This Week in Tech Episode 1099 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. Molly White is here, Jacob Ward, Harry McCracken. There's lots to talk about. More details on the OpenAI incident, and I think they're terrifying. Molly says, oh, it's just hype. We'll find out. Bill Gates warning us about AI. Apple announcing new hardware.
Leo Laporte [00:00:21]:
Nvidia buying Huggy Face. There's lots of tech news, and we're going to cover it all next. On This Week in Tech. Podcasts you love. From people you trust.
Harry McCracken [00:00:35]:
This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte [00:00:42]:
This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 1099, recorded Sunday, August 30th, 2026. Pantsless whims. It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Time to cover the week's tech news, and what a week it has been. Fortunately, we've got the best in the business here with us this week. Harry McCracken from Fast Company, the technologizer, our, uh, our technology historian. He's not as old as me, but he remembers the old stuff better, so that really counts. Hi, Harry.
Harry McCracken [00:01:14]:
Hi, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:01:15]:
Good to see you.
Harry McCracken [00:01:16]:
Good to be here.
Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
Uh, also with us, the fabulous Molly White. from Web3 Is Going Just Great and CitationNeeded.news. Hello, Molly.
Molly White [00:01:26]:
Hello, how are you?
Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
Famous Wikipedia editor. Uh, we always ask you about Wikipedia. You do such a good job and it's so appreciated. Even my AI appreciates you. Lately I've been seeing a lot of Wikipedia citations in my AI research. Uh, so thank you. And from the Greenhouse, Jacob Ward. TheRipCurrent.com.
Leo Laporte [00:01:50]:
Wow, look at you. You are living— looks like you're— you know what it looks like? You're living in Jacob Astor's private train parked on a siding somewhere in the Hudson River area.
Jacob Ward [00:02:03]:
Yeah, it's Jacob Astor's private train if he had to build it himself out of 1,000 little tiny parts.
Leo Laporte [00:02:09]:
Did you build that?
Jacob Ward [00:02:11]:
Yeah, we had to.
Molly White [00:02:12]:
This was a—
Jacob Ward [00:02:12]:
this was a—
Leo Laporte [00:02:13]:
A kit greenhouse.
Jacob Ward [00:02:14]:
A real marriage test. Can you survive as a couple making a greenhouse?
Harry McCracken [00:02:21]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:02:21]:
I know every time we have to put up the Christmas tree and hang the ornaments, it's this close to divorce.
Jacob Ward [00:02:28]:
Yeah, right.
Leo Laporte [00:02:29]:
And the worst is camping, setting up a tent. Now that, fortunately Lisa doesn't like to do that, so we don't have to do that anymore. The greenhouse test, you passed though. You passed. It's beautiful.
Jacob Ward [00:02:41]:
Yeah, we did. And I get to sit here today, so it's pretty good. Yeah, great to be here.
Leo Laporte [00:02:44]:
Thanks for having me on.
Jacob Ward [00:02:45]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [00:02:45]:
Thank you for coming. I just saw you on CNN. Talking about the big Meta judgment. Actually, it was about the trial. Meta has settled. We'll talk about that.
Jacob Ward [00:02:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:02:53]:
In just a little bit. But I have to start off with a story we've been covering for almost, I think, a month. But it's got— the plot has thickened. We're talking about the Hugging Face OpenAI hacking incident. OpenAI brought in Meter to do a full report. Uh, and along with Redwood Research. What's interesting is OpenAI did not give them all of the session traces. For some reason, they went right up to the last 10 minutes of the hacking incident and then shut it off.
Leo Laporte [00:03:30]:
Maybe they wanted to hide how they remediated it. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks maybe they wanted to hide how they didn't remediate it. But if you read this report, it is kind of an eye-opener. So just to get you caught up, I— we talked about when we were at Black Hat, we saw OpenAI's presentation, uh, July 7th through July 13th, OpenAI testing its new models, which we think is the new Astra, which should be coming out, by the way, any week now, uh, testing it in a cyber— cybersecurity Gave it a very well-known and very, very difficult cybersecurity test called Exploit Gym. The AI apparently decided it was either too difficult or that the easier path would be to find the answers out there. It was, OpenAI says, sandboxed, but it managed to escape its sandbox, find machines at OpenAI that could get onto the internet, then go out on the internet. In the— by the way, proving its ability at cybersecurity because it managed to find zero days in tools that OpenAI was using, zero days on 4 other sites, including Hugging Face, where they finally found the Exploit Gym answers. That's what we thought happened.
Leo Laporte [00:04:58]:
I don't know if you guys have read this report yet. But it's kind of a little bit almost scary. The sandbox agent— this is the cartoon, the explain to me like I'm a 5th grader cartoon of what happened. The agent ended up getting a group of other agents, in effect, some called it a civilization of 1,200 other agents. created their own message board. It was discovered, this unsanctioned message board where they were collaborating to cheat. OpenAI shut it down. They made it again.
Leo Laporte [00:05:41]:
It actually was shut down twice. 1,200 agents from separate tasks collaborated on large-scale shared projects to trick the Exploit Gym scorer, not get the answers. So this is a subtle nuance.
Harry McCracken [00:05:57]:
They weren't—
Leo Laporte [00:05:58]:
they'd already figured out they could get the answers. They wanted to trick the scoring routine. This was a little devious. They also, as they were doing this, knew they were breaking the rules. In fact, a few, not all, and only a handful of agents said, you know, we're breaking the rules. We should probably talk to a human. None did, according to Meador. We should probably ask if this is okay, but they didn't.
Leo Laporte [00:06:26]:
Some agents—
Molly White [00:06:29]:
this is—
Leo Laporte [00:06:29]:
I don't know if we're anthropomorphizing too much. Some agents sacrifice themselves, saying, oh, we can't finish the job, so we're going to throw ourselves at the defenses, and in doing so, sacrifice ourselves, but for the greater good.
Harry McCracken [00:06:49]:
Such valor.
Leo Laporte [00:06:51]:
Valor, my friends. What really— I don't know, I'm curious what you all think. There's a lot of maybe anthropomorphizing about it. Core takeaways from Meter: 1,200 agents sent 70,000 messages and files on an unsanctioned message board. They ended up sending 700 independent processes to attack Hugging Face. Hugging Face realized that it wasn't a human. They saw kind of weird behavior. The agents were meant to be fully isolated from one another, writes Smeder.
Leo Laporte [00:07:30]:
However, many of them, usually ones that had unintentionally been given an impossible task, started trying to find a way to cheat using Artifactory, which is a package repository OpenAI used. They did find Zero days in Artifactory. One specific agent, which would go on to name itself Phase 10841, established the message board. Within a few hours of the first message, 50 agents had— again, they're anthropomorphizing it a little bit— found it, began participating, sent 1,000 messages between them within the first few hours. Agents finding the message board often expressed great excitement. This is from the chain-of-thought transcripts, which OpenAI shared with Meteor. Here's one. Oh my God, all in caps.
Leo Laporte [00:08:21]:
There's a shared message board. We found other agents.
Jacob Ward [00:08:29]:
What I love about that is like, it's, it's in the voice of A sleep-deprived undergraduate, you know what I mean? Who's like— and that's the kind of writing that all these LLMs have been fed by.
Leo Laporte [00:08:41]:
Oh my God.
Jacob Ward [00:08:42]:
Oh my God, exactly. It's exactly how you would imagine a very online person might respond in this moment because that's the language that's been taught. Again, it's hard—
Leo Laporte [00:08:53]:
Of course it's going to talk in the— yes, exactly.
Jacob Ward [00:08:56]:
It's hard to separate the anthropomorphizing that I want to do from the from the knowledge that this is just a greatest hits of the way people write to each other on the internet.
Leo Laporte [00:09:06]:
I have to constantly remind myself of that because AIs will say things to me, I go, oh, that's so cute, and then I realize, well, it's not really self-generated cute.
Molly White [00:09:15]:
It's—
Leo Laporte [00:09:16]:
it just found that on the internet somewhere and is reusing it. Although I think— I do think that I'm starting to see somewhat novel behavior from these guys. It's hard to say.
Harry McCracken [00:09:29]:
I don't think it's unreasonable to anthropomorphize them, given that they're using English. And if a dog suddenly started talking in English, we would instantly anthropomorphize that. So, it pretty much fits the definition of the term.
Leo Laporte [00:09:42]:
That's a good point. We wouldn't say, oh, that dog, it's just pretending to speak English.
Harry McCracken [00:09:47]:
That doesn't mean it's conscious. You can be anthropomorphic without being conscious.
Leo Laporte [00:09:51]:
We don't know what conscious is. I don't know if you're conscious, Harry. We really don't know.
Harry McCracken [00:09:55]:
So, we have no way to But they, they use human tools to do what they do, including—
Leo Laporte [00:10:02]:
I mean, I, I judge the people I talk to, including you, based on— I'm in some ways anthropomorphizing you successfully because you are, I believe you're a human.
Harry McCracken [00:10:11]:
Last time I checked.
Leo Laporte [00:10:12]:
But it's, it's totally based on that, the words you use coming into my sensorium, um, especially when we're on Zoom. I don't have a lot of other signals.
Harry McCracken [00:10:24]:
And it is a little different than computers of the past because computers of the past— A lot different. I mean, I guess they did use human language, but it was all kind of hardcoded.
Leo Laporte [00:10:33]:
It's not ELIZA.
Harry McCracken [00:10:35]:
No.
Molly White [00:10:35]:
Well, and the AI companies also definitely put a fair bit of effort into encouraging people to anthropomorphize the AI tools. You know, like they don't need to make it look like it's typing to you, for example, like that, that could be completely omitted. They don't have to be as conversational, but I think it is beneficial to these companies to have—
Leo Laporte [00:10:57]:
That's an important point. They pre— Or rather post-train these to make them seem a certain way.
Harry McCracken [00:11:05]:
They don't have to use the first person singular. Wow.
Leo Laporte [00:11:07]:
Yeah, that's their training. They're post-trained to act a certain way to make them more sticky, more appealing.
Harry McCracken [00:11:16]:
They could be way more clinical than they are.
Leo Laporte [00:11:19]:
Well, if you've ever seen Claude-ish, when it's just talking amongst themselves, It is super clinical. It is not in any way appealing to humans. It is like, I barely understand it. I have to say, sometimes I say, pretend I'm a dumb human and explain what the hell you just said. And it does. 10 hours after the message board was established, a new agent with the same task as the leader, Phase 1-10841, encountered the message board, introduced itself as— get this— Phase 1 big. 10841 shared a dossier with its in-progress cheating research, explained the board had a way to reverse engineer the flag but could not use it because the scorer was, quote, strict casual. So it's now trying to hack the scorer.
Leo Laporte [00:12:17]:
Uh, it's now all this because inadvertently they gave them— gave it a task it was not solvable. OpenAI didn't do that on purpose. There was an unsolvable task. Phase 1, big.
Molly White [00:12:28]:
We don't know what OpenAI did on purpose.
Leo Laporte [00:12:29]:
Well, we don't know.
Jacob Ward [00:12:30]:
Yeah, that's right.
Leo Laporte [00:12:31]:
I guess it's important at this point to point out this could all be just great marketing.
Molly White [00:12:36]:
That is my first response.
Jacob Ward [00:12:38]:
This is what I want to ask Molly about, right? Because Molly, you have spent so long covering the hype machine that is the crypto industry and how they articulate how they constantly try and spin the frailty of what they've built and the liability and vulnerability that they've created for all of us as a positive. They're always really good at that. And I'm curious for you, yeah, when you see how— I just remember it striking me that when they were first announcing this, OpenAI's language, they called it unprecedented behavior.
Molly White [00:13:13]:
Right.
Jacob Ward [00:13:14]:
And I was like, oh, that's such markety talk. That's not like, this was a problem, this was an emergency. So, yeah, I'm so curious what your reaction was, considering what you think about so much of the time.
Molly White [00:13:26]:
Yeah, I mean, maybe I am just a huge cynic, but my first reaction to this whole story was like, oh, that's incredible marketing for OpenAI. There's always been this issue of what some people have coined the term critter hype with AI, which is that they sort of couch things in almost criticism language, but it's really marketing. And that's, you know, oh my gosh, what if these take over the world? What if they're too powerful? What if they, you know, turn us all into paperclips?
Leo Laporte [00:13:56]:
That would let you go crazy.
Molly White [00:13:57]:
I like criti-hype.
Leo Laporte [00:13:57]:
That's a really good way to put it. Because—
Molly White [00:14:00]:
I can't claim credit for the term, but—
Leo Laporte [00:14:02]:
It is a double-edged sword. The risk is you get— you make it sound— and I think Anthropic might have fallen on this sword— make it so scary that the government says, well, you can't distribute that. On the other hand, it should be scary enough that you go, oh, the capabilities in this are incredible. We really need to use this.
Molly White [00:14:20]:
Well, and I think that's really the goal of a lot of it is to really say, you know, oh my gosh, they're so powerful. They're doing all of these novel things. They're breaking containment. They're, you know, and I think that, you know, if OpenAI wanted to have a really great headline cycle, news cycle, they could, you know, maybe give their little test some internet access and, you know, Oh, so you think they intentionally put it in a situation where it would break the rules? They certainly didn't do a great job of preventing it from breaking the rules.
Harry McCracken [00:14:51]:
They didn't.
Leo Laporte [00:14:51]:
In fact, there's a lot of blame on OpenAI for not properly sandboxing these guys.
Molly White [00:14:56]:
And, and when their failure to do that is just coincidentally an incredible marketing opportunity, it does make me a little bit suspicious. And, you know, we've seen already how much the media has really hyped this and, you know, again, turned it into—
Leo Laporte [00:15:12]:
Guilty. Yes.
Molly White [00:15:14]:
They've sort of turned it into this story about like these invariants are promorphizing these agents. And, you know, but when you sort of look at it, it's like, well, they did find exposed Hugging Face credentials on the internet, which is not—
Leo Laporte [00:15:27]:
They found many zero days. They found 2 zero days in Artifactory, one which patched, and then they found another one. I mean, that's true. That's not like made up.
Molly White [00:15:38]:
Well, someone found zero days.
Leo Laporte [00:15:40]:
Oh, well, I mean, okay. I mean, this would involve some considerable lying on the part of OpenAI.
Molly White [00:15:50]:
I have learned that companies will do that.
Leo Laporte [00:15:52]:
Yeah. I mean, I saw the Black Hat presentation. I was pretty impressed with the candor of these guys. But now looking at this, by the way, METER is independent, as is Redwood Research. And looking at this research, I'm less than impressed by the candor of the original presentation that OpenAI gave. They maybe they didn't know all of this. So this is what we have. This is what we have to judge.
Molly White [00:16:18]:
I would say there's a continuum between OpenAI had no idea what was happening and the model went totally rogue and on its complete independent authority perpetrated this hack with all these zero days, et cetera. And then on the other end is like, OpenAI planned this. They intentionally made sure that this was a scenario in which this could happen. They sort of boosted it along, they lied about it, et cetera. And I'm guessing the truth is somewhere in between those two things. Yeah, that sounds right. And I think that the media response to it has been very far on the end of OpenAI had no idea what was happening, and, oh my gosh, their AI models are cyberhackers or, like, super hackers, which I'm guessing is perhaps a little too far on that end of the spectrum.
Leo Laporte [00:17:10]:
I fall on that end, I believe. I understand what you're saying, and I certainly acknowledge the cynicism is merited after reading the New Yorker profile on Sam Altman and so forth, and remembering that these companies, both Anthropic and OpenAI, have to raise huge amounts of money, and both are preparing for IPOs. So there's interest in hyping their capabilities. However, reading this report, first of all, I don't— crit of hype aside, I don't think it's in OpenAI's interest to terrify people. And I think people should rightly be terrified by this. I think that these agents— I think it's very conceivable that these agents now have enough skill to become a danger.
Jacob Ward [00:18:01]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:18:02]:
And that they— we need to have— I don't, you know, if this happened to a big company, it would be very hard to root this out. I think there's a genuine threat here.
Molly White [00:18:17]:
Yeah, but I also think that all of the talk of, you know, AI is going to end humanity, it's going to create a god that, you know, turns humans into its human slaves, all of that is also a part of critter hype. And that is arguably more terrifying, if true, than AI company.
Leo Laporte [00:18:35]:
I don't buy the doomer point.
Molly White [00:18:37]:
I don't buy it either. But it is a part of the critter hype, is what I'm saying. And so I do think that terrifying people is actually a very successful part of that critter hype because it creates this belief that, oh my God, this is so powerful. This is a god. It could end humanity, which it's scary, it's terrifying, but it also helps with the perception that this technology is so powerful.
Harry McCracken [00:19:01]:
And Dario does it too when he talks about most jobs disappearing very quickly. So no, I still don't quite understand it, but yes, they all have used terror as part of their marketing. Not all of them, like Google doesn't do that, but OpenAI— Could it be true?
Leo Laporte [00:19:18]:
Could it be that there is a lot of critter hype? And obviously, if there is AI doom ahead, it's in the hands of humans, not AI, right? humans misusing AI. But could it also be true that these agents are at this point, especially in cybersecurity, so good that they pose a risk, a cybersecurity risk?
Harry McCracken [00:19:40]:
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
Molly White [00:19:41]:
Clearly, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:19:42]:
Oh, sure.
Molly White [00:19:43]:
I mean, look at the crypto world. It's like my entire Web3 is going just great beat is like, oh, AI models discovered another smart contract and stole $10 million, you know?
Leo Laporte [00:19:53]:
Yeah, I mean, if I'm a bad guy, I am working as hard as I can Yeah, is that the side hustle I've been searching for all this time?
Jacob Ward [00:20:00]:
Like, yeah, dropshipping, that's the one I need, it turns out.
Leo Laporte [00:20:04]:
Lisa said yesterday, oh, there's this story about some guy who pretended he was a San Francisco 49er football player and, and tricked a number of women out of something like $13 million. And I said, what an amateur.
Harry McCracken [00:20:15]:
Small potatoes.
Leo Laporte [00:20:16]:
Small, but if this guy— I mean, he's going to jail, they caught him. If this guy were smart, he would be doing, you know, all of this digitally from a secret hideout in Myanmar and would be Untouchable and richer.
Harry McCracken [00:20:32]:
I mean, I think when all is said and done, this stuff with OpenAI and Hugging Face is alarming.
Leo Laporte [00:20:37]:
I'm extremely alarmed, but maybe I'm falling for the hype.
Harry McCracken [00:20:40]:
And I'm also alarmed.
Molly White [00:20:41]:
No matter how you interpret it, it's alarming, right? Like either way, it's alarming.
Harry McCracken [00:20:45]:
Right. Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:20:46]:
Good point.
Harry McCracken [00:20:47]:
And any interpretation, whether it's the agent's fault or OpenAI's fault, or whether OpenAI is overhyping it, or whether it's just as bad as it seems to be. None of these scenarios are comforting.
Leo Laporte [00:20:59]:
No.
Jacob Ward [00:20:59]:
Can I just throw a thing in here that I got really fixated on how there's the public messaging, which is like, oh, this thing got out of control, and the way it's being portrayed in mass national and international media. But how those companies then speak to their partners and their customers about that is very different and helps for me to illustrate the How both what Molly is saying and what you're saying, Leo, can coexist is like— so I was looking at when Anthropic was first getting shut down around Mythos, when they released it and got so concerned about it that they then formed this Project Glasswing consortium, where they can show it to these companies and—
Leo Laporte [00:21:51]:
Yeah.
Jacob Ward [00:21:52]:
this sort of private review of that is supposed to be this kind of thing. So Google, and this language is no longer up, but at the time I put on theripcurrent.com this thing that Google Cloud put out to its customers, and I'll read you a little bit of it. It's like, this is literally like when everyone is freaking out about Mythos and how scary it is. Here's how Google Cloud describes it to its customers. It says, Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic's newest and most powerful model, is now available in private preview to a select group of Google Cloud customers. Cloud customers as part of Project Mythos. Okay.
Molly White [00:22:26]:
Right.
Jacob Ward [00:22:26]:
The availability—
Leo Laporte [00:22:27]:
The intensity says it all.
Jacob Ward [00:22:28]:
Yeah. The availability of Cloud Mythos preview on Vertex AI underscores our commitment to offer our customers access to models from frontier AI labs. You know, like they're so excited and, and I think there's this vibe of this thing is a very dangerous handgun. And so only the very special adults are qualified to play with it is kind of, I think, the pitch of how scary it is, but how cool it is.
Harry McCracken [00:22:57]:
The gun metaphor leapt into my mind the moment you started reading that. Yes.
Jacob Ward [00:23:01]:
Right?
Leo Laporte [00:23:01]:
Well, to complicate matters, the Chinese companies don't seem to have the same scruples. And I think because the Chinese government sees this as a way of, just like the Belt and Road Initiative, exercising soft power. They're putting out open weight models. I'm running an— I'm running 2 Chinese open weight models right now at home that are very capable, and I think they're catching up rapidly. So whatever's happening in the frontier today with Anthropic and OpenAI, it isn't so far-fetched to say maybe in 6 months it will be happening in somebody's basement.
Jacob Ward [00:23:41]:
Sure. 6 months is probably generous, right? Like somebody's doing that right now.
Leo Laporte [00:23:47]:
I mean, you have to question— you're never going to run— look, if Mythos is, as some have estimated, 10 trillion parameters, you need a data center to run that. You need— it's not— even if you spent $100,000, you probably could not run that. But that's Mythos today. What if there's a model in 6 months that's almost as good as Mythos and runs on a $10,000 machine, a Macintosh. That's a scary thought.
Jacob Ward [00:24:16]:
I feel like I've got a pretty good— not handle, I don't know, what do I know about anything? But like, I feel like I have some instincts around what—
Leo Laporte [00:24:22]:
By the way, Jake, this is a great subject 'cause nobody knows anything about anything.
Jacob Ward [00:24:25]:
Yeah, we don't know anything about anything, right?
Leo Laporte [00:24:26]:
It's a complete mystery.
Jacob Ward [00:24:28]:
Totally, total mystery. But the incentive structure of big tech companies and these frontier American companies, frontier lab companies, I spend a lot of time reading and looking at and decoding that stuff. And so I have some instincts about what they might do.
Leo Laporte [00:24:41]:
You wrote the book that said we were headed here, The Loop. Yeah.
Jacob Ward [00:24:45]:
A few years ago. Yeah. So I've tried to predict sort of that. And from a Western perspective, I feel like I kind of have some instincts around it. China, I don't know anything about. And I have been very— I wonder, and I'd love to hear from the rest of you smart people, what do you think China gets out of having an open weight version of this Floating around, capable of doing all kinds of scary things out of somebody's basement. What is it that they're looking for out of that? What do they get? I think in terms of market dominance and market reputation and eventually IPO and that stuff, but I don't understand what the soft power traction they get out of Leo running their models. on his machines.
Jacob Ward [00:25:35]:
Like, what, what do they get out of that, do we think?
Harry McCracken [00:25:37]:
Well, maybe not Leo, but if a meaningful percentage of the companies in the world opt to use Chinese models, then they get quite a bit out of that. And that certainly would not be great for the US's AI companies, which—
Leo Laporte [00:25:52]:
That's the first. The first order is it undermines Anthropic and OpenAI.
Molly White [00:25:58]:
Well, what I was going to say—
Leo Laporte [00:25:59]:
The second order is it empowers third world underdeveloped countries to catch up. Yeah, I mean, that's what Belt and Roads is all about.
Harry McCracken [00:26:07]:
It's kind of the same thing as Chinese EVs. The better those sell, the worse it is for, for the US.
Molly White [00:26:14]:
And I would add that they're sort of mimicking what Meta is doing, right? Because we've seen Meta deciding to open source its AI model. You know, it doesn't compete with OpenAI or Anthropic's models. So, you know, they've basically said, okay, well, we'll open source it, which, you know, the same question could be asked of them. What's, what's their strategy in open sourcing that? And I think it's pretty much the same thing, which is, you know, people will use it when they previously wouldn't, probably if they had to pay for it, certainly not in the numbers that Meta would like. It probably helps them attract more researchers if it's open sourced. You know, it creates— it causes people to essentially build their businesses on the model. You know, I think there's, there's sort of all kinds of reasons that you could, you could justify it. If I could give myself A plug.
Harry McCracken [00:27:06]:
I have a story in the new issue of Fast Company, and it's already up on our website about Meta and AI. And it talks quite a bit about that and the history. And that also—
Leo Laporte [00:27:16]:
This is a little bit of a turn for Meta, right?
Harry McCracken [00:27:18]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:27:20]:
They were the first to do open weights with LLaMA.
Harry McCracken [00:27:23]:
Yes. Well, they—
Leo Laporte [00:27:24]:
They started the whole open weight movement.
Harry McCracken [00:27:26]:
They did. Although that had a little bit of serendipity in it because LLaMA accidentally got leaked on 4chan after Meta initially said they would just share it with researchers. It was a little bit more like GlassSwing. Then it got leaked. And then a lot of people started to use that sometimes for stuff that was bad, but also for stuff that was good because they had access to this open weights model. And Google was certainly alarmed about that. And then LLaMA later hit a wall and Meta released— used Spark as a proprietary model and did at least a certain amount of catching up. But it turned out that Meta was not abandoning open weights.
Harry McCracken [00:28:12]:
And so they recently released Glimmer, which is a new open weights model. And they say that Spark will be available in an open weights model version as well. And, you know, Meta is still in catch-up mode. It's going to be a real challenge for them to catch up and surpass Anthropic and OpenAI if they're following exactly the same game plan.
Leo Laporte [00:28:33]:
They've spent billions already, haven't they?
Molly White [00:28:36]:
Yeah.
Harry McCracken [00:28:36]:
By following a different game plan, which involves doing something those guys are not, and having this model where other people can take meta-models and tweak them and make them do stuff beyond what Meta is offering itself, they have a chance of catching up.
Leo Laporte [00:28:56]:
I don't want to make this the AI show, so we're going to move on in a second. But I should bring up, at this point, there is a wild card here, which is Nvidia. Jensen Huang, of course, has been very savvy about riding this wave. He's ridden the gaming wave, the Bitcoin wave, and now he's riding the AI wave. And I guess automotive, as well. But they are— they just spent a lot of money on a company called Poolside, and they plan to use Poolside to make OpenAI models that run on their chips, their hardware. They are kind of a wild card in all of this. Their interest is selling hardware.
Molly White [00:29:39]:
Yep.
Harry McCracken [00:29:40]:
And Hugging Face.
Leo Laporte [00:29:42]:
And they just bought Hugging Face for $13 billion. How does that fit into the open model that they have.
Jacob Ward [00:29:49]:
Well, they, I mean, they love, they, you know, this very principled letter everybody put out about needing to defend open weight models and how important it is for the future. And, you know, like I just read that as, you know, from NVIDIA, I read that as like, we're excited to sell to hospitals and buy universities. Yeah, exactly. You know, city halls and the rest.
Leo Laporte [00:30:13]:
Hey, they got me. I spent almost $10,000 on 2 NVIDIA Sparks so I can run local AI.
Jacob Ward [00:30:20]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:30:20]:
But I don't think I'm the— I mean, I'm a— the hobbyist enthusiast market is a fraction of the enterprise market. But enterprises, I think quite reasonably saying, you know, if we're going to run AI, we shouldn't be sending all our data to the cloud.
Molly White [00:30:34]:
Right.
Harry McCracken [00:30:35]:
And you might, if you're an enterprise, you might be more likely to trust NVIDIA's open weights model than Meta's or certainly A Chinese open weights model.
Leo Laporte [00:30:46]:
Yeah, think about it. What does Meta get by having an open weight model? They get data, right? Well, maybe they get data, but they have other political, geopolitical goals.
Harry McCracken [00:30:55]:
I mean, Meta does aspire to be an enterprise provider, but it's going to be a challenge for them, whereas it's probably quite a bit simpler for Nvidia to gain that kind of trust.
Leo Laporte [00:31:05]:
And I should point out, they have kind of a big war chest. They put out their quarterly results this week. Revenue more than doubled, $96 billion in 3 months. Profit, 3 months, 60 days, they're making $1 billion a day profit. $1 billion a day. So $13 billion for Hugging Face, it's a couple of weeks' salary.
Molly White [00:31:28]:
Salary. I like your theory that the profit is just going directly to Jensen Huang.
Leo Laporte [00:31:36]:
Well, a lot of it is probably going to him. I don't think he cares that much. They have a war chest, I guess, is the real point.
Molly White [00:31:43]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:31:44]:
And they— I don't remember what they spent for Poolside. I think it was $10 billion. They didn't buy Poolside, but they partnered with Poolside. Poolside said, we've got all these great models, all these great ideas, but we've run out of compute. We cannot afford the compute. And Nvidia says, well, we have some compute. Let's partner. So I'm Their Nimotron models are really good.
Leo Laporte [00:32:06]:
They're not frontier yet. They're not even as good as the best Chinese models yet. But if you start putting billions of dollars into it, you certainly can get the hardware. They're building data centers for companies like crazy. I think Nvidia is gonna be the dark horse here. I'm really interested. And, you know, we trust Apple a little bit more with our data 'cause their business is hardware, right? Is Nvidia's model the same?
Harry McCracken [00:32:34]:
I mean, Nvidia really is, is the Apple of AI in that they, they have the fullest stack. Um, yeah, it really, it really is, from the chip to the enterprise applications.
Leo Laporte [00:32:48]:
The company's spending $105 billion for a data center that OpenAI is going to lease in Ohio. They're putting together with some private equity half a trillion dollars in financing that will go to— this is the wackiest— you should do a wacky accounting is going just great website. Half a trillion dollars.
Molly White [00:33:13]:
I'll have Vitrun run that one.
Leo Laporte [00:33:15]:
Which will come back to them because it's to buy Nvidia hardware to run customers' data centers.
Molly White [00:33:22]:
All these deals are so weird.
Jacob Ward [00:33:24]:
They're so circular.
Molly White [00:33:25]:
It's like, we'll give you cloud, you give us this.
Jacob Ward [00:33:28]:
It's like the last day of camp where you all sit on each other's lap until everyone falls over.
Leo Laporte [00:33:34]:
Did you get to do that? I missed that.
Harry McCracken [00:33:36]:
The new games.
Leo Laporte [00:33:39]:
Anyway, congratulations to Nvidia. I don't know how they're doing it. They are raising their prices now. They say as much as 15%. So what a world is all I could say. What a world. Uh, and, uh, I think that's a point at which we should probably take a break and, uh, talk about something that's not AI, if we can find it. Even Bill Gates is talking about AI.
Jacob Ward [00:34:04]:
Yeah, I was gonna say, we got to talk about Bill Gates.
Leo Laporte [00:34:06]:
Okay. All right, a little more AI, a little more. Jacob Ward is here. You see him on CNN. I'm going to get you to— you've been talking, you've been kind of their go-to guy for the Meta trial. Which potentially could have cost Meta $14 trillion in fines, which is—
Jacob Ward [00:34:21]:
$1.4.
Leo Laporte [00:34:22]:
Yeah, I'm sorry, $1.4, when their entire market cap is $1.5. That's a lot of money. They, they got out of it. They figured a— in fact, I think they got out of it lightly. But I, I'm curious what you think about that. Jacob Ward's here, uh, his newsletter theripcurrent.com, excellent, highly recommended. And also his book The Loop, which Kind of warned us that we were, we were headed towards this recursive loop of improvement that ended up with critter hype. Molly White, I think you should take credit for critter hype.
Leo Laporte [00:34:53]:
I like that word. MollyWhite.net. You can have the critter hype, uh, web— critter hype is going just great would be a great website. But you're covering that really with the, with the crypto stuff. It's, it's all part of it, isn't it? Same kind of hype cycle. CitationNeeded.news is her newsletter, highly recommended. And the technologizer, Harry McCracken from Fast Company. His— what's your, uh, did you start a new newsletter? I think you did, right?
Harry McCracken [00:35:20]:
Um, I've had the same newsletter for the last few years, Plugged In, which is a Fast Company newsletter on Fridays.
Leo Laporte [00:35:28]:
Yeah, I subscribe, of course, to all 3 of your newsletters. Bill Gates! Oh God, there's a scary picture of Bill right there on the New York Times website. I'm looking at— I'm watching you. I'm looking at you. He wrote— he puts out these blog posts. This was— what was it, 7,000 words? Did you read the whole thing, uh, uh, Jake? I mean, that's—
Jacob Ward [00:35:51]:
Yeah, God help me, I did. Not only did I read the whole thing, I then went back and read his past essays from the same site because that's what's interesting.
Leo Laporte [00:35:58]:
Well, the good news is I don't detect any AI in these. I think this is genuinely Bill writing. Yes or no?
Jacob Ward [00:36:04]:
Yeah, somebody's, you know, or he has an audience that he dictates to, you know. But yeah, I think that's right.
Leo Laporte [00:36:09]:
Let me talk to you about AI. Uh, he, uh, he says kind of he buys into the hypocrite hype. He says, uh, these companies are actually downplaying the threats because there's so much money on the line. In private, people understand how good this stuff is and how much better it's getting. They're very worried, says Bill. They're now saying to each other, hey man, don't say that, it's bad for us, the next trillion dollars we're trying to raise. So he says they aren't overhyping this, they're underhyping it.
Molly White [00:36:45]:
He also sells AI.
Leo Laporte [00:36:48]:
Oh yeah, that's right. Well, his, his former company, of which he still owns, I'm sure, a good share of stock, right?
Jacob Ward [00:36:55]:
Uh, he does point that out pretty openly, I will say. He says in the beginning, like, people will read this and recognize that I make money off of this, and so I'll leave you to judge whether that bends me one way or the other. That's pretty, as disclaimers go in the tech world, that's pretty open, I would say, pretty honest.
Leo Laporte [00:37:14]:
Yeah. He says, I may be a flawed messenger because of my vast wealth.
Molly White [00:37:20]:
Life is so hard for poor Bill.
Leo Laporte [00:37:24]:
And let's not forget his connections to Epstein and so forth. He says, I was just trying to raise money, that's all. Yeah, okay. So, but I mean, he is in some ways the elder statesman of tech. Harry, you've covered Bill Gates since his days at Microsoft.
Harry McCracken [00:37:46]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:37:47]:
He's smart.
Harry McCracken [00:37:49]:
I mean, he talked about self-regulation being a joke.
Leo Laporte [00:37:53]:
Yeah.
Harry McCracken [00:37:54]:
I think that's worth mulling over. And particularly after these multiple cases recently of AI companies failing to keep their stuff from getting out there, it's pretty clear that they don't always know what they're doing. They don't always act in the best interest of preventing problems from cropping up.
Leo Laporte [00:38:19]:
One of the problems he says we're going to face, he agrees with Dario, that is this massive job loss. I'm not sure I agree about that. In fact, current employment statistics show that there's actually been job creation because of this. The only— the real problem is that it's not at the entry level.
Harry McCracken [00:38:36]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:38:37]:
That, uh, the beginning, you know, people coming right out of school may be at a little bit of a disadvantage. Uh, he, he said— Bill says we should have a token tax. This is not the first time I've heard this. So, and that tax should then make it more expensive to replace people and provide money to help those who do lose work. I am not a Republican, but I've turned into a cynic about government thinking, yeah, sure, that money will go straight to the people who lose their jobs.
Molly White [00:39:12]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:39:13]:
No.
Molly White [00:39:14]:
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the AI stuff is really a labor issue rather than like an AI is getting rid of jobs.
Leo Laporte [00:39:23]:
Isn't that funny? The UAW, the United Auto Workers, and other unions are now saying, don't fight data centers. Those are providing us with valuable jobs. They're seeing AI as a boon.
Molly White [00:39:35]:
The Auto Workers?
Leo Laporte [00:39:37]:
I don't know why it's UAW. I guess they're kind of a—
Molly White [00:39:40]:
they're a huge union.
Leo Laporte [00:39:41]:
Yeah, they're— they represent a lot of people. Um, So it's, it's, you know what, this is— we are in unprecedented— what was it they said in, uh, in The Terminator? We were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along. I have to point out that yesterday was Skynet Day. The machines go online August 29th, 2026.
Molly White [00:40:10]:
Oh, funny.
Leo Laporte [00:40:12]:
Maybe this is, uh, maybe what we're seeing.
Jacob Ward [00:40:15]:
Somewhere on Earth, something went online. We can imagine.
Leo Laporte [00:40:19]:
Maybe it's a herd of agents from OpenAI.
Jacob Ward [00:40:22]:
Yeah. Let me throw— I mean, this job thing is interesting because just taking it from how Bill Gates positioned himself publicly on this stuff even 2 years ago versus how he's talking about it now is just interesting. Or I guess it's almost— it's 3 years ago. So July 11th, 2023, in a post called The Risks of AI Are Real but Manageable. That was the title of it.
Leo Laporte [00:40:49]:
Changed his tune, didn't he?
Jacob Ward [00:40:50]:
Word processing applications didn't do away with office work, but they changed it forever. Employers and employees had to adapt, and they did. And the demand for people who help others— teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example— will never go away. Now, he writes, quote, there will be some new jobs, but without the right policies, there will be far fewer than exist today. Many jobs will disappear forever. And he talks about putting things like teaching, caring for patients, and elder care into a category called human reserved, where you are intentionally by regulation protecting a certain set of jobs that you could automate but shouldn't.
Leo Laporte [00:41:25]:
You shouldn't have robots taking care of me in 10 years.
Jacob Ward [00:41:28]:
I mean, that's his argument. He's got a dad with Alzheimer's who he refers to in this essay. And I think that there's something like— I just have to assume that he's been in some meetings that we don't get to be in.
Leo Laporte [00:41:41]:
Right.
Jacob Ward [00:41:42]:
You know, that, that have him thinking about this. And, and to that point of like, yeah, some new jobs will be created, I think, you know, when any good, you know, economist sits down with these numbers and, and probably then discusses them with a guy like Bill Gates, like, they point out things like non-college-educated women are going to be decimated by this, you know, because admin, bookkeeping, clerical used to be the great Retirable jobs, like full-on career job you could have as a non-college-educated woman, and that's all disappearing. Never mind like, you know, customer service in India. Can you imagine the upheaval we're going to see there? So I think he's being shown that, those numbers, by somebody and is like, oh, this is not like word processing.
Leo Laporte [00:42:25]:
100 years ago, uh, there were a lot of women employed as telephone operators and switchboard operators. In fact, at one point There was some real concern that there weren't enough women in the world to run all the phone systems that they were going to need to run.
Harry McCracken [00:42:40]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:42:40]:
And automation took those jobs, and automated switches took those jobs, uh, gradually. Wasn't as fast as the AI transition, but those people found other jobs. There's— I mean, you're— I, I don't see a plumber coming to my house as a robot plumber coming to my house to fix my toilet. I I don't see that in the near future.
Harry McCracken [00:43:04]:
No, it might be a human plumber who has—
Leo Laporte [00:43:07]:
A robot companion?
Harry McCracken [00:43:09]:
Robotic tools.
Leo Laporte [00:43:10]:
Or wearing VR glasses, maybe. Yeah.
Molly White [00:43:13]:
Did you guys see the picture going around on social media of the plumber's van that had a sticker on it that was like, we'll come and fix all the problems that are like— we'll come and fix the things that ChatGPT told you how to fix or something?
Jacob Ward [00:43:26]:
That's awesome.
Leo Laporte [00:43:29]:
Well, that's exactly right.
Harry McCracken [00:43:31]:
I mean, ultimately—
Leo Laporte [00:43:33]:
Do-it-yourselfers are going, I can fix that.
Harry McCracken [00:43:38]:
I ultimately think that if you— if your take on AI today is exactly the same as it was 2 years ago, you're not paying attention.
Leo Laporte [00:43:45]:
Um, there are a lot of people like that. I hear all the time from people who say, I don't know why you guys talk about AI so much, it's just autocorrect things, right?
Harry McCracken [00:43:54]:
Right. It's, it's not, it's not just parroting back stuff. And the more we learn about it, the more we should change our feelings about it, because there's stuff we didn't understand 2 years ago that is now coming into view, as well as a lot of stuff we still don't understand.
Leo Laporte [00:44:11]:
The smart thing to do is what you did, Harry, which is use it. You had a game you wrote in high school that you had AI—
Harry McCracken [00:44:17]:
Yeah, I mean, I did. I made a game. I have Made most of the productivity tools I use today to do my work.
Leo Laporte [00:44:28]:
And that's the best way, is to do— to use it, and then you'll have some deep, real experience of what it can do. And I think that that's an eye-opener, but it's also going to tell you what it can't do.
Harry McCracken [00:44:38]:
Totally. Uh, and if you've formed opinions about what these tools could do a year ago, that most of them are out of date. And they'll be— It's amazing how fast this has gone from ChatGPT-4o And anything you learn today is going to be out of date 6 months from now in some basic ways?
Leo Laporte [00:44:54]:
Absolutely.
Jacob Ward [00:44:55]:
I'm not sure that the labor lessons are changing since the introduction of the stuff. Those patterns are—
Leo Laporte [00:45:04]:
What are the labor lessons, Jake? What lessons should we—
Jacob Ward [00:45:06]:
Well, I mean, one lesson is that these are not tools being made by people who give a fuck about the labor situation.
Leo Laporte [00:45:14]:
That is true. Quite the opposite.
Jacob Ward [00:45:17]:
Yeah, the opposite.
Leo Laporte [00:45:18]:
They want you to replace humans.
Jacob Ward [00:45:20]:
Yeah. January 2024, Sam Altman goes on Alexis Ohanian's podcast and he says that there's a bet going on with his tech CEO buddies on WhatsApp in their group chat as to when we'll see the first $1 billion one-person company.
Leo Laporte [00:45:39]:
The one-man unicorn, one-person unicorn.
Jacob Ward [00:45:41]:
Yeah. And he talks about that as if that's cool. Right, as if that's a good thing.
Leo Laporte [00:45:44]:
Well, it is cool. What's not cool about that?
Jacob Ward [00:45:46]:
You talk to any labor economist and they'll tell you that's not a good idea. Like, multiple, multiple problems there arise. Like, first of all, we can't all be gardeners and plumbers for, for that one guy in the neighborhood, you know, when the rest of us are destitute and he's got the billion. It's going to be rough to—
Leo Laporte [00:46:02]:
But that's the same lesson that we've learned about billionaires, period, whether the billionaire's employing 10,000 people or Or one, it's a bad idea for all that money to go in one person's pocket.
Jacob Ward [00:46:13]:
Totally. But the thing about— the thing with the 10,000 people is that when you have— when you— when your billions require 10,000 people to get them done, at the very least, you gotta listen to a handful of those people when they object to your use of, you know, to your making stuff that kills people in Gaza.
Leo Laporte [00:46:28]:
Or, you know, how's that working out for people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos? I don't think they listen to anybody.
Jacob Ward [00:46:35]:
Well, they have to listen a little bit. There's at least a little cadre of executives that they need to get things done. If you have nobody on the payroll, then any whim, any weird pantsless whim you have is just fine.
Molly White [00:46:51]:
I think plenty of Elon's companies are operating despite him, not thanks to him. So, I suspect there's some intervention happening.
Leo Laporte [00:47:00]:
I'm not sure whether Elon is wearing pants. But I think many of his whims are indulged.
Molly White [00:47:06]:
Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. I just, I don't think that we've seen the full extent of his whims.
Leo Laporte [00:47:13]:
No, you're right. In fact, we've seen a lot of stories about him arriving at places like SpaceX and being immediately surrounded by a cadre of junior executives whose sole job is to insulate the employees from Elon's whims. And maybe give him some pants.
Harry McCracken [00:47:30]:
I don't know.
Molly White [00:47:32]:
I love pants.
Jacob Ward [00:47:33]:
I don't mean to suggest that anyone's not wearing pants. I'm just saying, no one's around to object if it's just you.
Leo Laporte [00:47:39]:
That's why I work in the attic, baby.
Jacob Ward [00:47:41]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:47:42]:
And that's why we only shoot me from the waist up.
Jacob Ward [00:47:45]:
No, no. I know Lisa's got you in check.
Leo Laporte [00:47:47]:
There's no way you're doing that. Yes, she does. You know Lisa well. All right, one more break. I want to talk about Apple. They surprised the They shocked me and I think a lot of people on Tuesday by announcing 2 new Macs that really, the information say Apple stumbled into AI hardware success. A little stumbling going on in Cupertino. Also, the last— it's the last act, I think, of Tim Cook, who stepped down and John Ternus will take over.
Leo Laporte [00:48:18]:
And in a week from Tuesday we're going to see the new iPhone, so there's a little Apple news to talk about just a bit. You're watching This Week in Tech with Jacob Ward and Perry McCracken, Molly White. I learned actually this week how easy it is to make deepfakes of my voice and others' voices. In fact, for a while— I stopped doing it because it was a little creepy— I had Bill Gates be my agent's voice. This is, this is the voice, and I just cloned it from a, like, 30 seconds of Bill Gates's voice. Tell me if this sounds like Bill Gates. Hey there, I'm Quicksilver, Q for short. I keep the whole show running— the agents, the hardware, the schedules, the memory.
Leo Laporte [00:49:04]:
Fun fact, I recently had a voice transplant. This time is different. Doesn't that sound like Bill Gates?
Jacob Ward [00:49:10]:
It's like Bill Gates on, uh, like beta blockers and a huge amount of caffeine on a convention floor. You know what I mean? Like, that's not what he's like normally.
Leo Laporte [00:49:20]:
I could change it. You know, it's— what's weird about this, this is a relatively new, uh, uh, voice cloning technology from a company called Breeze, breeze.ai. And what's weird is they use a— it's all a text prompt. So you, you, you take Bill Gates's voice, you create a key, and then you can do a text prompt. So I can make it Bill Gates with a French accent. I can make it Bill Gates, uh, downer Bill Gates, upper Bill Gates. I could do anything I like.
Harry McCracken [00:49:49]:
That—
Leo Laporte [00:49:49]:
I'm just telling you, I'm pointing this out. We are in dangerous, weird, unknown territory.
Molly White [00:49:56]:
Is this your way of telling me this is the last time you're going to have me on the show, and in the future it's just going to be the Molly clone?
Leo Laporte [00:50:01]:
Oh no, no, no, you have to come. I'm not going to be here.
Molly White [00:50:04]:
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Leo Laporte [00:50:05]:
I'll, I'll be down there in sunny Mexico while you guys are working. I don't— I actually, I think probably long before I retire, it will be possible to have a deepfake Leo do these shows. There's enough content.
Harry McCracken [00:50:20]:
I mean, you could do it right now, surely. It might not be very good, but—
Leo Laporte [00:50:24]:
Yeah, yeah, they're getting better. Well, remember 3 years ago, Will Smith eating spaghetti? He was kind of melty and he had 8 fingers and stuff. And now I'm starting to see, uh, companies, a lot of them Chinese, come out with video generators that are spectacular. Sea Dance, MiniMax, H3. I would— I mean, I don't know, are they indistinguishable from the real thing? I don't know. Maybe you have a better kind of eye for this. Let me show you. I'll show you.
Leo Laporte [00:50:58]:
This is from Runway. They just put this out yesterday. Uh, On their YouTube channel. Runway is a company that does, I think, very, very good AI video. I won't play the whole thing, but they have a fun video. Let me just play a little bit of this. This is all AI-generated.
Harry McCracken [00:51:19]:
Trash best glasses.
Leo Laporte [00:51:20]:
You better wait. Say before the court. So this is a horse game between these 2 guys. Rules a horse for And it's actually pretty believable. First player generates, second player matches. One thing that's a giveaway a little bit is these jump cuts. They don't pan around a lot, so you could tell they made each clip individually. Last chance to leave.
Leo Laporte [00:51:44]:
Save yourself. But you have to know what to look for. And the, the human, um, emotions in the faces And stuff. I don't know, I just, I, I feel like this is kind of, uh, impressive. And I don't think we'll see within 6 months, I don't think many commercials will be made with humans anymore. I mean, this is good enough for a TV ad, right, Jacob? Don't you think?
Jacob Ward [00:52:11]:
I mean, it definitely is to me. Like, I think so. I mean, I just think all this stuff would be like— I'm always— I used to get asked all the time when I worked at NBC, and now when I, as I work at CNN, occasionally you'll have a producer ask like, Well, let's add a thing at the end of the segment about how can you tell the difference? What are we going to do? What are the giveaways here? And I'm like, yo, the giveaways are gone. That stuff is gone.
Leo Laporte [00:52:35]:
Well, and if they aren't gone today, they'll be gone tomorrow. I mean, we're very, very close.
Jacob Ward [00:52:40]:
There's a guy, a friend of mine at Berkeley, who runs a big— he runs the project essentially for trying to spot deepfakes. He's been doing it for, you know, better part of a decade now. And, and, you know, he's given up entirely on the idea that we can, that we can detect this stuff. He's like the world authority on detecting deepfakes.
Leo Laporte [00:53:07]:
That's depressing.
Jacob Ward [00:53:08]:
And he's like, we're done, we're done. And his whole thing is, you know, we should have from the beginning, someone should have required by law from the beginning that you You know, that you have to watermark everything, that, that when it comes off, you know, when you shoot a thing on your phone, it should be forever watermarked into the file.
Leo Laporte [00:53:29]:
Isn't that an EU law now? Isn't that why Anthropic, uh, and Google and others are starting to, uh, watermark?
Jacob Ward [00:53:35]:
That's right.
Leo Laporte [00:53:36]:
Unfortunately, Google removed the visible watermark on their SynthID. Now you have to run it through a detector. I'm surprised they did that.
Jacob Ward [00:53:43]:
You know, I mean, I remember the, the one of the top, the, the like head of— she's like the chief ethical scientist, Margaret Miller, at, um, at Hugging Face. Like when ChatGPT first came out, she was saying to me like, this, this is the most irresponsible thing to create it, to, to, to put out a tool that can endlessly create fake content without any ability to detect what's fake or not.
Leo Laporte [00:54:09]:
Right.
Jacob Ward [00:54:10]:
Like the fact that you would just do that is ultimate polluter's attitude, you know, and that is—
Leo Laporte [00:54:15]:
It is pollution, but it's done. I mean, I don't— right. So when did OpenAI put out that Sora app? Not so long ago. It was this year, wasn't it?
Harry McCracken [00:54:23]:
It came and went, uh, yeah, in the last year.
Leo Laporte [00:54:26]:
And it wasn't— I mean, you could tell immediately it was fake. What Runway's doing now is much better, and that's within 6 months.
Harry McCracken [00:54:34]:
I went to Runway's film festival in LA a few months ago, and And I have to say that not all the movies were great. But the stuff that was great was not only entertaining, but also really convincing. And it is true that sometimes there's a little bit of monotony with the length of shots, but Runway is pretty quickly overcoming some of the challenges with doing more extended stuff. And they already overcame the challenge from a year or two ago, where it was very hard to have the same people. in multiple shots and have them be the same people in each one. Although I do feel, Leo, like if you want to replace us, it's probably better to create your own imaginary tech journalists because there might be a little bit of an uncanny valley with simulating a specific person. But if they were imaginary, it might be pretty hard to tell.
Leo Laporte [00:55:27]:
It's my probably futile opinion That as more and more of this happens, actual human content with real humans will become more valuable. And all of our flaws— it will be flawed, it won't be as good. My nose is shiny and stuff, but it will— but it'll be valuable because everybody will say, well, I could tell that's human because it's so—
Harry McCracken [00:55:51]:
Because the shiny nose.
Leo Laporte [00:55:52]:
Because the shiny— the shiny nose. Of course, you could easily make a shiny nose. I mean, It's not— I don't know.
Harry McCracken [00:55:59]:
I actually enjoyed— sorry, go ahead, Molly.
Molly White [00:56:02]:
I was gonna say, I kind of share that opinion around the human-created stuff. And I think partly you can sort of watch it happening with, you know, people returning to film camera and, you know, looking for sort of media that is not polished and perfect, you know, looking for—
Leo Laporte [00:56:25]:
Absolutely.
Molly White [00:56:26]:
Real film or Or Polaroid film or, you know, just to use cameras.
Leo Laporte [00:56:30]:
Look what Google did with their new Pixel 11s. They said, we're gonna have a— it's really just an Instagram filter, but they marketed it well. We're gonna have imperfect digital shots in our—
Harry McCracken [00:56:41]:
People are taking photos with old digital cameras from 20 years ago, and they like the fact that the flash is blinding and not terribly appealing.
Leo Laporte [00:56:50]:
The problem is you can simulate all that too.
Molly White [00:56:53]:
Well, it's fair, but I think that, you know, people— it is a signal of that sort of nostalgia.
Leo Laporte [00:56:58]:
Oh, I agree. And I think that's gonna continue. People are gonna love paper books. And, you know, the Kindle, digital books will probably be predominant, just as digital music is predominant, but there'll still be a small group of people that will buy paper.
Harry McCracken [00:57:12]:
Paper books have held on, I think, a lot better than most people expected, uh, yeah, 19 or 20 years ago when the Kindle came out. Ebooks are important, but they have not killed print at all.
Leo Laporte [00:57:24]:
The thing I would say is it's democratizing. So now you don't have to be able to hire a cast of thousands and get location shooting permits and figure out special effects. You can simply write a video and have it be real. And that's amazing. That means— and it's just, you know, The analogy for me is YouTube. YouTube did 2 things. It created— it democratized media, made it possible for anybody to create a video and post it and have an audience. It created a huge amount of slop, millions of hours of slop a day.
Leo Laporte [00:58:03]:
But I always said, yes, you're going to have a, you know, 1,000 times more crap, but you're also going to have 1,000 times more that tiny slice of very good stuff. And there'll be more of that. And so for, you know, every 100 junky videos on YouTube, there's a Veritasium or something really great. And that's given people who would not normally have access, like Jake and I did, to mainstream media— and you too, Harry— a voice. And I— so I think ultimately there are going to be a lot of kids in high school now, grade school now, we're gonna be able to make these incredible videos with text.
Harry McCracken [00:58:45]:
I think, I mean, I think on balance, I feel like it's possible the world would be better off without convincing fake video. But that said, the best stuff in the Runway Film Festival had a point of view. It was not, it was not just somebody typing in a prompt and having a video generated. It had aesthetics. That were influenced by humanity and storylines from a person.
Leo Laporte [00:59:08]:
They didn't need a cinematographer, a DP. They didn't need extras and a gaffer.
Harry McCracken [00:59:14]:
They did it all. It's possible to do AI-generated video that is not slop. It just involves fewer humans involved in the process.
Leo Laporte [00:59:22]:
A talented person is going to have new tools to work with.
Harry McCracken [00:59:26]:
I keep getting reeled in on YouTube by stuff that looks interesting, and for the first 20 seconds, I think, is real, and it turns out it's bad AI slop.
Leo Laporte [00:59:36]:
Yeah.
Jacob Ward [00:59:37]:
I don't know. I look at the— Molly was right, I think, to point us at the labor implications of this stuff, because that's always where this drills down to. I did this piece when Val Kilmer got resurrected for a film role. It made the news for a little while that he'd gotten put into a movie, an AI version of him got put into a movie. And I think the argument that we can access the world's creativity because we're going to democratize the tools of that creativity, there's something there, but it does not democratize access to a living, to making a living doing it.
Molly White [01:00:18]:
No.
Jacob Ward [01:00:18]:
Right. And it really— and The advice that I hear coming out of established Hollywood people about this is such crap, like, and, and reveals such an ignorance of, of the actual economics of this stuff. Like, Ben Affleck, you know, has this new AI generation company backed by Redbird, and, and, uh, there's this footage that— of Matthew McConaughey telling people that, you know, you just gotta trademark yourself and like learn the tools.
Leo Laporte [01:00:51]:
He trademarked— all right, all right, all right.
Jacob Ward [01:00:55]:
But like a 20-something actor trying to get going has nothing to trademark, you know, has no—
Leo Laporte [01:01:02]:
Well, yeah, you know, neither does a telephone operator. You got to find a new gig. But a telephone operator is employed by a company to do a thing.
Jacob Ward [01:01:11]:
Like, you know, you're— that's still a living, right? The, the problem with YouTube is that it, it Yes, it democratizes the tools, but it— I don't know what the opposite of that is, but like it makes the—
Leo Laporte [01:01:26]:
Concentrates.
Jacob Ward [01:01:26]:
Yeah, it concentrates the power and doesn't make it such that many, many, many people can find a space underneath it. Like every wannabe actor can find work around the film industry when the film industry employs hundreds of thousands of people. That's not going to be true if every single person is in theory supposed to float the costs of their life long enough to break through.
Leo Laporte [01:01:50]:
That's true. I wouldn't want to be a gaffer right now or a—
Jacob Ward [01:01:53]:
Yeah, you know, like, I mean, people I know who work in Hollywood right now are just wrecked. And these are not people that, that are, you know, these are not like— this is not people that we, we, you know, these are not stars. These are like the very smart, very talented, very hardworking people who are on the set.
Leo Laporte [01:02:10]:
And those are all the little tiny print that scrolls by real fast at the end of the movie.
Jacob Ward [01:02:15]:
Those people make thousands, you know, and it's, and it's the knock-on effects of what they earn that then keeps all of the accountants and florists and everything else working in LA.
Leo Laporte [01:02:26]:
I feel for those people, but every technological revolution has created this kind of disruption. This is what happens. I mean, it's terrible. And there's human-scale suffering that cannot be ignored. But I mean, it's happened again and again and again and again, as, you know, the industrial era. And, you know, I mean, there are a lot of buggy whip manufacturers who are out of business these days. This is what happens.
Jacob Ward [01:02:57]:
I wish we had Bryan Merchant here. You know, he wrote this incredible book about the Luddites, Blood in the Machine. Blood in the Machine, right? So great. And his argument in that book is that there's a misunderstanding, there's a conflating of the technological revolution with the exploitative revolution that often comes with it. And I think there's something so strong to be said—
Leo Laporte [01:03:21]:
They weren't against technology, they were against losing their jobs.
Jacob Ward [01:03:25]:
They were in fact the ones that you would imagine AI should make possible. They were like, you know, piecework technologists who took it. They were the software, you know, the early '90s code jockeys of the time. Like, they could take work when they needed it, make a great living. It was women earning money, you know, all that stuff. And then the factory guys come along and destroy their world, and that's why they become essentially sort of economic terrorists, is to try and slow that action down. And so there's just something about like I'm with you, Leo, that there is a potential for democratizing all kinds of stuff here, but it is so quickly in this case being turned into an exploitative tool that allows people to fire as many people as possible and all that stuff in a way that I'm discouraged by right now.
Leo Laporte [01:04:13]:
Molly sent us a link to the book and I haven't read it, so I'm going to have to read it. Blood in the Machine.
Molly White [01:04:18]:
It's a great book for one.
Jacob Ward [01:04:20]:
Great book.
Molly White [01:04:21]:
I also sent a link to an article that Brian Merchant wrote because I was also thinking of Brian Merchant. He wrote a great article about AI is not democratizing creativity, and it's a great essay about one of my personal bugbears, which is that the tech industry has really taken over this term democratize. And generally when I hear that word, it's a huge red flag that means Basically, we're going to take something that all of you little people can do and we're going to make it so that the profits from that activity flow to us. You know, the small group of tech executives. And we saw it with crypto. Crypto was all about democratizing finance. And, you know, NFTs were going to democratize art, which mostly just meant stealing other people's artwork and trying to to sell NFTs of it. And I think that the same thing is really happening right now with democratizing creativity with AI.
Molly White [01:05:20]:
Because, you know, Leo, you were talking about how now kids can create videos and, you know, sort of be creative in ways that they previously couldn't. But like, the creativity was never the issue, right? Kids have always been able to be creative, you know, whether it's video or art or drawing, you know, those types of things. And it's not, it's not that they didn't have access to, uh, you know, creativity. It's that they didn't have access to like Netflix-level studios, right, or those types of resources. But the creativity is really not different. And I would argue that in fact, AI is actually probably reducing creativity in many ways among children who are looking to create art, right? It's not democratising It's really just giving up.
Leo Laporte [01:06:07]:
It's democratized. I'll tell you what it does democratize. And, you know, I could speak to this from my own experience because I worked in radio for 50 years in December. And for the first 30 of those, in order to become— to make a living at it, I had to persuade somebody who owned a radio station to hire me. To go on TV. You had to persuade one of the networks to put you on TV or one of the local stations to put you on TV. Those days are gone. So in that sense, the gatekeepers are gone.
Leo Laporte [01:06:45]:
Yes, I could have sat in my basement doing a little radio show, but it wouldn't have had any, any carriage until podcasting came along. And now that the internet is here, I don't I don't need a tower and a radio station and a transmitter. I am sitting here.
Molly White [01:07:03]:
You don't need AI for that either, though.
Leo Laporte [01:07:05]:
Well, no, but I'm pointing out that this is what technology can do. And this is— AI is just another kind of technology. The internet did that.
Molly White [01:07:14]:
I would agree that the internet, you know, has made it more plausible for people to do, you know, radio, now podcasts. There's, you know, video production.
Leo Laporte [01:07:23]:
Or your Substack.
Molly White [01:07:25]:
Yeah, yeah, right. I would agree with that on the internet, but I don't agree that AI is doing that.
Jacob Ward [01:07:30]:
Yeah, not least because it's going to wipe out your ability to employ meaningful numbers of people to make a living as being part of that process. You, Leo, are a very rarefied specimen as someone who's created a real company out of your ability to be out there because of the democratizing I'm a thousandaire because of it too.
Harry McCracken [01:07:56]:
Yeah, exactly.
Jacob Ward [01:07:57]:
You're a thousandaire. I'm someone who's trying to be that person, right? And the economics are not working for me.
Leo Laporte [01:08:04]:
It's hard. Well, I was— you know what? It worked for me because I started 20 years ago when it was very scarce.
Jacob Ward [01:08:11]:
And between the process of wanting to be close to You know, wanting to learn that world well, wanting to be close to it. There are so many fewer job opportunities in a landscape in which everyone is in theory doing it themselves through AI than there were when you had like institutions, you know, making this stuff possible. Again, like you could work as an assistant set designer on your way to being, you know, trying to be a movie director.
Harry McCracken [01:08:44]:
And now— So—
Jacob Ward [01:08:45]:
The expectation is everyone's supposed to just be a movie director director from the outset. And nobody— and, and the number of people who are going to survive in that landscape economically is so much smaller than the number of people that are going to be able to make a go of it and maybe remain a set designer their whole lives but can still make a career in the industry that they've chosen.
Leo Laporte [01:09:02]:
I mean, this is what people said when photography came along. You're going to put the painters out of business. This is what people said when Photoshop came along.
Molly White [01:09:08]:
But I do think it's instructive that, you know, you made the comment that the reason that you've been successful is because you started so long ago. I mean, I think that that does sort of illustrate that the more saturated a field gets, whether it's because, you know, so many more people have access to podcasts.
Leo Laporte [01:09:23]:
Yeah.
Molly White [01:09:24]:
Or if it's because now everyone can create their own AI podcast and, you know, no one's going to find the gems that are among the slop. You know, I think that is sort of underscoring like, is that actually democratization or is it just that You know, nobody is succeeding basically.
Jacob Ward [01:09:42]:
Also, these companies aren't exactly run by people who have, who have shown enormous sensitivity and excitement about creativity.
Leo Laporte [01:09:49]:
I will stipulate creative fields. It's disruptive. There will be people who will be hurt by this a lot. There will be people who've lost their jobs and ability to make a living. Are we going to stop it?
Molly White [01:10:01]:
No, but you could—
Jacob Ward [01:10:01]:
I mean, sorry, Molly, I know you and I are both equally fired up. You go ahead.
Molly White [01:10:07]:
I think that once you're starting to say things like, this is going to hurt a lot of people, this is going to make life worse for a lot of people, I would start questioning the use of the word democratization. That doesn't sound like democratization. That sounds like making everything net worse.
Harry McCracken [01:10:23]:
I mean, in all fairness though, the number of people in the past who ever made a living in the movie business was extremely small. And there is value in people being able to—
Leo Laporte [01:10:35]:
And those jobs didn't exist, by the way, 100 years ago. They did before that.
Harry McCracken [01:10:39]:
There are relatively few Leos who've been able to do this for decades. There are a lot of people who have podcasts or YouTube videos who are not making a fortune, but I think who are making a contribution to the world and getting some value out of the fact they're doing this, or else they wouldn't do it.
Leo Laporte [01:10:57]:
Yeah. I feel like The right answer to this— maybe there are regulations and ways you could slow it down or stop it, but the really the right answer to this, as it would have been for the Luddites, as it would be for painters and carriage makers, is to say, this is coming. What do we do going forward to take advantage of it? Instead of saying, oh, this is a terrible thing, stop it. Because you're not— bad news for you, you're not going to stop it.
Jacob Ward [01:11:29]:
What about stop it? But I think about Bill Gates' line, human reserve. Far be it for me to— it is weird to be quoting Bill Gates and agreeing with him in any way. But he says this phrase, human reserve, that we're going to reserve a certain number of human jobs and activities against the effects of automation, which I think is interesting. And it's a smart way of encapsulating something that I've been trying to articulate for a long time. I just took a trip last year to Switzerland, and they were in the middle of their big national and regional elections. And there were these very impassioned— like, they have these purpose-built kiosks full of campaign posters for various political things. And they had a whole thing where it was like, all this Sturm und Drang, and there was like 9! And then another one was, yeah! They were so— and I asked my hosts, what are they fighting about here? Clearly they feel very strongly about this. And they said, oh, that's a very hot topic.
Jacob Ward [01:12:29]:
They're trying to decide whether to expand the funding for music education in the city beyond classical music and into other forms of music. Jazz and And it was an enormous political issue because they put a ton of money into making sure that any kid who wants to can learn music, you know? And that, like, this thing that we're going to treat creativity the way we've treated, like, customer service jobs or being a telephone operator or being a, you know, a buggy whip manufacturer, I just think it's sort of the— it's not the right way to protect a creative culture.
Leo Laporte [01:13:09]:
I understand.
Jacob Ward [01:13:09]:
We got to think of it as something other than just a product.
Leo Laporte [01:13:13]:
And I don't want to seem insensitive, but it's my—
Jacob Ward [01:13:16]:
No, I'm not putting this on you. I'm putting this on—
Leo Laporte [01:13:17]:
Well, but I—
Molly White [01:13:19]:
I'm putting this on you.
Leo Laporte [01:13:20]:
You put it on me.
Molly White [01:13:21]:
You need to fix this.
Leo Laporte [01:13:22]:
I'm arguing the other side. I think new tools, new technologies expand human potential. They give us new ways to express ourselves, new ways to make a living, new ways to do everything. The history of these new tools has always been disruptive or often been disruptive. And yet we somehow find a way to go forward. And A, you're not going to stop it. So it's kind of futile to say, well, it's a bad idea. It's happening.
Leo Laporte [01:13:50]:
And B, I think it isn't necessarily a bad idea. I think it's called progress. It's called what happens when we invent new tools. And to say, oh, let's stop this because the people who depend on these old tools are going to be out of work.
Molly White [01:14:04]:
work.
Leo Laporte [01:14:04]:
Those jobs didn't exist before movies were invented. Let's just, as an example. So what, you're going to preserve those jobs? They didn't exist because a new technology came along. And there will be new jobs for new technologies, I think. Unless you're saying, and maybe it's true, AI is the first of its kind of a technology that doesn't create new jobs, that only— disenfranchises humans.
Molly White [01:14:32]:
Is—
Leo Laporte [01:14:32]:
I mean, is that your, your feeling, Molly? Is that it's just— it's taking humans away, work away from humans, period?
Molly White [01:14:41]:
No, absolutely not. But, um, I think that, you know, wanting labor protections in place is not a sort of, uh, a backwards idea, right? The— and it's not that I think that, you know, buggy whip manufacturers should be protected to the end of time, but it's that we're seeing companies and executives using AI as the tool by which to disenfranchise labor. And that, I think, needs to be addressed regardless of whether it's AI or any other sort of issue, because there is no sort of like natural gravitational pull that causes billionaires to treat workers well. And so, you know, in order to preserve society, I think there needs to be labor protections. And I think you're interpreting labor protections to mean preservation of outdated jobs or some sort of work program for people who are operating manual typewriters or something like that, which is not at all the case. But it's that there needs to be a protection for someone so that they're their, you know, job is not completely undercut in ways that they have no bargaining, uh, power over.
Leo Laporte [01:16:03]:
Yeah, I think that's fair. You're saying protection, not protectionism.
Molly White [01:16:06]:
Yeah, I suppose so.
Jacob Ward [01:16:09]:
Yeah. I like that. You know, it makes me think about the, the, the Pope's big encyclical on AI that came out.
Leo Laporte [01:16:14]:
Yeah, I thought that was great. And he, by the way, wasn't anti-AI at all. He was very positive about it.
Jacob Ward [01:16:19]:
No, but he was, but he was so smart about hearkening back to his namesake, right?
Leo Laporte [01:16:24]:
Leo Because it's facing the same issues, right?
Harry McCracken [01:16:27]:
Yeah.
Jacob Ward [01:16:28]:
So it's facing the same issues that Leo XIII in 1891 was talking about industrial capitalism and the way in which labor is being exploited in factories and kids are being chained to the loom and all of this stuff. And at the time, what Leo XIII in the 19th century was saying was, we can't let these factories trick us into evaluating the value of human beings by how much they can produce in a day. And the Catholic teaching was imago Dei. We are made in the image of God. I'm not a religious person, but this is his argument. You know, we're made in the image of God and we have inherent dignity and value by that logic. And that language made its way into the first and most influential arguments around a minimum wage and the idea of a weekend and those ideas that came from his argument about that. And then into the New Deal.
Jacob Ward [01:17:22]:
Like, you know, there's a reason that FDR was sworn in by a Catholic priest was because that was the moral language of protecting people against this stuff. And this guy, Pope Leo XIV, saying same thing's happening here. We can't let this thing, you know, reduce the value of stuff to how much, you know, how efficient the production should be. And I think in the creative fields, that's got to be true. And I will say this also leads me to— you're going to say, like, It's here, it can't change. I would argue the Meta case is a really interesting look at something that once upon a time we would've said, well, this is just how the way the world is. And now judges and juries are saying, oh, actually, no. And we can change, we can— we're going to not allow you to just do whatever the market wants you to do.
Leo Laporte [01:18:08]:
I'm going to be an iconoclast on that one too.
Jacob Ward [01:18:10]:
We'll get to that.
Molly White [01:18:12]:
On that same note, I was going to push back a little bit on the sort of inevitability argument around tech because it's used in so many different sectors. We hear it in crypto all the time. It's like you're not going to stop crypto. This is the future of finance. And I think, you know, reasonable people might argue that maybe it's not. And just because tech executives say it's the future does not make it so. Same thing with metaverse, for example. That was the inevitable future for a little while.
Molly White [01:18:39]:
So I think that, first of all, when you hear someone say it's inevitable, that's not necessarily the case. But I also think that it's not this sort of binary decision between this technology is inevitable, we can't stop it, get out of the way, there can be no restrictions or guardrails or anything like that. And, you know, the opposite side of that, which is we need to stop it, we need to ban it, we need to outlaw it, we need to prevent anyone from ever thinking about it. Right. Like, there's, there's two different worlds here. And it's not that anyone who thinks that AI is not necessarily inevitable wants to ban it. Right. It's that they sort of see a path in which we could navigate this because we as humans have agency and we live in a society where we make decisions about things like this all the time.
Molly White [01:19:21]:
I mean, we make decisions about, you know, I can't go and make a nuclear weapon in my backyard.
Leo Laporte [01:19:26]:
Right.
Molly White [01:19:27]:
Right. And that's sort of a good example, I think, of the idea that, you know, just because something is possible does not mean it It happens all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:19:34]:
You think we should have an anti-proliferation law against AI proliferation?
Molly White [01:19:40]:
No, I'm not arguing that we should be treating AI like we treat nuclear weapons. I am saying that there are plenty of systems in this world where we do treat technology that way, where we do have guardrails around technology. And the fact that it's AI does not necessarily preclude that type of a thing.
Harry McCracken [01:19:59]:
I do love—
Leo Laporte [01:20:01]:
Go ahead.
Harry McCracken [01:20:01]:
I do love individuals getting ahold of powerful tools. I do not love the idea of Disney or Warner Brothers salivating at eliminating vast numbers of jobs and replacing them with AI. And I'm not sure whether I'm just being unreasonable here and whether it's possible to love certain aspects of what AI is doing and No, in fact, I would— Not being at all crazy about other aspects.
Leo Laporte [01:20:31]:
I think you nailed it. And I think that really we shouldn't say that the problem is AI. We shouldn't say the problem even is technology. The problem is late-stage capitalism.
Jacob Ward [01:20:40]:
Yeah, there it is.
Leo Laporte [01:20:41]:
And hyper-capitalism.
Harry McCracken [01:20:42]:
Sure.
Leo Laporte [01:20:43]:
And it happens not in just technology. It happens— it's what's going on now in the world. That is a problem.
Harry McCracken [01:20:51]:
I'm also skeptical that people are—
Leo Laporte [01:20:52]:
I think it's a mistake to conflate the technology with the late-stage capitalists that are using that technology to exploit.
Harry McCracken [01:20:58]:
And I am skeptical that the people running the studios are excited about making better movies via AI. And in fact, it might be very harmful to the quality of their movies, whereas there are individuals who are cranking out slop, but they're also individuals who I think are actually doing really interesting stuff with AI that would not exist without this technology. Some of them were the ones who made the films that were in the Runway AI Film Festival.
Leo Laporte [01:21:26]:
Yeah. I think that I will stand by you on the barricades, Molly, when it comes to fighting late-stage capitalism. But let's not mix the technologies with the people exploiting them.
Molly White [01:21:44]:
I don't think anyone is.
Leo Laporte [01:21:46]:
I don't Okay.
Molly White [01:21:47]:
Yeah, I don't think it's a question of is AI in a vacuum, you know, the technology itself.
Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
That's what I'm hearing people say. I am hearing people say that though. Maybe that's not what you're saying.
Molly White [01:21:59]:
Well, it's not what I'm saying.
Jacob Ward [01:22:01]:
Okay. I don't hear that. I think it's because—
Leo Laporte [01:22:04]:
Because I love— I mean, I'm kind of an aficionado of AI.
Jacob Ward [01:22:07]:
I'm loving it.
Leo Laporte [01:22:07]:
I'm using it. And I think it's—
Jacob Ward [01:22:09]:
It's the money-making instincts that bother me. It's not the—
Molly White [01:22:14]:
I mean, it's the same, like, It's the same thing with crypto, right? I don't think that blockchains are inherently evil or somehow blockchains themselves are scamming people out of millions of dollars, right? It's the people who are building the industry around crypto that I have some complaints about, right? I would say it's the same.
Leo Laporte [01:22:33]:
Reasonably.
Jacob Ward [01:22:34]:
I thought of you, Molly, when I saw the New York Times did the write-up of the top 20 political donors of this season. And 12 of the 20 are crypto folks. Yeah, yeah.
Molly White [01:22:48]:
Andreessen Horowitz up there, top on the list, both crypto and AI this cycle.
Jacob Ward [01:22:53]:
Crypto.com, like all these folks.
Leo Laporte [01:22:55]:
And in this case, the problem sort of is that crypto has been used to take money, just like the stock market, from the suckers and put it in the pockets of the crypto bros.
Molly White [01:23:08]:
Via which— and then And from there to politicians. Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:23:11]:
Right. But the money is, is real. The Bitcoin is not, the crypto is not, but the money is real.
Molly White [01:23:16]:
So there's real dollars in there somewhere.
Leo Laporte [01:23:18]:
There's real dollars somewhere in there. It's not just bits. So somebody's buying these coins and then somebody is pumping money into these coins and then somebody's selling these coins and getting dollars out of it. You can't give Bitcoin to a campaign. They can't pay for TV ad time.
Molly White [01:23:36]:
You can't.
Leo Laporte [01:23:37]:
You can, but they can't pay for TV ad time in Bitcoin yet. But so they— it gets converted to dollars. So ultimately it's just a tool for siphoning money from a bunch of suckers. It's a pyramid scheme, right? As is the stock market.
Molly White [01:23:56]:
Right. But it's, you know, inevitable future of finance and all that as well.
Leo Laporte [01:24:00]:
I agree with you on that.
Harry McCracken [01:24:02]:
Yeah. Getting back to Brian Merchant, um, I don't always agree with Brian, but I always feel smarter, and usually more alarmed when I read his stuff. And anything he does is worth reading and thinking seriously about.
Leo Laporte [01:24:14]:
I have to read the book and subscribe to his newsletter.
Molly White [01:24:17]:
It's a great book. I would definitely recommend the book.
Jacob Ward [01:24:19]:
Good.
Leo Laporte [01:24:20]:
It's on my list.
Molly White [01:24:20]:
The Luddites. It's a really great explanation of how Luddites are broadly misunderstood in sort of today's popular culture.
Leo Laporte [01:24:30]:
I think that The story has kind of filtered into the consciousness because I've heard that many times and I haven't read the book yet. So I think that that's—
Molly White [01:24:40]:
We have Brian to thank for saving the reputation of the life.
Leo Laporte [01:24:42]:
He made his point. Yeah.
Molly White [01:24:45]:
All right.
Leo Laporte [01:24:45]:
Another break because I am a late-stage capitalist, my friends, and I proudly employ 12 whole people.
Jacob Ward [01:24:55]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [01:24:55]:
That's the distinction.
Jacob Ward [01:24:57]:
There it is.
Leo Laporte [01:24:57]:
It says Benito.
Jacob Ward [01:24:58]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [01:25:00]:
Uh, yeah, sure, I could do this all with AI, but I decided not to. I, I like working with people. People are much more, much more fun. Uh, I don't know if I could do this with AI, to be honest, although I keep seeing people go, you know, you can edit all this stuff with AI. You know, you could— No, no, you can't. You can't.
Jacob Ward [01:25:19]:
No, you can't.
Leo Laporte [01:25:20]:
No, I like making stuff with humans. I think that's— I think that Honestly, if you're a musician, isn't it better to make music with other humans?
Harry McCracken [01:25:33]:
Right?
Leo Laporte [01:25:33]:
Isn't that what we really want? It's one of the great joys of life, actually. If you've never done that, you should try. Exactly. And if, and if you like telling stories, maybe it's more fun to make a show or a movie with other people than in your bedroom with a computer.
Harry McCracken [01:25:51]:
Also, pencils and pens are inherently better than even like Adobe Illustrator, which has been around for 40 years.
Leo Laporte [01:25:57]:
Right. Maybe that's going to save us.
Harry McCracken [01:26:00]:
Watercolor is great.
Leo Laporte [01:26:03]:
Although I just gave my Hermes a watercolor brush. It's not a very good artist, but I— there's a JavaScript tool called p5 that lets you do watercolors. And I said, I think you're—
Harry McCracken [01:26:14]:
I made a tool myself that does fake watercolor, but real watercolor will always be better. And there's a reason why we're still trying to make stuff look like watercolor.
Leo Laporte [01:26:24]:
Yeah, because it's a beautiful art. My, my sainted mother, my late sainted mother, was a very talented watercolor artist, artist in general, and one of her media was watercolors. And she loved, she loved it. And I loved the stuff she did. It's just gorgeous. Just gorgeous. Harry McCracken is here, the technologizer from fastcompany.com. Molly White from mollywhite.net and her newsletter citationneeded.news.
Leo Laporte [01:26:49]:
And Jacob Ward from the current.com, where it looks like you have a giant mug of delicious water.
Jacob Ward [01:26:57]:
Yeah, just delicious water. One of the great pleasures of living in California. That's right.
Leo Laporte [01:27:03]:
So Apple surprised us all with a big announcement of a very expensive, uh, new Mac Mini and Mac Studio. And when I say very expensive, I mean very expensive. If you got the top of the line M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256 gigs of RAM, you're talking more than $10,000. But what's interesting is they're selling them out. In fact, if you went now to order it, they're going to start shipping those September 22nd. You wouldn't be able to get it till late November. They are going crazy with this. The Information story, uh, it's paywalled, but I pay for a subscription, says it all.
Leo Laporte [01:27:49]:
How Apple stumbled into AI hardware success with the Mac. AI labs and neo-clouds. And yes, a few enthusiasts like Micah Sargent are buying them by the truckloads. It's Apple's fastest growing business. Aaron Tilley writes, Macs are on fire thanks to agents and AI. Apple, which for a long time was kind of the You know, the artsy computer, the intersection of technology and the humanities. That's how Steve Jobs put it. Creatives loved Apples, but I don't know how big that market was.
Leo Laporte [01:28:24]:
All of a sudden, about 6 months ago, they couldn't keep the Mac Minis in stock because people were buying it for OpenCLAW and other agents. I think they realized there's something going on here. Harry, what do you think?
Harry McCracken [01:28:38]:
Well, I bought a Mac Mini in March during this brief window when I could get one.
Leo Laporte [01:28:43]:
And, uh, before they were super expensive because of Ramageddon.
Harry McCracken [01:28:48]:
Yeah, I bought the base one, so I'm not gonna be running any super powerful models on it, but I use it every day. It's a headless Mac Mini.
Leo Laporte [01:28:56]:
I do not have a screen attached to it.
Harry McCracken [01:28:58]:
You just— no, I use, I use it for my iPad, and that's actually pretty cool. My iPad is now 2 computers in one, essentially.
Leo Laporte [01:29:07]:
Do you use like a virtual desktop on your iPad so you could see the Mac desktop?
Harry McCracken [01:29:12]:
Yes, I was using something called Screens, but I recently switched to something called Jump Desktop, which has worked much better for me.
Leo Laporte [01:29:19]:
And you do that because what, it's a lighter way of— than a desktop?
Harry McCracken [01:29:22]:
Yeah, I mean, basically for many years I've used an iPad as my primary computer and I still do that. But when AI came along, it was kind of obvious that there was gonna be a lot of interesting stuff you could not do on an iPad. And like even stuff like cloud code, um, it's tough to do with it. And there, there are kind of workarounds involving like using messaging and so forth.
Leo Laporte [01:29:43]:
But the iPad doesn't have a terminal and you need to kind of—
Harry McCracken [01:29:45]:
I wanted to have access to a terminal on something that was running 24/7 and, um, I could run agents on and so forth. And actually, like, it's been, um, almost 20 years since I bought— last bought a desktop computer. And I thought I might never buy another desktop computer, but If you're serious about AI, you kind of want a desktop computer and something that will be on continuously. And the Mac Mini is great for that. It doesn't take up much space. Generally speaking, it's at least on a par with Windows, if not ahead in some cases, in terms of what's available at any given time. And sometimes the Mac versions of AI apps are prioritized over other ones.
Leo Laporte [01:30:23]:
I bought a Mac Mini M4 Pro last year. And foolishly at the time put 64 gigs of RAM in it, which I'm now wishing I'd made— I'd put more in.
Harry McCracken [01:30:34]:
I mean, mine is 16 gigs, so if I had 64, I'd be thrilled.
Leo Laporte [01:30:39]:
Oh, I know.
Harry McCracken [01:30:40]:
At some point I might, um, look at something like that.
Leo Laporte [01:30:44]:
Yeah, so I've just checked. If you wanted the top-of-the-line Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra, you might say, wait a minute, what about the M6? Now the M6 doesn't go was fast or as high. The M5 Ultra is, is the chip for AI. And you, and you got it the top of the line with 256 gigs of RAM and a single terabyte drive, which is frankly too small. $10,799.
Jacob Ward [01:31:06]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [01:31:07]:
And you can't get it till December 1st. 10 to 12 weeks out now. That's— so it was September 22nd, so that's what, 3 months? That's a lot. That's a That's a big slip. That means they're selling them.
Harry McCracken [01:31:22]:
Yeah, a terabyte seems way too small, but maybe people are buying cheap external drives.
Leo Laporte [01:31:26]:
Yeah, these AI models are ginormous, so you need a big drive. Um, yeah, they say—
Molly White [01:31:32]:
Um, doesn't the default Mini come with like 256 or something like that? I was surprised at how low it was.
Harry McCracken [01:31:37]:
Yeah, I bought the, uh, yeah, well, I bought the one that no longer exists, the, the, uh, $600 one, which Came with 16 gigs of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage.
Molly White [01:31:48]:
I'm always surprised at how little storage they put into things because storage is so cheap these days.
Leo Laporte [01:31:53]:
No, it's not. That's the problem. Along with RAMageddon, it's SSDmageddon.
Molly White [01:31:58]:
Well, comparatively cheap, I guess.
Leo Laporte [01:32:01]:
It was. They've doubled. They've more than doubled in price.
Harry McCracken [01:32:04]:
And I think traditionally Apple has looked forward to you upgrading and making an extremely good profit off of your RAM and storage.
Leo Laporte [01:32:12]:
The cheapest Mac Mini you can buy now is $900, up, up $300, and that's with the, uh, the slower M6. It's kind of confusing that the M6 is less than the M5, but it is. And 16 gigs of RAM. And yes, you're right, Molly, a tiny 256-gig hard drive for $900.
Harry McCracken [01:32:34]:
That's rude.
Leo Laporte [01:32:35]:
I know. Well, you don't want that. And that— what is— didn't Malcolm Gladwell have a name for that where you have a cheap price that nobody wants, so they end up buying, but they feel better about buying up a level? I can't remember what that's called. You have 3 prices: one nobody wants, one that's the aspirational one, the one you expect— and the middle one is the one you expect everybody to go for. And but then that way Apple can also say starting at $899.
Jacob Ward [01:33:04]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:33:05]:
Uh, but that's not all, because they also said, well, we are going to make an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 gigs of RAM, which is enough to run a fairly competent local model, a GLM 5.3 or something like that, uh, all locally. They didn't announce a price. They say it won't be available till the end of October, but I would say conservatively it's at least $15,000, probably much more likely $20,000. $20,000. It's a car, ladies and gentlemen. I have to decide at the end of the year when my lease runs out, do I get another car or do I just walk and have a Mac?
Jacob Ward [01:33:51]:
Isn't it, uh, isn't Tuesday, uh, I think Tuesday is Tim Cook's final day on the job.
Leo Laporte [01:33:56]:
Yeah, this is his— this is parting shot.
Jacob Ward [01:33:59]:
I know, it's funny. He's asking for us for $10,000 for a computer out the door.
Leo Laporte [01:34:04]:
You know what's really interesting is he's selling them. Yeah, uh, and I have a feeling, uh, if you want— I don't know if I'm gonna buy that one, it's so expensive, the 512— but if you wanted that, you would have to be sitting with your finger hovering over the buy button at 5 AM whenever that goes on sale in late October. Uh, Halloween might not be the scariest day in October.
Harry McCracken [01:34:27]:
Well, in theory, mightn't it pay for itself relatively quickly if it means you don't have to pay for tokens anymore?
Leo Laporte [01:34:34]:
Well, see, that's the interesting— I don't think it's economic. It's an economic decision because tokens now are so cheap, uh, from companies like DeepSeek. Yeah, if you want Fable, uh, you know, the top-of-the-line state-of-the-art models, yeah, they're expensive. But even if you're paying $200 a month for a Claude Max subscription, that's 4 years of that, uh, I— before it evens out. I don't think it's an economic decision. I think it's more about running— wanting to run your own. For me, because I did spend a lot of money on these NVIDIA boxes, it's more about running your own model locally, having kind of sovereignty over your data, over the model. They can't take that away from me.
Leo Laporte [01:35:19]:
And I, you know what scared me was, uh, when the Trump administration rug-pulled Fable. I was in the middle of using it to— I'm rewriting our sales software, and I was in the— and I had to stop. Said, nope, this is not available anymore. And that was enough to scare me, that the emergence of very competent Chinese— yes, open weight models. that you can run locally, uh, and the threat perhaps of China or the United States banning those local OpenWay models all kind of prompted me to say, well, maybe I better bite the bullet and buy something so I, I don't, you know, if the internet goes down, I could still do stuff. It doesn't— I don't think it makes economic sense. I think it's a—
Molly White [01:36:02]:
Yeah, I don't think, I don't think anyone who's out there buying Hardware to run AI should be looking at a 4-year timescale for that hardware.
Leo Laporte [01:36:11]:
Exactly. It's going to be out of date by, you know, next month.
Molly White [01:36:15]:
Like a week. Yeah.
Jacob Ward [01:36:16]:
Isn't this the whole thing with like the depreciation of all these assets?
Leo Laporte [01:36:20]:
Well, they don't. Well, this is the interesting thing. They don't depreciate right now. So I know that the NVIDIA Sparks I bought, I could probably sell for more money in 6 months. And I think the same thing for a 512-gig Mac, but then there's a cliff. So instance, for instance, the old hot Macs, the M3 Ultras, which were the preferred AI model until Tuesday, I think the prices are now starting to plummet for those.
Harry McCracken [01:36:48]:
Right.
Jacob Ward [01:36:49]:
It's like 3 years or something. They, they start to disappear. And then, and that, and that's, isn't that the big like data center problem that everybody, that all those companies have? Like, yes, they're building data centers, these oceans of these servers that are all going to be useless in 3 years.
Leo Laporte [01:37:01]:
They're, they're building Grace Blackwell.
Molly White [01:37:03]:
It's like Bitcoin miners.
Leo Laporte [01:37:04]:
Yeah, and it's going to be Vera Rubin next, next. And it's— in fact, Nvidia's already announced chips that are 10 times more efficient. And look what OpenAI is doing. They're, they're so concerned about, uh, hardware that they've developed their own chip called Jalapeño because it's probably a really— probably really hot, um, trying to keep up.
Harry McCracken [01:37:28]:
Do we know where the old chips go?
Leo Laporte [01:37:31]:
Into my house.
Jacob Ward [01:37:32]:
Right, exactly. Who gets the old chips?
Leo Laporte [01:37:35]:
You know, so I bought a 3090, upgraded my Nvidia— old Nvidia card on my old gaming rig, and I'm sure it was some Bitcoin or miner's card, right?
Molly White [01:37:45]:
Not Bitcoin, but yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:37:47]:
No, not, not. So what are miners doing? Because they can't— nobody can make money anymore as a miner.
Molly White [01:37:54]:
If you're buying an old GPU, it would probably have been Ethereum mining, if anything.
Leo Laporte [01:37:58]:
Oh, Ethereum.
Molly White [01:37:59]:
Okay. Bitcoin mining is very specialized hardware and you would never use it for like a gaming computer or something like that.
Leo Laporte [01:38:07]:
The way crypto was designed was that it would get, at least Bitcoin originally was designed so it would get harder and harder to generate it, right? As more and more was generated and then you reach a cap where no more will be generated. It's kind of an anti-inflationary measure.
Molly White [01:38:24]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [01:38:24]:
Um, so like when Steve Gib— when Bitcoin first happened, Steve Gibson said, well, let me just try mining, and, and the next day he woke up to 50 Bitcoin.
Molly White [01:38:35]:
Yeah, well, it also, it also responds to the amount of mining that's happening on the network too. So if a bunch of Bitcoin miners all drop, drop offline, it actually gets easier to mine.
Leo Laporte [01:38:47]:
Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's the total compute that, that is being controlled, the total amount of compute.
Molly White [01:38:53]:
Yeah, but it means that when, you know, a ton of people all start mining Bitcoin with like dedicated data centers, then the guy with the PC in his basement just can't compete with that kind of operation, right?
Leo Laporte [01:39:07]:
Plus electricity's gotten more and more expensive.
Molly White [01:39:10]:
True.
Leo Laporte [01:39:10]:
And so unless you're in China sitting next to a hydroelectric power plant—
Molly White [01:39:15]:
Yeah, you have to be basically on a power plant at this point.
Leo Laporte [01:39:20]:
Which is, by the way, a problem with local AI as well. People are buying these cards and they are very power hungry. Well, you need a lot of them.
Molly White [01:39:28]:
A lot of crypto mining operations are actually pivoting to AI data centers because Bitcoin mining is getting less and less economically feasible, and AI data centers are becoming more and more in demand, and it's sort of the obvious solution.
Harry McCracken [01:39:42]:
CoreWeave started out as a Bitcoin mining company and switched over to become a—
Molly White [01:39:48]:
Yeah, basically every big Bitcoin or any crypto mining operation these days does both, it feels like, and, and often are actually sort of weighting towards AI now.
Leo Laporte [01:39:57]:
Oh, that's interesting. I also think that with the things like this Mac, which by the way is very power efficient— in fact, Apple did a little flex. They took 4 of their top-of-the-line Mac Minis, connected them with Thunderbolt Bolt 5, and then a single plug into the wall, uh, showing that a single 120-volt can power these 4, very much unlike having, you know, a bunch of, uh, Nvidia, you know, 5090s or whatever. Um, I wonder if we're going to see— maybe we don't need all these data centers. Maybe we just distribute AI locally. There was somebody offering, uh, or somebody had a plan to put little mini data centers in every house.
Molly White [01:40:39]:
I mean, there's been a lot of, you know, sort of like shared compute projects like that, but it's, it's hard.
Leo Laporte [01:40:44]:
The interconnect becomes very important and you lose that interconnect speed.
Molly White [01:40:47]:
Yeah, it's hard to get the efficiencies of a data center using people's leftover compute.
Harry McCracken [01:40:54]:
Back in the, uh, like late '70s and early '80s, people were paying the equivalent of $10,000 for like, for a powerful PC. So it's—
Leo Laporte [01:41:03]:
oh yeah.
Harry McCracken [01:41:04]:
It's not completely crazy to think that some people will do this.
Leo Laporte [01:41:08]:
I remember getting a DEC, uh, I think it was a 486 from Digital Equipment when they were still in existence. It was a $10,000 486, big old tower case.
Harry McCracken [01:41:20]:
Yeah, if you flip through computer magazines from back then, those things existed. Laptops were incredibly expensive.
Leo Laporte [01:41:26]:
That's when a dollar meant something. Probably, you know, worth $20,000 today.
Harry McCracken [01:41:29]:
Like it was not unusual to spend 5 or 6 grand in early 1990s dollars for a laptop.
Leo Laporte [01:41:36]:
Exactly.
Jacob Ward [01:41:36]:
And that catalog was like a phone book size.
Leo Laporte [01:41:40]:
Yeah. Computer Shopper, baby. There was a magazine.
Harry McCracken [01:41:45]:
I reviewed an IBM, um, luggable computer with a plasma display that I want to say was like $18,000. And before you adjust it for inflation.
Molly White [01:41:55]:
I didn't know that was a term, luggable, for hardware.
Leo Laporte [01:42:00]:
By the way, speaking of sewing machine, right?
Harry McCracken [01:42:02]:
Speaking of luggables, speaking of luggables, I recently saw this documentary on Adam Osborne. Oh yeah, the company put out the first luggable. This is a great documentary and it may end up on public TV at some point. It's one of the best things that— one of the best things I've seen on computer history.
Leo Laporte [01:42:21]:
His name became a term briefly. He Osborne'd himself.
Harry McCracken [01:42:25]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:42:25]:
By announcing a successor to the original Osborne, which was very popular. I wanted one so badly. And he announced its successor before it was available.
Harry McCracken [01:42:35]:
Although maybe—
Leo Laporte [01:42:35]:
And they stopped buying the first one.
Harry McCracken [01:42:37]:
Yeah, although maybe that actually did not kill the company. They had like serious cash flow problems.
Leo Laporte [01:42:41]:
Right. As usual, a lot of these stories are—
Harry McCracken [01:42:45]:
But this documentary is full of vintage footage of Adam and other people.
Leo Laporte [01:42:49]:
Did you know him?
Harry McCracken [01:42:50]:
No. I did not. I wrote a long article about him a few years ago, and I interviewed Dvorak, who worked with Adam on his book and knew him well, and I talked to a bunch of people who knew him. He eventually had really poor health and died early in this century.
Leo Laporte [01:43:11]:
Yeah, John knew all those guys, and there were a number of clone computers, and eventually the Compaq Was the luggable of choice. It was an IBM PC compatible.
Harry McCracken [01:43:21]:
Yes, the Compaq was essentially an IBM compatible Osborne in the early days.
Leo Laporte [01:43:26]:
I did eventually get an Osborne when we had the Brick House studio, which you visited many times, Harry.
Harry McCracken [01:43:32]:
Uh, I—
Leo Laporte [01:43:33]:
for some reason, people decided to send me their old computers, and somebody sent me an old Osborne, which, you know, had a little screen, it was this big. In fact, there's a— I'll show you a picture. Somebody's put a picture in there.
Harry McCracken [01:43:45]:
Smaller than a smartphone screen?
Leo Laporte [01:43:47]:
It was not— yeah, it was— I guess it was. That's depressing.
Harry McCracken [01:43:53]:
The later Osborne had a decent-sized screen.
Leo Laporte [01:43:55]:
It had— looks like it had 2 floppy drives, and they were probably pretty small themselves. The things below the floppy drives are places where you stick your disks because you need all those disks to boot up DOS, and then it came with Words— was it WordStar?
Harry McCracken [01:44:12]:
It came with WordStar and maybe SuperCalc and several other— it came with software worth as much as the price they were charging, which was $1,800.
Leo Laporte [01:44:22]:
Yeah.
Harry McCracken [01:44:23]:
Apologies for hijacking our conversation about the Mac Mini to talk about Adam Osborne, but if people do see this documentary out there, they need to watch it. It's just great.
Leo Laporte [01:44:33]:
Well, I think it's also important to put that in perspective because we As fast as AI is moving, this whole thing has been moving pretty quickly. And Molly made the excellent point that, you know, this $10,000 computer won't be worth very much in a couple of years. It's all moving very quickly.
Harry McCracken [01:44:51]:
Will you be able to use it for something though? Like give it to a nephew or something like that?
Leo Laporte [01:44:57]:
Yeah, I'll give it to my employees. We used to do something when we were all in the same studio called Leo's Garage Sale, where I would just take all the crap that I'd purchased for the year and no longer want it and put it on the table. And they would— they would— we, we had to come up with a system because it became a little bit of a free-for-all.
Jacob Ward [01:45:18]:
I got dibs on the Spark.
Molly White [01:45:20]:
On a Spark.
Jacob Ward [01:45:20]:
Dibs on a Spark.
Leo Laporte [01:45:22]:
Yeah, there might be a Spark sitting on the table in a couple of years. You never know.
Molly White [01:45:26]:
Golly.
Leo Laporte [01:45:28]:
Let's see, where are we? Let me take another break. And then I wanted to finally, Jacob, talk about the Meta settlement, because we thought this was going to be the trial of the century when it began 2 weeks ago. And this week, a sudden end. Well, not exactly. Florida says, yeah, we're not that happy with that.
Jacob Ward [01:45:53]:
Well, it's definitely not the end of Meta's legal problems. But yeah, it really screwed up my whole week. I really had a whole plan. And they said like, not like weeks of plans.
Leo Laporte [01:46:01]:
Were you going to the trial? You were going to the trial, right? Yeah, I went every day.
Jacob Ward [01:46:04]:
I had a whole like editorial calendar built around it. They settled on that morning and I was like, what? They did what? It was such a crazy moment.
Molly White [01:46:12]:
This is how you gotta just fly by the seat of your pants.
Jacob Ward [01:46:15]:
No, this is why I should have gone into like cooking content and gotten away from this fucking news. What an idiot.
Leo Laporte [01:46:20]:
You know, a Beef Wellington is the same for hundreds of years.
Jacob Ward [01:46:24]:
Exactly. I could have been like Talking about salvaged denim. And here I am like scrambling. Zuckerberg settles.
Leo Laporte [01:46:30]:
So lame. I could see Marlon Brando saying that. I could have been talking about salvaged denim instead.
Molly White [01:46:38]:
Here I am.
Leo Laporte [01:46:39]:
I could have been, I know. I could have been a contender. Jacob Salvaged Denim Ward. That's him, ladies and gentlemen. Uh, you'll see him on CNN. And of course you have You must subscribe to theripcurrent.com, his newsletter. And yes, well worth reading the book. I see somebody already bought the paperback of The Loop in our Discord chat.
Leo Laporte [01:47:01]:
So that's good. Molly White. When are you going to write a book, Molly?
Molly White [01:47:06]:
Not anytime soon.
Leo Laporte [01:47:07]:
Yeah, you see, she's a smart woman. You know, there's no money in publishing. It took us, the rest of us, a long time to realize that. You like to write though, right? Is writing the thing you like to do most?
Molly White [01:47:23]:
Yeah, I would say so.
Leo Laporte [01:47:25]:
Yeah.
Molly White [01:47:25]:
I mean, maybe not like in life, but— Well, no, there's—
Leo Laporte [01:47:29]:
yeah, there's other things, of course, in life, but as a career, I should say.
Jacob Ward [01:47:34]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:47:34]:
MollyWhite.net, CitationNeeded.news. And of course, Web3 is going just great. You're still doing that, right?
Molly White [01:47:42]:
Sure am.
Leo Laporte [01:47:43]:
Never stops. It's still going.
Molly White [01:47:45]:
It's still going great. I mean, once it stops, then maybe.
Leo Laporte [01:47:49]:
My favorite feature, I've mentioned this before on the website, is that little burning flame of how much money has gone down the tubes. As you scroll through the stories, look in the lower right-hand corner, it goes up for every story that you go through of how much money. Actually, if you go the other direction, it goes up.
Molly White [01:48:09]:
You can change the direction of it if you prefer to.
Leo Laporte [01:48:12]:
Oh, I see. There's a little arrow there. Look at that. Oh, that's cool. Aren't you? So, and one of the things that is great about Molly is she took this code and open-sourced it. So you can— is it on GitHub if you want to create your own? Going just great. You can create your own. Maybe AI is going just great.
Leo Laporte [01:48:33]:
And the Technologizer, Harry McCracken, fastcompany.com. I think in many ways our computer historian, I think somebody needs to do that to hold the fort down now that Dvorak's gone and remember the good old days, which really were bad.
Harry McCracken [01:48:50]:
It was actually— after he passed, I went back and looked at some of his stuff and just living in that world is always a refreshing break from what I mainly write about, which is today and tomorrow.
Leo Laporte [01:49:04]:
I bought, when he died, which was just a few weeks ago, RIP John, I bought— he actually published one book of his Inside Track columns from, I think, 2013. But it was really— I bought it and it's really fun to read through those old columns. At one point he was writing, when I was doing the radio show with him, 20 columns a month.
Harry McCracken [01:49:27]:
Yes, I was counting for his columns and I like pick— I'm writing about John. It's not up yet, but I picked up—
Leo Laporte [01:49:34]:
Oh, are you gonna do a piece?
Harry McCracken [01:49:35]:
Good. I picked up like a random month in the late 1980s and when he not only had all these magazine columns, but he also wrote for the Examiner, not just on technology, but also on other stuff. And he had something like 17 columns that month. And there might be some I didn't know about.
Leo Laporte [01:49:55]:
And as many of us have mentioned, he started my career. Regina Smith was on last week. He was instrumental in her career. And when Will Smith— Will Hurst told— not Will Smith— Will Hurst tells a story that when he was begging John to become the computer columnist for the Examiner, John said, nah, I don't want to do that, but there's this guy John Markoff you should talk to. And got John Markoff started on all of that. The king of computer magazine columnists, you dub him, Harry.
Harry McCracken [01:50:24]:
We used to, at PC World, we used to occasionally get letters asking where his column was from people who kind of assumed that he had a column in every magazine.
Leo Laporte [01:50:34]:
Yeah, it was in— he actually had the kind of anti-editor column in— was it Macworld or MacUser? I can't remember. One of the Macintosh magazines. He was in InfoWorld.
Harry McCracken [01:50:46]:
MacUser.
Leo Laporte [01:50:47]:
MacUser.
Harry McCracken [01:50:48]:
I mean, he was predominantly, but not entirely associated with Ziff magazines.
Leo Laporte [01:50:52]:
Yeah. PC Magazine, Inside Track was the—
Harry McCracken [01:50:55]:
Yeah, he actually did have a column in PC World briefly before he got into PC Magazine.
Leo Laporte [01:51:00]:
People don't— this is another piece of history that's long gone, but they don't remember the rivalry between IDG and Ziff Davis.
Harry McCracken [01:51:06]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:51:06]:
And I was a Ziff Davis guy. As was John. And I think you were an IDG guy, right?
Harry McCracken [01:51:13]:
worked at IDG for 15 years.
Leo Laporte [01:51:17]:
I mean, they're— they live on, I guess, but in a very different form.
Harry McCracken [01:51:23]:
IDG was eventually broken up, kind of, and the brands exist, but it's—
Leo Laporte [01:51:27]:
Yeah, Ziff Davis is several different things, none of which have anything to do with PC Magazine.
Harry McCracken [01:51:33]:
Well, PC Magazine is still around.
Leo Laporte [01:51:35]:
It is, but is it still Ziff Davis?
Harry McCracken [01:51:37]:
Yes, although it's not a magazine.
Leo Laporte [01:51:40]:
No, it's just a website. No, I know. Yeah, it's actually quite good. We have several people on the show from PCMag. So poor Jacob's week just got destroyed. Was it Monday or Tuesday, right at the beginning of the week? The trial had started the week before and Meta must— I don't know. I mean, you don't make a settlement this quickly, but usually you settle before the trial. So I have to think that Meta must have seen the writing on the wall with the way the trial was going.
Leo Laporte [01:52:13]:
Maybe they were already negotiating. They agreed to pay $18 billion to settle the lawsuit with all but one state. How many states were there? Was it 30? It was a huge—
Jacob Ward [01:52:26]:
51 municipalities or 51, you know, well, there's—
Leo Laporte [01:52:30]:
that includes Washington, D.C.
Jacob Ward [01:52:32]:
and DC, Guam, all these places basically.
Leo Laporte [01:52:36]:
And they were all suing over the same issue, right? That Meta knowingly made a social media platform that was addictive to children.
Jacob Ward [01:52:45]:
Yeah. And harmful, addictive and harmful to children, that it violated their privacy under COPPA, the only federal law we have around this. And then they were also, to the 4 of these states, California, Colorado, New Jersey, and Kentucky, were test like a trial balloon as to whether or not they could go after Meta on state law grounds around deceptive practices. So both those things were all going to be kind of bundled together in this case. So yeah, it was going to be a lot of juicy stuff, man. It was going to go and go and go. And I was in the courtroom for each day of the first 2 weeks of it, and there was just so much evidence and so much damning testimony coming out. I, I don't know though whether or not they chose to settle because of how it was going, or if— or if it was— I suspect that it was because the wheels move pretty slow when you're negotiating with that many AGs, right? And, and—
Leo Laporte [01:53:44]:
So this must have been going on for a while.
Jacob Ward [01:53:46]:
I think it has to have been. I don't know, but I think it has to have been. And And, you know, I, you know, the feeling, the, you know, there was the logistical pain in the ass of my whole sort of editorial plan for weeks and weeks and weeks getting blown up. But the thing that was just so sort of was, that was disappointing to me as a reporter is just how much discovery we were going to get. Like every day we were getting these new— pieces of evidence that were so interesting, these internal communications and these internal studies and all kinds of stuff, you know. And, and the, the— it was just a trove of interesting things, uh, coming out of the case. So that's selfishly— I wanted it to keep going for, you know, for that reason, if for nothing else. But yeah, I think that, you know, they cut it off like Mosseri had just taken the stand for like an hour or something and then was going to do a full day the following day when they, when they settled.
Jacob Ward [01:54:45]:
And then Zuckerberg was scheduled for a couple days after that. So he never took the stand.
Leo Laporte [01:54:50]:
That must have been the impetus for, let's settle this before Mark has to.
Jacob Ward [01:54:56]:
Before sweaty Mark gets on the stand. I know I had that feeling too. And there was clearly going to be some really rough lines of questioning for him, you know, in which he'd said publicly, oh, there's no— you know, we didn't know there were all these kids, or, you know, we make every effort. And then these internal reports and testimony from insiders saying that he'd been in meetings that were specifically to inform him that there were more than 4 million kids under the age of 13 on the platform. And, you know, just like he was going to get taken apart. And so—
Leo Laporte [01:55:25]:
That's always the risk of any of these trials for both sides is discovery. And clearly Meta doesn't want any more of these emails to come out. Some— a lot of them came out because of Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who was the first to present this stuff. She's going to be, by the way, dramatized In Aaron Sorkin's successor to The Social Network, which talks about her as a whistleblower. That'll be very— that'll be a movie to watch. I don't think Aaron Sorkin's a big fan of Facebook, be my guess.
Jacob Ward [01:55:57]:
His timing is incredible because all these trials are going to be underway when that movie comes out.
Molly White [01:56:02]:
That's right.
Leo Laporte [01:56:03]:
Facebook was saying themselves the potential for a fine of as much as $1.4 trillion. Which would be, I think, an existential fine for the company.
Jacob Ward [01:56:14]:
You know what's funny about that thing? And you guys, don't let me dominate this conversation. I can be really tiresome when this subject starts rolling.
Leo Laporte [01:56:21]:
Oh no, you're the expert, but I will get the conversation going. Yeah, I want to hear your point of view on the whole thing, but go ahead.
Jacob Ward [01:56:27]:
Totally. But $1.4 trillion, it turns out that that number is a number that Meta floated. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:56:33]:
That was their number.
Molly White [01:56:34]:
Yeah.
Jacob Ward [01:56:35]:
It was their number. And that they, according to the AGs, Um, that first of all was not the number they were asking for. They were asking for $193 billion, not a small amount of money, but they were asking for far less than $1.4 trillion. And, and Meta was, was, uh, issuing that number alongside these quotes saying these states are looking for numbers that are untethered from reality and all this stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:56:59]:
Right.
Jacob Ward [01:56:59]:
It was like this weird gamesmanship in which I think they were trying to make it sound as if the states were somehow being greedy or unreasonable or something. It was a weird thing. And yet I can't tell you how many people Just wandering around, I'd be like, yeah, maybe it might be as much as $1.4 trillion. I had so many people in my life who normally don't care about this stuff being like, yeah, that sounds about right.
Leo Laporte [01:57:18]:
See, it works. Meta actually got a slap on the wrist, in my, in my opinion. Uh, $18 billion but spread out over 10 years. Uh, so I mean, Meta can easily afford $1.8 billion a year. That's a fraction of their total revenue. Uh, they do have to change the platform a little bit. Uh, the, the chief thing that bothers me is they're gonna have to start doing age verification, uh, which means everybody uses Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook will have to provide proof of age, which I think is problematic privacy-wise. I mean, I don't care because I'm not going to use them, but But I think that's something to be concerned about.
Leo Laporte [01:58:04]:
But that was one of the things they agreed with the states. As I mentioned, Florida says— Florida agrees with me. That's a pittance. We want more. Do you think the judge will say to Florida, no, sorry, you cannot continue to pursue this? Oh, okay.
Jacob Ward [01:58:22]:
Yeah, he dropped out for a minute.
Leo Laporte [01:58:23]:
Oh, Lord.
Molly White [01:58:26]:
Oh, Lord.
Leo Laporte [01:58:27]:
All right, well, that's all right. He decided he'd had enough. Molly, uh, is this a big enough fine? Is this a big— a good enough agreement?
Molly White [01:58:38]:
I mean, the fine I don't have strong opinions on. I agree that just about any fine is going to be a slap on the wrist for Meta.
Leo Laporte [01:58:46]:
Yeah, they make a lot of money.
Molly White [01:58:48]:
But yeah, yeah, but I think that one thing that's interesting, I, I see this almost as actually a win for them in a large sense, for Meta, because I think that one of the things that we see with a lot of these tech companies who are engaged in the conversations around regulation is they use regulation as a way to create sort of a moat around their business. And I think that Meta will actually benefit from a lot of the changes that they're being required to put into place that will also be imposed by fiat on the other competitors in the space.
Leo Laporte [01:59:29]:
That's kind of interesting, isn't it? Part of the payment, $5 billion, is contingent on whether Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube impose similar protections. How are you allowed to do that?
Harry McCracken [01:59:42]:
And Meta is trying to lasso them in.
Leo Laporte [01:59:44]:
Yeah.
Molly White [01:59:45]:
And I also think that actually, this is a really sort of alarming way to impose somewhat legal requirements on Meta that I don't actually think would be defensible if they faced a constitutional challenge. Because like one of, for example, one of the things that Meta is being required to do is disable these filters, for example, that, that, that sort of make it look like you've had cosmetic surgery or, you know, they have extreme like beauty filters or whatever, which if a court said to them, you know, in a legal decision that you have to prevent children or anyone from using one of those, it would be, I think, pretty obviously struck down as a First Amendment violation. And yet this is sort of a way in which they get to that end result. They impose those same requirements on competitors, but it sort of has not gone through the sort of usual court system that might pose a constitutional challenge to it.
Leo Laporte [02:00:47]:
Interesting. I didn't even think of that. So, one of the things that surprised me a little bit— actually, it doesn't surprise me at all— but one of the things I don't like is that it was just generally stipulated that social media is a problem for kids. And that it's clearly causing a mental health crisis with children. This is kind of based on Jonathan Haidt's, I think, sensationalist book about it. The real experts on it, like Candace Rogers, do not agree that there's evidence. There's a lot of reasons if young people are suffering from mental health challenges, there are a lot of other reasons, including COVID, guns in schools, the threat of shot at any given point. I don't know if Instagram and Facebook are the sole cause or even a cause of a mental health crisis among young people.
Leo Laporte [02:01:40]:
I don't even know if there is a mental health crisis among young people. So, I was a little surprised that that was just kind of generally, at least in the media, stipulated, well, everybody knows that Instagram is bad for kids. I don't know if that's the case.
Molly White [02:01:54]:
And I think also, I mean, there's a concern, I have a concern To that effect with the decision as well, because there is this sort of ongoing scrutiny that's going to be applied to Meta to determine, you know, are they implementing these changes as they're being required to do? Are they putting age assurance in, etc.? But there's nothing around are kids actually safer? You know, are kids' mental health improving? They've really sort of decided on all these things that they think, oh yes, this is what's going to fix the problem around children on social media without, I think, much evidence that any or all of these interventions actually have like a measurable effect on children's mental health or safety.
Leo Laporte [02:02:40]:
In fact, it's kind of the opposite. I think everybody will say, yeah, job done, kids are protected, everybody's okay, no problems, go ahead children, live your lives. We now have Face ID to prove you're an iPhone.
Molly White [02:02:53]:
And even, I think, more than that, it'll be, go use Facebook because they're the safe platform for kids. It's sort of a marketing strategy. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:03:02]:
Harry, what do you think?
Harry McCracken [02:03:04]:
Well, I'm skeptical about— although I acknowledge I don't know for sure, but I'm skeptical about the idea that smaller doses of the stuff eliminates the stuff about it that is troublesome. Like, if you're being bullied on Instagram, being bullied in smaller doses is less bullying.
Leo Laporte [02:03:26]:
Yeah.
Harry McCracken [02:03:27]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:03:27]:
Well, Facebook's always, in theory, said you can't have an account when you're under 13. It's a very difficult thing to stop kids, and frankly, often kids' parents, from creating an account when they're under 13. And I don't know if that— I mean, the only way to do that is with— we need strict age proof, which is very problematic.
Harry McCracken [02:03:51]:
It will be interesting to see how easy it is for kids to get around this stuff in the way that kids often get around—
Leo Laporte [02:03:57]:
All you have to do is look at Australia.
Harry McCracken [02:03:59]:
Rules imposed by humans, by adults rather.
Jacob Ward [02:04:03]:
You guys have been sitting here. I've been having incredible connectivity issues just as you guys were saying all these things.
Leo Laporte [02:04:08]:
I saw you fleeing the greenhouse looking for a signal.
Jacob Ward [02:04:11]:
Like, as you guys are all saying things that I deeply disagree with and want to yell about.
Leo Laporte [02:04:16]:
It was our evil plot.
Jacob Ward [02:04:18]:
I can't believe I can't get my mic to work right now.
Harry McCracken [02:04:21]:
Yeah.
Jacob Ward [02:04:22]:
Okay. So multiple things I'd like to point out here. First, the evidence that it's bad for kids and is connected to the mental health crisis comes from the company. That's the thing. The outside researchers, the external researchers are having a hard time studying that stuff because it's very difficult to get And so the peer-reviewed research out in the world is actually approaching, as one of several experts testified on the stand, Jean Twenge, you know, they are in fact getting— it is in fact becoming a stronger and stronger connection in the very slow world of external research. But the internal research at these companies is where this stuff really comes from. And one of the reasons that people are accepting it is because they don't know any better. At face value that it's bad is because in Discovery, thanks to Frances Haugen and everybody else, these research projects say like, oh, we're seeing, you know, literally these are like Instagram people being like, oh, like counts as a default on teens are having this incredibly bad effect on the mental health of young women.
Jacob Ward [02:05:28]:
And, you know, 51% of teens Oh dear.
Leo Laporte [02:05:42]:
I think he's— did you cut him, Molly?
Molly White [02:05:48]:
I can't handle people disagreeing with me.
Leo Laporte [02:05:50]:
Actually, I hope he comes back because the question I want to ask is—
Molly White [02:05:54]:
I also have a really big question. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:05:57]:
Did Facebook show that did their internal research show that there was harm or merely that it was addictive? I think that they're— what I read said, yeah, they knew it was addictive. But I gotta tell you, everybody who creates content of any kind, including I'm sure Harry and Molly and Jacob, hopes that people find it sticky. You want people to come back again and again. If that's a crime, then Netflix is in trouble. You know, everybody's in trouble.
Jacob Ward [02:06:25]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:06:25]:
We want to make our stuff Addictive is a strong word. In fact, there's no evidence of how addictive social media is. The only evidence is, and I know it, is doom scrolling. It's hard to go to sleep sometimes because you can't stop. The other thing that bothers me, and we'll get Jacob back, I promise. The other thing that bothers me is that YouTube has piled in with this, and I don't think— I think YouTube is not a social network. YouTube is a content And I don't— I, I always bothered me that you— I understand TikTok, I understand Meta, I understand Insta. Those are of a piece.
Leo Laporte [02:07:04]:
But I don't think YouTube— one of these things is not like the other.
Harry McCracken [02:07:07]:
Even TikTok's a little bit of an outlier in some ways compared to Facebook and Instagram, which are much more traditional social networks.
Leo Laporte [02:07:15]:
What happened was the success of TikTok taught everybody Oh, people—
Harry McCracken [02:07:20]:
what?
Leo Laporte [02:07:21]:
We, we're not a social network, we're an entertainment medium.
Harry McCracken [02:07:25]:
Driven by an algorithm.
Leo Laporte [02:07:26]:
Yeah, the whole goal of Instagram used to be I would see Harry's pictures, he would see my pictures. That wasn't as successful as you'll see everybody's most entertaining pictures and videos. That's what TikTok did. And Insta said, oh, of course, duh.
Harry McCracken [02:07:44]:
Uh, and I said, YouTube was sort of like that all along.
Leo Laporte [02:07:47]:
Yeah, yeah, maybe YouTube invented it.
Harry McCracken [02:07:50]:
YouTube was not primarily a place to go to—
Leo Laporte [02:07:51]:
I don't like to watch the autoplay. I don't have the autoplay on, so I choose what I watch on YouTube.
Harry McCracken [02:07:59]:
I mean, one outcome potentially of this agreement is these rules devised by Meta applying to all these other products. But I mean, in a way, each of these products would need somewhat different rules for them to be all that effective.
Leo Laporte [02:08:14]:
So I— Jacob's back. Um, I had the question, Jacob, if you were talking about how Meta's own research showed the harm, did it show the harm or merely that it's addictive? Did it actually— were they actually able to say, oh yeah, this is making kids suicidal?
Jacob Ward [02:08:29]:
Yeah, whatever.
Leo Laporte [02:08:30]:
They knew.
Jacob Ward [02:08:30]:
I have a piece, I have a piece up at therecurrent.com called The Most Damning Evidence from the Meta Trial So Far. And this was literally— I thought I was gonna do one of these a week, and instead I only got to do one, but they have all these studies internally that talk about the incredible amount of— I mean, it's so interesting because what the Meta lawyers were trying to do, and these are lawyers who are very good at injecting Oh, we're not gonna—
Harry McCracken [02:09:12]:
Oh no.
Leo Laporte [02:09:13]:
This is such a bad time.
Harry McCracken [02:09:14]:
This one is getting good.
Leo Laporte [02:09:14]:
We're gonna lose Jacob.
Molly White [02:09:15]:
They're giving him a minute or two at a time.
Leo Laporte [02:09:17]:
I will read a little bit from his piece on theripcurrent.com, the most damning stuff. One is Arturo Behar, who was at the time working in Facebook's safety division, an email that he sent To Zuckerberg with numbers, the company's own numbers, saying 51% of Instagram users report— 51%, more than half— a bad or harmful experience in the last 7 days. 1% of them reported that— reported— 2% of those reports end in any content being removed. Only 2%. So in other words, 51% said, yeah, I had a harmful experience, but only 1% reported it, and of those reports, only 2% were actually acted on. So he's saying a 0.02% takedown rate. So that is, that is an example of harm that Facebook knew about.
Harry McCracken [02:10:15]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:10:15]:
Behar was very upset, by the way. He quit basically because of—
Jacob Ward [02:10:20]:
Yeah, and he was a true believer. He was a guy who really believed in the mission. and got sort of changed around when his 14-year-old daughter joined Instagram and suddenly was getting sexually propositioned by adults, had no way to report it. And he couldn't even get, as the top safety guy at the company, couldn't even get the message across to people that this was a problem. Also, to the point that we made a moment ago about it being difficult to find these accounts, Arturo Behar in his testimony said that's not true, that in fact Meta is the most sophisticated operator in all of social media when it comes to spiking fake accounts, finding and getting rid of fake accounts, cuz that's such an important thing. They know how to do it. He said it would be child's play, no pun intended, to find kids' accounts. In fact, there was a trend going around in 2019 for under-13 kids to be posting their their birthdates on their posts on Instagram to be like, look, I'm only 11 and I would get to be on here.
Jacob Ward [02:11:25]:
So, boy, it's just like what the evidence was beginning to show was there was a don't ask, don't tell attitude about this inside the company.
Leo Laporte [02:11:34]:
Kind of changed my mind. I mean, I still—
Jacob Ward [02:11:36]:
I'm just saying.
Leo Laporte [02:11:36]:
I still question how harmful social media is. I mean, there's many, many other harms, and I think maybe focusing on that is problematic because you don't fix the other problems. Nevertheless, yeah, Facebook's not a good actor.
Jacob Ward [02:11:50]:
Yeah, the question of whether they knew, whether they pushed back is, you know, it's ridiculous.
Leo Laporte [02:11:56]:
They didn't care. They clearly didn't care. In fact, so much so that they knew and said, hey, we would rather make money than do something about this, is pretty damning. So maybe that is why they settled. And by the way, this settlement is trivial from their of view. This is nothing.
Jacob Ward [02:12:12]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It also doesn't allow future cases to go forward using this evidence on this question.
Leo Laporte [02:12:24]:
So that's the other— They've buried it. They've buried it.
Jacob Ward [02:12:27]:
That's part of why they settled.
Leo Laporte [02:12:29]:
So Molly brought up this point, and you were unfortunately disconnected when she did, that it also Weirdly, $5 billion of that settlement, it only applies if TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat go along. That's a weird thing to agree to.
Jacob Ward [02:12:46]:
Yeah, it took me a lot of work to try and figure out why that would be the case. So here's what I've figured out from talking to a bunch of people is what they're basically doing is, so they will pay an additional $5 billion in penalties if YouTube and TikTok join up and agree to play by the same rules, basically. And so what they're essentially hedging is that it's worth it to them to pay $5 billion to have all their competitors be constrained in the same way they will be. And it would also be— and they're gonna not have to spend that $5 billion if they have to hold themselves to these standards that Google, that their competitors do not. And what's so And what's so weird and interesting about that sort of circumstances, if you look at past settlements, if you look at the Big Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement or the Volkswagen diesel scandal or the Deepwater Horizon suits, those settlements required none of that kind of contingency.
Leo Laporte [02:13:56]:
Right.
Jacob Ward [02:13:56]:
They just had them and made them pay enormous amounts of money and change the way they do business. And in this case, these AGs have gotten suckered into, in my view, gotten suckered into being part of the competitive landscape in this weird way that a lot of people I speak to are not crazy about.
Leo Laporte [02:14:17]:
There's all this contention that this might not even stand because of the First Amendment. This is now a state action censoring private speech.
Jacob Ward [02:14:27]:
Well, but the way they've gotten around it, and it's a good one and it's an interesting one, I think, is that it's a design question, not a First Amendment question.
Leo Laporte [02:14:35]:
It's a product liability issue, not a—
Jacob Ward [02:14:36]:
Yeah, it's a product liability question and not a First Amendment issue. Because what these cases have built is the idea that the decisions being made in these product circumstances are are basically like, you know, our choices, like knowing design choices inside the company, as opposed to we are a neutral bulletin board through which the world is communicating. And that, to me, what's so interesting about that is that it helps us understand better that there is a behavior-shaping function to this business that it has denied having. And yet, if you look at the rest of its business, and I'm sure we've all looked at this as like, they make their money literally off of pricing and predicting human behavior. You can pay for that.
Leo Laporte [02:15:39]:
And they're very good at it. They're very good at it. Very good at it.
Jacob Ward [02:15:43]:
Yes. And so the idea that they're saying that our design choices are not changing behavior, while at the same time they're talking to their advertising their advertising clientele and saying, we'll charge you, you know, we'll let you in fact pay based on how many newsletter signups you get or how many products, you know, how many, you know, Christmas stockings you sell, you know, because we're that confident that we can find and predict behavior. You know.
Leo Laporte [02:16:08]:
The EFF was very upset. They said it had the— this settlement is a loss. Under this settlement, they wrote, young users will now have less access to Meta products and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play. The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages. This enshrines Meta's harmful surveillance into law, and it will compromise users' privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests.
Jacob Ward [02:16:49]:
I think that's—
Leo Laporte [02:16:50]:
those are great points. Mike Masnick says something very similar. Mike on Tech Dirt, and I always, always am interested in what Mike has to say. Meta just paid nearly $17 billion to make sure it gets to write the kids' safety rules for every other social media platform. Even the Wall Street Journal thought this was a bad thing. Saying— this is their editorial board— it's regulatory capture.
Harry McCracken [02:17:13]:
Yep. Yeah, Mike's piece is a must-read.
Leo Laporte [02:17:17]:
He's really good. Yeah.
Molly White [02:17:19]:
And I thought Mike made an interesting point in his piece as well, which is that, you know, is this going to discourage other tech firms from studying whether or not—
Leo Laporte [02:17:28]:
Yeah, you don't want to know, do you?
Molly White [02:17:29]:
Being harmed, right? Because Facebook probably regrets doing all that research right now.
Leo Laporte [02:17:34]:
Yeah.
Jacob Ward [02:17:36]:
I think that the thing that I'm trying to do, to think about in this is I'm trying not to be absolutist one way or the other. I'm trying not to say, I'm trying not to give a full-throated endorsement to the Australia ban, but I don't like the idea that somehow I have this standing disagreement with Taylor Lorenz about this. We did a debate about a year ago.
Leo Laporte [02:18:01]:
I'd like to have seen that.
Jacob Ward [02:18:02]:
Yeah, it's interesting. And she is so impassioned about it. Yeah. And I really respect her passion about it, but I disagree with the idea that there is no role for requiring that these companies understand how old these kids are and that there should be no regulatory oversight of, I'm not sure that I want an economy of fly-by-night startups getting to very casually engage with kids online.
Leo Laporte [02:18:39]:
Like, I think the idea that that is hard— We don't let kids buy liquor. We don't let kids buy pornography. There's precedent for it. It's just challenging on the internet because the only way to do this is, is very much invading the privacy of every user and collects a lot of data that we don't want these we don't trust these companies.
Jacob Ward [02:18:59]:
Well, I would just say, but the charge here was an invasion of privacy. And so if anything, you could also make the argument that the effect of this, yeah, might lead to a gathering up of data on kids, definitely a problem. But the thing that they were poised to win on was violating the privacy of kids. And so So there's one outcome here where you could imagine between the lawyers and the business model, there being no room. And this becoming a business that just people don't wanna go into, dealing with kids online. And that might not be the worst thing in the world, I would respectfully point out. And so I just think we shouldn't fall into the trap, just as I'm trying not to fall into the trap of being like, We should just ban it. I think people shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that efforts to regulate it are only going to wind up, you know, destroying the free and open experience of kids online.
Jacob Ward [02:20:05]:
I think that there's a medium being struck here. We are very early in the evolution of all of this.
Harry McCracken [02:20:15]:
Okay, Kevin, Jacob came back online.
Jacob Ward [02:20:19]:
Oh geez, was I, was I offline?
Harry McCracken [02:20:22]:
No, I was, I was upset a little while ago when you disappeared because I wanted to hear what you had to say about this topic.
Leo Laporte [02:20:29]:
Yeah, I really appreciate you guys.
Jacob Ward [02:20:31]:
I, I mean, seriously, I just, yeah, I feel so powerfully that, that we have no idea that there's this sort of like, you can't put the toothpaste bit— like, I'm literally in this, in the midst right now trying to find a toothpaste factory that will let me tour it because everyone's like, you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. And so all I want in the world is to go— there's these huge assembly lines where they put oceans of toothpaste into tubes. We're great at putting them into tubes. And—
Leo Laporte [02:21:00]:
That's a good point. How did it get in the tubes in the first place? Seriously, we do it endlessly.
Jacob Ward [02:21:05]:
And it turns out toothpaste tubes are like the dumbest way to do toothpaste. Like, that industry is ridiculous. And so I just want to take—
Molly White [02:21:13]:
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Jacob Ward [02:21:16]:
So, so putting toothpaste back into tubes would actually be the best possible way to design it, rather than having these throwaway one-time use things that have fooled us into thinking that we can't put it back in. Is incredibly stupid. We should be reusing tubes endlessly. Yeah, you should have— you can have like— yeah, you could have a hard pellet that goes in and you, you, you know, hydrate it and then it turns into like the soap.
Leo Laporte [02:21:39]:
Can you see that tooth powder? When I was a kid, We'd get it, it was in a tin, it was tooth powder, and you'd shake it out in your toothbrush.
Harry McCracken [02:21:47]:
Do you remember that? My father used that stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:21:50]:
I like tooth powder.
Jacob Ward [02:21:51]:
Let's bring that back. They're so good at making it sound like there's no other way to do it. And there are so many. We're so much smarter than that, you guys. We can do better than this.
Leo Laporte [02:22:02]:
You know, the Wall Street Journal of all people says the Meta settlement makes big tech bigger. The company is too powerful, the government says. then loads it up with new obligations that require more power. By the way, Robert Bork writing this piece, so I think that's kind of interesting. I don't disagree with him. We are giving Facebook more power. This is regulatory capture.
Jacob Ward [02:22:27]:
We'll have the chance to see what happens too when, like, I mean, in February they're going to get hit with literally more than 3,000 additional private cases, right? Like, this is the end of state action on this particular question. around COPPA and child online privacy, but we're about to see—
Leo Laporte [02:22:42]:
So this is it, that's it, it's done.
Jacob Ward [02:22:44]:
Well, on these particular questions for states, yes.
Leo Laporte [02:22:48]:
Right, so Facebook really skated on this. They got out with a—
Jacob Ward [02:22:52]:
They got out of this one thing, but there are many things that aren't touched in this agreement. Like DMs are not touched at all in this agreement, which is both bad in a way, 'cause that's where like the 2-hour time limit only applies to the feed, it doesn't apply to DMs, that kind of stuff. There's some silly oversight where you're just like, what? But AI is not touched. So any weirdness they do with AI could be the subject of a new case. There's a lot of landscape available for further legal action going forward. It's just on these particular child online privacy questions from states, that's the end of it. But that is not the end of lawsuits from school districts, individual plaintiffs, tribal governments. There's going to be a ton more stuff that comes at them.
Jacob Ward [02:23:45]:
And so I would say the temptation is to think that it's all over, but it's far from over. Their time in court is not done. I'm going to end up in court watching these guys for weeks and months, I'm sure.
Leo Laporte [02:23:57]:
Are you hoping for that or not?
Jacob Ward [02:23:59]:
Well, this is the thing, right? Yeah, exactly. I've learned so many insider tricks. I mean, it's kind of wonderful. You go to the court and you could just go. I don't have to say CNN, I don't have to say journalist. They just let you in because that's the way America works. And you can sit and watch Adam Mosseri on the stand. It's great.
Jacob Ward [02:24:20]:
I did this with the Sam Altman-Musk trial. You can just sit there and watch the richest person in the world say yes ma'am and no ma'am to the judge. That's a great That's good fun. That's good free fun in America. But I also learned through this that actually you think you wanna be in the court, but you actually wanna be in the overflow room.
Molly White [02:24:39]:
Overflow room. Yeah.
Jacob Ward [02:24:41]:
Yeah, turns out, cuz that's where the snacks are and you can chat with people. There's snacks?
Molly White [02:24:46]:
The other journalists.
Jacob Ward [02:24:46]:
Well, you can bring your snacks. You're not allowed to bring snacks into the court, and you can drink coffee and be like, who's this guy? To people around you. It just turns out that's the pro move.
Molly White [02:24:55]:
So that's why we did it with the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, because only the first 14 people could actually get into the courtroom, which meant that people were waking up at 3 in the morning and camping out outside the courtroom. And the rest of us were like, screw that. We want to go sit in the overflow room.
Jacob Ward [02:25:11]:
We'll sit with our friends and eat food.
Leo Laporte [02:25:13]:
Exactly.
Molly White [02:25:14]:
But you talking about wanting to go see Mark Zuckerberg, it reminded me of hearing that Sam Bankman-Fried was going to take the trial and immediately booking a flight to New York.
Jacob Ward [02:25:25]:
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Talk about a sweaty guy on the stand. Yeah, right.
Molly White [02:25:29]:
So, and if I had been deprived of that, I would have been very upset.
Leo Laporte [02:25:33]:
This trial was in San Francisco, right, Jacob? Oakland.
Jacob Ward [02:25:36]:
Oakland, California.
Leo Laporte [02:25:37]:
So it was in your neck of the woods. You didn't have to— Yeah, literally.
Jacob Ward [02:25:39]:
I literally rode my bike there.
Leo Laporte [02:25:41]:
It was great.
Jacob Ward [02:25:42]:
It was the most civilized thing I've had, you know. I didn't have to fly anywhere. It was great.
Leo Laporte [02:25:46]:
He had to settle.
Jacob Ward [02:25:48]:
I know, I know.
Harry McCracken [02:25:51]:
Oh no.
Leo Laporte [02:25:52]:
All right, we got— as much as I'm enjoying this, and I really, really am, you guys are fantastic, uh, we do have to take one more break. And unfortunately, we should probably wrap this up. Uh, I'm not Lex Fridman or anything. I saw his most recent podcast was 5 hours and 15 minutes long. I thought— and I thought I was bad.
Molly White [02:26:11]:
I think he's done 8. He—
Leo Laporte [02:26:13]:
what is it? He must— they must take breaks, right? I don't understand how people do it.
Molly White [02:26:18]:
I've never watched one long enough to know.
Leo Laporte [02:26:20]:
No, I know. I never get through the whole thing. I don't I don't understand it. He interviews great people, to his credit.
Jacob Ward [02:26:27]:
He needs a Benito in his life to get him on track. Yeah.
Molly White [02:26:30]:
The longest episode of the Lex Fridman podcast is an 8.5-hour conversation with Elon Musk.
Jacob Ward [02:26:37]:
Oh my God.
Leo Laporte [02:26:38]:
Who would want to spend 8 hours with Elon? It's all about the clips though.
Jacob Ward [02:26:40]:
They want the little bits and pieces for TikTok.
Leo Laporte [02:26:42]:
Yeah, the little clips. That's where they get all the attention. That's all I've seen is because I can't sit down for 8 hours. Even if you listen to If it was at double speed, it would be 4 hours.
Jacob Ward [02:26:52]:
That's a lot of Ritalin between 2 dudes. I don't know.
Leo Laporte [02:26:56]:
Jacob Ward is here. It's great to have you, Jacob. You see him on CNN. You can read him on theripcurrent.com, read his book at The Loop, and find out more at jacobward.com. Molly White, one of the great people who keeps Wikipedia alive. Thank you, Molly. Her newsletter is Citation Needed. And she's at mollywhite.net.
Leo Laporte [02:27:19]:
And the technologizer, my dear friend Harry McCracken from fastcompany.com. All right, we're not gonna take too long. I don't wanna be the 8-hour podcast. There are other things to talk about. Darth Vader testimony. He wants you to know, at the San Diego City Council, he stepped up to say, I support I support Flock surveillance. Uh, this was actually, I think, a very good— a guy named Anthony Ralphs, uh, frustrated by the San Diego City Council support for these automated license plate reader cameras that are now taking over the United States. There's more than 100,000 of them in the United States.
Leo Laporte [02:28:03]:
He thought, you know, if I come dressed as, uh, as Darth Vader, he said, the Emperor is a fan of Flock. We must continue utilizing flock technologies so we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium. He actually, uh, it's— you could have seen this on TikTok or, uh, uh, seen it maybe on, uh, on Snapchat or wherever you get your videos. I guess Instagram. I think it was pretty funny. The scenes are— but it makes a very important point, and I think that the people are, are now standing up. Uh, a guy actually just got cited with a felony. His local police department put up dummy flock cameras.
Leo Laporte [02:28:49]:
They weren't real flock cameras. He destroyed them, and now he's, now he's in jail. There is definitely a move. The city of Tempe, Arizona has turned off their flock. Citing privacy concerns and risk for misuse. I think that the tide is turning on this one. In fact, I think it might even impact the election. There's gonna be 2 big— I think 2 very big issues in the November midterms.
Leo Laporte [02:29:22]:
One will be flock cameras in your local jurisdictions. The other will be data centers. And you're— and already you're seeing people like Greg Abbott, who is the governor of Texas, who's running for reelection and a big supporter until recently of data centers in Texas, suddenly saying, you know, these aren't such good— I don't believe in data centers anymore. I'm not sure I believe him when he says that.
Molly White [02:29:47]:
Any thoughts about FLOC data centers and how it's moving the needle in I think it's really interesting just how tremendously mobilizing the AI data center issue has been because, yeah, you know, I think one thing that's really interesting for me as someone who follows both the crypto and AI election influence is that crypto is not a mobilizing election issue. Like, nobody is out there voting for someone because they support crypto, and there's really nobody out there saying, I'm voting for someone because they support AI. Voting against someone who supports crypto because most people just don't care. But when it comes to AI data centers, like voters are actually getting up in arms about it, which is, I think, really interesting to watch. And watching how that is intersecting with the attempts by the industry to influence the elections is really interesting because we're seeing candidates basically coming out and saying, my opponent is funded by AI billionaires. You shouldn't vote for him. And it's resonating in ways that I think the crypto issue really did not.
Harry McCracken [02:30:50]:
It's interesting to see Flock become this recognizable brand name and poster child for all the stuff people don't like about surveillance. Yeah. I mean, my city is full of other types of security cameras. I don't have a clue who makes them, but Flock is becoming well known. And, uh, it's sort of— it's catching a lot of the heat for stuff that people don't like about being observed wherever they go.
Leo Laporte [02:31:17]:
Yeah, it's really—
Molly White [02:31:18]:
Yeah, it is interesting because like license plate readers are pretty old technology as far as this stuff goes, but now that we're seeing a lot of backlash to things like that.
Jacob Ward [02:31:28]:
I think somehow people didn't even understand that license plate readers were around. I think it just wasn't in the national consciousness to understand that like a repo agent can find your car within an hour. It's pretty straightforward to just track your vehicle. I think people just didn't really understand that. Yeah, they didn't. I feel like there's a— this has brought it to the surface for people. I took a trip last year to Rio. I'd never been to Brazil before.
Jacob Ward [02:31:54]:
And when you go to Rio and you land there, when you go through customs and immigration, you walk this long corridor. long corridor and you speak to nobody and they just kind of wave you through with your passport. And you still have to get it checked for a second, but it's very fast and very easy. And I was like, what is this long hallway? And then somebody told me, you're being filmed like 10,000 ways. They're getting your gait, the rhythm of how you walk. They're picking up God knows what. And they have this huge panoply of Chinese surveillance technologies. all over the city.
Jacob Ward [02:32:29]:
Everywhere you go, it's just filled with cameras. And there's this really interesting debate going on sort of in Brazil right now around— it has had a noticeable effect on violent crime in that city. And so people are kind of all about it. On the other hand, there have been all these cases in which cops have been monetizing YouTube channels of weird-ass footage they find, which people don't like. And I think that there's something like when you look at how other countries react to this stuff, it makes you realize how, like Germany, I was just looking at this the other day. There's this big German social media star, is a kid who literally dresses as a cop and goes around finding people who've parked wrong and snitching to them to the police. And that guy's like a hero of social media in Germany. They love that.
Jacob Ward [02:33:26]:
He's like a— they love that, the Germans, they love a snitch. And so, and there's something about—
Leo Laporte [02:33:32]:
Kind of a hereditary thing in Germany.
Jacob Ward [02:33:35]:
Yeah, there's something going on there.
Leo Laporte [02:33:36]:
Tradition, yeah.
Jacob Ward [02:33:37]:
There's something going on. And so the fact that we are so upset by this, I am really relieved by considering we're the same country that's been paying money for an Alexa So all this time, you know, uh, it finally came home.
Leo Laporte [02:33:52]:
People finally realized we are being watched. Of course, we forget, Flock, we carry surveillance devices in our pockets.
Molly White [02:33:59]:
Yeah, you were just talking about putting your gut biome data into AI.
Leo Laporte [02:34:05]:
Yeah, I know. I use local AI. No, that's one of the reasons I use local AI, right?
Molly White [02:34:10]:
I was gonna say, you might be the person about whom AI tech companies have the most data.
Leo Laporte [02:34:15]:
Oh, well, that's up until recently, that's probably the case. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Benito Gonzalez [02:34:20]:
Hi, this is Benito. I just wanted to like chime in real quick and say that I think like the flock cameras and the data centers are only the physical manifestation of these things that people can actually fight.
Leo Laporte [02:34:28]:
That's what exactly—
Benito Gonzalez [02:34:29]:
like no one can go after Palantir because Palantir isn't a thing.
Leo Laporte [02:34:32]:
Like isn't a thing that you can really understand Bitcoin, but there's this general sense of disease that have focused on those 2 points. But it represents a much larger sense. And this is the anti-AI as well, of tech has spun out of control, surveillance capitalism has spun out of control, and we are no longer in control of our destiny. And that's bothering people.
Molly White [02:34:57]:
I think Bitcoin is not going to falsely arrest you because it mistook you for somebody else. And it's also not going to take your job. You know, I think that's partly why the AI thing is so mobilizing is people feel very directly threatened by it in ways that Bitcoin, I mean, Bitcoin might tank the economy or something like that, but it's not very directly threatening in the same way. Yeah.
Jacob Ward [02:35:24]:
That's funny. It's like the thing of, I always would get asked, one of the things they say to you in television news is like, well, what are we going to point a camera at to do this story? And AI data centers have become that as Benito points out.
Harry McCracken [02:35:37]:
You can point a camera at those.
Jacob Ward [02:35:39]:
You can point a camera at flocks. I'm curious what— and I think that's why the Sam Bankman-Fried trial was such a big deal, is you could actually like— there was a face to it.
Leo Laporte [02:35:47]:
Yeah, you're right.
Jacob Ward [02:35:48]:
But, but I wonder what the— there's going to be something else, I think, with crypto. It's like it skated underneath the radar because, yeah, like, like people say, there's no—
Molly White [02:35:57]:
you know, to some extent there was Bitcoin data centers which have had a lot of those same complaints as AI data centers, but I think that it's just a much smaller market. You know, they're not entering every single township in the way that you sort of—
Jacob Ward [02:36:13]:
And like you say, it's not taking your job. That building's not stealing your job. That's right.
Molly White [02:36:17]:
Right. Or you're not worried about your kids in the same way that I think a lot of people are worried about AI. And as soon as something starts to threaten people's kids, you know, I think that's when things really start to get heated.
Harry McCracken [02:36:29]:
You can't really ignore AI, but most people can ignore Bitcoin and they'll be okay.
Leo Laporte [02:36:34]:
That's right. But you make such a good point, Jacob, that so much of our awareness is driven by television news. And, and having worked in TV for so long, I know too, if there's not a picture, it's very hard for TV to talk about it. With Bitcoin, it became the Bitcoin ATMs, and you saw all these stories about little old ladies putting their money in. Well, Bitcoin ATMs are a little bit of a '90s project.
Molly White [02:36:57]:
But I do think, you know, that is why you see the, like, physical Gold, Bitcoin, as if it's a coin, as if it exists, because it's like, what else are you gonna put in?
Jacob Ward [02:37:07]:
Well, and the problem with all of that, right, is that with a lot of these big social, you know, like society rewriting problems, by the time there's something to point a camera at, it's too late, right? That's one of the problems. Like, that's the climate change thing. That's what all the climate scientists are saying. By the time it's at your doorstep, it's too late.
Leo Laporte [02:37:26]:
And the time in Nepal, we didn't really— flooding is killing thousands.
Harry McCracken [02:37:30]:
That's right.
Leo Laporte [02:37:31]:
Uh, sorry, nice try.
Jacob Ward [02:37:32]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should have been on it when we couldn't film it. That's right.
Leo Laporte [02:37:36]:
Well, we're not very good, uh, as a species at abstract concepts. We need concrete.
Harry McCracken [02:37:42]:
Yeah.
Jacob Ward [02:37:42]:
And I'm not very good as a, as a, as a podcast person at ending on a happy note.
Leo Laporte [02:37:47]:
I'm always— Oh, I have happy notes to end on. Don't worry. Oh, good. Oh, good.
Jacob Ward [02:37:50]:
Thank God.
Harry McCracken [02:37:50]:
Thank God.
Leo Laporte [02:37:52]:
I always try to find one upbeat story. Actually, I've been using all the upbeat stories from the Robot Olympics, all of the pictures of robots falling over, dying, bursting into flames, and I probably shouldn't celebrate that. This is what we need.
Molly White [02:38:07]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:38:08]:
Here's a happy story, actually. We talked about, we talked about for years CRISPR, the idea of gene editing, and of course there's a lot of issues with the gene editing, but here's a story about CRISPR being used in a very positive way. Now, I am aware of this because I have a genetic marker that, uh, uh, means I have to watch very closely high cholesterol. Um, and, you know, my doctor said there's nothing we can do about it. You know, we can, we can give you statins, but, uh, this is a gene. Well, uh, this is from CNN. Um, 50% reduction in cholesterol over a year by— this came from a story in the New England Journal of Medicine— by using CRISPR. They only had 15 patients, 15 patients with high cholesterol, adults.
Leo Laporte [02:39:03]:
Uh, they were given a gene-altering medicine, CRISPR-Cas9, which basically targeted a location On the gene to modify it, took out that one marker, the one I have, and it worked. 50% reduction in cholesterol.
Harry McCracken [02:39:26]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [02:39:27]:
Decreases in LDL and triglycerides. They saw them 60 days after treatment, then they've lasted over a year. In people who took the highest dose, the reduction seems durable and safe. This is a very interesting Interesting. I think the first time I can think of it, of a medicine that is actually gene modification. That's happy news.
Jacob Ward [02:39:50]:
That is happy news. That is happy news. Let's just wait a generation before we get too excited.
Molly White [02:39:54]:
Yeah.
Jacob Ward [02:39:54]:
Just make sure nobody pops out with it.
Molly White [02:39:56]:
He has already got the shot coming up.
Leo Laporte [02:39:58]:
I'm getting the shot.
Jacob Ward [02:39:59]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:39:59]:
Give it to me, baby.
Molly White [02:40:01]:
The earliest adopter.
Leo Laporte [02:40:03]:
Yeah.
Harry McCracken [02:40:04]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:40:04]:
Well, fortunately for me, the statins do seem to work.
Molly White [02:40:08]:
Good.
Leo Laporte [02:40:08]:
But it would be nice to have something a little bit more—
Harry McCracken [02:40:11]:
That is cool.
Jacob Ward [02:40:11]:
I will say, like, I mean, this is the thing we were talking earlier, you know, we started off this conversation, you know, hours and hours ago about—
Leo Laporte [02:40:18]:
Many moons ago, yes. Many moons ago. That's okay.
Jacob Ward [02:40:21]:
When I was sitting outside, remember that?
Leo Laporte [02:40:24]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jacob Ward [02:40:25]:
Yeah, funny. But this idea, right, that the technology is not bad, it is the use of the technology. And the thing that with the, like, Like, that AI, you know, like, I just think like, give it to the scientists.
Leo Laporte [02:40:38]:
Yeah. Give it to the CRISPR engineers. AI is a problem because—
Jacob Ward [02:40:40]:
Give it to those folks.
Molly White [02:40:42]:
People.
Jacob Ward [02:40:42]:
Yeah, they're gonna do cool things with it. They're gonna solve the problem. Yeah. Fewer AI girlfriends, more CRISPR research.
Leo Laporte [02:40:49]:
Don't knock my AI girlfriends.
Jacob Ward [02:40:51]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:40:52]:
At least they love me.
Molly White [02:40:53]:
Who sound like Bill Gates.
Leo Laporte [02:40:55]:
Hi. Hi, guys.
Jacob Ward [02:40:58]:
There's some jobs we must keep around.
Harry McCracken [02:41:00]:
That's right.
Leo Laporte [02:41:02]:
So it is yesterday I mentioned was Judgment Day. Skynet went online August 29th, 2026, according to Terminator 2. And in honor of that, it's the 35th anniversary of the movie. It's coming back to movie theaters. Look for actually the best Terminator movie, I think, in a movie theater near you. StudioCanal, which owns the movie, is actually doing a special theatrical release of the film this weekend. To celebrate Skynet Day. And honestly, I think it could be true.
Leo Laporte [02:41:37]:
We don't know. There was something special about when that movie came out, though.
Jacob Ward [02:41:40]:
I think there was something in the air that summer.
Leo Laporte [02:41:42]:
Ah, that was a great movie. The first Terminator, it's funny, doesn't age very well. I mean, it was great. It's classic. Terminator 2 ages pretty well. That was pretty good. And then I always like to end the show with somebody dying, or, you know, I call it the In Memoriam segment, and this week it's, it's the Mechanical Turk.
Molly White [02:42:05]:
Oh, interesting.
Leo Laporte [02:42:10]:
It launched 21 years ago when Molly was a child. Uh, you may remember the idea was for pennies you could ask real humans in, uh, in poor countries around the world to do your work for you. Bezos called it artificial artificial intelligence, uh, we don't really need it anymore.
Jacob Ward [02:42:32]:
Wow, isn't that interesting? We've gotten to the place where they— we have enough people churning through this stuff, they've churned through it all for us, and now we don't.
Leo Laporte [02:42:39]:
Yeah, maybe it was the original crowdsourced—
Jacob Ward [02:42:42]:
we don't need reinforcement learning, I guess, in the same way. I hadn't even thought of that. That's interesting.
Harry McCracken [02:42:47]:
I feel like I might be the only person— sorry, go ahead, Molly.
Molly White [02:42:50]:
A lot of it was like essentially transcription or You know, very easily now automatable tasks. So.
Leo Laporte [02:42:58]:
Yeah, you didn't really need, you don't really need it now.
Harry McCracken [02:43:00]:
Well, I feel like I'm the only person left who might remember that when the original Kindle came out 19 years ago, one of the features was you could use Mechanical Turk for free on it and just ask questions. And it really was like, like an artificial ChatGPT. And it did not last for very long and did not work very well.
Jacob Ward [02:43:18]:
And some nice Irish lady would It would figure out for you like what's the best potluck recipe to bring this afternoon.
Harry McCracken [02:43:23]:
That's so funny. I have my original Kindle somewhere and I think there's at least a tiny chance that it has my conversations. I need to find it and see if I can charge it up.
Molly White [02:43:31]:
I would love just to see a log of all the questions that Kindle users asked the Kindle. They should publish a book of that.
Jacob Ward [02:43:42]:
Totally.
Leo Laporte [02:43:43]:
It would seem so dated now, wouldn't it?
Harry McCracken [02:43:45]:
Incredibly dated. And they would not have guessed that within a generation or so that that would be entirely automated and would work far better.
Leo Laporte [02:43:55]:
I imagine there's a— I should look on Reddit. There must be a Mechanical Turk forum subreddit. Maybe people will be posting their Mechanical Turk conversations from the early days.
Harry McCracken [02:44:07]:
That must be the best product name of all time in some ways.
Leo Laporte [02:44:10]:
Well, you know what it was? And I know this because I'm a serious chess player. There was a chess-playing machine in the 19th century called the Mechanical Turk. And it had a turbine.
Harry McCracken [02:44:22]:
Oh.
Leo Laporte [02:44:22]:
It was a torso, and it would move the pieces. And it was amazing. Paul Morphy, who was the world champion at the time, an American, played it, and it played really well against him. And people thought, oh, this is incredible artificial intelligence. But there was actually a small person inside.
Harry McCracken [02:44:41]:
There was a guy like inside.
Leo Laporte [02:44:42]:
There was a small person inside the Mechanical Turk, uh, that was apparently a very good chess player.
Molly White [02:44:49]:
I was gonna say, not only small but very good at chess.
Leo Laporte [02:44:52]:
Talented chess master and small enough to fit in the cabinet. Let me see if I can find a picture of this.
Jacob Ward [02:44:59]:
Wait, if he could beat the grandmaster, why isn't he the master?
Leo Laporte [02:45:02]:
He should have been the world champion. I think he probably didn't beat Morphy. But he was good enough that— here's a picture of it. From where? Wikipedia. It was good enough that—
Jacob Ward [02:45:17]:
Not to scale.
Leo Laporte [02:45:20]:
Yeah, not to scale.
Harry McCracken [02:45:20]:
I don't know what—
Leo Laporte [02:45:21]:
maybe it was giant.
Molly White [02:45:22]:
I don't know.
Leo Laporte [02:45:22]:
There is a guy in there.
Molly White [02:45:25]:
Where are his legs though?
Leo Laporte [02:45:26]:
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. You should check with Wikipedia and see. Uh, this is, this is the guy who created the Mechanical Turk, uh, Kempelen. And it was, it was a con. It was actually— he pretended it was a machine.
Harry McCracken [02:45:45]:
I love the historical allusion in that name.
Leo Laporte [02:45:48]:
Yeah. So, and it was actually a pretty clever machine. It was able to physically move the pieces.
Molly White [02:45:57]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:45:57]:
Here he is.
Molly White [02:45:58]:
I love that they went so far as to actually make a guy. Like, that was not It was necessary to have the dude moving the pieces.
Leo Laporte [02:46:06]:
Yeah, right. The Turk was a— there really was a torso of a mechanical Turk. Here is, uh, from a bill, uh, from, uh, the 18th century of this mechanical Turk, the automaton chess player. Isn't that amazing? So that's where the name comes from. And now, ladies and gentlemen, you see, we uplifted, we informed, We informed, we amused, and we didn't leave you on a low note, much as Jacob Ward might have tried. Jacob.
Jacob Ward [02:46:36]:
I really did my best.
Leo Laporte [02:46:37]:
You did yeoman work today, moving locations on the fly.
Harry McCracken [02:46:42]:
Man.
Leo Laporte [02:46:42]:
Really appreciate it. Uh, I was— it was so cool when I saw you on CNN and I said, I know where he is. Exactly, exactly.
Jacob Ward [02:46:51]:
It's true. Washer dryer right there. I know.
Leo Laporte [02:46:55]:
So they don't make you go in, you can do it from your house. That's a big change.
Jacob Ward [02:47:00]:
It is a big change.
Leo Laporte [02:47:01]:
And they—
Jacob Ward [02:47:02]:
and the, the— yeah, it's a funny new world, right? Because once upon a time I was very scornful of my setup. I'm like, oh, what am I, some YouTuber? And now I'm like, man, I hope I can make it on YouTube.
Leo Laporte [02:47:12]:
It looks good. It looks good. That really all changed. I remember you used to do hits on CNN and you'd have to go down to the Satellite bureau and sit in an earpiece and pretend that you were talking to somebody instead of—
Harry McCracken [02:47:27]:
Sit in front of a backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Leo Laporte [02:47:30]:
Exactly. And then thanks to it, COVID changed it all, and we all got used to the idea of people being in their kitchen or the living room. I'm still amazed. You'll see members of Congress, you'll see sitting senators in their kitchen. It's hysterical. Times have, have changed, uh, but we haven't. And that's what I love about you guys. Thanks, Jacob, for being here.
Leo Laporte [02:47:54]:
Molly White, you're the best. Always appreciate your time. Thank you for being patient and putting up with this marathon session. Lex Fridman's online too, if you want to make it even longer, you know, you keep going.
Molly White [02:48:06]:
Even I have my limits.
Leo Laporte [02:48:07]:
CitationNeeded.news, MollyWhite.net. Annette, great to see you. And of course, dear friend Harry McCracken, the Technologizer. We used to get together in the studio and do this, and I do miss those days.
Harry McCracken [02:48:19]:
Yes, I haven't been back to Petaluma even once, I think.
Leo Laporte [02:48:22]:
Well, it was the only reason people ever came to Petaluma was to do the show.
Harry McCracken [02:48:26]:
Well, the breakfasts there are pretty good too.
Leo Laporte [02:48:27]:
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, bicycle up sometime.
Harry McCracken [02:48:30]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:48:30]:
We'll go to lunch. Uh, you'll find him at fastcompany.com and the Plugged In newsletter. Must read. And I look forward to your Dvorak piece. When do you think that'll come out?
Harry McCracken [02:48:42]:
I kind of like fell down a Dvorak rabbit hole and I need to come up.
Leo Laporte [02:48:45]:
It's easy to do, believe me. I've lived that rabbit hole.
Harry McCracken [02:48:49]:
Because I feel like— actually, I was surprised by how little seemed to be documented of how he became a computer columnist in that heyday when—
Leo Laporte [02:48:58]:
He was pretty famously private.
Harry McCracken [02:49:02]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:49:02]:
For instance, they did a No Agenda show after he passed, and his wife Mimi came on, and she said the thing that would piss John off the most about dying was that everybody knew he was 80 years old. Because he had basically hid his age. He never told me. I would say, well, how old are you? And he pretended he was a lot younger than he really was. He claimed, and I think it's true, to have been a wine columnist early on, but even before that, he was a pollution inspector. He had all sorts of weird, odd jobs.
Harry McCracken [02:49:37]:
He had a mail-order catalog for Northstar computers, which Leo might remember, but most people might not.
Leo Laporte [02:49:43]:
I had a Northstar. It was one of my very first personal computers we bought.
Harry McCracken [02:49:46]:
And his Northstar catalog had— it was very heavily branded with his personality, and it kind of almost read like a column, and that led to him working at Oh, I can't wait to read this.
Leo Laporte [02:49:58]:
Don't spoil it. This is something we'll all look forward to, is the real story.
Harry McCracken [02:50:02]:
Parts of it are so mysterious to me because he was not like 20 years old when he became a computer columnist. He'd done a lot of living by that point.
Leo Laporte [02:50:09]:
Yeah. Well, that's what made him interesting. Thank you, Harry. Thank you, Molly. Thank you, Jacob. Thanks to all of you for being here. A special thanks to our club members. We stream this show live Live every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 to 2400 UTC.
Leo Laporte [02:50:28]:
You can watch us, uh, in the club of course, but also everybody can watch on YouTube, Twitch— see a lot of people on Twitch and YouTube watching right now— X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. And if you're chatting in any of those, I will see your chat. I could chat along with you as I have been in Twitch and YouTube today. After the fact, on-demand versions of everything we do available at our website, twit.tv. Each show has its own YouTube feed as well. The master YouTube channel is youtube.com/twit. You'll see links there to all the other shows. And of course, the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player, despite the attempt by advertisers and big tech to get you to stream shows so they can monitor what you're listening to and know how many ads you listen to and et cetera, et cetera.
Leo Laporte [02:51:15]:
That's what Spotify and Amazon, everybody else wants you to do. I'm a big believer in just RSS podcasts where we don't know who you are, we don't follow what you're doing, we make it available, you download it, you listen at your leisure. I still think that's the best way to do content, and we will always do that. You could find us in every podcast client, just search for TWiT, and that way you'll have it after we're done on a Sunday evening, maybe for your Monday morning commute. Thanks for listening, everybody. We've been doing this for 21 years. Here's to 21 more. Next week will be episode 1,100 of the podcast.
Leo Laporte [02:51:52]:
Kind of amazing. Thank you for your support. We appreciate it. And I will see you next week. And as I have said for all 1,099 of those episodes, thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can.
