This Week in Tech Episode 1098 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Robert Ballasare, the Digital Jesuit, is here. My car guy, Sam Abul-Samad. Of course, we're going to talk about flock cameras and why people all over the country are tearing them down. Uh, you might want to tear them down when you hear what they're doing. We'll also talk about the new Pixel 11. It's got AI, lots of it. And Meta, the new lawsuit that may cost Meta every penny it has.
Leo Laporte [00:00:25]:
That's next. On TWiT.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:00:29]:
Podcasts you love.
Leo Laporte [00:00:31]:
From people you trust.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:00:34]:
This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte [00:00:41]:
This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 1098, recorded Sunday, August 23rd, 2026. Usain Bolt. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our Joining our esteemed panel this week, Father Robert Balisere, the Digital Jesuit, visiting us from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's so funny that you go from Sin City to No Sin City and back and forth, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:11]:
It's basically the same thing, really, honestly. It's not too different.
Leo Laporte [00:01:15]:
You're in town probably to spend time with your family, which lives there, but also because I presume of DEF CON, yes?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:21]:
Correct. Originally, I was going to do the duo Black Hat and DEF CON this year, but we had a special apostolic visitation. For about a month, I was in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar.
Leo Laporte [00:01:35]:
How was that?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:36]:
Hot. Super hot. It's really hot over there, Leo. Wow.
Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
We're going to be there in September or October. No, October, November.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:01:44]:
We're, we're— That'll be rainy.
Leo Laporte [00:01:46]:
Yeah. Rainy and hot. Well, let's, let's start in Bangkok and we're going to take a little side trip to Angkor Wat. Then we're going to sail down through the Malacca Strait, visit Malaysia, Indonesia. We end up in Bali.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:02:01]:
And, uh, so basically all the same places that I went to. Awesome. I could have scouted out—
Leo Laporte [00:02:06]:
We aren't planning Myanmar. I don't know.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:02:07]:
You probably shouldn't.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:09]:
My daughter moved to Da Nang this year.
Leo Laporte [00:02:12]:
Oh, nice. By the way, that is Sam Abul-Samad. You know him from Wheel Bearings, the fabulous car podcast. Of course, he's a regular on our shows. He's VP of Research at Telemetry, where he covers automotive topics. Your daughter moved to Vietnam. I'm jealous. I hear it's a wonderful place to live.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:28]:
She's loving it there.
Leo Laporte [00:02:30]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:30]:
She sent us some photos and video the other day. She was up at 5:30, you know, sunrise, and sent us some photos of the sunrise over the beach and people. It was an exercise group out doing it, like sort of an exercise dance group out on the beach across from her apartment.
Leo Laporte [00:02:50]:
Yeah, we were— we had a trip planned to visit Da Nang and Ha Long Bay and Much of Vietnam. Then this thing called COVID hit and it kind of scotched those plans. I've heard of it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:01]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:02]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:03]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
We forgot.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:03]:
I haven't been to Vietnam for 26 years. I haven't been there since '99. I, it's, ooh. And the, the photos that people send me back, the places that I visited.
Leo Laporte [00:03:11]:
What were you, 12? It was so different.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:13]:
'99.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:16]:
Oh, Leo.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:18]:
Yeah. My, my wife and I are hoping to go visit her next year.
Leo Laporte [00:03:22]:
Oh yeah, you've got a place to stay. You're lucky. Yeah, Da Nang is listed as one of the top 10 beaches in the world according to Derenoke.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:31]:
They also cater to digital nomads. There's more and more countries that are really leaning into that, including Thailand. Bangkok, there's a big digital nomad community.
Leo Laporte [00:03:40]:
Yeah, and more importantly, Vietnamese coffee is the best. That's really all I—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:45]:
Oh, oh, I will be going to the, uh, to the Bay Area. I have to share the coffee that I got as a present From, uh, the Sultan of, um, Brunei. Where, where were we? No, it was— we were in Indonesia, of, uh, Yogyakarta. Yogyakarta. He gave us bags of luwak coffee. That's that coffee that gets digested by a little civet cat.
Leo Laporte [00:04:09]:
The civet coffee?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:04:10]:
It's the poop coffee, Leo. I think you'd like it.
Leo Laporte [00:04:12]:
I've had it many years ago, but you know, ever since then I've gotten really into pour-over.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:04:18]:
Oh, okay.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:19]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:04:19]:
Does it work? And I am the— I've kind of dialed in all my pour-over. I have all the tools, including a total dissolved solid meter. In fact, this morning, I just want to tell you, I overground a coffee. I made it a little— I undergrounded it. It was a little too coarse. And I got the extraction up to 2, TDS 2, and that was too high. Sweet spot's 1.5. I just— and I knew it the minute I tasted it.
Leo Laporte [00:04:43]:
I said, over-extracted.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:46]:
I pretty much quit drinking coffee. A number of years ago.
Leo Laporte [00:04:49]:
You're a wise man.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:50]:
For my blood pressure. But, uh, this year I've been on a binge of making ice cream.
Leo Laporte [00:04:55]:
Oh yeah, that's good for your blood pressure.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:04:57]:
It's not a good substitution.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:59]:
My favorite local coffee, uh, ice cream shop closed up, and so we bought a Ninja Creami, and I've been making a bunch of— yesterday I made some fig ice cream.
Leo Laporte [00:05:08]:
People love that Ninja Creami, but I know if that were in the house, I would weigh 400 pounds.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:05:13]:
Yeah. Well, I've got my mom and my sister and all of my, my loved ones telling me I have to stop drinking coffee. And I have to remind them, do you remember where I live? It's like, that's all we have.
Leo Laporte [00:05:23]:
In Italia, that's a coffee is all coffee and pasta. That's all you need in life. Well, anyway, anyway, I, uh, enough of this silliness. We have tech news to talk about. Uh, Molly White was scheduled to join us. Uh, she got scheduling problems. She'll be back next week, so that's great. But you know what, you 2 guys are all I need.
Leo Laporte [00:05:44]:
I'm happy. So let's talk about Meta, because Tuesday the trial began, a landmark trial. Meta is being sued by a number of states, and California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, they are seeking— get ready for this— Meta, I should point out, is valued by the stock market around $1.5 trillion. These states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:06:15]:
Works for me.
Leo Laporte [00:06:16]:
Yeah, so that would leave, uh, poor Mark Zuckerberg with a, you know, a couple of hundred million, you know, I don't know, uh, poor guy, a couple hundred billion. I mean, I don't know. Um, Meta also violated, they say, the Child Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA, by sucking up data about kids. Oh, really? What a shock. They also say that consumer protection laws were violated. This was the path set forward, I think, by the LA trial, which Meta also lost.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:06:48]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:06:49]:
Instead of going after Meta for not protecting kids or whatever, they said it's a defective product. And so consumer protection laws cover it. And that seems to have been an effective pathways in both New Mexico and California. New Jersey Attorney General said, we allege in our complaint, she told NPR, what we're prepared to prove at trial is that they're deceiving consumers about the dangers of Facebook and Instagram.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:07:19]:
Dangers!
Leo Laporte [00:07:19]:
They're putting profits over the health of a generation of young people.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:07:24]:
They're essentially taking the cigarette route.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:07:26]:
That's right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:07:27]:
Because you started with the judgment in Los Angeles was relatively small, $5, $6 million. Then you get to New Mexico, that's $567 million. Now you've got this one. And what they're arguing is not that, as they had before, that, oh well, Facebook didn't protect privacy or Facebook had a breach. That was the regular route to go after one of these companies. Now they're saying you've encouraged compulsive usage. Your product, it by its definition is, is not good. It's a bad product.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:07:57]:
It's, it's selling cigarettes. So If that is the tack that they're going to take, what they have to prove in court is that Meta prioritized engagement over the safety of young users. They have to prove that Meta actually knew that they were attracting a lot of users who were under the age of 13 on both Facebook and Instagram, and that they knew that the information that they were collecting was in violation of COPPA. Unfortunately for Meta, their own internal documents seem to show that they not only did they know. But they saw that as a growth area.
Leo Laporte [00:08:29]:
That's gonna be an interesting fight. Some of this, Frances Haugen, she was a whistleblower and they've gone after her big time. But those emails are damning. But actually, go ahead, Sam, I'll let you talk. And then I'm gonna say, I'm gonna put myself in the very odd position of defending Mark Zuckerberg, but go ahead.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:08:51]:
Well, I was just gonna, you know, follow up on what Robert said. In the absence of a lot of functional regulation— and it's getting harder and harder to do any kind of real regulation in this country because we've got one side of the political spectrum that is fundamentally opposed to all regulation. So in the absence of regulations like privacy laws or, in the case of automated vehicles, any regulation related to automated driving, product liability is kind of the only path forward we have to protect the public from all kinds of products that are, you know, potentially harmful to society, you know. And this, you know, this is a perfect example. And I think taking that route, uh, you know, in going after companies like Meta is, is really the only option that, that we have to protect ourselves from these companies.
Leo Laporte [00:09:46]:
My attitude is a little different. Um, first of all, I don't think it's been proven Despite Jonathan Haidt and others who've written about this, that these apps are harmful to children. A. You know, this whole idea of social media addiction, I think, is controversial. It isn't a drug, and I don't think it's necessary to protect children from this kind of addiction. I know that that is a strange point of view for some, but I really think it's overstating the dangers. Now, look, I don't think Meta is a good company. I wanna make this clear.
Leo Laporte [00:10:28]:
Their goal is to make money and they, you know, as any capitalist company would, decided the best way to make money is to make the most compelling product they could. I think if you use that standard, you could go after Hollywood for making movies that you love. You could go after the video game industry. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:10:49]:
You could go after, almost anybody.
Leo Laporte [00:10:52]:
This is what you do in a business. This is what I do in a business. You think I don't think about what shows are gonna be most appealing to the audience? I would love to get you addicted.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:03]:
I can't. There's, there's a difference. Yeah, I mean, it's one thing to, you know, to want to make money. I mean, nothing fundamentally wrong with that. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to do that without actually harming your customers along the way, because, you know, as with smoking—
Leo Laporte [00:11:19]:
But I don't think the harm is like comparable to the harm of tobacco. We know We know smoking causes cancer. Well, it has not been demonstrated that using Instagram causes cancer or does anything.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:32]:
No, it does not cause cancer that we, that we're aware of. And this makes you stay up late. Addiction, addiction, you know, is questionable. You know, that, that's a debatable one.
Leo Laporte [00:11:43]:
Well, you have to prove harm if you're going to make this stick.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:46]:
And, and there are, there are definitely harms that have been shown, like things like body dysmorphia.
Leo Laporte [00:11:53]:
Well, Cosmopolitan did that as well. Teen Cosmo did that as well. Should they have paid?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:58]:
But this is doing it at a scale that we've never seen in history before.
Leo Laporte [00:12:02]:
Well, because the internet is at a scale we've never seen before.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:05]:
Right, and that's why we need to step back and take a look at what we're doing because of the scale that social media is doing this at. The amount of content that people are seeing across as many platforms as you're seeing, is something we've, we've never seen in the past. And so, you know, it's one thing, you know, for somebody to be flipping through a magazine in the past. But this is, this is something totally different. And so I think we need to take a step back and take a look at, you know, what is happening. You know, certainly damage has happened before, you know, with, with print and with, with other forms of media, but not at this level. And so I think, I think it's so— I think this is why we need to address it.
Leo Laporte [00:12:49]:
We don't go after gambling, which is demonic.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:52]:
I'm not saying, I'm not saying we shouldn't go after them.
Leo Laporte [00:12:55]:
But it's selective prosecution, and I think it's also anti-big tech.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:13:00]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:13:01]:
And let me tell you, I think it's time to start defending tech. That's my opinion. I, I think this is absurd.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:13:09]:
I'm with Leo on the fact that we haven't proven beyond a, a shadow of doubt that—
Leo Laporte [00:13:16]:
No, in fact, all the evidence is quite the contrary, right? Every study is the opposite.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:13:21]:
The problem for, for Meta is that we don't have to do that because the case is not about what Meta did. The case is about what Meta knew. And that's what the internal documents— that's what the smoking gun— I understand.
Leo Laporte [00:13:34]:
But one of the issues here is that they're going to say Meta didn't do enough with age verification. Do you want age verification when you use the internet? Already I'm being asked when I use AI, what's your age?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:13:45]:
It wasn't just that Meta didn't do enough. It's that the internal documents show that Meta knew in their high-level meetings, they knew that their implementation was just a PR stunt. So they would— they would—
Leo Laporte [00:13:55]:
because there was no way to do age verification. In fact, that's one of the claims. They violated COPPA because it didn't do enough to block underage users. But there is no effective way to do that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:14:09]:
And, and I'm with you. I don't think age verification works. However, the way that Facebook has— that Meta has been playing this game is that they've basically said, yes, yes, we'll do this. Yes, yes, we'll do this. And then They make a token engagement and that's it. You can't do that. You can't— that is not a responsible company. If you know that your product has at least the potential to have a harmful effect, which Meta absolutely did because their own studies were saying we need to look at this, then they have to make a good faith effort to show that they're trying to comply with the standards being set down by our legislative bodies.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:14:47]:
They didn't do that. So do I think that Meta is the bad guy here, that they're pure evil and they should be destroyed? Absolutely not. I think $1.4 trillion is a ridiculous amount. Do I think that Meta has some culpability here? Absolutely. 100%.
Leo Laporte [00:15:02]:
I would like them to be a better company. I don't disagree with you. It's obvious that they don't really care, but that's not illegal.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:15:09]:
It's not. It's not.
Leo Laporte [00:15:11]:
No, you're right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:15:11]:
You're right. If we were going to hold every company to the standard that we're holding—
Leo Laporte [00:15:16]:
Those companies don't care.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:15:18]:
They would fold. They would all fold.
Leo Laporte [00:15:19]:
Yes.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:15:20]:
Gambling companies don't care.
Leo Laporte [00:15:21]:
Liquor companies don't care. Las Vegas doesn't care. They're all honey badgers, baby. That's called capitalism.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:15:34]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:15:34]:
Yeah. True.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:15:37]:
And, you know, I think Yeah, as you said, virtually all companies don't care about their customers or about society, you know, about what is better for the greater good. But, you know, unfortunately, that is the system that we live in. And that's why, you know, ideally, we have some regulation to manage that, you know, to find a balance between, you know, between making money and what is best for society as a whole. And, you know, a good place to start would be to make gambling illegal, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:16:11]:
Yeah, that's not gonna happen.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:16:13]:
Yeah, I know.
Leo Laporte [00:16:14]:
I see it getting worse.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:16:16]:
Make alcohol illegal.
Leo Laporte [00:16:17]:
People don't like big tech, right? They like to gamble and drink. They don't like big tech. And I see it as a little bit of a witch hunt against big tech. Big tech brought this on themselves. Okay, I understand. Uh, the other thing— but it concerns me because I think the outcome of this is some sort of reversion to the dark ages where we say, oh, it's technology, it's evil, it's bad. No, no, no. And I don't think that's the right answer either.
Leo Laporte [00:16:44]:
I wish these companies were more responsible because they have brought it on themselves, but so have the gambling industry and the liquor industry and so forth.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:16:52]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:16:52]:
I also think that one of the straw men here is algorithms, algorithmic recommendations. And I would submit, you take away algorithmic recommendations and you got something pretty darn boring. You've got a chronological feed, which we all say we want, but it isn't very sticky. It's not very fun. We kind of like the algorithmic feed. It's there because it works. No algorithms means, you know, everything's boring.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:17:24]:
I hate the algorithmic feed. That is one of the very first things that I'll disable if I can.
Leo Laporte [00:17:28]:
On Facebook, you can't do it anymore. It turns it back on again, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:17:32]:
Exactly. So, I mean, Reddit, Reddit used to have the ability to turn that off. Now it's kind of integrated and you can't really shut it off.
Leo Laporte [00:17:38]:
Because they know people spend more time, they're more entertained, they like it better when it's algorithmic.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:17:43]:
Uh, and I guess that's a different use case. I use social media to check in really quickly to see if there's anything I need to pay attention to.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:17:50]:
Yeah, that's really it. Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:17:51]:
But I mean, if you're living your life on social media, that's a different use case. And that's the use case where the algorithmic recommendations Can really become physiologically addictive. It's no longer just a psychological thing.
Leo Laporte [00:18:07]:
This is what happened was the promise of Facebook and Instagram originally was your friends in chronological order. And it was, you know, it was successful and you and I liked it, Robert. We're present on both cases.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:18:22]:
We're old people.
Leo Laporte [00:18:23]:
We're old folks. Maybe you too, Sam. But they also noticed that they really were— and this TikTok, I think, was the first to really point this out— entertainment mediums, not social networks. And if you're going to be an entertainment medium, you got to pick—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:18:43]:
You want the stickiness.
Leo Laporte [00:18:44]:
It bothers me. I go to X to keep up on AI. It's very— it's sadly, it's really the best place to keep up on AI. But when I refresh the feed, I'll see something from 25 hours ago instead of the most recent stuff. I want the most recent stuff. But we're the outliers. I go there to get information like you, Robert. Most people use these things as entertainment.
Leo Laporte [00:19:07]:
I watch Lisa and friends. I watch everybody on Instagram. They're going, oh, that's funny. Oh, that's funny. They're not looking for posts from their friends in chronological order. They're looking for an entertainment medium. It's like TikTok, right? TikTok really, I think, made, you know, pointed out that's what people really want. They're just doing what people want.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:19:30]:
So here's the thing. I'd ask open question, honest question. We can agree that that's bad, right? That, that kind of engagement that just goes next, next, next, next, that's not healthy.
Leo Laporte [00:19:40]:
Well, no, no, no, no, no. Here's what I would submit. I would say, I will stipulate, It's so fun that you have a hard time stopping. It's just like, you know, an amusement park.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:19:53]:
It's fun. But is it fun? Or— because that's how addiction works. Addiction, it's fun until it's no longer fun, and then it's a necessity.
Leo Laporte [00:20:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, isn't that what we call fun? Dopamine?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:20:05]:
Well, yeah. But I mean, we're talking about micro ice cream.
Leo Laporte [00:20:09]:
I know, as a priest, there's a deeper satisfaction.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:20:12]:
Yeah, I'm trying not to push that too much.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:20:14]:
Yeah. You know, there are things that I do that are fun, you know, that, okay, now I stop and I go and do something else. Um, you know, but when you, when you feel a compulsion to keep doing it, um, or if the, you know, if it, if the, the amount of fun you're getting from it is wearing off, you know, referring to what Robert was saying, if it's, if it's wearing off and you have to do more and more to get that dopamine hit, then, you know, then it's gone beyond fun. And I think, I think that, you know, whose job is that?
Leo Laporte [00:20:50]:
Maybe, maybe that to protect you from it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:20:54]:
And see, I'm with you on this. Legislatively, that is difficult.
Leo Laporte [00:20:57]:
When you get in the car, it's not an easy solution. You know what's fun, Sam? When you get in a car, you step on it and you go really fast. Is that a bad idea?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:21:06]:
Yes, absolutely.
Leo Laporte [00:21:08]:
Should the car companies be forced to put governors on there that keep you at 55?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:21:15]:
Not at 55, but arguably, yeah, they should have speed limiters on the vehicles.
Leo Laporte [00:21:19]:
But they don't.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:21:20]:
You know, when you're, when you're on public roads, you know, there, there should be an upper limit. And, you know, that's actually something they're starting to do in Europe. You know, they're putting— I think it's 110 miles an hour is the speed limit. You know, I have a car in the driveway right now that can go significantly faster than that. And there is no There's no reason why this car should go faster than that or why it should accelerate as fast as it does. I mean, this is a 6,000-pound SUV that goes from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds. This is ridiculous. There's no reason why any vehicle on the public roads should be that fast.
Leo Laporte [00:22:01]:
I bought Ludicrous Mode when I bought the X. I did it a few times and I realized this is dangerous. I'm going to red out. And I'm gonna run into something and kill myself. So I didn't use it. But I would— but see, that isn't the responsibility on the user. I mean, if we had— okay, maybe if we had good age verification methodologies, we could put a governor on Instagram that, that makes it unappealing to you.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:22:28]:
I agree that I don't, I don't think age verification is the right solution. Um, you know, because I mean, one of the things you obviously lose with that is any degree of anonymity.
Leo Laporte [00:22:38]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:22:38]:
And there, there are real compelling reasons to have anonymity online. You know, it's been talked about endlessly, but, you know, being able to access information that, you know, maybe, you know, you don't want certain— you don't want certain people to know that you're looking at, you know, and there's, there's obviously negative things, but there's also a lot of positive things that can come, come from that. And so I think that, you know, we do need access to anonymity online and age Age verification is fundamentally opposed to that. So I don't think age verification is the right solution. I'm not saying I know what the right solutions are, but I think what we're doing so far is not the right way.
Leo Laporte [00:23:24]:
My feeling, I agree. I mean, look, there is maybe a societal issue. I don't think the answer is to make Instagram unappealing so that I mean, I think you gotta give some responsibility.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:23:37]:
Less appealing.
Leo Laporte [00:23:37]:
It's like saying, you know, we should put something really bitter in alcohol so that people who wanna get drunk have to choke it down. That, you know, I think you gotta allow some responsibility on the end user. The other side of this, which is what really concerns me, in the process of going to court, Meta appealed to the Ninth Circuit saying, Section 230, Your Honor, we should be protected. And the Ninth Circuit said, nope, you have no protection. You've got to go to court and fight this. And this worries me too, because Section 230 doesn't just protect big tech that can afford lawyers by the dozens. It also protects people like me who run forums and chat rooms. And if, if suddenly I'm forced to go to court to defend my Section 230 immunity, It basically means 230 is useless.
Leo Laporte [00:24:33]:
Well, Section 230 protects me from going to court. It just dismisses it out of hand saying I'm not responsible for content somebody else posts on there, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:24:43]:
Section 230 addresses a different side of Meta's business. So 230 specifically calls out the publisher responsibility of Meta or you as Twit, which is content put there by other people, you cannot be held legally responsible as long as you respond in a reasonable manner when it's pointed out that you have content that is offending of some sort of statute. What they're saying about Meta in this case is that this is not a content issue. This is a platform issue. This is the way that the platform was created. So therefore, it has nothing to do with the content that's being put into Facebook. It has everything to do with how that content is being used by the publisher. So that's why Section 230 protections don't come into play here.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:25:30]:
It's not a safe harbor issue. It's an actual attack on the way that Facebook and Meta does business.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:25:37]:
And for that matter, every other social platform that has an algorithmic feed. You know, the algorithm in and of itself is, you know, that is a form of publishing. That is something— that's not the users creating the platform or the content. That is something that the company has chosen to do in the way that they are feeding this information. They are selecting what, what their, their users are going to see.
Leo Laporte [00:26:05]:
Well, EFF disagrees. They say this undermines Section 230, and it will force online platforms that host user speech— and they particularly singled out small platforms like mine— to fight lengthy and costly lawsuits before they're dismissed under Section 230. It is a significant— it pulls the legs out from under Section 230 according to EFF. Now, I'm not a legal eagle, so I'm gonna defer to the lawyers. This is an article written by EFF's legal division. Unfortunately, they say, this opinion seems to be part of a larger trend reflecting the Ninth Circuit's increasing disdain for Section 230 and apparently free speech rights more broadly. And it means just one more weakening of Section 230. And that's kind of my whole point here is, yeah, Meta is not a great company.
Leo Laporte [00:27:04]:
I don't wanna be put in the position of defending Mark Zuckerberg, but I do wanna be put in the position. I do think I need to be put in the position of defending technology and social networks against lawsuits that will have a consequence that go far beyond punishing Meta.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:22]:
We had a really good discussion in the EFF room at DEF CON, and one of— this was actually one of the things that we went back and forth with, with a large number of us. And the example I liked was someone saying, look, you have to focus on a specific issue of the lawsuit, the COPPA violations. The COPPA violations have nothing to do with content. They have everything to do with the fact that Meta was collecting information on individuals that they knew, they knew, according to their documents, they knew were minors under the age of 13. So that is 100% not a Section 230 issue.
Leo Laporte [00:28:00]:
But now it does raise the issue of how do you verify age? And there's no good way to do that without completely— in order to verify age, every single person using a platform, including the full internet, Linux, your phone, has to prove their age. And that is an incredible invasion of privacy. And that's what I mean by the— yeah, in, in its narrow interpretation, it makes sense. Oh yeah, you should do that. But people need to consider what the larger implications are.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:28:29]:
Right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:28:29]:
But now, now pull out and look at again those internal documents that show that Meta, they were making feeds, algorithmic feeds, specifically targeting those underage. So that's not an incidental thing. That's— this is a profit center, right? So once, once you pass that line where you are now actively trying to get that engagement because you know it's a profit center, you can no longer plead that, oh, we're just publishing. You're not publishing. You are now manipulating to attract an audience that you know you're not supposed to.
Leo Laporte [00:29:01]:
In that very, very narrow way, I think they are culpable. And maybe, maybe the— this is Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. We know that name. She was the one who spanked Apple in the Apple-Epic lawsuit. She has ruled on many big tech cases. I think she's smart. Um, but this is gonna— it, to, to be effective has to be a very narrow decision that only impacts Meta.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:28]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:29:28]:
And I fear that it will have far broader reaching impact. I don't care if Meta goes out of business. I got no problem with that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:36]:
No, but you're absolutely right. This is the kind of decision that people can start to say, oh, well, you know, there was this movie that had this 3-second scene that I didn't like and it harmed me.
Leo Laporte [00:29:44]:
It made me addicted. You know, or websites that use link bait. Look, I hate websites that use link bait. You know why they use link bait? Because you click it.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:29:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:29:54]:
They manipulate you.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:56]:
Look, I really don't like it when car manufacturers make attractive vehicles because then I might buy them, and that's a harm to me. So—
Leo Laporte [00:30:03]:
I think the minute they put fins on the Cadillac, they should have gone to jail. I mean, it's easy to show how absurd this can get if you push it. So that's why if it's a very narrow ruling that just says, Meta, you knew and you went after it and you shouldn't have done that, okay, I don't have a problem with that. I just worry about the larger impact of a decision. And by the way, I find myself in a, in a very uncomfortable company with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who I am not exactly a fan of. They are as far right as you can get. they call it a $1.4 trillion state tort raid on Meta. They want to turn social media into the next big tobacco.
Leo Laporte [00:30:47]:
And they— and of course, the Wall Street Journal says that's a terrible idea.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:30:51]:
Terrible.
Leo Laporte [00:30:54]:
The problem is it keeps getting cast as a bellwether trial. Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:30:59]:
And it should be.
Leo Laporte [00:31:00]:
Like, what happens now? We've got the means to go after all these guys. And guess who's next?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:31:06]:
Google.
Leo Laporte [00:31:07]:
Yeah, all the people.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:31:08]:
Amazon.
Leo Laporte [00:31:09]:
Yeah, all of them. All the AI companies. X. And all this does is it empowers people who say, well, my child was harmed by this. I mean, the harms we're talking about are, for the most part, pretty insignificant. Oh, like they stayed up late and didn't do their homework.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:31:31]:
I mean, I'm getting flashbacks to the decades-long campaign against video games.
Leo Laporte [00:31:36]:
Yes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:31:37]:
And I mean, so—
Leo Laporte [00:31:37]:
This is the— in my mind, this is the same thing. This is Tipper Gore saying, we got to put labels on albums. We got to stop this rock and roll music from infesting our youth. Cut your hair and turn your music down, you punks.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:31:53]:
What they do over in my side of the pond, which is you put They put pictures of cancer-ridden lungs on the back of tobacco, which does not work. 100% does not work. But it is kind of funny to see it.
Leo Laporte [00:32:06]:
We were in Rome. More people were smoking. Like, it's like everybody smokes in Rome. Those warnings don't— Canada has them too. I've seen them all over except in the US. We have fairly staid warnings on our cigarettes. They don't. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:32:22]:
If people want to smoke, they're going to smoke. If they're going to smoke, kids go on Instagram. And, you know, yes, admittedly, a small, small number of people, there's some real harm. They, you know, they harm themselves. They, you know, they stop eating. They do their— but that's, you know, you've got to think about the overall impact versus the outliers. You can't make rules about things based on harm to a few, right? When the Pinto gas tanks blew up— That's different, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:32:54]:
But, but there was a very clear harm there.
Leo Laporte [00:32:56]:
There was, there was a clear harm.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:32:57]:
There was no, there was no uncertainty sticking the gas tank behind the rear axle, between the bumper and the rear axle, where in a rear collision it gets crushed between the two.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:33:08]:
No, that's a juicy, juicy crumple zone. That's, that's all that is. It's juicy.
Leo Laporte [00:33:12]:
Yeah, but it didn't put Ford out of business.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:13]:
But there's some things that you don't actually want to crumple.
Leo Laporte [00:33:16]:
The penalties to that were significant, and Ford stopped doing that, but it didn't put them out of business, right? I don't think so.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:25]:
No, they're still around.
Leo Laporte [00:33:28]:
And you know what? Good news, they're not putting gas tanks in the back of the vehicle anymore. Yeah, so that's okay. That was a good thing. So we'll see what happens, but just pay attention to this because there are people out there who would very much like big tech to take a Yes. A tumble. And, uh, I think that the problems we face with big tech are problems we face in general with late-stage capitalism, uh, with greed. Um, and yes, those are real problems, but I don't know if the solution is to take these companies down one by one, because you won't like the world that we end up in. All right, we're gonna take a little break.
Leo Laporte [00:34:10]:
When we come back, there's more to talk about. Did you get a Pixel 11? Anybody, anybody order a new Pixel?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:34:17]:
I thought about it, but my 8 still works so well. I guess I can't justify it.
Leo Laporte [00:34:22]:
I know, I have—
Sam Abuelsamid [00:34:22]:
I'm still good with my 10 Pro XL. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:34:26]:
So, uh, Paul Theroux did order an 11. So yeah, but we'll—
Sam Abuelsamid [00:34:30]:
I usually do every other year. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:34:33]:
You know, I'm kind of an iPhone guy. I have to admit it. I don't want to be. I just don't, it's not, there's not a, I wish there were more choice. I really do. We'll talk about that when we come back. You're watching This Week in Tech. Great to have Father Robert Balisere, the Digital Jesuit.
Leo Laporte [00:34:50]:
Do you wanna plug anything? I just see your Bluesky handle.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:34:54]:
Actually, I do wanna plug one thing, and that is my next-door neighbor here in Las Vegas, longtime TWiT Army listener. I had no idea. And he had been helping my parents when I'm not in town. So like when my father falls or something. And, and, uh, the funny thing is he actually once, uh, when I was visiting, um, my mom says, oh yeah, my son is here. He's a priest from, from the, from the Vatican. And, uh, my neighbor says, oh, I, I know a Jesuit priest from the Vatican who, uh, who was on, on TWiTV. It's my favorite network.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:35:30]:
And she says, you mean Father Robert?
Leo Laporte [00:35:32]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:35:33]:
No, that's my son. So Scott, Scott Blaylock, you are absolutely wonderful. He's, he's, uh, gone through a lot of hardships. in his life. He just survived cancer, and now he's actually packing everything into an RV. He's going to travel the US. So I, I mean, I, I love that. I love that for him.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:35:49]:
Scott, you— thank you very much for years of helping my parents.
Leo Laporte [00:35:52]:
Oh, Scott, like all of the Twit Army, you're a good man. You're a good man. Also with us, Sam Abdul-Samad, who is of course the host of Wheel Bearings, covers cars. We got lots of car talk coming up, so we'll We'll do that too. Robert, I know you're a big AI user.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:36:12]:
I am.
Leo Laporte [00:36:13]:
You've fallen down the AI well, the rabbit hole. Help me, I can't get out. The new Pixel 11, we were talking about it, comes with AI. The New York Times asks the question, does anyone want that? There's a new camera mode called Magic Capture. I think that's the biggest feature. They say— Google said in the Trevor Noah presentation, people think camera phones deliver too much realism. They're too accurate. They want something a little more artistic.
Leo Laporte [00:36:49]:
So I mean, this to me looks just like Instagram filters, to be honest.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:36:53]:
It's just filters. I mean, everyone is anxious to call every product they have AI-enabled. This is, this is really just machine learning. And it's not particularly innovative machine learning. It's old machine learning from maybe 10 years ago. So is it interesting? Sure. I mean, anytime I can do something local, I would prefer to do it that way rather than in the cloud. And yes, I'm sure some people will be able to use the engine to do some interesting creative things, but AI so that my photos look better? No, no, that's— no, I'm not going to buy that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:37:25]:
If it comes with the phone, great. but that's not a driving feature.
Leo Laporte [00:37:28]:
Google's putting Gemini everywhere. In fact, Lisa's new car that she just bought has Gemini as the assistant. The, you know, when I set up the Gemini, little Gemini, the new speaker for my ex, Jennifer, she said, I keep getting ads. So I set it up for her. And the first thing it says, do you want the AI assistant? I said no, 'cause I thought it might confuse her a little bit. Your new phone can order groceries? That seems like a recipe for disaster. Hail rides, book restaurant tables. I have not tried this.
Leo Laporte [00:38:06]:
As much as I am an AI fanatic, I don't really trust AI to book restaurants for me.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:12]:
They keep trying to feed us that this is going to be Jarvis from Iron Man. And it's, it's, it's not there yet. It really isn't. And they really should stop because once they do get a product that's close to an actual virtual assistant, we're not going to believe them.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:38:28]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:38:28]:
Oh, that's a good point. We're going to say, oh yeah, we've seen this.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:38:31]:
Oh yeah. I've, you know, I've had too many, too many failures of, of all of these systems to, to trust it, to, to allow it to do anything on its own. You know, whatever, you know, if, if I'm, you know, for— if I need to put stuff on the grocery list, I'm going to go in and do that myself. I'm going to add it to my grocery list. If, if I want to order a car, I will do that. I will pull up my— pick up my phone, open up Uber or Lyft or Waymo or Zoox, you know, depending on where I am, and order a car ride. You know, I'm not going to rely on any of these assistants to do that because too often they get it wrong. You know, they misinterpret where I want to go or what it is I want.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:39:16]:
And it's just not worth the hassle.
Leo Laporte [00:39:20]:
It's funny because, like I said, I spend more time with AI than I spend with my wife, to be frank, than any human. I mean, and I use it like crazy, but I use it in coding. I use it in sysadmin stuff. It's great for setting up stuff. For some reason, the more analog things, interacting with humans, self-driving, I'm much more reluctant to use it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:45]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:39:46]:
I, I feel like you're right. It's not reliable enough. Why, why is that, Robert? I'm— I trust it to code. I don't trust it to make a book, a reservation.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:57]:
We, we trust it with things that, uh, that we can fix in, uh, in at a later time. We, we don't trust it with things that are making decisions in real time. That's a real time.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:40:10]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:40:10]:
It's just—
Leo Laporte [00:40:11]:
So I can refine the code. It can be refined. We can have a process. It takes time. It's taking a— it takes a long time. It takes human-AI interaction. I don't trust it to make phone calls for me.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:40:24]:
A decade ago, I had a fascinating conversation with somebody who was head of automotive at NVIDIA at the time. And, you know, one of the things he was saying about AI was, you know, AI is gonna be great at providing superhuman performance at very specific tasks, but it's probably never going to be able to be really generalized. And I think what we're seeing now is exactly that. You know, it is really good at very specific tasks like coding. You know, coding is something where there are boundaries, there's rules, there's constraints around, you know, you can, you can write a chunk of code. test it, know if it works or not. But when there is more nuance to it, things become much more difficult. That's where it falls down.
Leo Laporte [00:41:21]:
You don't ever see fully autonomous vehicles. Like, there will never be a car that can drive down any city street.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:41:30]:
I think, you know, what I've said is I don't expect to see what we call Level 5 vehicles. So the SAE levels of automation, The 2 key ones are Level 4 and Level 5. Level 5 means that it's able to drive anywhere under any conditions. Anywhere that a human can drive, the system can drive. Level 4 means that it can drive without human supervision or intervention within some constraints, within what we call an operational design domain.
Leo Laporte [00:41:59]:
We kind of have Level 4 now.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:42:01]:
My neighbor— We absolutely have Level 4 today.
Leo Laporte [00:42:04]:
Drove up from Southern California— actually, it's his brother-in-law who drove up from Southern California, put into his Tesla— he has a Model 3, or no, Model Y— put into his Tesla, drive me to this destination. Not only did it do the highway stuff, which most cars can do very well now, it did the city streets. It stopped. I said it stopped.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:42:21]:
That's still a Level 2 system.
Leo Laporte [00:42:23]:
That's only Level 2?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:42:25]:
Level 2 means that it requires human supervision.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:42:28]:
Yes, I know.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:42:29]:
And a human has to be ready to take over at any time.
Leo Laporte [00:42:31]:
But he did say, I don't know how I got here.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:42:35]:
And this is the fundamental flaw with level 2. Level 2 defines, this is what it can do. But I don't entirely trust level 2 systems. As an engineer who's worked on active safety systems for many years, I don't trust those systems because I know what can go wrong. You know, does not require human supervision. And even there, so you can take it now. They still make mistakes. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:03]:
Or there doesn't even have to be anybody in the vehicle. It can be, it can be, you know, it can be a—
Leo Laporte [00:43:09]:
That's what we're seeing now with Waymos. We've seen that with Zoox and Waymos.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:13]:
Yeah. You know, they're driving around going to pick somebody up and there's no one in the vehicle.
Leo Laporte [00:43:19]:
So that's level 4.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:20]:
That's level 4. Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:43:22]:
And we're seeing it on city streets. We had Dan O'Dowd on Intelligent Machines on Wednesday. He's the guy who ran for Senate in California, not because he wanted to become a senator, but because he wanted to run ads against Tesla. And so people weren't taking the anti-Tesla ads, but once you're a political candidate, they have to.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:43]:
So you do it as a PAC.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:43:45]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:43:47]:
And he ran— I remember this, it was a couple of years ago. He ran these ads showing Teslas driving over mannequin-sized child backing over people, doing all sorts of stuff. He's been— he's an interesting fella. He claims that software can be perfectible, and he's— the proof is that he writes— his company writes the software for F-35 fighters and the A380 plane. He writes software for, you know, mission-critical NASA, you know, situations where A, the software has to run perfectly, cannot have any bugs, and B, it isn't even— can't be maintained easily.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:28]:
You know, Green Hills Software—
Leo Laporte [00:44:29]:
He says that's possible.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:30]:
Green Hills Software is an amazing company.
Leo Laporte [00:44:32]:
Is that his company, Green Hills?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:33]:
Green Hills Software, yeah. They do, they do, they make some amazing stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:44:37]:
He was really interesting, but I'm not sure I buy what he's saying.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:40]:
And their, you know, their stuff is widely considered to be some of the safest software you can get.
Leo Laporte [00:44:46]:
Right.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:47]:
You know, they do a lot of embedded systems. Yeah, they use a lot, they do a lot of embedded system software and it works really, really well. But I agree, and I have a lot of respect for Mr. O'Dowd and the work that Green Hills does. I mean, we've, in the past when I was still an engineer, we looked at using their software. It wasn't the right tool for us.
Leo Laporte [00:45:10]:
It's expensive.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:45:11]:
Yeah, it's very expensive. But for certain applications, it's really, really good. And I think what they've done is taken all of the best practices and taken them to the nth degree to try to make the software as safe and secure and reliable and robust as possible. And they've done an amazing job at that. Do I believe that there is no way to ever hack that? software or that it'll ever crash? Not entirely. I think it's far less likely to crash, far less likely to be hacked than almost any other human-written software. But I, you know, I can't say with absolute certainty that it's, you know, absolutely perfect.
Leo Laporte [00:46:03]:
He's on a mission to stop full self-drive, Tesla's full self-driving. By the way, he said something interesting. He said the Waymos are fine. He didn't have as much of a problem with Waymos.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:46:13]:
They're not perfect either. You know, Waymos make mistakes. Zoox make mistakes.
Leo Laporte [00:46:18]:
They're better than humans though. I guess that's the point.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:20]:
Their sensor technology is better than Tesla.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:46:23]:
Yeah. Their sensor technology is a lot better. Waymos and Zoox vehicles are a lot better than humans within certain driving environments.
Leo Laporte [00:46:32]:
Right. Correct. In fact, which is—
Sam Abuelsamid [00:46:35]:
that's where they define— that's how they define the operational design domain. They, you know, when they, when they know it can work as safe or better than humans within, within certain constraints, that's where they will operate. You know, there are lots of places where Waymos do not operate because they are not confident that it can do better than humans. And, you know, when you look at the statistics, the crash statistics, you know, half of all traffic fatalities happen on rural roads. You know, half of them involve alcohol. Well, that, you know, the alcohol, getting, getting that out of the picture, you know. Waymos don't get pulled over. Autonomous vehicles don't have that problem.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:15]:
But certainly half of the fatal crashes happen on rural roads. Waymos don't operate on those roads. Fatal crashes are a lot less likely in an urban environment, in a dense urban environment, because for one, your speeds tend to be a lot lower. So that's, you know, they are safer again within that constraint.
Leo Laporte [00:47:41]:
Right. He was interesting. I feel like he's a little bit got a chip on his shoulder about Tesla, but you don't disagree. You don't disagree. I think, Sam, you've said that before.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:52]:
Yeah. You know, I think, I think that Tesla's approach is fundamentally flawed. And I, you know, I'm glad, I was glad to hear him call out, you know, the fact that, you know, they are testing, you know, they're putting beta versions of safety-critical software in the hands of untrained consumers that do not know how to evaluate.
Leo Laporte [00:48:07]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:08]:
That was his main point.
Leo Laporte [00:48:10]:
Yeah, that's something I've been calling out for more than a decade. And because we are on the road with Teslas, we are part of the beta test.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:48:16]:
Yeah. I mean, you know, usually—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:17]:
We're the NPCs in the beta test.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:48:21]:
Usually, you know, if you are going to get involved, say, you know, in experimental medical therapy, you have the concept of informed consent. You know, you are the one that is taking some experimental treatment for cancer. The doctors have to tell you, okay, here's the things that could go wrong. We don't know if this is going to work. We think it can help, but here's the things that might happen. So you have that concept of informed consent for the participant. The problem with what Tesla is doing, and this also applies to Waymo and Zoox and everybody else that's out there, is that all the rest of us on the roads have not consented to be part of this experiment.
Leo Laporte [00:49:10]:
Right.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:49:10]:
Pedestrians have not consented to be part of this experiment. And so we are at the mercy of their testing and what they're doing. And I think that Waymo's approach is much, much safer, much more robust. And they have generally shown much less likelihood to get in, you know, get into situations and crashes where, you know, where other road users are going to be negatively impacted than, say, for example, you know, Teslas. You know, there have been at least 50 crashes with the Tesla robotaxi fleet in Austin since they launched it a year ago. And, you know, many of those have been the fault of the Tesla vehicles, not You know, in the vast majority of the cases where there have been crashes with a Waymo vehicle or a Zoox vehicle, it's usually actually been the fault of another human driver that is interacting with that vehicle. But there was just an incident in— was it in LA? I think it's about a week or so ago, kind of similar to what happened with Cruise in San Francisco, where— a pedestrian was struck by a human-driven vehicle and knocked into the path of a Waymo.
Leo Laporte [00:50:30]:
Right.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:50:30]:
And the Waymo saw the pedestrian and hit the brakes and slowed down. We don't have all the details yet about exactly when it detected and when it slowed down. But by the time that the pedestrian was knocked into the path or actually into the side of the Waymo, the vehicle, I think, was down to about 5 or 6 miles an hour.
Leo Laporte [00:50:51]:
That was more of a problem though, because Waymo kind of covered it up, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:55]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:50:56]:
And that's an issue. That's one of the things that needs to be addressed for all of these companies is we need to have some rules, mandatory data disclosure. And one thing—
Leo Laporte [00:51:10]:
My sense is Waymo's better about that than Tesla though, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:51:13]:
Oh yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:51:15]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:51:15]:
In 2023 or 2022, there's NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, issued a standing general order that any vehicle that is operating at level 2 or above that is involved in a crash, the company has to submit the data about that crash to NHTSA. And there's a database that you can download that's got all this crash data. And there's a lot of really interesting data in there. Except for Tesla. Tesla submits all their data, but for reasons that we can only speculate about, NHTSA has allowed Tesla to redact most of the data from the publicly available database. So you go in there, you see, oh, there was a crash at this location on this date, and that's literally it. Everything else Tesla is declaring as company proprietary information.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:08]:
Yep.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:52:08]:
And so we don't really know what has happened in most of these crashes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:12]:
I mean, that's what I want to see. I want to see if you're gonna be testing on public streets, if you're going to be testing with our safety, you don't get proprietary information anymore.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:52:22]:
Yeah, everything has to be open.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:23]:
Everything has to be public information.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:52:25]:
Yes, absolutely.
Leo Laporte [00:52:27]:
So Waymo— so one of the things I'm kind of excited about is new looks for some of these self-driving vehicles. We talked earlier before the show about Zoox, which is now Uh, able to accept paying, uh, riders in Vegas. Did you— have you ridden in a Zoox?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:44]:
I've done it about a dozen times. It's actually— it works really well.
Leo Laporte [00:52:47]:
It really, really well. I'm really intrigued by them because they don't have a steering wheel, they don't have a front seat. It's living room style. They call it campfire style seating.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:56]:
It's set up so that when my Zoox pulls up, it changes to my color mode so that I know that that's my Zoox.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:53:02]:
That's something they added recently, by the way. How do they do that?
Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
What do you mean? change— the car changes color?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:53:07]:
No, there's, there's LED light strips in the windows.
Leo Laporte [00:53:11]:
So you, you know what color you're looking for and that's your Zook? Right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:13]:
So like I was at a DEF CON and 5 Zooks would pull up and you're like, well, which one is mine? You don't want to look at the license plate for each one, but you had your own color scheme. So you just look for the color scheme.
Leo Laporte [00:53:24]:
The, uh, the Vegas airport at the Uber stand has a big sign saying, make sure your driver knows your name and, and you ask his name. Make sure you're getting Because people, I guess, are picking up the wrong people or posing as Uber drivers. I don't know.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:39]:
Yeah, it's all in the same area.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:53:40]:
You can't really pose as Zooks. People just getting in the wrong vehicle, things like that.
Leo Laporte [00:53:45]:
Zooks, there's no driver, so there's nobody to say your name. So I think you have to do something.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:49]:
When I get into the car— oh, sorry, go ahead.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:53:53]:
I was just gonna say, when I went for a ride with Zooks in January during CES, you know, I was out in the pickup area at the Luxor. And, you know, there were, you know, 5 or 6 Zoox vehicles that pulled in, you know, at the same time. And all they had was a little number on the back corner.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:54:09]:
Oh, that's not good.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:10]:
And you had to, you know, you had to go up and look at each one to figure out which one is yours. And I talked to Zoox about this afterwards. You know, I gave them some feedback on my experience. And one of the things they've added since then is these LED light strips. So in the app, it shows you, you know, the color that's going to be on your car. So you'll see these various LED lights. And the other cool thing about the vehicle is that it has no front or back. It's completely symmetrical the way it's made.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:54:35]:
It goes either way.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:35]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:54:36]:
In fact, it changes. Like the headlights turn into the taillights and the taillights turn into the headlights.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:40]:
Yeah, they just go from white to red or vice versa.
Leo Laporte [00:54:43]:
And in the same ride, would it switch directions?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:46]:
It can.
Leo Laporte [00:54:47]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:47]:
Depending on if it needs to maneuver somewhere. If it doesn't have space to maneuver, it can just back up and go back the opposite direction.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:54:55]:
I love this.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:55]:
It's got all the same sensors on all 4 corners. So it's got the same sensor pods at all 4 corners. It's got— and like everything is completely redundant. So you have— there's a motor on each axle. So at the 2 ends of the vehicle, you have the exact same drive unit, suspension, brakes, steering system. It's completely interchangeable. So, you know, this gets shipped to them from their supplier as a module. They just bolt it up to the body.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:55:23]:
So if steering fails on one axle, you still have it on the other axle. If drive fails on one axle, you still have it on the other axle. Same with brakes and the air conditioning and the compute, some redundant compute. Everything is all completely redundant.
Leo Laporte [00:55:37]:
This seems like a good idea. Like, so the Waymos were Jaguar I-Paces. In fact, Waymo started to order now some— they still have a front seat and a back seat, so they're still kind of car-like, but they've ordered some new They call it the Ojai, which is a play on a town in Southern California and oh hi.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:55]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:55:57]:
It's a little, it's a little minivan made by a company called Zeekr, uh, which is part of Geely. Uh, yeah. It's, it's Chinese. Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:56:05]:
I want to try one of the Zeekr wheelchair accessible vehicles because they do have vehicles you can specify wheelchair and it will be like a minivan instead. It has a ramp that lowers down.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:56:16]:
So those are not autonomous. So what they will do is they will send you a wheelchair accessible— if you request a wheelchair accessible vehicle, they'll send you a human-driven vehicle with wheelchair access.
Leo Laporte [00:56:28]:
It makes sense.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:56:30]:
At some point they will, I'm sure they will have an accessible version of the robotaxi. Because back before Cruise went kaput, Cruise, they had the Cruise Origin, which like the the Zoox was a purpose-built robotaxi. It had this coach seating or campfire seating. And, you know, they had prototypes that had wheelchair ramps built into the floor. So when, you know, if you requested one with a wheelchair, for a wheelchair, you know, it would pull up, the sliding doors would open up, the ramp would emerge out from the floor, you'd roll in, and then one of the positions, they'd have no seats in there, they'd have anchors for the wheelchair. Nice.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:57:16]:
And you like it, Leo, when you, when you get in there, you— everything is controlled via your phone or the control panel. Your Bluetooth-delivered music starts playing over the, the speaker systems, and it tells you exactly how many rides you've done, where you're going, how much energy it's gonna take. It's kind of like a game ride.
Leo Laporte [00:57:32]:
It's like it knows you. It's a little friendly.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:57:33]:
It's kind of fun. Yeah, there's a cup holder, a wireless charging pad, a touchscreen for each of the 4 seating positions. So you can pair your phone, you can put it down on the wireless charging pad.
Leo Laporte [00:57:44]:
So Zoox right now is only Vegas, right? Is it gonna—
Sam Abuelsamid [00:57:47]:
No, they, they are doing— they've got their early riders— early rider program in San Francisco and Austin right now.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:57:55]:
And they want Miami, other cities.
Leo Laporte [00:57:57]:
Yeah, why do they— so why do these self-driving cars start in San Francisco, which seems to me like that's second only to Boston as the worst possible place you could be a self-driver?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:58:06]:
That's exactly why. No, it's a very challenging environment.
Leo Laporte [00:58:09]:
Okay.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:58:10]:
If you can drive there, you can drive anywhere.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:58:12]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:58:13]:
Okay.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:58:14]:
If you can make it work reliably in San Francisco, chances are it's gonna work fine in—
Leo Laporte [00:58:18]:
Phoenix seems easy. It's big wide streets. They're straight laid out.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:58:22]:
Same with Las Vegas. Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:58:24]:
Vegas has a different challenge. It has to be able to identify drunk people. Drunk people do things that they shouldn't do.
Leo Laporte [00:58:30]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:58:30]:
Hey, you know, in Vegas, nobody's ever moving fast enough on the Strip except during Grand Prix weekend. And, you know, that, yeah, it's not that much of a problem.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:58:39]:
But one thing I did appreciate is, uh, at one point I was going from Resorts World to Area 51 across the freeway, and it was a big traffic jam. And so I'm, I'm kind of zonked out.
Leo Laporte [00:58:51]:
Visiting the UFOs? What were you doing?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:58:53]:
Oh no, it's the, uh, the shopping center. The—
Leo Laporte [00:58:55]:
Oh, it's called— it's not actually Area 51.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:58:57]:
Oh, not Area 51. Area 15, right?
Leo Laporte [00:58:59]:
Oh, okay.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:00]:
I think so. Yeah. Yeah, it's a play on Area 51.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:59:03]:
Yeah, yeah, no, but, um, it's, uh, it, it started like turning my music up in the last 5 minutes because I get it, it figured I had fallen asleep. And I'm like, oh, hey, cool.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:15]:
Well, again, this is something that, that people should be aware of. If you're going to be riding in a robotaxi, there are sensors, there's cameras, smoke detectors, and they can detect damage in the cabin. Yeah, you know, I mean, if somebody gets sick You know, falls asleep, has a heart attack, you know, they want to be able to detect that. And, you know, so they— you're being watched, you're being recorded all the time.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:59:40]:
It's very upfront about that. That's in the app. Yeah. It says you are being recorded while you are in the vehicle.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:45]:
Yeah. And, you know, if you leave something behind, you know, then they want to be able to detect that, send it back to the depot so they can take that out. Or if the vehicle needs to be cleaned, you know, whatever it might be.
Leo Laporte [00:59:56]:
Pause for a minute. We'll talk more about vehicles and other things in just a bit with Sam Abul-Samad, our car, my car guy. And that's Father Robert Palisade. I threw Benito a little curve and started with you, Sam, the Digital Jesuit. Great to have you both on the show. I bet you use a little bit of Fable in your life, Mr. Robert, Father Robert. I do.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:19]:
This is my AI. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Leo Laporte [01:00:22]:
This one is mine. I say that all the time. It's so, and it's funny because I started in Claude Code. That's what I used for months and months and months. I, you know, I use a Gentix framework called Harness, a harness called Hermes. But honestly, every time I go back to Claude Code, which I do daily, I'm kind of blown away by it just knows.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:44]:
It's gotten a lot better, much faster than its competitors.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:00:48]:
I don't— So, Leo, I gotta ask you, are you now okay with Claude's fingerprinting Um, not a fan.
Leo Laporte [01:00:57]:
Not— I, look, I understand they, they're doing it because the EU is making them do it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:01:01]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:01:02]:
And, uh, and I understand that. I am a, I am a fan of— in fact, I think Google took the wrong, uh, approach. Google's been doing this for years, right? They call it SynthID, and the idea is that you can identify something that's created by AI. And I really like it that they put it on images and, and video, like they put a watermark. so that if you see a deepfake, you know it's a deepfake. And then Google stopped doing that. They said, we're going to have a hidden SynthID, but we're not going to have a visible watermark. It's like, no, that's the absolute wrong direction.
Leo Laporte [01:01:37]:
And I feel the same way with Anthropic's watermarking. If you're going to do it, make it visible, make it easy for people to see it. I don't—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:01:47]:
and that's the— Approach they're taking, you know, kind of kind of is, uh, kind of the opposite. They can't really do that with the, the type of solution that they've come up with.
Leo Laporte [01:01:56]:
They feel like if they do that, people will reverse engineer it, which of course they're going to do anyway, and, uh, and strip it out. Because there are people who really don't want you to know they're using AI to make deepfakes and things like that. And I do think that's problematic. I understand that what Anthropic did is because they were required to by the EU. And by the way, it's not just Anthropic. Everybody now is doing that. Um, I wish it were more visible, but I also understand why they're reluctant to do that because the bad guys are ingenious. And, uh, yeah, so yeah, I'm not a fan of watermarking.
Leo Laporte [01:02:31]:
I'm not. Uh, as far as I can tell, it's, it's as invisible as you can make it. Um, but that's kind of— I want to be visible.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:02:39]:
Can a visible watermark be backwards engineered? Absolutely, 100%. However, what it would stop is a lot of very low effort AI slop that has been just clogging up our feeds. Yeah. So I'm okay with that.
Leo Laporte [01:02:52]:
I would love getting rid of it. And you know what? I think if people saw, you know, made by Claude in the lower right-hand corner or the upper right, that would be a good thing. I'd have no problem with that. I think that's, that's what you really want.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:05]:
And I think— And content creators would learn how to use it because even if you're, if you're legitimately using AI to, to help tell a story, it shouldn't matter whether or not it's AI or not. The only ones who really don't want you to know are those who are— they're either trying to spread disinformation or it's an automated system where they're taking stories off of Reddit and trying to create them. Yeah, exactly. And I don't want either of those. Those are not just annoying, they're harmful.
Leo Laporte [01:03:34]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:03:35]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:03:36]:
Um, I maybe put it in the metadata. Yeah, that would be okay with me. You just, you need a way to check it. The problem right now is—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:03:44]:
The problem is for it to be useful, it needs to be persistent. Metadata can be manipulated.
Leo Laporte [01:03:50]:
There isn't really a very good solution for this. I think that's really the real problem.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:54]:
Anthropic—
Leo Laporte [01:03:55]:
The EU has mandated something impossible.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:57]:
Anthropic is working with camera manufacturers to build that technology in. So basically you can register Original content. So if there's ever a question about whether or not it's AI or real, you can say no, no, it's in the register. You know, the original source.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:04:12]:
With my life, digital cameras—is anything ever really real?
Leo Laporte [01:04:16]:
Well, no, no, that's kind of the point too—is there's you know the Neil is real.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:04:22]:
What's real?
Leo Laporte [01:04:22]:
Is a painting real? What's real? Is this video you're looking at real? What's real?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:04:27]:
We had this exact conversation ten years ago, Leo, when you were talking.
Leo Laporte [01:04:32]:
I have a Leica M11-P.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:04:33]:
It's not actually my office behind me. I'm not sitting in my office.
Leo Laporte [01:04:36]:
No, you're not. It's green screen. I have an M11-P that has content credentials in it. It's turned on. So, if you get a— if you look at a picture of mine, you can check it. There are websites you can run it through that says, you know, this is original, it was taken with this camera by Leo. I think that's a good thing. I don't have a problem with any of that.
Leo Laporte [01:04:55]:
In fact, I'd almost prefer it went that direction where Real stuff was, was validated as opposed to unreal stuff.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:01]:
Uh, all of the cameras in my shop do that, and I think that's— and for a very specific reason, because we represent someone who we need to be able to prove authenticity. So yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:05:11]:
Now that Shroud of Turin thing, did you— no, I'm just kidding, just kidding. If they'd had that, we would know, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:20]:
No, but no, no, what you don't understand, Leo, is that the Shroud of Turin is on the blockchain. Okay, so it's real.
Leo Laporte [01:05:27]:
It is real. All right.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:05:30]:
Leo, before you go on to another topic, what is the status of the Shroud of Turin?
Leo Laporte [01:05:34]:
Real or not real? Where do we stand today?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:36]:
You know, it's real. It is a real cloth. There is something on the cloth that is Jesus's image.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:05:43]:
The question is, is it what it is purported to be?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:47]:
Exactly. That's the question. Is there something on the Shroud of Turin? Yes. Does it exist? Yes. Are there people who are saying that it's the face of Christ?
Leo Laporte [01:05:55]:
Yes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:56]:
I cannot prove that. That is a matter of faith.
Leo Laporte [01:05:59]:
I have to say, when I went to Jerusalem, which was an amazing experience, we did, you know, we went to all of the, you know, canonical sites, Golgotha and the stone and so forth. And, you know, there is a church built around Jesus's tomb, and there's a shrine there. Can they prove that was Jesus's tomb? Absolutely not, because it was so long ago and there's no historical proof. But I'll tell you what is real. The people who are there, who are deeply devout, who are believing, and for them, it is a very powerful experience and that you feel the vibe there. And I think that's real. That's palpable.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:38]:
It's different. And it's like the shards of the real cross of Christ. That used to be the big thing. It's like if you gathered all the shards of the real cross of Christ, you could solve the homeless population because that'd be enough wood to build You could build millions of homes.
Leo Laporte [01:06:50]:
The size of the Empire State Building. Yeah, no, that's— but, but that's not really the point, is it? It is, uh, there's a Zen saying, uh, that you don't want to focus— when, when you have a finger pointing at the moon, the wise man looks at the moon, not at the finger. The less wise man is focused on the finger. It isn't about the finger, it's about the moon.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:14]:
Don't focus on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory. I'm glad you did that.
Leo Laporte [01:07:21]:
I didn't say it.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:07:23]:
Um, Leo, before you go on to another topic, there is one other thing I wanted to address on the, the AV topic.
Leo Laporte [01:07:29]:
Oh yes, please.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:07:30]:
Which is, um, you know, something that, that Dan O'Dowd did not talk about, um, is, you know, and what is actually probably one of the biggest potential software issues is the backend systems. You know, for, for a robotaxi to work, or even a personally owned AV, you know, there has to be some backend systems. It has to be connected somewhere. You know, if you're going to have a car that is going to go park itself, if it's your own personal vehicle or if it's a robotaxi or an automated truck, there has to be backend systems that communicate with that vehicle to, you know, tell it where to go, to retrieve the vehicle, you know, to dispatch it. And those are actually probably the most likely to have security vulnerabilities. You know, You know, for— then this is, this is one of the problems with security is you've got the entire value chain where there are potentials for security vulnerabilities to be introduced, you know, because, you know, not everything is done in-house. You've got different vendors that are producing different, different elements of this. You've got tools that could be corrupted.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:08:40]:
And so the, you know, the backend systems that manage these vehicles, are another part that we really need to take a look at to make sure they are also secure, not just the function of the vehicle. It's one thing to make a vehicle that you can tell it, okay, go to this location and it will drive itself through some environment and get there. But then you, like I said, you have to have some cloud infrastructure that actually manages all of that.
Leo Laporte [01:09:11]:
That's kind of scary. So if the internet goes down, now those cars are connected to the cloud via cellular?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:09:18]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:09:18]:
Must be, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:09:19]:
And, and, you know, this is, this is one of the issues that in fact we've seen with Waymo and with Cruise. I'm sure, you know, you've seen the stories of, you know, there's been, you know, 15 Waymo vehicles stuck on this block and blocking all the traffic. Yeah. Well, that's, yeah, during that, during that power outage last fall, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:38]:
Right.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:09:39]:
That's exactly what happened. You know, you lost cellular connectivity in that area. And because those vehicles, at least right now, are required to be monitored all the time, they have to have connectivity to their backend systems. When they lose connection to their control center, you know, they're not being driven remotely. But when they lose connectivity to their control center, They are supposed to pull over to a safe spot and stop and wait until connectivity is restored. And that, you know, if you lose that connectivity, you know, whether it's through a power outage or, you know, whatever else might happen, just, you know, the cell network goes down. And usually these things have redundant cellular connections. They have multiple connections.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:10:31]:
Still, if that goes away, then, you know, at best, the vehicle can continue on to whatever its last destination was set as. It should be able to do that because the actual control of the vehicle is handled locally in the vehicle. That's not being done in the cloud. So, you know, sensing, you know, the perception systems and telling it, you know, what's around the vehicle and And the maps and, you know, how to get from point A to point B, all of that's done locally, but all of the management stuff is done remotely.
Leo Laporte [01:11:07]:
Yeah. Wow. I had no idea. At least it won't run off the side of the road. It'll still drive.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:11:14]:
It failsafe, which is— that's good, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:11:16]:
Well, actually, actually, it's supposed to be fail operational. So there's a distinction. There's failsafe and fail operational. Failsafe means that the system has to be able to something has gone wrong and provide an alert to the operator and the operator takes over. That's what we've had traditionally with driver assist systems in cars like anti-lock brakes or electric power steering systems, whatever else. It failsafe. These things have to be fail operational. So if something goes wrong, there has to be a backup system that continues to safely operate the vehicle until at the very least it can get to what we call a minimum risk condition to basically come to a stop in a safe location.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:11:55]:
And so that's why you need all this redundancy of different types of sensors, multiple compute platforms, multiple braking systems, because you don't have that human behind the wheel that, you know, if your ABS fails or even your power brake assist or your power steering assist fails, the human can still operate the vehicle. You might have to turn harder on the steering wheel to steer But you can still do that. You can still bring the vehicle to a stop. But, you know, when it's all being done electronically, then you need a secondary system that can still stop the vehicle, can still steer the vehicle. That's why, you know, like what I was describing earlier with the Zoox, where having all that redundancy of steering, braking, propulsion, and sensing is essential for these types of vehicles.
Leo Laporte [01:12:44]:
Interesting. Now, let's say a little cautionary tale.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:12:52]:
Remember the years of yelling throughout the house? I'm on the internet, stay off the phone!
Sam Abuelsamid [01:12:58]:
This is why I drive a 36-year-old car that has no connectivity, no driver assist.
Leo Laporte [01:13:04]:
Yeah, no, I get it. Yeah, let's talk about Apple. We were talking about the EU. They've made a deal with the EU. Remember, the European Commission didn't like it that Apple was charging 30%. They wanted a negotiate that down. Boy, they sure got a break. It's 26%.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:13:23]:
Okay, well.
Leo Laporte [01:13:27]:
And John Gruber writing in the Daring Fireball blog said it's a total, near total victory for Apple. The main commission drops if you're an app in the App Store using the Apple payment system. The commission drops from 30% to 26%. And all apps still have to pay a 5% core technology commission, even if they're outside the App Store. So Apple gets a little, little vig no matter where you're buying your app from. Now, the point that's made, and I think the EU makes this point, I've made this point, is the people who pay for these commissions and fees by Apple aren't really the developers so much as you. That when I subscribed to Claude Max, it's $200 if I go directly through Anthropic. I can't remember, I think it was $248 if I went through Apple.
Leo Laporte [01:14:21]:
And for the longest time, I thought that's how much it cost until I wised up and realized $48 of that was going to Apple. And so that's the— actually really only $40, but I guess— no, maybe, no, I don't know.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:36]:
Maybe sales tax, California sales tax.
Leo Laporte [01:14:38]:
Math is hard. Anyway, Uh, I don't know if there's— they don't charge sales tax. Maybe they do. I don't know.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:14:44]:
I mean, they're probably taking a little bit of a hit because they don't want to transfer the entire thing to the customer.
Leo Laporte [01:14:49]:
That's right. Because 30% of $200 would be $60. So they're taking a little bit. Some of it's taken by Anthropic, but some of it's taken by me. And that's the point of these fees is really it ends up costing the consumer more. Um, it's an interesting breakdown that the EU came up with this number. But ultimately, I think it's a, it's a, it's ex— it's the best thing that could have happened from Apple's point of view. Now they have to negotiate the same thing in the United States.
Leo Laporte [01:15:20]:
Uh, we shall see. Epic, of course, wants Apple to give up a lot more.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:26]:
Well, that 26% is for apps that use Apple in-app payments, right? If you're using some other payment system, then the fees are lower.
Leo Laporte [01:15:36]:
Right. So there's that 5% core technology commission, the Apple Store distribution. This is how the EU calculated it, 10% of the app revenue. The implied value of the in-app payment API is 5%. The implied value of an in-app purchase using Apple's payment processing, 6%, which is roughly what a credit card costs. So that makes sense. That's where that number came up with. And yes, I don't know what the cost would be if you use a third-party store.
Leo Laporte [01:16:06]:
You— I think it's just the 5% core technology commission that Apple takes. Yeah, which is not unfair, uh, I think. I mean, I mean, you're on Apple's platform.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:18]:
What are you getting? What are you getting for that? What's, what's the value add by going through the Apple Store?
Leo Laporte [01:16:22]:
I mean, aside from, yes, you're on the platform, yes, you have access to the audience, you get to be in the Apple ecosystem, but I think You're right, if we're looking at Anthropic or Netflix or Kindle, Amazon's Kindle books, it's kind of rent-seeking. Like, here's your 5%.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:16:39]:
Being in the App Store and using in-app purchases, Apple in-app purchases.
Leo Laporte [01:16:43]:
That's different.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:16:44]:
It's the lowest friction path.
Leo Laporte [01:16:46]:
Yeah, and you should pay for it.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:16:47]:
The rest, you're right, there is no, you aren't really getting any benefit. I really, I think that the way this should have been done is that But for anything outside of the App Store or outside of Apple's in-app purchases, what they should do is Apple should just go back to charging some fee for developers to, you know, to use Xcode or, you know, other, you know, to use their tools.
Leo Laporte [01:17:13]:
They make that free.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:17:14]:
And then get nothing from the apps.
Leo Laporte [01:17:16]:
Well, they do get a $99 a year developer fee, which is nothing. I mean, that's pretty low.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:17:20]:
Yeah. I mean, you know, maybe that should be a little bit higher. And nothing for, you know, nothing from the apps because they really are not contributing anything.
Leo Laporte [01:17:28]:
Well, here's the example. So you're Netflix. Let's say you have a Netflix app on the iPhone and people want to subscribe to Netflix. They do it through the app. They do it through Netflix payment processing, Stripe or whatever. Netflix is going to pay 6% to Stripe. But that's, you know, it's a credit card. But why should Apple get anything?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:53]:
They shouldn't.
Leo Laporte [01:17:54]:
But they're gonna get $5 a month.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:17:55]:
I'm gonna be the opposite of Alex Lindsay. I don't agree that Apple should get a dime for that.
Leo Laporte [01:17:59]:
It's rent-seeking.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:18:00]:
They've already made their profit on selling you the device.
Leo Laporte [01:18:04]:
Right. And all the subscriptions nowadays that Apple— yeah. Yeah, so anyway, the EU, I think, basically gave in and said, okay, you know, you're gonna give us a little break Thank you. We'll take it. I don't know.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:18]:
I mean, American, the logic that they're using is that you know they're giving developers access to to an audience. But we know from the early days of smartphones that those smartphones that didn't have an that did not have content, did not have apps died. You know, look at look at Microsoft and its Metro. Look at all of its its efforts to do a mobile operating system. So yes, you do get access to a marketplace that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. But also that marketplace. would be useless without you. I hate these situations where they've forgotten— That's a good point.
Leo Laporte [01:18:52]:
You're giving them something.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:53]:
Yeah, exactly. You were paying to give them content.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:18:56]:
Yeah, and by giving them that content, you're making that device, that platform, more appealing to customers, so they are more likely to buy your phones.
Leo Laporte [01:19:04]:
Imagine if you couldn't get Netflix on an Apple device. That would be bad for Apple.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:19:10]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:19:11]:
I mean, it'd be bad for Netflix too, but that's the point. It's a mutual thing. Right? Yeah, see, okay, so 5%, maybe that's a little bit much. Anyway, we'll, we'll watch with interest because, as you know, what's going on right now is Apple has to bring a proposal back to Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers. She's busy, uh, you know, who rejected their initial proposal of, I think it was 27%, and said, no, no, you got— you guys, you got to give me something better.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:19:40]:
So $25.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:42]:
Okay, $25, last offer.
Leo Laporte [01:19:43]:
The thinking is maybe Apple will go as low as $15, but we'll see. And remember, there is a cut if you are subbed to Netflix, for instance, and you have regular after a year and so forth. But, um, it's still going to be at least 5%. I don't know, we'll see. We'll see what Judge Gonzalez Rodgers says because she has been very clear. She spanked Apple. She said, you lied to me. She actually said Apple's in contempt of court because you lied to me.
Leo Laporte [01:20:12]:
And, uh, and so she's been very harsh with them. So we'll see. Anyway.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:16]:
Yeah, judges really don't like being lied to. That's, uh, that's kind of funny how that works.
Leo Laporte [01:20:20]:
Yeah, pro tip, don't lie.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:20:22]:
And don't, you know, don't use AI to create your filings.
Leo Laporte [01:20:27]:
Apple, by the way, did, uh, lay off some people, uh, this week in an area that I guess I'm not too surprised Uh, 100 people off the Vision Pro group and 100 people from Siri. More than 200 jobs. I did immediately text Alex Lindsay. He said, no, that's not me, I'm in a different division. I said, oh, that's a relief. Um, the cuts according to Bloomberg, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, include largely shutting down the Vision Pro gaming team. Well, that's— I mean, is there a Vision Pro gaming team?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:59]:
Is there a gaming team?
Leo Laporte [01:21:00]:
There are no games. And reducing the size of the team that makes Vision Pro immersive content, that's a little more concerning because honestly, maybe it's just mute.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:10]:
What do you have without that?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:21:11]:
Unless, yeah, unless they have, you know, done deals with creators.
Leo Laporte [01:21:17]:
Uh, well, they have that camera now, the Blackmagic cameras.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:21:20]:
Yeah, you know, but I mean, and maybe, you know, maybe that's part of what Alex is doing, you know, is working with outside third-party relations. Yeah, not just for immersive content. To get third parties to create that content so that Apple doesn't have to do it themselves.
Leo Laporte [01:21:34]:
He may have more of a job. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know if this— is this bad news for the Vision Pro? Is it kind of— is the writing on the wall?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:44]:
Let me put it this way. Leo, do you remember maybe 6, 8 months ago I told you about the Vision Pro that I found in St. Peter's? Someone had left it behind and I turned it into the lost and found. It's still there. It's still there.
Leo Laporte [01:21:56]:
Oh, geez.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:57]:
So it's— it was so— I mean, whoever lost it, they're like, yeah, whatever. No, it's not a sneaky device.
Leo Laporte [01:22:04]:
Wait a minute, that's so bizarre. So the whole thing, the $3,500 face computer—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:09]:
In its case. In its case.
Leo Laporte [01:22:11]:
Oh, so they were carrying it around.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:13]:
They were carrying it around. They were— for some reason, I guess they were using it in St. Peter's. They left it on a bench and this wandered away. I turned it into lost and found. It's still there.
Leo Laporte [01:22:21]:
Maybe they didn't know where they left it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:24]:
That's possible.
Leo Laporte [01:22:25]:
But I mean, there's the assumption if you left something in Rome that you're never going to see it again.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:30]:
You can find it, right? There's a finding app for the last 10 years.
Leo Laporte [01:22:34]:
Oh yeah, find my Vision Pro. That's a good point. They should know exactly where it is.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:38]:
They should know exactly.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:39]:
The battery is only good for 2 hours.
Leo Laporte [01:22:42]:
Yeah, but it will remember the last place it saw it. And I presume there's a lot of iPhone users wandering through St. Peter's. So it knows where the last place it was. So the first thing I'd do is I'd I didn't know there was a Vatican lost and found. What else is in there? Do you go and check every once in a while?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:58]:
Oh, absolutely. It's, it's in the, um, so the Swiss Guard have an office near the, uh, the West Gate.
Leo Laporte [01:23:05]:
I'm just checking to see if the Vision Pro is still there.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:08]:
No, because you can go, because they sell things with like Swiss Guard hats and sweaters and keychains and stuff. And so as, as long as you're wandering through, you go, hey, does that Vision Pro that I turned on, is that still there? Oh yeah. Yeah, it's sitting on the shelf.
Leo Laporte [01:23:19]:
That's hysterical.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:23:20]:
Oh, did you actually find it and turn it in? Was it you?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:23]:
I did. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:23:24]:
Oh, okay. You're a very honest man, as I would expect.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:27]:
I mean, I, I— do they sell—
Leo Laporte [01:23:28]:
let me ask you though, do they sell this in the Swiss Guard merchandise store?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:23:34]:
They should.
Leo Laporte [01:23:37]:
I'm holding up— so my friend Jeff Atwood, who does a club show with us called Off by One, because he is definitely off, Uh, made these for me.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:49]:
Oh, I love it.
Leo Laporte [01:23:49]:
It's a bust with my head on it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:52]:
And you're in a toga.
Leo Laporte [01:23:53]:
And he decided if he was gonna do that, he got my favorite t-shirts, which are the Comfort Colors. I really like them, although they're somewhat ruined by the bust of me on the front. Uh, he said, I just ended up getting— I didn't know which color, so I got you all of them. So I have like 100 of these. 100 of these. I don't know what I'm gonna do with them all.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:24:19]:
Give them away on Club Twitch. Give them away there.
Leo Laporte [01:24:21]:
I think I will have to have a giveaway, but that means I'll have to put them in envelopes and mail them. I guess I can do that. I know we should, we should have club, club members. Would you, do you want a bust of Leo on your t-shirt?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:34]:
Wait until the next time you have stamps.com as a sponsor and then you can have them sort it out for you.
Leo Laporte [01:24:40]:
Every colour of the rainbow.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:24:42]:
Everybody that comes to the house to visit, you know, comes—
Leo Laporte [01:24:44]:
That's basically it. You get— everybody who visits our house gets a copy of Salt Hank's cookbook and a t-shirt of me.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:24:51]:
It's like, it's like when people come here, you know, anybody that leaves the house has to leave with a water bottle that I've gotten from somewhere over the, you know, from some, from some media program, you know, like, you know, this, you know, I've got here, you know.
Leo Laporte [01:25:06]:
Oh, that's nice. A Mustang water bottle.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:25:09]:
Yeah, so, you know, and my wife has warned me not to bring home any more water bottles.
Leo Laporte [01:25:14]:
I met one of the sisters.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:15]:
Anyone who visits me in Rome will go home with an indulgence. So, I mean—
Leo Laporte [01:25:21]:
Is the gate still open or no?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:23]:
No, no, the gates are long closed. Long closed. Sorry.
Leo Laporte [01:25:27]:
Did you know about that, Sam? The Jubilee Gate? It was open. You can walk through it. All your sins are washed away.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:33]:
25 years. 25 years?
Leo Laporte [01:25:35]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:36]:
Oh, which, by the way, Leo, this is the very first time in the history of the Catholic Church that the doors were opened by one pope and closed by another.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:25:44]:
Oh.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:45]:
It's never ever happened before, which is kind of weird.
Leo Laporte [01:25:48]:
Yeah, that is odd. Huh. How are we, are we liking Pope Leo? I'm liking him. I think we—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:54]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:25:55]:
We talked about the encyclical, the AI encyclical, which I thought was very thoughtful.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:59]:
Yes. Uh, and actually the funny thing about the AI encyclical is that I have been getting so many contacts from journalists that I've met over the years.
Leo Laporte [01:26:08]:
Everybody thinks you wrote it. That's why.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:10]:
Which is weird. I know. Oh no. But you know, I can, I can comment on it. But the question I get asked more often than any other is, why does Leo hate AI so much? I'm like, did you, you didn't actually read the document. No, he doesn't.
Leo Laporte [01:26:23]:
That's why I like it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:24]:
He specifically celebrated it. He said, yes, there's, there's cause for concern and there's ways that it can be abused, but it is a product of human imagination. Of course it's a good thing.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:26:33]:
Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was very good. There's actually a lot of extremely legitimate use cases for, for AI. Yeah. And I think that there's also a lot of use cases that are very bad.
Leo Laporte [01:26:44]:
Yeah. We were talking about that. Don't call restaurants with your AI.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:49]:
Which, by the way, Leo, just, just FYI, I did put your name because they had requested people for future forums on, uh, on AI.
Leo Laporte [01:26:58]:
I'd love to go.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:59]:
So, oh, I'll be there. If you hear from someone, that's where it came from.
Leo Laporte [01:27:04]:
I will, I will go there with my, with bells on, and I will wear my t-shirt. I think that's, uh, it's not a Buonarroti, uh, but, uh, it's pretty close.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:27:16]:
Actually, if you wanted Leo to take that, what you would do is you would add the lettering for Villanova, he goes crazy. Anyone wearing a Villanova hat. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:27:26]:
Did he graduate from there?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:27:27]:
He graduated from Villanova.
Leo Laporte [01:27:29]:
I'm holding this up so it can be the thumbnail for this episode.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:27:32]:
The new merch?
Leo Laporte [01:27:33]:
Yeah. The new merch. No, you know what? That's a good idea. I'll ask Jeff what he wants to do. He's the one who bought 'em and sent 'em to me, but I bet you he'll want to give it away. Maybe we'll do a charity thing, take donations for charity, and we'll send 'em out to club members, something like that. I think that's a good idea.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:27:48]:
Or set up a booth at the Sonoma County Fair, you know. Twitch booth, you know, hand out t-shirts.
Leo Laporte [01:27:54]:
Get your busts here, your busts of Leo, get your busts. I might have a few bobbleheads too in the back room.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:28:01]:
And homemade jam.
Leo Laporte [01:28:03]:
Yes. Speaking of, uh, Find My, uh, very interesting, uh, kind of detective work by 404 Media. They had been approached by rare booksellers who said, we don't know, but somebody's buying a bunch of rare books and we think it might be going to AIs for training. Can you help us? And 404 said, yeah, we're going to place an AirTag in the spine of it. And the AirTag revealed that those rare books, at least in that case, were going to an Amazon AI training facility in your neighborhood in Las Vegas.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:28:42]:
I know exactly where it is.
Leo Laporte [01:28:44]:
And the team there, by the way, the logo, uh, for the team is of an alligator devouring books. The team there—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:28:54]:
Not a good sign.
Leo Laporte [01:28:55]:
Yeah, tears the books, the paper from their spine, scans it, and then destroys the books. This is— is that an alligator? No, that's a dinosaur.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:29:05]:
It's something that's chomping. Yeah, it's a raptor.
Leo Laporte [01:29:08]:
So they definitely take pride in their work. Now, I'm probably on the wrong side of the law here. But I said, so what? Big deal. Nobody— these are old books. Nobody wants them. They're going to end up in a dump somewhere. At least they're going to end up in AI helping us all get better AI, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:29:29]:
I mean, they're going for books that are out of copyright protection. That's right.
Leo Laporte [01:29:34]:
So they don't have AI content, so they're training on real human content. And so Jeff Jarvis said, what are you crazy? These are rare books. They're— scholars want these books. Well, scholars should go get the books. The reason they have to destroy them, by the way, I pointed out, is because the court says if you don't, it's not fair use. The publishers don't want those books to go back on the market, so the publishers are happy if the books are destroyed. They do have to take them apart to scan them efficiently, you know, you can't— they have to cut off—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:30:08]:
But if these are old, you know, out-of-print books, The publishers aren't going to get any benefit from the resale of these books anyway.
Leo Laporte [01:30:16]:
Well, that's the point. They don't want— they want you to buy a new one.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:30:21]:
Well, for it to be fair use, it has to be transformative, and transforming it from a text to electronic is transformative. So that's within the realm of the law.
Leo Laporte [01:30:28]:
This was the Anthropic case where the judge said it's fine that Anthropic bought these books, destroyed them. That's fair use. But when Anthropic used a pirate database of digitized books, That was illegal. And then Anthropic had to pay, I think, $1.5 billion to authors for doing that. So the judge basically are doing what the courts told them to do.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:30:49]:
Yeah. I, I mean, I personally, I, I think rare books have to be treasured. I think that they're, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna last longer than any electronic copy of anything. But legally, they're not doing anything wrong. They're, they're purchasing it at fair market value. Uh, it's not under copyright protection, so they can ingest it into their AI training systems. and they're destroying it to be in compliance with the law. So if you don't like what they're doing, either buy the copy first or change the law.
Leo Laporte [01:31:20]:
Yeah. In July, this is from 404, one bookseller told 404 they received a very large order of 1,000 books. This is on Biblio, a rare book marketplace. By the way, the use of the word rare implies that they're actually valuable. They may just— I mean, my books are probably rare too, but they're not valuable.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:31:40]:
I've got a lot of rare books that are only rare because no one read them. Yeah. Then, I mean, and then I've got rare books that no, no, they're generally treasures and they are kept in an archive and we would never sell them to Amazon or drop it.
Leo Laporte [01:31:52]:
Vatican Library is world famous for doing that. Right?
Benito Gonzalez [01:31:55]:
Exactly. Hi, Leo. This is Benito. So there's also books out there that no one knows that they're valuable until 100 years later. And if those get destroyed now, we won't know in 100 years if that book is going to be useful to us or not. Which is why there are copies of 3 of Brian Brushwood's books in the Vatican Library.
Leo Laporte [01:32:15]:
No!
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:15]:
That someone may have snuck into the stacks.
Leo Laporte [01:32:17]:
Scam School? There's a copy of Scam School in the Vatican Library?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:22]:
There is! There is! I did that 8 years ago.
Leo Laporte [01:32:26]:
That's just funny. Wow. Some, some poor monk in 150 years is going to come across that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:34]:
What is the— what?
Leo Laporte [01:32:36]:
He's very puzzled. That's really funny. Did Brian know that?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:41]:
I'm not sure. I just did it for giggles. I'm like, yeah, you know, I've got a book you could add. Why not?
Leo Laporte [01:32:46]:
That is a hoot.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:48]:
Along with a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, by the way.
Leo Laporte [01:32:51]:
Well, that belongs there. I think that's a historical document.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:53]:
That is historical.
Leo Laporte [01:32:54]:
Yeah, absolutely. Amazon is— you might have something to say about this one, Sam. Amazon is aiming for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by the end of the year.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:33:10]:
Can I specify that it gets dropped in my pool? Because I—
Leo Laporte [01:33:12]:
Did you see the video? I was just gonna bring up that video. There's a very funny video of a woman who was so excited because her Amazon delivery was coming via drone, so she whips out her phone, this is great, and it drops it in the hot tub. Oh dear. Amazon is gonna launch Prime Air that's what they're calling it, delivery drone service in Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Syracuse, Boise, Idaho. More to come at the end of the year. Uh, if you— if I guess every primary site, so you have to go to the— I guess maybe it's a checkbox, I don't know— offers delivery drone service within an area of 175 square miles.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:33:57]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [01:33:58]:
That drone's gonna fly a long way. Delivery times range, and this is This is the thing that kind of bugs me. I— and this is an example of, just like Instagram, consumer demand, companies giving consumers what they want. But is it a good idea? Delivery times range from half an hour to an hour. I gotta have that Xbox in half an hour. Yeah, you really don't.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:34:23]:
Yeah, I mean, most, most of the stuff they're going to be delivering, people don't need in half an hour. I mean, there are absolutely legitimate use cases for this, like delivering medicines, you know. That makes sense.
Leo Laporte [01:34:36]:
I mean, I saw the movie Balto, right? Where they strap the medicine to the husky who goes through the wilds of Alaska and delivers the medicine and the child is saved. You can do that with a drone.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:34:50]:
Yeah, you know, somebody needs some medication, needs some prescription medication.
Leo Laporte [01:34:54]:
Right.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:34:55]:
And for whatever reason, they're not able to get into a car and drive to a pharmacy, or maybe they live in a rural area. It's 175-mile radius. They live in a rural area and it's not practical for them to get to a pharmacy, especially if they're sick and they're alone, they live alone.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:13]:
That makes sense.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:35:14]:
Yeah. I mean, there are absolutely legitimate use cases for this, but I think probably 99.9% of the crap that's gonna be delivered by these drones My cigs. Could have waited till the next day.
Leo Laporte [01:35:25]:
I need my cigs.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:27]:
By the way, so these are going to be operating in the same space that Flock is operating its fleet of drones. So you've got 2 companies that want to flood the air with drones just above the, the non-regulated space. At some point there's going to be a collision.
Leo Laporte [01:35:43]:
Albert in our YouTube chat says, how long before they start shooting them out of the sky?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:35:48]:
People just Well, you know, and, and I don't know about these particular drones that Amazon's using, but up till now they have— somebody just popped in. Darren Oakey just popped up another picture in the chat. Um, if, uh, Darren is trouble, let me pull that up.
Leo Laporte [01:36:06]:
This is in the Discord chat.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:36:08]:
You know, if these things are as noisy—
Leo Laporte [01:36:09]:
Oh, you guys look good in those t-shirts. That's good.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:36:13]:
I, I do. You know, I don't want these things buzzing around over my house all day long.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:18]:
You realize they're— you guys are wearing each other, right? You realize you're wearing—
Leo Laporte [01:36:21]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Robert's wearing me. I'm wearing Sam. Sam's wearing Robert.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:27]:
Yeah. That's, that's a little disturbing. I like it, but that's disturbing.
Leo Laporte [01:36:35]:
AI, is there anything it can't do? By the way, I didn't know this, but Walmart's been using drone delivery. They— Walmart has celebrated a milestone. They have more than 1 million drone deliveries 66 stores in 4 states. They want to expand that to 270 stores by, by next year. The sky's going to be full of delivery drones.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:58]:
Walmart has a more difficult path to it though, because before every delivery they have another drone that carries an old greeter that says hello, and then it drops off the box.
Leo Laporte [01:37:08]:
Yeah, stand by, keep the pool cover open, we got a delivery for you.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:37:14]:
Also the side effect.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:37:15]:
Yeah, I mean, you're Sorry, the side effect of all the buzzing, you're going to hear drones all day, every day. Oh yeah, that is just like if you're living next to a data center.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:37:25]:
Yeah, exactly. It is a noisy world. Yeah, to what you said, Robert, you know, these things are flying in, you know, what is currently unregulated space, you know, below 400 feet. And, you know, unless these things, you know, have, um, you know, sensors on them or they're using something like ADS-B, you know, to provide You know, they're broadcasting their location so that they can avoid each other. You're probably going to start seeing collisions of these things. Yeah. Or like in my neighborhood, you know, I live in an older neighborhood that is full of trees and, you know, I can, I can definitely see these things getting caught up in, you know, these old mature trees.
Leo Laporte [01:38:02]:
Here you go. Ready? Here comes the drone. Here comes the drone. Here comes the drone. Here comes the pool.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:13]:
Here comes the package.
Leo Laporte [01:38:15]:
Wait a minute.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:16]:
No, don't do it. No.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:38:18]:
I mean, you heard the sound of that thing. You know, they're loud.
Leo Laporte [01:38:22]:
Yeah, I know. I've flown drones. I know they're really loud. In fact, that's— they got to work on quieter drones because you can't sneak up on people's, you know, like you used to.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:36]:
Owls have the most stealthy flight characteristics in the avian world.
Leo Laporte [01:38:41]:
They do.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:42]:
But then again, they don't hover.
Leo Laporte [01:38:43]:
So, and they, or twice their weight.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:38:47]:
Yeah, we were at the lake this afternoon, you know, just, you know, watching a couple of vultures just soar around, you know, because they've got these huge wings relative to the size of their body. And they just, most of the time, they never, except when they're taking off, they never flap their wings. They're just soaring around. And, you know, it's basically looking for carcasses.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:05]:
Or, or they could wait the extra 5 minutes and have an actual delivery person deliver it. I'm just, I'm just gonna spit this out.
Leo Laporte [01:39:11]:
Is this true? D-Soul in our club says that Walmart finally is gonna start taking Apple Pay in the— in a week.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:17]:
Yeah, that's true. Tomorrow. I saw that.
Leo Laporte [01:39:19]:
What? They gave in?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:22]:
Did you know— I, I did not believe this until I actually encountered it in the wild, Leo. There are There are people who actually believed that Apple Pay wasn't a credit card, that it was Apple paying for stuff. I thought it was a joke. I really did.
Leo Laporte [01:39:38]:
My Uncle Apple gonna pay for this one.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:41]:
People who are complaining, I have to pay everything I put on the card, but it's just Apple Pay.
Leo Laporte [01:39:46]:
They really didn't. What? They, when they got the bill, they went, what?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:50]:
I thought it was a joke. And then it made me very sad.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:39:54]:
Well, hey, Leo, Lowe's and Home Depot just started taking, um, tap to pay like about a year ago.
Leo Laporte [01:40:01]:
I live on tap to pay, man. I don't— I love that everywhere I go. And yeah, not me. I never get a bill. It's amazing.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:08]:
Big wad of cash. I just—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:40:09]:
what else is cash?
Leo Laporte [01:40:11]:
You know who I carry the cash for? I carry the watch for the stores. I carry the cash for the people. When I tip, I always tip in cash.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:19]:
That's true. That's— yeah, same here.
Leo Laporte [01:40:20]:
Cash is king is what Lisa But so far I haven't gotten a single bill for, uh, for my Apple Watch for years. It's, it's gone straight to Lisa.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:29]:
Although this, this time back, Leo, this is the first time this ever has ever happened to me. I, I tipped 15% because I always tip 15%. Not fine dining, it was like a pho restaurant. And the waiter said, oh, you know, normally the tip's 25%. And I was like, wait, what?
Leo Laporte [01:40:43]:
Oh, that's not nice.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:44]:
I did not realize that it was that out of control in the United States.
Leo Laporte [01:40:47]:
Who goes to a priest and says, you didn't give me a big enough tip? What? I didn't, I didn't. We don't do that in Europe. No, they don't tip at all. In fact, Darren, our Australian, says tipping is stupid.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:00]:
It is.
Leo Laporte [01:41:00]:
Tipping is stupid, mate.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:02]:
It's a uniquely North American thing.
Leo Laporte [01:41:04]:
I like to tip. It makes me feel good.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:06]:
No, I like to tip, but I mean—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:08]:
I would rather the people just get paid sufficiently that we don't need to tip.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:11]:
Well, that would be nice. That's true.
Leo Laporte [01:41:13]:
That would be nice. All right, we're gonna take a little break so I can get paid. Ladies and gentlemen, you're watching This Week in Tech, Father Robert Bellamy.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:20]:
So you have some money to give At least it'll pay off your Apple Pay.
Leo Laporte [01:41:23]:
My Apple Pay. She hasn't seen the Spark bill yet.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:26]:
I don't know. At least— no, no, no.
Leo Laporte [01:41:32]:
When she gets that one. Yeah, yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:35]:
She thought it was just a couple of Mac Minis.
Leo Laporte [01:41:37]:
Yeah. Hey, I feel okay. She just bought a car. She just came home. I saw it in the camera. Nice bright red. What color? Bright red. Of course, she only buys red.
Leo Laporte [01:41:45]:
She bought it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:45]:
But didn't she get like a CR-V or something?
Leo Laporte [01:41:47]:
She got a Honda Prelude. The new Prelude.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:49]:
The blue that they have on the Prelude is also a fantastic color.
Leo Laporte [01:41:52]:
She says it looks just like a Porsche. When I— if I get a new BMW, I'll get a blue one because that's, that's the BMW colors.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:59]:
Get the Portimão Blue.
Leo Laporte [01:42:01]:
Portimão?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:42:02]:
Portimão Blue is an excellent color.
Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
Algarve in Portugal. Portimão. All right, I'll just charge it to you, Sam.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:42:12]:
Charge it to Apple Pay. Let them take care of it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:42:16]:
You could buy anything. So Nvidia has an interesting problem. They make, of course, the graphics processors that everybody is dying to get but can't. All the data centers use them. Here's the problem. They may actually have too many soon because none of these data centers are being built fast enough to buy up all the chips. They're worried there could be a glut, which is why Nvidia Nvidia is now committing half a trillion dollars to building data centers. They're trying to create the demand.
Leo Laporte [01:42:51]:
This is an Ohio data center, which Nvidia's gonna back with $105 billion. It's an interesting issue. There's this kind of overhang Nvidia's facing. Now, I remember, Sam, we've been talking about Nvidia for a long time. Of course, famous at first for graphics cards for video games. Then Bitcoin became hot, very famous for Bitcoin graphics processors. They sold a lot of those. You and I talked a lot about Nvidia in automotive and for AI.
Leo Laporte [01:43:25]:
And then finally, of course, the AI boom has really been great for Nvidia. These guys, I got that sense talking to you maybe 5 or 6 years ago, ago, really are firing on all cylinders. Just amazing.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:40]:
Yeah. I mean, you know, they've been able to, it's, you know, like a surfer catching every wave.
Leo Laporte [01:43:46]:
They've caught all the waves.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:48]:
They've caught all the waves so far. But this one, this one may be a little bit different ultimately, just because the size of this wave is so huge. And right now they're making so much money. But the question is, do we actually need all this data center capacity? And the thing is, Nvidia's chips are amazing. They are incredibly powerful. But where they really shine is in doing the training. Once you get to the inference, once you've got a trained model and you're just using it for inference, You don't necessarily need that same kind of power. You can, you can potentially transition over to other types of chips that are much more power efficient because, you know, these, these, these chips consume a huge amount of electricity.
Leo Laporte [01:44:52]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:44:53]:
And that's, that's one of the big complaints that people have about all the data centers being built is is, you know, they, they're requiring so much electricity that it is, it is forcing electric rates to go up in a lot of places where these data centers are being built. And it's also, uh, you know, uh, if, if they're not able to get the local utilities to build up the capacity fast enough, you know, you've got like, uh, xAI, for example, you know, installing 35 Or how— yeah, it's about 35 or so gas turbines to power his data centers in Memphis, which are adjacent to a predominantly low-income neighborhood. These things are noisy. They are putting out a lot of pollution. And the data centers are loud enough. And then you've got these gas turbines running 24 hours a day to power these things.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:48]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:45:49]:
And if we can do something to reduce the power consumption, and I think this is something that a lot of people are looking at, how can we reduce the power consumption? The Blackwell chips are definitely more power efficient than— sorry, the Rubin chips. The Rubin chips are more power efficient than Blackwell was, but it's still consuming a hell of a lot of power. And this is one of the weird phenomenon that we've seen in the last 3 years, you know, since this AI data center built up, buildup, is the fact that they are talking about these things, they're labeling them based on the amount of power they're consuming, not necessarily what they're actually capable of doing, but just how much power they're consuming. Talking about a gigawatt data center, it's consuming a gigawatt of power. That's enough to supply hundreds of thousands of homes every year for one data center. And I think if we think about that, how much electricity we are using for these things, it's just mind-boggling. And I think that's really problematic given all the other issues we have with the environment and energy use.
Leo Laporte [01:47:08]:
China's doing the same thing, but they're doing it with sustainable energy. That's one way to solve it.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:13]:
They're putting a lot of solar.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:47:15]:
Yeah. But no, we're not allowed to have nice things here.
Leo Laporte [01:47:18]:
They're all kind of backing off on solar.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:47:19]:
Not allowed to have nice things in America.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:21]:
I mean, right now there is a 4 to 8 year backlog on large turbines for gas turbine generation. They're very extremely difficult to put together, very expensive, and very difficult to ship. So even if all these data centers wanted to generate their own power, it's at least half a decade before they'll have the ability to. And those gas—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:47:43]:
For transformers?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:45]:
They use a ridiculous amount of water.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:47:48]:
You're looking at 2 to 3 years for transformers.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:50]:
Yep. Yep.
Leo Laporte [01:47:51]:
Do you think— I mean, Jensen's looked like a genius up to now. Do you think he's stumbled? Is he making a mistake?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:02]:
I think the mistake is that Right now, he is a vendor selling shovels at the gold rush. And that's a very safe place to be because you're taking on virtually no risk and you're making profit hand over fist. He is now getting into the business of running data centers. That's not speculative anymore. That's no longer selling just the tools. He's now selling the raw compute. I don't think that's a good business.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:48:27]:
And when you're giving the prospectors the money to buy your shovels, Correct. That's where things start to get problematic.
Leo Laporte [01:48:36]:
Also, and the Wall Street Journal calls attention to this, there's a lot of off-the-books investment.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:43]:
A ridiculous amount.
Leo Laporte [01:48:44]:
Yeah. So this is the pyramid of debt that is on balance sheet, but below it is the huge amount of money, almost $1.65 trillion off the books, minimum, minimum.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:48:58]:
Yeah, because—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:59]:
So tell me why that's important.
Leo Laporte [01:49:01]:
What does that mean?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:01]:
As you were saying earlier, Robert, these are all separate entities that they're creating to build these data centers.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:07]:
Special purpose vehicles.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:09]:
Yeah. And so the companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others, they're signing agreements to use the capacity of these data centers. But until the data centers actually exist, they don't have to count that commitment as debt or as financial commitments on their balance sheet.
Leo Laporte [01:49:33]:
Well, it's not necessarily even a commitment, as Elizabeth Lepato points out on The Verge. Didn't OpenAI promise, or Nvidia promise $100 billion to OpenAI, which then they said, nah, never mind.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:46]:
So it's book-to-market economics. And the problem is the last time we saw this done at this scale, it was Enron was the company that collapsed.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:55]:
And it wasn't even close to this scale.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:56]:
Yeah. And I mean, Enron was a novice compared to what we're seeing right now. So should people be nervous? Exceptionally nervous. All it'll take is for one of the Big 5 to go down because all of their circular deals with each other are dependent on the cash flow between each of those entities. So if you have OpenAI going down—
Leo Laporte [01:50:15]:
Why are they doing this?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:50:17]:
Because they have too much money now.
Leo Laporte [01:50:19]:
Yeah, they have too much money and they need to put it somewhere.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:50:23]:
Yeah, I mean, the VCs have so much money that they're, they're putting into these AI companies and, you know, companies—
Leo Laporte [01:50:29]:
But is it real money or is it funny money? I mean, if it's real money, uh, that's okay, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:50:34]:
It's, it's, it's, it's real money that they're putting in with the expectation of exploding that amount of money in future years, right? Um, you know, but, you know, in order They're putting real money into companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, who are then committing to building these data centers with even more money, money which has to be borrowed by these special purpose entities that Robert referred to. And that's that off-the-books debt, which doesn't show up on the balance sheets of these companies until those data centers are built. But in the process, somebody's already borrowing the this, this, all this money. You know, companies like, oh, Larry Ellison, you know, Oracle has all, you know, I think, I think they were the biggest or second biggest, I think, on that list, uh, of the off-the-books debt.
Leo Laporte [01:51:25]:
So it's like a pyramid scheme, kind of. Here's the, um, off-balance sheet obligations. Look at, look at Alphabet, $900 billion. They are the largest, then Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Oracle's got a mere $300 billion.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:51:42]:
Oh, okay.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:51:42]:
Oh, well, they're good to go. Yeah, they're fine.
Leo Laporte [01:51:44]:
Amazon and Nvidia is actually—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:51:46]:
Plus the other $110 billion that Larry's got to spend on Warner Brothers.
Leo Laporte [01:51:50]:
Right. So why are they— the reason they're putting this money in, the reason this money is available, the reason people are loaning this money and investing this money is because there's a feeling that there is a lot of money at the other side. There's a huge upside. Based on what? AI?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:09]:
No, based on the current market. Just look at what happened with SpaceX. You have a company that we know doesn't make money, that's going to lose money hand over fist, and yet people bought into it. That's all they need. They're going to get paid. These VCs are going to get paid. All they have to do is maintain the path because nothing in the recent market history has showed them otherwise.
Leo Laporte [01:52:29]:
Who's going to get hurt by this?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:52:29]:
They only have to wait until they can cash out after the IPO.
Leo Laporte [01:52:32]:
Is it retail investors? Is it institutional investors?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. Retail investors are gonna be caught holding the bag for everything. All the investment funds.
Leo Laporte [01:52:41]:
My 401k, my retirement that I'm gonna count on in my golden years, which are gonna be in any minute now.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:52:47]:
You might wanna consider converting that to cash. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:52:51]:
You know what I did?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:51]:
Or at least controlling what's in the index.
Leo Laporte [01:52:53]:
You guys all scared me. So 6 months ago I did, and then I went, no, and I bought back in. And I'm glad I did because it's gone up, up, up.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:53:02]:
Exactly. So people see it go up, up, up, even though there's nothing underneath that. Why should SpaceX go up when they're losing billions of dollars a year? It's on the promise that maybe in the future they might do something that makes profit.
Leo Laporte [01:53:15]:
Actually, what I end up buying is index funds and market baskets and mutual funds, because I don't want to invest in any particular tech company. But those— all of those funds have bought into the Magnificent 7, have bought into the Yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, yeah, but what do I do as, uh, some poor schmuck who's just trying to keep my retirement alive?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:53:36]:
You're right, because if you are not buying into the wave, then it's almost like you're losing. You feel like you're losing out. Yeah, a safe investment when someone else is 2x, 3x inflation.
Leo Laporte [01:53:47]:
Um, my money's shrinking by 4% every year. I guess I could— I don't know what's— I don't know, I could buy gold. I don't know if that's a good investment either.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:53:58]:
I mean, I can get upset at what I see in the market, but the problem is nobody knows how it runs anymore. It's not running on PE. It's not running on basic fundamentals. So hype is just as good a metric as any other, I guess.
Leo Laporte [01:54:13]:
Okay. We're not financial experts, and do not take any advice.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:54:17]:
Definitely don't take financial advice from us.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:18]:
Really, really seriously, don't do that. Don't do that.
Leo Laporte [01:54:24]:
Yeah. Mike B says, I need a better money manager. Better than me? The thing though—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:32]:
Magic beans, Leo. It's all about magic beans.
Leo Laporte [01:54:35]:
That's the hard part of all of this is, you know, you can't time the market. And so you know that in your heart you probably should get out, but when?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:44]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:54:46]:
You're lucky, Robert, because you have a big institution behind you. That probably won't go belly up.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:51]:
We're extremely conservative about investments.
Leo Laporte [01:54:54]:
I bet you.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:54]:
Um, so, but I mean, like—
Leo Laporte [01:54:56]:
Louis XIV melted down all his gold furniture so that he could pay for his wars.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:55:01]:
That's right.
Leo Laporte [01:55:03]:
I don't have any gold furniture.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:05]:
I only invest in tulips, Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:55:06]:
Tulips, tulips, the bulbs, they're gonna be big. All right, time for a break. Our show today, you're listening to Robert Balaser, the Digital Jesuit. Visiting us from Las Vegas where he was just at DEF CON. Great to see you, Robert. How's your family? Everybody good?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:23]:
Everyone is good. Everyone's healthy. And I actually, I just took them on a road trip to San Francisco. So that was fun.
Leo Laporte [01:55:29]:
Nice. Yeah. Aren't you a good son? And, uh, and Sam Abul-Samad, whose brilliant wife got me lifting kettlebells and swinging clubs. And thank her for that because, uh, I will.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:55:44]:
I thank her every day.
Leo Laporte [01:55:45]:
Yes, she's wonderful. He is, of course, the host of the Wheel Bearings podcast. We're glad you're both here. We're glad you're here, especially our club members who make all of this possible. Thank you. We are going crazy, by the way, in the AI world in many, many ways, obviously. But certainly the Chinese models are gaining a lot of attention. It seems like every week a new one comes out.
Leo Laporte [01:56:13]:
There's one right now. everybody's speculating about. It's free. It was free for a few more days. It was free this week on OpenRouter, and it was free on Noose, which I use for my subscriptions. No one knows what it's— where it's from. It's called Ox, O-X Alpha, and it seems pretty good. And the consensus is it is probably the latest from a Chinese AI company, probably Z.ai.
Leo Laporte [01:56:43]:
which does GLM. The GLM models are really good, and this one's free for a week. A lot of people are using it. GLM-5-3, which came out, uh, I think a few weeks ago, is doing really well. Bloomberg says Jipu, Z.AI, is iterating fast, and this is concerning to the government. The White House apparently drafting plans to require countries to pick a side in the US-China AI Competition. This is according to Reuters. They are saying to companies and countries, you should not be using Chinese models.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:25]:
Yeah, because we've got a lot of really good sway and goodwill that we spread around the world, so I'm sure that's—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:57:30]:
Yeah, I mean, everybody trusts us right now, you know.
Leo Laporte [01:57:32]:
I mean, yeah, it's really a new way to exercise soft power. I mean, China's done this with their Belt and Road Initiative where they help people People build dams and roads in third world countries, gaining friendship. It's soft power. Now this is it. And I don't, I can't say—
Sam Abuelsamid [01:57:47]:
And we currently are in an environment where our government does not believe in soft power. They only believe in hard power.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:53]:
They believe in transactional relationships, and that's not gonna invite anyone to actually help us with this.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:57:59]:
So, and a fascinating comment from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the other day after the trade talks broke down. And he said, Yeah, the US is now into signing agreements in pencil.
Leo Laporte [01:58:14]:
I kind of like Mark Carney. He's really outspoken and I kind of enjoy his point of view, even though it is at our expense. I'm a French Canadian. I can say that one. Let's talk flock. There's so much to say.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:34]:
I have 3 flock cameras within a block of my house right now.
Leo Laporte [01:58:37]:
Yeah, there is in, in our little town, there are Flock cameras, 2 of which are pointed at the public swimming pool.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:45]:
That sounds like a good idea.
Leo Laporte [01:58:46]:
I don't think there's any license plates going by. So Flock is— we normally, I think of it as an ALPR, automated license plate reader, which, look, you know, they collect—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:57]:
that's how they sold it. That's how they sold it at the beginning. They said, we're only tracking license plates.
Leo Laporte [01:59:02]:
And, and, and And to be fair, you don't have a right to use the public streets to drive on them. You have to get a license, you have to take tests, you have to show your competence.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:59:13]:
Unless you're an automated driving system.
Leo Laporte [01:59:15]:
Right, then all bets are off. But despite what sovereign citizens might say, you know, this— it's a privilege, not a right. And I guess it's reasonable to say law enforcement should have automated license plate readers. It's helpful in tracking lost vehicles, tracking stolen, you know, kidnapped people. It's, uh, there's all sorts of law enforcement uses for it. The problem is it seems to be law enforcement— well, we've seen a number of cases— uses it for other reasons, including stalking girlfriends.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:59:52]:
Hmm.
Leo Laporte [01:59:53]:
Uh, police are being told by a usage policy for the Flock license plate reader not to talk about the cameras. Uh, this is from Bruce Schneier. Do not mention ALPR usage to the occupants of the vehicle. Do not mention ALPR usage in your report, in your police report or your complaint, unless absolutely necessary. Why? Why are they trying to hide this? What are ALPR readers good for? What are they not good for? And what are they doing beyond reading license plates?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:24]:
Oh, because they're violating the Constitution of the United States.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:28]:
And they are actually collecting a lot more than just license plate data.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:32]:
Fourth Amendment.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:33]:
Fourth Amendment, yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:34]:
So here's the problem. In order for law enforcement to be able to do an investigation on you, they first have to have probable cause, and then they have to obtain a warrant in order to look into your affairs and see if there's actually any crimes being committed. Law enforcement can now bypass that by buying a subscription from Flock, because it's not a government agency that's collecting information on the individual, it's a private company, and the government agency is just buying that data a private company, it completely bypasses the Fourth Amendment. And law enforcement knows this. That's why they're trying not to mention Flock when they're writing out these reports, because they don't want that question of whether or not that evidence should be permissible.
Leo Laporte [02:01:13]:
Well, okay, one of the things we know is good for law enforcement, uh, is to put, uh, officers on foot walking through neighborhoods looking around, kind of like a Flock camera would, making observations. They don't arrest somebody till there's probable cause, but they're always looking. How is this different from that?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:32]:
Because this goes forward and back in time. This is data that's always stored. This is why Flock tried to make a big hoo-ha about, oh no, no, we're only collecting license plates, until now it's been revealed, no, no, they collect everything. They collect—
Leo Laporte [02:01:45]:
What else can they collect?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:46]:
Images of your—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:01:47]:
Bumper stickers on your car?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:48]:
Identities. Identities. They're collecting identities. They're collecting clothing. They're collecting any distinguishing factors that can be used in biometric location later on. They've just released a new product to law enforcement that it's basically an AI prompt. You can say, find me everyone who interacted with this red car between this date and this date. And because they've got cameras everywhere, they cannot just find the people, but they can find the addresses that those people ended up at.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:19]:
That's, that's too much. That's too much.
Leo Laporte [02:02:22]:
I've also seen some communities installing Bluetooth sniffers on their flock cameras so they capture every— you know, when you're driving down the street with your phone, it's advertising its Bluetooth presence, including your phone's name.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:35]:
Yeah, they're starting to consolidate all kinds of information from different sources. You know, I mean, and they had a deal earlier, either earlier this year or late last year, With Ring to start consolidating, you know, trying to fuse information from Ring cameras with the Flock database. So, you know, as Robert said, you know, this, this is collecting way too much information. You know, so it's way more than, than just the license plates. You know, there's bumper stickers there. You know, if there's a dent on the car, you know, they're, they're, they're picking— they're putting together all kinds of little bits that go Way beyond what they have publicly said, and also a lot of sometimes the the information is just plain wrong. You know, I I put in a story down below. I don't think you guys talked about it previously.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:03:25]:
This was actually about a month ago. Two friends of mine who are both auto writers got picked up by police because of incorrect flock data. They were— they both happened to be driving press vehicles from Jaguar Land Rover. And the way it works with the press fleets, usually the manufacturers that own these vehicles, they usually put on manufacturer plates from whatever state they happen to be based in. JLR is based in New Jersey. JLR North America is based in New Jersey. So they have New Jersey manufacturer plates. And the manufacturer plates usually are a little bit different from the others.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:04:02]:
In New Jersey— in Michigan, they look like regular plates except there's a— the middle character is an M. In New Jersey—
Leo Laporte [02:04:10]:
For manufacturer.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:04:12]:
Yeah. In New Jersey, they have the manufacturer plates are 34 and DTM, and then there's a 2-digit number that's much smaller in the middle, in between the 34 and the DTM. And somebody had incorrectly entered information in California into the Flock system, or I think into actually into a system for reporting stolen or missing license plates. And they missed the middle 2 digits and they just had the 34DTM. And so the Flock cameras, the Flock system will capture partial information because a lot of times police, you know, when they put information, they may have a partial plate. So they put in the 34DTM. And so as soon as the Flock cameras noticed vehicles with the New Jersey manufacturer plates on them, it flagged it for the local police. And so my friend Joel Fetter, who lives near Minneapolis, it turns out he had been tracked for 4 days by Flock cameras before the police—
Leo Laporte [02:05:22]:
Why did they think they were— was it mistakenly reported as stolen?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:05:27]:
The license plate was reported as But mistakenly reported as stolen. That's when somebody managing the press fleet in California had incorrectly put in information into the license plate system.
Leo Laporte [02:05:42]:
So the manufacturer—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:05:43]:
No, it wasn't stolen. It was reported as missing. Sometimes when they're doing marketing photo shoots, they'll take the license plates off and put on a different license plate. And so they had misplaced it. It wasn't stolen.
Leo Laporte [02:05:56]:
They lost the license plate, not the car.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:05:58]:
Yeah, but, you know, so they flocked, misinterpreted the whole thing as a stolen vehicle. And so Joel—
Leo Laporte [02:06:07]:
So somebody could get hurt. I'm watching Joel's video on here, and the police were fairly understanding about this.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:06:14]:
I mean, yeah, but this whole thing took over an hour before they got it sorted out.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:06:18]:
And that has a relatively happy ending.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:06:21]:
Yeah, Joel is white. Imagine If this had been another one of my friends whose skin tone is a different color, right, it might not have turned out quite so well.
Leo Laporte [02:06:31]:
He was surrounded by 3 officers.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:06:34]:
4 police cars.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:06:36]:
Yeah, and we don't have to imagine it. It's already happened.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:06:39]:
3 days after this, another friend of mine, Tim Esterdahl, who lives in Nebraska, was driving another JLR press vehicle. Exactly the same situation, but those 2 little— those 2 small middle digits were different digits from the ones that were on Joel's car and the ones on the original missing license plate. And he got pulled over and he was held for about an hour and a half while they sorted out the situation. I mean, this is ridiculous that this is happening. And the information should have been corrected as soon as they sorted it out with Joel, but it wasn't. And 3 days later, it happened again in a different state.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:07:22]:
There have been more than 30 cases, Leo, 30 cases of misidentified vehicles that led to arrests. In a couple of those cases, people sat in jail because even though the officers knew that the data didn't match what their terminal was telling them, that this was a suspect. So again, there's, there's a question. The big question for me here is accountability. Who is responsible when it gets to the point where people are arrested? it wrong because the police officers are saying it's Flock and Flock is saying it's the police officers, which means that someone who gets caught up in one of these mistakes, they have no recourse.
Leo Laporte [02:07:56]:
A grand jury declined to indict a man who was caught on camera destroying a Flock pole. There is a backlash. The people are starting to see that these Flock cameras are everywhere. We're living in a surveillance society. a grand jury in Ohio refused, which very, by the way, very rare grand jury will refuse an indictment. The prosecution—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:08:22]:
You can indict a ham sandwich.
Leo Laporte [02:08:24]:
That's the saying. If a prosecution wanted to, they could indict a ham sandwich. In this case, the grand jury said no. He removed the bolts on the ALPR pole, toppled it over, and destroyed the surveillance camera and its solar panel, and nobody's unhappy about that except the police.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:08:43]:
And a lot of communities have been canceling their Flock contracts, although some have been following that up by signing contracts with Axon, the company that makes tasers, because they have their own ALPR system.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:08:55]:
The problem is that canceling the Flock contract just means they're canceling the service. That doesn't necessarily remove the camera.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:09:02]:
Right. And so there is a solution for that. Fortunately, because the Flock cameras are being paid for with taxpayer dollars. You know, we have a responsibility to make sure these things are properly taken care of. And, you know, they're all outside, so they're exposed to a lot of UV radiation, and you don't want them to get sunburned. So somebody has actually come up with something with the, the flock sock that you can, you can, you can get to protect your local flock cameras from UV radiation.
Leo Laporte [02:09:30]:
Oh yeah, because they're so dangerous. You know, that's bad. The sun is so bad, as you know. You don't want them to get sunburn. Exactly. Yeah, it's a carbon fiber sock. You don't have to take the pole down, just— I'm sure this is illegal.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:09:44]:
You know, Leo, actually, on a completely unrelated note, at DEF CON, we, we may have had access to some Flock hardware, and we discovered that in the newer models they're installing cut filters so that if red or green lasers are shined through the lens, it will protect the sensor from being burned out. Unfortunately, it does not really stop blue lasers. So if you have a high-intensity blue laser, you can burn out the sensor almost immediately.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:06]:
I mean, definitely don't play around with blue lasers.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:10:09]:
Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that.
Leo Laporte [02:10:11]:
I'm sure this is illegal and we are not advocating anything.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:15]:
We specifically said not to play with blue lasers near flock cameras.
Leo Laporte [02:10:20]:
If you're wondering where the flock camera near you is, this is a map called Deflock, which records 64—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:28]:
The VOR flock called this a terroristic organization.
Leo Laporte [02:10:31]:
No, it's just public information.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:34]:
Yeah, that— yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:10:35]:
Don't you think you have the right to know what cameras are in your neighborhood?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:10:39]:
Camera has no reasonable expectation of privacy if it's on a public road. I'm just saying. It's, you know, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:10:45]:
Uh, fortunately, my little town—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:48]:
look at that— my community does not have, uh, flock cameras, um, and neither does Ann Arbor, which is neighboring us. Uh, there are flock— the thing— the other thing to keep in mind mind is not all contracts with Flock are from communities. Some of them are on private property. So even though Ypsilanti Township and the city of Ypsilanti don't have any Flock cameras, there are a couple of major retailers nearby me here that have a bunch of Flock cameras in their parking lots. Wow.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:11:16]:
Of course, they might not need it now that they've got their Flock drones. So, you know, that's—
Leo Laporte [02:11:21]:
So what's that all about, Flock drones?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:11:23]:
That's their next big growth market. They've realized that they can do plate reading from a For instance, with drones that don't have to worry about things like permits or being allowed to by the city, they can just overfly an unregulated space and have pretty much immunity from any sort of backlash because you can't even see it.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:11:42]:
Wow. So it's a lot harder to protect your flock drones with flock socks though, you know, if they're up in the air like that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:11:49]:
But that's why I order stuff from Amazon constantly, just to create a line of drones. ones that defends that area from, uh, flock drones.
Leo Laporte [02:11:56]:
Defense orders. I'm wondering, these are defensive. Um, yeah, and by the way, not all cameras on poles are flock cameras. There are red light cameras, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:12:07]:
And there's also Axon, as I mentioned.
Leo Laporte [02:12:09]:
Oh, Axon makes them too. But red light cameras aren't necessarily— or are they— tracking every license plate that goes by? Usually they should— they only want to take a picture.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:12:20]:
The resolution's not high enough to really do that. It's, it's kind of chunky.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:12:23]:
Well, I mean, they're high enough They're high enough to read the license plate. So you gotta know who to send the ticket to.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:12:30]:
A single, but that's a single view.
Leo Laporte [02:12:32]:
It's just a single shot. When the light changes, they take a picture in case anybody goes through the intersection. Okay, well, we'll keep an eye on this one.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:12:40]:
It is interesting though, because we— I had thought that we were at that point that we were so desensitized to cameras in public because it's in everything. You just always assume something's going to be recorded. That Flock has managed to pretty much energize people from the left and the right, no matter what your political leaning might be, to say, this is not okay. No, we do not like this.
Leo Laporte [02:13:02]:
Yeah. We don't mind it against our enemies, but here at home—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:06]:
Not here. Not here.
Leo Laporte [02:13:08]:
This is here at home. This is Palantir for domestic use.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:13:11]:
It's funny that the 2 things that seem to be uniting people on the left and the right are Flock cameras and data centers. Data centers. Yeah. Everybody hates them both.
Leo Laporte [02:13:21]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:23]:
You could actually, you could run a campaign today. You could just say, all I care about is no more data centers and no more flock cameras. You'd win. You'd probably win.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:13:30]:
You'd win. Well, it's funny. Here in Michigan, the Republican candidate for the Senate seat, US Senate seat is Mike Rogers. And a couple of days ago, he came out backing a data center moratorium.
Leo Laporte [02:13:44]:
Because it's good for the voters.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:13:47]:
Right. However, it also turns out that he personally has invested about $2.5 million in data centers and like in Blackstone real estate trusts that are in building data centers.
Leo Laporte [02:14:03]:
He's like an optimist pessimist. He thinks the glass is both half full and half empty.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:14:08]:
It's— no, no, no. He's like an engineer. He thinks the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
Leo Laporte [02:14:13]:
Yes, I love that. I love that. All right, one more break, uh, a few more stories now that we've got you all head up over flock. I guess, you know, we're going to have to keep covering this story. This is a growing, uh, story, and it kind of snuck up on us. These— I mean, uh, between Ring cameras everywhere and flock cameras—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:14:31]:
There's over 120,000 of these things in the country, or more.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:35]:
Well, you know what it is, Leo? The techno-rati have been— we have been raging against the growing omnipresent, uh, surveillance state for what, 2 decades now? And every time they've kind of hemmed and hawed about it. So I think we just assumed everyone's going to be okay with everything. So the fact that they're finally— this finally crosses a line, I, I kind of enjoy it.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:14:58]:
I mean, you know, you talked earlier about, you know, the backlash against big tech. I think the reason why we're seeing this backlash is because of leaders in big tech, people like Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and so many others that are— many of them, some of them are openly advocating for the end of democracy, the end of freedom.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:24]:
Right. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:15:25]:
Yeah. And what's the name of that ridiculous philosopher You know, um, that they all follow.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:31]:
Um, I can't remember.
Leo Laporte [02:15:32]:
Habermas or—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:15:33]:
No, no, no, this, this, uh, Silicon Valley guy. Um, oh, oh, the wannabe Ayn Rand. Um, yeah, what's his face?
Leo Laporte [02:15:43]:
Uh, I can't remember his name.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:44]:
I know you're not Peter Thiel.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:15:45]:
No, no, Thiel, Thiel is a follower of this guy. Um, I know who you're talking about.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:50]:
I can't remember his name right now.
Leo Laporte [02:15:52]:
Yeah, Flock says they've— in 2025, it helped locate 10,000+ missing people. 42% of Flock customers, that is cities, recovered more than half of all stolen vehicles. That 1 in 5 cases were cleared involving Flock evidence, including abducted children, home invasions.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:18]:
It wouldn't work in Las Vegas because like 90% of the cars aren't registered.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:16:22]:
So Curtis Yarvin. Yeah, I'm thinking of— yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:29]:
Uh, okay, Leo, none of that matters because you've passed the line, the ick line. You've done something that has collectively made the public say, uh, no, I don't want that. I don't, I don't know why that stands out for me, but I don't want that. And that's Floch right now. Floch can say anything they want and people, they, people would just say, we can't trust you anymore. You crossed that line and there's no way back.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:16:52]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:16:53]:
All right, we'll take a break, come back and talk about something nice.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:58]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:16:59]:
Something light, something like a drone dropping a package into a swimming pool. You're watching This Week in Tech with Father Robert Balisere, the Digital Jesuit, and Sam Abul-Samad, my car guy. Molly White, who was scheduled this week, has moved to next week. She couldn't make it this week, but we will look forward to having her on next week. Um, did you see—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:23]:
this is, this is a happy story, Leo.
Leo Laporte [02:17:25]:
It has to be a happy story. There's nothing happier than when robots hurt themselves. This is the fast robot at the Olympic— oh, he just ran into the— oh, that's got— and blew up.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:38]:
Oh wow, sparks. Actual sparks.
Leo Laporte [02:17:40]:
The Robot Olympics are going on in China. China right now. This— they, by the way, the robots beat the humans.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:17:45]:
Looking a little wobbly there in the middle.
Leo Laporte [02:17:46]:
The 100-yard dash. I'm sorry. It's— you should— you know what, we're now on record of laughing at robot mayhem, just for those— which means we're gonna get it. We're the first up against the wall after the robot revolt.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:01]:
So Leo, when— if, if AI robots want to board a passenger plane, do they have to remove their lithium batteries before they get on board?
Leo Laporte [02:18:09]:
That's a good question.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:11]:
See, these are the—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:18:11]:
These are all over 100 milliamp or 100 watt-hours.
Leo Laporte [02:18:15]:
At the Chinese Robot Olympics, a robot beat Usain Bolt's record for the 100-yard dash by several tenths of a second.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:24]:
Well, that's like saying a car beat him.
Leo Laporte [02:18:26]:
Yeah, right, I know. So what, right? It's a robot.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:18:29]:
Yeah, was it named Usain Volt?
Leo Laporte [02:18:31]:
No, it was not.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:33]:
Okay, that's—
Leo Laporte [02:18:34]:
Usain Volt.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:18:35]:
I like that one.
Leo Laporte [02:18:37]:
Uh, yeah, this robot, not obviously one of the victors in that 100-yard dash, but it was fast. I don't know, I think it's kind of scary actually. I don't want robots to run faster than humans.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:49]:
But Leah, do you remember like 16, 17 years ago when we started watching those DARPA challenges and we were laughing at cars falling over? Yeah, I mean, the fact that they've done this in just over a decade, uh, That's okay. It's impressive. Even if you don't like it, it's impressive.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:19:05]:
A lot of the same people that were building those early DARPA Challenge vehicles are the ones leading these companies today that, you know, leading, you know, Chris Urmson, Brian Saleski from Carnegie Mellon, you know, they, you know, they led the Waymo program for quite a few years until they went off and did their own thing. You know, many, many of the others that were involved in those programs are still involved today and they've learned so much.
Leo Laporte [02:19:34]:
Yeah. We've come a long way, baby. Meanwhile—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:19:39]:
Chris Urmson's got, you know, his company is running autonomous trucks around Texas and New Mexico now.
Leo Laporte [02:19:45]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:19:46]:
But can you play Crysis on it? That's all that matters.
Leo Laporte [02:19:49]:
That's the real question. You can't get— I'll tell you what.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:19:52]:
If you had enough GPUs, you probably could.
Leo Laporte [02:19:54]:
You can't get 'em in the United States. United States. They are banned in the, the US.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:00]:
Just like BYD vehicles.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:01]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:20:02]:
FCC last month added advanced robotic devices to its list of banned devices because of their national security risks. Uh, robot vacuums included, lawn mowers included.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:15]:
Yeah, anything that generates a map, anything with a camera.
Leo Laporte [02:20:19]:
Yep. New models of smart-made humanoids, quadrupeds, To qualify for entry, a robot needs to be assembled in the US with 65% or more of its components by value produced in the US. And of course—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:32]:
So that's zero.
Leo Laporte [02:20:33]:
Zero.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:34]:
We have none of those.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:36]:
I think the Boston Robotics stuff is actually made here.
Leo Laporte [02:20:39]:
They got bought.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:40]:
All of their own—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:41]:
all of the assemblies?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:42]:
I think so, yeah. Hyundai owns them, but I think they are made in the US.
Leo Laporte [02:20:48]:
Hyundai's a South Korean company, so not on the banned list.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:53]:
Because I can't see a lot of the electronics from Boston Dynamics coming from U.S. fabs.
Leo Laporte [02:20:57]:
Well, that's the problem. In fact—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:59]:
Well, the chips, the chips probably aren't, but this—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:02]:
Well, that's the important part. Yeah, I mean, isn't going to report back home. It's the electronics that are going to. So that's the important parts.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:21:10]:
And, and the software, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:12]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:21:13]:
And this is problematic for U.S. robotic companies like Boston Dynamics because they get the parts they need because those are banned as well.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:23]:
Um, on a corollary, on this Asia trip that I just did, uh, one of our primary vehicles was a BYD, and that is a really nice vehicle. It was extremely nice.
Leo Laporte [02:21:34]:
Expensive, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:36]:
And crazy. Half the price of a Tesla, twice the luxury of a Tesla, the range of a Tesla.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:21:40]:
I'm thinking, wait, is this the reason why they're They're going to be selling across the river in the next couple of months. Canada?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:48]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:21:48]:
But you can't bring it into the US. You get stopped at the border.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:52]:
You get like a 120% tariff or something?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:21:53]:
Well, I mean, there's the tariff, but also there's a bill in Congress, sadly co-sponsored by one of my state senators, one of my senators.
Leo Laporte [02:22:04]:
Yeah, because he's protecting the Big 3, of course.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:22:06]:
Yeah, they would ban those vehicles from even being brought into the US.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:10]:
So you can't even register it in the US?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:22:12]:
Not, not just that, but like the, the, um, the US ambassador to Canada said that they are going to institute a policy to not even allow them to cross the border. Not just not register them, like a Canadian that happens to own one would not be allowed to drive it into the US.
Leo Laporte [02:22:28]:
Wow. Meanwhile, uh, okay, Dan O'Dowd, who we had on Wednesday, we talked about it, who is the the, uh, Dawn Project founder and the, the guy crusading against Tesla, also warned us about the vulnerability of our grid, our water systems. Uh, here's a story from Wired. Brian Barrett, Andy Greenberg writing, China is strapping digital bombs to civilian infrastructure.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:56]:
We don't need a digital bomb. We need, we need the infrastructure that we've been implementing for the last 40 years. This has been a DEF CON talk for what, 20 years now? The SCADA, the supervisory control and data acquisition devices that basically run every water plant, every power plant, are so woefully poor when it comes to security that at DEF CON, we, we can violate these within a minute, like 60 seconds, get and we'll be in the device.
Leo Laporte [02:23:23]:
Using probably technology written by US and Israeli security companies. It was called Stuxnet. It was used to destroy SCADA centrifuges in Iran, but it leaked.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:23:36]:
It leaked. It leaked all over the place. Now everyone has access to it. And those devices, they were never designed for the internet. They predate the internet.
Leo Laporte [02:23:46]:
No, they were air-gapped. Remember, they had to do candy drops to get them on the SCADA devices. Exactly.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:23:52]:
And then they tried to slap on security at the end, but we know that doesn't work. That never works. They're just— they should be— every single one of them should be replaced.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:01]:
They're all in a sandbox so that they can't— oh, never mind.
Leo Laporte [02:24:05]:
So you've heard about Salt Typhoon, which is the Chinese infestation of our phone networks, which by the way, nobody can do anything about because if you fixed it, not only would it cost a lot, you'd have to rip out all this equipment.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:24:20]:
You'd have to rip out everything.
Leo Laporte [02:24:21]:
And the telecommunication system would be down during that process. Now they're calling it— it's not Salt Typhoon, it's Volt A bolt typhoon, same idea, a Chinese cyberattack on our infrastructure, water and electricity. And as Dan O'Dowd pointed out, if they were to pull the trigger on that, we would be starving within days. I mean, literally without food.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:24:48]:
A blackout. You could do— you could trigger a nationwide blackout by attacking 9 of the 10 most important substations in the country. Not cyberattacking, like with a gun or with a Molotov cocktail. If you took out 9, we wouldn't be able to restore power across the United States for months. That's how old and long ago that is.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:25:05]:
That's interesting.
Leo Laporte [02:25:06]:
In the face of Salt Typhoon, T-Mobile did do something about this. Uh, this is a, a report from Bloomberg. Cybersecurity staff at T-Mobile chopped a cable. They— this is the cable. They cut it. As they were looking for Salt Typhoon, when they found it, they— it's— there's a frayed piece of yellow Ethernet cable on display at T-Mobile Seattle headquarters. A security staffer cut it during an intense nationwide hunt for Chinese spies, Salt Typhoon. It wasn't— they weren't able to get rid of Salt Typhoon entirely from their network, but that's one way to do it.
Leo Laporte [02:25:47]:
Just cut the Ethernet. Cut the Ethernet.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:25:49]:
That has a history. Do you remember when the ILOVEYOU worm was first released back in the— was it '90s?
Leo Laporte [02:25:56]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:25:57]:
You had one network administrator who panicked and just took an axe to the communications trunk coming into the university. That was one of my favorite stories. It worked. It totally worked.
Leo Laporte [02:26:08]:
Yeah. That's a little harder to repair than a single severed Ethernet cable. But meanwhile, robots Are running into walls at the Chinese Olympics and bursting into flame.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:22]:
We just did this one, I like.
Leo Laporte [02:26:25]:
I know we did. We're doing it again because—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:27]:
Because it's funny. That is so funny. It's that backpedaling. The backpedaling just sells it for me.
Leo Laporte [02:26:35]:
So to describe it, it's at a 100-yard dash, it's running down the track, and for some reason it loses track of the course, runs into a wall, Stumbles backwards and bursts into a shower of sparks. Oh, poor little thing.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:49]:
Leo, could you, could you delete this part?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:26:50]:
It can't even stay in its lane.
Leo Laporte [02:26:52]:
No.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:53]:
I don't, I don't want future AIs to see me laughing at this. That, that—
Leo Laporte [02:26:56]:
I know. Uh, we have to cut this out.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:57]:
Mark for termination. Oh no.
Leo Laporte [02:26:59]:
We have to cut that out. I just play it again as an amuse-bouche after all of the disaster stories and disaster scenarios we've been talking about today. I don't know.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:27:10]:
I will say though, that's progress. That is still progress. They will learn what caused that failure state and they will fix it.
Leo Laporte [02:27:17]:
Don't run into the walls, I guess.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:27:21]:
That's what you're going to see chasing after you when you're running away.
Leo Laporte [02:27:25]:
Yeah. Faster than you can run, faster than Usain Bolt can run.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:27:30]:
Or we could go really dark and just drop a bomb to take out the guy next to you. You don't have to be faster than the robot.
Leo Laporte [02:27:36]:
Sam. Yeah. Uh, Sam Abul-Samad, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. Uh, he is a VP of research at Telemetry where he covers automotive tech. No one knows more than Sam does. You can get a little bit of that in his podcast, Wheel Bearings with Robbie and Nicole, wheelbearings.media.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:27:53]:
Uh, no more Nicole. Nicole's retired. Yeah, she's, she's walked away from the whole, uh, automotive journalism stuff. So—
Leo Laporte [02:28:00]:
I love Robbie though. It's like, we got to get him on the show. Yeah, absolutely.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:03]:
Absolutely.
Leo Laporte [02:28:04]:
Roberto Baldwin, and he could talk about his many cover bands.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:09]:
Yeah, he just did a show last night with the Talking Heads band.
Leo Laporte [02:28:14]:
Oh, nice.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:28:14]:
Oh, nice.
Leo Laporte [02:28:15]:
Robbie's great. I love Robbie.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:17]:
Yeah, he is awesome.
Leo Laporte [02:28:18]:
Send me his— send Benito his contact. I think—
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:21]:
I will do that.
Leo Laporte [02:28:21]:
We've gotten out of touch with him and I just really always enjoy having him on. He'd be great.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:25]:
And, you know, in addition to Wheel Bearings, I've got a couple other podcasts.
Leo Laporte [02:28:28]:
Oh, tell me about it.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:29]:
I've got my Telemetry Transportation Daily, which is like a 2-minute daily hit on some interesting news item. them in the transportation space. And we also have the Green Cars podcast that we're doing, where we interview interesting people in the transportation space. This past week's show, we had Scott Case, who's the CEO of Recurrent, a really interesting company that gathers data on EV batteries, Both for— to allow people to track the health of their battery in their EVs, but also to help figure out the value of EVs for resale. And they're doing a lot of really interesting stuff. It was a fascinating conversation. And this week, coming up on Wednesday, we are going to have Alan Clark, who is the VP of Advanced Development Projects at Ford. He is the leader of Ford's Skunk Works project that has been working on low-cost EVs.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:29:38]:
And so their first product is the new Ford Fathom, a compact electric pickup truck. So it's about a Maverick-sized pickup.
Leo Laporte [02:29:46]:
So it's their slate competitor, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:29:48]:
Yeah. And it's gonna be, I mean, they're out and about testing now. They should be starting deliveries to consumers probably about this time next year, I think, Late summer, sometime in the fall. The plant is being retooled right now. They're going to start pilot production there early in the new year.
Leo Laporte [02:30:09]:
I thought they'd given up on electric trucks.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:30:12]:
They gave up on the Lightning. Because electric full-size trucks are kind of the wrong product.
Leo Laporte [02:30:20]:
People who buy F-150s are not buying electric F-150s.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:30:25]:
A lot of people buy trucks thinking, oh yeah, I'm going to do a bunch of towing, right? But the reality is, the way people actually use their trucks, the F-150 is actually the best. The Lightning was actually the best version of the F-150. And for what most people actually use an F-150 for, right, they would be much better off with a Lightning than a gas one. But for the, the people that are towing, it's a bad— it's, it's a wrong— it's the wrong vehicle for towing a big trailer, right?
Leo Laporte [02:30:48]:
Right.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:30:48]:
But for smaller, um, you know, for smaller vehicles like, like the Fathom, which is about the size of a Maverick. It's, it's gonna be a great solution. And they're doing a whole bunch of other products off that same architecture as well. So check that out on Wednesday, Alan Clark, to talk about what they're, you know, what, what the Skunk Works was, what, you know, what they're trying to do and, you know, how they're developing their new EVs.
Leo Laporte [02:31:13]:
I think I met Alan, didn't I, when I was buying the Mach-E?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:31:17]:
No, that was, that was Darren Palmer. That's right, Taryn. Yeah. Alan has not been out and about very much since he joined Ford a few years ago, but that's starting to change now as they get closer to the launch of the—
Leo Laporte [02:31:31]:
I'm glad to see American car companies not give up on EVs. I love my EV.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:31:38]:
Yeah. I mean, my wife has said she will not go back to a gas car and she loves driving her EV6. And recently her best friend bought a Chevy Blazer EV, loves it.
Leo Laporte [02:31:50]:
Nice.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:31:51]:
Although the dealer didn't do a great job of explaining a bunch of stuff. And so she came over here and I spent a little time.
Leo Laporte [02:31:58]:
Sam will tell you.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:31:59]:
Yeah. Here's how you open the charge port door and here's how you plug in the charger. Right, right. Like, dealers.
Leo Laporte [02:32:07]:
Green Cars, the podcast. And of course, the telemetry daily. Thank you.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:32:14]:
And Wheel Bearings.
Leo Laporte [02:32:15]:
And Wheel Bearings podcast.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:32:16]:
And then all the stuff that we do at Telemetry as well.
Leo Laporte [02:32:19]:
So have microphone, will travel. Sam Abelsamad. Thank you, Sam. Father Robert Ballas here. When do you go back to Italy?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:32:29]:
September 10th, the morning of September 10th. I'm jumping on a plane to get on back to Italy.
Leo Laporte [02:32:34]:
Right after the Big Apple event. You're going to Cupertino the day before.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:32:37]:
Of course. Of course. No, actually, I don't know how much of this I can— I can, I can say this. I am doing creative work for a big content producer in the Bay Area. Yeah, I can say that.
Leo Laporte [02:32:54]:
Not me.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:32:55]:
That you, that you will see on the big screen at some point.
Leo Laporte [02:32:59]:
What?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:32:59]:
Yes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:00]:
So they— I get to do some fun stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:33:02]:
What a few fun stuff that is.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:33:04]:
Next time.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:05]:
I won't, I, I won't, I will not, I cannot say any names. I did have to sign a bunch of NDAs.
Leo Laporte [02:33:10]:
Oh, I know. Oh, I know.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:33:12]:
But when, when will we see this stuff? Uh, this—
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:17]:
no, no, I think the release is Christmas. I think the release is Christmas, probably. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:33:22]:
And what kind of work are you doing? Are you praying over it or what?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:26]:
All sorts of work. Uh, you know, there's Stuff.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:33:30]:
Voicing a priest in a new animated movie.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:33]:
Things and stuff. And yeah, maybe—
Leo Laporte [02:33:36]:
Robert, you're amazing.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:37]:
If you've, if you've, uh, just think of my background, my ethnic background, and you can probably figure out the movie. I'm just, I'm just going to put it that way.
Leo Laporte [02:33:44]:
Oh, how exciting. Uh, I don't know.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:47]:
Uh, you can look it up. You'll find it.
Leo Laporte [02:33:49]:
Street Balloots. I don't know.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:52]:
Actually, what I really want though, is I really want a Leo t-shirt.
Leo Laporte [02:33:56]:
Uh, you'll find me on the streets selling Leo I got a lot of them.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:34:04]:
Those actually do look really good, Leo. They do look good.
Leo Laporte [02:34:06]:
Thanks to Jeff Atwood for making these. Actually, the whole story is he, of course, is one of the creators of Discourse, which is the forum software we use. And on their executive page, all of the executives are portrayed as busts like this. So, he decided to make me an honorary bustee. That's pretty good.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:34:25]:
Did you know that at the Pixar Studios in Oakland, yeah, there's a bust of William Shakespeare, and if you flip the head of the bust back, there's a switch? Like, if you click that switch, it opens up a secret door where Steve Jobs and a bunch of Pixar animators used to have their Friday booze and cards nights.
Leo Laporte [02:34:48]:
Now that's cool. Yeah, that's very cool. See, he knows a lot. He knows every— he knows where all the secrets are. That's Father Robert Ballas there. Anything else you want to mention?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:00]:
Uh, no, I'm heading back to, uh, to Rome after— I've been on the road basically for almost coming up on 3 months, so I'm excited to just get back and try to remember what I was doing before I left.
Leo Laporte [02:35:11]:
Get back to your little cell and your hard bed.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:15]:
And the next time you'll be coming through is when? When?
Leo Laporte [02:35:18]:
I don't know. I soon, I hope. I, uh, I have, I love Rome. I would, I would move to Rome if I could, if I could.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:26]:
I just found out about this on our campus. I had no idea it existed. There is a special place, uh, with 2 much nicer rooms that have a private common area, like a little kitchen, its own patio that looks out over Rome. It's a special guest place that we can reserve that I'm just saying.
Leo Laporte [02:35:47]:
You're just mean.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:47]:
It's got 2 rooms attached to it, so.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:35:50]:
All right.
Leo Laporte [02:35:52]:
I'll be there. Count me in. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Sam. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do TWiT every Sunday from 2 to 5 PM Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us do it if you want. We do it live in front of a non-studio audience.
Leo Laporte [02:36:10]:
You can also watch, even if you're not a club member, you can watch us live on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. We're everywhere. After the fact, download audio or video of the show from our website, twit.tv. There's a YouTube channel with a video, of course. If you go to youtube.com/twit, you could find all of the shows and all the channels, or subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically as soon as we're done. And that's nice. You'll have it just in time for your Monday morning commute.
Leo Laporte [02:36:40]:
Uh, thank you all for being here. Thanks to our producer, uh, Benito Gonzalez. Appreciate your hard work, Benito. Our editor, Kevin King. Our executive producer, Lisa Laporte. Uh, and I will see you all on Tuesday for MacBreak Weekly. Meanwhile, another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.
