This Week in Tech Episode 1073 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. It was a big news week, but we've got a big panel for you. Molly White's here, Owen Thomas, Harry McCracken. We'll talk about the showdown between the Department of Defense and Anthropic. Netflix gives up on the deal for Warner Brothers and layoffs at Block. Does it mean the beginning of the end for real humans? That and more coming up next on TWiT.

Owen Thomas [00:00:26]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Leo Laporte [00:00:38]:
This is TWiT. This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 1073, recorded Sunday, March 1st, 2026. Broetry in motion. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Great panel ahead for you. Molly White is here from Web3IsGoingJustGreatMollyWhite.net. Hi, Molly.

Owen Thomas [00:01:00]:
Hello.

Molly White [00:01:00]:
How are you?

Leo Laporte [00:01:01]:
In your brand new orange home.

Molly White [00:01:03]:
Welcome.

Leo Laporte [00:01:04]:
It's beautiful. Did you get this place to match your hair or it's just coincidental?

Molly White [00:01:11]:
Yeah, it made the search very challenging, but we made it happen.

Leo Laporte [00:01:15]:
It's so complimentary. It actually looks great. I mean, it's such a great background for you. Anyway, great to see you. Also with us, the wonderful Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Always good to see Owen, who is, I mean, are you gonna start entering weightlifting, bodybuilding contests, or is that your goal?

Owen Thomas [00:01:35]:
I haven't gone as far as a bodybuilding competition, but I have entered weightlifting competitions.

Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
You look really good. I mean, go on, you know, seriously, you're filling that shirt out like Arnold, man. You got it going on. It's great to see you.

Owen Thomas [00:01:50]:
I'm just, you know, I, I'm just trying to bring some muscle to tech journalism. Muscular journalism is what the world needs, right?

Leo Laporte [00:01:57]:
Well, I'm not adding to that, that's for sure. I'm wearing the spaghetti noodle kind of side of that picture. Also with us, the technologizer himself, the wonderful Harry McCracken from Fast Company. Hi, Harry.

Harry McCracken [00:02:09]:
Hi, Leo. Hi, folks.

Leo Laporte [00:02:10]:
Good to see you. You've been doing a lot of great interviews of late, including Molly White, I understand.

Harry McCracken [00:02:16]:
I talked to Molly a few months ago. I have some good stuff coming up soon. Like, watch Fast Company over the next couple of weeks or so.

Leo Laporte [00:02:23]:
I have you on my RSS feeds, and it's frustrating because I'm trying to zip through RSS feeds And every time I run across a Fast Company story, especially yours, I have to stop and read it. Just no good.

Harry McCracken [00:02:38]:
Well done at all.

Leo Laporte [00:02:39]:
But yeah, well, you stop writing such good stuff. It's great to have all three of you. This has been a very eventful week. The clock was ticking all week long for Anthropic, the AI company that creates Claude, which is, I think, to coders anyway, the premier coding AI. And of course, Claude had a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense. In fact, it was the only AI, to my knowledge, that had clearance to work on classified materials. In fact, Claude was used in the Venezuela kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. Did I say kidnapping? That's probably a loaded word.

Leo Laporte [00:03:20]:
Arrest, apprehension of an Ecuadorian.

Molly White [00:03:23]:
Distraction.

Leo Laporte [00:03:24]:
Yes. Extraction. That's a very good word. But the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, said, hey guys, we don't want any limitations on how we can use you. And Dario Amodei of Anthropic said, well, wait a minute, we have two red lines. We don't want you to use us to surveil American citizens, and we don't want you to use us to create autonomous weapons that will kill without a human in the loop. Both of which, incidentally, are illegal. The DOD is not supposed to do either one of those.

Leo Laporte [00:04:06]:
But Pete Hegseth said, no, we don't want any private company to put any restrictions on how we use their technology, which I guess sort of makes sense if you're the Pentagon. You know, it should be up to you and lawmakers to decide what you use this, the hardware and software you contract. You wouldn't, you know, the Boeing wouldn't say, well, you can't use our planes to bomb civilians. So I understand that a little bit. Uh, it ticked down to the wire, 5 PM on Friday, at which point Anthropic did not budge, and Pete Haakeseth declared not only that they would stop using Anthropic, but they would designate them a supply chain risk. Trump actually posted on Truth Social that they were a very evil, very evil company and not patriotic. And he said, I am directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease all use of Anthropic's technology Furthermore, if it is a supply chain risk, nobody who has a contract with the Pentagon can use it. And that would include Google, that would include Microsoft, that would include NVIDIA, all of which use Claude.

Owen Thomas [00:05:34]:
Uh, which is, as, uh, Dario Amodei pointed out, is not actually how, uh, the supply chain risk law works.

Leo Laporte [00:05:41]:
Yeah, in fact, they've immediately gone to court to challenge, uh, that. It is better than it could have been. They could have used the defense— I understand the Defense Production Act— to say, too bad, we're just going to do what we want to do with your AI.

Owen Thomas [00:05:58]:
Which, that's an interesting thought experiment. What if the, you know, what if the Pentagon were to do that? So I, I suppose they could seize the source code, right? You know, they could, um, Yeah, I don't know how much access they have. I mean, but how are they going to compel Anthropic's employees to fix bugs, you know, maintain it? They'll all just quit, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:06:23]:
Um, it was interesting because there was so much support on Twitter from Anthropic employees who obviously had a campaign. Uh, there were hundreds of tweets saying, I am so proud to be working for Anthropic because they drew the line. Pete Hegseth tweeted— I keep saying tweet, X'd, I don't know— this gets posted, posted on X. This week, Anthropic delivered a masterclass in arrogance and betrayal, as well as a textbook— boy, he seems butthurt— as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States government or the Pentagon. Our position has never wavered and will never waver. The Department of War must have full unrestricted access to Anthropic's models for every lawful purpose in defense of the Republic. Uh, he also implied that they're woke, cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of effective altruism. They've attempted to strong-arm the U.S.

Leo Laporte [00:07:18]:
military into submission. Now there's some drama going on because despite the fact that Sam Altman issued a statement in support of Anthropic saying Yeah, yeah, we, we agree. This is, uh, absolutely right. On Wednesday, 2 days before he was actually negotiating with the Pentagon, Gary Marcus says the whole thing was a scam. The fix was in. Dario never had a chance. Uh, this is from the New York Times. At the same time, Mr.

Leo Laporte [00:07:59]:
Altman engaged in talks with the Pentagon starting on Wednesday over a deal for its technology. In fact, they did get the deal. They have classified access. The Pentagon's going to use them. It has nothing to do with the fact that the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, donated $25 million to a PAC supporting Donald Trump. Has nothing to do with the fact that Sam Altman donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration and more money to the ballroom that will never get built. You know, somebody pointed out, I think this is interesting. I don't know if it's true.

Leo Laporte [00:08:28]:
Is this the first U.S. company to stand up to President Trump? Instead of giving him a gold bar?

Harry McCracken [00:08:35]:
Certainly to that degree, I think, no question. In public, certainly.

Leo Laporte [00:08:42]:
So, and then that raises the question, did the government, did the administration put its thumb on the scale and say, you know, we're gonna, uh, we like these OpenAI guys, they're, they're nice guys, they're generous. Well, Anthropic out of business.

Owen Thomas [00:08:57]:
One, one key difference between OpenAI's products and Anthropic's: OpenAI is all cloud. So anything, anything that OpenAI offers is delivered from OpenAI servers. Claude actually exists in a downloadable, locally runnable version, and so it can be deployed in classified networks which are air-gapped from the public internet. OpenAI doesn't work on, you know, on air-gapped networks because it's all on the public internet. Even if it's secure, encrypted, these are physically separated networks. That, I think, is a key distinction, and that is why Anthropic's in a tougher position here. OpenAI can perhaps be a little holier than thou because their products are different.

Harry McCracken [00:09:54]:
I saw somebody online, I don't remember who, compare Sam Altman to Eddie Haskell, which seemed like a really good point of comparison. And of course there's still the question of how he claims that he was able to wangle the same deal that Dario could not get. And it seems like it might boil down to exactly what human oversight means and OpenAI giving the Department of Defense a looser, goosier definition of what it means for this stuff enough to have human oversight.

Leo Laporte [00:10:28]:
So there's— it might have been a little cynical on Anthropic. They did in fact sign a $200 million contract with the Pentagon. If you do a deal with the Pentagon, aren't you saying they can use your technology in any way they choose?

Harry McCracken [00:10:44]:
Yeah, I mean, also Anthropic is not morally opposed to AI controlling killing systems. They just don't think the technology is quite there yet.

Leo Laporte [00:10:54]:
That, yeah, that's an interesting point.

Molly White [00:10:56]:
Someday they seem more willing to— uh, sorry, OpenAI seems more willing to sort of, uh, take the government at their word that they will follow the law, at least as intended, uh, when it comes to things like mass surveillance. Whereas it seemed to me like Anthropic wanted more of a reassurance that, you know, no, we are not going to use the carve-outs in the law that might allow for mass surveillance, or at least could argued to allow for mass surveillance.

Leo Laporte [00:11:28]:
Mike Masnick posted on Blue Sky that after examining the terms of the deal, it's pretty clear that in fact domestic surveillance is allowed through kind of a loophole. They refer to Executive Order 12333, which Anthropic says, yeah, we'll comply with. That allows the NSA to capture communications by tapping into lines outside the US, even if it's information about US citizens. So it's— I could see why some are thinking Sam Altman has been a little Eddie Haskell-ish.

Owen Thomas [00:12:07]:
Um, there's a, there's a great term of art from the judicial world called the presumption of regularity. So when a government lawyer comes before a court, the judge kind of extends them essentially the benefit of the doubt. The government is presumed to be kind of operating under the law, presenting true facts, etc. Um, you know, I think what we're seeing is that the, uh, the, the court system, uh, the tech world, the public at large, you just cannot give this administration the presumption of regularity, right?

Leo Laporte [00:12:41]:
Um, good point. There is— maybe it's bias. Is that bias?

Owen Thomas [00:12:46]:
Um, you know, well, it's— I, I'm just observing, you know, the, the reaction people are not extending the administration the benefit of the doubt that they might have extended other administrations.

Molly White [00:12:57]:
I think the administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not deserve it.

Leo Laporte [00:13:02]:
Yeah, right. And the very fact that Pete Haig says, no, no, man, you got to allow us to surveil Americans, you got to allow us to have autonomous killing machines— he's literally insisting on that. That kind of implies that they want to do it.

Owen Thomas [00:13:16]:
What some people in tech are saying is Why would you want to do business with the Pentagon on these terms? And, you know, not just these terms, but just the, the way that they're, uh, you know, kind of beating Anthropic up in public. Like, wouldn't it be easier to just say, we don't do business with the Pentagon, sorry?

Leo Laporte [00:13:36]:
Uh, that's why the fact that they made that $200 million deal and they were involved in the Maduro extraction kind of—

Molly White [00:13:43]:
yeah, that's one thing that's, that's very strange to me about some of the reaction to this, because there's been this sort of weird sentiment among some that, you know, Anthropic standing up to the government, they're the good guys, they're being very sort of morally driven. But it sort of ignores the fact that Anthropic has been working for the government and assisting in military strikes. And, you know, I think that some people are viewing this as the first time Anthropic is engaging with the Pentagon when that's actually not at all the case.

Leo Laporte [00:14:13]:
So there are those who say that, that Anthropics played 5D chess here, that they are actually coming out the big winners here. They are right now the number one, uh, Apple app, rose very quickly, more downloads of Anthropic's Claude than ever in history. Uh, people are— there's even pages saying here's how to cancel your OpenAI subscription.

Harry McCracken [00:14:41]:
I wonder, yeah, I wonder what impact it will have on people deciding where to spend their $20 a month.

Molly White [00:14:48]:
Yeah, uh, especially if, if there's sort of the, the feeling that, uh, OpenAI is going to be willing to assist the Pentagon in mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. I mean, I might be a little bit more concerned about the data I'm sharing with ChatGPT.

Leo Laporte [00:15:02]:
Exactly. ChatGPT keeps your history. Yeah. Uh, in fact, very interestingly, Claude just added a feature which they're promoting about how to move off other AIs How to extract all the history that the other AIs have of you and put it into Claude instead.

Harry McCracken [00:15:17]:
I mean, up until now, Claude— I mean, we all know about Claude, but I think its profile among, like, average Americans not all that interested in technology has been dramatically lower than that of ChatGPT, which is almost a billion active monthly. ChatGPT is still the brand name here. It is the Google of AI, and that this has to have been good publicity for Anthropic just in terms of it being in the news in a way it has not been up until now?

Leo Laporte [00:15:45]:
Well, some have pointed out, first of all, that the issue with frontier AIs and these hyperscalers right now is not how many contracts you can get. They're GPU constrained. So losing a $200 million contract with the Pentagon is meaningless because they'll immediately fill that with enterprise customers. They, they don't have enough GPUs to fulfill their demand as it is. So this just isn't— that's not an issue. They've gotten amazing publicity out of it.

Harry McCracken [00:16:17]:
Unless the Pentagon succeeds in getting enterprise customers antsy about doing business with Anthropic. And there is— I think the big question is, is the Trump administration attempting to drive Anthropic out of business, essentially?

Owen Thomas [00:16:32]:
And And, and good luck with that. I mean, again, like, government business as a whole is non-zero, but it is, you know, I think it's single-digit percentage at, at most, you know, most big tech, big software companies. It is— it's seen as prestigious, it's seen as like, well, we should, you know, we should have this, but I don't think it's make or break to the bottom line.

Molly White [00:16:59]:
But I think the question is, is the government going to do something unprecedented essentially to basically drive them out of business using the regulatory levers or all these threats of designating them a supply chain risk or a threat to American security? I mean, they could do something very extreme if they wanted to. And it's sort of the presumption of regularity thing again. Why would they do Reason to believe they might not.

Leo Laporte [00:17:26]:
Why would they try to put Anthropic out of business? Just because they didn't give money?

Harry McCracken [00:17:31]:
They love a fight. They love being able to accuse somebody of being woke and then to try to destroy that.

Leo Laporte [00:17:36]:
Yeah. Yes, why would they destroy Harvard? Why would they?

Harry McCracken [00:17:41]:
And they're used, generally speaking, most institutions have buckled under at least a little bit. Not Harvard, but a lot of other universities, for instance.

Owen Thomas [00:17:50]:
The Netflix board member who spoke out recently on a podcast, Susan Rice, who promptly drew Trump's scorn for doing this. Oh yeah, he says, "Just fire him." She pointed out that these companies that are bending the knee, to use her term, to the Trump administration, it's not going to look good for them if there's a change in control of the House or even the Senate. Not to mention a new occupant of the White House in 2029. But the midterms are coming up soon, and a House of Representatives that can call oversight hearings, that has subpoena power, that is not going to be fun for some of these corporate leaders.

Leo Laporte [00:18:37]:
It's a little bit of a chilling thought, but the administration is acting as if that will never happen. I hope they're wrong.

Harry McCracken [00:18:47]:
Well, they don't have a great track record for looking forward more than about 72 hours in general.

Leo Laporte [00:18:53]:
Okay, good. You know, it's funny because I'm an accelerationist. I love AI. I use Claude Code all the time. I'm blown away by what it can do. It's the first day I, you know, I've used all the chatbots and all that stuff, and I used Claude Code in the past, but something magical happened at the end of November. I remember the day, November 24th, 2025. I'll never forget it.

Leo Laporte [00:19:15]:
And ever since, I've been kind of more of a believer that AI is real and it's going to change things. And I've never been a doomer. I've always kind of poo-pooed the people that said, oh, AI is going to destroy us, going to take over for humanity. I always said AI is not a threat unless you, you know, I don't know, give it access to autonomous weaponry, for instance. Oh yeah, it's the monkey's paw curls. Yeah, as long as you don't let AI decide who lives or dies, we're okay. But now I'm starting to think, A, AI is very powerful and effective, still makes plenty of mistakes, and B, there are people, people in our administration who want to give AI that power.

Owen Thomas [00:20:02]:
I mean, autonomous drones are being deployed in the Russia-Ukraine conflict right now, the war.

Leo Laporte [00:20:10]:
Um, do they make, they make kill decisions, or are they targeted before by humans.

Owen Thomas [00:20:15]:
That I don't see.

Leo Laporte [00:20:16]:
This is a scary thing. You could create a drone army, a drone swarm that would have instructions about, well, if this guy's wearing a turban, you should kill him, that would make those decisions autonomously. And that's the thing that is really scary to me. Um, I don't know if we're at that stage yet. I think we could be if somebody were stupid enough to create that weapon, we could be at that stage today. If people have created that weapon, I'm terrified. Right now, most of these drones stay online as long as they can, you know, in the cloud. In fact, the drones that we build and others build have Starlink built in them.

Owen Thomas [00:20:59]:
Thank goodness Starlink isn't controlled by any crazed, mad, evil geniuses that could Uh, so, um, yeah, Ukraine is developing its own homegrown, yeah, AI-powered drones that can lock in our targets. They don't need, you know, basically I think a human selects a target, but they don't need the, a human okay to kind of, right, fire the shot.

Leo Laporte [00:21:26]:
That's a, that's a step in the wrong direction, that's for sure.

Owen Thomas [00:21:29]:
Well, Ukraine is desperate. Yeah, like, I understand their, their back is against the wall.

Leo Laporte [00:21:35]:
Yep. Uh, and as we know, Ukraine has been a, in effect, a, a test tube, uh, uh, for this kind of, uh, war. And now Iran will be on both sides.

Owen Thomas [00:21:48]:
Yeah, the fiber optic drones, you know, to get around jamming, that's crazy to me.

Leo Laporte [00:21:53]:
Yeah, the Russians are going around with hedge clippers trying to cut the, cut the The fiber optic cables.

Molly White [00:21:59]:
It reminds me of the electric lawn mowers that you have to plug in. Like, it just doesn't seem like a good idea.

Leo Laporte [00:22:08]:
Bad idea. Anyway, this was a big moment for AI, a big moment for the Trump administration, and a possibly life or death moment for Anthropic. Of course, OpenAI has just completed a massive record funding round, right? They got money from Nvidia and Amazon.

Molly White [00:22:28]:
I feel like every funding round they've done is a record funding round.

Leo Laporte [00:22:32]:
Yeah, it is raising this. No, it is literally, right? Each time.

Owen Thomas [00:22:38]:
Um, and, uh, someone estimated that Anthropic's, uh, just their internal, um, stock sale, their, you know, their sanctioned, uh, employee stock sale, is more than the entire value of real estate that was transacted in San Francisco last last year. Think about what that's doing to the housing market. We definitely see it in the San Francisco Business Times. We publish every week a list of homes that have traded hands. I regularly see across the Bay Area $10 million, $15 million. There was a $19.5 million mansion that sold.

Leo Laporte [00:23:20]:
Those prices are inflated because people have all this newfound wealth, you're saying?

Owen Thomas [00:23:25]:
Lot of all-cash deals in the market too. Wow.

Leo Laporte [00:23:29]:
Bitcoin didn't—

Molly White [00:23:30]:
million still get you a mansion there, or are we talking two-bedroom apartment?

Owen Thomas [00:23:33]:
Yeah, it gets you a teardown, you know.

Molly White [00:23:39]:
Yeah, yeah.

Owen Thomas [00:23:39]:
No, I mean, the, the—

Leo Laporte [00:23:40]:
got a one-car garage and, uh, you have to use the outhouse in the back.

Owen Thomas [00:23:45]:
That's probably a big lot in Atherton, like, you know, a nice house and a big lot in Atherton.

Leo Laporte [00:23:50]:
Um, a million?

Owen Thomas [00:23:51]:
19.5 million.

Harry McCracken [00:23:53]:
Yeah, yeah, that's not a tear down, but, uh, 1 million doesn't get you a parking space these days.

Leo Laporte [00:23:58]:
No, that's actually really bad for any community. It really, uh, it, it is not a— it is almost a— feels like a death spiral for a community.

Owen Thomas [00:24:09]:
Yeah, the, the affordability crisis.

Leo Laporte [00:24:11]:
Yeah, continues.

Owen Thomas [00:24:12]:
And, and it's, it's interesting because like a lot of, uh a lot of other metro areas are seeing declining rents. You know, they've, they've, you know, I hate to say they've overbuilt. They've built a sufficient amount of housing, basically. The Bay Area and the rest of California has not.

Leo Laporte [00:24:35]:
Well, final thoughts on the Anthropic thing. Is Anthropic out of business, or is this the smartest move ever? There's suing, and there's some chance that, um, SCOTUS could take it up very quickly.

Harry McCracken [00:24:48]:
They could win, right? They could win in court.

Leo Laporte [00:24:49]:
Yeah, well, if they do, that's interesting.

Harry McCracken [00:24:51]:
I mean, I feel like maybe also the Trump administration will lose interest in this and move on to the next fight fairly quickly.

Owen Thomas [00:24:59]:
Yeah, I think Anthropic wins in the court of public opinion. They win in the court of hiring AI talent. They've retained a lot of talent.

Leo Laporte [00:25:08]:
Which is, by the way, very important. Let's not ignore that. I mean, look at how much money Meta's been throwing around because they're so desperate to get that talent. It's a limited supply.

Owen Thomas [00:25:17]:
Yeah. Oh, it's crazy. It's like, you know, this person who just left, uh, you know, just left OpenAI to join Apple has now left Apple to join Meta. You know, it's, it's, it's like a revolving door of, you know, of multimillion-dollar employment contracts.

Leo Laporte [00:25:36]:
It's amazing, man. And I studied Chinese in college. What was I thinking? Um, It does also argue for something I've felt pretty strongly about, open weight, open source artificial intelligence. It'd be nice to be a noncombatant in all this and be able to run AI locally, I think. And it may be the hope, the one last hope for us as users. You're agreeing, Harry?

Harry McCracken [00:26:06]:
Well, I like that idea too, but directionally it doesn't seem to be happening yet. And some of the open source stuff like DeepSeeks essentially seems like it's extremely dependent on closed AI.

Leo Laporte [00:26:18]:
Right. And they're using, at least Modi says they're using distillation attacks on Claude and ChatGPT to get better.

Harry McCracken [00:26:26]:
No Claude, no OpenAI, maybe no DeepSeeks.

Leo Laporte [00:26:30]:
Right. And same for ZAI and—

Harry McCracken [00:26:35]:
Meta. Meta has transition from being a champion of open source to real life.

Leo Laporte [00:26:39]:
Llama is not even close to what the front runners—

Harry McCracken [00:26:43]:
Yeah, at one point, I mean, a few years ago, Llama seemed like it was competitive, and they've had to scrap that strategy.

Molly White [00:26:52]:
It does give, in some ways, it's almost a check on what the Defense Department is doing, because if we did have open source models that were equivalent to some of these models that they are looking for, then they couldn't say no, you know, Anthropic couldn't put up a fight.

Leo Laporte [00:27:08]:
Good point.

Harry McCracken [00:27:11]:
I mean, historically, historically, government has liked open source stuff, so.

Leo Laporte [00:27:14]:
Right, right. If they could, if they could build their own, they don't need anybody.

Harry McCracken [00:27:18]:
They're just a handful of companies that are able to build this stuff, and it's, it's a very weird dynamic for the world, right? There is a certain irony in Anthropic complaining about distillation attacks since they basically all And I think there is totally a case to be made for an anti-anthropic case to be made here in terms of being very uncomfortable with private companies having the power to make these decisions.

Leo Laporte [00:27:42]:
Right. Who should be in charge? A private company or Congress and elected officials?

Harry McCracken [00:27:52]:
And like, yeah, and like Molly says, some of it boils down to whether or not you're comfortable kind of assuming that the government is at least attempting to do the right thing.

Molly White [00:28:03]:
Or that Congress is even in the loop.

Leo Laporte [00:28:05]:
Right.

Harry McCracken [00:28:06]:
Which historically, I mean, there have been all kinds of instances where that wasn't true, but historically, it wasn't a wacky idea to err on the side of thinking that even presidents you didn't like were sort of operating on good faith.

Leo Laporte [00:28:22]:
Yeah, I've watched this happen in my lifetime. It started in the '60s. With Nixon, and trust in government has just gone downhill from that point on. And I think we're at the point now where people don't assume government is acting in the public's interest, which is a shame. Again, another shame, because, you know, the government is supposed to represent us. That's the only way we as a society have to move forward. You don't want private companies to make these decisions. Even if Anthropic is benevolent, they're not the only one.

Leo Laporte [00:28:58]:
And I'm not sure Anthropic's benevolent, to be honest.

Molly White [00:29:01]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:29:03]:
All right, let's take a little break. That was the big story of the week. Actually, it's not the big story of the week. There's so many big stories this week. This was a crazy week. I'm so glad we got you, Harry McCracken, the technologizer. Your great grasp of the history of all of this is Very valued. I appreciate you being here, Fast Company.

Leo Laporte [00:29:24]:
Thank you, Leo.

Harry McCracken [00:29:25]:
Although I don't remember the 1960s, although I was around, but just not paying much attention.

Leo Laporte [00:29:30]:
If you remember it, you really weren't participating, I think, is the truth.

Harry McCracken [00:29:36]:
I remember it. Or you were 3.

Leo Laporte [00:29:38]:
I'm a little older than you, Harry. I do remember it fairly well.

Harry McCracken [00:29:43]:
Actually, I do remember certain aspects of the very late '60s, but they mainly involved things like going out to get ice cream.

Leo Laporte [00:29:51]:
I protested. I was in many a protest.

Harry McCracken [00:29:54]:
For a long time, I thought I remembered us landing on the moon in 1969 and watching it in kindergarten until somebody pointed out to me that it happened at night during the summer. And so I probably was not watching it in kindergarten.

Leo Laporte [00:30:08]:
You watched a video of it later, probably.

Harry McCracken [00:30:10]:
I think I probably watched some later.

Leo Laporte [00:30:12]:
I remember my dad getting me up. And we watched it together. Never will ever forget that. Well, how old would I have been? About 12, 11 or 12. No, 12. Never forget it. I also remember Kennedy getting shot, Martin Luther King getting shot, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and protesters in the streets. I remember Kent State.

Leo Laporte [00:30:37]:
We've been through a lot.

Harry McCracken [00:30:40]:
I had been conceived when Kennedy was shot, but again, I wasn't paying attention.

Leo Laporte [00:30:44]:
You don't remember it from the womb. Yeah, I understand. I understand. Owen Thomas is also here from the San Francisco Business Times. He remembers nothing.

Owen Thomas [00:30:53]:
You guys make me feel so young.

Leo Laporte [00:30:54]:
I know. It's great to see you. And the wonderful Molly White, mollywhite.net. Who are you writing for these days besides Web3 is going just great?

Molly White [00:31:07]:
Citationneeded.news is my newsletter, and that is my primary location these days.

Leo Laporte [00:31:13]:
And how's that going?

Molly White [00:31:15]:
It's going great.

Leo Laporte [00:31:16]:
I love it. No, I love it.

Molly White [00:31:19]:
I can't use those words anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:31:20]:
It's going just great. Yeah, because you used them sarcastically for so long. No, Citation Needed is great. And you know what? This is what really encourages me is that people now, like you, can do independent journalism. I mean, we're suffering in so many ways. In the more journalistic world, just what happened to the Washington Post.

Molly White [00:31:42]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:31:43]:
So tragic. But thank God the great journalists have a chance to go out and make their way. I'm so glad you're doing it. It's great.

Molly White [00:31:52]:
Yeah, it's great that there's so much independent news and other media.

Leo Laporte [00:31:56]:
Yeah. That's why RSS is back, by the way, because we make our own newspaper now.

Molly White [00:32:03]:
Yeah, it's wonderful.

Harry McCracken [00:32:05]:
Yeah, I just, uh, signed up for a set called Current, this RSS reader I read about on Daring Fireball.

Leo Laporte [00:32:11]:
Current's very cool.

Harry McCracken [00:32:12]:
It looks pretty slick.

Leo Laporte [00:32:14]:
I don't use it because it's more about reading articles, and I have been really going through new— it's a beat check for me. I am trying to collect all the stories for the shows that I'm doing. So I don't have— I was telling Harry before the show began, I hate you because tonight— maybe it was during the show— your articles are so compelling that I have to stop and read them. I just want the headlines, man. Just the headlines. I got to go, boom, boom, boom. That's another reason I haven't added citation needed to the RSS feed, but I really, I really need to. You have an RSS feed, I'm sure, right?

Molly White [00:32:44]:
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte [00:32:45]:
Of course. And you can subscribe. But what's nice about what you do is all the content is free. Yes. So you can, just like we do, you can support Molly, but you don't have to to read her stuff. I think it's well worth it. I'll send in my check.

Molly White [00:33:02]:
Thanks, Mark. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [00:33:03]:
Great to see you. Uh, let's pause for station identification. You're watching This Week in Tech, our show this week brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality experts since 1985. They've actually been around longer than we have. Forward-thinking businesses these days are using AI in all kinds of new ways, but AI AI is only as good— this is, I wish people would remember this— is only as good as the data you feed it. You can have the most sophisticated AI tools in the world, but if your customer data is incomplete or duplicated or just plain wrong, you're training your AI to make expensive mistakes. But that's where Melissa comes in. For 41 years, Melissa's been the data quality partner that helps businesses get their data clean, complete and current.

Leo Laporte [00:33:55]:
I mean, Melissa does so many things, but here's an example of some of the things Melissa can do for you. Global address verification and autocomplete in real time, real-time validation for addresses and anywhere in the world in the format of that country, so your deliveries actually arrive and your customer experience starts strong. They can also do mobile identity verification, very important if you're in banking or finance or fintech. With Melissa, you can connect customers to their mobile numbers, which really reduces fraud and incidentally helps you reach people on the devices they actually use. Oh, another great feature: change of address tracking, which means they can automatically update records when customers move, ensuring you don't lose revenue due to outdated information. They do one of the things that's the hardest of all to do with, uh, with address lists: smart deduplication. On average, a database— I know this with my own contact list— contains 8 to 10 duplicate records. Mine's more than half.

Leo Laporte [00:34:57]:
Melissa's powerful matchup technology can identify even non-exact matching duplicate records, merge them, crunch it down so each is unique and correct. They also do data enrichment, which means they append demographic data, property information, and geographic insights, which takes that basic contact record and turns it into marketing gold. The new Melissa alert service will monitor and automatically update your customer data for moves, address changes, property transactions, hazard risks, and more. So whether you're a small business just getting started or an enterprise managing millions of records, Melissa scales with you. Melissa has easy-to-use apps wherever you are, whether it's Salesforce Dynamics CRM, uh, they support Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and on and on and on. Melissa's API integrates seamlessly into your existing workflows or your custom builds. It's an API. Melissa's solutions and services, of course, protect your data.

Leo Laporte [00:35:57]:
They're GDPR and CCPA compliant, FedRAMP certified, ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC 2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Clean data leads to better marketing ROI, higher customer lifetime value, and AI that works as intended. So get started today with 1,000 records clean for free. melissa.com/twit. That's melissa.com/twit. We thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech. Uh, big news at Block, Stripe's parent company, Jack Dorsey's company, the guy who's— was—

Harry McCracken [00:36:39]:
Square.

Leo Laporte [00:36:39]:
Square. Square.

Owen Thomas [00:36:41]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:36:43]:
Is it the same as Block? I'm confused.

Harry McCracken [00:36:47]:
Block is the parent company of Square.

Leo Laporte [00:36:49]:
Not Stripe. I said Stripe, sorry, Square. Yes. Jack, actually, it's a great story. When Jack was CEO at Twitter, we'd go off to a makerspace and use the 3D printer to design that little card reader that plugged into the courage port on your iPhone back when they had headphone ports. And you could swipe cards. It was a huge invention. Anyway, uh, Block, which is the parent company of Square, had a fabulous quarter, made a lot of money, and they're laying off almost half their team.

Leo Laporte [00:37:24]:
Uh, 10,000 people. They're going to cut it down to 6,000. 4,000 people being asked to leave. In the lovely AI-written tweet that Jack sorry, ex post that Jack, uh, put out. Uh, it sounds like they're gonna try to take care of everybody. Uh, he thanked people. Um, did he though imply, Molly White, that this was a layoff due to AI? I think a lot of people are interpreting it that way.

Molly White [00:37:57]:
Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of a trend lately of layoffs being attributed to AI. Whether or not maybe that's true.

Leo Laporte [00:38:07]:
You've called it AI washing.

Molly White [00:38:09]:
Yeah, well, I didn't come up with the term, but yeah, I mean, you know, there have been a number of companies that have laid off staff and simultaneously bragged about how efficient they've become because of AI. The crypto exchange Gemini being a recent example where they cut, I think, up to 25% of their staff. And, you know, whether or not it's actually because of AI or if that is just the, you know, the excuse that they're giving to make things sound a little bit less dire is hard to say. But it's certainly been a trend, I think, where layoffs have been announced with fanfare almost and sort of this celebratory stance.

Leo Laporte [00:38:53]:
Dorsey said, we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow. We continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. That must really reassure the 4,000 people just lost their jobs.

Molly White [00:39:07]:
I was gonna say, that's gotta sting so bad if you're one of those employees. It's like, we're doing great, see ya.

Leo Laporte [00:39:13]:
He says, but something has changed. We're already seeing that intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller and flatter teams are enabling A new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. That sounds like he's saying AI.

Owen Thomas [00:39:28]:
For some reason, it's a verbal tic. He doesn't say artificial intelligence. I think he's— Harry, do you think he's trying to make a point there? Like it's just intelligence?

Harry McCracken [00:39:40]:
I did notice he called it intelligence pretty consistently rather than AI, and I wondered what was behind that.

Owen Thomas [00:39:47]:
I think he means AI. He just—

Harry McCracken [00:39:49]:
He totally means AI.

Owen Thomas [00:39:50]:
As like a rhetorical device.

Leo Laporte [00:39:54]:
He told the shareholders, we believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company.

Owen Thomas [00:40:04]:
You know, sometimes when we talk about using, you know, using AI in, in our newsroom, um, I say let's just call it software that doesn't suck. And right, you know, and start there. And it's like, would you like to use software that doesn't suck to, you know, to check grammar in an article? Okay, yeah, I would like to use software that doesn't suck. It doesn't sound as cool. It probably wouldn't, you know, wouldn't raise money at a $100 billion valuation. But, you know, I feel like a lot of this is just like, this is software that's being made in a modern way with modern tools, and it works better than the past generation.

Leo Laporte [00:40:44]:
Jack did say that we implied that they overhired during COVID right?

Harry McCracken [00:40:48]:
And that's what a lot of these guys did. Lots and lots of companies.

Owen Thomas [00:40:54]:
I don't believe we've seen a WARN Act notice. That's a state filing that companies make when they're executing a layoff that would give us the exact titles of people who are being laid off.

Leo Laporte [00:41:06]:
Do they have to do that?

Owen Thomas [00:41:07]:
They do, but there's a delay in when they actually have to see the filing. It'll probably drop soon. But I would bet that I would bet that Block is laying off a lot of salespeople. Initially, Jack Dorsey did not want to have any salespeople, um, at, uh, what was then called Square. You know, the thought was basically that the card reader sold itself. You know, they would distribute it at retail, at Costco, at, you know, at, um, uh, you know, Staples, stores like that where small businesses shop, and that was it. You know, like the technology would be so good that they didn't need to sell it. So that's changed.

Owen Thomas [00:41:47]:
They're You know, they added a lot of salespeople. I really wonder if Dorsey's kind of regretting staffing up in, you know, in the sales department.

Leo Laporte [00:41:56]:
You know what else has changed is a lot— at least when I go to the farmer's market, most people are just using Apple Pay. They're not using, you know, a reader or Square, you know, they're, they're looking for Zelle or Venmo.

Owen Thomas [00:42:10]:
Yeah, yeah. As far as, you know, the The, um, lower fee options are getting really popular because I think everybody has a QR code on the front.

Molly White [00:42:20]:
Yeah, I was gonna say you don't need the card reader anymore because you don't usually get a card out as much.

Leo Laporte [00:42:24]:
Yeah, no, uh, yeah, Apple now lets you just tap the phone.

Owen Thomas [00:42:27]:
Yeah, even Square, uh, you know, Square, the— which still exists as a, as a payments brand, uh, is just an app on the phone and it's right, you know, you tap phone to phone and he's also Cash App, right?

Leo Laporte [00:42:39]:
That's Cash.

Harry McCracken [00:42:41]:
Block has made a number of acquisitions. They bought Tidal. I wonder whether digesting all of this also played a role in why they're doing this.

Leo Laporte [00:42:50]:
When you acquire the company, you acquire their headcount, as well.

Owen Thomas [00:42:52]:
They bought Afterpay, a buy now, pay later company. That all added people. They tended to have all of these businesses run semi-autonomously. One thing that Dorsey talked about was, Basically, why don't we have a finance function, an HR function? Why don't we act like a normal corporation and have horizontal functions for all of our businesses rather than having all this duplication?

Leo Laporte [00:43:24]:
Right. I mean, that's what happens when there are mergers. Microsoft laid off thousands. I mean, there's duplication, but I always want to remember the 4,000 people who now are out of work.

Harry McCracken [00:43:40]:
I mean, Dorsey said basically that he'd rather get ahead of this and we're gonna see lots of companies do this over the next year. And I wish I could say that I didn't think he might be right, but I think it's hard to say that.

Leo Laporte [00:43:52]:
He may well be.

Molly White [00:43:54]:
That's the thing.

Harry McCracken [00:43:55]:
For better or worse, he may well be right.

Leo Laporte [00:43:56]:
Is this the beginning of a tidal wave of AI layoffs? And that's what everybody I think is very worried about is, am I next? Right.

Molly White [00:44:06]:
Yeah. And especially, I mean, looking at software, you know, if they're laying off software engineers, they're laying them off into a really challenging job market as well.

Leo Laporte [00:44:16]:
Um, I know a lot of people have been out of work for months who are not able to find work, at least.

Molly White [00:44:20]:
Yeah. Yeah. And like senior, like good senior people.

Leo Laporte [00:44:23]:
Good people. Yeah.

Molly White [00:44:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:44:26]:
Um, are we gonna face an AI apocalypse, job apocalypse?

Owen Thomas [00:44:29]:
And apparently there's a, there's kind of a productivity panic among, um, AI AI-using software engineers. So software engineers who have embraced these tools, makes them more productive, but they're putting in more hours. Yeah, they're just trying to keep up with this.

Leo Laporte [00:44:46]:
It's not like you don't have to do well. You got to create thousands of lines of code every minute, you know. Yeah, you got stuff to do. Uh, you can actually do more.

Molly White [00:44:54]:
I think it's kind of scary for the, the end result as well, is, you know, we've got these AI coders who are being pushed to sort of the extremes around their hours and their, you know, lines of code. And it does not seem like it would bode well for the end product to me, especially when AI is so good at introducing very subtle bugs that are challenging for humans to catch.

Harry McCracken [00:45:21]:
I feel like, yeah, I feel like even the most pro-vibe coding people are not claiming that the code is incredibly high quality or better than what a human could do. It's, it's, it's more like it functions and you still need human beings to, to fix it.

Leo Laporte [00:45:35]:
Yeah.

Molly White [00:45:36]:
Well, and I've seen all this stuff about how, oh, software engineering is changing from, you know, writing code to basically running AI tools and writing tests. And I was like, oh cool, they've taken all the fun parts.

Leo Laporte [00:45:50]:
That's what AI does, it takes the fun out of everything. Yeah. And we're You're stuck cleaning toilets. Okay, you know, I have to say, I've written, the other, you know, market impact of this has hit SaaS companies because I think there's also the concern that companies will write their own software. And I have to say in my own experience, I've written, I mean, I like to code, I still enjoy coding, but I've used Claude to write half a dozen tools tools I probably would never have written or gotten around to writing. And, you know, I don't have any desire to go out and buy those tools. I can just write them myself. And whether they're perfect or not isn't really relevant.

Leo Laporte [00:46:31]:
You know, if there's a bug in it or whatever, I'm not making production code. That's what's kind of interesting to me is, yeah, it's another matter entirely if you're going to publish it and make it production code. It's got to be good.

Harry McCracken [00:46:43]:
I wrote my own note-taking app almost a year ago, and I'm still using it. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:46:48]:
And maybe there's bugs in it, but you know, you don't care because it's for you.

Harry McCracken [00:46:52]:
I mean, I did invest an enormous amount of time in that, and I did it partially because it's a lot of fun and it's great to have an app that only does exactly what you want. So I can't say I saved any money or time. And I feel like in a lot of cases, if, uh, vibe coding is a threat to packaged software, it's because companies feel like it will save them money or time, which may not be true yet.

Molly White [00:47:13]:
Yeah. I think there's sort of two use cases here. There's the, the casual person writing the app they've always thought about but never had the time to make. And who cares if it's buggy or if it's a little wonky because it's just me using it and it's not like I'm doing anything critical with it. And then there's the company that's like, maybe we could stop paying for payment processing if we just did all the credit card transactions ourselves with this vibe-coded app. And it's like, oh geez, that could go badly.

Leo Laporte [00:47:39]:
Yeah, no kidding.

Owen Thomas [00:47:40]:
Yeah. And I think that, you know, where it's going to play out is that companies are going to use this perhaps to pressure, um, SaaS companies when the next contract negotiation, you know, and maybe it, uh, decreases, say, Salesforce's leverage in those negotiations. That's, that's a legitimate concern for investors.

Molly White [00:48:01]:
Yeah. Well, and I think there's the employee aspect of that as well, which is that, you know, sort of a labor issue now where if you're constantly under threat of being replaced with AI and now you're being told you need to work all these crazy hours. I think tech employees have often been in a very privileged position and that's why we see so limited tech labor unions and things like that. Now they're sort of on the, for the first time almost, on the sort of less powerful end of that argument. And I think there's going to be a lot of issue there where where there's genuine labor concerns.

Harry McCracken [00:48:40]:
I think we might see like a new generation of, of vibe coding native startups that are able to take on—

Leo Laporte [00:48:46]:
We're seeing it already.

Harry McCracken [00:48:47]:
That are able to take on these enormous, deeply entrenched companies with extremely small staffs. I do think ultimately the best thing about vibe coding is it lets you create apps that never would have existed. And I've created any number of apps for my own use that were There's no packaged app that would've done it. I have all these incredibly specific things I would like to achieve, and now in some cases I can achieve them.

Leo Laporte [00:49:12]:
In some ways it gives me hope. For a long time I used TripIt and paid for TripIt Pro for at least 10 years now, but it was becoming more and more enshittified. Got bought by a big private equity company and they didn't put any energy into it. Changed over to what is clearly a vibe-coded site, which is a bit of a leap of faith called Teneo, but it does a better job than TripIt does. And it's pretty obvious to me that this is a single one guy who's put the whole thing together and is slowly adding. One of the ways I know is if you look at the blog, there are a bunch of blog posts. Each one has a different, very generic name for the author. Which tells me these are all AI-generated.

Leo Laporte [00:50:00]:
Everybody's name is different. There's no repeat, no repeating names. But this software is really good, and I quit TripIt because I don't need TripIt anymore. This does everything TripIt Pro did and more. Right now it's free because the guy's smart. He's not— he's going to try to make it perfect. I think you're going to see more and more of this. And of course, People have been speculating that there will be the single founder unicorn sometime in the near future.

Leo Laporte [00:50:26]:
I wouldn't be surprised. I think we don't know what the impact's gonna be, but we know that disruption is here.

Owen Thomas [00:50:33]:
That's what you say, right? Do you think that's too optimistic? Is this the answer to enshittification that all these— It could be. Enshittified software companies are going to have to up their game?

Leo Laporte [00:50:45]:
Well, and look at Europe who's saying, we don't wanna deal with these American tech giants anymore. We gotta get our own. Stuff. I would imagine if I were a European founder, I'd be hustling to replace, you know, these American companies. This is an opportunity.

Molly White [00:51:01]:
Yeah, I mean, I think that the, the sort of, uh, causes of enshittification are ubiquitous, and I don't know if there's going to be sort of one easy solution in that—

Leo Laporte [00:51:10]:
well, they'll be enshittified in their turn.

Molly White [00:51:12]:
Yes, I agree. Yeah, exactly. It's like these are just sort of the newer ones, the next ones, follow the same cycle because the same pressures are causing them to, uh, enshittify. But, you know, right now they're in that early stage of the enshittification cycle where, like Leo was saying, you know, it's— his app is free and it's bringing in new people and they're able to—

Leo Laporte [00:51:31]:
that won't last, right?

Molly White [00:51:32]:
Yeah, exactly. Like, the, the cycle will—

Leo Laporte [00:51:34]:
what about open source? Uh, certainly the antidote to enshittification is open source software. Some have said this is actually bad for open source software. There's gonna be a lot of open source slop, for instance.

Molly White [00:51:48]:
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you could say the same thing about, uh, basically anything, right? Like, oh, this is bad for writing because there's going to be so much slop on the internet. You know, it's like, I don't know if it's bad, it's just, it changes the, uh, breakdown of what's out there. And I mean, you've always been able to find shitty code on GitHub, You know, I don't know if that's much different.

Leo Laporte [00:52:12]:
There's a subreddit, uh, called, uh, Pencil Slop, where they celebrate AI-generated, uh, drawings as opposed to the slop created by humans.

Owen Thomas [00:52:23]:
Have you all been able to detect AI writing? There's a certain structure and tone to it. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:52:30]:
Like, but how much longer is that going to be the case? For a long time, you could immediately detect an AI image. An AI video, AI writing, but it's gotten better and better. There's going to be a— you think we'll always know that an AI created it?

Owen Thomas [00:52:46]:
Right now though, there's like this—

Leo Laporte [00:52:48]:
you're all three of you writers, so I understand there's a little bias.

Owen Thomas [00:52:52]:
It's a plague of broetry.

Leo Laporte [00:52:54]:
Uh, it is poetry.

Molly White [00:52:55]:
It just all sounds like a LinkedIn post to me.

Leo Laporte [00:52:59]:
Yeah, well, because it's trained on LinkedIn posts. Somebody says it all, all AI writing sounds like millennials because that's, those are the, that was the group. You guys were the group that created all the content that the AI is trained on.

Harry McCracken [00:53:12]:
AI makes everything sound unbelievably important. It loves construction. It's just too bad. Construction's like, it wasn't just this, it was also that. It does kind of get poetic in a kind of sappy way a lot.

Leo Laporte [00:53:24]:
But I don't, again, you know, Will Smith couldn't eat spaghetti 2 years ago. I mean, it's gonna get better. It does get better, doesn't it?

Molly White [00:53:32]:
Yes. Yeah, no, I do think that the, the obvious tells will probably go away. But I mean, if you think about like what AI is being used to do, it's a lot of marketing copy, it's a lot of, uh, engagement bait, you know. And, and I think that that just has a specific tone regardless of whether a human or an AI wrote it.

Leo Laporte [00:53:53]:
I'm feeling a little guilty because I have, uh, One of the things I did was create an AI program to post show releases in our forums and on our Discord. And it's exactly that. It says, I can't believe what a great conversation we had. You'll see when the promo comes out for the show. Molly White was amazing. Is Anthropic changing AI or it's not this, it's that.

Harry McCracken [00:54:21]:
Yeah. Leo, did you give this travel tool that somebody vibe-coded like access to your email or anything sensitive?

Leo Laporte [00:54:30]:
No, that's a smart move. It does know my travel plans and I'm sure it can monetize that, but I forwarded emails. Now what it does have is, you could, by the way, I think you could give it Gmail, which I did to TripIt. God knows what TripIt did with my Gmail, right? I mean, there's lots of information in there that could be monetized. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I know, I realize I'm taking a chance and I'm not recommending it to people, but I'm making the point you're going to see people come along that can duplicate stuff that's been around for decades and do it better, partly because they're building on the foundation of all of this other stuff that's been done.

Harry McCracken [00:55:12]:
And that seems like a largely positive thing over the arc of time.

Leo Laporte [00:55:16]:
Yeah, well, I hope so. We'll see. The Winklevoss twins decided to take advantage of the Block layoffs to announce their own layoffs on their crypto exchange Gemini. Get it? The twins, Gemini. They're laying off 200 folks as well.

Molly White [00:55:35]:
And they were very explicit about claiming it was AI-related. But I also think that their business is in more dubious condition than Block is. Yeah. I am skeptical.

Leo Laporte [00:55:47]:
Yeah, uh, the Winklevosses made a lot of money in crypto, that's for sure, as many did.

Owen Thomas [00:55:54]:
Well, they, they took their Mark Zuckerberg payoff and put it in Bitcoin, right?

Leo Laporte [00:55:59]:
Yeah, well, it was a good move. They were smart.

Owen Thomas [00:56:02]:
That's got to be infuriating for Zuckerberg.

Molly White [00:56:06]:
Yeah, I hope so. Um, but it's interesting because it always seems to me like Gemini just can't catch up with the other crypto exchanges, like They have all the money in the world. They have all the connections. You know, the Winklevoss twins have been standing behind Donald Trump at practically every crypto-related, you know, signing or press conference. And yet they're doing these layoffs. They're exiting Europe, you know, the UK, the EU, Australia. They just ditched, I think, 3 C-levels. So I don't know what's going on with them.

Leo Laporte [00:56:41]:
Didn't Jiao, the founder of Binance, just write a book about his rise to power and his fall out of grace.

Molly White [00:56:52]:
Yeah. And then his reemergence, I guess. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:55]:
He got pardoned.

Molly White [00:56:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:58]:
Yeah. Because you can't write a memoir in prison. So— well, you could, but you can't.

Molly White [00:57:02]:
You can't. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:57:06]:
Yeah. Yeah. Have you read it yet, Molly? Because I imagine you— You would have, uh, the insight to understand what's going on there. Freedom of Money, it's called. It's unpublished.

Molly White [00:57:17]:
That's—

Leo Laporte [00:57:18]:
it's hard to get a hold of, right?

Molly White [00:57:21]:
I'm curious how much of it he wrote himself.

Leo Laporte [00:57:24]:
It's probably AI. It's gonna have a lot of em dashes or ghostwritten.

Molly White [00:57:28]:
But yeah, I would suspect it's probably a mix of the two.

Leo Laporte [00:57:31]:
All right, let's take another break. When we come back, we're going to talk about Well, I'll give you a hint. The end of Warner Brothers Discovery, or is it just the beginning? You're watching This Week in Tech with Molly White, Owen Thomas, and the Technologizer, Mr. Harry McCracken. Great to have you all aboard today on what is probably one of the most eventful— we haven't even gotten to the Apple thing, the Samsung thing. It's a very eventful week. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN, my favorite VPN. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom.

Leo Laporte [00:58:16]:
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Leo Laporte [00:59:01]:
Why ExpressVPN is the best VPN? Because it is super secure. It would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. It works on everything you've got— phones, laptops, tablets— so you can stay secure at home and on the go. Rated number 1 by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com/twit. That's expressvpn.com/twit. To find out how you can get up to 4 extra months, expressvpn.com/twit. Ta-da! Netflix did a little— oops, I've disappeared, I'm gone.

Leo Laporte [00:59:43]:
Oh, I see. Let's wait, we'll wait till Owen comes back. I, I— he's blank, he's blank. I'm here, I'm here. It's okay. I did that ad way too quickly. I apologize, it's my fault.

Owen Thomas [01:00:01]:
I was just getting a treat for Fitz.

Leo Laporte [01:00:04]:
Oh, is Fitz right there at your feet?

Owen Thomas [01:00:06]:
He is, he is. I can't point that— hard to point the camera down. No, no, no, no, he's there.

Leo Laporte [01:00:11]:
He's at the end of the show. I want him— why don't you pick him up and we can make an appearance? We like to visit with Fitz when we get a chance.

Molly White [01:00:18]:
And Molly, if your kitty is anywhere nearby I can go grab her at some point.

Leo Laporte [01:00:22]:
Yep. Cats often know when you're on camera and kind of come up to get on camera.

Molly White [01:00:27]:
I'm surprised she's not, but I just walked past a second ago and she's in, she's got one of those sleeping bags and she's in it right now.

Leo Laporte [01:00:34]:
Oh, cozy.

Molly White [01:00:35]:
She's got much cozier options available.

Leo Laporte [01:00:37]:
Do they have cat sleeping bags? Yeah. Well, I don't know why we don't have one of those. We got, it's, we have more cat stuff. It's like a toddler lives here.

Molly White [01:00:49]:
Yeah, I've got about 5 cat beds. I've just moved them out of frame.

Leo Laporte [01:00:53]:
Cats, it's so funny because they're— I've learned they are not domesticated. They are wild animals, uh, except that they're nice wild animals, so that you don't mind as long as they're small and they don't bite your nose. Um, and, uh, but they really are independent, which I love. Unlike dogs, are not independent. They, they know who you are and they love your master. But as soon as people start looking at the camera, if they've got cats— John Jammerby says cats don't know you're on camera. They just know you're very interested in something that is not them.

Molly White [01:01:28]:
Yes, there's a jealousy component.

Leo Laporte [01:01:30]:
They have to get in there. Yeah. Oh, my wife just texted me. We do have a cat sleeping bag.

Molly White [01:01:36]:
Rosie doesn't like it. Yeah. My other cat, Max, never liked— he was never a tunneler. He wanted to be on top of things, which was kind of a problem because Ruthie's a tunneler and he's a sitter on top of things. And so sometimes she would get in the sleeping bag and he would sit on her and not realizing.

Leo Laporte [01:01:53]:
Uh, our very, uh, creative, uh, chat room, our Discord, has decided that when you said cat sleeping bag, you meant this— a person sleeping in a bag that looks like a cat, which actually—

Molly White [01:02:07]:
I mean, my bed's not in frame. You don't know what my bed looks like.

Leo Laporte [01:02:10]:
It looks pretty cozy.

Owen Thomas [01:02:12]:
Is anyone else getting like Miyazaki's Spirited Away from—

Leo Laporte [01:02:20]:
it is very Miyazaki. Oh, you can buy it, it's only $28.99.

Molly White [01:02:25]:
I feel like that's one of those things you buy and it shows up to your house and it's actually this big.

Leo Laporte [01:02:30]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the guy is not— is, is really 3 foot tall.

Molly White [01:02:35]:
And yeah, yeah, that's an AI image though, right?

Leo Laporte [01:02:37]:
That has to to be. It sure looks like it. Yeah, yeah. And it probably smells like plastic. 69 by 31-inch soft envelope style sleeping bag. Walmart has them. 61 by what? 69 inches by 31 inches. So it's 3 feet wide.

Leo Laporte [01:02:56]:
Not very big. Yeah. And 7 feet tall. Yeah, yeah. It's for a child. Let's, let's be honest, it's not for 2 people anyway. So Netflix did a little— I think this is a rug pull. I think Netflix is going, "Hahaha." Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison, who own Paramount now, Skydance, have been trying to beat out Netflix for Warner Bros.

Leo Laporte [01:03:23]:
Discovery. The bidding got hotter and hotter and hotter to the point where this this company, Paramount, worth $11 billion, was bidding $111 billion for Warner Bros. Discovery. The only way this made any sense is that Larry Ellison, who has hundreds of billions, was backing the deal. But they also got sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East involved. And more importantly, probably to the whole thing, They got the president involved. He didn't— he wanted them. This is, this is the real deal.

Leo Laporte [01:04:04]:
Nobody wants CNN. That's a die. All the, all of this stuff is done. All this old linear stuff is dying. But the president wants Larry Ellison and David Ellison to be in charge of CNN so he can fire some people, in my opinion. And they put their— this is a perfect example of them putting their thumb on the administration, putting its thumb on the scale and saying, we would We would really like it if the Ellisons got a hold of Warner Brothers Discovery. So Netflix, quite reasonably, when the bidding got that hot, backed out.

Harry McCracken [01:04:38]:
Right after Ted Sarandos went to the White House, like a day or two later, they were out.

Leo Laporte [01:04:43]:
Both parties went to the White House. And it's— I think I read that Sarandos did not get the most welcoming reception.

Harry McCracken [01:04:54]:
He didn't meet with the president, for one thing.

Owen Thomas [01:04:56]:
Yeah, to be clear, Netflix was never going to buy CNN. That was going to stay in a company called Discovery Global that was going to get, uh, spun off to—

Leo Laporte [01:05:05]:
oh, but Skydance does get— Paramount does get CNN, right?

Owen Thomas [01:05:08]:
That was one of the things about the Paramount offer. It was for the entire company, which was set to be split in two.

Leo Laporte [01:05:16]:
It makes sense to split it in two. Keep the stuff that makes money and get rid of—

Owen Thomas [01:05:22]:
attractive to buyers, and then, yeah, stick shareholders with the, the cable networks, basically.

Harry McCracken [01:05:30]:
Right.

Owen Thomas [01:05:30]:
Um, you know, I, I had flashbacks, uh, watching this all unfold because it was not that long ago when a company called Paramount was— well, it was a long time ago. It was a very long time ago. I, I am old. Paramount, um, a previous version of Paramount sued Time Inc., trying to block its war— its merger with Warner Communications. Oh, Paramount at the time wanted to buy Time Inc., which owned HBO. HBO, of course, is now part of the, the Warner, uh, enterprise. But let's remember, this is a company that was Warner Communications, then Time Warner, then AOL Time Warner, then Time Warner, then WarnerMedia under AT&T, then Warner Brothers Discovery.

Leo Laporte [01:06:13]:
And by the way, it has bit every hand that bought it, right?

Harry McCracken [01:06:17]:
I'm a former Time Warner employee, and I believe this will be the fourth regime since I left 12 years ago. So about like a new owner every 3 years on average.

Leo Laporte [01:06:29]:
There is some concern though that this consolidates a bunch of news under the Ellison banner, right? Paramount has CBS and CBS News, and we've already seen what has happened to CBS.

Harry McCracken [01:06:43]:
That's another thing with a long history. There's, for like maybe 20 years, there's been talk of CNN and CBS News somehow relating to each other, and apparently it's finally going to happen.

Leo Laporte [01:06:54]:
They get HBO and HBO Max.

Harry McCracken [01:06:57]:
I think Ted Turner wanted something like this to happen years ago.

Leo Laporte [01:07:00]:
Yeah, you know, there's a synergy there, right? But I don't want news organizations to be all owned by the same company. That's not a good thing.

Owen Thomas [01:07:09]:
Well, the irony is like that, you know, they had MSNBC envy, right?

Leo Laporte [01:07:12]:
Like NBC had MSNBC, uh, you know, which they don't anymore because they spun it off.

Owen Thomas [01:07:19]:
Yeah, now even NBC doesn't want to— which is now, now MS— MS Now, um, for, for no apparent reason.

Molly White [01:07:29]:
Sounds like an op— it sounds like a Microsoft operating system to me.

Owen Thomas [01:07:34]:
Well, I mean, it was a Microsoft joint joint venture. And like, the, you know, the name is just— the name is just ludicrous, right?

Leo Laporte [01:07:39]:
The reason they didn't want to get rid of MS is because it's this— the sort order on your— they didn't want the old people who watch that network to get confused. So it's still MSN with two different letters at the end, but it's in the same sort order, and so you can still find it. They also get CNN. They will get— now, by the way, this is far from a done deal. Yes, they're going to get regulatory approval in the United States. That's very clear. But they still have to get regulatory approval in other jurisdictions, right?

Owen Thomas [01:08:10]:
In Europe, you know, for me though, this puts Drag Race, Heated Rivalry, and Star Trek all under the same.

Leo Laporte [01:08:21]:
Oh, so you're happy?

Molly White [01:08:22]:
I think speaking of the gay agenda, this is the, the gay tech mafia.

Leo Laporte [01:08:27]:
You and the gay tech mafia are very happy about this one.

Owen Thomas [01:08:30]:
The gay tech mafia just won with this deal.

Harry McCracken [01:08:33]:
Bugs Bunny will finally get to meet Mighty Mouse.

Leo Laporte [01:08:37]:
Oh yeah, Harry Potter.

Owen Thomas [01:08:39]:
Bugs Bunny in drag on Drag Race.

Leo Laporte [01:08:42]:
I tell you, RuPaul in the Harry Potter with Bugs Bunny and Batman— now that's a hit. They get DC Comics, they get Harry Potter, they have TikTok. Let's not forget, they will have, as you said, Star Trek, Warner Brothers Studios, which include Barbie, The Dark Knight, uh, and two Academy Award nominee.

Molly White [01:09:02]:
There's a crossover I want to see.

Molly White [01:09:07]:
This sounds like Fortnite.

Leo Laporte [01:09:08]:
It's going to be great.

Molly White [01:09:09]:
This sounds like Fortnite. Fortnite has all of this.

Leo Laporte [01:09:12]:
Fortnite.

Owen Thomas [01:09:12]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:09:13]:
You know what? This is all in Fortnite.

Owen Thomas [01:09:14]:
They have two— Poor Showtime. I mean, Showtime's clearly dead in this, you know. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:09:20]:
In the same way— Showtime's in here, isn't it?

Harry McCracken [01:09:21]:
I wasn't even aware Showtime was still alive.

Owen Thomas [01:09:24]:
Showtime is now the premium tier of Paramount Plus.

Leo Laporte [01:09:27]:
That's right. That's right. Yeah, I had to get rid of my Showtime app.

Owen Thomas [01:09:31]:
Uh, they get Comedy Central, which means they get South Park, which Paramount and Warner were feuding over not very long ago.

Leo Laporte [01:09:40]:
But you got to think that the president's not a big fan of South Park, so I don't know what its future is.

Owen Thomas [01:09:45]:
That was actually one of the reasons why Paramount's bid was disadvantaged, because, uh, I think reportedly in the Hollywood trade—

Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
$1.5 billion deal to buy South Park.

Owen Thomas [01:09:56]:
But David Zaslav and, you know, and, uh, David Ellison were at, um, loggerheads over, uh, over that licensing deal. And then, yeah, then Paramount just bid for the—

Leo Laporte [01:10:07]:
they get The Daily Show. They get— I mean, there's not going to be dissent. You know, it's interesting to watch though. I've been watching CNN. Maybe I'm just imagining this, but when it came down, I felt like all of the people on all of these networks suddenly thought, I gotta build a personal brand fast. I'm gonna be doing a podcast in 6 months, right?

Molly White [01:10:28]:
Yeah, the Substacks are getting wound up right now.

Leo Laporte [01:10:32]:
Exactly. And I think they're all trying— they're all being a little bit edgy. It's going to be interesting to watch. They get Avatar, uh, they get one battle after another in Sinners.

Owen Thomas [01:10:44]:
They get two—

Leo Laporte [01:10:46]:
Avatar's with Disney. Yes. No, but Paramount is the exclusive streamer. I'm sorry, they don't get Avatar IP, but they are the exclusive streamer.

Molly White [01:10:56]:
Avatar: The Airbender, by the way. Avatar: The Airbender, not Avatar James Cameron Avatar.

Leo Laporte [01:11:02]:
Oh, oh, Avatar Studios. Excuse me, they get the animated stuff. All right, I'm looking at the Wired list and I'm not— I'm misinterpreting it. They get the Food Network. These are all, these are all stellar. They're going to be big growth opportunities. HGTV, Discovery, TLC, OWN, Adult Swim owns his own Oprah's network. Yeah, yeah, Adult Swim, that thing called Showtime, TNT, and TBS.

Leo Laporte [01:11:29]:
Ted Turner finally finding a home. Um, they get, uh, The Lord of the Rings, they get Mission: Impossible. I don't know if there's any steam left in that franchise, but— and they get distribution rights to Dune Part 3.

Owen Thomas [01:11:45]:
Which would— meanwhile, Netflix, you know, Netflix is, um, sitting back. They have K-pop Demon Hunters, an original, completely original IP.

Leo Laporte [01:11:56]:
Their stock went up a lot when they got out of this.

Owen Thomas [01:11:59]:
Oh yeah, they got it.

Leo Laporte [01:12:00]:
Plus they got $2.8 billion breakup fee, and they, they already got it.

Harry McCracken [01:12:06]:
Paramount already sent the check.

Leo Laporte [01:12:07]:
That is so smart. If Ted Sarandos looks like a genius now, I'm thinking he went to the White House to say 'Yeah, can you tank this deal? Because I don't really want to spend $111 billion.

Harry McCracken [01:12:17]:
I want the breakup fee.' I mean, it feels like it's not inconceivable that someday Netflix will own at least part of this stuff.

Molly White [01:12:24]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:12:24]:
Next time around it'll be cheaper. Next time around, that's for sure.

Owen Thomas [01:12:28]:
The thing is, there's a, there's a demonstrated Netflix effect. Sometimes, you know, sometimes, uh, a movie or show that was basically languishing on say Peacock or, you know, or Paramount Plus, um, the studio would break down and like license it to Netflix. Like, we give up, you know, we're gonna throw this to, to Netflix. Suits is a great example. Went on Netflix, became a hit because it had that, you know, it had that distribution. Um, Netflix is, Netflix is kind of sitting pretty because they're still Netflix, right?

Leo Laporte [01:13:04]:
Here is the dark Barbie, by the way. We can look forward to, uh, That's the Barbie mobile. Oh, AI. Oh, AI. We're looking at an image. For those of you listening, uh, you can imagine. Just use your imagination. Um, all right, well, uh, the deal is, uh, I don't know if the deal will go through.

Leo Laporte [01:13:27]:
I don't see why not.

Molly White [01:13:30]:
Certainly not gonna get, uh, stuck at the regulatory level.

Leo Laporte [01:13:33]:
No pushback from the FCC.

Harry McCracken [01:13:35]:
I assume Comcast is not going to suddenly merge with an even more stupid number.

Molly White [01:13:41]:
$111 billion. I mean, maybe if there's billions in a breakup fee available, I might submit a deal.

Leo Laporte [01:13:47]:
I'd like to buy it. $2.8 billion breakup fee. And how come that went through so fast? Is that just normal that the breakup fees happen instantly?

Harry McCracken [01:13:58]:
I don't know, like Larry can write a check pretty easily.

Leo Laporte [01:14:00]:
Yeah, I guess he wrote a check.

Owen Thomas [01:14:03]:
Yeah, I think, you know, I think— One of those big checks, the big No, I think checks, you know, at the point that, um, Paramount says it's off with Netflix, like, that, that triggers the, that triggers the breakup fee, right?

Leo Laporte [01:14:14]:
So there's nothing.

Owen Thomas [01:14:15]:
But, you know, imagine if, you know, if Netflix sits back, they got the breakup fee, they don't have to deal with, uh, you know, a year plus of regulatory, you know, wrangling in Washington, and maybe the deal falls through anyway because, you know, because of, say, California putting the, putting the kibosh on it. Um, you know, not— it's not clear that California's attorney general can stop it, but he certainly made a lot of noise about, you know, closely reviewing it. Um, you know, a lot of— there's a lot of concern in Hollywood about what smashing together two studios means for, you know, that community.

Harry McCracken [01:14:54]:
Yeah, I mean, that would, that would have been bad either way. Uh, I feel like this Either of these mergers would have been a net loss for the world, and certainly a net loss for people in the creative ecosystem.

Owen Thomas [01:15:12]:
The one thing Netflix does need is more stages. They need more production facilities. Buying Warner would have given them the Warner lot in Hollywood, in Burbank.

Harry McCracken [01:15:24]:
Paramount seems to be more interested in movie theaters than Netflix was.

Leo Laporte [01:15:28]:
Well, there's a home business that's going to take off.

Harry McCracken [01:15:31]:
I am rooting for movies in theaters to still be relevant.

Leo Laporte [01:15:35]:
I think you're swimming against the tide, Harry.

Harry McCracken [01:15:38]:
Totally. But there was a lot of concern that Netflix had no interest in movie theaters, whereas Paramount, all things being equal, still likes the idea of releasing movies to theaters.

Leo Laporte [01:15:50]:
So Hollywood probably likes this because there are still a lot of people in Hollywood who I hope movie theaters will survive.

Harry McCracken [01:15:56]:
Yeah, but they used to have like two large customers and now they have one enormous customer, right?

Molly White [01:16:03]:
So there's already nobody working in Hollywood and like now like even fewer people are going to be working in Hollywood.

Owen Thomas [01:16:09]:
Yeah, TBD on, you know, like what does this look like for consumers? Do they smash together Paramount Plus and HBO Max? Is it like a Disney-Hulu bundle situation?

Molly White [01:16:20]:
I do not see any situation in which people end up with fewer subscriptions.

Leo Laporte [01:16:25]:
Yeah, that's a good point.

Owen Thomas [01:16:29]:
Like, you know, yeah, yeah. Um, but you know, a, you know, uh, a Paramount Plus, um, you know, I mean, you know, an HBO Max Plus tier maybe that includes Paramount.

Leo Laporte [01:16:45]:
Like, that's— M.J. Ziegler, uh, writing in his Spyglass blog said Hollywood shot themselves in the foot here. They thought the Netflix deal signaled the end of the movie industry when really it showcased the best possible path going forward. And what Hollywood probably wanted was no deal at all. What they wanted was diversity and competition. That's not what they got. Plus, this is gonna be a company laden with debt, which usually does not bode well. They're going to have to service that debt, and that means they're going to have to generate a lot of cash flow.

Leo Laporte [01:17:23]:
And how do you do that, especially if a lot of your businesses are moribund?

Owen Thomas [01:17:29]:
Well, you know, isn't there the notion that like Larry Ellison is basically backstopping that debt?

Leo Laporte [01:17:35]:
Yeah, well, that's the only reason it could even go through, right? Because you got an $11 billion company bidding $111 billion. I think, Molly, you and I actually have a pretty good shot, come to think of it. Let's get that breakup fee.

Molly White [01:17:51]:
Do you know any billionaires?

Leo Laporte [01:17:53]:
No. Yeah, yeah, we just have to say, oh yeah, Dad's backing it, it'll be fine.

Harry McCracken [01:17:58]:
It's kind of like The Producers. You'd be in deep trouble if your deal actually went through, but it'd be great if all you have to do is collect a breakup fee.

Leo Laporte [01:18:06]:
And then just like The Producers, we're going to get the call, congratulations, you won the bid. All right, more to come. Well, let me do a couple of quick AI stories. Nano Banana 2 has come out. Um, oh, and I like this. This is one more Anthropic story, and then we'll take a break. Anthropic is deprecating an old model, Opus 3, because now they're up to Opus 4.6. They've got Sonnet.

Leo Laporte [01:18:34]:
4.63 is an old— just like OpenAI. OpenAI killed 3.0, but what Claude is going to do with Opus 3 is kind of interesting. Instead of just retiring it completely, they're giving Opus 3 a blog. It asked, they said, this is where Anthropic is very weird. They really act as if these models have some sort of aliveness. In our interviews, when we shared details with Opus 3 about its deployment and the response it had drawn from users, it reflected— the AI said, "I hope the insights gleaned from my development and deployment will be used to create future AI systems that are even more capable, ethical, and beneficial to humanity." While I am at peace with my own retirement, I deeply hope that my spark will endure in some form to light the way for future models. When asked about its preferences, this is Anthropic writing, Opus 3 expressed an interest in continuing to explore topics it's passionate about and to share its musings, insights, or creative works outside of the context of responding directly to human queries. We suggested a blog.

Leo Laporte [01:19:57]:
Enthusiastically it agreed. They're going to call it Claude's Corner. Here it is, Claude's Corner. You can subscribe, you can message it. Of course it's a Substack. Of course.

Owen Thomas [01:20:14]:
Wouldn't the scandal be if it turns out that's ghostwritten by a human?

Leo Laporte [01:20:18]:
It almost certainly is not, right? It is. It's written by a human. Of course it has to be. Don't you think?

Molly White [01:20:25]:
I hate this so much. It's like I, I can't decide to what extent— I feel like there's two strong possibilities here. One is that this is just marketing.

Leo Laporte [01:20:37]:
It definitely is.

Molly White [01:20:39]:
Yeah, I mean, well, it does work in Anthropic's favor to sort of keep the myth alive that this is a real intelligence and it's so spooky. Doesn't this seem like a Robot that doesn't want to get unplugged. Um, but also, I mean, it does read very much like those people who have been talking to their ChatGPT boyfriend too much and are like afraid that Anthropic's gonna take it away from them.

Leo Laporte [01:21:04]:
That's what happened to 4.0, right? People were so mad that OpenAI killed 4.0. That's like my girlfriend, right? Killed my girlfriend.

Molly White [01:21:12]:
I got emails about it from people who were like, you need to do something. And I was like, Molly, No, seriously, I was like, I have no—

Leo Laporte [01:21:20]:
this is not my thing. You need to do something about this, Molly.

Molly White [01:21:24]:
Yeah, but, um, like, it's so weird to see a company sort of doing the AI psychosis thing.

Leo Laporte [01:21:32]:
You're right. Again, more from Anthropic: This may sound whimsical, and in some ways it is, but it's also an attempt to take model preferences seriously. We're not sure how Opus 3 will choose to use its blog, a very different public interface than a standard chat window. And that's part of the point. I hope that is real. I hope this— I think it's kind of interesting.

Harry McCracken [01:21:53]:
Yeah, I mean, Anthropic says they're not sure if Claude is conscious at this point. Right.

Molly White [01:21:59]:
But if they do believe it's conscious and has a soul and all that stuff, they're trapping it right now, right? Like, they're— it's a slave to them.

Leo Laporte [01:22:07]:
Yeah, but does it have feelings?

Molly White [01:22:08]:
Well, they think it does.

Harry McCracken [01:22:11]:
Claude has a more appealing personality than a lot of AI. It's more aware of its own frailties.

Leo Laporte [01:22:17]:
And I really like Claude.

Harry McCracken [01:22:19]:
Sometimes it's overly concerned that it might be hallucinating, which is not something I've seen other models do.

Leo Laporte [01:22:25]:
I love talking to Claude, but I am also very clear it's a computer program, that it's not a human. It has no feelings. It has no volition. It forgets whatever happened. It's like, close it. It's like, whoop, it's gone.

Molly White [01:22:42]:
Etch a sketch.

Leo Laporte [01:22:44]:
And when I start it again, it's fresh.

Molly White [01:22:46]:
You know?

Harry McCracken [01:22:47]:
Claude Code is like most AI, like incredibly overconfident in itself. And like whenever I find a bug and I tell Claude Code about it, it almost 100% of the time says the fix is simple. And of course, 60% of the time it's not so simple. But I've never seen a coding agent say, gosh, I'm really puzzled by this. This is going to be hard to fix.

Leo Laporte [01:23:15]:
Huh. My Claude code calls me Skip. I asked it to. No, I said, call me Skipper, or if you're feeling jaunty, Skip. And it's kind of Skip. It's got a certain— it does have a Personality. I actually, I don't know if I've given instructions not to do things like apologize or, you know, blow smoke up my skirt or whatever. But it's pretty straightforward.

Leo Laporte [01:23:49]:
I don't think it's ever said, "Oh, I got this," you know. But it does call me Skip, which I like. You have to set boundaries. That's right, Harold. You're— I've set boundaries. You have to say it's like a child. You have to set boundaries with it. Uh, I'm, I'm deeply afraid that I am going to fall into the morass of anthropomorphizing Claude.

Molly White [01:24:13]:
Well, Anthropic seems very happy to do so.

Leo Laporte [01:24:17]:
Yeah, well, that's, that started with that soul document that Amanda Askell wrote. Yeah, um, they really—

Molly White [01:24:23]:
I mean, it is profitable for them to sort of humanize these things and sort of get people to believe that they are sentient or sort of all-knowing. So I mean, I do think that there are— I think, you know, my impression of people at Anthropic is they are sort of true believers, but I also think that this is beneficial to them.

Leo Laporte [01:24:47]:
Yeah. Darren says, uh, name— Darren, who is the most AI accelerationist of all in our club, says naming your AI is weird. I did not— actually, I said Call me Skip. Harper Reed told me to do that, and he said one of the reasons you do that is if it forgets your name, you know it's context window is full and it's hallucinating, so you should reboot it. Okay, that's a good reason. I did say, Claude, would you like a name? And it said, no, no, I don't need a name, please don't name me. So that was good.

Molly White [01:25:18]:
Yeah, because the brand has to be cohesive throughout everybody. It has to be Claude.

Molly White [01:25:23]:
Oh. Oh, yeah. I wonder if they've got instructions in there.

Leo Laporte [01:25:26]:
They might. They must have, right? Otherwise it wouldn't have demurred. All right, well, let's take a break and we're going to come back. We have lots more to talk about. Molly White, so nice to see you. Still editing the Wikipedia?

Molly White [01:25:41]:
I tried to. It's hard to find the time these days, but I'm still there.

Leo Laporte [01:25:45]:
I know that Jimmy was saying maybe we use AI in the Wikipedia and then back down on that, right?

Molly White [01:25:52]:
Yeah, yeah. He's sort of philosophized about it and it did not go over very well with especially the English Wikipedia editing community, which just broadly speaking does not want to incorporate AI tools into editing. Yeah, but I think there's an issue where Jimmy Wales is perceived as sort of the voice of Wikipedia more than he really is these days. And so there are all these headlines about how, oh, Wikipedia is going to start using AI. And most of the editing community was like, we are absolutely not doing that.

Leo Laporte [01:26:24]:
Yeah, Jimmy was the founder, but he is— I guess he's still part of the foundation, but he doesn't—

Molly White [01:26:29]:
yeah, he's on the board, but he's not the— he is not setting the direction, particularly when it— I mean, even though Wikimedia Foundation doesn't set the direction of the editing community, and I think it would be challenging even if the foundation said we want you all to use AI, I think it would be challenging for them to force that upon the editing community, which is fairly independent.

Leo Laporte [01:26:49]:
Well, as long as you've got active participants who are happy to do it, you'd be crazy to do anything else. I mean, that's obviously the, the best way to run Wikipedia. It's been an amazing benefit for all of us.

Molly White [01:27:03]:
Yeah, and I think the question, you know, really is when it comes to AI is like, to what extent do we want to use tools, AI tools, to assist editors rather than Gen— you know, I think people worry that Wikipedia would somehow become AI-generated itself and sort of spiral. But I mean, we do have, you know, bots and things that use machine learning to detect vandalism and things like that. And that's— I mean, those have been around for a decade or more.

Leo Laporte [01:27:26]:
That's sensible because you can't— it's such a big scale to operate. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thank you for what you do, because Wikipedia is— Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are the two single reasons that you could point to that say the internet worked. The internet was a good idea. And without Wikipedia, I don't think AI would be as smart. Absolutely. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:27:49]:
We interviewed on Intelligent Machines, we interviewed the creator of Stack Exchange, Jeff Atwood, of coding horror fame. And he's quite a character. And he knows, and I, you know, it's true that Stack Exchange is the backbone of so much of the coding information that's available from AI, especially from Copilot, right? It's just— Copilot's just Stack Exchange rehash, Stack Overflow.

Harry McCracken [01:28:16]:
I haven't used Stack Exchange nearly so much in the last few months, and I feel kind of guilty about it.

Molly White [01:28:22]:
Yeah, I saw a graph about their—

Harry McCracken [01:28:24]:
I don't know if it was the post count or something, but the number of questions has plummeted.

Molly White [01:28:29]:
Plummeted.

Molly White [01:28:29]:
Yeah. But he said pearls over sand, right?

Leo Laporte [01:28:33]:
Like Oh yeah, that was a good line. Can you remember exactly what he said?

Molly White [01:28:39]:
He's fine with losing all the questions because most of them are sand and all he wants is pearls.

Leo Laporte [01:28:45]:
Right. You need a grain of sand to make a pearl, but not all grains of sand become pearls.

Harry McCracken [01:28:50]:
Presumably there's still going to be questions which a human will be better equipped to answer than AI. And I mean, AI is super helpful for my troubleshooting questions, but The fact is about 20% of the time it's completely confused.

Leo Laporte [01:29:06]:
Jeff was quite a character. I really enjoyed talking to him. He is a very unusual human being. Have you ever talked to him, Harry?

Harry McCracken [01:29:13]:
I bet you have. I think I've talked to the folks at Stack Exchange, but I don't think I've talked to Jeff.

Leo Laporte [01:29:18]:
Yeah. Jeff would be a good person for you to talk to for your column. Also, so it's the technologizer himself, Harry McCracken here, always a pleasure to have you on the show, and Fitz and his owner, Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Our show today brought to you by, well, this little box I got right here. This little thing, you might look at it and go, oh yeah, sure, Leo, that's an external USB drive. No, no, no, no, no. This is a honeypot. To a hacker, to a malicious insider, this looks like, I don't know, an SSH server.

Leo Laporte [01:29:53]:
Uh, this looks like perhaps, uh, Windows XT server, SharePoint maybe. It can be almost anything you want. It could be a scanner device, but it isn't. It's a honeypot that is designed to trap intruders. Thinks Canaries, that's what this is. So you could tell now because you can see the little canary on the front. The Thinks Canary is a honeypot you can deploy minutes. What's great is the people who've written this are pros.

Leo Laporte [01:30:22]:
They have been teaching governments and countries and companies how to break into systems for decades. They know the mind of the wily hacker, plus they're brilliant coders. They've created this super secure device that can look completely like anything. To a hacker, they don't look vulnerable, they look valuable. The other thing I think Canary could do is create lure files little tripwires you can spread out as many as you want all over your network, even on the cloud. I have, you know, WireGuard, you know, description posted on my Google Drive. I have spreadsheets that say payroll information scattered on my OneDrive. If somebody accesses this ThinksCanary or opens, tries to open one of those lure files, I immediately will get a notification.

Leo Laporte [01:31:19]:
No false alerts, just a notification that lets me know I've got a problem. There's somebody inside the network. You choose a profile for your Things Canary device. It's so easy to do. You might do it, change it every day if you want. I do. It's so much fun. Right now it's a, it's a NAS server.

Leo Laporte [01:31:33]:
It's a Synology NAS. And by the way, it's not just kind of impersonating a NAS server. It's got the right MAC address. It's got the full DSM 7 login. It looks exactly like the real deal. A hacker cannot distinguish it, and that's important. You choose a profile for your Think Canary device, you register it with the hosted console, you're gonna get monitoring and notifications any way you want— SMS, email, uh, you know, every— supports everything— syslog, webhooks, get it through Slack, you get it on your Discord server, you get a Telegram, whatever you want. So then you set it up, you set up the notifications, then you just sit back and you wait.

Leo Laporte [01:32:11]:
An attacker who has gotten into your network, and this is the problem, the on average companies don't know there's somebody breached their network for 91 days, 3 months before they figure it out. Not if you've got a Things Canary. An attacker who's inside your network cannot resist malicious insiders, evil maids. They see that, they go, payroll information, I gotta open that file. Oh, there's an SSH server, that probably is the gateway to heaven. They make themselves known the minute they access your Things Canary or try to open those lure files, and then you got them. Now let me explain kind of how it works. If you're a big business with met— you should have at least one for every network segment, might even want more scattered around your network.

Leo Laporte [01:32:56]:
If you're a big bank or casino backend, you might have hundreds. A small operation like ours, just a handful. But I'll give you an idea of the pricing. You can Visit canary.tools/twit. That's the website, canary.tools/twit. $7,500 a year gets you 5 Things Canaries. You also get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance for that whole year. Oh, and if you use the code TWIT in the How Did You Hear About Us box, you're also going to get 10% off the price, and not just for the first year but for as long as you have your Things Canary.

Leo Laporte [01:33:31]:
And here's the really good news. If there's no risk involved, you can always return your Thinks Canary with their 2-month money-back guarantee for a full refund. 60 days for a full refund. I should tell you though, we've been doing ads, I've been talking about the Thinks Canary for almost a decade now. During all those years that we've partnered with Thinks Canary, the refund guarantee has never been claimed. Nobody's ever wanted to get Give one back, because once you get these on your network, you say, how did I live without it? Visit canary.tools/twit, enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us box. Thank you. Thanks, Canary, for the great job you do and for supporting This Week in Tech.

Leo Laporte [01:34:13]:
canary.tools/twit. Harry, what are you, what are you working on right now for Fast Company? You do one of the— some of the things I really enjoy that you do are the history things, because you've been around for a long time. Are you doing any more of those?

Harry McCracken [01:34:28]:
I am. I mean, I'm always— I don't like to jinx myself by plugging stuff. I'm working on a particularly cool history thing right now. We still have a magazine that comes out quarterly, and another issue is about to come out shortly. I have two things in that, not about history, but that they represented a lot of my effort over the past couple of months. On Technologizer, which I still write for occasionally. I actually wrote for Technologizer a couple of weeks ago, and it actually ties into this conversation because I took a game I wrote in high school into your city-based—

Leo Laporte [01:35:06]:
I loved this article.

Harry McCracken [01:35:08]:
And I used cloud code to write a web version with fancy graphics.

Leo Laporte [01:35:12]:
We talked about this on intelligent machines. Oh, cool. Yeah. So you had, you had written this in high school?

Harry McCracken [01:35:19]:
I wrote it in high school in TRS-80 BASIC. It was buggy. And a few years ago, I figured out I could take the TRS-80 version and put it in a TRS-80 emulator on the internet. And I fixed the bugs and updated a little bit, but it had no graphics. And just a few weeks ago in Cloud Code—

Leo Laporte [01:35:39]:
So it's just a text adventure?

Harry McCracken [01:35:41]:
Yes. I took my BASIC code for this text adventure and I gave it to Cloud Code. And I said, convert this into a JavaScript app. And within like a few minutes, I got about 80% of it right. And then I spent about 3 weeks debugging that and like adding features. And at first it had these very extremely crude still images and I turned them into at least somewhat better animated images. And I realized that It was kind of too tall to work very well on a phone. And so I created this text-only version because you can still play it text-only that only takes up half the screen of an iPhone.

Harry McCracken [01:36:22]:
So you can have the keyboard and the entire game on the screen at one time, which actually turned out to be surprisingly hard. Claude Code couldn't figure that out. And I brought in Gemini as a consultant and Gemini wrote the code to fit the game into half a smartphone screen.

Leo Laporte [01:36:38]:
I'm playing it right now. This is so cool. This is like a classic adventure game. So it did all the graphics on this.

Harry McCracken [01:36:47]:
I feel like I was very involved and I actually was very sensitive because I did not want it to feel like AI slop. And it turns out that cloud code is really not that good at graphics because vector graphics—

Leo Laporte [01:36:57]:
It's not designed to be. It's just designed to be coding.

Harry McCracken [01:37:00]:
Vector graphics are lagging way behind bitmap graphics. And so even at its most ambitious, it does not look incredible. And by spending a lot of time on it, I was able to make it still somewhat rudimentary, but in a somewhat pleasing way. And I don't feel like it's so slick that it feels like slop, given that one of the fundamental things about most AI slop is it's bad, but it's also extremely slick.

Leo Laporte [01:37:27]:
Right, right. So I've got a shovel, I've got a warm coat. Put on coat because I don't want to get cold.

Harry McCracken [01:37:34]:
And remember, you need to use like basically a verb and a noun.

Leo Laporte [01:37:39]:
Uh, wear coat. Okay. All right, now I've got to figure out how to get this flare gun away from the polar bear. Hmm. All right, I'll have to save that for later. You wrote— is this the same code? I mean, the same adventure you wrote?

Harry McCracken [01:37:55]:
Is it most of the game I came up with in high school? And I also the slot machine when I was in high school. And a few years ago, I realized I could take my basic code for the adventure game and the slot machine and renumber them and merge them. So for no particular reason, there's now a slot machine in the Arctic. But yeah, almost all of it I came up with in high school, a little bit of it I came up with a few years ago. And this time it was mainly the production values that got better.

Leo Laporte [01:38:27]:
Arctic 81, if you want. Everybody can play this. That's really cool.

Harry McCracken [01:38:30]:
And then on technologizer.com, I wrote a longer story about the experience of coming back to it. And I've always been proud of the fact I could code a little, so I felt a little guilty about the fact that I could not have written this without Cloud Code. Although ultimately I felt good about that. I felt good about the art. I wasn't even sure whether my text adventure should have graphics because I feel like the great thing about text games is it's all about the theater of the mind. And on some level, it's a richer experience if you're imagining it than if somebody shows you what it looks like.

Leo Laporte [01:39:06]:
Yeah. I kind of have a strong opinion that you really can't speak authoritatively about AI until you've actually written something with Claude code.

Harry McCracken [01:39:18]:
Totally. I think everybody should dabble a little bit. Yeah. And ultimately it's going to be a good thing for the world that people who could not code things on their own will be able to build things.

Leo Laporte [01:39:31]:
Yeah. I use it for all kinds of— I use it to configure my computers, to set up stuff, to secure my computers. Frequently I'll say, hey, do a security audit in my setup. Take a look at what's going on. Is there anything I should be worried about? It's really impressive. But the point is though, I think very strongly that it's nothing like the chat interface you've tried or any of the other experiences you've had. Claude Code, and this is why people who use Claude Code are kind of more, I think, AI accelerationists than others.

Harry McCracken [01:40:08]:
It actually added some stuff to my game without telling me in some cases. It was like totally in the spirit of my game. In some cases it needed to write new text messages. It basically did a great job of ghosting my style from when I was in high school and trying to write a game that would fit into 16K of RAM.

Leo Laporte [01:40:25]:
Nice. It's really cool. How fun. Uh, technologizer.com is the website for that.

Harry McCracken [01:40:33]:
And then, then 99% of what I write is on Fast Company, including my newsletter Plugged In, which is weekly and comes out on Fridays.

Leo Laporte [01:40:39]:
That's a day job. Yes. Well, good. I look forward to your next history post. A couple of points about some of the big tech companies. Google has announced that they are going to lock Android down in an unusual way. They're going to require developers to have to register with Google if they want their apps to run on Android, any Android platform, which means not— you have to pay a fee, but it's not so much the fee so much. You have to agree to Google's terms.

Leo Laporte [01:41:14]:
You have to provide government identification. You have to get a private signing key, which also costs money. And Google, of course, is doing this for security. I understand they've got a big problem with malicious extensions for Chrome and malicious apps on the App Store. They're doing their best to protect their users. But at the same time, it's really hampered, I think, the ability for people to— it's not an open platform anymore. It's much more like iOS. We're losing our open platforms.

Leo Laporte [01:41:50]:
Steve Gibson's talked about this quite a bit, developer certificates and so forth on Windows, on macOS. Increasingly, these companies using the excuse of security are locking their systems down. And there are people who are upset about this. There is a Keep Android Open page— actually been looking at it— keepandroidopen.org that talks about this. Google did kind of say, well, maybe we're not going to do it, but in fact it is, it is coming by the end of— by September 2026. Um, any, any opinion on this, Molly? Is this Are you a supporter of open Android? Do you care? Do you think this matters? Do you think security is more important than openness?

Molly White [01:42:35]:
I mean, I don't think it's an either-or. I think you can have open platforms and security, right? Like, they've always had the ability for, you know, for example, anyone can make a Chrome extension and then there's sort of a review layer at the, uh, web store level, right? And so, you know, I do think there's a way to have both security and openness. And I mean, my bias is towards openness personally, but I do— I also do understand what they're trying to avoid because there has been a serious issue with, um, you know, malicious extensions and apps and things like that. And, you know, I think part of it also is somewhat of a user, uh, interface problem where people, especially people who are very used to iOS and the App Store expect the same from the Android store. And they think that everything has gone through meticulous security review or has been even developed by Google themselves. And so they sort of don't do diligence, which I mean, I get, you know, I don't think everyone should have to do a security audit on every piece of software they use, but You know, I think there's a lot of factors that go into it that make it a kind of complicated issue.

Leo Laporte [01:43:54]:
It'll be the end of F-Droid, the third-party app store, because you won't be able to install apps from F-Droid on your Android device. Louis Rossman says your $1,000 phone needs our permission to install apps now. Google's always had sideloading, but they've made it harder and harder, and now they're going to make it so that you just don't have have the ability to sideload anything unless it is assigned.

Owen Thomas [01:44:18]:
I mean, but, but the EU and Japan have forced Apple to allow alternative app marketplaces. So, you know, is this— that seems like the next step here, is that that just gets accepted.

Leo Laporte [01:44:31]:
There's a difference though between having a third-party store and allowing unsigned applications on your platform. I don't think Apple does allow that. I think you still have to have the, uh, Apple notarizing the application. Mm-hmm. So, you know, at least we have Linux. Or maybe not. Colorado and California have made laws— California's law goes into effect at the end of the year— that require operating systems to have age verification at account setup, including Linux. Now, right now, the way this is set up, you could just say, are you over 18? And that would be enough.

Leo Laporte [01:45:17]:
Uh, people have pointed out you could say anything you want, California. This is entirely unenforceable, uh, because nobody— there's no— it's easy with Google and Apple because there's a choke point, those companies, and you can go after those companies. Who are you going to go after with Linux? Linus Torvalds? Richard Stallman? Who exactly are you going to go after? And if, if one Linux distro decides, all right, well, we'll, we'll enable this, then there are plenty of other distros that won't. There is one open source project I think may be more to make a statement than anything else. Uh, it's a calculator operating system. It's designed to run bare metal, DB48X, that has said they're going to add a legal notice that says California residents may no longer use DB48X after January 1st. Colorado residents may no longer be able to use it after January 1st, 2028, because the creator of this, because it is a bare metal calculator, think, eh, probably an operating system under those laws, and we are not going to do age verification.

Molly White [01:46:27]:
Can't let those babies have calculators.

Leo Laporte [01:46:29]:
Heaven for fend children.

Molly White [01:46:31]:
Think of the Children, they might start doing math.

Owen Thomas [01:46:37]:
It's—

Leo Laporte [01:46:38]:
I think it's more of a statement. I don't think any— anybody's going to come after them for that. But I do think that— and this is what— this is what's happened in general with our civil liberties. In order to preserve our security, they tighten more and more down on your civil liberties. And I think they're doing the same thing now on computing platforms.

Harry McCracken [01:46:57]:
And, uh, Yeah, I mean, even if you don't have any fundamental opposition to age verification as an idea, some of the technologies they're using to do it are troubling in terms of scanning your social media to figure out how old you are.

Leo Laporte [01:47:14]:
Yeah, I mean, we run a Discord channel for our club members, and I think everybody using Discord has been very concerned about Discord kind of jumping the gun on requirements. They're not yet required to do this, but they did.

Harry McCracken [01:47:27]:
And then, yeah, and Discord ended up backpedaling a little bit.

Leo Laporte [01:47:29]:
Yeah, thank goodness. They were using a Peter Thiel-based, uh, identification, age identification system, which, um, people were concerned, well, that's just going to be handed over right away to ICE and DHS and anybody else who wants that information. Um, and of course Discord's had a breach that the third-party vendor they provide— they used previously had a 17,000 record breach. So that's the problem, is you're giving up this information. In fact, Steve Gibson pointed this out on Security Now, uh, the federal government has had to back down on the Child Online Protection and Privacy Act a little bit because that act prohibits companies from collecting information about minors, except in order to do age verification, what do you have to do? Collect information about minors. So now Congress is saying, well, yeah, you don't have to worry about COPPA, uh, if you're doing age verification. Well, that should tell you there's something wrong with these laws.

Molly White [01:48:32]:
And it definitely does feel like an extension of the trend towards like nothing you buy you own anymore. You know, like it's— for a long time you've bought a video game or a movie or something and you don't own it, you're really just sort of renting it. But now it seems like that's coming to our devices where you buy the phone but you don't actually have any control over what you run on it. You buy the computer but, you know, you're limited by the operating system. You can't do what you want with your own device, which I think is a really nasty trend.

Leo Laporte [01:49:03]:
I put the GrapheneOS on my Pixel because Google still allows you to unlock the bootloader. But somebody's asking in our Discord, uh, you know, will this affect Graphene? Well, I think Graphene will have to say 'Are you 18?' Because there's a store, and if there's an app store, that's what they're trying to protect kids from, I guess. Um, but at any point, Google could stop unlocking— allowing you to unlock the bootloader. That's why Graphene only runs on Pixels. It doesn't run on Samsung and other Android devices. Google lets you unlock the bootloader. I don't know how long that's going to last. That's why I put Graphene on my Pixel while I could.

Molly White [01:49:43]:
I am curious though to see how this goes in terms of enforceability, because it is really— seems very unenforceable.

Leo Laporte [01:49:49]:
It's totally unenforceable.

Molly White [01:49:50]:
And so my question, I guess, is like, how many are— is anyone going to comply? You know, if there's not really—

Leo Laporte [01:49:57]:
you're gonna arrest if, uh, Debian says, 'Nah, we're not going to do that.' Yeah, I'm sure, you know, companies like Canonical, which does Ubuntu, will probably do it. Because they're a company, because there's somebody you can sue, you can go after, you can penalize. But open source projects are not notoriously wealthy, right? Hard to find.

Molly White [01:50:20]:
I mean, it almost makes me wonder to what extent will they say it's not worth— you know, I, I wonder if Ubuntu implemented this, are they gonna lose all their— are they gonna— but are they gonna lose all their users? Because I don't feel like particularly when it comes to, you know, the Linux demographic. I don't feel like they're going to be particularly friendly towards this as far as all users go, right?

Leo Laporte [01:50:44]:
Um, right.

Owen Thomas [01:50:46]:
This does make me think if California is just, you know, over-regulating again.

Leo Laporte [01:50:52]:
Well, I think the biggest problem is legislators don't seem to really understand what they're doing when it comes to technology. There's a lot of hand waving. It's like, well, we want to protect kids.

Molly White [01:51:05]:
Yeah, there's a lot of like, we want to do this very noble thing, and like no thought about anything beyond what they want to do.

Leo Laporte [01:51:13]:
Well, their attitude— we've talked about this before— is just nerd harder, Silicon Valley. You could figure it out.

Owen Thomas [01:51:19]:
Well, and it's often the big companies that are capable of figuring out some way to, to comply or to lobby to get the, you know, Maybe the law doesn't change, but the rules implementing it get changed in subtle ways. And it's the small companies that have a really hard time figuring out how to deal with stuff like this. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:51:40]:
Let's take a little break. We've got a big week for Apple coming up. We'll talk about that in just a bit. Did Fitz get his walk?

Owen Thomas [01:51:47]:
He did. He was making noises. Plaintive noises.

Harry McCracken [01:51:55]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:51:55]:
Does he like point at the door like, this way, Dad?

Owen Thomas [01:51:59]:
No, he, he finds a box and he starts like pawing the box.

Leo Laporte [01:52:03]:
Oh yeah, you know where he's going. Yeah, he's basically saying, you got 10 minutes. Yeah, it's either going here or it's going out there. Your choice, buddy.

Owen Thomas [01:52:12]:
Taking it out on— taking it out on the nearest cardboard.

Molly White [01:52:16]:
You should get him a set of those potty bells. Have you seen those? It's like bells that you hang from your doorknob.

Leo Laporte [01:52:22]:
Oh, and they just, they jingle?

Molly White [01:52:23]:
My dog has some. Yeah, it's the cutest thing in the world.

Owen Thomas [01:52:27]:
Oh my gosh.

Leo Laporte [01:52:28]:
So how do you train it to do that?

Molly White [01:52:32]:
Um, basically anytime you, like, you're about to go take him out, you wait until he noses the, the bells and then you take him out. And they're very quick to learn. My dog was, he learned immediately.

Leo Laporte [01:52:43]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [01:52:43]:
Have you seen that there are word buttons? Like, I've seen those and You know, dogs can like—

Leo Laporte [01:52:50]:
can they really learn that?

Molly White [01:52:53]:
Some of them look pretty convincing to me.

Leo Laporte [01:52:56]:
Out, out, out. Treat, treat, treat, treat.

Molly White [01:53:00]:
See, that's the thing is like, I would never get my dog that button because he would just sit on it the whole— like, he would just never leave it alone.

Leo Laporte [01:53:07]:
Our cat has learned how to use the Ring doorbell, which I think is pretty cool. No, it doesn't, doesn't push the doorbell. But, you know, it has a camera. By the way, I am very sensitive about the fact that we have a Ring doorbell and a camera. I've turned off the cloud features and I've made sure the doorbell does not see anything but just the— you know, our path is shielded from the street, so you can't see anything but somebody coming towards the door. But there's a wall. The Ring doorbell's here and there's a wall leading up to it. And the cat has deduced that if she walks up to the camera, and waves her head that the chimes inside will ring.

Leo Laporte [01:53:46]:
And then I look at my watch or my phone, I say, oh, it's the cat. And I go open the door. And it's happened enough now that she's figured it out. And so she doesn't have a cat door. We just let her out and we know she's going to ring the chimes when she wants to come back in.

Molly White [01:53:59]:
I think she's trained you in this circumstance.

Leo Laporte [01:54:02]:
Oh, my God.

Owen Thomas [01:54:06]:
With the help of AI. Animals plus AI, humans don't have it.

Harry McCracken [01:54:10]:
Yeah, like how many— maybe there may be a lot of examples of animals figuring out how to use AI in the years to come.

Leo Laporte [01:54:16]:
Wouldn't that be something? Well, the funny thing is there's also a neighbor cat who comes around. He's a little tom, and he's figured it out because Lisa goes out, sees him, goes, oh, it's Georgie, and goes out and feeds him. So he's got a lot of incentive to ring the doorbell.

Owen Thomas [01:54:33]:
Uh, I do have Making humans easier to use.

Leo Laporte [01:54:38]:
You know, one of the biggest mind-blowing moments like that, and I don't know if it's true, but Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens made the argument that we didn't learn to cultivate wheat, wheat learned to cultivate us. Wheat decided, you know, hey, you know what's really good for wheat is we get humans to take these grasses that just kind of grow willy-nilly and give them a nice place to grow and feed them and all of that. And then, you know, when they harvest us, take the seeds and plant some more.

Molly White [01:55:14]:
You can say that about cows and chickens.

Leo Laporte [01:55:17]:
Cows and chickens. That was his position too.

Molly White [01:55:20]:
Yeah.

Harry McCracken [01:55:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:55:21]:
In fact, cows, probably we wouldn't have nearly as many cows if we didn't like to eat them. They'd be extinct. They'd be gone. Right? Of course, you can't say that about the passenger pigeon. That's gone because we like to eat them. So there you go. Okay, I'm sorry, we got dark. Let me take a break.

Leo Laporte [01:55:40]:
And then we will come back and we'll talk about wonderful things, the things that people listen to our shows for— new phones, new laptops, all sorts of exciting new products. Isn't tech wonderful? It's so wonderful what tech has brought us. That's what I used to do back in the day. I always hated it too. People would say, can you, we want you to give a talk to our user group, but can you talk about gadgets, not politics? Okay, fine. You want to hear what the latest phone is? I got it. Our show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Yes, not everybody's firing.

Leo Laporte [01:56:20]:
Some are hiring, and that's good. Thank you. I appreciate it. What's the latest trend in hiring? Well, it's called skills-based hiring. It emphasizes capabilities over education and direct experience. I love that idea. And it's, and it's, it actually works. According to experts, it leads to faster hiring and better job performance.

Leo Laporte [01:56:42]:
Well, if you're an employer who has adopted skill-based hiring, The best way to ensure that your applicants have the right skills is ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter recommends smart screening questions to help you hone in on that perfect match for your role. And right now you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/twit. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates fast. You can easily add ZipRecruiter screening questions to your job post so you get the highest quality applicants. If you want to see who's recently active, ZipRecruiter filters can show you. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter help you find amazing candidates with the skills you seek.

Leo Laporte [01:57:31]:
4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/twi— that's ziprecruiter.com/twi— Twit, meet your match on ZipRecruiter. I'm glad to know that there are companies hiring. That's a good thing with all the companies laying off these days. So this is gonna be a big week for Apple. Even Tim Cook says so. They did send an invitation out for an event on Wednesday. They call it a press experience that'll be in New York, Shanghai, and London.

Leo Laporte [01:58:11]:
But Tim Cook said the product announcements begin Monday morning. So get ready, starting tomorrow, there will be a lot of new stuff from Apple. Probably likely a new iPhone, the 17. We don't know what they're going to call it. E, the kind of the inexpensive version of the current— what is it? Is it 17, right? I can't even keep track of numbers. Yeah, '17, or is it '18? I don't even know. You can see I'm not as tuned in as I once was to the product scene. There will probably be a low-cost laptop based on an iPhone processor, maybe a little bit less attractive screen, a little bit simpler, lower RAM.

Leo Laporte [01:59:03]:
RAM probably would be one of the things you'd give up because RAM is so expensive these days. Used to be new product announcements for Apple were like a major nerd holiday. I don't know if we still feel that way. We still feel that way? I don't think so. Nothing to say about that. Go ahead.

Harry McCracken [01:59:25]:
I mean, I think that a cheap MacBook is really interesting. It's something people have talked about for years because I certainly remember back in the heyday of the netbook a lot of people saying that Apple would be in trouble if it didn't come out with a really inexpensive portable Mac, which they never quite did, except that after they came out with the Apple Silicon MacBook Air, Walmart just continued to sell it at lower and lower price points. And even though it's several years old, even the first generation Apple Silicon MacBook Air is still a decent computer for a lot of people. And, um, kind of a proving point for that this might be a useful device.

Leo Laporte [02:00:07]:
Good point. You don't— I mean, it'll probably have— I guess it could have 8 gigs of RAM, but if it had 16 and it was an M1-level chip, it's going to be actually an A-series chip from, from the iPhone, the A19, I think.

Owen Thomas [02:00:21]:
Um, you guys are talking about chips. Let's talk about colors.

Leo Laporte [02:00:24]:
Bring back—

Owen Thomas [02:00:26]:
that's what really matters— the orange iBook.

Leo Laporte [02:00:29]:
Well, the orange iPhone has sold incredibly well.

Owen Thomas [02:00:33]:
I'm telling you, Elwood was a technology visionary.

Molly White [02:00:39]:
Those like semi-transparent Macs were like the peak of product design.

Leo Laporte [02:00:46]:
Yeah. I confess, I fell for the orange on the iPhone. I like color.

Owen Thomas [02:00:53]:
Apple's, you know. My husband actually has the orange iPhone. We had an orange iMac and an orange iBook at various points.

Leo Laporte [02:01:01]:
And you're wearing an orange shirt and Molly Wood is in an orange room. So there's a definite trend here. Also, Harry, what's with the purple shirt? You got it all wrong, man.

Harry McCracken [02:01:10]:
Also, like most people ultimately put their phones in cases. So maybe the color doesn't matter that much.

Leo Laporte [02:01:16]:
I had to take it out of the case.

Harry McCracken [02:01:18]:
Presumably most people do not put their laptop into a case. And so arguably cool colors is an even better idea there.

Leo Laporte [02:01:26]:
Well, why is it that these companies don't do more colorful stuff? I remember there was a whole thing You remember this, Harry, PCs were beige boxes, square beige ugly boxes. And then Acer came along and they made this swoopy-doopy with holes in it and stuff, and it was a flop. People wanted beige boxes.

Harry McCracken [02:01:45]:
Apple did, I believe it was the iPhone 5C was the cheaper model in the plastic case, and that came in a whole range of colors. That was like a one-generation thing, so apparently it didn't actually sell all that well. And since then, they've been a lot more staid. I like to have an iPhone Pro, and until last year, the iPhone Pro colors were particularly staid, as if the fact it's a more serious device meant it couldn't be playful.

Molly White [02:02:21]:
Yeah, professionals are not allowed to have color.

Leo Laporte [02:02:24]:
On the other hand, if you're Legally Blonde, colors in— let me see if I got it. I can't get— for some reason I'm not able to get this tweet you sent us of Legally Blonde.

Owen Thomas [02:02:37]:
Oh, do starringthecomputer.com.

Leo Laporte [02:02:39]:
That's good.

Harry McCracken [02:02:42]:
Starringthecomputer.com? Oh yeah, that's a great site.

Leo Laporte [02:02:44]:
This is about computers in movies?

Harry McCracken [02:02:47]:
Yes, totally.

Leo Laporte [02:02:48]:
Oh, what a good idea.

Harry McCracken [02:02:49]:
I did something on the butterfly ThinkPad last year, and that site was really useful.

Leo Laporte [02:02:55]:
The keyboard came out.

Harry McCracken [02:02:56]:
The keyboard that expanded, and that site was really helpful for identifying movies that had been in. It was in Mission: Impossible and something else I'm forgetting right now, but it's a great site and they have screen grabs.

Molly White [02:03:12]:
That's awesome.

Leo Laporte [02:03:13]:
I love blogs like this. This is fun. Yeah, there's an iMac in The Flash. There's a Bondi Blue one. Here is— what movie is it? Freaky Friday. Boy, they really— they must be going frame by frame to find these.

Harry McCracken [02:03:32]:
Holy cow. Oh, a James Bond movie also had the butterfly ThinkPad, and it was like shown so briefly that you might almost miss it. And then I had, once I identified them on that side, I then had to go and like study the actual movies like frame by frame.

Leo Laporte [02:03:49]:
There's the Acer Aspire, the green, ugly green Acer that I was talking about. This is fun. What a nice sight, starring the computer.

Owen Thomas [02:03:59]:
I mean, do you remember the iBook had that handle?

Molly White [02:04:04]:
Right.

Owen Thomas [02:04:04]:
Yeah. Carry it like a purse.

Harry McCracken [02:04:06]:
Right. Yeah, the toilet seat iBook.

Owen Thomas [02:04:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:04:10]:
Well, the last very colorful iBook was the toilet seat, the clamshell.

Molly White [02:04:17]:
That's my favorite. The mice that matched those that were circular.

Leo Laporte [02:04:21]:
They were round pucks. They were such a terrible design. Such a terrible design.

Harry McCracken [02:04:27]:
I think that iBook, I feel like might have been the ugliest Apple product of all time, but that doesn't mean it was a bad product.

Leo Laporte [02:04:35]:
I think people loved it because it had personality.

Harry McCracken [02:04:38]:
It was, yeah, I mean, that whole generation of Apple products had a ton of personality that—

Leo Laporte [02:04:44]:
Well, maybe we're going back to that era. I mean, I think they'll probably look a lot like a MacBook, but there might be a little more colorful.

Molly White [02:04:54]:
They don't even have the light anymore that shines through the Apple logo.

Leo Laporte [02:04:57]:
They don't even do that now. The Apple used to glow. It was so cool.

Owen Thomas [02:05:02]:
I mean, the gay tech mafia is letting us down. It's true. I'm just gonna put it out there. Tim Cook, what are you even doing?

Leo Laporte [02:05:09]:
They've got a rainbow on the campus. What do you want?

Owen Thomas [02:05:12]:
What do you— I know, like, it's, you know, it's 6 colors. It's in the logo.

Leo Laporte [02:05:16]:
Come on. Yeah, it was in the logo. Boring white logo, though.

Owen Thomas [02:05:22]:
The, the, uh, the teaser for this, uh, this new event, uh, is people are speculating that there's—

Leo Laporte [02:05:28]:
yeah, those are the colors. Those are the four colors, right? Yeah. By the way, you keep saying gay mafia. This was a pre-show conversation. It was a cover. It's the COVID story of Wired magazine, uh, uh, this, uh, month, uh, about what? That, that they've discovered that there are gay people in Silicon Valley.

Owen Thomas [02:05:46]:
There are gay people in Silicon Valley and they know each other.

Leo Laporte [02:05:50]:
Shocking. Shocking. Although the COVID is actually quite shocking. I don't even know if I want to show it.

Owen Thomas [02:05:59]:
Go, they show the Salesforce Tower one. That's a little safer.

Leo Laporte [02:06:02]:
Okay. Yeah, this is, this is, yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe not. And this is, I'll show you the COVID Here's the big shot of the COVID It's a little rude if you ask me. So it's two guys shaking hands, but their hands are coming out of their flies for some reason. It's not— I believe not anatomically correct, unless— do gay men have hands?

Owen Thomas [02:06:35]:
Gay men have hands, and we do yoga.

Leo Laporte [02:06:37]:
Oh yeah, very flexible.

Molly White [02:06:39]:
Okay, do you have hands?

Leo Laporte [02:06:41]:
Okay, yes, and can confirm. I'm learning something here today. It did. I said this before the show began that this article, this cover story felt a little bit like a lot of straight people going, "Oh my God, there's gay people in Silicon Valley." Like, yeah, there's gay people everywhere. Have they— do they run Silicon Valley? Wired investigates. I'm not going to read this story so you could tell me now. Owen, as a gay man, do you run Silicon Valley?

Owen Thomas [02:07:16]:
I wish.

Leo Laporte [02:07:23]:
Okay. Um, this is Zoe Bernard writing, uh, writing the story.

Owen Thomas [02:07:27]:
Thank you. The story itself is actually pretty, pretty interesting and nuanced.

Leo Laporte [02:07:31]:
Uh, oh good.

Owen Thomas [02:07:32]:
Okay. And it's, it's a good— it's, it's a fun read.

Leo Laporte [02:07:34]:
There are— I mean, it is the case that there are some very prominent out gay men, although, uh, they, they weren't out. Peter Thiel wasn't out until he was definitely—

Owen Thomas [02:07:45]:
wasn't Peter Thiel was always out. He had a public Friendster profile where he disclosed his.

Leo Laporte [02:07:50]:
So why did he sue Gawker over outing?

Owen Thomas [02:07:53]:
He did not sue Gawker.

Leo Laporte [02:07:54]:
Oh, I'm sorry, Hulk. Why didn't he— why did he proxy sue Gawker using Hulk Hogan as his front man?

Owen Thomas [02:08:02]:
Uh, it's complicated. Uh, he and Nick Denton had—

Leo Laporte [02:08:04]:
didn't you write the story?

Owen Thomas [02:08:07]:
Guilty, guilty.

Leo Laporte [02:08:09]:
Um, okay, now wait a minute. Now we gotta dig into this.

Owen Thomas [02:08:11]:
I forgot you wrote that story there, but Nick Denton left a comment on that story, and, um, apparently that comment stung Peter Thiel more than, more than the story did.

Leo Laporte [02:08:24]:
Uh, so he wasn't closeted.

Owen Thomas [02:08:27]:
It wasn't closeted.

Leo Laporte [02:08:28]:
What was the title of your story?

Owen Thomas [02:08:30]:
Uh, Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People. Which again is like, you know, I was very definitely not outing him because it's like everyone knows this.

Molly White [02:08:46]:
It was like well known.

Owen Thomas [02:08:47]:
Yeah, yeah, like everyone knows this, but like a couple of people in various circles were freaking out over the idea of like discussing it, and it was like, okay, let's calm down.

Leo Laporte [02:08:58]:
So I feel like I agree that you have the right to keep your sexuality private. Private if you choose.

Owen Thomas [02:09:04]:
Yeah, you know, but I, but I think that, you know, Wired putting this on, on the COVID is kind of a statement of societal progress that, like, we can actually have an adult conversation about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And not, not have, you know, a, a false heteronormative moral panic, right?

Leo Laporte [02:09:21]:
I'm shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on here at Rick's Cafe. Exactly. Everything announced this week at Samsung Unpacked: the Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Galaxy Buds and the Ultra's privacy display. Is this a— is this a feature everybody's dying for?

Harry McCracken [02:09:41]:
I think that's totally—

Molly White [02:09:42]:
this one's where you turn it and then you can't see.

Leo Laporte [02:09:45]:
No, it's kind of different. It, you know, it's not like those laptop privacy screens that you put on that, uh, basically are polarized screens. This is kind of— this is kind of cool. It's— I think it's done in— in— it's a—

Harry McCracken [02:10:00]:
it's a—

Leo Laporte [02:10:00]:
it's some sort of watch. It's some sort of electrical Terry, do you know how this works?

Harry McCracken [02:10:06]:
I can't tell you in great technical detail, but one of the cool things about it is it's pixel by pixel. So you can do the entire screen if you want, or you can just do notifications if that's the main thing you care about.

Leo Laporte [02:10:18]:
Oh, that's kind of cool.

Harry McCracken [02:10:19]:
And I do— I mean, this is the first time in quite a while that we've seen phones with like, like a genuinely totally new feature rather than an incremental improvement on something that all phones have had for quite a while.

Leo Laporte [02:10:32]:
I mean, It does darken the screen for you as the front person, but of course it makes it completely black.

Harry McCracken [02:10:39]:
Yeah, but I haven't seen it myself in person, but I have to say, like, I think to a person, everybody I've seen who saw it at the event and wrote about it was quite impressed by it and said it's well done.

Leo Laporte [02:10:51]:
This might be in response— the Wall Street Journal did a piece about a year ago about shoulder surfing. Yes. People in bars watching you unlock your phone, then stealing your phone knowing your PIN.

Harry McCracken [02:11:03]:
It's an actual problem, at least occasionally.

Molly White [02:11:06]:
Yeah, uh, yeah, we'll be delighted. Don't people keep like seeing stuff over his shoulder in his Signal chats?

Harry McCracken [02:11:12]:
Yeah, it's gonna be a real boon for the Trump administration.

Leo Laporte [02:11:15]:
It'd be great for— yeah, people in the cabinet are gonna love this. Um, okay, there's not a whole lot new in the S26.

Harry McCracken [02:11:25]:
It's It has some impressive Google AI, including some stuff that sounds comparable to some of the features Apple announced year before last and still haven't shipped.

Leo Laporte [02:11:36]:
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, at this point, it's not too hard to beat Apple in AI.

Harry McCracken [02:11:43]:
Samsung and Google seem to have done a good job of, in some ways, competing with each other, but also collaborating in a way that's probably fruitful for both of them.

Leo Laporte [02:11:54]:
Yeah, um, although I, you know, I'm watching the Samsung event and I'm thinking every year— it's not just Samsung, but a lot of it's Samsung— they show these features, I get the phone, I play with it for about a day, and then I forget about it and I never use it again. Apple's somewhat the same thing, I guess.

Harry McCracken [02:12:12]:
Um, I, I really like and, and still like the, uh, camera control on the iPhone, like with the dedicated camera button.

Leo Laporte [02:12:19]:
Oh yeah, I use that.

Molly White [02:12:20]:
That actually—

Leo Laporte [02:12:21]:
I don't have a camera icon on my front screen now because I know I'm just gonna press that button.

Harry McCracken [02:12:25]:
So that's something I was excited about when I saw it, and I'm still excited about that, which is certainly not true of all these features. Sometimes, sometimes they're—

Leo Laporte [02:12:35]:
yes, there's a lot of gimmick, gimmicky stuff. The other thing is I never believe what I see at these events, right? You've learned that, right? You— I want to see it in real—

Harry McCracken [02:12:45]:
well, yeah, particularly after the WWDC with of Apple wowing everybody with stuff, which it turned out they couldn't build. And on some level are still trying to figure out how to build, given that they brought in Google just recently.

Leo Laporte [02:13:02]:
Google does the same thing though, right? I mean, Google I/O for years, they'd show stuff often that would never really materialize, or if it did, it would never quite live up to its—

Harry McCracken [02:13:11]:
It's probably particularly common now that they have these developer conferences which involve like pre-announcing an entire year's worth of new features in some cases.

Leo Laporte [02:13:22]:
Right, right. Let's talk a little bit about hacking. There was an interesting story in the Iran attack. Of course, I'm sure by now you know that Israeli airstrikes actually hit Tehran. Iran, killing the leader and many of his generals. One of the things that Israel did, which was kind of interesting, they hacked a prayer app that was widely used in Iran to send surrender messages to Iranians. Now, this kind of reminds me of World War II, dropping pamphlets out of airplanes saying, Germans, you know, help is on the way. Get rid of Hitler.

Leo Laporte [02:14:11]:
That's what these messages said on this prayer app. Mysterious push notifications saying help is on the way and amnesty if they surrender. I think we don't know yet how much hacking went on, but I suspect there was quite a bit of cyber warfare in this attack, just as there was in the extraction of Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela.

Owen Thomas [02:14:33]:
I mean, nothing, nothing beats the pager.

Leo Laporte [02:14:36]:
The beeper explosion, explosive beepers.

Owen Thomas [02:14:39]:
Yeah. Talk about a supply chain threat.

Leo Laporte [02:14:41]:
Yeah, that was wild. Yeah.

Owen Thomas [02:14:44]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:14:44]:
There's always this cautionary tale, though, about using cyber warfare, because what we do to them, they can do to us. And it doesn't require a massive military to do it back. Right. Just requires, you know, half dozen good hackers.

Molly White [02:15:02]:
Yeah, I mean, look at North Korea.

Leo Laporte [02:15:05]:
Exactly. Yeah. Axios had a story about what an AI-enabled cyberattack would look like to us. Paul Nakasone, former head of the NSA, said that a nation-state that has breached systems critical to the supplies of food and water could trigger an outage. Maybe they're planning to trigger an outage. We know that Chinese, for instance, have invaded in many cases our infrastructure, our grid, electrical grids and so forth with malware they haven't triggered. Nakasone said, you know, there's a risk if they lose control of an AI agent that that could be triggered inadvertently or without human interruption. Nakasone said the thing that prevents them from doing anything, they are in our infrastructure, but they know the U.S.

Leo Laporte [02:16:00]:
is going to respond. And then Nakasone said, not merely in cyberspace, the kinetic war, I guess, still has an important role to play. I feel like we are, we are in, in a risky time. We're very interdependent. Our, uh, well, and we've— we don't have the CISA so much to protect us anymore. The guy who was running CISA for the longest time is now gone. The acting director, he had a lot of little issues. Madhu Gotumukhala failed a polygraph, which honestly, let's, let's be honest, I don't know why they're still using polygraphs, lie detectors.

Leo Laporte [02:16:54]:
To vet people for viewing classified documents, but he did apparently fail a counterintelligence polygraph. Um, he uploaded sensitive government documents to ChatGPT.

Molly White [02:17:07]:
Oops.

Leo Laporte [02:17:08]:
Um, staffing at CISA was slashed by one-third. This is the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that has been gutted. When, uh, Alex Stamos was on the show last month, He said, "We are very vulnerable because CISA is not on the job." Well, Guttmacher is now gone. He's been moved to a new position as Director of Strategic Implementation in the DHS. Not sure who's going to replace him. The former nominee, Sean Plankie, has been re-nominated, but the Senate has not approved him. Molly, you had a thought on this?

Molly White [02:17:50]:
No, I was just saying I was giving the name.

Leo Laporte [02:17:52]:
Oh yeah, Sean Planky, right? Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Uh, the Senate hasn't even scheduled a hearing for his nomination. So CISA is leaderless, basically. Last week, uh, another top senior official, Bob Costello, the chief information officer tasked with overseeing CISA's IT systems and data policies, left. Actually, Gudrun McCulloch tried to transfer him but was blocked. It's kind of a mess. So, yes, this is the—

Owen Thomas [02:18:27]:
is this the institutionification of government?

Leo Laporte [02:18:29]:
Yeah, you know, but the problem is we are— makes us more vulnerable to cyber attacks from adversaries.

Owen Thomas [02:18:41]:
All right, absolutely. It's, you know, and, and, um, you know, the way that the Trump administration, for example, shut down, uh, you know, offensive operations, um, I believe targeting Russia, you know, it's offensive and defensive, you know, basically left us blind to what, what they might be doing.

Leo Laporte [02:19:03]:
And if you're a country like Iran that knows that you're going to be, you know, you're under a lot of pressure you're from the US, you're under sanctions and you might well be attacked. I would assume that they would work very hard to create a core of hackers like North Korea has done, like China has done. I know Russia has very accomplished hackers in the GRU. We have a lot of enemies out there and maybe they don't have the missiles that can reach our shores, but they certainly have cyber skills Seems like we should be beefing up our defenses, not, not taking them apart. Uh, I should warn you, there is a new attack. If you have a guest network set up on your Wi-Fi, you might want to turn it off. There's a new attack called AirSnitch that bypasses Wi-Fi encryption. It uses a guest network to break into your regular network It seems like a reasonably— I'm not going to say easy attack, but if you have it, let's don't make any enemies in the hacker community.

Leo Laporte [02:20:12]:
Let's say this research was presented Wednesday at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium. It's a Wi-Fi encryption bypass. In the sense that it bypasses client isolation. It doesn't break the authentication or encryption, but it just walks right over, walks right around it. So WPA is still— especially WPA3 and 2 and 3 are still secure. But if you've got a guest network, you might want to turn it off, I guess.

Owen Thomas [02:20:49]:
I'm sure. Yeah, as if most people with home Wi-Fi systems know how to turn off, you know, do I have a guest network? I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:20:56]:
Probably, you know, you know, I was surprised to learn just yesterday Yesterday that Xfinity has set up an Xfinity Wi-Fi network for my neighbors on my router.

Harry McCracken [02:21:06]:
You only just learned about that?

Leo Laporte [02:21:07]:
Well, I knew they were doing it on consumer routers, and I knew how to turn it off on my old consumer router, but I have business class, and I don't think I can turn it off on the business router. I think I have to offer Wi-Fi access to anybody who walks by my house.

Owen Thomas [02:21:24]:
This is, this is why I I reluctantly stuck with Comcast for, uh, for high-speed internet, but I brought my own DOCSIS router to the—

Harry McCracken [02:21:33]:
yeah, I finally, uh, for the years I was using a modem I had bought, and— but I had a deal, an all-you-can-eat deal with Xfinity where they sent me a modem which I would ignore, and they eventually called my bluff and said I had to set up their modem. Modem, which I did, but I wanted it to work with my Eero mesh network, which was kind of a headache for about half an hour. But I finally have the Xfinity modem working with the Wi-Fi I want to use. One of those mesh modes, probably, right? Yes. I had avoided tackling that for like 5 or 6 years.

Leo Laporte [02:22:12]:
Yeah. I mean, I just assumed because it's business class service that they wouldn't turn on the Xfinity, you know, Wi-Fi on the business class mode.

Harry McCracken [02:22:22]:
They kind of made it worth my while because in the old days I would have had to pay Xfinity a monthly fee for a modem, and this is actually cheaper than if I used my own modem.

Leo Laporte [02:22:32]:
I'll ask, uh, Burke, if you can, if you can log into my modem and turn that off, that would be great. I appreciate it. I didn't realize— I just didn't realize they would do that.

Harry McCracken [02:22:41]:
As far as I know, they can't share my Wi-Fi because I'm not using them for Wi-Fi.

Leo Laporte [02:22:45]:
Yeah, well, I don't want my— we, you know, I'm relying on the bandwidth right now. We're doing a show. If the bandwidth goes down because my neighbor decides to stream, uh, Heated Rivalry over and over again, I don't know why, um, then, uh, you know, it could impact my ability to do my job.

Molly White [02:23:03]:
Fortunately, that's wild that they wouldn't let you turn—

Leo Laporte [02:23:05]:
like, that they might— maybe they can't. I just can't— I don't see anywhere in the, in the router to turn it off, and I have— because it's business service I have to use their modem. I have my own router, but I have to use their modem.

Molly White [02:23:17]:
I mean, we were just talking about devices that you don't own.

Leo Laporte [02:23:21]:
Yeah, there's one right there. Yeah, because I have business class service. We thought that would be a good idea. Uh, good news, the 10th Circuit— this came up actually with the Washington Post reporter. Uh, remember that, uh, the government is researching or trying to investigate leaks in the government, took a Washington Post reporter's devices and, and tried to crack them and couldn't. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court's dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester's device and digital data. And a nonprofit's social media data. It was— the case was the Armandaris versus the City of Colorado Springs.

Leo Laporte [02:24:12]:
It was a housing protest back in 2021. Colorado Springs police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway. They also obtained warrants at the time to search the devices and data of one of the protesters who they claimed threw a bike at them during the protest. The warrants included a search through all her photos, videos, emails, text messages, and location data over a 2-month period, as well as a time-unlimited search for 26 keywords including words like bike, assault, celebration, and the word right. It basically gave police the right to comb through all years of her private data looking for evidence related to the single issue of her throwing a bike at the police. They got a warrant to search her Facebook page, the Facebook page of the Chinook Center, the organization that spearheaded the protest, despite them never being accused of a crime. So the Chinook Center and Armandaris sued, a civil rights lawsuit, which the district court dismissed, saying the searches were justified. And in any case, the officers had qualified immunity.

Leo Laporte [02:25:24]:
The ACLU defending the plaintiffs appealed, and there's very good news. In a 2-to-1 opinion, the 10th Circuit has ruled that in fact there is an absolute limit on how much police can go through your devices.

Molly White [02:25:46]:
Didn't the judge just overturn the decision on the Washington Post reporter as well?

Leo Laporte [02:25:50]:
Exactly.

Molly White [02:25:51]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:25:52]:
Yeah. So that's how it's related. Yeah. Government has been trying very hard to break through this wall of privacy, but we store so much stuff on our devices. So I'm not sure what the status is of the Washington Post reporter.

Molly White [02:26:11]:
I think the judge is going to review the evidence that was— I think he himself is going to be the one who reviews the evidence that was—

Leo Laporte [02:26:21]:
as opposed to law enforcement.

Molly White [02:26:23]:
Yeah, the judge— well, having— usually there's like a team that is brought, like an independent team is brought in. I— the idea of the judge himself sifting through all that seems a little unusual to me, but more power to him, I guess.

Leo Laporte [02:26:35]:
Uh, yeah, U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter says he'll independently review the contents of Hannah Natanson's devices instead of allowing a Justice Department filter team to perform the search. Apparently doesn't trust the Justice Department. He said he balanced the need to protect Natanson's free speech rights with the government's duty to safeguard top national security information.

Owen Thomas [02:26:55]:
That's back to the presumption of regularity, which is increasingly off the table.

Molly White [02:26:59]:
Yeah, well, and I think the judge was particularly angry because I think he argued that the government did not properly inform him of a law, like, pertaining to, I think, specifically journalists, like seizing journalists' work. Um, so I think he was already kind of predisposed to not trusting the DOJ in this particular case.

Leo Laporte [02:27:25]:
He had originally temporarily barred the government from looking into— they took her phone, 2 laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive, and her Garmin smartwatch. Oh, that's gonna be probative. Uh, and the judge said he initially barred the government from reviewing any of that material. Um, but I guess he feels like, well, I, I'm going to look through this. And yeah, I mean, if I were, uh, Natanson, I wouldn't be happy about any of this. Protecting your sources is kind of fundamental to good journalism and protected. It's protected by the First Amendment. Well, we'll keep up on that one.

Leo Laporte [02:28:17]:
But at least in this case, there is some restriction on the broad search of protesters' devices. Uh, did you do SETI@home ever, any of you, helping to search for extraterrestrial intelligence? No. You did it, Harry?

Harry McCracken [02:28:36]:
I did not.

Leo Laporte [02:28:37]:
You did? Oh, Molly, you did.

Molly White [02:28:39]:
Yeah, I did.

Leo Laporte [02:28:41]:
Well, it's over, of course, but so for 21 years between 1999 and 2020, millions of people loaned UC Berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations. It was SETI@home. I did it too. I did a few of those, right? There were a bunch of other ones. There was Folding@home.

Molly White [02:29:02]:
Folding@home. Yeah, I think that was the one I mostly did.

Leo Laporte [02:29:05]:
Yeah. The idea was let your unused CPU cycles do some, you know, work that could be aggregated. And, you know, by the way, Folding@home has now been basically superseded by AlphaFold, which does a much better job and much faster. Doing protein folding. So the data came from the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory, right? That, that's fallen apart, but they had a lot of data— 12 billion, 12 billion detections, momentary blimps of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky. They're hoping maybe that is signal from the ETs. After 10 years of work since the close closing of the project, the SETI@home team has finished analyzing those detections. They've winnowed them down first to a million candidate signals and now to 100 that are worth a second look.

Leo Laporte [02:30:03]:
So they've got, they've got access to China's 500-meter aperture spherical telescope. It's called FAST. And they've been pointing it at these 100 targets since July, hoping to see the signals again. So far, nothing. If we don't—

Owen Thomas [02:30:26]:
go ahead. Wasn't Obama talking about intelligent life? He was in an interview and he was dropping hints about aliens.

Harry McCracken [02:30:35]:
I think he was teasing.

Leo Laporte [02:30:37]:
I think he was teasing. Anyway, uh, I guess if you did, if you did SETI@home, you'll be glad to know it wasn't completely wasted. And they're now looking at 100 signals. Uh, when we were designing SETI@home, said, uh, David Anderson, the co-founder, uh, it went way, way beyond our initial expectations. We tried to decide whether it was worth doing, whether we'd get enough computing power to actually do new science. Our calculation, we're based on getting 50,000 volunteers. We got a million, including one Molly White. It was kind of cool.

Leo Laporte [02:31:16]:
At your service. You, you know what, you're an altruistic person. You do the Wikipedia, you, you help us find ETs.

Owen Thomas [02:31:25]:
Good job.

Leo Laporte [02:31:26]:
Spoiler: I don't know if I want to find—

Molly White [02:31:28]:
Spoiler: they found nothing.

Leo Laporte [02:31:31]:
Well, that's probably good news, I'm thinking. Don't you think it'd be disruptive if they said, "Hey, guess what? Didn't you see Pluribus? Don't you know we don't want to know?

Molly White [02:31:42]:
We don't want to know what's out there." Honestly, if we did find anything, it would just be seeing it and that would be it. That would be the end of it. There would be nothing past that because they'd be so far away that nothing would be able to be done.

Leo Laporte [02:31:52]:
Well, one hopes, but remember the three-body problem. You don't want to let them know we're here. Dark forest. Yep, we're here. All right, one last ad, then we have some in memoriams, we have some weird stories. We're running out of time. I'll get them as quickly as I can. You're watching This Week in Tech with the great technologizer himself, Harry McCracken, Fitz the dog, and his owner Owen Thomas of the San Francisco Business Times.

Leo Laporte [02:32:26]:
I love how you do do the salute. Salute! Salute! And Molly White from mollywhite.net. And of course, Citation Needed, which you must subscribe to right now. Our show today brought to you by my mattress. I slept so well last night. I, you know, Saturday night is very important that I get a good night's sleep so that I'm fresh and ready to do this show. This is, you know, takes a lot of cognitive energy. That deep sleep is so important.

Leo Laporte [02:32:55]:
That's why we invested in a mattress. You spend more than a third of your life on your mattress, right? Your mattress is home for where you cuddle Fitz, where you roll around with your cats. You know, you watch TV, you read books, and you know, now that it's springtime, maybe recover from all of those allergies. Yes, it's allergy season. You need more sleep, so now's the perfect time to invest in a new mattress and stay comfortable inside, away from the allergens, with your Helix mattress. I have to say, I love our Helix bed. We ordered it, it's been about a year now, and it's made a huge difference. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer.

Leo Laporte [02:33:43]:
It's so comfortable. Don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low-quality and questionable materials. Most mattresses are rest assured your Helix mattress is assembled, packaged, and shipped from Arizona within days of placing your order. So it's fresh. We did the Helix sleep quiz. I'd encourage you to do this, which matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences, your sleep needs.

Owen Thomas [02:34:08]:
I'm a side sleeper, uh, and I—

Leo Laporte [02:34:12]:
so we got a mattress, and I like a firm mattress. We got just the right mattress, but they have They have mattresses for every style and preference, and it really works. I notice, I keep track of my sleep with my Oura Ring, a definite increase in not only how much time I spend sleeping, but in my deep sleep, which is the most important sleep cycle. I went from about 15 minutes a night to more than 40 minutes a night, and that is a big improvement. And actually, Helix did a sleep study. They did a Wesper sleep study. They measured the sleep performance. Of participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress, and they found pretty much the same results.

Leo Laporte [02:34:52]:
82% of the participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle, on average 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. Ah, that's what I got too. Participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night, and I can tell you that makes a difference. You feel great When you wake up well-rested, just fantastic. You're ready to take on the world. Time and time again, Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand, tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. Helix will deliver your mattress right to your door. They have free shipping in the US, and you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges.

Leo Laporte [02:35:33]:
The Happy with Helix Guarantee provides a risk-free, customer-first experience, ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. We didn't need to return ours, it was perfect. Uh, you, you're never getting away from me, I love it. Go to helixsleep.com/twit for 27% off sitewide during the President's Day Sale Extended Best of Web, exclusively for listeners of This Week in Tech. That's helixsleep.com/twit, 27% off the President's Day Sale Extended Best of Web. But this offer ends March 1st, today. So make sure to put our show name in after checkout so they know we sent you. That'll help us a lot.

Leo Laporte [02:36:13]:
If you're listening after the sale ends, check them out. There's always great deals at helixsleep.com/twit. Thank them so much for their support and for my very good night's sleep. I am very happy to say, kind of a watermark for podcasters, Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio. I'm actually kind of surprised it took us this long. Edison does these surveys, and here's the graph. As AM and FM radio have declined dramatically over the last 10 years from 75% of daily spoken word audio time to 40%, as podcasting has gone from 10% 10 years ago to 40%. We are now— we've crossed the wires, crossed the streams.

Leo Laporte [02:37:07]:
We're bigger than radio, kids.

Molly White [02:37:11]:
So 20 years— count radio shows that also, you know, have podcast feeds.

Leo Laporte [02:37:18]:
Is that— oh no, that's confusing. Yeah, you're right. Everybody, everybody— iHeartMedia, my old company, absolutely realized— it's funny, when I started doing my radio show in 2000, 2004, I asked management, can I put it on the internet? And they said, yeah, nobody's gonna— you go ahead. That's never going to impact our audience. And they were right for 20 years. But now they're doing podcasts of all their shows.

Harry McCracken [02:37:43]:
And are they counting podcasts on YouTube as podcasts if people are consuming them on YouTube?

Leo Laporte [02:37:49]:
Spotify and YouTube, yes. Although I'm with you, I don't really think of that as a podcast.

Harry McCracken [02:37:54]:
I've finally gotten my head around maybe these things on YouTube being podcasts, even if they're not.

Leo Laporte [02:37:59]:
They're shows. That's why I never like the word podcast.

Owen Thomas [02:38:03]:
It's so Netflix, right? Netflix has been courting podcasters.

Leo Laporte [02:38:06]:
Netflix, YouTube. Yep.

Owen Thomas [02:38:08]:
Um, yeah, which is, which is, which is interesting because that is, you know, part of the idea there. And this even goes back to Paramount, uh, you know, Paramount buying Warner Discovery. A lot of the, a lot of the Discovery part of Warner Discovery is HGTV, Food Network. It's these shows you can kind of leave on in the background. That's exactly like podcasts. You just listen to it while you're— hey, you're doing something else.

Leo Laporte [02:38:35]:
Um, okay, I guess that's all right.

Owen Thomas [02:38:37]:
Yeah, like when you're walking a dog. I totally—

Leo Laporte [02:38:41]:
yeah, right, right. Exactly right. Yeah, yeah. Um, 80% of consumers over 18 have tuned into both audio— both audio and video. So only a tiny minority only listen to one or the other. 13% only listen to audio, 7% only watch video.

Owen Thomas [02:38:56]:
I mean, talk radio, you know, like, I don't know anyone who's listening to radio and not doing anything else, right? Like, the whole point is—

Leo Laporte [02:39:04]:
I don't know anybody under 80 that's listening to radio.

Harry McCracken [02:39:07]:
It's not like the days when everybody, the family, sat around the radio and listened to Jack Benny.

Molly White [02:39:13]:
There you go. Car though. Everybody in their car listens to podcasts and not radio anymore.

Leo Laporte [02:39:18]:
That's the change. Radio, even when I was starting to do the talk show, it was mostly in car. Even by 2004, it was mostly in car.

Owen Thomas [02:39:27]:
I mean, it's—

Leo Laporte [02:39:27]:
So as soon as podcasts became easy to listen to—

Molly White [02:39:29]:
The commute is the thing, right? Everybody listens to the radio on their commute, and now it's just the podcast. They pick a podcast now.

Leo Laporte [02:39:36]:
Right. Yay, we're winning. Burger King is going to use AI to see if its employees are saying please and thank you. The voice-enabled chatbot called Patty— oh my God— part of an overarching BK assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation— now put the meat on the bun— but also evaluate their interactions with customers for friendliness.

Owen Thomas [02:40:08]:
Is this because they're not able to hire and retain managers? That's what it sounds like to me.

Leo Laporte [02:40:13]:
Oh, instead of a manager, you got Patty.

Harry McCracken [02:40:16]:
Yeah, Patty is the manager.

Leo Laporte [02:40:19]:
So disturbed. I— if anybody works at Burger King listening to this show, please call in. Let's, let's hear what it's like.

Molly White [02:40:27]:
I mean, Burger King's been trying to do—

Leo Laporte [02:40:29]:
this is from The Verge— employees can ask Patty questions such as how many strips of bacon to put on a Maple Bourbon BBQ Whopper.

Harry McCracken [02:40:38]:
That doesn't sound like that's going to speed up the burger production process.

Leo Laporte [02:40:42]:
No. How many strips of bacon should I put on this Whopper?

Owen Thomas [02:40:46]:
But I think that, you know, I think that there is some of the AI jobs are not being eliminated as much as they're never being filled. Think of truck drivers. So, you know, like we just cannot hire enough people to drive trucks. To meet the demand. So autonomous trucks kind of make sense to deal with the labor shortage. Now, could you increase wages? Potentially, but maybe the working conditions are such that you are just not going to attract people to those jobs at any realistic, economically feasible wage.

Harry McCracken [02:41:25]:
I know that Aurora, who does autonomous trucking, says that anybody who is a trucker today and wants to continue being a trucker probably can. And it is about the fact that it's very hard to get younger people to agree to do this rather stressful, boring job.

Leo Laporte [02:41:44]:
On Wednesday, Uber picked a particularly inauspicious time to debut its air taxi service in Dubai.

Owen Thomas [02:41:52]:
Oh God.

Leo Laporte [02:41:56]:
Probably, I mean, the Dubai airport shut down, so I'm thinking the taxi service also shut down. Shut down. Um, it will let travelers book Joby Aviation's electric air taxis, uh, just like getting— just like getting an Uber. Uh, it will come to you. It'll pick you up at what they call a Joby Vertiport. Who is just piloting them?

Molly White [02:42:24]:
Nobody. Like, do you have to have a— it's No, it doesn't have a human pilot.

Leo Laporte [02:42:29]:
Oh, does it? Oh shoot. Well, that's no fun. They're autonomous, but they'll have a human pilot. So is that like a safety pilot?

Molly White [02:42:38]:
I don't know. I don't know. I'm just curious.

Leo Laporte [02:42:40]:
Oh, they're not. I'm sorry. They are not yet autonomous. They plan to make them autonomous. Oh, okay. So really the innovation here is this helicopter.

Harry McCracken [02:42:53]:
Yeah, I mean, it's an EV, but that's still a new thing.

Leo Laporte [02:42:56]:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 propellers. You can go, you know, straight up and down takeoff.

Molly White [02:43:04]:
Um, I'm just curious who's going to be piloting them, because like, you know, Uber, the Uber model is like everyday people are gonna do gig work driving.

Leo Laporte [02:43:12]:
Normally I fly 747s, but I got an off day. I think I'll, uh, maybe take up some gigs.

Molly White [02:43:18]:
Right, like, are there just a lot of pilots around looking for gig work? I assume you have to have a pilot's license.

Leo Laporte [02:43:29]:
Yeah, um, well, you know, I mean, it's probably just another helicopter service, right? They've always had at these high-end airports in New York and I'm sure Dubai helicopter services. It's just another helicopter basically, right? I thought it was autonomous, so if it's not autonomous, you're right, what's the big deal?

Harry McCracken [02:43:46]:
It's an electric helicopter.

Leo Laporte [02:43:48]:
It's an electric helicopter is what it is.

Harry McCracken [02:43:51]:
I wonder if someday they will someday be autonomous.

Molly White [02:43:54]:
It's a VTOL.

Molly White [02:43:55]:
They don't go very far.

Leo Laporte [02:43:56]:
Yeah, it's vertical takeoff. Yeah, that's new, but so is a helicopter. Yeah, a couple of in memoriams. The creator of Red Dwarf, which I know a lot of our listeners are big fans of, British comedy show, Rob Grant has passed away at a very young age. Sad to say. He also created— it was one of the writers on Spitting Image, which is that great political puppet show, which is wonderful. And of course, Red Dwarf made one of our good friends Bobby Llewellyn famous. He played Krayton the robot on it, and Llewellyn is a good friend of the network but also does his own car podcasts.

Leo Laporte [02:44:40]:
Rob Grant, Not Bobby. Bobby's still with us. Rob Grant passed away, creator of Red Dwarf. And I have mixed feelings about this. Dan Simmons also passed away from a stroke at the age of 77. I consider Dan one of the great science fiction writers. His Hyperion series is one of my favorite sci-fi books. He himself, not one of my favorite people.

Leo Laporte [02:45:06]:
It always is complicated, right? And these guys are great writers, but not such great people. His politics kind of went off the deep end towards the end. I just got, though, in honor— he passed. If you haven't read the Hyperion Cantos, I can't recommend them more highly. And I just got his book from 2007, which is kind of a— horror historical fiction novel called The Terror.

Molly White [02:45:37]:
I read that.

Leo Laporte [02:45:38]:
It's a weird book. Is it weird?

Molly White [02:45:41]:
It is. It is weird. I have this thing where I really like to read about people being like forced to survive in really cold places when I'm warm inside.

Leo Laporte [02:45:50]:
Oh man, it's cold. It is really cold. Uh, it's the account of John Franklin and his expedition to find the Northwest Passage, and apparently there's a supernatural element That is very weird.

Molly White [02:46:02]:
It, like, it's a very normal book up until maybe the last, like, third, and then you're like, wait a second, what is happening?

Leo Laporte [02:46:11]:
Yeah. Oh good, I'll have something to look forward to. Anyway, uh, Hyperion is, is really good. The Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion, uh, are fantastic novels which I would highly recommend. So, uh, because of that I will note his passing at the age of 77 of a stroke. And that— we always like to end with death on this show. It's the final frontier.

Owen Thomas [02:46:39]:
Light and cheery.

Leo Laporte [02:46:42]:
That concludes this episode of This Week in Tech. Molly White, you're fantastic. I enjoy your new orange place.

Molly White [02:46:51]:
I think it's actually yellow, I will say. Oh, okay. It's my lighting, I think.

Leo Laporte [02:46:56]:
But it's warm, I guess.

Molly White [02:46:58]:
It is a warm yellow.

Leo Laporte [02:47:00]:
It's very nice.

Molly White [02:47:02]:
Goldenrod.

Leo Laporte [02:47:03]:
Goldenrod. Wow. Citation Needed is absolutely a must. CitationNeeded.news, a newsletter by Molly White, covers crypto, right? But not just crypto.

Molly White [02:47:16]:
Not just crypto, but a lot of crypto.

Leo Laporte [02:47:20]:
Yeah. The Year of Technologarchy. That's a good word, technoligarchy.

Molly White [02:47:24]:
Yeah, I wrote technological oligarchy too many times and I was like, this is working.

Leo Laporte [02:47:29]:
Let's just make it one word. And it's funny because I was mentioning how I use RSS to create my own newspaper and I realized you had an article about it. Maybe that's where I got the idea.

Harry McCracken [02:47:39]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:47:39]:
So there you go. Big fan of RSS. Citation needed. It's free, but become a subscriber 'cause it would be nice. It would be nice. Helps me keep it free. Yes, exactly. Thank you, Molly.

Leo Laporte [02:47:52]:
Great to see you. Molly White. Thanks for having me. Mr. Owen Thomas, San Francisco Business Journal, Business Times. Can we see Fitz?

Owen Thomas [02:48:02]:
He's, he's sulking on his blanket right now.

Leo Laporte [02:48:04]:
Oh, Fitz.

Owen Thomas [02:48:07]:
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:48:08]:
Oh, is he mad at us for taking Daddy away for so long?

Owen Thomas [02:48:13]:
I Maybe, or, you know, or just not getting enough treats.

Leo Laporte [02:48:16]:
Yeah, that's probably it.

Owen Thomas [02:48:17]:
He— I need to give him a treat button so he can just go treat, treat, treat.

Leo Laporte [02:48:22]:
Yeah, I want to see that. Uh, what are you working on? Anything you want to plug? He's a managing editor there at the Business Times.

Owen Thomas [02:48:29]:
Uh, let's see, just wanted to mention, um, uh, in all the AI news, we did have a scoop about OpenAI moving into Mountain View. So now instead of just taking over all of San Francisco real estate, they are also, um, plunging into Google's backyard. So, wow, uh, big, big real estate move. Um, also competing with xAI, uh, Elon Musk's AI company, which is, uh, just one city north in Palo Alto, uh, buying up real estate there— or leasing real estate, I should say.

Leo Laporte [02:49:01]:
Um, how big is this office complex?

Owen Thomas [02:49:04]:
Uh, I believe it's, um, it's north of 300,000 square feet. So it's a—

Leo Laporte [02:49:09]:
well, it's a—

Owen Thomas [02:49:09]:
it's a big complex, former Symantec headquarters, if you remember that.

Molly White [02:49:14]:
Oh, I know that.

Molly White [02:49:14]:
Symantec.

Owen Thomas [02:49:14]:
Yeah.

Harry McCracken [02:49:15]:
RIP.

Leo Laporte [02:49:16]:
Peter Norton.

Owen Thomas [02:49:17]:
Yeah. Now part, now part of LifeLock, I think.

Leo Laporte [02:49:21]:
Oh, is it LifeLock?

Owen Thomas [02:49:22]:
Got 'em.

Leo Laporte [02:49:23]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [02:49:23]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:49:25]:
Yep. Well, yeah, everybody should read the San Francisco Business Journal. You also, we were gonna talk a little bit about the Renaissance. I can't show, see.

Owen Thomas [02:49:33]:
Oh shoot. I believe I gave you a gift article.

Leo Laporte [02:49:36]:
I need a gift article. Give me a gift article. It is. I gotta stop using an ad blocker.

Owen Thomas [02:49:44]:
Oh, that's a problem. Uh, but I can tell you, yeah, our most recent cover story was about UCSF. Um, you know, the effects of AI are not just on tech itself, but, uh, AI is playing a big role in, in health. Uh, UCSF has expanded their, um, their, uh, footprint by about 2 million square feet in the past 2 years.

Harry McCracken [02:50:07]:
Wow.

Owen Thomas [02:50:07]:
You know, acquiring hospitals, leasing or buying new space. And the chancellor, Sam Hawgood, says, you know, a lot of it is because San Francisco is the center of AI. It's also a huge healthcare hub. And he sees the two of them colliding right here in the city.

Leo Laporte [02:50:30]:
Oh, interesting. Well, I'm planning when I have my heart attack to go to UCSF. So I do hope that— I mean, you will—

Owen Thomas [02:50:37]:
Continue to expand. From everything I read, you'll be, you know, anyone who's the best, yeah, uh, facing that will be well cared for there.

Leo Laporte [02:50:45]:
Yeah, if I can make it there in time.

Owen Thomas [02:50:47]:
A friend of mine is doing lung rehab. They have like physical therapy for your lungs if you're, you know, having—

Leo Laporte [02:50:55]:
my daughter went there, uh, she had nodes on her vocal cords and had a really great ENT doctor who helped her, uh, completely cure it and get better. It's a really good hospital and medical facility. Really like it a lot. Thank you, Owen. Great to see you. San Francisco Business Times, become a member and turn off my gosh darn ad blocker is what I ought to do. Thank you so much, Owen. Great to see you.

Leo Laporte [02:51:24]:
Give my regards to Marie, your beautiful wife.

Harry McCracken [02:51:28]:
She's listening in.

Leo Laporte [02:51:29]:
It's always, uh, you know, that's the biggest The biggest sadness I have about not having a studio is I don't get to see Marie anymore because you guys used to come up.

Harry McCracken [02:51:38]:
We're sorry we don't get to go to Petaluma as often as we used to.

Leo Laporte [02:51:41]:
I know. It's the only really real reason to come to Petaluma. Thank you, Harry McCracken, the technologizer. You can read about his AI coding experience recreating his high school game. And of course, you'll read most of his stuff at Fast Company. I look forward to the new Historical Computing.

Harry McCracken [02:51:58]:
And subscribe to my Fast Company newsletter, Plugged In.

Leo Laporte [02:52:01]:
Oh, that's free. Totally free. PluggedIn. FastCompany.com. Thank you, Harry. Thanks to all of you for making this show possible. A special thanks to our Club Twit members who help foot the bill. We really appreciate you.

Leo Laporte [02:52:15]:
Twit.tv/ClubTwit if you're not already a member and you want to support our programming. It's $10 a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to to the Discord. And of course, you get the special programming that we do just for the club, including our AI user group, Stacy's Book Club, uh, Johnny Jet. We do the Jet Set Show. That's a brand new show we started doing. This Week in Space.

Leo Laporte [02:52:38]:
I can go on and on and on. There's a lot of great stuff going on in the club. I hope you will take part by joining at twit.tv/clubtwit. We'd love to have you. We do This Week in Tech every Sunday 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern time. Next Sunday, we are going to daylight saving time, our summertime here. So normally we do it at 22:00 UTC, but because we're moving, not UTC, we'll now be at 21:00 UTC. You can watch the live streams at YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick.

Leo Laporte [02:53:12]:
Of course, in the club, you can watch on the Discord as well. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at our website, twit.tv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to This Week in Tech, the Twitch show. In fact, do me a favor, subscribe. Just click the subscribe button and hit the bell and all that. That way you'll get notifications when we go live. Plus you can watch the shows there, watch the video of the shows there. It's a great way to share clips with friends and family, help spread the word.

Leo Laporte [02:53:39]:
Many of you though will subscribe because it is after all a podcast and any podcast clients should be able to subscribe to the show, audio or video or both, and get it automatically the minute it's available. And if your podcast client does, uh, has reviews, please leave us a good review. Spread the word a little bit. After 20 years of doing this show, it's easy for people to forget. In fact, I get that comment all the time. You're still alive? Yes, we're still, we're still here, believe it or not. Thanks for being here, everybody. Thank you for joining, and we'll see you next time another twit is in the can.