This Week in Tech 988 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech Great panel for you. Denise Howell is here, mike Elgin, harry McCracken it's kind of like a classic twit from the good old days. We'll talk about the FTC taking a couple of actions banning a social media app, or at least fining them, and ordering some well-known tech companies to change their warranty rules. Companies to change their warranty rules. Elon Musk is in trouble with the EU. What's new? And finally, spellcheck comes to a very important Windows program. All that coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love From people. You trust this is TWIT.

00:51
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 988, recorded Sunday, July 14th 2024. Flaming corn maze. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news with a panel of brilliant, stunning, good-looking, fascinating people, Like the technologizer himself, Harry McCracken from Fast Company. Hello Harry, Hi Leo, Nice to see you in studio. Good to be here, Sniff. Well, it might be the last time you're in studio. Not the last time on Twit, though.

01:32
No, no. And so we've been mentioning the fact that we're probably going to close the studio next couple of weeks. Everybody's going to be doing their thing at home. We found a technology, I think, that's going to let us do the same quality of shows. We're going to continue to Zoom ISO as we do now, with Ecamm switching, so Benito will be at his house, where he's probably more comfortable, I would guess, than behind the giant desk here, and he'll be switching from this house and you're going to have a voice channel, right, benito, you can still talk to me. I should be able to talk, yeah.

02:07
John, our studio manager, is going to retire His second retirement. He retired to come here from Cal State and now where? Cal State, la, LA, that's right. And now. So you have that pension. And then he retired and he moved up here to be near the studio and at some point Lisa finally said you know, we should give this guy a job. And ever since best thing we ever did he's been our studio manager, but without a studio. But, john, you don't mind, you're ready to retire. Yeah, yeah, you're going to move up to Pacific Northwest and enjoy.

02:44 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I'll join Mike in Washington.

02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, tire, yeah, yeah, you're gonna move up, uh, the pacific northwest and enjoy mike in washington, yeah, you're gonna have a fishing boat, uh and uh, he'll be a part on the greatest catch, the most deadliest catch. Also here, mike elgin, who is also always peripatetic, he understands, he is. Where are you now in washington?

03:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I'm in washington visiting family, uh between trips to to Europe and Mexico later in the month.

03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gastronomad Mike Elgin. You know what's good Between you and Harry. I think I have two editors for Windows Magazines on yes.

03:16 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I knew of Mike from Windows Magazine before I actually knew Mike.

03:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, yep, and vice versa.

03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
PC Magazine Denise Howell has never worked for a windows magazine in her life, and she's proud of it, right no, but I've read them and I've looked for them.

03:31 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I've looked for them at airports in recent years and I'm sad, sad, at the paltry selection there.

03:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really, isn't magazines oh you know, one computer shopper would last you a 12-hour flight back in the day, you know.

03:45 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah.

03:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you could use it as a pillow or a seat to raise your seat. Denise Howell is, of course, an attorney, former host of this Week in Law, and current podcast is at Hearsay Culture. She actually has two at hearsayculturecom Uneven distribution and R&D with D& and d, so it's good to have mundo you are. You are doing a lot of stuff nowadays.

04:11 - Denise Howell (Guest)
That's great, love it yeah, and you're gonna do my show on friday I'm on your.

04:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I forgot I am. Thank you for reminding me. I have it, my calendar. I have it, my. I'm looking forward to it. Oh, good, you good, you might see the new attic studio, my special place. I'm bringing this chair. I have to have the Dr Evil chair, right, you do, I think that's part of the look, and even though the gear behind me is, how big is that? Three feet, four feet, yeah, eight feet, 20 feet, how big? Yeah, eight feet, twenty feet, I don't know if I'm going to be able to fit that in. I'm definitely not bringing that crappy clock that hasn't worked in a long time.

04:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I guess that's seven and a half feet.

04:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Seven and a half. Harry is one of those people that knows the exact dimensions of anything Right before perspective. Yeah, yeah, so I think I have before perspective. Yeah, yeah, so I think I have a wall. I have my brick. Yes, I see your brick. What does your brick say?

05:12 - Denise Howell (Guest)
It says Twills in your studio, copy and floppies.

05:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is a dated reference, if ever there was one, yes. Anyway, it's great to have you all three to talk about what was really a fairly uneventful week, at least in tech. It's not an uneventful week in news, as everyone knows, but at least with tech there wasn't a huge amount of an event the unpacked event at which they announced the galaxy fold, z fold 6 1899 it's a little squarer, which is kind of cool. The z flip 6, which I kind of like the form factor, but I don't really much use it. A new watch, new earbuds is it just me or? Or? I mean, is there excitement about Samsung these days?

06:07 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think they deserve credit. I wouldn't say it's exciting, but I think they deserve credit because they're really spending on these events. They're doing live events. You go to an Apple event nowadays and everybody's just watching a film.

06:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a TV show.

06:18 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You have a substitute teacher at school, and so these guys are holding big events in big cities like Paris, right, and making a big deal out of it at school. And so these guys are holding big events in big cities like Paris, right, and making a big deal out of it. Now, they don't have any charisma as a company, really, but they're trying and I kind of appreciate that.

06:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's good technology in these things, but you nailed it. It's not charismatic, it doesn't grab you.

06:39 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Well, it's interesting to see that folding phones have kind of become mature and they are no longer inherently exciting. I think they are getting a little bit better every time, which is what you want to see happen. But my gosh, I remember when the first Fold came out oh that was something. I wrote several extremely long articles just because there was a lot to say, and now there isn't, although I still wonder, if they were were 900 rather than 1899, whether everybody would have them.

07:08
It kind of feels like a niche product, not a mainstream product it seems like I mean it's a niche that I think some people do love. Uh, both, both the tablet style, that's the definition of yeah it's got to be a small.

07:23 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You know, these are expensive devices and, besides the folding screens that they have, they've pretty much given up on the concept of being an alternative to Apple and they've instead decided to just be Apple. You know, let's just have earbuds that are exactly like AirPods. Let's have a watch that's just like Apple's high-end watch.

07:44 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
They even call it the Ultra. You're not trying to hide it when you even call it the Ultra.

07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like well, there's, but in a way I think that's not a bad strategy, because there's the half of the world that uses iPhone and then there's the other half that uses Android and they probably want parity in terms of their technology. I would guess, right, I like the Z Flip, but I don't carry it. I mean, it's a kind of a cool. Do we know that these screens are reliable? Now, I mean, are they? Is there anything to worry about with the screen?

08:15 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, how is the first generation holding up after all this time? That's a good question. Harry do you have any sense of that?

08:21 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, since they had original, original ones that had all kinds of problems. I haven't heard too many stories about issues, but yeah, I assume particularly at these price points people are still carrying the early ones um I think the galaxy watches are very credible.

08:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Again, it's for people who use android. Right, and it'll work with most Android. Any Android device that can run the Galaxy Gear app it'll work on, which includes Pixel phones.

08:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I really do wish there was one great smartwatch that worked on everything yeah that would be great.

08:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish there were a messaging app that worked. I wish. Well, I guess there is. But I mean, it feels like the world is now bifurcated between Android and iOS. Denise, are you an iOS person? I would imagine.

09:10 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I'm an iOS person and my son and I just went through our. You know every what is it four or five years? We upgrade to whatever the current version of the phone is and we ho-hum about how it's incrementally better than it used to be, and, oh, it's nice to have a nicer camera and the thing doesn't glitch all the time, like the older phones you know, eventually start to do.

09:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your son is college age now, yeah.

09:37 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yes, yeah.

09:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So how old was he when you got him his first cell phone?

09:51 - Denise Howell (Guest)
got him his first cell phone, um cell phone, probably 10, but he had a fully network, you know, wi-fi enabled. Um ipod, yes, you recall they used to look like phones right. So he had one of those. He just couldn't make, you know, cellular network calls on it, um, unless unless he was on wifi. I think you could do that. Maybe back then Did I have wifi calling, maybe not, but um, anyway, god, he probably got that when he was seven.

10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're in LA. The LA school district has announced no more cell phones in classrooms, and the other school districts following suit. How would you have felt if you had a middle schooler and you were told, yeah, he can't bring his phone to school anymore?

10:28 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Well, they can bring them. They can bring them and then they put them in you know a locker or a bag or whatever and they get them back at the end of the day, but they're not going to be able to take calls from mom and dad during the day, or call mom and dad during the day, or anybody else for that matter. And uh, I, my son, definitely attended schools where phones in the classroom were off the table. So, um, it wasn't a big deal and probably you know it doesn't offend my sensibilities as a parent to do that.

10:58 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's actually kind of great, isn't it? Because the whole problem with with uh, with having kids, having kids, uh, not have a phone is that all the other kids have phones and they they feel like outsiders.

11:08 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But if all the kids have their phones put away during the day, it's fine, yeah my entire junior high had one pay phone which I believe I would occasionally call my mother on, but only if I had a dime, which I usually didn't.

11:21 - Benito  (Announcement)
If I had a dime which I usually didn't Well, okay, so maybe I'm being overreactive to this.

11:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't have kids that age anymore, so it's not.

11:35 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I don't have a dog in this hunt but it feels like as a parent, you'd be disturbed by that if you had a kid that age.

11:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah.

11:44 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
All right. I mean, I think maybe are uh influenced a little bit by jeff jarvis, who has a yes, uh, high sensitivity to moral panics. Yes, it feels like a moral panic. Yeah, yeah, uh, yeah, I, I, I just think, I just think it's fine. I just don't think any of this stuff is particularly good for kids when they're in school.

12:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just, uh, just now would you go even farther and uh and restrict their usage at home?

12:09 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
absolutely I would if I had uh kids, that if I had young teenagers, today I would say no social media, no cell phones till 16 yeah, I wonder what I would do.

12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had to, okay. So my kid, my daughter's now 32, so this was an issue 16 years ago and it was really. Should she be allowed to use neopets and chat on aim instant messenger while she does her homework? I mean, it was at that level. But as soon as there were cell phones that she could reasonably care, I gave her hand-me-down phones around about that time, but it wasn't the same thing, because they weren't. They were flip phones, they weren't. They weren't so distracting, you couldn't do all the things, you couldn't play fortnight on them.

12:53
So yeah, you didn't have instagram, you know you didn't have any stock no yeah do you think, uh you do you agree with uh surgeon general vivekk Murthy, that social media should have warning labels, mike?

13:08 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
No, I think it's ridiculous. First of all, warning labels in that context are just going to be just ignored. You see it once, you're like huh and then you never notice it again. They're just completely worthless. Plus, I think it's a misuse of that concept. If we have actual poisonous cancer know, poisonous cancer causing substances like tobacco and we put a warning label on it. It makes a lot of sense.

13:30
But, it's a. You know the idea that social media is addictive. It's a different kind of addictive. I think we're still. Just for some reason we have to use old ideas and old language because people just don't get with what's really happening now. It's problematic, but addiction isn't quite what it is. That's not quite the problem, and a warning label would be perfectly worthless.

13:56 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Especially when it comes to if this is all about protecting kids. Is a kid going to pay attention to a social media warning label? No, it's just going to make it more attractive.

14:13 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, they put FBI warning labels on on movies and you know it means exactly nothing.

14:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, don't pirate. That's right. They even had ads for a while saying you see these poor people, they're going to lose their job If you steal this movie. They used to do that in the movie theater like yes, dudes, I paid 18 dollars to see this movie. I am supporting them. So there is a.

14:31
There is an app that you probably don't want your teenagers to use, known as ngl, short for not gonna lie, I had to ask my daughter. Ngl aggressively marketed to young users despite risks of bullying on the. It was an anonymous. You know the teenagers love the anonymous messaging apps. The Federal Trade Commission and the LA District Attorney's Office unveiled a complaint this week saying that NGL tricked users get this talk about skeezy tricked users into paying for subscriptions by sending them fake, computer-generated messages appearing to be from real people and offering a service for as much as $9.99 a week to find out who the real identity was. So they would send them messages saying I know what you did last night and then say for 9.99, you could find out who sent the message, except it was ngl. People who signed up received only hints of the identities, whether they were real or not, according to the enforcers after users complained about the bait and switch tactic.

15:43
I'm reading from the Washington Post executives at the company laughed off their concerns, referring to them as suckers. Wow, here's the sad thing. All they did was they got a $5 million fine. Well, I mean, that would hurt, I guess. And they said we'll stop marketing to teens and kids. To settle the lawsuit. They also. I think they should have gotten more than this. They also the lawsuit alleged. The FTC alleged the company had violated privacy laws by collecting data from kids under 13 without parental consent. Yeah, they settled.

16:22 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
And it's done. Yeah, this is probably why they did it. They probably calculated that, you know, we'll just do all these things and if we're caught when we're caught, we'll just roll back as few of them as we can and we'll still be in business and by then we'll still have the users and we'll still have the whatever it is benefits that we were after in the first place. So it's just a calculated, you know, amoral grab at business. It's shameless.

16:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They didn't even admit any wrongdoing. They say well, we believe many of the allegations around the youth of our user base are factually incorrect. We anticipate that they agreed upon age gating and other procedures and now provide direction for others in our space and hopefully improve policies generally. It's them, it's us, it's us, we're good, we're the good guys. Uh, ngls were very popular 200 million user base at its peak. Uh, the most downloaded product on the app store.

17:18 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Uh, in an apple's app store a year after its launch in 2021 it certainly seems like it flew a little bit under the radar, with kind of older folks not paying close attention. Uh, compared to some of the stuff like 200 million, I was not aware it was anywhere near that big yeah, well, that's because you're not under 18 exactly right, and I feel like its founders must have been sort of young and naive to not realize, or, or cynical count or cynical, or.

17:46 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I've gotten counsel about kappa, which you know has been around for a long time and as people get more and more concerned about the health and welfare of children online, you know it's going to get beefier and even more enforced yeah, it reminds me a little bit of uhcom in the old days, which would spam you with messages suggesting that your long lost schoolmates were desperately trying to reach you, except they didn't have AI to help them out.

18:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I signed up briefly and then I realized no, they're not looking for me.

18:20 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And I think those messages are still flooding out there.

18:23 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I have to roll my eyes at the concept of age gating as a super effective solution to this problem anyway. I mean, what under 13, under 15, under 18 year old is going to really give their real age if they want to use this product?

18:39 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, exactly how are they enforcing it?

18:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they enforcing it, and courts have, uh, in fact, very recently said that, uh, any attempt to to for to require age verification is problematic, to say the least, because it doesn't just impact kids. Everybody has to go through it. Um, this wasn't this. This, this actually happened. It got buried because it happened at the same time as the supreme court issued a couple of very controversial uh uh opinions, but I think it was a. It was a judge in mississippi that blocked age verification rules.

19:18 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Saying it, it it's a violation of the first amendment right, and how actually do you verify a child's age, if they're under 16 or whatever the driving or id age is in most states? What are you going to use?

19:34 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
as far as I can tell, it can't be done yeah not certificate yeah, not without.

19:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh. Well, there are companies that claim they can look at you and tell you I swear to God, uh, you know that. Oh well, we just we could tell. No, we know, we know how old you are. We also know what you did last night. But that's a that's a different, that's a different branch of our business.

19:55
Uh, senate bill 17 in Indiana says visitors website display pornography or other quote adult oriented, end quote content that is harmful to minors must submit a copy of their driver's license or otherwise verify that that they're at least 18 years old. Mississippi, the walker montgomery protecting children online act says social media platforms must verify people's ages before letting them create accounts and bar minors from doing so without the express consent of parent or guardian. Uh, federal courts basically have so far said what no, you can't do that. So a judge in mississippi uh halted, uh halted, at least halted that particular bill. What happened to my? Here? It is um. Mississippi attorney general lynn finch says it ain't over yet. The uh, the uh preliminary injunction from us district judge uh sul ulzer didn't. Uh came the same day the law was set to take effect.

20:58
A tech industry group probably net choice I guess sued mississippi on june 7th, saying the law would unconstitutionally limit access to online speech for minors and adults. The judge wrote it is not lost on the court the seriousness of the issue that legislature was attempting to address. Nor does the court doubt the good intentions. However, there's no way to do this without severely hurting the rights of adults as well as kids. Meanwhile, the Attorney General says that age verification for digital sites could mitigate harm caused by sex trafficking, sexual abuse, child pornography, targeted harassment, sextortion, incitement to suicide, self-harm and other often harmful and often illegal conduct against children. And we're not going to give up. We're going to pursue this. So that means, while this is just a temporary injunction, the state will pursue it and perhaps even go to the US Supreme Court.

21:59 - Denise Howell (Guest)
You know this NGL and the fortnight settlement earlier, which was hundreds of millions of dollars, um, and people are now eligible to to be paid proceeds of that of that if they feel like their child was duped into buying things in Fortnite because of dark patterns, et cetera. I think it's great that the FTC is trying to make there be good behavior standards at some level, but you're never going to get around the fact that and this is really hard for families who are stretched for time and resources but parents have to know what their kids are doing.

22:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have to be involved yeah, there's no way a state legislature can protect uh your kids without your help yeah um it.

22:53
I understand the the desire to to do something here, but what they don't think through is well, how are you going to do that without, uh, invading privacy, not just of of kids, but of adults, of everybody? Parents got a parent says out of sync in our club to a discord gotta do it, man, gotta do it. I mean, I, I understand and it it's. It's not perfect and I think parents deserve all the help they can get it. It's a hard thing to do and I can only imagine what it's like to parent a kid in this day and age.

23:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's much harder, even than when I had kids. I think really, one possible thing that could happen over the next five years I don't think it's likely, but I think it's possible is that one good thing is that Americans are conformists, in the sense that our culture is amenable to changes in our culture and in the norm. So if you look back over the decades how Americans stopped littering, stopped smoking so much stopped there's a lot of things stopped leaving the dog poop on the sidewalk without picking it up these things are ostracized. These are unacceptable behaviors in the United States through a combination of PSAs, I guess, and social pressure, and you can imagine a future where we all decide that just you know phones and social networking apps for kids is unacceptable and just everybody let's. Let's all not do that. I can imagine that. I don't think it's going to happen, but I that's that's one way to do it. Just have everybody not do that.

24:39 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Well, I feel like we're almost kind of getting there for everybody, right? I mean, I I feel like the adult population is very leery, uh, becoming more and more leery of you know the time that you spend engaging with these platforms and you know there are whole vacations out there that are strictly designed and marketed to get you offline, to put you somewhere remote, and isolate you from those influences, but only for a limited time, not forever.

25:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just for a day a week yeah, well, nobody wants to be offline forever, or am I wrong? Very, you're not wrong. A brief time a week. Everybody wants to get off social, but they don't want to get off, so you could just not use it.

25:21 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean you could just not sign in I know people who intentionally don't have a smartphone, but I don't think I know, anybody who intentionally is just not online period Right, Although it is tempting.

25:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, it helps that the social networks kind of suck these days. It helps a little, I think.

25:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I find and I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I'm among friends it's like a car wreck. I can't like I have to go to x every once in a while just to see, just to see the wreckage. The wreckage, yeah, it's the look you lose. You know, uh, it's funny, you know this, mike that every halloween there is a giant corn maze in petaluma and it's right on 101, on the big freeway, and inevitably for the entire month of october there's a traffic jam because everybody has to stop and look at the corn maze. Yep, it's like a corn. Twitter is like a corn maze.

26:16 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You can't, you can't look away but it's on fire and there's, like you know it's people are running around screaming.

26:24 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, even better. And they kick it out of the maze.

26:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's like the children of the corn.

26:30 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It may have hit a slow point over the last 24 hours or so I have to say unfortunately, inevitably so.

26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I mean. This horrific thing that happened yesterday obviously galvanized many different groups on Xcom, including, by the way, elon Musk, who had, without kind of secretly, given quite a bit of money to we don't know how much we'll find out in a couple of weeks to a PAC supporting president, the former president trump, but he endorsed him after the assassination attempt.

27:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
it's like he's my man and he's been posting that, that picture it just seemed like uh, rumors and misinformation and crazy theories and unpleasantness, yeah, ran rampant and there was some actual news, but it was harder to find than it would have been a few years ago if something comparable had happened.

27:31 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I have a list of people who do high-quality open-source intelligence work, mostly around the Ukraine war, but also around all kinds of other things, and that list got super busy sort of shooting, shooting down the uh, debunking the uh, the false things that were flying around. So one of them there's a photo going around saying this is the shooter, and then they quickly jumped on that and figured out through open source intelligence techniques.

27:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's not the shooter, that's a hoaxer how often has that happened on reddit, where they identify the culprit incorrectly?

28:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
you know Boston Marathon bombing being the classic example yeah, the.

28:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Internet is not good at that.

28:10 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
One really impressive thing that one of them did was there was immediate disinformation about how the whole thing was a hoax and blah, blah, blah. This person basically took and dissected the video and calculated the time between visual information of the bullet and the sound of the bullet and found out that it matched exactly what they were saying in terms of the distance. Oh, how interesting. And so he was. Basically, he was verifying the claim that it was legit and that this is what the person was and all that stuff.

28:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It took like six years after Kennedy's assassination for all the Dealey Plaza. You know numeric calculations.

28:48 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It took six seconds and this one took six minutes.

28:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Internet, everything's a little faster.

28:55 - Denise Howell (Guest)
What's been striking me is how you know much more technology we have now to sort of unpack what happened, but wouldn't you think that the technology we have now could have contributed to this not happening? I mean surveillance technology, AI I don't know what the secret service uses.

29:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why there's conspiracy theories is nobody believing what happened? I believe it happens, but I believe it certainly shouldn't have yeah, well, that, yeah, that's another matter and kind of outside our, our purview I do notice, though, that many of us went to x and watched the.

29:35 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
The car wreck, right, yeah, oh, I gotta see what's happening I did learn of it from x uh that I happened to be doom scrolling and I saw this horrible news come through, but then I turned on the TV.

29:46 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I have to say, in the way I might have in the old days, yeah, I was actually watching Godfather 2 with some people and there was an attempted assassination of Michael Corleone Right Right when that happened, my Twitter blew up with the news. Wow, very strange.

30:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you still have. Okay, so this is interesting. You've just revealed that you have your notifications turned on.

30:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
What I do is I have three or so breaking news notifications that ring my watch yeah and just for the major breaking news thing.

30:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're not going to be the guy that goes for a week with no no, that's not happening.

30:28 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
No, no, that's not you, no.

30:30 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I knew from snap, but only because I have a 20 year old. Oh, he snapped, they knew. No, he didn't snap me, he was in the house and he yelled at me, but he found out because he was happening. He knew in real time, he knew moments after it happened. Wow.

30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm proud to say I had no idea for hours, hours, oh, wow, yeah, tell me your secrets. I plug my ears with wax Like a discus on the mast. Let's take a little break when we come back. Oh, another fascinating breach. Breach, uh, at at&t. Well, this one's a biggie. Uh, you're watching this week in tech with denise howell from this week in law and hearsay culture having a nice. Are you having a la croix? Today I'm having a kombucha, oh, delicious. I've become a kombucha fan. Every day I have my kombucha. Uh, I hear it's good for you, I don't know. Harry mccracken is here.

31:26 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I like them, I like it.

31:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, technologizer, great to have you from fast company. And, of course, mike elgin, our digital nomad, his new newsletter. We should give it a big plug machine society dot ai. Is it an AI newsletter, I'm guessing. Oh, you mute every time I go to a commercial, thinking that I will not speak to you.

31:50 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But no, oh no, I just I just expect that nobody wants to speak to me. No, it's a, it's a machine. Society is about AI, spatial computing, really advanced stuff that's starting to impact culture, and so it's fairly loose about the subject matter, but it's really topical about what's really really about to change a human, human life.

32:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And and you know as as people, harry, I'll include you in this we've covered technology for decades. It's nice to have something new and exciting happening, or do you disagree?

32:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Oh my gosh, I think this is the single most interesting time in a lot of important ways. Yeah, certainly, since the web came along and may be bigger than the web or at least more fun to write about than the web it had been getting kind of you know, ho-hum, oh, another Samsung phone, and now it's kind of like, oh, let's see where this AI goes.

32:49 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Now, did you, mike, did you buy the vision pros? No, heck, no, no, no, no, it's the the I. I think that that product is is interesting and I think it's the beginning of something really important. But basically they're trying to do ar with vr equipment and it's just way too much and way too expensive.

32:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah so how about you, harry?

33:01 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
you're wearing your vision pros nightly I have a loaner from apple at the moment and at some point I'll have to decide whether I plunk down the money myself.

33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, were you still on the fence?

33:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yes, totally. I mean at a lower price. It seems like it would be a no-brainer.

33:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the rumors are flying about whether Apple will do a lower price and, if they will, when it will be, and all of that. But I be, and all of that.

33:21 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I don't believe I've ever spent that much money for a computing device of any kind.

33:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really I don't think so oh, I have, maybe 2500 for a laptop, but yeah yeah, well, uh, I alex lindsey has promised, and I think we're going to do it on the uh in two weeks, on the 28th, we're going to do a vision pro stream of twit using uh from a company called a voodoo stream streaming. I can't remember their exact name, anyway, alex. Yeah, voodoo streams is that right, I can't remember. Anyway, alex is going to do it all. We're going to bring the case, can bring a camera in, and, well, I, it'll be 3d, it'll be 3d if you have a vision pro, it'll be. It's going to be a spatial episode of Twitch. Nice, yeah, it's probably the last studio episode as well, so I think it's kind of nice.

34:13
Alex has always done that. Years ago, when Dolby had a technology called Dolby Headphone that was spatial, we did a show that way. It was spatial. We did a show that way. Alex brought this 60 000 camera that did 3d. You know vision, you know pictures back in the day and we did it at the old brick house. We did this version. So we've always alex has always brought toys and we've always taken advantage of them. So, the 20 of two weeks, 28th, if you've got a for the handful of you who watch, you have a vision pro. Harry, here's your chance. Do something interesting, I'll charge it up. Charge it up, dust it off and charge it up.

34:55 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Can I ask, since I don't have a vision pro and I haven't played around with it, what's the benefit? Like I could walk around behind you while the show is going on.

35:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, not allowed, you don't want to see me. No, I don't think you can. Actually, that's what's to me. It's a little weird because it isn't.

35:15 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
They'll likely be life size holograms instead of people in a little box, and so it feels like you're here but you can't walk around us, right, yeah? But I think, I think you can be placed in the room, that the user can place you in the room where they want you.

35:32 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
If you did the show on a tightrope over the Grand Canyon, it would be incredible, but if you're sitting in a chair, a little less incredible.

35:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, that's me. I'm not doing a tightrope on the Grand Canyon, so take it or leave it. I have a question for you old-timers. You remember a site called Experts Exchange. I used to use them all the time. It was my little secret during the Tech Guys show. If I had to find an answer to a tough question, I would go to the Experts Exchange. Well, I was really pleased to talk to them the other day. Not only are they still around, they're better than ever, especially in the age of AI. Our show today brought to you by Experts Exchange.

36:13
Experts Exchange is real people, real experts with real answers. Plus, they promise never, never, to let AI scrape their content. It is a place for humans. I love that. Join a network of trustworthy and talented tech professionals to get industry insights and advice from people who are actually using the products in your stack, instead of paying for expensive enterprise-level tech support and, by the way, I have to say, the answers are usually better. I love experts exchanges. The tech community for people tired of the ai sellout. Experts exchange is ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence.

36:57
Professionals in over 400 different fields coding, you bet, microsoft, yes, azure, and so forth, devops every topic under the tech sun and, unlike other places, they're never snarky. They never put you down. Duplicate questions are always encouraged because the contributors are tech junkies who love graciously answering all questions. Plus, they get karma points for those answers, which is they love too. In fact, in many cases, the people who are answering questions get points towards their certs or towards their continuing education. It is very much encouraged, which is fantastic. One member said I've never had GPT stop and ask me a question before that happens. On EE, all the time, experts exchange. They're proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental. I'm with them on that one. In fact, we've got listeners, security now listener and VMware V expert. Rodney Barnhart is one of the experts on Experts Exchange. Microsoft MVP and ethical hacker. Edward Von Billion, cisco design professionals, executive IT directors and more.

38:06
Whether you're a CIO, an IT professional, a CISO, there are answers here. Or just you know a user, there are answers here for you. And again, while other platforms and most of the other platforms are doing this are selling their content to train AI models, experts Exchange says your privacy is not for sale. They actually consider it betrayal of contributors worldwide. They have never and will never sell your data, your content, your likeness. They block and strictly prohibit AI companies from scraping content from their site to train LLMs. Oh, and you'll like this too the moderators are absolutely, absolutely adamant that no LLM content can come in the answers. They get rid of it all. If they see it, if they see the word delve, it's over.

38:55
The supreme reward for attaining expertise I think this is true is the fulfillment of passing your knowledge on to help someone in need. I've always felt that way and that's what Experts Exchange is all about. Experts deserve a place where they can confidently share their knowledge without worrying about a corporation stealing it to increase shareholder value, and you and I deserve the answers from real experts, safe from AI. Join Experts Exchange today.

39:22
Oh, and because you know a lot of people like me had kind of forgotten about Experts Exchange, they want you to know you're welcome back and they're going to make it easy 90 days free, your first three months free. You don't even need to give them a credit card, so they really know that if you try it, you will like it. This is confidence in their product. It's easy to remember the address and you can tell how long they've been around E-Ecom slash twit, e-ecom slash twit. I had such a nice conversation with them. I said, guys, I'm so thrilled you're still around, you know, and doing better than ever E-Ecom slash twitit. But they know you may be suspicious. You may say well, am I going to get good answers? So they're giving you three months free, no credit card needed. Yeah, uh, aaron mays in our uh youtube chat says I forgot they existed. I know, e-ecom slash twit, welcome back. Experts exchange.

40:21
We're so happy to have you as sponsors of this week in tech I know I've recommended them, but it has been a long time, a long time you know, just between you and me, uh, it got very expensive and I didn't want to pay the extra money and so forth, and and then along comes stack overflow and quora and all these others. But I have to say I don't know if you've used either stack overflow or quora lately, but the content is just terrible. So it's nice to you kind of do want to pay for it, it's not expensive. They've really understood that they needed to cut the price and 90 days free because it's really good content and they want you to see that and know it. I don't know. I think it's kind of fun to have a company that says yeah, no AI. Sorry, I know their stock value would be much higher if they had ai in the letters, but I would like to see a lot more of that.

41:08 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Actually, I would love google search. Okay, have your separate gemini thing, whatever, but I want a google search to be able to click a button, say find me the human generated content. What a service that would be.

41:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and stop putting peanut butter in my chocolate. Stop putting AI everywhere. Stop putting glue on my pizza yeah, especially no more glue in the pizza. I hate that. I don't want to eat rocks. Stop it. So this is a continuing saga. The snowflake breaches continue. Snowflake now. I think they said there's 155 companies that used Snowflake software and that have been hacked as a result. So you can't completely blame AT&T for this. Snowflake is oh good. Look at their headline. Generative AI is easier in the cloud. Snowflake is a cloud solution that AT&T and many others were using and, as a result, breaches happen. At&t says criminals stole phone records of quote nearly all wireless customers Nearly all wireless customers in a new data breach. And oh, by the way, if they were calling you on any other carrier, you're in there too, and if they were calling you on a landline, that's in there too.

42:37 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But don't worry, leo, it's just metadata, which is, by the way, the most important kind, the one that is the most privacy invading People think. Well, it wasn't the actual calls, it was just all the information about who, when, where, why. Yeah, about the call.

42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you know, as intelligence agencies know, this is the stuff you want. You want to build the knowledge graph. So, to reassure you, it doesn't contain the content of your phone calls or your texts, but does include calling and texting records that an at&t phone number interacted with during the six month period beginning may 1st 2022 through october 31st 2022 discovered in april.

43:24 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, it sounds like everybody is to blame, because at&t was not using any kind of multi-factor security and snowflake didn't make them do it so you can't fully blame snowflake no, but it seems like I mean gosh stuff this important, not locking that down as as well as you possibly could and not having multiple layers of authentication before you get in?

43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, incidentally, it's not just the phone numbers. Some of the stolen records will include cell site identification numbers, which gives you a kind of a location data as well, not the GPS quality, but approximate location where the call or text message originated. 110 AT&T customers will be notified if you are or have been 110 million Million, did I say 110? 110.

44:16
I've done an important part of that number 110 million. There is an AT&T press release where you can read all about it and see if you were affected. How will I know if your data was affected? They will contact you and let you know. I'll be curious because I had an AT&T account in that time period. So I'm waiting. I'm waiting for my call.

44:42 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But, as I understand it, they're not going to contact me because I have T-Mobile.

44:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you're in there. If I was interacting with anybody on AT&T, which I do, Of course you did.

44:50 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I'm going to be in there too, barry. I have a good fast company angle on this story for you, for you to have somebody write this article. Go on, because there's a privacy issue here, before this data is ever compromised. Why are these companies using Snowflake? Not for storage, although they are using it for that, but for analytics? They're using all this data to do stuff.

45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe they're selling this data. So TechCrunch says it's not clear why AT&T was storing customer data in Snowflake. An AT&T spokesperson would not say but good news, Denise Howell will. So they're using Snowflake to do data analytics.

45:38 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Absolutely, Denise Howell is not Snowflake she'll tell you I mean they could have you know, they could use other cloud storage, they could have their own servers. Snowflake offers other services that these companies are using. Yeah, and you know I'm sure in the I'm sure in the fine print of their terms of service with users, people are signing their life away and allowing those analytics to take place. But is it right, is it good? Should we have companies out there pursuing different models saying, hey, we don't do this to you, uh-huh.

46:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh-huh.

46:12
Snowflake said a hundred and, or rather Mandiant, which discovered the incident, said that about 165 Snowflake customers had significant volumes of data stolen from their customer's account. That includes Ticketmaster, lendingtree, subsidiary Quote Wizard, among others. Snowflake said, as you said, mike, it's their fault, they didn't use multi-factor authentication. It's your fault. Mandi had attributed the breach to an as-yet-orized cyber criminal group, tracked only as UNC 5337. They do say the hackers are financially motivated and have members in North America and at least one member in Turkey. So it's not a it's not a Russian nation state attack, but actually that's in some ways that's scarier because these numbers will be now used in various cyber schemes, probably Bitcoin offers and so forth.

47:14 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
No doubt, no doubt. And this comes on the heels of a recent 10 billion password leak or posting, I guess online happened.

47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, a couple see, I'm wondering, I mean that's one of the things that, just as just as this kind of mass storage and computer power has been useful for companies cross-referencing information about us for advertising and other purposes, the bad guys presumably have the same kinds of capabilities and if there's a breach of this and a breach of that and they can tie the two, maybe they get the passwords from one breach, the phone numbers from another breach and there's a lot of money to be made A lot of money and the other thing that's happening I read a lot about cybersecurity and the clear arms race in cybersecurity with AI is just really astonishing to witness.

48:05 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's getting to the point where all the cyber criminals are using AI and it's getting to the point where the only defense is to use AI-based cyber defense tools. So we're getting all those things we talk about with the military. Oh, it's going to be drones fighting drones and AI. You know, self-targeting drones fighting other self-targeting drones. That's what's happening in cybersecurity already.

48:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's really a fascinating new world, rusty Bones in our YouTube chat says it's the third time AT&T has notified him he's been violated.

48:39 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I thought this was the same breach as the other breach that happened not too long ago.

48:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's not. It's another one, unbelievable, unrelated to the breach that, uh, we've talked about a couple of do we know if snowflake has decided to make its customers use better security practices henceforth that would be one solution.

49:00
Uh, they could say you know you have to turn on to a mfa two-factor. That would be one possible solution. Um, we were talking about x, uh use. Uh says x is in a little bit of trouble over the blue check mark. They say uh, elon musk's x is accused of deceptive practices over the blue check mark. Um, it's a breach of the digital Act which came into force earlier this year. In preliminary findings from an investigation they began last year, the EU said that, following Musk's $44 billion takeover of the company two years ago, allowing anyone to gain a blue checkmark would deceive millions of users. I guess that's true, because a blue checkmark implied that that was a verified account. Regulators in Brussels said, quote since anyone can subscribe to obtain could be a French, could be Flemish, but I don't do a Flemish accent.

50:01
Since anyone can subscribe to obtain a verified status. It negatively affects users' ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the contact content they interact with. X can defend itself, according to financial times, but if the eu's findings are confirmed well you know this the digital markets act allows for some pretty, pretty hefty fines.

50:30 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Six percent, but I this seems like an issue that we're where it'd be, in violation of european law, but not in violation of us law. It seems to me like calling anybody. Anything you want on your own social network is an exercise of free speech on the part of elon musk. Yeah, and, and what's the harm, really? I mean, I'm totally against Elon Musk, I'm totally against his takeover of Twitter. I think he's wrecked the place. But this seems like you know, he's already demonstrated that. It's his personal playground and the First Amendment applies mainly to him, as the owner Doesn't.

51:06 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Twitter, though sorry. X claim they are doing verification because they're checking out your credit card information.

51:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They know who you are. You may not know who that person is, but X knows.

51:16 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And I'm not sure what happens if I use my credit card but try to register somebody else's name.

51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do know, because very early on, when they did this, they had people posing as all sorts of other people For a while. Yes, yeah, it was a real problem for brands. It's one of the reasons X lost advertising.

51:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And of course they ripped away my verification and then gave it back to me without me asking for it.

51:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but we all have blue checks now. Thank, you.

51:40 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Now that it's a mark of shame, they give it back to you.

51:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Cory Doctorow calls him on his X account and says unwilling blue check recipient uh, now so do we is there.

51:55 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Go ahead, leo.

51:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry I'm just gonna just go, I'll go, you go, and then I'll go.

51:59 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Okay, we'll make it I'll go, then you go, okay, thank you. Uh, yeah, does anybody know if paying for a blue check mark does the things that it says that it does? I mean there was a threat early on where elon musk says if you don't have a blue check, we're going to treat your posts like spam. Does the things that it says that it does? I mean there was a threat early on where Elon Musk says if you don't have a blue check, we're going to treat your posts like spam and your comments like spam and you go to the bottom of the trash can. But if you do, you'll get boosted. Are people really getting boosted because of the blue check mark? Do we have any metrics on that?

52:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
There's certainly a ton of stuff from blue checks that shows up in comments oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely they get promoted to the top, not because it's great quality content, but because they're paying yeah, here's.

52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's cory's ex-account. Cory doctor, oh, non-consensual blue check he doesn't work before I do know that when I got the blue check, uh, I all of a sudden got a lot of benefits because I have still have, for some reason, almost half a million followers, uh. So so I got grok, I got, uh, all sorts of additional is that really a benefit? Grok is the is the dad joke, ai, you can edit your tweets. Yeah, I can edit tweets. I get all sorts of monetization and I mean there is a lot of stuff you get.

53:13 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
The best thing is the proxcom, which is the old. What do they call it? Twitterific or whatever. It was called TweetDeck. Tweetdeck is worth it, TweetDeck, thank you, Thank you.

53:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got TweetDeck, which is nice, I do agree. Yeah, so Elon and the EU got in a shooting war, which seems to be a bad idea, but Elon's never, never one to hold back on Friday Go ahead.

53:35 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Oh, it seems to me at least, with this thing about the blue checkmark. Someone at the EU is just having a ton of fun here, because in order to defend against this, x has to go in and say no, our users fully understand that this blue check mark is just a piece of junk. We're not deceiving anybody.

53:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're not, there's no yeah, everybody knows that on friday, elon x tweeted, posted, posted on x the european. This is listen to this. The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal. If we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us. The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not. Of course, he provided no evidence, to which EU Commissioner for the Internal market, thierry breton, responded be our guest, be our guest. Be our guest. Be our guest. Elon musk. There has never been and will never be any. This is all an x any secret deal with anyone. The dsa provides x with the possibility to offer commitments to settle the case. To be extra clear, it's your team who asked the commission to explain the process for settlement and to clarify our concerns. Up to you to decide whether to offer commitments or not. That is how rule of law procedures work. See you in court or not? He actually added the or not, which, which is superfluous.

55:11 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee and we throw dog poop on their teeth.

55:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Back in the day, blue checks used to mean trustworthy sources of information. Now your father farts elderberry blueberry. Now with X, our preliminary viewers. They deceive users and infringe the DSA. We also consider that X adds repository. The advertising repository and conditions for data access by researchers are not in line with our transparency requirements, which is also probably legit. X now has the right of defense, but if our view is confirmed, we will impose fines.

55:49 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Also under the, the dsa, you're supposed to be able to opt out of targeted advertising. Oh yeah, that's right.

55:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know if x lets you do that, or maybe they do in the eu and we just don't see it that's one of the things the meta is in trouble with with the eu, because they said okay, we'll do that, you can pay us and I think it was like four more than 14 a month uh, to opt out of ads, and the eu said, no, that's not what we meant. So you know, I have mixed feelings, as I agree with you, mike, because this is a european affair. Uh, they almost always target american companies. Our rules are different. We have a First Amendment, they don't Things like that, and so I have mixed feelings about this.

56:36 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
What a lot of American consumers don't realize is about the overzealousness by which European regulators go after American companies. Is that very often most of the time, I believe it's other american companies lobbying them to go after the editors right? And well we're european companies like spotify lobbying to go after sure, yeah yeah, but it's mostly microsoft going after google, trying to get the eu to go Google, et cetera.

57:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let's see. Oh, speaking of Microsoft, you guys used to cover Windows. You'll be happy to hear. Notepad now has spell check.

57:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Whoop-de-doo Basil. I'm sure there are Notepad enthusiasts who are very excited. Probably not. Actually, the thing about notepad used to be that it didn't do anything.

57:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was what was so good about it. It was just a text, so good. Plain text editor.

57:38 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
After 41 years, I didn't realize, I didn't really think about it but yeah, I didn't realize it was quite that old, it's really been around, I mean.

57:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Back to the middle-aged notepad, spell check and autocorrect. What's really strange is what happened to Microsoft that they, like somebody, sent out a memo saying hey, you know, I just noticed notepad doesn't have spell check, why not? And then somebody else said, oh, we got an intern, let's.

58:07 - Denise Howell (Guest)
More likely, somebody sent out a memo written on notepad. Oh, there you go.

58:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Heinously misspelled word, exactly and it slipped through exactly, just just to age myself, I I used to actually build web pages in notepad, wow that's not so weird, because apple folks always used uh, always used BBEdit and other plain text editors to write.

58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, bracket A space. Href equals quote, http. I still remember it, see.

58:38 - Denise Howell (Guest)
And then HTTP colon forward, slash, forward, slash, blah, blah, blah.

58:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yahoocom end quote close bracket. Yahoo open bracket slash A close bracket. Yahoo open bracket slash close bracket. Wow, I just did that verbally. I did a whole link. You still do that.

58:58 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Occasionally. I also feel like this news about Notepad is similar to the fact they left Microsoft Paint unchanged for several decades and then all of a sudden and then all of a sudden they started adding new stuff. And actually, of course, it does make sense to have a decent image editor bundled with an operating system.

59:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But so many people have by now given up on Paint that it's like maybe you should have changed the name. What's?

59:21 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
the point at this point Just come out with a new product. My main concern is Mary Jo Foley, because she's the biggest notepad super fan that I know of and we should probably check in on her and see if she's okay.

59:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I saw her Wednesday actually because Paul Theriot was doing Windows Weekly from her apartment and right after commercial, all of a sudden Paul morphed into Mary Jo briefly and then morphed back. I was hoping she'd give us a beer pick, but did not. Yeah, mary joe, famously, I think it's still. You know, I should have. I missed darn it. I should have asked her because, famously, she's used notepad for years to write all her columns, uh, and loves it. Yeah, I bet she didn't. I bet she's not happy about spell checking. I'm just thinking probably not, yeah, probably not. Yeah, let's take a little break.

01:00:09
Mike elgin, harry m McCracken, denise Howell it's kind of what I call a classic twit, a classic twit panel with the best of the best. Are you ready for Cisco Motific, our sponsor this week? Outshift, cisco's incubation engine, merges innovation with the art of possible. A launchpad for transformative emerging tech, outshift blends startup agility with corporate strength to develop next-gen technologies from the ground up in AI, quantum technologies, clown native and more. It's their pirate ship. It's their R&D labs, their incubation engine.

01:00:54
Well, you'll be happy to hear about OutShift's newest AI innovation. It's called Motific and it addresses a critical challenge in the rapidly advancing world of generative AI, bridging the gap between concept and deployment. It's fine to dream, but you've got to implement right. This model and vendor agnostic solution supports the entire Gen AI journey, from assessment and experimentation to production. Motific accelerates deployment from months to days while safeguarding against Gen AI security, trust, compliance and cost risks, all while empowering business functions to rapidly configure end-user assistance powered by organizational data. This is a dream come true. This is brilliant. Use Motific to create those assistance without any of the risk. Motific provides advanced, customizable policy controls to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and helps ensure compliance throughout the entire process. With deep visibility into operational and business metrics, motific enables you to track ROI, optimize costs and make informed decisions. Wouldn't this be cool? By offering a centralized view, motific deters shadow AI usage, and that's, I think, got to be a problem in a lot of businesses.

01:02:13
Let me just see what Gemini says. Let me just see what OpenAI says. No, you got Motific now. It empowers teams to innovate, but to do it responsibly. How cool is this? Move beyond the constraints of traditional AI implementations. Utilize AI deployment that is as responsible as it is revolutionary. Ensure your projects are not just quickly launched, but built on a foundation of trust and efficiency. Is this not cool, motificai, if you want to learn more? M-o-t-i-f-i-c, m-o-t-i-f-i-c Motificai. I love these innovative solutions coming out of OutShift. That's very cool, motificai. Thank you so much. Motific and OutShift and.

01:03:04
Cisco for important this week in tech. Uh, speaking of ai, um, here's an interesting piece from bloomberg qualcomm. This is brody 40 inking and evan gorlick writing, and I'm really curious what you guys think of this. And by guys, I mean you too, denise, I should say peeps. How about I'll call you peeps? And by guys, I mean you too, denise, I should say Peeps. How about I call you Peeps, although you look nothing like marshmallow chicks? But anyway, qualcomm and Microsoft lean on AI hype to spur PC market revival.

01:03:44
I think you know an observer from the outside looking at the marketing blitz for Co-Pilot plus PCs, the use of AI everywhere, even adding a button on the keyboard, your AI, your co-pilot button, seems to have a lot more to do with selling more computers, especially to people who haven't bought a computer in a while, than it does with actually helping things.

01:04:11
Only 3% of PCs shipped this year, according to Bloomberg, will be considered an AI PC. Only 3% will have enough processing power to do it. Actually, this is according to IDC. So to persuade consumers and corporations, it's time to buy something the PC industry desperately needs. They'll have to offer a wider variety of the PCs and deliver software that takes advantage of the new hardware, but so far, according to Bloomberg analysts and reviewers, they're taking a skeptical tone toward the new laptop's AI abilities. In fact, somebody pointed out that the 40 tops that Copilot Plus PCs offer 40 trillion operations per second is actually not such a big number. After all that, if you have an NVIDIA GPU, you could probably do three times that. Do you think this is just marketing? Are they shilling because they need so desperately to sell more PCs?

01:05:00 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it feels like for the last 20 years the PC industry has been desperately trying to find technology that is so exciting You'll buy a new machine Right, and it comes along very rarely. And you know, sometimes stuff like been desperately trying to find technology that is so exciting, you'll buy a new machine right, and it comes along very rarely.

01:05:11
And you know, sometimes stuff like there have been things like touch screens which have not really been all that transformative yeah, I was gonna say, did that drive a lot of sales and so they're very excited about a ai based on that and the hype has gotten ahead of the reality and um well, uh, these machines are pretty cool in some ways and the battery life actually is a good reason to consider these.

01:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what Keith512 says in our Discord. He says forget the AI, I just want 12-hour battery life.

01:05:36 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But in terms of actual functionality built into these machines, there is not a lot yet, and some of what is there is like the Windows recall feature, which they discovered that people were very concerned about based on privacy issues, and so they had to roll it back. And long term, I'm pretty optimistic that AI will make PCs a lot better, but it's going to take a while and there's no need to rush out and buy a new machine right now, unless you want really good battery life, right, and in that case, yes, these are worth looking at.

01:06:09 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think that what's really happening.

01:06:11
There's a couple of trends involved here.

01:06:14
One of them is that, in general in the tech industry, ai is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, and it's very difficult to find both funding and also interest in innovations that aren't AI-based.

01:06:29
So that's one problem that they're trying to sort of like take advantage of, and, like Harry said, I think in the long term this is going to be a big deal. I think that both PCs and phones will be split in two, where there'll be some phones, especially iPhones, where they do more of the AI on board, locally, and whether they're small language models or they figure out some way to do the AI on the phone instead of hitting the cloud servers, they'll do that and it will be more expensive, because you'll need massive processing power and so you'll have to spend $1,500 on a phone. And then there'll be a whole bunch of other phones that get even cheaper than they are now, because they're doing all of that in the cloud and you need merely to you need the phone to move data to and from the phone, and with the processing happening in servers that are remote, and so I think that's going to split both PC and phone markets into two radically different price categories.

01:07:25
In the meantime, though, they're sort of ahead of the game, and I think that it's more hype than anything else.

01:07:30 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Long term, I don't think there's going to be such a thing as an AI PC, because all PCs will eventually be AI PCs, and it reminds me of the days when Mike and I were covering computers and there was such a thing as a multimedia PC, oh yeah, which for a time was an expensive and powerful computer that didn't have a lot of great content at first, but very quickly, the multimedia PC was not a category, because every PC did this stuff, and that was when the technology actually became useful.

01:08:04
because who wants to write software for a platform that only a tiny percentage of people have?

01:08:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's interesting, because that's one of the things the Bloomberg piece says is that three of the big application makers Adobe, salesforce and SentinelOne rebuffed one of the larger PC makers when it asked them to tweak software so that AI tools could be used directly on the new computers in time for the launch, partly because these companies offer AI features in the cloud, so they're not interested in supporting AI on device. That's not their business model. And if you don't get the software companies you know the big ones to come along, you've got nothing. I've got a PC that can use the cloud. Well, guess what they all can.

01:08:49 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think Adobe might be excited about the AI PC if it could do something like Firefly on device.

01:08:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But all of that is in the cloud right.

01:08:56 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It's all in the cloud and it's going to be a very long time, if ever before. You can do Firefly, Do Photoshop's.

01:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI features, like outbuilding the picture or replacing, are those on device. Those are super duper in the cloud, All in the cloud yeah, so they have no interest really in a PC that has special hardware for running jobs locally.

01:09:19 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It feels like a lot of cases. What an AI PC can do now is a much less impressive version of something that works pretty decently in the cloud at the moment, so there's not a lot of point. You can do chatbots on device, but they're just not very good chatbots.

01:09:34 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, who wants?

01:09:35 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
to chat with them anyway.

01:09:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
And when you say in the cloud, when you're talking about the cloud, you're talking about mainly NVIDIA chips in the cloud, right, and so Snapdragon is fighting for its life against NVIDIA. Microsoft is always competing with Apple and so on, so there's a lot of taking big bets to try to compete with what the future is going to be In the future. Nvidia is going to just completely own the future for the next five years in terms of processing power, in terms of AI hardware, in terms of AI software that helps you use the hardware and all the rest. So that's really the play. Here is, the Snapdragon X Elite chip is being promoted as a serious AI chip.

01:10:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But really it's more than that. It's kind of like Apple's own Apple Silicon chips. It's a chip that's designed for modern workloads to give you better battery life, lower power usage, Absolutely. And.

01:10:38
I think that's something users want in laptops and mobile PCs. They don't care about the AI. They're not there for the copilot key on the keyboard. So I kind of agree with this piece. I think that that actually. Idc says that adoption of AI PCs is going to take a long time. They're predicting only 40% of all computers shipped in 2028. In 2028, only 40% will be AI PCs. That might even be optimistic. It doesn't seem like. On the other hand, you got apple saying on our future. Now this is all future tense for apple. But they announced at wwdc that their hardware would be smart enough to say oh, I can do this load locally and do it locally and then go to a special apple privacy forward cloud if it had to. There is a reason for these companies to do it. It's very expensive to run this stuff in the cloud.

01:11:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think, when people think of AI and you talk about 2028 and AI, you're thinking, oh, it's going to be like a better version of ChatGPT, which is not the case. First of all, 2028 is four years away. 2020 is four years away. That's how recent, you know. That's how the future always seems further away than in the past. But we're talking about the gradual introduction of agentic AI, which is a radically improved version of LLMs where, instead of just trying to give you an answer for something, you chat into a chatbot. It will look to understand your intent, your goals, and then it will actually do research and train itself, test its results and then deliver it to you. So by 2028, the AI people are going to be using is going to be way more powerful. It's going to be her is what it's going to be yes basically.

01:12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is the problem, remember, microsoft offered with these. In fact, microsoft may be saying yeah, well we tried to make them useful and you wouldn't let us. They offered that recall feature, which is a gentic ai it. It watches everything you do okay and then when you query it, it knows everything you've, it knows what you did last night and it can can talk to you about it. But security experts pointed out, this is a real problem and this is the same thing.

01:12:54 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Apple's been struggling with.

01:12:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do we make it private and useful?

01:12:59 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Let's call the recall feature what it is it's lifelogging. They introduced it in the same week that Gordon Bell died, and nobody's using the L word. This is lifelogging par excellence.

01:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used it. I brought up Gordon Bell. In fact, when I met him, he had a little camera around his neck, and this was 20 years ago. He was taking pictures of everything, and that was partly because of his own wife, gwen Bell, who had early Alzheimer's and was very forgetful, and so he realized this is important. We're going to record everything that happens and it's going to be a huge help for her and then, ultimately, a huge help for everyone, right?

01:13:36 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But he stopped doing that in 2007. And I interviewed him later and he told me that the reason he did that was that, thanks to smartphones and other new technologies, there's way too much data to process. And he said life log. He saidogging will happen in the future when we have the AI to process it. That future happened, was announced by Microsoft, the company he worked for as a researcher emeritus or whatever it was, and on the same week he died. And it's like we need to keep, like you did. We need to keep that thread. That's what's happening here. This vision started in the 40s, right, the life logging vision. We finally realized it and everybody's like ah, it seems like it's privacy violating. No thanks.

01:14:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the history of computing, in a way.

01:14:21 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Can we throw Justin Justin Kahn into this conversation as well?

01:14:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure, the guy, who, the guy Justin tv, started justin tv by allowing himself to be continually filmed, or I guess it's videoed, or whatever you call it. Uh, and then I, justine, followed suit and did it as well. Um, but it all started. It started before that with jenny cam, thank you, was that jenny cam? Jenny cam? Uh, was that you, benito, who said jenny cam?

01:14:53 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I did. That was my okay. Good, yeah, she was. She was a little too transparent with her life. Yes, probably so to speak she just.

01:15:02 - Denise Howell (Guest)
She may just have an only fans account yeah exactly right it's funny.

01:15:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was talking to my uh, who is an influencer. In fact, his cookbook is currently Saul Hank discounted on Amazon. You should check your local retailer. I think Target's got 40% off. I just saw the first copy of it. It's not out until October, but it's beautiful, it's fantastic.

01:15:21
But I was talking to him about influencers and how everybody in his generation wants to be an influencer and he said well, there's different levels of influencer. He said the people who make the most money are cam girls and OnlyFans. He says those guys are raking it in, to which I said yeah, they're good for them. You know, they've reclaimed their own instead of some seedy porn video company. They're doing their own thing. He told me and I don't know if this is true that one of them showed the receipts. She made $50 million in a year. Wow, she became famous. Oh, he told me the whole. I can't remember the whole story. She was on some TV show, a Jerry Springer style TV show, dr Phil and she said something I'll meet you outside. She's now known as the I'll meet you outside girl. I don't know what that means.

01:16:21 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Anyway, I don't know, what that means.

01:16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what that means I'm too old for this.

01:16:25 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
And she couldn't make a sandwich to save her life.

01:16:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's outrageous. He said you know he calls what he did ASMR cooking. And he says, yeah, everybody does it. Now I can't do that anymore. I have to do something new. You always have to be moving in that arena. Anyway, the look for Cash Me Outside. That's what she's called. Cash me outside, danielle Peskowitz Spragoli, known professionally as bad Bobby, during her appearance on the talk show Dr Phil September 2016,. She uttered the phrase cash me outside. How about that? For which she became best known? There's a whole world out there that I know nothing about.

01:17:18 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I assume you've heard the expression haktwa.

01:17:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, we were talking about that earlier and I started to play the video and John said, hey, stop me. Started to play the video and john said, hey, stop me, but what? This was a. This was a young woman uh in atlanta was uh some podcast or vlog or whatever was interviewing her and she he asked her what about her boyfriend? Have you seen it? Denise you tell me, because I I need an informant.

01:17:46 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yes, Well, I can't. I mean, I'm going to get the hay too, but she was speaking of oral sex.

01:17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yes, now I see the problem. Okay, okay, but anyway, she's like, she's famous, now right For saying ha toi. Thank you, denise.

01:18:11 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I think, globally famous is.

01:18:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's huge. Yeah, she's like the next cash me outside girl she has a feature in rolling stone. Oh my god the world has gone mad. The world has gone mad. I don't understand it at all. Goldman Sachs says AI is overhyped, wildly expensive and unreliable.

01:18:37 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
All true.

01:18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason Keebler, writing for 404 Media. I love Jason, he's been on the show. Goldman Sachs published a research paper titled Gen AI too much much spend, too little benefit. They note that there is little to show for the huge amount of spending on generative ai infrastructure and questions whether this large spend will ever pay off in terms of ai benefits and returns. Now, this is important because this is a research. This is the market will pay attention to this research paper from goldman sachs. Right, and what they're saying is it's hey guys, this is a bubble. You're investing inside any, any company that says they got ai. You're putting money into where there isn't a whole upside, a lot of upside. You know the upside, as you already said, it is nvidia and the companies are selling the hardware to do it. They're making money.

01:19:28 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Nvidia, the biggest, the poster child for this run-up yeah, but what people need to understand about this is yes, there is a bubble. It's a from a financial point of view. There's a bubble. There was a bubble of dot-com companies right in 1999 and 2000. The bubble burst and yet e-commerce is how we do everything now, so it's not like it wasn't wrong, like AI goes away. It's just, it was just too much hype, too much money for what it was at the time. And yes, ai has a massive future and it's a bubble.

01:20:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Goldman Sachs says the stock price gains we've seen are based on the assumption that generative AI is going to lead to higher productivity, is going to lead to higher productivity, but those stock gains are already baked in. Although the productivity pickup that AI promises could benefit equities stocks via higher profit growth, we find that stocks often anticipate higher productivity growth before it materializes, raising the risk of overpaying. So you talk about bubbles, but there's the inverse of the bubble In every. In many cases, these bubbles have ended up being a good thing in the long run. The one of the examples I think Tim Wu gives this is of the American railroads In the days after the golden spike. Almost all those railroads went bankrupt, but as a result, we got the infrastructure and in the long run, it was very good for the economy. And, just as you said, mike, the dot-com boom. There was a lot of infrastructure built, including fiber, some of which is still dark, but in the long run, we got the infrastructure.

01:21:12 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I don't think these server farms are going to go unused, even if they're ultimately used for things not what they were planned to be, so maybe the trick is to be patient.

01:21:36 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Bigger message. What I would urge, coming from the technology world to the financial world, is the financial world needs to be a lot more sophisticated about what's real and what isn't. So there's a big, big difference between some little startup that's using ChatGPT's API and calling it an AI product and NVIDIA. Those are night and day different plays and they have totally different futures. Everybody's trying to come up with some reason to put AI in their marketing and most of it is probably kind of irrelevant. They're users of other AI products. There are also a ton of LLMs. If you think about the number of LLMs in existence, the average person would be forgiven for thinking that there were maybe six or seven or eight or nine. There are tens of thousands out there. Universities, there are a dime a dozen. They're everywhere and we don't know how it's going to. You know we don't. There's no guarantee that open AI will be any kind of leader in the industry in three years, will be any kind of leader in the industry in three years.

01:22:29 - Benito  (Announcement)
We don't know who the leaders will be, but we know that there will be an industry.

01:22:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's as if, with the explosion of the AI bubble, there will be a hock to a moment. Well done, well done. But then and we don't know who the winners will be but the overall winners will be us, because the technologies, the plans have been laid, the rails have been laid for these technologies, and we'll benefit. It's just you don't know who's going to be. We know NVIDIA will benefit, probably, right.

01:23:05 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think some of this stuff is the. Go ahead, Mike.

01:23:09 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I'm sorry. Yeah, I agree with that. Nvidia is. I don't want to give financial or stock advice to anyone. I'm not a financial person. I'm into the technology and the culture, but NVIDIA the most exciting things about the future of NVIDIA have little to do with their chips, little to do with their chips. They're pioneering the world of digital twin technology. They have something called physical AI, where they're building AI environments that obey the laws of physics, where you can test robots at high speed. You can do all these things in the physical world and use automation and machine learning to train robots how to do something in a factory, for example, and then what it spits out is a software that you can plug into a real robot and it works perfectly right out of the box. So they're doing stuff like that. That's really. You know, the world of manufacturing is a 50 trillion dollar industry and and they have no competition.

01:24:09 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Basically, so nvidia is, there's everybody else and there's nvidia when you're thinking about the future of ai nvidia has done a really great job of not just pushing out chips but, um, I mean doing stuff across an array of industries. I mean they have a lot of cool stuff for entertainment, gaming, all the enterprise commercial type stuff that Mike mentioned, and so I think they are doing a lot of the heavy lifting of making this stuff useful and in a lot of cases it's not hypey, it actually is kind of practical, even today.

01:24:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I almost feel like Goldman Sachs is having a boomer moment. I mean, it's pretty clear to people people of use ai that while there are lots of stupid uses, there are also lots of very real today uses for this thing I think some of the productivity stuff is a little bit overblown and at the moment it's it's too slow and uh, inaccurate and hallucinatory.

01:25:04
But people would have said the same thing when the wang word processor was the dominant computing platform in offices, and remember we were all saying, oh, the paperless office is the next big thing. And none of that happened and yet, but it all happened.

01:25:18 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It all happened.

01:25:19 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Offices were absolutely transformed. By the time it actually happens, nobody cares anymore. But the other thing we for some reason everyone's obsessed with when we think of AI, we think of chatbots. In the larger scope of things, chatbots are kind of irrelevant.

01:25:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, they're just a game, they're just silly, right.

01:25:42 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, but I mean, ai is going to cure cancer, it's going to deflect meteorites, it's going to find. The number of uses that benefit humanity in AI that really doesn't pierce the public imagination much are almost infinite. It's really quite remarkable. It's not about chatbots per se that's the part that we're going to really directly interact with but the scientific and medical and organizational applications of different kinds of AI, not just LLMs, is really really breathtaking. There was a study I heard of recently where, using LLM-based based AI, they were able to detect Parkinson's disease in their research 10 years before the first symptoms arrived in 100% of the cases.

01:26:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow.

01:26:44 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
How valuable is that? If you can start treating Parkinson's 10 years before the onset of the first visible symptom, that's the end of Parkinson's, and how great is that? Hi, this is Benito.

01:26:55 - Benito  (Announcement)
And yes, while I agree that that is all excellent stuff, what percentage of the AI compute is actually going to that kind of stuff?

01:27:04 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, that's where you get into the funding. I mean, the LLM-based chatbot stuff is, just like I said before, sucking all the oxygen out of the room, especially when it comes to funding. If you're a startup trying to kickstart some new product or something like that, it's almost got to be AI, because all the venture funding is going to the AI and chatbot-like AIs. It seems like Right.

01:27:24 - Denise Howell (Guest)
That was one of the things that jumped out at me about that article is they talked about the potential being out of whack with the current spend, and what I would have liked to hear them talk about more is the resource consumption as well, and some sort of you know. How do we encourage this industry to have a balance between all of its potential and running way off the charts, with both the money being spent right now and what it's doing to global resources?

01:28:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
The report also compared AI to the metaverse, which I think is kind of unfair. And AI even now is way more real than the metaverse, which I think is kind of unfair. And AI even now is way more real than the metaverse is now. And the metaverse is dependent on technology that doesn't exist yet and might not exist for a long time, whereas with AI, the hardware is actually very capable right now and the bigger issue is the software that lives on top of it.

01:28:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think some of the negativity comes from both that a lot of companies like Meta invested tens of billions of dollars into VR and it's probably not going to happen, and also blockchain and Bitcoin. There was this big bubble for a while. I remember, a few years ago, any company that put the word blockchain into its name, including what was the soda company that renamed itself blockchain arizona iced tea.

01:28:55
That was good for the stock market, but the stock market is still still stinging a little bit from that, and so I think it's not unreasonable for folks at goldman sachs and others to say, well, we've seen this before, but I don't think this is the same quality uh revolution as blockchain or vr.

01:29:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think there's something else going, something more powerful going on I still see companies talking about web 3, and web 3 is a ridiculous concept and yeah, it's, it was just a completely hype. I mean blockchain, nfts remember nfts? Yeah, whatever happened nfts? Nobody knows NFTs.

01:29:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, whatever happened to NFTs?

01:29:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Nobody knows.

01:29:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little break and we'll go find our NFTs and we'll show you all of our NFTs. I have some Beanie Babies I'm willing to sell for a good, good price. It's great to have you here, denise. Denise, do you have any Beanie Babies left?

01:29:50 - Denise Howell (Guest)
No, but I attended Coachella and they gave you an NFT.

01:29:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, how nice of them as part of your ticket.

01:29:57 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I'm trying to find it on my phone. You went this year to Coachella, not this year. It was two years ago Two years ago.

01:30:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I wonder if they.

01:30:04 - Denise Howell (Guest)
When FTEs were more of a thing.

01:30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't think they give you NFTs these days. Lisa keeps saying well, let's go to Coachella. And I keep telling her I'm 67 years old, they won't let me in.

01:30:17 - Denise Howell (Guest)
She'd be surprised. You can have a good time at Coachella.

01:30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are there old farts there? Okay, good, there are. Yeah, there's everybody there. I would like to go. I would like to go, so we'll get Denise's Coachella NFT. Do you still have it?

01:30:33 - Denise Howell (Guest)
well, as I said, I got a new phone and I don't know if I can still access it. It's a problem with NFTs right? Wait, hold on, I'm going to try and find it.

01:30:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You do your ad a search strip in our discord says they had an old Chella a couple of years ago. I would have gone to that. Pete Seeger, kingston Trio it was great. Chris cross, chris cross for cross christopher cross sailing, sailing away. That's mike elgin. He is in, uh, the united states of america, washington state. Yeah, oddly enough, but wherever he is, he's always working, contributing to machine societyai his new newsletter, where actually you cover this exact subject, so I'm really glad we could have you for that and really enjoying my beat on that.

01:31:21 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yes, yes, fascinating.

01:31:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And also, of course, the great technologizer, Harry McCracken. You know I love having you on here because you have been here, as has Mike, for every stage of this. You have the context for all of these things that are happening, whether they are significant or insignificant, whether it's just another turn of the wheel or whether there's something really happening, and I feel like you feel like something's happening.

01:31:47 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think so I mean, I think a lot of the most exciting stuff we don't understand yet and stuff we're excited about right now in some cases will dwindle, but um, well, that's always the case, totally, and, and that's part of our job and I love this.

01:32:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the reasons I love this job is to figure out which is which right, to write about it, to study it, and you do such a good job at Fast Company. Thank you, you're one of the guys. I love it because you're one of the guys who's been there, who knows it, and I can read your stuff and you have that deep understanding of it. Plus, I love the nostalgia pieces you do too. Those are fantastic. Great to have all three of you. More to come in just a moment, but first a word from our sponsor, bitwarden. Got to love the Bitwarden, the only password manager I recommend these days. It's offering a cost-effective solution that can dramatically improve your chances of staying safe online and, by the way, by itself, bitwarden does everything you need. You want that two-factor that the folks at Snowflake don't require. Bitwarden will do that. You want pass keys? It's funny. I just logged into my Google account and I said, well, you have several ways. You have a YubiKey you could use, or you could use your authenticator, or you could use your pass key, and I went. I forgot I have a pass key in Bitwarden Click the link boom, I'm in. I love Bitwarden Bit and Bitwarden Click the link Boom, I'm in. I love Bitwarden Bitwarden. Now they just officially announced they support pass keys on their browser extensions and on their mobile devices. This is fantastic news. It can you could take your pass keys with you wherever you log in. So so if you've been using like your phone for your pass key or your computer for your pass key, you understand how inconvenient that is when you're not at your phone for your PASCII or your computer for your PASCII. You understand how inconvenient that is when you're not at your phone or your computer but Bitwarden's everywhere you are, and now those PASCII's are stored there, which means they're always available to you wherever you log in. Pascii's on mobile are available now on iOS open beta on Android. I highly recommend it. I've been using it and love it.

01:33:47
Bitwarden knows that people are not secure. They did a survey of 2,400 people from the US, uk, australia, france, germany and Japan and asked them some hard questions about passwords and man the news 31% of US respondents reuse passwords on multiple sites. 42% put personal information in the password. Well, it's easier to remember that way if I use my mother's maiden name or my dog's name or my birthday, but that's the worst way to make a password. It is easy to remember, but easy to remember means easy to crack. 58% of respondents continue to rely on their memory for all their passwords. Oh, that's a bad idea. 34% in work in business and enterprise, they use pen and paper for password management. Now, it's one thing at home, right where it's just you, but if you're putting a post-it note on your screen with your password, that's problems. In fact, a quarter of the respondents knew their workplace security habits were risky. 45% say yeah, we store passwords insecurely. 44% use weak credentials easy to remember but easy to crack.

01:35:00
There's a lot of room for improvement in organizational cybersecurity practices, but you can do it all with one tool Bitwarden. Bitwarden empowers enterprises, developers and individuals to store and share not just passwords, but all your one tool Bitwarden. Bitwarden empowers enterprises, developers and individuals to store and share not just passwords, but all your sensitive data. My passport is in Bitwarden. My social security card, my driver's license, secrets, like your AWS keys. You keep them in Bitwarden. They're safe. In fact, it's great for developers because you can use Bitwarden to store those secret keys and API keys. Use them conveniently but not accidentally, commit them to GitHub, which unfortunately happens a lot.

01:35:39
With a transparent, open source approach to password management, bitwarden makes it easy for users to extend robust security practices to all their online experiences. If you're a business and you're not using Bitwarden, you're at risk. Get started with Bitwarden's free trial of a Teams or Enterprise plan and, as always, bitwarden's promise to individuals is free forever for an unlimited number of passwords, pass keys support, hardware key support. Get started for free across all devices as an individual user, and that's the benefit of that. Bitwardencom slash twit Use them at your business. That supports their efforts. I actually pay 10 bucks a year for the premium just because I want to support them. But if you want, you know this is actually really good to know because you can tell friends and family You've told them for years you've got to use a password manager. They say, oh, it's too complicated, it costs money, it's free, it's easy to use. Make them use Bitwarden, bitwardencom, slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. It is a fabulous, fabulous program. Uh, let's see open. Are you ready?

01:36:55 - Denise Howell (Guest)
are you ready for the coachella nft? Oh you found it yes well, no, actually there's no trace of the coachella nft on my phone um, however, was it a picture? No, it a flower, it started out as this bulb and then it bloomed. Oh, that's cool, they bloom and then.

01:37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But when you go to it was like a Tamagotchi, did you have to?

01:37:19 - Denise Howell (Guest)
They partnered with FTX, by the way.

01:37:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's where it went. It's in prison with Samuel Bankman, freed, okay.

01:37:30 - Denise Howell (Guest)
And hold on. I'll show you what happens when you go to the Coachella. This is what you get. Nftcoachellacom now reads this deployment has been disabled.

01:37:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, at least you didn't pay money for it, or something, no no, they were free. I mean, there are people who are sitting there watching this show, who spent $40,000, $50,000 or more on a cartoon of an ape, right, and I got to wonder how they're feeling these days. From Mike Elgin US says Russian bot farm was used and used AI to impersonate Americans In the Russian bot farm. Ai impersonates you.

01:38:17 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I put this on the rundown just to hear your Russian accent, just for that. I knew you couldn't. They're using a software program called Meliorator to create and manage fake accounts, which uses AI to do all of it, and it's really kind of a fascinating thing. I don't we don't really know that much about it, but they're able to deploy large and maintain large numbers of X accounts at scale and basically just spew out Russian talking points about the Ukraine war and other matters, and it's really kind of interesting.

01:38:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And of course, they were caught by the fbi partnering with a couple of other countries it was part of a kremlin approved, according to npr, and funded project run by a russian intelligence officer, a one guy. And this seems to be how. This is the entrepreneurial side of the gru. You know okay who. Who wants to run butt farm? Okay. Who wants to be gucci fur? Okay, you're gucci fur. Who wants it's like always one guy why it's it.

01:39:23 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I mean, this is basically the the the plan of queen isella of Spain, who both defeated the Muslims in Spain and also conquered the Americas by having a policy where an individual person could gather up a bunch of dudes, go conquer some little piece of land. They would make in governor, and now it belonged to Spain Privateers. Yes, this works.

01:39:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It works. It's the entrepreneurial side of hacking, that's right. Wow, well, thank you for bringing that historical note into this. Uh, yes, my pleasure, my pleasure. Just think, if queen isabella had had ai, what she could have done oh, what she could have accomplished she wouldn't have been such a loser.

01:40:04 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But the um, yeah, no it, and this is associated. The person was an editor at RT Russia Today oh, you're kidding, no, who managed the whole thing, apparently. And to me, what's interesting about this is not the fact that yet another disinformation operation was shut down. What's interesting is you see the innovation in this space. So who knows how many other programs like this are operating on Facebook or elsewhere?

01:40:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, if one person can do this and create thousands of accounts and have them all generating content. But that's what AI enables. That's the whole point.

01:40:42 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
By the way, zach says it's not useful. Ha ha.

01:40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should ask GRU if it's useful. We should all be investing in meliorator. The doj said that rt had been looking for alternate distribution channels into the bot farm was part of these efforts. So rt is kind of like radio free europe in reverse. Right it's or or tokyo uh, what was her name? Tokyo sally tokyo rose it was a propaganda effort from russia into the united states.

01:41:16 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Uh, you can watch rt on most cable systems and it's certainly the genius of rt is that it's it's you know I am making these numbers up, but it's it's like 70, 75 percent legit, right, and they use that just like radio free europe, right, you just?

01:41:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
put it a little spoonful, of propaganda makes the medicine go down, but I love rt's response. Their press office response asked for allegations that they had a bot farm to spread the propaganda, the rt responded farming is a beloved pastime for millions of russians oh sweet mother of mother russia loves our farmers.

01:41:58
Thousands, a thousand fake profiles on x, but this one guy, including a user claiming to live in minneapolis, who posted videos of putin justifying russia's actions in ukraine and claiming parts of ukraine, poland, lithuania, lithuania were gifts, were gifts from russian forces after world war ii. X did suspend the account. The problem is, you know, it was that easy to create them in the first place. You know, just create a thousand more again yeah right um leo can.

01:42:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Can we also transition into the olympic story, also on the rundown, where russia is really gunning for the olympics? Uh, now in past olympics, the last few years russia has not been allowed to participate right, right as a result, but in this olympics, in particular as a result of doping uh state-sponsored doping program and also the invasion of ukraine uh russian olympics uh who have not been caught doping personally. Olympians who have not been caught doping uh can compete under sort of a, not under the Russian flag, an Olympic flag.

01:43:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've done this. They did this last time, yeah.

01:43:12 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Right, and they can't march in the opening ceremonies and so on. And so Russia's really out to discredit the Games, and doing it in a couple of ways. One is they actually used AI to create a Tom Cruise movie that's been circulating on Telegram. What, yeah, it's called the olympics has fallen instead of olympia has fallen, and it's a cheesy, ridiculous thing. But it's out there trying to create the. You know they're trying to associate the olympics with terrorism. They've done a whole bunch of fake, oh to make people afraid to go, exactly, exactly afraid to go or just fearing the violence.

01:43:49
They actually used ai. They took picture, legitimate photos of different streets in paris and they used ai to put anti-israeli graffiti on those walls, claiming that they're going to murder israelis if they come to the olympics, and all this kind of stuff. There's all kinds of like crazy stuff and and it's a full court press against the olympics and and it just keeps getting louder and more noisy in terms of like this drumbeat of going after it. So they're looking to discredit the IOC, looking to discredit Macron and also the Paris government, and they're looking to just basically create fear, uncertainty and doubt around the Olympic Games themselves, and they're doing it mostly with AI.

01:44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, as you know, there's a big soccer or football tournament going on in Europe right now and that's also being targeted. Deep fake clips of the England football manager. Sorry, england, they didn't. I think they lost. But anyway, swearing at the England football team, I feel like we're going to live in a world where you have no idea. If what you're seeing is true. Is that? Are we already there? What do we?

01:45:01 - Denise Howell (Guest)
all knew yesterday that what we saw was true.

01:45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I have to say it went through. Maybe it didn't, but went through my mind. I remember the movie wag the dog. It kind of went through my mind, but then I you know, I mean I realized it was real.

01:45:18 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But I didn't see anybody claim it was ai generated, but I certainly saw a ton of people claim it was not what it seemed it was a hoax, even though it was pretty obvious.

01:45:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was what it seemed to be yeah but now you were on X, that's why right. But that's what happens. And, by the way, that's what the Russians want. They don't care if any individual campaign works. What they really want is that you don't trust anything.

01:45:41 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Just sowing doubt, get their job done, you assume that.

01:45:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I don't know. Is that graffiti real or not? I don't know. Well, I don't know.

01:45:48 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Is that graffiti real or not? I?

01:45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
don't know, and eventually nothing seems real to you.

01:45:52 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think the real issue here is that the public is completely unready for a world where things are convincingly fake. People are very quick to believe their own eyes, even if they have theoretical knowledge that there's perfect, deep fakes out there, for example, which are absolutely coming. I saw a report and I'm sorry it's not in front of me so I'm not going to get this exactly right, but a majority of people believe that ChatGPT has feelings and memories and so, even for something as simple as that, there's a fundamental misunderstanding about what's going on. Uh, when it comes to ai and I certainly don't think that you know ai is going to be used in other technologies to fake things, uh, to create whatever narrative. You know. We already see it happening. There have been ai based influencers, um, on instagram for a long time. They actually get work modeling and things like that modeling clothes, uh, stuff like that and you see their comments blowing up. But people talking to the ai character who do you think you're talking to, like who you know it's well some people.

01:47:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think they care right, exactly right.

01:47:08 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
They're playing along, yeah, yeah, which is also somewhat chilling. I kind of despair for the To talk to someone without caring that there's no one there. Yeah.

01:47:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're going to put a warning label on social media, that's what it should say is don't believe anything. Yeah, don't believe your lion eyes.

01:47:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Right right, don't believe anything. Yeah, don't believe your lion eyes, right, right, anyway, it's, it's a. It's really impressive, uh, what the olympic authorities are up against. Nobody's had to face what they're facing they're also dealing with just four years ago, we didn't have this luxury goods? Yeah, exactly, and so this is the first are they proactively making statements and rebuttals?

01:47:49
Oh, absolutely. They're all over it and they're so far doing a great job. But regarding the problem with Russia at the moment, I looked it up and this is the only Olympic Games that have taken place in Europe when there was an international war happening in europe. So this is a this situation with the ukraine war and having the olympics in europe is clearly not even the 1938 berlin.

01:48:19
I guess now the war had the spanish civil war was taking place in 1938, but that was not an international war. So I'm kind of hedging the. There was war, civil war, yeah, but, but this is the first time that you've had this. You know, you've had an antagonist toward france to host country, right, who's doing the olympics? Uh, who's engaged in a war on european soil? So this is a really unusual situation. The ai the reality of ai makes it unusual. And there are other things as well.

01:48:48
In addition to all of that, they are simply being hammered with cyber attack risks and threats. You have a situation, from a cybersecurity point of view, where you have both tons and tons of government officials from all over the world, especially from France, physically packed together with random people from all over the world, right, so the opportunity to sort of steal state secrets is unusually high in this scenario. That's one problem. There's a million other cybersecurity threats associated with this. But if the French get through this and it's all successful games, and, and, and nobody gets hurt and everything turns out fine, it will be an unprecedented achievement by the, by the French.

01:49:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm just depressed. This is. This is the event we hold every four years to forget national boundaries, to celebrate a global sportsmanship and achievement the Greeks used to spend wars to do the Olympics. I swear you guys, you're ruining the place.

01:50:03 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Of course, they competed naked as well, so you can't really follow that, yeah, okay. I feel like I'm. Do you have the Debbie Downer music? I feel like I'm.

01:50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How about this one? This is from Fast Company, but Jared Keller is one of the editors at militarycom. And do you know, jared? I do not know Jared personally personally, but he's been writing for us recently yeah, my 28 000 follower twitter account was hacked and changed my life for the better. I spent nearly 15 years growing an audience on the social network.

01:50:43 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Losing it was a godsend he turned out he liked not being able to use Twitter, which I think is probably understandable to almost anybody. Yeah.

01:50:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny because you know I stopped using Twitter when Leon bought it. So that was October two years ago, right, almost two years and I said you know, follow me on Mastodon. And that was that. It was fine. I survived.

01:51:08
I've always had a like love, hate thing with twitter. I was one of the early users. For a while I had the most followers of anybody five thousand followers. Then kevin rose and I had a little race to the top that they stole your brand. Well, and that was the hate part. That's so. The love part was this is a cool platform. The hate part was I was twit before there was twitter and, uh, I was a little mad. I asked ev williams, why'd you name it twitter? He said because he knew about me, because he was his previous company was a podcast aggregator, audio. So not ev williams, um, because, no, it was F Jack, no, it was F, it was F Williams, he was Odeo, right. And I asked F, why'd you name it Twitter? You knew about Twitter. He said well, I didn't think either of us were going anywhere. It wouldn't really matter. Anyway, I'm glad it's X now and unfortunately you can't say xcom without explaining formerly known as twitter.

01:52:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It's like prince I noticed in our headline. We didn't call it x, we called it twitter.

01:52:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, x is a terrible, by the way. Seo on x is awful.

01:52:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's awful it's a terrible name and I've also when I. When you type in twittercom, it'll, it'll turn into xcom, but if you go to protwittercom, it keeps twitter, so I don't know what's going on. Oh, that's weird.

01:52:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they well, they've been slowly, you know, killing all the little bit of twitter that's been left. I uh, the thing I noticed is my password. My pit warden stopped logging me in because it says well, you have a Twitter account. What's his ex? That's not the URL. It works. I have to help you. I have to change it. Well, it did work. It's trying to help me. Like Jared Changed my life forever. Losing it was a godsend. It's very hard to turn away. 500,000 followers. It's down now. It was 550. It's 500 000 followers. It's down now. It was 550. It's down to 490. Um, but I haven't tweeted in two and a half years. We are now on twitter, by the way, which is changing my whole tune on this, and I would have never countenanced this except for the fact that they renamed it x. I didn't want anybody to confuse it, but look on the right, live on x. We have 750 people watching, hello everybody. 750 people watching on uh x. So just so you're not confused we're twit, they're x. What's this twitter you're talking about?

01:53:43
no such thing no such thing, thing, no such thing.

01:53:54 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Elon's first company was a pre-paypal, was xcom and I guess he he had the domain, so why he loves that, I mean I think he wanted his kids were all named x, right? He wanted paypal to be called x, but nobody else would buy into it.

01:54:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
No, because it's a terrible name anybody remember the la best punk band called x on the yes xene shirvinka.

01:54:12 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Is that her last name?

01:54:13 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
yep, xene, right, dj bone break and billy zoom and yeah, wow, big fan, wow yeah look them up there oh, they were so good oh, yeah, yeah, but they had bad seo as.

01:54:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go ahead, try and find them.

01:54:27 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Terrible yeah, and drug addictions, but yeah, mostly bad SEO.

01:54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Back in the day, seo was not a thing. No one even knew what you were talking about. This is from Denise Howell. Is anyone concerned? I like any paragraph that starts that way. Denise, I'm going to read Is anyone concerned that Palmer Luckey who, lucky, who of course was the founder of oculus uh, made the first oculus rift, then I, which I kickstarted, and then he made billions selling it to meta, stayed at meta for a while but then meta kind of lost interest in palmer because palmer got a little strange. Palmer, lucky's new company and Anduril which is what that's from Lord of the Rings, anduril, yes, Aragorn's sword, oh, the flame of the West.

01:55:14 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Isn't it a painkiller? I think it's pharmaceutical.

01:55:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
New from Bayer Anduril. So this company is making military products. And Denise says and here's the website. We can read the mission statement. Denise says and here's the website, and we can read the mission statement Transforming US and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. And let me read the quote, because Anduril is a defense products company. Unlike most defense companies, we don't wait for our customers to tell us what they need. We identify problems privately, fund our R&D and sell finished products off the shelf. Ideas are turning to deployed capabilities in months, not years, saving the government and taxpayers money along the way.

01:56:04 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Okay, wasn't that the whole?

01:56:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
premise of Robocop you don't, you don't need, you don't, you don't need, you don't.

01:56:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
We'll show you how to do it Wow, and he's doing quite well with that. He seems to have quite a bit of traction.

01:56:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I remember his tech. The endurance technology was used on the border, wasn't it To try to spot people crossing the border illegally?

01:56:27 - Benito  (Announcement)
Well, I mean, we all know like AI military technology is really. That's where, that's where it's at yeah, tell goldman sachs.

01:56:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, fine, that is absolutely where it's at. Just look at the conflict in israel and the conflict in ukraine, where ai is heavily used in both, and then you think that his, his headshot, looks fake it looks a little ai manipulated.

01:56:52 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I'd check how many fingers he has by the way, have you talked about, have you talked about, um, the, uh, the white stork, which is, uh, the startup founded by former google ceo, eric schmidt?

01:57:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, no, but I you know we haven't talked about it, but I have actually been following it and it's kind of it's a little, tell us about it.

01:57:16 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
What does white stork do, which is, by the way store off, builds awful name and, unless you know, you're delivering babies or something like that. Um, it's a. It's a. It's designed to create small, low-cost killer drones that have bombs on them, that use AI for the targeting and for everything. So if there's jamming of drone signals, you let the drone pick the targets, track them down and kill them.

01:57:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because right. Why should you control it? Let it do its thing Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Let the drone pick the targets, track them down and kill them. Yeah, because so this is right. Why should you control it? Let it do it exactly why exactly it's.

01:57:54 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's, uh, what could go wrong? But he's but. But eric schmidt goes to ukraine all the time. He's working the ukrainians. It's unknown to what extent white stork drones are being used in the ukraine conflict. Uh, but this is what eric schmidt does now.

01:58:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He makes ai killer drones and names them after a cute bird. Yes, you don't want this white stork to pick you up. No, you don't. Uh, the white stork is the national bird and sacred totem of ukraine, according to forbes.

01:58:25 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So it was really specifically aimed for the ukraine conflict well, the ukraine conf, eric schmidt, seems to understand that the ukraine conflict is the future of so many things it's yeah, it's a test tube. Yeah, it's a yes experiment, the, the things they're doing with ai and drones and other technologies, and its application for warfare is. It's just like the ultimate laboratory for that on both sides of the conflict forbes has the exclusive on this because it has not emerged from stealth.

01:58:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, but they have. But apparently, according to forbes, it's an open secret in the drone community. Six people familiar with its activities told forbes. I think this is exactly so. When they talk about ai, I always say oh, it, oh, it's not a threat to humanity, unless you I don't know give it weapons.

01:59:16 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Right, turn it loose in a battlefield. But the other thing, if you're thinking about military drones, right. If you're thinking about $20 million drones, these drones that White Stork is making cost 400 and you can make them in mass quantities.

01:59:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can make millions of them and they target autonomously.

01:59:38 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So you hope the software is good one hopes not a good time for hallucinations they call them kamikaze drones.

01:59:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, schmidt called them that in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last July. Also known as suicide drones, these cheap aircraft can loiter on the battlefield before being dispatched to disable or destroy their targets. In the hands of a skilled operator with several months of training not that skilled, a little skilled. These drones fly so fast they're nearly impossible to shoot down. He again wrote an op-ed for Foreign Affairs declaring that Russia's superior electronic warfare capabilities allow it to jam and spoof the signals between Ukrainian drones and their pilots. If Ukraine is to neutralize Russian drones, its forces will need the same capabilities and, frankly, be even better if the drones didn't need operators. Well, at least he's working for the good guys.

02:00:42 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, and it's all in the background of GPS and other signal type of jamming technology that that russia is really really good at yeah, we've talked about in fact, they're disrupting tens of thousands of flights in europe.

02:00:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh, it's a, it's a massive problem yeah all right, let me take another break I need to, I need yeah, when we come back, there's actually good news on the rundown, the good news talk about the good news is coming up, okay, yes, my favorite part of the show is where we play sad music and talk about all the people who died this week but, we won't.

02:01:20
We won't do that this week for you. It's like the academy awards in miniature, right, right, yeah, right In memoriam. In memoriam, there were, you know what? Richard Simmons Loved him. Very lovable fella. Yes, shannon Doherty, lovable actress. You know, sad, it's sad, but this is a tech show so we're not going to talk about that.

02:01:44
Our show today is actually brought to you by a technology that will transform your business. It has our Zip Recruiter. So summer's here and maybe you're a seasonal business. I know my favorite seasonal business in Providence, the place where I get my clam cakes the Dune Brothers. They staff up right about now. It gets very business but it's busy.

02:02:06
But it's not just clam cake shacks, it's everything from mule packers I don't even know what that is to drama camp leaders. These they're looking for people with specific skills and they're not easy to find. Whether you're hiring for one of those roles or, frankly, any other role, how do you find top talent before the competition gets to them? And I can tell you what we do Zip Recruiter. Right now you can try Zip Recruiter free at ziprecruitercom. Slash twit If you are looking for an experienced clam cake maker. You know that there's three other clam cake shacks down the beach that are trying to hire two. You need a special little tool in your pocket Zip Recruiter. Their powerful matching technology does a deep dive to identify top talent for your roles. We've already we had this experience. We had a two-week notice from one of our continuity people. She got a better job. That's fine, we understand, but that meant we had to fill that position fast. We went to Zip Recruiter and it's amazing because ZipRecruiter, as soon as we posted it, said well, you know, I've got some resumes from people we think would be very good for that job. They start showing people qualified for the job and you can invite them to apply. And I have to tell you, if you're trying to beat out the other guy the other clam crab shack down the beach inviting them to apply to yours is definitely the way to go. Gear up for summer with ZipRecruiter's high speed hiring tools.

02:03:36
We love Viva. That's how we got her. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. For us it's almost always within the first hour or two. It's so great because you know when you're down a person it's like I'm going to have to work harder. This is going to be a struggle. I don't have time for this. Ziprecruiter makes it easy. Just go to our special address and try it for free. Ziprecruitercom slash twit. Ziprecruitercom slash twit. Ziprec recruiter. It's the smartest way to hire. It's the way we hire. Zip recruitercom slash Twitter. We thank zip recruiter for supporting us, but also for making a fantastic product. All right Enough about killer drones. What is? Give us some good news.

02:04:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Apple and Google have introduced a new order data portability tool where you can transfer your google photos from google photos to iCloud photos and it all happens cloud to cloud. It doesn't go through your own personal system, and the reason this is good news is this is a rare instance where companies are embracing a standard, working together and doing something for users that nobody profits from.

02:04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think they're doing it, though let's be honest, because the EU or somebody you know it's fear driven or no? You think they're just nice being nice guys?

02:05:03 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's hard to say, I don't know actually.

02:05:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In this case, it's Apple is getting the new customer. It's google. That's being nice right that's my ask.

02:05:11 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Can you sync in both directions beginning?

02:05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
today actually this was something they announced like a year ago. I remember it's finally, uh, bearing fruit. Beginning today, apple and google are expanding on the direct data transfer offerings to log users of google photos to transfer their collections directly to iCloud's photos. This complements and completes the existing transfers that were first made possible from iCloud Photos to Google Photos and fulfills a core data transfer initiative. This is the DTI Principle of Reciprocity. The offering from Apple and Google will be rolling out over the next week and is the newest tool powered by the open source data transfer product technology stack.

02:05:53 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I basically would like to use both and have them always be in sync with each other.

02:05:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, DTI was Google, Apple and Meta, by the way, and you know I have to think it is to kind of blunt regulation, but it's good for us. It's good for us.

02:06:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Whatever it takes, because I've always been terrified of cause. I have all my photos in Google photos and, uh, you know, going back from beginning of time, and you know I just don't trust them to manage the service going forward. Google photos just keeps getting worse, their, worse, their photo editing tools are horrible now and I thought what if I get stuck? What if they just close the whole thing? And so what I've been doing in the last year or so is I've been taking copies of, I download my pictures into Google Photos and then I do another copy into Amazon Photos, which doesn't compress them at all as far as I know, but I'd love to be able to do that into iCloud. So this is great.

02:06:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you go to Google Takeout Actually, I'm logging in, look, with my passkey on Bitwarden. I love that, oh, it's so great. You go to Google Takeout and I'll confirm, start an export, yeah. And you say choose the data you want to copy Google Photos, okay, okay. And then it gives you as an option you can use iCloud, let's see. Continue. This probably hasn't been rolled out yet. Oh, I guess not. Yeah, yeah.

02:07:26 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So this is coming. You got the broken robot. All right Well well, that's good.

02:07:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, that's exciting. Um, I used uh, so it takes some. This is I've used google takeout before. The problem is you do a takeout on your photos, you get like 100 files with unusual names and they're not photos. Yeah, it's all bizarre, and it zips and you unzip them and then it's just like but one of our sponsors, milio, did import it, so I was able to do that and, importantly, it has a dedupe function, because that's the problem If I just did this in iCloud, I would have the same photo over and over and over again.

02:08:03
All right, I'll give you some other news. Good news, news, good news. The federal trade commission has told eight companies you better change your tune in 2022. They took action against harley davidson, uh, weber grills and westinghouse saying your requirement that you use our tools and parts and facilities violate warranties, specifically the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Now eight additional companies have received letters from the FTC saying you have to open up your repair process. You can't. You know you can't. So the ones that are applicable to the tech community ASRock, zotac and Gigabyte. You cannot tell customers that using third-party parts in repair shops violate product warranties. That's illegal. All eight companies are ordered to review their box stickers to ensure you don't imply warranty coverage is conditioned on the use of specific parts and services and they're going to monitor them.

02:09:14
So good news for Right to Repair, the other companies implicated or involved 4Air Purifier, cellars, ares Health, blue Air, medify Air and Orancy and Treadmill Maker in movement. But I think, more importantly, other companies are going to sit up and take notice and say, oh, they're actually enforcing the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act. We best not, we best not. So that's good news. That is good news. There you go, See, it's nice to end on an upbeat note. Happy news. Thank you all for being here. It was a classic Twit episode with the wonderful Denise Howell, your podcast network, your new podcast, and there are two of them at hearsayculturecom. One is uneven distribution. We've talked about that before. William Gibson's classic line the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. What do you talk about on this show? The future.

02:10:10 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I'm not a futurist by any means, but I feel like I just, through my acquaintances and contacts in life, encounter a lot of people like yourself who I consider to be living in the future.

02:10:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this the?

02:10:23 - Denise Howell (Guest)
one I'm going to be on. It's the one you're going to be on.

02:10:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I better start thinking then, Okay.

02:10:29 - Denise Howell (Guest)
So I try to gain insights on things that we can expect, not in any sort of like stock picking way, but just how to think about where things are going.

02:10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, this is going to be fun. I you know as much as we talk about the future, I don't know if I have any ability to predict it. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that I have no ability to predict it at all.

02:10:59 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I don't look. I don't look for predictions. I think everyone here would probably agree with me that you've been living in the future for a long time.

02:11:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Predictions are the worst with me that you've been living in the future for a long time. Yeah, predictions are the worst. You can't. You just can't, because that's one of the things we love about technology is is it isn't predictable. You don't know what's gonna happen next. But I will come up with some some good thoughts. How about that? Not predictions? I, I know that you will uh, you also do something called r and d with dnd, research and Development with Dave and Denise. That's also kind of about technology and sort of the future.

02:11:34 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yes, Sort of kind of it's more about culture, society. We had a really interesting guest recently who talked about healthcare inequities globally. That's his area of study.

02:11:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting, yeah.

02:11:52 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, so I mean I'm learning a lot doing this show and Dave Levine. Dave Levine is a really old friend of mine. He's a law professor at Elon University, really fun and funny. He has forever done a radio show at Stanford's FM channel called he hearsay culture and he decided to spin that into our network.

02:12:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he's the hearsay culture guy. He is Cool. Hearsayculturecom, the two podcasts, uneven distribution and R and D with D and D. Thank you, denise, it's so nice to see you. I can't believe your son is 20. I know, holy mcdoley.

02:12:32 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I can't either. Yes.

02:12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, is he in college now, or is he about to go, or what's the?

02:12:39 - Denise Howell (Guest)
He is, he'll be a junior.

02:12:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A junior Starting in the fall. Yeah, oh my God, I know it's crazy. What? Is he? You know I often feel bad for kids growing up today, for you know he had when he was in high school, during covid. I mean it's. He's got this. All this stuff climate change, political division. Is he bullish about his future or does he go, mom, I don't know what's going to happen.

02:13:06 - Denise Howell (Guest)
He's hesitant, he's not bullish he's he's not.

02:13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, morose, but it's got to be scary.

02:13:16
I mean yeah it is you know I was talking to henry, I said I'm just glad you became an influencer. He said, yeah, everybody, everybody I know wanted to be an influencer. That was like it used to be. I want to be an nba star, and now it's. I want to be an NBA star, and now it's I want to be an influencer. But he actually did it, and then, and then Abby wants to be a standup comic. So I think my kids are are actually damaged somehow and I blame myself, but no, I think this is good.

02:13:40 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Your kids have both found the two things that social media is good for Right Food and comedy, right, right.

02:13:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, but I feel right. Food and comedy right, right, right. But I feel like that's been kind of you're pushed into that direction because otherwise it's flipping burgers for 20 an hour and you're never going to be able to have a home and I mean life is. I feel. I feel for your, your boy and and all the kids in college right now. It's going to be, it's got to be, tough anyway.

02:14:06 - Denise Howell (Guest)
It'll be interesting yeah.

02:14:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know what they're smart they're, they're energetic, they're ambitious, they're going to make it. They're going to do great. I know it, just like Harry McCracken did. You know his parents were worried about him and they said when were they? What did you want to be in college? What did you think you were going to do? I actually, um, what the issue was in college. I didn't really know what I wanted to do earlier than that. I wanted to be a cartoonist. Oh, that's cool. You actually are very. I've seen your uh drawings.

02:14:36 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I like to draw sometimes, yeah, yeah, you're good at that, and in college I was kind of clueless.

02:14:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So how did you find journalism and tech?

02:14:44 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
oddly enough, even when I wasn't sure what I wanted to do in college, I I was already writing for magazines for money, but I didn't realize it was actually an option as an actual profession.

02:14:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we're very glad you did.

02:14:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And I love computer magazines, so I started writing for them.

02:14:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, me too. That's how I started, right, I was a DJ, I was in radio, but I thought I really loved this computer thing that was starting to happen. This is the late seventies, right, and I have friends who worked at Atari and Apple and stuff. So I bought and I spent a lot of quarters at Chuck E Cheese, pizza time, theater, playing arcade games and I thought, well, maybe if I get a computer I could just play them at home and save my money. So I got an Atari and then I realized how expensive it was going to be. I mean, at the time a floppy disk drive was like a thousand dollars. It was like crazy.

02:15:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
so I started writing for magazines to support my habit there was that, like the really early days, of chuck e cheese yeah, the fact you call it still nolan busha the fact you called it pizza time.

02:15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Theater shows yeah, oh, they had the dancing bears and all that weird stuff and I would go go off in the corner they had Battle Zone on the tank game and I'd go and I'd play that and play that for hours and hundreds of dollars or quarters later I realized I better buy something. But then I fell in love with it and so it was nice, because I had a radio career and I liked writing for tech magazines and at some point in the early 90s they kind of converged and the rest is history. I think it's a lot of luck. I think that's what you tell your son, denise, is you don't know, you don't know.

02:16:20 - Denise Howell (Guest)
And they so think that you know everything is set in stone and everything they do has these enormous ramifications. They don't realize how fluid things are.

02:16:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I tell. I always said to my daughter a life is a, is a, is brownie in motion, it's a the drunkard's walk. You can't. It is not a straight line from A to B. You just at least my life you kind of meander, and then at the end it all, it all works out, or then maybe it doesn't. I don't know, but there's no guarantee, let's put it that way, and there's no way of planning yeah, my career didn't even exist until 10 years ago, 15 years ago what? What is your career, benito?

02:16:57 - Benito  (Announcement)
I guess I'm a media producer, I guess yeah, you're right. New media producer yeah, and I've been doing this for about 15 years so like basically when it started, so like when I was in college, this didn't exist yet.

02:17:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been podcasting long enough to see it rise and fall, so both ends. Mike Elgin, what did you want to do when you were in school?

02:17:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I wanted to be a diplomat, I wanted to work for the US Foreign Service and I was an international relations major. I studied Japanese and a whole bunch of other things like that and I actually in college published an international relations publication for students, really Just did it myself and distributed it myself. But yeah, and then I took that and got into journalism and then in journalism fell in love with with the max we're using to produce the newspaper. Yeah and uh, decided to switch over to computer magazines.

02:17:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Technology was very enticing in the in the 80s and 90s because it was it was all really was starting and it was exciting, and I think maybe that is the thing that's happening now for young people is that there is some excitement.

02:18:07 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Uh yeah, I hope so I mean the biggest risk is that is that technology is a black box and nobody cares how it works, and so you want young people to understand how things work right so you know, in lucifer's hammer, jerry pennell kind of talks about that subject, because the giant asteroid hits the planet and he says nobody knows how anything works.

02:18:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, exactly, and you know if, if that were to happen today, uh, and you lost a certain portion of the population, no one would know how to make a new computer or a new cell phone or a new tv set.

02:18:43 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Right, we just that's right I read recently that someone is directing what they're calling the Earth's Black Box, which is supposed to be, like this, perennial repository of human knowledge.

02:18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:18:56 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, I guess we could break into it if necessary.

02:19:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So aliens can figure out what happened, right? Yes, when they come.

02:19:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The title by the way of the website. The website is brace for impact that is not good so? So this is like the seed bank, right? The seed bank is to preserve all of the seeds for all of the living things. This is to preserve the intellectual seeds. Is it actually task? They said that's what youtube is for. They built this. Did they actually build this? They actually built this box. Well, maybe not. It says to be completed 2023 oh dear they built a look, they built a website. You know, that's a, that's a start there, they built.

02:19:48 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I like the box. How much of the stuff, yeah, how much of the stuff that exists in the world that were built by people and organizations is just, you know, people taking the sci-fi of their youth and trying to make it happen. Oh, most of it, right.

02:20:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, Elon Musk.

02:20:02 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Everything Elon Musk does is just like a 13-year-old sci-fi fans.

02:20:06 - Benito  (Announcement)
you know fantasy Except right now they learned all the wrong lessons from those books Exactly Well, the metaverse is a perfect example.

02:20:13 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
The metaverse was always a dystopian nightmare and Mark Zuckerberg was like. That sounds great.

02:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wasn't reading it carefully. He didn't understand that the world of Ready Player One or Snow Crash. The reason people were so into that is because life was horrible. Yeah, this was an escape from life.

02:20:32 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Understand the assignment Zuck.

02:20:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Read it more carefully next time.

02:20:40 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I would like to segue my comments about understanding technology into.

02:20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hello Chatterbox.

02:20:47 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Hellochatterbox. Hellochatterboxcom, my son's startup, which teaches kids how AI works, how technology works, how consumer appliances work. Look how cute it is. And it's cute, yes, and it's an extremely ethical company. There's 100% private, 100% COPPA compliant client and he my son kevin spends 90 of his time making sure that everything's his existing users are updated with better tech. He supports it to the nth degree. He's like the opposite of google, which just throws something against the wall and then walks away. He's constantly improving it and making it even more perfect, so it's a really great company that's so great.

02:21:28 - Benito  (Announcement)
he's constantly improving it and making it even more perfect. I love Kevin, so it's a really great company. That's so great. He is really really good.

02:21:32 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
And so this is a smart speaker that kids build themselves. Then they teach how to themselves. It uses APIs. It does more than the you know Amazon Echo type products. If you program it to do those things it can turn on and off lights, it can get the weather, all those things.

02:21:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's for kids eight years and up.

02:21:54 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So it's just a great product. Oh, it's doing well I hope because I really think it's fantastic. Yeah, there there are school, the school districts that use it, the schools that use it are absolutely in love with that. It's just a great technology education. And again, they love the fact that it's usable. It's private, completely private, and it actually teaches technology, which most ed tech products do not do. So cool.

02:22:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this is, by the way, a public benefit corporation.

02:22:20 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
He's done this, that's right.

02:22:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He really cares. He's done this right. Yep, he does. He's fantastic, he does, he's fantastic. So hellochatterboxcom For yourself with your own kids, or for a school that you know, or if you're our teacher, you should definitely take a look at this. This is the right way to teach technology, and then we'll have a generation that knows how it works. So, when the asteroid?

02:22:45 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
hits, we can build it all back. I mentioned that survey that found that the majority of people think that. Uh, you know, open ai's chat gpt. It has is sentient and has thought feelings well any chatterbox you any eight-year-old chatterbox user is going to know that's not the case. It's just a thing.

02:23:01 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Somebody built an appliance one of my favorite things mike ever wrote for fast company was about how you shouldn't treat um alex Alexa politely, because that would lead you to think that maybe Alexa had feelings, which is a dangerous thing to think. Yeah, yeah.

02:23:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is no thank you. There is no person in that, in that box. That's right. It's just a machine. Read more about it. Machinesocietyai is Mike's newsletter. Mike is one of the smartest guys I know. Actually, I think all three of you are pretty damn smart, and always a pleasure having all three of you. You're no slouch either, leo. I'm smart enough just to surround myself with smart people. That's the key. That is absolutely the key. Two more weeks in the studio, then I'll be at home surrounding myself with smart people. But you know it won't really be that much of a change, will it? I mean, that's what's kind of cool about this Zoom technology, although it was great to have you in studio.

02:23:56 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
No, the lunch in downtown Petaluma. Yeah, you got to see where'd you eat the place with the long tables that serves breakfast.

02:24:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Della Fattoria. Exactly, love that place, martha stewart's favorite bakery wonderful yeah, really amazing.

02:24:13 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, you know about let me ask you yeah, let me ask you a question, leo are you going to be able to travel and do podcasts? You should do more gastronomatic experience, yes, and do the shows from there.

02:24:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I cast from this, yes, absolutely yes, yeah, uh, that is part of the point is, if you're anchored to a studio, it's a different experience than if you can take your gear with you on the road. Uh, yeah, I might have to get one of those little new miniature uh starlink satellite dishes that you can carry with you everywhere oh, yeah, no, the, yeah, the, the portable ones that those look amazing.

02:24:45 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But there's a. There's a rooftop in oaxaca that I've done podcasts from, that actually has fiber optic connection and you you have, like, this view of the city, okay, and you're outside and this is an amazing place to do a podcast well, there you go now.

02:24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm now, I'm in. I love. We had a wonderful time in Oaxaca on the gastronomat. Where's your next gastronomat experience?

02:25:06 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
the next one is Barcelona. We're pretty much sold out for the rest of the year. The next available one is, in fact, oaxaca, in march, and I would encourage everyone to do it, because oaxaca as you, as you know, leo incredible, it's totally unexpected. It's not what you think it is. It's beautiful, it's, it's the real mexico, it's a real, the real, actually.

02:25:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really a good way to put it. It's the real mexico. It's not a tourist destination, it's the real mexico.

02:25:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's incredible as I like to say, that's, oaxaca is where mexicans go when mexicans want to go to mexico mike elgin is where smart people go.

02:25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When people want to read smart writing uh, so nice to have you machine site societyai. Or they go to fastcompanycom where Harry McCracken writes all the time as global technology editor. Your interviews lately have been stunning just really, really good, so I can't wait to see what's next. Thank you, harry, it's great to have you and the fabulous Denise Howell. Do you still practice law or are you just all podcasts all the time now?

02:26:12 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Oh no, I practice law.

02:26:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OK, I'll be calling. I do tech law.

02:26:15 - Denise Howell (Guest)
OK, a lot of privacy law these days. I bet.

02:26:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you all for joining us. Please do one more joining thing Join the club. Club Twitter is what keeps us on the air these days, as podcasting audiences and advertising diminishes. We want to keep this community together and the best way to do it is with Club Twit $7 a month. You can pay more if you want, but you don't have to. Gets you ad-free versions of all of our shows. Gets you video from shows we only put out in audio. Gets you time with me because that's one of the things we're going to start doing is spending more time in the club kind of impromptu stuff with me and micah and the gang benito too.

02:27:00
So if you're not, the ai version of leo the ai leo will live in the club it lives on. It is not the smartest ai ever, I have to tell you that right now, but it's good at dad jokes. You can ask it to tell a joke. Anyway, join the club. Twittv slash club twit. We'd love to have you. Thank you for joining us and boy hello to all the live stream viewers. Now. Those numbers have been going up and up and up Every week. We've been doing it on YouTube and Twitch and LinkedIn and Facebook we do. And YouTube and I mean I have there's so many I can't. Xcom Join us live every Sunday from about 2pm to 5pm Pacific Time, that's five to eight Eastern Time, 2100 UTC.

02:27:48
Youtubecom slash live slash twit, or sorry, youtubecom slash twit. Slash live. Twitchtv slash twit. Xcom. Usually we're right there on the front page. Linkedin. I don't even know where we are on LinkedIn or Facebook, but if you can find us, we'll be there for all of our shows now and I think that's a really fun way to watch and participate in the shows. Thanks for being here. I'll be back next week. I hope you will too. Meanwhile, as I've been saying for the last 20 years, another twit is in the can. This is amazing.