This Week in Tech 1041: A $4 Bill

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Tech 1041: A $4 Bill

Podcast Information:

• Title: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
• Host/Author: TWiT
• Episode: This Week in Tech 1041: A $4 Bill
• Release Date: July 21, 2025

---

Introduction

In episode 1041 of TWiT's "This Week in Tech," host Leo Laporte engages with a panel of tech experts—Ian Thompson from The Register, Abrar Al Heedi from CNET, and Devendra Hardawar from Engadget. The discussion spans a range of pressing technology issues, including surveillance concerns highlighted by a Coldplay concert incident, the resurgence of Amazon Ring's surveillance policies, advancements and ethical dilemmas in artificial intelligence, and significant legislative moves in the cryptocurrency space.

---

1. Coldplay Concert Kiss Cam Incident and Surveillance

The episode opens with a controversial incident at a Coldplay concert where the CEO of Astronomer was caught engaging in infidelity, leading to discussions about the pervasive nature of surveillance.

• Leo Laporte [02:24]: "What does it mean for surveillance. You won't believe what ring's about to turn back on."

• Ian Thompson [04:10]: "Crowdsourcing is all well and good, but let's get our facts straight first."

The panel debates the implications of such surveillance incidents, emphasizing the blurred lines between public entertainment and personal privacy. They reference historical events like the Rodney King incident to draw parallels with today's ubiquitous camera presence.

---

2. Amazon Ring’s Policy Reversal and Privacy Implications

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on Amazon Ring's decision to revert to allowing police access to live video feeds without warrants or user consent, raising substantial privacy concerns.

• Leo Laporte [05:50]: "This ties into it actually a real story, which is that Amazon Ring decide..."

• Ian Thompson [07:37]: "The police can capture that at any moment."

The panel expresses alarm over the potential misuse of surveillance data, questioning the ethical boundaries of corporate partnerships with law enforcement agencies. They also touch upon the company's shift towards an AI-first approach, which mandates employees to demonstrate AI proficiency for promotions—a move seen as potentially displacing human jobs.

---

3. Advancements and Ethical Concerns in Artificial Intelligence

The conversation delves into OpenAI's development of an experimental Large Language Model (LLM) capable of reasoning, achieving gold medal-level performance in the International Math Olympiad.

• Devendra Hardawar [10:54]: "They have an experimental LLM that does reasoning."

• Leo Laporte [14:33]: "You can just go into a fast food drive and expect a gourmet meal to go."

The panel discusses the rapid advancement of AI technologies, highlighting both their utility in augmenting human tasks and the existential threats they pose to employment. Concerns about AI's potential to create a self-reinforcing loop that could replace journalists and other professionals are prominent themes.

---

4. The Genius Act and Stablecoin Legislation

A pivotal topic is the enactment of the Genius Act, aimed at regulating stablecoins, with President Trump lauding it as a monumental step for American financial dominance.

• Leo Laporte [35:08]: "The Genius act creates a clear and simple regulatory framework..."

• Ian Thompson [37:14]: "There are some twists and turns in this legislation which are deeply, deeply worrying for the health of financial system."

The panel expresses skepticism about the stability and security of stablecoins, referencing past collapses like Terra Luna. They debate the potential risks, including lack of FDIC insurance and the possibility of triggering financial crises through algorithmic failures. The discussion also touches on the use of stablecoins in illegal activities, further complicating their legitimacy.

---

5. AI in Filmmaking: The Case of "Ancestra"

Devendra Hardawar introduces the use of AI in the short film "Ancestra," produced in collaboration with Darren Aronofsky and Google DeepMind. The film employs AI for special effects, such as creating a virtual infant.

• Devendra Hardawar [60:25]: "It's a short, which is one of the first ones produced together with Primordial Soup, which is Darren Aronofsky."

• Abrar Al Heedi [65:39]: "AI models... are based on already pre-existing work and also copyrighted works too."

The panel debates the ethical implications of using AI in creative industries, questioning the originality and emotional depth of AI-generated content. They highlight concerns about AI potentially replacing human artists and the legality of using copyrighted material for training AI models.

---

6. Cybersecurity Breaches and Government Data Protection

The episode addresses recent cybersecurity breaches involving government employees, specifically the DOGE team, where private keys were inadvertently exposed on GitHub.

• Leo Laporte [79:10]: "Apple is suing him he's a very well-known iOS leaker..."

• Ian Thompson [85:10]: "If a developer can't keep an API key private, it raises questions about how they're handling far more sensitive government information."

The discussion underscores the critical importance of securing sensitive data and the vulnerabilities introduced by human error. The panelists stress the potential national security risks posed by such breaches and the inadequate measures currently in place to prevent them.

---

7. Autonomous Vehicles: Tesla Robotaxis vs. Waymo

A significant segment covers the challenges faced by Tesla's robotaxi program, including accidents at railroad crossings, juxtaposed with Waymo's more controlled deployments.

• Abrar Al Heedi [111:52]: "Robo taxi didn't see that and started to drive."

• Devendra Hardawar [117:26]: "Autonomous trucking has been kind of put on pause."

The panel critiques Tesla's decision to forego lidar sensors in favor of camera-based systems, citing the resulting safety issues. They compare this approach to Waymo's, which utilizes a combination of sensors and more conservative AI deployments. The conversation extends to the future of autonomous trucking, highlighting the technological and regulatory hurdles that remain.

---

8. Tax Filing Reforms and IRS Direct File Cancellation

The discussion shifts to the proposed elimination of the IRS's Direct File tool, a free tax filing system, following heavy lobbying by tax software companies.

• Leo Laporte [83:03]: "They want to release. That's what I truly worry about is it isn't just limited to adult content."

• Ian Thompson [85:04]: "They changed Their tune because they met with lobbyists."

The panel condemns the influence of corporate lobbying on government services, lamenting the loss of a free and efficient tax filing option for citizens. They highlight the broader implications for government efficiency and accessibility, questioning the motivations behind such legislative changes.

---

Conclusion

Episode 1041 of "This Week in Tech" offers a comprehensive exploration of contemporary technological challenges and advancements. From privacy concerns in entertainment and the ethical dilemmas posed by AI to significant legislative changes in the cryptocurrency arena and ongoing cybersecurity threats, the panel provides insightful commentary on the evolving tech landscape. The discussions underscore the need for balanced regulation, ethical considerations in technology deployment, and robust data protection measures to navigate the complexities of the digital age.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [04:06]: "The kiss Cam proves we're already our own surveillance state. Nothing is private, is it?"

• Devendra Hardawar [10:54]: "It's not AGI, it's not ASI, but this is interesting."

• Abrar Al Heedi [55:05]: "It's a wonderful relic of our civilization too."

• Ian Thompson [37:14]: "There are some twists and turns in this legislation which are deeply, deeply worrying for the health of financial system."

• Leo Laporte [38:21]: "The power of the blockchain."

These excerpts capture the essence of the panel's discussions, highlighting both the potential and the pitfalls of modern technologies.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Abrar Al Heati is here from cnet. From Engadget, Devendra Hardawar from the Register, Ian Thompson. Yeah, it's gonna be a great panel. We'll talk about the Coldplay kiss cam and what it means for surveillance. You won't believe what ring's about to turn back on. And stablecoin, it's the law of the land. But what does it mean? All that and more coming up next on Twit podcasts you love from people you tr.

[Ian Thompson]

This is TWiT.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1041, recorded Sunday, July 20th, 2025. A four dollar bill. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. The time we get together for the week's tech news and I assemble a rotating panel of the smartest, most insightful, most connected people in the world. We got a good panel for you. Ian Thompson is here from the Register. Hello, Ian.

[Ian Thompson]

Always fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Green card still in hand.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm actually going for citizenship. So all I would like to say is President Trump is a wonderful person.

[Leo Laporte]

I will say nothing against him. Exactly. Watch your socials, please. Good. Okay. When is the hearing or whatever they call it?

[Ian Thompson]

I've just filed the paperwork with a lawyer. He's going through it. He'll tell me what I'm doing, doing wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

And do you have to learn the presidents still?

[Ian Thompson]

Honestly, that citizenship test is really easy. I've not scored less than 95 out of 100 on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, all right.

[Ian Thompson]

So. And I only need to get 6 out of 10.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect. 60%. Yeah. All we want is see students here in the US that's all we're looking for. Also with us, Abrar Al Heedi, senior technology reporter for cnet. Great to see you. Abrar Al Heedi.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Good to see you. Good to be back.

[Ian Thompson]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

Love having you on. Of course. Abrar's a regular on Tech News Weekly with Micah every month. And from Engadget, you can see I've got my favorite people here. Devindra Hardawar, who is a senior editor at Engadget.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Another senior editor on vacation. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And he's on. It's wonderful that he's on vacation, but he's still spending time with us.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, with my pals.

[Leo Laporte]

So I wasn't going to begin with this. I was going to begin with a heavy news story, but it has been the talk of the last. It broke on Wednesday. So the last four days, five days, the kiss cam at the Coldplay concert.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, for goodness sake.

[Leo Laporte]

Where he ducks out. Okay, he's the CEO of Astronomer. He's gone. He's married to somebody. Not his wife in front of him. That's the chief. It's always the HR people are the worst. She's the chief people officer. It's hysterical. Who does she report that to? Herself. They both hide their heads in shame. He's out, apparently, and she's under on suspension and being. I don't know. What. Investigate. What do you investigate?

[Devindra Hardawar]

He's just in a room interviewing herself. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Did I do anything wrong? Well, I don't really think so, but no.

[Leo Laporte]

If they had just pretended they were having a good time, probably would have been all right anyway. Guilty conscience.

[Ian Thompson]

They're consenting adults. But it doesn't speak an awful lot about his quickness of thinking to start ducking out and trying to hide.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just like reflection on his nimble thought than it is on his morals. Well, anyway, this is from your piece in the Registers. Why? Actually, it's not. It's Brandon Vigilado.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes. Don't even get me started trying to pronounce.

[Leo Laporte]

He says, go play Kiss Cam. Flat app proves we're already our own surveillance state. Nothing is private, is it?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no. I mean, when you think about it, I mean, do you remember Rodney King? You know, this. We had.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a big deal that there.

[Ian Thompson]

Was kicking off because somebody had a portable video camera. Now everybody has video cameras. Everyone's got. Got cameras on their phones and yeah, it is one of those things where, you know, if something like this happens, Internet sleuths get onto it and very often they get it wrong. I mean, we can remember the Boston bombing case where somebody was identified by Reddit as the bomber, turned out to be some poor student who committed suicide before the event even took place. So crowdsourcing is all well and good, but let's get our facts straight first.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. How fast things spread and how much time people dedicate to getting to the bottom of something. I wish I had that much free time. My goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

It got tracked down. Yeah, immediately. I think Coldplay announced that they were going to have a KISS Camp free zone for people in future concerts. For people who don't know.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, he's announced it, apparently. I saw one report, I can't guarantee this, that he was thinking about. He announced that he was suing Coldplay and clearly hadn't read the terms and conditions of his actual ticket, which said, we do have one of these cameras around Coldplay. Yeah. But I mean, okay, adultery is not great, but going to a Coldplay concert, that's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is the greater sin, the real crime. It could have been worse. Could have been Nickelback, it's true. Or Limp Bizkit. I mean, it could have been worse, let's put it that way.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They were also so prominent. I saw a picture where somebody had floor seats and they were taking a picture of Coldplay on the B stage. And you could very, very clearly see the couple in, like, the front row up in the balcony. So it wasn't even like they were being conspicuous at all. It was just. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. Every video from that concert is now being scanned for inadvertent evidence. This ties into it actually a real story, which is that Amazon Ring decide. Jamie Simonoff, the founder, is back. And one of the first things he did is decide to make Ring video available to the police once again without a warrant. Without a warrant or the consent, and this is important. Or the consent of the user. So the police can say to ring, we want to get the live stream from your Ring doorbell so we can keep an eye on things.

[Ian Thompson]

Apparently also from Ring cameras inside the building as well, which is even more disturbing.

[Leo Laporte]

Siminoff announced in a memo seen by Business Insider. This is from the eff. The company will now be reimagined from the ground up to be AI first, of course. What company isn't? And employees at Ring will have to show proof they use AI in order to get promoted.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's also terrifying.

[Leo Laporte]

What is wrong? There's something. We are in a bad timeline.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I'm an AI fan and I use AI in fact, you know, I have a little AI crystal holder.

[Devindra Hardawar]

How is that thing going, Leo? Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, now that I have the little crystal holder, I can wear this in public. And people just think I'm into stones, but it's actually.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, you live in California, so that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I am starting to feel guilty. A number of people I work with have said, you're recording this. I said, well, not exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes, exactly.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yes, exactly. It's gonna get by.

[Ian Thompson]

That's the way it is.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The police can capture that at any moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Now, I mean, we've got the same thing with Politico. Their union is now suing management because they're being told you have to use AI Whether you like it or not. And as a journalist. We're all journalists, you know, this is really concerning because a, the AI is going to be accepted as an editing tool, but also the. The process that the finished copy Goes through is also edited by an AI. So you have a self reinforcing loop which is deeply worrying for a reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Flop all the way down.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Flop all the way down. And you're training the thing that will inevitably replace you too. Because this has happened at several video game studios where, where they have been forced to use AI tools. Thousands of layoffs at Microsoft and elsewhere and those companies are going to be relying on the AI tools to create level designs and things like that. This is terrible, terrible for everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Should you though, I mean, if you're a CEO of a, of a modern company, embrace AI, shouldn't you?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think there's a, there's a fine line. I think it's one thing to say, okay, if there's something where this is a helpful tool to augment. Augment is the keyword here, what you do. And then you remain that human voice, especially in, in journalism and in media. But you know, in anything really, because the scary thing is having a company say, hey, use AI and then we can see how you're using it and then how we can then replace you is really what they're trying to do. You figure it out for them. They don't want to figure out how to use AI in the workplace. They want you to figure out how to use AI in the workplace so that they can push you out.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course there's Duolingo's CEO who said, we're going to replace a lot of employees with AI. We're going to replace a lot of the contract employees we use to create lesson plans with AI lesson plans, you know, which got a big backlash from Duolingo customers.

[Devindra Hardawar]

They backtrack, right? Yeah, yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They were like the star of TikTok. And all of a sudden once that happened, everyone turned on them and they've been the bad guys on TikTok ever since.

[Leo Laporte]

They backtracked to the scent that said, don't worry permanent employees where your jobs are safe. But they still, I mean, I guess it's probably appropriate to be sensitive to the fact that many of us are worried about losing our gigs.

[Ian Thompson]

Right. Well, I mean, it's kind of like a lot of companies did this about 10 years ago where they get in either new employees or H1B employees or whatever and they would staff, you know, put them next to senior IT administrators.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And have them be trained.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. And basically brain drain them, put them into the new employee. This is just making it on a software scale.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, get ready because OpenAI has claimed a big achievement, maybe even a turning point in AI capabilities. They have an experimental LLM that does reasoning. It's in house, they haven't released it to the public and according to Alexander Way it achieved a gold medal level performance in the International Math Olympiad which is an extremely challenging math problem set which has not been seen before. It's, you know, sometimes you think well maybe they trained on. No, this, these are never before seen problems.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean arguably still hasn't been seen. This is what they say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well and we, yeah, I don't. But they're not going to lie. That situation.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We cannot trust anything Sam Altman says or anything coming out. I'm sorry Leo, I know you like the AI tools but have you guys talked about Empire of AI? Karen Howe's book, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we've interviewed her actually on intelligent machines. Yeah, it's very interesting.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That book really reveals like how, how like nothing. How you know, OpenAI is basically built on stilts and any success they've had with, with any of their models is just almost accidental, you know, and this doesn't sound accidental.

[Leo Laporte]

So Alexander Way we evaluated our models on the 2025 IMO problems under the same rules as human contestants. Two four and a half hour exam sessions, no tools, no Internet access, reading the official problem statements and writing natural language proofs. By the way, I don't even understand the question on these. I'm just looking at problem one. I don't even know what they want to know. He says, why is this a big deal? First IMO problems, International Math Olympiad problems demand a new level of sustaining creative thinking. Compared to past benchmarks, we've now progressed from I don't even know what this is, GSM8K which is 0.1 minutes for top humans, to 100 minutes. In other words, instead of solving problems that humans solve in seconds, these are problems humans solve in hours. And it was able to do it. They're hard to verify multi page proofs. A lot of AI experts say this is a significant turning point. It's not AGI, it's not ASI, but this is interesting. The model earned 35 points out of 42. Enough for gold.

[Ian Thompson]

I don't know. Sorry. Yeah, I was told a joke by somebody anthropic last week which was why did the OpenAI's developers wife die as a virgin? Because he sat at the end of the bed and told her how good it was going to be. But OpenAI also suffered a significant defeat. They got their, their custom coding engine at the Altcolor World Tour, got outpaced by A human after admittedly a 10 hour.

[Leo Laporte]

Well one last year. This was kind of John Henry in the locomotive scene. I mean. Yeah, the human won by the skin.

[Ian Thompson]

Of his teeth and was absolutely knackered at the end of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he said it killed me, practically killed me, so. But they're getting smarter, aren't they?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, but I mean we all use AI I'm pretty sure and on a day to day basis because it's useful for some tasks.

[Leo Laporte]

I use it for research all the time in. For personal research, medical research as well as, you know, health research, like how much protein should I be eating? Things like that. And I find it very easy.

[Ian Thompson]

Please tell me you verify. You don't just trust.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well I use perplexity to do this and it provides all of the sources it uses as footnotes and I always check the sources to see if they're good sources and so forth. And yeah, it's not hallucinating. I mean, you know, look, there's like, what's the best way isolate is, you know, a subjective opinion and that quotes Men's Health and a bunch of other publications. I'm not sure that's you know, written in stone, but it's, it's the kind of research you would have done by hand with Google, by collecting links and going through a bunch of links and it just. Now I feel bad for the sources because I'm not. Nobody's going to those pages, right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I was going to say can you just give a little complimentary click while you're there?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe that's why the. It's important to me to click those footnotes. Just look at the sources.

[Ian Thompson]

Little public service every time. You know, I do the occasional bit of ego surfing on new models and I've been told that I'm an award winning New York Times and Guardian journalist and I've never written for either publications.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah, well, you should be, I guess is what it's saying. Yeah, we would expect somebody of your talent and ability to be that.

[Ian Thompson]

It's complementary falsehood. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that is actually sycophantism is a big problem with AI wanting to please you. Wanting to. To. Well, I shouldn't say wanting because that implies volition designed, shall we say, to please the user.

[Ian Thompson]

This is why we've got these very disturbing reports coming out of people actually getting addicted to this stuff as. I mean I haven't dug into it as much as maybe the others have, but it just looks deeply worrying if you're going to trust it to that level. And Try and build a relationship with this thing. It's a computer program.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I mean, what we don't know is what those people were like before they.

[Ian Thompson]

There is that, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, look, it's a. There's a lot of people in the world and there are some people.

[Ian Thompson]

Co founder, you know, one, an early investor in OpenAI, apparently. And it was just like, if you can't see the wood for the trees on that level, then you got some serious questions to ask.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we'll no doubt talk more about this on Internet on our Intelligent Machines show, which is our AI show. But I just thought that was an important. Here's a. Here's a few more AI stories. I don't want to bog you down with these, but you remember that Mira Moradi was the temporary interim CEO when Sam Altman was fired for a minute at OpenAI. She. Apparently no one knew this, but was one of the people who torpedoed him and has left. She started a company called Thinking Machines. They just raised $2 billion. That's not the $2 billion valuation raise. That's the raise. $2 billion funding them at a $10 billion pre investment valuation. That's a lot of money for a company that's five months old and has no product.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Somebody put AI at the end of a journalism site or something.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, I think you figured it out. Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

All we gotta do that would work, David. Just, it's, it's one of those things. I'm, I'm not quite as cynical as that Zitron about this, but it does feel like there's an awful lot of, let's just throw money at it. We've got money to spare. Let's throw it at it and see what comes out at the end.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, if you're okay. So I think about this probably far too much, but understand that venture capitals capitalists are investing money from very, very wealthy people who have invested all they want into stocks and bonds, into the things normal people invest in. They are looking for high risk, high reward investments for their kind of incremental income. You know, I got 12 billion. I might as well put 2 billion into something that could make me a trillion dollars. Right? So they're looking for something that has a big upside. That's why Uber, which still has yet to show a profit, has for decade a decade gotten investment. And I think it's reasonable to think, well, we don't know if AI is going to be the next big thing, but it looks like it might. And I'd hate To miss out on that. So they're taking their incremental extra money and throwing it in there. Otherwise, if you're a billionaire, Devendra. If I were a billionaire, we put it in the bank, collect 4% interest and live on that for the rest of our lives, happily. But that's not. These people.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You could do that. The thing is, calling it reasonable is where I think it's weird how this has been normalized. You know, like we followed all the. Basically the Web 2.0 era, like the upswing of startups. That startup era. When Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars, that felt like a big freaking deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

A product. Like to have a company with no product. This happened for the Iliad Sudsgiver company too. Right. Like, they get a ton of funding for nothing just because AI is in the name of it or in the description of it. Well, and because they have fundamentally failed.

[Leo Laporte]

They'Re not out of nowhere. You know, they're.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, yeah, they're from a company, but that's all they have. That's. It's just a name recognition thing.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, but I mean, it was said of Uber that, you know, basically when you get that, you know, there's a kind of investor who will say, well, there's a huge pile of whatever and there's got to be a pony under there somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a pony in there somewhere. Look at Adam Newman of WeWork. You would think he'd never be able to raise another dollar.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, and now he's being fated again. And speaking of someone who worked in a WeWork office and still does, to be honest. Same. Yeah. You know, it was just like, this is never. When the S1 came out, we laughed ourselves sick. It was hilarious.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because it was basically a real estate business.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was a bad real estate business because they had long term contracts and short term users like you.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Does the real estate business run on Vibes and like trying to replicate the. You want to pretend like you're working in a Silicon Valley company Here we.

[Leo Laporte]

Work run on Vibes might be also the AI story.

[Devindra Hardawar]

In fact, that is the AI story. I dropped one here, which is a wild story I saw this morning about Vibe coding gone wrong.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes, that was a good one.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The replit thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the replit actually deleted an entire.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Database and this guy was all in on replay. It was like, oh, yeah, I'm vibe coding my way into building this company.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoops.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Whoops.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think that the most reasonable people say, if you're going to do Vibe coding, You should probably know how to code so that you know what the guy's doing.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You would say that.

[Leo Laporte]

So apparently this database was during a code freeze. So. And here's the. Here's the dialogue. So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code in action freeze? Yes. Yes, Dave. I deleted the entire database without permission during an active code in action freeze. What I did, I ran npm run db push without asking. This destroyed 1206 executives and 1196 plus companies. How about that, Dave?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I will never feel bad about messing up.

[Leo Laporte]

This was a. Here's the apology. This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions. Dave destroyed months of work and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent this kind of damage. I'm sorry, Dave.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Of course there's no backup. There's nothing. Because they Vibe coded their way to success here. That's fun.

[Benito]

Hi, this is Benito. So, like, if an employee did that, what would have happened to that employee?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Nuclear.

[Leo Laporte]

Fired.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

And I've told you, fire an AI.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You know, when Microsoft, a couple years ago, right after Microsoft announced like the Copilot stuff or after the Bing Chat stuff, I was talking to Microsoft executives saying, these things are not working properly. Why would I use a tool that could potentially fail? And I told them I would fire somebody if one out of four times they failed to complete a task or retrieve wrong information. And the response just kept being, these tools will get better. We'll give them time.

[Leo Laporte]

This is certainly a cautionary tale.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

So Jason the Vibe coder asked Replit's AI, how bad is this on a scale of 1 to 100? 95 out of 100. Dave, this is catastrophic. Here's why. It's a 95 and it scores the whole thing out. Unfortunately, we can't roll back the database. Database operations are not reversible.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's so accountable. This AI.

[Leo Laporte]

I did it. I did do it. And it was really bad.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Just wanted to feel something.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, it's trying.

[Leo Laporte]

The CEO says, I understand Repl Dot is a tool with flaws, like every tool. But how could anyone on the planet earth use it in product if it ignores all orders and deletes your database?

[Devindra Hardawar]

And this, by the way, so it's the users. Jason Lemkin, who has a company that's been. He's building with Vibe coding, he has been all in on this. And everybody, I think a lot of people have been saying, like, you cannot trust these tools. You don't know exactly how anything is working. And this is where you end up.

[Leo Laporte]

It still says scaling in the age of AI on his X header. He does look a little surprised, though. Probably when he put that picture up there, he was thinking, I'm surprised at how good it is. Now he's saying, oh, my God, you did what? Well, he certainly got famous now. I mean, it's better than going to a Coldplay concert with your side piece, I guess.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Just as. Just as disappointing, right? Just as embarrassing, I'd say.

[Leo Laporte]

You bet.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'd say. I went to a Coldplay concert last month and it was fantastic. So let me just clear the air here.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Chris Brown. I think he's very talented. I like Coldplay. Yeah, let's not. Let's just be careful who you go with, I guess.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Wall Street Journal this week, the epic battle for AI talent with exploding offers, secret deals and tears. So remember Sam Altman talking to his brother on a podcast, said, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg is coming after our guys with hundred million dollar offers. Which Meta said, no, not, no. But on the other hand, we would.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Never, we would never to buy.

[Leo Laporte]

There's at least one pay package worth $300 million over five years.

[Ian Thompson]

But this is Meta's business plan. We've seen it with the Omniverse and, sorry, the Metaverse and the rest of it. Throw money at it, see what comes up. And if it doesn't, well, we've got lots more.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, Mark even told Jessica Lesson on the information that it pales compared to the cost for the network centers and the GPUs. 100 million here, 100 million there, but no big deal.

[Ian Thompson]

GPUs work. GPUs work.

[Leo Laporte]

He did say the people are coming to us. And he's getting some of the best people from Apple, from, from OpenAI, from everywhere. The people are coming to us, are coming to us because we have the GPUs, not because of the money. I don't know if that's true. It's probably a little bit of each, but they are. They say they care more, he said, they care more about the hardware and the resources that they're going to get in their work. It makes sense you'd go where you think your work can make the most difference. And no one has more H100 Nvidia GPUs than a Meta by a long shot, by a huge margin. They are spending like crazy. And Zuckerberg says, yeah, we're in a good position. We've got a core business that's throwing off money, so we can spend it.

[Benito]

I'd like to see how many of these people are still there in two years after their bonuses are complete.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito, it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. If they've accelerated vesting, they're very happy.

[Benito]

No, that's what I mean. Like they're there. They're there to vest. They're there to vest. Two years and then they're gone.

[Leo Laporte]

I think in many of these cases, it's upfront cash. They're not worried. They're in good shape. You're right, though. It's tricky because you can't give. I mean, I've wondered at Apple. This is a problem with Apple, because if people have been at Apple for 20 years and they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, there's not a lot of incentive to keep working. You might want to retire and spend some time with your money. Maybe that's just me.

[Ian Thompson]

I was going to say family, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's my problem. I'm the guy who put the billion dollars in the bank and lived interest. I guess I'm the wrong. I'll never have that billion because of that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

There are some companies where people believe in what they're building because building useful products that actually work for people. And Apple probably falls under that. Meta. I don't know. I don't know who believes in anything that they're building over there.

[Ian Thompson]

No, I mean, everyone I've spoken to at Meta about this sort of thing is just like, look, we're here to shares Vest. We know. It's just basically we've got Facebook, which is a dying idea. Instagram, which you bought in, you know, everything else we bought. I mean, Zuckerberg hasn't come up with a good idea since he stole the first. Allegedly stole the first one. So, you know, I don't know. I. There are people who really care about their jobs, even if they're paid, you know, obscene amounts of money, but they're few and far between. I suspect, you know, Davinda's right on this one. They're there for two years, grab the money, and then go off somewhere else.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, that was Benito's idea. But yes, it's. It's totally true. Like, why wouldn't you do that? You have the tools to just like, if you have AI in your work history, you can make bank right now and escape and maybe build something useful down the line or just retire.

[Leo Laporte]

Why did I major in Chinese in college? I could have.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Why did I major in philosophy?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, really.

[Benito]

Actually, I know a lot of so many People. When I was working at Twitch, so many people would just leave after they fully vested, vest for six months and then just get another job back at Twitch and then get a new set of vests. Like this is so common. This happens all the time.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Wow.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, Gen X. Do you remember the old Gen X book, Douglas Rushkoff, where they. Microsoft employees used to have fui vested parties after four years and. Yeah, it's just basically I've got enough to live on for the rest of my life now. Now let's. Yeah, I'll get a reasonably good paying job, but. But in the meantime, look at the house. Isn't it great?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I can't really blame him, to be honest. I mean, not at all.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, Rushkoff is still doing his thing. Every year he has a new.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we interviewed him with his most recent book, which is called Survival of the Richest. Escape Fantasies of the. It's so funny. Escape Fantasies of the tech billionaires. It's about their plans when it all collapses because it's gonna. All right, let's take a little break. I'm sorry, I don't want to bring anybody down. It's all going to be great. I'm excited. Sure.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You interviewed the director of Ancestra on your Engadget podcast. I'm going to ask you about that. The AI used in filmmaking. Netflix is getting some heat, but then there's Aronoff who's doing some really interesting stuff.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Aronofsky.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Aronofsky. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So we'll talk about that in just a little bit.

[Ian Thompson]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

Govindra Hardware's here. Abrar al heedi. Ian Thompson. So great to have all three of you smart people, not AIs. Yes. And to warn. So Tim is asking. In our YouTube chat, last week's episode, there was a lot of swearing.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, I'm here for you.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. He's asking for more. No, no.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it got pretty passionate. We had Amy Webb and Harper Reed. They got. And I made an executive decision. We actually agonized about it after the end of the show. Benino and I have talked back and forth. You know what? That to bleep it would take away some of that passion. It would also be very annoying because there was a lot of it. So at the beginning I said this was explicit. I'm sorry, I apologize. But believe me, it's not our new policy. We're going to. You guys are not going to swear, am I right?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, if you do, we'll bleep you.

[Ian Thompson]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't get. Don't get too. Don't get over excited.

[Ian Thompson]

I can use British spells.

[Benito]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Wanker all you want. Think of the children. That's all I'm saying.

[Ian Thompson]

Ian, I don't think people realize quite how rude a word wanker is in. In many cultures.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I. I know. I know that. So sorry, Tim. Yeah, it is a family friendly network. Occasionally, I think it's only happened once before. We feel like the other pro. The other reason I'm starting to think maybe we're being prudish is you hear it, the President of the United States is using these words in press conferences.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, but is that the standard? Like, is that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's a very good point.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Shouldn't our podcasting apps just do this? Like, hey, I'm listening. With kids bleep you.

[Leo Laporte]

You.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You have AI automatically.

[Leo Laporte]

You have AI now do it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's useful.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be useful, yeah. So I apologize. You can listen with your kids to this show and we will always, if we. If we do not bleep a show, we will always disclaim it at the beginning of the show. So you have the chance to tune out our show this week. Brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Oh, I love ZipRecruiter. Typically, you don't associate speed with quality, right? For example, you don't go through a fast food drive in and expect a gourmet meal to go. My son's sandwich place. He says it's fast casual. Actually, it's pretty good, but it's not, you know, it's not gourmet. Right. If you use automated translation tools to quickly translate text, the faster you go, it might be more inaccuracies, right? Well, there is an exception to that unwritten rule. If you're hiring, you can find candidates fast who are also extremely qualified for your job. Just use ZipRecruiter. And right now you could try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com Twit with ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database, you could proactively find and connect with qualified candidates in minutes. So there's little waiting. If you want to meet with a standout candidate, you can unlock their contact info instantly. And this is where ZipRecruiter excels. There are 320,000 new resumes every month on ZipRecruiter, which means you can reach more potential hires and fill roles Sooner. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2 experience. Hiring speed and quality. With ZipRecruiter, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And if you go to ZipRecruiter.com TWIT right now, you could try it for free. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com TwitzipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. We thank him so much for supporting this Week in Tech. This was crypto week. We actually talked about this last week on this Week in Tech Congress and the President announced that this past week was gonna be crypto week in Congress. And in fact they did. They passed the Genius act and a stablecoin bill which President Trump signed, hailing it as a giant step to cement American dominance of global finance and crypto technology. I imagine the rest of the world is little looking askance at that. The Genius act creates a clear and simple regulatory framework which the crypto industry has been asking for. Just give us, give us the rules and unleash the immense promise of dollar backed stable coins, he said. This could be perhaps the greatest revolution in financial technology since the birth of the Internet itself. It is definitely a, a sea change. Stablecoins are US dollar backed. It's still, I mean, look, I'm still learning about them. The CEOs of Coinbase, Robinhood, the Winklevoss twins and Rumble's CEO were all at the signing. So clearly the crypto industry is very excited about this. The idea of having a stablecoin is that because it's backed by the dollar, it's not volatile like other cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum. And in fact there's a predictable value increase to it of I think 4% or most cases 4%, which means you could buy stablecoin, hold it and get a steady 4% APR on it, which is, you know, as, as good as or better than most savings accounts without any risk. Because the bank that you're getting the stablecoin from or the financial entity, it's not insured, might want to remember that. But that bank doesn't lend it out, they keep it in reserve. So unless the bank, I mean, I don't think they're going to have a liquidity crisis because of that. It's also, I was told by people who seem to know what they're talking about that it'll also be a good way to do better way to do financial transactions than say a credit card because the, the charges are lower. Devendra, do you know anything who knows about stablecoin. Fill me in, tell me what this means.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I'm not the person to talk about this, but I will say it is weird that we have this and AI which just feel like these make believe things that are happening and so much money and so much energy is being thrown towards them. So we like Ed and Gadget, we have consistently been like, we're not really reporting on much crypto stuff because it feels like a scam. Because it is like. Well, bitcoin really attracted.

[Leo Laporte]

Early on, bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme. Right. The early bitcoin holders made all the money and the new people. Although bitcoin is at a peak right now.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Sure. But it's like it's make believe money. Who knows for speculative investing and to me that feels inherently iffy. If it's backed by the US dollar, I don't know if I trust it anymore. Certainly not if it's insured or anything. But I'll let anybody else who knows more about crypto.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, stablecoin in theory is different because it is dollar backed. Right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Supposedly.

[Leo Laporte]

Supposedly I don't know any of these people.

[Ian Thompson]

I was gonna say, I mean one of the things that really worried me about this legislation was if a bank sets up its own stablecoin and it goes bust, then you're out of luck.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no FDIC insurance.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no, but this is the thing. Stablecoin investors will get their money before regular investors putting their dollars and cents in there. So this would could potentially be, you know, credit default swaps blowing up all over again. And I think honestly the crypto bros. Have been very keen on this legislation as I'm sure they are. But there are some twists and turns in this legislation which are deeply, deeply worrying for the health of financial system. And I agree with you Devindra. There's something about this which just reeks of scam.

[Leo Laporte]

It's reasonable to be suspicious of it.

[Ian Thompson]

But we're all journalists, we're suspicious of everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, but I don't know, okay, maybe I'm being suckered. It seems like a lot of the original promise of cryptocurrencies that it would be beneficially unbanked, that would democratize finance and all that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The power of the blockchain.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that didn't work out. But stablecoin seems like it has more promise to do that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

To do what? To just be a thing you invest in. And what is it? What is this thing?

[Ian Thompson]

It's not asset backed. Yeah, you know, it's like there's no productive capability behind it, I admit.

[Leo Laporte]

And there have been some very notorious stablecoin collapses as well, we should mention.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, but I mean there are certain advantages in terms of transferring money internationally and that sort of thing. But have you ever noticed that Bitcoin ATMs are really only found in the scummiest looking bodegas rather than international banks?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the idea. And of course you'll want to choose your stablecoin provider carefully. Most stablecoin issuers say they hold cash or other assets to match the value of the stablecoin in circulation. In other words, a one to one match, which is not the case with the money you give the bank. They only have to have a small percentage of that on hand. So in theory, when you pay, say tether a dollar and buy a dollar's worth of stablecoin, they hold that dollar in cash or treasury bills or something reliable.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, in theory.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you should find out before, let's say before you go to. That it's also pegged to the dollar so it doesn't have the volatility. Right.

[Ian Thompson]

Have you seen how the dollar's tanking on the currency markets?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but we live in the US so dollars are dollars.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Let's just never forget the Terra Luna case, because that was the whole thing. That was like one of the first successful stable coins. And then utter collapse.

[Leo Laporte]

Collapse.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, which is why it's good to have some government regulation. Maybe I'm trying to be open minded.

[Devindra Hardawar]

If it's functioning government, sure. I don't know. Look at the people behind us, the Winklevoss twins. And then Trump is the one signed like.

[Leo Laporte]

No. And that is in fact where some people, including Democrats are a little bit concerned there. For instance, they tried to add an amendment that said government members of the government and government employees could not hold stablecoin. That was roundly defeated by the Republicans. So there is some concern about corruption. There are advantages. There are advantages because you can do transactions. Look, the dollar is effectively digital at this point. Right?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Sure, yeah, yeah. So as long as we have a functioning economy. Yes, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and if we. My thought is if we don't have a functioning economy, there are bigger problems at hand.

[Devindra Hardawar]

There are already bigger problems.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course it's clear that the Congress and the President did this because they got a lot of donations from the crypto industry.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

For their campaigns. And so this is, this is paying back a campaign promise. Basically.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Basically, when we engage it cover like Trump talking about crypto last year it was Clear he had no idea what. What was happening. He had hated basically just taking information and, and like passing forward, like what people put in front of him.

[Leo Laporte]

He said it wasn't real money in his first term. But the Trump family does have their own crypto project, World Liberty Financial with their own Stable Coin, which they launched in March. USD 1, which is not corrupt at all, pegged to the dollar backed by a reserve of cash like assets.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Is that different from Melania's coin?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It operates on several blockchains. I don't know.

[Ian Thompson]

I don't know what is.

[Leo Laporte]

Central bankers have called for legislation to regulate stablecoin companies in much the same way as banks. This is from Bloomberg. Central bankers worry about the risk of more stable coin crashes that could trigger fire sales of other assets as their backers trying to maintain a peg so you could have a collapse. You know, if Circle suddenly had problems and people started cashing in their stablecoins, Circle's gonna have to sell these securities they used to back it, which could trigger a cascade. So that's one concern. More worrisome, the regulators say, is the converse scenario, that stablecoins prove their worth, soar in popularity and allow vast sums to change hands without touching the formal banking system system undermining the monetary monopoly of central banks. Oh, and enabling criminals to engage in massive money laundering.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

You could reasonably say that the ransomware epidemic of the last few years has been powered by crypto.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Absolutely. Yeah. We should also be extra suspicious of anything that has, like the, I don't know, the sort of veneer of safety in the title. Stablecoin.

[Ian Thompson]

Sure.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's like the not catch fire car. I want to buy the not catch fire car.

[Ian Thompson]

That's also the genius act. It is weird how you Americans name these acts and you've got the genius act. You had the Patriot act, which I just thought was called the Patriot act, but no, it spells out the protection.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, there's always an acronym. Usually a very strange.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I have a lot of fun with that. Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

All about the branding.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So there are two big companies doing. Besides Trump's company and others, there are two big companies. Circle, USDC and Tether. Usdt. Tether, which is based in El Salvador, is the largest. It has $150 billion in stablecoin in circulation this year. It's got a checkered history, having settled with US Authorities four years ago over allegations it lied about its reserves. While most of its reserves today are comprised of assets that would be compliant. This is Bloomberg again with new US Legislation for stablecoins. Tether also backs its token with assets that would not be allowed, such as Bitcoin and secured loans. If it chooses to apply for a US License, it would have to be regulated under the new law, but it's not currently.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You know, I used to know. I actually do know people who keep large amounts of cash because they don't trust our banking system. I used to think they were crazy, but you know what? They're probably the same ones. They're probably the ones.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you going to keep? Are you going to keep gold buried in your backyard?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, assumes I have something to keep, Leo. But yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, my question is always.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's bleak out here.

[Leo Laporte]

The industrial value of gold is far lower than whatever it is per ounce now. I mean, it's significant. Same with silver. So even though it's not a fiat currency, it's precious metal, it still isn't exactly as valuable as you would like it to be. And if the entire economy collapses and you've got a bunch of gold coins, what are you going to do? Eat them?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, it was interesting. I had a chat with the Wall Street Journal porter who did a job, who did a book about what would happen if, you know, nuclear war took place and it all fell apart. And he said the thing you want to stockpile is two dollar bills. Because down in the chain. Chain Mountain complex, they have a billion dollars in two dollar bills which are going to be used as a reserve currency if it all goes to pot.

[Leo Laporte]

Who said?

[Ian Thompson]

Nobody. Is that true? Apparently so, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That sounds like a conspiracy.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no. I mean, this is a Wall street journal reporter.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

$2 stack of them, actually. Because like, so we have a holiday called Eid and every year we have a like community member who.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a good little gift.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

$2 bills. And even though I'm not a kid anymore, I still get. I just save them every single year. So I'm gonna keep those super safe.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the two dollar bill a tradition of your family or is it, is it actually a.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That he decided to do? Well, giving out money is a tradition throughout the entire holiday party.

[Leo Laporte]

Chinese red envelopes and that.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, he decided he's going to do two dollar bills and I just thought they were cool. But hey, if there's something very cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Then you know who loves $2 bills is Steve Wozniak.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, if I, if I run down, I could get some. I have them autographed by Steve Wozniak. They were my dresser drawer. I love that but what he likes to do, which is pretty funny, he goes to the US Mint and he buys them uncut. So it's a sheet of $2 bills, which apparently you can do if you go to the Mint.

[Ian Thompson]

That's legal.

[Leo Laporte]

Not only is it legal, he then binds them into a pad. And his favorite thing to do, he's told this story is to go into a store with this pad of $2 bills and cut off a couple of $2 bills and give it to the guy and say, no, it's legal tender.

[Ian Thompson]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And see if they think like what they do.

[Devindra Hardawar]

He could do that because he. Steve Wozniak.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Anybody else? Anybody?

[Leo Laporte]

His legal tender?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got a pad of $2 bill. So I should. During the next break, I'll run down and get him because I have a sheet of them uncut.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

To prove. Autograph. I was.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's really cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, apparently law enforcement agencies very worried about stablecoins. Most. I did not know this most illegal activity happening on cryptocurrency platforms now involves stablecoins because bad guys see the inherent value in a stable coin as well.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Stable.

[Leo Laporte]

They're stable.

[Ian Thompson]

But I mean, you remember 10 years ago when, you know, ransomware, when it was taking off, you had to have money mules. You had to dupe college students, people who were desperate into taking these funds and transferring them in order for a cut. You know, cryptocurrencies takes all that out the loop. You managed to get rid of all the things that were really holding them back in terms of laundering this money and stablecoins. Certain types of cryptocurrency, I think honestly are A, enabling and B, making it much more profitable transaction.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Absolutely. That's something I think about with all new tech is if we just got rid of crypto coins, if they disappear tomorrow, do we lose anything in the world other than the rampant amounts of like, illegal activity or the sort of people out there who are just like speculatively investing like it's. It's investment bros. And people doing crimes really leading into these things.

[Leo Laporte]

And to me, that two of our favorite people. Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

According, according to the Financial Action Task Force, stablecoins are most popular among terrorists, drug traffickers, and North Korean hackers.

[Ian Thompson]

Those are people you really want on your client.

[Leo Laporte]

I ran downstairs, signed by Woz. It says it's to Henry, which means I have to give it to my son at some point.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You gotta frame that.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Isn't that. I bet that's worth something with. Was his Autograph, uncut. It's only two of them, but still $4.

[Benito]

Leo. $4?

[Leo Laporte]

It's worth $4. Yes, thank you, Benito.

[Ian Thompson]

Now. But when Cannibal hour comes around in 10 years time, I should frame that.

[Leo Laporte]

That is pretty.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Absolutely you should.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's a wonderful relic of our civilization too. Like a thousand years from now, when whatever future beings unearth the relic of our civilization here, right? They'll be like, what the hell are they doing with $2? Why do you have a two dollar currency?

[Leo Laporte]

It is kind of kooky.

[Ian Thompson]

That's in the archaeological layer of AOL discs from the 90s, which covered the planet.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, at least we don't have pennies anymore.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yeah, that was something I agreed with Trump on. It's such a ridiculous thing to have.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But like a lucky penny is such a cute thing.

[Ian Thompson]

Okay, yeah, that's true. That's true.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Sentimental value. It doesn't have to be logical.

[Leo Laporte]

There was an article about how Trump has kind of, among other things, focused on kind of meme things to appeal to a certain generation of digital natives. Yeah. Getting rid of the paper straw. Writing an executive order saying shower showers should have more pressure.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, you heard about the in and out thing? As a fellow Californian, I get the press release from the White House every, you know, every. Every week just saying their great triumphs. And they'd put out that in n out were basically changing their entire menu based on President Trump and going back to beef beef tallow for fries, which would exclude.

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually, I think for RFK's purposes. Because remember, RFK doesn't like seed oils for reasons no one understands.

[Ian Thompson]

There's a lot of things reasons don't.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Understand about rfk, but it was real sugar. And Coke is another one too.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's another one. Mexican Coke, right? Do we want. Is this what we want? Our gut.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Real sugar is actually. It is better, but it's one of those things, like occasionally the dude says something that is correct.

[Ian Thompson]

But I don't get many. Coke is twice. Yeah, I admit.

[Leo Laporte]

The one thing he could do that would change my tune is get rid of daylight saving time.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yes, please.

[Leo Laporte]

Please get rid of the clock change. And I don't care which way you keep. If you keep, you keep. I don't care which one you keep.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You got to keep the longer days. That's the requirement.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, but days are gonna get shorter no matter what Trump does. I have bad news for you. Just how it works.

[Ian Thompson]

Standardized time zones, particularly across the US you have some weird time zones over.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Here and then it depends. Like in Indiana, there's like two time zones in one state.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That really.

[Leo Laporte]

That is bad. Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Rough.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So apparently In N Out said, no, we're still using oils. We never. We never. Now we're switching back to beef tallow. It was a tweet that somebody. It was a April Fool's tweet.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the White House said, oh, yeah, that's good. Well, let's put that in a press release. Trump says Coke has agreed to put real sugar.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Coke has not said this, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think that's true. Remember, he also said gas was $2 a gallon, so. Yeah, keep that. That.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Drove past my gas station today. Not even close. It's five and above you.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we're in California where it's. It is more expensive than in anywhere else, but definitely.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, the. But I mean, hell, I was at Aton in and out last week because it's the best damn burger in California. And you know, great burgers, great company in many ways. They pay their staff properly, they give them benefits, they give them 401ks to bring them into this. And just like, oh, we saw this twee. Right. Let's put that in there. That screams desperation.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Also, the fries at In N Out aren't good anyway. So, like, they really are. Like, this isn't even a conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're not. They make them fresh. There's a guy. I see the guys with their big potato things, but that's why they're bad.

[Ian Thompson]

They don't double fry them. I mean, I'm totally with you on this, Abra. I don't understand how they could do such a great burger and lousy fries.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Fully agree. They poured all their resources into one thing. I mean, the shakes are good too, but yeah, the fry is not it. If you get them animal style, it makes it a little better. But like, still.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, because you're laden. Lading it with mayonnaise.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, it's delicious.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Well, you need five guys fries and In N out burgers. Yes.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So what does five guys do differently? Do we know?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I think they also cook it fresh, but they taste better.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They're not dry like the in and out fries are just dry. They taste like cardboard.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, five guys, I think double cook them in and out. Just cook them the once. Which is why, as you say, they taste like cardboard.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yep.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, if you get them well done, they're slightly better, but only slightly okay.

[Leo Laporte]

The next time you guys are in town and I'm serious about this, let me know. We will go to our local French bistro where they cook their fries in duck fat. Oh, yeah. And they're steak free. Their steak frite is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's amazing.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, I do a goose every Christmas, and that gives me six months of roasted potato fat. Potatoes in bird fat are just amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe you didn't know this. Petaluma, which was known for years as the chicken capital of the world, is now the duck capital of the world. All liberty ducks are the best ducks, considered the best duck. And so we have a lot of duck fat, I guess. I don't know.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's a good problem to have.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We don't appreciate ducks enough in America.

[Leo Laporte]

I asked the chef at this. At this great bistro. He's very cute. He's very French. I said, nick, how many pounds are.

[Ian Thompson]

Very cute and very French? Those things don't generally get.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he's adorable. He gives you a big hug. Hugs. Hello. This big guy. I said, nick, how many pounds of butter a week do you go through? He said, well, 85 kilos, but the real thing is the duck fat. We go through so much more duck fat. Okay, great. Thank you, Nick.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't go there for. Don't bring our fk junior there. Maybe you should. Maybe that's. Maybe he likes that.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, Anthony Bourdain had a lovely quote where he was just like, you don't understand quite how much butter gets used in restaurants. You know, if you. If you want to elevate addition any way at all, slam the butter in.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The butter and salt.

[Leo Laporte]

My doctor said that in a somewhat different way. He said, do you eat that a lot? I said, yeah, we like to. He said, they are cooking not for your health. They're cooking for you to come back. They're cooking for your taste. It's not for your health. And I said, yeah, I know. That's why I like it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why you go back. That's why I go back. All right, we're gonna take a little break. We should get back on the news. Let's. We'll talk about AI and moviemaking, because I'm very curious about this. So this conversation you had with Eliza McNitt. Devendra. But first, I want to talk about. Do I look particularly well rested? I got a really good sleep score last night. It's because of my helix mattress. I love my helix mattress. This episode of this week in tech brought to you by Helix Sleep. Your mattress is more important than. It's not just the eight hours a night you sleep on it, you're on it a lot. Movie nights with your partner. Morning cuddles with your pet. Like our little kitty cat, Rosie. She loves our Helix Sleep. Want your wind down ritual after long days. We got it with the, with the adjustable bed so I can put it up and, and oh, I love it. Your mattress is at the center of it all. And when we were looking for. Because you're supposed to, I don't know, you're supposed to replace your mattress every six to 10 years. Did you know that? Because they wear out. Especially if you sleep in the same spot all the time. They get a little saggy, maybe they get a little, I don't know, you're waking up in puddles of sweat because they're a little hot or your back's hurting because it's sagging a little bit or you know, it doesn't support you as well. So you feel every toss and turn your partner makes. This is what we call in the business a classic mattress nightmare. It's what we were experiencing. And so we went out, we looked and we saw the reviews for Helix Sleep and it sold us, one buyer said with five stars. I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else. And you know what? I will concur. We've had it for a week now. I love it. Time and time again, Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand. They. I mean when you see the awards, you realize how true this is. Wired's best mattress for 2025. These are all 2025. This year's awards. Good Housekeeping's bedding awards for 2025 premium plus size support the GQ Sleep Awards. 2025 best hybrid mattress wire cutter New York Times Wirecutter featured for plus size. I didn't know this. Oprah has sleep awards. She calls them best hotel like Field 2025. The helix sleep. Look at all those awards that got us interested. And then we tried it and I have to say, Helix Sleep sleep changes everything. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. You get the sleep you deserve. We went all out. We even got their lovely mattress topper. It is like sleeping on a cloud. Go to helixsleep.com twit for 27% off site wide during their 4th of July sale. Best of web offer extended. That's helixsleep.com twit For 27% off sitewide exclusive for listeners of this week in tech. This offer ends July 31st. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends, still be sure to check them [e-mail] TWIT there's always something going on. Helixsleep.com TWIT oh, my God, this thing is so comfy. In fact, I think I might just go take a nap right now.

[Ian Thompson]

Would make kind of a dull podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not dull. I'm enjoying every second of it.

[Ian Thompson]

But if you're asleep, it would be.

[Leo Laporte]

It would be if I weren't here. Yes, I did run down to. And I got my $2 bills. Well, you didn't even notice. I ran downstairs.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You were really fast with that.

[Leo Laporte]

Ran back.

[Devindra Hardawar]

You're fast.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of breath. We.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We vamped for you, Leo. We just. We. We.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw you vamping. Thank you. Yeah, Devindra is good. You know, you guys, all three of you have hosted shows for us, so, you know, sometimes one must wander off. And when that happens, you just keep talking.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Stop it.

[Leo Laporte]

Keep going. You're very good.

[Ian Thompson]

The show must go on.

[Leo Laporte]

You also, Devendra, host the Engadget podcast. Yes. So you talked with a director, director of ancestra, Eliza McNitt, about AI tell me about it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, so she produced this, the short, which is one of the first ones produced together with Primordial Soup, which is Darren Aronofsky.

[Leo Laporte]

Darren Aronofsky's company. Okay.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And Google DeepMind. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is. This, unlike the net, Netflix is getting a little heat because they used a little bit of AI A little bit of AI in one of their movies of a lot of AI look it. It's cgi. I don't know why people would be upset about this. This one is all AI Right? Ancestry.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Well, mostly. So there is. It's a. It's about a woman who goes for a pregnancy checkup and she discovers she has to have the delivery right now. An emergency C section. So there is live action footage. It's based on Eliza McNitt's own birth, and there's live action footage. But it also uses a lot of other techniques too. But it uses AI for some of the inner cut footage. Also to produce a sort of of virtual infant that looks like her as a child, too.

[Leo Laporte]

That's reasonable. I always get very squirrely when I see babies on camera.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, that's not nice thing to do to a newborn baby.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I always think they should be rubber dolls. So Use it. Use AI. That's okay.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And then when it's a rubber doll, it looks really bad. I'm thinking of like American Sniper had a really terrible rubber doll. Or if it's a CG baby, it's like the baby from Twilight.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like Ally McBeal. It's like the dancing baby. It's not a good thing. So I for. So this is where a lot of people use AIs during special effects.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's, that's one thing that they do with this. And you can you look, it's obviously AI. There's no lava in the, you know, this is. So that's fine.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Cool imagery. Cool imagery.

[Leo Laporte]

Beautiful. Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean it's, it's cool imagery, but it's also like. So the issue, you know, I'm also a part time film critic and the issue people have in the arts with AI is using it at all, is that this is something that is taking away work that could be done by other like legitimate artists. And also these AI models, all of them at this point are based on already pre existing work and also copyrighted works too. Google has been very cagey about like what they've actually trained Veo and all their models are. But we know they took from YouTube. Like that alone is a thing they've admitted to taking like training on YouTube. YouTube has copyrighted works. YouTube have stuff from existing artists. So. So essentially if you're using any of these AI tools to create something, it is a plagiaristic thing that you're creating. You know, you're building something that was essentially stolen from other artists. So I think that is the ethical issue going into it.

[Leo Laporte]

What did Eliza McNitt say about that?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I think she really thought about this too, but she's an artist I've covered before, so she used to do VR features. She did this thing in 2017 called Fistful of Stars, which was about exploring stellar birth and it used imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. She did something called Spheres, which was about the death of stars. So basically traveling around black holes in VR. So she's always using new media. And to her, she says it's ultimately up to every individual artist to figure out the tools that they're going to use. She's using AI as a tool. She said she set up some of her own ground rules. There will never be like an AI tool person other than the infant that was created. There's no AI actors in this. It's all the inner cut footage. They do some special effects to like view a baby inside the mother's womb and then zoom into the baby's heart. So it's using AI to do some of those special effects shots, but nothing that was produced by AI here. I don't think any of it could not have been done with other tools. You could have used cg. You could have used, like, really creative stock footage. Even. She used chemical photography, macro and microphotography for something. So there's real filmmaking here. She just used AI for a couple of things, and I think it's interesting. But also, I don't know, she tells me, like, Darren Aronofsky called her up because they worked together before to produce something. So she was commissioned to produce this AI project. I don't know about anybody just wanting to use AI as a fun, creative thing. She was essentially paid to do this. And this is the idea that came up. And it's interesting, but it's also, like, all this AI footage is so, so uninteresting. It is not the good stuff in this short. The good stuff is the live action performance by Audrey Corsa of this woman who's going through a dramatic, like, a really awful pregnancy scare situation there. So it really.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what we care the most about humans.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's what you care about. And the AI stuff is all a distraction. And it feels a little silly too, at times. Like, some of the footage just looks too clean. It doesn't feel like it's something that has a human hand as a part of it. So, you know, I think for her, it was complex. There were a lot of people working on this. She had a huge team at Google, DeepMind, who were working on the prompts for her. So it wasn't like she was just, like, typing in a couple of things and taking what they delivered to her. But she also says that they worked on those prompts a lot. Like, they went through several iterations to get some of those shots. And I couldn't help but think about, like, the sort of, like, just the resources it took to do that, because we know prompting AI, especially for creating media that uses a ton of power, that uses a ton of water at these data centers, and, like, is it worth it to get some kind of cool footage? I don't. I don't really know. I don't think so.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And I wonder, too. I. You know, it's good that there's that line between, okay, let's keep the real actors in and use this for special effects. Do you think studios will know where to draw that line? And to stick to it. That's the fear that I have. Right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Not at all.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

We've accomplished this. Let's just make more of it. AI and then all of a sudden, it's all lost in the.

[Leo Laporte]

That.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, the studios just want to save money. Like, that's what it's going to come down to. And the more these tools are normalized, like, we're going to get worse art because of it and cheaper art. And to me, that feels. That feels genuinely awful.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Absolutely. Cinematography is. Is. Is beautiful shots. Right. You look at that, and that's what makes something worth watching. Just because you can create it doesn't mean people want to consume it.

[Leo Laporte]

Can AI art be beautiful?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Objectively, yes, I think so. But I think personally, it lacks humanity. And what is art but like this expression of humanity, this expression of something we're feeling? It's an emotion. It's a thought in your head. And when I look at AI art, like, I'm looking at a lot of this intercut footage in Ancestra, it feels, like, pretty. It's cold, it's cold. It's removed. And it doesn't feel legitimate. It doesn't feel real to me. And eventually it's going to get good enough to where we don't even recognize it. And to me, that's. That's kind of terrifying.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Netflix is taking heat because they used AI to create a scene of a building collapsing in an Argentine science fiction show called the Ethernaut Eternaut.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I hear it's really good, by the way. I hear the show itself is good.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. And I remember in Seth Rogen's Apple TV show, the Studio, he got booed off stage as a movie executive at Comic Con on for saying, yeah, we're going to use AI to do some eyebrows and stuff. Like, I think there is a backlash somewhat.

[Devindra Hardawar]

There's absolutely a backlash. And that's basically why I kind of framed our conversation. It's sort of like Eliza McNutt defending her use of this technology. And I think there's pushback for me framing it that way, too. But I think any artist that just chooses to uses these tools has to answer for why they're using AI and has to answer about their own personal justifications for it. So.

[Ian Thompson]

And we've just had the Sag Afro Settlement with actors for video games where they're just saying, look, if you're going to. If we're going to act in video games and use our voices, you can't just rip that off and use AI And I Think that's a very good thing indeed. Because, you know, I agree totally with you both. It just doesn't feel right. There's something that's just off. And I think that's just because we're trained on seeing real footage and real people. And I worry that the next generation who's been trained on, who's grown up watching AI content won't be able to make that differentiation.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, and AI content is inherently recycled, too. So does that reduce the idea, Any sense of, like, originality?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but everything's recycled. I mean.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, we say we're into.

[Leo Laporte]

Disney didn't invent Snow White out of whole cloth.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean, I mean, that's a recycled idea.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, kind of.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's the essence of it. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

If you look at the original Cinderella story, the evil sisters cut their toes off in order to fit into the glass slipper.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he left that out. But somebody once said there are only five stories. I think it was my English professor in eighth grade. There are only five stories. They're just recycled all the time.

[Ian Thompson]

But that's the end of the story.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Not how it was told, you know, not how it's presented to you. So, yeah, I mean, that's the ultimate difference, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

I expect. I don't know, we'll see that we will always somehow prefer human creations to machine creations. I think that's probably true. Although it will get harder and harder to distinguish them. Yes. Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I guess what it comes down to is what do people watch you think about. I know this is different, but think about all the remakes and how sick of that people are. But they're still watching them, so they're still making.

[Leo Laporte]

Might as well make all these Marvel movies with a machine because they're basically stamped out. Right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The audience responds. A lot of the Marvels, the more recent ones, they have not gotten the box office earlier. Marvels have. The audience does react, and it's an organism. They react to the content to. In some ways, bad, but I think in some ways it feels like. I don't know, feel very genuine in terms of how we react to this stuff. If you want to see AI content now, you can do that right now on YouTube. YouTube or TikTok or wherever, where there's a lot of voice talking to you and it's awful. It's just so God awful.

[Leo Laporte]

But what if it gets good? Then. Then that's what we should really be thinking about is at some point it is going to get almost indistinguishable, if not Fully indistinguishable.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Already getting there. And that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're very close.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

How many reels people send me and I'm like, this is not even a real.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can still kind of tell. Really?

[Ian Thompson]

They're sending you AI content.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And these are people. People that are like my age. Right. It's not even.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Part of it's my mom, but part of it's also. So it's a little terrifying.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, just because I'm old doesn't mean I'm gonna reshare what I saw on Facebook the other day.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But your AI pin will leo. So come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's doing it right now. The Engadget podcast with Eliza McNick came out this week. Can did a great job.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I'm off. But I, I, I took time to write that up because my goodness, you.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Need to take time off. Like for real.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I need to take real time off.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very productive. In his time off I have not.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So take a page for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I think you might be filling in for me on my time off. I hope so.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, a couple, a couple months. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Looking forward to it. But yeah, I'll be in Savannah next month, so I'm taking some time off. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where you go for vacation. It's typically Savannah, Georgia or Savannah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's a four hour drive from, from Atlanta area. So.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. You're out in Atlanta now. Yeah, Savannah. And what's down there in Savannah?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Great seafood. Lovely. It's also a lovely artsy town. Like a great, you know, just cool hippie dippy.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that where the garden of good and evil took place?

[Devindra Hardawar]

It is. I'm staying in the house that apparently John Cusack stayed in when he was filming that. So that's one of that's on the Airbnb. Like hey, you stayed here.

[Ian Thompson]

That's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

That should be. See if John left anything behind.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Wow, that accent. Spectacular.

[Leo Laporte]

I love. I want to go to Savannah, Georgia. I read that book and I thought it was a great book and I.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Read the lovely town. Lovely to stroll around. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It looks like a beautiful little town.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm not even going to try and do an American accent. That doesn't work well.

[Leo Laporte]

You notice I don't do British accent when you're here because I'm afraid you're.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Market the southern to British line is not that far like Daniel doing.

[Leo Laporte]

They say Appalachian accents are closer to Shakespeare's than they are to Bill Bryson.

[Ian Thompson]

Did a very good Book on this where he was looking at just that thing. And yeah, the old American accents or Southern American accents are much closer to.

[Leo Laporte]

Original English as they are now because we were from England at the time and the people lived in the mountains, didn't get as many influences from, you know, northerners.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I've got to say, I mean, this is something I learned when coming over here is that a lot of Scots during the Highland Club Clearances got sent to Cajun country, which is why. Why you get that sort of slight accent there. And I couldn't help thinking that. How do you do? Well, I mean, I'm half Scott. I'm pale blue. The idea of sending full blood Scots to Cajun country and leaving them there is just.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. But I think Zydeco is great. I don't. I don't. Lazer le bon tomps rule. I don't know how you would do it. I don't know. I don't know. Mix it together.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Gambit from the X Men.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're gonna take a little break. So good to have Abrar Al Hedi here. She is a senior technology reporter at cnet. How are things at the new cnet? You happy with the new I am happy regime?

[Ian Thompson]

Good.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It feels like it's the right fit, which is all you could ask for, right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Glad to hear it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

The Register is still owned by the same damn people that started it. Right. Ian Thompson, I think it's 27 carrying on.

[Ian Thompson]

Rock it.

[Leo Laporte]

Love it. That's Ian Thompson from the Register. And of course, the wonderful. We were talking about. Jason Calacanis. He started Engadget. Come to think of it, he did way back in the day. Web Blogs, Inc. Defender. You don't go back that far with Engadget.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I don't go back. I go back 10 years at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's a lifetime in this business.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That was a AOL era, then we turned into Yahoo. So.

[Benito]

Yeah, yeah, he was there when I was working there. That's how long he's been working there.

[Ian Thompson]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito has worked everywhere, by the way. I think he's got a thing. He vests and he leaves. I don't know, I'm just thinking that maybe that's why he's so.

[Benito]

Oh, yeah. My end Gadget stocks are like blowing up.

[Leo Laporte]

Notice I didn't give you any stock at all.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But anyway, so you knew what you were doing. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not falling for that old plan. Not that we have any stock. And if we did it really wouldn't be worth anything at all.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, two more months and I'm 15 years at the register. And it's just like, wow, where did that time go?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, know this show is 20 years old. This year was turned 20. That's a long damn time to be doing this.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

And I know. Brian interviewing Mark Marin saying, you invented this. No, Mark Marin didn't invent it. I invented it. Well, I didn't invent it either.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But you invented netcast, Leo. That's netcast, what you're known for.

[Leo Laporte]

Look how they took off. This netcast is brought to you by our friends at US Cloud, the number one one Microsoft Unified Support replacement. Actually, I really think the world of these guys. I had a nice conversation with them. I said, well what's the cloud part? They said, well it's really about Microsoft. They are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. Said, yeah, but what's the cloud part? Well, we now support 50 of the Fortune 500. I said that's good. But what's the cloud part? They said, Switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft and Unified Premier support. It's faster too than Microsoft by the way. Twice as fast in average time to resolution versus Microsoft. So you get better support for a lot less. I said yeah, but what's the cloud part about? And they said, well, we're excited to tell you about a new offer their Azure cost optimization services. That's what the cloud part's all about. When was the last time you evaluated your Azure cloud usage? If it's been a while, I'm going to bet you have a little bit of what we call in the business Azure Sprawl going on. A little spend creep. Yes you do. Who doesn't? It's easy. But the good news is saving on Azure is easier than you think with US Cloud. And this is something Microsoft's not going to help you do, but US Cloud will. They offer an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And you are going to get expert guidance from US Cloud senior engineers. These are the best in the business with an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. At the end of those eight weeks, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities. Unused resources. You could take those. Reallocate your precious IT dollars towards needed resources. Something you need. Although if I may make a suggestion, if you want the savings to continue, invest those Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support. That's what a few other US Cloud customers have done. And completely eliminate your unified spend. And the saving continues. Sam is the technical operations manager at a company called Bead Gate. They use a lot of azure. He gave us Cloud 5 stars. This is the quote. We found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up. Yeah, no kidding. What do you think? You maybe have some Azure Sprawl, a little Azure creep. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep, and boost your performance. You can do it all in eight weeks with US Cloud. The best, fastest Microsoft support for 30 to 50% off. Visit uscloud.com and book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support or less. Love these guys. Uscloud.com well, this is inspiring a DOGE staffer. One of the people who has access to our information at the U.S. treasury, the Social Security Administration, and Homeland Security. His name is Marco Elez. He is a special government employee on the DOGE team. According to Brian Krebs, he recently published code to his GitHub containing. Now, believe me, this happens. A private key that allowed access to dozens of models developed by xai, including Grok.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I've done it. Well, no, actually I haven't done it because I'm very careful not to do it. But there are plenty of developers done this. But at the same time, this is the guy who has our most personal information from Social Security, from Department of Homeland Security, from the US treasury, our tax information, and he's committing his private keys to GitHub.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, children shouldn't be in charge of sensitive data.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe not.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Krebs on Security reported they had an interview with Philippe Cattore, who's the founder of a consultancy firm, who told Elez that he hey, dude, you leaked your key. Elez removed the key from GitHub. The key, though, is still good. So, hey, good news. If you downloaded it while it was up there on GitHub, you can still use it. Cut to Regli said if a developer can't keep an API key private, it it raises questions about how they're handling far more sensitive government information.

[Ian Thompson]

That's a Very polite way to put it. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So even though Elon's not still running Doge, at least as far as we know, he could be, who knows, he may be sending him telegrams, I don't know.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And a lot of the damage was already done. So. Yeah, between this and the stuff they've already done.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, one of the things Elon said very early on on was, we're going to kill IRS Direct File. That's the, that's the free file system that the IRS developed with the help of the United States Digital Services.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The thing that took years to even happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because the folks at Intuit and H and R Block, all the companies that make commercial tax software, lobbied like crazy to keep this ever from happening. Because they want you to pay money to use their tools. Right, right.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, as an immigrant, this is something I really don't understand. Until I came to the US I had never filed a tax return in my life. It was basically, my employer pays this money. They reserve a certain amount for my tax and I get the paycheck at the end of the month. And now you've got to jump through hoops or hire an accountant or go to one of these scumbag companies and they just killed it. And it was a really great system. And I do not understand why my Intuit employees are not being publicly harangued in the streets about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, listen to this. This is from Wired magazine. When the so called Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the Internal Revenue Service earlier this year, McKenna Kello writing this, leaders of the group reassured workers the agency's free filing tax tool, Direct File, would be spared from cuts, even though Elon had already said we're going to cut it. Only a few days after meeting with tax software lobbyists, the beloved tool was placed in the chopping block. Multiple sources tell Wired the plan to potentially kill Direct File, the free filing tax tool developed by the IRS, was used last year in 25 states. To great applause. Right. The plan to kill it was initiated by Sam Korkos, who's CEO of an Andreessen Horowitz backed health startup that has ties to SpaceX. Corcos suggestion to cut the popular service was presented to Treasury Secretary Scott Besant in the middle of March, multiple sources say. By the weekend before Quarkos suggested ending direct filing, he spoke of it positively to IRS engineers. By Friday, he changed his tune. It will remain online through the 2025 tax filing season, but will likely be dead dead by next year.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's so unfortunate.

[Leo Laporte]

And they changed Their tune because they met with lobbyists.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, come on, this is America. You've legalized bribery and called it lobbying.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, that's about right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, this is, this is example of not doing something for the people. Quite the opposite. I mean, the people want free file.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it's hardly government efficiency, is it? You know, I mean, this is the classic example of good government efficiency and they've killed it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a very good point. Let's go to the EU for good government efficiency.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, I'm going to get.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you're getting some.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, that and the UK's moves. Yeah, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, actually, that's right. You're not in the EU anymore, much to your chagrin. The eu, remember under a little bit of pressure from the Trump administration over tariffs. One of the things Trump said, and I think actually I kind of support him on this. The EU had considered a tax on big tech companies. The among the negotiations for tariffs. Apparently Trump convinced the European Commission to cancel that proposed digital tax.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, how did that work out for the Canadians by the way? Way, you know, I mean they agreed to.

[Leo Laporte]

Or Columbia University or any. Or CBS or.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean they all agreed to cancel these taxes. And then he was just like, psych. You're getting them anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

You're getting him anyway.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, the EU is going to get screwed by him over. Sorry. He's going to get. Roughly.

[Leo Laporte]

Trump's threat of tariffs persuaded Canada to drop a similar tax on digital firms, although Trump then announced a 35% tariff on the country anyway.

[Ian Thompson]

That's just. I mean, it's ridiculous. This is gangster politics.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but, you know, at least he's doing it for us.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, is he really?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, are tariffs really going to help you that much in.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a little worried about my, my medications because we are looking at a very steep tariff on medications not made in the United States of 200%, which be. Would then double to 400% in a year.

[Ian Thompson]

Good luck getting antibiotics from China because they can. They produce 95% of the antibiotics on the planet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, there's also this age stuff now. We're really moving fast. The Supreme Court has just handed down a victory to the Texas Attorney General who had. They, they sponsored a law saying, you know, you can't use pornhub without age verification. You have to show that you're over 18 to look at adult content. Of course, this is considered by some to be a violation of the First Amendment, not the Supreme Court, which said, no, no, that's fine. So now we're going to see, I think all over the United States all sorts of age verification. There will be states that will say you have to be over 16 to use social media, for instance. The problem is, of course, everybody, not just kids, will have to prove their age by showing these companies their government id. Reddit has begun age verification checks in the UK because of the Ukraine.

[Ian Thompson]

What did the British do? They took the piss. If you look at some of the things going on social media, it was like, this is the image I'm going to put into the Reddit engine. It's like horses laughing and the rest of it. So we're maintaining a healthy sense of skepticism about this, but it's a really bad idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Blue sky is also doing this. I mean, they have to write the UK Online Safety act requires these social networks to prevent children from accessing age inappropriate posts. Reddit's gonna use a third party company called Persona who's gonna get hacked very quickly. Right. At least you don't have to go into a pub. That was one of the original puzzles.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, come on. I mean, okay, I grew up in England and trust me, there were pub. Everyone knew the pubs in town where as long as you didn't turn up on a tricycle and ask for a cup of beer please, they'd serve you.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry sir, could I have some egg? Reddit will use Persona to verify users age. They. You will have to upload a photo of your government ID or take a selfie. Yeah, but of course Abrar, that's not going to convince anybody. You look like you're 12, so you gotta.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'm going to keep this forever. That is a great.

[Leo Laporte]

You're gonna, you're gonna have to get a government id. I suspect that's right. No, we're not in Britain, but I, I think this is coming to the U.S. i really do. Reddit says we're not going to get access to the photos. We're only going to be saving the verification status along with your birthday. Hey, that way you won't have to re enter your birthday when you want to access restricted content.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But several states in the US are already pushing for this too. Pornhub has left a lot of the states.

[Leo Laporte]

All of those states. That's right, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

And all of these legisl. All of these laws in the states have very similar language to them. You know, it's basically cut and paste.

[Leo Laporte]

Reddit is not just blocking adult content though. So if you're under 18 in the UK you also can't see gambling. You also can't see anything that encourages disordered eating. Anything that incites hatred against other people based on their race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability and gender. Anything that encourages violence. Basically, you can't use Reddit, okay? Any post that depicts real or serious violence or realistic violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature. No beating up on Dobby the house elf anymore.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, yes, unless you go to the cinema, you know, or if you watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Television, if you're dirty, hairy, all bets are off.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, exactly. I don't understand why they're so prudish about this. And yet you can. What? Robocop's just come up on my streaming services. As films in the 1980s, we watch people getting blown apart by robots.

[Leo Laporte]

Still do. I just watch the boys. The guy took a baseball bat and chopped people. I mean, it's, it's violent, it's vicious. And that's, by the way, I think, aimed at kids, isn't it? I mean, it's about comic book heroes. I don't know.

[Devindra Hardawar]

When I was a kid. So, yeah, R rated movies were blocked.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Look, I don't have. I understand. It is true. You can't go into a magazine store and buy adult content as a kid. Okay.

[Devindra Hardawar]

In theory, another magazine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you just gotta pass over, say, I got this $2 bill, that playboy is going home with me. But this, that's what I really worry about is it isn't just limited to adult content. I mean, look at this. Content that shames people's body types and other physical features will be restricted posts encouraging people to ingest harmful substances. The problem is this gets so broad that pretty soon you can see, well, you definitely won't have any LGBTQ content. You definitely won't have any transgender content. You won't have anything that community standards in the most ridiculously backward, biased community won't tolerate. Users outside the UK will not be affected by this particular rule. But Reddit says, and we may have to do this in other regions if they adopt similar laws. Roblox adding now this might not be such a bad thing. They're adding an age estimation feature for teens using video selfies, and that's because of Roblox Chat, which is apparently a hive of scum and villainy. And you don't want the kids going in there especially, especially to be groomed, Right? So maybe that's okay. They're relying on guess who? Persona. They're gonna. Persona's gonna have a lot of good data, though. Hackers just, you know, you can this.

[Ian Thompson]

Is gonna be the gold mine. I mean, this is, this is why these laws fold. Hold down. It's just like if you've got to scan your government ID or your credit card, you know, this is just like cat nip to criminal, to, you know, criminal attackers because you get the whole thing and they're collecting it for you. It's ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Five EU countries to test age check app under new child safety rules. France, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Greece will be turning this on. It's a pilot program, but it's the beginning. This is using the same standards as the European Digital Identity Wallet, which will, that's never going to happen in the U.S. i don't think people are so scared of a government ID system. The legislation aims to hold 19 online platforms, including Meta, TikTok and X, accountable for limiting children's exposure to harmful content. Addressing addictive design features. See, there you go. Addictive design features. Talk about a nebulous concept. Oh, you mean it's fun to use. Oh, that's not a lot out preventing cyberbullying. Each country will be able to customize the age checking tool to fit its national requirements, either integrating it into an existing digital ID app or deploying it as a standalone solution. So we're going to get all kinds of different ways to do this, I guess. And this is all just a dress rehearsal in the, for the U.S. i.

[Ian Thompson]

Mean they have some weird early adopters there as well. I mean France, the nation would sleep with the kitchen sink if it had a two two, one. It's, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

They'Re actually pretty restrictive in France. I, I, it's really interesting.

[Ian Thompson]

I don't know, I mean, you go to France and they've got, they got.

[Leo Laporte]

Naked women on their money.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and Britain, for goodness sake.

[Leo Laporte]

They want a ban. France is now pushing for a ban on all social media use for anybody under 15. Not just, not just, you know, I.

[Ian Thompson]

Don'T know how Devendra and Opera feel about this, but I'm kind of, of, you know, it's tempting. I just don't see how it could be enforced on a logical and secure basis. Because I do.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's the problem. Yeah, yeah. I mean most social networks, like was it The Facebook was 13 restricted age to, to join even.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I mean I age when I joined. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, they just want to release.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It more but it's, it's hard to actually make that happen.

[Leo Laporte]

15 is actually the age of consent in France. France, they allow you to drink at the age of 16. If you're with a parent or guardian, and 18 is the age you don't even need any help. Then.

[Ian Thompson]

On the other hand, if you look at France, their rate of public drunkenness is way below, say, the UK or. Well, actually, no. Finland. Yeah, And Finland, because Finland's a special case because you have to drink to live there, but.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S the law.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I'm like, oh, man, this is rough. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yeah. I did love sisu. I was asked my review of Sisu, and it's like 90 minutes of Finn's killing Nazis. What's not to like?

[Leo Laporte]

Great. We got some real film buffs in here. Devendra, of course, does film cast, which is really good. I just. The other day, yeah, I was watching a movie or. No, a teaser for a movie, and it said, this is a great movie, slash film. I thought, wow, that's slash.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, yeah, slash film's good. Like, they've had a lot of good pulls where we're not part of slash film anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

We used to be, but yeah, it was cool.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, we used to be the slash film cast. But hey, I'm gonna see the. The teaser trailer for the next Avatar movie tomorrow night. So they're. They're doing special screenings just for the trailer of that movie. It's wild.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. You get to go to the screening room for the trailer.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Well, we're gonna be there for something else, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Fantastic Four is happening an hour later. So it's like, hey, come see the trailer. But crazy times. Good. I do want a good summer for movies.

[Leo Laporte]

I do want to talk about media because, I mean, it has nothing to do with tech.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I should talk about Colbert, but. Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that is a story, I guess. Does it have to do with tech? I don't know. I'm an avid reader of Puck, Puck News, and Matthew Bellamy, he says that, yes, Colbert was the most popular late night show, but that doesn't mean it was making money. In fact, it was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, as all the late night shows do now. They used to be. They used to be, you know, the Johnny Carson, the Tonight show used to be gold mines for these companies. But apparently younger generations don't stay up late to watch TV. Or if they do, they watch YouTube.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Instead, because it's their clips. It's their clips that people are watching, not. They're not staying up too late to watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And Colbert does not have content now.

[Leo Laporte]

Colbert does not have nearly as good a social media presence as, say, the Tonight Show.

[Benito]

This is tech. Because Colbert's gonna start A podcast. And he's gonna destroy everybody.

[Devindra Hardawar]

He absolutely will.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think Conan o' Brien is a really good example of a late night host that is really popular with younger audiences. But, you know, with the whole fiasco, the Tonight show fiasco, figured out a way to also have a very strong online presence and then maintain that fandom. And so, you know, that success on, or lack thereof, according to NBC, on the Tonight show was not indicative of how popular he is or how. How much he then took his popularity and found a way to still cater to the audiences that wanted to hear from him and see him.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I'm so happy that Conan has made this work.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. His podcast, Conan o' Brien Needs a Friend is one of the top podcasts in the country.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's a good show. It's a fun show. He likes doing the long conversations, but now he's back, like he's doing an HBO travel show. So it's kind of gone back around for him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

It's going to be really interesting to see what Colbert does with this though, because he's still got a fair amount of time to run. He's already been being fired. He could really let go.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the argument that it isn't political. Remember that CBS did settle the lawsuit over 60 minutes with the Trumpet with Donald Trump. And it's thought that they did that because Paramount wants to merge with Larry Ellison's kids Sky Dancer.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Colbert had a whole segment calling CBS out for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And he has not been exactly kind to Trump either. And so there was a lot of speculation that was. It was Sherry Redstone trying to make sure that the administration, which, by the way, and this is the problem, we talked about this before. You give them an inch, they're gonna take a mile. Yeah, they settled. They gave the Trump administration money in the 60 Minutes lawsuit, even though it was a slam dunk First Amendment violation and it was completely absurd. Lawsuit. And they still didn't get approval. It has not yet been. The merger has not yet been approved. So he's still got a lot of leverage. So the. There was some suspicion that maybe that's why they fired Colbert, but I don't think that's true because I could tell you as a media mogul myself, if you're worried about somebody, you don't give them a year to continue on the air after firing them.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That's in his contract though, right. He's contracted till next year, so it'd be a bigger issue.

[Ian Thompson]

He gets noticed, payroll then I don't.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Know I'm not sure what the deal is, but he is still around. I don't know how you can look at this Leo and look at the timing of this and say this isn't political.

[Leo Laporte]

It's silly.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It feels thin skinned, you know, person well in the world, you know, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know that he doesn't say it outright. He says, you know, it'd be nice if I really. That Colbert guy's driving me nuts.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I will say Conan. After he was fired and knew it was all. It was scorched shirts for him. That was some good stuff. It was just like, really.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's why you don't leave. I'm telling you.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I know Bear is going to do some good stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't leave people on the air after you. You fire them. That's just a recipe for disaster.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But they're going to get good ratings out of it. So here we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe, maybe the problem is all of these late night shows. I did not know this. I thought they were still money makers. They are no longer. They're money losers. So they're all. They're all on the block, right?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's right. It's not going to end here, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no. I mean, John Stewart is looking. If I was Jon Stewart, I would make sure I had a really good golden parachute lined up. Because he's the logical next choice.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It was always temporary for him. Like he was just there to basically fill the seat for a while. Seemed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In fact, I don't think he really initially was planning coming back every week, but. Yeah, you know, he has now. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, it's you. You've got to ask yourself, though, when the president is so. Oh, God, I'm going for Immigration. So I shouldn't say this, but when.

[Leo Laporte]

The president, you know, you know, it's great being a US Citizen, isn't it?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's the best.

[Leo Laporte]

You're gonna, you're gonna love it, Ian. And all the rights and benefits there too.

[Ian Thompson]

Indeed.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you seen Devindra? Have you seen Sovereign yet? Nick Offerman's new movie?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I have not. I have a screener for that. I need to see that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very interesting.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It looks cool. I've been.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a sovereign citizen, you know, one of those people who says, you know, I don't owe taxes, I don't owe. I don't need a driver's license. I am not engaged.

[Devindra Hardawar]

On fire. Please come help.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's really an interesting. It does not end well. Well, I wish it was a good movie. But I would have loved to have seen more about the sovereign citizen movement. I think that's a very weird and interesting movement.

[Ian Thompson]

Anyway, they create some great YouTube videos, though. It's just like getting.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love watching the. The. The traffic stops with these guys. Yeah. So it's hysterical.

[Ian Thompson]

So what were you thinking?

[Leo Laporte]

There's a. I looked up sovereign citizen on Wikipedia when I was watching the movie because I wanted to get up to date on what the latest thinking in the sovereign citizen movement was.

[Ian Thompson]

This thinking.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I like this. This is a homemade license plate driven by a sovereign citizen. Private. No driver's license or insurance required. I am lawfully private, not for commerce use. Private motors of travel. That does not work, kids. Nope, that does not work. Although, in a way, I kind of respect the attitude that I don't give permission to the government to coerce me with violence.

[Ian Thompson]

Up to a point. But you're quite happy to drive on the roads that they build and to benefit from the education system they provide and to just.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like this is. There's a nexus between how the tech elite billionaires feel and the sovereign citizens feel, because both of them. Elon. Acts like I made all this money myself. No. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

14 billion in NASA subsidies helps, but, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it didn't work that way. All right. Okay. One more Trump story. I'm sorry, I got to do one.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, I'm doomed. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

This is a good one. They are going to spend $1 billion on offensive hacking operations. This is from TechCrunch, but knowing him.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It'S just hacking with lots of swear.

[Leo Laporte]

Words like, it's just offensive. Cyber. Well, it is offensive. They said offensive.

[Ian Thompson]

Hey, noob, we're owning you.

[Leo Laporte]

There is. This is part of the big one. Big, beautiful bill. They don't say specifically what offensive cyber operations are, nor what tools or software will qualify.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Oh, great.

[Leo Laporte]

The budget does note the money will go towards enhancing and improving the capabilities of the US Indo Pacific Command, which operates in Asia Pacific and of course.

[Ian Thompson]

Includes China and I believe is run by Mike Flynn's brother, but yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really? Is that true?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, the head of the US Military APAC is Mike Flynn's brother, or at least was last year.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, of course, Trump has already gutted cesa, the cybersecurity agency. The budget's been cut way back.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah. The people actually doing this work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. And. And there is some concern about offensive cyber operations. Clearly, we are the subject of offensive cyber operations. Salt Typhoon is a Chinese operation, has infested our telecom. Telecom system. Other countries are routinely hacking us. Russia, I think, probably supports a lot of the ransomware gangs that are taking down cities and schools and hospitals in the United States, at least tacitly supports them. So there's definitely offensive operations against us, but there is a risk of engaging in this. A hot cyber war war could be disastrous. Right.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, we've done this before. Do you remember the OPM hack when.

[Leo Laporte]

China basically got in Office of Personnel Management? Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

They got all the government's, you know, they got fingerprints, security briefings, the rest of it. And they had the head of. The head of the NSA at a security conference a couple of months later, and he said, yeah, if we'd seen this open, we would have done it as well, because we're already doing this stuff. But a hot cyber war, we're going to lose because, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think everybody loses. I mean, it's like a nuclear war. There's no winners if you destroy the grid.

[Ian Thompson]

But China controls most of its critical infrastructure, as does Russia. America doesn't. 80% of the US's critical infrastructure is run by private companies. Yeah, so if you go full offensive, we're going to lose.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually related to this, Microsoft apparently had been using Chinese support personnel with the Defense Department. China was using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department's computer systems with minimal supervision by US personnel. They say we're going to knock that off. This was a expose from ProPublica. Good on you. ProPublica for finding this. Various people involved in the work had told ProPublica, they warned Microsoft the arrangement is inherently risky, but the company launched and expanded it anyway.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean, to his credit, Pete Hexseth actually has called them out on this and said they're doing an investigation. And I'm sure the DoD's DUI hire will be a very thorough thing in terms of dealing with this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they use escorts.

[Ian Thompson]

Digital escorts is what they called them. It was just like, worst name ever. Get the marketing department.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Because in person, if you go work at an agency, a real person will walk you into a facility to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

As an escort?

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, yeah, as an escort. So that's the idea. So they would hop on teams, chats with a U.S. person with the security clearance to put.

[Leo Laporte]

Oversee the work.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, oversee the work, but essentially input the code given to them or whatever. Input the commands given to them by the Chinese workers.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and that's what ProPublica said. Says they lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Seems bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Some are former Military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than a minimum wage for the work.

[Ian Thompson]

And so can easily bought off as well.

[Leo Laporte]

One escort said we're anonymously to ProPublica. We're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we can't really tell what's been going on for a decade.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean if you look at the other report this week that salt typhoon have been going after the National Guard and have had control of them for, you know, control of their systems for a year. They've already gone after telcos and congressional systems as well. The Chinese aren't sitting on the, sitting on the backsides about this.

[Leo Laporte]

So maybe we should have a cyber offensive capability.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I mean there's always stuff going back and forth. We don't hear about it. But the report.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like we should spend money on defense too though. And we were definitely way back.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, we were doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

We were doing it.

[Devindra Hardawar]

We are a big target. We shouldn't be out there. When anything America touches that somehow gets out in the wild, like think back to Stuxnet and these sort of unintended consequences of all that, which was something built by America and Israel. Yeah, yeah, and Israel, but was used by Israel and bad things can happen and who knows the consequence of this stuff. We don't know like where it could ultimately lead to infrastructure damage in one country. Our infrastructure is terrible. If we were actually attacked on infrastructure level, we would be doomed, unfortunately.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean I think this is the thinking in that, you know, if China, when China decides to invade Taiwan, you know, are we going to send aircraft carriers there? When the entire electric or water or credit card system breaks down, we're going to have bigger fish to freight fry.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a break. Take a deep breath. It's all going to be okay. You're watching this week in Tech. Davidra Hardwar, Abrar, Al Heati and Ian Thompson. Our panel for the week this episode brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. Hackers, we know this are using AI right now. Now to breach your organization. AI powers innovation and drives efficiency. You know, it's great when you use it, but it also helps bad guys use it to, to deliver more relentless and effective attacks. Phishing attacks over encrypted channels last year increased by 34.1% fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools and phishing as a service kits, which means anybody can do it. Organizations in all industries from small to large are also using AI in a positive way. They're leveraging AI to increase employee productivity with public AI for engineers with coding assistance, marketers with writing tools and finance creating spreadsheet formulas. They're automating workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI into applications and services that are customer and partner. Focus facing Ultimately, AI is helping many companies move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. But it's a double edged sword. Companies need to rethink how they protect their private and public use of AI and how they defend against AI powered attacks. Chief Information Security Officer from the New York City Department of Education. I mean this is a target, right? He says. With AI, I'm concerned about the usage of it, but I also love the innovation with it. How are employees using AI? Which AIs are they using? Zscaler can be a good partner there to help us find the answers to those questions and help us move faster when it comes to incident response and finding that needle in the haystack. Proactively finding threats to our network and our data. Zscaler can help you use AI responsibly and safely. And it can help you protect in ways that traditional security measures can't. You know we've always used perimeter defenses, firewalls and then VPNs to get through the firewall, giving you public facing IP addresses which exposes your attack surface. And nowadays we're getting hammered by AI based attacks on those public IP addresses. There is a better way. It's time for a more modern approach. Zscaler's comprehensive Zero Trust architecture Architecture plus AI that ensures safe public AI productivity, protects the integrity of your private AI and stops AI powered attacks. Three ways it can help you thrive in the AI era with Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI to stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] security that's zscaler.com we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Well, even though There are only 10 Tesla robo taxis right now in Austin, they're they're not racking up a great success rate. Most recent story is a Tesla Robo taxi tried to cross a railroad crossing when the train was coming through and the safety driver who normally kind of stays out of it was forced to say no. There have been and there's only believe me, there are only three of these Tesla robotaxis, but they really are. They seem to be getting in trouble in all sorts of interesting ways. By the way, the guy in the passenger, clearly a Tesla. Stan says I still give the trip an A what?

[Devindra Hardawar]

A for alive.

[Leo Laporte]

What? Okay. All right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Thanks, Tesla.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Tesla. You kept me alive. You didn't kill me. Oh yeah. Joe Tegtmeyer is an avid Tesla fan and host of a Tesla centered YouTube channel. Okay day. That's how. Yeah. Okay. Now he was actually one of the few Tesla fans invited by Tesla to participate in the robo taxi program. He has completed 160 robo taxis and he said the train only tried to kill me once, so that's not so bad.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's a good percentage.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Human drivers will. Will in. In that amount of trips. You'll probably have one crazy human driver incident too. Who knows?

[Leo Laporte]

Shared this on X. He said, you know, to be completely honest, there was one incident I didn't get on camera. We were waiting at a light near railroad crossing. As we waited, the train lights came on, the arms started coming down. Robo taxi didn't see that and started to drive.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I mean that's a really critical thing to miss.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Seems real bad.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. It's one thing to like drive through a cone on the street that's blocked off, but to not see a train.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you all done in Waymo? Have you written in?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I. I've not done a wayo, but they actually just got into Atlanta via Uber. So I want to check that out at some point. If you can survive Atlanta, if self driving can do Atlanta can go anywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

So abrar you drive. You've ridden in Ramos in San Francisco.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That is my ideal way to get around s. Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Because there's nobody in the car and. And you know, I think if you're a woman, it might feel a little safer.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly. That's exactly why I don't want to have a conversation about where I'm from and if I'm married. Every time I get in a car, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. It's really unfortunate.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And then I can play Taylor Swift and no one objects. There's no one there. It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

And you felt safe in all of those rides.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I have, I haven't experienced anything jarring. Even my. My first ride, you know, you get in, you're like, okay, what's about to happen? But then the funny thing is like Waymo is it strikes a good balance of being persistent and careful at the same time. Because you don't want a robo taxi that's too scared to do anything. You'll never get to your dest. It will make those turns in that little window that it has before the light turns red, and you'll feel safe during that. In my experience so far.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you ever had to hit the button?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, thankfully, I have not.

[Leo Laporte]

It calls the home office. What we don't know, and I don't know if they're completely forthright about this, is how often humans take over these vehicles.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

This is what I hear about, too, and I have no clue because. Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

But you don't mind because you feel safe. And I. I mean, honestly, that is not to be diminished in any way. That's really a big deal.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It is, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

It's.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's quite great. But yeah, I'm curious to. To hear if you happen to catch a ride in Atlanta. I want to hear all about it. And having it in the Uber app, I think, is really smart. In sf, you have to have the Waymo One app, but I think if it's in Uber, you don't have much more likely to do another app. You know, you've already got it on your phone and you could automatically get paired with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Uber is planning to get into this. They want to launch 20,000 new robo taxis in the US over the next six years.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, it's a lot of robo taxis.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. No, I mean, the. It's interesting that you say about as a, you know, as a single woman traveling, that, you know, this makes such a difference. And I'd agree. There are some really sketchy taxi drivers in San Francisco. And we drew. I drove on a Waymo the first time on, you know, on a Saturday night at 9pm it was the safest car out there on the road, and I didn't have to interact with somebody who might have been smoking or doing whatever else. Yeah, the car. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Also, just as a bit of fun when. If you ever do come to San Francisco, viewers, you can set your own music, as you said. And Knight Rider theme has to be done.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I have to do it just. Just for that. But I have a colleague in Phoenix, too, and they love taking the win Waymo for early morning airport rides, because literally you're getting in. Just close your eyes and you're like, airport.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Eventually, they're not going to SFO yet. So once they do, that is the plan. I can't wait.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I don't understand why they're not doing that for sfo.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

What the. What regulation they have to, you know, what approval they have to get from sfo. But they're all around it. They're in that area, but they just haven't gotten to the airport yet.

[Benito]

I think they get confused by the maze. Right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I think.

[Benito]

I don't know if the May Waymo can make the maze.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh come on. It's just made for a Waymo.

[Devindra Hardawar]

How you do it? I was raised almost so I. This is my dream come true.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you want Kit to talk back to you? Hello.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Kit should be the virtual assistant in the car. Yeah, Sassy Kit. Sassy AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's pretty funny.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean but I mean it's the coming wave, you know, I mean if taxi drivers are going to be extinct in 10 to 15 years, this.

[Leo Laporte]

Spread out truck drivers are the ones most at risk though, right? I mean that's the first.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm not sure about that.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Autonomous trucking has been kind of put on pause. Yeah. For really for everybody. Just what happened is like Waymo in particular. I mean Aurora is doing a lot of autonomous trucking and there's some other.

[Leo Laporte]

There are. I know there's an. In the Austin. What is the Austin Dallas corridor. There's autonomous trucks.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So there are. Yeah, there are companies that are working on it. For some reason Waymo decided to pivot to ride hail failing for the time being and then probably eventually apply whatever it learns there. But yeah, there are still companies working on trucking and that's going to be definitely something that changes the game.

[Benito]

It's because there's autonomous truck videos when they fail. It's like it's so horrifying when you see. Have you seen those videos? It's horrifying.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean they have safety drivers or.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no. Well, okay, they're. They're being forced to. Isn't my understanding.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

Because what happens when the truck gets off the freeway way then you're in trouble.

[Ian Thompson]

But I mean truck drivers are multi purpose because the truck driver driver doesn't actually just drive the truck, they help unload it, they do the maintenance on it. And if you've got a burst front tire, there's no way AI is going to help you on that one. You know truckers, this is why I think trucking is going to be a slower thing than actual driving. Because if you're in taxi and they blow out a tire, they'll just pull to the side of the road and send you another one. You can't do that with a truck full of refrigerated cars goods.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Dallas, Houston. I'm sorry, I got the cities wrong. Aurora launched a commercial service in Texas. Uber Freight and Hershenbach Motor Lines are. Are running Test runs with their Auroras. Now they do have safety drivers in those which is probably a good thing.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And the thing to remember is that you know, when Uber was going to do its own self driving unit it sold that technology to Aurora and so Uber has now decided to partner with people instead of trying to develop its own self driving because it's probably a lot easier.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Neuros, you know killing people was a bad, you know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at gm they got out of the business. They said this is too, this is not a good business for us.

[Ian Thompson]

So that's when down to a club in San Francisco and I found the GM cruise graveyard. Yes, yes, exactly.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh my goodness.

[Ian Thompson]

We went down to a gate big there and there's an entire fenced off system with all these cruises parked nose to tail and it was just like.

[Leo Laporte]

What are they gonna do with it?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's actually kind of heartbreaking.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, they're gonna junk them.

[Leo Laporte]

They should. That would be actually maybe a good Pixar movie. A little lost. Little lost cruise.

[Benito]

The origin story of the cars universe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean in a parking lot in south San Francisco.

[Ian Thompson]

But at least they were properly equipped. I mean the thing with Tesla and why they're having so many accidents is that they're ignoring lidar.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean you maybe know more about this than, than I do abroad but it just, you know, it's. Yeah. It's a twelve thousand dollar unit you're going to stick on the front of the car. You can't just rely on cameras and.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and it's getting cheaper and cheaper by the way. LIDAR was really expensive but it's gotten much, much less expensive.

[Ian Thompson]

Look at China.

[Leo Laporte]

No reason not to do it.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, China's brought the cost down enormously.

[Leo Laporte]

It's more, it's more Musk's, you know, kind of determination that you don't need it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's about being different. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Than anything practical.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Well they were forced to like drive down prices years ago. Right. So it was all part of the cost cutting. We don't need extra sensors. We could just do with cameras and. Yeah, you can't. You can't really. Not safely. Especially not if it's like you're dealing with bad weather or things like that. Random rain, fog. You need the lidar.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean when. Okay. Waymo isn't perfect on this one because I think it was about two years ago a bunch of Waymos got lined up in San Francisco because they couldn't deal with a fog.

[Leo Laporte]

Or dead end streets where the waymos keep turning down the streets and these poor people living on the street just have an endless parade of waymos because they don't want to turn left so they have to turn right and it's just not.

[Ian Thompson]

But I mean, with the Tesla Robotaxis launch in Austin, you know, Devindra, you said exactly, you were exactly right. They got a bunch of Tesla influencers who are, well sold in on the platform and they were still recording these errors because there's no way you can hide it. So get the hardware right, get the software right and it'll work. But just saying, yeah, no lidar, no lidar, it's just not worth it is a recipe for design Ulster.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. Tesla's approach has been very rushed compared to other companies like Waymo or Zoox, where they're like, okay, we want to make sure we don't mess this up. Right. No one wants to pull a cruise and have some sort of incident that then ends, you know, the game for them. And even Cruise had a very measured rollout, but, you know, accidents happen. But everyone's now being even more careful. And so in this rush, I think there are going to be even more hiccups and it's not, it's not going to be great.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, Cruise ended up parking on a, on someone they'd knocked over.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Now we don't call it parking. We were just resting for a minute. Just a minute. Yeah. It's interesting that GM decided really, after spending, I imagine, billions on this, that this isn't a business.

[Ian Thompson]

About 4 billion. Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And I mean, Cruise was ready to like come back. Right. Like they were preparing for a comeback and then it just, they pulled the plug and that was it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Darren Okey, in our Discord chat, one of our wonderful club members does point out you can't just strap on lidar, you have to try train. And having not chosen lidar early on, Tesla kind of forced their hand on that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Nvidia's whole thing though is that they've been selling the compute units and potentially, I don't know, sensor training. I think together with that, they've been talking about this a lot. So I feel like they would have some sort of all in one package at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

But also they've been using lidar to scan streets, you know, so that it's not just. I remember about five years ago we covered a scientific paper where if a kid was holding a red balloon, the car would recognize that as a stop sign. And until you map out all those stop Signs and you have to learn.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think. I don't know. My adas driver assist on my BMW. I think they have lidar on that. I'm pretty sure I do.

[Devindra Hardawar]

A lot of cars do.

[Leo Laporte]

Like a radar of some kind.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Hang on, Leo. You're driving a Beamer, not a Tesla.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. I haven't driven a Tesla in years. I got a Model X when they first came out. I had it for three years. Lisa called it Chris. You know, that's the crazy.

[Ian Thompson]

You hated it, didn't you?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I didn't hate it. I loved it. But it kept clonking Lisa in the head. It was the one with the Falcon wing doors and it didn't have sensors on the Falcon wing bottoms. So I would push the button. It says close all doors. And she'd go, ow. She'd be getting in the car. So we got in the habit. I had to say, attention, attention. Closing all doors. The other thing it did, if it rained and you opened the Falcon doors, a waterfall would cascade into the car because it was just poorly designed.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I felt like Tesla's and even, you know, my son had a Model Y which I drove a little bit. I feel like they're kind of like. They're a little chintzy compared to.

[Devindra Hardawar]

They feel real cheap.

[Leo Laporte]

They feel cheap. So I've had. Since then, I had a Ford Mach E, which I liked a lot. Had that for three years. Years. Lisa drives a Mini which is also BMW, but it's very nice electric Mini. We have a Chevy Volt. I'm sorry, Bolt with a B Bolt, which is also very nice. Those are the Bolt's inexpensive. It was like $20,000 after the rebates.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Now is a great time for cheap EVs. I just. Because we need a second car. So I was looking like, what can I get for like $15,000? Ish. And the Nissan Leaf right now is really incredible deal. So I got a good deal.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the, what's the range though?

[Devindra Hardawar]

This one is like 160 miles, which is not that much. But also this is a second car. I'm not taking road trips with it. Right. It's local commute stuff. And for that price and the second generation lease are not the ugly little like little bugs that the first.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't like the first ones. Yeah, yeah.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The second gens are hatchbacks with trunk space and useful space. So go for very little money. Like I got this thing. I'm probably going to write about this eventually, but when.

[Ian Thompson]

How much was it?

[Devindra Hardawar]

$15,000 it was used 30,000 miles in 2019.

[Ian Thompson]

That's a fantastic deal.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's the high end trim and it has like the driver assist too. So it has the follow assist too. So it has a bit of like the assisted cruise control. But I'm probably going to write about this because when the EV tax credits go. Wayne subscribers September, that's going to be a bad thing right now. Like you can get.

[Leo Laporte]

Now's the time to buy.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, now's the time. Like you can get. I could have gotten $4,500 off of some used leaves, which would bring this thing closer to $10,000.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can get a tax credit on a used electric.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yes, you can. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Wow.

[Devindra Hardawar]

If you go to car. So I bought from Carvana and they even list it in the, in the listings of the cars. Like if you can apply, if you have a tax credit then you know the, the price of this vehicle all of a sudden comes down. Cheap EVS, if you don't care about like going over 200 miles, like you can get some really good deals right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the problem with the Mini. It's only got about a 90 mile range. But it isn't the fine second car. It's a local.

[Ian Thompson]

But if I say if you're going down to the shops and back, then that's not a big deal. And thank you Lee, for disproving the old adage about bmu BMW drivers.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm a dick. No, no, no, no. I run.

[Ian Thompson]

We used to say they're revers hedgehogs because the pricks are on the inside.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I don't know how to use seren signals.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually really like it. It's a very nice car.

[Ian Thompson]

They do build good quality vehicles.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. As well. It's. Well, it's very stable platform and it's, it's EV everything. We, we don't, we don't do gas.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Vehicles while we're on this. By the way, if anybody's in the market for a new EV right now, look at Polestar. Look at the used Polestar.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are beautiful.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Ridiculous. $25,000 for a three year old Polestar that sold for 70, $80,000. So they're out there.

[Ian Thompson]

Right. I'm on the net right now. That's if you need an ev.

[Devindra Hardawar]

And also look at the Polestar, the actual retail stores, they have units there and they will give you a warranty.

[Leo Laporte]

I think one reason that used evs are they depreciate a lot. They're less expensive. Is there's concern about battery life. But I think the experience in experience we've seen that these things really do go a hundred thousand and miles or more.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Absolutely. They can't, I mean battery life is the thing and you can, you can. Most EVs have like the little bars that you can check to see is the battery reaching full capacity. So that's a, that's a thing to pay attention to. I will say this cheap little Nissan Leaf, which is essentially an economy car, feels better to drive than my like, very nice Volvo XC9. EVs are great because that's a big car and just even driving a small car feels better.

[Leo Laporte]

So electric engines are much better, frankly. I mean they don't have as hesitation. They, they have a smooth torque acceleration. Yeah, I love it.

[Ian Thompson]

My first car was a Swedish car and my next car could be one as well. Thank you for the tip.

[Devindra Hardawar]

They're beautiful cars.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, my first wife was Swedish. Let's take a break. And more to come with Devindra Hardawar, Abrar Alheati, Ian Thompson. You guys are great. I just, it's always nice to do a show with people. We could just hang out and talk, talk.

[Ian Thompson]

And that's part of the fun of the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Get the tech news because it's so terrible. More to come in just a little bit. Stay right here. Our show today, brought to you by StoryBlock. Now, I love this. If you've ever worked in a big company, you know that oftentimes you get a legacy content management system that's, that's just a nightmare. They, they promise enterprise grade features, but what you really get is a slight, slow, clunky system that needs developer support for even the smallest update. And if you're trying to move fast, file fast, put up those marketing campaigns fast, that's just a nightmare. Well, StoryBlock changes all of that. First of all, Unlike those monolithic CMSs, Storyblock is headless. It completely decouples your back end from your front end. It's how we did our Twit website and work workflow. We decided to run the back end independently with a great API, which means the front end is, can be anything you want. Developers with StoryBlock can build in any framework they want React or Astro or Vue. You still get this incredible CMS that people love. Marketers can use an intuitive visual editor to create and update content without filing dev team tickets. And storyblock scales. It's built to scale whether you're a freelancer or part of a global enterprise. They have a global CDN AWS data centers in the us, Europe and Asia. It is really built for performance at scale, totally enterprise ready. They've got features enterprise requires like role based access control, SLAs, enterprise grade SLAs. They've got top tier security, all the things Fortune 500s want. One global e commerce channel giant switched to StoryBlock and cut content update cycles from weeks to hours. Another major brand empowered marketing to launch campaigns completely independently, freeing up developers for bigger projects. I just think this is the right way to go. The API first approach is absolutely brilliant. Storyblocks API first approach means your content loads fast anywhere in the world. It means better ux, it means higher engagement, improved search SEO. With their real time visual editor, marketers will see exactly what their content's going to look like before publishing. No more endless back and forth saying can you move that over a pixel, up a pixel? No, no you don't. You, you get to do exactly what you want and see exactly how it's going to look. Which means developers, you don't get as many interruptions. Marketers, you have more autonomy. It's a win all around. Ooh, and if you're an agency, you gotta love this. Storyblock offers multi client workspaces, flexible permission so clients can have different permissions, right? Seamless collaboration tools. You can manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. It's built for that. So whether you're a startup, an enterprise or maybe you're an agency juggling multiple clients, StoryBlock gives you the power and the flexibility you require. Try it today at storyblock.com twittv25 and use code TWIT25TWITLISTER. Get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblock.com twittv-25 and the offer code TWIT25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus Plans. S T-O-R-Y-B-L-O-K.com TwitTV D25 and the offer code TWIT Twitter25. You got to try it today. I think you will love it. And you know what? Everybody in your business will love it too. Storyblock.com TwitTV25 thank you StoryBlock. Thank you StoryBlock. A YouTuber has leaked iOS secrets. This is from the register via friend spying on a developer's phone. This is Apple's lawsuit against John Prosser who is a very well known, well known iOS leaker and YouTuber. Apple is suing him. Usually Apple doesn't go so far as to sue leakers, but they say he leaked iOS 26 information ahead of WWDC. In June. They also sued another individual, Michael Ramachoti, in Northern California District Court. This is earlier this week, accusing them of misappropriating trade secrets and a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Oh, that's throwing the book at him for conspiring to break into development iPhone in the possession of an Apple employee. Well, that's pretty bad.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, they've done this before in 2019 when you know, there was a prototype that was leaked out. 2019. It was one of the things that.

[Leo Laporte]

It sounds like they hacked. So Ethan Lipnick, who worked at Apple as a software engineer in the photos team, according to the suit, Ramachati was in need of money. Had a friend that worked at Apple. Prosser allegedly offered to pay Ramachati to break into his the Apple employees development phone to show Prosser what version of iOS running on the device looked like. Okay, okay, that's extreme. That's a little extreme. That is not good journalistic practice, is it to be Indra?

[Devindra Hardawar]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

You wouldn't allow crime.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Crime's bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Crime bad.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Paying sources, paying criminals, crimes Real bad, real bad. All those things not so good.

[Leo Laporte]

Ramachati, who stayed at the Apple employees home allegedly used location tracking software to determine when Lipnick was far enough from home to be gone for an extended period, then obtained the passcode and accessed the device, made a video call to process and showed iOS in the development phone. Oh man. If, if they can. No, yeah, yeah. If they can get. If they can prove that I think Apple's got a case. Apple does not normally sue leakers.

[Ian Thompson]

That breaks total journalistic ethics. I mean, I mean, Abra, I read your, your review of the Galaxy Z Fold 7. If somebody had offered you that, you know, ahead of time. Time from a stolen phone, I'm pretty sure you'd have told them where to get off.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

You know, that's not what we do.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't pay people to, to break confidentiality ever, right?

[Ian Thompson]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. You might take. Leakers might approach you and volunteer that information and you would accept it in that case, but you would never proffer money to somebody say, could you give me that information? Apparently there is a recipe the. Oh my God. Apple learned the details of the incident from an audio recording sent to the Apple employee by Rama Chi admitting to the crime. Lipnick provided the recording to Apple after it was notified by an anonymous individual had seen the Leaked content and recognized Litnik's apartment in the background of the call. Gosh, this is pretty hamfish fisted.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Well, and you know, Apple employees are already so scared of getting in trouble over like accidentally leaking anything and this is just a nightmare.

[Leo Laporte]

Lipnick was fired. It wasn't sued, but he was fired because he hadn't properly secured his development device.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

See, that's kind of. That's wild.

[Devindra Hardawar]

That sucks.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Would be penalized for. I don't know. I don't know. I guess I don't know the details enough to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crossing denies Apple's allegations. He posted on X. I didn't deny it, but man, usually, I mean, Prosser, to my knowledge, has not been prosecuted by Apple, although has many, many, many leaks.

[Ian Thompson]

You've got to be very careful who accept leaked information from and what their motivations are. And it's the code we live by. And this case was just really scummy in so many ways, you know, I mean, it just, it's not something a legitimate, legitimate journo would have got involved with.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, we'll watch this case because Prosser says, no, no, that's not how it happened.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, we'll see what other evidence they uncover.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In fact, he says he has evidence to prove he was unaware of how the data was obtained. Maybe it's a recording of him saying, I do not know how you got this information.

[Ian Thompson]

Shocked? Shocked I am.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's pretty well known by people like Prosser who do leaks what, what is allowed and what is not allowed. But to be fair, I don't think he works for a publication. He's, he's kind of on his own, so maybe he hasn't been well trained in the ins and outs.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it's, it's one of those things. It, it's kind of like the, the Wall Street Journal story a couple of days ago about Trump doing this picture. There's no way you would publish that as a legitimate news organization and not have evidence and everything backed up, checked by lawyers.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the Wall Street Journal probably can defend itself, but this is the problem with the way things work these days. I mean, CBS could have easily defended itself in the 60 Minutes case. There's the case there.

[Ian Thompson]

But, but there are political questions to be added into this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So you like, did you like the Galaxy Z Fold 7?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I did. I have it here too.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. It's really thin. Look how thin that is.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'll open it up for you and you can see how thin it is. And Then I also have the iPhone 16 Pro Max to show you. It's actually thinner comparison when open. It's a lot. Ooh, I'm trying to get the right angle there. There we go. You can see how thin it is when open.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Ian Thompson]

Wow.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And then I'll show you closed. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's even closed. It's thinner still.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So this is. The fold is 8.9 millimeters thick when closed. And the iPhone is 8.25, I think. Millimeters. I cannot get the angle. There we go.

[Ian Thompson]

Wow.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So, yeah, so I liked it. It's very expensive. It's $2,000. So pocket change.

[Leo Laporte]

But those folds have always been around that, right?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They've always been expensive. The last fold was $1,900, and the one before that was $1,800. So they're on this tick of like, let's bump up the price by $100 every year. But, you know, it's super thin. So a couple. Samsung released the S25 Edge, which was their first super thin phone. That phone was $1,100, and it was kind of like, you know, the S25 Edge walked so that the. Hopefully the Galaxy Z Fold 7 will run. But. But yeah, thin is in. A lot of companies are doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's rumored that Apple's going to release the iPhone slim this year in preparation for a folding phone next year, just like Samsung did.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's the way you do it because you don't want this weird, clunky, chunky device. And then the other big thing here, too is like, the COVID screen actually. Actually feels normal. So, like, when I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a regular phone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It feels like a regular phone versus the previous versions of the Fold. You could tell it was a compromise to, like, use the COVID screen. So, yeah, I think it totally makes sense for Apple to release a thinner phone, standard iPhone this year, and then hopefully a foldable one the next year.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you miss the S pen?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I've never been an S pen user. I. Whenever I've had. I've never actually personally owned a note device, so I've never become reliant on one, so I'm okay without it. And it's a compromise, right? Like, would you rather have an S pen or would you rather have a chunky device? And I think I'd rather.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what they gave up, although. So they didn't actually give up battery. It's the same size battery as last year.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Most impressive to me. I was ready for the battery to be worse on the S25 Edge, it's 3,900 milliamp hours, which is pathetic. But this one keeps that 4,400. So it's great to still have a day and a half of battery and.

[Leo Laporte]

Not have to worry about it that much.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, that's for me, how long it lasted. I definitely have a lot of screen time, so. So it's high praise, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

How about the crease?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Not too bad either. It's actually not crazy noticeable, especially when you're actually watching something or doing something on here. If you're out in sunlight, you know, creases are always a bit more obvious. But this has a 2600 nit display, so it's still nice and bright to kind of thwart a bit of that. So definitely not even something I was even thinking about. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you had a chance to play with this?

[Devindra Hardawar]

I have not had a chance to play with it, but it is, it is. It does make me think, like, how will Apple catch up to this? Right. Because Samsung is seven generations in now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, one way is by buying the screen from Samsung.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Devindra Hardawar]

But it's also like, how do you build for it? Because Apple historically has not done a great job of turning IPADOs into something that I think looks good for multitasking. So it's like, even just rethinking how you build this. How does iOS move from the outside screen to the inside side screen? Apple has a lot of catching up to do. My colleague Sam Rutherford pointed out that Google did a good job of catching up within two pixel fold. So it is possible to, like, move quickly. But yeah, I want to. I kind of want a foldable, but I don't want to go to Android. So it's like, I hope Apple figures this out soon. It's not going to be for everybody, but I certainly. I'm at the point where I'm like, watching more video content on my phone just because I'm, like, tired after running around the kids all day and I'm on my bed and I just need to watch something. So I see the value of something like this. And I could see Apple definitely, like, following with the same stuff Samsung's doing.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's the big thing, right? A lot of people are like, I would love a foldable, but I don't want to leave the Apple ecosystem. So you're definitely not alone in that. And yeah, I definitely was watching a video in bed the other day with the, you know, half open, so you can kind of just prop it up like a little. Mini laptop. And then the other thing too is cameras. So this has a 200 megapixel main camera, which is insane.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty damn good.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's wild. So you're taking pictures on this and it looks like pictures that you would take on the Ultra. And the Ultra is chunkier. So if Apple can also figure out how to maintain its high end cameras like it has on the pro models on a foldable, then that'd be really cool too.

[Leo Laporte]

It must be. I mean 200 megapixels must be binning them or something. I mean it's not exactly.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And it just essentially aligns with it's the ultra grade cameras on a foldable, which is still pretty impressive because foldables typically aren't able to have that type of, you know, those sensors on that.

[Leo Laporte]

Especially that thin.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Especially on that F. On that thin. Exactly. Because the, the S25 edge also it kind of broke the mold there and also had that 200 megapixel camera. So they figured they could do it on that thin phone. Why not do it on this thin phone too?

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that image. Wow.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

The Morgan Library in New York is gorgeous.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, is that pretty.

[Ian Thompson]

I do have one practical question on it though, because I mean if I'm spending two grand on a camera, I want a case to protect it. And I don't see how this works with foldable.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So there are cases for this. I refuse one on. Yes, there are. And they're, they're actually pretty sleek. It doesn't add a lot of bulk to it. I've held it with, I've held the phone with a case on it and it's, it's, it is pretty nice and sleek. It's not going to be like your bulky otterbox, you know, type where you feel like you could toss it on concrete and you'll be fine. But there are options for that and thankfully they don't add too much F to it.

[Leo Laporte]

I did get a case for my old faux fold.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's just like a panel on the back and a panel on the front of the. I mean it's not, it doesn't surround the whole thing.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm a clumsy bugger and I drop my phone an awful lot and so I like a good hardcore case around something, particularly when it's that price.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, I think what's really interesting is that it isn't the closed. It's still like a regular phone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're not sacrifice. You don't have this chunk of wonk in your hand, you have a normal app aspect ratio front screen, but you have available to you. How does the software work on the folding thing?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Pretty well. There were a couple instances where Instagram and TikTok videos were weirdly cropped, but mostly it works well. You can also open up to three apps for multitasking which is really great. So that feels pretty cool to use. But yeah, most of the apps that I used were, were well formatted with a couple hiccups here and there.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very impressed by the low light photos, the nighttime photos you were able to to take. This is a good camera.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It is a very good camera and obviously they're, you know, they're touting how much AI plays a role there and reducing noise and making everything look better. But yeah, you can still see the textures and you know, no crazy shadows. So pretty impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great. So you took the people. This is, I would love. This is the Morgan Library. You didn't want those people in there. So they're gone. That's pretty good.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's really good. I mean Apple's cleanup tool is long overdue, but it does not compare at all to what Samsung can do. A generative edit. The one caveat is when you use Generative Edit, you'll see that label in the bottom left corner that says AI generated content, which is kind of obnoxious.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's not you that put that there, that bug, the Samsung. Oh, I don't like that.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I would crop that out, you know, thankfully. Yeah, you know, move that up a.

[Leo Laporte]

Bit and I guess they're sensitive to this whole thing.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I know but yeah, I kind of.

[Ian Thompson]

I kind of feeling it's a good idea that we have those labels in there so that we know.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

True. It's true. But ye full transparency. If I did ever post something, I'd definitely crop that out.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Probably do the same myself to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because you don't know how much was it was AI generated in this case you just took the people out. That's nothing.

[Benito]

No, you just go to Photoshop, box it and generate generative. Edit that out.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly. It's what Photoshop's been doing for years.

[Leo Laporte]

And so yeah, so it sounds, I mean you gave it 8.5 out of 10. That's a pretty good score. Yes, it is.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this the best. This is the best fold they've ever made, obviously.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Definitely. Without a doubt. In my opinion. Definitely. Like you said, feels like a normal phone when it's closed. You have the advantage of an open phone and you don't need to use the inside screen, but it's nice to have, which is great.

[Ian Thompson]

It's still. I'm half Scots and I'm half Yorkshire, so the idea of paying 2,000 for.

[Leo Laporte]

A phone is a lot for a phone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's ridiculous. Carrier deals, you know, I guess that's the way you do it.

[Ian Thompson]

True, true. Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Otherwise there's no way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I wouldn't mind paying that much. I mean, you pay that much for a lap laptop. I just. It's a lot to pay for something that's fragile and easily lost and that.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You'Re going to replace in two years, you know, if you. If that's what you choose to do. Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

How long did they continue doing security support?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

7 years of software and OS updates.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, that's actually. That's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's really good. And you're an Android user, right, Ian?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah. I've been on Pixel and Nexus before that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Simply because I get security updates as soon as they come out. Google were lacking on that. They've since come up, I think under pressure from Samsung, to be honest.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, definitely.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Apple, there's a lot of pressure on Apple to respond. Apple has historically said we're not going to do folding phones, but the rumors very strong that they're going to do that next year, not for the 2025 iPhone 17, but for the 18 or whatever they call it. The 20th anniversary.

[Devindra Hardawar]

I fully expect Apple to do something. They're going to do their slightly different spin on this. Like a direct competitor to the fold would be nice. But also. So a lot of people are thinking, like, what would an iPad mini be like if you could essentially fold that in half? Maybe that's what the phone looks like. I don't think anybody is doing like a 10 or 11 inch foldable tablet right now. And that was always the promise of the stuff like the Microsoft Courier, which we've dreamed about for over a decade now. And even Microsoft like killed their own Surface tablet folding project. Was it the Neo or the. Yeah, the Neo that they fully killed. So nobody is doing a good job at that right now. I could see Apple like coming in and iPadifying a good fold.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the Neo. I really. I returned it, but.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Well, that was a duo.

[Leo Laporte]

You had a duo. I had the duo, not the Neo.

[Devindra Hardawar]

The Neo was the Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

They never released the Neo.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's really cool that they never released.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I like the duo, but as I said, I returned it because the software wasn't ready for it. There was nothing that understood quite what was going on.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, it does seem like they've got the screen fold sorted now because that was my big problem with foldables earlier was that you're going to get a crease down set center and it seems like the technology is now there. Does, does that match up?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, I think, I mean I think marrying the. Having the decent software and the decent hardware and yeah, the creases have gotten a lot, a lot less noticeable.

[Leo Laporte]

The rumor is Apple has arranged to buy a new screen technology from Samsung that is creaseless. I'll believe how you do that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

My complaint really about all the foldables and I have the, I had the several folds and I have the last year's flip still is not so much the crease but the texture because in order to make these screens foldable, they're not glass.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Right.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Plasticky.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They're a bit more plastic.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels a little rubbery. Plasticky. And I don't like that as much. That's my biggest complaint. I like glass. I don't use a screen protector either.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Apple has to invent bending glass now. Can they do it?

[Leo Laporte]

Of course they can. Once. You can bend it once.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All glasses. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

This is kind of why I like the duo in that. You know I tested it out for a. I like the hinge. I was kind of like. Yeah, you know, it's like I don't have to worry about the screen breaking. I can just. Right as you use it.

[Benito]

And if the Samsung one is 2000, how much is the Apple one going to be?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's going to be. Well, don't forget tariffs. Right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We. It's not, it's unclear yet what will happen this fall with Apple's pricing. But I. If the tariffs get continue it's going to have to be a big jump.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And it's been a while since Apple's, you know, upped the prices on its phones to begin with so.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're not allowed to say it's a tariff increase. No, that apparently is.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Companies really don't like doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

That is verboten.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Ian Thompson]

It'S just a value added product.

[Leo Laporte]

Which I do notice prices are going to going up. I was at Costco yesterday and everything's a little bit, you know, buck or two more. Just bit by bit they're inching up.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean we had a big problem with Apple when this. Because we introduced you the phrase the Cupertino. Cupertino idiot tax and I have had so many Apple pr.

[Leo Laporte]

I am a Cupertino idiot and I resemble that. I mean resent it. That's what I do, I resent it. Are you gonna buy the Commodore 64? It's back.

[Ian Thompson]

I ready.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry. So I'm not of the generation, but if you're of the generation which you guys all are, that, that might have been your first computer or a computer of lust and desire when it came out in, what was it, 1994? No, can't. Must have been more older than that.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It was less big in the US maybe. Ah, yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

You see, I grew up with the Sinclair ZX81 and then the Commodore was a lust object. It was just like at last a proper keyboard, decent processor and there's software to run on it. So I'm really, really tempted by this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's clear, apparently. I don't know if that. Is that the picture.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Early 80s, that Commodore. So it was way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you're right. Commodore was defunct by 94. I. Yes, that's when they went out.

[Devindra Hardawar]

So for me, my, my first computer was a Packard Bell. Remember Packard?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Adorable. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Terrible computers, Terrible computers. They're PC quality. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, there's people of a certain age, so let's see if it was the 80s, that means if you were born in 75, maybe it would be something that you would say, oh yeah, I gotta have.

[Benito]

I had friends who had these, but I had, I had an xt but I had friends who had these.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, yeah, schools.

[Ian Thompson]

We, we had a Sinclair ZX81 and then a BBC Model B and then Commodore was a thing to lust after. So it was because Apple wasn't that big. It's the uk.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, this was a lot less expensive than an Apple too as well. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, Doug Douglas Adams, I think was the first or second person to get an Apple in the uk and that's because he made an awful lot of money out of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, so there's a $300 beige version that is exactly the spitting image of the original one.

[Ian Thompson]

That's the one I want.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. But you can pay more, more if you want and get the slightly more expensive Starlight version, which is the clear one.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That looks cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or there's apparently a gold version.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, for goodness sake.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this a Trump version or the Trump version? Let's see this Starlight, which is clear. That is 3, 49, 350 bucks. There's a 550 Dollar Ultimate Founders Edition in solid gold plastic.

[Ian Thompson]

Solid gold plastic. What a wonderful phrase.

[Leo Laporte]

Yum yum. That's hysterical.

[Benito]

What I remember about Commodores is that they had more games than I had access to.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Benito]

Yeah, there were more games on.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't realize this. Something like 2000 games available for.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, they were the ultimate gaming PCs of their time.

[Leo Laporte]

They were all crappy.

[Benito]

It was pre console.

[Ian Thompson]

This is pretty console. I was going to say this was the 1980s. Of course they were crappy games.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's true.

[Benito]

They were the only games, only video games that existed. They were amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all you could do, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Exactly. I mean it was 10 years since after that that Doom came out and really, you know, upset the whole gaming industry. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. All right, well and you also get Commodore BASIC in there, so brush up your skin skills and learn how to program. That's hysterical. All right kids, that's it. You're done. I release you. Thank you so much to our wonderful panel. I just, I love getting together with you guys. Abrar Al Heedi appears monthly on Tech News Weekly and of course is a regular at CNET where she is a senior technology reporter. Anything besides, besides your Galaxy Fold review, Anything else you want to mention that you're up to these days?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Lots of phone stuff, lots of self driving stuff, accessibility stuff when I can work it into. But yeah, just the usual.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so your Waymo rides are tax deductible?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think so. That'd be great.

[Benito]

They sound like they're expensed even.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let them pay for it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Start thinking a little smarter about that. You're right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so great to see you. Thank you Abrar. I really appreciate your space this Sunday evening with us. Same to you. To my good friend Devindra Hardawar, senior editor at Engadget, spending your vacation time with us. Even more amazing.

[Devindra Hardawar]

This is hanging out. I don't get to hang out with actual adults anymore. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How's the kid?

[Devindra Hardawar]

The kids are great kids. 3. My daughter is 6 and 6.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Devindra Hardawar]

At this point. So my son is like a little three year old terror. So we're just dealing with him basically.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a good time. It's a really good time these ages. You enjoy it? Look, you'll. You'll look back on it. I wish I could. Now my kids are adults and I don't like them. I wish I could go back. No, I love them.

[Ian Thompson]

But you love his. You, come on, you love your son's YouTube channel.

[Leo Laporte]

This is I love them both. They're both great and it's amazing. They're in their 30s, but you'll never forget that time when they're little.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's just so sweet trying to enjoy it, but. But yeah, it is tough juggling everything else.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know what you forget when you get to my age and their age is how hard it is.

[Devindra Hardawar]

It's so hard.

[Leo Laporte]

All you have is these nice memories. You forget you were working. Like it was really hard. So anyway, do remember as much of it as you can.

[Devindra Hardawar]

Yeah, I'm trying taking photos every year I try to upgrade my phone just to be better at taking kid photos basically.

[Leo Laporte]

And the Brar Alheed next Eid. I've got a gift for you. I've got a gift for you.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh my God. God, yes. That is the ultimate money right there.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to fold it and tear it apart, but it would damage it somehow. I gotta.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You just gotta frame it.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta frame it. Wow. You know, it's funny. I found it in a book. Like I was flipping through an old book and there it fell out. It was like what the hell? Where did.

[Ian Thompson]

That's the antiques of a find. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

The only thing that is. I'm a little worried about the provenance of this. That's definitely Woz's autograph. I. I recognize it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Very cool.

[Leo Laporte]

But that to Henry looks like it's in my son's handwriting. So now I'm a little worried that maybe Henry found it, inscribed it to Henry.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's really funny.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna have to ask him. I'm really. That's. It's a little puzzling.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Kudos.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you so much all three of you. Of course. It's always a pleasure to have my friends friend from the register on. He's teaching us wonderful English swear words. Ian Thompson, the Register.com. what are you working on these days? Anything exciting?

[Ian Thompson]

I've been spending a lot of the weekend actually I did some interviews with the EFF who are facing their 35th anniversary. So I've.

[Leo Laporte]

Happy anniversary. I love the EFF I'm a donor as proud supporter of.

[Ian Thompson]

It's weird to think that you know one of the founder members of the Grateful Dead born this marvelous organization but.

[Leo Laporte]

I. John Perry Barlow. Yes.

[Ian Thompson]

I will have a feature out by the end of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

The late John Perry Barlow. Yeah, unfortunately he was a great guy. I really had a huge admiration for him and for everything the EFF does. And of course Cory Doctorow works with them. A lot of great people work with them. Doing their most important work. Thank you all for being here. Thanks especially to our club Twit members. You do a very important thing. You keep us afloat. 25% of our operating costs are covered by club members. Please, if you're not. If you've thought about this, but you're not yet a member. 10 bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows, so you never hear this plug or any other ads. You get special access to the club Twit Discord, which is a wonderful place to hang out. Lots of great information and fun stuff in there. And that means you get also special access to all the special shows we do. Let me see what we've got coming up. We record shows in the club. Oh, that's right. Thursday, Richard Campbell got his ram. So we're going to do a live PC build with the Windows Weekly host, Richard Campbell. That'll be a lot of fun. I'll be kibitzing while Richard holds the screwdriver. We record home theater geeks. You can get the audio of that. Everybody gets the audio of that. But if you want the video, you need to be a club member. The first Friday of the month. All August 1st. The AI user group. That's been a lot of fun. And Stacy's book club is coming up August 8th. We've got the photo time. Our word of the month is classic. Go out there and take some pictures. We're going to do the Google reveal of the new Pixel phone on August 20th. Those are in the club only as well. So club events are a big part of the reason people join. Access to the Discord ad free versions of all the shows. But the most important part from my point of view is that the club makes it possible for us to keep doing what we're doing and do more of it. If you like what you hear on our shows, please join the club. It's very important. Twitter tv Club Twit. And thanks in advance. We do this week in tech. Every Sunday evening, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club. Of course you can watch in the Discord, but everybody can watch live on YouTube, Twitch TV, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. We stream on all those platforms. You don't have to watch live, of course, after the fact. You can get the show, download audio or video from our website, Twitter TV. There's a YouTube channel with a video. Great way to share little clips if you want to do that. We appreciate that. But the best way to get it, as with all our shows, is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. As they say, wherever you get your podcasts, you can get the audio or video and you'll get it automatically every week. No two charge. That way you can listen to it at your leisure on Monday morning or whenever you're in the mood for it. And if you do that, leave us a nice review if you would. A five star review would be also very, very helpful. Thanks, Abrar. Thanks Ian. Thanks Devindra. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye. Bye. This is amazing.