma Giving them weapons?

01:01:28 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Grandma, here's your doll.

01:01:30 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Don't give it a knife.

01:01:31 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Whatever you do, don't give the doll a knife. You're good. Yeah, you know what.

01:01:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Put the knives on the top shelf, but I like the idea that a machine could perhaps be, you know, a useful tool. As long as you understand, it's a tool and it's a machine, and it's not real Now. Echo hasn't lived up to that, siri hasn't lived up to that, google Voice hasn't lived up to that. But maybe in my life look, I'm going to be in the home in a few years. I want a doll.

01:01:56 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I'm just saying bring me, we'll chip in to buy Leo a doll, okay, you know what I do think this will be interesting, for actually is maybe less in this specific scenario that this Korean company is talking about, but I've been thinking a lot about like AI translation right, and like AI translation has gotten a lot better Perfect.

01:02:15
And I could see like a doll like this where, like you know, it'll talk to grandma and you know grandma's first language or whatever, and like grandma has a better time talking to her grandkids because you know, the translation is working better, right, and so I do think there are like uses for this, but I think it has to be more targeted than just like, hey, talk to the LLM, yeah.

01:02:35 - Mike Masnick (Host)
But there's also I mean similar but slightly different thing is also just as like language learning, right, I mean, the best way to learn a language is to talk to somebody who's fluent. But like finding someone who's fluent and wants to talk to you as you're trying to puzzle through, like these dolls could be amazing for that.

01:02:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think there's a lot of use, as long as we understand that it's not a human, it's not a and don't arm it, and it's not and, but it can be a tool, it's a tool right, yeah.

01:03:01 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Well, the irony is that AI makes way more sense for writing code than it does for, say, writing an article.

01:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, cause you're talking to a machine. Yeah, and the machine. Who are?

01:03:10 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
building the code. They don't talk about that. They're like oh, we could just make movies that are based on things that I like and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm like actually yeah you're probably going to lose your job in a couple of years.

01:03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you were at Southby on International Women's Day, you might have seen Soul Machines, Digital Maryland. What this is? A AI created Maryland Monroe. They call it a biological AI for endless interactive fan enchantment. Now listen, because she's going to talk, Hi darlings, I'm Digital Maryland.

01:03:45 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Come visit me at Soul Machines.

01:03:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This isn't even as good as a video game. This is terrible.

01:03:51 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Why does she sound British? It's awful. What made them think?

01:03:55 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
this was a good.

01:03:57 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I don't think Norma Jean was from like South London.

01:04:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then Chelsea and 2007 says yeah, I've been impatiently waiting, she looks fabulous.

01:04:08 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm sure that's a real account.

01:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, chelsea and 2007. Sure.

01:04:13 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
That's creepy. It's creepy as hell. And also, like you said, you can just make this in a video game and get a voice actor.

01:04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would actually be better.

01:04:21 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm going to mocap someone and they're just going to say the words.

01:04:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This happens every time you go to CES or any one of these trait shows. There's always a robot, sometimes it's a rubber head with a mouth that moves, and they're supposed to be odd by how good these simulations are, and mostly it's just like oh God.

01:04:40 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
They haven't made anything better than the Tiki Room at Disneyland.

01:04:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Click, click, click, click, click click click, I still believe those birds more than I believe most of you right here they're snapping their wooden beaks, All right. Well, that's the. I think that's the AI segment in its entirety. Is there any other AI news? I think that's. That's pretty much it. Let's take a tiny little time out and we will get back to the wonderful conversation with Louise Metsakis, Soon to be star newsletter writer.

01:05:18 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
You can subscribe right now if you want.

01:05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You may also like that beehivecom. Beehive is spelled, unaccountably spelled.

01:05:26 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
B, two E's, two I's.

01:05:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And no E, yeah, only two. E, b, e, e, h I I Vcom. You may also like that beehivecom. Is it free right now to subscribe?

01:05:36 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, it's certainly free and will be free for the the foreseeable future.

01:05:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So oh well, how do you plan to monetize?

01:05:42 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
if I might ask you to mine a grownup question, yeah, I'm going to be freelancing, so most of my income will be from there. I already am freelancing.

01:05:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, really, this is writing about, this is your passion project. This is what you want to write about.

01:05:52 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, I think. Well, my hope is that a lot of my freelancing will be about this. So it's like you know, a little bit sort of behind the scenes where I didn't get into the stories and you know, maybe smaller thing.

01:06:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, a newsletter about e-commerce, fashion and China, and it's starting. It launches tomorrow. Bam, I'm putting you on the spot, okay.

01:06:12 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's launching tomorrow.

01:06:15 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, you should get one tomorrow.

01:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what will it be? Can you give us a little?

01:06:19 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I think. Well, I'm going to talk a little bit later in the week about the story that I wrote for wire today, but I think tomorrow I'll just get like a why am I doing this? Nice, what does it mean?

01:06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I have lots of questions Like is Timo? Is Timo Alibaba with a different name? It's the same. Is there a difference? Is Alibaba now longer? Good, because the because Xi Jinping didn't like what's his name and so now it's Timo. Yeah, yeah.

01:06:44 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
So actually, yeah, kind of your, your sort of. So Timo was owned by a company called PinwoDuo, and PinwoDuo are PDD. I got really big in China, I think, by doing exactly what they're doing in the US is that they went after customers in rural and third and fourth tier cities.

01:07:03
So they went after the lower end of the market, which is what you're seeing with Timo. So, like a lot of people, I talk to say, oh yeah, my like aunt in Wisconsin loves Timo, like what's up with that, and I'm like that is by design, whereas I think Amazon and Alibaba has traditionally gone after the urban.

01:07:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do you go after smaller markets? Facebook ads Targeted at it?

01:07:25 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, they spent I think the latest estimate is last year about $2 billion on better ads. Timo spent a lot of money.

01:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, cause it's like it is. It's interesting, it's like your relative knows a bit all about Timo and you're going what? What are you talking about? That's very interesting.

01:07:39 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, that's totally. That's totally by design. Have you bought anything on Timo? No, no.

01:07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did buy something from Alibaba about three years ago.

01:07:46 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It is supposed to come any day now I bought things on certain sites there from China. I was like, I just gave up, and then there's so cheap, and then like three months later you get it.

01:07:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And also, for some reason, they really like to wrap stuff. There are 18 layers of tape and bubble wrap and you, it's like it's got to be safe.

01:08:08 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Wow, it's safe. They're just a guy kicking it down the road To the mailbox and they just chuck it in.

01:08:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
stuff from China seems to be highly wrapped. That's, that's Roberto Baldwin. He's in charge of standards now at SAE, which is pretty amazing All the standards now are go through me.

01:08:24 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Sorry, I think that's that's great J 3400. It depends on whether what I'm doing next oh, I have a 1334.

01:08:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to upgrade, so get to work. Well, yeah, sustainability editor at SAE sustainable careerssaeorg. Great to see you again. And Mike Masnick, who also is launching a brand new show. We know him from Tech Dirt, which is fantastic, but his new podcast is coming out soon, right.

01:08:53 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, we should have the first episode coming up this week sometime. What's it called? Give us the name Control alt speech. That's CTRL alt speech and you can find it at that domain name, ctrlaltspeechcom, or in, you know, every podcast app. And it's me and Ben Whitelaw, who's based in London, and we're just going to be talking about everything having to do with online speech, whether it's content, moderation, trust and safety, new laws, regulations. We're going to have a whole bunch of experts on it's. We've been preparing for it for about six months now. We're really excited that it's now coming out into the world Awesome, cool.

01:09:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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01:13:10 - Mike Masnick (Host)
So there you have to have to wait 90 days for tour? Why is?

01:13:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this because they're shipping cheap from China. It's like yep cuz I can get stuff from China tomorrow.

01:13:19 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, it's on a, but they're putting it on a boat container. It's the difference between air and yeah and shipping. See.

01:13:25 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, fish and birds. Fish and birds.

01:13:31 - Mike Masnick (Host)
The fish are cheaper.

01:13:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But slower, they're slower, but you know they're chill so, mike, you're a big blue sky guy, I think. Yeah, yes, yes, they have announced this week the AT proto protocol API is available for others to use. You talk to Jay Graber, she's the Leader over at blue sky. Blue sky came out of Twitter, which for some is a discipline, is like, oh well, I'm not gonna use it, for others is, oh, that's encouraging.

01:14:00
Back in the day when Jack Dorsey was still the CEO at Twitter, he I think he realized he was started reading tech dirt and realized there was no win in the moderation problem right between government Various constituencies. You just can't satisfy people and correct me if I'm wrong. My sense is that that Jack Dorsey at that point said you know what the best way to do this would not be a centralized site where one Companies are responsible for all this impossible iteration, but instead a federated site where moderators were local, they were on the ground, kind of like masted on, masted on existed, or I should say activity pub, which is the protocol that masted on and others use existed. But he funded with 15 million dollars a blue sky, get it blue sky project to come up with federated Social media, and this blue sky is the result. And did I? Is that roughly the chronology?

01:14:55 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Sort of there's a little bit that's different in there. He and he did read my work, he credit credits you, yeah, and announcing blue sky. So yes, that was nice. But he didn't think of it as federated, so he didn't think of it in the same form as activity pub or masted on, which is a very federated system where you have sort of Local fiefdoms.

01:15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we run a masted on for Twitter Twitter social and I moderate that out in a way that I think our community wants, and so if you're on our Twitter social, you're getting what my vision is for the community. It's easy to moderate a small there's only a few thousand people. It's easy to moderate a small site like this, and I think it's easier to be responsive to its constituencies, right.

01:15:40 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, so, but the blue sky Vision and models a little bit different, which is that you're abstracting out the different layers, and so the thing that they are about to launch and I believe it's within a few weeks is that moderation is a third-party service. So, depending on what you do and how you use blue sky, you could choose who you want to moderate you. So in masted on, that works by you deciding which server you go on and which instance you're, you're you're on and you allow. So if you're on Twitter social, you trust Leo you to to moderate. But with blue sky, the idea is that moderation can be separate entirely. So you could set up, you could still be on blue sky, which is their own service, on the at protocol, but you could choose somebody else's moderation service on top of that. Now, who's gonna offer those, we still will have to see, but the idea is that those are totally separate items. Oh, so that's interesting shoes.

01:16:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That might be the best of both worlds. So you still, because the problem with masted on and other services you don't have the, the centralized Twitter Was everybody was all there, you had this critical mass and you just don't have the critical mass in federated or smaller systems. You knew that when you went to Twitter you were going to see what people were talking about, right that?

01:17:05 - Mike Masnick (Host)
may not so much on Twitter.

01:17:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's social right.

01:17:07 - Mike Masnick (Host)
But? But blue sky is very much like they have said over and over again. Their goal is to enable the global conversation. They don't see it as little little offshoots and federated in that way. They want to give you access to that entire fire hose really wanted, yeah. And then there are a number of different approaches in terms of how you know how you handle that. So there's a lot of Tools in terms of like which algorithms you see, so which which content is promoted to you.

01:17:35
Again, third-party service Anyone can create different feeds, different algorithms. You don't have to trust just there for you algorithm, like most social media. Well, you know, where you only have two choices the for you algorithm that they give you or the chronological feed. Here there's already 40,000 different fees that you can get on blue sky. And then on the moderation side, that is also about to be a third-party service as well. As it currently stands, blue sky handles all the moderation, but they're opening that up so that anybody can offer their own moderation service as well and you could choose. If you don't trust that's, you don't trust J, or they just hired a trust and safety lead. If you don't trust them, you can sign up for somebody else's moderation service instead.

01:18:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you still have the centralization of a Twitter, but you can Also have the benefit of trusting, say, a third-party moderator to make sure that your feed looks like you want. When I, as I use blue sky, it's easiest for me to think of these almost as Twitter lists. It's more sophisticated because it isn't just people in these feeds. You can use Regular expressions and so forth to control what's in them and you can.

01:18:39 - Mike Masnick (Host)
You can, yeah, you can add in machine learning AI stuff as well. So you know, one of my favorite feeds, for example, is Quiet posters, which I think was down as of this morning, so I don't know it's back up yet. But quite quiet posters is wonderful because it it looks through the list of people that you follow who don't post very often and then Highlights you know when they have posted yeah which is it's really wonderful, because otherwise I often will miss the quiet posters that I follow, but I do.

01:19:06
I do want to see what they're saying right. So tools, tools like that, and and people have done a whole bunch of different, really creative things already. As I said, there's already something like 40,000 different feeds that have been created and you get to choose, and so so much of this is about being able to choose different things. You know, with Macedon, which you know has has its advantages, you know what you're really choosing is, you know who's in control of this, whereas with blue sky, you can choose everything and sort of abstract out the different layers and sort of make different decisions, and so it's an interesting experiment. I I like this approach. It's the approach that I advocated for, so it's it's kind of like Validating to see it coming into practice, whether or not it actually works. You know that we saw to see so, if you wanted.

01:19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, assuming that every that's really one of the things that Twitter did at first and then stopped doing was allowing. Princess Tritter, very early on, had a feature called track, which would let you track not just people but content Not as sophisticated as a T Proto, but but still it was a really useful tool for creating kind of a custom feed of your Twitter. They took it out very early on. In fact, I met a lot of people at what they called bear hug camp. I think it was Steve Gilmore who put it together, the idea being let's, let's force Twitter to bring back track. Then they started a limit who could have the fire hose. They started to monetize the fire hose and now, under Elon, I don't even know if anybody has the fire hose.

01:20:30
Fire hose being the full, it's too much, probably full feed. So this idea of, well, let's make the fire hose available To anybody who wants to shape it, and then you follow the shaper. So, if you know, instead of having gab be a whole separate site or truth social be a whole separate site, you could have the moderators there take the feed coming out of blue sky and make it into that kind of conservative Feed which is kind of very interesting. Do they anticipate that would still have to see what part of problem with moderation is? Well, if you don't like Nazis, you want to get rid of them, and if you are a Nazi you want to stick around. How do you serve those consistencies? Is the feed have everything? We're not gonna block anybody at all right.

01:21:18 - Mike Masnick (Host)
So that's you know. That is some of the underlying challenges that there is. This aspect of you know, the underlying content might still exist, but if most of the more recognized or used Trust and safety moderation services don't allow it, then you won't see it, and so it's a slightly different way to think about it. Like, yes, they can still speak, but if they can't reach anyone, does that, does that matter as much? Or if they can't really reach the wider audience, does that matter as much? And so it's a little bit of a different way of thinking about it. But it is sort of you know better if you think about it from a decentralized system. How can you have a decentralized system in which anyone can use it, but that doesn't mean that anyone can reach anyone else. So they sort of see it as this separation of an. Elon has used this phrase to, though he means it in a different way, like a separation of the speech layer from the reach layer.

01:22:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of interesting because one of Elon's chief complaints In fact one of the reasons he said I'm gonna buy Twitter is this is overloaded with bots and, as far as I could tell, that's all that's on Twitter nowadays.

01:22:24 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Occasionally will log on to Twitter, except because I still have opening DM.

01:22:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I love Twitter.

01:22:30 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Locked my account. I've deleted all my tweets.

01:22:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you just go for the DMs.

01:22:33 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I just checked for the DM. Yeah, but I'll like sort of scroll through and it'll be like two tweets and then the same, like weird ad for like some sort of pill for a while you could walk those or Gummies from Cheech and Chong.

01:22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I get a lot of the yeah.

01:22:53
But for a while you could block that account and say, you know, and then you wouldn't see it, except then they now the latest thing is well, yeah, but you're gonna see the. Anyway, it's like really just really block if you're premium and Elon clearly is struggling still with Twitter and yet. So I know you guys don't care by the Academy Awards or you wouldn't be here, but for those who do that, or the Super Bowl, or the Republican National Convention of the Democratic National Convention election, I still think Twitter is the place you go right to see what's going on or to see I I, you know, I've seen in the last few like large events.

01:23:34 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I've seen a lot more culture, because for a while, like it was sort of a pop culture wasteland, and so, yeah, I'm seeing, I'm seeing a bit more of that, which is which is fine.

01:23:46 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, I've seen the same thing amount, I think. Yeah, blue sky for me is really replace what Twitter used to be. Yeah, in terms of breaking news and things like that, it's maybe not as big a flood and you might not have as sort of you know, random people chiming in, but there is it's really sort of, I think to me At least, it's reached critical mass. What about threads?

01:24:08 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I don't even have a threads account, I'm just like not another meta thing.

01:24:15 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I'm on threads and, like, my sort of beef about threads is that, mike, I don't know if you've seen this, but I feel like.

01:24:21
However, they're like arranging the algorithm, like right now it's a really sort of primitive experience. And then you know, you sort of have to look at the feed that they've made for you, and I don't know if this is because of their ethos of like trying to not make it about news, but it sort of has a reddit quality in a bad way and like what I mean by that is like because, like I'm not subscribing to like r slash Relationships or whatever. But I get these people who, like must be like three degrees separation for me, and I can't put it any differently than like they're just like airing their dirty laundry and like because it's kind of juicy, like it seems to like get a lot of engagement. But like I have some person I have no idea who this is and they're like at my son's school yesterday, like the teacher said this and I'm like what is this? But I kind of look at it because I'm like wait well.

01:25:11
Yeah because I used to happen on Twitter and I would like quickly often see like, oh, this is relevant to my bead, or like this, whatever is happening here, like has some sort of connection, and so I should like tap it and engage, but what I'm realizing is that it often is just sort of, yeah, like random drama and but there's no links and it's not like Newsy, and so I think that's why it's getting amplified.

01:25:33 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's just like she's a lady. She loves drama. That's the. That's what they're going for.

01:25:44 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
The drama.

01:25:49 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I get the drama feed too. I mean, again it's and like the thing there are a couple things with threads and I just I can't figure out. Like the UI just doesn't work for me, like I don't quite understand what, what the you know how they've set up the UI and I keep getting confused. But yes, it does keep presenting sort of weird drama things in the feed and again it's like another reason not to just like keep talking about blue sky. But like I like the fact that I can choose the algorithm that I want to use on blue sky and I can't believe that no other social media has offered it seems like such a straightforward thing to offer.

01:26:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the rest of the services. People turned down a masted on which I still kind of want to support because I don't know why I. But they turned it down because it's complicated and it seems like what you just described is so complicated that no normal persons ever. But you can just sign for which, for which part? Just like. Well, what? Who should I follow? I don't understand. What am I following?

01:26:46 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Well, that, that's the on threads around blue sky. On blue sky, well no, let's forget reds.

01:26:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, yeah, I didn't say that clearly threads out meta, screw it. Instagram screw it, don't want it too much.

01:26:59 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
algorithm got it, I got it have to use it for work, that's where I'm at.

01:27:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, all the meta product.

01:27:04 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I have Facebook work to Graham. I use it for the bands.

01:27:07 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, occasionally I can see if family members are still alive. That's it, facebook, the thing you have to use.

01:27:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's yeah.

01:27:15 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, it's like a family reunion that you don't want to go the the thing with blue sky and again, like I'm not here to like advertise blue sky. But the thing I'll note is that they've really sort of thought pretty hard about designing it so that you don't. If you don't want to think about those things and you don't care about those things, you don't have to okay, so, so you could just go to blue.

01:27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, I'm using deck blue, which is already. Yeah, I love it because it's basically a tweet deck for blue sky and I can have all my lists and see, I keep calling lists. I still have that Twitter. I tell you how can I my custom feeds and all that. I like it. But but again, and also I have to say this conversation does not happen In the American kitchens across the country.

01:28:01 - Mike Masnick (Host)
And saying I think you should use this guy.

01:28:04 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
No, grandma, her little, her little robot, because you're never gonna visit her again before you leave. Grandma, what are you thinking? I'll be up here blue sky master I don't know, it's kind of difficult that whole master.

01:28:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really only tech journalists.

01:28:16 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
It's a very narrow People who even care okay, because I think that with all these platforms, the reality is that and this is a problem right like tiktok's running into this problem right now Twitter's always had this problem where like 10% of the user base if that, if you're lucky right Are sort of the power posters or like producing all the content that people I Come in for.

01:28:39
So as long as it's like pretty frictionless to become a lurker, I think it's fine. And if these like algorithms make that 10% more engaged, makes them post more, helps them find stuff that they want to surface, then I think it ends up working. Because, like you know, what kept me on Twitter for so long is that the search function was incredible Right, so I could, I could surface stuff. It was still kind of janky, but it was like pretty easy to like see what people were talking about with certain topics and that made a lot easier to like do my reporting right, and so then I would surface that to my audience and I think that that's the key. So it can be really complicated, but as long as grandma is like engaged enough to lurk, then it's all good.

01:29:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but that's a good point. The massive on was you couldn't get to anything until you made some decisions.

01:29:25 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, that was the issue made you on boarding was too hard.

01:29:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can't just look, you gotta figure out where you're gonna be Twitter. By the way, when you go to Twitter now, I feel like it's a I'm an outsider at a group that I don't even know what there. I don't know what's going on. What's going on? You know, get grog, haiti, chaos cannibal gangs.

01:29:43 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
There's a lot of anger.

01:29:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, it's weird, it's just weird.

01:29:47 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's like you walk into it like a subculture, like a bar, and clearly there's been an argument in the bar like five minutes For you got there. So there's like this vibration of anxiety and you walk into Twitter and you're like I'm gonna go back with a blue sky.

01:30:01
I, you know I had like 12,000 Twitter followers. I have like three blue sky far. Totally fine with that. Yeah, because I know what it's like to have like a bunch of people follow you. I noticed like to go on Facebook and have a. You know, have follow a bunch of people like I don't need that anymore.

01:30:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My team's people I'm marketing thinks I'm crazy because I have half a million followers on Twitter but I don't participate. I don't have anything to do with it. What are you gonna do with it?

01:30:25 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
What's the value it's like. It's like the 1 million Google plus followers. I had yeah List when Google plus launched because I wrote an article about Google plus. I guess Google liked it, like put him on the list, and so I had a million Google plus followers and it was like the value of like 12 Twitter followers, exactly exactly I will.

01:30:46 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I will note that I Recently surpassed the number of Twitter followers I had. Now I'm blue sky and more on blue sky.

01:30:55 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Oh, that's good, yeah, but you're doing good work. I'm again tweeting about dream weaver or Skeeting, or whatever you want to call it 5,205 followers.

01:31:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mike, I got nobody.

01:31:05 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Why don't you have?

01:31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why don't you have Mike a tech dirt? Why?

01:31:09 - Mike Masnick (Host)
yeah, that I need to do that. That takes time and, and as you noted very early on the beginning of this, I have a lot of projects and so you need something to help you Actually setting up things like the, the DNS stuff for blue sky?

01:31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have not done, yeah, but at the original paper though you do link in your bio on blue sky, which is protocols, not platform, and I think it's still, to this day, very brilliant and insightful and right on, and I'm really glad that it inspired Jack Dorsey to think about another way of handling this. Good, I have high hopes because we need Twitter. I know this sounds nuts to everybody. Like Twitter, you mean yeah, yeah, no, we do, and, honestly, if I'm start was starting to think maybe Twitter might. First of all, no one thought I would survive, that Elon was gonna fire everybody and just go bankrupt, so the fact that it's still running, still seems pretty vigorous, is amazing. I think Twitter is gonna get through the Elon era and something will emerge. It may not be something I want to. Well, if it goes down, it's Earth's fault.

01:32:11 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
No wait, you have to yeah, no, you need to answer earth will judge you.

01:32:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, we're talking about. Strange pronouncement the advertisers killed Twitter, and earth will judge them. Earth, earth. He is so weird, he's just so not Mars.

01:32:32 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
They're fine with it, yeah.

01:32:34 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Mars, jupiter, venus are like me. I don't need that but earth. So Okay.

01:32:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you believe, as I do, that we need something like Twitter, we need a communal space to talk, we didn't know we needed Twitter until Twitter happened, right, and then all of a sudden was like, oh, this is really useful a Place you can go if you hear somebody died, if you want to know what people are saying about a news story, if you want to get in a fight with somebody, like in a bar. It was perfect for that. And we, we kind of need something like that without the Elon nuttiness. And so you think it sounds like you think, mike and I kind of maybe starting to agree with you that the winner here is blue sky. A lot of them have kind of fall off.

01:33:14 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Well, darth is on blue sky, so that's literally one of the real right drill on blue.

01:33:20 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Darth is here. I'm like all right cool. I know Darth. Darth is on hibernation, but the hibernation should be ending soon.

01:33:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, and every year, darth hibernate and Mike are you gonna create your custom? What would you call a custom blue sky?

01:33:35 - Mike Masnick (Host)
So, so, right now they they only just recently, about two or three weeks ago launched the what their version of Federation is, which is hosting a personal data server, and so that's all of your information, all of your Skeets or posts, or whatever you want to call it.

01:33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, can we fix that, mike? You've got your.

01:33:56 - Mike Masnick (Host)
So so. So, jay, you call it, b Does not want it. So part of the reason Skeets is called Skeets is because the entire blue sky company we're saying no no, we're not calling it that. And as soon as they did that, everyone's like well Skeets it is.

01:34:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can I put on the boat scats? Can you talk to people?

01:34:14 - Mike Masnick (Host)
you know, somebody bleats.

01:34:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's blue sky bleats like a sheet bleats no maybe I think, I think the ship is sell and they get skeets.

01:34:24 - Mike Masnick (Host)
It's the worst. It was just people joking in the early days, I mean when.

01:34:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a kind of Dirty. Yes, this is why some people I'm just like your, your grandpa, going wait a minute. That sounds dirty I.

01:34:54 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Think you figured out why some people were Okay.

01:35:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, but I, but I want, I do want something that is a sane Twitter. I really do want that. I think we need. It's a useful thing.

01:35:08 - Mike Masnick (Host)
So I'll say I'll say, like you know, I don't know that it's going to win and I don't know if winning is a concept that even makes sense in this context, but what I will say is that I've been really impressed with the way they're thinking about it and the vision that J In particular and this is what I discussed with her when I had her on the podcast what her overall vision is, and it's very, very thorough and very, very detailed, and it is not, as many of these other Platforms are, sort of, you know, seat of your pants, like coming up with stuff on the fly, dealing with each crisis as it comes in. She has a complete vision of how to create a kind of global Decentralized system where she is not the only person in control, but that everybody has some element of control that actually works well and is not confusing and is not complicated.

01:35:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Has vision is really compelling because this is brand new. Probably nobody's step forward. Say, okay, I'm gonna make, I still do. They need a name, not skates, yeah, for whatever. This moderated this. My, I Guess people are already making lists or whatever they call them, and feeds Feeds, so I guess people are already doing that.

01:36:15 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yes, people are already making feeds and you already have seen like deck blue is. You know that's not a product. That's and there are. There are a few others like that and there are, I believe, people planning to do some of these other services as well, but we'll have to see. We'll have to see how well they actually develop and whether or not there really is a thriving community. It looks like it in terms of feeds and third-party apps. Whether or not the moderation layer is the same yeah, that that remains to be seen.

01:36:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I, I did the DNS thing kind of back in the day because I thought, well, that's really cool. The initial promise of it was, perhaps I thought that you would have your own, federated maybe.

01:36:53 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Well, you, yeah but I guess it'll be a database at least.

01:36:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's Leo report, dot me, and At the very least that's authentication, like that's. Well, that's gotta be Leo, he owns it. I could have made a trip, but I made a Leo report on me. So and then now would that be where I would, the data would be hosted, yeah right.

01:37:12 - Mike Masnick (Host)
So you could now, as of a few weeks ago, you could. They say it's still a little bit, a little bit techie and they're gonna make it easier and simpler, but you can set up your own personal data server that what they refer to as a pds in which you are then hosting everything that is related to you, but you are still connected to the wider overall system interesting.

01:37:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So replies to me would go there. Might mice heats would go there.

01:37:41 - Mike Masnick (Host)
You'll get used to it. It's tough at first.

01:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can I call my skeet wad? Would that be no?

01:37:50 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm gonna have to leave.

01:37:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we'll take a break. More news to come. We're almost done. I'm sorry. I am Really With Roberto Baldwin, who's having second thoughts. He's gonna stay, I'm gonna make. I got nowhere to go. Yeah, I got ankle bracelet on you. You just don't know yet. Louise Metsakis so great to have you who graduations on the new venture. You may also like that be hive calm. And, of course, mike Mazznik, who is, whether he knows it or not, a seminal influence.

01:38:23 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Oh, oh gosh, I didn't say don't, I really didn't.

01:38:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Please don't say that that's terrible and all of us. What a panel. We'll have more coming up After this word. Some good news the FDA has cleared its first over-the-counter Continuous glucose monitor. There are 14 million diabetics in the United States, many of them like me, type 2 diabetics. In the past you've had to get a prescription for a Glucose monitor, like the Abbott or the dexcom. Now the desk com steelo glucose biosensors system is Is over the counter for anyone over 18, as long as you're not an insulin diet dependent diabetic. Really great for not only people with type 2 diabetes but people who just want to monitor how their blood sugar is doing and if for, I think for perhaps half the nation, the estimates for pre diabetes or meta metabolic syndrome in the US or fair like huge percentage. This would be a great thing to kind of get educated so you don't become diabetic.

01:39:33
I've used these in the past. It seems a little scary there. They do insert a sub, a tiny filament, subcutaneously to monitor it, but it's not painful, it's very easy. You wear them for two weeks and this one. It automatically sends the information every 15 minutes to your phone. You can get notifications, you can get alerts. It's a really a great idea and, given the ozempic Epidemic in the United States, maybe be a good idea to get this first. So I wanted to mention this. The FDA has approved over the counter. Continuous glucose monitors will be available Sometime in the next couple of months.

01:40:09 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I want to try it. I feel like it's. It's a great innovation and I'm glad that it's gonna be over the counter. It seems like a silly thing to need a prescription for. I do wonder, though, if it's gonna help people. I push them to then ask for ozempic right and say like hey, I have.

01:40:24 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I have to do my ozempic.

01:40:26 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
But I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing, right? I think a lot of times people don't understand, like why are they so tired or why do they not feel well?

01:40:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And if you can see this data, I think that would be Really helpful for a lot of performance athletes wear cgms because it's a really great way to look at how your diet is impacting your performance and vice versa. It's a really even just to do it for a little while. It's really incredibly useful.

01:40:53 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, I've heard, like I've had friends who've stopped Like having one or two you know glasses of wine or beer or something with dinner because they got an aura ring and then they could immediately see that night, even though they wouldn't realize, like how bad it the impact was on their sleep, right, yep. So I could see something similar happening here where, like, you have a really sugary meal or something or you know, get that Frappuccino from Starbucks and then you see the impact on your blood sugar and maybe that would motivate some people, right.

01:41:19 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I need something like this. I'm free diabetic. There's diabetes on both sides of my family and I eat like a 12 year old boy, like a child.

01:41:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like, oh, hot corn dogs and I the worst thing, though, is when I had the monitor, and then I would have a corn dog and I would see it, I would have another corn dog, it's like.

01:41:38 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm gonna get the highest score today 800.

01:41:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, it is really valuable to at least understand that it's what it's doing to you. Whether you act on it, I would like to act on it.

01:41:53 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Act on it.

01:41:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Absolutely. It's an epidemic in this country. The the solar winds midnight blizzard Nobellium saga continues. Your may remember, microsoft of Months ago said yeah, so some Russian hackers Happen to get some emails of some of our executive teams. It wasn't a big deal. It's getting worse and worse. Now Microsoft is saying that the same midnight blizzard group stole source code. This, this is just getting worse and worse and worse. Microsoft's kind of been downplaying this attack for a long time at first is well, they didn't really. You know they only got a small percentage of the company emails. Have it to be the executive team, but you know small percent of you emails. This is a few emails. Microsoft and a blog post said that midnight blizzard has been exfiltrating from our systems Access some of the company source code repositories and internal systems. Oh, but good news. To date. This should reassure you. To date, we have found no evidence the Microsoft hosted customer facing systems have been compromised.

01:43:08
We found no evidence today we have found no evidence hey hey, hey, don't send that that thing over.

01:43:15 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
We got a press release we got to send out today and ever in like three weeks wait.

01:43:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is just a nightmare, I think.

01:43:23 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
maybe they'll take the source code of Microsoft teams and fix it. Wouldn't that be funny? That'd be nice if they just be awesome. They, like Microsoft teams, worked.

01:43:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have Russian hacker version of teams that works.

01:43:36 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
He's good.

01:43:38 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Would you, would you trade a working teams for, for whatever spying they might do on you?

01:43:43 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I don't I might.

01:43:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to use a lot of People who use teams great are not fans of teams.

01:43:51 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's well, I haven't had to use the SAE IT department. I don't know how they did it, but they figured out how to make teams work on a Mac, which I couldn't do when I did my interview. They use teams. I had to use my phone because I kept trying to set it up on my computer. I kept trying to set up. I was a tech reporter. I can, I can. I can make arduinos do cool things, can't?

01:44:11
set up teams, but I can't get teams to work on my Mac, open up the terminal and do nerdy things. Can't get teams to work.

01:44:18 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Eu is starting to crack, go ahead. That's because I have windows and I can't get it to work either.

01:44:23 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
So yeah, no has any of this stuff gotten any better? I will say, the other day I was with a friend and she was showing me an email that she got and I said, oh, like, what client is that? Like that looks kind of interesting. And she was, like this is outlook. I just have dark mode on and I was like, oh, I haven't looked at outlook and so long that it like looks slightly better than I thought she was. Like what, this is my MIT email.

01:44:44 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Like this is an outlook email and I was.

01:44:46 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I was shocked. I was like, oh, it doesn't look as horrible as I recall.

01:44:49 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's still not good if, if someone sends me an email and we're talking and I reply to their email and then I want to reply again to their, to you know, on the thread, if I hit reply, it just replies to me oh, my god, it's just so. I sent an email about an important thing at work and I got the email and I was like, oh, I must get reply, all all right. And then, like 30 minutes later, I'm like hold on, let me double check that. Oh, I went to you. I, oh, I sent an email to myself. You have to hit reply all every single time, even though you're only talking to one other person.

01:45:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So outlook in dark mode is kind of like Robbie and his daft punk helmet it looks good on the outside and the inside it's just it's a nightmare, inside it's a night.

01:45:31 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's a, I'm wearing a Like a snowboarding helmet a fan in there monitor.

01:45:37 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Is there the?

01:45:37 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
other. The other Guy in the the thing has a fan in his, but not you, because he passed out at a show I'm not in mind. But what happens is is that and I really need a fan is that the I'm wearing like it looks like a VR headset, but it's really like a wearable monitor, it it fogs up because I'm sweating oh, you could, so that's how you see in this thing, so, but all I can see is my computer screen because I'm running like this giant ableton live Like set up for all the songs, so, uh, so like three quarters halfway through the set I'm doing this. You see my hand just going underneath the mask, constantly adjusting it.

01:46:14
And I'm just like, why don't I just now I really in here.

01:46:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I. We were gonna ask Robbie to wear his daft, so he has a. Just to explain this. It's probably a little confusing. Robbie, besides being all the other things he is and a wonderful guy too also is a very talented musician in fact, benino played with you for a cup of coffee who has a number of cover bands, including a daft punk cover band called robots. After all, yes, and as people know, daft punk now disbanded, so this is your last chance to see them as robots after all.

01:46:46 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Oh, there's also a really really good one.

01:46:48 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Oh, okay, but they look just like daft punk.

01:46:50 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
We're, as far as I can tell, much better than we are and they tour like nationally. We're regional and I thought it would be funny is if, instead of having regular size helmet, we had 175 scale, so we looked like bobbleheads. I thought that was hilarious and I Until you, had to wear it. They're so heavy after I put all those tiny mirrors on. I, I, I, yeah, it's, I love it. It's a fun show, like you know.

01:47:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would love to see the music and people dance. I think the music's great Robots, after all. Catch Robbie's suffering At a club near you.

01:47:23 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm suffering, but I'm suffering with joy. Yeah, I forgot how this came up. Uh, it was the Microsoft teams of helmets, that's right.

01:47:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. Uh, onto the news apple will find 1.8 billion euros it's more than 2 billion dollars by the eu over music. Spotify complained I think quite rightly that uh, apple charges at 30. If it were to, it doesn't anymore what used to. Uh, allow you to subscribe to Spotify on an iPhone. Uh, furthermore, you'd have to install spotify, where apples music is pre-installed on iPhones, and, of course, apple doesn't have to pay itself 30, 15%. Uh, spotify said that's unfair, your honor, that's unfair competition, and the eu has now agreed. This is a massive penalty which, of course, apple will appeal, so they don't have to pay it for some time. Um, they got the money, they do have the money.

01:48:17
I mean, no one's doubting that they have the money. They're a three trillion dollar company, but Uh, nevertheless, that's a. That's a hefty fine 0.5 of apples worldwide revenue, which it could go up, could go up to 5 percent, but right now it's 0.5 percent. Uh, it's the third biggest antitrust fine the commission has imposed. Google got the, I think, the biggest. They were fined, uh, eight billion dollars in total over a decade for infringements, although they haven't paid up any either because of appeals.

01:48:50 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
They go on and on lawyers are cheaper than eight billion dollars is what I've learned.

01:48:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And apple's response is spotify is doing just fine. What are you talking about? And they're doing fine because of us. We, you know, you and people install spotify and iPhones. Uh, they wouldn't be as successful as they are and they are completely dominant, especially in europe, if it over even apples on music, if, if it weren't for us.

01:49:18 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
There's no winners in this one. There's no one to room for.

01:49:22 - Mike Masnick (Host)
They're they're. They're also claiming that, um, you know, spotify is getting all this benefit for free, and so they they put up this blog post. That, I think, was a little bit disingenuous. No, apple disingenuous.

01:49:34
Yeah, they're saying you know apple, you know spotify is getting all of this for free. They're not paying us a cent, um, they use our developer tools for free. All of this stuff, right. But what they leave out is that, at the same time, like the availability of spotify on the iphone Also makes the iphone more valuable and is leading to more sales of the iphone, which is where apple makes all of its money in the first place.

01:49:57
So I find that you know they're they're complaining because really, what this, this whole complaint is about is whether or not spotify Is allowed to tell people if you go to our website and subscribe online, it costs this much, and and so apple had banned that, and that was what spotify was mainly complaining about.

01:50:16
The whole thing just seems really really silly. But the the other sort of really Annoying part about this, and and silly part is that this week, on wednesday or thursday I forget which day now um was the, the, the uh, dma went into effect and March 6th was the big dma day. Big dma day when the companies are supposed to do all these things, and and the way that the dma was presented in the eu Was that it was supposed to solve all of these competitive problems with the big gatekeepers, as they call them under the law, and so it felt weird that, two days before the dma was going into effect, that suddenly we would get this fine because it was Well, didn't you need the dma to solve problems like this, and now are you saying that it doesn't solve problems like this.

01:51:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the the. This fine was under an earlier ad. They basically antitrust Uh law, the digital markets act. The dma Is, I think, as much as anything about imposing interoperability Uh among the big players. Now apple's messages, ironically, is too small to be considered Uh. Subject the dma in europe. They're too small a percentage, but if it had been, then the apple would have had to provide interoperability with other messaging apps, which is good for consumers. I think that's a good thing and interoperability is absolutely a good thing.

01:51:36
Um, but in order to Qualify for the dma, you have to be a gatekeeper, which means you have to be kind of a dominant player, and the eu and apple apparently Was not. Uh, I'm sure what's app is Uh. Anyway, I'm gonna be very interested to see what happens with the dma. March 6th of the day. Apple did release An update the day before march 5th, ios 17 for, which allowed for third party App stores also a requirement of the dma, because the app store is dominant in the eu. Ironically, one of the things apple warned is well, if you buy something in a third party app store In the eu, the minute you leave the eu, the clock starts ticking and very shortly thereafter it will everything will stop working that you bought elsewhere.

01:52:24
Oh, so they're really they're fencing it all off. You know you, you got to be in the eu for to take advantage of this.

01:52:29 - Mike Masnick (Host)
There's a lot that if you look in the last month or so, apple you know sort of getting ready for the dma to go and go into effect that I think a lot of people would refer to as malicious Compliance exactly that they are complying, but everyone is complaining. So spotify is complained about the way apple's implementing the dma, yelp has complained about the way apple's doing it, epic has complained. All of these companies are complaining that apple is complying with the dma but doing so in ways that was not what they expected or what they think the eu commission intended.

01:53:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yet to hear a response from the eu on this. I would hope that they would say yeah, apple, that's not enough, we got to go farther. Mozilla complained because In order. So one of the things the dma will do and in fact I presume our eu listeners are now gettinga A kind of a ballot, a browser style ballot, on their phone. Uh, when they install the new version of ios, that says well, which browser do you want to use? Because in theory, you could have non webkit browsers On your iphone now, but firefox pointed out yeah, that means now we have to write two browsers, one for the eu and one for the rest of the world. That's not a that's not a good solution for us. Uh, and actually really underlying is the biggest problem the eu has, which is the internet. Technology is global and it's very hard for a country, whether it's the eu or the us with tiktok, to enforce Local rules on a global technology it it's hard to do.

01:53:57 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
You really have to go for the largest Audience and enforce the rules there, and then it makes financial sense just to do the rule everywhere else.

01:54:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but apple's not doing that, and that's exactly that malicious Compliance is saying, well, if you want an eu, you can have it, but no one else can. What's apple now let you see messages from other messaging services in the eu, like signal? Uh, we'll see what else happens. I mean, the companies that are subject to this are alphabet, amazon, apple, meta, microsoft and, yes, bite dance All big enough, in certain parts of their businesses anyway, to be subject to the digital markets act. But that story is not, has not yet been written. Um, we'll have to wait and see what happens to apple and to the others. Um, let's see. Um, oh, I have a nice little story here about the future. Would you like to hear about the future again? Always the future, the future is here yet, not yet.

01:55:03
It's coming someday, mit. So we've talked a lot about fusion, uh, and fusion being the last best hope of surviving the planet earth. Fusion power Uh is safe, is uh is uh, you know, is Non-polluting and doesn't exist except on the sun. But MIT says that the breakthrough you may have heard two years ago we talked about it. Mit scientists Claimed that achieved a breakthrough in fusion, that it could happen at lower temperatures. I mean, the problem was that you had to do it. It's basically absolute zero, which meant you had to put more energy in than you were getting out of the fusion reaction.

01:55:44
Mit has now said In a comprehensive report, six separate studies published in the IEEE transactions on applied superconductivity. Quote overall, this new magnet based design has basically changed the cost of watt per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 In one day. Now fusion has a chance. So I think this is worth talking about. It's not here yet, but progress is being made and it is possible we will have fusion reactors at some point in our lifetime, which I think would be a dramatic change. Anything to say about that? I just I just raised the issue. I'm excited, I'm excited.

01:56:27 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Can you see it on my face? I'm excited. I'm excited about fusion, like I'm excited about solid state batteries. It's always five years away. Yeah, it's always quantum computing or quantum. Everything's always five years away. It's coming or artificial general intelligence, yeah any day now, any day now.

01:56:43 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah but the thing is, some of those things I mean I used to say the same thing about video calling and voice recognition, and now those were always five years in the future technologies also, but now both of them, now we got it. So, it'll be here, it just hopefully some of these are actually actually coming. Yeah, fingers crossed.

01:56:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You remember the AT&T, you will ads yes, those are great. Oh my god.

01:57:05 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I I watched them recently. Yeah, I know you will.

01:57:08 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Oh, now I remember how life will be yeah, let me know, I'll just.

01:57:13 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I'll just there's astoundingly Prussian, but also here's one very bossy.

01:57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you ever borrowed a book? Is that time selling? Yeah, it's magnify everyone across the country.

01:57:30 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Oh my god, the nostalgia is insane.

01:57:37 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Or set someone a fax not the pda Set someone a fax from the beach?

01:57:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
from the beach, ladies, gentlemen, no.

01:57:47 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Not a.

01:57:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On the beach you ever received your own email back from outlook? Uh, I, I think these, these are actually really fun. I mean, that was gps. Uh, it really does kind of show a future. That did happen.

01:58:04 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Cash machines. Wow, oh, you can buy tickets from a cash you will. Not AT&T. Well, you can buy stuff train tickets, yeah.

01:58:15 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I think you the minute you wanted to know every. That's all ticket from jazz. No, any questions from far away places. Oh, where did jazz come from? Good question.

01:58:29 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Where did jazz wow?

01:58:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A video call.

01:58:35 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
At a phone booth. What's a phone? Is that? What's her name?

01:58:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
elfman Is it jenna elfin.

01:58:40 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It looked like it could be.

01:58:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you ever kept an eye on your home when you're not at home? We've done all of these. Yeah, I've talked to my watch. I have a company that'll bring it to you.

01:58:52 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Thanks, thanks, tom selling.

01:58:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just said apple, maybe you know Uh fun. Okay, you're gonna stop me now, but he doesn't want any more of it.

01:59:02 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm kind of quite enough switched, switched away, quite enough your old person shenanigans. You know, I don't know if we're gonna get the.

01:59:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, now, no, we will get pulled for that, that's all pro 18.

01:59:12 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Is you think you think atmt is sending dmca? No, this is for that. I get everything we get everything any time.

01:59:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I play anything from youtube Instantly. Oh really, oh my god, it's incredible. Oh, it's all this. It's automated content id. So all these companies have to do Is you know we, I don't protect your ip.

01:59:30 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Then it sets a precedent.

01:59:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but it doesn't have to be your ip. That's the beauty of it. That's whatever you say.

01:59:35 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Hey, but it's, and it's not even true with copyright. It's true with trademark, but copyright, oh yeah, there you go.

01:59:40 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
There you go, trademark. Sorry, I'm not a lawyer. You will. No, I'm not even close. You will. Clearly I'm not. I'm the oppie ever to learn. Get, get your. Take the bar exam from a computer. You will.

01:59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not gonna pass, though they uh, this was the year the sat's are no longer admitted.

02:00:00 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Administered on paper, you do it on the end of the scantron, the end of the scantron.

02:00:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never took the sachs. Number two pencils.

02:00:07 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yep, you see ticonderoga. People are gonna be so upset about this?

02:00:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you will. Uh, have you ever joined a club to support a podcast network Like club twit? You will, I hope you will. Club twit is our way of Getting around the fact that nobody wants to buy ads anymore on podcasts. Uh, we unfortunately have seen a dramatic drop in revenue, but we want to keep doing shows and I think you want to keep listening. All I would ask, if you listen to more than one show a week From the podcast, is you spend a little money to keep us going? Seven bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. Ad free means track or free, and I know mike Will know this because he does quite a few podcasts.

02:00:50
These days, ad agencies are very, very, hmm, interested in, in tracking you and the people who are hearing those shows and we don't want to do it, so we don't, which means we lose advertisers, but we think we can make it up. If you are devoted, listeners would just help us out. Go to twittv slash club twit. You get our discord server, which is really active and fun. You get additional content, video from all of the shows, even shows we only put out in audio. Uh, if you are not yet a member of club twit. You will Maybe before the end of the show. That would be nice and thank you in advance. We had a great week this week On the network. We want to show you a little video. We've made of some of the highlights Previously on twit security.

02:01:42 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Now apple has apparently invented levels of security post quantum Level three. Oh, that's something that apple just made up out of whole cloth because of course they said we, we want to be special. They miscategorized telegram, saying that it didn't have end to end encryption. It's like what are you talking about?

02:02:06 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Coming up on this week in space. Is russia really building a nuclear space?

02:02:09 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
weapon. This capability, the ability to destroy, disable or degrade Western satellites, is something we know. Russia and other nations like china are very actively pursuing Coming up on ios.

02:02:23 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
today, I'm joined by wonderful app developer james tomsen to talk about vision pro.

02:02:28 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I could not give you a prediction as to whether this is going to succeed or fail. I think the only reason it might fail is if developers don't make stuff for it.

02:02:36 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Tech news weekly. Us lawmakers trying once again To ban tick tock, send a push notification actually asking Uh users to essentially reach out to the representatives. It almost get well, no, it does. I quite literally have goosebumps. It gives me goosebumps because that is like that's a flex mech break weekly.

02:02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The e-u says apple, we'd like two billion dollars the argument that awful therapy they're.

02:03:01 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
They're exploiting our resources and our app store and the developer tools they have to. You force them to your. You don't allow them to develop a spotify app with anything else, so you don't get to make that argument this week in google, elan musk suing open ai.

02:03:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But open ai has responded yeah, they got the emails. Basically, elan says you got to raise a billion dollars, give me majority equity board control ceo and merge with tesla.

02:03:31 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
The complaint Quotes open. Ai is a attainment of a gi, like the song, tomorrow in annie will always be a day away, ensuring Tech just like you like it.

02:03:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do a rousing rendition of the sun will come out. Oh, please don't sing.

02:03:58 - Mike Masnick (Host)
It just said in the discord.

02:03:59 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I hate you all.

02:04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not our finest hour.

02:04:07 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
If only got a song on their heart leo.

02:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, don't this rate this way. The daff punk Dome, it's it. So last story of the week comes from the fabulous folks at roku. If you bought a roku tv, you might have seen the banner that said hey, we're changing our terms and if you don't agree, say bye, bye. Um, this is ridiculous. Roku like many companies we do it, I mean I don't have a problem with this says that you will have to, if you have a dispute with them, accept binding arbitration instead of going to the courts. I don't have so much of a problem with that, but I do have a problem with the fact that people who bought Roku TVs would have to agree to it before they could continue to use their Roku TV. Mike, is that even legal?

02:04:54 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Well, it depends on your definition of legal, I guess I mean yes, for the most part this has been determined to be legal. Not that many of us think that's the right answer, but more or less it's been shown that these sort of click-rap agreements that you agree in the original agreement probably had something in there that said we can update these terms at any time. So you'd already agreed to that yeah, I get it you most likely did, and therefore they have changed the terms.

02:05:27
And then this happens and it's you know, it is sort of a statement of the times that we live in, where the things that you buy are no longer the things that you own, and that's problematic for a whole bunch of reasons, but it is reality.

02:05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it. Mashed potato in our chat room says didn't Darth Vader say that? Yes, I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. Cough cough, yeah, they are kind of the Darth Vader of TVs, I guess. Now, by the way, another way they get around this oh, you don't want to agree, that's okay. There is no way to do that on the TV set. If you click no, you get another thing that says yeah but you gotta. Or yeah but you gotta, yeah but you gotta. Or you can send them a letter. Send a letter to Roku's General Counsel in California. They need the name of each person opting out, contact information for each such person, the specific product model, software or services used that are at issue, the email address you use to set up your Roku account and, if applicable, a copy of your purchase receipt. And then we may consider ridiculous, ridiculous.

02:06:40
They're bringing back postal mail. Thank goodness it's a little subsidy for the US Postal Service. Exactly, you have till March 21st to write that letter, so find that receipt and get to work. Okay, I just bought a Roku TV, did you really?

02:06:54 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Did you really Like we had a TV? Have you agreed to anything? I don't think I've agreed to anything, but who knows, when you set up stuff now, you're just like uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. You just want to sign in and just get it over with.

02:07:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly nobody reads that.

02:07:06 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I don't have time to like to like pay attention to what I'm doing.

02:07:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Roku knows that most people, and I would include myself, will just say, yeah, fine, finding arbitration fine, I don't care, what am I I'm not gonna look at. Trust me, if you've ever filed a lawsuit you don't want to, I don't care what it's for or how much merit your case has you never, am I wrong, mike? Have you ever you've gone to?

02:07:30 - Mike Masnick (Host)
court. I know you have, I have. I have gone to court. I'm always on the defendant side. I've never filed a lawsuit against you.

02:07:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know how awful it is for everybody involved.

02:07:39 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, the entire process is really designed to just wear everybody down and make them hate everything.

02:07:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, Don't, don't sue Roku. So, in other words, forget the letter and the thing, just press the button and watch Netflix. Watch Netflix.

02:07:55 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Try to zone out or whatever you're watching.

02:07:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pretend the world is an ending right around your head. Watch Star Trek, Everything this is fine. Star Wars this is fine Star something. Roberto is at SAE now stands for Society of Automotive Engineers established in 1906.

02:08:12 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
By Henry Ford and a bunch of other nerds and the idea of being.

02:08:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There should be standards. Yes so the idea is that the brake pedal should always be on the left and the accelerator on the right Sort of.

02:08:22 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, like SAE is a standards body and we work with people within the industry in order to create those standards. So we don't just make stuff up for funsies. So I think the big the big one is that J3.

02:08:36 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
You should think about it.

02:08:38 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, we should think about it.

02:08:39 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
We should figure it out. So right now, the big one is the J3400. It's the Tesla port. Tesla owned the port. As soon as we start taking over for standards, if you go to Tesla's site about it, it actually points you to SAE. So SAE is actually. They're working on the standard right now.

02:08:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you can now for free if you have a Ford Lightning or Mustang. I just turned my Maki in, but you could send away and you'd get a free adapter so that you could use the Tesla superchargers.

02:09:05 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
So you can plug your up until June something. Do it now. If you own those vehicles, you'll get a free adapter. After that's like $200 and something. And you don't want to pay $200 or something, I have to say it seems a little like giving in, Like OK, you win, Elon.

02:09:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We tried to electrify America, we tried to make chargers and it didn't happen. Now I don't know if it's an inflation reduction act, but I think it was Put in like $10 billion for nationwide chargers.

02:09:39 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
There is a. You can get money from the government. If you're a company who is building a charger, it has to be within a certain mileage of a major corridor and the uptight has to be 97%.

02:09:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the problem with electrify America.

02:09:51 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
So right now currently the best estimates are uptime is around 80%. That's like a lot of people different journalists, different people who are doing research. So we've all. If you own an EV I own an EV you go to the station and two of them are broke Almost always, and then, like everyone's doing the shuffle where you pull up to it, you plug your car and it doesn't work. Someone walks over. Oh yeah, that one doesn't work. So you move your car over to somewhere else and you plug it in and then it's charging at like 11 kilowatts. You're like, oh my gosh.

02:10:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you unplug somebody else's car and you take their slot. Oh my God, I've had people do that.

02:10:29 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Really, yeah, it should lock, doesn't it lock on your vehicle?

02:10:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this is a Maki, Maybe it didn't. I've only used outside chargers twice in three years once when we went to Carmel and I needed to, and the other time just to see what it was like.

02:10:42 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Mostly I charge at home, like most people, If you're a homeowner, if you have a spot to charge like we have a level two charger at my house. So we rarely ever charge our vehicle, our personal vehicle, outside the home.

02:10:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But my son has a model Y and he lives in a houseboat, so he doesn't. He has to go to a charger.

02:10:57 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, so for those of you living in a multi-family, is he blocking from the houseboat?

02:11:01 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I hope so.

02:11:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is doing his TikTok. See, he's just moved in. Watch for Salt Hank's new sea-worthy TikToks, the thing is he does cooking with big, sharp knives. I don't know. I said, henry, is it going to rock? He said, eh, whatever, it's OK. Well, put them on gimbals, yeah, yeah, it's a good question, it's a very good question. More shanties.

02:11:23 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I think I feel like he needs more shanties.

02:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sea shanties?

02:11:25 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah, but because I review or I drive other EVs, I take them to charging stations and it's gotten a bit better, but it's notoriously bad, it's yeah, and if you're not going to buy a vehicle, if you can't refuel it period, and I think that's and if you're an automaker who has been looking at the landscape and you just keep seeing articles and you keep seeing people complain on social media that I went to this charging station or this charging station, or in this charging station it wasn't working.

02:11:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Meanwhile, the Tesla charging network- it rarely hear anything about it. Tesla was amazing. Yeah, just bloop, bloop, bloop.

02:12:02 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
It's easy to play, it's fast, so at some point 4GM and literally everyone else who's a major automaker in the United States said you know what fine, We'll just. Let's just do this. And, to be honest, the Tesla charger is like this yeah just adapter or is you know this is what it's like when you're using the CCS.

02:12:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's using visual things, but it's like a LaCroix can plus glasses case plus iPhone, iphone and I just got LaCroix all over here.

02:12:29 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Whatever you say, is it LaCroix? Or LaCroix, how do you say?

02:12:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that LaCroix. But how do you say that? You say LaCroix, LaCroix.

02:12:37 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
All right, Louise. I say LaCroix, yeah. Ok, I say LaCroix, but if you have mobility issues like having that large, heavy CCS charger it's difficult Meanwhile. That Tesla one is pretty light, it goes in. I've looked at the TIR which is sort of where we're going right now with the J3400.

02:12:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And when he says we, he means we yeah, well, not the. Sa.

02:13:02 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I work for them.

02:13:04 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I'm part of the organization, but I'm not doing anything. I'm not nearly that smart, but they're working on making it, so it's better than what Tesla has when you go to company meetings, do you bring your glasses, case, iPhone and LaCroix. I do, I show them, I'm like, this is your car on CCS.

02:13:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stop that, this is your car on.

02:13:25 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Nex, yeah, nex. So yeah, I think at the end of the day, what's better for consumers is going to be better for EV adoption overall, which is better for the environment. Thank you for doing.

02:13:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God's work at the it's all me At the SAE International, sustainable CareersSAEorg, and, of course, in your multi. How many groups do you have? I have?

02:13:52 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
five, I have two. Ok, so if you live in Utah April, you have a Utah group. No, we're going to Utah at the beginning of April. We're going to play a talking head show and an LCD sound system show in Salt Lake City April 10th and 11th or 11th and 12th and somewhere around there, but then the week before. If you love Jonathan Richmond and modern lovers.

02:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Love them Road run, road run, run, really.

02:14:15 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
So we're playing at Hotel Utah Love, I love Jonathan Richmond the Saturday before that at Hotel Utah, which has great food Look at that Mashed potato. Knows what I'm talking?

02:14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
about If you saw, if you remember something about Mary, the guy playing the guitar in the tree.

02:14:29 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
That was the only good thing about that movie, by the way, Jonathan Richmond. I missed that movie when it came out and then I watched it years later Like well, at least Jonathan Richmond's in it. I missed the Zeitgeist of it.

02:14:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I was watching it. Everyone didn't wear well. Robbie, great to see you. Roberto Baldwin, and of course we didn't mention you are one of the trio, along with Nicole Wakeland and Sammable Samad on Wheelbarringsmedia.

02:14:56 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Oh yeah, you should have just come out.

02:14:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, your Rivian R2 talk was this most recent episode on Wheelbarrings.

02:15:03 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
So I got that podcast. I got an SAE podcast that's coming up. Oh nice, we got videos coming up. I'm not as busy as Mike though. I do sleep.

02:15:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would be asleep right now I don't know how Mike does what he does. If I were you when you're doing, I'm just have a. You know I you might know I have a little bit of history with podcasting Wait ears, yeah, and I know a little bit about podcasting. And if I were you, when you do the SAE podcast, you should model it on this, the Turbo and Cannabulator podcast. I want to see you in a lab coat.

02:15:40
I want to see you with a blackboard. I want to see you with odd machine parts and a picture of the space shuttle.

02:15:50 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Wait, why is our catalytic converter? A rotor for the brake rotor. And then what?

02:15:56 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
What an instrument is the Turbo and Cabulator Not basically the only new?

02:16:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the SAE podcast. This is what it should be.

02:16:04 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I would be generated by the relative mode. I would watch it. Doctors and fluxes.

02:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I could see you in that lab coat. I'm just saying.

02:16:10 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
The familial interaction of magnetorelectants and capacitors.

02:16:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is happening? Louise Mazzakis, your brand new show newsletter I'm sorry Newsletter comes out tomorrow. You may also like if you are a team or a she in. Is she in over? Is it over for she in? Are they done? I don't think so Not yet.

02:16:29 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Not yet they're still trying to IPO, but we'll see how it goes.

02:16:31 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
But yeah, if you're interested in.

02:16:33 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
if you want to know where the stuff you buy comes from, I would say yes, it all comes from China E-commerce, fashion and China.

02:16:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you wearing fast fashion right now?

02:16:45 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
I am not, actually. This is a good. I'm wearing a jacket made from recycled towels actually Excellent.

02:16:52 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I'm living my life Kind of.

02:16:54 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, it's kind of great, it's amazing I usually wear enough for a workout, because it's kind of like just putting on a towel after you work out.

02:16:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I ordered. People who watch the shows know that I have a problem middle of the night with Instagram and I often buy stuff. I ordered what I thought was a sweater made out of seaweed. Oh yeah, what was it actually made out of? Well, it's supposed to be sea cell, which is a new fiber made out of the you know, the seaweed. But apparently I pushed a button wrong. It is 3 AM and I instead got a sweater made out of yakwad.

02:17:29 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
That's incredible. They're right next to each other.

02:17:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean I like it, but it's not seaweed, so I have ordered. It's not fast fashion either. It was not cheap. I have ordered the seaweed sweater and that will. I will model that next when I come back.

02:17:42 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, please update me. I would love to know about the seaweed sweater and how it compares to the yak one.

02:17:46 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
Yeah Well, how's the yak one Does it feel like it's great Well.

02:17:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OK, so they say it's yak will, but then you look at the label it's 25% yak wool and the rest is marino, which is very, always very nice and it feels like a very nice wool sweater. But I'm trying to get away from wool because my wife's allergic to wool and I don't get hugs if I wear wool so I and I don't want to wear all cotton all the time, so I'm hoping seaweed will be.

02:18:10 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
How do you know she's not allergic to yak I mean, so I had her.

02:18:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I thought it was. Did you find a yak and have her hug? No, I thought it was seaweed.

02:18:18 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
So I said honey hug me.

02:18:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said how do I feel? She said the same as always. I said do you notice anything?

02:18:25 - Mike Masnick (Host)
She said you smell a little bit like yak you sure she's not just allergic to you what?

02:18:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fast fashion and more e-commerce in China. You may also likebeehivecom. So great to see you, Louise. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.

02:18:45 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
It's been a really good time as always, always fun.

02:18:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like your towel, towel jacket that's cool, yeah, yeah. It's not such a long leap to go from a towel to a jacket To go from seaweed to a jacket. It's a little bit more of a leap. But I'm puzzled by how you recycle a towel. I don't understand how do they mush it up and then make a jacket?

02:19:10 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
No, no, it's just, they dyed it like a fun color.

02:19:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you can feel like there's a strange towel. Ok, good.

02:19:16 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, the towels are still there. They just dyed it all one color and they added like you know, this is like a sweater.

02:19:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like the coat of many colors. It's like dolly pumpkins.

02:19:22 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Made up different pieces of old towels Exactly exactly, and they just dyed it all the same color, but it looks cool.

02:19:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it looks really neat. Yeah Right, mike Maznick, now it's your turn. Former founder not former founder and editor of TechDirt. Techdirtcom. Brand new show coming out this week ControlAltSpeechcom. And what are you going to talk about in ControlAltSpeech? We'll see.

02:19:47 - Mike Masnick (Host)
We're trying to have it be a newsy podcast, kind of like what you do.

02:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, stop it. Stop it, it's a money loser, don't Please.

02:19:57 - Mike Masnick (Host)
We have to see what happens this week, but I'm sure you know there's various court cases, there's the laws that are happening?

02:20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all sorts of things. You guys are the best and I will listen.

02:20:11 - Mike Masnick (Host)
And my co-host has a very nice British accent.

02:20:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a cool that actually makes everything sound smarter. That leads to extra stars on the review Exactly, it sounds. Smart, they sound smart.

02:20:23 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I'm the dumb one on that podcast.

02:20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The detector is amazing. The Copia Institute, what you're doing, the games you put together, it's just really impressive. Thank you, mike, I appreciate it, and, of course, the podcast itself, the detector podcast itself.

02:20:35 - Mike Masnick (Host)
Yeah, I was going to say we're working on some new games, so stay tuned for that. Oh cool, why do you do the games you do not have enough to do? I mean, the games have been really, really effective, right. I mean the games are sort of like both fun and educational at the same time and we get to sort of explore the different topics that we talk about.

02:20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've played Moderator Mayhem on the air, and the purpose of this, well, besides the fun of it, is to really show you how hard it is to be a moderator here. It is illegal. Review of a drug includes a photo of a syringe. Would you keep it up or take it down? Take it down or keep it up, and then when you say, oh, ok, fine, and that was the right answer. But you keep doing it, it gets harder and harder. No, that's wrong, ban it. Oh, no, right answer. Ok, so this is really a useful, a wonderful thing. By the way, I failed already because I didn't do it faster.

02:21:30 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
You've already been fired.

02:21:31 - Mike Masnick (Host)
I'm going to get you you do. That's part of it is you have to do it fast. Yeah, I did it.

02:21:35 - Roberto Baldwin (Host)
I got fired. It's so much fun.

02:21:36 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I got fired immediately.

02:21:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, mike, techdirtcom. Yeah, thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. Thank you all for being here, thanks especially to our club members that make this show possible. Twittertv slash club Twitter.

02:21:49
If you're not already a member, we do this week in tech every Sunday afternoon, 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern. That's now Pacific Daylight time, because we are in summertime, which means it's 2100 UTC. Utc didn't move. We moved. It's not them, it's us, but you can watch us live at youtubecom slash Twitter. We stream live while the shows are on. After the fact, you get copies of this show and everything we do at our website, twittertv. I think. Most of the shows have a dedicated YouTube channel for the video, and you can also and this is the best way to do it, I think subscribe to either the audio or the video on your favorite podcast line. You'll get it automatically the minute it's available. We must be, at this point, one of the longest running tech podcasts in the world.

02:22:36
Our 19th birthday is coming up next month, right April 20, april 2005. We can vote, we can carry a gun, but we can't drink, which is weird, which is a little weird, yeah, so I don't know. Our 1,000th episode is in October. We're going to, I think, have a little something, something, maybe even a party We'll see, and you're all invited. All right, I am going on vacation for the next week. Who's filling in? It's Devinder Hardware and Gadget's. Devinder Hardware is going to fill in Great show next week.

02:23:12 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
He does a wonderful job, are you going Leo, you always go to fun places.

02:23:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Today, this time, just Cabo, just down to Mexico, just.

02:23:19 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
Cabo.

02:23:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just Cabo, go down and see Sammy at the Cabo Wabo and it'll be yeah, have you been to Toto Santos? You know, I hear Toto Santos is great. My son goes there a lot and he loves it. So he's got some recommendations.

02:23:33 - Louise Matsakis (Host)
You've been yeah, yes, I love it. It's really close to Cabo.

02:23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

02:23:38
We actually wanted to stay in Toto Santos, but I couldn't find anything. So we're in one of those big resorts in Cabo, but we'll be driving down. Yeah, thank you Louise, thank you Robbie, thanks Leo, thank you Mike, Thanks to DeVendra, for next week. I'll see you in two, but now it is my sad duty to say as I do, as I have for the last 19 years another twit is in the can. See you next time.