This Week in Tech 1010: The Densest State in the US

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Tech 1010: The Densest State in the US

Podcast Information:

• Title: This Week in Tech 1010: The Densest State in the US
• Host/Author: TWiT (Leo Laporte)
• Release Date: December 16, 2024
• Description: Leo Laporte brings together some of the most interesting personalities in technology to discuss the most pressing issues. The show is known for its fun, relaxed, informative, and entertaining approach, making it a trusted source for the best tech podcasts globally.

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1. Introduction and Panel Introduction [00:00 - 02:57]

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte welcoming the panel members:

• Mike Elgin: Joining from Oaxaca, Mexico, Mike is known for his newsletter MachineSociety AI and his gastronomic adventures with his wife, Amira, documented on gastronomad.net.
• Emily Forlani: An attorney from New Jersey, Emily brings legal insights to the discussion, especially pertinent to the New Jersey drone mystery.
• Kathy Gelis: A writer for Tech Dirt, Kathy adds a critical perspective on technology policies.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [01:49]: "Mike Elgin's MachineSociety AI explores the cyberpunk, nonfiction world we all live in."
• Mike Elgin [02:32]: "The tastiest places we've ever found."

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2. The New Jersey Drone Mystery [02:39 - 38:18]

The primary focus of the episode revolves around the mysterious drone sightings in New Jersey, sparking widespread concern and debate.

Key Points:

• Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs): Drones resembling helicopters with distinct light patterns have been frequently spotted near Morris County, the epicenter of the sightings.
• Government Response: The Department of Homeland Security, led by Secretary Mayorkas, has downplayed the sightings, attributing them to ordinary planes, which has raised suspicions about the government’s transparency.
• Local Impact: Residents report seeing these drones regularly, leading to heightened anxiety and calls for decisive action.

Discussion Highlights:

• Legislative Challenges: New Jersey Governor Kathy Hochul has urged federal lawmakers to grant states more authority to handle drone-related issues directly, emphasizing the current inability to shoot down unidentified drones without federal consent.
• Military Involvement: Panelists speculate that these might be military drones or foreign adversaries (e.g., China or Russia) testing surveillance capabilities.
• Public Perception and Conspiracy Theories: The widespread sightings have fueled conspiracy theories, comparing the situation to historical events like the Witches of Salem. The lack of clear information has led to increased public hysteria and misinformation.

Notable Quotes:

• Emily Forlani [04:10]: "This is where maybe I'm in New Jersey. And I do think, like, people deserve answers."
• Kathy Gelis [06:01]: "Chuck Schumer requests drone detection system for New York, New Jersey. As mysterious devices litter the skies..."
• Mike Elgin [14:17]: "They have this capability. It's a great technology for spying because if you shoot it down, they can be like, well, it wasn't ours."

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3. Infowars' Sale to The Onion Overturned [38:18 - 47:35]

Another significant topic covered is the bankruptcy court's decision to overturn the proposed sale of Infowars to The Onion, amidst legal disputes and stakeholders' interests.

Key Points:

• Bankruptcy Court Ruling: Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston has mandated the reevaluation of the sale, rejecting The Onion’s initial bid despite its alignment with the Sandy Hook families' preference for satire over Infowars continuing under a company affiliated with Alex Jones.
• Stakeholder Interests: The families associated with the Sandy Hook tragedy preferred The Onion acquiring Infowars to prevent further dissemination of harmful misinformation.
• Alternative Bids: The court's decision points towards potentially favoring higher cash bids over the culturally aligned but financially lower offer from The Onion.

Panel Discussions:

• Legal Implications: The panel debates the trustee’s decision, questioning whether the process was transparent and fair, and if the court is appropriately balancing the interests of all parties involved.
• Future of Infowars: Concerns are raised about the possibility of United First American Companies, affiliated with Alex Jones, eventually securing ownership despite higher financial bids.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [42:36]: "The bankruptcy court judge Christopher Lopez in Houston said, 'We're going to go back.'"
• Emily Forlani [42:54]: "The Onion is a better owner. Even though they offered less cash upfront, the families believed in their vision."

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4. TikTok Ban and First Amendment Implications [47:35 - 116:03]

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the ongoing legal battle surrounding TikTok's ban in the United States, examining its constitutional and national security aspects.

Key Points:

• Legal Proceedings: The federal appeals court has declined to block the TikTok ban, leaving the decision to the Supreme Court. The ban aims to prevent ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, from selling the platform to a U.S. entity, effectively enforcing a perpetual ban if no sale occurs by January 19th, 2025.
• First Amendment Debate: Panelists discuss whether TikTok's ban infringes upon free speech rights, with differing opinions on the balance between national security and constitutional freedoms.
• National Security Concerns: The primary justification for the ban is the potential for user data to be accessed by the Chinese government, posing cybersecurity threats.

Discussion Highlights:

• Government Transparency: Critics argue that the government has failed to provide sufficient evidence for the national security threats posed by TikTok, leading to skepticism and distrust.
• Impact on Free Speech: Questions are raised about the broader implications of such bans on other social media platforms and the slippery slope of government overreach in regulating online speech.
• Bipartisan Perspectives: The ban has garnered support from both political sides, but motivations vary, with some citing genuine security concerns and others leveraging it as a means to suppress dissenting voices.

Notable Quotes:

• Kathy Gelis [61:53]: "Users of TikTok have their own First Amendment interest in being able to communicate through it and also to consume content through it."
• Leo Laporte [67:02]: "We do not want to be more like China, do we?"
• Emily Forlani [75:03]: "TikTok is a company, a law. It feels like they're kind of hiding something."

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5. Cryptocurrency and AI: Opportunities and Challenges [116:03 - 183:58]

The panel shifts focus to the evolving landscapes of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, exploring their societal impacts, regulatory challenges, and ethical considerations.

Cryptocurrency:

• Speculation vs. Investment: The discussion emphasizes the distinction between using crypto as speculative assets versus genuine investments contributing to societal benefits.
• Regulatory Landscape: Concerns are raised about the lack of regulation allowing cryptocurrencies to facilitate illicit activities, such as ransomware payments and money laundering.
• Economic Impact: Panelists debate the ethical implications of crypto, with some advocating for its potential in decentralized finance, while others criticize its role in exacerbating economic inequalities and enabling criminal enterprises.

Artificial Intelligence:

• AI in Healthcare: Positive developments are highlighted, such as AI-powered diagnostics significantly improving cancer detection rates ([16:43] Mike Elgin: "AI powered mammograms were 21% more likely to have cancer detected than those who didn't.").
• Risks of AI Misuse: The potential for AI to replace human judgment in critical areas, leading to overreliance and loss of essential skills, is a major concern.
• Future of AI: Panelists express skepticism about achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the near future but acknowledge AI's transformative potential when used responsibly as a tool to augment human capabilities.

Notable Quotes:

• Mike Elgin [116:03]: "AI can accelerate the grunt work, no matter what kind of grunt work you're doing."
• Emily Forlani [133:07]: "They're just sort of rent-seeking, based on how can I turn my $1 into $2."
• Leo Laporte [137:27]: "Cryptocurrencies do have a very concrete use case. They are a technology that has latched onto and then helped build a culture that celebrates greed and speculation as virtues."

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6. Open Source and Intellectual Property [117:53 - 163:04]

A segment discusses the legal tussle between Matt Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress, and WP Engine over access to WordPress.org resources.

Key Points:

• Legal Battle: Matt Mullenweg accused WP Engine of misusing the WordPress trademark and blocking access to essential resources, leading to a preliminary injunction by the court.
• Implications for Open Source: The case underscores the challenges open-source projects face when commercial entities leverage the community without contributing back.
• Court’s Stance: The judge ruled in favor of WP Engine, emphasizing the need to maintain the status quo until a full trial can determine the merits of the case.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [118:01]: "This is not a small thing you're saying. You're talking about basically making the Internet a First Amendment free zone..."
• Emily Forlani [162:24]: "I'm really suspicious that there is such a popular opinion to hate the TikTok ban or there's too much consensus."

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7. Listener Engagement and Personal Stories [163:07 - 181:56]

The episode delves into personal anecdotes and listener engagement, highlighting the real-world implications of technology policies on individuals.

Key Points:

• Personal Health Story: Kathy Gelis shares her battle with ovarian cancer, emphasizing the importance of healthcare technology and personal liberty in accessing medical advancements.
• Impact of Technology on Daily Life: Discussions revolve around how technologies like AI and self-driving cars are integrated into everyday experiences, influencing behaviors and societal norms.

Notable Quotes:

• Kathy Gelis [160:03]: "I'm a lawyer. Everything's an argument. It was really good to start the conversation with, 'I have a Princess Kate problem.'"
• Emily Forlani [177:54]: "I want to try something else. And I had a personal experience."

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Conclusion and Closing Remarks [181:56 - 185:56]

The episode concludes with promotional segments for sponsors like Mint Mobile and Chumba Casino, followed by final thoughts from the panelists on the discussed topics.

Key Takeaways:

• Regulatory Balance: The need to balance national security with constitutional freedoms remains a contentious issue, with ongoing debates about the extent of government intervention in technology.
• Future Outlook: The panelists express cautious optimism about technological advancements while underscoring the necessity for informed policy-making and ethical considerations to harness technology's benefits while mitigating its risks.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [184:26]: "It's an AI-powered mammogram that was 21% more likely to detect cancer."
• Kathy Gelis [175:36]: "I don't think there's any of them that I'm rooting for."

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Final Thoughts

This Week in Tech 1010 offers a comprehensive exploration of pressing technology issues, from unidentified drone sightings and high-profile legal battles to the intricate debates surrounding TikTok's ban, cryptocurrency ethics, and AI's role in society. The panelists provide diverse perspectives, rooted in their respective expertise, fostering a nuanced discussion that underscores the complexities at the intersection of technology, policy, and societal impact.

For those interested in delving deeper into these topics, subscribing to TWiT's podcasts and following panelists like Emily Forlani on legal platforms or Mike Elgin's MachineSociety AI newsletter is highly recommended.

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Note: This summary excludes advertisement segments and non-content discussions, focusing solely on the core topics and insights shared during the episode.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. We have such an exciting panel, smart people all. Mike Elgin is here. Emily Forlani, our attorney at law, Kathy Gelis. Of course, one of the biggest topics of the day, the New Jersey drone mystery. We'll delve into that. Emily lives in New Jersey. She has quite a few thoughts. We'll also talk about Infowars. Apparently the Onion isn't going to get them. And the TikTok ban. What are the First Amendment implications? All that and more coming up next on a great Twit podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech, episode 1010, recorded Sunday, December 15, 2024. The densest state in the U.S. it's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. And I've got a great. As always, I've got a great panel assembled for you. Mike Elgin's visiting us from Oaxaca, Mexico. Hi, Mike.

[Mike Elgin]

Hey, Leo. Thank you for having me on.

[Leo Laporte]

I know exactly where he is because I've stayed in that house and it's a wonderful place. And yep, you're surrounded by great food and just you walk out the door and half a block away there's a nice little taco place and oh, it's just incredible. Yes, incredible. Great to see you, Mike. Great to see you. Mike has his own newsletter Now, MachineSociety AI, if you're interested. That's where you write about the machine society that we all live in.

[Mike Elgin]

It's cyberpunk, nonfiction.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Mike Elgin]

That's the world we live in.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. He also still writes for many publications. You'll see his byline and the reason he's in Oaxaca. He and his wife Amira do wonderful gastronomad trips to all over the world. And you just did one. I know. In Oaxaca, the gastronomad.net is the website and the experiences. You're going to go to Sicily next, Prosecco and Venice, Morocco, El Salvador and back to Mexico. This is Barcelona. Some of my favorite places in the world.

[Mike Elgin]

They're the tastiest places we've ever found.

[Leo Laporte]

The tastiest places in the world. We like food. Everywhere has good food, though.

[Mike Elgin]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Except Norway. Everywhere but Norway.

[Mike Elgin]

Oh, wow.

[Emily Forlani]

And Iceland.

[Kathy Gellis]

Straight out of the gate.

[Leo Laporte]

Annoying people right from the start.

[Mike Elgin]

That.

[Leo Laporte]

That was Emily Forlini mocking me. Dry Belbus. So it's great to have you. Welcome.

[Emily Forlani]

Thank you. Coming at you live from New Jersey, I'm Inside a drone. I'm flying the drones.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, I want to ask you about that in a second, but first, let's say hi also to Kathy Gelis, who is joining us. She writes for Tech Dirt. You have a lot of Gatorade there, Kathy. Old Kathy Gelis. Look at that.

[Kathy Gellis]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

There was a sale, so hydration, very important, especially when you live on a houseboat.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right. Yes. I, too, was also mocking you for the Norway quote. So just to be clear.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't know. It's just me personally, but there's only so much pickled herring I can eat and.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, I like pickled herring.

[Emily Forlani]

Oh, I've never.

[Kathy Gellis]

I've never found that threshold amount of too much pickled herring.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Emily, have you seen the drones?

[Emily Forlani]

I have not. I. I did write a piece about it for PC Mag, and I was hoping to go out and take a good picture, but it's. You never know where they're going to be. And they haven't been over my house, but I am the county right next to the main county where they were seen. So Morris county is where the whole thing kind of started. And now it's up and down the east coast, But it's like 20 minutes from me. I haven't. I haven't seen anything, but I would love to.

[Leo Laporte]

So there is a certain kind of Witches of Salem element to this.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is the. I mean, there probably was something really going on over New Jersey. I would. I'll ask you, Emily, but. But I think also now I've seen drones. Everybody's seeing them. Because any light in the sky, whether it's a helicopter, an airplane or a drone or whatever, you go, oh, there's the drones.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

And probably people are taking them out. And now adding to the mix and, you know, just complicating it, I bet, because now you get pictures of them.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm tempted to fly my drone at night now. That's right.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe put some Christmas lights on.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

My brother saw one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

He just texted the group chat. Drone. I see a drone.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're. They're UAPs. Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. Right. The military is getting into it. The President elect is going to look into it. What do we have any idea what. The military denies any knowledge of it, Right?

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, the military is denying it. And I saw that D.C. mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, he did an interview and he totally squashed it and was like, oh, they're planes. And I thought it was a little suspicious how much he discredited it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a plane. It's just a plane.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

So when I talk about that, like.

[Leo Laporte]

A plane, I gotta be honest with you. The one I saw, I'm pretty sure was a helicopter.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But it had three lights. Is that always the case? Yeah, I saw one over my house in Petaluma, California. They're everywhere. Yeah, but as I said, it's a. It's a certain amount of hysteria. That's.

[Kathy Gellis]

Larry Hogan was basically pointing. There's lights in the sky and people said, that's Orion.

[Emily Forlani]

Like, these are the stars that have.

[Kathy Gellis]

Been over your head for your entire.

[Leo Laporte]

Lifestyle in a row. The belt of Orion.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. I'm just saying, like, there's a headline on NBC News. Chuck Schumer requests drone Detection system for New York, New Jersey. As mysterious devices litter the skies, New York Governor Kathy Hochul urged federal legislators to pass a law that would grant states more authority to deal with drones directly.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah. So that's the issue. Yeah. That the states, they can't. They don't have authority to shoot them down. So they need to convince.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't shoot them down.

[Emily Forlani]

Why wouldn't you shoot it down over the ocean?

[Leo Laporte]

What if it's a plane? What if it's a passenger jet?

[Kathy Gellis]

Okay, There's a reason why we may want federal preemption here because what if it's an F?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

What if 100% pro. Shoot it down. Shoot that thing down.

[Mike Elgin]

What if toll we're entering the era of folks, they shoot it down, they.

[Emily Forlani]

Need to get a permit. There's an FAA restriction. You cannot be flying around.

[Mike Elgin]

You don't. Can't tell if they have a permit or not. Like, we don't know what's going on.

[Emily Forlani]

Well, the guy in New Jersey said that the Coast Guard told him that they had like 13 following a coast Guard ship. So that's when he was like, if they're over the ocean, we could shoot it down.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, but then so could the Coast Guard.

[Emily Forlani]

But don't you guys think we need to nip this in the bud? And, like, how else are you going to do it?

[Leo Laporte]

Nip what in the bud do. We don't even know what it is. So why are you nipping it in the bud?

[Emily Forlani]

This is where maybe I'm in New Jersey. And I do think, like, people deserve answers.

[Leo Laporte]

You do, you do say in your piece on PC magazine, it's giving off kind of a Chinese spy balloon.

[Emily Forlani]

Right. And by the way, we're being very cautious. Like, I haven't written more pieces than this one because we're not trying to add to hysteria and I'm not trying to add to hysteria right now. It's. There's an important kind of like reporting ethics in this situation because you don't know what it is. But I still think you should shoot it down like off the record. Like I wouldn't write that in article.

[Leo Laporte]

What is your drone expert think? Is it an actual consumer drone?

[Emily Forlani]

No. So he. That's one of the things we talk about in this is that if they are very large, it seems like they're not something you couldn't buy it at Best Buy. And he talks about how.

[Leo Laporte]

How do we know if they're large?

[Emily Forlani]

I think they're flying relatively low to the ground and so people can see like with their eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

How do we know they're flying low to the ground? This is the thing.

[Kathy Gellis]

At night, people are hearing it.

[Emily Forlani]

People are hearing it.

[Mike Elgin]

So. So the thing is, you have to understand that, that when it's. They are flying low to the ground, people are seeing like five or six or seven different things. They're seeing stars, they're seeing consumer drones, they're seeing airplanes, they're seeing helicopters, they're seeing lots of different things.

[Kathy Gellis]

And now they're starling satellites.

[Mike Elgin]

Everybody' got aliens in their head and they. Look, I don't. I know you've seen that video where the woman is watering her lawn and she sees a rainbow and because the sun is shining through her lawn, it's like, what are they putting in the water? The government's putting something in the water to make it do. Because. Because she started with the. She started with the conspiracy thinking and then she looked at the world and the same thing happened with Area 51. Area 51 is an experimental aircraft facility. That's what it does. It flies things that fly that nobody's ever seen before. So yes, people saw things they never saw before flying around Area 51. It's really ridiculous. Meanwhile, there almost certainly is China. Chinese or Russian drones that are highly capable and very fast buzzing military aircraft. Right. And. And spying through that realm. What I don't understand is why we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Why New Jersey?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, but seems a long way happening in San Diego.

[Leo Laporte]

China. Would you fly to New Jersey to harass. You could just go to Germany or. I mean, it seems like a long way.

[Emily Forlani]

There's a military base near where they exactly started.

[Mike Elgin]

Wherever there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they started from the military base.

[Mike Elgin]

It's a global phenomenon. This is not New Jersey. Oh, it's global now. The hysteria is New Jersey. But they're buzzing air bases in Europe, they're buzzing in San Diego, and maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

They are Russia, Virginia.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. I mean, there's. They have this capability. It's a great technology for spying because if you shoot it down, they can be like, well, it wasn't ours, you know.

[Emily Forlani]

Right. I mean, I think there's a balance that you don't want to be controversial. But also, I watched this hearing on drones because the New Jersey thing is starting all this conversation, and it really does sound like our country is not equipped to handle drones. Like to figure out what they are to stop them from coming over. Like, the fact that we can't just diagnose it and like I said, nip this whole thing in the bud is actually because our technology and our strategy towards drones is not good enough. And from the hearing I watched, everyone in government agreed that that's the case. It's just like a question of how to handle it. So I don't think we should dismiss it just because we don't have the technology to figure it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Why, if you're a Russian spy drone, do you run bright lights in a triangle formation?

[Emily Forlani]

I agree, but just we should be able to figure it out. And that's what everyone is saying.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think there's two things. One is, okay, drones are a technology that exists that may or may not pose various vectors of trouble for us, and we seem ill equipped both technically and from a policy standpoint, standpoint, to be able to deal with it. Okay, I think we're all on board with that. But I think in terms of leaping to the conclusion that the thing to do when you see the lights in the sky is to shoot it. I don't think we're at that point.

[Emily Forlani]

I don't think it's a leap. I think, like, this has been going on for a month and is like, people deserve answers. It's scary. If something is flying over your house every night, it's a failure of government that they can't help you.

[Leo Laporte]

But so are there. Okay, that's a good question. Are there people who are. Every night drones are going over their house.

[Emily Forlani]

They see them all the time in their community.

[Leo Laporte]

100, a group of them. What is it that they're seeing?

[Emily Forlani]

It seems to be anywhere from one to like four.

[Leo Laporte]

And those people are. Or they just go over.

[Emily Forlani]

They seem to do weird different patterns. But those people are scared and they have families and they're like, what is going on with my house? And I think that they deserve to have, like any answer. And it's ridiculous that they don't.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think what we're saying is this is literally shoot first, ask questions later. Like let's ask the question.

[Emily Forlani]

Who's saying shoot? I'm saying shoot one down over the ocean. Is that what you're responding to? No one's saying shoot it down besides me, but one over the ocean.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, the one problem is like, okay, is that.

[Leo Laporte]

Recover it to see what it is. Is that what you're saying, Emily? So, yes, just recover.

[Emily Forlani]

That's what we did with the spy balloon. Just recover it and see what it is.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, as a methodological, remove one, you know, extract a sample. That may make sense. And maybe extracting a sample involves shooting it over the ocean. But I think one of the problems is there's so much hysteria and there's so many lights of so many things. How do you actually know that you've extracted one of the sample that we're concerned about? Because you may have just gotten somebody's hobby.

[Emily Forlani]

But I mean, you act like shooting something down is like, you know, so dramatic. It's like we're sending bombs with the push button across the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Shooting down. If you're shooting down some people in a helicopter, that is dramatic.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think people have a good ability to distinguish between what's, you know, alien lights, drone lights, helicopter lights, airplane lights.

[Emily Forlani]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, of course it would be, yes. I don't think people are good at making that distinguishing. And I don't want people to start shooting at those just in case it is civilian aircraft or even military aircraft. Now wouldn't we be able to monitor radio transmissions around these drones?

[Emily Forlani]

It seems like we can't do anything.

[Mike Elgin]

There may not be. I mean, the state of the art in military drones is that they're AI based.

[Leo Laporte]

There's an Australian company that they're silent, they're autonomous.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, they don't use, they don't use gps and they don't need a connection with the operator. They, they can, they can be, basically, they can program AI to say, go, go, fly over this ship or this air base, take lots of high res video and fly back. And it's like no big deal. There's no, there's no there there in terms of, in terms of interrupting a radio signal. Australia, interestingly, has developed a methodology for drones, bigger drones, you know, like the kind that go great distances. They're more like aircraft to navigate by the stars of all things. Because Russia and North Korea right now are jamming airspaces to defeat drones that do rely on The GPS and other signals.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Interest.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, so. So that's the state of the art. But I. I think. I think it's very likely that many of these drones, or most of these drones are consumer drones. These are DJI drones. There's more than a million of them in the United States. 850,000 of them are registered with the government. There's so many of them, and people are flying around.

[Leo Laporte]

I have two in my bottom drawer.

[Mike Elgin]

And they're getting more capable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

At flying at night. So people are flying them at night. And so, you know, again, if Russia is flying drones with lights, it's probably the point of that is to freak everybody out and to understand that Russia is flying drones over American airspace. Right. So otherwise it wouldn't have lights. What's the point? So I just think, you know, we need. We do need to get on, you know, the Pentagon, the darpa, does need to develop technology to be able to track a drone visually, so that you have a telescope that automatically tracks what's in the sky, no matter where it goes or how fast it goes. And so we could look at it and see what it is before we shoot it down.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, I mean, it's just such an unsatisfying answer that they're just saying, nah, it's nothing. That's not. That's not sufficient.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I think the most likely scenario is it's some sort of military vehicle.

[Emily Forlani]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why it's being seen near military bases. I saw one. One person say that we are developing the capability to detect radiation from atomic weapons and that we're testing these drones to. We would potentially be using in a scenario where there was an atomic bomb somewhere and we could triangulate it.

[Emily Forlani]

The military base said it's not theirs, but we don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but isn't that what they would say?

[Emily Forlani]

Right. Warp drones.

[Leo Laporte]

What do we, you know, I mean, they should probably. What they should do is they should place a call to somebody and say, dudes, how do we get out of this? Because we don't want anybody to know what we're doing, but we don't want people to start shooting at them, and we don't want people to freak out. What would be the next step? How would you do that? You'd have the somebody, the Pentagon spokesperson. Come on, say what? Those are ours. No, nothing. If there's nothing to see here is what they would say.

[Mike Elgin]

So here's what you need to know. Here's what you, the audience, needs to know. We are. We just Entered over the last couple of years, the world of drone warfare. Drones are the most important development in war.

[Leo Laporte]

Because of Ukraine.

[Mike Elgin]

The Chariot. Exactly right. Ukraine itself is like using, you know, a million drones a month and they're kamikaze drones. We all remember the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. His company makes $400 kamikaze drones that fly using AI and drop bombs on things. That's what he does for a living. There's many, many companies like that by, with.

[Leo Laporte]

With Palmer Lucky's and.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

To provide intelligence, artificial intelligence to these drones.

[Mike Elgin]

So as a background, it's important to know that the US Military and all of its, all the companies that supply the US Military are scrambling to develop and test military drones. And they're not going to admit that that's what they're doing or what that that's in the sky. They're not going to do any of that stuff. So that's one thing that's happening.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what's happening.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, and also consumer drones and planes and stars and all the rest.

[Leo Laporte]

Once there was a panic. I think a lot of kind of kids are for sending their drums up. But really it's military tests.

[Emily Forlani]

If that's what's happening. They're actively lying to the American public.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, of course they are.

[Emily Forlani]

And they're smoking mirrors because the FAA issued a no flight. You can't fly over here, which suggests the FAA didn't know about it. So then. And if that's what.

[Leo Laporte]

Why would they tell the faa that's a sure way.

[Mike Elgin]

That may be the test is to see if they can.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't tell anyone. Right.

[Mike Elgin]

That may be the test.

[Emily Forlani]

Well, they would. They dramatically failed FFFF on that test. Like everyone saw it.

[Leo Laporte]

They probably shouldn't have put bright lights on them. That might have been a mistake.

[Emily Forlani]

Usually you do that to comply with the faa. They could have flown without lights.

[Leo Laporte]

The lights are the biggest puzzle. Yeah, to me, that's the biggest puzzle.

[Mike Elgin]

But again, I doubt that all of them had the same lights.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike Elgin]

So people are seeing all kinds of different things. Sometimes people are seeing a light, right? And it's like, you know, Jupiter single.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. I'm looking at a picture of it and it's not like it looks like it's. It could just be atmospheric friction.

[Leo Laporte]

There is no. That's the problem. There's no.

[Kathy Gellis]

Like, this is. This is a lot of things. Like I'm looking at a picture of something where, yeah, something is in the atmosphere. But it looks like I saw, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Saw somebody post the picture of The Starlink satellites in a line which of course, yeah, we know about, and saying, oh my God, it's happening.

[Emily Forlani]

Well, this is what I'm worried about. Now that it's a national story, it's different. Like when it was showing up on my TikTok feed and my social feed because I'm in New Jersey, tone of the posts were different. It was kind of like, whoa, that's actually really weird. And like there were a lot of them and it was kind of like, this is really weird. Like, should I be writing about this? And now it's national. Now everyone's trying to get their two cents on it and they're trying to maybe put up their own drones. And now it's like they're definitely not going to get any answers because now it's turning into like a full blown conspiracy.

[Mike Elgin]

So these things happen all the time. There was a, there was a thing in I think the 90s or the 80s or something where everybody was seeing leprechauns and because like everybody went outside at night with flashlights trying to see leprechauns and every cat and raccoon look like a replica to everybody, like this, that kind of stuff pops up. Everybody's like looking for something specific and, and when they see something, their mind applies. The thing that they were freaking out.

[Emily Forlani]

About to was the military testing lethal leprechauns.

[Mike Elgin]

They were, in fact they were, they discontinued the program because they just got it cost too much gold.

[Emily Forlani]

So many they put them in a basement. Now the leprechauns are flying the drones.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly right.

[Emily Forlani]

Got it. That's it.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I think maybe it solves a number of policy problems if we sort of figure out how society could have a little bit more interest in engaging with evidence based policymaking. And like, let's understand things, let's. Let's think about things and not just sort of react with projection of our stories or narratives that we either think would suit us or not suit us or something like that. And this does not seem like a story where evidence is really key here. And I think it would do us some favors in multiple areas if we had.

[Emily Forlani]

That's why I'm saying shoot it down and get some evidence. But what would you do if there was one of these flying over your house every night? Wouldn't you say this is weird? They're just normal people.

[Mike Elgin]

I would do what everybody else is doing. They're getting their own drones and flying up there and see if they can see it. And now everybody, this is like you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know what I mean?

[Emily Forlani]

It's like, that's illegal with the FAA restrictions.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course it's illegal to shoot him down by. Don't shoot at them.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

The military should shoot down. I'm not saying the average person. That'd be crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, but you got to be careful these days.

[Mike Elgin]

Do you imagine even for a second nobody is doing that?

[Emily Forlani]

Okay, but I'm saying you're getting two steps ahead. I'm saying take it down to base level. You're an average citizen. You're in your house. This is not a national news story, and there's weird stuff flying over your house and your family. What do you do?

[Mike Elgin]

It's only weird because we don't know what it is. But. Yeah, you don't do anything.

[Emily Forlani]

I think you're not. It's the little. It's like there's not enough empathy for people who are experiencing this, and it's. It's real to them.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm also not quite sure what this is because there seems to be so many things. I mean, if. If my neighbor's flying drones over my house, that's going to be really annoying. I might want to call some authorities because it seems like they shouldn't be doing that because it's really annoying. But if it's something else and it's bigger or brighter or higher or farther, then am I being affected?

[Emily Forlani]

Well, it's freaky. And then what do you do? You. You talk to your local government, your local representative, and now it's bubbled up, and that's where it's at. And now the New Jersey officials are trying to get support because they don't have the power to answer the question. So.

[Mike Elgin]

But. But Emily, Emily, just a quick thing. Empathy. For what? Who has been injured, what property has been damaged? Nothing has happened. People look at the. At the vapors from jets in the sky, and they think they're. The government is poisoning everybody with chemtrails. There's no need to be, like, to support that kind of paranoia. People are looking up in the sky, which they normally don't do, and they're noticing that there's satellites and stars and things flying around, and it's like, okay, stop doing that. Until a single person has gotten so much as a rash from this, nobody's in danger.

[Emily Forlani]

That's not how modern warfare works. Like, the reason that drones are scary is because they can drop things on your house. That's why they are restrictions. Yeah, but there are restrictions about flying them over stadiums and things because they pose A threat. So everyone agrees they pose a threat. So I don't think it's ridiculous that if they're over your house, you might be like, what is this? And is this a threat to me?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, they do pose a threat, and they don't pose a threat. Lots of drones fly in.

[Emily Forlani]

It's a tricky issue.

[Kathy Gellis]

But I think what Mike is saying is, like, has it actually done something that's caused an injury, or are we just so worried that it might cause an injury? And I think you're saying the possibility that one theoretically could is sending us around the bend. And Mike is kind of like, we probably shouldn't go around the bend unless it's actually causing an actual problem, and that the threat of the danger is vastly more palpable than others seem to be.

[Leo Laporte]

There seems to be a trend lately of people worried about what might happen, like, for everything. Like, well, what could happen? What could happen if TikTok was used by Chinese to steal our laundry? What could happen? And, you know, that strikes me as a populace that is a little jumpy, and I understand why people are jumpy.

[Emily Forlani]

But, yeah, until you see it with your own eyes and experience it yourself, really, there's a lot of peace of mind and writing something off. But if it's happening to people, people. And like, I see, you know, newscasters, they go out, they say, wow, I saw it myself. That was crazy. So it's so. It's so lovely to write something off. But I'm just saying that this is affecting people.

[Mike Elgin]

But nothing happened to them. Nothing happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember the Chinese? What happened from that?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's also. What are we writing off? It doesn't seem like what are. There's some confusion about what are we writing on that. This doesn't seem like a very tangible.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, well, airspace is. There's free rein in our airspace. We've now had an issue that's popped up. There's something in the airspace, and we do not have a way to answer that question. And that's highlighting. Okay. Whether or not you care about these people in New Jersey.

[Mike Elgin]

That's all about them. They need to understand that those things were flying before, but they didn't look up because there was no news story about all the stuff. There's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Who would be the appropriate authorities? The faa?

[Emily Forlani]

Well, it's gone to the local officials. So the New Jersey governor is on it. They're the Morris County. That's encouraging the local FBI. And now it's up to the Department of Homeland Security, national FBI, so the highest levels of government are trying to handle it. And what we found out is that they can handle it. And if New Jersey aside, Sopranos aside and everything that comes with saying New Jersey we have. Our country is not prepared for drones. And that is an issue in the modern age. And that is I guess what we've learned from this situation.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean that may be true as the, you know, it's worth workshopping the mights, but we're trying to workshop the mights where we really should have very clear head as we approach what are the possibilities. And our heads are not very clear right now because there's a lot of panic and paranoia.

[Leo Laporte]

I did not have this on the agenda for the show at all.

[Kathy Gellis]

I would just like to state for the record because I feel like I'm being accused of indifference to New Jersey. I am from New Jersey and my dad.

[Leo Laporte]

As am I.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yes. So team New Jersey. No, we totally. I mean of all the states that, you know, I'm going to care about, that is high on my list of states that I will care about.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we need to get Space Force involved. And if you have a Space Force.

[Mike Elgin]

They, they must have something. They, they need something to do. So. So the, the as in a California. I would point out that there's very well documented cases of very strange drone activity around military bases in California.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh really?

[Mike Elgin]

In the last two years that. Very well documented with gazillions of like reports and people have interviewed everybody. It didn't quite become a mass hysteria kind of thing, but it happened. And it's like it's happened in other places too and it's happened in Europe as well. And there's lots of stories and so people need to understand there's a lot of drones flying around. Some are military, most are constructed consumer drones. There's a million consumer drones out there and people are testing EVTOLs which we're. This coming year is going to be the first year where they're going to be commercial FTL flights probably starting in Dubai and then the year after that it's going to be become a banality. You're going to get up with your.

[Leo Laporte]

Uber electronic ver vertical takeoff and landing. So these are.

[Mike Elgin]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably mostly they do need a new name.

[Emily Forlani]

They need a new name.

[Mike Elgin]

They do.

[Leo Laporte]

Right now it's very tall. It's an evidence.

[Mike Elgin]

But, but I used to it. But, but I, I agree with Emily. If we're going to shoot one down, we should do it quick because pretty soon these things are going to be flying around and you know there's going to be four people inside. So that's going to be an interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, don't shoot them down if there's people in them. I think that's a good. That's probably good.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. There's also another thing to worry about.

[Emily Forlani]

Is I stand on my case. For the record.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Emily is. Is lobbying hard for the military to take these drones out.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. But I would demonstrate my empathy for people in New Jersey who are really, really worried that by saying stop worrying. It's probably nothing. It really is probably nothing. So please don't worry. They'll figure it out.

[Emily Forlani]

I think the government could also do people a solid by publishing high quality pictures of it and being like any level of clarity would show respect to the people of the country who are paying taxes, to the military, to the government electing these officials. Like, any level of respect to help clarify the situation would be much appreciated and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

[Mike Elgin]

And can you file a Freedom of Information act request for those pictures?

[Emily Forlani]

FOIA.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe I should file a FOIA.

[Emily Forlani]

I tried to take them. I talked to PCMag, I identified equipment I like. I posted on Reddit, where can I see drones at night? And people, a lot of people responded where they're seeing them and they're seeing them in the same place every night. But then when the weather's bad, you can't see them as well. And I don't know. So. Yeah, I just think like any. The lack of seriousness that they're engaging with this issue is creating more conspiracy theories and just the whole situation is kind of a disaster.

[Mike Elgin]

So you're the journalist own this story. Seriously?

[Leo Laporte]

This is yours?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

I kind of had a feeling it was mine. I think it's mine.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

FOIA is a good request or a good note.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. Let's get to the bottom of this.

[Emily Forlani]

I've always wanted to file a foia.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, here is from Fox News actual footage and it's blank now.

[Emily Forlani]

No, it's all, it's all like cell phone cameras and blurry stuff and it's not, it's not. None of it's sufficient.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought one of the news crews had its own cameras out there. That's certainly gonna happen. You know, the only thing if I would say is Florida, you're letting New Jersey take all this, all the, you know, story here. You gotta get out there and start looking for drones in the sky in Florida and, and then we can really. Then we'll have something. Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

Characters in New Jersey are like, we gotta get back in the spotlight.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's what it is. Honestly.

[Emily Forlani]

Jersey Shore hasn't been on air for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

They're letting Florida man eat our lunch. We need to get out here and find something.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, I mean, these drones are flying over very wealthy areas. I don't know if people know, but there's a huge amount of money that flows out of New York City and into New Jersey. Like, there's large homes. There's.

[Leo Laporte]

My family's from New Jersey.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, there's a lot of, like, serious people, and they're flying over this part. It's not like the Jersey Shore. So if. If you're thinking it's like Snooki is.

[Leo Laporte]

Taking over the president's golf course has.

[Emily Forlani]

I'm just setting the stage.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think that's what I Is kind of in the back of my mind. It doesn't make the story more credible because, like, why are you going over Morristown, New Jersey? What could the Russians hope to get from.

[Emily Forlani]

I mean, money is what I'm saying. Actually, they're really smart because this is a very wealthy area with a military base.

[Kathy Gellis]

So are they going to stalk the people and rob the houses when they see them drive away? Like, what are the. I just don't see the play here. So it doesn't actually seem.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, that if you're at the. What is it called? The Piccadilly Air Force Base?

[Emily Forlani]

The Picatinny Arsenal.

[Leo Laporte]

Arsenal. Okay. Is it an air force base or an arsenal?

[Emily Forlani]

I haven't looked into it. I emailed them to interview them, and I did not hear a response.

[Mike Elgin]

Let's get a job.

[Leo Laporte]

Let them. Let them worry about it. Right? I mean, if you're an arsenal, it seems like you would have ways to handle this.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, I mean, the thing is that consumer drones are.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a powder depot.

[Mike Elgin]

It's where they store devices to take them down.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not an Air Force base. It's where they store gunpowder and mu.

[Emily Forlani]

That's a predecessor.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the predecessor. Okay. It used to be the Picatinny Powder Depot. Yes. It's also Home to the U.S. army Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technology Directorate.

[Emily Forlani]

Well, what if it's. What if it's just the case that it is the US Military and the government is just lying to us? Like, then what?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, the CIA has a lot of secret bases inside of airports abroad, and who knows, maybe in the US as well. So you never know.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, the problem is this is. I think we need to, as Sane people, we need to recognize this. A false denial sounds exactly like a true denial. And it's sort of like, well, they've denied it. Aha. But they've also denied it maybe because it's deniable.

[Emily Forlani]

It's like there, we need pictures. We need to see if there's a brand name on it. There needs to be high quality pictures.

[Kathy Gellis]

We need to keep our wits about us to like, actually, like, not go aha too easily and to actually be calm and measured and figure out how to tease out what is evidence and what is not evidence.

[Leo Laporte]

Where the Patriot misses.

[Emily Forlani]

And that's what I'm proposing. Taking some pictures. Like, what type of wing format are they? What's written on them? What color are the lights? What arrangement are they in? I just feel like any level of seriousness would be so far beyond the dialogue we have now, and we're just not getting that. And people are looking to their elected officials to get that, and it's not coming. And that's a failure.

[Mike Elgin]

Have you seen our elected officials lately?

[Emily Forlani]

Here's it's a failure. It's not that these people are idiots. It's that the government is not answering their questions and they're paying taxes and they're looking for help and they're not getting it.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, I think the officials may be stoking the hysteria as opposed to actually responding calmly to the hysteria, which is not going to do anything.

[Emily Forlani]

I mean, all these people are going to work every day. They're taking their kids to soccer practice. They're living their lives. They're eating dinner. No one is running around. You know, there's no hysteria that's tangible. It's just like people want to know what's going on.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, then Larry Hogan discovers Orion.

[Leo Laporte]

So, I mean, according to cnn, the Defense Department has acknowledged that there are drones flying over Picatinny and the Naval Weapons Station.

[Emily Forlani]

They're confirmed sightings, and they're not all drones, but they're confirmed by the dod. Yes, yes. The DOD read my article. I could see in our analytics platform that the DoD read my article. And then they looked at my bio page and I was like, emily, if.

[Leo Laporte]

You get any strange phone calls.

[Emily Forlani]

I know, right?

[Kathy Gellis]

If you see a drone above your house, you'll know that your article was a success.

[Emily Forlani]

Oh, I know. Oh, I see people in China reading my articles and stuff too. I'm on so many lists. But I was like, do they. Are they reading because they want to know what the media is putting out about it, or are they reading it because they Want to actually figure it out.

[Leo Laporte]

They have no idea. And they figure Emily Forlini has figured it out. Let's find out.

[Emily Forlani]

If they don't have any idea, it's interesting. And I don't think we should accept just. We shouldn't just accept that there's no answer. That's ridiculous.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's stuff in the sky.

[Leo Laporte]

There's an answer. It might be multiple answers. Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

And probably multiple answers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. And I wouldn't. Just because the federal government denies something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

[Emily Forlani]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. I mean, they. That's, you know, normal. Right.

[Emily Forlani]

So you gotta get a little fight in us. We can't just. You'd be like, oh, it's nothing. Because they say it's nothing.

[Mike Elgin]

But I think we need to get better as a country at being a little bit less fast to freak out about things. So these sightings have occurred in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania. They've been over the Stewart International Airport in New York, air bases in the UK, three air bases in the UK. Some of these are described as 6ft in diameter. Many of these are reportedly have their lights off, which makes more sense. So. So this is a worldwide phenomenon. Sort of. Right. So it's. It's, you know, Europe and the US So far. I would be really surprised if the US Isn't flying things over foreign. You know, we've been doing it since the Cold War. And so this is. This is a bigger issue of assuming it's spy aircraft than just New Jersey. New Jersey's in the news. So I think. I think we really do need to get to the bottom of it. And it's not just the us It's. It's also Europe as well.

[Leo Laporte]

I think your. Your explanation is probably correct, Mike, which is that drone warfare is suddenly the hot topic thanks to the Ukraine, Russia war, and that militaries everywhere are working on their drone capabilities. They shouldn't be lighting them up, though. That's just making people nuts.

[Kathy Gellis]

But I think some of it is atmosphere, atmospheric or reflection from.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's all sorts of stuff.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah. Of course, the problem which we haven't directly touched on, but we've touched on, is that posting something on social media that's a really sensational image at this point can make you rich because you get likes, you get followers, and so we have a real incentive to get misinformation out there. And that's. That does stress me out. And that almost adds to my urgency that if we're going to not regulate those technologies. If we're going to continue to pour or billions of dollars into the ability for people to do this, we also have to have the ability to answer questions and stop conspiracy theories. Like, just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think that's.

[Emily Forlani]

The whole thing's a fail.

[Leo Laporte]

So if we are. Our government communications are living in a different era.

[Emily Forlani]

Right. It's total mismatch, and it's. It's just a lot falling through the cracks. And.

[Mike Elgin]

And I would like to add one additional thing, which is that if you're testing a military aircraft, there's no reason not to put lights on it. I mean, you don't want lights in the final product, but, like, if you're testing it just to see if it will fly or whatever, you want to be able to see it in the sky for your own.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's a pretty crowded airspace that you're putting your stuff in. Like, you know, most of the time we tested aircraft over the desert where there was nobody. New Jersey is not really, like, empty.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point, too. Yeah. You put lights on so nobody hits it.

[Emily Forlani]

New Jersey is the densest state in.

[Kathy Gellis]

The U.S. yes, in all sorts of ways.

[Emily Forlani]

Remember when you were, like, being accused of, I'm allowed.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm allowed.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm a Jersey girl. I can totally throw New Jersey under the bus. It's my people.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. It wasn't on the agenda, but I'm glad we covered it because it is a story that people are worried about and there is a tech angle to it. And thank you, Emily Forlani, for bringing this up and making us aware and. But please, folks, leave the shooting down to the law enforcement in the military.

[Emily Forlani]

I'm sorry that I accidentally incited violence.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not. Do not start shooting in the sky. It's dangerous for everybody. Bullets go up, but they also come down. We're going to take a break and talk about other tech news in just a little bit. But, Emily, in all honesty, thank you for bringing it up and thank you for fighting the good fight. We ought to know what this is. And gosh darn it if I own the story.

[Mike Elgin]

Own the story.

[Leo Laporte]

Own the story.

[Kathy Gellis]

If I may close with a swift on security skeet, that skeet is situation. There are 65 unknown drones in the sky. Ridiculous. I need to go investigate this myself. Better send my drone situation. There are now 66 unknown drones.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like an XKCD cartoon.

[Kathy Gellis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

In real life. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll come back. Also with us, Kathy Gelis. It's great to have you. We will talk about what's going on in Supreme Court. Looks like that TikTok case is going all the way. Waiting for a word from scotus. Mike Elgin is also here. Always great to have you. Machinesociety AI this is a newsletter. We'll be right back with more in just a little bit. Our show today brought to you by Mint Mobile. I have my Mint Mobile phone. Every time I get my Mint Mobile bill and I compare it to the bill from other carriers, I think why would anybody go anywhere else? Look, I mean I love a great deal as much as anybody else, right? But I'm not going to crawl through a bed of hot coals to save a few bucks. It has to be easy. It has to be real. There's no hoops, there's no bs. So I was skeptical, I admit, when Mint Mobile said it was easy to get wireless for 15amonth when you buy the three month plan I checked, turns out that really is easy to get wireless for $15 a month. I liked it so much I re upped and re upped again. In fact, the truth is the hardest thing you're going to do is spending time on hold waiting to break up with your old provider. You should by the way, because you can bring your phone number, port your phone number over that's they're required to do that. Make it your phone number. A Mint Mobile phone number. You're going to save so much money. I mean 15amonth. How much is your current cell bill? 70, 80, 90, $100 or more to get started. To start saving go to mintmobile.com twit Three month plans are only $15 a month and that is including the Unlimited plan, $15 a month for your first three months. That's pretty amazing. All the Mint Mobile plans come with high speed data, unlimited talk and text nationwide delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can bring your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan. They will send you the sim or they'll do an E sim, no charge and port your phone number over. Bring all your existing contacts. It couldn't be easier. They also sell phones. I bought a Nice new iPhone SE from Mint Mobile for a really good price and then I got the even better price on Mint Mobile. Find out how easy it is to switch to mint mobile. Get three months of premium wireless service for 15amonth. Mint Mobile this is absolutely the best deal out there and I, and I don't know why everybody isn't a Mint Mobile customer. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month for three months go to mint mobile.com twit that's Mint Mobile M I N T minty fresh mobile.com twit cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com twitter $45 upfront payment required. That's equivalent to 15 dollars a month. It is. New customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on the unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Mint mobile.com Twitter we thank them so much for supporting our show. And we thank you for supporting the show by doing that address. Because that way they know. Oh yeah, they saw it on Twitter. Mint Mobile thank you Mint Mobile. As long as we're in the silly season. Infowars the sale to the Onion has now been overturned by the bankruptcy court.

[Kathy Gellis]

Boo.

[Leo Laporte]

Boo.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's been delayed. I don't know if we know exactly. Yeah, the deal that was going to happen is not happening. But it's not quite clear what will happen next, whether it's starting over or whether things will sort of pick up somewhere along the line.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the bankruptcy court judge Christopher Lopez in Houston said, okay, yes, there was a deal and the Onion won, but no, we're going to go back. He instructed the Coin appointed trustee to come up with an alternative solution. I don't know what the alternative would be. Part of the problem is that the Onions offer had less cash in it than the offer from the other interested party, which is really just, let's be honest, affront for Infowars and the Sandy Hook parents. Remember they, they won the lawsuit against Alex Jones and Infowars because he kept saying that it was a fake shooting in Sandy Hook and so forth and won $1.4 billion judgment, forcing Alex Jones into bankruptcy, selling off his assets. And then the families talked to the Onion and said, okay, we, we would prefer for Infowars to go to a satire site than to First United American Companies, which is essentially a bidder affiliated with Alex Jones. We don't want to see Infowars stay on the air. So we're willing to take less cash up front because we think this is a better owner. The total value of the onions bid was $7 million, including 1 1/4 million dollars in cash put up by the Global Tetrahedron, the company that owns that owns the Onion. And it's funny, some of the cash coming from the families, they essentially opted to put a portion of their earnings from a defamation judgment towards the Onions bid. So they're sending a very clear signal. They want the Onion first unit. American offered three and a half million in cash, twice as much cash. The expert who advised the trustee said the combined bid with the families was a better choice. And initially that's what happened. But now the bankruptcy judge says, no, he didn't like it, and he's going to send it back. Which sounds to me. I agree with you, Kathy. He's not saying, no, the Onion can't have it. But it sounds to me like he's putting his thumb on the scale for United First Company.

[Kathy Gellis]

And I think there's a question of whether he's allowed to. That the trust. The trustee's choice. There were two. One, there's two things that kind of catch some attention. One is the way that the deal was put together because there's a concession as opposed to pure cash. But the second thing is that it was, I guess they did a sealed auction and they did it with a single bid, and nobody got to go back and stuff. But it sounds like talking to some experts that that is not unus unusual, that is not atypical, and that none of these things really. That the trustee didn't act in a way that prompts the second guessing. And they keep referring to something either called or akin to the business judgment rule, where you got to leave it up to the best judgment of the person running this and give them some leeway, or else they'll never be able to accomplish anything. And that there's no. A lot of observers are like, I don't see what the trustee did that would prompt the second guessing. I mean, you want there to be second guessing if the trustee does something really terrible and really kind of disadvantages the parties. But nobody's suggesting that. And I think a lot of observers are really kind of surprised because they don't see why there was an avenue for complaint and having complaint affect us in any way.

[Mike Elgin]

I think the solution is obvious. They should launch a Kickstarter. I personally would add 100 bucks, and.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they could raise more money.

[Mike Elgin]

And just have an open auction and be the highest bidder and there would be no controversy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but then who would that be that would own it? The Onion of Kickstarter?

[Mike Elgin]

No, no. Raise the money.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

Everybody wants this.

[Kathy Gellis]

You run into some problems, I think, with securities issues, with how you finance a purchase like that, like donations to the Onion, like, yes, functionally, that sounds great. I think legally that may be a hard thing to achieve. But who knows, maybe that's next. So we'll see.

[Emily Forlani]

It's just there's so many shady deals that go down in this country. I don't see why this one. I mean, it's the bar and the standards are so all over the place. But this is a huge bummer. I mean, I would love to see this go through. And I'm so sad it's installed.

[Mike Elgin]

Like they get the same audience. Right. They have the list. Right. Of the audience that they would be serving. So that would just be gold. I mean, it was be. So.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah. I mean, I think we need more humor writing in general. And I don't think maybe the judge feels like it's a biased case or something, but it should just be considered as two neutral parties. Like, I know these parties are huge characters themselves, like the Infowars and the Onion are just massive personalities as far as media companies, but should just be considered neutral. And I don't if there's any reason the judge is. Is reacting based on the content on either side. I don't think that's fair.

[Mike Elgin]

I mean, let's think of the. Think of the lying sociopaths. They have to be protected.

[Kathy Gellis]

Think of the sociopaths. Yes. Well, I think the issue with this one is Jones himself isn't happy. And Jones is also trying to sell his supplements. And then there seems to be shell companies who are like, why weren't we taken seriously? And then there's the allegations that they're shell companies that are really just him, like alter functionally alter egos. So it's messy. And then there's a question of whether the judge is everybody as neutral when maybe they shouldn't be treated as neutral, which is also a thing. Right.

[Emily Forlani]

Well, he's Jones. I watched a little bit of the live stream he did right after it was announced that the Onion won the bid. And he was on. He was claiming it was a deep state conspiracy to limit the free press, you know, of course. So that's his perspective. Yes. And so, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I mean, what the judge and what any bankruptcy court judge should be doing is looking for the best deal that returns the most money for the creditors, the Sandy Hook families. Should he consider the Sandy Hook family's interest, you know, expressed interest? I don't know. It was a two day hearing and he was fairly irate that it was not a transparent bidding process, whatever that means.

[Emily Forlani]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

He didn't like the sealed bid, it sounds like, but I'm not entirely sure and I'm not a bankruptcy expert, but from the commentary I was reading, people seem to think that, like, there was no reason that that was not a reasonable way to go forward.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Also, we, because of this hearing, we got the opportunity to hear from lawyers4x.com Elon Musk's Twitter replacement saying, you can't. Your honor, they can't sell the X accounts owned by Alex Jones in Infowars because X owns them, which I think for many of us was just a reminder that you do not own your social media accounts. The social media company who runs the platform seems at least to think they own the accounts and certainly probably do. I don't know. What do you think, Kathy? Does X own ALEX Jones FORMER TWITTER ACCOUNT?

[Kathy Gellis]

So it's one of these things where the motivations behind X's choices may be suspect, but they may be right. Anyway, I think any social media platform is reasonably concerned that there could be construed like a property right in anything that they're offering.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

And I think their concern with the way the bankruptcy was processing that was that it was being treated as an asset that was that in some ways had a property right context to it.

[Leo Laporte]

So on the other end, we have a twitter account on x.com and I own the trade trademark to Twit. But it is it their assertion that if I decided I don't know to sell the Twit account that I couldn't? This happens all the time. Alex Wilhelm bought at Alex back in the day.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think a couple things are happening. One is you'd have to look at the terms of service, but the terms of service generally seem to. The terms of service generally seem assignable, that the contract is assignable. So that if you started the account and you wanted to sell your media empire to somebody else, that whoever bought it, who obviously is interested in continuing the media empire, would want all the things that kind of come with it. And why wouldn't they be able to essentially step in your shoes to now be the contracting party with X?

[Leo Laporte]

I suspect that if I announce, and I might announce this, I would like to sell our Twitter account for $1.50. And I did that. X would not stop me and say, oh, no, we own that. You can't sell it for $1.50. It feels like this is them weighing in on the entire process.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, I think both of them, I mean, remember x?

[Leo Laporte]

X kept Infowars on the air when he was kicked off YouTube brought him back.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, right. Both things, I think, are true. I think X reasonably wants to make sure that there is not a Property. Right. Construed in a handle. Because weird things can happen where they start ending up obligated in ways that are going to be very uncomfortable for them. And let's say not just. Just them, but, you know, any social media platform or any platform whatsoever. You know, wait, you've offered somebody a handle and now that person has a property right in the handle? That is a big deal. But they are generally thought to be assignable. And there is a thing of. Do they have any business stepping in and impinging on that assignability? I don't know. We'd have to look at the terms of service. And that's the thing where maybe the motivations are less than, you know, pure. Right. It's the thing if they. Well, if they take it back, can they assign it to somebody else and.

[Leo Laporte]

That kind of give it back to Alex Jones? Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

That would be a strange thing because somebody has trademark rights in Infowars. That is, I think, an alienable asset that can get discharged through the bankruptcy.

[Leo Laporte]

Twitter couldn't. Couldn't. Or X couldn't reasonably take at twit and give it to Kathy Ellis because I have a trademark and so that I have some interest in that.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's a little interesting. And he's done that. He's taken handles that people have had for decades and taken away and redone it. But maybe there's not like, findable trademark rights in that.

[Leo Laporte]

With Elon Musk and many of these people, it's always rules for thee, not me. He's not.

[Emily Forlani]

Is there a way to think about this that in my head I'm trying to think, is it similar to, like, if I'm a commercial property owner, so I'm X and I own like a physical commercial building and a business uses my space, and then that business sublets the space to someone else and like brokers a deal, but still the building owner still owns the building. Like, is that a fair analogy? Like, you're. Because you're kind of using their. You're using their platform. To me, they kind of own it because it's on their servers. They can take it down at any time, ultimately, their fingers on the trigger. And you're like a renter on the platform.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm wary of saying yes because I don't want that analogy to accidentally communicate too much. But that is kind of what I was saying in terms of the terms of service, that there's a contract and that contract would be assignable. And in the scenario you're describing, there's some assignability of rights. But the landlord still owns the building. And what you have is a contractual relationship slightly different than your example, because that was a sub lesser. But you can actually sometimes, like, oh, you want to move out. You can sometimes assign your rights as the tenant. You've assigned your lease, you assign the contract.

[Emily Forlani]

And if it's a commercial situation, also you. You're leasing the space, but you still own the business as a trademark. So you could move to a new space and it would. It would follow you. But ultimately, if your business is a restaurant and it's taking place in this physical space, that it's a very important part of the business, I guess you could relocate. Like, maybe you could go to Blue sky or anything. But I think X is a very serious ownership stake in anyone and all of our content on that platform. I think it's almost a prideful exercise to think you own it. You don't, right?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, they don't own our tweets.

[Emily Forlani]

It feels like they do.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, it feels like they do, but I think I haven't looked at the terms of service in a while. Yeah, the terms of service in a while. But most of the times the terms of service, as I understand them, are written in a way that says you own them, but you've given us a really expansive license because they obviously need to hold back enough rights that they can actually, like, continue to publish your stuff and not run into copyright problems. But they don't tend to own them. I don't think they want to own them, although now they kind of want to own them because they want to train for the AI. But that's a whole other argument about whether you actually need to own it to have that happen anyway, but. Got it. Yeah. And he's also making it up as they go along. Like, we had the entire industry that made it up as we went along has, like, social media became a thing and Internet becomes a thing, and we had to kind of learn stuff, but we kind of ended up settling some stuff. And then kind of Musk shows up and pretends that nobody's ever figured out anything before him and does things afresh. And, you know, so it's one of these things. He. He's wrong. He's probably poorly motivated, but accidentally somewhat. Right?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, exactly. And I also think that, you know, Elon Musk hates it when there's a news story, a prominent news story that is not about him, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he's gonna have to fight with Donald J. Over that one. That's gonna be a tough one. Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Rumor has it their fight is, hey.

[Mike Elgin]

We called it on the show last time I was on Twitter, we called it that they were gonna have a falling out and we were like taking over.

[Leo Laporte]

Have they have a falling out soon? It's not yet.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, there's leaks that.

[Emily Forlani]

Oh, those.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, there's leaks about sufferance of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but you know. Well, we'll see. I. I'm on the books for June, but we'll see.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, I'm sure there's sufferance coming from his wife as well.

[Emily Forlani]

So I had a weird brush with X recently that might be worth discussing. I might write an article about it. I'm not sure, but. So a couple months ago I noticed that, that X actually responded to journalists emails for one time. It was about like a report, send.

[Leo Laporte]

You a poop emoji. What the hell, right?

[Emily Forlani]

So now they're responding. That was a couple months ago. And then last week I was feeling gutsy and I'm PCMAG now is co owned with CNET and there's a bunch of publications under Ziff Davis. So we're having this big party at ces. I invited Twit as well. You can all come.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. We're not going to be there, but thank you.

[Emily Forlani]

I know no one's going to be there because who wants to go? But if you're going, you can have some free drinks. But I emailed X just like press at X and I was like, hey, do you guys want to come?

[Leo Laporte]

And what happened?

[Emily Forlani]

I got a response and the head of media strategy wants to come and he also wants to get coffee with me in New York this week.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an admission that they read the emails before they send.

[Emily Forlani]

Also, he said he was hired recently, so it seems like X recently hired ahead of media strategy who is now actually engaging with the media.

[Leo Laporte]

But only if you invite him to a party. Emily.

[Emily Forlani]

I invite him to a party. He invited me to coffee.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's true.

[Emily Forlani]

I feel like maybe, I don't know, I'm trying to tease out what's going on because here's my advice.

[Leo Laporte]

Go to coffee before you write an article about this. Okay. Get the coffee.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, exactly. I'm going to email him and remind him about the coffee because I don't think we like set a date. But definitely, I. I don't know if it means Elon has been tweeting about how the press is useless. You know, the mainstream press is garbage. Twitter is the new press. Citizen journalists are the new press. So that's been his M.O. for the past two. But, you know, they are kind of having some user issues potentially. Maybe they realize they do need the press, but there's definitely a difference in what I'm seeing in my inbox versus what Elon is projecting. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Very interesting.

[Emily Forlani]

So there's. They might be warming up to the press because they realize they need the press. I don't know, but I'll get coffee.

[Mike Elgin]

Numbers are in the toilet and they're just tanking. So I think he'd like to continue to toe that line while simultaneously trying to do something to turn around the user activity.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, I mean, usually when you hire someone, it's to solve a problem or accelerate progress in a certain area. So suggests to me that they think this needs attention.

[Kathy Gellis]

Is he really about the citizen journalism stuff?

[Emily Forlani]

A thousand percent.

[Kathy Gellis]

Because he keeps advocating for policy that would be really bad for, like, really bad for his business.

[Emily Forlani]

Like, well, as Mike said, he wants press up, but about him. So if it's about him and it's positive, he likes it. If it's not about him and it's not positive, or if it's about him and not positive, he doesn't like it.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, I'm just talking like the section 230 stuff. Like, he should be like, I'm not really happy with his role in government, but I should be, like, breathing a sigh of relief that, okay, we've got the best ally we could ever have for section 230 with the ear of the White House, and that's not the way it's turning out at all.

[Emily Forlani]

He advocates against EV legislation too. I think we're foolish to think he's really thinking straight or thinking like someone who needs more money. He really doesn't. Doesn't. It's different game for him. No.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. No. I think looking at this and regarding him as an economically rational actor is not the frame to what he does.

[Emily Forlani]

Legacy opinions of him that need to be seriously refreshed.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good. Very nice way to put it. Very nice way to put it. All right, we're going to take a little break. When we come back, the federal appeals court has declined to block the ban on TikTok. They did that on Friday. So now it's up to the supreme court or nothing. January 19, the day before Inauguration Day, Tick Tock will either be sold or somehow magically shut down. We'll talk about that when we come back with Kathy Gellis. As you might have gathered, an attorney, cgcounsel.com is her website, of course, she writes at Tech Dirt and for the Copia foundation and is admitted to. What do you call it? Advocate before the Supreme Court. You could actually.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm a member of the Supreme Court bar and also the bars of a whole bunch of other courts. It means I'm allowed to file stuff there.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect. So we're going to lobby you to file something about drones in just a second. Also with Assembly Forlini, who's definitely not.

[Emily Forlani]

Cleared to testify in front of the Supreme Court and therefore is sparring with Kathy.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, don't spar. It's okay. You can disagree. This isn't sparring. This is conversation.

[Kathy Gellis]

We'll bond over New Jersey.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, I feel like you're bonding.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Elon's most recent X post where it's the New Jersey guide to aircraft identification. If you'd show that to us.

[Emily Forlani]

Oh, see, you guys all agree with him that it's fake. Joke is on you.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically, it's a picture of a variety of airline aircraft silhouettes, all of which are labeled drone, from the 767 to the Iranian mothership drone.

[Emily Forlani]

That's embarrassing for you guys. I'm so sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. We're on the same side as Elon Musk. I never thought I'd say that. Also with us, Mike Elgin of Machinesociety AI.

[Mike Elgin]

Yep. And just like Kathy, I am admitted to the most of the bars here in Oaxaca as far as I can remember.

[Leo Laporte]

I tell you, I remember going into that pulque bar. I don't remember coming out though. Boy, no.

[Kathy Gellis]

The, the etymology of the word bar really is the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Mike Elgin]

Yes.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You stand before the court bar, right?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. There literally was a bar and a whole bunch of these contexts and the context have just evolved and they're own sort of realm.

[Leo Laporte]

Judge Roy Bean at a bar. Yes, our. Our show today, brought to you by those great folks at Shopify. And I have to say right up front, I have, I have a dog in this hunt because my son Salt Hank uses Shopify to sell his salts and his pickles. He loves Shopify because it made it so easy for him to set up an e commerce site. When you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing, businesses like Allbirds or the shirts I wear untucket, you think about an innovative product, a progressive brand, button down marketing. But the often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business making, selling and for shoppers, buying easy. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. Oh, I love Shopify. Nobody does sales better than Shopify. Home of the number one Checkout on the planet. And the not so secret secret with shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%. Far fewer carts going abandoned, way more sales being made. Love those sales. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or scrolling on the web, in your store, in their feed and everywhere in between. Businesses that sell more more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that Saul Hank uses and all birds and untuck it. Sign up for I'll admit the other guys sign up for your $1 per month trial [e-mail] Twitter that's all lowercase. Shopify S H O P I f y shopify.com Twitter go there to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com love that sound. Topify. All right, so Tick Tock, the clock is ticking. I guess one would say January 19th is just a month away. I don't even know how the U.S. it's a law the U.S. congress passed and President Biden signed that somehow if the company is not sold to an American entity, that they will somehow be banned forever. Don't know how you do that.

[Mike Elgin]

Take.

[Leo Laporte]

Does that mean Apple and Google pull them off the stores? Is that sufficient? Well, I still have TikTok on my device. I'm sure a lot of people will. Do you block traffic from the TikTok IP addresses? What do you do? Supreme Court. Will they. So first of all, they haven't weighed in, but will they offer cert, do you think? Will they give, give this a hearing?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, the first thing that's, that's coming to the fore is timeline control.

[Leo Laporte]

So they'd have to, they'd have to step in on an emergency basis at this point.

[Kathy Gellis]

So Tick Tock went and asked the D.C. circuit like could. It's a little confused what they asked for, but they basically said, could you call a time out and give us a chance to, you know, get our petitions together and figure out our next steps?

[Leo Laporte]

They said to this appeals court, if you don't block it, the Supreme Court's going to have to put it on their shadow docket.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And so respect for the Supreme Court's vital role, this court should grant an interim injunction that enables a more deliberate and orderly process. They're just trying to stop the clock. And the lower court said no.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right, the lower court. Well, and let's also not forget the lower court is, is the appeals court. When this law was written, it was written in a way that bypassed the district court and said if you're, if any, if there's any issue over this law, it has to go straight to the D.C. circuit.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Kathy Gellis]

And you know, on the one hand, there's something handy with saying what the, what the, whose jurisdiction the dispute would be in because of the. We didn't want this to go to Texas and sit in the fifth Circuit where everything is very crazy down there. But we got a crazy result out of the D.C. circuit, too. And we got it without.

[Leo Laporte]

This is kind of surprising to me, a layperson. They said there's no Fifth Amendment, I'm sorry, First Amendment issue at all. And a lot of our contributors here have argued. What are you talking about? Don't the people who post on TikTok, American citizens who post on TikTok have a right, a First Amendment right to post on TikTok?

[Kathy Gellis]

There's a variety of First Amendment interests that the court overlooked. One of them is that TikTok itself would appear to have a First Amendment right, certainly the US subsidiary and possibly also even the foreign entity. And what is the lens by which the court should. How quickly and easily should the Court dispense any First Amendment claims that TikTok has? But meanwhile, meanwhile, users of TikTok have their own First Amendment interest in being able to communicate through it and also to consume content through it. That there's right to read issues. I've talked about right to read and other contexts on the show before, and here's one instance where it's relevant. Do users of TikTok have the right to receive information via TikTok because it impinges on their ability to consume information if TikTok goes away, you know, goes away at the compulsion of the government. And so the Court was overlooking those First Amendment interests and also the ones that users like to speak through it. And what happens to that speech if TikTok goes away?

[Leo Laporte]

The D.C. circuit said that it satisfies a legal standard known as strict scrutiny that has to be met for government restrictions on. On speech to stand. Quote, the act was the culmination of extensive bipartisan action by Congress and by successive presidents, I guess successive means Trump and Biden.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It was carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary. And it was part of a broader effort to counter a. By the way, there's some question on this next statement, a well substantiated national security threat. As far as I know, that court was not offered any the secret information that the intelligence services gave Congress and the president. So I don't know what they're talking about they basically said, all right, well you say there's a substantial national security threat, so we're just going to take it as written posed by the People's Republic of China. Under, again, quoting under these circumstances, the provisions of the act that are before us withstand the most searching review. In other words, no First Amendment protection at all. Will the Supreme Court, you think, do the same thing? Kathy?

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, gosh, I hope not. Because I think what we understand there.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a standard for national security. There's a precedent for that in the case of national security, limiting what foreign nationals can do in the U.S.

[Kathy Gellis]

That'S not how heightened scrutiny is supposed to work. This isn't how heightened scrutiny is supposed to work. This is a problem, irrespective of TikTok itself, that the way the court court reached its extremely trite analysis is we do not want this precedent on the books. If I were going to be China and I wanted to really stick it to America, I would get to this point and abandon the appeal because we have just broken First Amendment law in the United States that this is what stands. The court didn't actually decide that strict scrutiny applied, but it decided that hypothetically, if this could pass a strict scrutiny test, then we won't worry about it. They used it more as the hypothetical worst case scenario. If it can pass strict scrutiny, then it's definitely okay, as opposed to us arguing about what was the appropriate level and then thinking, well, it passed intermediate scrutiny, but it didn't pass strict scrutiny. So did we get the result wrong here? They're like, we are going to decide that the ban is okay and we're going to give it a test under the most strict way of looking at this and doing it with the way that has the most, the least leeway for the government. We've decided that the government is totally fine. And it did it by basically it's calling its analysis strict scrutiny, but it really reads like a rational basis test. And a rational basis is like the easiest test for the government to clear of. Did the government have know a good, you know, something reasonable or wanted to accomplish? Did this reasonably come anywhere close to apology accomplishing it? That's not the official and to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Clear, they're not ruling in favor or against TikTok. They're just saying we're not going to pause it. That this is the Congress has been clear that they wanted this to happen by January 19th and we're not going to pause it. The Supreme Court has two ways to in effect ban TikTok. One is just not to accept it. Right. They could just say, yeah, we're not going to grant certiori. We don't need to rule on this. The, the appeals court stands. Although it doesn't sound like what this appeals court was really thinking.

[Emily Forlani]

Well, there's also the sell. So people say ban because it's more dramatic, but there's also the sell off.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Bite Dance has said we're not going to sell the Chinese. Even if ByteDance sold, we're not going to allow them to sell the Alpha algorithm. Which means if somebody like Frank McCourt comes along, he's, he's launched a $20 billion bid to buy TikTok for America.

[Emily Forlani]

I just, I find myself, even if.

[Leo Laporte]

He won, he wouldn't get the algorithm. So what do you get?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, the users and the name decided that, oh, it's, it's not a ban, it's not a for sale. It's just divestiture. This is totally fine. Nothing to see here. No, that's totally something to see here. This is a real constitutional. This is a really aggressive thing that the government has done that the court is looking like, looks like fine. They're incredibly deferential to the government and its judgment about what the national security problem was. But it's also being extremely deferential, even though one of the stated purposes of the government is to control the content of speech that people end up interacting with. I understood this. Maybe I still hated it and think it's unconstitutional when it was just about the data slurpage of what, you know, TikTok is. TikTok is probably everything that it's being accused of in terms of it gets user data and it sends that user data to people who shouldn't have the user data, but then it gets.

[Leo Laporte]

And who, by the way, are also buying it from companies like National Public.

[Kathy Gellis]

Data legally, not slurping data and sending it to people who shouldn't have it.

[Emily Forlani]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

China can buy that data from data brokers in the U.S. just like anybody else.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right. So. But if that's the way the law was done, then I think it still doesn't pass constitutional scrutiny because. Because that's not narrowly tailored to solving a data problem by forcing the entire platform to be divested. But that's not the only thing that they're trying to do. They don't like that China is covertly affecting what information people can interact with. They don't like the information that people are interacting with. They are trying to go at the content of information that.

[Leo Laporte]

Why don't they Then show, shut down CCTV or rt, which are propaganda arms for these. Russia.

[Kathy Gellis]

This decision says they could ban the BBC.

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean there was really no limit.

[Emily Forlani]

No, it doesn't. Because it's not a foreign adversary.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it is. Well, it's not an adversary.

[Kathy Gellis]

One small step. One small step that, you know, our President Elect needs to do when he's in office and suddenly Britain is an adversary and we don't get BBC anymore.

[Mike Elgin]

There is, that's, that's a little, I.

[Kathy Gellis]

Mean, no, no, there's no limiting principle that was very.

[Leo Laporte]

It's clear. China is an average.

[Emily Forlani]

It's very clear. We know that who our adversaries are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

There's a superpower conflict brewing between the United States and China in Taiwan. They're going to invade Taiwan and we are going to defend Taiwan. They are, it's, it's, they're like a, it's, it's a superpower adversary that's going to involve information warfare.

[Emily Forlani]

Yes.

[Mike Elgin]

And for the Chinese Communist Party to just determine US public opinion on this issue is unacceptable. And so, you know, it's still in the realm of potentiality. Assume. We can assume. I mean, personally I would favor keeping TikTok around but having like a kill switch on it because, you know, the ability to track the location of special, you know, military people who are using TikTok and whatever else. Who knows. I haven't thought about it that deeply, but clearly there's a capability there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's already banned for military and government and as it should be.

[Mike Elgin]

But we're talking about asymmetric information warfare where all of the US social networks are banned in China. The Chinese people have no access.

[Kathy Gellis]

That's because they don't have a First Amendment.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the difference between us and China. Exactly. We don't want to be more like China, do we?

[Mike Elgin]

Can't allow foreign adversaries to just freely spread propaganda in the United States.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, it does and it has to because there's no limiting principle to say what is the difference and who's going to decide? The First Amendment A doesn't have a national security exemption to it. This is something that's been invented. But even if we think that a national security exemption could at times pass strict scrutiny, this is so broad in the way that they did it that they're deciding that this government has decided it doesn't like certain content. And so it's trying to look for a leverage to control what content that American citizens get to interact with. It's very thing that it's trying to do. The First Amendment says make no law, and they're trying to make a law that does exactly what the First Amendment says make no law for. So if we do compare, why we're not, you know, the same on both in both countries, it's because China doesn't have a First Amendment restraining its government from doing things like this. We do. And this was so tritely analyzed to figure out how the government could just get this leeway to go do this to TikTok. There's no limiting principle that would keep it from being able to do this to any other content produced by anybody else. And there's also also a right that Americans have to be able to get access to information from abroad, including people who may not necessarily be our.

[Mike Elgin]

That's akin to the, to, to the, to the, you know, the People's Republic. The, the, the, the Chinese army having a First Amendment right to all the passwords of all the military companies in the United States or something like that. It's like if there's a, There's a point at which they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not free speech.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I don't even. That's not analogous to anything going on here.

[Mike Elgin]

My point is that. That things change. You have different relationships with. In terms of information, with adversaries than you do with everybody else. And so the question is, what is an adversarial relationship and how do you define that and what are the rules around that? It's certainly. It's got to be within the realm of the First Amendment for there to be some controls on adversaries, at least during times of warfare. War. Right. With those adversaries for them to spread propaganda. AI Propaganda within our country.

[Leo Laporte]

It has to be a long history of doing that in the United States. Right after the First Amendment was passed, they passed the Alien and sedition Acts in 1798, which forbade false and malicious statements about the federal government from aliens.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that was always done. This we did it, but we didn't. I mean, that happened and it never actually went off the books, but it was so massively unpopular, it sank John Adams presidency. He was a political nullity at that point. This isn't something that certainly. And we've got 100 plus years of modern First Amendment jurisprudence and this is completely out of step with that jurisprudence. And the test that they did itself with how they analyzed strict scrutiny of whether it was compelling purpose and narrowly tailored, even if you wanted to credit it for the compelling purpose, it was not narrowly.

[Mike Elgin]

But Is there no allowance for the fact that social media and AI based algorithms designed that can be tweaked secretly without any access to the algorithms is different.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's not.

[Mike Elgin]

Surely it's different.

[Kathy Gellis]

It is not different. The only thing that First Amendment jurisprudence says where we've impinged on foreign actors has been when it's come to spectrum. And that falls into the. Because spectrum is different because it's finite. The idea otherwise. There are cases that actually make clear that Americans have their own interest in their own right to be able to consume information, including information that's not produced from America. And it is too easy to declare anybody an enemy. I mean, it may or may not.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that there is a point, and let me take this argument, Cathy. There is a point to saying we trust Americans, they should be able to read anything from anybody, and we trust them to make the right decisions. And who is it? We certainly don't trust our government to make the decision about what we can and cannot see. Right, Mike? We don't want that.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right. And that's been very clear with the jurisdiction.

[Leo Laporte]

Let Mike address that.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, so. So the. When I say that the, that social media algorithms, especially a super algorithm like the one on TikTok, is different from allowing the Japanese to distribute pamphlets in the United States during World War II or something like that, it's obviously different. Clearly different. The problem is that the laws don't reflect that difference. We're still sort of rummaging around in the dusty old laws to try to govern something that's radically different from what.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand what you're saying. And this is a larger issue, which is that somehow social media has weaponized speech and that suddenly, I mean, in, in every respect, that suddenly. And this kind of leads to things like the Australian law forbidding people under 16 from participating in social media, or in fact, we have laws like that in, I think, Kentucky and Texas. It seems to me that it's appropriate for us to draw a bright line that says government shouldn't decide what we can consume or not.

[Mike Elgin]

I agree. So I think the solution to all the social media algorithm problems is very, very obvious and clear. Are they like a newspaper or are they like the telephone? Well, I think they should be both. I think there should be a clearly defined feed required by law for all of them to say, okay, here's the algorith algorithm, rhythmically sorted or human sorted content, which is newspaper.

[Leo Laporte]

And here's the feed.

[Mike Elgin]

Wait, wait a minute, hear me out. And here's the feed of the people you followed. You get every single thing that you. That they post in order with nothing removed and nothing added. Right. And those two things need to be separate. Right now people just blindly open the thing and they. And they receive the opinion that comes at them from whoever's determining the algorithm. And this is a real problem.

[Leo Laporte]

That actually seems fair. What about that? What? That wouldn't be a restriction of speech. It would just merely be a clarification.

[Mike Elgin]

Solution to the problem. Are they common carriers?

[Kathy Gellis]

It's not a solution at all.

[Leo Laporte]

And most people, Mike, would choose the algorithmic feed, you understand?

[Mike Elgin]

They probably would.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's.

[Mike Elgin]

Again, that'd be a clear.

[Leo Laporte]

More entertaining.

[Mike Elgin]

That'd be a clear choice. Right now they don't know that they.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T have a choice.

[Mike Elgin]

That choice has been made for them.

[Leo Laporte]

What about that, Kathy?

[Kathy Gellis]

Absolutely not hard. No. And even this Supreme Court would say no. First of all, it's already come close to analogizing it to the newspaper. It hasn't. Thomas and Alito and Gorsuch are a little not on board with that. But it's getting there. ACLU vs Reno made it clear that Internet counted as a First Amendment protected media communication space as anything offline we had. And what you're talking about is just one small thing would basically disrupt everything that happens online and all First Amendment perspective that we have on it. This is not a small thing you're describing. You're talking about basically making the Internet a First Amendment free zone for the government to regulate as it sees fit. And good luck having any free speech, any complaints about any powerful people, any government, any democratic organization if that was the rule. There's a reason that we make the government stay out of what content is consumed by people and what they can express and what they can assume and what they can be associated with and how they can see it and how other people can present it. The reason the First Amendment says no is because that's a good way to make sure that you don't have any democracy anymore. So, no, that's not a small thing that you're saying.

[Emily Forlani]

Mike, you're muted. Mike, you're muted.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike, you're talking, but nothing's coming.

[Mike Elgin]

Sorry, sorry about that.

[Emily Forlani]

That would have been a great time for me to talk because that was.

[Mike Elgin]

Your chance and you blew it.

[Emily Forlani]

Go ahead, Mike.

[Leo Laporte]

Michael responded, then you. Emily, I'm sorry.

[Mike Elgin]

Elon Musk acts as an extreme example. Is anything but the open free Internet. It's Elon. It's the elon Musk show 24. 7. He. It's his first amendment rights, that's being protected and should be. Right. But that's an example. Like, these walled gardens are not the open Internet. Those are two different things. And if somebody's publishing, if somebody's determining what opinions are being published. Right. That's just like the op ed section of the New York Times. And it's nothing like. Just like the open Internet. And that's why I think, think there should be one feed that's like the Elon Musk show and the other feed that's the open Internet where you select what you hear from and who you want to hear it from. This is. This is. These things are different. And, and the whole algorithm. Mick, Problem.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, Mike, you got a problem because now you have the government telling Elon Musk, a private individual, what to do with his company, a private company. And I think, I think that what. I don't want to put words in Kathy's mouth. No one needs to. But it's a slippery slope.

[Mike Elgin]

They already do it. They already do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course.

[Mike Elgin]

Of course he can't allow. Allow the publication of child abuse material. He can't allow.

[Leo Laporte]

There's certainly legal things in Germany.

[Mike Elgin]

He can't even show a swastika.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm not defending German law. I'm going to take issues with the fact that Germany doesn't have a First Amendment and we get some. You know, they can arrest opposition leaders for having said the wrong things. So, no, I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

It's one of the. I agree with you. It is one of our most valuable strengths in this country is free speech.

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I understand, understand that it sounds like, in your opinion, any abridgment of absolute freedom of speech is a slippery slope. That's problematic.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, you mean to me. I mean, yeah. Yes, I generally do. The reason we have strict scrutiny is for the very select things where maybe the rule needs to be different. You, the government has to thread a very tiny needle in order to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

No, no. I mean, that's no security. It might be a compelling reason, but it doesn't answer the question unto itself. And then it also has to be narrowly tailored. So, for instance, in the example that was just brought up, Musk and Twitter have some obligation to police for csam. But even that is a more complex policy argument and legal requirement. Like they only have to police what they know about. They don't have to police it prospectively. And there's reasons why you wouldn't want them to anyway. We're essentially relitigating the last 30 years of Internet law, which has found that the First Amendment applies online and has to apply online in a relatively broad way, and that the fact that occasionally we might have threaded the needle for regulation that can survive strict scrutiny does not mean that the government gets to help itself to any sort of content.

[Leo Laporte]

I gotta pause you both because Emily gets to get a word in edgewise. Go ahead, Emily.

[Emily Forlani]

Okay. I really appreciate, appreciate Kathy's perspective as well as Mike's. My gut feeling is that this is the right thing to do, what's being happening to TikTok, because this is the only thing that I have seen be bipartisan, have bipartisan support in this extremely divided country that we have. I think that if both sides agree this is the way, there is really something there. And it's a true shame that most Americans don't have education on cybersecurity. Don't know why China is a threat, why everything is behind smoke and mirrors. But I think there's enough here that there is a real important threat. And to me it's less of a free speech issue and more of a cybersecurity national security issue. And I think that I see a lot of people in my TikTok feed who are making a lot of money off of TikTok, like creators who are advocating my son wouldn't have a business. But I don't think that's a reason to keep something. I'm sorry, like it's. I know we like it, but because you are making money from.

[Kathy Gellis]

It has nothing to do with making money.

[Emily Forlani]

That's why I appreciate your perspective, Kathy, because what I see the conversation among young people is completely ill informed on why China is a threat and why these types of things do have bipartisan support. And I think that is a real shame and part because TikTok is super.

[Mike Elgin]

Pro China and, and the Chinese version of TikTok, by the way. And Kathy, I know this is irrelevant and they don't have a First Amendment, but the Chinese version of TikTok is like super constructive and.

[Emily Forlani]

Oh, exactly. Yeah, they're feeding, they're pumping us stuff to. They know. I don't know, maybe they don't know this, but it is affecting our mental health. It is shaping how people think we.

[Kathy Gellis]

Can speak, how we need to speak and discover new ways and teach ourselves new things because we have the First Amendment protecting our ability to protect the platforms to give us the other opportunity.

[Emily Forlani]

I don't think that protecting free speech is protecting TikTok. You can protect free speech whatever you want.

[Kathy Gellis]

We don't like it. If we're talking about that, people are.

[Emily Forlani]

This is about a company.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's not about a company. It's about.

[Emily Forlani]

Yes, it is. TikTok is a company law.

[Kathy Gellis]

In order to stick it to TikTok. And the court was agreed with you that the whole kumbaya of Democrats and Republicans who weren't actually agreeing necessarily for the same reason. Some of them just didn't like it because they don't like. The kids today are on TikTok. And some of them, those kids were talking about ways that didn't like their politics. It's a really convenient way of sticking it to the kids who are speaking out against their politics. If you take away the platform that they were speaking on.

[Leo Laporte]

Many, many platforms.

[Emily Forlani]

Many platforms you can speak on. You don't need this one.

[Leo Laporte]

I think all of us have had a chance to say our point of view and I. It's pretty clear there's no. It's difficult, let's put it that way.

[Kathy Gellis]

This.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also clear that we don't know how the Supreme Court's gonna on this because it's kind of a wild card these days.

[Emily Forlani]

It's also clear that we're not even talking about why they banned it and why it's a national security issue.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know why the problem, Emily. We don't know why. And that's the part of the problem.

[Emily Forlani]

That's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why the drones haven't been willing to give us their thinking. They merely said, well, we know it is. You just have to trust us.

[Emily Forlani]

But what if they're right?

[Leo Laporte]

But I agree. I think Kathy has a really strong point, which is that the First Amendment is a very, very important part of our politics and needs to be protected. But I think we've all made our points. I don't think we've come to a resolution on. I don't know if we will. I will be very interested. It does sound like it is something the Supreme Court should rule on.

[Kathy Gellis]

It should. I mean, let me. I'm frustrated about the policy decision in this argument because I think the policy is, yes, this is bad, but let me just frame it this way. It changed fundamentally the way First Amendment jurisdiction prudence behaved, and it changed it in a way that if we're going to be able to say no to the government trying to set content policy for us, our ability to do so is much weaker. So even if you think that, okay, TikTok, fine, let's say everybody agrees and they're bad and they should Feel bad and go away. Clearly that's not going to be the case on all sorts of other types of Internet expression that we're going to have going forward. It's never been the case in the past and there's certainly no reason to suspect we're going to have it now. I mean we're not going to get that much coupon by eyeshadow of what's going on with, you know, the politics that we're heading into. And this hurt the ability for people to say something other than what the government likes. That is a problem unto itself. It really broke a lot of precedent. It broke the strict scrutiny test and will be. It will be bad if that doesn't fix it.

[Mike Elgin]

And by the way, Leo, you tried, you tried to change subject. A valiant effort. But I just want to quickly say that that are what you saying that you wouldn't mind so much or you would find it in support of the First Amendment to have a law that essentially accomplished the same thing, but did it in a different way that protected future unintended consequences or is just the outcome is the problem.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm not entirely sure I understand the question.

[Emily Forlani]

Don't have a free speech issue but still get rid of TikTok. Like would you support that they marry.

[Mike Elgin]

With the lawn in such a way as that to open it opens up the door to all kinds of horrible. But. But is there a way to write a law for the outcome of TikTok going away that could be done in such a way that would protect the First Amendment in the future?

[Kathy Gellis]

So I don't want to say it in terms of Twitter TikTok going away, but there were two things that the government wanted. There were two concerns that the government had. One was the data slurpage and one was the COVID manipulating the content that we're exposed to. The second one, I don't think in any way shape or form can survive First Amendment scrutiny because it inherently was trying to interact with what the content policy was. So I think that's doomed from the outset in the first part. I think it's doomed when the way they wrote the law had just such a catastrophic effect to it. Like basically you banned TikTok and that's going to have speech harms. But the data slurpage, there's, you know, I think some legitimate policy issues there as we were just discussing. Like, you know, a lot of companies slurp way too much data issue that.

[Emily Forlani]

They won't sell the algorithms. Like it feels like they are kind of hiding something.

[Kathy Gellis]

The but the algorithms was the other part in terms of the data slippage. To answer Mike's question. Yeah, I think there's things that the US Government could do to address the data slurpage, like actually having a comprehensive of data protection policy now you can write them really badly, which have first amendment impacts. But I think that is a needle you could thread. It would justify it and would take care of a lot of the concerns that people have with what the problem is that TikTok is Chinese.

[Mike Elgin]

Unfortunately, even though the public may be more concerned about the data slurpage from a national security perspective, 95% of the national security threat is the other one is the.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike. China and Russia both use X.com to do the same thing. I know that. I know they both use Facebook to do the same thing, but they can't control the algorithm Facebook.

[Mike Elgin]

As a result, they don't have control of the algorithms. The Chinese law says that basically if we want to, we can go into any Chinese company and we can look at all the data and see what's happening and make changes and do like.

[Leo Laporte]

They specifically, let's say Elon Musk decided, decides that he's going to favor Chinese content or Russian content on his site. What would we do about that?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, I mean, I don't. I think that that's another. That's another issue that we'd have to figure out what, what's happening there.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think it's his protected right to do so.

[Emily Forlani]

Well, what if banning TikTok is the right thing? Like we haven't even explored that. We're just Tick Tock apologists. I mean we. There's not the right that this deal is the right thing. Why, why do we have no support for that?

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean not everybody.

[Mike Elgin]

Public support did.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean some of the people are. They found common because I mean people like Tick Tock.

[Emily Forlani]

They like. I watched so much Tick Tock, it's like I need to get off Tick Tock. I like it. But people, you know, their sons are making money on Tick Tock. Like everyone here is so enchanted with Tick Tock. What if there's a problem?

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't, I'm not enchanted with Tick Tock. I don't care. I never.

[Emily Forlani]

You're defending it to the death.

[Kathy Gellis]

And I know defending TikTok. I am defending amendment. I'm defending the First Amendment because it isn't just TikTok that will fall. There's no limiting principle to what they did to TikTok in this legislation and what the court blessed and any other platform and speech that any that the government wants to turn to next, it will look a little bit different, but not in any meaningful way. This greases the skids. Including on like even the point of.

[Emily Forlani]

Well, it's about a foreign adversary. It's about a foreign adversary. It's about a foreign adversary.

[Kathy Gellis]

Like that is way too easy to get a foreign adversary. And there's nothing about the way they defined it here that makes me think it's the country's one. It's a country.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute though, Emily. Isn't it conceivable that South Korea will become a foreign adversary and North Korea become our ally under a President Trump? And if that were the case, you wouldn't be able to buy Samsung TVs. How would you feel then?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, we may feel like how would.

[Emily Forlani]

You guys feel if it was the right decision to ban ticket and you argue against it?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it isn't because there's no evidence that it is that you have to give us evidence that it is.

[Emily Forlani]

The government needs to give us the evidence. That's what they owe us. The problem is they think it's probably a national security issue to release it. But I mean, I've reported on so many shady things from China, it's outrageous. China is an absolute threat and I feel like we are losing that thread. That is true.

[Kathy Gellis]

So the thing is, I think, you know, that's what I meant about the long play that if China can cause us to give up our First Amendment rights because it was using them in a way that wasn't good, that is an interesting long play. But that's kind of where this decision left us.

[Mike Elgin]

Let me see if I can shift it just a little bit. First of all, I'd like to say that Salt Hank doesn't need TikTok. He's killing it on Instagram. The other thing, the other point I want to make is that, is that I think all our points of view are clear. But I would love to know, Kathy, what you think the Supreme Court is actually going to do.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, who knows with these particular judges, but I think they, I'm hoping they will at least buy time. And so if we have to do this via the shadow docket, I'm hoping they will at least buy time because this is. There are principles in law and granted, this court hasn't been all that supportive of them lately.

[Leo Laporte]

What's interesting is if they buy one day.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

President Trump will be president the next day.

[Mike Elgin]

Even if they don't, even if they rule something on the 19th Trump is, you know, do some executive order that'll have to go through the courts and all that stuff. He's already, he's already announced that he's going to be more pro TikTok than he was when he tried to ban it when he was president, so.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, let me ask you. Well, let me go back to Emily's point, because it's kind of like one of the things I'm trying to argue. The government can be arbitrary with what it likes one day and what it doesn't like another day. And if we allow the government to ever show up and say, well, based on the way we feel right now, we're going to control online speech, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

A problem because that's the point of the Constitution, frankly.

[Kathy Gellis]

The Constitution says stay out of it because, because you're going to change your minds, there's always going to be an opposition.

[Leo Laporte]

The Constitution is there to give you an eternal set of values that you adhere to regardless of how the current government feels.

[Emily Forlani]

I agree and I appreciate it. I just think I'm suspicious that there is such, it's such a popular opinion to hate the TikTok ban or there's too much consensus.

[Kathy Gellis]

Let me.

[Emily Forlani]

Compared to the consensus in the government, there's a real gap and I'm uncomfortable why everyone wants to keep it. That's. And then the government on both sides is like, actually, this is like one of the biggest national security issues. So where. How do we reconcile that?

[Leo Laporte]

But wait a minute, Emily. The government on the right doesn't like it because they've censored conservative. They say consensus or conservative speech.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. I mean, kids were like, organizing on.

[Leo Laporte]

The left doesn't like it because I forgot why the left doesn't like it. But it. They don't agree on why they want to ban TikTok. They just agree they want to ban TikTok. That right there should tell you something.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. One of the things to be aware of is pretext. It is very easy for a sensorial government to use pretext. And national security, it's a real bogeyman that's very easy to deploy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's protect the women, protect the children, and protect our national borders.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I think an answer to. Well, I think an answer to Emily's point is like, I could believe. I mean, I'm not arguing with you necessarily of is TikTok good? TikTok may be bad and maybe an overall bad thing. I can accept that. But the government doesn't get to do this in response to the bad Thing because there's no way to do. Okay. There's no way to do it.

[Emily Forlani]

I see this being one of. One of those things where people post about how dumb the TikTok ban is, and that gets them.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, we're going. We're operating at a higher level than that. I don't think.

[Emily Forlani]

I know, but I just, I'm really suspicious of the current dialogue. I'm seeing. Like this is a good dialogue. But just the fact that saying the TikTok ban is dumb makes people like you and therefore it's going in that direction is highly suspicious.

[Mike Elgin]

Being pro platform is good on any platform and.

[Emily Forlani]

Right. And Tik Tok is a company that's making way more money than you. And I feel like people are bending the needed Tik Tok. And there's. There's tons of issues here.

[Mike Elgin]

There's a. There's a legal dimension and then there's the public dimension. The Constitution exists for the people of the United States, like U.S. citizens. And I'm pretty sure that almost, you know, the vast majority of US Citizens believe that the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment exists to protect American citizens. That that's one of the benefits and perks of American citizenship. The idea that it. It protects Xi Jinping.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike Elgin]

I don't think most people.

[Emily Forlani]

That's what I'm saying. Like, there's reason to. This isn't it? Said black and white. We're presenting it as black and white. People want it to be black and white issue. It's not. I'm sorry.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm sure that was black and white in terms of its unconstitutionality. I don't think this is a close call.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she's not defending TikTok for TikTok's sake. Let me ask, though, a question. During World War II, were there limits on Nazi propaganda in the United States?

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I suspect there were.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, there were.

[Mike Elgin]

I'm sure there was. Yeah, absolutely.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, I mean, one of the things is that our line of precedent goes back to in World War I when you weren't allowed to protest against the draft because they thought that that destabilize America. So the law at that point was, of course, the government can jail Eugene Debs because he was organizing against the draft and we needed the draft so that the country would come together and fight this war.

[Mike Elgin]

But again, American citizens exercising his free.

[Kathy Gellis]

Rights, that is a mistake.

[Mike Elgin]

And now an American citizen exercising his free right to assembly and all that stuff is different from Adolf Hitler exercising his constitutional right to spread Propaganda in the US that wasn't really under us Different.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't think that was a scenario that necessarily got treated by law. But one of the things is that. Oh, sorry, I lost the.

[Emily Forlani]

You've done a great job.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm just, I'm just saying we probably have a precedent of violating the First Amendment in times of war. I would imagine that's the case.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't think. Well understand that it's a line of cases that started from World War I that have moved now and they've moved very steadily and very consistently away from. From the government gets to do something. Oh, this is what the point I was going to make. The idea that the Bill of Rights protects only Americans is not actually necessarily the case. It's not necessarily the case in that all of the laws enumerated only apply to American citizens. And some of the reason for that is because there's no way to actually have it apply to American citizens only and not other people. Because if you had to do the test of are you a citizen or not? It would already compromise the view views of the rights of the American.

[Leo Laporte]

We do have the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States which has a legal right to prevent foreign nationals from investing in U.S. property.

[Kathy Gellis]

That is different and it's not seen in the speech context. In the speech context Americans do. And this has been recognized by a case that I can't think of the name offhand. Americans have the right to consume information, including information produced by non Americans. So you're going to. And again, when you look at this, American users have their own rights that this impinges upon. So yes, it's impinging upon TikTok's rights, but it also impinges on Americans rights because it's affecting the information ecosystem they get to participate in. And that is where the rubber hits the road.

[Emily Forlani]

If nothing else, what's the counter argument like do other. Other people that in the legal space or in your sphere, in your world that disagree with you?

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean there's a lot of people that keep trying to pull out including text 30 and ban the Internet and.

[Leo Laporte]

Censor all the attorneys working for the government.

[Kathy Gellis]

In terms of the people who I like and respect, there is deep alarm over this decision. And the basis of the alarm again really has very little to do with TikTok itself and has entirely to do with the framework of what the court did, how it applied its strict scrutiny test and what that would mean for anything else. That's not TikTok that comes up next and we're in deep trouble.

[Emily Forlani]

Who we who like the TikTok ban is associated with, like who raised the bill? Who is there somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

Trump started it, right. And then the US Congress voted it in last in this current session and Biden signed the law.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, and I believe also and you know, and the court is like, oh, and it's, you know, esteemed judgment and wisdom Congress decided to have that have passed this law. It wasn't getting passed directly and it got passed I believe as part of, of getting glued to a must pass bill which is, I believe that is the case. And it got the escape velocity that way like these laws like the court is like, oh, the very considered, you know, esteem of the bar partisan in Congress. And it really ignored the evolution of the bill and the fact that common cause to pass it was made by people who, yeah, some are genuinely concerned about the national security impact, but some of them really didn't like what kids today were saying on TikTok and wanted to shut them up. And that was a big part of the motivation that pushed the bill and eventually got enough allies is to get itself passed.

[Mike Elgin]

Here's a, here's a question though. We were talking about what, you know, what the restrictions were during World War II. In 1938, Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration act, which meant that everybody who's disseminating propaganda on behalf of foreign governments had to register with the State Department. So to what extent does algorithmic tweaks that favor the Chinese position or any other sort of propaganda fall under the, under the 1930s?

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't think that was litigated. And the second thing is I would need to do something called Shepardizing, which anybody who cites an earlier precedent should do. And Shepardizing is, you look up to see is that decision still good law or have the courts moved away from it? So I don't know what the status of that sort of registration would be. But that's also again, something much more narrow. And it's not like that was the.

[Mike Elgin]

Issue whether it's still right, whether it still applies or not. There's a strong precedent for something that's at least akin to what we're talking about now, which is foreign adversaries disseminating propaganda with the United States. It can be shut down by the Congress and that's that that has happened in the past.

[Kathy Gellis]

No, I'm saying, I'm saying that may not be good law at all. It doesn't count as a strong precedent if we've moved away from. No, it matters a lot.

[Mike Elgin]

It was Enforced and now we've.

[Kathy Gellis]

We may have repudiated it and repudiated in a way where it's well, if we repudiate it, we repudiate it with Congress.

[Mike Elgin]

Neither Congress nor the courts, nor the lawyers, nor the Supreme Court are infallible in any degree. I think that the fact that it's common sense that we shouldn't allow foreign adversaries to spread propaganda within the United States if depending on the level of conflict it's common sense. I think it's common sense and it does not mean that the First Amendment is null and void.

[Kathy Gellis]

Common sense is that this is a dangerous road to go down.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm not sure common sense.

[Emily Forlani]

Maybe both are true. Maybe. Maybe both. Maybe both are true.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually believe the American people are smart enough to hear all points of view, even adversaries. Points of view.

[Mike Elgin]

Okay. But even movies are labeled PG13 or whatever. It's okay to label content.

[Kathy Gellis]

For example, the labeling happened because Congress was trying to censor the movies which would have had a First Amendment problem because they didn't want to deal with the practical reality instead of the industry decided to self regulate and that's why they do that.

[Mike Elgin]

I don't think there's anything wrong with laws that are designed to inform the public.

[Leo Laporte]

Where do you think you really the public pays any attention to movie ratings.

[Mike Elgin]

And no, not really.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think that that's really it actually.

[Kathy Gellis]

So Mike, you'd ask the question of what could the law have done if everybody's suspend this?

[Leo Laporte]

Because as good as this conversation is, we spend an hour on it and I think all the points have been well stated. I don't, I think at this point we're just kind of reiterating too much free speech. Too much free speech. And I as a dictator, I'm going to end it right here. But a great conversation.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Mike Elgin]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's your section 230 protects me from any suits against me for doing that. But I think it's a great conversation. I'm really glad we had this conversation and I think, I would hope people would listen and think about it. It's an important question. I suspect that in fact TikTok will be shut down January 19th but and.

[Mike Elgin]

Then reopen on the 20th.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I don't think Trump, it's not number one on his agenda.

[Emily Forlani]

He doesn't get shut down. That's part of the reason I'm bullish on just saying whatever I want about it. I think this story is Just going to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to get shut down and Apple and Google are going to be forced. They're going to be forced to stop offering it in their store and they will complain, reply, and that'll be that. There'll be people who I'll keep tick tock on my phone and I'll still be able to see tick tocks. And I imagine a lot of us creators will continue to use TikTok.

[Kathy Gellis]

So the irony is how much of a cybersecurity vulnerability is to have unsupported software on people's personal devices. But I think an open question is, yeah, this may not be the. Let's say this litigation hits a wall. Okay, we're shutting it down of the litigation.

[Emily Forlani]

Where will we see more.

[Kathy Gellis]

And Apple comply? That will be the next story with.

[Leo Laporte]

Russia and China for similar requests. I think they'll comply with the US Government.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't know. I think it's a sad day. If they do, I'd like to see if they fight it.

[Leo Laporte]

This is gonna be interesting. Maybe we'll be talking about this in a couple of weeks. We may. Well, next week's show will be a best of, not a best of a look back at the year, so to speak. We do this every year, which is kind of fun. We look at the top stories of 2024. We've put together pan. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun of our own people. It'll be Micah Sargent, Father Robert Balaser. Richard Campbell's gonna join us. He listens to Twitt on a regular basis. I always see him in our chat. Hi, Richard and Paris Martino. Next week on Twitt. The year end and then the best of on December 29th. Excuse me. And then we'll get back together and start a show January 5th. And who knows, maybe by then we'll have some. Some Supreme Court stuff to report. You're watching this Week in Tech with our great guests. Very smart people. This is a problem when you get smart people on with, with a lot of opinions, they may not agree and then fireworks. And I'm enjoying it. Mike Elgin is here from MachineSociety. AI, I'm sure you've written about this on your newsletter.

[Mike Elgin]

Oh, I think so. So, yes, more than once. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And you may. And you may again, Emily for. Have you covered this on PC Mag?

[Emily Forlani]

Just the peripheral news, but not, not in depth. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean it's an interesting cover.

[Emily Forlani]

China all the time. So to me, I see it from that lens and that's Why? I just had a bad gut feeling about it from what I, I see about how we engage with them. But it's also why I appreciate Kathy's perspective on just she. She looks at it from a completely different lens.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's one of the reasons we love having Kathy Gellis on. She is an advocate and you can tell. Contributor@techdirt cgcouncil.com and as a avid reader of Tech Dirt, I think I know how Mike Masnick feels about this as well.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't think there's a lot of daylight between my opinion and I think.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels pretty much the same way. Yeah, that's a great place to go. Tech dirt.com if you want to read Kathy's writing my Mike Maznix Carl Bode. So many great people writing there about these issues. It's great to have all three of you on the show today. I would like to point out that normally we would have an ad here, but we don't. This is one of the issues that's facing many podcasts. I saw the other day that 50% of all ad sales in the United States go to the top 10 shows. Needless to say, we are not, we're not in the top 10. We might be the longest running. We've been around for almost 20 years. 20th anniversary is in April. But that doesn't mean you're number one and it doesn't mean advertisers. In fact, advertisers like anybody else, they go, oh yeah, I knew about that show. But yeah, yeah, we want, we want to get caller daddy. Let's get her on. She's hot right now. Which means we need to come to you to make up the difference. Even though we have cut back as much as we can, shutting down the studios, canceling shows, laying off some of our most beloved team members, it hasn't been enough to balance the books, if you will, and we're looking at a fairly bleak 2025. I appreciate all of you who are members of Club Twit and if you're not, I would love to invite you to join the club now. We try to keep it affordable. Seven bucks a month. We try to give you good benefits like ad free versions of all of our shows, video for shows that are just audio to the public, of course. Our great Club Twit, Discord. The events we do in the Discord Discord we have. Stacy's Book Club is coming up on Thursday. Really good book. The new book from the guys who wrote the Expanse, James Sa Corey they have a new book, a new series coming out. The Mercy of the Gods is the first and it is really good. I just finished it and I'm just, I can't wait for the next volume of this. So we'll be talking about that on Thursday. Jason Snell recommended and I'm gonna desperately try to get Jason to join us for the book club. Micah's Crafting Corners. Also coming up this week, chance to sit down, do some crafts with Micah. I think he's building a tiny kitchen. Last time I checked, we did an AMA last week with Emily Forlini. If you and if you're a member of the club, you can hear the the ask me anything on the Twit plus feed. So we try to give you extra content, extra stuff to make it worthwhile. But the real reason to join Join the Club is to keep this kind of programming on the air. It isn't very lucrative, but I think it's very important and we really believe in what we're, what we're doing. So we'd like to invite you to help us out. Twit TV Club Twit. And thanks in advance. Let's see.

[Mike Elgin]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Emily Forlani]

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[Kathy Gellis]

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[Emily Forlani]

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[Kathy Gellis]

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[Emily Forlani]

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[Kathy Gellis]

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[Kathy Gellis]

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[Emily Forlani]

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[Leo Laporte]

I could talk about Cosa going to just. That's just going to get another big argument going.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm only going to talk about the First Amendment again, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. How about this one? This was a surprise. You remember there was a little tussle between Matt Mullenweg, CEO and creator of WordPress, CEO of Automatic with a another company that puts word puts people's WordPress sites online called WP Engine. Matt got upset with WP Engine and actually pulled their access to WordPress.org resources interfered with its plugins. A judge has now ruled that he must stop on Tuesday, California district judge ordered automatic to stop blocking WP engines access to WordPress.org this was kind of a shock. Mullenweg had waged this is from the Verge waged a public campaign against W P Engine in September accusing them of misusing the WordPress trademark, not contributing back to the WordPress community, and then blocking WP Engine from their servers plus taking control in effect of their plugin. WP Engine's plugin judge Araceli Martinez Ouin found merit in WP Engines claims that automatics and actions harmed business relationships, saying Mullenweg's conduct is designed to induce or induce breach or disruption. Disruption. Kind of a shock, I guess. I guess I should ask you Kathy, what you think of this decision? Is it merited?

[Kathy Gellis]

It's been hard to sort of completely follow. So I put an asterisk, but I think the answer is probably yes. It did seem like it was a measured decision and the judge seemed to understand what was getting complained about. And it's really a decision that like in theory the Mullenweg view could still prevail, but it's really I think sort of an injunction to sort of one of the points I was making earlier is that the law like status quo until we realize, until we're all sure that it's okay to have that's kind.

[Leo Laporte]

Of how it should happen, right? There's a little speed bump to keep.

[Kathy Gellis]

You from changing things and sometimes we don't like that because sometimes it's like go ahead and break things because money will fix it. So we'll sort it out later. But especially for things where money can't fix or too much harm will accrue, then the government wants to like you know, a step back, let's preserve things how they are.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what's happened because this is just maintaining the status quo. There still will be a trial, there will be discovery. It's WordPress's contention that they're protecting the open source ecosystem in general that this is often the case that commercial third parties take advantage of open source without contributing back to the original open source. That was what Matt felt was happening.

[Kathy Gellis]

It may also be so one of the things and the standard for preliminary injunction is general status quo and like, you know, what are the balancing the harms? Are we going to harm more if we change stuff now or more if we over change and then turn out that was wrong and then also likelihood of prevailing on the merits. And this decision does seem to telegraph that the judge found that non mule and WEG side to be have a persuasive argument but it isn't fully dispositive. This is not the end of the case. If they want to keep litigating it. The judge might get to a different point eventually but we've left things out as they are for now. But it does say seem to if he was really on board with the argument he would probably think, yes, there's a harm and we need to stop that harm right now. And it doesn't sound like he was particularly convinced that there was that sort of harm accruing.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll watch with interest. I think this will develop and it does really impact open source. The open source community.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, it's just a mess. It's hard to. It's unfortunate. This is not who mommy and daddy are fighting and is not good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

Something this episode.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. Nobody's a mommy here and nobody's a daddy here. We're just fighting.

[Kathy Gellis]

We're just sort of like, you know, sometimes you can look at a dispute and you have more of a sense of who's the, you know, who the bad guy is and this and the other thing and you know, even if you're not swayed by Muhlenberg's Muhlenweg's actions here, he's been a good guy in the space for a long time. So that would be unfort if this is not consistent with that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly my feeling. I have, we've interviewed, I've Interviewed Matt many times. He's had him on our shows. I have the highest regard for him and his support for open source, so I kind of lean in his favor without really knowing what the case is. I think that a trial is probably the best solution to all of this. Let me talk about an interesting piece in the Our Atlantic this week by Charlie Wart, who I often quote on these shows because he's a very provocative and interesting thinker about technology. He, like me, admits that for years he thought of crypto as really more of a problem than a solution to anything, with NFTs and DAOs and crypto being used, Bitcoin, particularly for ransomware payments and of course the world burning consequence of generating this crypto currency. He says, I've read opaque white papers for Web3 startups and decentralized finance protocols, but I've never found a killer app. He says, maybe now after the presidential election, we have found the killer app. And this is the paragraph I'd love to get your comments on. Mike and Emily and Kathy. This is the quote from Charlie Washell in the Atlantic. Crypto is a tech technology whose transformative power is not a particular service, but a culture. A culture. One is one that is by nature distrustful of institutions and sympathetic to people who want to dismantle them or troll them. The election results were at least in part a repudiation of institutional authorities and crypto helped deliver them. We know this, that not just Elon Musk, but the generally the crypto industry put hundreds of millions of dollars into the election to support crypto friendly politicians. And they won big time. The new SEC chairman is pro crypto, replacing Gary Gensler, who wanted to regulate crypto as securities. And the crypto industry didn't like that. They kind of, I've even seen them go so far as to say, you know, there shouldn't be any capital gains tax for money we make in speculating on crypto. And that's the case in some countries. I don't know if it'll be the case here. Trump has said he wants the United States to be the big crypto power. He wants us to have a giant crypto Fort Knox.

[Emily Forlani]

You know, he always uses like the most dramatic imagery possible.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, actually I chose the Fort Knox, but okay, yeah, Trump did pledge deregulation to help, quote, ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.

[Mike Elgin]

Take that, El Salvador.

[Leo Laporte]

That El Salvador. By the way, people who criticize President Bukele's decision to put the El Salvador currency. And you would know a little bit about this. Mike, I'd like to know what you think on a crypto basis. His investment in bitcoin has proven a 400 million million windfall for El Salvador. What, what do you think? Was that the right thing to do?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, if he cashes out, I mean, if crypto is supposed to be a currency for buying things, he tried to make that happen. It doesn't really happen in El Salvador. Nobody's.

[Leo Laporte]

They still use dollars. Don't they use chivo wallets?

[Mike Elgin]

They use the US Dollar. And, but, but as a, you know, but it's also investment. So like if you, you can invest in, you know, the stock market or this or that, or you could, you could buy bitcoin. Right. So it's, it's mainly a way to make money. You, you buy.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as it's going up, you make money.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

If it doesn't go up, you would lose money. The problem I have with, with cryptocurrency is it's not tied, the value is not tied to anything. At least with a stock, it's sort of tied to the exact results of the company or real estate, it's sort of tied to the market. But there's.

[Mike Elgin]

In the last couple of decades we've sort of accepted the idea that making tons of money for its own sake is an acceptable thing to do. I am a little old fashioned and I tend to think that the reason you invest in a company is because that company makes things that people need or want. And it's part of how you contribute to society. It's part of how you make things better. I'm a capitalist and I think that despite so many abuses, capitalism in generally has lifted people out of poverty because basically you build a company, you can have a small business, all these things, things are positive. And here comes along a thing that's, it's an investment just like that in terms of you buy what is the equivalent of a stock and you sell what is the equivalent of stock. But no clothing has been made, no food has been produced or distributed, no benefit to humanity has happened at all. It's just the dudes making money. And I tend to sort of think that we've lost the plot.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the problem. Those dudes who did make a lot of money then invested it in buying the best government money could buy. And the problem with our politics in this country is it's so based on money that they now have immense power.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's hard To. With that being said, to rain on that parade. But I think they are confusing speculation with investment. And I think, to Mike's point, investment is something that, you know, there's some value in doing it for. For the sake of what it is that you hope to get a return on your investment, but something is going to get built with that investment. And so there's other reasons to do it. This is just sort of rent seeking, and it's just rent seeking based on how can I turn my $1 into 2? And there's reasons why we have regulation. We may not have enough regulation, but what they keep agitating for is no regulation. So we relearn why we have any regulation. At the first point.

[Leo Laporte]

We would learn that, wouldn't we?

[Kathy Gellis]

It just is. This is where Elon Musk.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Elon. Says delete the Consumer Finance Protection Board, the cfpb. Because it's just getting in the way. It's just getting away.

[Kathy Gellis]

At least.

[Leo Laporte]

Charlie talked to Molly White, who's been on our show. We love Molly White. She, of course, created the website web3 is going just great and covers the cryptocurrency industry. She said bitcoin and to some degree, the other crypto assets have this anti government and anti censorship ethos. She said, but it's. But the original crypto ideology was built around the notion that large financial institutions and the government shouldn't be part of this new paradigm defi decentralized finance. She says. But many crypto advocates have established a great deal of power through the wealth they've managed to accumulate using these assets. And over the time, there's been a shift from we don't want these institutions to have the power to. We want the power. And I have to kind of agree with her at this point. Emily, are you all in on Bitcoin?

[Emily Forlani]

No. I did an experiment where I invested $1,000 in Bitcoin in 2021. Not Bitcoin specifically, but other coins, because I wanted to track the market and see how it went. And I picked coins that were more environmentally friendly and that enabled.

[Leo Laporte]

That was your mistake right there.

[Emily Forlani]

Exactly, exactly. It was greedy enough and also enabled smart contracts, which I thought was the interesting part about bitcoin or just crypto, because it's. It's a technology. And what it could do is it could enable kind of like a digital handshake. And when you release funds, so maybe when you place the pizza order to Domino's, when the pizza is put in your hands, then the funds are automatically released digitally. So that's like a smart contract. And I was like, that could change. Change the way that we work. That could add something to the country. So I invested in coins that enable that. And I don't think the promise of that has really come to fruition. And it's certainly not entered the dialogue. But just because of the research I did for that I got interested in. Maybe there is a specific technology component here that could be interesting in terms of the rich getting richer, which is what Donald Trump is currently after. I think he's. That narrative is going to. Is going to lose loose steam. I just. Same old crap, you know, I mean.

[Kathy Gellis]

The problem is right now there's a lot of people with a lot of money and everyone's like, face pressed up against the glass and wants that too.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's a reason Las Vegas always shows ads for the winners, never shows ads for the losers which far outnumbered the winners.

[Kathy Gellis]

But this is all air. There's no there. There.

[Emily Forlani]

Isn't that what people argued at like the beginning of the stocks market though? Maybe?

[Kathy Gellis]

No, but there would be some equity. Like in theory, you own the teeny bit of the company and the company.

[Leo Laporte]

If you bought shares in the British East India Company, you made, you made money. It was a good investment because they were sending ships out.

[Mike Elgin]

And I think what's underappreciated or under discussed is. So there's this ethos and philosophy by advocates of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but there's not enough discussion because I write a lot about cybersecurity and the ransomware world wouldn't be what it is today without bitcoin. Not even close. It's great for money laundering.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember in the early days of ransomware, they said, go down to 711 and buy some money cards and mail them to me. As soon as Bitcoin was in wide.

[Mike Elgin]

Use, that transformed way better for crime and criminals than it is for all the. All the. All the sort of ethical mumbo jumbo that the crypto enthusiasts will spout. And so, you know, I think, I think on balance has been. Has had. Had quite a malicious influence. I mean, all the. Think of all the healthcare organizations and schools and other institutions that are important to society that have been ground to a halt because of ransomware that's enabled by Bitcoin. Surely that has to be factored in. It's nice to have no regulation and no oversight. But there's a dark side to that, clearly.

[Kathy Gellis]

So the funny thing is, for me as a civil libertarian, I kind of like that there's ways of having currency that may have some built in privacy protection. But I take your point like it is a. It is very easy and it's being exploited for that ease. But again, like all these people, there's, it's just air. And they're the people who are already in crypto. Make more money when more people come into crypto because all the valuation is what the demand is, but there's still no inherent valuation to anything that's owned. So it's kind of a pyramid scheme because they need to get more and more people to come in.

[Emily Forlani]

But I bet if more people had are making money on crypto now, I think people would like it more. I think people just like what benefits them. Right now, corporations and people who, you know, commit crimes are making money on crypto, so they like it. And we're not making money on crypto, so we don't like it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no one's losing money right now. It's at an all time high. So.

[Emily Forlani]

I know, but like the average citizen still hasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

You've made some money, right?

[Emily Forlani]

Unless you're me and you tried to get environmentally friendly ones.

[Leo Laporte]

You bought the wrong coins, obviously.

[Emily Forlani]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I had 7.85 bitcoins, which I only have because I lost the password to the wallet because I would have sold it when they were worth a thousand bucks. Now they're worth 105,000 bucks. And that 7.85 bitcoin is almost a million bucks. I think it will probably get to a lot more. Thank God I couldn't sell it. The only reason I made money.

[Kathy Gellis]

Emily has me pegged. Half. Yeah, I'm annoyed that I don't have any bitcoin and I have some sour grapes. But I think I am principled enough to say that my bigger concern is that this is air and there's a bubble and that bubble is going to pop and it's going to pop disastrously. And for the people who least can afford it. And I think based on all the dynamics and the physics of what is going into this, where it's just speculation based on how much demand they can do, at a certain point they will run out of demand and it will pop and that will be bad. And I think, I think the concern is really rooted not purely in the South.

[Emily Forlani]

It's annoying corporations are making money on crypto and we're not. It's annoying that the incoming president is advocating for people who are already incredibly wealthy and have incredible tax advantages to make more money. And that is also part of this.

[Mike Elgin]

But what's annoying to me though, it's not that any somebody else is making money. I don't care if other people make money. I want everybody to make as much money as they can. And I think that's great. What's annoying to me is that nobody cares that this investment is both facilitating crime and providing no material benefit to society. And it would be so much better if people did their investing into companies, that we're doing something positive, building something, creating something.

[Kathy Gellis]

Emily tried, she tried to buy the right trip down.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's right, buy something that's going to contribute back to society. Crypto doesn't do that. It's pure speculation.

[Kathy Gellis]

What I'm more concerned now is that they want a lot of energy. They want a gun for the regulatory state. So the regulatory state may be good, bad or otherwise, but it kind of exists to sort of not have bubbles. And if they do pop, they don't pop so disastrously. And so at least like, what would be a more constructive investment? Well, invest in a company in a normal way and they're not happy with the sec because the SEC is kind of like looking at their stuff and saying, like, I think you fall under what we're regulating because you kind of need the regulation here. So they want to do away with the sec, they're going to do away with it. Then we've lost a lot of the protection that protects all of us and helps guide to make sure that we can have sounder investment and that the public can invest more soundly.

[Leo Laporte]

So I bet you that the vast majority of our listeners right now have been thinking about getting into bitcoin, right? They see it's going up. Seems like it's going to go up forever. My wife said I should buy some bitcoin. They've made it easy because most of the, you know, the stock brokerages sell Bitcoin, easy ETFs, you know, so it's easy now to buy a fractional Bitcoin and, you know, just cross your fingers and it continues to go up. Charlie writes, crypto's future is uncertain, but its legacy, at least in the short term, seems clearer than it did before November 5th. It turns out cryptocurrencies do have a very concrete use case. They are a technology that has latched onto and then helped build a culture that celebrates greed and speculation as virtues, just as it embraces volatility. The only predictable thing about crypto seems to be its penchant for attracting and enriching a patchwork of individuals with Qualities including but not limited to an appetite for risk, an overwhelming optimism about the benefits of technology or a healthy distrust of INC institutions. In these ways, crypto is a perfect fit for the turbulence and distrust of the 2000 and twenties and well said.

[Mike Elgin]

And I think we're going to miss those institutions when they're gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I think you're right.

[Emily Forlani]

I would much rather have a strong central financial institution than be what a country and a people that relies on crypto. Like that's a very poor outcome.

[Kathy Gellis]

Wait a minute. I think this is something where I we agree.

[Emily Forlani]

What's interesting is hey, I liked your opinion on TikTok. I was just like I have absolutely no problem with what you said. I just am trying to figure out how I square on it and that's. I don't think I have no ill will towards you have new input subjects.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

And I love your championship of the First Amendment and we need more people like you. And I say that for sure.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean especially because like I do like regulation in certain ways. I kind of want a role for government. So then the issue is I fight hard for like the civil liberties and like the First Amendment. Especially because if you're going to endow the government with a lot of power, that's a lot of power that can be abused. And so one of the fundamental checks on it is to make sure we've got this free avenue and free path to be able to complain about it if it screws up, especially because we're democracy. So we should be able to discuss how we want to re steer it. So that's why I hold on so tight for this because it's the counterbalance for when we need the government to actually be more strong and centralized to do these helping things where we're just not going to be able to sort it out unless we come together to form this more perfect union than promote the general welfare. Yes, some very smart people 200 plus years ago kind of had that idea.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching this weekend. I got to pause. Hold on. You're watching this week in Tech, Emily Forlini who has a thought. And we will get to that in just a moment from PC Magazine, Kathy Gelis who was our attorney at Law contributor at Tech Dirt and of course Mike Elgin of Gastronomad.net and his newsletter MachineSociety. It's great to have smart people talking about this stuff and if smart people all agreed the world would be a lot easier but it wouldn't be necessarily a lot better. Thank you for being here and thank you all for watching. Attention sports enthusiasts. Keep the adrenaline pumping and elevate your game day with Chumba Casino. It's completely free to play, no purchase necessary. Whether you're cheering from the stands, on the move or relaxing at home, Chumba Casino Casino brings the thrill of social casino directly to your fingertips. Experience the ultimate social casino adventure with reels of casino style games offering hundreds of exciting options to choose from and fresh new releases every week. There's always something new and thrilling to explore. From action packed social slots and classic blackjack to engaging bingo and solitaire, the fun never stops. Plus enjoy generous daily login bonuses and a fantastic free welcome bonus to kickstart your social gaming journey. Dive into the excitement, discover a world where you can play for your chance to redeem some serious prizes and have a blast along the way. Don't miss out. What are you waiting for? Join now and immerse yourself in non stop fun and adventure with Chumba Casino. Get in on the action [e-mail] and make every day a Chumba Day.

[Emily Forlani]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Mike Elgin]

Plus right now you can switch keep.

[Leo Laporte]

Your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan vs Verizon and at&t@t mobile.com Keep and switch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption Required card has no cash access and expires in six months. The flavor, the tradition and the spirit of Carne Asada lives on at Del Taco. Join the Asada today with Del Taco's new limited time half pound Chipotle Carne Asada Steak Burrito packed with sweet, spicy and smoky flavor wrapped up and grilled to perfection. The whole Carne Asada steak menu delivers the bold flavors you crave with epic burritos, loaded fries and street tacos starting at just 2.99. Only at Del Taco actually, post election, there's an interesting article in the New York Times. Among other things, they talked about how the election was a boon for Silicon Valley. Mark Andreessen, the guy who wrote Netscape Navigator when he was a student at the University of Illinois the ncsa, is now a venture capitalist and podcaster, I might note, and a big Trump fan, said he has spent about half of the Time since election day. Working on the presidential transition, he framed Donald Trump's win as a cultural moment for a tech optimist ideology. You may remember about six months ago Andreessen publishing his techno Optimist manifesto. We talked about it. He said, it's morning in America. So I'm very happy people are finally poking their heads out of the frozen tundra of culture and realizing it's actually okay to build things, hire on merit, celebrate success, and fundamentally be proud of the country and be patriotic.

[Kathy Gellis]

Woof. All right. I mean, that sounds good, but that's really good. I like it for following through on that tends to not be that, well, let's see.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, look, I admit I'm Andy Trump. I've been a never Trumper since the day he rolled the golden escalator. But maybe I've been wrong all this time. Maybe this is going to be a good time in America where going to build and get stronger. And maybe we should celebrate Silicon Valley and the innovation culture.

[Mike Elgin]

But let's not forget what we already know. So the first thing we know is Donald Trump, the person doesn't know anything about technology. He calls it the cyber. And every time somebody asks him any question about anything, Bitcoin, AI, whatever, he always says, well, my son Baron is really good with his laptop and so he personally doesn't. And, and I, I have a tendency to think that he's brought in all these Silicon Valley people because they have money, they have an influence, they, yeah, they helped him get elected. I don't think any of the things, I don't think any of the people he's brought on for this transition, like Andreessen or for future Pinkus of Zynga.

[Leo Laporte]

David Marcus from Meta Musk, for crying out loud.

[Mike Elgin]

That doesn't mean he's going to let them be in charge. I think what it means is that he's a megalomaniacal narcissist and he's going to sit on Mount Olympus and say, I think I will allow children to get polio. And so it's like, I don't think any of this. He still hasn't decided whether he's going to go with any of this stuff. And there's no reason to believe that he's going to go with any of these people and certainly doesn't understand anything about AI Crypto or any of that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

It's ironic. Peter Thiel equated liberalism with the ancien regime in France, which of course was overthrown and promptly headed to the guillotine. To get their heads chopped off. Ironically, the reason they got their heads chopped up is because they were collecting all of the resources, all of the money, and letting them eat cake. And it seems like maybe Mark has his history, or Peter Patil, I should say, has his history a little bit up.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, if this wasn't our country and our future and our democracy, it might almost be kind of fun to sit back and watch. But the thing is, I don't disagree with the characterization of Trump and how he will probably comport himself, but, you know, his little court of people competing for each other, it's not like there's any of them that I'm rooting for. I don't think they have any better insight into that interface between what technology can do and how it interfaces with humanity. They don't seem to actually like humanity very much, and it's really concerning. Like, what would they actually advocate, to a certain extent, Trump might actually temper them because a lot of this stuff is really nihilistic and programs humanity off of the Earth to just have this sort of techno utopia. I'm deeply worried about what they would want to prescribe, and I'm only somewhat happy that they may crash into each other and take each other out before they actually get to do any real damage.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting timing because we are at a moment, I think, perhaps at a moment where AI is going to suddenly change a lot of what's going on in the world, and it coincides with this rise of a techno elite. I don't know if that's good or not. I'm not sure what that's going to. It's going to be uncertain.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's not good because a lot of this, like, tech AI can do some really cool stuff, but we're not really applying. Well, we are in some degree applying it to the cool things, but we're also applying it to a whole bunch of things that are like, this is a really bad. It's like, they don't. Like people. They don't see the value in humanity. They think, like, the idea of valuing.

[Leo Laporte]

Human creation doesn't either, to be honest with you. I think he's always looked down on.

[Emily Forlani]

People who I think would be. It would be a really odd reaction to tour some of, like, the poorest neighborhoods in America, like, people who are really, really struggling and those. Those terrible places that all these people never go to. I think it would be really odd to go through those places and come out of them and say, hey, AI is the answer, right? Or crypto is the answer. That would be a very strange reaction. So I think that a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a good point.

[Mike Elgin]

The other thing is that they're mutually exclusive things. So there's a lot of talk about Trump ushering in an era of techno utopian thinking. But at the same time, he wants to put, you know, these massive tar, tar, tar, tar, tar, tar tariffs on other countries and 10% tariff on China. China will retaliate.

[Leo Laporte]

60% tariff on. 60% tariff on China.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's varied depending on the country.

[Mike Elgin]

I've been. I've off Oaxaca. I haven't seen the latest percentage. But the point is that there'll be retaliation that will seriously damage the technology sector, likely, if he's so weird, because.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon Musk has obviously made a good portion of his money out of EVs. But Trump wants to eliminate the EV, and Elon supports this eliminate the EV tax credit.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's not clear that any of these people really understand how anything works. They keep arriving at, ooh, we have a problem. But they're not understanding the problem. They're not understanding any of the expertise developed from people who've been studying the problem, and therefore they can't fix it. But they're all kind of busting in like, Kool Aid man. Like, I'm here and I will provide the thing that everybody has been missing.

[Leo Laporte]

And Eli is definitely Kool Aid man.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. I mean, the lack of humility is. Smart people tend to be kind of humble about what they know. So when you're not seeing the humility, that's kind of like a giveaway that you really don't. They really don't know what they're talking about, but they don't understand the problems, so therefore, they can't fix it. Which is why, oh, just add AI seems compelling. Because if you don't know anything about anything, making stuff up, why not? So it sounds good.

[Emily Forlani]

I mean, I had some hope after the election. Just a twinge of. I do think there's a lot of engagement, like deep engagement with issues in the US and issues with politics. And so there is an underlying sense of, like, everyone just wants the right thing to happen. And I. I think that people really. People seem to really, really, really want this country to succeed on both sides. So, I mean, even though all of this is okay, I can't continue.

[Kathy Gellis]

I wish you did.

[Emily Forlani]

There is some hope, though. I mean, it's easy to get. We just have to figure out, like, what is the better. And I do think there's just, apparently everyone Deep, deep in their chest wants things to be better. And it's. I think there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, we all do.

[Emily Forlani]

Commonality.

[Leo Laporte]

Think anybody who voted voted with the intention of hurting the country. No, everybody's doing what they think is the best for the country.

[Kathy Gellis]

But I wish more people knew how more stuff worked because there's reasons, like some things that we had leading up to everything was okay, we could have done better, but some things existed for a reason. And to just sort of, like I've written before and I have a Tech Trek post about it, it's Chesterton's rule of fences, where the idea if you go to a field and nothing is there and you're like, why is this fence here? It's such a waste. And you take out the fence because you haven't seen the tiger hiding in the grass. And now the tiger is free to run around everywhere. And these people are pulling up fences that have been built for a reason, but because they don't know the reason, they're pulling it out. But okay, that's more the musk and the Trumps and stuff. But a lot of people were like, well, that sounds good to me. Because they didn't know why the. They didn't know what fences were there. They didn't know why the fences were there. We had established some systems and the systems were kind of working, or even to the extent they weren't working. You can't fix them necessarily by just chucking them out.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing is, and there's a tiger, it makes a lot of sense to give the tiger $1 million for his inauguration ball so that he'll like you and not eat you. And that's in fact what Silicon Valley seems to be doing. Millions million donations for the inaugural from Metta, from Amazon, from Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Tim Cook, and on and on and on.

[Kathy Gellis]

But there's the problem of what does it mean that you have to pay the tiger and what does it mean when the tiger has planned to hurt other people who are not giving him a million dollars?

[Emily Forlani]

Well, it's just the self interest era. That's how I see like all this Trump stuff. It just. These things used to happen behind closed doors and now it's, it's cool to pay people to get what you want.

[Kathy Gellis]

And I just think such the American way.

[Emily Forlani]

Yes. Now it's on full display now. That's to me, I've just seen it so much more in recent months and years. It's all about who's paying who who's self interested in what and who's just open about it and that's, that's how the world works. I think that's really wrong.

[Mike Elgin]

It's better over here now.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Emily Forlani]

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[Kathy Gellis]

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[Leo Laporte]

I didn't even get to all of our AI stories. That's how how fun this show was. You're watching this week in Tech. Emily Forlani. It's great to have you here. PC Magazine. You cover a whole lot of stuff on PC Magazine. What are you working on right now?

[Emily Forlani]

Well, I write about EVs. I write about AI.

[Leo Laporte]

What should I buy for my next EV? What do you you think?

[Emily Forlani]

I've advised a lot of people on this and that. I really love doing that. It's so fun to put People in evs. So if you want to Seriously, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Should tell you, I have owned a Tesla, a Mini Cooper. These are all EVs. A Mustang Mach E EV. I have owned a Chevy Bolt EV. I currently am on a BMW i5 EV.

[Emily Forlani]

Okay, so I thought this was a podcast. I thought we weren't making money here.

[Leo Laporte]

Because should I get a lucid. Should I get the lucid Pure. Have you driven that yet?

[Emily Forlani]

I don't think that's worth it, to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

It's expensive.

[Emily Forlani]

Expensive car. It has over 500 miles.

[Leo Laporte]

How about a Chevy Equinox? I'm seeing that looks like a pretty nice.

[Emily Forlani]

Pretty good one. I high tested that one a couple weeks ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. What should I get?

[Emily Forlani]

My goodness. You've tried everything. I don't know. You've done all the greatest hits.

[Leo Laporte]

I love them all, to be honest with you. There's. There. Each of them have their own. But once you. And this is. By the way, this seems to be held out by statistics. Once you've bought an EV and driven an ev, you very rarely go back to a gas vehicle.

[Emily Forlani]

Yeah, they're great. I mean, I like that. That's what I. Oh, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

That. Just tell my wife that, would you?

[Emily Forlani]

I will.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's Leo needs a taycan.

[Emily Forlani]

The sexiest and coolest ev.

[Leo Laporte]

It is pretty cool. Range ain't great, but, you know, know, it's still. Who cares, right?

[Emily Forlani]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Also with this Mike Elgin, who is in Oaxaca. But you're not going to be there long. Where are you going next?

[Mike Elgin]

We're going to el Salvador on January 1st, and in the interim, I'm going.

[Leo Laporte]

To bring your bitcoin.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, but I'm drinking some nice mescal. I'm actually drinking Gastronomad brand mescal.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a bottle of that.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, you do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's so good. You haven't seen it. I. You know, Mel.

[Mike Elgin]

I know it's. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't really drink, Mike, so.

[Mike Elgin]

I know you don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to work my way up to Mezcal.

[Mike Elgin]

Let's put it anyway. It's lovely. We. We don't sell this, by the way. This isn't an ad. You. We only give this to. To our.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I'm keeping it. I'm not going to drink it. I'm going to save it. It's like my beanie babies. It's going to be my retirement.

[Mike Elgin]

But whenever. Whenever I come on Twitter, you always let me talk about Gastronomad and also my son startup.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello. Chatterbox. Let's.

[Mike Elgin]

Because it's the holidays.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Mike Elgin]

I like to say that both of these things are great gifts. If you want to be a hero to your significant other Astronomad, and if you have anybody who's 8 years old and up and wants a totally secure AI device, I would recommend Chatterbox. And I talked to Kevin before the show, and he said that if anybody places an order before the 18th, he can fill it by Christmas. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. So you could buy now and have it by Christmas. What a gift this would be for a smart. I'd say fifth grader to eighth grader, something like that.

[Mike Elgin]

Even an adult. So many people, including on this show, complain about surveillance capitalism exemplified perfectly by Amazon and its Echo device, just harvesting information. They have an echo device for kids that's very inexpensive because they want to monetize that kid till the end of time. Whereas the Chatterbox is the only. It's so private. It's the only smart speaker allowed in schools, and it's super private for any adult who wants to have access to AI, who wants to tinker with building their own system. It References Wolfram, Alpha, ChatGPT, et cetera, but it's totally private when all users are completely anonymous on the system and cannot be tracked. So for a gift, I think this is perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. I agree. It's very cool. Hello, chatterbox.com for your chatterbox. And a little mescal to go along with it. Kathy Gellis. I don't think I'm speaking out of school because you've written about it on Tech Dirt. You recently had a little health scare.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, for people who've seen me over the year, in the beginning of March, I got diagnosed with cancer. And so I've been dealing with that. And I wrote about it because I realized it was such a. I wanted to get something out of it, like, what a stupid waste. There needs to be. You know, there got to be some.

[Leo Laporte]

Way to make this lousy T shirt. I don't.

[Kathy Gellis]

And so I wanted to write about it partly because it. Well, I wanted value. And so I wrote about in a couple contexts. One is that around the time that I was diagnosed, Princess Kate had also announced that she'd had her cancer. And not that I'm enamored with the British royalty or any or whatever follow that. It was really helpful because at that moment when I'm sort of like, just drowning in the reality of it, but I need to tell people, and this is a really hard conversation to have because I'm not I have to get my own head around it. And I'm going to traumatize the people who care about me by telling them. It was just really nice to be able to start the argument with. Or the argument. I'm a lawyer. Everything's an argument. It was really good to start the conversation with, I have a Princess Kate problem. And that opened the door. And then I could follow it up with details. And then I also wanted to write about it because my cancer was ovarian cancer. So it's a gynecological cancer. And. And I thought it was really important to. I'm sorry.

[Emily Forlani]

My grandma had that.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, yeah.

[Emily Forlani]

One of the reasons she died. Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. It's. I mean, I thought ovarian cancer was a death sentence. Obviously I'm still here. It's virulent. It doesn't. It still doesn't have good rates. But my understanding of basically where I was is about a third of the people who get diagnosed would not survive it. Then they get erased. And then of the other two thirds that are left for half, you're okay and the end and you move on with your life. And for the other half, it can come back and then you have to keep fighting it. But it's a lot more fightable than it used to be. And I did really well. Kanahara, etc. Knock on all the wood. I respond. I didn't have too miserable time with the therapy and at the moment I'm. No evidence of disease. So then it's just a question of.

[Leo Laporte]

That's wonderful.

[Kathy Gellis]

Is it going to come out?

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations.

[Kathy Gellis]

So. But I also want to write it because it's gynecological and boy, an awful lot of gynecological issues have really been brought to the fore. And I wanted to write about it in the context of personal liberty and the reproductive freedom that I had, which gave me access to professionals, which is how I happen to have found it.

[Leo Laporte]

You were going in for ivf.

[Kathy Gellis]

I was going to try to do ivf and we were doing a procedure and the procedure did not work. And this turned out to be why. But that's how they found the masses. So. But how good that I was able to like, you know, have access to that reproductive technology and the caregivers and then also that the caregivers can understand these parts and the science behind these parts and also come up with cures and remedies and things like that. And we are busy criminalizing the science. So the liberty is getting taken away and the science is getting taken away and the science will get taken away, not just from women, but it's such an anti science attitude with the idea that we could understand our parts and provide curative science to understand how they can work better. That's going to roll towards everybody in any sort of condition that any human body can have. And you know, it's the stuff that I write about there on Tech Dirt, personal liberty and innovation. And I thought my experience just brought those situations to the fore. And trying to get something out of that, like it's much easier to be public about it than try to keep my secret. I mean, after all, like the hair thing kind of gives it away anyway. Can there be some value out of it? Can we reframe some of these issues and so that when people make policy decisions that may seem convenient to them for whatever reason, they can understand that there's greater impacts that can happen down the road.

[Emily Forlani]

Good for you. Women's health is just so woefully underexplored and underappreciated and disconnected from science and technology and for some reason considered in a different sphere than any other kind of, you know, medicine. And I think it's, it's just a tragedy and it's amazing that you wrote about that, like, how brave and smart. So thank you.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, it was a wonderful article and we do do need a lot more science and days look dark ahead for science about women's health and all kinds of things. But it's also has to be said because this tech podcast that we talk a lot about all the risks and dangers, dangers of AI. But one of the great things about AI will be it its powers of diagnostics. And so anybody with any sort of disease or anything that could be better diagnosed with AI, hang on because over the next few years there's going to be a revolution in AI based diagnostics. And this is a good thing that we should be celebrating.

[Leo Laporte]

We're already seeing it. This is one of the stories I had. AI is detecting more breasts, breast cancer cases. A study, women in a study, women who chose. And by the way, you had to pay extra for it. AI powered mammograms were 21% more likely to have cancer detected than those who didn't. This is from a finding presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. So we've heard before that AIB being used in radiology. I have friends who are radiologists, not to replace the radiologist, but to help the radiologist. And I think that's already in widespread use and very powerful. And they also Use by the way, AI for dictation. Because it turns out it's very good at.

[Mike Elgin]

No it isn't. No, no it is not. So there have been multiple studies I wrote about this in machine machine society where the, where pretty much every single package of dictation that they analyze had some hallucination or another, including some whoppers in some cases. And a lot of this, the leading brand is based on ChatGPT, but they're even making up medicines, they're saying help by that and they're just created.

[Emily Forlani]

Well that's why the human needs to.

[Leo Laporte]

Stay in the loop.

[Emily Forlani]

But I saw the same thing about diagnostics. I wrote that there was a good quality study that you know, gave AI diagnostic tools to a bunch of, you know, people who work in the field and it did not, it didn't help them. So I think there's like in the best case scenario, yes, it works well but without like training, proper technology, proper usage, it doesn't help with diagnosis.

[Mike Elgin]

Right. But where it's, where the excitement is is in the experimental phase where in cases Parkinson's disease, they're showing promise and the potential to Detect Parkinson's disease 10 years before the first discernible.

[Emily Forlani]

Which is amazing. But I would love to have more faith in the healthcare system. I mean we didn't even get to Mr. Luigi but.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I mean I think having it as a tool to augment the people, if it's a tool that people can use and it is carefully tailored to the problem that is trying to solve, I think that's where the really interesting things with stuff like AI is the problem is, I think when it tries to replace the human beings and presume at this point in its development that it can do better, I think then we run into problems because we just sort of abandon our own.

[Leo Laporte]

We've learned that, haven't we? With self driving vehicles. Don't let the car do all the work, get some assistance from the AI. But honestly you still need to keep.

[Emily Forlani]

Your head on the. When I had the Equinox site we were just talking about and I had a Mach E2 in the same week and both of them had like the hands free self driving. So level two. Yeah. And I felt like I was becoming a worse driver, like I was having.

[Leo Laporte]

I know for sure trouble. Yeah. Don't you notice that with already with GPS maps like you don't know how to find, find your way anywhere.

[Emily Forlani]

Right. So then I worry with this case, if we give AI to radiologists, are they just going to become kind of default to it and actually lose a little bit of critical thinking. So it's all in the implementation.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's another story. Huge randomized trial of AI boosts discovery, at least for good scientists. That's interesting. This is from nature. This is the use of AI in research. And. And it showed. And maybe, Mike, you should speak to this, since this is kind of what machine society is all about. But they followed the deployment of a machine learning tool at an unnamed corporate laboratory with 1,000 researchers teams that were assigned, and it was by random to use the tool, discovered 44% more new materials and filed 39% more patent applications than the ones that didn't use the AI.

[Mike Elgin]

And this totally checks out with our own experience with AI, doesn't it? I mean, it can certainly accelerate in the case of the 39% increase in patent applications, it can sell it. It accelerates the grunt work, no matter what kind of grunt work you're doing in most cases, for example, software development or writing. And it also has a. It also has a more open mind than a human being generally has. If you can think of five reasons for XYZ and you put those into a good AI and say, are there any other reasons? It'll come up with other good reasons where you can go, huh? And then you can move on. And it's very quickly. You can sort of expand the scope of your thinking and expand the number of things you're considering. So that totally checks out. And also we can expect the AI to keep evolving and getting better and better. So. So do you believe we'll get to.

[Leo Laporte]

AGI anytime in our lifetime, Mike?

[Mike Elgin]

I don't think so. I think it's a bit of a delusion that it's a pipe dream. Yeah. And I think what we'll discover is that the human mind is vastly more capable and amazing than we ever thought.

[Leo Laporte]

But not to diminish the value of AI in conjunction with a human mind.

[Kathy Gellis]

No, not appreciating the. We're approaching the policy problem of are we appreciating AI? And I think the policy problems. We're not appreciating the human beings. So I mean, one of the things with AGI is, well, what the problem. One of the problems we have right now is we keep acting as though we've achieved it and taking out the people and just replacing it with the technology, as if that were not there yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Not there yet.

[Kathy Gellis]

We're not there yet. And you're not going to get that result results. But it's really. I think we also suffer in general from the lack of appreciation of the people and how cool people's brains actually are and all the interesting things they can do.

[Mike Elgin]

And one of the things I think that's cool about the human brains is that I think we actually, deep down, really do care where stuff comes from. For example, you know, there. There have been articles that say that, you know, AI is better at writing poetry, but the knowledge that a human being didn't feel these things makes a huge difference. And for people, they're not in. They just want. Don't want good words. They want. They want to share the experience of another person.

[Leo Laporte]

I noticed this in chess, and when I, you know, I played chess quite seriously in my youth, and machines got better and better. Pretty soon you couldn't beat a machine. Pretty soon machines were better than humans, and now machines can solve, you know, positions much, much better than humans. In fact, probably would easily be the world champion. But that doesn't mean we want to watch AIs play chess. We want to watch humans play chess. And Benito, who welcome back, by the way. Benito Gonzalez, our producer, came back from the Philippines and Japan. I thought we'd never get him back. It's good to see you, Benito. But he's always said, and I believe this more and more, Benito, that really we write poetry, we play chess, we make music, because we enjoy the process that. That is part of what it is to be human. And seeding these creative tasks to a machine doesn't solve or satisfy any need. And so it's, you know, there'll always be humans who want to write poetry or play chess or make music. And we will always, as humans, I suspect, prefer the output of those. Now there are places music is used, as in elevators and on podcasts, where AI, you know, generated music is probably okay, it's Muzak, but that's not the music we. We love, the artists we go to see. Last week, Christina Warren was on. We had to let her go a little early because she was going to the very last ERAS concert by Taylor Swift. I cannot imagine any future where anybody would say, I can't wait to see the last performance of Machine Swift performing its latest.

[Kathy Gellis]

Why would you ever have a last one? The whole point is that you could just keep going and going and going.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to create false scarcity. GM has called it quits on their robo taxi. Cruz is dead. Mari Barra, who's the CEO of GM, this is her $50 billion robo taxi dream. Lots of people put money into these cruise taxis. Its business Basically disappeared after it dragged a pedestrian and then GM lied about it.

[Kathy Gellis]

I worry as a cyclist, like I don't like self driving taxis because I need to make eye contact and there's nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no contact. Yeah, yeah. You do this person to see if they've seen.

[Kathy Gellis]

Sharing the road is a, communicate a communicative experience and there's nothing to communicate with where it's going to affect behavior.

[Emily Forlani]

So yeah, this was big. I listened to the earnings call for this and Mary Barra just kept saying like, oh, it's not our core business. We're going to focus on passenger. What we just talked about the Equinox Level 2 self driving system. So. Which I like a lot. Yeah, and that's a noble mission too. It's. I guess they're just getting out of the commercial like a B2B kind of thing. So it's just going to be like passenger tech. We get experience and kind of operate quote unquote.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things Elon Musk is pressing for is an elimination of regulation around self driving vehicles. Yeah, he says, you know, we can't really get good at this unless you'd let us do whatever we want.

[Emily Forlani]

I saw a video today that a McLaren was speeding and got in a car crash that was so bad that the car split into.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh dear.

[Emily Forlani]

And I was like, I don't know. I mean they say that self driving can solve, you know, all these car crashes and things, but there's got to be some way that the type of person who would be speeding down the highway at 150 miles per hour in a two hundred thousand dollar car can abuse that. There's got to be some way that person in a self driving car could also abuse it. Like I just, I don't feel like we can get rid of it. I don't know if I'm being.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. My BMW will not let me drive fast.

[Kathy Gellis]

But then they'll just do something else.

[Emily Forlani]

Like, like they'll do something else like what?

[Kathy Gellis]

Is it going to do math in the backseat while the car is driving?

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. By the way, this does not mean Google's abandoning Waymo. It's, it's. Of course, I think Barra implied that. Look, we already have the market cap of a Google or of an Alphabet.

[Kathy Gellis]

Talk about not the core business. It's weird that the car company is the one that's not doing the car thing and the computer company is the one that's doing the car thing.

[Emily Forlani]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Honda was a big investor. Microsoft, Walmart T. Rowe Price, Softbank all put money into the GM effort. Barra says that they're going to pay them all back, but it's over for Cruise.

[Emily Forlani]

I feel like Cruise got. I mean, they definitely messed up with the lying and the crash that they had, but it's not like Waymo hasn't had issues like Teslas. A lot of them have been involved in killing people and they're still teasing that out in court. So I feel like GM got a little bit of harsh shutdown here.

[Leo Laporte]

But is it a big deal, Emily, that you can now buy a car on Amazon?

[Emily Forlani]

Yes, actually. I have personal experience with this. Like when I started at Amazon and I used to work there, this was considered the holy grail of products they were trying to get on, really. So this was in like 2015 and it was considered. They were working on it back then and I was exposed to that effort and in meetings about it and they just. No car company would do it. So when I saw that Hyundai is doing this, I was like, wow, they did it. Like. So I just, I had a personal experience.

[Leo Laporte]

Car dealers in America are incredibly powerful. I was not able. In some states, you cannot buy a Tesla direct from Tesla because the laws of the state say you have to have a dealership in the state. I think Texas is one of those states. I had a great experience buying a Tesla in California directly from Tesla. I didn't have to go through a dealer. And for a lot of people, the idea of not going through the negotiations with a salesperson at a dealership is very appealing.

[Kathy Gellis]

This was one of the things I think Musk was very vocal when Tesla was first coming out about. This is nonsense.

[Leo Laporte]

They were very frustrated. Yes.

[Kathy Gellis]

And I think I viewed him as meritorious in those views.

[Emily Forlani]

But yeah, this is, this is big for Amazon internally because Amazon makes a percentage of the sale price. So this is such a. This is a massive ticket item as of now.

[Leo Laporte]

You still have to go through a Hyundai dealer though, don't you, to go get the car or.

[Emily Forlani]

No, there's. I haven't looked into that, but that, when I, when I was there, that was why they wanted to get cars onto Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

Wired says customers can hop onto Amazon Autos and search for the Hyundai make and model they want, then find dealers at a vehicles in a nearby dealership. Shoppers can select trim, color, interior features, get evaluation of their current vehicle, but.

[Emily Forlani]

That must be how they worked it out. But I mean, companies list a product on Amazon. You do, you do seed some percentage of the sale. So there is no, there's no way that Amazon's not either doing that now or working towards that.

[Leo Laporte]

You still get Amazon reviews. You get, you know, star ratings. You probably even get an Amazon pick.

[Emily Forlani]

That's why Amazon pay has sellers pay. It's called like quote unquote marketing. So if you're listing a product, you're paying Amazon. So that's how it works.

[Mike Elgin]

You can buy a house on Amazon. So they're, you know, can you. There are hundreds of different brands and I'm looking at one right now. And they'll deliver it by December 19th.

[Kathy Gellis]

You know, that's not weird if you consider that in the 1800s. Duplicate house by cat catalog.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, the, the barn that's on the. That they had to move on the Apple campus when they built the big donut thing. That was a like, that was like a Sears and Roebuck type kit.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a 40 foot luxury house, three bedroom, one. One living room, one fully equipped bathroom and kitchen. Prefabricated container house for adults living. It's foldable. It's only $16,000 free delivery by January 9th.

[Emily Forlani]

Bad reviews. Honestly. 3.3.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, that's a good.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, bad reviews. Oh, see, you're smart. Well, when you worked at Amazon, what, what, what division did you work in?

[Emily Forlani]

I was work. I worked in three separate teams and almost six years. But when I was exposed to this was my very first team which was like Amazon.com retail. So I.

[Leo Laporte]

Why did you leave and become a journalist?

[Emily Forlani]

I don't know. I. They did it to its full extent and I want to try something else. And I had. Yeah, I do have a.

[Leo Laporte]

You came over to the light side.

[Emily Forlani]

Of purpose driven bone in my body and I didn't want to go my whole life without exploring that.

[Leo Laporte]

Most of the reviews, Mike, are not people who bought it. They're just people looking at their floor plan or it's not sweeping the nation.

[Mike Elgin]

It's not choice for homeownership.

[Leo Laporte]

Seems good.

[Kathy Gellis]

Probably buy something that would sweep the nation on Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

Clean design, no closets.

[Emily Forlani]

Maybe we could list TikTok on Amazon.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let's sell TikTok on Amazon.

[Emily Forlani]

You sweep the nation, apparently.

[Leo Laporte]

And this show has gone full circle. Emily, we have so much more we could talk about with all three of you. You guys are great. By the way, if you needed that house before Christmas, you could set a gift card for it. And I imagine for that Hyundai Ionic as well, you know, so that. Wouldn't that be a nice thing under the tree?

[Mike Elgin]

That'd be nice.

[Leo Laporte]

You've got a new car.

[Mike Elgin]

Nice for Amazon if you lost the card. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So many other stories I would have loved to talk about, but we've run out of time. Mike, Elgin, have a wonderful evening in Oaxaca. I imagine it'll involve mezcal and some of those delicious. What are those sandwiches on the. They make them on that. On that grill.

[Mike Elgin]

Playuda.

[Leo Laporte]

Playudas, yeah. They're fantastic. I could live on. Play with us too.

[Mike Elgin]

I love.

[Leo Laporte]

So good.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So good. I hope you ate dinner before the show.

[Mike Elgin]

No, I didn't. We're going to go grab a bite right after the show, so we got to go.

[Emily Forlani]

Release my love.

[Leo Laporte]

Give my love to Amira. And thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. Emily, you're the best. We love having you on. And I'm sorry to starve you in New Jersey where it is already after 8 o'clock in the evening. Oh, my God. What's for dinner?

[Emily Forlani]

I think my husband's downstairs making polenta. I can smell. I can smell.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a nice Italian. A boy. I love it.

[Emily Forlani]

Exactly, Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta make it to polenta.

[Emily Forlani]

But I upped it. I brought some wine this time. Last time I was on, we got to the end of the show and everyone was drinking besides me, but nobody talked about how they were drinking.

[Leo Laporte]

So I was like, yeah, it's definitely covert.

[Emily Forlani]

This time I'm gonna covert.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike's got the mezcal. You looks like you have a nice white. I'm drinking coffee, which is probably a mistake.

[Kathy Gellis]

I have.

[Leo Laporte]

And we know what Kathy's drinking. Oh, look, a Petaluma Hills mug. Is that what you put your Gatorade in?

[Kathy Gellis]

No, but it was a. I did a bike ride. And the souvenir glass from the bike ride County Challenge.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's neat. Yes, thank you, Kathy Gellis Tech.

[Kathy Gellis]

But I can say I sound more interesting if I say, oh, yes, it's Mezcal.

[Leo Laporte]

Just say it's. Or vodka is vodka. Drinking vodka. Cgcouncil.com She's Kathy Gelis on Blue Sky. You said don't. No more Mastodon. You want to promote Blue Sky?

[Kathy Gellis]

Not known Mastodon forever. But I'm clearly very invested in my Blue sky experience. And I may migrate Mastodon servers anyway, so for now. Now we'll go flip it to Blue sky, because I'm definitely there.

[Leo Laporte]

Slip it to Blue sky, baby. Emily, are you a Blue Sky? A mastodon, An X. What are you.

[Emily Forlani]

I should say that people can. Can find me. Follow me at PC Mag, and then I'm on Blue Sky. I'm. I'm still on X. I'm trying to figure out my relationship to it at this point. I'm on TikTok.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you still have dry Belbus or did you move everything to Forlani?

[Emily Forlani]

I moved to Forlani. I'm trying not to confuse people. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Lot of work, isn't it?

[Emily Forlani]

Yes. I just submitted my passport for renewal yesterday, which was a big milestone. It's. It's all right though. It's. I think people talk about it being like really, really terrible, but it's just. Just bureaucracy. You get through it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, bureaucracy.

[Emily Forlani]

We're talking about changing my last name because I got married, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Mazel tov.

[Leo Laporte]

Mazel tov.

[Emily Forlani]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

We have lots of muzzle tubs to go around here today. Thank you all for being here. We really, really appreciate it. Great, really great, provocative and interesting show. Thank you, Emily and Mike and Kathy. We'll see you soon. We thank all of you for joining us. We do twit every Sunday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern Time. That's 2200 UTC. I mentioned that because you can watch us live. We stream the show and most of the shows we do, we stream them live in discord, of course, for our club members, but also on YouTube, Twitch. We do it on Facebook and LinkedIn, X.com and TikTok. Yes, we're on TikTok at least until January 19th. And kick. So there's eight different ways you can watch live, but of course most people watch after the fact. It's a podcast, after all. You can download copies of the show, whether it's audio or video, from our website, TWiT TV. When you get there, you'll also see a link to a YouTube channel which has the video. Great way to share clips. If you wanted to share a clip of, you know, our discussion about TikTok with a friend, that would be a great way to promote our show and to show your intelligence. And of course you can always subscribe to the show and any podcast client. Pocket Casts, Overcast, Apple Podcasts, all of. All of the above. Just search for twit. You know why we're. I, I think at this point we must be one of, one of, if not the longest running podcast casts in the world. Nearing 20 years. Over a thousand episode. 10. 10 episodes. Thank you all for your support. Thanks to our club TWIT members. Your support makes a huge difference and I will see you all next week for a very special year end episode. We'll look back at 2024 with some of our favorite people and then of course our best of so this is the last normal twit for the year. Happy New Year. Have Happy Holidays as I have said for nearly 20 years. Thanks for joining us. Another twit is in the can. Bye bye. Attention sports enthusiasts. Keep the adrenaline pumping and elevate your game day with Chumba Casino. It's completely free to play. No purchase necessary. Whether you're cheering from the standard fans on the move or relaxing at home, Chumba Casino brings the thrill of social casino directly to your fingertips. Experience the ultimate social casino adventure with reels of casino style games offering hundreds of exciting options to choose from and.

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[Mike Elgin]

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[Mike Elgin]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Mike Elgin]

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