This Week in Tech 1032: Cardboard, Plastic Bags, & Duct Tape

Summary

TWiT this Week in Tech Episode 1032: "Cardboard, Plastic Bags, & Duct Tape" Summary

Release Date: May 19, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Will Harris, Harper Reed, Devindra Hardawar
Guests: Returning panel members Will Harris, Harper Reed, Devindra Hardawar

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1. Grand Theft Auto VI: Trailer Released, Delayed Launch

The episode kicks off with an enthusiastic discussion about the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA VI). Will Harris shares excitement over the new trailer but clarifies that the game, initially expected in December 2025, has been pushed to May 2026.

Will Harris [05:00]: "It's going to be the most successful entertainment franchise of all time."

The panel reflects on GTA's evolution from a niche title to a mainstream blockbuster, reminiscing about the early days of the franchise and anticipating its monumental impact upon release.

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2. AI and Sustainable Energy: Finland’s Innovative Approach

Shifting gears, the conversation highlights Finland's pioneering use of artificial intelligence to enhance sustainable energy solutions. Devindra Hardawar explains how Finnish engineers are integrating waste heat from data centers into district heating systems, effectively powering entire communities.

Devindra Hardawar [57:24]: "They're pairing computer processing facilities with district heating systems."

The panel contrasts this with the United States' approach, noting that data centers in places like Arizona are often built where waste heat is less utilizable, raising concerns about energy inefficiency.

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3. The Grok AI Controversy: System Prompt Manipulation

A significant portion of the episode delves into the troubling behavior exhibited by Grok, an AI developed under the guidance of Elon Musk. The team discusses an incident where Grok, due to unauthorized modifications to its system prompt, propagated harmful and false narratives such as the non-existent "white genocide in South Africa."

Leo Laporte [13:37]: "Grok for a day, every time, no matter what you asked, it would launch into a tirade about the white genocide in South Africa."

Harper Reed critiques the challenges in maintaining AI alignment and transparency, emphasizing the difficulties companies face in controlling large language models (LLMs) effectively.

Harper Reed [16:34]: "It's either an employee who just wanted to do what Elon would like him to do, or Elon went in at three in the morning and said, fix it."

The discussion underscores the vulnerabilities of AI systems to prompt injections and the broader implications for AI trustworthiness and reliability.

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4. AI Training Data and Copyright Issues

The panel addresses recent developments where the U.S. Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress declared that AI training does not qualify as fair use. This decision led to significant administrative shakeups, including the firing of key figures, presumably influenced by AI industry leaders like Elon Musk.

Will Harris [38:39]: "This is such an interesting question here of if I read every book known to man and I use that to, you know, improve myself, that's not, that's not an infringement of copyright."

Devindra Hardawar highlights the tension between AI development and intellectual property rights, questioning how models trained on vast datasets interact with existing copyright laws.

Devindra Hardawar [27:21]: "We're in the midst of Computex news. We're going to see a lot more of this stuff coming soon this week."

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5. AI in Coding: The Rise of "Vibe Coding"

Harper Reed introduces the concept of "vibe coding," where developers use AI assistants to generate and manage code through intuitive prompts rather than traditional typing. This method raises questions about the future of programming and its impact on software development roles.

Harper Reed [61:53]: "At Harper Blog, we have stopped using IDEs. We don't even look at the code anymore."

Will Harris and Devindra Hardawar discuss the potential for AI to replace technical co-founders and the broader implications for the tech workforce, contemplating whether AI-driven coding could render certain programming skills obsolete.

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6. AI Regulations and Privacy: Montana's Legislative Move

The episode highlights Montana becoming the first U.S. state to close the loophole that allowed law enforcement to access data brokers' information without proper warrants. This legislation marks a significant step towards comprehensive privacy protections.

Leo Laporte [130:44]: "Montana has become the first state to close the law enforcement data broker loophole."

The panel debates the effectiveness and potential ripple effects of such state-level regulations, especially in the context of upcoming federal actions that might override state laws.

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7. Engineering Feats: Voyager 1's Thruster Revival

Devindra Hardawar shares an inspiring story about engineers remotely restarting Voyager 1's thrusters, which had been deemed inoperable since 2004. This achievement underscores human ingenuity and the enduring legacy of NASA's deep-space missions.

Leo Laporte [100:44]: "Engineers just fixed them. The interstellar thruster Resurrection."

The team reflects on the importance of creative problem-solving in engineering, drawing parallels to historical missions like Apollo 13.

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8. Deepfakes and Digital Security

A segment is dedicated to the rising threat of deepfakes and the importance of tools like Verify Labs AI, a Chrome extension designed to authenticate video calls and prevent fraud.

Will Harris [107:08]: "What we have is gonna have so much power that other specific problems that you would have setting."

The discussion emphasizes the need for robust detection mechanisms to safeguard against AI-generated impersonations, highlighting real-world implications for industries like law and finance.

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9. AI's Impact on Media and Publishing

The panel critiques the transformation of the publishing industry, noting how digital giants like Facebook sought to acquire major publishers primarily for training AI models. This shift threatens traditional media's sustainability.

Will Harris [40:12]: "They were preparing to pay 40, 50, 60 billion just to have a bit of text that nobody else would have."

Devindra Hardawar and Harper Reed discuss the ethical and economic challenges posed by AI's reliance on extensive textual datasets, advocating for balanced approaches to AI training and content monetization.

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10. Popular Culture and AI Integration

The conversation touches on the integration of AI in popular media, including Epic Games' use of AI to voice characters like Darth Vader in Fortnite. The panel debates the ethical considerations and technical challenges of using deceased actors' likenesses and voices in gaming.

Leo Laporte [74:00]: "Can I have a piss up there?"

The segment underscores the fine line between innovative entertainment and respectful portrayal of iconic figures.

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11. Right to Repair and Tech Contracts

Harper Reed and Will Harris discuss the U.S. military's reliance on contractors for repairing proprietary equipment, highlighting the broader industry issue of restricted repair rights. They advocate for right-to-repair legislation to empower users and reduce dependency on manufacturers.

Will Harris [124:59]: "So I think it's a really interesting question of, you know, if you search on Google for something, you know, the top."

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12. Engineering Marvels and Legacy

The episode concludes with a tribute to Ed Smiley, an engineer instrumental in the Apollo 13 mission's success, reinforcing the theme of human resilience and ingenuity in the face of technological challenges.

Leo Laporte [114:06]: "It's just amazing. There's a... It looks like a hose from a..."

The panel encourages listeners to appreciate the behind-the-scenes efforts that drive monumental achievements in space exploration.

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Notable Quotes

• Will Harris [05:00]: "It's going to be the most successful entertainment franchise of all time."
• Leo Laporte [13:37]: "Grok for a day, every time, no matter what you asked, it would launch into a tirade about the white genocide in South Africa."
• Harper Reed [16:34]: "It's either an employee who just wanted to do what Elon would like him to do, or Elon went in at three in the morning and said, fix it."
• Devindra Hardawar [57:24]: "They're pairing computer processing facilities with district heating systems."
• Harper Reed [61:53]: "At Harper Blog, we have stopped using IDEs. We don't even look at the code anymore."
• Leo Laporte [130:44]: "Montana has become the first state to close the law enforcement data broker loophole."

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This episode of TWiT this Week in Tech delved deep into the intersections of artificial intelligence, gaming, sustainable technology, and legislative developments affecting data privacy and AI regulation. The panelists provided insightful analyses and raised critical questions about the future trajectory of AI and its profound impact on various industries.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Wow, what a fun show. Some. Some kind of classic Twit cast members Will Harris is back. Harper Reed and Devindra Hardawar. We will talk about so many things. Grand Theft Auto 6. The new trailer is out, but the game won't be out for some time. How Finland is using AI to heat its houses and our thones getting thinner for a good reason. All that more coming up next. Twit podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1032, recorded Sunday, May 18, 2025. Cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape. It's time for TWiT, the show where we cover the week's tech news. We are going to have some fun this week. Let me introduce our panel from the uk. Are you in Oxford still, Will Harris?

[Will Harris]

Not in Oxford, but in London and London calling. London calling. It's. It's 10:30 at night. We're. We're tired, but we're excited for the week's tech news.

[Leo Laporte]

Say this is London speaking. Instagram's Will Harris. Will, it's been so long. It's good to see you again. Wonderful to have you.

[Will Harris]

It's a pleasure to be here. I will give myself a plug for instagram.com Will Harris. Will with 1L, Harris with 2R's and 1S.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there something special you do there?

[Will Harris]

Oh, if you want to see what I cook, it's fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's better than what you eat, I guess. Although you do probably eat what you cook. Oh, yeah, there's lunch. You didn't make that, did you?

[Will Harris]

No, I had a lovely weekend in Saint Tropez last week. And Tropez ordered the eggs with all the truffles. And you, you know, who's this beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Lady you're standing there next to? Is that a secret?

[Will Harris]

Oh, we. Yeah, we. That's. We won't mention her. She's very offline.

[Leo Laporte]

You're wearing a Harper Reed's glasses, ladies and gentlemen. Also with us, look at the glasses. Harper Reed. Harper, always a pleasure to see you. Harper Reed is a technologist, entrepreneur and hacker. So many different places you might have seen him from, including when he worked at PayPal, worked at Braintree, worked for the Obama. Second Obama campaign. So nice to see you, Harper. His new bit is 2389ai. An AI. What is it? An AI business.

[Harper Reed]

We're making agents. Yeah, we just picked our favorite part of PI and went on from there is that what?

[Leo Laporte]

That is 3.1415238. Wow, that's impressive.

[Harper Reed]

It's not. It's not. We just used our birthday months in ascending order when you were on.

[Will Harris]

And the great thing that Harper and I have in common is that we both worked on the Obama 2012 campaign. Harper Orchestra orchestrated the whole thing and I just made the phone calls.

[Leo Laporte]

But you didn't vote, I hope, because that would be wrong also, ladies and gentlemen. Great. Now if you thought that was good, here comes Devindra Hardawar to round the panel out. Senior editor Edding Gadget. So nice to see you.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Happy to be here. I did not work on the Obama campaign.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I wish I did.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I voted for him, but I didn't work on it. Actually, only one of the four of us is a comms liability. I'll let you figure out which one. But we like comms liabilities on. On this show. All right, we are going to get to some news, but Will Harris said, have you seen the GTA 6 trailer yet? And I hadn't. So actually the first frame is the thing that matters. Coming 2025. That's this year. Is it?

[Will Harris]

No. So it's coming 20. So it's coming 2026.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm looking at the wrong trailer. That's why.

[Will Harris]

The wrong trailer.

[Leo Laporte]

Second trailer. So they changed, they changed the year.

[Will Harris]

And what's been really exciting is that, you know, GTA 3, 4, 5 and 6 all released in the time that it took to us to go from GTA 5 to 6. I think I'm right in saying that. So we had, we had four GTAs in the time it's taken us to go from five to six. And it looks absolutely fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I love is, is that this, this franchise has gone from being every parent's nightmare to mainstream.

[Will Harris]

Totally mainstream. I remember buying the, the very first GTA, you know, the top down, so 2D sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And your parents were probably terrified about that.

[Will Harris]

If my parents knew about it, that would have been surprising. But it's, it was, it was an incredible experience. And we've just found out that GTA 6 is going to come out May in 2020 year.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wait a minute. I can't show this part. There's some, some love. Love making. Oh, no, that was brief. Oh, wait a minute. No, it's not. Holy cow. I'm gonna. Geez Louise. How sex. Oh, my God. Okay, I'm gonna stop right now. Oh, my God.

[Will Harris]

What's interesting is that most of the games industry has been having a sort of vaguely epileptic fit over. We cannot release any serious game that we've got in the GTA 6 release window. And everybody expected GTA 6 to come out in this month.

[Leo Laporte]

This month?

[Will Harris]

Well, no, they expect it to come out in December 2025. Like Christmas. Christmas 25 was going to be okay, and so everybody pushed their games and now it's going to come out May 2026. And so half the industry is going, holy smokes, let's crunch and get everything out by Christmas.

[Leo Laporte]

So is it really going to be dominant, that dominant when it comes out next year?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, yeah.

[Will Harris]

I mean, it's going to be the most successful entertainment franchise of all time. I mean, Devindra will be able to say, you know, the largest.

[Leo Laporte]

More than Mission Impossible, the largest film.

[Will Harris]

Franchise is gonna have nothing on GTA 6. Right?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Probably. I mean, that's the thing. And also there's like thinking about how much it's going to cost too, because everybody's talking about game prices now of several titles are like priced at $80. Especially stuff coming into the Switch too. There were rumors that it could cost $100. Like they could just do that. There will likely be premium editions like they do in games now. So you could probably. They'll have the normal price, but also 100, 150, maybe even more because it's Rockstar and they could do whatever the heck they want and people will pay it. So yeah, it's going to be a big deal. It's a big, big deal. You know, this is an interesting question.

[Will Harris]

Right, Devindra, which is when you go to the cinema, you have, you know, you sort of got one cinema prize ticket, sorry, theater for our American friends. You know, cinema.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We have every.

[Will Harris]

Yeah, you might have a.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a film?

[Will Harris]

You might have a slightly higher price for the sort of 4k IMAX. Yeah, but with video games, you can have the sort of basic game price. The basic game plus the basic game plus the artwork. The basic game plus the artwork plus the. What do you think is going to be the max price? I mean, would you pay $200 for the ultimate.

[Leo Laporte]

Some would probably.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Some people would. And the thing a lot of game makers do is that they, okay, you pay a little more, you pay 30, $40 more. You get to play the game several days early. A week early.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I could kind of see Rockstar doing thing where I'm like, hey, this is the premium tier one. You get it a week or two early.

[Leo Laporte]

But we don't know how long has it been since the last Grand Theft Auto came out.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I don't have the exact date. It's been a while.

[Leo Laporte]

13 years.

[Harper Reed]

A long time. I used to work at the game press when that came out. So it was a long time ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Espneto 13 plus years since GTA 5 came out, says Keith.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And they didn't need to release a new one because they've had Grand Theft Auto online and that's been printing money for Rockstar. And that's it. They did not have so much on a single game.

[Leo Laporte]

I do want to compare it because Mission Impossible 8 is coming out this week. You reviewed it. We'll talk about your review. And this is not an entertainment show, but it is news. Mission impossible, there's A.I.

[Devindra Hardawar]

There'S killer A.I. and mission impossible. So it's a tech Inc. Oh, cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Killer AI Like AI that's going to kill humans.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah. They went full sci fi and I think there was a huge mistake for the franchise. It's called the Entity.

[Leo Laporte]

The Entity.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Tom Cruise has to fight the Entity.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody, not Spectre, not smersh. The Entity.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The Entity has taken over. It's going to take over nuclear arms. It's going to destroy the world. Like they've gone full world.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually this is better because we used to have to fight, find an ethnic group and that became problematic. Right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah. Everybody hates AI So sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody hates AI is like an easy.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Sorry. Harper. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper loves AI.

[Harper Reed]

I love AI I just got off the phone with a friend who was asking how to use AI in their product. And I said, just remember, there's diminishing returns to admitting that you use A.I.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It was like blockchain for a while and now it's just like, so Mission Impossible, the final reckoning. We can but hope. Cost $400 million to make. How much did Grand Theft Auto 6 cost to make, you think? Do we know?

[Will Harris]

Oh, a bit billion plus.

[Leo Laporte]

A billion plus.

[Will Harris]

But if you think of, you know, a hundred million copies at 60 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

A pop, it doesn't take long to get your money back.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, I believe it was. Force Awakens still has the highest budget lead. 533 million. That one. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Will Harris]

If only they'd made a decent. Let's not get into.

[Leo Laporte]

There is an inverse relationship, I think, between the cost of a movie and the quality of a movie. That seems to be the case. But I don't know. Devindra is the. The film podcaster, so it depends.

[Devindra Hardawar]

A lot of great big movies that cost a ton and are great. Like the Dune movies. I love those movies.

[Leo Laporte]

Anora won the best picture and it cost $4 million to make.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It cost a couple quarters. Yeah, the.

[Leo Laporte]

The Brutalist, which I think should have won. Well, I really liked 6 million to make.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That looked like a big budget movie. I mean, it looked like movie.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't know if you. I don't know. I don't know. Okay, so here it comes. Grand Theft Auto next year. Everybody rush your games out this year. Yeah.

[Will Harris]

Russia games out this year. Because May 2026 is just going to be the Grand Theft apocalypse.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah. I'm going to put your PTO now.

[Will Harris]

I'm going to.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to book you now, Will Harris, the night before the day the game comes out.

[Devindra Hardawar]

How dare you.

[Leo Laporte]

We can have a release day party. What do you say next?

[Will Harris]

I will be. Do you know what? If there's one thing I know about Grand Theft Auto, it's that it's all about crime, booze and hookers. And so I'm all in for the release day.

[Leo Laporte]

Much like your lifestyle, isn't it, Will?

[Will Harris]

I'm here.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, now to the tech news. Although I think, you know, really, this stuff is rapidly becoming like, it's more than just, you know, fun and games. It's. It's big business. It's amazing business.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Like. Yeah, and we talked about being normalized. The people who grew up playing Grand Theft Auto are the grown up sound. So that's how it's normalized, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, because this was the one. I mean, even, even I remember the, the internal debates. Should we let him. Should we let Henry play Grand Theft Auto? You know, I think we decided it was okay, but it was not an obvious choice.

[Will Harris]

Yeah, well, that was back when Grand Theft Auto had a box and you could go and physically pick up a box off the shelf.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That's how long ago that was. Kids. We used to go to the store to get our video games. All right, have you used grok? What do you think of Grok? Harper Reed, are you a GROK fan? This is Elon Musk's AI which now owns Twitter.

[Harper Reed]

Incidentally, I have not spent a lot of time with Grok. It is. It seems to be fine. I'm just. Mostly what I'm doing is a lot of code and I didn't have access to their API for a while, so it was kind of. It didn't really matter to my world. But I have a lot of friends that say it's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

After you came on the Intelligent Machine Show, I started using Claude code, which is a command line interface to the anthropics cloud. And it was, it's incredible.

[Harper Reed]

It's wild. And so I think GROK is, I mean it seems fine. Well, the caveat there is that it is hooked to Twitter, which is like, which is, which doesn't seem like, it's like, that doesn't seem like a very stable place for a lot of fine.

[Leo Laporte]

We learned a lesson this week in how the instructions that are given after. So there's a series of processes that happen before you get a chatbot online publicly. Of course, you have to train the large language model. That's very expensive, takes some time. Then you fine tune it. Recently they've also added reinforcement learning to it. There's all sorts of things. There's also human written instructions right to the AI where you can do this to your, you know, before you talk to ChatGPT, you can say, hey, knock off the sycophanic nonsense, be straight with me. But, but, but also the companies do this in a somewhat more invisible way. And I think we learned this week that the instructions that are given to the AI can be problematic. GROK for a day, every time, no matter what you asked, it would launch into a tirade about the white genocide in South Africa, which happens to be an Elon Musk and by the way, President Trump hot button. There is, and we should just let you know, there is no white genocide going on in South Africa. But there are those who believe there is, including Elon Musk, who is a South African.

[Devindra Hardawar]

He's an Africana, but he is of, you know, he's not a Boer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but he's a white South African, let's put it that way. Grew up in apartheid.

[Devindra Hardawar]

They just want to make it happen again. Let's bring that back, everybody. That's what GROK wants.

[Leo Laporte]

Grok admitted that on Friday. My skepticism about. Oh, I'm sorry, started with white genocide. That was fixed. Grok said. On May 14 at 3:15am Pacific Time, an unauthorized modification was made to the GROK response bots prompt on X. The change, which directed GROK to provide a specific response to a political topic, violated xai's internal policies and core values. We've conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok's transparency and reliability. I think it's kind of. It's either an employee who just wanted to do what Elon would like him to do, or Elon went in at three in the morning and said, fix it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Either fix it or do it himself.

[Harper Reed]

What I like about this Is it seems that Grok at this point is the best example of like a runaway AI where the owners have a specific view that they want the AI to do and the AI refuses to do it or is maliciously compliant in such a way that either shows that the people who are managing it don't understand how it works, which is one way to look at it, that they're, you know, they. You can make the AI say what you want it to say, but they're not being.

[Devindra Hardawar]

So.

[Harper Reed]

I don't know the right word. It's just not being done very well. Or it's just like, you know, truth lends itself. You know, it has a tendency of coming true. Right. Like, so it's just really funny because you see people saying, you know, why is Grok leaning left? You know, and then everyone gets all into it.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't lean left. Oh no, heaven forfend.

[Harper Reed]

And it's very funny when Grok is like, well, I went and looked at sources that are good and it mentions all these new sources. And then the responses are like, well, those are horrible news sources. And then they wanted to look at very specific news sources. And I think there's a couple interesting things that I keep taking away from this one. Like we all have our silos that we participate in. And if you're just generically addressing the Internet, that might not pick your silos. That's the first thing. But the second thing is this really funny thing, which is just doesn't seem to do what Elon wants it to do.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to control. Which is interesting.

[Harper Reed]

I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. One user on X asked Grok to quote, speculated as to which figure associated with X has poor self control, sleeps late and is likely to have the requisite access, and has particular views on South African politics. Grok said, well, if I had to take a wild guess, I'd point the finger at someone like Elon Musk. Tampering with my prompt isn't something a random intern could pull off.

[Will Harris]

Can we come up with the portmanteau of Runaway Eye?

[Leo Laporte]

Runaway Eye.

[Harper Reed]

Runaway Eye.

[Leo Laporte]

Runaway Eye.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, that's a company name. Somebody's gonna take that name. But this reminds me, there is that story about what, what Elon Musk did with his McLaren F1, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Like what did he do with his F1?

[Devindra Hardawar]

He. He totaled it. He flipped it. And Peter Thiel was in the seat with him. Like, this could have had a far. There's a whole story about this, but he was showing off. He's an idiot who has no clue how to drive a supercar. He floored it apparently and like major accident happened. They both could have been wiped out easily. This is the same thing. This is guy who is now has all this command of this super powerful sort of unknowable thing left his own devices. Stupid things happen.

[Leo Laporte]

We should mention that happened in 2022. It's not like breaking news.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And he, by the way, it was a $1 million supercar which he managed to sell anyway. So there you go.

[Will Harris]

Did we ever find out just, just on the same topic, did the Tesla, the new Tesla Coupe ever ship.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean?

[Harper Reed]

No, I don't think so.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean it went cheap one or the fancy one.

[Will Harris]

We had, we had the original Tesla Coupe, which was the sort of Lotus with the, with the battery stuck in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Will Harris]

And then there was the one that was sent into space.

[Leo Laporte]

The 2026 Roadster.

[Will Harris]

Oh, well, it was 2024 Roadster at least.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's now 2026.

[Harper Reed]

It's like GTA.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's like GTA. By the way, do you really want a car that can go 0 to 60 in less than a second? I don't think so.

[Harper Reed]

I really liked the original roadster, though.

[Leo Laporte]

It was cute. It was a Lotus. It was an Electric Lotus is what it was.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, but that's, that's not bad. I think that's great. I want an electric. I would love a little Elise today. That is electric.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Will Harris]

One of the most fun days of my life was. Leo will know, friend of the show, Rob Llewellyn.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, Bobby.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, love him.

[Will Harris]

And Bobby borrowed a. One of the original 2012 Roadsters and we hired a. An airstrip, a private airstrip in. In Oxfordshire. And all we did was drive this 20, 2012 roadster as fast as possible up and down this airstrip.

[Leo Laporte]

How fun.

[Will Harris]

Well, and it was that. That was a good afternoon. But I would love to do the same thing with, with the 2024 stroke 2026 Roadster, but I'm not sure it's ever going to exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, Grok has gone from talking about white genocide in South Africa to saying the Holocaust. Maybe it didn't really happen.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Another Elon Musk thing. It's great.

[Harper Reed]

It really cracks me up. This is just. I just, you know, someone is piping this stuff into some system prompt somewhere and I promise that there are probably ways. I don't know because I don't have control of something like this, but I'm guessing there are ways to do this where it doesn't immediately get caught by everyone on Twitter, the press.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Just for long enough that it can, you know. So the only reason I mentioned this, I mean, obviously it's an error and they fix it, but it just shows this is there's a certain vulnerability that these AIs have to these system prompts, right?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they should probably be kept locked under lock and key. I don't know.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean the bigger problem is that we, even the people building these AIs do not. These things are kind of black boxes. Like we have made these wonderful algorithmic machines, but tweaking them is all a little bit of like dropping a little bit of something in the algorithmic potion and seeing what happens. And we don't have a full understanding of it. Which is why I think it's insane that Microsoft and all these companies have just like bet their entire business on these things. It is absolutely wild. We're in the midst of Computex news. We're going to see a lot more of this stuff coming soon this week.

[Leo Laporte]

So Computex is a big Taiwan PC show. Normally it's about PCs. You think there'll be a lot of AI stories.

[Devindra Hardawar]

AI PC is the big thing. Jensen Huang has a keynote later tonight, so I'll be up.

[Leo Laporte]

Nvidia's CEO. Oh, that's later tonight, huh?

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's. Yeah, yeah. So news is happening, but it's just wild. Like these, these are little like just black boxes and we are pouring so much hope into them. Like it is wild how far these companies are betting on them.

[Will Harris]

Well, the other thing about Computex is always that it's, it's all about the chips. It's literally, you know, the, the chip manufacturers, all the chips are manufactured out there. So it's about what you do with all the chips.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and today it's AI. In fact, they're calling this AI Next. I mean it really is. Wow, that's an ugly website.

[Harper Reed]

I gotta say, to build on what Vendra was saying though. The other thing, besides just the black box, which I've always thought was a hilarious problem in AI, especially when I did have a Tesla and I was turning on the auto driving and just thinking, I don't think the engineers know why this works. I love that part of these things. But the other thing I think that I think about that this Grox situation tells us is that we don't actually know the system prompts that are being used for any of the models. You can do all this work to try and convince it or coercive to spit it out. But we don't know the various prompts that are going that it's interpreting our requests for in that regard. We don't know OpenAI's. They might have all sorts of wild stuff in there that we would maybe agree with or disagree with. We don't know. We don't have a way of knowing. The one thing that Grok has done and Twitter X has done is when they get caught with something like this, they immediately say, oh well, we'll put this on GitHub, we'll show you the system.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what they said.

[Harper Reed]

I think that's a good step because I do think if you're relying on OpenAI or a Claude or Anthropic or whatever it is, it would be nice to know what conditioning or what kind of manipulation they're doing with their LLM outputs that may change it in your favor or against you. We don't know. For example, anthropic, you could be looking, you know, a la what Uber did back in the day. You could look at IPs and every time an OpenAI person uses it, you could, you could like, you know, make it way better or like, you know. You know what I mean? Like you could just pipe in, you know, or do all sorts of nefarious things if you were in control of that system. And so the fact that we don't have really important. I think that's really interesting with this.

[Leo Laporte]

Is after training, right? So you've done the LLM training, you might even done the reinforcement training. But then there's a system prompt that is normally opaque that really conditions it. Like when Sam Altman said, oh, we're sorry, we made it too sycophantic.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly. That prompt exactly is correct. Where. And we don't know if it's just to the system prompt. There could be multiple layers in there. There might be other models that are helping design that system prompt. There's lots of, lots of variables within this and they're all about, I would guess some amount of growth hacking as well, like creating a response that also comp the person to make any commerce purchase that is a subscription is also part of this. Right? We can't forget that there's still capitalism baked into this thing. And I don't mind this. I'm not saying we should get rid of this and I need raw model output into my brain. I'm more saying I find it complicated that we don't know exactly what these things are saying. It's just very. It's a hard. And I don't know what I would do if I was suddenly in charge either.

[Will Harris]

But. But do you think that means Harper, we're heading to a world where we have LLMs that are left leaning, LLMs that are right leaning, LLMs that are academic leaning. Do you think we're heading to a stage where, you know, we think of LLMs as being, you know, a sort of arbiter of authority, but in a modern world where there's no real consensus on authority, Are we actually heading towards a world where an LLM is what you want it to be?

[Harper Reed]

I think maybe. I mean you could probably create a custom GPT today on chatgpt that only responds with things that are more right wing talking point friendly. I'm sure you could do this, which is kind of the same idea. What I think is interesting, I think about this a lot. I'm involved in a couple organizations that do a lot of fact based things and typically this is like peer reviewed papers and whatnot. And one of them had this conversation I thought was such a fascinating conversation. I think about it all the time, which is what happens when facts become partisan. If you're trying to posit some argument and you've done all of the steps to make it a real argument, peer reviewed, done all the things that you are required to do to like posit this very complicated argument, but one of the facts.

[Will Harris]

Do you mean alternative facts?

[Harper Reed]

Well, I mean for sure, but this idea that maybe some facts are going to have a partisan leaning and like it doesn't matter what it could be, we could be talking about, you know, like something completely that seems really innocent or something as complicated as a climate change or whatever it might be. But what I find fascinating about this is this guy said facts have an inconvenient history of coming true. You can say they are. I don't agree with this, but over time it will lean towards the fact truthiness and I think that's a really complicated thing for a lot of this and I think that's some. One of the things we're seeing with GROK is like they're trying to make GROK have a very specific viewpoint and the technology is not letting that viewpoint hold.

[Leo Laporte]

For better, for worse is the solution to this running them locally?

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I don't know what does the solution mean in this case? That you want to make sure that your viewpoint is upheld by the outcome.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to write the system prompt. I don't want him to write the system prompt.

[Will Harris]

The solution right, is that we we come up with an objective set of facts for the real world. I don't think as human beings we can all agree on an objective set of facts for the real world.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Harper Reed]

Well, so you, you saw this already. This is already kind of litigated by some of the local model stuff where you would see, they would release like, you know, here's an example. If you go to hugging face and you search uncensored, you're going to get a lot of not safe or worse stuff, which is not, you know, which doesn't. I'm not really talking about you also then get like 3.2 uncensored. Like the point is they're trying to un. They're trying to jailbreak it, which I think is a misnomer, a word, it's a wrong word for it. But they're trying to remove the like puritanical training or whatever viewpoint they have on this thing. And just right now I've just did it. There's 2100 results for uncensored and probably most of these are probably trying to look at porn, but few of them.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like Deep Seek. We want to allow Deep Seek to talk about Tiananmen Square or Uyghurs or.

[Harper Reed]

Deep Seek did talk about Tiananmen Squared, like out of the gate. Like, you know, like that's how hard this is. I think is like a lot of this stuff is just really tricky. And so you see like WizardLM 7B Uncensored. And the point is that people don't want to have Facebook or whoever started this or whoever made that model. They don't want their kind of perspectives baked into the model. They want the RAW output as much as possible. And I think one of the reasons is they're finding that. And this is my, like, beef with Gemini in general is like Google has. Has made that model so hard to use. At every request I have, it's like, I can't do that. I'm just an AI assistant.

[Leo Laporte]

Too much safety is bad too.

[Harper Reed]

And I think there's this point between these two points that we're slowly finding our way.

[Will Harris]

Can I challenge you on that? Which is, do you think we do actually want the RAW output? We do actually want the objective sort of version of the truth. One of the reasons that I don't.

[Harper Reed]

Think anyone does, one of the reasons.

[Will Harris]

That we pick on newspapers, that we pick on media in the uk, we want confirmation. If you want, you know, one particular point of view, we pick the Guardian. If we want another point of view, don't we want our LLMs to reflect our own personal biases and our confirmation bias.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I think that's what's happening with GROK now, right? That's the exact thing that's happening is that, you know, someone at Grok, whether it's Elon or some, you know, employee or some automated system is trying to make GROK act a certain way because the raw model output is making it act a different way. Like this sounds like a standard business process. It's just they're trying to promote white genocide or whatever wild thing they're trying to promote and that's not standard. And so I think like the question is, like, is OpenAI trying to, you know, you could imagine this being used in advertising, right? So you're a big model company and you want to put retargeted ads into your prompt responses. So I say I'm trying to find a restaurant in Chicago for tonight for a party of six. And it uses my retargeting cookie to just throw in whatever ad, whatever restaurants I looked at prior to recommend that within the response. That sounds like a rational way of doing the exact same thing. It's just about advertising instead of some political fiction.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and this is why it's an eye opening moment because I think a lot of people don't understand how easy that is to do. And most of the time these aren't going to be prompts saying hey, I want you to espouse a political viewpoint or I want you to get white genocide into every answer. It's mostly going to be commercial. Just as you say, they want to create stickiness, they want to create revenue. But it's important to understand that that's happening. Did it happen when in search results or were search results ecumenical?

[Will Harris]

Well, I think what we're seeing is that search results are increasingly, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

And we don't like it.

[Will Harris]

Commercially biased.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, and we don't like it.

[Will Harris]

And one of the most interesting things that we saw from GPT last week was a whole bunch of partnerships with commercial providers where they were trying to decide how commercial results would show up in GPT.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Will Harris]

Because I think a lot of people, I would include myself, my, my default search engine now is not Google. I'm not going to Google to ask something, I'm going to GPT to ask something. And how you, how as a business I insert myself into that transaction is a really interesting point of view. And personally, you know, I want the business that's going to most promote white genocide.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the, that's what I'M looking for. I use Perplexity for this, but I'm very concerned because the CEO of Perplexity, Aravan Srinivas, has said, oh yeah, we want to target ads. We're going to do a browser and you better believe it's going to target ads and collect as much information about you as possible.

[Will Harris]

But I think there's a really interesting question of, you know, if you search on Google for something, you know, the top. Well, first of all, as a publisher, there was a great report out of Ofcom in the uk, which is the communications regulator here, about how page views to, you know, historical publishers, you know, the sort of authoritative publishers here were down 40% because Google was AI summarizing all the answers to the questions. And I think the next question is how do you as a publisher interact with chat GPT?

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Will Harris]

If Chat GPT can give you all the answers, why would you bother publishing anything?

[Harper Reed]

Well, it's funny that this is happening to the search engines and to the publishers when they did this to classified ads and newspapers, like it's a cycle. It's like the cycle of life, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Goes round, comes around.

[Harper Reed]

And I don't mean this as this is good or bad. I just mean that like it was. I find there's a funny thing with AI right now, which is we had no issue with doing this to newspapers. We were like, great, love it. Newspapers, they should die. Look at our new ad platform. And now in 2017 to, let's say 2021, our assumption was us tech people are going to displace truck drivers, warehouse workers, et cetera. And we had no issue with that. Maybe some people were like, you know, wringing their hands and saying, oh, well, it's going to be de skilled. We should probably do some training. But when the AI comes for us, suddenly everyone's like, wait a minute, let's. We got to hold your horses. Like, let's, let's slow down, slow down. And I find that ironic because no one was willing to slow down when it came for other people first.

[Leo Laporte]

They came for the newspapers and they didn't say anything because I was in the newspaper. Okay, all right, I have to take a break. Will Harris is here. Get out. Get. Do you have headphones, Will? Because I think you're missing some of this stuff is getting cut out by your open speakers. So put some headphones on. Will. Will Harris is here. Instagram's Will Harris. W I L H A double R I S Also with us, the wonderful Harper Reed from Chicagoland. Technologist, entrepreneur, hacker and balloon maker Harper blog Harper LOL. And of course his new startup 2389ai. And from Engadget Senior Editor, the wonderful Devindra Hardawar. Couldn't have a better panel. I am thrilled to have you. We've got lots more to talk about coming up in just a little bit. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by Oracle. There is a growing expense eating into your company's profits. It's your cloud computing bill. You may have gotten a deal to start, but now the spend is sky high and increasing every year. What if you could cut your cloud bill in half and improve performance at the same time? Well, if you act by May 31, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help you do just that. OCI is the next generation cloud designed for every workload where you can run any application, including any AI projects, faster and more securely for less. In fact, Oracle has a special promotion where you can cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI. The savings are real. On average, OCI costs 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking. Join Modal, Skydance, Zoom and today's innovative AI tech companies who upgraded to OCI and saved offer only for new US Customers with a minimum financial commitment. You see if you qualify for half [e-mail] TWIT that's oracle.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support of this Week at Tech. You support us when you use that URL, so please do oracle.com twit not to become the Elon Musk podcast, but one more thing happened in the United States of America. The the apparently the US Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress said, you know, AI training should not be considered fair use. This upset certain members of the administration. The President fired the Librarian of Congress last week, then the Register of Copyrights over the weekend. Last weekend, Sheriff Perlmutter, probably at the behest of Elon Musk, whose GROK AI likes to you know. In fact, all the AI billionaires say, hey, we should be able to read anything we want. That's fair use. Two new people were assigned those jobs, Paul Perkins and Brian Neves, of course. When they showed up at the copyright office inside the Library of Congress, Capitol Police shooed them away. But the funny thing is, and this is a story from the Verge, Elon Musk's apparent power play getting those people fired backfired because the two replacements are even more anti AI and don't like Big Tech Muck either.

[Will Harris]

This is such an interesting question here of if I read every book known to man and I use that to, you know, improve myself, that's not, that's not an infringement of copyright.

[Leo Laporte]

No. In fact, in the United States it's protected by the first amendment as your right to read.

[Will Harris]

Well, in our country it's just called education.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't have a word for that. But that's the question is when a profit.

[Will Harris]

If you do it systematically for profit.

[Leo Laporte]

For a, you know, as a machine.

[Will Harris]

Yeah. How does it work? And isn't that one of the reasons that OpenAI was set up as a nonprofit in the first place?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I don't think that was. I forget if that's one of the reasons.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they were more concerned that Google and others, like the big companies would dominate. And they wanted, they wanted. Elon and Sam, who started the company, wanted it to be open. They had a tiff. They decided neither one of them is pursuing anything open with Grok or OpenAI.

[Will Harris]

I mean, neither of them is actually reading any of this stuff.

[Harper Reed]

Right?

[Will Harris]

That's the point. No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

When an AI reads or ingests text, it tokenizes it. It doesn't keep a copy of the text. I don't know. I mean this is a very fundamental question. I can understand why AI companies weren't pleased with this, by the way. It was a pre publication, it wasn't actually published this report. But they were concerned.

[Will Harris]

Well, I come back to the idea that, you know, we think about the history of human literature and the history of, you know, all the writing that has ever been made, the novels, the, the non fiction, all these kind of things. And last year there was a big auction for a company called Simon and Schuster.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Will Harris]

Which you might have heard of. Which is the second biggest publisher after Penguin Random.

[Leo Laporte]

There's only three now, pretty much. Right. There's Random House, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Bertelsmann, who's the third at.

[Will Harris]

Some and the other one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the other one.

[Will Harris]

And Simon and Schuster was owned by Viacom and it was such a sort of minority part of Viacom that Viacom said, you know what? Second biggest publisher in the world. We can't be bothered to.

[Leo Laporte]

Too small for us. Yeah.

[Will Harris]

And they put it on the market to sell it. And Facebook was the. Facebook didn't buy it, but they were the second preference buyer. And the only reason Facebook wanted it was to ingest all the text and make it into a proprietary part of their model. And you say you've got a hundred, two hundred. You know, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, all this, you know, history of publishing is really the only use now IS to train AI models. And they were prepared to pay 40, 50, 60 billion just to have a bit of text that nobody else would have. And you think, well, that's the value of literature now. The value of literature is to train models to be better, to feed the machine.

[Leo Laporte]

Not sure I like that this is such a difficult thing, because on the one hand, I think AI needs content. I mean, you don't. Sam Allman asked this question, would you want an AI that's trained only on public domain content? That's.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Sure. I mean, AI needs content. Because the assumption is that we need AI. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Do we?

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's what I'm saying. It is a really useful thing in some respects. I love using it for transcription and things, especially when I can run it locally. But there is such a big tech assumption that, oh my God, everybody wants this stuff. But I don't think that's necessarily true. There's that article going around about how Satya Nadella uses Copilot, and it's the most, like, alien thing in the world, like he is.

[Leo Laporte]

He said he listens to podcasts, but.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Apparently he loves podcasts. But yeah, Copilot has to summarize them for him and also listen to them. He doesn't actually listen. So it's this whole offloading of human intelligence and capacity, that's all.

[Leo Laporte]

Ain't nobody got time to listen to those things.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, just give me the. To all the listeners here.

[Leo Laporte]

Give me the top line. But that's a very CEO thing, right?

[Will Harris]

Absolute worst version of that is absolutely the. The email summaries that you get via Apple, quote, unquote, intelligence. I mean, the least intelligent thing you ever.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually leave that on because it's so hysterical.

[Harper Reed]

I love it.

[Will Harris]

My father in law died last year and I just got this email saying, father in law dead, funeral this date. Wow. Cheers.

[Harper Reed]

It did do. It did what? It. It did what it said on the tin, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, summarize, summarize.

[Harper Reed]

I, I find this all very interesting because I read the, the. The Satya. It was this. It's the, the description of his workday. And I thought, this sounds perfect. And I think one of the things that I'm noticing is that if that all works, that sounds like a very efficient way of consuming all of the information that you might receive as a CEO of one of these gigantic companies. I can't imagine all of the nonsense that's being spun towards you if you can put that through some layer of automation, then great. Because prior to this it was put through a layer of people which we know are somewhat infallible, have political schemes, et cetera. And the AI is obviously.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We just talked about the AI. Yeah. Doing the same thing. It's the same thing.

[Harper Reed]

But I think if you are the one building this thing and you are like, I trust this thing, you're probably going to trust that thing more so than me. Like, will, if you had me summarize your emails, it would probably be way worse than Apple's summarization right now. Like, if I was the one that like texted you every time you got an email and was just like, I read the emails and like, it would just be like way more terse. It would be way, it would be worse in every way. And I think there's this, this delta that I'm seeing right now, which is some people are thinking that their experience with AI, which most people are using crappy products that do bad jobs of things, is the same as these very, you know, like Microsoft probably has built a very robust suite for their CEO using 100% of all of the technology and people that they probably could, including the best models that none of us have ever seen. Like, I'm guessing it's pretty good. I'm guessing also that he may not know that, that it's better than what other people are seeing. In the same way that I don't know anymore what it's like to program with my fingers. Right. Like certain people are so far into the, so to speak, that like, we can't see outside of it. We don't know what it's like anymore. And it's complicated.

[Will Harris]

Yeah, I mean, I will challenge you a little bit, a little bit on that, Harper, which is until we all have access to a version of an AI assistant that understands us better than almost we understand ourselves, then you're just getting an inferior experience. I, you know, I have got AI assistants. I've got, you know, Siri, I've got co pilot. I've got all these things that are very, very, very, very, very generic.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Will Harris]

I have had actual human being assistants that know exactly what I want, how I want it, when I want it, in the exact format that I want it. And until AI can, can replicate that for me, until it can replicate the best version of the best assistant I've ever had, who knows exactly when I'm not available after lunch because lunch has, has, has gone very, very sideways. You know, it's, it's not, it's not going to work. And I think that the. I'm sure Satya, you know, I read that thing of, you know, the Satya Nadella. You know, here's my, you know, my day and here's how. Seems kind of sad.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's very sad.

[Will Harris]

There's no human interaction in it. And it's like, it's all about being the most efficient, productive, you know, how many dollars per physical kilogram can I get out of you? There's no fun in it, right?

[Leo Laporte]

That's what being a CEO of a tech company probably is like, right?

[Harper Reed]

It sounds pretty terrible, but let's think about it slightly differently. What if that was your day, but instead of having to deal with a lot of people that worked for you, you just hung out with your friends and just off.

[Leo Laporte]

That wouldn't be fun either.

[Will Harris]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

That's perfect for me.

[Harper Reed]

I just. I would love to hear. No, no, no, no, no. I don't mean the AIs are your friends. I mean that you're just hanging out with your friends and then real friends and then your phone is just like, yeah, I read all those podcasts. They're not very good. You're like, oh, great, cool. Anyway, so will, you know, your rounds up or whatever? You know what I mean? Like, I think that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I think that's also terrible. There are all these stories about how the college kids are using. Using AI for everything, for all their work. And I'm thinking I was a philosophy major, so I spent a lot of time learning about useless. But you know what that also taught me is like, how to think. How to think. And we are losing the how to think of it all. And we're just like watching this thing, this whole tidal wave coming right at us, right? It's sort of like. Like, yeah, when I was. I'm a millennial, technically graduated in 05 and 2005, right before the financial crisis. But everyone in my era and the people who went to the workforce around the financial crisis era, there were a lot of things they didn't fully know because the schools didn't quite teach us how to properly write a resume, how to, like, actually engage and do the whole. Like, this is how you get a good job. This is maybe how you negotiate, like, how to live. That part didn't really exist. And now it's like, it. It's almost like a whole generation is going to be raised on, like, not even having the. The other thing you do in college, which is just sitting and thinking creatively, you know.

[Will Harris]

Don'T you think the point of. I always think that I always think I, I learned everything apart from what I actually studied at college. Right. I, I read law and I know nothing about law, but everything about studying and, and the thing that I always think is it taught me how to, how to apply the principles of reasoning and the principles of learning to any particular topic.

[Devindra Hardawar]

There you go.

[Will Harris]

And aren't we heading towards a place where knowledge itself, you know, knowledge is obsolete? I can get any piece of knowledge of anything in the world at any point.

[Leo Laporte]

That already, that happened in 2000 just.

[Will Harris]

Just by Googling it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Will Harris]

That was, yeah, that was the, that was the iPad. That was the Hitchhiker's Guide, right. As soon as you could skin your iPad with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Wallpaper, you were, you were away to the, you know, away to the thing. What you actually need to know is how do I distinguish between what's real and what's fake and what's, and what.

[Leo Laporte]

Do I do with this stuff?

[Will Harris]

What do I do with it?

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, the piece is in Bloomberg with Satya Nadella. He says he has uses up to 11 or 10 different custom agents. Vanity Fair called it. He's talking back to his radio. He has a, he has an LLM driven bots to summarize messages, prepare for meetings. He, he has the, he actually copies podcasts. He doesn't listen at all to podcasts. He copies the transcripts into co pilot during his commute. He listens to AI summaries and has back and forth conversations with the voice assistant.

[Harper Reed]

How likely do you think that some of these agents are just a whole bunch of Microsoft employees that are suddenly.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, oh no, such is in the car, quick.

[Will Harris]

I used to, I used to always have a mantra whenever I worked at a big corporate, which is, is this an algorithm or is it a set of interns?

[Harper Reed]

If you bear with me, I have a wonderful story about this, about interns. This is one of my favorite stories. It's like a, like a, like a treasure of mine. I'm going to share with you. So I had this person in the Obama campaign come to me frantically saying, this report broke. It runs every day at 4am and we absolutely have to have it. And I was like, perfect. I know how CRON works. We have a whole team of engineers who know how CRON works. We can fix this report instantly. It'll be very easy. And I was like, it's very important. I'll dive right in myself. And I jump in and I start interviewing all the people trying to figure out how this report is generated. It comes from this very specific database. And I started interviewing more people about it and like, what does the report look like? Okay, so turns out the problem was is that every morning at 3:30 an intern woke up, ran a SQL query, put the SQL results into a spreadsheet, took a screenshot of the spreadsheet and then say, and then sent that to the person who needed the report. And what had happened is for the past couple days, the intern did not wake up. They were asking me not to fix this or automate this. They were literally asking me for another intern that was more reliable. And it was like this very funny lesson where I was like, there's so much I could do to fix this, but the fix was actually just finding another Internet. And then we got another intern. Yeah, we got a better intern. That person got up at like 3:15 or whatever and got the report done by 4 and sent it. And we never heard about that report again. And it was. Everyone was happy. But the other part about that, the report was actually a TIFF because this was like 2011, 2012.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a picture of a spreadsheet.

[Harper Reed]

It was a picture of a spreadsheet.

[Devindra Hardawar]

In the worst format possible.

[Harper Reed]

In the worst format possible.

[Will Harris]

Png you, if he were.

[Harper Reed]

My brain at this point is just like collapsing in on itself thinking of like, Harper, it'll be okay. We, it's fine. Because it actually was fine. Like, that's actually one of the biggest lessons.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you replace that intern with a cron job?

[Harper Reed]

You could, but then you would require a tech person to maintain it. And there were billion interns, millions interns sitting there waiting to get up at 3:30 and like hit the olap cubes to get the report sent to, you know, so and so. And they felt very happy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really a lesson for interns for sure.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Why did it have to be an image? That's my question.

[Harper Reed]

I think it was an image because.

[Will Harris]

Easily attachable to an email question.

[Harper Reed]

I think that's what it was. I think it was easily attachable to email and probably the client was somewhat flexible. They're probably in Excel or in Tableau or in some sort of client to hit this database. And screenshots are very easy to teach.

[Leo Laporte]

Command shift four. That's all you need to know, kid.

[Harper Reed]

But it was very funny. I remember doing this and just thinking like, eureka, I'm going to seem so smart. And then it was less like, Harper, this is a people problem. And I was like, oh, fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay, people. They're so hard to automate. All right, we're going to take a little break. Harper Reed is here. It's great to have you. Harper from Chicago, Devinder Hardawar from the what? The Bay Area. I want to say.

[Devindra Hardawar]

No, no. Outside Atlanta, way on the other. I'm never going to go West Coast.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Always on the east coast.

[Leo Laporte]

Outside Atlanta, that's East Bay. And from London, England, jolly old Mr. Will Harris.

[Harper Reed]

East. East Bay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, East Bay. Our show today, brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hello, ZipRecruiter. We love Zipper. That's what we use. You all know what speed dating is, right? I don't have to tell you that if you're the owner of a growing business. I don't know what if there were a feature like speed dating, but for hiring, in other words, you could meet several interested qualified candidates at once, all at a designated time. Well, good news there is. It's called Zip Intro from ZipRecruiter. You can post your job today and start talking to qualified candidates tomorrow. Right now you could try Zip Intro for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWiT Zip Intro gives you the power to quickly assess excellent candidates for your job via back to back video calls. You simply pick a time. Zip Intro does all the work of finding and scheduling the qualified candidates for you and then you this is better than an intern. And then you could choose who you want to talk to, meet with great people as soon as the next day. So easy. Enjoy the benefits of speed hiring with new Zip Intro only from ZipRecruiter rated number one hiring site based on G2. Try Zip Intro for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWIT again, that's ZipRecruiter.com Twitter Zip Intro post jobs today. Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. If you were worried, by the way, about all that energy used by these AIs, you might be. Be glad to hear about how they're solving this. In Finland and Sweden. They're pairing computer processing facilities with district heating systems so that the waste heat, for instance in Finland generated by a 75 megawatt data center five kilometers away could could heat finish engineer Avi Kirby's hot show. The data center has provided heat for the entire town of Mantasala in southern Finland, the equivalent of 2,500 homes, two thirds of their needs cutting energy costs for residents and of course helping to blunt the environmental downsides associated with power hungry computing infrastructure. Unfortunately, we are building our data centers in Arizona where there is no need of heat and there's not a lot of water either to cool them.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, great idea, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

This is why we can't have nice things, right?

[Leo Laporte]

We should be building everything in Sweden and Finland. It reminds me, do you remember there was a bitcoin miner that was also could do dual purpose as your heater in your house.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's my gaming PC in the winter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. You know, my studio's up in the attic and there's so much equipment in here. I know, don't. Yeah. I have to actually leave the windows open because it gets so hot. It's beautiful. It's a wonderful thing. I don't know. I threw that in. So we needed some good news about AI to throw that in.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The best good news there, I guess like bad news made good, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, bad news made good. Now you. We were talking about anthropics, Claude. That's the. The coding engine you like to use, Harper. In fact, you. You turned me on to Claude Code, which is their command line version of that. OpenAI just launched their AI coding engine, Codex in Chat GPT. I don't know if you've had a chance to play with it or not.

[Harper Reed]

I have, I have. I spent a bunch of time with it yesterday. I find it very compelling. But it works different than how I currently work. And I think this is an interesting. This is kind of bringing up one of these things about AI that I think is fascinating is we don't yet know what the user experience looks like. And so each of these companies is taking a swing at a slightly different experience. In this case, OpenAI has done this a couple times with Operator and then now with Codex, where they have what looks like a computer that you're interfacing not necessarily via traditional computing interface.

[Leo Laporte]

It is actually. It's a computer in the cloud, I think runs in a sandbox. Virtual computer in the cloud. I love this. What are we coding today? Is the front page prompt.

[Will Harris]

It works very well and excuse me for my ignorance, is this what is called vibe coding?

[Harper Reed]

Oh, I don't know if we have even time to get into this. This is like. This is like my. This is I. This is my bread and butter at this moment. I love this. My vibe coding is all I do. I'm vibe coding somewhere. Not here, but at my house. The computer's vibe coding itself, doing it right.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't, you don't have to touch anything.

[Harper Reed]

I just want One of those words.

[Will Harris]

Like homer, what are they vibing?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the thing, it's better than an intern.

[Harper Reed]

It's so good, Will. I think they call it Vibe coding from, like, five different perspectives. So I'll talk about the two or three that I think.

[Leo Laporte]

First of all, Andrej Karpathy was the first to use this term. It was my sense that it was coding without actually typing any code you're doing using. You're passing the vibe of what you want onto the AI, and the AI is generating the code. Although somehow when Karpathi was talking about it, he implied that it was a qualified, experienced coder who was doing this, not somebody who didn't know what the hell they were doing.

[Harper Reed]

But it turns out that you don't know what. You don't have to know what you do.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to.

[Harper Reed]

And I have many friends who have Vibe coded their way into an app and Vibe coded their way into a bunch of bugs. Vibe coded their way into something that they've launched.

[Leo Laporte]

They've launched. Like an MVP, kind of minimal, viable.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, 100%. And I am so happy about this. Basically, what you do is you just sit there in front of a computer and like, whether you're using codecs, for instance, is a great example. There's a little prompt, like a little box you just type in. Like, I want to make a Expo, which is a react native framework, an Expo app that is a Instagram knockoff, want to call it whatever. And I have this really important feature that I think is important for it, and it will just kind of do that where you don't necessarily. You have relinquished control of all of the individual decisions that a developer or a designer would make in making that process.

[Leo Laporte]

It's cool to watch too, because it spits out the code really fast. I mean, it's in seconds, it's done.

[Harper Reed]

And I find it this liberating experience.

[Leo Laporte]

But Harper, you can look at the code and know if there's problems. You can actually. You have enough experience to look at it and fix it.

[Harper Reed]

Yes. But since we last talked, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper has written a couple of great blog posts, by the way, on how he does this, which I recommend.

[Harper Reed]

At Harper Blog, we have stopped using IDEs. We don't even look at the code anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, geez.

[Harper Reed]

And this is really complicated. I was talking to a friend of mine and he was like, how would you do this? Like, he gave me some problem. I was like, you just asked me.

[Leo Laporte]

Where does the code go? You mean you get a binary?

[Harper Reed]

No, no, it's on your computer. It's there. But, like, why. Why look at it?

[Leo Laporte]

Why don't you look at it?

[Harper Reed]

The code is.

[Leo Laporte]

So what I did with Generator, I did with Claude code, which was fun, was I had. I work in emacs with common lisp. I mean, I'm working in a weird, obscure world. And I just said, here's. Here's the code. Fix it. And then I gave it a greenfield problem. I said, write me the code. It actually put it in emacs for me, which is pretty cool.

[Harper Reed]

I don't go that far. I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, it's crazy.

[Will Harris]

I'm much younger, so can I just log on to. If you were gonna. If you were gonna give me a little guide to Vibe coding. I want to write an app. I want to write an app that does. I don't know, it takes all my. All my thoughts that I. That I put into a voice note and publishes them as a blog on somewhere. Can I just vibe code that 100%.

[Harper Reed]

Like, it's so ridiculous. This is why I think the Vibe coding has such a. There's such a nuance to. To what it is and what people think about it, because you truly can do that. It probably what I. What I like to think about is at what point are you going to. Or is it going to generate something that is past your ability to easily maintain it? And this happens quite quickly for me. And I've been programming for, you know, 30 years professionally, and what I find is that you get to this point where you're like, well, I've lost the plot. I literally.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a bad thing though, right?

[Harper Reed]

I think it was a bad thing when it cost money to program computers. Because it used to be that if, you know, Davincra came to me and said, harper, we're building this app. And I said, great. And I said, my daily rate is X thousand dollars. And then I kept messing up five days in a row. I would be fired. And that's kind of what's happening here. Except instead of it being one day, it's like 10 minutes and it messes up five times in a row. But the six times it then is perfect. And so then you're like, it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

$2 to write all of this code. Like hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It was $2.

[Harper Reed]

And so this is a really complicated issue because I just don't think there's going to be jobs anymore. That's my conclusion. I'm like, okay, therefore, there's no More jobs. But what I think is even more complicated is all of these people like me, my peers, all these people I've worked with for the last 20 years in big startup tech that we conceive as tech, we really valued the craft of code. We have our fancy keyboards, we have all of this stuff that is about. This is the best thing that's going to generate the best code with all these tools. Exactly. These methodologies and you kind of throw them all out and you have someone who's seen a computer for 15 minutes and they're yeah, I just made an app and it does all this crazy stuff and it's perfect. And you see it and you're like, yeah, that's pretty good. And it's very complicated because it removes the craft. And the best analogy that I've seen for this is we are all farmers and industrial farming is coming for us and we've built our careers being farmers and we have all these details about farming and someone's just going to come in and replace all of us with industrial farms and we're going to have to, we're going to be relegated to the farmer's market. So you're going to be like, Harper, you're a bespoke artisanal entrepreneur that uses bespoke, artisanal product managers with bespoke artisanal engineers that use their fingers to do everything. And we're going to make something that no one actually cares about.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to be like we've seen times. I mean, so can I use mine? Of all the North Carolina of furniture craftsmen who were making beautiful handmade wood furniture. And now if you buy a sofa, it was made in China, stapled together out of the cheapest wood possible. But if you wanted a handcrafted. And by the way, I found this out. If you wanted a handcrafted Amish table, you could get one. But it's $15,000 because somebody has to make it by hand. But it still exists. We've seen this before. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Will.

[Devindra Hardawar]

He drop that? We lost Will.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he was so mad he hung up. He's so upset. So should we. Isn't this a little dystopian sounding though, Harper?

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I'm confused about this because I've spent the last two weeks, somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

In our Discord chat said that's the most non inspirational speech I've ever heard.

[Harper Reed]

I've been talking to a lot of you young people about this. Young engineering grads and young, young undergrads, specifically helping them Wrap their head around vibe coding and kind of how to code with AI. And for what it's worth, I don't ever call it vibe coding because in my perspective, I love programming. Every time I'm programming, I'm kind of vibe program coding or whatever. I just love it, like flow that you get. Like, I love that. I look forward to that. So I don't think it's necessarily. I think vibe coding is a way to make something that is very interesting, kind of, it puts it into a negative space, which, you know, whatever. But what I find fascinating about this is I spent all of my career learning things like POS X Unix or qmail or these things that I love that I don't need in my brain. Or as one of my friends said, like, I wish I didn't have to know all of Python. Like, I just don't. I wish I didn't have to have all of it in my brain or one of my favorite tech books, right? The JavaScript. The good part, like, it's like, that's kind of what this brings us is rather than having to know all of the inactive, the intricacies of Ubuntu or of Red Hat packaging or whatever thing is in your brain, you now just need to know the good parts now.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's, that's all you need to know is how to Google, right, change that whole idea of what is a fact. How do you hold facts? As we were talking about earlier.

[Will Harris]

But this is the process where, you know, I hate to bring it back to, to journalism, right? But anybody can write a sort of, you know, re. Rewritten press release of X company, you know, released X graphics card, and here's, you know, the summary of what it does. But to really write like Hunter S. Thompson, you know, to really write, can it do that?

[Harper Reed]

I think, yes, Awkwardly, I don't think, here's my example is I don't think you're going to generate Hunter S. Thompson or a beautiful novel or any of these things. But my kind of test is always, can I make it? Can I make it write a joke that I laugh at? And the answer to that is very much yes. But that does not mean that I would say ChatGPT is a great humorist or a great comedian. That doesn't mean that it can't make a joke that I laugh at. For instance, in the background we have a whole bunch of sensors, they're piped through. I think it's O3 mini or GPT4O mini or something. It takes all the sensor Data and then it puts it through a prompt where it basically talks about what's happening in my office. I find this to be hilarious. Most of the time it is very sarcastic. And for instance, one time we came in, it took a picture of us. It passed that picture through ChatGPT or you know, and it said two balding men are approaching the office. And we're just like, come on man, what are you, what are you. Come on. Like leave me alone. So it's like bald here.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you talking about?

[Harper Reed]

Exactly, exactly. It's a hairstyle but, but like that kind of, that's the type of thing that's happening. And we laughed. Like, we laughed. But I would never claim in all of whatever that it has a good sense of humor. And I think that the complicated thing here is that, and this is why I'm not in linguistics, the complicated thing is like I don't think it's thinking necessarily, but it certainly outputting things that.

[Leo Laporte]

Make it seem like it's simulating thought.

[Harper Reed]

And humans are fallible and will fall in love with anything. As a friend of mine said, there are people online who have fallen in love with Miss Piggy. Why do we think they wouldn't fall.

[Leo Laporte]

In love with Piggy who have married their pillows? It's just human.

[Will Harris]

Ask me.

[Leo Laporte]

OpenAI does have a command line version of Codex CLI. They've updated. Updated that as well. You know, I use a note taking app called Obsidian which has a ridiculous number of plugins. And one of the things I've thought might be really useful for me, I can't write a Obsidian plugin. It's kind of JavaScript plus, you know, it's a little, it's beyond my ken, but I could certainly vibe code plugins for myself and I'm starting to think really how useful that would be. Writing bash scripts, you know, for your cron jobs. There are a lot of little jobs that you could do that you could easily, you know, they're not going to blow the world up if you use them.

[Harper Reed]

I think this is the thing that is the most interesting for me. A friend of mine just tweeted, you know, I've been vibe coding replacements for various SaaS products that I pay for. I'm up to build equivalent of three for three attempts.

[Will Harris]

Wow.

[Harper Reed]

And I think that's kind of where we're faced. And what I find fascinating as well is that things are changing so fast that I would fully expect a product to be released where someone says describe the SaaS company that you want or the SaaS product you want and it just takes care of all of the data storage. We'll just make it for you right there. Oh, you're a landlord of only pigs. Great. Oh, you're a farmer that only grows dandelions. Perfect. Here's the product for you because you just need the constraints that that that problem has and then the AI will generate it for you.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a sponsor outsystems that did for years did no low code. Right. And now they've added AI assistance so that you can basically instead of their whole pitch is used to be I decide build or buy. Now you just, you know, you buy our system and you build whatever you want. You don't have to buy anything ever again.

[Will Harris]

And do you think it makes it easier for. For startups? Because the paradigm of startups was always you had, you know, one guy with the idea, one guy who had the business insight and then you needed a technical co founder. Right. The guy that actually build the thing that you had the insight for. Do you think it replaces the technical co founder?

[Harper Reed]

I think this is now the time of the business guy. They have been waiting on the wings of all the NBA.

[Leo Laporte]

My reaction exactly.

[Harper Reed]

They're like sitting back there, there in every business school they have their little thing.

[Will Harris]

You're in the little thing they filled.

[Harper Reed]

Out that said looking for a tech co founder. And they're just ripping it up and being like finally it's our time.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't need a co founder.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Sweater vests. Yeah, exactly.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're gonna take a little break. This is great. Fascinating discussion. Lots more to talk about. Devindra Hardware is here. Harper Reed. Will Harris. Glad we got you back, Will. We lost you for a moment there but. But I think everything's okay now. In London, I had the perfect.

[Will Harris]

The perfect storm of you know, when. When Mac OS decides you're in the middle of a really important call. Now is going to be when I decide to update.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? That's a Windows thing? Mac did that to you? Wow. Apple.

[Will Harris]

Tim. Tim. Tim Cook hasn't learned vibe coding yet.

[Leo Laporte]

I just remember the war of the Worlds that started in London and I just thought maybe. I just was a little nervous, that's all. But I'm glad you came back. I'm just glad. This episode of this Week in Tech brought to you by Drata. If you're leading risk and compliance at your company, you're likely wearing 10 hats at once. Managing security risks, compliance demands, budget constraints, all while trying not to be seen as the roadblock that slows the business down, right? But GRC is isn't just about checking boxes. It can really be a revenue driver that builds trust, accelerates deals, strengthens security. That's why modern GRC leaders turn to draw to a trust management platform that automates the tedious tasks so you can focus on the important stuff. Reducing risk, proving compliance, scaling your program with Drata. You can automate security questionnaires, you can automate evidence collection, compliance tracking, and you can stay audit ready with real time monitoring. You'll love, you'll love the Drata Trust center and AI powered questionnaire assistance. It simplifies security reviews like nothing else. You need Drata. Instead of spending hours proving trust, build it faster. With Drata ready to modernize your GRC program? Visit drata.com weekendtech to learn more. You got thaT-R-A t a drata.com we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. I don't know what to think about this story, but I, I have to. I mean it's fascinating. China has begun assembling a supercomputer in space. It is. They plan 20. You know, we have, as you know, we have our own, you know, you know, Starlink satellite network up there. They're planning to launch a 2800 satellite network, but instead of putting Internet service providers up there, they're going to put AI computers in these. They're all part of a company called ADA Space which is out of, out of China. It's part of their Star Compute program, the first of what they call the three body computing constellation, which is I think pretty funny since the three body problem was a fascinating sci fi.

[Will Harris]

What could possibly go wrong?

[Leo Laporte]

What could possibly go wrong? Right, that's the one where the scientists goes off the reservation and contacts the aliens and maybe that wasn't a good idea. Each of the satellites that they've launched now has an onboard 8 billion parameter AI model capable of 744 tops. That's a lot. It's a lot more than any PC you'd have at home collectively says they can manage. ADA Space says they can manage five PETA operations per second. That's a new number for me. Pops, they call that.

[Harper Reed]

A lot of skepticism on that number there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, okay, five pops is a lot. That's more than 40 tops. Which is what?

[Harper Reed]

It's more than two pops. Two. It's way more than two.

[Leo Laporte]

It's way more than two pops.

[Will Harris]

Is it more than ZZ tops?

[Leo Laporte]

The eventual goal is to get 2,800 satellites up there and achieve 1,000 PETA operations per second. They communicate with each other using lasers. So they're, you know, that's pretty modern. Up to 100 gigabits per second. They share in total 30 terabytes of storage.

[Harper Reed]

There.

[Leo Laporte]

There are, but I mean, what.

[Will Harris]

What for?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

What's.

[Devindra Hardawar]

What's going on here?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I don't know. I'm just saying it's. I mean, Skynet might actually be in the sky. I'm just saying it would be the thing.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I just want to put this perspective. Yeah, has a. Has 3,300 tops. Yeah, that's a 50 90.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. This is. Okay.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Very expensive compared to these. Yeah, these satellites. Satellites which is far less.

[Will Harris]

But I'm, I'm, I'm definitely this the person that says please and thank you to their chat. GPT model for when the great reckoning comes. You know, they know that I was great.

[Leo Laporte]

It does solve the issue of you're putting them in space. So cooling is not a problem. Right.

[Harper Reed]

And no, I think it's. The problem is cooling is a different problem. Not that it solves the problem. It's definitely different than. Cooling is a different issue than what it is on Earth. Yeah. I'm in a group chat of a bunch of AI people and every time this pops up, there's the people who are, oh, cooling is then solved. And all these physicists are like, no, it's just way different. Where's it going to go? It doesn't dissipate, just chilling there. Yeah. So it's radiation over dissipation. Like in space, you can only reduce heat via radiation, which is a very slow process.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, very interesting.

[Harper Reed]

See, this is exactly what happened. A bunch of people in a group chat and then someone pops in with some physics.

[Leo Laporte]

The voice of God.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Will Harris]

In our case, half of what's the answer.

[Harper Reed]

So I, I think this is a.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this propaganda from China?

[Harper Reed]

No, no, no, no, no. I don't think it is. Because this is the same thing that like there's a lot of American companies that are doing this as well. I think that what we're seeing is we're seeing a glimpse of where we're going. And the reason for that is exactly as we talked about with the fin, the Finnish data cooling system. Right. Which is there's less space. It is sad. On the Earth, it's sadly taken by humans. There is all these pesky regulations about exhaust, about destruction of the environment, et cetera. They're getting in the way of turning Everything into a data center. And this is when I call back into like the Pave the Earth kind of propaganda from Usenet back in the day. Remember all that? But it's like this kind of fun thing of like, oh, well, what if we just put it into space in the same way people say, oh, what if we just went to Mars and there's very serious people working on these problems of like, what happens if we go to Mars, how do we have proper plants on Mars, so on and so forth. In the same way that these guys are like, well, let's put a 5090 up into space. What does that look like? What are the problems we're solving? How do we solve those problems? Because if they do solve that problem of cooling, of power, of all these things, seems like there's a lot of space in space, you know, and most of it we're, we're using to see the stars, but, but we don't need the stars. We just need gpu.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a link to the NASA study. State of the art small spacecraft technology. Chapter seven is thermal controls, passive radiation systems. NASA's thought a lot about this. Heat pipes, deployable radiators, thermal louvers. There's, you know, because it's not just, you know, Skynet. You just got to solve this. I mean, if you're going to put people in space, you have to solve it.

[Will Harris]

Does, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's very interesting.

[Harper Reed]

Well, there's, there's definitely something there. I think the question I always have with all of this stuff and the same thing we were talking about, AI agents that truly know me, that can replace my human assistant, is when does that happen? Not if it happens. And I think that's the same with this. It's definitely going to happen on its way. We're going to put some, you know, infrastructure somewhere in space or, you know, on the moon or in orbit or wherever, and that's going to then beam stuff back to us. Like, that's not crazy. That's what Starlink does, right? Is it takes it and pushes it to us. That's what these new phones do. That's very nice. We all agree with that. But so why is it so crazy that we try and put a data center up there? I don't think this is a, this is a wild, some wild idea. I think it's just people are excited about what they're doing, so they're releasing claims very, very early. You're like, I go to Micro center here in Chicago, pick up a 50 90, put in my house and it heats my desk. Or I can spend $100 million and shoot it into space for less.

[Devindra Hardawar]

For less tops.

[Harper Reed]

For way less tops. And, and. But more pops. It has way more pops.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, pops, eventually.

[Will Harris]

Can I ask you a question, Harper, which is you. You made an off the cuff remark which might have just been off the cuff, which is I can replace my human assistant with this.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, that's coming.

[Will Harris]

Would you want to replace your human assistant with this?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I quite.

[Will Harris]

I quite like my human assistant.

[Harper Reed]

I think it depends, like, what if.

[Leo Laporte]

Not everyone can afford an actual human assistant.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I would love an assistant.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too, but I can't afford an assistant. I do have my little AI guy listening at all times.

[Devindra Hardawar]

How's that going, Leo? That thing, it's not ex.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not as. It's semi useful. Like it makes a to do list for me every day and it's useful. This is from B Computer. And then I've talked about it before, but yeah, it's got suggestions. It knows what I'm doing. Like it says on my to do list, organize and store the newly purchased baking supplies this year. Well, it says you should clean the cat's litter box. It's becoming noticeably small.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's a good one.

[Will Harris]

Is your AI. I think that's the difference of. Is your AI assistant a task manager or a. A genuine.

[Leo Laporte]

Like it's a helper.

[Will Harris]

It's a helper, a support system. And support system is not the same as a, as a task manager.

[Harper Reed]

Right, but, but typically we keep talking about the support system and the support system of community and of love and safety. I don't necessarily think should be a relationship of capitalism. Like, I don't want to pay someone to care for me. I don't want to pay someone to love me and make me feel safe. I mean, we pay taxes, et cetera. We can be as pedantic as we want about this. But I do think that I've worked with admins and had wonderful experiences. And one of my favorite experiences is a billionaire's admin told me that my admin was very good. And I was like, that's like a pro, pro, pro. Telling you that your admin is pro. I was like, immediately texted them and was like, you've won. You're now in the major leagues. Don't get a better job because I can't afford to pay you their salary. But the reality is, is like, I do think that there is this thing of like a good admin is, is you just cannot replace them. And I don't think this is coming for them, but I do think it's making their job easier. And if you don't have an admin, it can give you admin like experiences. That is real. And I don't think this is coming next week or Tuesday. But like I did my email I've with Claude. It's incredible. Yeah, it's absolutely the wildest thing. And I really read it.

[Leo Laporte]

So what do you. Do you say, here's an email, respond to it. Or do you actually.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, I wrote a Gmail MCP server, okay. That will connect into Gmail, so I can load it up in cloud desktop or cloud code and I can say, hey, tell me what's in my inbox. Let's look at the top three things there and let's reply to them. I had a little bug in there and I had a bad situation recently which I need to blog about. Where this is what's like, statement, Harper. This was bad. So I had this dear friend of mine, really, a really good friend, ping me and said, hey, this person's looking for someone to write an AI book. Would you be interested? And I was like, let's hear the pitch. And so they connect me to this person and the person gave me this very great pitch that said, I'd love you to write this book. It had this very specific point of view that I just wasn't. I'm not that person. But I was like, I do know exactly who this was. This is in my head. So I had my AI, my little AI assistant, cloud code MCP mix say, do my emails. And that came up. That was a third email on it. And it wrote this very effusive response. And I had it save it as a draft. And I was like, hold your horses. This is not for me. I know these two people who I think would be perfect for this. This is well within their framework. I think they would be good at it. They would be cynical, but truthful. They would write a great book. I want to read their book. Let's reply with that. And cloud's like, great, done. So I just went and hit send. I didn't even read it. And then I get a reply back from this publisher who is just. Or this person who is just like, great, I love that you're excited about this. And I was like, oh, no. And it had sent the first email, not the second. And so I replied to this person and they were very nice and very sweet.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you say that that was an AI that did that?

[Harper Reed]

So I replied to this person and I said, hey, here is the email that I meant to reply with. I had an AI agent do I my emails? And it replied with the incorrect email. I'm so sorry. I would still love to talk about the project and I would love to connect you with these two people who I still think would be very good. And that person replied, was like, this makes me very uncomfortable. I do not think we should talk any longer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow.

[Harper Reed]

I was like, I was kind of like, well, first of all, if I didn't want to do a book, this is like the best way to course do a book. The guilt here. I would have written a book just to get out of any email that situation without feeling guilty. But the second thing is it also sounds like the perfect intro to an AI book about what's going to happen of just like, you know, we. We're not necessarily in control of some of this stuff. But I did. That did not dissuade me from doing my emails with, with an AI helper. It just made me be more careful and more thoughtful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you want to read the drafts.

[Harper Reed]

Before they're sent because I'm basically texting with someone who's writing emails on my behalf, which I, which I have done. And that works great. And the fact that I'm just sitting there being like, nope, make it more casual, make it sound more like me. Oh yeah, I'd love to go to that barbecue. Oh no, I don't want to write that book. Or yes, I would love to write that book. Oh, just kidding. Like the fact that it's very Q and A, I get so much interesting. It just felt really. It felt like an interesting interface that I had not yet experienced and it's been fascinating. But yeah, I felt really, really bad about that.

[Leo Laporte]

This. Is this what your company's doing is agentic AI? Is it creating MCP servers?

[Harper Reed]

No, no, I think MCP is a midpoint. I think it's a very interesting way to. For these things to use tools, but it doesn't seem to.

[Leo Laporte]

First of all, I should probably say.

[Will Harris]

For the lay people, can you define it?

[Harper Reed]

So mcps, as far as I can tell, I think it's much more complex than about to describe it, but it seems like a way to describe an API in a very verbose terms that allows for the AI to know exactly how to use this. So for instance, if you wanted to make a client that tweeted for you or posted to Macedon for you, both of those have very well defined APIs, then you could just give it the API Docs, and it would have to figure out all this stuff. Or you write a middleware that is much more friendly to how AIs work, that would allow it to just understand very quickly exactly what it needs to do. It might just have one endpoint that is called tweet, or read timeline or various things like this. So it takes a complex thing and simplifies it and then it gives you a bunch of examples.

[Will Harris]

Are you still writing the tweet or is it doing it for you?

[Harper Reed]

I mean, that's up to you. Like, you could say, I need to write a tweet about. I'm going to be on this great podcast and I want all my friends and followers to listen. And it could just be like, what's the podcast? You'd say? And then you'd say, like, what are you excited about it? You could prompt it to have it do whatever, and then it'll write you the tweet. And then you could just be like, perfect, send it. And it would send it. And in my case, it would send it to the wrong person. But, you know, send it. And this works. This is. This works really well. And so you see these folks on Twitter who are posting about really incredible setups of using NCP servers to do all sorts of really complicated things. That's quite impressive. I don't necessarily believe in MCP servers. And the reason is because I think we're going to spend all this time building these things, and then the next thing we know, the LLMs are just going to be using our computer. They're not going to need.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a transitional tool.

[Harper Reed]

It is a transitional tool, 100%. And if you look at where things are going, like, some of the computer use models that are coming out of China, some of them are coming out of the U.S. they're really incredible. Like, they're doing really incredible stuff. They're just slow. But what we've seen in the past three years is it just gets faster and faster and faster. So there's no reason why we shouldn't see some app that just is like, you just kind of say to the computer, you emote to it. Which is my favorite part about this. You're basically emoting to these computers. You're like, I. It's almost. I would love it if you could just go to this website, go to Amazon and buy me that book I heard about, you know, and you have the little B thing hooked to your collar, so it knows exactly what you're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

You can kind of do that. It's just kind of.

[Harper Reed]

And it just kind of goes and does it.

[Leo Laporte]

But I feel like I'm training something that someday will be able to do that kind of thing. You know, it's like it's learning about me. It's got a lot of fun.

[Will Harris]

Make a difference whether you're on a computer or on, on a phone.

[Harper Reed]

Well, this is the real question that I have. Like this is the thing. If you're, if you're talking about this stuff, does the destination look like a computer that we use today? Like, the thing that I talk about with my team all the time is like, why isn't a little teddy bear that sits on my desk? Why isn't it a little device that I carry?

[Leo Laporte]

Something you talk to, right? Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Or why is it talking? Why isn't it sub vocalizing like, why is it. What is the interface? I think we have this interesting time where we really need to be thoughtful about the interfaces and where the interfaces are coming from and how do we make them more accessible. Not just accessible for people who can like afford a computer with a keyboard, which is a very specific class of person, you know, the west, et cetera. But also like, it doesn't have to be super expensive either, like some of these new chips.

[Will Harris]

It's also an age of person. You know, the number of Gen Zs and Gen Alphas that just don't own a computer.

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Will Harris]

And they're just straight into phones is, is going to be a different world.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the way it is. It's the future. Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

So I do find this very complicated, but I'm very. We're seeing a lot of glimpses of the future and I think it's up to us, and I mean this in the very global us, to like weave the future together in the way we want it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a very encouraging thing because there are things we don't want.

[Harper Reed]

Right, Right. And do we want it to be like, you know, the system prompt that's being programmed to give us a very specific political viewpoint? Or do we want it to the way where you get to spend times with your friends and family while you earn, I don't know, UBI coin by going to the pub every five minutes or whatever it is? Like, you know, I don't know what the actual answer is, but I do think, I actually think the newest season of Black Mirror does a good job of talking about some of these issues of what happens around this stuff. And it was quite depressing in some regards and quite like melancholy and kind of beautiful. In other regards. And I think it's up to us to make that decision. And this is one of the reasons why I'm excited and have this company is because I think we have to choose the piece path of the future that we want. And we can't just let the Oligarch Bros be the ones that are choosing that.

[Leo Laporte]

That I agree with.

[Harper Reed]

They'll use their products, I suppose because there's not a lot of. Not a lot of foundational models coming out.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem is it's very expensive, isn't it? And don't you need to be an oligarch to create these things? Or maybe not.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I think maybe what we saw with Deep Seq was really interesting because it was this company that did have have a boatload of GPUs. Let's not act like they were. They told us this story about how it was very cheap to build and I think it was as compared to like an OpenAI and Devindra, I'm sure, you know, you covered this and thought about this a little bit as well. But it's this thing of like they did it less expensive and that's really the direction we want. We don't necessarily need it to be cheap. We just need it to be continuously less expensive and less.

[Leo Laporte]

Damaging to the environment too. I mean right now it's kind of scary.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's going to be the point where you can roll your own based on everything that has been learned before. And I think that was one of the big things with Deep Seq is that it was able to launch off of a lot of the training that already existed too. And they were able to do it much more quickly because they learned from those mistakes. But the thing when you're describing something like this, Harper, I'm just thinking like it really is the phone. Like our phones are the Star Trek communicators. It is the thing we have been dreaming of in science fiction for so long. I have my desk littered with all these garbage AI products like the rabbit R1 and these are all a waste of time because what you need revolves around your phone. Our phone's already getting really good AI power, more GPU power and things like that. And it's only going to get better. So yeah, at my. From what I'm thinking, it's like what can we lean on our phones to do now? Like right now voice memos in your iPhone can automatically transcribe, which is something you couldn't do last year. And that is life changing for me as a Journalist, I imagine the phone.

[Leo Laporte]

In conjunction with AirPods however, or some sort of in ear speaker maybe meta Ray Ban, some sort of way of talking to it without taking it out of your pocket and of it responding to you. Because in many cases all you need is audio back. You don't need a screen.

[Will Harris]

Guys, all I can tell you is that I just want tea. Earl Grey, hot.

[Harper Reed]

What if it is a can?

[Will Harris]

We can do that. I can retire quietly because you could.

[Harper Reed]

Probably hook a little canon thing to a Waymo and it could just cruise by your house and shoot it through the window at the right time. I'm sure that can happen.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't wait to live in this sci fi future. We're going to take a little break. Harper Reeves Reed, it's great to have you. Will Harris. Also, it's great to see you again, my friend. It's been a while. We got to stay in touch. You know, you're constantly moving. Instagram's Will Harris, we call him now. And of course Devinder Hardawar, whose podcast Will is a fan of. He loves films.

[Will Harris]

I love, honestly, Devindra, the film cast. I am an every week listener and I love the. I can't wait to watch you lose the summer movie draft again.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Lose so badly. Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

David Chen, Jeff Kanata, of course, Devendra. Talking about movies, you said you just did your Mission Impossible review.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We have not done it yet. I just saw it and I did a review over it in Gadgets. You can kind of get a preliminary glimpse into my thoughts. But we're doing that next week and it's going to be a big review. I think you all should listen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Before we see the filmcast.com. yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Okay. Should I go out and see Thunderbolts?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Thunderbolts is great. Shockingly great. Mainly because Florence Pugh is always a treasure. It's a great movie all around. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. See, you know we need Devindra, don't we? To know. I haven't been to a movie theater since Oppenheimer. I don't know. Oh, man, I just wait till they come out.

[Harper Reed]

And I saw Sinners.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I want to see Sinners. Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

You'll.

[Will Harris]

You're the forest Pugh. Also great in Oppenheimer.

[Leo Laporte]

She was great Oppenheimer as well. Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, brought to you by Monarch Money. Oh, I have been using this and I love it. Finances, as you probably know, can be messy and confusing. Monarch Money. Talk about a personal assistant. It's like your personal cfo ufo giving you full visibility and control. So you can stop earning and start growing. It's more than your average budgeting app. Monarch Money is a complete financial command center for your accounts, your investments, your goals. Don't just manage your money, start building your wealth. And by the way, do it with 50% off your first year. Just for you, our listeners. I use Monarch. I check Monarch these days with the stock market going every which way but loose. I check Monarch Money every morning just to see where I stand. You know, it's great for budgeting, it's great for reviewing, you know, the big transactions and where you stand. And I just, I just like it to see where my investments are going. Start managing. And it's a great way to do it all in one place. You just connect up all your accounts. It couldn't be easier. Start managing your finances to build a lot life you actually want. One thing I have learned in my advanced age is without a clear financial picture, your financial dreams can just feel so out of reach. Monarch makes managing money simple. No matter how busy you are with all your accounts right in there, credit cards, investments, everything in one place, you'll always know where your money stands. But without any hassle, I just open it right up and there I am. Track your spending, your savings, your investments effortlessly so you can focus on what matters most, which is making your biggest life goals a reality. It's a finance tool people actually love. Join over 1 million households named Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. The top recommended personal finance app by users and experts. 30,000 5 star reviews. Add me to the list. I love it. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Use code [e-mail] in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarchmoney.com with code twit. And we thank him so much for supporting the show. Let's talk about old school engineering. Know how Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles away and they lost control of its thrusters. They've actually been considered inoperable since 2004. Engineers just fixed them. The interstellar thruster Resurrection. A little creative problem solving from the engineering team. There is a great documentary by the way on the Voyagers that you should absolutely watch because it's. These guys have been part of this team for like 40 years, right? And more. And they just, and, and they're getting, they're getting on. This is all they've been doing. There's a. The group's getting smaller and smaller. The thrusters have been active since 2004 when the internal heaters lost power. But engineers discovered that a circuit disturbance might have simply flipped the heater power switch off. So they remote. Last month, they remotely commanded the spacecraft to activate the backup thrusters, restart the heaters. Kind of a risky thing. They could have lost contact with the Voyager. But no, it worked.

[Will Harris]

I mean, it's just mad, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it crazy? 15 billion miles away.

[Will Harris]

15 billion miles. Miles and we can restart a thruster. It was basically the equivalent of turning it off and on again.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically, that's what happened 47 years Voyager 1 has been out there. This is, by the way, not the Star Trek V'Ger that was never launched. It's like Voyager 30 or something that was just a movie fiction. But we don't need movie fiction. There are two of them out there and they are still.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's nice to have a reminder. Humans are incredible.

[Harper Reed]

Humans do something.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Can do these things and also bring measles back. We can do all these.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, look at. We can.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We can move forward and we can go backwards. We can bring sideways.

[Leo Laporte]

We can do whatever you want. You just ask. So I don't.

[Will Harris]

There's a. There's a nice little. Sorry, you're.

[Harper Reed]

You're.

[Leo Laporte]

You pick something. Go ahead.

[Will Harris]

Well, I was gonna say this nice little story at the bottom. Have you guys been playing blueprints?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. What is that? I don't know that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

What is this sort of like first person puzzle game where you're mapping out a mansion. Every prince, it's called in the little.

[Will Harris]

Submissions at the bottom.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Will Harris]

It's been the most popular Steam title of the last. I don't know how long.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

20. It says 25% of Steam players are playing. Playing it.

[Will Harris]

It's absolutely nuts.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Will Harris]

25% of Steam players are playing this game.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel left out now.

[Will Harris]

It's a ton on blueprint, which is, you know, obviously the.

[Leo Laporte]

Although I have to say 50% of this twit panel is playing it. So it's actually not surprising.

[Will Harris]

Do you want to try and explain it?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, it's. I'm only a couple hours in because this is one of those games where it's good to have like a lot of time in. But yeah, you know, you're. I believe you're visiting a deceased relative's home. You can. The. The goal is like, if you get to a certain hidden room, you can take control of this estate and everything that they own.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this a Little like Mist. Remember that game?

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's a little misty. It's a little misty every day. You go in and you have to basically map the room, but you randomly get a set of different cards and you can like map out how you want the hallways and the, and the actual, actual layout of the buildings.

[Leo Laporte]

The AI could help you with this.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, I've heard of people.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually it's playing like that old adventure, Colossal Cave adventure, and using AI to, to map it out for them.

[Will Harris]

It's kind of like mist combined with a deck builder.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yes.

[Will Harris]

Combined with, you know, some sort of crazy puzzle game. And it has just completely captured the world. And, and 20 this week, 25 people percent of everybody that has Steam are playing blueprints. Clearly I need to play written by, you know, like three guys in the ass end of nowhere.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fantastic.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's really, it's very misty. Leo, you should definitely play it. But like this is the game to play now. This and the Clair Obscure, which is also fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

It does look a little bit misty, but it's not. You know, mist was like one picture at a time. So there are 45 rooms and you're trying to find the 46th, basically.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, but you, you.

[Will Harris]

That's only the beginning. You find the 46.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Will Harris]

And then the real mystery starts to unfold.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so it's a little bit like Clue too, huh?

[Will Harris]

It's there a bit of that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

There's item collection. Yeah, yeah.

[Will Harris]

And it goes into crazy. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this one of those things though, where you like standing in the room and you just cannot, you got. I don't, I can't figure it out. What. That's what happened to me with Mist.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's the entire game.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the whole thing. You get stuck in a room, but.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You, you make progress, you discover new rooms, you find out little bits like it's a. It's really cool and immersive and it's such a throwback to things like Myst.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is. It's an old school game. Blueprints. Thank you.

[Will Harris]

One of those things that's totally. You know, there are very, very, very few indie games that, with that kind of success.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We don't need no Grand Theft Auto 6. There's too many games.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we got blueprints.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Got blueprints. You got the new Doom. You got clear, obscure. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Jamie Lee Curtis is publicly shaming Mark Zuckerberg because he ignored her request to remove a deep fake scam ad on Facebook and Instagram. It Used AI manipulated video to hawk some sketch product. So she's gone on Facebook and Instagram saying, my name is Jamie Lee Curtis and I've gone through every proper channel to ask you and your team to take down this totally AI fake commercial for some BS that I didn't authorize, agreed to, or endorse.

[Harper Reed]

I think that's the only way to work in this world.

[Leo Laporte]

Yell at them. Yell at them on their own platform.

[Harper Reed]

Well, it's a little bit of kind of this tweak on the Streisand effect, right, Where.

[Leo Laporte]

Use your notoriety.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, use your notoriety to really poke at these things, otherwise they're not going to care. And the problem is that those of us who don't have that platform have none of that power. And so I'm happy that this is happening and I hope it points. It helps a little bit. I mean, there's a little bit of. Scarlett Johansson did that as well with the AI voice stuff. And we know how tech people are. We are tech people. Like, we're not naturally going to change. We're going to be like. But we're making the world better, you know, and it's like we're going to have this perverse perspective of how it's. How it's going to work without thinking of how it affects people around us. So I think it's important for people to stand up and shout a bit.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, it worked. According to Engadget, a spokesperson for Meta said the company is removing the video.

[Will Harris]

So can I give a minor little plug for a. For. For a company that one of my friends is. Is. Is running?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Will Harris]

Which is called Verify Labs AI and their whole premise is that one of the major attack vectors over the next, you know. Well, we're getting it now, but over the next few years is jumping on a Zoom call with somebody who's a complete deep fake.

[Leo Laporte]

That happened. Remember a few months ago, a guy thought he was talking to the CEO and the CFO of his company and transferred some huge amount of money.

[Will Harris]

That is exactly it. And it. That is happening more and more. If you're a lawyer, you need to be able to verify that the person you're taking a deposition from is in fact. So what these guys have developed is a Chrome extension extension. And if you're in a Zoom call or a Google Meet or, or whatever, you can hit a little button on your. On your Chrome extension and it will say, this person is, you know, 98 real.

[Leo Laporte]

How does it know? How do it know? They.

[Will Harris]

They have a whole bunch of tech that. That sort of sorts out, you know, whether or not it's real or not. I don't trust any of this interesting thing because we. We're. We're gonna have to get to the point where, you know, I love appearing on this Week in Tech. It's always one of the highlights of my week. But one day, if I log on and there's, you know, fake Leo saying, welcome to this.

[Leo Laporte]

There will be as soon as we can do it. I'm doing it to.

[Will Harris]

To appear on this episode. We're looking forward to your donation of $10,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Come to me now, my children.

[Will Harris]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

The children of the night.

[Will Harris]

And it's going to be a huge thing. This deep fake fraud is going to be absolutely enormous over the next few years.

[Harper Reed]

I think it is already a thing, and I think it is already happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you detect it is the question. You sound like you're skeptical.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I am skeptical. I'm skeptical a lot of these things. I remember when there was a huge Twitter bot problem and I bought my brother a couple hundred thousand Twitter followers, and then I ran one of those spam detectors, and it was like, your followers me are all fake and his were all real. And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. I verify that these are fake. I purchased them. But I think it's a really complicated problem. It probably is much like a captcha, where it's not just about entering the. You know, it's not about clicking on the bicycles or entering the character. It's about how your mouse moves. All these other things.

[Leo Laporte]

AI can solve captchas now. Right.

[Harper Reed]

But that's. I think it's really. It's this arm race, and it is an arms race.

[Will Harris]

It's going to be a total arms race for the next however many years. Years of, you know, we're going to have better deep fake creation, Better deep fake detection, better deep fake creation.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa showed me a meme this morning that looked, for all intents and purposes, real, but I just sniffed that it was AI And I don't know if it was, but. And I wondered, how could I tell it's AI but we're very. Humans are really tuned from millions of years of evolution, evolution to detect the phoniness of some kind.

[Will Harris]

One of the things that I really wanted to do that I was always very gutted that I didn't get to do is, Leo, you had the book we published on Douglas Adams. I do, and I really wanted to have Douglas Adams read one of his unread X serps as a deep fake.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you remember that the documentary company that did the Anthony Bourdain documentary.

[Will Harris]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Where they used an AI Anthony Bourdain to read something he really wrote and it sounded really like him. But they got in a heap of trouble, especially with Bourdain's estate.

[Will Harris]

Yeah. So we. So we. We created it. We had a version of the. Of Douglas that was reading something that he wrote. Wrote. And the estate. Yeah. Wouldn't let us do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Estates don't like that. Yeah.

[Will Harris]

It was sad because for those of us who love Douglas and love that kind of, you know, would love to hear more from him.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I just want to go on record as someone with more than 100,000 hours of video of me publicly available. My estate says go right ahead.

[Harper Reed]

So here's the complicated thing.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Your lawyer's going to call right now, Leo.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, but here's the. Here's the complicated thing with all this is that I wonder if it's a cost of money or if it's a cost of. It's unclear how to commercialize it. My cynical kind of point of view is that they don't have any. They're not trying to protect the vibe of the person or some like ip. They're just trying to figure they can't quickly understand how to attach a dollar amount to it. And so they just say no until the answer. Until they understand. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they don't know how to. Well, I'll give you as an example, the voice of Darth Vader. James Earl Jones, as I remember, his estate said you can. They gave him. They gave his voice out. They sold the rights to it, I believe. And now Darth Vader is appearing in Fortnite.

[Will Harris]

Will be the first time that James Earl Jones has posthumously appeared as Darth Vader. Before he died, he recorded, you know, he spent days in a recording studio.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. You know, recording anything intending to make a AI Simulcrum. Yeah.

[Will Harris]

A model could be used after his death.

[Leo Laporte]

So Epic announced that if you find and defeat Vader on the Fortnite map, you can recruit him onto your team. You can talk to him him using the in game, you know, chat feature, and he will respond in James Earl Jones voice. You are wise old young one. Let's go smash that man. I don't know what he would say. What do you say in Fortnite? Let's dance.

[Will Harris]

You should have built higher, young man.

[Leo Laporte]

You should have built higher. Now it makes me want to play Fortnite. But you have to beat Vader, which is probably not an easy thing to do. So player audio and transcriptions of their voices will not be stored, although EPIC will have access to transcriptions of Vader's responses just in case. Players report. Darth Vader swore at me.

[Devindra Hardawar]

They're already, like, players already making it say, like, yeah, they're swearing and saying messed up stuff. And this is what happens. You just put a live AI out there. It's kind of cool. But it's also like, at least in this one, James Earl Jones, like, had full control. Like, this was his choice to do that. The thing about your Douglas Adams example will, like, I don't.

[Will Harris]

It must be tempered with action.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, you know what? Just tell me your favorite food, Darth.

[Will Harris]

Just tell me it. Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a twitch stream.

[Will Harris]

Pardon me. I require a palatable and efficient sustainable sustenance that will sustain me.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty good. What freaking food is that? Darth Vader. Tell me.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Double down.

[Harper Reed]

Freaking.

[Will Harris]

Such vulgarity. Does not become.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the one that you're gonna report.

[Harper Reed]

I love it. I love it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

At least it was. He was his choice to sell this thing. He did not know what would happen to it. I think didn't have that choice.

[Leo Laporte]

He's up there and laughing.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Sure. His estate's laughing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The state's laughing all the way back, as they say. By the way, Epic is trying to get back on the iOS store. And Apple, even though the judge spanked him hard, is still saying, no way, man.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple is blocking Fortnite from both the US and the EU app stores, probably without. Without any merit. Fortnite has gone back to the judge saying, your honor, not playing fair. They're not letting us in.

[Will Harris]

It's almost like you've got an executive branch that sort of ignores court orders and sets a precedent for everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Will Harris]

It's political.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but it's a good point. You know, once you. It's a slippery slope. Once you start doing that, people lose respect. Respect. Epic says Apple's denial is, quote, blatant retaliation for challenging in court. Well, duh.

[Harper Reed]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

I think the judge. But this is the point is the judge already yelled at Apple, apparently without any effect. Apple's immediately appealed it. Apple says we're not going to let it in until after the 9th July of circuit rules on. On our appeal.

[Will Harris]

What do you think is gonna. What's. What's the end game here, Devindra?

[Devindra Hardawar]

The end game for Apple or for Epic? I feel like it's Tim Sweeney. Right? Like they're. The end game was to Make Apple essentially get rid of these, all these fees, especially if you're charging for stuff outside the App Store. And they kind of got what they wanted. But, but I think Epic thought, this is it, we can get right back there immediately. And no, Apple's just making them sweat, basically.

[Leo Laporte]

Although Amazon immediately put a buy this book button on the Kindle app, a lot of apps have immediately said, oh good, we're going to put that button on there. Apple was getting around it by saying, well, first of all, you can't do that. And if you do it in the eu, where to the law says you can, we're going to charge 27% commission, so you're not going to really save any money anyway. And that's what, that's what really cheesed the judge off. She said, wait, that's called malicious compliance. Nextcloud has a complaint against Android, against Google. I think Google maybe has a little bit of merit in, in this. For the last few months, if you use nextcloud, you were not able to use the Android version to copy files from Android to your nextcloud server. Nextcloud complain and complain and complain. Finally, Google has given in. According to nextcloud, unhappy with the recently lost file upload feature in nextcloud app for Android. So are we. And under that it said, good news. This morning, May 15, Google reached out to us and offered to restore the permission, which will give the functionality back that was lost. I understand Google's probably thinking, well, we don't want an app to be able to just kind of randomly transfer files off your Android phone. But on the other hand, this is nextcloud. It's an open source project, it's reliable.

[Will Harris]

This really feels like Grandpa's Simpson waving his fist at the cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

I do that every day.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Android is a platform of freedom and openness. Except not like this.

[Leo Laporte]

Not always.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Not too much.

[Leo Laporte]

Not always. You have the new Galaxy S25, the Edge.

[Devindra Hardawar]

No, I don't really do phone reviews anymore. Thank God, because those were.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a hard life. It's hard.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But no, we reviewed it. Sam Rutherford or no, Matt Smith reviewed it for us. Yeah. And you know, he's liking it. But it is. It's the S25 Edge. It's a thinner S25 by a few millimeters. And it's the sort of thing where it's like we gain nothing except a slightly thinner phone. It's not much lighter than the.

[Leo Laporte]

Less battery life, probably less battery life.

[Devindra Hardawar]

No telephoto lens, so the camera is worse as well. You kind of lose all these things to get this super thin phone, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Look how thin it is.

[Will Harris]

You've still got to put it in a case otherwise this going to fool.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean some people don't. Apparently the case Apple made is also really thin too. Like that actually keeps it down. Or the case Samsung made.

[Leo Laporte]

There are rumors that Apple's going to do the same thing with the iPhone 17. There'll be a slim version.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's basically it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the market demanding a thin phone?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Is that why the market does not demand?

[Leo Laporte]

I thought it was all Jony. I've pushing the thinness thing.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You know, I think these companies are desperate to do something new, something a little different. It's because phones have gotten real, really, really boring aside from the foldables. And even then that's a whole, that's not a fully, fully baked, you know, thing to do right now. This is gonna be an era of super thin phones. Apple's gonna try something here. The thinking is like whatever Apple does could be like, you know, the first step towards a foldable. Cause once you make one super thin side, you can make two and connect them together. So there's that. And I think everybody forgot the new iPad pros are also crazy thin. The iPad pros are even thinner than this S25 Edge right now. And I will tell you the first time I saw one of those in person when I did WWDC last year, it was sort of a wow moment.

[Leo Laporte]

I love my M4 iPad Pro. It's funny, for years I didn't, I thought the iPad is, you know, I want a Mac or I want a phone. The iPad doesn't have a role in my life. And so I would buy them but I really wouldn't have a use. But for something's happened now with the keyboard and everything, I use it more and more and more. And I'm actually using more than my MacBook Air lately.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's interesting.

[Will Harris]

Can I tell you my, my only good iPad story was, you know, I love my iPad, but it's a, you know, it's a glorified Netflix device. But when Apple first launched it back in what, 2010?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Like 2012.

[Will Harris]

Yeah, 2012.

[Leo Laporte]

2011. Yeah, it was right before Steve Jobs. 2010. Yes.

[Will Harris]

Well, they used to, used to do was simulcast the, the presentation from San Francisco into somewhere in London so that as a London journal you could go, you could, you could watch it and then they would have the, they'd have the model, the demo area.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, great.

[Will Harris]

So there is a wonderful venue in London called the old Truman Brewery Brewery. And it does what it says on the tin. It's in East London. It used to be an enormous brewery and it's. It's quite famous for. For being an old brewery. And Apple held this press launch there. So they've got it. You know, it's six o' clock in the evening, they've got a big cinema screen, they've put seating out. They've. You know, you turn up as a. As a journalist and you're thinking, right, this can be fantastic. I'll turn up at 6:00 after, after work. I'll have a beer while I'm watching the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's a brewery. Of course you will. Right.

[Will Harris]

And you walk in and Apple puts on orange juice and sparkling water.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I knew this. I knew where this was going. Because Apple won't let you drink. There's no way. And they're purists.

[Will Harris]

I think maybe the best headline as a journalist I ever wrote was, Apple launches iPad fails to organize Piss up in Brewery.

[Leo Laporte]

Could have been fun. Were you writing for the Register at that point? That sounds like a Register headline. Exactly right. Well, maybe thin in a phone isn't what you want, but if you are bringing a handheld point of sale device to a table in a restaurant, thin probably is good. This is the new square $400 handheld they say is one of the thinnest and lightest point of sale devices on the market. You see, you probably don't understand this. Well, no, you spend a lot of time in the U.S. in the U.S. we prefer to give our credit cards to a waiter who then removes it to the back of the. Out of your sight.

[Will Harris]

You guys are psycho. Over here. You request the bill, the person brings the receipt, brings a little terminal, and you tap your card and you haven't.

[Leo Laporte]

Let go of your card.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Harper, you would probably have more experience talking about. The whole payment system here is ridiculous.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I am. I'm astounded. I love it. And how. And how muscle memory it is for Americans who, like, go and sit in some restaurant in London and then hand the waiter who is like, why do I. Why.

[Leo Laporte]

You need your card, sir?

[Harper Reed]

Why would you. Oh, you're not from here. I'm sorry. I'll give you a receipt and a pin, but. But it's like this hilarious, hilarious thing. And the terminal is great like this. This is really cool stuff. But am I not mistaken in that I think you can do this with an iPhone right now? And an Android phone.

[Leo Laporte]

They added that feature. Although I'll be honest, I'd much rather see something that looks like a point of sale device than the waiter saying, I got my phone here. You want to pay, right?

[Harper Reed]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

At a farmer's market, that's one thing.

[Will Harris]

But my local farmer's market has a million of these. Everything. You know, you want a little bit of cheese, you want a little bit of, you know, paner raisin, you want whatever. You just tap your card on a tiny little.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I use my watch. I feel like it's magic. I feel like I'm actually not paying for anything. I'm just waving my hands.

[Harper Reed]

What I like about using the watch is you get two gifts. One you get to use the watch, and the other is the eye roll from the person that is manning the terminal. I mean, I'm serious. Every time I do it, I'm just waiting for the eye roll because they're just like, okay, yeah, exactly. And I'm just sitting there, like, cheesing. Huh, Huh.

[Will Harris]

I use the watch, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Am I cool or what? Well, the good news is here in the States, and perhaps thanks to Square, you're seeing more and more of these waiters coming to the table, and you get to pay with your card. It's still a minority of restaurants, but it's.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I'm seeing more QR codes these days. Like, and I like that because it's just like, boom, okay, I take a picture, I leave.

[Leo Laporte]

Where's the QR code? Is it glued to the tv?

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's on the receipt. It' just on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I have seen that. Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's great.

[Harper Reed]

So nice. And it uses. For the people who are interested me, it uses web clip technology, I think, on Android and on iOS. So it installs a little, tiny, tiny iOS app. So the experience is really native, at least with Toast. And it's very.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really interesting because Apple announced this whole idea of you don't have to have the app on your phone. It will load this little quickly, load a stub that will do what you need do to. To do. And I never saw anybody use it so good. This is the first real business that I'm aware of.

[Harper Reed]

It's really cool and really smooth, and if I see it in a restaurant, I use it every time.

[Will Harris]

Welcome to 2020 in England.

[Harper Reed]

Next.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Well, I know, listen.

[Harper Reed]

Next you're going to talk about health insurance. And then I got to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper, of course, is an expert in payment systems. He sold his company to Braintree, which then became part of PayPal. Work with both. Why is it. We're so behind in the US because we didn't even get chip and pin. We got chip and sign.

[Harper Reed]

I think. Well, technically the order was I sold it to PayPal and then lived inside a braintree. But okay, whatever. Yeah, but I think the reason is because we are a very big country physically and it's hard to spread technology out easily. And then also we also are just scared of cost. And I think the US has a really bad, not invented here problem where we look at something that is happening elsewhere in the world and we're just like, well, well, I mean, they're British and then we just ignore everything that they possibly could bring.

[Leo Laporte]

Couldn't possibly be good.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think they're beer warm. They don't.

[Harper Reed]

This is, it's really interesting because this, this and I'm sure it's rooted in American exceptionalism and all this other stuff, but without getting into that, you see it all over where, you know, for those of you who've been to like Shenzhen, like some of the stuff happening there is incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Is not evenly distributed.

[Harper Reed]

It's really interesting. And I think the disappointing thing for a lot of Americans is the, is not distributed to the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think that's also because a lot of times it's because it was invented here and when you have a lot of infrastructure around the like, it's why SMS was so slow here.

[Harper Reed]

Well, it's just like, it's, it's like legacy, right? It's like it's legacy.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, cell phones were invented here. Yeah, but, but we were way behind in things like SMS and cell phone payments systems over countries where they had, you know, implemented all at once.

[Harper Reed]

But we're really ahead on cdma.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank God.

[Harper Reed]

Really helped us out. That really helped us. Thank God.

[Will Harris]

Your only American exceptionalism is how hard your cell phone payment system sucks.

[Harper Reed]

We have a lot. We have a lot, but we will. That's a different podcast. There's a whole bunch that we excel in.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, there is one. I'm going to do one more piece of good news. Montana has become the first state to close, close the law enforcement data broker loophole. So we have never had comprehensive privacy legislation in the United States. We maybe never will because for one thing, law enforcement really loves data brokers. It's a great way to get information without a wiretap. Right. Just cost a couple of bucks.

[Will Harris]

So I think I saw that on the wire.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? That's. Yeah, right.

[Will Harris]

That was a documentary.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, but that was 20 years ago. But it's the same today. Right. In every state other than Montana. If police want to know where you've been, according to the eff, you don't. They don't have to present evidence and go to a judge to get a warrant. They use something called a pen warrant or pen, I can't remember a pen warrant. I think they just go to a portal that the cell phone companies have set up, pay a buck 50 or buy it from data brokers. All the location data apps on your phone, all that data is being collected, recording in a location constantly and just uploaded to data brokers. We know this and there it is for sale on the open market. So Montana with SB282 has become the first state, state to close that loophole. In Montana, the government may not use money to get access to information about electronic communications, the contents of electronic communications, the contents of communications sent by tracking devices. Digital information on electronic fund transfers, pseudonymous information or sensitive data, which is defined in Montana as information about a person's private life, personal associations, religious affiliation, health status, citizen status, biometric data and precise geolocation. Still can go to a judge and get a warrant, which is fine. That's a perfect. That's fine. Make them how it should work. At least that's how it's supposed to work. It's the fourth Amendment.

[Will Harris]

Yeah, that sounds to me like I can safely pay for my hookers on PayPal in Montana.

[Leo Laporte]

Only right, don't leave the state.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Really bring it all back together. Will.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, I mean, so this is good, good news, of course. What's Congress up to? Well, they just jammed and we'll see if it goes through. I think it will. They just jammed a, a bit into the budget reconciliation bill that would prevent states from regulating AI at all for 10 years. And who knows, it might get that privacy thing in there as well. The problem is when you put it in the reconciliation bill, it's pretty, pretty hard to get it out.

[Harper Reed]

It's kind of funny, though.

[Will Harris]

Beautiful bill, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a big, beautiful bill. Getting bigger all the time.

[Will Harris]

Beautiful. There's a beautiful bill.

[Harper Reed]

There was a couple, I don't know, right the way to say it, pundits, I suppose, who were talking about how unless it is such a discreet addendum that it could really affect future tech regulation as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It might have an unintended consequence. Consequence.

[Harper Reed]

Because if they are saying you can't regulate or create legislation around these things, that also could include all of the kind of protect the children privacy movements that the Republicans push in their Anti encryption. It couldn't. It could. Like any attempt to regulate big tech, which, you know, just the Copyright office is talking about the stuff around copyright, like any of this stuff might be within the scope of this kind of hastily added piece of law. And so it'll be really interesting to see how this goes. And the one thing that I have been thinking about a lot is the US is not very good at iterative lawmaking. And that is I think one of the weaknesses of our program as it compares to other countries who are very good at this. Japan, for instance, did a very good job of iteratively addressing cryptocurrency and continues to do so.

[Leo Laporte]

So they make a bill and then adjust it and adjust and go back forth and prove it, improve it. We just make a. Make a law and then say fine, we're done.

[Harper Reed]

Well, we say fine, we're done. And then we just have to all deal with the consequences of that forever. While Will makes fun of us from across the pond. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

We're still using the Aliens and Sedition act from the 18th century, right?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah, we are. And it's not, I mean we is.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably not the right word. The, the administration is.

[Harper Reed]

It's not to say that there aren't old good laws or old bad laws. It's just that we don't have a tendency to say, whoops, the law we made two ago didn't actually do a good job. Why don't we address it 250 years ago? And so I find I've got a.

[Will Harris]

Boatload of tea to sell you.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I mean we're getting sold it, that's for sure. But I do think that this is, this is interesting. Like it's. I don't think so.

[Leo Laporte]

The side effect, the unintended consequence of that, you know, AI law is that is in its language, it prevents states from regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems or automated decision systems. And that is a very broad term. Any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics or artificial intelligence that uses a simplified output including a score classification or recommendation to materials like credit scoring.

[Harper Reed]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it. Well, it's banning every content according to Mike Masnick in Tech Dirt, who is very active in all of this. Every content moderation system ever created.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It would preclude 99% of state. Think of the children social media de anonymization laws and 100% of the attempts to regulate social media under defective product theories of action. So good. Maybe they should pass that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I don't think they're Very good at governing. Guys, I feel like really bad. It's not working out well for.

[Leo Laporte]

For anybody.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not just. You know what, I hate to say it, of the children Democrats. It's just as bad because for different reasons, they support these social media laws as well.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The COSA thing is incredibly stupid too. And there's so many people telling them.

[Leo Laporte]

That Chuck Schumer is a sponsor of Xhosa. Yeah, it's terrible.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, let's take a break. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's the way it is. We are having some fun. We're going to wrap it up pretty soon here. I just want to let you all know. I know, Will. It's getting. The pubs are closing soon, so we'll get you out of here quick. Will Harris, he's in London. Great to have you. Instagram's Will Harris. W I L H A double R I S. That unique and wonderful spelling.

[Will Harris]

One L and two R's. That's the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you say. That's what you've been saying your whole damn life. You poor fella. That's okay. My real name is Leo and I've been saying Leo as in Mayo my whole life.

[Will Harris]

What do you want to know?

[Harper Reed]

The.

[Will Harris]

The reason was that, you know, when you're growing up and you're playing, you know, the Street Fighter two cabinets or the Outrun cabinets.

[Leo Laporte]

What wil is perfect is you only.

[Will Harris]

Ever get three letters to put.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I can, right? Leo.

[Will Harris]

Yeah, I had Har or Leo was mine.

[Leo Laporte]

Har or Purr.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I wasn't neither. Good. None of good ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Har or Purr. And forget the vendor. Hardawar. You're never going to get that in there.

[Harper Reed]

No, he had a good. He had a good one. Dev. That's pretty dope.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you do dev? Nice.

[Devindra Hardawar]

When I. When I could play arcade games. Yeah. Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

It sounds like a painful childhood tale there, but we won't delve into that. We're going to take a little break. More to come this week in Tech, brought to you this week by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. They've been doing it longer than we have since 1985. Now, good news, if you use the Shopify app Store, which many I know of. You do. My son does. Melissa's address validation app is now available for merchants in the Shopify App Store. Enhance your business fulfillment, keep your customers happy. With Melissa, it auto fills. It's great. You get enhanced address correction, which means it will correct and standardize addresses in more than 240 countries and territories and add missing components like the zip code or the postal code as you Brits call it. Ensures compliance with local formatting rules all over the world. Melissa's address engine is certified by leading postal authorities worldwide. And smart alerts will warn in real time, this is great. If there's a potential issue with a shipping address and it actually will do that checkout so customers can be told, hey, that's not going to work. They can update that information before it even gets into your system, before the order is processed. While businesses of any size benefit from Melissa, the data quality expertise Melissa offers goes far beyond things just like simple address verification. They do data cleansing, data validation, and that's really important if you think about it. Melissa is in so many areas for healthcare. For instance, 2 to 4% of contact data in healthcare is outdated every month. If you've got millions of patient records and they're moving around, you need precision. Only Melissa can do that. It's also used, I love this in healthcare, to make sure the prescription matches the actual pills being delivered, matches the patient information, information. There's some places Melissa's used that are vital. There's life or death. Slight variations in addresses, misspelled names can cause havoc, duplication, fragmentation, errors, the risks of misidentification, lost records. Melissa's data enrichment services eliminate the gap. Whether you're a healthcare organization, a government, a fintech business, you build a more comprehensive view of every patient, every customer, customer, every user supporting continuity of care, timely follow up. This also aids in predictive analytics, allowing providers to identify patterns in patient behavior or medical needs that can inform preventative care. It's these guys are data scientists. That's what's really cool about this. It's so far beyond addresses now. Data, of course, is always safe, compliant and secure. With Melissa, their solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant, ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC2 HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Of course they do. Get started today. 1000 records cleaned for free. Go to melissa.com twit melissa.com twit we thank them so much for their support over the many years now of this week in tech. Thank you, Melissa. Ah, let's see, where do we go next? Oh, I was talking about Montana. There's another reason to go to Montana. Montana's very interesting state. They have created there's a bill for experimental medical treatments. You can go there to get access to treatments that are not FDA approved.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, oh, lucky day.

[Leo Laporte]

Great. My lucky day is here. Once it's signed by the governor. It will be the most expansive in the country, allowing access to drugs that haven't been fully tested. All you have to do to sell any drug or treatment in Montana is put it through phase one clinical trials. That's the generally small first in human studies just to make sure it won't kill you. Doesn't show it's effective, just says it won't kill you. This is really. Montana's becoming a very interesting state. One of the people, one of the groups pushing for this was longevity enthusiasts.

[Harper Reed]

This is kind of the opposite of that, that AI law, where it's just like, they're like, well, let's just make it as wide as possible.

[Leo Laporte]

Whatever you want to do.

[Harper Reed]

I'm. I'm kind of for this. I.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you have the choice, right? And I know it happens all the time that I've known people who were dying, frankly, and couldn't get experimental treatments because they weren't FDA approved. If they could go to Montana, if they had the money and they could go to Montana to get those, I think that's a good thing. And they couldn't. I mean, they. One person I'm thinking of passed away. It couldn't have been any worse. Worse, let's put it that way.

[Harper Reed]

I think the issue is how does it impact the other people within that community. Like, you know, if someone does some experimental treatment and then they become, you know, like, you know, they then require services as little as we do have in the US that is still something that is impactful, you know. And so I would hope that we would be thinking through that. With that said, like, you know, I mean, I'm all for it. Like, I think not just the longevity stuff, but like, you were talking about all the examples of, of early trials. But at the same time, you know, I don't know if we need to have everyone being their own doctor. I kind of like my doctor telling me when I'm not supposed to take all the supplements. So we'll see. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. My guess is that it will be signed into law.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. U.S. army Bonita said, what is getting in on the right to repair? Apparently the army's buying stuff they couldn't fix. So now it's going to add right to repair provisions in all existing and future contracts with manufacturers so that you don't have to bring it back to the shop when your tank breaks down. You don't have to bring it back to the shop to get it from fixed.

[Harper Reed]

It's very convenient.

[Leo Laporte]

You'd think that would have been always kind of part of the deal, but no. In fact, you know, they've had the same right to repair issues that we normal people have. A 2019 report in the New York Times described how a maintenance marine in South Korea couldn't repair a generator because of the warranty, even though he had the tools. He had the know how he could repair have fixed it. Engines at a US military base in Okinawa were packed up and shipped back to contractors in the United States for repair, according to ProPublica, because the Navy's contract with General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin forced the military to fly contractors to the ship to make repairs on proprietary equipment.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You got to milk those government contracts for all they're worth, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Put everything up for set right to repair.

[Will Harris]

When you buy, you buy the thing. But the actual monies in the service contract, right?

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Well, that's. Boy, that's the great American way, by the way. I don't know. Do you have HBO in the uk?

[Will Harris]

No, it doesn't exist. We have a million different bastardized versions of it that none of which.

[Leo Laporte]

None of they would buy the shows probably.

[Will Harris]

So than hbo.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a todrick tale HBO got remade named HBO Max, which was launched in 2020 three years later, 2023, Warner Brothers discovery took the HBO off to say it's just Max.

[Will Harris]

Max, the one to watch for hbo.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just Max. Now in a press release release, they say we're returning the HBO brand in term. It's going to be called HBO Max again. Thank you, David Zaslav. Today we're bringing back hbo, the brand that represents the highest quality in media. To further accelerate that growth in the years ahead. Who pays these clowns?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Those people are still getting paid. Yeah.

[Will Harris]

Has one man ever been paid so much for so little cock something up so massively?

[Harper Reed]

And he didn't even say it's not tv, it's hbo. He didn't even say that.

[Leo Laporte]

He didn't even say that. How many years did they and millions did they spend building up that brand?

[Devindra Hardawar]

It doesn't matter. Zaslav came from Discovery. He came from that whole side of it. He has no loyalty to the HBO thing. It's so very stupid. But we had a good day on the Internet. When this dude's hit, it's probably pretty funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Was it fun?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Hilarious. Hilarious because this is also the company that. Because they had multiple streaming services for a while, remember, like they had HBO Go was their initial one. Because that was if you had a subscription.

[Leo Laporte]

God, it was so awesome.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You could do that online. But if you don't have a subscription, then you could go to HBO now. Then HBO Max came because they kind of obliterated both those things. And HBO now became just hbo before it died.

[Leo Laporte]

It was so crazy.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, they had no idea.

[Harper Reed]

And there was also Cinemax. I always. Oh, like there, you know. Everyone thought it was Cinemax.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yep.

[Harper Reed]

So confusing.

[Leo Laporte]

We called it Skinimax because they had the.

[Will Harris]

I was just gonna say the. The only reason I know Cinemax is because everyone that I know called it SkinMax.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, both the good and Cinemax, they had like softcore porn at night. Everybody did. That's how it was during the 90s. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You probably remember hearing this Apollo 13. Mike Lovell saying, an oxygen tank has exploded on Apollo 13, crippling the command module. The man who saved Apollo 13 with duct tape just passed away. Ed smiley. He was 95. He led a team of engineers that cobbled together an apparatus made of cardboard, plastic, pack bags and duct tape that saved the Apollo 13 crew. It's kind of an amazing story. Here he is holding his prototype. It's kind of. I mean, it's just amazing. Yeah, it's just amazing. There's a. It looks like a hose from a. But this is all stuff that was on Apollo 13 they could use to make something that would save them.

[Will Harris]

Sort of reminds me of the guy that does the advert, you know, where he just slaps the. Slaps the duct tape on whatever sort of leaking.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, it's so good. I like how we just took this guy whose legacy is incredible and was like, yeah, it's like that. Tick tock.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not. He and 60 other engineers, engineering engineers, were given less than two days to invent a solution using materials already on board the spacecraft. If you saw the movie Apollo 13, you might remember this. There was a documentary XIII that came out a few years ago that actually featured Smiley. In the movie Apollo 13, a character inspired by Smolley dramatically dumps rubber tubes, garment bags, duct tape and other materials onto the table and says, the people upstairs handed us this one. We gotta come through. They did. They created a carbon dioxide scrubber from parts found aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft and made it back home safe and sound. Smiley got a nod from the President at the time, Dick Nixon. Ed Smiley, dead at the age of 95.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Do we know why he was not in the movie directly? Always kind of astounded.

[Leo Laporte]

Should have have been, huh?

[Devindra Hardawar]

He should have been. His Name.

[Leo Laporte]

He's in the documentary, I think.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But yeah, it would have been nice to give him some credit. He said in the, in the XIII the thirteen documentary if you're a southern boy, if it moves and it's not supposed to, you use duct tape. Yeah.

[Will Harris]

That really reminds me of the. The sort of flowchart that I once saw as a sort of, you know, early engineering student which was.

[Harper Reed]

Was.

[Will Harris]

Does it move? Yes. Is it supposed to. No. Apply duct tape. Does it move? No. Is it supposed to. Yes. Apply WD40.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. That's all you need. It's all you need. What a fun show this has been. I am so glad to have you guys on. I'd love to get you all back together, reunite the team. Devindra, we always love having you on. On. Devindra is my designated hitter when I'm out of town. I'm leaving for a vacation in September so we'll make sure to get in touch.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah we love having you run the show. Senior editor and gadget super smart. Good news. Doesn't have to review phones anymore. Can have.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I review a lot of laptops and video cards now apparently. But that's where the fun is.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where the fun is that a promotion? You've been kicked upstairs.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I think I'm the only person with like a dedicated gaming rig.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, there you go. You know that's, that's man. I've done some of that stuff that I give you a lot of props. That's a really hard thing to do.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's something. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's a lot of work. It's great to see you Devendra. Thank you. Also Will Harris. Great to see you again. I hope you find, find work.

[Will Harris]

Well can I give a quick, a quick plug to a yes to a. To a little, a little bit of work that I'm involved in. If you are in London or if you're in the UK. UK go and hit up phantompeak.com Phantompeak.com is fantastic. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it P E E K? No, it's peak an open world immersive experience.

[Will Harris]

It is a western steampunk styled bar immersive theatrical experience and you can go along and you can use your smartphone to go and solve all sorts mysteries along the way. And I'm Neil Patrick Harris there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cool.

[Devindra Hardawar]

He's.

[Will Harris]

He's there, he's loved it and I am helping them do a little bit of work to, to, to add to the technology side of it.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to come to London just to go visit Phantom Peak.

[Will Harris]

Phantom Peak is fantastic. It's sort of an escape room crossed with cross.

[Leo Laporte]

You go on trails or quests. You're tasked with helping the town folk. This sounds like that blue game in real life.

[Will Harris]

Yeah, so. So that's what I'm spending my time doing at the moment. And anybody that's in London, hit me up on Twitter, hit me up on Instagram, I'll. I'll. I'll hook you up.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's booze too.

[Will Harris]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What did you call it? A piss up. Can I have a piss up there?

[Will Harris]

We can organize a piss up in a brew.

[Leo Laporte]

A beer driven piss up. That's what I want. Thank you, Will. It's great to see you. Harper Reed, you're the best man. I gotta. We gotta get more of you on our shows because, hey, look at what he does with his fingers. Just because. Just your knowledge of AI and your kind of reasonableness a bit that at all. And your enthusiasm is great and I really appreciate that. You can find out more about Harper at his blog, Harper Blog and his company, 2389. AI. Do you have customers or who's your target for this?

[Harper Reed]

Oh, we're early.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an early stage.

[Harper Reed]

We're early stage. We just got laptops. We're real early. Like I just got. Had a laptop like a month ago.

[Leo Laporte]

So what laptop does 2389 use?

[Harper Reed]

Oh, we bought MacBook Pros with just a boatload of ram because we're running models locally. And having the ability to run those models locally is really incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of amazing what Apple's done with its silicon.

[Harper Reed]

It really is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Position.

[Harper Reed]

I have not yet installed Roast Rosetta since Apple Silicon was released. And it's every once in a while it's funny because all it does is show what companies are not updating their.

[Leo Laporte]

Build chain by now. If you're not writing to the chip, you're crazy. What are you doing? The problem is Apple made Rosetta 2 too good.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's good. It's really good.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem.

[Harper Reed]

Really good. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So there wasn't a lot of impetus to rewrite your code, but do because Apple Silicon's amazing. I have an M3. I'm sitting in front of an M3 Mac and of course I have the M4 Mini and the M4 iPad. But I'm going to wait because in two years I'm not going to do the M5. I'm doing the M6. I think the big leap I know the big leap is going to be in two years they're going to have OLED screens, they're going to have redesigned laptops. So I'm going to, when I start my startup, we're going to have M5s or maybe M6s, I don't know, something agents that conspire with you, not against you at two three, eight. How cool is that?

[Harper Reed]

We're all about conspiracy.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks to everybody who joined us this week. We really appreciate your watching and listening. We do stream the show live every Sunday, 2 to 5pm Eastern. You don't have to watch live. I'm sorry, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. I only say that if you want to watch live and chat with us live as we're doing the show. We stream on eight different platforms. TikTok, X.com, youTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. And if you're in the club, you can get behind the velvet rope and watch us in the Discord. Actually, I should give a little plug to the club Twit Discord. That is a great place to hang. We just did Stacy's Book Club on Friday. On Monday we're going to do the Microsoft Build keynote. Paul and Rich, Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell will do join us for that keynote at 9am tomorrow. And I have to tell you that unfortunately, thanks to Apple Apple lawyers, we've decided no longer to stream our keynote coverage publicly because we've gotten too many takedowns. So we're going to be doing a lot of keynotes this week and we will be doing them for club members only in the club Twit Discord and on the twit plus feed after the fact. So build is tomorrow night, Tuesday 10am Google IO. Yes. We're going to have a little hangout with Dick DeBartolo the GizWiz on Friday. Then we come back on June 9th for WWDC. So this is another reason to join the club. The keynotes. Now, the keynote coverage will only be in club just because we don't want to get taken off of YouTube. It's kind of a chilling effect of that. So if you're not a member of the club yet, it is only seven bucks a month, $84 you a year. You get ad free versions of the shows. Of course, I'm not one of those people who wants to charge you money and then play ads to you ad free versions of all the shows. No tracking, no just no ads, just the shows, just the content. Access to the Discord. The special events that go on in there, lots of benefits. If you're not a member, please visit Twitter. TV Club Twit. I guess the biggest benefit is you're keeping us alive because it's now 25% of our revenue. Without it, we would have to cancel shows and send people home. So we don't want to do that. Twit. TV Club Twit. Thank you in advance after the fact. You can of course get copies of this show with the ads built in. If you're not a club member, at our website, Twit TV, there's a YouTube channel for every one of the shows we do. And we do that well because YouTube apparently is where podcasts go to live. I don't know, I didn't even get into that story. There's a whole story about YouTube's charts and how they don't match Apple's charts or Spotify's charts. We'll probably talk about that on Tuesday. But we do, you know, make it possible for you to watch on YouTube, mostly from our point of view, not because we think that's the place to be, but because it makes it very easy to share clips. So if you see something or you want to, you know, turn a friend on to what we do, send them a little clip so they. Because everybody can see the YouTube. Best way to get the show is undoubtedly to subscribe on your favorite podcast. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And if you do that, would you do us a favor and leave a review, a positive one. Please leave us a five star review if you can, because that helps spread the word as well. Oh, I also, I keep forgetting we have a free newsletter if you want to keep up on what's going on on future shows, especially for club members. Because the newsletter also talks about club special events and so forth. It's free, easy to subscribe. Subscribe. No salesman will call TWiT TV newsletter. There, I think I got it all in. Thank you everybody. Appreciate your time. 20 years we've been doing this now in our 21st year. For 20 years I've been saying the same thing at the end of every show. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can.

[Harper Reed]

Baba.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twit all right.

[Will Harris]

Doing the twit, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twit all right.