This Week in Tech 1040: The $100,000 Stapler

Summary

This Week in Tech 1040: The $100,000 Stapler – Detailed Summary

Release Date: July 14, 2025

1. Introduction and Panel Overview

Leo Laporte kicks off the episode by introducing his esteemed panelists, Harper Reed and Amy Webb. He humorously warns listeners about the occasional use of strong language by the panelists, setting a candid and engaging tone for the discussion.

2. Age Verification Laws: Supreme Court Ruling and Global Implications

The conversation shifts to a landmark Supreme Court case: Free Speech Coalition vs. Paxton. At [04:23], Leo summarizes the decision, where the court upheld a Texas law mandating age verification for websites hosting sexually explicit material. This ruling requires users, regardless of age, to verify their identities using government-issued IDs.

Amy Webb offers her insights at [06:09], expressing concerns about the business landscape:

"If Pornhub now has to age verify, I don't see a lot of people willingly doing that."

Harper Reed adds humor while highlighting the absurdity of the company’s name, referencing their own company, 2389, which cleverly incorporates digits from Pi. The panel discusses the broader implications of this ruling, noting its potential to shift America's stance on digital regulation:

Amy Webb [09:18]: "This law seems like it will have mostly negative knock-on effects for the very people that wrote the law because it's going to open up innovation in all of these other ways."

3. Stablecoins: Potential and Challenges

At [40:00], the panel delves into the realm of stablecoins, digital representations of fiat currencies like the US Dollar, designed to mitigate the volatility inherent in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Harper Reed explains:

"Stablecoin is a digital representation of a dollar. It's pegged to the US dollar to reduce chaos from volatility."

They discuss the benefits of stablecoins, such as facilitating easier international money transfers and reducing transaction fees compared to traditional banking systems. However, concerns about regulation, centralization, and potential misuse are also raised:

Amy Webb [51:05]: "There's a problem to do with money transmission. How does that work?"

Harper emphasizes the need for robust legislation to ensure stablecoins enhance financial access without enabling illicit activities:

Harper Reed [47:10]: "Stablecoins are an opportunity if they're done with some thoughts in mind."

4. AI Regulation and Future Impacts

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around AI regulation. Leo brings up the Supreme Court case, linking it to broader themes of digital regulation. Amy Webb advocates for an iterative approach to regulation, favoring financial incentives over punitive measures to encourage ethical AI development:

Amy Webb [84:26]: "We should make it possible for the companies creating the stuff to make as much money as they possibly want if they follow... treating a lot of this as a policy, public good."

Harper Reed echoes concerns about the potential creation of a generation adept at circumventing regulations:

Harper Reed [27:15]: "This is going to affect people who are at risk anyway instead of affect the people who, you know, the lawmakers are thinking about."

5. Blockchain and Privacy-Preserving Technologies

The panel explores blockchain as a potential solution for age verification, aiming to decentralize and preserve user privacy. Amy Webb suggests:

Amy Webb [07:12]: "This was a great time for OnlyFans to build up its business because any freely available porn is going to be harder to access."

Harper adds that while blockchain offers cryptographic security, practical implementation challenges remain:

Harper Reed [21:44]: "You don't need blockchain to do this. You have like all sorts of privacy-preserving technologies."

6. Cultural and Creative Impacts of AI

Amy Webb raises alarms about AI's impact on human creativity and cognitive development. She fears that over-reliance on AI tools might erode the brain's creative faculties:

Amy Webb [129:34]: "I worry we're moving into an era where we can't think things up, we're over lubricating."

Harper Reed concurs, noting the difficulty in finding genuinely creative content in an AI-saturated landscape:

Harper Reed [138:25]: "There's still a lot of creativity, etc., but it is an uphill battle, much more so than it was when I was younger."

7. Future Technology and Ongoing Developments

The panel briefly touches upon emerging technologies like Jack Dorsey's BitChat, a peer-to-peer messaging system leveraging Bluetooth mesh networks. They discuss its potential uses in scenarios lacking internet connectivity, such as protests or remote areas.

8. The $100,000 Stapler Incident

True to the episode's title, Leo narrates the viral story of a customer who accidentally broke his Nintendo Switch 2 by stapling the receipt to the box, resulting in the staple tearing through the screen. GameStop responded by auctioning the damaged device on July 9th, raising $122,800 for the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. The high bidder received the unique stapled console, the damaged box, and a certificate of authenticity from GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen:

Leo Laporte [56:00]: "The stapler went through the box into the screen of the Switch 2, breaking it. The company replaced the devices and auctioned it for charity."

A humorous touch is added as Cohen jokingly offers to include his underwear if the bid reaches six figures.

Conclusion

Throughout the episode, Leo Laporte effectively navigates complex topics with Harper Reed and Amy Webb, offering listeners a comprehensive analysis of current tech issues such as digital regulation, stablecoins, AI ethics, and the preservation of human creativity in an AI-driven world. The standout story of the $100,000 stapler adds an entertaining and memorable conclusion to a thought-provoking discussion.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [00:00]: "If you're interested in deep conversation about important issues of the day, including AI, I think I would stay tuned because this one's a great one."

• Amy Webb [07:12]: "So it's gonna be a good time for OnlyFans to build up its business because any freely available porn is gon harder to access."

• Harper Reed [27:15]: "This is going to affect people who are at risk anyway instead of affect the people who, you know, the lawmakers are thinking about."

• Amy Webb [129:34]: "I worry we're moving into an era where we can't think things up, we're over lubricating."

• Leo Laporte [56:00]: "The stapler went through the box into the screen of the Switch 2, breaking it. The company replaced the devices and auctioned it for charity."

Timestamps:

• Introduction and Panel Overview: [00:00] – [04:23]
• Age Verification Laws: [04:23] – [12:29]
• Stablecoins Discussion: [40:00] – [52:03]
• AI Regulation and Impacts: [52:03] – [86:40]
• Blockchain Solutions: [21:44] – [35:21]
• Cultural Impacts of AI: [84:26] – [142:33]
• $100,000 Stapler Incident: [40:00] – [56:00]

Final Note:

For those seeking a deep dive into the intersection of technology, regulation, and societal impacts, this episode of This Week in Tech offers invaluable insights, enriched by the expertise of Harper Reed and Amy Webb.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Great panel for you. In fact, one of the chat room folks said, this one is a banger, and I would agree. Harper Reed and Amy Weber here. A quick program note before we get started. Both Harper and Amy are passionate and occasionally adult expletives slip from their mouths. We decided this time not to bleep them out. So if you're offended by strong language, this might not be the show to listen to. If, on the other hand, you're interested in deep conversation about important issues of the day, including AI, I think I would stay tuned because this one's a great one. Twit is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 10 1040, recorded Sunday, July 13, 2025. The $100,000 stapler. It's time for TWiT this week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. You're going to be very glad you're here today because we have two of my favorite panelists. Well, we always have my favorite people because we don't book my not favorite people. But I'm always pleased to welcome Harper Reed to our microphones. Technologist, entrepreneur, hacker at Harper Blog and his company, 2389, which is not the line number of. You're not expected to understand this in the UNIX code. We know that now. Unfortunately, it's not too late to change the name of the company. Harper. I'm just saying.

[Harper Reed]

Well, we've been leaning in on the PI part. Like this is our favorite digits of PI, and we're moving offices right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait. 3.1415-82389. Oh, very nice.

[Harper Reed]

Further down. Yeah. And we're changing offices and our unit number is F314. So we're just going to keep going.

[Leo Laporte]

And keep going, Keep going. Pie all the way down. Also here, as if this that weren't enough, the wonderful Amy Webb from the Future Today Strategy group. Our favorite futurist. Hi, Amy.

[Amy Webb]

Hi, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And hardcore bicyclist.

[Amy Webb]

Yes, I did. I only. I had a shorter ride this morning because we had some pretty bad storms, but yeah, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your weekly mileage? Typically?

[Amy Webb]

I've been traveling a lot for work, so it depends, but somewhere between 150 and 200. But to put that into perspective, the Tour de France guys are riding between 100 and 200 miles a day.

[Leo Laporte]

A day?

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, right now. But I. Since I saw you last. I competed in Unbound, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

You mentioned you were going to do that.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. It's a great gravel. It's the world's best gravel race, according to me, out in Kansas. And it was great.

[Leo Laporte]

You had a good time?

[Amy Webb]

I had a great time.

[Leo Laporte]

It says get all muddy.

[Amy Webb]

We were dry this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good.

[Amy Webb]

It was the north route this year, so it was hilly, dry. It was direct sun and like 95 degrees. Pretty gnarly crosswinds which were just. It was just hot air blowing. So that was not, not fun.

[Leo Laporte]

How many flats?

[Amy Webb]

I did not have any flats. I had enough equipment on me to service five different bikes if anybody else had had problems.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Amy Webb]

Just added to weight that I probably didn't need to. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How many? It looks like a lot of people get involved in this. Maybe like 80 or 90 or.

[Amy Webb]

No, no, no. There's this. I think there were 4,000 people committed, but there's. There's different tracks, so. One of the world's most, probably the most famous ultra endurance cyclist, Lachlan Morton, came in second. I watched him cross the line, the xl.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. If you watched him cross the line, that means you came in first.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, that's exactly right. No, they had started the night before. Okay, we. So there's a 2. The main event is the 200 mile and there's a 100, a 50, a 25. So, yeah, it's. It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

What fun. Congratulations.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a. That's a big deal. All right, well, that's enough for the nice stuff. Now we're going to talk about the news of the week.

[Amy Webb]

Do we have to, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I wish we didn't. From the Atlantic. This kind of summarizes what is basically happening all over the world. Age verification requirements are kind of coming in in Australia and in the UK and yes, now in the US The Supreme Court last week in the Free Speech Coalition versus Paxton, the Attorney General in the state of Texas upheld a Texas law requiring websites with sexually explicit material to verify the age of their users. Which means everybody, not just kids, has to prove they are of age using government ID in most cases. Although I guess there are some third party technologies that might keep porn. Keep your. Keep your ID out of the hands of pornhub? I don't know. As the Atlantic points out, the case's true importance lies not on its effect on the adult entertainment industry, but it shifts America's willingness to regulate digital technology at all. You know, we've lived in the age of section 230 and light hand regulation of the Internet because it was a nascent technology. Clarence Thomas in the majority opinion said, nope, it's not nascent anymore. It's established. And we think age verification is okay, despite the, quote, incidental burden on adult speech. Thoughts? Nothing to say, Anybody? Come on, Amy. I know you have a thought.

[Amy Webb]

And then, um. So my initial reaction to this was I wonder how this shifts the business landscape. Although I think that's kind of what I focus on. Because if pornhub, if you now have to age verify for pornhub, I don't see a lot of people willingly doing that. And I.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, pornhub's already withdrawn from the states.

[Amy Webb]

That require just like, fine, anybody who does.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

It seems like this is a huge win for only fans because I don't think OnlyFans is gonna be the same. Is gonna be subject to the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not harder?

[Amy Webb]

Because it'll be harder to prove. First of all, a lot of the content that you might consider to be totally explicit is behind a paywall anyways. So how would somebody verify? It's not out there for anybody to see. It's not the same thing as pornhub. So my initial thought was it'll be easier for them. Like, this is gonna be a good time for OnlyFans to build up its business because any freely available porn is gon harder to access. But that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there'll also be, I would imagine, kind of sketch sites that aren't like pornhub, where they go, you know, come and come and get us. Right. I mean, imagine there'll be some of that too.

[Amy Webb]

Right, Right. So that. That's the main thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And there'll be also sites that set up. I would. If I were an evil actor that set this all up just to get the information.

[Amy Webb]

That's right. So what this has me, interestingly enough, I'm always worried about monopolistic power and control and centralization of certain things and any government, including our own. And so this seems like perhaps the first reasonable use case for blockchain. So if there was a third party, it's like, of course porn finally is the thing that makes it take off.

[Leo Laporte]

They kind of go together in some.

[Harper Reed]

Way, but so to speak.

[Amy Webb]

But look, I. I initially thought about, like, if there's going to be some kind of regulation going forward, which clearly now there can be in certain states will want it, then I would. There would. It would be a good time for a third party to come in either clear or some blockchain something or another. Or pornhub that was the other thing I kept thinking if pornhub was really smart they would make their own browser VPN built into the browser and it would be like porn browser that would allow you. So it's like a little bit of. But whatever. So like you just bypass anything that requires age or ID verification because it's got a built in vpn. You know, I mean there's ways around the. And I'll stop as I. There's obviously lots of ways around this. You just VPN to a different place but that's out of reach or confusing for a lot of people. So it just seems like from my point of view this law seems like it will have mostly negative knock on effects for the very people that wrote the law because it's going to open up innovation in all of these other ways.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that often what happens is it just, it just channels all that energy.

[Amy Webb]

And Clarence Thomas is like chief among them. Don't think about the next order impacts of the arcane and draconian laws that they attempt to, to create.

[Leo Laporte]

So and I mean I, it's look, if you go into a bookstore, a news shop and as a kid and try to buy a Playboy the owner's gonna say no kid, get out of here. I mean it's, we have a standard, a normal standard that we don't let kids see the adult content. And I don't, I think that that's.

[Harper Reed]

A, I think we had a standard.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Now it's probably don't really have, I.

[Harper Reed]

Don'T think we really have that.

[Leo Laporte]

So maybe that's why this is happening because kids do in fact thanks to the Internet have all sorts of access. I don't have any problem with in the, in your mind saying well let's, let's figure out a way around this promise. It's not just going to be adult content, it's going to be LBGTQ content. It's going to be political speech that people, some people don't like. Utah has a minor protection in social media act. It's going to keep kids off social media. California has the so called age appropriate design code which is so poorly written that it could apply to anything. There's Cosa Harper. What do you think?

[Harper Reed]

I mean I think Amy said it well, I don't know if you've ever interacted with young people but they're pretty good at getting around rules. They're really good at getting around things as well as they don't have any experience to deal with scams and to deal with bad actors, etc. And so I think the big worry that I would have is that this is just going to create more opportunities for people to prey on youth and the people who theoretically this is trying to protect. The other thing is, back when NFTs were relevant, there were a lot of people that were trying to put KYC information on chain so that if you KYC one place you wouldn't necessarily have to KYC at all these other subsequent places that were related or partnered or what have you. Obviously that is not how fintech works. And so it kind of died on the vine in some regards. But I do think there is opportunities to do verifiable credentials and all sorts of fun open source y sort of web standard ways to solve some of these problems. Of course, none of these, this legislation is taking that into consideration. And so it's just going to be the worst of any imagination on this stuff, which is always a bummer.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, I think we're hitting this inflection point across multiple technologies and forums for communication where we've had this unbridled, totally open, restrict nothing approach for a really long time. And I think that that worked except that society also changed. And you know, if I think back to, I mean, God, if you think back now to Janet Jackson and the super bowl and the studio, oh God.

[Leo Laporte]

People were so shocked and they lost.

[Amy Webb]

Their minds, you know, and where we got, where we are, I think still.

[Leo Laporte]

The most rewound moment on TiVo of all time.

[Amy Webb]

Oh my God.

[Harper Reed]

Well, TiVo shortly died after that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, yeah, there's no chance for anything to compete now.

[Amy Webb]

I mean, I think, I think this is kind of the problem when you go totally free enterprise, totally, the market will figure it out, open innovation or nothing. The problem is that that works on paper and that works in math, but that doesn't work in practice because there's a lot of other variables when you involve people, especially young people who are learning how to be human, like adults. So I just, I think we're going to see a lot of these inflection points and I. Unfortunately, the way that our government works, we don't really have mechanisms in place that are more flexible, that there's not.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of nuance in this style.

[Amy Webb]

And it's binary and then politics has become really binary. So I think we're just going to live through a really challenging period as we try to straighten everything out.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what this Atlantic piece written by Alan Z. Rosen Rosenstein, who was senior editor at Lawfare and a professor of law at University of Minnesota Law School says he says the results of the 30 year experiment with a hands off approach on the Internet are in much of society, including the Supreme Court, is recoiling from the consequences. The fear of stifling a new technology has been replaced by the dread of the harms that technology left unregulated can cause. So is that a good thing? I mean, maybe we were a little too laissez faire. I personally prefer the laissez faire, but that's, that's kind of my attitude. You have kids, you have a kid.

[Amy Webb]

I have a kid. Now to be fair, my kid is like a really lovely but weird kid compared to other kids. So she's, she's a 15 year old ready to jet off to MIT and could care. Doesn't use tick tock or anything else, but good for her. Yeah, but look, it'd be, it's an, it's a challenging time and I don't study this, so I've any. This is all just anecdotal. There's ample sources of reputable data out there. You know, when I was 15, there was the, the back of the video store, right. Where that was the adult section through the beaded curtain. Yeah, right. It was that. There were like, you know, dirty magazines and I'm sure people had like. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I forgot about that. But we didn't have cable, so my.

[Harper Reed]

Favorite though was the friend who had the satellite dishes. And you would go over there and you would like try and see between the squiggly lines because they didn't quite have the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Harper Reed]

See this like weird.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. You could kind of see body parts maybe if you looked real closely. Let me just look real, real closely. But I think. What's going on in there? I don't know, but here's the.

[Amy Webb]

I don't want to sound like a prude or anything because I'm not. But here's my take on this is you've got readily accessible content. You don't have to have a friend with a satellite or like jerry rigged cable box or any. So it's. You can have it on your phone in private.

[Leo Laporte]

And the content is.

[Amy Webb]

Well, that was the other.

[Leo Laporte]

Dramatically more extreme than it is.

[Amy Webb]

That's what I was going to say. Right. So the content is significantly more extreme and you're dealing with kids whose frontal lobes aren't quite like working. And I just think it sets. There was actually. There was actually. Do you guys watch Big Mouth? It's a cartoon on the network. It is, it's uneven. The first season was very good. The current and last season addresses like free and unfettered content for everybody without regulation or anything at all. Like no friction content.

[Harper Reed]

And.

[Amy Webb]

The kids are the teenagers on the show really. I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but it's a really good explanation of why like maybe we should come up with some something. But I don't know, Harper, I'm kind of interested because you've been much closer to this than obviously I have. Is there a way to regulate that doesn't stifle speech? I mean, that's the tricky part.

[Leo Laporte]

Or impair privacy?

[Harper Reed]

I don't think that, I don't know. I've been thinking about this a lot for years. Really, just because of the KYC thing and having built my career on like fintech in many ways there's always that friction point where you're like, man, I don't want to ask anyone for this information. So how do you, how do you do this without that? And I don't know, I, I think that, that I think my main worry is kind of what Leo was saying, which it's like it's one thing and we can kind of all agree maybe that, that I say maybe, but I'm pretty sure we all do that. Like, you know, children should not have access to pornography or if they do, they should have it in some sort of context which is very well observed, etc. By, by people they trust, et cetera. So like, okay, but then the problem is it's not just going to be used for that. And I think that's where the technology is not necessarily the problem. Right. We can have the best technology that's open and like privacy preserving and all these things and still it could be used to stifle free speech. I don't think privacy preserving technology is, you know, we could get signal to design it and it's could be used by parties to say, oh, you have to put all, you know, LGBTQ + content behind it or you have to put anything that is politically, you know.

[Amy Webb]

I could totally see that, by the way. I could see that being a next step that anything in some of these states that are LGBTQ needs to have age verification. I can see that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, get ready. Australia is quietly rolling age out age checks for search engines like Google, which we all use.

[Harper Reed]

This was one of the funny things I always wondered about because I don't know if any of y' all have ever tried to make an app and put it in the app Store. But there's a lot of draconian rules that Apple puts onto their apps. And one of them was like, if you have any kind of link out or inside of your app to like unfettered Internet, they would, they would make you raise the age requirement of that app because theoretically it could address. It could suddenly get Internet on it.

[Amy Webb]

And.

[Harper Reed]

And I just always wondered how this is the same thing with like pirated.

[Leo Laporte]

Stuff, but by the way, and Safari lets you get anything, of course, at any time.

[Harper Reed]

But like, I think about this a lot where people are like, we have to stop all the torrent search engines. And it's like, bro, Google is a pretty good torrent search engine, right? You know, like, I think we have.

[Leo Laporte]

Led starting at the end of the year in Australia, Google and Microsoft will have to use some form in Australia of age assurance technology on users when they sign in or face fines of almost $50 million per breach.

[Amy Webb]

So question, you can use a breach browser without signing in. So yeah, what am I missing here?

[Leo Laporte]

Does it mean that Google will then say you have to sign in to use Google search so that we can check your age?

[Harper Reed]

The issue that I have with this is it's not necessarily about age, it's about identity. Right? Like, it's one like if you just click a little button that says I'm above 18 a la. Like tobacco sites or alcohol sites.

[Leo Laporte]

Whiskey sites.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, whiskey sites, that's one thing. But my guess is that the legislation and then also the search engines probably don't. They probably hate this and don't hate it at the same time because then they can start owning more of the identity of that person and they can start owning.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's good for them. Hey, we have no choice. Australia is making us do it.

[Amy Webb]

So who's. Who's on the other side of this? So they scan your face and estimate how old you are based on your. So for somebody like me, I would have. I'd be in serious trouble because I was so young for my age.

[Leo Laporte]

But you still get carded, Amy?

[Amy Webb]

I do, Leo. I get carded all the time when I order all the alcohol that I drink. But what it's like, so who's. Damn. I hate that I am saying this out loud, but I think if all of these things actually start causing new points of friction, this is the moment for blockchain, is it not?

[Leo Laporte]

Or something. How would blockchain be implemented to make this work?

[Amy Webb]

I guess because I'm thinking, because like.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm on the Blockchain. I have some sort of entry on the, on the universal ledger and you can go check the blockchain and see how old I am.

[Amy Webb]

I'm thinking about cloaking digital identities. You're just a, like a no pii, but verified number so that, you know what I mean?

[Harper Reed]

Who would administer that card or like the Apple or anything like that.

[Leo Laporte]

You still have to have some point of entry that is not blockchain like Apple or Google or somebody that would have to.

[Amy Webb]

Then it's just, it's just a different type of key. Right, So a key like.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, but somebody's got to establish the key. Somebody has to say, okay, this is, I have verified this person is 18.

[Harper Reed]

You don't need blockchain to do this. You have like all sorts of privacy preserving technologies. Like, I mean if you think of like Apple is rolling out identity, like state IDs on the phone, like that is basically a picture and then that ID you're describing. I think there's lots of ways to do this without rolling out blockchain. I do think that there are aspects of blockchain and people that have been working in that space that have been talking about putting ID on there for years and years and years and years. It is nice that it's cryptographic but you know, verified credentials. The web standard is pretty good at this. It exists, has done a lot with this stuff.

[Amy Webb]

I was just clicking a couple steps forward and when you have all of these moments of disruption, there's there money follows and I was just immediately going to like, what is the new ecosystem?

[Leo Laporte]

So what is Marc Andreessen going to do? Is what you're asking a complaint in.

[Harper Reed]

A group chat about colleges or universities or something? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

So just to pile on, Blue sky is now rolling out age verification in the UK because the UK's Online Safety act requires platforms with adult content and yes, even social media has adult content to have age verification.

[Amy Webb]

I think it is lovely, I think it's lovely that Blue sky thinks that people are using it. Young people are using Blue Sky. I think that's, I think Blue Sky's big public announcement is taking a page out of OpenAI's. Let's make the announcement first and then everybody will follow.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They're going to use something called Kids Web Services kws, a parent verification platform, which I think in a way I like the idea of the parent deciding what's appropriate for their kid. I mean that's the main problem I have with all of this is who Is government to say whether a child is adult enough to experience this? Shouldn't the parent be responsible for that? I know there are lots of loopholes.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. And here's the thing. And I just, just because I get irritated every time I hear this argument that it's, it should be the parents. I had to go to a mandatory phone safety class last year, or start of seventh grade maybe. Every parent had to sit through. It was mandatory. Every parent had to sit through it. And it was four high school students and their parents talking about how damaging the phones have been and they wish they wouldn't have started the phones. And my husband and I are sitting there with our couple of other friends, like, we shouldn't have to be here. Our kids don't have phones.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

Like, you know, you know how easy it is to make sure your kids don't have these problems. You don't give them a phone or.

[Leo Laporte]

Your 16 year old still doesn't have a cell phone.

[Amy Webb]

We finally got her a phone because now she's like gonna be starting driving and stuff. But it's, she, there's no social media on it. And, but also this is, this is.

[Harper Reed]

The plot point of Ferris Bueller's Day off. Right? Like, why is your friend your parent that says, oh yeah, I confirmed that Harper is of age. I am Harper's dad. Also Harper, like, I feel like this is the thing. This is.

[Leo Laporte]

So does that mean government should be doing it?

[Harper Reed]

I think this is fine. I think we should enact all this stuff. It's just going to make a whole generation of hackers.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

Which I'm happy with. There's going to be people who are good at bending these rules, like young people. And like porn or alt content or whatever is like water down a hill.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

They're just going to get to the end. Like, it doesn't. And they may not. That might not be their thing. They might find something else that they like. But they're going to, they're going check it out and you're going to put all these things in front of them and they're going to figure it out. They're going to, I mean, like, you can share a password. There's like, there's all sorts of ways to do this. I mean, it was happening when I was in middle school.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm old enough to remember the days where every parent was trying to install these web blockers and, and there were many sites that said that told the kids how to get around it. It was, you know, and the thing is, one person Figures out how to get around it, it spreads like wildfire through the middle school and then it goes out onto the Internet. There's just no way to stop it.

[Amy Webb]

So here's a question. Yeah, so like, so somebody going to put instructions in chat GPT to block. So just to further your point, Harper, so like, fine. All these regulations come down. There are all these restrictions. Is. Does that mean that somebody's going to have to change the model or the output or retrain all of these AI systems where they might go next to just teach me how to.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, they already do that, right? There's already safety work on that. If you read like Anthropic's safety research, they talk a lot about this kind of thing. Obviously not this thing specifically, but they even talk about the biorisk and all these other things which are just orders of magnitude different. It's just like you're pivoting, focusing on a different thing. And they do a lot of work to protect it. And I'm sure that if we said, oh, we're banning this word, then they would probably enable the same amount of work that they're doing to ban like Molotov cocktails or hot wiring a car. And then you can use the same tricks that you can to get it to talk about hot wiring a car, to get it to talk about being gay or whatever, you know, other puritanical thing we want to ban in the United States. So I think that there's a lot of. I think that what I think is going to happen, though, which I think is going to be interesting, I really believe that this is how you create hackers. Because every story I have of a friend who is like, very good at computers starts with something like, my parents were mad at me and grounded me and took away my keyboard. And so I stole a credit card in the AOL chat room, bought a new keyboard, plugged the new keyboard in, and was back to hacking. You know, like, it's like, oh, great, great. Like, this is how you create people who are very good at getting around. Good.

[Leo Laporte]

A new generation of hackers is coming.

[Harper Reed]

Well, the difference is, is like when we were doing this in the 90s, no one knew about, like, the cops would just be like, you did what? And you'd be like, yeah, I got to go to school. Okay, cool. Now they're going to put you in jail and probably some camp somewhere. And so, like, I feel like it's a little different. Like, it's. Yeah, it's like, I think that there's some Ramifications. And especially the. And the ramifications are going to be uneven based on, you know, who you are, your ethnicity, et cetera. And so I think that it is going to be you. It's like what they say, like, justice is going to be unevenly distributed throughout the US with these rules and these rules.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it already is.

[Harper Reed]

This is going to affect people who are at risk anyway instead of affect the people who, you know, the lawmakers are thinking about.

[Leo Laporte]

But there'll be a lot of white kids who know how to hack.

[Harper Reed]

There will. I think there's going to be a lot of kids who know how to hack. The white kids are going to be talking about it.

[Leo Laporte]

They're going to get away with it. You know, I love, though, about both of you. We've been talking about this for a while as it's been coming, and we. Oh, I, you know, I'm focused on the age identification and the privacy issues and, you know, the enforceability of all this. You guys are already like, and I love this about you, especially, I mean, thinking about three steps ahead, like, well, okay, so this is going to create a nation of hackers. And how does this, what is the business opportunities here? You guys are already, you've already accepted it. And it's like, okay, so what do we do now? I guess, Amy, when you work with your clients, that's. That's kind of what you say to them is, look, this is what's happening. So here's what it's going to mean and here's how you adjust.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, we're. Yes, I guess I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

You're a realist.

[Amy Webb]

I'm very pragmatic. So if this is the situation, then my job is to say, where is the world going? Where will value be created? Or where is there their absolute destruction ahead? And then what do we do about it?

[Leo Laporte]

Instead of wringing your hands and oh, dear, oh, dear, you just say, well, how do we. You know, I look at somebody like Tim Cook and I think about all of the, you know, tidal forces impacting him, from, you know, the tariffs to China kind of. I mean, it's just, it's everything. And this guy has to somehow weave very carefully his way through all this, and he continues to do so. But I guess that's the job of a CEO in interesting times.

[Amy Webb]

Yes, definitely. So let me put it this way. CEO tenure is down. It's in decline.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Amy Webb]

More so than any other time.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's such a stressful time to be a CEO.

[Amy Webb]

No, I think it's partially because a lot of CEOs stuck along for a very long time and waited to retire. There were different crises that you know, the board said just stay another day, stay another X amount of time. So now you've got this new crop of people and especially from companies that promoted from within. It's their first time at bat as CEO, but they're like 55, 60 older than that and they're just not gonna stick around for 10 years or they just can't. Cause it's tough at that point point. So it's just shrunk everybody's time horizons pretty significantly. And then in government any like we defunded the agencies that would have done the long term planning. They don't exist anymore. And the people who would have done the planning.

[Leo Laporte]

So and, and, and I would presume that the stock market's focused on quarterly results also helps that trend because you only get a few quarters before.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, investors are like, like the worst.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have much patience.

[Amy Webb]

Investors create totally unnecessary tension and a lot of the valuation. Look, Nvidia is having a great year and they just crossed a threshold of $4 trillion. So it's like the first time in history. It also signals a sea change. You know the, it was blue chip companies that made stuff and then financialization companies and then it was computer companies and now it's Nvidia, which signals a different kind of, of you know.

[Leo Laporte]

What kind of company is Nvidia? What category do we put this in?

[Amy Webb]

Well, right now it's robotics, if you listen to. Yeah, I mean I just think it's, I think it's really tough. And so this whole, all of this stuff that's now happening in the judicial realm and the FCC and like all of these things that are happening are I think, I think everybody's just got this constant like state of, I would call it foma, the fear of missing anything. It's not FOMO anymore. And so it's just people just miss. Make weird decisions when they're under duress. And I think everybody feels like they're under duress.

[Leo Laporte]

Are these unusual times. Somebody in our YouTube chat says, Ah, it's always like this.

[Harper Reed]

It's not always like this.

[Leo Laporte]

Always like this.

[Harper Reed]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been around, I'm older than all of you.

[Harper Reed]

I've had my job changed like a hundred times and I keep trying to do the same job and it keeps changing. And I feel like that wasn't the case for any one of my relatives.

[Leo Laporte]

AI has really accelerated this in interesting ways. We're going to talk about AI in just a little bit. Great panel. I love having you two on. Harper Reed, technologist, entrepreneur, hacker. It's great to have you. He's working in AI right now at 238 AI and he has got everything wired in there. He's got agents. We were talking before the show. I'm jealous. I like this. You've got, you gotta, you got people listening at all times. When I say people, I mean AI people.

[Harper Reed]

I did have to put a sticker on the door that says when you enter. Just FYI. There's a lot of listening happening. And just if you have an issue, here's our privacy policy. And if you have an issue, please just like send me a note.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's an example of how fast this has happened because in the last 10 years, and I feel bad for kids growing up, suddenly everything's on camera. There's nothing that's not being recorded at all times that's already over. Now it's everything's on AI. There's nothing that's not being analyzed, dissected and summarized into bullet points at all times. It's crazy. We are being observed by our own agents. Also wonderful to have Amy Webb here, futurist. She thinks about, she thinks about long term strategy at Future Today Strategy Group and they're both going to Japan. When are you going to both be in Kyoto?

[Amy Webb]

Well, I'm, I'm coming in early and like I think I'm gonna be there a week before.

[Harper Reed]

Same.

[Leo Laporte]

This is for the Japan leadership. What is this?

[Amy Webb]

So let me plug, if I may, please, wonderful program called the United States Japan Leadership Program which brings together youngish American professionals in government, in business and the arts and technology and science and Japanese professionals for the purpose of fostering dialogue and like stuff going forward. So there's one week that start is spent in the United States with experiences and dialogues and stuff and one in Japan. And when you're done with both of, and it happens in consecutive years and then you become a lifetime fellow, which Harper and I are now, and it's, I cannot say enough about it. So you don't have to be fluent in Japanese or like you have to be interested in Japan, but you don't have to be like a Japanese speaker, have lived there or anything. I highly, highly, highly recommend that you apply if you are interested in Asia and Japan and the future. And I don't know, Harper, you want to say anything else?

[Harper Reed]

I mean it's a very good example of a very well Executed soft diplomacy program that is just about partnership and friendship and all that stuff. The things that. That I'm misunderstood about it is how much impact it would have on my life going forward. Which I thought, like many programs, I'm sure, Amy, you've been involved with many programs that kind of act like it's the same. And then the moment you're done with it, they disappear, you disappear. And then next thing you know, you're like. You forget about it. Five years later, you meet someone in an airport and you're like, oh, great, remember that? And that's basically the entire interaction. This is like a daily. There's a daily thread going on. You know, you. You see people, you know, get married, you see people change careers, you see people, you know, everything. Life to death to everything. And it's this really, really beautiful community. And it kind of builds itself. But I highly recommend taking a look at it. And really, what age.

[Leo Laporte]

What ages are this?

[Amy Webb]

The cutoff is 40.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So you don't have to be that young.

[Amy Webb]

But what's kind of cool is the program, I think started about 20 some years ago, but there are people now who's. Who. So, like, my daughter, who's 15, has friends in Japan because of the program. While Harper and I are doing our fellows thing, Petra's gonna be out roaming around Kyoto by herself with her friends. And like, you know, she'll have two free days and screw around and have. They're gonna go to the Nintendo museum and the manga museum and have, you know, so it's.

[Leo Laporte]

You have prepared your child for the future. I think that's amazing.

[Amy Webb]

I have prepared my child for a very narrow type of future where she's gonna have to work hard to find other nerds like her. But she's a good kid.

[Leo Laporte]

We exist, we're here.

[Amy Webb]

She's got. Sorry I was a proud mother moment. She just got her Eagle.

[Leo Laporte]

She's an Eagle Scout. At 16.

[Amy Webb]

At 15.

[Leo Laporte]

15, yeah.

[Amy Webb]

And she got it just after turning 15. So she's.

[Leo Laporte]

She must be one of the youngest.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, one of the youngest. And she also won a National Science Award for doing all of this original science research. So she's. Scouts has a horrific history. So I don't want to gloss over any of them.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not Boy Scouts anymore.

[Amy Webb]

No, it's Scouting America. And I gotta say, our particular. We have an all girls but also all inclusive troupe.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Amy Webb]

And it has been unbelievably great for her and for the other kids on it. It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

So. All right. You've always impressed me as a mom, and your daughter is very lucky. I think that's fantastic. Congratulate her. That's amazing. At G Achievement. Wow. And if you're Interested in the US Japan foundation, it's us-jf.org if you want to apply or just find out more. Us-jf.org and then you can come and.

[Amy Webb]

Hang out with Harper and me in either Japan or Seattle.

[Harper Reed]

A lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Kyoto's incredible. I just love Kyoto.

[Harper Reed]

It's hot. It's gonna be hot. Like, I. I don't understand. I don't think people understand how hot.

[Amy Webb]

No, they don't. There's a whole. They have a whole different. The word for the kind of hot we are about to encounter. There's a whole. It's called mushitsui. There's a whole individual word just to explain that type of hot, which is humid and horrible and wet.

[Harper Reed]

It's horrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we could thank Harry S. Truman for not nuking Kyoto back during World War II, because I think he honeymooned there or something and decided not to drop the bomb because he honeymooned there. Okay, gonna take a little break. And this is a special message from our sponsor going out to all of you kids this week in Tech, brought to you this week by Express vpn. Yes, you might want to get to know it. A few decades ago, private citizens used to be largely that private. And what's changed? Well, of course, the Internet. Think about everything you have browsed, searched for, watched, or tweeted. Now imagine all that data being crawled, collected and aggregated by data brokers and government into a permanent public record. Your record. Having your private life exposed for others to see was once something only celebrities worried about. But in an era where everyone is online, everyone is a public figure. To keep my data private when I go online, I turn to ExpressVPN. In fact, when I travel, it's a great boon because I can still catch the football game or the F1 race. Why everyone needs ExpressVPN One of the easiest ways for data brokers to track you is through your device's unique IP address, which also reveals information about your location. With ExpressVPN, it's not your IP address. Your IP address is hidden. You've got an address assigned by ExpressVPN. That makes it much more difficult for data brokers to monitor, track, and monetize your private online activity. You've got the same IP address as other people. People. It's not yours. Why ExpressVPN is the best VPN. I love ExpressVPN. It's the only one I use. They just had a third party audit. That said in fact they do not log. They go the extra mile not to log. They run this trusted server technology runs only in RAM as sandbox can't write to the drive disappears when you disconnect. And to make it even better, every day they wipe the entire drive. They reboot their custom designed Debian machine to start fresh. There is nothing on the servers to identify you. And when you use ExpressVPN, it encrypts 100% of your network traffic. So your data isn't visible from hackers even on public Wi Fi in the same coffee shop, hotel, airport. ExpressVPN works everywhere you work. Your phone, your laptop, your tablet. You can even run it on, I often do on the router. So the whole house is protected. You tap one button, you turn it on and you are private. You are protected. It's that easy. Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com twit that's E-P-R-E-S-S vpn.com twit and you can get an extra four months free when you buy a two year package. Expressvpn.com twit they picked a good time for this ad. ExpressVPN probably, probably will be a good time to be in a VPN company right now. Let's see, moving on. This is a good one. I'm very curious what you all think of this. The House has announced its crypto week. Yay. Bitcoin. At a record high over $120,000, Trump is considered by many the first crypto president. The Genius act has been passed by the Senate. Now it's going to the House. This will make possible Stablecoin, which is how dollars. I don't understand it myself.

[Harper Reed]

I love stablecoins. I think they're so cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Explain Stablecoin to me then, Harper, please.

[Harper Reed]

Okay. It's a digital representation of a dollar. It's pegged, so to speak, so they can peg it to a yen or to a US dollar.

[Leo Laporte]

Unlike Bitcoin, it doesn't fluctuate. Crazy.

[Harper Reed]

It's trying to remove some of the chaos from it. But also if you're all on chain, so to speak, and you're buying Bitcoin or you're buying Ethereum or any of these things, you can't buy it with your paper money over here or your money that sits in a JP Morgan or whatever it sits in. You have to actually buy it with something that's on that chain. And so you want something, a good representation of the money, that of your fiat currency, so to speak.

[Leo Laporte]

The other issue besides volatility with Ether and Bitcoin is the gas fees, the cost of creating a transaction and both time and money.

[Harper Reed]

I think that's largely mitigated by some of the other chains that they've created.

[Leo Laporte]

So Stablecoin doesn't have that.

[Harper Reed]

It depends on where you're doing it. Like if you're doing it on the Ethereum chain, you certainly can rack up some charges just using stablecoin coins. But what I think is really interesting about stable coins and I am not a tax accountant so don't trust me on this, but it seems that because it's not going up and down, there's not a, there's no, you don't, you don't gain any money by trading in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, so you don't have speculation.

[Harper Reed]

So you don't have speculation. Your taxable income is very, very, very low. All of these things are happening there. But what's neat about it is it's a good way. It's like it feels a little bit like future money because if I send Amy 10 bucks, she just kind of gets 10 bucks. It's like you can build Venmo, you can things without having to do bank partnerships and all this other stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's the other thing I've been told that is good about Stablecoin is you don't have the vig that MasterCard and Visa and banks charge for these transactions.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly. Well now where it's complicated though is someone's making money on it. Because typically how you build and design these things is you have a, you create a token and then you back it theoretically with treasury bonds and all this other stuff. To say this is one for one. So when you put a dollar into the system, we buy something that makes us money to support this. And so you're making percent off of billions and trillions of dollars of tether or circle or what have you. Super smart business. But it's, it's, I don't ne, I don't think that it's a good idea to have some private, theoretically venture backed business controlling the fiat electronic digital currency of the United States. So for example. But like, you know, smoke if you got them, I suppose. But I, I certainly, I have a small number of usdc. It's almost my only crypto on my Coinbase debit card that I use. It's the card I give my kid, when he run and does weird stuff like he's at an arcade, it's like, yeah, go use this one. It's all fantasy money, but it's all. It's all usdc, which is a stablecoin. But I love Stablecoin.

[Leo Laporte]

So there is not one so cool. Even if the Genius bill passes in Congress, there isn't one stable coin. It's every.

[Amy Webb]

Every country has a. So there are these central bank, cbc, central banks.

[Leo Laporte]

You may not get that because there are three bills that Congress is considering, one of which which would prevent the Fed from ever creating a digital version of US currency or a central bank.

[Harper Reed]

This is what I like about the United States is that we were not very good at thinking. That's one of my favorite parts about this. Not to talk about our Japan fellowship much, but one of the other fellow fellows there was part of writing the Japanese stablecoin stuff. And it's just so well thought out. Out and like watching them. And the reason why it's thought out is because for whatever reason, they're very iterative. They did one in like 2018. They were like, great. And then a couple years later, like, let's fix it. And they did it again and again and again. And it's just like last year they released another one and the US Is just like, here's five different versions that are all cancel each other out. We're just going to pass them all.

[Amy Webb]

And then reverse it when the next.

[Harper Reed]

Administration reverse it hard.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that does hurt the United States is that to the outside world we look very ephemeral. Like every four years it's different.

[Amy Webb]

It's. It. What it really looks like is we have no plan. And that's because we don't.

[Harper Reed]

No, we don't have a plan.

[Amy Webb]

I was in Davos in 2018, I think 2018 and 19 at the world Economic Forum, Central bank digital currencies was a big topic and everybody was trying to hash this out and think about it. And you know, so it's not. It's not like all of this is happening overnight, actually. If you guys are. If people.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, we're laggards. Is that what you're saying to this? I mean, this process?

[Amy Webb]

I mean, we're laggards in getting our shit together. But there are lots of really smart people who think about this. So there's a person, a researcher at MIT named Neha Narula who's brilliant, who is great, and she heads the digital currency initiative. There's a lot of really Smart people out there who are consistently trying to advise, you know, here's what you do, but nobody's, you know, picking up what they're putting down or at least they're not holding onto it.

[Leo Laporte]

So, so in, in theory at least, stablecoin would be a good thing. We could, we, banks could start moving, markets could start moving money in stablecoin instead of cash for settlements to be faster, costs would be lower.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, and then there's all sorts of, of really neat kind of impacts in that if you're trying to send money back home to some other country, so to speak, you can send, send it magically over the Internet without having to pay someone else to facilitate that. And so it really has some big options. When one of my last companies, we built a stablecoin debit card specifically because we were thinking that crypto wasn't real until you can pay for rent or child care etc, and stablecoin allows you to do this because if you're working for crypto, so to speak, then you're being paid in magic beans if you can't buy food with it. And a lot of people I think are excluded from that world because they're just like, yeah, I got to pay for childcare, like, I can't do this. And so, you know, a good, good legislation around this, what it will do, is it normal, it may bolster crypto in general, but what it will do is it allow the banks to actually work within these things, within a framework that allows them to not get in trouble with the future because there's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there's regulation around it, there's actual regulation and legislation.

[Amy Webb]

This, this stuff is pretty hard to understand, to be quite frank. And so sometimes what I've noticed is that on the non on fintech side of things, there's a lot of conflating, just like Ethereum or Bitcoin with Stablecoin.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're not the same.

[Amy Webb]

Well, I, so not always. I mean, Harper already said it earlier, there's less volatility. The idea is you reduce the volatility. It's not day trading, you know, you're reducing volatility.

[Leo Laporte]

Haven't there though been some pretty well known stablecoin collapses?

[Harper Reed]

They had a different name for them, but they, most of those were algorithms, meaning that they had some algorithm that was helping them peg. Instead of saying I'm pegged at USD, they were pegged at some equation and most of those all have gone up in flames. And I happily have forgotten all of that world. But I still love I truly think stablecoins are an opportunity for us to build some just really neat things that give that increase financial access, etc. I also think it's a great way for rich people to hide wealth. Wealth if they want.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, just what we need.

[Harper Reed]

We'll see. Come on. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

So in other, what you're saying is we no longer need the Canary Islands. We've got stablecoin.

[Harper Reed]

You can just put all your money in some Stable coins, you know, and then magically transfer it to your phone, and then magically transfer it to someone else's phone, and then, you know, throw your phone in the ocean and then lose all your money.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Is there a leader in stablecoin? Is. Is it usdc? Is that your preference?

[Harper Reed]

So Circle, which I have a great factoid about Circle. Jeremy, the founder of Circle, was the inventor of cold fusion.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. Who knew that?

[Leo Laporte]

Why didn't you tell everybody else? We could use that right about now.

[Harper Reed]

No, the web programming language.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that. Not the cold fusion.

[Harper Reed]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, I used to use cold fusion. That was cool.

[Harper Reed]

I like that he made cold fusion and didn't make it and then now makes stable coins, but then. And then the other one is Tether. And Tether is worth researching because it's quite a roller coaster.

[Leo Laporte]

Tether, That's Tether. That's the one you like is Tether.

[Harper Reed]

I prefer USDC because. Because I find it to be a little less sketchy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is part of the problem is there isn't going to be a federal digital currency because we want. We want market.

[Amy Webb]

Oh, there isn't going to be. Isn't there a Trump coin that's getting rolled?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, a dollar sign. Trump. Yay.

[Amy Webb]

Feels pretty federal to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, obviously what's his name thinks so. He just bought another hundred million dollars of it, son. Oh, it's gotta be a good investment. This guy's all in on Trump. He's got $200 million in Trump.

[Amy Webb]

I.

[Harper Reed]

So much money in Trump. Trump.

[Leo Laporte]

You get to meet the president, though, and have a fine rubber chicken dinner with him.

[Harper Reed]

I feel like that's not my interest. I don't think I'm the target audience there.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so good. I didn't realize this stablecoin good. And this is so it's good. We're gonna do crypto week this week. That's gonna.

[Harper Reed]

Everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, well, everybody should watch with great interest.

[Harper Reed]

I personally think stablecoins have an opportunity to really help further financial security for a lot of people if they're done with some Thoughts in mind. I don't have a lot of confidence that our current batch of legislators are thinking just stop. So I'm pretty concerned about that. I also know that, like, one of the things that I think. I think you said, leo, this stuff's complicated. It's hard to think through. I guess Amy said that as well. Like, it's this really a lot of. Like, for instance, here's an example. Like, how does money transmission. What, work? Like, how does that work? Which is a whole batch of whole thing. Like, there's licensing.

[Leo Laporte]

We are really digital already. I mean, cash is not king any longer, right? I mean, everything.

[Harper Reed]

But in the US we are so far behind when it comes to open banking, et cetera. We are like the least progressive banking country in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, probably because same thing happened with cell phones, because we invented it. So we have all this legacy infrastructure that we. That we're reluctant to get rid of.

[Harper Reed]

I don't think we're reluctant to get rid of. I think we're protecting it because of power.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. MasterCard have a lot of money.

[Harper Reed]

One of the things that's interesting about this is that this is a way to disrupt that. And Visa and MasterCard invested a tremendous amount of money, acquisitions, resources, etc, trying to support this stuff. Most of the support is done outside the US because the US just doesn't know how to handle it. But I think it. I think it.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't even have jib and pull in.

[Harper Reed]

No, we don't. It's. It's so funny that. Do you remember traveling?

[Leo Laporte]

I still give my credit card to the waitron.

[Harper Reed]

I know, I know, I know. I never. Anyone from Europe is like, the. Are you doing. What is wrong with you?

[Leo Laporte]

They just took your credit card, dude.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah, they're.

[Leo Laporte]

They're bringing it. Where'd they go with it?

[Harper Reed]

I always hope that they're swiping it. Like, that's my dream. I, like, hope.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope they're swiping it and there's not a skimmer installed in the thing they're swiping it in.

[Harper Reed]

No, that's what I mean. Like, I want. I want to be. I want to be caught up in some crime syndicate. Like someone at a restaurant is back there being like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you don't mean swiping it, like, running it through. You mean they're stealing it?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, they're skimming it. I just. I just love the. Like.

[Amy Webb]

Harper, let me. Let me tell you, you truly do not want to.

[Harper Reed]

No, I don't.

[Amy Webb]

As somebody who has this happened to You, Amy, it's less glamorous than you may be imagining.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Identity theft. It's not everything it's cracked up to be. Is that what you're saying? You know, it's very common here in. In my little town in Northern California for skimmers to be discovered in gas stations, pumps, you know, all the time. It's a very easy thing to pop one in, come back in a couple of days, you got a bunch of credit card numbers.

[Amy Webb]

You know how you. You know how you don't get caught up in that? You don't. You don't put gas in a car. You drive.

[Leo Laporte]

You and I drive electric. I know, yes. I fill up at home.

[Amy Webb]

Or you take public transit.

[Leo Laporte]

We have the same car now.

[Amy Webb]

Do we? You have an i5?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

Oh, nice. Do you like it?

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Harper Reed]

I want an i5.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to decide. My lease runs out in a year and a half. I'm trying to decide.

[Amy Webb]

Fine.

[Leo Laporte]

If I should keep it or maybe the next thing will be there by then.

[Amy Webb]

So, Brian, quick side quest. There's a lucid gravity that Brian eyes on, and he's for like three years been talking to people.

[Leo Laporte]

So I hope he's been saving for those three years.

[Amy Webb]

There. There is no car. So he. He has now finally gotten a hold of somebody there and he's like, all right, six months from now, I'm ready to get this car. And they were like, no, it's not gonna happen. You can't. Can. There. There is no. I think it's like, not happening for them.

[Leo Laporte]

The gravity.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, but yeah, any lucid would be nice.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. I don't know. I think the V1 of, like, version one of a lot of these cars.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

They're so glitchy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, after owning a Tesla, I decided I want to buy a car from a company that manufactures cars.

[Harper Reed]

Isn't that a funny thing? We've got a Volvo after our Tesla. We were like, oh, look, handles. This is incredible. You can hold on.

[Leo Laporte]

My car guy Sam Abulsamed calls them metal benders. You wanna buy a car from a metal bender? You don't.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Cause basically the Tesla's a golf cart with a computer in it, is what it is. And I don't the computer, by the way. Speaking of which, good news, Tesla owners, you're gonna get grok.

[Harper Reed]

I'm excited about that. I love this. I hate talking to Google and its lack of ability in my car. Like, when you're just like, hey, Google, take me to wherever and it's like searching for tacos. And you're like, I know I'm home.

[Leo Laporte]

Calling Mom.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, it's like, whatever. And it's. I really want a smart, somewhat unreliable AI assistant in my car. I promise you, I want all of the bad and all of the good.

[Leo Laporte]

You won't feel bad when it, when it goes full Mecca Hitler.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. If I get into a Tesla, is the Tesla going to have a little chit chat with me about my, you know, city.

[Leo Laporte]

There's genocide in South Africa right now.

[Amy Webb]

That I can drive you involving a. Yeah, it's a little campsite just for people like you.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to take a little break. When we come back, we could talk about Grok. We could talk about what happened with Grok.

[Harper Reed]

That was a wild. That was a wild.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a wild ride.

[Amy Webb]

And yet entirely predictable.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft learned this years ago when they created a tay, a bot that was.

[Amy Webb]

Trained on Twitter because it happened. They yanked it offline and, and then fixed and re released it and the same damn thing happened again within 24 hours.

[Leo Laporte]

It went racist because Twitter. And Twitter's not Twitter anymore. It's X.

[Harper Reed]

It's not Twitter anymore.

[Amy Webb]

You know.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we'll talk about that in just a bit. Great panel. I love having. If I could just, you know, do all the shows with you guys. But you've got real lives and real things you're doing. But anyway, it's wonderful to have you on. I very feel very fortunate when we get Harper Rent Reed and Amy Webb together and I know you feel the same way. Thank you for being here. Special thanks to all our club Twit members who make this show possible. We appreciate you our show today brought to you by NetSuite. We appreciate our fine sponsors as well. NetSuite. It's an interesting. I think if you've been listening, you know, I think Amy would concur. An interesting time for business tariffs. Trade policies are.

[Harper Reed]

Are.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the word? Dynamic. Supply chains are squeezed and cash flow is tighter than ever. If your business can't adapt in real time, you are in a world of hurt. You need total visibility from global shipments to tariff impacts to real time cash flow. And that's NetSuite by Oracle, your AI powered business management suite trusted by over 42,000 businesses. NetSuite is the number one cloud ERP for many reasons. It brings accounting, financial management, inventory and HR all into one suite. You've got one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions with Real time forecasting. Suddenly, you're peering into the future with actionable data. And with AI embedded throughout, you can automate a lot of those everyday tasks, letting your team stay strategic. Netsuite helps you know what's stuck, what it's costing you, and how to pivot fast. It's one system, full control. Tame the chaos with NetSuite. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free ebook Navigating Global Trade. 3 insights for [e-mail] TWiT that's netsuite.com TWiT we thank them so much much for their support of this week in tech. Elon Musk said, I'm gonna update Grok Grok. The new Grok model came out on Wednesday. Grok 4, all new version. Elon, well, I mean, look, he spent a lot of money, bought a lot of Nvidia H100 cards after Meta. I think Xai is the number 2 owner of Nvidia card cards. Elon billed it as the smartest AI in the world. In their own tests, Xai says Grok 4 appears to meet, match or beat competing models from OpenAI and Anthropic on advanced science and math problems. And by the way, I pay 20 bucks a month. Actually, I don't. Oh, I'm sorry, did I say I pay for it? No, I'm an involuntary blue check on Twitter, so I get it for free.

[Harper Reed]

You're an involuntary blue check check?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

That's incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

So I actually bought. I should show you this. When Elon bought Twitter, I was a normal blue check, a verified user. So I bought. I. I ordered this plaque. It says, in honor of Leo Laporte, who had a verified Twitter account before they were available for purchase November 2022.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, I want one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that cool?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, It's a little dusty. Dusted it off. And then. So I labored in obscurity for some years after that without a blue check. Then one day I woke up to say, oh, look. Without giving him any money, Elon has given me a blue check.

[Harper Reed]

You're not notable. You're verified.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm verified. Cory Doctorow changed his handle at that point to say involuntary blue check. I don't use X, so I don't really care. But I do. I was happy to see that I get the benefits of that, including access to a Groq, which is nice because I pay for every other AI.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, same.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have any of the $200 Pro accounts, Harper?

[Harper Reed]

I bet you I have the OpenAI one and I have the anthropic one and I don't have the Groq one.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you find it beneficial to have.

[Harper Reed]

The extra so on the OpenAI one, the Oath 3 Pro or the Zero1 Pro? Prior to that, I find very good from a reasoning standpoint.

[Leo Laporte]

I like O3. Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. And it's, it's, it's very, very good. I've heard a lot of very good things about the new GROK model. I typically don't really use Nazi products, I should say, except for Volkswagens.

[Leo Laporte]

But Volkswagen, we only think of the last 75 years. We don't consider.

[Harper Reed]

But, um, I've been, I've been. I did download the app yesterday, being like, I should probably check this out because so many people that I really admire were saying it's pretty good kind of unfortunately. And I do, like, just the whole, this whole last week, I was just like, oh, my God, could you imagine being on that team? One of my favorite things to think about are people who are doing stuff and they're doing with all of their, their, their effort and they're trying to be very good and well intended and all this stuff and then, then life just hits them with. And. But they're, but they're like, like, there's obviously a bunch of people on that team that really are spending their life building this thing. And then, and then Elon is like, let me introduce you to Mecca Hitler. And they're just like, our presentation is tomorrow. Like, what are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

So what do you think happened? Do you think Elon literally went down to the office and typed in a few special tweaks or. Actually, the Grok team apologized. They said, update on what happened on July 8th. First of all, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was not Elon. It wasn't Elon. It wasn't Elon. It was an update to a code path upstream of the Grok bot. Oh, maybe it wasn't Elon. This is independent of the underlying language model. Well, yes, it's fine tuning after the model.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I'm guessing it's the prompt, right? My guess, I'm guessing that.

[Leo Laporte]

And that you can easily change. That's in text, right? You could just go in and say, hey, mention the white genocide in South Africa. You might want to mention.

[Harper Reed]

I, I think it's very clear that this is Elon.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it follows his beliefs. The other thing that somebody noted is that if you ask the reasoning model model to respond to Something like Israel versus Palestine. One word, which it will consult, it will literally show you as its reasoning. Let me see what Elon says.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, I have a different. I'm not a conspiracy theory person. I want to just say that first. Yeah, look, O3 Pro has made some pretty decent advancements in the past couple of weeks. And Gemini is banging out some good stuff and Claude is banging out some good stuff. And here's little scraggly Grok desperately trying to get some kind of attention. And Hook got the attention. I was with, I'm not gonna say who, but I was with some of the some folks at Grok not too long ago, talking to them about like Elon Musk. Yes, I was hanging with my bro Elon because he loves people like me.

[Leo Laporte]

You joke, but we've had, you know, a couple of weeks ago, Jason Calacanis went on and he literally was hanging with Elon.

[Amy Webb]

Now I am, I. Look, I don't have a lot of free time and among the people that I would want to spend such little time that I do have, Elon is not anywhere on that list.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. You've never carried his child, I take it. Okay.

[Amy Webb]

Not yet.

[Harper Reed]

Not with that attitude.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, yeah. All right. No, but here, here's my thought. So I was talking to the, some of the Gro guys and I. They were pretty tight lipped and whatever, but I, but I, I was like, look, just tell me what, where do you guys see your place in the world? You know, you've got three pretty strong competitors and just what's going to differentiate you off Plat, off the Twitter or whatever it's called, X Platform. Just where do you see yourselves? I. There's literally not a single executive team that I ever encountered where your name ever comes up. You guys are never in the room in any of the conversations. Anybody who's doing anything with hyperscaling, like, I'm happy that you're building the world's biggest supercomputer. You got all the chips, but like you're just not even on. You're just nowhere. And they didn't have an answer to that other than, well, we've got a lot of stuff cooking. So I'm wondering if this was actually a publicity stunt and intentionally done.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the wrong kind of publicity, though, Amy.

[Amy Webb]

It is, but. It is. But Microsoft survived. And Elon, there is some.

[Leo Laporte]

That's because Microsoft does a lot of other things besides chatbots.

[Amy Webb]

But if you're Elon Musk coming up or down from Ketamine, wherever you are in Your cycle and no but, but I mean in all honesty there is so much money on the line for that company. There is an exchange.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact he's just borrowed more money from SpaceX.

[Amy Webb]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

So which is really mistake but okay.

[Amy Webb]

That's right. That's right and if I was a shareholder I'd be running for the hills right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Really are one company. They're, they're, they're the Elon companies now.

[Amy Webb]

So I'm wondering if. I don't doubt, I think Harper is right. I think this probably came top down and I'm wondering if he miscalculated and thought that some you know, even negative publicity will stir up enough and it'll get us people talking about us again and see that it is a really.

[Leo Laporte]

Good kind of person who try it. There's no such thing as bad publicity.

[Amy Webb]

That was a stupid thing to do. But like, like again I don't know. I don't know any formidable any team out there that is using Grok in any way.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I know a couple that are doing it for Cogen stuff but I, but I can't tell if they're doing it to be like contrarian or if they're doing it because that they, they, they just find a better outcome but they, but they are using it for real.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it damaging though to you know, kind of give people the impression that an AI can really be grotesquely not just wrong, grotesquely evil? Isn't that a bad thing to tell the world that you know this? Easily you could make an AI be.

[Amy Webb]

But that is exactly what, that's what Sam Altman did In February of 2022 we've built GPT2. It is so powerful, it is so strong that we cannot release it. And there is so much craziness and hype right now around AI. I, I just, there's a part of me that wonders like there was no. Like it takes a long time to retrain a model and it's highly unlikely given that they, they fired all of their security team people that like anybody was minding the store. So my hunch is it would have been hard to engineer this overnight or to remove a restriction. So my hunch is that there was a tiny upstream tweak that got made.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. To the prompt. Right. So so my do that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's easy. Anybody can do that.

[Harper Reed]

I think there's this other thing that is, is people don't like to talk about which is like the billionaires anti woke agenda where they're just, they're so Mad about something. I can't quite put my finger on what they're mad about because it doesn't seem like it's real every time they say the words that they're mad about. But this. They're mad about something to. So to such a level that they are. Are like. Elon just goes. He probably just put in a system prompt like be anti woke. Say the opposite of woke. And they're, you know, there's no safety.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't think he said talk about Hitler or talk about genocide, but I think he very likely said when somebody asks you opinion on a controversial subject, check my posts on X. Something like that. Right. That would. That would be all it would take.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Marc Andreessen say universities will pay the price for dei.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

What are they upset about? What are these nut jobs? I mean, we have rewarded them all with vast, unthinkable amounts of money. This is a gilded age for Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman and all these guys. They have more power and money than any one. Sam, since. I don't know, Putin.

[Amy Webb]

Because. Because the. Because as things were changing in between 2016 and 2020, that centralized power in a different place, away from the tech oligarchs and instituted new, if not restrictions or laws, expectations for how their system should behave. And I don't think they wanted to be told what to do. I don't think it's that challenging.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember Larry Page at Google I O saying, oh, you know, I wish we could have a Google I O island where there'd be no governmental regulation.

[Amy Webb]

Interestingly so. So they weren't just blowing smoke. There's actually, there's a very interesting. I don't want to like, direct people to a different podcast, but. But the Hard fork, which I don't love.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, no, you can direct people to other places.

[Amy Webb]

But Ross Dutat, who's a. Oh, that.

[Leo Laporte]

Interview with Teal was, wow.

[Amy Webb]

Right. But Teal. So there's a couple things that I found interesting. Interesting. He did talk about leaving a meeting with Elon. So I wonder if there was a little bit of bro tension talked about. There's a moment in that podcast where he talks about Elon giving up on Mars. Mars is a different place to start civilization again. They were talking about sea studying at some point.

[Leo Laporte]

So this was big into for a long time moving out of the United States and creating independent sovereign, sovereign islands on oil and abandoned oil.

[Amy Webb]

But. But that is okay. So some states have wisened up to that. And the State of Montana, just like last week, changed some of its restrictions, I mean this past two weeks to enable more longevity testing outside of traditional rules. So again, I think this is less about anti war woke or somebody's mad at somebody else. I think this is just, I have a worldview and, and the rest of the world should follow it and I'm going to concentrate power around me in that worldview.

[Leo Laporte]

They also think he's smarter and better than everybody. Right, okay.

[Amy Webb]

But like so did kings. I mean if you go back, yeah, so did kings. So we just, it's a different.

[Harper Reed]

Well, kings, kings didn't have Mecca Hitler though.

[Leo Laporte]

Kings had Mecca Henry viii and they.

[Harper Reed]

Had, they had, they had real Hitlers.

[Leo Laporte]

They would chop people's heads, heads off.

[Amy Webb]

I guess the point, the point is it's about consolidation of the kind of person at the right moment in time that has the right personality, amasses the right amount of wealth that's able to consolidate power. So what we're seeing unfold in real time are, is just a new form of immensely powerful people duking it out which has happened throughout human history. This is just the latest version of that, that for my.

[Leo Laporte]

So in this interview with Dutat, Thiel says 2024 is the year Elon stopped believing in Mars. Mars was supposed to be a political project, it was building an alternative. And in 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI, it would follow you to Mars. He says if I had the seasteading version with Elon where I said if Trump doesn't win, I want to just leave the country. And then Elon said there's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to go. This is the only place. Maybe that was when Elon decided to pump a quarter of a billion dollars into the Trump campaign. I guess it was.

[Amy Webb]

Again, it's interesting as Sam Altman was considering a run in politics prior to Trump. So I think if you.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, I thought Mark Zuckerberg, when he went on that tour of the 50s, he definitely was, he wanted to be president.

[Amy Webb]

But this is not about anybody wanting to be president. This is not about like a strong desire to contribute back and be a civic leader. This is about power, amassing power and feeling like you are, it is your right that, that you have the right to win.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that kind of what's changed in the world? I don't know, maybe I'm a pie eyed optimist, but it used to be there was this sense of community, this Sense of let's become leaders so that we can make the world a better place for everyone. And now it's, what can I get for me and mine?

[Amy Webb]

Well, I think there's that. And also, and I don't want to, like, veer off into crazy territory here, but, you know, the Trump administration, it's too late for that. Trump administration. Straight station published on White House letterhead a ridiculously written, and let's just be honest, stupidly capitalized open letter.

[Leo Laporte]

Who does that? Who does the capitalization there in that White House?

[Amy Webb]

A president of another country admonishing that president for wrongly, like Bolsonaro, that there was a previous president that did some bad stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

You already said the B word, so we know what you're talking about. Brazil. Okay, go ahead.

[Amy Webb]

Okay. So. So anyway, anyhow, imagine some other foreign country president publishing an open letter to us, doing the same thing. We're now, like, on in social media, like, interfering with the politics of other countries. So I think all.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, that's what you're worried about?

[Amy Webb]

No, no, no. To me, that exemplifies these shrinking. For as much as these people talk about democratization, which is quite total, they're working very hard to consolidate power around them. So it's a, it's a form of a kingdom. It's just taking a totally different shape this time around. And, and it's tricky because so much of it is algorithmic, so you don't have to fly your flag in the street. There's a algorithm that is identifying you and, and putting you, you know, sort of sorting you into a tribe and then stoking your emotions.

[Leo Laporte]

David Brooks, who wrote Bobos in Paradise and not one of my favorite people in the world, but he does put forward this notion that in the, back in the day, people wanted to do something. Wanted, wanted political power so they could do something good for society. But that is clearly not the case anymore.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I mean, I, I think these, I think a lot of these folks would say they are doing something good for society. Good. And it's not our good or it's not a shared good.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. They believe that, though.

[Amy Webb]

I think from their perspective, they, I.

[Harper Reed]

Mean, the world doing the best thing.

[Amy Webb]

World coin, which is now just world, you know, the orb. I mean, I, I think I want.

[Harper Reed]

One of those orbs. I would love an orb to scan my eye. Everyone that comes into my office, I'd be like, you got to scan your eye.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll give you some, I'll give you some stick stablecoin.

[Harper Reed]

I'll take it coin.

[Leo Laporte]

So they took the word coin off so that it wouldn't have the.

[Amy Webb]

Just kidding. Well, now we're just. Yeah, we're not exploiting Kenyans anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Amy Webb]

Now it's just a cool piece of.

[Leo Laporte]

This was Sam Altman's big investment world, actually. Still is. You can go to a little. They're rolling out retail storefront New York City and San Francisco. Cisco with some plywood and two by fours and you can scan your eye. Inspires a lot of confidence. All right, well, okay, maybe I don't want Grok in my Tesla. Although they're very quick to say, I think it's great it won't drive the car. They're saying that.

[Harper Reed]

I spent a bunch of time yesterday talking to a friend about Waymos, specifically how I thought they were very cool. I like that experience. Experience. And her entire perspective was, but what if it locks the door and doesn't let me out?

[Leo Laporte]

She saw Silicon Valley where it drove the guy into a container ship and he ended up in Japan.

[Harper Reed]

Maybe, but that. But that is that like she thinks.

[Leo Laporte]

People think that AI has volition.

[Amy Webb]

Wait a minute, Harper, why did you find that interesting? Tell me more.

[Harper Reed]

I find it interesting because she has a fear that is not like I. Most of my peers and friends that I've talked to about Waymos say, oh, I don't have to talk to someone. Oh. As a. As a person who is oftentimes scared of the Uber driver, I don't have to interact with a person who might take me someplace I don't want to go or even have some awkward interaction, or I have to fake that I'm on a phone call or all of these things that are survival mechanisms. Her first thing was like, what if there's a bug and it locks me in and drives somewhere and won't let me out? Which. Which I was like, that's a very valid concern. And. But it was not anywhere in any of the things I had ever talked about about with this. And so it was just very. It was very interesting for me that, you know, and we. Her and I had talked a lot about Uber drivers, etc. And how she doesn't like that experience. And so the fact that she wasn't like, I don't have to talk to anyone anymore. She was immediately like, I don't want to get locked into a machine. Which is a very valid fear. I feel like that's a real thing. I don't. I also don't want that. I just didn't think about it at all.

[Leo Laporte]

I have never ridden one of those, but I don't live in a town where they're great prevalent. You like it?

[Harper Reed]

Love it.

[Leo Laporte]

So one of the things I think is a little bit hand wavy is how much of that is actually being driven by an autonomous AI and how much of it is being driven by someone back at the home office.

[Harper Reed]

I kind of all of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think there are a lot of times where somebody takes over.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, I got in a situation, can you tell in LA where it was just in, it was just kind of stuck and I hit the, like I just waited for a second and then I hit the help button and then it just said, and then it said someone is, is helping you get out of this situation and kind of pull and they're like, like, but, but from my perspective I was just like, yeah, cool, that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it's good there's somebody there watching.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah. I, I, I, I think a lot of the current AI world is puppetry, where it's like a person on the back, whether it is someone stoking a prompt ala or whether it's driving a car or helping you buy something. And I actually don't think this is too bad. Meaning tech is, a lot of tech has been this way. Like if you think of anything that's defeating Captchas, that's like Captcha farms in the Philippines or in all these places. Like there's a lot of this that is, that has been around for a long time. It just is. We're now acting like it is some magical thing. And the problem is it's very hard to discern whether it is an actual puppet or whether it's the magical thing. And you know, as someone who's trying to build a magical thing and not a puppet, I think about this quite a bit. Like how do you, how do you give magic to the user without them thinking, oh, this is just another, you know, puppet that is there. With that said, puppets are pretty cool sometimes. My brother makes puppets.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like the laundry folding robot they've been showing for 10 years at CES which is really so many in Japan saying, do this, do this. This goes back a long way. There was a chess playing robot 300 to 200 years ago that impressed everybody.

[Harper Reed]

Had a little inside of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Little person inside of it. Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Mechanical turk. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which Amazon then decided, hey, that's a pretty good name for what we're going to do. The European Union has unveiled rules for powerful AI systems. Rules, rules. So you don't have to worry about getting locked in. How do we feel about government regulation of AI? Good. Is it a good thing? Harper?

[Harper Reed]

I'm pretty pro regulation. I think generally, I think, I think the thing that I'm most mad about is the lack of iterative approach to regulation. And I really, because I, I'm pretty happy with like gdpr. Like great. Like it has some problems but I'm not unhappy with the ramifications there or the fact that I have USB C on my iPhone. I'm pretty happy about this. Like, I don't think that. I think Europe being the like the person that forces everyone else to like have relatively open access rules is not a bad thing for our world. I do think that sometimes it could be more thought out and I do think the people who are building a lot of these rules may not be thinking like, I mean to what Amy said earlier. They're not thinking so far ahead. They're only thinking about right now.

[Leo Laporte]

I like your point though. It should be an iterative process that we should try something, see how that works, adjust it over a period of time because no law can at this point be perfect. We have to watch what happens. Right. Amy, you agree?

[Amy Webb]

I, yes, I agree with generally with Harper. I agree in general anyways. I agree with the iterative approach. I however think that that so regulation works in the EU because they're far less litigious than we are in the US and also they've, there's been a very, for the past 20 years they have had a very consistent approach. So and they, you know, they have had a plan, they execute on the plan. So they, we knew, you know, they announced GDPR years in advance. Same thing with the AI regulation. This didn't come overnight. They've been talking about it for a while, so that's fine. I don't think that approach, I don't think regulation works in the United States in the same way. And I can give you a couple of quick reasons why. First of all, our society is too litigious. So the moment that we try to enact really, I mean the moment that we try to enact legislation, we already have a patch of work in the United States. Like every single state has a very different approach which makes it incredibly difficult for anybody, you know, and then trying to figure out something federally, any company is going to fight back against that. So the moment that you start really trying to regulate, you are going to wind up in years worth of court battles which doesn't resolve anything. It just creates more problem. I think though, rather than regulation. And I'm alone in this opinion, and I will die on this hill. I think we should make it possible for the companies creating the stuff to make as much money as they possibly want if they follow. So it's not regulation, but it's a financial incentive to do what we all believe is what I believe is best, which is treating a lot of this as a policy, public good. The market. The market helps them make decisions. So regulation is punitive. Financially. Incenting them is a much better pathway.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you do that, though?

[Amy Webb]

I know so. And that leads me to the third thing, which is planning. So we don't have a, we don't have a perspective on AI in the United States. I find it unfathomable that Russia made Spike Sputnik and the United States was like, shit, we gotta do something, guys. And we had a moonshot moment and nine years later, you know, whatever, this.

[Leo Laporte]

Decade is out, we will put a man on the moon.

[Amy Webb]

Great. And we did. And many wonderful things happened after that point. It's not like this AI stuff materialized overnight. We. Why, I don't understand why we don't have a public, private, singular sort of. Sort of. This is what we all want to do. And why?

[Leo Laporte]

Because we can't agree.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I don't think that's true.

[Amy Webb]

We, I agree, yes. I think if we have good leaders, which I don't think we have right.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, and that's the job of a leader, is to coalesce public opinion around. Good.

[Amy Webb]

And look, I'm, I, I'm politically independent. Trump has done a terrible job, but from my point of view, so did Biden. Like, we've had a bunch of terrible jobs, jobs when it comes to certain things. And AI and tech and certainly biotech fall into those categories. So we're at this impasse where European style regulation is not going to work in the US because it's just going to get stuck in the courts. I think that the best way forward is to incent the companies to do what's right by following a bunch of rules. And I actually have written extensively about this. So I think there is a way to do it, but it's not going to be popular. Nobody wants rich people to get richer is the problem. But I honestly think that's the only way forward.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, those work. We know, we know those market incentives work. They're right now they're kind of, unfortunately, they're negative incentives, but they do work. People respond to them. So you're saying you have to adjust the incentives to get people moving in the proper direction. That's better. A carrot is better than a stick.

[Amy Webb]

In other words, mainly because I don't know of another lever we can pull right now, given without radically changing what regulation is in our country.

[Harper Reed]

And we've also done it before. Right. Like what you're describing, Amy, is very Vannevar Bush kind of, you know, the past and how things have worked. So it's like this is a pattern that has worked before. I think that the hard part is that when it worked before, we were flush from World War II and had a lot of tailwinds pushing us a very specific direction, whereas now it seems like we have a of lot, a lot of headwinds that are stopping us. And, and I think what's complicated about this is a lot of the people who, you know, the government or, or, or various orgs would say are our enemy, China, etc, are taking advantage of this playbook and just running with it. And so where we are trying twiddling our thumbs, waiting for Sputnik, you know, they're the ones that are building all of this really great stuff. And you would have thought that Deep Seek or some of these other kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was going to say ch. China, China has done stuff that is equivalent of Sputnik. Deep Seek is a good example.

[Amy Webb]

It is. But again, so what was interesting about the Sputnik moment was we weren't completely like we didn't rely on Russia to make all the stuff we buy. So the problem with China is there is a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

So it's, it's a little complicated. But again, there's a way to do this where we have a perspective on the future. This is the future. This is where America continues to exert it's wonderful things about America. Right. That has nothing at all to do with China. So it is not a. China's bad. The US is good. This is more like we have a clear vision of, of what prosperity looks like in this country and now we're going to go after it and everybody else can try to keep up. So the point is there is a way forward. I worry that the longer we persist, AI and it's not just AI, there's other important technologies that exist out there that are as fundamental. Fundamental or you could argue more on a fundamental. But we keep politicizing it and, and at the same time that we're politicizing tech or it's becoming politicized, we're more divided. So we, we gotta like, gotta rein things in.

[Harper Reed]

Do you know, Amy, if The Sputnik push. Although. And I just read the, the Right Stuff, the Tom Wolf book, which is really great. Do you know if that was enabled by the labs that Vannevir Bush or was that outside of that? Because it also seemed to fit within some of the frameworks of the defense contractors of the time and some other places. But because there's quite a big difference between, you know, 1950 and 1965.

[Amy Webb]

Right. It's my, and I'm certainly not an expert in any of this, but my daughter's national history project, National History Month. I don't know. Big project she did on, on Sputnik and how it catalyzed tech innovation. So. And we looked at a bunch of declassified CIA documents. So that I'm pulling from like 8th grade research here.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, it's the best, by the way.

[Amy Webb]

But it seems like, it seems like the establishment of, it seems like the Sputnik moment wasn't just this race. It was like this horizontal approach where we were going to change education. Education. We were going to establish public private research projects or partnerships. It wasn't like we were just going to designate one lab or the, or whatever, these three labs. It was a much more, it was a much more multifaceted approach. But there was a singular direction. So I think that's what's missing. I think we just don't have this like, you know, and it, it's even worse because, like, I don't mean to dog on Sam Altman today, but he, and he's, he keeps saying, like, there's a lot of, like, we don't know what artificial general intelligence is. Well, you know, we're figuring it out. Or we don't know what super intelligence is. We, we, we don't know what the future is going to look like. And it, it creates this completely ridiculous unneeded, like, we don't know until we get there. Just trust us that we'll build it. I think we need to coalesce around not what it is, but what is the society that we want and how are these enabling technologies. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting you mentioned Vannevar Bush, who wrote a classic essay in 1945 called as We May Think, which really kind of ushered in the information age. But his moment wasn't the Sputnik moment. His moment was Trinity. His moment was the use of the atomic bomb. And he was very concerned that we were focusing our technological advances on destructive technologies. And that's why he advocated for information technologies. So it is interesting how these kind of pivotal moments can push a society in a direction in response.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, I think maybe there's just so much, I worry there's so much unneeded distraction that we're taking our eye off the ball. And the result of that is going to be a dip in prosperity and a dip in like you could be significantly more productive and that can yield significantly less GDP and people can realize significantly less individual wealth. I just, I feel like we're, we're missing this like layer of is it.

[Leo Laporte]

A one way ticket? It feels, sometimes it feels to me like the direction we're headed is irreversible. I think Amy, you wouldn't believe that. You seem like you're an optimist.

[Amy Webb]

Look, I don't believe in fate. I'm not a religious person. I think that the future is the result of the decisions that we make. And that means we have agency, which is great. We just have to like, you know, it's really. I think one of the most radical acts any person can make is to imagine themselves in the future. Like that is a terrifying thing to do because you have to confront your cherished beliefs in order to do that and be willing to think the unthinkable. And maybe it's good things, maybe it's bad things, but it's different. We, I don't think we have leaders that are willing to do that. I think everybody, the people who have assembled. Look, I, I never wanted to be president, but I wanted to be solicitor General. That was my dream job when I.

[Leo Laporte]

Was in fifth grade. Cool. You wanted to be testify in front of the Supreme Court pursuit cases.

[Amy Webb]

I wanted to be the, I was super interested in constitutional law. I wanted to be the lawyer. I wanted to be the lawyer that argued in the Supreme Court.

[Leo Laporte]

Love that.

[Amy Webb]

And I would never go into government. I think it's amazing that Harper like side quested over for, for a period of time.

[Harper Reed]

It was definitely a side quest. Side quests.

[Amy Webb]

But that takes so much personal resolve and I mean that's A lot of people won't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

We all need to do that. Right. We all need to pitch in and in a democracy. And what I worry about is that we have become an oligarchy and that the incent, the perverse incentives of money and politics have just turned us into a nation of rich people asserting their, their power over the rest of us.

[Harper Reed]

Can we, can we just put that into the capitalism bucket?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're late stage capitalism. That's, that's not just a bucket. That's the state of the situation.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I Don't know if it's a, if it's a one way street. I do have some concerns about my own ride on this journey and my ability to see the other side of this. But I do think, you know, I had a friend who is an AI researcher at one of the big foundations models and one of the things they noted was most of the people that work at these companies are very educated people. They've gone through lots of, oh yeah, graduate programs and gone through school for most of their adult life and they're now working professionally and very well compensated, all that. But they're saying that the only lab that hires like that that is pretty right leaning is Grok and, and of, you know, and so it's the people who go through these programs that then, you know, that's their, their world. And I think it's very interesting because like most of tech, in my experience, the reason I was able to be successful as Obama's CTO for that election, which was a very tech election, was because a lot of people were leaning to the left and it was very easy to hire. And so I don't know, I kind of think that we're going to get there, it's just going to be real Hugo Bossi until we get there. Like it's going to be a real mess.

[Leo Laporte]

What is Hugo Bossi? What does that.

[Harper Reed]

Didn't he make the Nazi uniforms? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did he?

[Amy Webb]

Oh yes, yes he did.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know that. They were nicely designed. Was that under Albert Schmear? Did he? They were, they were attractive.

[Harper Reed]

I'm really hoping the ice, the ice budget gets better uniforms. This is what I'm hoping. At least we have some really good masks.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not good.

[Amy Webb]

There's a lot of khakis, a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Of ill fitting khakis, some sharp lines, maybe a big hat, like know, with a badge, you know, maybe some light.

[Harper Reed]

Big hats would be good. We need bigger hats.

[Leo Laporte]

Bigger hats. They don't wear hats at all. Well, they wear baseball caps. That's what's wrong with modern society. By the way.

[Harper Reed]

Baseball.

[Leo Laporte]

Baseball cap. Go to a restaurant. There's guys sitting in nice restaurants with baseball caps on. What the hell? Yeah, where did we go wrong? All right, Baseball. My old, my old man moment is over. We're going to take a break. Amy Webb and Harper. Harper Reed. Wonderful to have you both. Amy is a futurist at the Future Today Strategy Group, FTSG.com she's also the author of many books. In fact, when you said that AI may not even be the most important technology. Made me think about your most recent book, which is called the Genesis Machine, which is all about biotech. And you're right. I mean, we. We're in an interesting world, but we don't even think about what's going on with biotech these days. People should read this book because there is a lot going on and there is a nexus between AI and biotech. Absolutely. And all you have to look for is the MRNA vaccine to see how biotech could change everything.

[Harper Reed]

Everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything. Harper Reed. It's good you're not wearing a baseball cap. That's all I can say.

[Harper Reed]

I don't know. I don't want to mess up my hair.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think you even own one. I'm guess you don't even own one.

[Harper Reed]

I don't own a baseball cap. Cap?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Harper Reed]

I'm looking for you. Ever seen the movie Holy Mountain?

[Leo Laporte]

No, what's that?

[Harper Reed]

Holy Mountain is a surrealist Spanish movie from 70s maybe. And that's more my style. So I'm. I'm looking for a Holy Mountain hat.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm thinking you. You would be more like this kind of leather top hat.

[Harper Reed]

But I have to be very careful because. Because I'm like three minutes from either being a burner, a steampunk, or an alt right guy.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'm thinking.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, that's not my vibe. I mean, I know I have seen punk glasses. I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Harper Reed]

You know, I'm just. I. I really think the world. Amy, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I think we're headed towards Mad Max or like rems. It's the end of the world as we know it. Those are the two choices.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, what about bringing back colonialism? I think the pith helmet, we still have that. I'm going to wear this in some restaurants and just see what happens.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, let's see what happens.

[Amy Webb]

Fun fact. I'm a enormous REM fan, but that's not the fun fact.

[Leo Laporte]

It is the end of the world as we know it. Yes.

[Amy Webb]

The fun fact is that it's my understanding that that song that Michael Stipe and crew were in Georgia somewhere at a college and happened to walk in on a debate. There was a debate tournament going on and as a former debater, it's hard to imagine this. There's no way for me to explain it. There's talking really fast and usually in order to win, it has to be the end of the world. Unless you have some other really crazy argument so they see all of this and the super fast talking and the apocalyptic end of the world. And that was the genesis for the song.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Amy Webb]

Inspired by incredibly cool debate nerds.

[Leo Laporte]

It all starts with forensics.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Yes. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Were you a debater, Harper?

[Harper Reed]

I feel like unfortunately I was, but I couldn't get out of my own way because we had mohawks and we never wore suits and we always were docked points because of this. So no matter how good we were, we were always punk.

[Leo Laporte]

Debate team. We don't like them.

[Harper Reed]

My CX partner only wore shorts. I grew up in Colorado and year round and so they would always have like, the judges would always be worse than baseball caps.

[Amy Webb]

Dude, he's not making it up. If you. If the. If. So we're. Harper and I are about the same age and if we didn't. If the women didn't show up wearing like heels and like, you know, business suits, we were docked as well. So. Which is, you know, unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

You were also a forensic.

[Amy Webb]

I competed in debate, but my. But my strengths was something. It was something called extemp. So there were extemp. Impromptu. It's like speech, rhetorical. It's a. I don't know what the kids. But no, no, no, no. This is you. I competed in foreign extent. So you have to know what's happening everywhere in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

And they would give you a piece of paper and say, you have to.

[Amy Webb]

Then go in and give a 10 minute speech with sources, analysis. So that was my main event, that impromptu. There was something called rhetorical criticism. I used Dinesh. I do not like Dinesh d', Souza, but he had a book called the End of Racism and I used. That was my book.

[Leo Laporte]

He's come a long way sincere.

[Amy Webb]

And after dinner speaking, which is kind of like early TED talks. And then so that I could compete in something called pentathlon, I did something called duo, which is hilarious. Yeah, it's two people. I was terrible. Two people reading out of a. Out of a script and sort of somewhat acting with.

[Harper Reed]

Anyhow, my brother did duo stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

I am not surprised. This is what makes you such great panelists. You are extemporaneous speakers. You know how to take a subject and just go, go.

[Harper Reed]

My goal in life is to be able to do a 10 to 40 minute talk on anything at any moment with someone else's slides. Like, that's one of my favorite things ever.

[Amy Webb]

Harper, I can make that dream come true for you. And maybe we should do this in Kyoto. So this is a.

[Harper Reed]

A slice of karaoke.

[Amy Webb]

I Run an underground activity called PowerPoint Karaoke where I make the slides and there's.

[Leo Laporte]

There's somebody else talks to him and he's never seen.

[Amy Webb]

The slides are. There is a theme, there's a beginning and end. They're ridiculous. Ridiculous looking stock images or GPT generated gems. And I'm the one who controls the clicker. So if you're killing it, I let you go a little longer and if you're bombing, we go faster. Maybe we should do that.

[Harper Reed]

I did this at a conference once and someone had missed the plane and they couldn't show up. And a friend of mine said, do you want to just do their stuff slides? And I was, I was like, yes. And it was when I was working for President Obama and the talk was about Obama era, like wire surveillance, like Obama. And I was just like, I don't think I can actually give this. I don't think I can do this. Like the next slide. I was like, oh, I'm in trouble. Hopefully there's no recording.

[Amy Webb]

I'll. I'll message you after. Maybe we should like do that as a alternative to.

[Harper Reed]

Okay, love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I have fomo. That's what I have.

[Harper Reed]

You can always come. I told you, just be one of our children. We'll register you.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Little Leo, this is my son.

[Harper Reed]

This is my son, little Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

This is my little son. He wears leather cowboy hats, but don't hold that against him. All right, we're going to continue on in a moment. You're watching this week in tech with two of the most interesting people in the world. It turns out. I had no idea. Our show today brought to you by Bit Warden, the. Oh, we love Bit Warden. The trusted leader and pastor. Not just passwords, pass keys, even secrets management. If you're a geek, you will love it. That Bit Warden, this is so cool. I know. It's a small slice of the audience. Will generate your SSH keys and store your private key for you and automatically feed your public key when you log in. Mind blown. But that's just a small. I mean, I know. No, nobody listening is going, well, I can't wait to get that. But if you needed, that would be really cool. Bitwarden is consistently ranked. Ranked number one in user satisfaction and not just by geeks, but by G2 and software reviews. More than 10 million users across 180 countries. 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Bit Warden is frankly the only password manager I recommend, the only one I use. I am a fan. I think you probably gathered that by right now by how I've been talking. So if I can make a recommendation, it's time, just time to get your company on Bitwarden. Get started today with Bit Warden's free trial of a team or enterprise plan or as an individual. Get started for free across all your domestic [e-mail] TWiT bitwarden.com TWiT we thank them so much for their support of the show. And of course everybody here at Twit uses Bitwarden because we're big believers in the old Bit Warden. All right, everybody has had a chance to refresh to, to have a beverage if you need. Back to the matter at hand. Should I stay in the AI sphere. We have a few more things. VO3 is everywhere now. In fact it's pretty cool. Yeah, this is the video generator Google put out and everybody's getting it now. If you have a Pixel phone, it's coming to your Pixel phone. If you have a Even the, the $20 Gemini account, you can generate, generate video and it's pretty good, isn't it Harper?

[Harper Reed]

It's Very good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of scary good.

[Harper Reed]

It's not a cheap model to run though, so I'm pretty excited for it to become more or more inexpensive. When it first was released, I did it on one of the AI providers and I think I quickly hit 50 bucks generating stupid videos of stupid stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it was fun, wasn't it?

[Harper Reed]

And the results are just incred. Very good. I'm pretty scared of what this, what this means for content like that. Just because it's. It's just you cannot verify anything's real.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, not anymore.

[Harper Reed]

Very difficult.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, not anymore. That's part of the problem, isn't it?

[Amy Webb]

On the cost thing. So this, this is. I have two totally opposing thoughts on this. I kind of like the fact that.

[Leo Laporte]

It Will Smith can now eat sports spaghetti. You like that? These are all generated, obviously.

[Amy Webb]

I don't mind it being expensive to generate anything that looks this good because it reduces AI slop. You're not going to just burn a ton of cash, right? Just generating crap.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean like this Pepe the Frog at the counter of the lunchette? You mean that by the way, they speak too. I should turn on the volume here so you can hear my breakfast. It's a gorilla.

[Amy Webb]

So what I would love to know.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it's a giraffe on a motorcycle doing wheelies in Manhattan.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. So all my content, a lot of my content has been scraped and is part of these models without my consent.

[Harper Reed]

Same.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting. You mean on Future Today strategy group.

[Amy Webb]

Then a book mat. So, like my books have been scraped. Our trend reports, which we have given away for free for years, have all been scraped. No. You know, nobody asked us anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have robots, text and stuff?

[Amy Webb]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're not adhering to the. It's not a law.

[Amy Webb]

Of course we do, but it doesn't. Great. So what are we supposed to do? Like send our lawyer after, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, an interesting thing. You know, cloudflare last week or a couple weeks ago offered this automatic blocking, except they can't block Google because Google uses their search spider for their AI.

[Amy Webb]

We are longtime Cloud Fair Flare customers, so that's all well and good. However, I don't have a way to dig. So, like, I would love for Google or somebody to offer me digital protection for my identity. It's one thing to steal my book and build a model around it. You know what, what, what if somebody hacks my face? It's not the same thing as a deep fake. Like, this is a pretty significant improvement. I Don't have the. What am I, what do I send a takedown notice of my, my face being used creatively or whatever.

[Harper Reed]

Or maliciously.

[Amy Webb]

Or maliciously. Right again, I think so. Going back to that whole conversation about regulation, our regulators would not have. We don't have the mechanisms to regulate in advance meaning to it would have been either the regulation be so broad that you wouldn't be able to enforce it or it would be narrow and wouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of prior restraint. Right. You can't so.

[Amy Webb]

Right. So again we have to figure out a way to get companies to invent cool things. I think that's great. But then like use them. Incent them to also create systems that prevent bad stuff from happening.

[Leo Laporte]

So Denmark has passed a law giving everybody the right to copyright their image. That just happened. Is that a. Is that the kind of thing you would like to see?

[Amy Webb]

Well, look, if you. Harper and I both have very specific looks. Okay. We.

[Harper Reed]

What do you mean? I'm confused.

[Amy Webb]

We don't, you know, we. Harper looks like Harper and nobody else looks like Harper and I. I look like, you know, I've got giant crazy hair and I tend to wear the exact same thing all of the time and you know, whatever. We're easy to spot and that makes us very easy to replicate. So right now I've got hundreds of.

[Leo Laporte]

Thousands of hours of audio and video of me online and I'm sure it's been scraped same boat.

[Harper Reed]

There's probably. I think this is something that I don't think we've seen the last of or the beginning of is that anyone who has any content online you can just make a digital clone of them and that can be used adversarial raise or it can be used for cool content. You know and in some cases I think all of us can take advantage of this with the LLMs where we can say like I am Harper Reed, you know who I am. Like so. So tailor your response to me. That's helpful.

[Amy Webb]

I'm not going to tell you where. I don't want to point any traffic to this but I. Somebody sent me an interview that I did with somebody in Brazil and sent a YouTube video and even it is a weird looking. So it's me, it's my voice. It is a very strange looking version of me and it was video and what the guy did was a mat. So like he presented it as though I sat down and had a conversation with him and then he made an AI version of me when in actuality I don't Know who this is? I certainly never talked to him, but he's presenting, he's representing my view. I mean it's, you know, it was not like.

[Leo Laporte]

Was he putting words in your. Well, obviously he was putting. Literally. Yeah, but was it stuff that you would disagree with or.

[Amy Webb]

It doesn't matter. Yeah, right. I, I don't, I don't, I didn't authorize any of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

So this is different than building a chatbot of me or a one off video. You know, this isn't like deep fake porn of me. This is like me, my acting more.

[Leo Laporte]

Insidious because it's the kind of thing you would, would do.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do we just have to get used to that? That this is the world we're in now? I mean, I don't know how he would even stop it.

[Amy Webb]

Well, I'd like for us to get started on stopping it like now.

[Harper Reed]

That's, I think the key. We should get started on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Denmark, maybe that's the first step. It's gonna, I guess it gives you the right to sue, but the, My experience with the right to sue is that's not very strict. Strong protection.

[Harper Reed]

It's. And once again, I think the issue is not like, certainly we can do something like that, but who is going to be, who's going to take advantage of this? Like, you know, Amy, myself, you, Leo, we're all people who are for better or for worse, have been in the public eye in some regards and have resources, etc, are doing fine. But if you're some young person who's like, you know, likelihood or whatever has been taken and used for some nefarious thing or to make money. I think Snapchat did this with a bunch of photos where they introduced photos into people's photo stream that were photos of them doing things they had not done. And some people were like, this is awesome. And other people were like, this is really creepy. In the past, when we've worked around these kind of things that are kind of future y, we always try and push it through is this creepy filter, which I just don't think some people are naturally good at or they're even thinking about because we just don't want like the worst thing to happen for your brand in my experience, is for someone to associate it with creepy shit. Some people don't really have that problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and we've tried to do this. There's the Take It down act, which President Trump said in his State of the Union address he can't wait to use against social networks because he's been the most mistreated person on the Internet ever in history.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Signing a law in May. I haven't seen any outcome from that. But this is. It was designed to deal with non consensual intimate imagery. But the way it works, you only a site like for instance my Mastodon site Twit social would have 24 hours after a take it down request to verify that it is non consensual intimate imagery and take it down, down and which means I would immediately take it down because I'm not going to take the chance. So it's widely believed it'll be used not merely to take down deep fake revenge porn, but anything that anybody doesn't like.

[Amy Webb]

I don't know, I don't, I don't think that's true. If I'm the general counsel for a company and if the law says, you know, non consensual intimate content and somebody's upset that the. They got parodied, that is not intimate. Right. It's something totally different. You know, think of the volume. So if you just think about this from a practical operational point of view, the volume of takedown requests that they could get untenable. You could build a scrape, you could build a bot, try to, you know. So I don't think this is going to have any impact on for the most part on content that is, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Think people ignore it.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, we. Look, we have a full. We can have a lawyer on our team that most is mostly supposed to be doing contracts and higher order stuff and he's spending a chunk of time every week now on takedown notices.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

Because people are either stealing our stuff, we've never.

[Leo Laporte]

Sending out, sending out takedown notices. Not incoming. Tick tock.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, yeah, take. Yeah, sending out. We just, we haven't been in this. It's amazing we haven't been in this situation before and all of a sudden there's an avalanche. Avalanche of. Of stuff.

[Harper Reed]

Wow. You think it's AI related? Like people are using AI to generate stuff and using your corpus of data to like create.

[Amy Webb]

So a couple things. We wrote a very influential paper that we, you know, we always make all of our stuff publicly available. So this was on Living Intelligence and it has had a lot of impact and a whole bunch of people have taken either the entire thing or chunks of it and have put it through an AI engine and are just republishing it as though it's their original thought and their own stuff. So we get one of, we see that like once a day. My Visage. My voice is popping up in non sexual but like thought leader style interviews or podcasts or whatever that I, you know, it's just, I think the, the, the availability of generative AI and the, the. I don't know, I, I guess people just don't, aren't have like lack self awareness and they're just posting.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't you worry it'll be used? Misused?

[Harper Reed]

Well, I mean, it's currently misused, right? That is a misuse.

[Leo Laporte]

Then there's economic cost. Chris Coons and Amy Klobuchar have the no Fakes act, which the EFF really doesn't like, but it sounds like something you would like. Like the no Fakes acronym isn't very good. Nurture originals, foster art and keep entertainment safe.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. Look, all of this is great when you're sitting around having deep thoughts with other people. I think we all want there to be fewer restrictions because the slippery slope is you publish something that runs afoul of somebody else's political beliefs and you're silenced. So I understand where all of this is coming from, but the practical reality, reality is like I'm paying somebody and I did not have to before to just issue takedown notices because it's become so easy for people to steal our stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you would like this because this no Fakes act is focused on digital replicas. It's targeting this exact kind of theft. But I mean, I understand your desire to protect yourself, but I worry about how it will be misused.

[Amy Webb]

This. And that was what I was saying at the beginning. I think we've hit this inflection point where there were lots of. I certainly, I'm sure, Harper, I mean, there were a lot of us 20 years ago who were saying, here are plausible futures. This is where we are. These are plausible outcomes. Let's figure out a way to mitigate, to like make sure the best stuff goes forward and we mitigate risk and in advance. There were, it's not like there was a lack of that. There were a lot of people doing that. At one point Facebook had a. I knew the people on the team. They had a team doing this.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't anymore. Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

No. So now, now the shit is here.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not worried about Facebook and Google. I think they have the means to do this. I'm worried about me. I'm worried about my chat room and my mastodon and my forums. I do not have the means to respond to a bunch of takedown requests for people who don't like it that somebody said Something they didn't like. And I, and I feel like this is going to stifle free speech. It's going to stifle a lot of little guys who will no longer be able to. I will have to close all of these.

[Amy Webb]

So the incentive, we've incentivized people. Look, LinkedIn, if you, if you've been on LinkedIn lately, it's just I literally, before we started, popped on and saw that somebody had taken a post that I had written and chat GPT ified it and it popped up because I'm connected to them. And it's like.

[Harper Reed]

Was it me?

[Amy Webb]

It was, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

You wouldn't do that, Harper.

[Amy Webb]

And look, I don't, I don't give a shit. It's LinkedIn. So fine, copy, paste, whatever. But the point is, it wasn't good, it wasn't written well, it wasn't compelling, it was cheap too long. So I think the problem is we've made it so turnkey and so easy for people to generate slop that that's the, the incentive.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you. You can't stop.

[Amy Webb]

Change the incentive structure. So LinkedIn could penalize people for doing that, but it's not in LinkedIn's best interest to do it because YouTube didn't.

[Harper Reed]

YouTube just announced that they are changing monetization around this.

[Leo Laporte]

They're concerned about slop, for sure. Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Amy Webb]

My, my biggest concern in all of this, honestly, is not me. It's this, like, slow march to absolute mediocrity and, like, no fresh ideas. It's hard. There's a reason why. And whatever, maybe I'm weird, but, like, I, I write, you know, all my thinking is done using pen and paper. And I, it slows me down. I spend, I read in print. I do this for a reason. It's because of how my brain works. And I want to have new thoughts. And it takes time to do that. You know, we're making it. And I know, I know, I know right now I sound like some fuddy duddy from yesteryear or whatever, but, like.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm the one who's saying people shouldn't wear baseball caps. So it's. I've already set a standard way beyond that.

[Amy Webb]

I think if you want to live in a future culture where what you find on Netflix is, like, fine, it's not compelling, but, like, that's what you got. And if you want to have products that are, like, okay, but not, like, amazing, if. Look, when I first saw the Matrix, I was living in Japan. I had just come out of Aikido. So I still had my gi on. I was all sweaty and gross and I saw that in a theater with other people and it blew my thoughts mind and, and I felt, I like the way that I felt. I wanted to like I chased that feeling. It was an amazing feeling. And there's no AI system that would have created that movie. For many reasons we can debate later on, like we're, we're going to wind up in a future where everything is like fine, like it's mashed potatoes and gravy for everybody all the time and whatever we're fed. But like maybe that will create the.

[Leo Laporte]

Incentive for human created content. That there will be a huge incentive.

[Amy Webb]

Yes. By. Sorry, one last thing. My concern is because I've seen, and I'm not going to say say where I've seen this, but my concern is you have to learn how to think that like generating. You have to exercise that part of your brain. And the problem is if you're using LinkedIn or whatever, chat GPT to write all of your. Whatever it is that you're doing, if you're constantly assessing assisted, you are not unlocking deeper levels of creativity in your brain. You are no longer using the part. There's a neurological thing here. You're no longer using the parts of your brain responsible for creativity. And if we, you know, if you get into a habit of that, it uses less energy and the brain wants to expend less energy. So if we have an entire wave of people now where, where this is how they're operating, they're going to be very fast at doing many things. And I think we lose, I just think we lose the extreme creativity. I know a lot of people out there think it's totally wrong and that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I mean there is a history of old farts like us saying, well, you know, once people start reading novels, they'll stop imagining on their own. You know, this is a long history of moral panics over new technologies somehow damaging our ability to, to think. Maybe it's not as bad as we're worried about. I understand what you're saying. I don't disagree with.

[Amy Webb]

I'm seeing it. Harper is one in a zillion.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Harper's always been 100 years ago. Harper would be. You guys would be unique 100 years ago, 200 years ago.

[Amy Webb]

There's two. There is an avalanche of evidence pointing to the contrary. Look, I am seeing it's because of incentive structures. So people are incentive incented to pump out more crap More quickly. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so funny because I've been thinking this. I just said it to Lisa the other day, the whole everything is crap. But I thought it was because I'm old. Because old people always say you young people don't know what music is. And I. But maybe it is all going downhill.

[Amy Webb]

Everything is. I mean, there are plenty of. There are plenty of, you know, wonderfully creative people out there. What I'm saying saying is it's. It's. Everybody else is losing this muscle or they're under developing them.

[Leo Laporte]

Where are the next. Where's the next generation of.

[Amy Webb]

We're just like come from. I think we just want more. I don't know. I'll stop.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I think there's a couple interesting things. First. The first thing is, is I get in this conversation a lot with my musician friends who are saying there's no good music. The young people are all creating boring music. It's all the same, sounds the same. And I think that's incredible. Incorrect. I think you're just. They're looking at the wrong place. I do think there's still a lot of creativity, etc. But it is an uphill battle, much more so than it was when I was younger. I was free to create as much terrible stuff as I wanted and everyone thought it was unique. The other thing that, that I. That an anecdote. Of course, my entire life is anecdotes. I don't actually have any real information, but I was just in a photography store dropping off some film and they had moved the film to the front. Very prominent displayed of this very commercial photography store. Not commercial meaning a commercial photographers. Not commercial meaning. It's a big. It's a lot of foot traffic because film is so popular right now. And the theory of the people who are working there was that it's because in this AI world nobody knows what's real and they want something that's verifiable and interesting and real and feels not perfect. And I think that there is a thing that is this world of what does it look like when it's imperfect, when everything around us is so manufactured.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that the. Isn't that the Japanese. What do they call it? Bunraku, the Japanese aesthetic, which is that a cup, a pottery cup isn't. Shouldn't be perfect, it should have a flaw. Right? But we're not going to lose that. I disagree, Amy. I don't think we're going to lose that capability, that capacity. I think there's always been a mediocre.

[Amy Webb]

I love your optimism. I think we are headed right into an era of learned helplessness.

[Leo Laporte]

That's sad. What do we do? What do we do about it?

[Amy Webb]

I think that, I think that we, as we lose friction, I think friction is important. And I think as we lose friction in our lives, we fall into this learned helplessness trap.

[Leo Laporte]

We need friction.

[Amy Webb]

Where I again, I think all. Look, I use all these tools too. I've got O3, I've got Claude, I've got Gemini. And I'm using them in different ways, but I am not only using them, if that makes sense. And I just see an increasing number of professionals relying heavily on them to do everything from figuring out how to respond to an email. It's not like outsourcing the mundane tasks. I'm seeing it from analysis. It's starting to replace the original thinking. And Harper, to your point, I would rather have somebody's bad original thinking than just generated mediocre. You know what I mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, we need wabi sabi.

[Amy Webb]

There's learning in, there's valuable learning opportunities and like things up. And I worry we're moving into this era where like we can't things up, we're over lubricating.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I think that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything's just slipping around. Wow.

[Amy Webb]

You know, leave it to me, Lou. I will always bring us way down.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually completely agree with you. I've been observing this, but what I've been telling myself is, oh, you're just getting old. But. But now you young people are saying it. Now I'm thinking, well, maybe it's true.

[Harper Reed]

I. I don't think, I'm not, I don't. I'm not as negative as Amy is. But I do think it is hard, harder. I always thought of it as like the YouTubification of, of like the world. And how when YouTube first started, it was very similar to how Vimeo just started. It was all these artists and weirdos doing weird devo kind of film. And then it became like the most boring, brainless kind of content of like Minecraft videos ripping off Amy's content and, and done with AI Right. Like it's. And I think there's this interesting kind of experience. Experience. There's still really good video content out there. There's still really interesting people. It's just harder to find. And we went through a time where it was all gone. And then the only way to find it recently has been like TikTok, which kind of up the algorithm, up our experiences about our assumptions about the algorithm, change that on you know, and to some extent it's scary accurate. But like that then surfaced a bunch of different types of creators and then those creators then all iterated, as Amy said, towards, towards this, this kind of perfection kind of point of view. And that's why we have the Minecraft videos of Amy's content, is because they, they started creating the content that is, that was going to be the, like the saccharine content for that platform.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't have to go that way.

[Harper Reed]

I will give you my point is that it was. Keeps shifting because I think that the users don't want it. Like, they want it for a little bit and they're like, oh, this is tasty, this is tasty. And then it dies.

[Leo Laporte]

Smarter than that. In the long run, we're gonna.

[Harper Reed]

I hope so.

[Amy Webb]

So I think in the creative realm, there is that correction that happens. I'm. I guess what I'm pointing at is, and unfortunately, I know nobody cares about business, but in the world of, of business, I'm not seeing the correction because the incentives are so strong to outsource.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, and I'm, that's the initiative occasion.

[Amy Webb]

I teach graduate school and have for years and I'm seeing some of the same, same patterns happening there. And look, I, I want everybody to be smarter, faster. There's a prompt that everybody uses. Help me learn 80% of the. It's the 8020 rule, right? Like, tell me the Pareto principle. Yeah, right. So tell me the most important 20% out of the 80%, whatever, so that I can learn it all. It. There's a benefit in having the mind wander pretty productively in the, in the professional realm. And I just think the incentives are, you know, somebody just, I think it might have been IBM. Somebody did a study that like, yes, everybody is much more productive, but that hasn't reduced anybody's amount of time. So like, everybody's more productive and that's actually created more work, not less. So I just. Business, technology, creativity, government, they all, they're all the parts of an interlocking Venn diagram. And I just think it's important that everybody, that we don't lose this, this function. You know, productivity is great. Bottom line is, you know, every company cares about their bottom line. But like, we've got to figure out a way to incentivize people to keep working the parts of the brain, you know, that have to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think people will do that. I think people will do that. I have more fears.

[Amy Webb]

I'm not seeing it. I'll be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but there's, you know, I think maybe you're getting old, Amy.

[Amy Webb]

It could be.

[Leo Laporte]

There's. Of course, there's always been the mediocre middle, the mediocre majority. And that's why exceptional people stand out. That's why they are exceptional.

[Harper Reed]

Hi, this is Benito. I have something to say about that real quick. Yes, because I'm a, you know, creative. I, you know, I went through the creative stuff for a long time. And the problem is that, like, yes, there's a mediocre middle, but a lot of that is that they don't have the time to actually learn how to.

[Leo Laporte]

Do the craft part of it, or the opportunity now, or the opportunity.

[Harper Reed]

And, like, we don't know how many Mozarts we lost plowing fields. You know, we don't know how many, you know, Picasso's we lost at factories. You know, we just don't know because, you know, they don't have the time.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not given the opportunity.

[Harper Reed]

They don't have. You know, art has. Has pretty much from the beginning, has been a rich person's adventure. You know, only rich people could really.

[Leo Laporte]

Go into art or somebody, and it's.

[Harper Reed]

Still kind of the truth.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, look, I. I am. I know. I know that I'm. I'm on pretty. Pretty much on one side of this debate. I'm. I am.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm not disagreeing with you.

[Amy Webb]

I understand what you're saying. I wrestle with this. I think about this a lot. Is this a natural part of aging? And I think everybody at some point hits this, you know, hits this moment. So I. I do think about it a lot, and I'm trying to figure out if I'm overly indexing on, like, things aren't what, like, they used to be. You know, I think the. The issue is that I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm seeing a little young for getting to that point. But maybe you're advanced.

[Amy Webb]

I'm. I'm. I mean, I'm certainly on the camp if I can't find any new music I like, but. Harper, you and I'll just talk later.

[Harper Reed]

But I'm so much weird shit.

[Amy Webb]

I'm seeing it in. In my world. So I am. I. And I'm not seeing the correction. So there is no TikTok algorithm where some. Something interesting pops up and then it gets popular and then it goes away. And because people are like, wait a minute, you know, and then. And then that correction is happening. I'm not seeing a correction. I'm not seeing a correction in boardrooms. I'm Not. I'm, I'm seeing some changes that are, again, if you're prioritized to be fast and first or most productive or whatever it is, and nobody wants to be left behind, that creates a pretty tricky set of conditions. And, you know, are we going to get like, I heard, I heard Sam talk about Jony, I've. And the ambient device that's coming and are we going to, are we going to inhabit a future where it's surprising and, and delightful?

[Leo Laporte]

No. This is why I'm glad to be on the older side, because I won't live to see it. I do feel bad for your child and I feel worse for her children, your grandchildren, because I told my kids yesterday we have till 2100. After that, all bets are off. We are not going to make it out of this century. So enjoy. Enjoy it. I often think, Amy, that I wish I had known that in the year 2000 we were at the peak and it wasn't going to get any better. I would have enjoyed it more.

[Amy Webb]

So I feel like, what was the best?

[Leo Laporte]

What was the peak year? When would it, when did it all start going downhill? 2010.

[Amy Webb]

Look, I don't, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, six smartphones.

[Harper Reed]

You guys are, you guys are boring.

[Amy Webb]

I don't think everything has gone downhill. I guess what I'm saying is I, I.

[Leo Laporte]

But you think it's starting to.

[Amy Webb]

We're always on the precipice of going downhill. I don't think it's a fait accompli if that was the case, you know, look, it'd be hard to go to sleep tonight. I sleep fine. I get my light.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't.

[Amy Webb]

So I'm not, I don't think it's all bad. I just want everybody to not give up agency and I want everybody to stay plugged in.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think there might be. And my daughter always encourages me on this. She's 32. She, she always says, the pendulum will swing the other way. Dad, we are swinging in strongly in one direction, but it's the natural course of events. The arc of history always bends towards justice. We will swing the other way. My daughter is not Martin Luther King, but she apparently channels.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I think we're in a dark time for most of the people I know right now. But I also, also think that for 10ish years, I listened to no new music. And for the last five years, I've listened to almost all new music, which is exciting. And it's not just weird EDM stuff that sounds all the same, like I think that there's art that's happening. I just think that what I've noticed is that it's harder to find, to, like, Amy's point. The unique stuff that has an identity where it's very easy to find the content, the political beliefs, whatever it might be, that are very, very traditional or boring.

[Leo Laporte]

To Benito's point, every time I go down in the subway and I hear a busker playing an amazing melody, I think there are so many good musicians out there that we've never heard that will never have a contract that we'll never hear. There is an abundance of great art out there. It's just not evenly distributed, I guess. We welcome you and thank you for joining the first parental advisory version of TWiT. We've got a new. New CD cover we're gonna. We're gonna put out. Just, you know, because. No, I'm just kidding. There is a debate going on behind the scenes about whether we bleep you guys or just leave it in. I might do a disclaimer at the.

[Amy Webb]

Beginning saying, I'm sorry, it's my fault. I'm super reserved and I'm thinking about. And then like an hour in, I'm just like, it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I said.

[Amy Webb]

Now I'm just myself.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That was my response, which is. I love it because it means you guys are engaged and you're passionate and you're talking what you feel. And that's more important to me than. Look, the President of the United States dropped an F bomb to the press. Everybody broadcast it. The news channels were saying the word. I think we live in a different time. Maybe not the best time, but different time.

[Harper Reed]

We definitely live in a different time.

[Leo Laporte]

We definitely.

[Harper Reed]

I think. I think it's. I think you should change your phrasing, framing of whether it's a good or bad time. I just think it's like, it's the only time we got. It's super weird, right? Nobody knows what's going to happen. Yeah. And it's, like, very bizarre. Like, we just got to figure some. There's some weird shit's going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

That's kind of what I've been thinking.

[Harper Reed]

You got to lean into it. This is the thing I keep. Like I was saying about, is it Mad Max or rem? Like, where are we at? Like, is it just going to be like, you guys remember the book?

[Leo Laporte]

It's not Mad Max. I don't want to lean into madness.

[Harper Reed]

It has good fashion, though. And the cars are cool. You have the Hats. But you remember the book from the early 2000s. I got it the first time in like 1999 called, oh, I think maybe, maybe 2000. Who moved my Cheese?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Is that a good book?

[Harper Reed]

No, it's a horrible book.

[Amy Webb]

It's a terrible book, and it is a very oft repeated phrase.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, it's like the funniest thing ever because I got it because I was an Internet of company and the company had sold the tech team to another company and fired everyone and then gave everyone on the tech team this book about workplace change called who Moved My. We all looked at it like this, like DBA with a giant beard who was just really into aix, was just like, like said some horrible thing. And you know, to my little intern ears, I was like, what the. What's going on? And I just remember this experience of like, these people with their whole careers suddenly just shifted and the. And the. And the bosses were like, you'll understand if you read this book. And then gave them this stupid book.

[Leo Laporte]

This was their excuse for firing you because it's. Okay.

[Harper Reed]

Well, but I think about this a lot is that we now have all sorts of change and no one is handing out stupid books. Like, we might need to go back to the stupid book time where we're just like, look, I know it's confusing. It's very hard to understand. You have to move up past Led Zeppelin. Here's a book about like hyper pop or some horrible.

[Amy Webb]

That's actually a really, really smart insight. It's. You're right. We are going through an unprecedented amount of change right now. We really are. So I'm not. This isn't like, if you look at all the different variables and all the different circumstances and macro uncertainties, and it is a. It is a pretty concentrated moment in time that we are all living through. And. And also, I don't. I think it's great that mental health awareness has. Has risen up and people feel like they can talk about it or talk to somebody, but there's. There's not that at an orchestra, organizational level. So I think like, organizations have panic attacks and people who are part of communities. It. We. We don't have a guidebook for how to get through this moment in time because it's not really, you know.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. For better or for worse. Like, I think this is this interesting thing is the who Moved My Cheese? Book was horrible, but it was this bookmark that said things are moving, things are changing. And you get this book that is really, really weird. Especially as like a. Like I Don't know how I was 21, 22, or whatever. I was like, what does this. Like, what is that? I don't even understand capitalism. They sold the tech team. Something you can do is sell a team. Like, what is a team? Am I on a team? You guys think I belong? Like, I had a lot of feelings that morning.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? This. This show is the who moved my cheese for the 21st century? So we're just glad you're here.

[Harper Reed]

I hope it's better than that.

[Amy Webb]

That is a lot of pressure on us to get this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's a take, take a break. When I was working at Tech TV and things were starting to go downhill, I bought 20 copies of the Clue Train manifesto and gave it all to all the executives, hoping that they would understand this new era that they were entering at the beginning of the 21st century. They didn't.

[Harper Reed]

They did not.

[Leo Laporte]

They did not.

[Harper Reed]

Who has, though, has that ever. Has anyone ever understood the era they are entering?

[Leo Laporte]

You can't. You're like a fish in water. You don't even know that there's water.

[Harper Reed]

I think we got to think about rock and roll more like. I think it's like, I think we're.

[Leo Laporte]

All not moving past Led Zeppelin, though. I got to tell you right now, that's a little. That's a bridge too far.

[Harper Reed]

I. I was talking to you there, Leo, but I think this is about rock and roll. I think it's a lot of like, we're sitting there being like, this music is too loud.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Mike, who's watching on Facebook, says, can you please talk about text? So we're going to take a break and we are going to talk about this.

[Harper Reed]

I thought this was this week in Amy and Harper's opinions.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is a lot about tech. This is about. This is about the cultural moment that tech has brought us to is what it is. But, you know, to each his own. He probably wants to hear about the new Samsung fold phone, so maybe we'll talk about that. Maybe not. Our show today, by the way. So glad to have Amy Webb with us and Future Today Strategy Group FTSG.com if you're coming, company has even the slightest inkling that maybe you should think about what's coming. This would be a good person to ask FTSG.com and Harper Reed, who is living in the future and he always has. And so I always use Harper as kind of an indicator about where we're headed now. I'm scared. You've terrified me. Harper. His company is what is it? 20. 23, 23, 89.

[Harper Reed]

2389. Our favorite. Our favorite digits of PI.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good. A very good part of PI. It's probably the heart of PI.

[Harper Reed]

Tasty part.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. I told you last time you were on the mnemonic. I use how I want to drink. Alcoholic, of course, after the heavy chapters on quantum mechanics, that gets you 10 digits of PI without even. Just like that. And 2, 3, 8, 9 is in there. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. Oh, I love Shopify. You know, we were talking about TikTok and businesses. My son who became a TikTok superstar. Two and a half million followers. Then moved to Instagram. Millions of followers there. And has now created his own company, Salt Hank, where he sells salts and pickles. It all happened because of Shop Shopify. He will tell you Shopify and Shop pay made the difference for him. Now he's got a massively successful restaurant in New York City. It's incredible when you're starting a new business and he went through this, learning all the new hats you have to wear. It seems like your to do list just keeps growing every day. New tasks that easily can begin to overwhelm your life. Finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything can be a game changer. And for Salt Hank and millions of businesses like him, that tool is Shopify. Love that sound. That means there's been a sale. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. In fact, my daughter uses Shopify to sell her books and her T shirts. 10% of all E commerce in the United States, US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started like my kids. It's really cool that independently both Abby and Henry are using Shopify. It's that good. You get started. Henry's used Shopify. It was basically his design studio. Hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helped him and will help you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. It accelerates your content creation. Shopify's packed with helpful AI tools that can write product descriptions for you, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. Get the word out like you've got a marketing team behind you, but you could be a solo proprietor. I mean, both of them are or were. Now, Henry's got many employees, but that's how you build the business, right? You can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are strolling or scrolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world Class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into. With Shopify on your sides, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com TWIT go to shopify.com TWIT shopify.com TWIT couldn't recommend it more highly actually. Very grateful to Shopify. Now I don't have to support my son. In fact, he's going to be supporting me any minute now. All right, on we go. Let's see. Oh, this is, this is talk about inside iFication. Belkin is announced it's shutting down Wemo next year, which a lot of home automation fans are very upset about. But honestly, yeah, wemo was one of the first. Right.

[Harper Reed]

Just worked very solidly. It was super easy and just was.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, but this is the problem. They could pull the plug. They sent an email to customers saying that wemo's smart home products will no longer be supported as of January 31st. Any features that relied on cloud connectivity, including remote access and voice assistant integrations. The wemo app, gone. Customer support will end on the same date. Yeah, pulling the plug. But I think that's a lesson, isn't it? I mean this is part of the insidification process.

[Harper Reed]

Anyone?

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody. They were still selling wemo products as recently as two years ago. Now, some of the products, because they support thread will continue to function through HomeKit, but not all. For devices still supported under warranty, which is not many, you get a partial refund. That's really a very short list. Here's the longer list of products that will be affected by the shutdown.

[Harper Reed]

What else does Belkin make?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Belkin. Well, so Belkin's Electronics. Yeah, they're an interesting company to my knowledge. Maybe you know better, Amy. Basically they look at the Chinese manufacturer, manufacturer and they say that, that, that we're going to take them, we're going to put Belk, slap our name on them and sell them. And it's very often the case that something you get from Belkin is actually made by another company. You could even buy at Temu or Alibaba or somewhere.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, they're like cheaper, lower end.

[Harper Reed]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of people use those wemo smart home stuff.

[Harper Reed]

Well, maybe this is what's happening, right, is that they're, they're seeing that that was a, you know, they invented that. That's something that they have to deal with. Full stack support and all that nonsense. And they're just like, why would we do this? There's so many. I mean, the market is not. It's slammed with competitors. Threads and matter have made it where you know, those aren't necessarily relevant. No one wants another app. It kind of pro. It probably makes sense. It's just annoying for people who have kind of done that. I mean, I'm surprised Hugh has kept on so long as it is. But. But like it was the first. It was. They were the first easy to use. Like just plug it in.

[Leo Laporte]

The Phillips hues.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, I disagree with you. The. The first easy to use was the clapper.

[Harper Reed]

Well, that's true. That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Clap off.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

I've been thinking about that fish. Remember that fish? The talking fish.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Don't worry, be happy. I've been thinking bass, big mouth, Billy Bass a lot.

[Harper Reed]

Yep. Thinking about that.

[Leo Laporte]

You can buy Billy basses that have been modified to do other things, sing other songs. I don't know. I looked for. I searched for Billy Bass and I got Bill Blass. So that wasn't Maybe another designer, another singing fish. Maybe I need to say the, The.

[Amy Webb]

You know, you could probably drop that into VO3 and have Bill Blass sing a fish fish song.

[Harper Reed]

There we are.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you. I mean, you say we have become insidified, but forgive me. This was a very big sell seller. This was huge. Roundabout. I don't know, 2000, 2005, something like that. It also sang I will survive for those of you who wanted to make a political statement. And you can still buy them on Amazon. Look at that. It's still available. Available. The big mouth Billy bass.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

Made by Jemmy Industries. Well, no, no, you have to get a used one. I see that. It's just. Yeah. It says on the listing, top material type, basswood, the finish type, polished, the instrument guitar. I don't think I. I don't think that that's right. Color red. Who filled this in? What are they talking about Now? I want to visit the Jemmy store and see. Founded in 1984, Jemmy is a trendsetter in seasonal decor, including air blown, inflatable light show. Big mouth, belly bass. Okay, okay. So powering Christmas decor all over the world. What else? The streaming wars have now basically, according to the New York Times, come down to two. Netflix and YouTube. That's it. The rest of them also ran including such big names as Disney and Max. Now HBO Max as of this week because we. Changing names always helps the business. Let's do it often. YouTube and Netflix between them share almost 20% of all television. All television viewing time. That was back in May, according to Nielsen. The next closest is Disney, which includes Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN. All three together 5%. Not even half what YouTube does.

[Harper Reed]

Wow. YouTube is a beast.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a beast. And we're talking watching it on your tv. I'm not talking about watching it on your phone. This is sitting in your living room watching it on tv. Television viewing time, Well, I think Netflix.

[Amy Webb]

Was the first big commercial. And there's longevity and you know, and YouTube is free and everything else. There's barriers to entry. Can I, Can I ask a question, Leo? Are we gonna not talk about bitchat? Because I actually had a question about that. Dorsey's social network. And if we're not, that's fine. I can ask offline.

[Leo Laporte]

No, let's talk about it. Jack Dorsey has launched, I thought a very interesting idea, not a new idea. This was used during the Hong Kong protests, a new network messaging system built on kind of Bluetooth. Peer to peer.

[Amy Webb]

So this is. I have a technical question that I would love to get some insight on. So the mesh network that existed during the Hong Kong protests worked because everybody opted in. The way I. I'm understanding this is that you don't somehow have to opt in. And it's also still secure. Am I missing something? Like how would you secure.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they're encrypted as users. Mute. I'm just reading the CNBC article. Article. As users move through physical space, their phones. Phones form local Bluetooth clusters. I installed this and I wanted to use it, but I don't think anybody nearby is.

[Amy Webb]

Well, that was my question.

[Leo Laporte]

Using it.

[Amy Webb]

So it. Only because like Amazon has a similar mesh setup using Bluetooth as well. In fact, if you have.

[Leo Laporte]

She's using low raw.

[Amy Webb]

I think if you have an A word, you are automatically opted into that. You have to opt out.

[Leo Laporte]

So the question was saying, Alexa, you can say echo. I think it's safe to say echo. She doesn't want to wake anybody up.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, you. You automatically opt in.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we used to be really, by the way, just parenthetically. We used to be very careful about saying all those wake words.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And now I feel like everybody's. They're all waking up all the time for random reasons like nobody cares anymore.

[Amy Webb]

I don't. Well, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Siri constantly goes, what? Huh? Yeah, like all the time. If you say, seriously? She goes, yeah, it's terrible.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. Or anyway, and it's like super sensitive and really is listening to what you're saying. You know, everybody wants somebody to really listen. So maybe that is the true breakthrough of tech. Good now but I would like to understand. So it's, it's a mesh. So do you have to be part of. Do you have to be part of bit chat for it to work or is it.

[Harper Reed]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

Okay.

[Harper Reed]

That was as far as like can tell. And so strangely right around the time that he released this, I started looking into Meshtastic which is a Lora mesh network that is kind of spread around and it's very fun and there's a whole bunch of nodes around.

[Amy Webb]

What was the word you just said, Laura? L A U R A L O.

[Leo Laporte]

R A long range Lora.

[Harper Reed]

And it seems like there's a whole community of people that are building these things. And I have, there's these little devices like a little card. I have this little router thing and this seems kind of built on a very similar thing. I'll like.

[Leo Laporte]

I would be willing to bet you it is Meshtastic with Jack Dorsey's brand on it would be my guess.

[Harper Reed]

I mean it's very similar. It's. In this case it's Bluetooth instead of Lora. But I think it's what I think it does require everyone to have the app installed for it to be used.

[Leo Laporte]

And there are some devices that become bridge devices according to the CNBC article. And those the ones that kind of can connect separate nodes into a mesh.

[Amy Webb]

So it's just, it's just what Amazon has already done, but now it's a social media.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Amazon's very low bit rate though. I don't know if that's one of the problems with what Amazon's doing is it really is designed for things like, you know, location tag.

[Amy Webb]

So what does it matter that it's Bluetooth versus what am I missing? What's the big revelation here? What does it matter that. That it's not.

[Harper Reed]

I think the. I think the rev revelation is that Jack Dorsey did it instead of some hacker in Hong Kong. Well, that he has like he has the head of Square, obviously a very large company.

[Amy Webb]

I get it.

[Harper Reed]

But brands under it.

[Amy Webb]

What does it matter?

[Harper Reed]

I think that's it.

[Amy Webb]

If it's encrypted, then what does it matter if it's not mobile packets and it's not Internet data? So what's the. What am I missing about this?

[Harper Reed]

I guess you can't shut it off.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Bluetooth le is the key. Right. Ble so you don't, you know, remember in the old days of Bluetooth, you'd to have, have to pair.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And there was this whole process.

[Amy Webb]

It made sense during Hong Kong because they were literally trying to stop democratic.

[Leo Laporte]

Get around Internet restrictions.

[Amy Webb]

Okay, but this is in the. You, like, you don't need this for security, do you?

[Harper Reed]

Not yet.

[Amy Webb]

All right.

[Harper Reed]

Like, I mean, I think we, we, we, we. If you're. I would suggest that people look at censorship restrictions, resistant technologies, install it now before it's prohibited. But I do think there is, you know, the question of why you need this is, is something important. And obviously, I mean, Jack Dorsey has invested in a lot of really interesting things like Noster and Blue sky and all these things. Like I do. And there is a thread there of making things that are centralized. Yeah, yeah. Decentralized and kind of focused on scaling. And this seems like another one. I do, I do prefer peer to peer based chat, typically. To your point, what do you use? I, I mean, I just, I still wish Jabber was around.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Jabber was great. I was so sad that Jabber got killed.

[Harper Reed]

But I'm a, I'm a. I use a lot of WhatsApp. I use huge amount of WhatsApp. WhatsApp is like, you know, it's, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Now the US Congress says you should not be using WhatsApp. It's not.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I use signal as well.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm not sure why they messed up. Secure, by the way.

[Harper Reed]

I think it's perfectly secure, but I don't know. I'm not, I'm not a government worker.

[Leo Laporte]

Hopefully you don't care.

[Harper Reed]

I'm not their threat. Not a model is not my threat model. Right. I'm not. I don't have to worry so much about that.

[Leo Laporte]

If you were, for instance, planning on Thursday to go down and join the protests as I am, you might want to install this.

[Harper Reed]

I probably wouldn't bring my phone, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't even bring a device that can pinpoint you.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I would not.

[Leo Laporte]

Where were you on July 17, 2025?

[Harper Reed]

Well, I mean, they're going to pinpoint. I mean if, if the surveillance is at point now. Faces. It's all faces. Let's.

[Amy Webb]

And if you're a passerby, you're scraped anyways and you know, good luck.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The city of Petaluma. I, I noticed this. Every single intersection has a camera and I thought, why are you. Are, are these all red light cameras? I think they got a grant and they decided, you know, we should just have cameras. All over town.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, on that Leo, I actually got a notice from the DMV this week that I got. I was going 36 in a 25 downtown and they said this is a courtesy warning. In 60 days we are going to start charging people for this.

[Leo Laporte]

We're watching.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. This has been in Chicago for ages. You guys are behind the peloton and.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S face recognition attached to this. Yeah, yeah. And we know that ICE is now using a face recognition system that was not intended for this purpose but on their smartphones to try to track down illegal. I'm sorry, undocumented immigrants. So anyway, if you want to get Jack Dorsey's system, good luck because it's in test flight which means very few people can use it. I don't even know if Apple would approve it to be honest. Honest, I don't. I don't.

[Harper Reed]

I think they would. It's. There's a handful of apps that do very similar things. They're just not as well designed theoretically or as well funded. And you know the, the Hong Kong example is a great example. It's pretty interesting. I think that there's, there's definitely a need for, for things like this. It would be really cool if a thing like WhatsApp or Signal would use this if it couldn't get connectivity.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good idea.

[Harper Reed]

That would be really neat.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I can't get online so maybe I'll see this BLE and see and connect with other.

[Harper Reed]

But there's a great idea. Some interesting applications that I think are. People aren't really thinking of. It doesn't. You don't have to be in a protest. You could be in a plane like chatting with your friends while you're on a plane. Not on wi fi is interesting. Like you could be at a party. You could be in a low bandwidth zone. You could. There's all these other things that, that mesh networking could be very cool. Connecting this to a greater mesh where you're, you're bouncing and eventually you hit the Internet, you know, through a peer to peer group is, is pretty compelling. I think there's a lot of really interesting aspects of this and I'm, I'm excited that Jack is spending him his time doing these things because I really want that. That kind of hacker. Let's just try this out thing and we'll see. It's. It's interesting.

[Amy Webb]

Is the content being stored on device then if it's decentralized temporarily.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's ephemeral. Messages only exist in device memory. They are encrypted and end to end.

[Amy Webb]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And I, I, I presume that they self destruct at some point. There's a whole white paper on it on GitHub, permissionless tech.

[Amy Webb]

So I think this is, we're heading, I think given politically where we're at. Solid hasn't really taken off, has it? Tim Berner Lee's yeah, his idea was.

[Leo Laporte]

To you own your own data and it's stored inside the solid, you know, blood blob.

[Amy Webb]

It was it I think that decentralization is going to become more and more of a thing going forward.

[Leo Laporte]

Is blockchain the solution for that? No, because blockchain is not anonymous.

[Harper Reed]

Yes, true. I think that, I think the, the key here is, you know, privacy preserving technologies, things that are, that are zero knowledge, etc. Like I think that's really the key is zero knowledge technologies and there's a handful of that them. I mean signal and the whisper protocol is very, very, very good. You can use that in such a way where you're not giving your personal data. I for instance choose to give my phone number, et cetera, to participate. But I think the key is it's just all about consent. Are you making the decision to share your personal data to, you know, even if it is to get something, it's still, you're making that conscious decision where I think a lot of our default social software is that no one is, you know, it's, it's just expected that you should share all this stuff. I think that's not as great.

[Leo Laporte]

And it almost sounds like in self defense we should prepare to have these kinds of technologies.

[Amy Webb]

Well, there was a, there are lots of parts around the country that are still without connectivity or consistent connectivity. You know, so there's a case to be made or you know, God forbid a satellite light goes out, which is, you know, plausible. I mean this is, these are critical workarounds that I think to Harper's point, like there's no commercial incentive right now to develop this stuff. So it is going to take a hacker, a group of hackers just sort of like let's figure out some workarounds. So it'd be good to have mesh networks established in case there is, you know, as a fail safe, at the very least to be able to communicate. You know, it would turn our phone phones into like walkie talkies, which wouldn't be the worst thing.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah, I think that's pretty neat.

[Leo Laporte]

The bitchat white paper is quite good and quite complete on and, and to my relatively untrained Eye looks like it's doing everything right. It's using well known Internet technologies for encryption and so forth. It's. It looks pretty good, including Bloom filters, which is cool. You know what, I'll run this by Steve Gibson and we could talk about it on security now at some point. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he's already thinking about that. It's interesting, you know, I'm sure Jack. Because he what he put up how much? 15 million for blue Sky. For the.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, he's a smart guy. Yeah, he's a well known hacker, has spent a lot of time thinking through these things. I think that this is, this is a good. This is good. You know what I do hope though is that it doesn't. That he actually pushes it out and that it is, it is. Becomes an actual product that people can use because there's lots of uses that aren't just. I'm hiding from the government, you know, there's lots of valid uses and it would be neat to like have a ephemeral chat that you could use for places that are low bandwidth. A plane or the, you know, a club or a bar or just someplace that doesn't necessarily make sense to have full Internet, better WI fi.

[Amy Webb]

We were in. We took a family vacation, hiked in Yellowstone and there's, you know, you're. There's enormous stretches there where you've got nothing. So it would have been useful just to have.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's Spot.

[Amy Webb]

We were using a satellite communicator, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's Spot devices for that. Right. That's what Spot's all about.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, but like. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I have satellite on my T. Mobile phone. I've never, I've never used it. I was very attempted to, but I wasn't sure how much of a going to cost you.

[Amy Webb]

You've got Elon in there.

[Leo Laporte]

I've got Elon. I got Elon everywhere. I can't get away from Elon. If I lose bandwidth here thanks to Comcast, which happens fairly often, I have a dish on the roof that will switch over to Starlink, fail over to Starlink. I'm not thrilled about it, but there's. There aren't a lot of choices. Right, Eli, Elon is all over my stuff. All right, we're going to take one last break and then a couple of last stories and anything you want to bring up Amy or Harper that we haven't covered. I'm glad you brought up the bit chat thing that was actually something I did want to talk about. I think that's a good, interesting subject. Amy Webb, Harper Reed. Two of the smartest people I know. It's great to have both of you going to Japan. And if I could, I would just hop on a big old jet airliner and meet you in Kyoto. God, that sounds great. It's pretty easy nowadays. You just, you know, you walk, walk on, say, I'm here. You don't have to take off your shoes anymore. So that's a good thing, right? 20 years, 24 years.

[Amy Webb]

Well, you do have to, you do have to take your shoes off. Once you get there, there's, there's no shoes. You have to change.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's for a good reason. That's for a good reason. You wear your little slippers, but. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I know. I was talking about this earlier this week. I have a friend who went out and bought Skechers advertised slip ons for going to the airport so you could take them off easily and put back on. He actually bought a pair. We were going out to Wisconsin. He said, I got the new airport, you know, TSA Skechers. I said, I'm good for you. He won't need them anymore. We've Christine Noem has decided in infinite wisdom that there is no longer a threat from Richard Reed. The shoe bomber is in jail. And keep your shoes on. It's the strangest admission of security theater ever.

[Harper Reed]

Really weird.

[Amy Webb]

Didn't either Trump. Somebody in the administration said that the liquids are next, I heard.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Boy, that I have so many three ounce bottles of stuff or what? I'm sorry? Two point. What was it? It was weird. It was like 2.4 ounces. It was some strange measurement. Yeah, companies had to rush to make little tiny bottles of their emoluments. Weird emollients. Emoluments is something else. I wonder if sketches get stock dropped. That's a good question. Serge might have this episode of this week in Tech brought to you by Oracle. In business they say you can have better, cheaper or faster. But you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thompson, Reuters and Specialized bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development and AI needs where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second cheaper. OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, 80% less for networking better. And test after test. OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads right now with zero commitment. Try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com TWIT that's oracle.com TWIT thank you Oracle for supporting this week in Tech. We appreciate it. You remember, maybe you don't, but it was a big. It was a big story at the time. When the Switch 2 came out, young man went into a GameStop very excited the Staten island location to get to pick up his Nintendo Switch Switch 2. In fact, I think he was the first in line. And the employee was so excited to sell the first Switch two that he took the stapler and stapled the receipt right to the box. The staple went through the box into the screen of the Switch 2, breaking it. The company replaced the devices. The incident went viral on social media and GameStop put it up for auction on July 9th. Quote, authentic relics from the now infamous Staplegate incident. The company spokesman person told Fast Company, sometimes the universe hands you a stapler and says, run with it. So they did. But the good news is they did it for a good cause. To benefit the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. They raised after 200 bids, the highest bid, $122,800. In addition to the stapler, the high bidder got the first known console to be officially stapled during a product launch by GameStop. They got the stapled box, the removed single staple probably framed suitably, and a certificate of authenticity signed by GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen. I love, by the way. He said, if the, if the, if the. If it reaches six figures, I will include my underwear. So I'm not sure I. But. But I think. I think there may be some underwear as well. Look at that. Oh, wait a minute. It looks like this.

[Amy Webb]

Wait, is it just the stapler?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, it's a whole thing. You get the box, you get the Nintendo Switch, you get the.

[Amy Webb]

Oh, you do get that stapled.

[Leo Laporte]

You get the staple. You get the whole thing. Oh, no, we're not. Wait a minute. That's not it. This is the wrong listing. I don't think this is the one that sold for $5,000. I got. I went too far.

[Harper Reed]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see what you get. I guess I was looking at another. Here it is. There it is. You get the whole thing. Even that certificate of authenticity. Look at that. That is sweet. A sweet stapler deal. I guess it's still going. Is that right or is this an old listing? Oh, this is an old listing. Yeah. Does it still work? Like, can you still play it docked? No, it's got a whole. Oh, I guess you could play it docked. I don't know. I mean, pay $128,000. You could find out if you are a Nintendo fan. Maybe you're a Pokemon fan. Sad news. We often end the show with obituaries. In this case, the voice of Professor Oak has passed away. James Carter Cathcart, who is a voice of actor. He was the voice. I don't. This. To me it's meaningless, but I know there are many Pokemon fans who will mourn the loss of. It wasn't just Professor Oak. It was Gary Meowth and James. He was prolific. James Carter Cathcot passed at the age of 71, which is way too, too young.

[Amy Webb]

I wonder what his estate, if there's an estate for his voice, which will continue if he liked it.

[Leo Laporte]

A license deal. That's actually interesting. SAG has settled its actors. Its voice actors strike that went on for six months. Went on for a long.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Time. These were the voice actors who did not were really concerned about AI stealing their job. Actually, this is old. Let me see if I can find the latest one. Anyway, our long national nightmare is over and the voice actors have made a deal. Strike is over. I was hoping I could talk about the agreement, but let me see if I can come here to an end. Anyway, so. Yes. So I guess perhaps he will benefit somehow.

[Amy Webb]

Leo, are you in? Are you in?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. I used to be SAG Aftra when I did a radio show. I was SAG aftra, but. So I guess I technically am. But I.

[Amy Webb]

You have such an iconic voice, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, I. I could. I could be anything you want, just ask. You know, I always. I wish I had done that because it's much more lucrative and the hours are a hell of a lot better. But I foolishly thought, you know, podcasting, there's. That's the future. That's the future. You know what? Our future.

[Amy Webb]

You got it so wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I blew it. Wouldn't be the first time I predicted the future incorrectly. Amy, though, she's got it. She knows she's got. She's got the future well under control. Her last book, the Genesis Machine, is all about synthetic biology. This is a great read. I know you're not promoting it anymore. But it's still in print and it's only a couple of years old. But it's well worth reading. I really enjoyed this book.

[Amy Webb]

Thank you. And the. The book that I wrote on AI called the Big 9 is a lot of what was in there is now happening. So the scenarios I get, I've. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I had a copy of the Big nine. Oh, I do. Wait a minute. That's right here I have the whole Amy Web bookshelf. Are you kidding me? Yeah. This is it is. It came true. How the tech titans and their thinking machines could warp humanity. Too late. It already happened. Now you picked as the Big nine and they're listed around here. IBM, Alibaba Baba, Microsoft, Amazon, Google.

[Amy Webb]

I get a lot of questions about why in 2018 I didn't put OpenAI. Apple is.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there was no open AI.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. They were around in 2015.

[Leo Laporte]

Were they?

[Amy Webb]

The reason was because there is no model without a server farm and basically there is no AI in the in market without a hyperscaler. So you. You and I. That still holds true today. So as much as OpenAI is making such big waves, there is no OpenAI without a way to distribute it. Which means that the telecommunications providers and. And the hyperscalers have an enormous. They wield enormous power which. And they. Which continues to be true.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I have to. You wrote this in 2015.

[Amy Webb]

I started working on it in 15. I think it. Publishing takes extraordinarily long. Like it came out in 2019.

[Leo Laporte]

But you started.

[Amy Webb]

I don't rem. It came out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it says 2019. But I mean it is prescient. You say artificial intelligence is poised to change the course of human history forever. And you were right. Oh look. I even saved the press release from your publisher. So let me see what questions I'm supposed to ask you.

[Amy Webb]

Please don't.

[Harper Reed]

I always do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you've heard them a few hundred times. I know.

[Amy Webb]

Now we can.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no, they didn't give me any questions. I hate it when that happens.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I used to interview everybody who came to San Francisco for years. I had a radio show. I interviewed more than 5,000 authors.

[Amy Webb]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Over a period of years.

[Harper Reed]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And every one of them came with this. The. The one sheet with. And almost all of them. Your. Your publisher to their credit didn't do it would have. Here's 10 questions you can ask. And what I learned very quickly because San Francisco's on the west coast, so we were at the end of the book tour in many cases is they have hurt. Those questions from Good Morning Muncie from today in Portland, from every goddamn radio station, TV station in the entire country. And they are sick to death of them. So I would actually gain points by tearing up the press release.

[Amy Webb]

And yeah, when I've been on book tour, I don't. I always just say like, you know, sometimes nobody reads the book and then they have to have those questions.

[Leo Laporte]

But I would try to read the books, which is not. I mean, I would do five or six interviews a day. So it was a non trivial.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Challenge. But I got very good at skimming. You even talk about artificial superintelligence in here.

[Amy Webb]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Has your opinion on that changed? Are we on our way to superintelligence or is that so?

[Amy Webb]

What I wrote about was we don't have a definition for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, by the way, we still.

[Amy Webb]

So look, there's plenty to worry about right now. I wouldn't worry about artificial super intelligence or whatever. Zuckerberg is renamed the company this five minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

He cracks me up, man. The guy, he's got the, he's got the money to back it up though. In fact, he stole somebody from Apple this week. I mean he's really a lot of money.

[Harper Reed]

200 mil for that. Could you imagine that?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, for scale. AI the.

[Harper Reed]

No, for the Apple guy. I think he paid him.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Harper Reed]

I think so. Something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy cow.

[Harper Reed]

I take it. The thing I think is Goodbye, Tim.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going over there.

[Harper Reed]

Is this is how professional sports works. This is not how tech normally works. And the one that is very fascinating to me was the wind surf deal that fell through.

[Leo Laporte]

That was also just.

[Harper Reed]

Was just like yoink. But what, what is, what is interesting is that they took the execs and then a few key employees and left the team and the shell of the. The product. And so the question is, what happens? This happens.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope they gave them all a copy of who Moved My Cheese.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I think that's something that we've. The conclusion here is that we're going to need another copy of that who Moved My Cheese? Which I'm not sure what that copy looks like, what the title is, but I'm sure within 15 minutes it's going to be posted on LinkedIn by someone in the, in the live stream.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, so they got really. The core of Windsurfing, you think?

[Harper Reed]

I don't know if they got the core. I think the question is what is the core? Is the, is, is the, are the, are the leaders that. That built this? Are they what Made Windsurf pop, you know, possible. Is that really we should mention it?

[Leo Laporte]

It was Codium, they renamed it to Windsurf. But it's a vibe coding editor.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. I have many friends who use it, love it and it's, it's really great. And, and I think that's, I think it's like that's a cool thing, right? Like it's, it's a neat thing. But I, but there's this trend that seems to be happening which is instead of an app, Aqua Hire or instead of a straight acquisition, what they do is they basically poach the executives and then shell of a company. Yeah. And then the question is like, what happens to the investors? What is the motivation to invest if that's the worry. Like if someone did that, you know, to my company, I would be very happy. Our investors would be very sad. And that's just a, you know, that's a very, it's interesting. And so is, are there going to be some compelling terms put on, on new term sheets that are like if this happens then we need a little bit of a cut of that. Like, I'm not sure.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like they kind of hollowed Windsurf out. They got technology.

[Harper Reed]

Seems externally, I mean they gave them also 2.4 billion or something. Right. So I feel like Wind Surf itself has some money to go forward and then, you know, it's. Is it, is it the founders? Is that who it made it successful? Are they going to be able to hire an executive to come in there and make that. Is that you, Leo? Are they going to hire you to go in there and.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, here's the problem. I would presume there's a limited number of talented people that can do this job. I mean it's gotta be fairly constrained if they're getting $200 million.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is like the, you know, the star quarterback or the, or the, you know, the no hitter pitcher. This is a, this is somebody, you know, in a small number of people can do this.

[Harper Reed]

I'm guessing that there are agents, so to speak that are help negotiating these things. Like that's, that's there's too much money on the, on the hook here to be able to do that. And so I, I have a friend that's in the sports world and, and he's like, this feels just like, you know, pro boxing or this feels just like any of these things where the deals are so big.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and the reason it is in sports is because those people make the companies that own them a lot of money. And I guess potentially true. It's not clear, but it's potentially true for AI. By the way, I am not crazy about the Win surf site. The new purpose built IDE to harness magic.

[Harper Reed]

Really, I do like magic. I'm a big magic fan.

[Leo Laporte]

And tab, tab, tab ship. Really. I don't know.

[Harper Reed]

Somewhere around here I have. I have my friend Jesse Vincent's Continue button, which is an easy button. You just press and it says that was easy. And then outputs to the keyboard to USB just continue. So you plug it into your code gen. You just hit it every time, it just says continue, continue.

[Leo Laporte]

Or you could do shift enter. And you don't even have to do that. You just let it go, let it run. Harper, is. Do you want to say what 2389 is doing?

[Harper Reed]

Not yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, I.

[Harper Reed]

Because I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

He's in stealth. No, he's not in stealth. He's in confusion.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I just think you just. I just sit in this building here, this space, my studio, and we wait for the company to arrive. And once it's here, then I can share with you what is actually happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Agents that conspire with you, not against you. I like that. I like that. 2389 AI, anything else you want to plug, you're all going to Japan. I'm so jealous. We should give that Japan foundation one more.

[Harper Reed]

It's a very cool organization and the founding of it is also very interesting. The. The. The people who are, who are, who are fellows within it are variants. Interesting. There's a lot of really great people and a lot of, you know, a lot of people have done some really incredible stuff. And the best part is, is you'll be sitting next to someone who is quote unquote famous. And then the person next to them is like some like artist somewhere or a chef or like love it. And then everyone is just like kind of very friendly. It's very nice.

[Amy Webb]

Yep, agreed.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like fun. Sounds wonderful.

[Amy Webb]

Well, I guess I'll see you in like two weeks.

[Harper Reed]

Yes, indeed.

[Amy Webb]

All right, Safe travels.

[Harper Reed]

No, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

And if there's some guy named Shmiel Schma Port who has applied.

[Harper Reed]

Just lie about your age.

[Leo Laporte]

If there's a guy shows up in a pith helmet, you might just, you know, treat him like a nice person. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much. You two are fantastic. What a great conversation. We went a little long and I apologize, but I couldn't cut it off. It's just too good. Really appreciate your time. Thanks to everybody who got to see this Fabulous show. We do twit every Sunday, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. So you can watch us do it live. If you're in the club, you can watch us in the club Twit Discord, which is a wonderful hang. Club members get ad free versions of all of our shows and a lot more at Twit tv Club, Club Twit. And they perform a really important function. About 25% of our overhead, our costs are absorbed by the club. Thank you. Thank you. After the fact. Well, wait a minute. Before I go on, I should mention you don't have to be in the club to watch live. We're also streaming on YouTube X, Facebook, Twitch, TikTok, LinkedIn and Kik seven other platforms. So you can probably see us live anywhere you are. Don't have to watch live though. You can download copies of the show from Twitt tv, our website. You can if you're in the Discord. There's always some interesting things going on in the Discord, including a lot of AI generation stuff. There's Bob Ross painting a fluffy little club Twit cloud. You can also see us on YouTube. We have a YouTube channel dedicated to video video of the show. We do the show in audio and video. And we might have to do a third explicit version of the show Twit After Dark. For those of you who don't want the bleeps, you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. If you do leave us a review, please. It's hard when you've been doing a show, a podcast for 20 years. People forget about you. But if you leave us a nice five star review, maybe remind somebody, hey, that was I to listen to that back in the 80s or something and subscribe, that would be nice. We'd like that. We do want you to listen. We're glad you're here. We thank you for listening. For 20 years we've been doing this. What a world. What a world it has become. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. As I've said for the last 20 years, another twit is in the can doing the twist. All right. High interest debt is one of the toughest opponents you'll face unless you power up with a Sofi personal loan. A Sofi personal loan could repackage your bad debt into one low fixed rate monthly payment. It's even got super speed since you could get the funds as soon as the same day you sign. Visit sofi.compower to learn more. That's s-I.com podcast. We are loans originated by Sofa Bank, NA member FDIC terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891.