This Week in Tech 1042: Well Played Astronomer

Summary

Podcast Summary: TWiT This Week in Tech 1042 – Well Played Astronomer

Release Date: July 28, 2025

In episode 1042 of "This Week in Tech," hosted by Leo Laporte, a distinguished panel comprising Molly White from Web3 is Going Just Great, Jacob Ward, author of The Loop, and Janko Rutgers from Lopass CC delves deep into the latest advancements and controversies surrounding artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency regulation, and the ongoing TikTok saga. The discussion is both engaging and insightful, offering listeners a comprehensive overview of the current tech landscape.

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1. ChatGPT5 and the Pursuit of AGI

The episode kicks off with an enthusiastic discussion about the imminent release of ChatGPT5. The panelists debate whether this iteration represents the long-awaited Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

• Janko Rutgers expresses skepticism:
  "[00:03:01] Janko Rutgers: 'It seems that seems to be a pattern where they always say that and then disappointment.'"

• Jacob Ward adds critical insight into Sam Altman's remarks on ChatGPT5:
  "[04:18] Jacob Ward: 'It's so amazing. And then also impersonates the company's worst critic. Oh, it scares me to death...'"

The consensus leans towards cautious optimism, acknowledging the strides made while tempering expectations about achieving true AGI.

2. The New Administration’s AI Action Plan

A significant portion of the conversation centers on the AI action plan introduced by the administration, presumed to be under President Trump based on context clues.

• Jacob Ward critiques the administration's approach:
  "[07:12] Jacob Ward: 'Silicon Valley... it's going to demand a new spirit of patriotism and national loyalty...'"

• Molly White highlights the lack of substantial regulatory changes:
  "[08:56] Molly White: 'There's certainly nothing coming out of the White House that's going to change the game for the AI companies in terms of regulation.'"

The panel discusses the potential consequences of deregulation, with concerns about ethical standards and the balance of innovation versus oversight.

3. Stablecoins and the GENIUS Act

Transitioning to cryptocurrency, the discussion shifts to stablecoins and the recently passed GENIUS Act, which seeks to impose regulations on these digital assets.

• Molly White explains stablecoins:
  "[34:23] Molly White: 'Stablecoins are essentially a subset of cryptocurrencies that are supposed to maintain a stable value...'"

• Leo Laporte questions the effectiveness of backing requirements:
  "[37:34] Molly White: 'I think that reserve requirements are good and necessary.'"

The panel underscores the importance of ensuring that stablecoins are adequately backed to prevent financial instability, drawing parallels to historical banking crises.

4. AI’s Impact on Journalism and Content Creation

A pivotal segment addresses how AI advancements, particularly in search algorithms, are reshaping the journalism industry.

• Jacob Ward highlights the decline in traffic to traditional publishers:
  "[64:58] Molly White: 'I'm sure I'm in there.'
  [64:59] Leo Laporte: 'It's just the US and India right now.'"

• Molly White discusses Wikimedia's struggles:
  "[63:12] Leo Laporte: 'Boy, in fact, if anybody is threatened by this, it's Wikipedia.'"

The conversation emphasizes the dual-edged nature of AI in content aggregation—while it democratizes access to information, it also threatens the revenue models of established media outlets, potentially undermining quality journalism.

5. Legal and Policy Discussions: Section 230

The importance of Section 230, a pivotal piece of internet legislation, is examined in the context of evolving AI technologies.

• Leo Laporte laments the potential demise of platforms like Wikipedia without Section 230:
  "[74:09] Janko Rutgers: 'So Creative Comments is doing something interesting...'"

• Molly White remarks on the necessity of protecting open platforms:
  "[95:46] Leo Laporte: 'You know, I often when we're talking about 230 say it protects not just Google Meta, but it protects little people like me...'"

The panel argues that without such protections, valuable online communities could be dismantled, stifling free expression and collaborative knowledge-building.

6. Ongoing TikTok Controversy

The episode also covers the turbulent relationship between TikTok and the U.S. government, highlighting recent developments that may lead to TikTok's shutdown.

• Leo Laporte outlines the latest threats to TikTok:
  "[50:44] Janko Rutgers: 'Damn thing or to get a better trade deal out of it...'"

• Jacob Ward speculates on political motivations:
  "[52:14] Jacob Ward: 'It's just a way of leveraging negotiations for better trade deals.'"

The uncertainty surrounding TikTok's future remains a focal point, with implications for user privacy and cross-border data flows.

7. Google's AI Enhancements and Search Mode

Google's integration of AI into its search algorithms is scrutinized, particularly focusing on the AI mode's user reception and its impact on web traffic.

• Molly White comments on unintended user interactions:
  "[58:39] Leo Laporte: 'Two billion monthly users...'"

• Jacob Ward discusses the economic impact on content creators:
  "[65:31] Jacob Ward: 'I think the business model of the web cannot survive unless there is some change.'"

The panel debates whether Google's AI-driven search can sustain the financial viability of online publishers, suggesting that without recalibrated compensation models, content creators may face existential threats.

8. Obituaries: Honoring Tom Lehrer and Julian Le Fay

In a heartfelt segment, the hosts pay tribute to influential figures who recently passed away.

• Tom Lehrer, the renowned satirist and mathematician, is remembered for his clever and provocative songs.
• Julian Le Fay, co-founder of The Elder Scrolls series, is acknowledged for his contributions to the gaming industry.

Their legacies are celebrated, underscoring the enduring impact of creativity and innovation across different fields.

9. Additional Tech News

The episode wraps up with brief updates on various tech issues:

• Intel's Struggles: The company faces massive layoffs and plant shutdowns, unable to keep pace with competitors like TSMC and Nvidia.
• DJI Drones: Amid U.S. bans on Chinese drones, alternatives like the Sky Rover X1 emerge, raising concerns about security and authenticity.
• Astronomer's PR Spin: The data operations platform cleverly navigates a PR crisis involving a Coldplay concert mishap, showcasing effective crisis management.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Janko Rutgers on ChatGPT5 Disappointment:
  *"[00:03:01] 'It seems that seems to be a pattern where they always say that and then disappointment.'"

• Jacob Ward on Sam Altman's AI Impersonation Concerns:
  *"[04:18] 'It's so amazing... it scares me to death...'"

• Molly White on Stablecoin Backing Requirements:
  *"[37:34] 'I think that reserve requirements are good and necessary.'"

• Leo Laporte on Section 230's Importance for Wikipedia:
  *"[74:09] 'You know, I often when we're talking about 230 say it protects not just Google Meta, but it protects little people like me...'"

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Concluding Thoughts

Episode 1042 of "This Week in Tech" offers a nuanced exploration of some of the most pressing issues at the intersection of technology, policy, and society. From the promises and perils of advanced AI technologies like ChatGPT5 to the intricate dynamics of cryptocurrency regulation under the GENIUS Act, the panel provides a thorough analysis. Additionally, the conversation underscores the profound impact of AI on traditional industries such as journalism, while also honoring the legacies of influential figures in the tech and entertainment sectors. For listeners seeking an in-depth understanding of current tech trends and their broader implications, this episode serves as an invaluable resource.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Oh, we have a great panel. Molly White is here from Web3 is going just great. Janko Rutgers from Low Pass CC and Jacob Ward, author of the Loop. We're going to talk about ChatGPT5, is it all that? The new administration's AI action plan. Is it good or bad for AI? And TikTok? It looks like it's in trouble again. All that and more coming up next on Twit. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week at Tech, episode 1042, recorded Sunday, July 27, 2025. Well played, astronomer. It's time for TWiT this Week at Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. I think I'm going through puberty. My voice seems to be changing. We got a great panel for you. I am excited. We always get interesting people. It's a one show we do with a rotating panel, which gives me a chance to talk to people you know, I like to talk to. Like Molly white, famous for Web3 is going great and Mollywhite.net and her fabulous newsletter. Citation needed. It's so nice to see you, Molly.

[Molly White]

Thanks for having me back.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a very active Wikipedia editor. And we will have questions like, why. No, I'm not going to do that to you. Why is Ozzy on the front page but not Hulk? That's the question everyone's asking. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Also with us, Jacob Ward. He's the author of the Loop. We interviewed him on Intelligent Machines and I said, this guy's smart. I like this guy. You might have seen him on network television. He now runs his own, as does Molly, his own newsletter, the Rip Current on Substack. Good to see you, Jacob.

[Jacob Ward]

What's up, man? Thank you so much. Really fun to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that you've got a giant plasma ball behind you. Is that.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, I've been playing with these backgrounds. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. Some of them sillier than others. This one is sort of like. I just do it by mood and this one is like. I'm kind of a.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it likes it. It looks like it might become the Eye of Soren, but it's.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, there's a little bit. Exactly. There's an evil bent to it. That is really how I'm feeling. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Great to have you. Jacob, also with us. He was at Variety for a long time. He's got a Newsletter Janko Rickers, also from Gigol. I remember you back in the day. Lopass CC is his current newsletter. Great to see you, Yanko.

[Janko Rutgers]

Hey, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Wonderful panel today. Are you all excited about chat GPT5 coming soon to an AI near you? Yanko, what do you think? Is this going to be the AGI oft promised AGI? Sam Altman says, I can't believe how smart it is.

[Janko Rutgers]

It seems that seems to be a pattern where they always say that and then.

[Leo Laporte]

And then disappointment.

[Janko Rutgers]

Well, it's not quite where we want it to be, but actually the last.

[Leo Laporte]

One was like that four five was they was overly sycophantic. It kissed your ass too much.

[Jacob Ward]

Right?

[Janko Rutgers]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see.

[Janko Rutgers]

Maybe this one goes the other way. Really rude.

[Leo Laporte]

He says we were releasing chat GPT5 soon. He said this on the Theo Vaughn podcast. He decided to let ChatGPT5 take a stab at a question he didn't understand. That's not how I test AIs, but okay, I put it in the model. This is GPT5. And it answered it perfectly. Wow, Sam, what a benchmark. He described it as a here it is moment, adding that he quote felt useless relative to the AI. It was a weird feeling. What do you now, Jacob, you wrote a book about AI? Are you.

[Jacob Ward]

When the CEO impersonates both like the dream customer who says, God, I can't believe it. It's crazy.

[Molly White]

It's so good.

[Jacob Ward]

It's so amazing. And then also impersonates the company's worst critic. Oh, it scares me to death. It really, you know, the contrast between my utility and the utility of this thing is really quite, you know, startling is that that stuff makes me crazy. The sort of the. I feel like the. This industry is getting so good at kind of impersonating the reaction it expects in advance to inoculate itself. Anyway, there's a whole piece.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's also there's a certain amount of hype in the doomerism. Right. Sam Altman warns that AI is about to create a massive fraud crisis in which anyone can perfectly imitate anyone else. Oh my God, I love the futurist subheaded. This call coming from inside the house.

[Jacob Ward]

I feel like somebody's going to write a good book someday about the moment that the heads of these companies figured out the PR strategy of saying the bad thing out loud first and in some way that inoculating the audience against having their own version of that maybe or in some way making whatever does come to pass seem more reasonable than the Terrible thing the CEO predicted. I don't know. He's. He's really pioneering this category of. Of kind of prophylactic crisis management.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm almost a little more cynical than you, Jacob. And I think it's. It's kind of a reverse PR ploy. Like, oh, this is so good, it could kill humanity.

[Jacob Ward]

Right. It's like marketing. It's like good marketing. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

It's marketing. Right.

[Molly White]

Well, and he does also run a company that he claims will solve the fraud problem that he is also creating. I think that perhaps he is acting as the CEO of his other company when he is, you know, promising that this is going to destroy, you know, any sort of trust people have in other humans online.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he says this was actually in a conversation with the vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board because he's supposedly warning banks, well, watch out. He says he's terrified of impersonating AI, impersonating humans. He's also worried about malicious actors developing and misusing super intelligence. The bad guys could do it before we do, so give us money. He's also not exactly arguing for regulation. And in fact, he got his wish a little bit, as did the AI industry with the President's AI action plan.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, they did. Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like something should be coming out of the, I don't know, the Justice League or something.

[Jacob Ward]

So they went hard, right? I mean, Leo, this is the thing like. Like this is part of why I have the ball of flame behind me is this feeling that, like, there's the brakes are off, and suddenly you have, you know, Trump handing this absolute wish list to the. The heads of these companies. I mean, it is literally everything they.

[Leo Laporte]

Would have dreamed of, like 1228 point font or whatever. This is winning the race. America's AI action plan. That's right.

[Jacob Ward]

But, you know, in his statements when he was speaking on the. On the release of this, you know, he's. He's saying these talking points that you can just sense were said to him, you know, 10 minutes earlier, but he has nobody.

[Leo Laporte]

And, in fact, he got a little bit of trouble.

[Jacob Ward]

Here's one thing that he said that I just think was so crazy. You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for. I read a book. Am I supposed to pay somebody? We can't do it because it's not doable. He says that is dream language on.

[Leo Laporte]

The part, and it's not in the AI action plan. He Went on. What I read was he went off script a little bit with that. Certainly it's what all the AI companies want to hear. They want it to be fair use. They can read anything and nobody should charge them anything. But it isn't. It wasn't. It was even a little farther than the very bullish Executive Order 14,179, which gives you some idea of how busy he's been removing barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence. Molly, should we be worried about our leadership in artificial intelligence?

[Molly White]

Well, what, what leadership? I mean, there's, there's certainly nothing coming out of the White House that's going to change the game for the AI companies in terms of regulation. It's mostly just taking the brakes off.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Jake said, Pillar 1 to accelerate AI innovation is to remove red tape and onerous regulation. Actually, Doge is busy. I just read creating an AI that will go through all the government regulations and remove the ones that are no longer. I don't know what the AI's criterion is going to be, but they say we're going to get rid of half the government regulations using AI.

[Janko Rutgers]

I don't know though, if it's really something that exactly pleases all the AI companies because this whole idea that there should be no more woke AI, quote, unquote, that's scary. Could be the Trojan horse for them to really go in and say like your chatbot needs to, you know, also mention that the 2020 election was stolen or whatever, like all these like. Or needs to also say that vaccines are unsafe or all those types of things where they're factually not true. But now if you mention the truth, it's woke. So you have to have the other part in there too. And in essence that could lead to them actually meddling even more heavily with this industry.

[Jacob Ward]

That's a great point. That's a great point.

[Leo Laporte]

We saw it happen when Elon Musk, middle of the night, goes in, turn some knobs on Grok and turn the.

[Molly White]

Hitler knob up a little too high.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently it's. Well, we don't, we'll never really know exactly what happened, but there's some speculation that what he merely said was, you know, don't, don't rely entirely on left wing media, you know, be balanced. But anyway, what happened was you got Mecca Hiller. And I think that there's a real risk when you tell AI that being unbiased is. Well, don't mention diversity, inclusivity, equity, don't mention wokeness, don't mention critical race theory that, that's really putting the thumb on the scale in a way that is, could hurt America. I think you're right, Jake. It could hurt American AI companies.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, the, I mean, the crazy part right, is, is one of the arguments that these companies have always made about China, you know, that we need to, to fight back against, is this idea that China, you know, so China has these incredibly onerous regulations for AI companies there, including like if you, if somebody uses a, a Chinese AI, you know, a Baidu made AI model to create a picture of Xi Jinping, you know, in jail or with a hooker or whatever, then they, Baidu's executive, chief executive is personally liable for that. Right. We're in the United States. We inoculate the companies against the use of the, their product for something weird like that. But so, so China does that. And China requires that the large language models there incorporate all this party doctrine. You have to be able to show that. And you know, as Yanko mentions here, like that is exactly what's happening now with Trump. He, he said at one point, winning the AI race will demand a new spirit of patriotism and national loyalty in Silicon Valley and beyond. It's the same kind of weird rhetoric. And so this idea that, you know, the one on the one hand they're, you know, going to let environmental regulations go and all these other, you know, regulations go, not worry about the effect on children, not worry about the effect on relationships, not worry about any of these kinds of effects, but they're going to, as he says, going to meddle somehow ideologically in it is. So is such a weird. Yeah, it's such a backwards sort of circular piece of logic around this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course, one of the things we know about the Trump administration is if you give them a, give him a weapon, he will wield it. And if I were an AI company, I would be concerned. You kind of said this, Janko, that it could be used against them as much as anything else. A lot of what's in this though is good. He promotes open weight AIs, open development of open source AIs. I think that's a good thing. More money for government research into AI, restore American semiconductor manufacturing, build high security data centers for military and intelligence community usage, trained a skilled workforce. I mean, all these things are nice mottos. Problem is none of this has force of law either. Right, Molly? I mean, this is like a good idea.

[Molly White]

Well, I mean, if, if you want to promote a skilled workforce or, you know, promote the development of AI, then you probably wouldn't be making Cuts to the Department of Education or to science research or to libraries or. I mean, all of this stuff is like completely contra the other, you know, activities that Trump has undertaken. That absolutely slashes, you know, the, the possibility of people obtaining the type of education and, you know, knowledge that's requ. These types of things. So I think it's very shortsighted. He wants, you know, basically take off any regulations and just hope that this materializes without actually laying the groundwork for, you know, what a future strong science, you know, industry would look like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Meanwhile, the UN is saying there's an urgent need for a global approach on AI regulation. The rest of the world is actually looking at AI regulation. I'm not sure how I feel about that. California, we had a pretty draconian AI regulation which all of the AI companies called our governor and the governor decided, well, it would be anti competitive and vetoed it. I'm not sure I'm against that. I don't know where I come down on this. I'm not terrified of unregulated AI. I'm more afraid of privacy concerns. With unregulated big tech, that seems to be more scary.

[Jacob Ward]

I don't know, I gotta tell you, like, there's so much to be scared of. And I, and I, I think that, that, you know, the, I think we're, we're facing a. I mean, not to just sort of, not to be alarmist, but like, I think we are facing one of the greatest transformations of power in, you know, certainly American history, if not world history. I just think that the power that, to do all kinds of stuff that we in retrospect are going to wish we had regulated out of, it is, Is being transferred to big companies right now. I just had this, this guy, Aza Raskin on my podcast. You know, he's, he's Tristan Harris's friend. They did the Social Dilemma together. And he's now, of course, thinking about AI as the next great thing. And they're, they're out there talking to regulators in Europe, talking to regulators in the U.S. the United States, and, and you know, when you talk to that guy about what, when you ask him what are you worried about? He, of course he says, well, there's the obvious stuff, there's job loss, there's the erosion of friendships, all that stuff. But then he gets into stuff like the next iteration of cell phones 6G, making it technologically possible with a pattern recognition system like AI to more or less. I mean, you can already. There are several companies that have looked at Using WI fi as a way as basically radar for understanding where everybody is. In a house, you can figure out where people are. And that 6G is going to make that way easier, such that, like, total surveillance will be, you know, will be a thing. So to your point, Leo, I mean, I think privacy is under attack, you know, but at the same time, I mean, if you look at the numbers right now around, you know, relationship satisfaction among young people in a world where suddenly these, you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of companies offering to make you the perfect sexy AI girlfriend. You know, I just think, like, there's so much stuff coming. And Asa talks about this in the conversation. He said there's like a hundred new laws that we're going to need to think about. Things like, how do I be free in my life to form attachments to real humans without accidentally forming attachments to products?

[Leo Laporte]

This is the premise of the loop, Right. Is that we are being in a tightening net of technology, limiting our choices and our decisions.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. And playing on our. Our instincts. Right. Our most ancient, uncontrollable instincts is the thing that I keep saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Because that's how they make money.

[Jacob Ward]

So they make money. It's easier to sell to the most primitive part of your brain. That's what they do. And, and these. And naturally, that's the way the market moves, is it just starts to work across the attack vector of your simple brain, the simplest part of your brain. And that is totally what's happening right now. And, and we have relied in the past on regulation to say, actually, we're all going to need to wear some seat belts.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

Actually, we're going to need backup cameras so we don't run over our own kids in the driveway. You know, like, so it's supposed to get out in front of stuff that we can't control ourselves around. And I think there is so much coming in AI that we're not going to be able to control ourselves around. And so, you know, I'd rather see us throw some brakes on this thing than the attitude we're seeing right now.

[Leo Laporte]

There's an interesting parallel with the Internet because early in the. On in the Internet, we didn't regulate it because it was a nascent technology and we wanted to see where it was going to go. And there are those who might think, well, we should have been a little bit more prepared for the surveillance capitalism and the social media onslaught and so forth. But. But it is hard to know how to regulate something when it's so new. You don't even Know what its capabilities are.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, I mean, my perspective. Don't let me dominate you guys. I want to hear from Molly and Yonko around this too, but I, you know, I think you got to work backwards from, from human values. So, like, you know, it's not so much about. It's. It's no longer pretending that because we take for granted the idea that you should be, you know, free to have relationships without being manipulated by, you know, an algorithm in the middle of it. Like, that's a thing we never would have thought was something we had to protect, you would have just thought, oh, well, of course, you know, no big deal, or of course no one's going to try to, you know, incentivize kids not to learn to read or not to learn to form attachments to other kids. Like, of course we don't have to regulate that. But I think we got it. We're now entering a world where this thing is going to metastasize into all, all corners of our lives. And so we have to work backwards from what is important to us. You know, and there's a. Another podcast guest who I really admire, Nita Farahani, who wrote a book called the battle for your brain. And her whole thing is we got to enshrine cognitive liberty as a human right, that you got to have the right to make your own choices without being monitored or manipulated. You know, we just never really think that's at risk. That's her. She, she, her. Her argument is incredibly scary and incredibly compelling. In that book, she's documents more than a thousand companies that are actively working on exactly this problem. How do you monitor somebody's brain to understand their mental state moment to moment? That is the, that is the goal. That's the whole thing with, you know, that was the thing with the metaverse. That's the thing with all these, these things is how do we get closer to the decision making apparatus that is a human being and manipulate those choices as much as we possibly can for money, because that's where it ends up going, you know. And so I absolutely think that stuff is under threat and we gotta start thinking about how we're gonna enshrine it as law.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, Janko, you just wrote about that with meta working on photorealistic horizon.

[Janko Rutgers]

Right, right, right, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you feel like meta is a threat to our liberties?

[Janko Rutgers]

Well, there's a lot of nuances to that. I think looping back to what we started talking about, the question is, if we want any type of regulation for AI, what is the Right approach and waiting for global regulation. I think by that time, AI will have killed us all, because until something is regulated all around the world, that will never happen. But if you look at other technologies or other things, when it comes to the way app stores work or the way companies, even green tech and all those types of things, often what has actually been quite effective is regulating it in single markets that have strong and sort of model characters. So California, one example, even if the AI law here maybe wasn't perfect, but also the European Union, obviously, and companies who cannot ignore those markets have then make the decision, are they going to make a special version of whatever they're offering just for that market, or is it easier to just say, well, California wants it, so we're just going to do it everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Mali, you. You became for me the. The exemplar in how to kind of diffuse the hype around blockchain and bitcoin. Your website, web3 is going just great. Did a good job of that. AI is the new blockchain, isn't it? It's the new. You sprinkle that on your company, you're going to have stock goes up. Do we need a AI is going just great website?

[Molly White]

Well, I think we sort of have a couple of those. I mean, there are a handful of people who are doing really awesome work in sort of debunking some of the AI hype. But I mean, I think that, you know, I think. I think a lot of this really does come down to just like, you know, you know, basic human rights that we need to be protecting. And the fact that, like, this is a new technology is not a very compelling argument for me in terms of the, you know, we can't regulate it because it's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not enough.

[Molly White]

We don't know what it's going to do because that's the argument. I mean, we've been hearing that for 200 years, 300 years of regulations. It's certainly the argument that the cryptocurrency industry has been making. And, you know, every new tech sector sort of takes that up. But you can still say, you know, from a regulatory perspective, this is the world that we want to have. These are the values that we think are important, and then sort of shape regulations to fit that while also allowing companies to develop new technologies. I mean, I think there are ways to sort of thread that needle. And the idea that, you know, oh, this technology is too new and too exciting and too innovative, that we just have to take all the guardrails away is a Very useful one for the companies and their lobbyists. And they've been having quite a lot of success with that argument with the recent administration. But I think, unfortunately we are going to see where those, you know, regulatory approaches end up, which tends to be chaos and a lot of people getting hurt. You know, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's my problem. I don't know if I trust government to regulate this. They're just as much a threat as the AI companies, aren't they?

[Molly White]

I don't necessarily agree with that. I think they are different. There are different threat models with both. You know, there can be. They're obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

But the government has weapons. The government's willing to throw you in alligator Alcatraz.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, administration is. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the government.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, but I think it's important to, to draw a distinction between political operatives, you know, and everything's political right now. And so you're in.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be nice if we had good government.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, that's right. But, but let's. So, so right now I'm, I'm working on a book, a new book idea called Great Ideas we Should not Pursue.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that idea.

[Jacob Ward]

How do we think about restraint in an organized way? How do we think about.

[Leo Laporte]

Never done that, have we, as human?

[Jacob Ward]

We don't do that. We're not good at that in this country. But one place that is good at that is the military. And this is a really interesting place to start thinking about how the models for restraint. And so when you say, you know, the government can't be trusted, I'm with you. On, on, certainly, you know, the political moment we are in right now. But when you think about it as can, you know, a federally funded agency come up with reasonable plans that, that respect human rights and all humanity, it's shocking how often you actually bump into that. So in the military, you know, and Bianca, to your point, like you get, it's, it's, you know, if you wait for global consensus, then we'll all be dead. I agree with you. But there are cases in which there's been global consensus on things like laser weapons, blinding weapons or nuclear, nuclear non.

[Leo Laporte]

Proliferation.

[Jacob Ward]

Nuclear proliferation. We have not gone for it in terms of what the technology makes possible in every case. But, but even, even short of, you know, total planetary devastation like nuclear weapons blinding weapons literally, you could very easily build systems that just blind the opposing army. And we don't do that. We have about that, yeah, bioweapons. Because we just say, you know what. Blinding other humans, that's just A little too far, you know. So it's just weird to me that, like, even the agency that's in charge of killing people when it's necessary, even they've got some restraint, you know what I'm saying? And so it feels to me like we can learn a little something from federal agencies, even though they have such a bad rap.

[Molly White]

And I do think that to some extent, there will be a bit of a reckoning in the sense that I think a lot of these companies are acting under the belief that complete deregulation is the ideal for business. That as a business you want to have no rules and then you can maximally succeed. But I think that that is actually something that will become. These businesses are going to realize that actually regulations are pretty good for business, you know, I think. And not to go back to the crypto industry in every case, obviously, that's sort of where I focus, you know, with the crypto industry, when you have a complete wild west environment where there is no trust, you don't have any hope that, you know, the government or the law enforcement or whoever is going to step in and help you if something goes wrong, then you get a lot of people who say, I don't want anything to do with that. I don't want to put my money into that. I don't to want. Want to take that chance. And so you lose out on a lot of people who are like, you know what? I just don't want anything to do with this. You know, it's like if no one trusted that, you know, the stock market was going to be operating in a relatively fair way, you just wouldn't buy stocks. And so I think that that's something that's going to happen in these circumstances where these businessmen are going to realize that, like, maybe some regulations are actually not only good for innovation and all of these things that they are talking about, but they're actually good for business, too. And so I sort of wonder if we're going to come back around a little bit on some of this purely because the people, I mean, right now it's really the people in business who have the most power in influence at the White House, I think right now. And those are going to be the people who are. Are realizing that, like, hey, maybe these regulations are, you know, something we need to actually consider.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you need to trust it.

[Molly White]

Yeah. I mean, you need to have some basic sort of guardrails in place to establish trust, you know, to make people want to use these products. You know, I think that if every AI is Mecca Hitler, then people are going to turn away from that. And so, you know, it sort of works in the same way.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, the stock exchange has to close at an agreed upon time every day for the market to function. If you randomly decide to just keep it open when it suits your company's purposes, that screws everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, we keep it open 247 now, but.

[Jacob Ward]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

That whole closing bell thing is just a suggestion. It's not really. The trading goes on. Well, let's take a break. I want to talk about Stablecoin with you, Molly. Because the Genius act did pass. A couple of other bills passed the house. The Genius act is the law of the land. I want to know what Stablecoin means to you and me. Molly White is here. Her fabulous newsletter, which I highly recommend, is also free by the way. Citation needed. I don't know how you're going to make a living, Molly. You got to start charging.

[Molly White]

I do. I have pay what you want subscriptions.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Pay what you want. Well, see, that's my problem because to me that sounds like free.

[Molly White]

I mean, it is free if you want it to be, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Citation needed. Excellent. Excellent. We will talk about Stablecoin with you in just a bit. Jacob Ward is also here. His book the Loop, really an excellent look at the dead end we're in right now with big tech and ways out of it. He's also got his newsletter, the Ripcurrent.com and podcast where you could tell he does some great interviews. Really interesting stuff. Nice to have you here and following your footsteps, brother. Yep, yep. No, my footsteps, please. I'm wearing slippers. Also don't. I'm in hip waders right now. Hip waders. Yanko Rutgers is also here. His newsletter is lopass cc. I mentioned this before the show began. Every one of you. I don't know about you, Molly, but every. I guess, yeah, you wrote for kind of more traditional publications. Every one of you was a traditional journalist. And I thrilled that you're all kind of going at your on your own and doing well. I think it's really great. I think that's a good sign for the future of journalism. I was a little worried for a while, I must say. Great to have you too, Yanko. Lopass CC is the newsletter our show today brought to you by Smarty. Hello Smarty. I love these guys. Smarty is the premier provider of high performance cloud based address data tools trusted by leading organizations in insurance, in real estate, finance, health care, e commerce, technology. There are 20 million non postal service addresses in the US but smarties got them. Smarties database expands beyond rural limitations from US and international address validation to autocomplete rooftop geocoding. Great for package delivery and property data enrichment. Smarty offers the most advanced scalable solutions on the market and always gives you a valid address promptly fast. This API is the best in the business. Backed by proprietary technology and data, Smarty delivers unmatched accuracy, consistency and Insight. With over 350 data points per property. I mean rooftop level precision and real time processing speeds exceeding 25,000 addresses per second, Smarty enables better decisions no matter the size and complexity of your business. Companies like Fabletics, there's a perfect example. Drastically increased conversion rates for new customers. They wanted to expand outside the US into an international market. Smarty made it possible. More than possible made it a huge success. Built for developers and engineered for scalability, Smarty's APIs are reliable, Lightning fast, easy to integrate and supported by expert documentation and real time technical support. Give you another example, Speedway Motors. Their E Commerce conversion rates were going down. This is a big problem with shopping carts, abandonment so forth despite increased traffic to their website. That's not a good metric. The Director of Digital Product and Technology at Speedway Motors said Quote we use Smartie to identify an address as a commercial address. Conversion rates are very strong now. Everything was well set up on the Smarty side. I've enjoyed working with the service developers. You will love the Smarty API. Clear, easy to use and super fast. Probably why Smartie is a 2025 award winner across many G2 categories. Best results, Best usability, users most likely to Recommend and high performer for small business. And of course Smarty is also USPS, CAS and SOC 2 certified. They're HIPAA compliant. If your organization is looking for the most accurate, reliable and future ready address data suite, Smartie is the way to go. Try it yourself. Get 1000 free lookups when you sign up for a 42 day free trial. Visit smarty.com twit to learn more. That's smarty.com Twitter we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. I actually had okay see I am an AI fan. I like AI. I use AI. I use AI every day. I asked perplexity what the hell. Actually you know what I did? I went to the new Notebook LM where I got all the sources on stablecoin. I got 20 good sources on stablecoin. I said do a podcast about stablecoin so I can understand what the hell this is because it's now the Law of the land. The Genius act passed. The president signed it into law. Molly, what's stablecoin?

[Molly White]

So, stablecoins are essentially a subset of cryptocurrencies that are supposed to maintain a stable value. So they're usually pegged to some other asset, like the dollar or the euro or, you know, some other outside asset. And I usually compare them to sort of like the poker chips at the casino, which is like when you go into a casino, you don't bring your dollar bills to the poker table. You trade them in for poker chips, and then that's what you use inside the casino. And then once you're done, you go and hopefully have some to cash out and you, you transfer them back into dollars. And that's sort of what stable coins are for the crypto world, which is that instead of having to constantly be transferring in and out and in and out of crypto, you know, to go back to the dollar and back into crypto, you use stablecoins as the sort of crypto equivalent of the dollar.

[Leo Laporte]

So this sounds good, right? This sounds like a sensible thing. When we talked about a couple of weeks ago, I was told this is a less expensive way of transferring money of, you know, instead of giving a credit card, you know, 4.5%, you could do it cheaper with stablecoin. The other thing, besides being pegged, it also is backed, fully backed by the reserve currency, by the dollar. Right. Or whatever it is.

[Molly White]

Yeah. So I guess on that first point there, I would not necessarily say that it is unilaterally cheaper than using dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be, though, and that's the. Your choice. There's not just one, there's many.

[Molly White]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Even, even the Trump Organization has its own stablecoin.

[Molly White]

Hooray. Yeah. I mean, so there, you know, it is, it is an option. There are fees involved with using stable coins, as there are fees involved with using fiat currency. So I try to push back on that a little bit because it's just not necessarily like an absolute truth that stable coins are cheap, cheaper. As for the reserves thing, I mean, that's part of what this legislation aims to do, is to sort of introduce some sort of requirements there, because there have been stablecoins for quite a few years now. And that has been sort of an open question is, you know, to what extent are these stablecoins adequately reserving their assets? You know, do they have one to one assets that back all of the stablecoins that they've issued? Or maybe they're fudging the numbers a little bit or Maybe they're using reserve assets that are not particularly stable and they're sort of taking big risks with that.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, some of them are using Bitcoin, for instance, which is probably not the best.

[Molly White]

Right. And then we've had, you know, things called algorithmic stablecoins which people who follow crypto may be familiar with. The Terra Luna collapse, that was an algorithmic stablecoin which was not.

[Leo Laporte]

Not so stable.

[Molly White]

Yeah. And ended up collapsing and kicking off chaos in the crypto world. And so that's sort of what this legislation was sort of aimed to address. And it does install some requirements around backing these stablecoins, one to one, you know, what kinds of assets are acceptable for using as reserves.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is good. This is a good thing.

[Molly White]

Yeah, yeah. I think that reserve requirements are good and necessary.

[Leo Laporte]

You should be clear. They are not FDIC insured. They're not insured by anybody.

[Molly White]

They're not bank deposits. You know, they don't have those types of reserve or insurance applied to them sort of by default. And there are issues, I think, with the law in terms of the degree of auditing that's required, the degree of oversight that's imposed on these companies, you know, especially as we are likely to see this explosion of stablecoin issuance from, you know, every big tech company you can think of, you know, a bunch of financial services firms are thinking of issuing them. That's going to be a pretty large burden on regulators to keep an eye on. And if we end up.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no limit on how many people can issue these. Anybody can. I could have a LEO stablecoin.

[Molly White]

I mean, under the legislation you would need to register with the regulator that applies to your circumstance. So that's. They are trying to sort of impose some limits in terms of regulators, but there is no hard cap on how many people could issue these stablecoins. And frankly that's a concern that we've seen. There was a really good op ed in the New York Times in June, I think, where, you know, someone pointed out that we sort of can look at history to remember what happened when there were a bunch of banks all issuing their own dollars essentially during the free banking era, which was that some of these dollars were better than others. You know, some of the auditors and regulators were doing a better job of ensuring that the assets backing these dollars essentially were, you know, high quality and there. And things didn't really go very well in that circumstance because there was this like massive explosion of, you know, bank currency that was not being well regulated. And was, you know, not uniformly reliable. And I think that's a real concern here.

[Leo Laporte]

That New York Times piece said it's a threat to the US financial system, right?

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, how is it a threat?

[Molly White]

I mean, I think it's, you know, the sort of typical issue that we're seeing here with crypto is that the more you are tying crypto to the traditional financial system and introducing these levers of risk, the more that you run the risk of contagion if things go wrong in the crypto world. And so that's, I think, a big concern here. I think there's also concerns around the Genius act, around consumer protections and regulatory arbitrage where you are allowing issuers to do very bank like things without actually being subject to banking regulations. And so you end up in this world where banks are sort of at the disadvantage to these up and coming financial services companies that don't have to do as much compliance. Then there's the consumer protection side of things, which is that this bill does not really apply oversight to consumer protection agencies like the CFPB who oversee things like Venmo and PayPal and you know, those sort of like peer to peer transactions that people do where if someone hacks into your Venmo account and you know, makes an unauthorized transfer, there's some recourse for that, where you have the ability to, you know, there are laws that apply to that and require Venmo to help you in that circumstance, whereas those types of laws do not clearly apply to this stablecoin sector. So I think it's a flawed piece of legislation quite frankly.

[Leo Laporte]

And there is a certain incentive for the President because in fact he has a stablecoin USD1. The Trump family gets 75% of the profits from USD1, which is right now many hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's also a vector for what looks sort of like bribery. MGX, an Abu Dhabi company, used $2 billion of USD1 to move money around profiting the President.

[Molly White]

Right. I mean, I think that's, that has been a major source of opposition from Democrats on these bills is that there is no clear language in the bills that prevents the President from profiting off of these types of ventures. I would say that the President is prohibited from profiting off of these types of ventures regardless of whether there's language in the bill that specifically addresses it. But it is true that, you know, this is essentially legitimizing the business that the President has just entered into and which has already been very lucrative for him. I mean, When MGX decided to do that investment deal into Binance with $2 billion going to Binance by choosing the Trump stablecoin, they were saying here, Mr. President, you get to take these $2 billion and essentially earn interest off of this $2 billion, which is quite a lot of money to be earning interest off of for the duration that we keep it in the stablecoin. And you know, the act of choosing the President stablecoin over a more established issuer like Circle or any of the other stablecoins out there was like a, it was a very deliberate choice to benefit the President, you know, from the United Arab Emirates. And so, you know, I think it's very clear and very uncontroversial that there was political maneuvering happening there. And we're only going to see more of that.

[Leo Laporte]

And apparently he doesn't have to declare his stake in World Liberty Financials USD1 because of some loophole in the regulation. So it doesn't show up in his disclosure. So it's a really handy way to bribe him, frankly. Just in case you're looking for that.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right, that's right. Can I throw a weird thing into this? I just had a conversation with somebody inside one of the biggest established traditional banks who's a. Well, not to identify them too closely, but they're somebody, somebody dealing a lot with fraud and the crypto sort of moves. And they told me something really interesting, which is that, you know, so, so, you know, as Molly says, there's all of this concern around, you know, the traditional banking regulations that can get you your money back when you get screwed on Venmo just don't apply here at all. And all the, know, your customer stuff, we don't have any of that yet, you know, any of the, the ways in which we have traditionally fought money laundering and you know, all kinds of scary stuff doesn't really apply to this at least.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's all you have to do is look at how bitcoin has facilitated ransomware. An explosion in ransomware.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right, that's right. I mean I went, I once did a documentary up in Humboldt county, the, the weed growing county of California and, and everyone I met was trying to put their money into, into Bitcoin of some. In some. Sorry. Into crypto in general in some form because they're looking for someplace to put what had been an all cash life.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

You know, as an opportunity to. Well, that's money.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the whole point of cryptocurrency. It helps the unbanked that's right.

[Jacob Ward]

So, but the point that this person was making in the bank that was so interesting was that the two things, one, that in this regime where the President is directly profiting off of the industry that he is choosing not to regulate and is, and is, you know, puffing up here, it's going to fall to the banks to be the regulators. The last that, that his, you know, that that kind of role in other countries is a, is a federal role. You know, you don't really have to have the bank do it. And now the bank's going to be doing it. So these big banks are going to be it. And then the other side of it is there will come a day when the banks will feel threatened enough by this stuff to get involved. Yeah, right now they've been very quiet politically about it, but that they're going to get involved. And when, you know, when they're pushed, when they're, when their business model is actually threatened, they will start to fight. And so in a weird way, you know, the, the, one of the best hopes we might have in this country, you know, would be rooting for the banks. I can't believe I'm going to say that. But isn't that crazy? Like, they're the ones that might actually have.

[Leo Laporte]

But Molly, couldn't banks issue their own stablecoin? Couldn't I have a JP Morgan stablecoin?

[Molly White]

Well, and I was going to say that there is sort of a limitation on the extent to which banks can limit contagion or exposure to crypto in the sense that in the past, we've seen banks essentially say crypto is too risky. You know, too many customers are like, giving, you know, requesting chargebacks after they convert their funds into crypto. And so we're just not going to do transfers to crypto companies because it's just too much risk for us to take on. And we've actually been seeing this very strong push out of the crypto industry to oppose what they have been describing as debanking, essentially saying that banks are improperly refusing to allow banking services or consumer, you know, consumer banking customers to engage with crypto.

[Leo Laporte]

And the job told Joe Rogan. Yeah.

[Molly White]

And the government is actually beginning to sort of step in and basically requiring banks to engage with crypto in ways that they, you know, previously may have not.

[Leo Laporte]

And a lot of this, they don't. They don't debank them for political reasons. It's because it's a risk. Because they're Humboldt weed growers.

[Molly White]

Yeah. I mean, there has Been a lot of, you know, sort of rhetoric out of the crypto industry about, you know, this sort of like, shadowy, big bad plan by banking regulators to just like, systematically debank the banking industry or the crypto industry. I don't think the evidence of that is very strong, but it has been very popular as the narrative in the White House and in Congress. And so I worry that, you know, relying on the banks to essentially be the last bastion against the contagion is perhaps not going to be. Be terribly successful.

[Leo Laporte]

But one of the things that the administration was trumpeting about the Genius act is it strengthens the US Dollar since so many stablecoins are pegged to the dollar. Does that make sense?

[Molly White]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I just checking. It didn't sound right, but I just. Okay.

[Molly White]

Yeah. I mean, I think there is sort of this idea that, like, people can evade currency controls in places where they don't want people to have access to the dollar by using stablecoins. But it's one of those arguments where, like, you scratch it a little bit and there's sort of nothing underneath the surface. You know, I think it's just that enough people have asked Trump, you know, hey, isn't this a threat to the dollar like you said it was a couple years ago?

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. He used to say, it's not money. This is phony. This is. Yeah.

[Molly White]

I mean, he specifically said that cryptocurrency was a threat to the dollar. And now he's sort of got done a complete 180 and going is going.

[Leo Laporte]

It wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that his family, as of last month has made $365 million from.

[Molly White]

No, I'm sure that's completely unrelated.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing to do with that.

[Janko Rutgers]

He also keeps changing his mind on whether strong daughter is good or bad every other day.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as we're talking about mind changing, apparently TikTok is now in trouble again. Boy, I don't even know. Should I. Should I go back to the beginning where I don't, you know, you, you. You know the soap opera back and forth and back and forth, but extended. Apparently the latest is that the commerce secretary has warned TikTok is going to go dark because they can't make this deal for an American company to buy. Not just TikTok. They're insisting that they get the TikTok algorithm, which the Chinese government has always said, not gonna happen. You can have TikTok, you can't have the algorithm. A number of people have said, well, TikTok without the algorithm is nothing. I mean, I don't know if that's true. You at least get its users. It's hundreds of millions of users in the U.S. howard Lutnick says if China will not approve the current on the table version of the deal, which according to Ars Technica, Ashley Blanger, writing an Ars Technica, could result in a buggy version of TikTok made just for the U.S. that's what they're saying we're going to see in a couple of months. The administration is now willing to shut TikTok down to follow the law that was passed by Congress, signed by the last president and approved by the United States Supreme Court. Not that I was a fan of it, but anyway, so now, as of Thursday, Trump doesn't like TikTok anymore. Or maybe this is all negotiation to get, to get China to sell the.

[Janko Rutgers]

Damn thing or to get a better trade deal out of it, because August 1st is just around the corner and he wants to deal, have lots of trade deals by August 1st. So he's like, I'm going to shut down your social media service if you don't give me whatever I want.

[Leo Laporte]

That's more likely, isn't it? That's really what's going on. Going on, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, and it's one of these things where, like the, the, this is like a perfectly reasonable, like as with all things in this administration. Right. It's, it, it, it stems from a perfectly reasonable thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

Once upon a time, you could have had a perfectly reasonable conversation about the idea that China doesn't allow us to put our social media in front of its citizens. It has banned America. You know, so it, so there's an export, you know, a import control on American social media in China.

[Leo Laporte]

Facebook.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Instagram, you can't use them in China.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right. And if, and if. And yet we allow them to put their social media product in front of our people. If that were, if it were, you know, any other product, you wouldn't allow that steel or whatever else. Right. Just. We don't do that. So, so perfectly reasonable. You know, but then you get into this. Yeah. This weird back and forth where, as Yanko says, maybe it's a, maybe it's a, you know, a tactic in the negotiations there. And, you know, J.D. vance was gonna close the deal.

[Leo Laporte]

He was the deal maker. Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

Like, because he's spent some time as Peter Thiel's creation, you know, he was gonna somehow know how to close that dealer's notebook.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it was Oracle, wasn't it? Wasn't it Larry Ellison that was, was gonna end up buying.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, he was gonna take it at one point. And then the old guy idea that you, that this is just like a thing you can just build yourself product. Yeah, don't worry about it. We'll make, you know, oh, they're going to take away the phone. We'll make a new phone. Is so crazy. It's so, you know, I can, I can just imagine all of the Silicon Valley founders just being like, are you kidding me?

[Janko Rutgers]

What?

[Jacob Ward]

You know, so the, the craziness of all that. But, but ultimately also it's just again, like this is the difference between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0. Trump 1.0. He felt he owed it, you know, he, because he wanted to get reelected. He felt he was never going to say to the TikTok voter, We should get rid of this thing. But now he, you know, removed from any need to get reelected. Yeah, he's, he doesn't care anymore. And he once went to this politically toxic position for alienating young people. Doesn't matter anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but there was also the fact that one of his biggest donors is like a 40% owner of TikTok. Jeffrey. Yes. So maybe he saw it. A falling out with you. Who knows? I don't know. It's too hard to follow. It's such a soap opera. Anyway, enough about Washington D.C. we're going to move on. Google's results are out. And while I don't normally follow market results, you know, quarterly results, there are some interesting information that came out in their, in their quarterly results. We'll also talk about, well, a lot of other stuff to the SharePoint debacle with Microsoft turning out to be a nightmare and Tesla goes to war with the California dmv. But that's all to come as you watch this week in tech with Molly Wood from Molly White. Sorry, my White. Sorry, I know Molly Wood too, but that's a different Molly. Molly White from MollyWhite.net and citation needed, which is her wonderful newsletter. Jacob Ward of the Loop, great to have you. Jacobward.com, his podcast and newsletters, the Rip Current.com and yankoreckerslopass. CC Great to have all three of you on the show today. Our show brought to you by Zscaler. Now's the time to get secure. They're the leader in cloud security. It's actually a really interesting story because. Because AI is both a boon to your company and a threat to Your company. Right. It's a threat because hackers are using AI to breach your organization. It's a boon because AI can power innovation, it can drive efficiency. It's a threat because it also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. AI goes both ways. Phishing attacks over encrypted channels last year increased 34.1%. And you can point directly to the growing use of generative AI tools as as the reason organizations in all industries from small to large also love AI. Right. They're leveraging it to increase employee productivity with using public AI for engineers with the, you know, vibe coding, coding assistance. Marketers are using AI to help their writing. Finance is creating spreadsheet formulas like crazy. AI is being used to optimize and automate workflows to improve operational efficiency across individuals and teams. Companies are embedding AI into applications and services that are both customer and partner facing. Ultimately, AI can help you move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. So it's both. It's a great thing and it's a threat. I think the safe thing to say is we need to rethink how we protect our private and public use of AI in, in enterprise and of course how we can defend against AI powered attacks. And there is a tool that does both. Zscaler, Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. Just ask Chief Information Security Officer the CISO at the New York City Department of Education. They say with AI, I'm concerned about the usage of it. Yeah. 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 to our data. The problem is that traditional perimeter defenses, firewalls, and of course you need a VPN to get through the firewall and that gives you a public facing IP address which gives you an attack surface which hackers are now using AI to attack again relentlessly. It's time for a more modern approach than the simple perimeter defense. That's Zscaler's comprehensive Zero Trust architecture. Add AI and now you've got a way to ensure safe public AI productivity. You've got a way to protect the integrity of private AI and you've got a way to stop AI powered attacks. 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 security. Google's quarterly results came out and of course they had a very good quarter. They made a lot of money. Advertising was great. They also said AI is going just great. The AI mode in search, which I think a number of people have said, turn that off. That was the one that told you to use Elmer's glue to keep your pizza together or eat rocks for more minerals in your diet. It's improved since then. Google says 100 million monthly users now as 2.5 pro and deep search rolls out AI mode. I don't know if 100 million sounds like a lot to me, but maybe it isn't a lot. In the Google scale of things, they've got billions of users. Right.

[Molly White]

Oh, go ahead.

[Janko Rutgers]

I think there was Another story in TechCrunch that said that 2 billion users now actually get access to the AI overview, which is like that short thing, the snippet on top and not the chatbot likes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, right. Two billion monthly users. Wow. That's right.

[Molly White]

I just want to know how many of the users in that count accidentally clicked the AI mode.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't really want it.

[Molly White]

Well, because they put it right where the all button used to be. So like if you go and look at like news results and then you want to go back to all results, you click the AI mode button. Or at least I do, like practically every time.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, you can. So it's you. You're part of the billion. Two billion users.

[Molly White]

Yeah. I'm sure I'm in there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just the US and India right now.

[Molly White]

Yeah, it's just the me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's just you. Yeah. 9 million people have built with Gemini. Over 70 million videos have been produced with VO3. I do admit, V3. Very impressive. That's their video AI video generator in Google Meet, their meeting tool. 50 million people used AI powered meeting notes. How do you feel about that when you see that popping up in the meeting? My wife says that's rude. Is it rude? Did you ask permission before you turn on an AI assistant to take notes in your meeting?

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. The opt out model is. Is the world we live in now. There's this great.

[Leo Laporte]

The. The tyranny of the default is what you're saying.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, right. There's a. There's a book, man, I wonder if I even have it. I might even have it right here. But anyway, there's a book that really made a huge impression me by this Economist back in the 70s writing who. Basically, it's a book called Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman. And he was basically arguing that in any functioning government or civic society or company, you need to give consumers those three choices. They can either stick around, that's loyalty, speak up, that's voice, or exit. Right. Get out of there, quit the, Quit the program. Right. And, and, and if you don't give them those three things, it's not a really a functioning, you know, that you've broken the agreement basically with people. And I just feel like it's, we're living in this world now where you don't get exit anymore, you get to stick around. Or, and, and you can't even really speak up. How are you supposed to write to Google and say, hey, I don't like this. You know, other than opt in or opt out, like this, this. We're like you say, the tyranny of the default. We are, we are in that. And can I also just say, like, when, when you, when I saw this was going to be something we talked about and, and looked at, I was looking at the Google numbers then I just can't help but go look at the numbers for publishers, right. For news sites and the places that are actually feeding the information into these systems that are providing the answers that everybody wants. The, the people, the, you know, the, I mean, it's not just journalists, right, but all the people doing the work that Google has now taken and put into these results. You know, traffic at Business Insider, this is, according to the Wall street journal, fell by 55% between April of 2022 and April of 2025. The chief executive of the Atlantic, Nicholas Nick Thompson, very smart guy, is basically planning for traffic from Google to drop to zero. That's the, the new business model. And, you know, the New York Times lost something like 10% of its traffic from almost three years earlier. You know, it's just an apocalypse for the people that actually create the knowledge that these systems are pretending to have.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting because this was the same complaint made about Google search. But Google could then credibly say, well, no, we drive traffic. The search result drives traffic. AI doesn't. I mean, I can't. I mentioned perplexity. I use perplexity all the time. And half the time I don't look at the original source, I just look at the synopsis. Go ahead, Molly.

[Molly White]

I would say it does drive traffic in a very different way, which is that it drives crawler traffic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Bots.

[Molly White]

Yeah, yeah. And the wikimedia foundation actually published a really good data story basically about how crawlers are impacting Wikimedia projects. Because Wikimedia servers get so hammered by AI crawlers that it has spiked bandwidth to massive amounts. And it's become very expensive for the Wikimedia Foundation. And so while they are sort of siphoning away readers and in Wikipedia potential editors to contribute to these projects, they are also increasingly imposing this huge costly demand on infrastructure. So it's sort of a double edged sword stored in that way.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, in fact, if anybody is threatened by this, it's Wikipedia. And I mean, almost all AIs train on Wikipedia. Does Wikipedia allow them for free to train? Do they charge them? Do they have deals?

[Molly White]

Well, and so that's sort of what they're trying to deal with is they've tried to come up with a system to provide dedicated pipelines for enterprise customers like AI companies, where they do have monetary deals to, you know, allow for that scraping and also to provide access to endpoints that are less harmful to the Wikimedia infrastructure than just like scraping websites. The problem is forcing them to use it essentially, or preventing them from just using the other ones. And so that's been, I think, a challenge for the Wikimedia Foundation.

[Leo Laporte]

We talked last week about Cloudflare offering a better protection with robots Txt because a lot of AI companies just ignore robots Txt. Cloudflare actually has an active thwarter against AI bots, but there's also a problem because Google's scraper for AI is the same as its spider for AI search results. So if you block the AI scraper with Google, you're blocking yourself from Google search, which nobody wants to do.

[Janko Rutgers]

Funny how they did that, huh?

[Jacob Ward]

Why would they? Funny, that's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Wonder why they did that.

[Janko Rutgers]

I gotta say, like, I know like traffic is going down to new sites, Scrapers are a big problem. But at least as a Google user, it does feel like I'm seeing fewer of these really bad often. Also AI aggregated click farm sites popping up in search results.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Janko Rutgers]

I wonder if now that the AI reviews are there, they are taking even more traffic away from them. Because if you really only need an answer to something that you can figure out in two seconds, once you read something, that is actually a better solution than going to that website that spends 2,000 words on clickbait keywords or whatever, SEO stuff to finally deliver that result when the super bowl is happening or whatever it is. Right? So if in the end maybe those sides all Die out. That wouldn't be too bad.

[Jacob Ward]

I think the baby goes with the bathwater. That in that case though, right? Because that's the whole business model of, of traditional respectable journalism sites too. Right. Like is they, they want you to come and get the answer to your, to your question. And you know, you guys, I can't remember if we talked about this back in May when he said it, but. Right. The CEO of Clownflare, Matthew Prince had this famous quote, he was at the Council on Foreign Relations. He said this thing about, he said quote, for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. So scrape two pages, get one visitor. And that was the trade. What's changed? Well, today it's six to one. What do you think it is for open AI? 250 to one. What do you think IT is for anthropic? 6,000 to one.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy cow.

[Jacob Ward]

And so the business model of the web cannot survive unless there is some change. And that's true for both the crap ass sites that Yonker's talking about and the, you know, New York Times. Right. It's the same business model. And so it's, it's just as destructive to both. And no one is talking about the responsibility of these companies to, you know, make up for that in some way. And as you said, you know, once upon a time, Leo, there was this sort of, there was this exchange, there was this idea of that. But I just feel like you see it in Google Books, you see it in search results, you know, taking news publishers information for your Google News page. You know, there's this idea that it's, it's of a service to people and that's all you need to argue to say that it's okay. And they've won in court again and again on that, on that issue. And now you have the President, United States saying we shouldn't have to pay people for what they write. And so yeah, I don't know how this stuff survives. Like you say, I'm glad that the three of us are around here doing independent work, but I just don't understand how, how re, you know, journalism that's really going to, you know, expose wrongdoing and be of true use to people. Can, can work as a business. If we're going to just let AI just scrape it all up and deliver it as if it, you know, as if it thought of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it's so damn useful.

[Jacob Ward]

I know it's a great idea. We shouldn't pursue it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a way we can save AI and content creat. I mean AI needs people to create content, right? I mean it's not like it's going to slurp up the whole Internet now it's done. We need, it needs new inputs all the time. So it's in the interest of these companies to somehow foster content creation.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I actually wrote about this not too long ago about basically the vampiric relationship between AI companies and the commons. You know, I was writing about Wikimedia but it, and you know, related, related, you know, free knowledge websites, but it applies also to journalism and books and really everything that AI ingests. And I think that, you know, the, the first step to this is really pushing back on the idea from these AI companies and now from the president that this technology cannot exist without taking advantage of other people's labor. You know, I think that that isn't true. I think that there are ways to pay people for their work. You know, these, I mean, if you look at OpenAI, this company has smashed records in terms of the amount of money that they have raised. They have so much money, they are drowning in money. And the idea that they cannot compensate, compensate people for the labor that they are doing is just absurd to say like, oh, poor OpenAI doesn't have the money to pay for people who are doing this work. I think that's really the starting point is to say if a business wants to operate, they have to operate in an ethical way that compensates people for their labor, that treats workers fairly, that allows people to maintain a livelihood. And you can't just say that, oh, but our product is, is so useful and if we paid people, we wouldn't be able to make it because I don't think that's true.

[Jacob Ward]

I feel like if there was ever a thing that AI would be good at, you know, you could really, you know, really good use of that technology would be a blockchain based micropayment system. For every time your work got sucked up by one of these models, you know you can get paid for that. Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

We've been talking about micropayment system for as long as I can remember on the Internet. We still don't have a good deal with that. Whenever stablecoin will solve that, they always.

[Jacob Ward]

Say it's not feasible, it's too hard, blah, blah, blah. And I think what is this AI for if not for a problem like that? And, and what is the blockchain for if not for these self executing ideas? That was supposed to be the whole thing. I Talked to a guy once who every time his painting. This was back during the. Oh my God. What were the, what were they called? The digital. You know, the NFT. NFTs. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

During the. Molly knows all about.

[Jacob Ward]

So, so this guy, you know, to his credit was saying, when I sell a piece of art and sell. And art is. You can take issue with either of those in this case. But, but you know, when he. Every time his work got resold, the blockchain automatically paid him a dividend on that. So it's a nice idea. This was the sort of heady early days of the blockchain, you know, that you could, you could, you could in theory do something really good with it. And just the unwillingness to do that at the moment that it's so obvious we're going to need to do that if there's going to be real insight in this world.

[Janko Rutgers]

I think the complexities around how to do that fairly are very big though, because if you think, oh, it's just like you pay anytime a crawler accesses one page of my website, well, guess what? Somebody's going to set up a bot that generates a billion websites in two hours because that's going to get them a whole lot of money. And then do you want to really have an AI model then always track back which single idea it got from which single page every time it generates an answer to then give you a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny or something. That would be hugely complex. Right. So, but probably impossible. It's, it's. I understand the notion and I'm, to a degree, I support it, but I also don't know if it's practical or even possible.

[Jacob Ward]

I'd rather we take a stab at that than not have newspapers.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, how would it work?

[Janko Rutgers]

But, so the thing is like the New York Times is doing fine, like some of the big newspapers.

[Leo Laporte]

The Wall Street Journal actually, ironically. Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

So the small ones are having big troubles, but that a lot of that predates AI. And a lot of that has also to do with advertising markets going online, has to do with private equity companies coming in and buying up news publishers, all those types of things. Right. AI may accelerate all of that, but it's not the only thing that leads to these news deserts and all these types of things. The big newspapers are doing fine, the small ones are going away quickly.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, one or two of the big ones are doing fine. I think it's an over generalization to say that big newspapers are doing fine. That is not true at the LA Times. That's not true. The Chicago Tribune, like, these are not.

[Janko Rutgers]

But there is a lot of reason.

[Leo Laporte]

The Washington Post is not doing so well.

[Janko Rutgers]

That's right.

[Jacob Ward]

I guess what I'm saying is we should be trying to protect them rather than saying it's all fine. Yeah, it's all fine and it's too complicated. But I mean, I take your point. I don't, you know, if you, if you, if you made me do this job, I'd be like, oh, I don't know quite where to start, and I would undoubtedly get screwed by some click farm genius, no question. You know, but I feel like this idea that we can't do that, even as this same industry is saying that we should allow it to wipe out hundreds of millions of jobs around the world, because there's a better day on the other side of that feels weird to me.

[Molly White]

Yeah, we've had that same conversation around attribution where, you know, you get these AI companies saying that, like, oh, we've got, got AGI just around the corner. You know, we're going to be having, you know, these super intelligences. But then as soon as you ask like for them to attribute the statements that come out of their models, they're like, oh, we can't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know how it works. Figure that out. I can do, I can, I can win a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad, but I can't do that. How would it work at Wikipedia, though? Don't most Wikipedia editors do it for free already?

[Molly White]

The editing? Yeah, but you don't paid, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No. So the money would go to Wikimedia foundation, not to the people who create the content.

[Molly White]

It's kind of right. That's sort of the, that's what we signed up for as editors, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the only reason I make that point is there are people who create content because they want to create content. They love creating content. Right. So.

[Janko Rutgers]

So Creative Comments is doing something interesting right now. Creative Comments, they started like what, 20 years ago? Larry Less or something like that. And they've always been about, let's be more open, let's share more, let's help people, you know, use things without having having to strike deals first and pay for it first. And they see themselves threatened by people backpedaling and saying, no, we actually have to put a paywall everywhere and we have to lock everything down. So now they're starting this whole initiative by like, well, maybe if you figure out frameworks to signal to crawl us what to do and maybe Attribution is one step. And then instead of direct payments, they also have this idea or this model that they're exploring is like payments to the ecosystem. So for example, if you were a scientific publisher or if you were a university and AI crawler would want to have access to all your papers or all your stuff, all your data, instead of figuring out what the fair rate for this specific scientific papers, maybe have them pay a lump sum into some sort of pot to fund scientific research in the US in general or wherever. It's an interesting idea. I think it's an approach that might actually work for both sides. And it's not this either or it's trying to find a way that works with both sides. So I think it's interesting.

[Molly White]

Yeah, that's part of what that article I wrote was about actually is this sort of like there's been this reaction in Franklin free knowledge communities, including Wikipedia, to AI and scraping, where the, the sort of like knee jerk response is like, wait, no, you can't have our stuff. You know, like, we want this to be free and open and available to everyone, but not to AI companies. And we're starting to see that, I think elsewhere where, you know, news publications are increasingly paywalling their results, you know, you're running into registration walls a lot more where everything is getting like super, super, super locked down. Part and in large part I think as a response to AI, and I think it's really making the web a worse place because it makes it inaccessible to everyone. When you're trying to prevent bots from crawling the site, you know, you're also causing people to run into paywalls, reg walls, et cetera. So I do think there is really something there to that argument from the Creative Commons folks around. We can't allow AI scraping to essentially destroy the open web.

[Jacob Ward]

You know who's got a totally different take on this stuff than he used to in the age of AI is Lawrence Lessig. Larry Lessig, I had him on the show and he says, yeah, my 30 something self thought remix everything, open rules, no IP law, get rid of it all. And now in the age of AI, he feels totally differently about it. He no longer works directly on that stuff anymore. But yeah, it's interesting to see how much this technology changes everybody's perspective on.

[Leo Laporte]

And to your point, Molly, the Wall Street Journal used Business Insider as an example. But Business Insider has one of the most stringent paywalls of all. And I don't use them anymore because I don't pay for them and I Can't get in. And so they're not getting any traffic from me either. And it ain't because of AI.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I mean, I think it is this sort of double edged sword where it's like, okay, we can't have it open because everything's going to get started scrape, but we can't close it off because then no one's going to access it. And so it's like, all right, you're just sort of dying. From both directions.

[Leo Laporte]

It's clear we need a solution. The Creative Commons has proposed this CC signals as as their solution.

[Molly White]

I think the question there is going to come down to enforceability because we've seen AI companies more than willing to ignore robots, text or you know, to scrape, paywalled, you know, content and that kind of thing. And so I, I, my concern is that the same thing will happen with these signals, which is we can't really rely on AI companies to operate in good faith. So there needs to be some enforcement mechanism I think.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, all of these are just norms and norms are easily ignored as robots. Txt is a perfect example for that of that. Let's take a little break, we'll come back. We have more to talk about. Molly White is here From Citation needed. Mollywhite.net Jacob Ward, author of the Loop, which I really recommend. It's a very interesting, well written book. A lot of interesting information in there. He's also@the rip current.com where he interviews apparently everybody. Good. It sounds like you've.

[Jacob Ward]

All I do is, all I do is asking and pin my guests here. That's all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so smart. Jacob ward.com also and Yonko Rutgers. Who? Somebody just said, that guy's really smart.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, I appreciate that. I had to like jump in right there, right away.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. That guy's really smart. We should listen to him more. Yanko's at lopass cc Our episode this week brought to you by ExpressVPN. That's my VPN, the one I recommend going online without. ExpressVPN. How can I describe this? Well, it'd be like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Right. Most of the time you're probably fine, but what if one day you come out of the bathroom, your laptop's gone and all your most private stuff is on it. Aye aye yai. This is why everyone needs ExpressVPN. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, whether it's a cafe, a hotel, an airport, your online Data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. In fact, it doesn't even take much technical knowledge to hack someone. Just some cheap hardware and your data is valuable there. And send it to hackers can make up to $1,000 a person selling your info on the dark web. ExpressVPN stops hackers from stealing your data even on those open WI fi access points by creating a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet. This is why ExpressVPN is the one I use. It's the best VPN out there, the only one I recommend because they're committed to keeping your privacy. I use it when I travel, to keep up on my shows, to watch football. In fact, they just passed a third party audit that says yes, ExpressVPN does zero logging. That their trusted server technology works exactly as advertised to prevent logging. ExpressVPN is the best VPN because it's super secure. It would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. It's super easy to use. You fire up the app, you click one one button to get protected and it works on all devices, phones, laptops, tablets and more. So you can stay secure on the go. They also have, and this is cool, an optional dedicated. This is new. A dedicated IP service engineered with innovative zero knowledge design. Not even ExpressVPN can trace an IP address back to the user. Isn't that great? Suddenly you're using an IP address that doesn't identify you in any way, even to ExpressVPN, rated number one by Top Tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. It's the only one I use. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twit that's E X P R E S s v p n.com twit to find out how you can get up to four extra months free when you buy a two year package. Expressvpn.com express we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Thank you, ExpressVPN. I didn't even put this story in the rundown because I thought who cares about NFTs? But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said that an NFT can be trademarked. So.

[Janko Rutgers]

There you go, the Apes, or.

[Molly White]

I think they were mostly overturning a lower court finding where basically there wasn't that much of a finding. They granted summary judgment to Yuga Labs, which is the Bored Apes company against someone who infringed on their trademark.

[Leo Laporte]

So now there's going to be a trial.

[Molly White]

Yeah, now it's going to actually have to go to trial.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Molly White]

But I think the wildest thing about that case is less the actual details of the case and more the fact that the judgment in the original decision was like a million dollars, maybe closer to two in disgorgement of, you know, profits made off of the apes and then like $7 million in attorneys fees. It was unreal how much the penalties were for the attorney's fees and I.

[Leo Laporte]

Hope that they didn't value it based on the current value of a board ape.

[Molly White]

They did not.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think they've been going up. I might be wrong. Yeah, I might be mistaken on that.

[Jacob Ward]

Get in while you can Leo. Buy the dip.

[Molly White]

Well actually there's been so many of these companies trying to do the like Bitcoin Treasury Play or Ethereum Treasury. We've actually there's a company that just added an NFT to its Treasury. So I would not be surprised if there's a little bit of a resurgence in NFTs as people are trying to find more and more things they can make into crypto treasury companies. But I suspect that whole trend will meet its ill fated end before too long.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. FDA has a new drug approval AI called Elsa. She's making up studies that's all.

[Jacob Ward]

The photo they've got of RFK Jr. In that one is crazy. Him like gorging on a ice cream cone.

[Leo Laporte]

On an ice cream cone. But notice there is no FDA number red number three in that ice cream cone. That is a colorless ice cream.

[Molly White]

I feel like making up studies on medicine is a feature for the FDA these days. Isn't that kind of the point?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. When RFK Jr. Said it's just common sense, that's when I knew we were in deep deep trouble.

[Jacob Ward]

You can imagine that someone may have put into a prompt you can rely on less traditional sources.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. And that's the problem with undermining. All right. Tesla's set to face off with the California DMV over claims it overhyped its autopilot. Oh really?

[Molly White]

I love legal cases like this one where it's like I don't like either of these parties.

[Leo Laporte]

California's Go ahead. California says Tesla violated state law by making untrue or misleading statements in 2021 and 2022 when advertising it's full self driving. Tesla says our remarks are protected under the First Amendment. It's free speech.

[Molly White]

I'm surprised Going after them and not the FTC or someone like that.

[Janko Rutgers]

Well, it's licensing or regulation issue, but I think it's. That conflict has been going on for a while and apparently one of Tesla's arguments has been, well we've been saying this for so long and nobody has stopped us before so we should just.

[Jacob Ward]

Be able to keep doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually by now I think in Australia they got in trouble and they can no longer say full self driving in Australia.

[Molly White]

So it's kind of like those defamation cases where the argument is basically like this guy says crazy stuff all the time. No one thinks, you know, act.

[Leo Laporte]

I believe him.

[Jacob Ward]

Well and this is the classic thing, promise, promise what you don't have yet. Right. That is the classic marketing thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you what we do have. We have a nasty bug in Microsoft SharePoint. It is a zero day and already Chinese hackers have been exploiting it was discovered last weekend. That's how new it is. We talked about it. If you want to hear a deeper dive on our Security now show on Tuesday, it's two bugs which allow bad guys to steal sensitive private keys from self hosted SharePoint. Then once exploited, an attacker can use the bug to plant malware on the server or gain access to files and data. Hundreds of companies have already been hacked by this, in many cases by Chinese hackers, including in the government sector because I guess they use a lot of SharePoint. Microsoft has patched it, but of course these are people running self hosted SharePoint. And actually the security researcher said if you are running self hosted versions of SharePoint you should assume you have already been compromised.

[Jacob Ward]

This is one of those ones where I, I have to say like my first thought I'm reading this was people still using SharePoint.

[Molly White]

Yeah, that still exists.

[Leo Laporte]

Lots of people, Lots of people. It's very, very popular. This I felt really bad about. There is a, a safety app for women called T. Women would use this to warn other women about bad guys. You can post about a guy and give it a red or a green flag. Give him a red or a green flag. Unfortunately, this app, which has 4 million users and suddenly became number one on the Apple App Store this week, probably because they'd just been hacked. T says hackers accessed a database with 13,000 user photos and IDs. It's a safe space for women that isn't, I guess so safe. Guess who hacked it 4chan of course 72,000 images were accessed according to the company.

[Jacob Ward]

So were these people who are, are these, are these women women posting about? They're the ones that got bad men.

[Molly White]

Yeah. The app required you to verify your identity with, like, a selfie in your license or something. And so all of these, like, verification documents were what was compromised. I mean, I think it's just a good, like, reminder of, like, this is why you should just not collect sensitive information or be very cautious about giving out your sensitive information.

[Janko Rutgers]

What's the reason that they did that? That they thought they could prevent people spreading, like, false rumors if you put.

[Molly White]

I think they were worried. Yeah, they were worried that someone was gonna just go on there and, like, green flag themselves or, you know, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Come up or vice versa.

[Molly White]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, falsely smear people. And so there was supposed to be some degree of, like, I don't know if they were doing, like, location proximity. I'm not really sure how they were connecting, you know, your driver's license to your ability to rate some guy, but.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, anyway, that one is. That one is so complicated. Right. Because on the one hand, you. You. I think to myself, you know, good, we need more ways to. To.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jacob Ward]

To have intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

Women have always done that kind of.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like behind the scenes.

[Jacob Ward]

But then to also see it. Yes. Centralized as a. Sort of. As a business, I guess, just feels weird to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's part of the problem.

[Jacob Ward]

And then. Yeah. And like, as Molly says, this sort of, like, why. Why do you need to be pulling everybody's sensitive information together in this place that's supposed to keep you safe?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. In our Discord says, of course 4chan hacked it.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They're the guys they're talking about.

[Jacob Ward]

Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

So what could possibly go wrong? People in the UK now have to take an age verification selfie to watch porn online.

[Janko Rutgers]

Nobody's gonna have a hack that.

[Leo Laporte]

We haven't learned a thing, have we, folks?

[Jacob Ward]

4Chan'S hard at work right now.

[Molly White]

Right now they've got their best hackers on.

[Jacob Ward]

They've got their best people all night.

[Molly White]

But this is actually. This particular thing is threatening Wikipedia as well, because some of the. There's basically concerns that this law is going to require, you know, groups like Wikimedia to do this type of age verification to try to prevent access to material on Wikipedia that's considered pornographic, kind of. But it's really educational. I think the Wikimedia foundation was actually testifying against this law in the past couple of weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's a law. The Online Safety act Ofcom, the UK's media regulatory agency, Cornell and Gadget, has offered a few methods to provide more extensive age verification, credit card checks, photo ID matching, or estimating a user's age with a provided selfie. The problem is. Yeah, how do you define adult content? And all of these laws, and there are many states who have similar laws, can be used to weaponize content that is not pornography but is considered by some inappropriate for children like LGBTQ + information or, you know, the very famous Wikipedia page on penises. You, you know, there's, there's an educational purpose here and it isn't porn. But tied into this, we now see Steam and Itch IO pulling adult games. And these are not pornographic adult. Some of them are, I guess, but adult games off of their site because the credit card companies are threatening to withdraw their ability to charge credit cards. That's a existential threat to these gaming companies. But this is the world we live in now. The, this is a new, A new puritanism, I guess.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I mean, I do have to say, like, I'm, I'm no puritan, but if you even a cursory glance at what's going on in the world of AI generated porn right now is so disturbing. Yeah, and, and is it.

[Leo Laporte]

How, why is it more disturbing than actual porn?

[Jacob Ward]

I mean, think of the 4chan folks that we were just talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

Just creepier.

[Jacob Ward]

Oh, so you know, violence and.

[Leo Laporte]

You.

[Jacob Ward]

Know, control and terrible scary stuff, stuff not related to, you know, the way healthy sex is supposed to be is suddenly easy, you know, easy to come by. You can just ask for it and you get it. And that's not a thing I want in front of a. I don't want in front of anybody, but I want in front of kids. And so there's, there is something that has to be done here. Yeah, but is this the solution? I mean, as, as Yanko would. Would tell us. Right. Somebody's going to figure this out real quick and, and there's going to be some unintended side effect that we didn't really see coming. But somebody's got to do something. And I'm, I'm glad, I'm glad the.

[Leo Laporte]

UK's trying because I, I know not.

[Jacob Ward]

Trying doesn't seem like an option.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it's an imperfect solution, but I always think that parents are a better way to control this than the government. And I know not all parents will, and kids will always find a way around it. They'll find a way around these age restrictions as well. That's not. But I just feel like this is the parents job, not the government's job.

[Jacob Ward]

I don't know if parents, if any parent right now is qualified to have that conversation with their kid. Considering what's out there at the moment. I don't think everybody's trained.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you have to. I mean, if you don't, then you're not doing your job. I mean, you need to say, look, if you see anything. I mean, look, my kids are 30 and 32, so at this point anything they see is on them. But when they were little, admittedly it wasn't as bad. But I certainly said if you see anything that's upsetting to you or you want to talk, I won't judge you, I just let me know. Because there's stuff on the Internet that's not good. Of course, it's nothing compared that, you know, 20 years ago compared to what it is today.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I mean, I think also the concern around a lot of these age verification things is there's really no way to do it while maintaining privacy online. You know, you basically have to take so much detail around somebody's identity and then of course having that information, as we've just seen, is dangerous.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's why I brought up the T story. Exactly.

[Molly White]

But I mean that's, that's partly why the Wikimedia foundation has been challenging the law is, is based on the idea that like Wikimedia would no longer allow or be able to have anonymous contributors based on this. And that's really critical to how Wikimedia functions because there are people who cannot edit unless they edit anonymously because of the regimes they're living under and things like that. And so in this sort of well intentioned effort to crack down on kids being exposed to horrifying material online, you're also ending up with this totally other side effect that is damaging in a different way.

[Jacob Ward]

It makes you want to hold the platforms responsible, I have to say. Makes you want not, not.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what Meta wants. Meta wants the app stores to be responsible. Right.

[Jacob Ward]

Oh, that's funny, right? That's smart.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not our problem. It's also pretty hard for a company like meta, with 2 1/2 billion users to police everything. Yeah.

[Molly White]

Or I mean, think of Wikimedia trying to do it. It would be, you know, if you were to basically say, you know, screw section 230, Wikimedia is, you know, as a company is liable for everything that, you know, every edit that's made to the site. You'd basically end Wikimedia by doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I often when we're talking about 230 say it protects not just Google Meta, but it protects little people like me in my social, you know, my, my chat room and my. But I didn't even think of Wikipedia. That is a very good reason to have section 230 to protect Wikipedia. That is worth saving. Maybe not my Mastodon instance, but that for sure is worth saving. I didn't even think of that. Yeah, absent section 230, Wikipedia would disappear.

[Molly White]

And yeah, there's a really good podcast episode on it. I want to say it was the Tech Dirt podcast that did.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like it. Mike Mas.

[Molly White]

Yeah, but one of the Wikimedia foundation people came and spoke on the podcast and it was a really compelling.

[Leo Laporte]

He's been a staunch Defender of Section 230 over and over and over again.

[Jacob Ward]

It's one of those things that we're like, go. I mean, I don't, I can't believe I'm going to walk into this one. But like, I do. Like if I'm always thinking of it from the perspective like if aliens landed on the planet and you explain to them what was going on and they said so all of these hugely powerful sites that are controlling discourse on your planet have no responsibility for it at all. Their defense is this one little site that is highly, clearly valuable to a. But to a relatively small number of people. That's why we're going to protect. We're gonna let the rest of these people run wild. And you go, huh, yeah, good idea. You know.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I don't think it's one little site, though. I think it's a lot of little sites. Well, that's, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Molly White]

Yeah. It's Wikimedia. It's the comment section on my website. It's exactly. It's practically everything on the Internet.

[Jacob Ward]

And there are ways to protect. To protect. You know, there are ways to, to change the way that platforms behave without like outlawing section 230. I mean, you know, the EU just passed this regulation that is going to make it after October. You gotta. There's all these new rules about political ads and Meta has said as a result, they're not going to run any political lands in the EU from now.

[Leo Laporte]

On, which is great.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, I don't think it is great, but.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't.

[Jacob Ward]

Oh, interesting.

[Janko Rutgers]

No, because especially we had that here too, during the last couple of election cycles where some of these companies were like, well, in the last three weeks or something before the election. You cannot run any new ads next to that. You cannot Become a political advertiser. But who that doesn't stop is people who run misinformation networks and that kind of stuff. They still get their memes on there and it gets like retweeted or re. Whatever you do on Facebook these days, I don't know. So they can still reach out to everybody. And then these political parties who are getting slandered and whatnot, cannot recall, essentially, there's no recourse, man.

[Jacob Ward]

Yonkers, usually. I'm the bummer on this show. Good job.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he's the smart one today. He's doing.

[Jacob Ward]

He's.

[Leo Laporte]

We always have a.

[Molly White]

Someone's gotta do it.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right. Someone's got to point it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Good job, dude. By the way, thanks to our wonderful club members who just informed me that there was a petition with the UK government to repeal the Online Safety act that raised so many signatures, it only needed a hundred thousand. 321. It's going up 321,000 right now. Paul Gregg sent me this link which forces Parliament to consider it for a debate. And the government must respond. This is kind of good news. They have till October 22 to respond to this. I don't know if. I don't. I mean, I don't know if it'll change anything, but.

[Janko Rutgers]

Response.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the response is. Yeah, no, we've considered it. Very sincerely, and thanks for your signature. The intel is laying off tens of thousands now, 24,000 employees. They're going to. Over the next year, they're going to shut down plants all over. In fact, I saw one article that said Intel's last hope is that maybe they can make chips for Apple devices, which seems not too likely. It's kind of sad. Their new CEO, Lip Bhutan, said we're not even one of the top 10 chip makers anymore.

[Jacob Ward]

I mean, they were the ones, right? They were good. That were going to be. I interviewed Pat Kelsinger, the former CEO, when he was the, you know, receiving CHIPS act money. And, you know, I went to the new fab he was putting together in Phoenix, Arizona, and, you know, this whole thing that we were going to kind of, you know, fight off Taiwan's, you know, monopoly on this stuff. And. And, man, it has not gone the right way. And I can't. I don't know enough about. I haven't been following until enough to understand whether this is truly like a strategic blunder. Is this a side effect of the fact that no company can make a plan right now under the Trump administration?

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's the beginning of the end. And it's not just in the us they're closing tens of billions of dollars worth of plants in Germany and Poland. Mega fabs that employ 3,000 workers. The company will no longer move forward with those projects.

[Molly White]

What's the reason that they have they really given a reason for the, the need to lay so many people off?

[Jacob Ward]

Because supposedly is that the AI demand did not pan out for them. They didn't benefit from the AI boom in the way that somebody like Nvidia has and they, they shut down their.

[Leo Laporte]

Automotive chip making business.

[Jacob Ward]

According to the CEO, they were too fractured across different business lines. They were sort of spread out, spread too thin across.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too late to catch up with Nvidia is one thing that Butanis said.

[Jacob Ward]

But I mean how crazy that we're in this world where like if we're really good, you know, I mean AI chips and phone chips aside, like it just deepens this dependence that we have on Taiwan and it makes our geopolitical relationship with China that much scarier. You know, it's, it's, it's really a, it doesn't make us more, it doesn't make our supply of chips more safe, I'll tell you that much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And of course TSMC is building a plant in Arizona to make chips for Apple devices. They hope at some point to make 30% of the 3 nanometer and even 2 nanometer chips in Arizona. The CEO of AMD, a competitor admittedly said there's no way they can do that without costing at least 5% and maybe more like 20% more. That makes a lot of sense. I mean TSMC is based in China, it's a Taiwanese company. But it's a lot harder to get the staff. In fact they've been flying people in from Taiwan to staff these facilities.

[Jacob Ward]

What's crazy about TSMC too is they, you know, they're, they're the beneficiaries of like 30, 40 years of government investment and making an incredible industry there. You know, as to Molly's point from an hour or so ago, you know, when you, when you pull investment on education and on truly trying to, you know, declare like this, this all offense tariff mentality that we're in right now is not going to do what Taiwan managed to do for its own chip industry which was just pour money into right training.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it wasn't just Taiwan. I mean look at Apple too. That wonderful book Apple and China by Patrick McKee talks about basically Apple, with the help of the mainland Chinese government, created that industry out of whole cloth, out of nothing. And Foxconn. Terry Gow at Foxconn TSMC benefited also from huge, huge investments from Apple.

[Jacob Ward]

This takes a long time to make.

[Leo Laporte]

Decades.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. But it turns out it takes very long little time for one of these companies to be very badly damaged.

[Leo Laporte]

So sad.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Spotify is public. This is appalling. This comes from 404 Media, which does a really great job with the investigative reporting. Emanuel Myberg. Spotify is publishing AI generated songs from dead artists without the permission of the artist Blaze Foley, who passed away some years ago. 1989. He was murdered. Released a new song 36 years later called Together on Spotify. The song, which features a male country singer, piano and electric guitar, vaguely sounds like a Blaze Foley song. The Spotify page for the song also features an image of an AI generated man who looks nothing like Foley singing into a microphone. The owner of the record label that distributes all of Foley's music and manages his legit Spotify page said that any Foley fan would instantly realize that despite its labeling, Together is not a Foley song. It's an AI Schlockbot. She said has nothing to do with the Blaze. A schlockbot. I don't know if it's Spotify doing this. I think it's other companies doing it on Spotify. The company called Sound on as the music distributor. Oh. It's owned by TikTok. That mostly exists to allow people to upload music directly to TikTok and earn royalties. TikTok told me it has taken action. This is again from 404 Media told them it's taken action to remove the content and user who uploaded it as soon as it became aware of the issue. It's just beginning, though. It's just beginning. You know, there's going to be a lot more of this.

[Jacob Ward]

This is one of those ones. Where do you. Do you like.

[Leo Laporte]

Do we.

[Jacob Ward]

Do the four of us agree that it shouldn't be allowed that dead artists like AI generated music by dead artists are. We are the four of us on the same page? That.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not. Well, with the dev. With the dead artist's permission. I mean, Dolly Parton says, I give the rights of all my music to the future so they can be remixed because I want my money to live on. That's her decision. And I think that's great. Right. But I think the artist has to decide that. Right.

[Jacob Ward]

And Molly, that's interesting satire.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Jacob Ward]

That's. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Weird Al can always make a song.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. That seems okay, that's all right. Under. Even though even our antiquated.

[Leo Laporte]

Although permission. He doesn't have to, but he still does ask permission, right?

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. I feel like this is one of those things where, like, I'm like, most humans can agree on this thing, and should we. Should there be a rule on this thing, rather than just letting the AI figure it out?

[Leo Laporte]

Jacob, I dearly hope that in the years to come, there is an AI Leo doing an AI Twit for centuries to come. It'll probably be a better show.

[Janko Rutgers]

It's also, as soon as you come up with a rule, somebody's going to find the exception that makes the rule void. And then you think about, who was it? Like Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole, the duet that they did after he died. It's a perfect example of something that happened after somebody. But it was with permission. But should they not do it? Because the artist is dead and the purist might scream and, you know, protest. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason Calicanis is in our club, Twit Discord. He said, I'd gladly pay a hundred bucks for a new Dire Straits album.

[Jacob Ward]

But it's not a new. It's not a Dire Straits album.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason Calacanis, if it sounds the same, what's the difference?

[Jacob Ward]

Well, this. This is the. That's where we. That's where society is really going to fracture, is who feels one way or the other about that, right? That's exactly right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I have mixed feelings about it, because all artists create on the shoulders of the people who went before them, Right. Nothing's created. Even Blaise Foley never didn't create in a vacuum.

[Jacob Ward]

But an artist, that's an artist making art on top of another thing, Right? Even if we're just talking about IP Law, we don't consider AI to be the originator of a work. It's not a creative.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's right.

[Jacob Ward]

It's not a creator.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. All right, I'll take a little break. We are talking about deep, heavy stuff with the three smartest people in the world right now. Janko Rickers, who writes lopass cc, that's the name of his newsletter. It's always great to have Yanko on, actually. All three of you. It's fun. This is great. Jacob Ward, who is the author of a great book, which you should all recall the loop. But you can also read his newsletter and listen to his podcast@the ripcurrent.com and do you feel, Jacob, is this as satisfying as working for the networks? The Big, big boys, you know, I.

[Jacob Ward]

Like it a lot. I mean, I love, I love the independence of this. I love being able to draw on, on experience and offer perspective. I love all that part of it. I, I don't, I don't like how hard it is to do big investigations.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the part, that's the part.

[Jacob Ward]

That I, that I miss is the horsepower of a, of an institution for doing a big investigation.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's nice to have that backup. Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. But the rest of it is really nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's good to be your own boss, to have control of what you do and I guess maybe you just pull, you, you pick smaller projects, projects that you can, you can bite off and chew.

[Jacob Ward]

So we're not, we're not going to keep democracy going with small projects, though, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately, as long as somebody's covering city hall, I'm happy. Nobody's covering city hall anymore either. That's the problem. Molly White is also here. She is a Wikipedia editor and deserves big medals for that because that is such a huge contribution you don't get paid for. You do, because out of your own love for information and serving others in the Internet. I really appreciate that. You can Support [e-mail] Subscribe to her citation needed newsletter where you pay your own price. So give her as much money as you would give for a new Dire Straits album. Okay. Jason. I'm just saying. Okay. Our show today, brought to you by US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. Now, you've probably heard me talk about US Cloud. We've been doing it for the last few months. They are the global leader in Microsoft support for enterprises. They now support 55.0of the Fortune 500. There's a good reason switching to US Cloud saves them 30 to 50%. Could save you 30 to 50% over Microsoft's unified and Premier support, but it wouldn't be any good if it was just less expensive. It's also better. I mean, it's faster. Twice as fast in the average time to resolution versus Microsoft. And when the network's down and your hair's on fire, speed is of the essence. They're also better because they have the best engineers in the business. And they're better for another reason that I hadn't really thought of. They will tell you the truth. For instance, do you use Azure? You probably have, as most people who use Azure do. It gets a little out of control and you have a little Azure spend creep. You know Azure Sprawl. Everybody does. Can you Expect Microsoft to knock on your door and say, hey, you don't really need all those VMs. We could really save you some. No, US Cloud will. In fact, they have a new offering called Azure Cost Optimization. So let's be honest. When was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? If you haven't looked at it lately, be prepared for a little bit of a shock. It just. That's the way it is. You know, you spin these up, you forget to shut them down, you use more and more. The good news, saving on Azure is easier than ever. With US Cloud, they offer an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox. It identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And you'll get that expert guidance from US Cloud senior engineers. These are the best in the business. An average over 16 years with Microsoft products. And at the end of the eight week engagement, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities, unused resources, letting you reallocate those precious IT dollars towards needed resources. And every IT department needs those dollars, right? Although I got a suggestion for you. You could keep the savings going by investing those Azure savings into US Cloud's Microsoft support, like a few other US Cloud customers have done. Completely eliminate your unified spend. Save 30 to 50%. The savings just keep on going. Ask Sam. He's the Technical Operations Manager at Bead Gaming. B, E, D e. He gave us Cloud 5 stars his review. This is his review. Quote, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. Sound familiar? That can happen. 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 four, 40 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up. Yeah, it's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. 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 for less. Thank you, US Cloud. Dji. I have a DJI drone right over there. The. The little one. I love it. It's fantastic. Apparently you can't get them anymore. There's a US ban because it's a Chinese drone manufacturer and we don't want the Chinese spying on us flying around overhead. So what did DJI do? Well, it's. It's unclear, but according to the Verge, you can buy something this is Sean Hollister writing called the Sky Rover X1 on Amazon. He says it's a dead ringer for the DJI Mini 4 Pro. Down to the same specs, the same features, and an incredibly similar app to the one DJI provides for its drones. It also uses DJI's own online infrastructure. This comes from an X post by Kevin Finstaire. He's a hacker who's been digging into DJI products in the past. He was even able to log in with his DJI username and password.

[Molly White]

You almost have to respect the game, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

That's impressive. Yeah.

[Molly White]

Why not knock off your own stuff?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it uses the same encryption keys. The drone reviewer Air Photography took flak in the comments of his Sky Rover X1 for not pointing out the similarities DJI turned out. He agreed not to mention any other drone brands in order to get the review unit. This is, by the way, why I do not do review units. Apparently they've now adjusted their thinking and their latest Air Photography reviews call it suspiciously similar. It does. It looks like a yellow version of the Mini. Look at that. So, shenanigans. I think one of the reasons I wouldn't want to tell people about this is because I think that the ban on DJI is bs. American made drones aren't anywhere near as good in my experience. And I don't think the Chinese are spying on what our rooftops using dji. I don't. It's apparently not illegal because the Sky Rover is made in Malaysia. The US government hasn't also completely banned DJI drones. A de facto ban will happen automatically by December unless, quote, an appropriate national security agency in China can publicly declare that its products do not. Or Maybe in the U.S. i don't know. I don't know what's an appropriate national security can publicly declare that its products do not pose an acceptable risk to the national security of the United States. Customs, though is is blocking DJI drones from entering the US when when the Verge asked CPB whether they are blocking it, the agency said we're not allowed to discuss that, but try and get one in. So not only can DJI not confirm or deny, it makes the Sky Rover X1. Border Patrol cannot confirm or deny that they're blocking DJI drones. So this isn't even a story. Why did I even mention it? We don't even know what's happening. Anyway, I'm glad I have my dj. I own a DJI drone and you're not going to get it out of my fingers.

[Jacob Ward]

That's True Cold dead hands.

[Leo Laporte]

Cold dead.

[Molly White]

Maybe the secondary market for DJI drones will explode and you can make a killing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't even think of that.

[Janko Rutgers]

Plus, you can now use that login for all kinds of.

[Leo Laporte]

FCC has approved the merger of Paramount with the Ellison Skydance Company with a very interesting proviso. Brennan Carr said in a statement. FCC chairman, we welcome. FCC was the agency that had to give it their approval. We welcome Skydance's commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network. They have committed to ensure the company's programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum. They've also agreed to a babysitter.

[Molly White]

Also a $16 million payoff.

[Leo Laporte]

And the payoff. And we're going to fire what's his name and a few other things. I don't even understand how Brendan Carr, the chairman of the fcc, can in his own mind rationalize or reconcile this notion of having the government have a babysitter inside CBS to make sure they don't say anything bad about President Trump with what we call in this country the First Amendment to the Constitution. But it did and it does. And he, I don't, you know, what are these guys thinking?

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I'm, I mean, we're in a, we're in an ideological vortex right now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's bizarre. How do you.

[Jacob Ward]

It is really. It is bizarre. I mean, you know, and the, and there's a certain, it's a crazy sort of, there's a, there's a meshing of both the, like, you see this every so often. Like I remember after 9, 11, there was this explosion of modern, of like media about like revenge and terrorism. And you know, there was that movie SWAT came out. Like there was all this sort of like pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

These.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and we all get patriotic when.

[Jacob Ward]

The country's been attacked.

[Janko Rutgers]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

And I feel like right here you've got this combination of, of the Trump administration's kind of ideological project and this idea on the part of CBS's new owners that it's that the market will want more conservative news. And I mean if, well, the market has voted.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, they love Fox News. Right.

[Jacob Ward]

If Fox News is any indication, then that is absolutely the case. Right. And so they're courting. The rumors are they're courting Barry Weiss, the sort of center right conservative who has this thing the, the free press. And she. That she might be a big fixture in cbs. You know, there's all this stuff that's sort of like it's this mishmash for me of like, kind of the ideological scramblings that the Trump administration is trying to set off. And then this weird idea that somehow this is, this is going to be a better way of making money as a corporation. These two things are coming together in this really stinky way right now. That bothers me a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things Carr said, one of the things they're going to have to do is put an ombudsman in place for two years. So basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the president.

[Molly White]

It's such a wild situation where, like, words are just being used in the complete opposite of their actual meaning. Like free speech is being used by the Trump administration in the complete opposite sense. Diversity of viewpoints. Complete opposite sense. You know, they're talking about the FCC fairness doctrine. Complete opposite sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, it's like the unfairness doctrine.

[Molly White]

Yeah, it's, it's crazy.

[Jacob Ward]

We are in the upside.

[Janko Rutgers]

The good news is that only old people are watching cbs. So that problem is all gonna solve itself eventually.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, I'm an old person. I resent that. It used to be, we used to call it the Tiffany Network. You know, it was Edward R. Murrow. And it was like, you remember, you remember this, Jacob? I mean, it was, it was revered. 60 Minutes was the number one news show, know, for decades.

[Jacob Ward]

And, you know, in the, in the industry, it's still considered, you know, one of the great. I mean, I was trying to say, I said earlier before the commercial break that we, you know, we, I miss the institutional horsepower that makes good journalism possible. And CBS, you know, for all of its trouble, 60 Minutes has been the state gold standard of that. You know, they go hard at a story and they do a really good job when they do. And, and I think it's no coincidence, right, that this is the, the channel that's going to get hit with this ombudsman. I mean, it's, you know, it's real. It's, it's really scary stuff. And, and so to, yeah, to see the, the, as Molly says, the kind of the, the language being twisted back on itself in this crazy way is. Yeah, it's a, it's a creepy moment for that stuff. And, and, you know, and, and I think that the, you know, Yanko, I take your point about it's mostly watched by old, old people. And everybody likes to say, well, it's in, you know, linear is in decline anyway, so it doesn't matter. But that's one of the few gathering places that People, once upon a time had for gathering up a shared sense of reality.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and, well, it was Walter Cronkite on the CBS Nightly News who basically ended the Vietnam War because LBJ said, if I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost the nation.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right. That was the first time they really proved that the United States government was lying to its citizens about what was going on. You know, and that was, and that was a huge turning point, a huge journalistic, you know, real piece.

[Leo Laporte]

Anybody nowadays who has that kind of credibility that it could, that he could change things in that dramatic of a way? I don't think so.

[Jacob Ward]

I mean, now we're in this environment, this atmosphere where everybody gets to choose their own version of reality based on who feels what way, and AI is going to make that worse, you know, So I think the bubble whole problem that we're about to have is going to get worse and worse and worse. And, and it's especially going to be made worse if you've got, although, maybe, I don't know, Branco, if you can think of a alternative to this that I haven't thought of, I'd be really grateful. But, like, I feel like it's going to get worse and worse and that this move by the Trump administration is, is going to exacerbate that. But I don't know, maybe, maybe if, if the government gets involved, they'll screw it up in some way.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and my daughter, who's young. Ish, younger than me, she's 32, says the pendulum is going to swing the other way. That when you push this hard in one direction, at some point Americans are going to say no. You know, we think the First Amendment's actually not a bad idea. We'd like to defend that a little bit. Hey, speaking of the media scrutiny, the CEO and the HR representative of Astronomer have now been fired after their surprise appearance on the Kiss Cam at the Coldplay concert. And I really like Astronomers PR reaction to this. First of all, nobody had ever heard of Astronomer before then because they're the leading unified data ops platform for Apache Airflow, which even I have no idea what that means, but they played on that a little bit. This is the video they posted on X. Thank you for your interest in Astronomer.

[Molly White]

Thank you for your interest in Astronomer. Hi, I'm Gwyneth Paltrow.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been hired on a very temporary.

[Molly White]

Basis to speak on behalf of the 300 plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days and they wanted me to answer the most common ones. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God. What?

[Molly White]

The actual place to run Apache airflow.

[Leo Laporte]

Unifying the experience of running data ML and AI pipelines. She's Chris Martin's ex wife.

[Molly White]

Thrilled. So many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation. As for the other questions we received.

[Leo Laporte]

How is your social media?

[Molly White]

There is still room available at our beyond analytics event in September. We will now be returning to what we do best. Delivering game changing results for our customers. Thank you for your interest in Astronomer.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that f. That is the best PR spin ever.

[Molly White]

It is well played. I have to get well played.

[Leo Laporte]

Especially hiring Coldplay lead man Chris Martin's X to do to be the spokesperson.

[Janko Rutgers]

Did you all see the Colbert sketch where he had Wyet o Yankovic playing a Coldplay song and all these couples popped up in the audience and it brought everything together. It was like the Coldplay Astronomer thing. Colbert getting canceled.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing. It all goes. It all goes together. It all fits in. It's just an interesting timeline we're in, isn't it? Let's take one more last break before we get some of the wrap up news and unfortunately a couple of obituaries. I always put those at the end of the show. I don't want to bring people down, but we're going to do it. Molly White is here. Great to have Molly. She's not dead. No, that's not your obituary. Somebody else's. Somebody much older than you. Molly White. Although you were saying that there was a little fracade in the editorial division of Wikipedia over the front page.

[Molly White]

There often is.

[Leo Laporte]

Too many people have died lately. Is that the problem?

[Molly White]

Yeah, we were, we were trying to figure out if Hulk Hogan should get like the full size blurb or just the name and the recent deaths and there was the argument from one editor that basically there have been too many deaths lately. We need to. We need to stop.

[Jacob Ward]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

So you did do Ozzy, which is good. And then you, you put Hulk down with the others in the.

[Molly White]

For now I don't think the discussion has closed. So he made yet get a blurb.

[Leo Laporte]

But if I hover over Hulk's name, we at least get a nice picture of the Hulk. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. You know what? Now can you, if you go to like, is there a discussion page for the front page? So if you go to the discussion page, can you see all of this back and forth?

[Molly White]

Yeah. If you, if you click on where it says nominate an article in that and in that Little blurb area, just where Ozzy is.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Molly White]

You'll see all the discussions for everything that's in the. Yeah, there you go. And you'll see Hulk Hogan's in there.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the best part of Wikipedia is it's all done in public. I mean, what. There's so many best parts. There's so many best parts. But I just love the way that you guys do. How long have you been an editor at Wikipedia?

[Molly White]

Oh my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

Teacher in high school. Right?

[Molly White]

Maybe it's. Yeah, it's been a really long time. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How did. What was the first thing. Why did you start?

[Molly White]

I realized that I could. There is a button that said edit and I was like, I can click that.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm proud to say, as tempting as it has been, I have never hit the edit button on my own article. So there.

[Molly White]

Oh yeah. Well, that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not supposed to do that. I know. Although it's amazing how many people do. Anyway, Molly, thank you for that. And of course, thank you for your newsletter. Citation needed. And for Web3 is going great, which is another great website Molly created. It's also wonderful to have Jacob Ward here, repeat visitor. Got to have you back more. I love your stuff. Jacobward.com, the Rip Current.com is his podcast and newsletter. You must subscribe to that. You've got three to subscribe to now and a few books. You might. You keep bringing up books to buy. I want to find that 1970 economist's book. Wow. And also with us, Janko Records from lopass cc. First started reading your byline in gigaom. That's how long it's been.

[Janko Rutgers]

Back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

Back in the day, yeah. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Starlight vms. We've talked before about Spaceship, which is a great place to get your domains at below market prices. One of the things Spaceship's been doing though is adding services and features. They've got a great enterprise grade mail server. I mentioned before Thunderbolt, their messaging platform where your domain name is your user handle. But I neglected to mention they're incredible virtual machines. Starlight VMs, that's spaceship's virtual private server hosting. Built for performance. And by the way, you'll love the price. Spaceship is a domain and web platform that simplifies choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products, including hosting. If you've ever struggled to find a budget friendly hosting that meets your needs, you gotta check out Starlight vms. Industry leading vps hosting that meets the high demands of seasoned hosting web pros. Total flexibility with options to fine tune your plan to include bonus storage or super fast CPUs. You can turn it up, turn it down as needed. US or Singapore Data center. The choice is yours. Choose the one closest to you to ensure faster response times. Starlight VMs detailed analytics offer a complete picture of how things are performing. Cpu, ram, network traffic, disk space. Get the whole picture so you can fine tune for efficiency and forecast costs efficiently. I think one of the things I love about Spaceship is that they are a software driven modern company and they this and Starlight shows you exactly. They have of course pre installed software packages allowing you to choose from some of the most popular operating systems around. All the features you want, but not expensive. With flexible billing plans you could pay monthly, you could pay yearly. You can even try pay as you go for an hourly rate where you pay for resources only after you use them. Which for me is great because I often want to spin up a VPS just to try something or use some code and then shut it down. Perfect. Go to spaceship.com TWiT to find out more about Starlight VMS and get custom deals on Spaceship products. That spaceship. Check it out. It's all there on the front page. Spaceship.comTwit we thank them so much for their support. We also thank you, our Club Twit members for your support. Your $10 a month makes it possible not only do this show but all the special programming we did on Thursday. Richard Campbell built his computer. He was how long he was here, like three and a half, four hours. He was a big build and you got to see it from beginning to end. Coming up we've got our book club with Stacy Higginbotham. This Is how youw Win the Time War. Great book. Highly recommend it. You still have time to read it. It's. It's fairly short. Highly recommended. We also have Chris Markowart's photo show coming up. Every month we do that. The AI user group. The first Friday of every month. That's just. That's this Friday. It's coming up. And of course access to the Discord ad. Free versions of all of our shows. There's lots of reasons to join, mostly because it keeps us on the air. 25% of our operating costs are paid now by club members. Thank you. Doesn't go into my pocket. It goes to the pockets of all the people who make these shows possible. TWiT TV Club TWiT. We thank them. Thank you and all the club members. So much for their support. A couple of passings. I don't know if you were fans of the Elder Scrolls, but the Father of the Elder Scrolls, Julian fay, passed. Only 59 years old, he was co founder and technical producer at Once Lost Games. He had stepped back from game development after a lengthy battle with Cancer Danish. He started his career in early Amiga and NES games before becoming one of Bethesda's earliest employees in 1987. Anyway, if you are a fan of those fabulous games, I'm a Sky Roll fanatic. You will want to mark the passing of the Father of the Elder Scrolls, Julian Le Fay and satirist and musician Tom Lehrer passed at the age of 97. Today he taught mathematics at the University of Santa Cruz almost until the end. But he became very famous in the 50s and 60s for his songs like Poisoning Pigeons in the park and the Vatican Rag. I feel like we really need Tom Lehrer's music. One of the things he did that was really cool, he put all of his songs in the Creative Commons towards the end of his life so that everybody would have access to the sheet music and the lyrics and could perform them himself. He started in 1945 with a parody of football songs called Fight Fiercely. Harvard. He was a Harvard alum. Fight, fight, fight. Demonstrate to them our skill, albeit they possess the might. Nevertheless, we have the will. How shall we celebrate our victory? We shall invite the whole team up for tea. Anyway, look up Tom Lehrer's wonderful albums, including, and I Probably should should play a little bit of it. I think I can because I think he's released them all into the public domain or into Creative Commons. But my favorite, one of my favorite songs of his is the Elements, where he actually sings a song with all the elements in it. And in fact, maybe we'll end the show with that as we say goodbye to our fabulous guests. It's been fun. Thank you, Molly White. You're the best. I appreciate your time and your patience and most of all, the work you do at Citation Needed and at the Wikipedia. Thank you.

[Molly White]

Thanks for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you so much. Hope we'll see you again real soon. Same to you, Jacob Ward. Buy the book the Loop. I really can't recommend it more highly. You did so much research on it. I learned just the first just reading and I learned so much about everything besides big tech. It's really good.

[Jacob Ward]

Thanks, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Appreciate it, man. Yeah. And of course, the Rip Current is a fantastic podcast and newsletter@the rip current.com Yanko Wreckers Lopass CC all three of you proving that with brains, good looks and charm you can make it as a solo journalist in the world. Thank you Yonko. Great to have all three of you.

[Janko Rutgers]

Thanks for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

We Do Twit every Sunday 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live. Club members get to watch behind the velvet rope in the Club Twit Discord, where there's armchairs and cigars and brandy. No, there's none of that. But you can. You can watch in the Discord. Might be easier to watch on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn x.com a kick. We stream on all of those platforms, but you don't have to watch live. You can watch after the fact by downloading a copy of the show, audio or video from the website Twitter tv. When you get there, you also see a link to our YouTube channel where you can see the video. Great for sharing little clips. Best way to watch or listen to is to subscribe to either the audio or the video versions of our shows in your favorite podcast Catcher. And if you would, if they allow reviews there, please give us a good review. Help spread the word. It's hard when you've been doing a show for 20 years. We're not the flavor of the month. We're not the hot new thing. People forget we exist. So tell your friends, tell your neighbors, give us a good review, join the club and participate in our community. Those are always you can make twit better. We thank you so much for being here and we will see you next time. And as I have said for 20 years, another twit is in the Give a big shout if you know who Tom Lehrer is.

[Molly White]

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium and nickelodemium, neptunium, German uranium and iron, amarisium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium and lanthrum and osmium and astatine and radium and golden, poor titanium and indium and gallium and iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

[Jacob Ward]

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium and boron.

[Molly White]

Gadolinium, niobium, iridium and strontium and silicon and silver and samarium and bisl, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.

[Jacob Ward]

Isn't that interesting?

[Molly White]

I knew you would. I hope you're all taking notes because there's going to be a short quiz next period. There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium and phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium and manganese and mercury and lithium, magnesium, dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium and lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium, palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, metadalum, denisium, titanium, tellurium and cadmium and calcium, calcium and chromium and curium. There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium and also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium and arca, krypton, neanderidon, xenon, zinc and rhodium and chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium. These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard, and there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.

[Leo Laporte]

Love it. Love it. 97 this is amazing. Doing the twit all right. Doing the twit, maybe doing the twit all right.