This Week in Tech 1043: It All Starts With Baby Shark

Summary

Summary of TWiT this Week in Tech Episode 1043: "It All Starts With Baby Shark"

Release Date: August 4, 2025

Panelists:

• Leo Laporte (Host)
• Mike Elgin (MachineSociety AI)
• Brian McCullough (Tech Brew Ride Home)
• Richard Campbell (Run as Radio, .NET Rocks, Windows Weekly)

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1. Tesla's $240 Million Verdict in Autopilot Crash Case

The episode opens with a significant legal development involving Tesla. A jury in Florida has ordered Tesla to pay over $240 million in compensatory and punitive damages following an autopilot-related crash that resulted in fatalities.

• Incident Details:

  • The crash occurred six years prior when a Tesla vehicle operating in full self-driving mode lost control after the driver became distracted by a dropped phone, leading to a collision that killed a pedestrian and a young couple.

• Legal Implications:

  • Unlike typical Tesla lawsuits where the driver or their family sues Tesla, this case was brought forward by the family of the pedestrians killed.
  • The driver admitted partial responsibility for relying too heavily on the autopilot feature, which "plowed right into" a parked vehicle without sufficient intervention from the system.

• Notable Quote:

  • Mike Elgin [05:55]: "They're going after the branding of this and pointed out that, you know, other car companies don't use things like autopilot or... any sort of implication that it in fact is designed to be full self-driving."

• Panel Discussion:

  • The panel debated the responsibility of Tesla in ensuring drivers remain attentive, highlighting that Tesla's reliance solely on cameras (without radar) might have contributed to the crash.
  • Richard Campbell [07:41]: "Like just a forward looking radar that would have stopped this. Like it's just that Elon gets these hang ups and nobody can stop him."

• Broader Impacts:

  • This verdict sets a precedent, potentially opening the floodgates for more lawsuits against automotive companies developing autonomous technologies.
  • Brian McCullough [09:54]: "There's a quote in the piece that says from a lawyer that says this will open the floodgates."

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2. Apple's Robust Financial Performance Amidst Tariff Challenges

Apple reported its largest quarterly revenue growth since December 2021, with impressive increases in iPhone and Mac sales, despite facing significant tariff-related costs.

• Key Financial Highlights:

  • iPhone Sales: Up 13% year-over-year.
  • Mac Business: Grew by 15%, marking the fastest growth among Apple's units.
  • Overall Revenue: Increased by 10%.

• Tariff Impact:

  • Tariffs imposed in the June quarter cost Apple $800 million, slightly below initial estimates.
  • Apple anticipates tariffs to cost $1.1 billion in the next quarter.
  • Mike Elgin [20:03]: "I think it's the tariff pump. But let's face it, the Mac is a gorgeous machine."

• AI Investments and Acquisitions:

  • Tim Cook emphasized Apple's openness to mergers and acquisitions to accelerate their AI roadmap, hinting at potential acquisitions like Perplexity.
  • Brian McCullough [25:43]: "And it's good precedent."

• Notable Quote:

  • Richard Campbell [22:41]: "That Mac is the best computer on the planet right now. There's nothing even comes close."

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3. Google's Exceptional Quarter Fueled by AI and Cloud Services

Google reported a stellar quarter with substantial growth driven primarily by its AI and cloud services divisions.

• Financial Achievements:

  • Overall Revenue: $96.4 billion, up 14%.
  • Advertising Revenue: Surged by 13%.
  • Cloud Revenue: Increased to $13.6 billion.

• AI Dominance:

  • Google's advancements in AI have significantly contributed to its revenue growth, positioning it as a leader in the AI-driven market.

• Notable Quote:

  • Brian McCullough [52:54]: "And it's all about AI, isn't it?"

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4. Australia Bans YouTube for Users Under 16

Australia's government has enacted a ban on YouTube access for individuals under the age of 16, citing concerns over harmful content.

• Regulatory Actions:

  • The Australian Internet regulator found that 37% of minors reported encountering harmful content on YouTube.
  • YouTube has responded by stating it is implementing age estimation technologies to comply with the new regulations.
  • Leo Laporte [59:57]: "You have to be careful that this is what they'll like that."

• Challenges Highlighted:

  • Ensuring effective age verification remains a significant hurdle, with a spike in VPN usage as minors attempt to circumvent restrictions.
  • Brian McCullough [64:41]: "Things from China like how Tuvalu or whatever that, that island nation is that."

• Notable Quote:

  • Brian McCullough [55:48]: "And they also are using AI now to even if you lie about your age, they're going to try to catch you and change the content you can view."

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5. AI Industry Insights: Progress Towards AGI and Ethical Considerations

The panel delved into the current state and future trajectory of AI, debating whether the industry is nearing the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or experiencing a period of disillusionment.

• Divergent Views:

  • Sam Abulsamed [10:52]: Expressed skepticism about achieving full autonomy in AI, suggesting that while AI can handle a majority of situations, unpredictabilities remain.
  • Brian McCullough [34:54]: Compared the current phase to the historical evolution of broadband, indicating that we are on the cusp of mainstream AI integration.

• Notable Quote:

  • Mike Elgin [36:20]: "I think we're on the brink of a cultural transformation that results from the ubiquitous application of AI."

• Ethical Concerns:

  • The potential for AI to inadvertently reinforce harmful traits or biases was discussed, referencing a study by Anthropic on AI personality shifts.
  • Richard Campbell [116:10]: "Personality traits to be reinforced."

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6. AI Integration into Daily Life: Wearable Technologies and Smart Glasses

The discussion transitioned to the integration of AI into everyday life through wearable devices, such as smart glasses and AI pins.

• Emerging Technologies:

  • Brilliant Labs Halo Smart Glasses: Upcoming models feature multi-modal AI agents capable of collecting and processing data through cameras and microphones.
  • AI Pins: Devices like the AI Pin and Limitless AI Pin are being developed to act as personal assistants, recording and analyzing user interactions.

• Business Models and Privacy:

  • The panel debated subscription-based versus ad-supported models for AI wearables, emphasizing the importance of privacy.
  • Leo Laporte [83:07]: "If they could come out tomorrow and say hey, we just acquired Perplexity... an AI search tool."

• Notable Quote:

  • Brian McCullough [26:19]: "If you should have an old hands... a functional MRI of the AI's weights."

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7. Content Licensing and AI: Amazon's $20 Million Deal with The New York Times

Amazon has reached an agreement to pay The New York Times $20 million annually for its content, marking a significant move in AI content licensing.

• Industry Implications:

  • This deal sets a precedent for AI companies compensating content creators, potentially leading to more such agreements across the industry.
  • Mike Elgin [72:17]: "It's a good precedent."

• Additional Deals:

  • Similar arrangements are being made with other publishers like Axel Springer and News Corp, ensuring that content creators receive compensation for their work used in AI training.

• Notable Quote:

  • Brian McCullough [72:13]: "If you're at a company and you bring in 1% of revenue on one deal, that's you."

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8. Challenges for Original Content Providers Due to AI Models

The proliferation of AI models using vast amounts of online content has posed significant challenges for original content providers like Wikipedia.

• Strain on Resources:

  • Heavy reliance on AI by companies like OpenAI and Google has led to increased traffic on original content sites, causing strain on their servers and resources.
  • Mike Elgin [87:03]: "It also makes it slower for users to use the original site, Wikipedia."

• Future Concerns:

  • The sustainability of content platforms facing constant AI scraping and data usage remains uncertain, raising questions about the long-term viability of freely accessible information.

• Notable Quote:

  • Mike Elgin [86:42]: "It's killing Wikipedia."

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9. AI Talent Wars: Enormous Pay Packages for Top Researchers

A striking trend in the AI industry is the offering of exorbitant compensation packages to attract top talent, akin to those in professional sports.

• High Compensation Trends:

  • AI researchers are reportedly receiving pay packages exceeding $250 million, comparable to top NBA players.
  • Mike Elgin [93:14]: "AI technologists are approaching the job market as if they were Steph Curry or LeBron James."

• Panel Reactions:

  • The panel expressed astonishment at the scale of these offers, questioning the sustainability and motivations behind such high compensations.
  • Brian McCullough [93:32]: "You're proving to me that this is a generational opportunity."

• Notable Quote:

  • Leo Laporte [93:53]: "But no, I just... This was Gordon Bell's idea... to help her kind of remember things."

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10. Upcoming Developments and Final Thoughts

As the episode concludes, the panelists shared insights into upcoming AI technologies, the importance of media literacy in the AI era, and the evolving landscape of podcasting and newsletters.

• Future Technologies:

  • Emphasis on AI-integrated applications, such as collaborative tools and enhanced search functionalities.
  • Mike Elgin [104:49]: "Everything will be running LLMs, small language models, all kinds of different kinds of AI."

• Media Consumption Shifts:

  • Discussion on the resurgence of tech IPOs and the strategic moves by companies like Figma and Adobe.
  • Leo Laporte [105:21]: "I have to think it's worth, but I don't think it's known yet. It could flop completely."

• Notable Quote:

  • Brian McCullough [165:08]: "It's like the Wall Street Journal's model, for example... subscribe, and that's what it's all about."

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Conclusion: Episode 1043 of "This Week in Tech" provided an in-depth analysis of significant events shaping the tech and AI landscape in 2025. From legal battles over autonomous driving to the financial triumphs of tech giants amidst global challenges, the panelists offered valuable insights into the evolving interplay between technology, regulation, and industry dynamics. The discussions underscored the rapid advancements in AI, the ethical and operational challenges they pose, and the strategies companies are adopting to navigate this transformative era.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Mike Elgin's here. Brian McCullough and Richard Campbell. We're gonna have a lot of fun talking about AI. A big jury award for a victim of a Tesla crash, more than a $240 million Apple results, Google results, and Australia banning YouTube for people under 16. How's that gonna go? All that more coming up next on Twit. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week at Tech. Episode 1043, recorded Sunday, August 3rd, 2025. It all starts with Baby Shark. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. The show. We cover the latest tech news with a rotating panel of fine, industrious, smart and connected journalists. Starting with Mike Elgin in Oaxaca.

[Mike Elgin]

Two out of three ain't bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Which one aren't you? I didn't add good looking, so we'll add you. You put you in the good looking box. His newsletter is@machineSociety AI. He does podcasts. He does everything.

[Mike Elgin]

I do dishes. I do it all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, an excellent pizza cook too, I might add. Thank you for being here, Mike. It's nice to see you.

[Mike Elgin]

Glad to be here. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

A beautiful evening in Oaxaca, I'm sure.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Also, joining us from. Well, we're going to change the name. It used to be the Tech Meme ride home. Brian McCullough is here, the Internet's historian. Now, the Tech Brew Ride Home, is it a beer show?

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, that was the original pitch. Somehow the name got through all of the various editorial meetings and things like that. No, it's the exact same show. Literally. The only thing that even the music is the same. The only thing that is changing is at the beginning of every show, instead of saying Tech Meme Ride Home, I'm saying Tech Brew Ride Home.

[Leo Laporte]

Now part of the morning brew crew, which is fantastic. Congratulations.

[Brian McCullough]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

That is a excellent network of shows growing, apparently. So that's good. Also with us, one of our own, he is Richard Campbell. He doesn't do the beer, he does the whiskey. Host of Run as Radio and dot net Rocks and of course, regular every Wednesday on Windows Weekly on this network. Hi, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Hi. Just back off a boat story at the back at the end of this, if you like.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. We can add some whiskey. You know, that's the one thing this show's been missing all this time. You were on a cruise over the week. In fact, we missed you on Windows Weekly. That's why I said, hey, you Know, maybe we could get him off the boat and into the show on Sunday. And you very kindly left early, I think.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I just took the early exit. We had options but you know, after a week on the boat, you're ready to get off anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

It was an Alaska cruise.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. This time out of Vancouver, which is nice. We did Sitka and Juneau and Ketchikan and we also stopped at a new stop called Icy Strait, which is the local Tlingit band in huna, which is 800 people that they've built out quite a little facility there now.

[Leo Laporte]

And so did you get to see the Menden Hall Glacier or any.

[Richard Campbell]

We didn't. We could see it from a distance from Juno. They warnings on that glacier today of potential glacial outbursts which, you know, sound.

[Leo Laporte]

That doesn't sound good.

[Richard Campbell]

We were supposed to go up the Tracy Fjord, but it was all fogged in and the glaciers are calving and let's face it, ice and cruise ships, not good.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's a, there's a history about that.

[Richard Campbell]

Made a whole movie about that sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Although I wouldn't mind meeting Kate Winslet, but perhaps not under those circumstances. Well, it's good to have you back on dry land and on the show today. Big story. In fact, I was having dinner with Sam Abul Samid, our car guy who was in town driving some Hyundais around when this story broke. A jury has ordered Tesla to pay more than Tesla $240 million in an autopilot crash. Now I'm sure Tesla will appeal this, but this is in Florida. They didn't find the Tesla interestingly, 100% responsible. A driver was using full self driving in a Tesla. So a couple of years back he dropped his phone.

[Richard Campbell]

A couple years back, it's well back.

[Leo Laporte]

Six years back. Yeah. This case been going on for four. He dropped his phone, distracted, reached down to get it, thought he was cool because full self driving was engaged. The car continued and ran into another car and hit and killed a pedestrian. Hit the car. The car hit a young couple who were stargazing and one of them was killed. So the lawsuit came not from the driver. That's one thing that makes this unusual in Tesla lawsuits. Usually it's the driver or the driver's family if the driver's been killed in the accident. In this case it was the family of the pedestrians who were killed. The driver was found partly responsible because he trusted full self driving. The lawyers for the family of the deceased claimed that Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident. Tesla said, we made a mistake. After being shown the evidence. They said, no, honest. Your honor, we thought it was gone.

[Richard Campbell]

We tried really hard.

[Leo Laporte]

We thought, we deleted. I mean we thought it was. The sister of the deceased says, we finally learned what happened that night. The car was actually defective. Tesla said, quote, this verdict is wrong. It only works to set back automotive safety. Not sure. Right. You get there. And jeopardized Tesla's and the entire industry's effort to develop and implement life saving technology. They said the plaintiffs concocted a story blaming the car when the driver from day one admitted an accepted responsibility. Tesla has to pay 43 million of a total 129 million in compensatory damages for the crash, plus a punitive award of $200 million.

[Mike Elgin]

Interestingly, they're going after the branding of this and pointed out that, you know, other car companies don't use things like autopilot or you know, any sort of implication that it in fact is designed, you know, to be full self driving. And so that, that's part of the blame. You know, the idea that he was misled into thinking the car would handle it. Just based on what they call the feature.

[Leo Laporte]

The, the feature of full self driving. This isn't, I mean, I think, was it Australia that says you can't call it full self driving? Right, right, right. So there's always been this issue. It isn't full self driving, it's driver assist.

[Mike Elgin]

No, but it's called autopilot though, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so you, you call, you use the term FSD for full self driving. Like they have been misnaming that product all along.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And using the word autopilot, which is fine. Tesla was partly at fault. It allowed the driver to act recklessly by not disengaging the autopilot as soon as the driver began to show signs of distraction. So that's why they were partially responsible. The driver said, I trusted the technology too much. I believe that if the car saw something in front of it, it would provide a warning and apply the brakes. No, it just plowed right into the part was a parked vehicle.

[Mike Elgin]

It hit by the right, which spun around and then the spinning parked vehicle is what hit the victims.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, let's face it, any other cruise control would have stopped.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, my Toyota would have stopped.

[Richard Campbell]

Would have stopped. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So Tesla says, look, we tell drivers, you got to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel. We even check for that. And if you remove your hands from the wheel, we go Put your hands back. And they said the driver chose not to do that. When he looked for the dropped cell phone and added to the danger because he was speeding, Tesla said, look, he's gone through the same intersection 30 or 40 times previously and hadn't crashed, not once until the final crash. He said the cause is not Tesla, but that the driver dropped his cell phone and stopped paying attention. Now, I asked Sam about this because the key in this is that the jury found some, not all, not 100%, but some liability for Tesla, despite the driver saying, yeah, I wasn't looking. And he said, that sets a precedent. And in fact, that's what this NPR story says. Despite the driver's admission of reckless behavior poses significant legal risks for every company as develop cars that increasingly drive themselves.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, I was gonna say there's a quote in the piece that says from a lawyer that says this will open the floodgates. And there's earlier in the piece, suggestions that they're surprised that it came to trial because a lot of other cases haven't.

[Leo Laporte]

Like I thought, well, that's what Tesla usually does. And the reason they can do that is the people who are suing are usually the drivers of the car. So Tesla says, no, no, let's settle. But in this case, it wasn't. It was an innocent pedestrian victim not driving the car. And so apparently they weren't anxious to settle. So Tesla was not able to shut this down before discovery, which turned out not so good for Tesla and the verdict. So a precedent.

[Mike Elgin]

And another interesting thing is, as I think we mentioned, this was six years ago, this accident. Right?

[Brian McCullough]

So.

[Mike Elgin]

The autopilot feature has gotten way better, we presume, Right? Where are we at with that? Is it still, I mean, Elon Musk had been promising full self driving mode for years and years, always saying, oh yeah, next year we'll have it. Are they getting close to full self driving mode? I have no idea, Sam.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, my car guy, Sam Abulsamed, has told me he does not believe cars will ever get to full autonomy. Because while they can navigate 90%, maybe soon, 95, 99% of the situations, they can never be ready to handle every single weird, unexpected incident that happens.

[Mike Elgin]

But they just have to be safer than people, right? Because people that, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they already are. For people, I think they already are. I mean, don't tell the pedestrian who has killed that, but. Well, yeah, that happens all the time, doesn't it? I hate to say it, but that happens all the time with cars driven by humans.

[Richard Campbell]

The dumb part with Tesla is they're insisting on using only cameras.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

No radar.

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like just a forward looking radar that would have stopped this. Like, it's just that Elon gets these hang ups and nobody can stop him. He's like, we can do this with cameras and he's killing people because of it.

[Mike Elgin]

I'm sure we've all been in a Waymo in San Francisco. It's amazing. I mean, and they do use LiDAR.

[Leo Laporte]

Radar and cameras, all three.

[Mike Elgin]

They have a big rig on the top. You know, they, they look weird because of it. Yeah, yeah, they look weird. And, and, and, but it works, it works really well. I'm. I guessing that it's significantly safer than human drivers.

[Benito]

Hi, this is Benito. So I was driving down the city in San Francisco yesterday and I was. So for a while I would have to take this route through the city where I would always be behind a Waymo. And it was like the worst thing ever.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're downtown, every third car is a Waymo. The first time I saw one, I said, oh, look awaymo. And then, oh, there's another one. Oh, there's another. They're everywhere.

[Benito]

But then I, then yesterday while I was in the city, I noticed driving around Waymos, they drive a lot better now. Like they, they seem more, more like people. Like I'm not as pissed at them on the road anymore as I used to be. So I think that's an improvement.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, maybe that's kind of what Tesla was saying is. Yeah, you know, you're gonna, we're gonna have these judgments, but it slows down development because we gotta get these things on the road so that they can get better. They can't get better in a test.

[Richard Campbell]

Tube so that they have how many people to die, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, people, okay, 50,000 people died in auto accidents typically every year in the United States, a million globally. That's not even newsworthy. It happens so often.

[Benito]

Right, but people are liable for those, for those accidents.

[Leo Laporte]

So like this is an issue or kind of driving safer? That's, I mean, that's really the ultimate issue is can we make drivers get.

[Richard Campbell]

To sign up for this? They're being done and this has been happening to them against their will.

[Leo Laporte]

We're in a beta test that we never agreed to.

[Mike Elgin]

But plus, I don't really follow the argument. How is this slowing anything down?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you can collect the data regardless.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, but if, Okay, I guess. But if you're liable for every accident you cause, then maybe you're going to be less likely to. That's what they're. That's.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's what you're likely to be more careful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe. Okay, maybe, maybe that's.

[Mike Elgin]

I mean, you know, $200 million or whatever it is. 3, 3, 3, $400 million. It's nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

4.

[Mike Elgin]

Tesla.

[Leo Laporte]

Tesla is going all in on the robo taxi. Here's a story from Ford. Forget. I'm sorry, Forbes. Forget cars. Tesla's future is a robo taxi empire. He doesn't want to sell cars. Apparently Elon wants to sell robo taxis, but if they can't drive right now, these robo taxis are still unlimited tests in just a handful of cities. Although I guess they're coming to San Francisco, kind of using a loophole with dmv, because DMV is saying you can't test in San Francisco, California Department of Motor Vehicles. But because they have a safety driver, somehow they're getting away with it.

[Brian McCullough]

But the promise that Waymo, Waymo specifically always used to make was once we can prove this out, it's sort of like the restaurant franchise model. We can just copy the playbook city by city by city. And they're doing. They are like Atlanta was it. Dallas was the most recent one announced. So, yeah, I mean, like putting, putting the stupid history hat on for a second.

[Leo Laporte]

The.

[Brian McCullough]

If you go back and look historically at when automobiles first hit the scene, especially in the United States, the amount of carnage, and I'm talking running over pedestrians, running over horses, running. Like someone said that we're running a beta test on new technology that none of us signed up for, but that had, that happened.

[Leo Laporte]

That's always what happens. Yeah.

[Brian McCullough]

Now part of the mitigating point of that is, well, there were no laws. You could run over a pedestrian and there was no law on the books that said, hey, by the way, you could be liable for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in fact, and you probably know this Internet historian, the whole concept of jaywalking was created by auto manufacturers who wanted to make sure that pedestrians were held liable if they crossed the street at somewhere besides a crosswalk. There was no law against jaywalking until the auto industry pushed it.

[Mike Elgin]

If you look at those old timey videos that people remaster and stuff on YouTube and you look at a city street, before automobiles were huge, people used to go every which way all the time because everything was moving pretty slow and people were cutting in front of cable car type things and horses and stuff like that.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's kind of like the roundabout in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Insane, right? Over the decades.

[Richard Campbell]

By horses too.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly. But over the decades, the, the concept of the road belonging to the cars, you know, took hold. But it took decades for that, that psychological reality. Jaywalking laws were part of that. But, but nowadays, you know, you, you basically y. You know, you'll cross, you'll jaywalk or whatever. Rarely. But back in the day, that was just how you got around town.

[Brian McCullough]

You just go across going even further back and correct me if I'm wrong, chat room. But the first fatality from a railroad running over somebody, a train running over somebody, was literally because. Because trains were so new, moving at a speed that was faster than any humans had any context for. The reason the person got run over is because they didn't. They couldn't imagine that the train would them as quickly as it did and didn't get out of the way. But I'm making that point to say that one of the things that I find compelling about the idea of, again, to use the term running a beta test on self driving is this is. I've just given two examples of new technology that was, you know, run out in the open as a beta test. Nobody signed up for it, but could get run over by it. This is a beta test that is being run with the explicit idea that this is going to be safer on the aggregate, on average. And so as opposed to those previous times in history, again, like if you, if the amount of deaths that happened for the, you know, miles driven on American roads versus miles flown on airlines, like airlines would be. No one would fly. You know, so like we have someone made the point, we accept. Leo made the point. We accept the hundreds of thousands of deaths and maimings and things like that by the car being central to our society. And so the point of this technology is to improve that sort of horrific statistic.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, yep, early flying was very dangerous and also only for the wealthy.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So it's only if rich people died. If we could just work on that, that wouldn't be so bad. I could. No, that's so mean. Anyway, it's. You see, this is why it's complicated. It's a complicated thing.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm still surprised that they didn't settle out. Like there's a. There was a TR Tried.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure they tried.

[Richard Campbell]

And I also wonder if Elon was just too distracted. Like, look at the timing of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Yeah, good point. Apple's biggest revenue growth since December 2021. This is not typically a big quarter for Apple. This is not Quite the worst quarter. Next quarter will be the slowest quarter, but it's far enough from the release of a new iPhone. That is not typically a big quarter, but it is a big quarter for Apple. Sales of the iPhone grew 13% year over year. Overall revenue grew 10%, its largest quarterly revenue growth since 2021. Of course, some of that is services. The service revenue might be in jeopardy depending on what the courts do with Google's 20 billion a year payment to Apple for making Google search the default on the iPhone. Apple shares of course, went up. Apple, I think is now 4 trillion dollar company. I haven't checked lately.

[Richard Campbell]

The services bump was tiny compared it was mostly iPhone sales, which is interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we're in off an off quarter.

[Mike Elgin]

No, but what was happening is all the talk about tariffs and it's a tariff bump raising the prices. People were getting one while they were still.

[Richard Campbell]

That makes sense prices and also. Or a Mac or an iPad, like all of them took unusual bumps and I think it was just, hey, if you were going to buy one this year, you should buy it now.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Apple did say the tariffs in the June quarter costed $800 million. That was a little lower than the 900 million they were saying they might have to pay.

[Brian McCullough]

But they're expecting more next quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, 1.1 billion next quarter. Interesting that they're going to absorb some of those costs. This is what the president wants companies to do. Doesn't want it to. Doesn't want them to pass the tariff costs along to customers. But there's only a limited amount of profit any company is willing to give up. And Apple, even with its massive margins, I'm sure still passes along more than half of the cost of tariffs.

[Mike Elgin]

Just to focus on the negative for a second, do we have any sense of why iPad revenue is down 8%?

[Leo Laporte]

The analysts say because they didn't have an iPad pro to sell this quarter. And you know, typically this is a slow quarter because people are aware that in September Apple will announce new iPhones and possibly in October new iPads. So it is typically a fairly slow quarter as next quarter is as well. I think you nailed it though. There was the expectation of tariffs brought people to the store. Cook said about 1 of the company's 10 percentage points of revenue growth could be attributed to that. That's 10% of 10%.

[Mike Elgin]

It's rare when politics, political conversation. Of course, the idea was that there were going to be material tariffs, but usually affects gun sales, not phone sales. Every time there's an election, one side always Says the other side is going to take away all your guns and people go buy a gun before it gets taken away or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

And so as a result we have a per capita average of four or five guns.

[Richard Campbell]

Although it's only 20% that own a gun. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like it's really at least the people who own them own a lot of them because they keep buying one every election. IPhone revenue was strong, said Tim Cook, because the his thought is because the iPhone 16 is more popular than the 15 was. IPhone 16 sales up strong double digits versus the predecessors. Mac business grew fastest of any of Apple's units. 15%. Why do you think that is, Mr. PC Richard Campbell?

[Richard Campbell]

I think definitely was the tariff pump. But let's face it, the that Mac is a gorgeous machine. It's the best computer on the planet right now. There's nothing even comes close.

[Leo Laporte]

The MacBook Air is its best selling.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So if you're digging for a reason to buy a machine, tariffs is a good excuse, whether real or not. And that's the best computer on the planet. Why wouldn't you buy it?

[Brian McCullough]

By the way, Leo, Apple is not even close to 4 trillion. It's down at 3 trillion. It's down significantly for a year to date.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe it was Nvidia. Somebody went to Microsoft.

[Brian McCullough]

No, it was Microsoft.

[Mike Elgin]

Microsoft went to Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft is beating Apple.

[Mike Elgin]

Yep. By a trillion.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. I apologize. Yeah, that's right. Microsoft did the 4T. Apple services business was up 13%. 27.42 billion. Cook said it's growth in the icloud subscriptions and App Store revenue despite the fact that the App Store is under assault in the EU and wearables didn't do so hot. I'm not sure why that is. Apple's wearable unit declined 8.64%. China slightly up, which is important to Apple.

[Mike Elgin]

Is iPad. I'm sorry, is the Vision Pro considered a wearable?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think Vision Pro, they probably.

[Mike Elgin]

Had an artificial bump the previous year which they didn't have this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because that came out last year. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They stopped talking about the return numbers on the Pro. On the Vision Pro too, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a bad sign. Yeah, we knew there were a lot at least in previous reports. Revenue $94 billion now. What was. Microsoft had a good quarter too, didn't they? And Google had a spectacular quarter. So despite the fact that the stock market has been taking a hit in the tech sector, these companies are doing okay. IPhone no longer more than half of Apple's revenue.

[Brian McCullough]

Surprisingly, in both the cases of Google and Microsoft, it's because it's the AI stuff, it's their cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's all about AI, isn't it?

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah. I mean basically killing it in terms of like actually weirdly, Amazon was the one that AWS was not reporting as good numbers as Microsoft and Google did for their cloud AI stuff. But you know the thing that Tim Cook said on the earnings call that'll get them back to a 4 trillion or get them to $4 trillion would be, he said on AI, Apple is quote, very open to M and A. That accelerates our roadmap vis a vis AI. So I mean look, if they come out tomorrow and say hey, we just acquired Perplexity, hey, we just acquired God forbid Anthropic, which they could not do.

[Leo Laporte]

They'Ve got the cash.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah. And Anthropic's raising right now, so this would be the time to go.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think Anthropic's for sale, do you?

[Brian McCullough]

I don't know. And actually don't they? Doesn't Apple have a deeper relationship with Perplexity at the moment?

[Leo Laporte]

Eddie Q said in the testimony in the epic trial that in fact they were looking at acquiring Perplexity. They do have a relationship with Perplexity and it would make sense because what Perplexity primarily is, and I love it by the way I use it, is a search tool and that's what Apple would really like to have, is kind of an AI search tool. I think everybody Google and the real.

[Richard Campbell]

Interface is the phone. Like it's the best fit you could find.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a natural, isn't it?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. They do things in hooking into the phone that Siri doesn't even do in terms of agency and stuff like that. Through Perplexity, that's a great app.

[Richard Campbell]

This is, this is just a number. This is what is the number the investors will accept from Apple to make this happen. It's probably too high.

[Leo Laporte]

According to Mark Gurman who every Sunday writes his rumor newsletter, the Power on newsletter for Bloomberg, Apple has a new team called the Answers Team. This is where John Giandreya apparently went. He was the big acquisition from Google who turned out not to be such a star at Apple and has been kind of pushed aside. He's still doing research. So this is a new team, the Answers Team that will Answers Knowledge and Information Short is Aki Gurman says this group, I'm told is exploring a number of in house AI services with the goal of creating a new chat GPT like search experience.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is the right thing for Apple to do to get the perplexity price down. Right. Like you show you've got x many months to make this deal before I have a competitor and I don't need you anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Number of people from the formerly of the Siri team. The Siri is no longer a candidate to become a chat GPT like anything. Including Robbie Walker. He's now the senior director of the AKI team, reporting to John Gandrea. In fact, I think a number of the Siri people have ended up on this AKI team. You're right. This is, I'm gonna guess it's more like a skunk works where they're doing something maybe with the eye towards bringing the price down on perplexity. That makes sense.

[Brian McCullough]

All the other reporting is about how, I mean, you know, we know that Zuck is hiring everybody he can in AI even offering a billion and a half dollars to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we'll get to that story. Yes, no kidding.

[Brian McCullough]

It's the, what is it? The model team at Apple that apparently has lost so many people in recent times. And the reporting from the information that I did this week on the show was sort of that the talent problem is not just that people would leave Apple, it's that the people that are still. Since no one really knows what Apple's strategy is, that's kind of why they should just pull the trigger and buy somebody. Like if, you know, this is the direction we're going in, then you could probably retain talent even if you don't, you know, increase their salaries and things like that. If you just tell them, okay, this is where we're going, this is what we're gonna do. And people internally don't have that sense yet.

[Richard Campbell]

Apparently on Friday people want to make something and if, you know, give them path to make something, they're gonna go somewhere they can make something.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're trying to, they're trying to keep people in the, in the fold. On the information Reported that on Friday, Tim Cook at an all hands meeting told employees Apple has exciting plans. I can't discuss with its own people.

[Brian McCullough]

You need to read in some of those people really quickly because $300 million is very enticing.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, all of this has to be quite disturbing to Apple. I mean, I'm sorry to Google because Google has always had a privileged relationship with Apple and iPhones. And if Apple is maybe buying Perplexity, maybe re engineering Siri to become a search engine and so on, they're going to have no use.

[Brian McCullough]

But this is also the time because they might lose the contract. Like, you know, build your own search. Now's the time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, because the government won't let you do that anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. This is, by the way, the first time they've had an old hands, apparently in years, according to the information, probably because of leaks, which is why Tim's not completely candid with his own people. He tells the staff, AI is, quote, hours to grab. It's ours to grab hours. O u r s not h o u r s important distinction.

[Richard Campbell]

Now you're trying to grab a train that's whizzing by.

[Leo Laporte]

He says the AI revolution is as big or bigger as the Internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps. I think we'd all agree that. He says, quote, and this is again a leak from the all hands. Bloomberg got this one. Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is very Churchillian. This is sort of. Oh, he just blew it.

[Mike Elgin]

Sort of grab them on the beaches.

[Leo Laporte]

We are grabbing. This is sort of. See, I don't think Churchill would have thrown the sort of in ours to grab. We will make the investment to do it. Hmm. So it'll be interesting. We've rarely been first. He told staffers there was a PC before the Mac. There was a smartphone before the iPhone. There were many tablets before the iPad. There was an MP3 player before the ipod. He's basically saying, yeah, we always have the winning horse. At least not the first horse over the finish line, but we'll win in the long run. He says, we invented the modern versions of these products. And this is how I feel about AI. This is a pep talk. This is not a. This is not a planning meeting. This is him trying to keep everybody happy before they go to work for Zuckerberg.

[Mike Elgin]

But also, if I know Apple, and of course, we all know Apple very well and how they think about things to date. People think of AI chatbots as like, okay, here's a chatbot and here's a search engine. We're going to use the chatbot like it's a search engine, or we're going to use a rag system like Perplexity that's kind of both a search engine and a chap. Apple's, you know, with their name answers, Right? They're going to say they're not going to have this thing that's like, okay, here's a chatbot, here's a personal assistant. It's basically going to be whatever. It's all the above. But it's just going to be a person answering your questions and hopefully they'll make it personalized, keep all the personal data on the phone and so on. And this falls really neatly in with the glasses they've been working on forever and probably won't see till the end of next year. So this is really the killer app. And I think they understand that the killer app is going to be a personal assistant with Omniscience and that knows all about you, that lives on your glasses.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me ask you guys this, because I think part of the reason for this, All Hands, is that I feel like maybe, and I want to know what you guys think. We are on the cusp of a big breakthrough in AI. Like, I don't know if it's ChatGPT5. I don't, you know, I don't know if it's, it's Google, but it feels like we are really, this is the eve, almost the eve of, dare I say it, AGI set. No. You disagree, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

I think we're hitting the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. Is what you're feeling that we're actually.

[Leo Laporte]

We'Re actually as bad as it can get? Is that what you're saying?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we're sort of getting to the point where it's like, okay, we see the limits now. These things are good at some things and they're not good at other things. And get real.

[Leo Laporte]

But don't you, I mean, look at people who are doing vibe coding at this point are saying, hey, I'm not going to have a job in senior software engineers. I'm not going to have a job in a couple of years. This stuff is so good. Google is clearly terrified it's going to lose its hegemony in search. That's why they added these kind of not so good AI, whatever it is garbage to its search results. I think there's a lot of fear in Silicon Valley that chatgpt or Anthropic or somebody is. Or maybe the Chinese, because we're seeing some really strong models from China right now, small and interestingly open weight models from China right now that are in some respects beating the best models we have, the best closed source models we have. We're seeing both ChatGPT and Gemini score gold in the International Math Olympiad. We're seeing better and better benchmarks all the time. You think we're at the bottom of the trough? Yeah, I feel like we're just. This could be the crest of the wave where maybe that's the same thing I Don't know. You disagree, Brian?

[Brian McCullough]

No, I agree with Richard in the sense that, I mean, again, this is all definitions of buzzwords and stuff, so we can debate these things, but if it's AGI that's like going to cure cancer and give us nuclear fusion and maybe kill us all, versus well, if it's the bottom of the trough of disillusionment, you don't necessarily. I'm not one of those people that thinks that AGI is right around the corner, but it could be sort of like a 1996 period when people are like, you know, there's this thing called broadband and three or four years down the road, imagine the things you can do on the web. Like, so the bottom of the trough of disillusionment is the beginning of reality, of right. What the actual where the technology is, but actually gaining traction in actual mainstream ways. It's not just people dialing into aol, it is people saying, oh, you know, you can run entire businesses on the web. You can do like, look at all the things that we can do with telecommunications. It's actually the rubber hitting the road. Even without GPT5 becoming self aware.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know if GPT, let's.

[Richard Campbell]

Face it, the rate of improvement is slowing, Right. Like they're not getting. Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like we're also seeing some hints of self improving AI. I'm hearing that phrase as well, which would be a hockey stick if that happens. Mike, what do you cover this in your machine intelligence newsletter?

[Mike Elgin]

What do you think? I mean, I think we're on the brink of a cultural transformation that results from the ubiquitous application of AI.

[Leo Laporte]

More like what Brian was talking about with that happened with the Internet where it's becoming ubiquitous now.

[Mike Elgin]

Another, another analogy would be electricity, right? So you had electrical systems being developed in the 1830s and 40s, and for a long time it was the telegraph. And then eventually cities started getting lights that didn't have, you know, dangerous gas lines going under the city to power the lights. And you know, by the time the revolution was happening, it was something of a banality. The revolution was a toaster and you know, an alarm clock that, you know, that you didn't have to wind.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, like that. But if you were, if you were a woman in the Appalachians, in the Texas Hill country, if you were a woman in the Texas Hill country, the Appalachians, who was going three or four times a day to drag gallons of water back to the house for your family or hand washing your clothes in a stream, electricity was a massive Revolution. It changed your life and your future.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, and then. And I think that's going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Much more than a lamp.

[Mike Elgin]

Right? But I mean if you, if you think about the potential for what AI can do for an entrepreneur, right, A one, a one or two person business, right. It's. That is a real, like a major thing. They can do marketing. They can do. They, they can do marketing in 100 languages. They can, you know, there's so applications for AI for small businesses that, that they are the Appalachian housewives of our era.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Mike Elgin]

Because it's. Their whole lives are going to be. They're going to be able to do things they previously couldn't even have imagined.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, put me down for. I think we are about to see a phase change and a sudden shift, a paradigm shift. Something hockey stick like. You guys all think it's going to be incremental and, and it's going to become more ubiquitous. I feel like we're on the edge of a big unpredictable phase change. That's just my. It's just a feeling probably, I mean.

[Mike Elgin]

If, if we do, it'll probably have something to do with agentic AI sort.

[Leo Laporte]

Of operating and self improving AI and models and tools beyond large language models. I think that their people are working very hard and in many cases not publicly on new developments that could very well change everything. Kind of like the discovery of the atomic bomb or.

[Brian McCullough]

It doesn't have to be uniform either in the sense that like the things that have been moving so fast just in the last six months have been like around video, where now we're used to, oh, you can create five seconds of really impressive video around anything and then you stitch it together and you can make 30 seconds and then three minutes and then like things like video. I feel like in 18 months it's over. Like you can do well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, look what Z3 can do. Is that not almost a phase change? I mean, that's. I think we're getting a little complacent because it was a couple of years ago, everybody had seven fingers and Will Smith's spaghetti was all over the place. And in just a couple of years, massive improvements. My feeling is we're actually about to shift even into a whole new gear. But maybe that's.

[Benito]

I have a question.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito is skeptical.

[Benito]

I have a question about.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you calling, what are you calling it? Vibe.

[Benito]

Futurism. Vibe. Futurist.

[Leo Laporte]

Vibe. Futurist.

[Benito]

My question is, do you think Veo is going to be free forever? Because how much do you think that's actually going to cost when they're going to actually start charging people for that? Do you think it's really going to be free forever?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think another thing we don't know, first of all, the real cost as we know of AI is in training, not in use.

[Brian McCullough]

Okay, not anymore. Not anymore. Inference is now the. It has become the most expensive part of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, really interesting. That's a big shift.

[Richard Campbell]

And the best programmers I know utilizing these tools, the guys that are doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Are running out of credits.

[Richard Campbell]

They're doing a six week sprint in three days. Like they're doing tremendous levels of productivity and they are spending thousands a month. And you know what? It's worth it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Also not enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They're still getting even with as much as they're spending. They're still getting cut off because it's still costing the company more than what the company is charging them.

[Benito]

See, this is this, this right there. This is the problem. I don't think this is never going to be free forever. So how is this going to actually make economic?

[Leo Laporte]

First of all, I don't think you could predict this because there's a huge financial incentive for these companies to come up with more efficient ways to do this. And I think the Chinese companies actually have found small models, have found ways to do this with less.

[Richard Campbell]

To be clear, the Chinese have never done anything efficiently. They don't actually, they don't need.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no incentive for them.

[Brian McCullough]

But also, Benito, it can be free. For things can be free for a very long time. If the people offering them for free believe that this is a generational land grab where I need to train the filmmakers, the coders, the whomever to use my tools. It'll be free for as long as it takes before they have to. Once they have their moat, then. Then they'll charge you Uber.

[Leo Laporte]

Uber rides were way below cost for almost a decade. You know, sometimes to acquire a market. And the upside, look, maybe this is all gonna crash and burn, but the upside, if, if AGI, if ASI, if really capable AIs come down the road, is so big that a lot of VCs, a lot of companies, look how much money.

[Benito]

So it's the drug dealer. So it's the drug dealer model. Your first hit's free.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're such a skeptic. I surround myself with skeptics because I've got a feeling. A feeling I can't hide.

[Brian McCullough]

You know what, Benito? The best test is the mom test for things like, well, my mom will never have an iPhone or a Smartphone. And then one day your mom calls you from the iPhone. Or my accountant will never bill me from the web or have a website. And then now your accountant does everything virtually. So the day that your mom has a Claude subscription, a ChatGPT subscription of $2050 a month, that's when you know that the jig is up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't think that'll happen. And I don't think that that's. I think that's an old way of looking at things. Mass. Mass adoption. I don't know if this is a mass adoption product at all.

[Brian McCullough]

I think the.

[Mike Elgin]

Sure it is.

[Brian McCullough]

Answers. $20 a month for answers.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. I mean, Yeah. I pay $25 a month for a better Google search for Cogi. Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

You're pressing against the other, which is that the Internet free model has been unraveling for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

This is an amplifier of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, we have to take a break because this Internet is not free. Your attention is all you have to pay. It's great to have you guys talking me off the ledge. Mike Elgin is MachineSociety. AI talks about this every single day. It's fantastic. And you do a show with Emily Forlini, who we love. And of course, he's also in Oaxaca getting ready for another gastro nomad adventure.

[Mike Elgin]

This is true.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll talk about that in just a little bit. Great to have you. Brian McCullough with a new home. He's part of the morning brew crew at the Tech Brew Ride Home. Now, you don't have to change your subscription if you subscribe to the tech. Subscribe to the tech.

[Brian McCullough]

Absolutely not. All that happened was the art changed. The name that I say at the beginning of this show changes. The music's the same. The advertisers should be getting better, but, yeah, it's just the same thing I've done for almost eight years now. Over 2100 episodes.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Wow.

[Brian McCullough]

Just Tech Brew ride home instead of tech meme.

[Leo Laporte]

Right home.

[Brian McCullough]

And by the way, love tech meme. Love Gabe, love all the people there. Just potentially a new audience for me to reach.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. Now, you like this guy named Axel. And I ain't talking Axl Rose, I'll tell you that right now. It's great to hear this, Brian. You deserve the success. Also, our dear friend Richard Campbell, who is just off the boat.

[Richard Campbell]

And staring episode 1000 of Run as in the face, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, that's exciting.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, podcasting, I think, is going to be big pretty soon. So one of these days, we're in the right position here. Actually, that's one of our. One of our stories. Today we'll talk about the new kinds of podcasting, but first, a word from our sponsor. It's My Little Thingst Canary. See this little doohickey there sitting on my desk? It's about the size of a external USB drive. It's connected. In fact, if you saw this, you'd say, well, you know, that just looks like you got something connected to the Internet there. It's got a Ethernet connection and power, but, oh, no, to you, it may look like a little box, but to the bad guy, that looks like a Windows Share. Oh, you know what? I'm going to make this one SharePoint. Let's invite the bad guys in. This is the interface to the Thinx Canary. This allows you to take this. It's a honeypot, and make it anything you want right now. Windows Server 2019, Office file share. 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Look for places to place ransomware, time bombs to exfiltrate emails or customer records. How embarrassing is that? These things, canaries are so easy. You choose a profile. You saw how easy that was. Then you register it with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. And the notifications can be any way you want. Your things. Canary can send you a text message, an email it can use, Syslog it, you web hook, Slack, there's an API. You can even create your own interfaces. You can have them all. Then you just sit back and relax. Attackers who breached your network or malicious insiders. Any other adversaries cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your thinks Canary or those things. Canary Lure files. I love this thing. Big banks might have dozens of them. You should probably have one for every segment for sure. If you. I'll give you an example. Visit Canary Tools Twit Canary tools twit get five of them for $7,500 a year. That includes your own hosted console, your upgrades, your support, your maintenance, all the alerts in any way you want. And if you use the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box, you're gonna get 10% off for life. But if you say, you know, I wanna try before I buy, you can. They have a very generous 2 month money back guarantee for a full refund. 60 days. I have to tell you though, we've been doing these ads for eight years. And all that time that refund has never been claimed. Nobody's ever asked for the money back. Cause once you get a thing scanary, you go, God, how do I live without it? Visit Canary Tools Twit Enter the code Twit in the how did you hear about us? Box. Canary Tools Twit don't forget that offer code Twit. You need this thing. You really do. Thank you. Thanks for long term support. By the way, the DOJ is still going after Apple. Not one more Apple story. They sued Apple last year saying you illegally monopolize the smartphone market. Apple says what do you what Apple. Apple says this threatens. It's a dangerous precedent. And allowing the government to take a heavy hand in designing people's technology. The filing this week by Apple responded to every point the doj made. In its complaint, the DOJ says Apple stifles the success of super apps or apps that offer multiple services on one platform. Maybe like Epic or Microsoft wanting to do a game store, which Apple won't let them do. The company says our rules allow and support such apps. Is that true, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think so.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think so. They say a multitude are available right now on the App Store. I don't think. Not the Microsoft Xbox Game Store, not the Steam Store, not the Epic Store. Apple also denied the DOJ's allegation that it blocks cloud streaming games. Says, oh, no, we allow game streaming over the web and in the App Store anyway. I'm not going to go through all the points. Apple is simply not a monopolist. Apple said it also, it says we don't. How can you even say we have a monopoly? The only way the DOJ could do this is by creating a separate category from smartphones called performance smartphones, which Apple says does not correspond to economic reality. I think they've got a good point there. In order to make it monopoly.

[Richard Campbell]

This is not how you go after Apple. Honestly, it's like you run out of good idea, so you're working your way through the bad ideas.

[Leo Laporte]

The lawsuit heads to the point that I'm sure Apple would like it or prefer it not to, which is the discovery phase. It is in discovery that we learned so much about how Apple works behind the scenes in the Apple Epic lawsuit. If ever Apple could get out of that, I'm sure they would. But here that. Here it comes. And that'll be good for us. We'll have.

[Brian McCullough]

I was going to say that's only good for us.

[Leo Laporte]

Gives us things to say. Yeah. We learned so much stuff last time. All right. We talked about Apple's earnings. Alphabet also had a good quarter. Actually, Alphabet had an exceptional quarter.

[Richard Campbell]

When you can't attribute to tariffs.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's right. They're a services company. Their overall revenue, 14% growth, which beat Wall Street's guess by quite a bit. Revenue, $96.4 billion. Advertising revenue was 9.8 billion. A big jump. Cloud revenue up to 13.6 billion. Very, very successful. What was the profit? It was something.

[Mike Elgin]

28.2 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

That's just for 12 weeks.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's more than $2 billion a week in profit after tax profit.

[Mike Elgin]

They made 10 billion in YouTube advertising. Advertising up 13%.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing. Yeah, but YouTube is really, I think what's safe to say at this point has become the dominant way people Consume video? Yes. Over tv, over cable, over everything.

[Brian McCullough]

I mean the, all of the numbers bear that out. Like you have a story on the, on the spreadsheet here about like, oh, this is how young people watch video now or present. But that, that doesn't even matter. Like they beat. Remember when, when Netflix used to say our real competition is not hbo, it's video games, it's your real life, it's your spouse. You know, like YouTube is just killing everybody in that metric of like if you're going to spend time like it, it's now YouTube and basically TikTok, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Brian McCullough]

Like if in terms of time spent not doing something functional, just sitting back and consuming.

[Leo Laporte]

From the financial times. Young people now turn on YouTube in the UK above any channel on their television sets. This is the UK's media watchdog reporting not even YouTube. One in five of those born after 2010 Gen Alpha turned to YouTube first on their TV. US old folks, people over 55 doubled their time on the service.

[Brian McCullough]

That's their growing demo by far. Old people, oh, 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because we didn't watch YouTube, because we didn't have YouTube.

[Brian McCullough]

We, you know, hey listen, last time, last time my parents were in our house, I realized my dad was a full on YouTube convert.

[Leo Laporte]

Kidding.

[Brian McCullough]

For the reason that he became an eBay convert 20 years ago because he loves 1970s era stereos. And there are multiple creators on YouTube with millions of followers that have channels devoted just to 1970s era audio equipment.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the real secret of YouTube. The way they beat the networks is niche, niche programming. I mean they are able to touch everybody's particular interest.

[Richard Campbell]

Remembering the complaint with cable with too many, you know, 500 channels on Try 5 billion. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, across all age groups in the uk, now the second most watched TV service behind the BBC ahead of itv. Part of the reason Ofcom, the British regulator is looking at this is because they of course want to regulate it. It Australia has now and this has got to be controversial, they have a teen social media ban. YouTube was exempted. No longer in Australia, if you are under, what is it, 16, you can't watch YouTube. How's that going to work?

[Richard Campbell]

Good luck with that.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, they also YouTube and Google generally they're using AI now to even if you lie about your age, they're going to try to catch you and change the content you can view.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. According to the Australian government, the Internet regulator, their survey found 37% of minors reported harmful content on YouTube. Is YouTube a threat to young people?

[Brian McCullough]

Oh, Hell Yeah. With an 11 year old and a 9 year old. A thousand percent.

[Leo Laporte]

What is. So what is it? They're not just watching Cocomelon?

[Brian McCullough]

Listen, man, they might start there. You know how it works.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And then. Is it the recommendation engine that's a problem.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, but like. And Even there's the YouTube Kids app filter. Yeah, but I think I've told the story on this pod before. But you know, one day I'm walking through the room and I can't remember what they were into, you know, bluey or whatever it was at the time. And the Bluey family's in a car going through a McDonald's drive through and the drive thru is on fire and there's gunshots and I. Oh God.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you mentioned that. That's right. Yeah. That's AI slop.

[Brian McCullough]

Right, well, but this was like two or three years ago. Yeah, like they had a bluey. Yeah, no, but that's the point.

[Leo Laporte]

It all starts with baby shark and it just goes downhill.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, or you know, they're all into watching people play Minecraft or whatever, video games, play along stuff and then you get the. Well, the next influencer. The next influencer that is cursing and then the next one that is, you know, like. Yeah, there's no way you can.

[Leo Laporte]

YouTube used to demonetize you if you had F words within the first few minutes. They backed down even on that. Maybe they figure we're just gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

What's happening is the ad revenues come back. Like the bigger thing with YouTube is the adpocalypse is finally over.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it? Yeah, obviously that number you told me. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

A few years ago there was this, there was a couple of events where the most influential podcast, most interesting youtubers did inappropriate things for views and the ads ran screaming because they're. Their customers freaked out and, and ads changed utterly for a while. A lot of YouTubers dropped out, the stress went way up, the incomes went way down and that's winding down. The YouTubers have changed, the formats have changed, the number of products is diversified and the, the new filtering tools work in a different way. And so the ad revenue is flowing back in. And so YouTube's reducing the constraints and encouraging more things because they need to place more ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Jay, who is ironically watching us on YouTube right now, says, as a parent, I can, I can definitely say YouTube shorts are 100% not regulated or monitored. And that's how kids get around the age restrictions on videos. So that's an issue. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, I'm calling time on It I want Australian parents to know we have their backs. YouTube responds. By the way, the ban will take effect in December. YouTube responds by saying we're. We're watched by nearly 3/4 of Australians in the age 13 to 15 bracket. 3, 75%. We should not be classified as social media because our main activity is hosting videos. They were exempt as a video hosting.

[Richard Campbell]

Company, not a make them to make them liable for the content they show. If you're a video hoster, you know television stations can't show this stuff. So give them the same rules. If that's what you're going to be, then follow the rules. You've been using social media as the COVID to not have to follow the rules. Now you're calling yourself broadcast.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we're not. YouTube says our position remains clear. YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free high quality content increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media. It is true that a lot of the content is consumed on the. In the living room, on the big screen tv.

[Richard Campbell]

No. I love the idea of them being regulated like a broadcaster. Let's see how they like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the reason broadcast at least in the us, I don't know what it is in Australia. The reason broadcasters are regulated in the US is because they use the public's airwaves.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But they historically never been regulated for content. And this is where our problem lies. Right.

[Mike Elgin]

The elephant in the living room of course is TikTok, which I assume is treated as a social network and that's really the alternative. You mentioned that. What did you say? Three quarters of Australian youths are using YouTube but the other quarter are probably on TikTok primarily. So TikTok is vastly worse for kids because it's just such crack cocaine. Just go swiping through.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's crack for all of us.

[Mike Elgin]

On YouTube at least you can go and you can learn how to fix the sync and people use it, they search for content they're looking for, whereas on TikTok they don't do that so much. So I think the main use of TikTok is just let the algorithm control my brain for the next two hours. Whereas YouTube is only like that for some people some of the time.

[Leo Laporte]

The law passed last year only requires, quote, reasonable steps by social media platforms to keep out Australians younger than 16 or face a fine of 49.5 million Australian dollars which Google could easily pay given their making $2 billion a week. Yeah. Is it per person and it's per offense.

[Richard Campbell]

So that could be per person.

[Leo Laporte]

That could add up.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The problem is, of course, we don't have a good way to do age verification. Google says it's working on a way to do it just by looking at your head.

[Brian McCullough]

Now there was a whole bunch of other signals that they were. Again, they're throwing it to AI to say, okay, sure, you gave us a birth date, but then like what you're watching, like what else your account is doing. We're going to.

[Leo Laporte]

But it might be sufficient to satisfy this Australian rule, which is. Well, we're doing what we can. YouTube said it's beginning to roll out age estimation technology in the US to identify teen users. Let me see if this is from.

[Mike Elgin]

They're also offering up the ability to verify your age, showing our details.

[Leo Laporte]

So it says if the new system incorrectly identifies you as under 18, you'll be given the option to verify your age with a credit card, government ID or selfie. So they're not asking kids to verify.

[Richard Campbell]

No, they're only asking. They're finding a way to get. Regulators should not require them to check everybody's id.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Which should be better than the mechanism to say, we're going to do it automatically. It doesn't work. Then we'll check your id.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

That way we don't check everybody's id, which is what they really don't want to do. This is expensive.

[Leo Laporte]

So how so? It says in this TechCrunch article. YouTube isn't sharing specifics about the signal it's using to infer a user's age. Notes that it will look at some data like YouTube activity and the longevity of a user's account. Yeah, if your account's more than 20 years old, you're definitely overrated.

[Richard Campbell]

Probably good.

[Leo Laporte]

The new system. Well, this is interesting. The new system will only apply to signed in users. Oh, I didn't know this. Signed out users already can't access age restricted content. Brian, do you have any insight into how they're going to do this?

[Brian McCullough]

No, because, I mean, isn't there's. It's, it's been like a wave around the world of this age restricted stuff. You know, in Britain, the, the porn stuff and the, you got to use VPNs and, and, and state by state in the United States or whatever. It is weird or not weird, but I guess it's just sort of the accumulation of time. But the fact that all around the world this sort of. Hey, let's, let's go ahead and start age verifying and keeping the kids off of the socials or at Least throwing sort of, you know, soft padded walls around the kids on the socials. Like it's, it's really happened in the last six months.

[Leo Laporte]

But of course, nobody's better than a 16 year old or a 14 year old at figuring out how to get around these restrictions. In fact, according to Ars Technic, a VPN use soars in the UK after their age verification laws go into effect. Proton says our signups in the UK increased 1,400%. Is that sufficient to use a VPN? I guess you could say, well, I'm not coming in from the uk, I'm coming in from Rome or somewhere. Right.

[Mike Elgin]

You pick a country that has the laws that you, that you want to be governed by. Italy actually requires parental consent for anyone.

[Leo Laporte]

So Rome would be bad.

[Mike Elgin]

Okay, yeah, Rome would be bad.

[Richard Campbell]

But better pick an English speaking language because even an AI could figure out, hey, you're only watching.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, it'll be one of those.

[Brian McCullough]

Things from China like how Tuvalu or whatever that, that island nation is that.

[Leo Laporte]

Has made all the.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, yeah. So they'll, they'll become the VPN center of the world because, because they'll be like that.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm watching from Barbados, man. Yeah, I'm, I'm a 21 year old. Barbadan Windscribe VPN posted a screenshot on X claiming to show a spike in new subscribers. Adguard VPN claimed they've seen a two and a half times increase in install rates since the law went into effect. A week ago Friday, Proton said, just a few minutes after the Online Safety act went into effect, we are. Signups surged by 1,400%.

[Richard Campbell]

When did they put age restrictions on VPNs?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what China does. Well, no, China just bans them outright, don't they? As does Russia. Nord says there's been a 1,000% increase in purchases. So. Yep.

[Mike Elgin]

It is an interesting problem. There's a global demand for age verification and you know, you can do, you can do all kinds of things, but ultimately, you know, 12 year olds and 11 year olds and 10 year olds don't have credit cards, driver's licenses or ID or anything like that. May they have library cards maybe. So it's a difficult problem, but I think ultimately they're gonna, you know, it's gonna be AI we're talking about how AI is just gonna be everywhere. I think this is one of the things that AI is gonna have to, to be a big part of just that'll look at you and decide how Old you are.

[Leo Laporte]

Ironically, given how much of an accelerationist I am, based on my earlier comments, these are exactly the things AI should not be allowed to do. Right? Oh, well, yeah. Let's take a little break. More to come. You're watching this week in Tech with Mike Elgin, Brian McCullough, and of course our great friend Richard Campbell. If you haven't seen his 3 1/2 hour PC build from last week, what he did in the club, you gotta be in the club to see this stuff. By the way, we thank our club members. We stream all these club events live on eight different platforms. YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, linkedIn, Facebook and Kik. In fact, we're streaming right now on those platforms. But after the PC build ended, then we put it into the private Twit plus feed for club members. If you're not a club member, you can get it just by going to Twitter, TV Club TWiT. And then a month after that, 30 days hence, it goes public again on our TWiT YouTube channel for all the 13 year olds to watch. So thank you for doing that, Richard. Is it working?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah, the machine's fine. It'll replace this machine, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. It looked like a pretty nice PC. You're building.

[Richard Campbell]

Great. It was a great machine in that. And that fractal north case is gorgeous. Just a beautiful work of art.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it around somewhere?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's, yeah. I'll dig it out after the day for the next.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it light up?

[Richard Campbell]

Not really. No. I'm not that guy. Right. I like the, I like the wood trim. I like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like wood. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

There's no external bays because that's not a thing anymore. I'm not putting a DVD drive in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a monolith. A wooden monolith.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a fan. It's all fans and cooling to keep it quiet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Nice. Yeah, very nice. Thank you for doing it.

[Richard Campbell]

Even though we had to lift the motherboard out at one point and put it back in again.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How did the pasting go?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, the pacing was fine. That's, that's an easy part. And I had a, I got the kit from, from Arctic, so I had a little board.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that makes it easy. Wipe it on and template.

[Richard Campbell]

We had a great discussion in the, in the chat about what's the right pasting technique. It's like not. Did you thick smooth it out?

[Leo Laporte]

Did you baptize it with a little drop of some Jameson or something?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. You know, I, I, I mean, I'M not saying I'm not above threatening a machine with a squirt gun. Like, if you don't behave, things are gonna get hard for you. But I, I, I think, I think they called me on the channel at one point. I'm the Bob Ross of PC builds, because I just don't. There's only happy little accidents here. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it was also calming and beautiful, just like Micah's crafting corner. Some of the stuff we do in the club is very peaceful, some of it not.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I think I hit the style that the crowd, the crowd expects.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, no, everybody loved it. I'm sorry I missed it. I got called away for, yeah, I.

[Richard Campbell]

Think about an hour or so. And I, I said to Anthony, it's like, kind of glad we didn't wait for Leo on this one.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I told you, I told him not wait, not to wait. Go right ahead. And I would get there as soon as I can. I thought you'd be done.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's what I figured by the time we.

[Leo Laporte]

So I didn't even check. I had no idea you were still there three hours later.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, thank you for doing that. And if you're not a member of the club, you're missing some great content, some really fun stuff. Our show today, brought to you by ZipRecruiter. The best way to hire. It can be overwhelming to have too many options in life. Such as? Well, when you're trying to figure out what TV show or movie to stream, or you're on vacation and you've got all those sites to see. Well, the same applies if you're a business owner who's hiring. It can be overwhelming to have too many candidates to sort through. But you're in luck. ZipRecruiter now gives you the power to proactively find and connect with the best ones quickly. How? Through their innovative resume database. And right now, you can try it for [e-mail] TWIT ZipRecruiter's resume database uses advanced filtering to quickly hone in the top candidates for your roles. You can see a candidate you're really interested in and then unlock their contact info instantly. Did you know 320,000 new resumes are added to ZipRecruiter every single month? That means you can reach more potential hires and then sort through them and fill those roles faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Skip the candidate overload. Instead, streamline your hiring with ZipRecruiter see why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to our exclusive web address ziprecruiter.com twit right now to try it for free. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com Twitter Twitch, ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. And we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Couple of AI stories. Amazon, it has been discovered by the information, has agreed to pay the New York Times $20 million a year for its content. I think these are good story. I think this is. I'm sure other AI companies may not agree, but this way content creators get somewhat compensated for their work, Right? It's only about 1% of the time's revenue, but every 1% counts.

[Brian McCullough]

That's actually not insignificant.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's a good point.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, and it's good and it's good precedent.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Brian McCullough]

If you're at a company and you bring in 1% of revenue on one deal, that's you.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's just one AI company. This is the first time Amazon has made an agreement with a publisher. It's the times first AI licensing deal. I didn't realize that. I thought for sure they must have other deals. In fact, they are suing OpenAI, right?

[Brian McCullough]

Microsoft, they're the ones that have put the flag down in terms of suing in specific cases.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Your company, Axel Springer, your new company has a deal with OpenAI, as does news Corp. Reddit signed a deal with Google, right, for I think $20 million also. Maybe that's the new going rate. I have to think it's valuable to these companies, these AI companies and at this point they're writing checks.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, hey, by the way, Reddit, Reddit, I mean this is not, I'm not an investing sort of dude, but like have you seen what Reddit stock has been doing and their revenue, like they have been, I think doubling revenue in the last year since they started getting on that, that sort of AI licensing train.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they've done their every increased 78% to $500 million. That's year over year, daily active uniques increased 21%. I'm a big Reddit fan. I use Reddit like crazy. But one of the things they did that was really smart, they created their own search tool. And this is in response to the fact that Reddit users have for a long time known that if you added site Reddit.com to a Google search, you often got better than Just a general search of the web, especially if you're looking for expertise like which cough syrup to buy.

[Brian McCullough]

It's not only that, because we sort of alighted over this when we were talking about Alphabet and Google and got onto the YouTube thing. But, you know, so so far Google slash Alphabet has survived the AI moment without it affecting their revenues. But it's kind of because they might be in the act of abandoning the web. Because if you have a cloud side and you're just providing answers, you don't necessarily need the web to provide those answers anymore, and you can still put advertising around it. But to Reddit's point, if you're Reddit, you're probably seeing your traffic from Google search and things like that declining, so you might as well build your own search product.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and here comes Digg, right? Which is going to be an AI kind of version of Reddit. Kevin Rose, and ironically, the creator of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, bought the Digg name back and they're starting to create a new digg.com digg preceded Reddit. I think a lot of us think that Alexis and Steve Huffman copied Digg to some degree, creating Reddit. I don't know if Reddit feels threatened by Digg, but Digg will be AI first. So maybe now's the time for Reddit to cash in on these AI deals.

[Mike Elgin]

And by the way, you brought up Amazon. So Amazon's CEO is sort of getting in hot water for saying that he thinks there should be advertising in the conversations you have with Alexa.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good.

[Mike Elgin]

Like the Truman Show. Remember Truman's wife would do ads like when she was talking to him, that sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

You'd be like, Truman, you know, your clothes are brighter than ever. Thanks to Tide.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly, exactly. And also, and the other bit of. So that was bizarre. I think that's the best reason yet to never use Alexa. That's just awful that they.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I've used it and it is awful. It's not great. We got it somehow. I don't know how we got it.

[Benito]

But this is how they're going to keep your AIs cheap, by the way, people, this is how they're going to keep it cheap.

[Leo Laporte]

The head of Perplexity said, yeah, one of the reasons we created Comet browser is because now we're going to have lots of, lots of signals for advertising. Right?

[Mike Elgin]

And speaking of things, you. You do use. Leo, did you hear that Amazon is acquiring bai?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, where did I throw my bee? So this was that little device that I'VE been wearing since January. They announced at CES in January and immediately picked it up because it was only 50 bucks, no subscription, which should have been a red flag. Right?

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That should have told me right there. They're. They're. They're angling for an acquisition. But the idea was because this thing recorded everything it heard for six months. It recorded all my conversations, everybody, everything. Every day. At the end of the day, I'd get a list of things I'd agreed to, you know, to do. List items, a kind of sycophantic but fun summary of how my day went. You could ask it questions. I made it sound like J.K. simmons. So it was kind of a gruff AI. I loved it. But as soon as I saw that Amazon bought it, I thought, I don't want this. Six months of my life. I mean, this is Alexa on steroids, right? This is everything I've said for six months going into that, including, by the way, one of the things they do at the end of every day is say, hey, we learned 23 new facts about you. Would you look at them to make sure we got it right? It had more than 2,500 facts about.

[Mike Elgin]

Me, which Amazon just bought. The facts about you.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I deleted it immediately, but you will be glad to know that it hasn't slowed me down. I am now wearing two new pins, and I have a third on the way, so I'm. I. So here's. Okay. AI accelerationist again.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I truly believe that the. One of the most va. There'll be many, many uses of AI in my life. I already use it all the time, but one of the most useful would be an agent working for me that listens to everything that goes on. Here's everything I agree to, and so forth. Forth. And helps me in my life. Kind of like her in that movie. That helps me, you know, negotiate, navigate my life, remember things that happened. And so that's why I got the B. When I got rid of the B, I got this thing from. This is called the Limitless AI Pin. Kind of does the same thing. Records everything. Bullet points, it analyzes it. Unlike the bee, it saves the audio. So they say, you really should ask people before you wear this in their presence. Don't worry, it can't hear you guys because I'm wearing headphones, so it only hears me. This is called the Omi. I kind of like this one. Same idea. But this has an open API, so there are literally more than a thousand apps for it. You can have Steve Jobs be The AI assistant that advises you based on what this thing hears or Machiavelli or sounds like. I don't know.

[Brian McCullough]

There's no way that's a stereotypical Italian voice. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, you decided that you wanted to run the world. How can I help you? So anyway, I think. And then I've got one more coming called Fieldy. So this is a category that is now very crowded.

[Mike Elgin]

Okay, so. So, Lee, are you going to want to throw all those away because. Have you heard about the Brilliant Labs halo Smart glasses?

[Leo Laporte]

I have those over here. Wait a minute.

[Mike Elgin]

Oh, you have the old ones, but the new ones.

[Leo Laporte]

I have the old ones.

[Mike Elgin]

The next ones are going to work like the bai, plus they're going to have multimodal AI. So they're going to hoover up information through the camera. So these things, these things are going to cost 300 bucks. Only they say they have an agentic memory system called Narrative that collects data from the. From the camera and the mics, and it creates a knowledge base just like the BAI does.

[Leo Laporte]

So these are the original ones and I really didn't like it very much.

[Mike Elgin]

The original. Original ones were a monocle.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Yeah. I didn't get the monocle. You could see the prism here that reflects the heads up display. I don't like this. A heads up display should not have a prism in it. It should just. No. Somehow bounce laser light off the screen.

[Mike Elgin]

But that company's coming a long way fast. So they.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And they have an open API as well. So this is really a development platform like the omi. So I think that that's probably pretty promising. I agree. I want it.

[Brian McCullough]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

This was Gordon Bell's idea. You know, the, the digital equipment guru. Right. He want. He wore, when I interviewed him, a little device around his neck that was doing the same thing, was recording everything. And he came up with the idea. His wife, Gwen Bell, who was wonderful, got Alzheimer's and he was trying to find a way to help her kind of remember things. And I know I'm getting Alzheimer's at some point if I live long enough. So both my parents have it. It. So I'm just trying to record everything now. Now so I could say, hey, what did I do last week?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, but that's the thing about the Brilliant Labs glasses. The next version is that they have this NOAA multimodal AI agent that will basically, you have conversations with your glasses about and it will incorporate the stuff that it's harvesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's very promising. I don't know what the form factor will be Johnny Ivey. Yeah. This is not a good look, is it?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. You look like. You look like Harry S. Truman.

[Leo Laporte]

The vox stops here. I think there will be though a wearable. I don't think it'll be a pin ultimately. Although apparently what Jony I've doing for OpenAI might be something like this. We don't know.

[Mike Elgin]

It's going to be glasses. It's going to be glasses.

[Leo Laporte]

It should be glasses. Just due to the success of the ray ban made at ray bans, which I know you're a big fan of.

[Mike Elgin]

But check this out, Leo. Here's the craziest thing about the brilliant labs Halo smart glasses. They're going to have something called called Vibe mode. So you can vibe code apps for the glasses while wearing them by talking.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love it. Yeah. Maybe it'll be for me like those pins. I have a couple of those pins. I could just wear a few of these glasses at the same time.

[Mike Elgin]

I would recommend that you're like Harry.

[Brian McCullough]

Truman with Flavor Flav.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a big clock. Yeah. I don't know. I'm all in on this stuff.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't think it's hype, I don't think it's bs. I mean I think it could be. I don't think it's known yet. It could flop completely. We've been through three or four AI winners. It could be another one. But if it's, if it hits, this is going to be incredible. And I'm, I want it, I want to be in on it.

[Mike Elgin]

That's why I think that the, the, the earth changing effective AI won't be because we have super intelligence. It will be because we have ourselves plugged into it. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Completely. It needs to train on our lives, right?

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Or maybe not train. Maybe that's more like a rag. That's context for its existing training. I don't know. I don't know enough about it to know if it's going to take off, but I want to believe. I think that's the problem.

[Brian McCullough]

We sort of touched on this obliquely for a second. But like what's the ultimate business model for this? Are you paying? Is my mom paying 20 to 50amonth for a subscription?

[Leo Laporte]

Is that enough?

[Brian McCullough]

Is it free but ad supported or third option? Both. So they're getting you coming and going?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is where there is an opportunity for Apple because believe it or not, Apple's kind of made the privacy promise. They're certainly marketing on the privacy promise. If they could come up with something that is an Apple service. I already pay Apple. I don't even know. It's a lot of money for Apple One if they could come up with an Apple service that they could say, look, it's private. We don't share this with anybody. We don't put ads in it. I think that's worth a hundred bucks a month, maybe 500 bucks a month. It's worth a lot. And I think the usefulness will have to be proven. But there's the potentials there.

[Brian McCullough]

Was it Richard that said that he thinks the idea of everything has to be free? I think we're through the looking glass.

[Leo Laporte]

We know it's not. We know it's not.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, but what I'm saying is people are comfortable now. If it's giving me answers for everything in my life, I'm willing to pay 50 bucks for that.

[Leo Laporte]

People pay for the Wall Street Journal. Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's got expense, paywall. The, the whole if you're not paying for the product, you are. The product thing has finally sunk in.

[Leo Laporte]

People get it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so more and more people, you know, even young people look at a given product and go, oh, and I'm not paying for this. So how are you exploiting me? Like they're, they're at least looking at whether I'm going to spend money or not. But it's like we won't use a product that's free because they know they're being exploited.

[Brian McCullough]

And mentioning the vibe coders and them keeping it on, you know, 247 if it's, if it's making you money. Leah was mentioning the Wall Street Journal, but any, any of those, you know, Wall street newsletters for years that cost you thousands, they make you money. They, if it makes you money, you can pay whatever is above.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, but, but if you look at the chat companies, the AI chatbots, they're making money in multiple ways that people don't even know about. So let's say you're a paid user of Perplexity, which Leo, I know you are. I am too. So they take our subscription revenue. They also have paid prioritization and enhanced, what do they call it, Branding for partners. So they partner with companies, deliver those companies, results in your answers.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's kind of like advertising.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes. And then like OpenAI is actually trying to get micropayments when they suggest something and then there's an ad at the top or there's a link at the top and they go and you buy the product.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to be careful that this is what inshidified Google though, right? Yep. This is why I pay 25 bucks for Coggy.

[Mike Elgin]

Right, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I didn't. It actually ruined Google.

[Mike Elgin]

Full disclosure. My son works at Kagi and so. But. But yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

That's more disclosure. His boss is going to be on Intelligent Machines on Wednesday. Vlad.

[Mike Elgin]

Fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, fantastic. I'm really curious. I was a fan of Neva before this, which was a similar paid ad free search. I accepted just as you said, Richard. I wasn't going to get free search that wouldn't be inside. So I thought I'm going to pay for it. Niva was one of the first to have AI results. It was, I thought very good. They pivoted because they said we can't compete against Google. But times have changed. They might have pivoted too soon. We'll talk to Vlad on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines. That should be interesting.

[Mike Elgin]

I mean it's part of, just to. Speaking of machidification, it's part of the problem with AI chatbots. So one of the things that they do is they go to open access scientific and other types of websites that provide ad free content of very high quality and they are hitting them so hard with their, with their spiders. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well we're in that phase, aren't we now?

[Mike Elgin]

Yes. So that actually makes the. Not only makes their results faster, that makes it slower for users to use the original site, Wikipedia.

[Leo Laporte]

We talked last week with Molly White who's a Wikipedia editor. It's killing Wikipedia. Right.

[Mike Elgin]

And then they also are competing against search engines. People are using them as search engines, but they're doing something Google couldn't get away with, which is that, you know, they charge a subscription fee and then they initiatify it through advertising and all these other things. Right. They're doing both nice. Google did that, you know, and also if Google provided prioritization in search results without disclosing it, without labeling it, people would be on fire about that. Right. But that's exactly what OpenAI and perplexity do.

[Leo Laporte]

We need to take a little break. I do want to talk about. There is a lot of money flowing. You mentioned it earlier, Brian. One and a half billion dollar pay package for one guy. We'll talk with Wall Street Journal thinks they knew who that person is.

[Mike Elgin]

We'll talk about that worker can get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And he turned it down. Anyway, we'll talk about that in just a little bit. Mike Elgin is here. Brian McCullough, Richard Campbell. It's so nice to have. I always, I look forward to it. Because it's I get the smartest people and we talk about the most important things going on in technology and it is always an education for me. I hope you feel the same. We just really love having you here. Every Sunday we do the show from 2 to 5pm Pacific. That is 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. As I mentioned, you can watch it live. You can get it after the fact. Download shows All 1043 shows are available on our website, TWiT TV. There's a YouTube channel with most of the shows. We've been doing video longer than almost anybody has of our shows. And of course you can subscribe in a podcast client. Leave us a nice review if you would. One of the problems with having a show that's more than 20 years old now, now we're not the flavor of the month. We're not the flavor of the year. We're not even the flavor of the decade anymore. So, you know, publicity is dependent on you, our our viewers. So if you like what you hear, share it with friends. Tell them what Tell them about twit. We would appreciate that. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. They are experts in the understanding that AI cuts both ways, right? It's both amazing and problematic. Problematic hackers are using AI to breach your organization faster and more effectively than ever before. On the other hand, AI powers innovation. It drives efficiency. On the other hand, it also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. That's why you need Zscaler to help you on both sides. Phishing attacks over encrypted channels. Here's a bad statistic. Increased last year alone by 34.1%, fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools and phishing as a service kits, right? Meanwhile, organizations in all industries ours, little ones like me, big ones like the biggest companies in the world, are leveraging AI to increase employee productivity. They're using public AI for engineers with coding assistance, all that coding. Marketers are using AI with the writing tools, helping them craft new campaigns. Finance is using AI to create spreadsheet formulas. Companies are automating workflows for operational efficiency across individual and teams. They're embedding AI into applications and services that are both customer and partner facing. Ultimately, AI is helping enterprise move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. All of that is great. But if you're using AI, you need to think about how you protect your company's private and public use of AI. You also, of course, need to think about how to Defend against AI powered attacks. That's what Jeff Simon did. He's senior Vice president and Chief security officer at T Mobile. T Mobile uses Zscaler. He said Zscaler's fundamental difference in the technologies in SaaS space is that it was built from the ground up to be a zero trust network access solution, which is exactly the main outcome we were looking to drive up to. Now we've thought of perimeter defenses as being, you know, the way to protect yourself. Firewalls for instance. And then you need a VPN to get through the firewall so you get to work. Which means you've got public facing IP addresses which are exposing your attack surface. And nowadays they're no match for hackers using AI. It's time for a modern approach. Zscaler's comprehensive zero trust architecture in AI ensures both safe public AI productivity, protects the integrity of private AI and stops AI powered attacks. Zero trust means deny by default. It means bad guys can't do anything until you've explicitly authorized. Really works. It lets you thrive in the AI era. With Zscaler, Zero trust plus AI, stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] security that's zscaler.com security we thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. Very happy to know that they're coming back in 2026. Really, really appreciate your support. Thank you. Zscaler. So New York Times headline, I like it. And a beautiful graphic to go with says AI researchers are negotiating $250 million pay packages. Just like NBA stars, AI technologists are approaching the job market as if they were Steph Curry or LeBron James.

[Mike Elgin]

I love that framing too. It's like, how on earth did we get to a point where people who are changing human culture and determining the fate of nations are making as much money as men who run around in shorts throwing balls.

[Leo Laporte]

But think about it. The reason basketball players and football players get so much money is because they make that money for the there's teams, right?

[Benito]

And they're still underpaid.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. The teams are still making incredible profits. I think it's the same premise. It's why Mark Zuckerberg, who, by the way, has even said, look, I've got a cash cow here, I got a fountain of cash with Facebook. I can afford to do two things. To hire and pay people. The best people, the best paycheck they could ever get anywhere, and and invest in infrastructure, in GPUs and buy more of them. Because the people coming here don't just want money, they want access to the hardware. And I can do both. And that's his superintelligence team. The Times talks about a 24 year old. Mike, what were you making at the age of 24?

[Brian McCullough]

Let's see.

[Mike Elgin]

I was a room service waiter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you were living on tips.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to think. I think I was a busboy at Denny's. This guy, he's a Matt ditke, he's an AI researcher, was offered $125 million in stock and cash. It was over four years. So let's be honest, it's a mere 30 million, 31 million a year.

[Richard Campbell]

How will he get by?

[Mike Elgin]

I know in Silicon Valley. Have you seen home prices?

[Leo Laporte]

Dickey said it wasn't enough. I wanted to stick with my startup. So Mark came over, he drove his Lamborghini up his Countach. I'm here. My Countach. And revised the offer to $250 million with 100 million of that paid in the first year. Ditki said, I was so surprised. I asked, asked my peers what to do. Some said take the deal. He did. It's kind of hard to turn that down.

[Richard Campbell]

Good for him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, you might as well cash in because who knows, next year those. That money may not be there for one year.

[Benito]

Yes, please, one year.

[Brian McCullough]

Listen, the lesson from this show is if someone comes to you and offers 100 million, $50 million, take it. I mean, depending on what they're asking you to do.

[Leo Laporte]

But wait, because here's a guy. He, he followed Amira Morati, who was former interim CEO at OpenAI. Started a company called Thinking Machines Lab. No, by the way, no product. They don't, we don't know what they're doing. But the venture capital market has thrown money at them. Yeah.

[Brian McCullough]

Largest, largest seed round raise in the history of venture capital.

[Leo Laporte]

And we don't even know what they're doing. But it's more, they're more investing in Mira Morati. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Saying, well, but. And also point out all Valley money.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Just.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, but that's worth pointing out. Is that what Zuck is sort of disrupting here is what would have been pouring in from VC funds into these startups. Continue. But that's.

[Leo Laporte]

He's his own fund. He has so much money. So he, first thing he did is he went to Mira and said, I'll buy it. I'll buy the whole company. She said, no. So what do you do then? You go and you talk to each employee. According to the Wall Street Journal. In the following weeks, he approached more than a dozen of her 50 employees to say, what would it take. His number one target, a guy named Andrew Tullock, co founder. He offered Tullock a billion dollars. A billion dollars with bonuses that could have been worth as much as one and a half billion over six years. Tullock said no.

[Mike Elgin]

Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Tullock said no.

[Richard Campbell]

Doesn't seem to.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to make you a billionaire, dude.

[Brian McCullough]

Wait. Mark Zuckerberg did similar things in his life. He was offered a billion dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

What's better than a million dollars? A billion dollars.

[Richard Campbell]

He's offered that for his company. You know, there was other shareholders.

[Brian McCullough]

Right, but the point is. Right, as opposed to this is a check that I will write to you in person, which is a different thing.

[Leo Laporte]

But also, by the way, Meta denies this. Meta spokesperson said it was inaccurate and ridiculous. But the general standing by it, it.

[Brian McCullough]

We're all sort of. Sort of schadenfreude. Ing is that. Does schadenfreude fit here?

[Leo Laporte]

But no, it's the opposite of schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is the shameful joy in the misfortune of others. We are having pure joy in the fortune of others.

[Brian McCullough]

Like so is.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what the German for that is.

[Brian McCullough]

The question is, it's so rare because some of the debate that I've heard internally from, like, the AI community is like, it is. It is Zuck coming on so hard and so gauche that it's turning them off, Right? And then it is the. Yeah, but if you want me so bad, then there is something here that is. You're proving to me that this is a generational opportunity, right, That I could make more money if I had the balls that you had and stuck it out as opposed to taking the page.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, all right, Brian, how much did you make at the age of 24?

[Brian McCullough]

Not that much money, but I founded my first company at 19, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you were already an entrepreneur? I was just a busboy at Denny's.

[Brian McCullough]

Let's put it this way. I had my friends as my. They lived with me and paid me rent because I could afford a. Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Ve always been like a macher, huh?

[Brian McCullough]

You've always had that, but not to the tune of $100 million, that's for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's. I mean. And honestly, no one needs a billion and a half, right?

[Brian McCullough]

If.

[Leo Laporte]

If you thought, well, if I stay with thinking machines, I'll Be worth half a billion in a year or two. I would, that would be enough.

[Brian McCullough]

There's also a real evangelism in true AI circles that this is not just generational, this is civilizational. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So if you thought that whatever Zuck is doing, however, my money, much money is pouring into it isn't gonna be the thing. If you thought, no, no, we got a handle on it here at Thinking Machines, you would stay because you wanna, you wanna be where the action is. Especially since you're gonna make money.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you remember that all of OpenAI was built on the idea of pulling those people out of Google Monk mind.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And paying them less.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. For the privilege.

[Richard Campbell]

Because the mission was more important than the income.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, maybe. Is that it? Zuckerberg's just so gauche. He's getting people. I mean there's a billion and a half. Somebody who's gauche is still a billion and a half. It doesn't matter.

[Richard Campbell]

You're a tech giant. You have a choice. Buy them at the beginning, before they've been successful and be successful with them, or buy them afterwards when they're much more expensive. Expensive?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

I mean they should all get together. People got offers, take them all at the same time and then just hang out at the office and play ping pong. That's what they should do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Mike Elgin]

Go up on the roof.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we should point out that Marathi took a bunch of people, 20 people from open AI. I mean, it's not like she's got the moral high ground here or anything.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, did she do it with money or with a better goal? Right. People get to work where they want to work. Like at least if you're selling a culture and a goal, it's better than I'm just going to pay you a huge part pile of money.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably the case that the really good people are not motivated by money in this case.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. To some degree. I mean I've known lots of folks who joined Microsoft because the signing bonuses were a quarter of a million dollars and a half a million dollars. And so. And they literally put in their year and walked.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to turn it down, especially have student loans and yeah, that's, that's.

[Richard Campbell]

Get yourself out of debt kind of money. Yeah. You know, and that was just run of the mill mid tier software developers back in the time because there was a period there where nobody in the valley would work for Facebook at all. And so they went to the Microsofts and the Amazons and like people outside of the valley to do their recruiting.

[Leo Laporte]

What it looks like is there's a general belief that there will be one winner.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, in the Valley, that's the belief. Right. That there is going to be a winter mute, you know, using William Gibson's term, like this super AI moment, which I just completely, every piece of evidence says that's not what's going.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't look like that right now. In fact, it looks like nobody has that. There are some people like Amazon that are laggards or Apple that are laggards, but the top companies are all roughly equal.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and then how do you measure that per se? What do you mean by equal per se?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, DeepMind, I would say DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI are in the race. I don't see one company pulling ahead. And then there's qn, there's, you know, Alibaba, there's the Chinese companies, which also seem to be doing some really good stuff. I don't think there's a monopoly, let's say, on success in AI.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, so one of the things that's coming out of this is that LLMs are just not that hard to build.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Well, not only are they not hard to build, the secret sauce isn't secret. Google published all of those papers.

[Richard Campbell]

Ultimately it's the weights and it's the source of data. Like let's back up a bit on some of the stories we've gone over here. If you start paying for data, if you start making sure you're only training models on quality data that you paid for, what does that model look like after the fact?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, the other, yeah, the other thing is that, you know, right now people think in terms of chatbots, but I think chatbots, their days are numbered. You know, I, I, in five years, nobody's gonna be using a chatbot.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Really?

[Mike Elgin]

Go to OpenAI, they're not going to go to chat.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, yeah, Type in. It'll be a device.

[Mike Elgin]

It, well, it'll be, it'll be on all the devices. It'll be part of applications. Right. One of, one of the coolest things I learned about it on this network. I don't remember who, I apologize but is use of the word Lex, the word processor. Lex. Lex writer. Lex writer is amazing. It's like a word processor, a cloud based word processor, but the AI is sort of baked in. But it doesn't write for you. It's like a partner, you'd have conversations with it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pair writing, kind of like pair coding. Right, right.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, I mean it's it's passive. It's in the back of you. It doesn't do anything until, until you explicitly ask it to do something. But it'll, you can just say, hey, what do you think of this? And it'll say, well this is. And it gives you really good feedback about your work and stuff like that. Right. So I'm not using a chat.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're saying AI will be kind of mixed into the things you'll use?

[Mike Elgin]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It'll just be everywhere.

[Mike Elgin]

Everything will be running LLMs, small language models, all kinds of different kinds of AI. But, but you won't have to explicitly go and say I'm using a chatbot now. I don't think that's really going to be a major use case in a few years.

[Leo Laporte]

Lex we should say is at Lex Page.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And is I think 15 bucks a month.

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a collaborative. It kind of makes me wish I were a writer. Maybe I should be a writer.

[Brian McCullough]

I've been screwing around with writing a sci fi novel and I've been using it for this exact purpose where it's been in my head for years. So I know, know generally the plot that I want to do, but when it comes to like okay, describe what the planet looks like, I don't have time to think about, oh, is it a mushroom based planet? Are the aliens, you know, amphibian or what like, so you ask AI to either give me five options for the next paragraph or write a paragraph of what could come next and then you don't take it it because usually what that paragraph is, is garbage. But that's the vibe. Everything vibing is the thing because it's like you can get in a flow where you're creating, you have the structure in place, you know where you want to go, but all of the intermediate steps where you lose the flow and that's what it can do for you.

[Richard Campbell]

You.

[Brian McCullough]

And LEO lost the flow.

[Richard Campbell]

We lost the leo. That's what happened. Yes, that, that, that happens occasionally. I do think, you know, AI is almost not the product or LLMs are not the product. They're the interface.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Just going to see more and more places where they're going to appear.

[Mike Elgin]

And I think, I think that's my, my point. I mean I'm a big believer in glasses that they're going to be the interface for us to be using. Use it the way we now use chatbots. We just talk. And I just, you know, I think these companies, if I was OpenAI. If I was, you know, some of these companies, I would be all over the glasses thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure. Where you look is the most useful piece of information.

[Mike Elgin]

Right. And then, and then the answer can be just whispered in your ear by the hardware that's just right there next to your ear.

[Leo Laporte]

So I should, I should, I should. Last week I should ask this question because we had three people on who had successful newsletters. I don't think, Brian, you don't do a newsletter, right?

[Brian McCullough]

Not yet, but Morning Brew does do a lot of newsletters, so we'll see. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but Mike does. You know, I was thinking maybe this whole podcasting thing doesn't have legs. Maybe I should do a newsletter instead. But this would be. But the thing is, I can write, but I don't like to write. Well, maybe if I had a tool like this, it would help me.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Newsletter. That's hilarious.

[Mike Elgin]

What you should do, Leo, is you should basically tell AI to take every episode and turn it into a newsletter. Write it.

[Leo Laporte]

I have content.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, exactly. It just did that within five seconds. Like just what he said would be a newsletter within five seconds.

[Leo Laporte]

Should I do a newsletter? Write it out for me and put it up on. Not on Substack anymore because they invite people to join Nazi newsletters. Let's do Beehive. How about. About that? Where is yours, Mike?

[Mike Elgin]

Substack.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Were you, you saw the story?

[Mike Elgin]

I did. I thought. I felt that the criticism was somewhat dish.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right, exactly.

[Mike Elgin]

They, they, they say, oh, you know, the, the, the harshest critics say that, oh, this really reflects the, the, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we know there are, we are. We know there are Nazi newsletters on.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes. The question is, I mean, they take a point of view that says, hey, if it's legal by the First Amendment, they can publish on our service, however reprehensible. Exactly. And that's not a crazy policy.

[Richard Campbell]

No, that's common carrier. Next you're going to blame telephones for communicating. Transmitting.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little more than that.

[Mike Elgin]

But my problem with the criticism is that they're saying, oh, they really reflects their thing. No, actually the truth is that Substack is the best source of sort of anti Nazi lefty kind of publications every. You know, everybody's not like the, the, the number of powerful leftists who left their, you know, wash. Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to go do their own publication and who are now liberated because then they're not under a editorial, you know, mission of a, of a newspaper. They're mostly on substack. So if you look at the, the totality of what's on Substack. It's mostly a force for, you know, anti Nazi type stuff. But the other thing is like, you know, they apologized for the error. They said it was an error. They said they're going to make sure it doesn't happen again. They said that the content that was promoted was damaging and harmful.

[Leo Laporte]

It was pretty bad.

[Mike Elgin]

This was. Yes, but this is not the policy of a company that exists in order to make sure that Nazis have.

[Leo Laporte]

Taylor Lorenz publicized it on her newsletter.

[Mike Elgin]

Of course, in the sixth paragraph, she mentioned that it was an accident that should have been in the, in the second.

[Leo Laporte]

In the lead.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, yeah, but, but it's, you know, so it's, it's, it's a bit disingenuous and I, I hope that, I hope the, the mob doesn't sort of tear them down and cause.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's also been some, some talk that maybe Substack isn't the best place to, to try to make a success in a newsletter. Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

It's so good though.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, you like, you like it. You still get promoted and, and you get.

[Mike Elgin]

I've never been. No, I've never been promoted by them at all. They've never thrown me a bone at all. Which, which I wish they would, but. But no, I just.

[Leo Laporte]

The format just defended them. Maybe they'll, maybe they'll do that.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, they're much bigger.

[Leo Laporte]

If I were going to start a newsletter, now would be the time. While I still have a podcast, I could promote the newsletter. Yeah. On.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, you, you should absolutely have a news. I mean, you know, what is a newsletter? You know, it's, it's like. It can be a video newsletter, podcast, newsletter.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, so lazy. I just like to talk. It's so easy. You just turn on the microphone, you.

[Mike Elgin]

Talk staff, make Bonito do it.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't make Bonito do it.

[Benito]

But also the AI outsource that to AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Bonito would get Lex to do it.

[Brian McCullough]

Outsource it to Bonito to outsource it to AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yes. Anthropic did a study in which it found out why AIs become evil. They're also parenthetically. This is from the Verge hiring for an AI Psychiatry team. I don't know if that means a psychiatrist for the AI or for the users of the AI. Jack Lindsay, an Anthropic researcher working on interpretability who is also tapped to lead the company's fledgling AI Psychiatry team, told the Verge. Something's been cropping up a lot recently. Is that language Models, and maybe you've noticed this. I certainly have, can slip into different modes where they seem to behave according to different personalities. Now, by the way, the flaw here is in thinking that it has any personality in the first place, right? Well, gosh, ChatGPT is not acting like itself. Well, that makes no sense. There is no itself. Right. Lindsay said this can happen during a conversation. Your conversation can lead the model to start behaving weirdly, like becoming overly sycophantic or turning evil. This can also happen over training. Now, I've appreciated this.

[Richard Campbell]

Blame the victim model.

[Leo Laporte]

It's your fault.

[Richard Campbell]

You did this. You made the AI crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You talked. Well, I think what happens is it has a limited context window. Right. If you get too many tokens in there, we've all seen this AI start to slow down, they start to act weird, they start to hallucinate more. It's just a limitation of AIs.

[Richard Campbell]

Sometimes the token block overflows.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Friday's paper came out of an anthropic fellows program which had been funded to do safety researcher research. Researchers wanted to know what caused personality shifts. They found that just as medical professionals can apply sensors to see which areas of the human brain light up in certain scenarios, they could also figure out which parts of the AI neural network correspond to which traits. And once they figured this out, it's almost like a functional MRI of the. Of the AI's weights. They could then see which type of data or content lit up those specific areas. The most surprising part of the research to Lindsay was how much of the data influenced how much the Data influenced an AI's model qualities. One of its first responses, he says, was not just to update its writing style or knowledge base, but also its. Its personalities. He said if you coax the model to act evil, the evil vector lights, that portion of the AI brain will light up. They also found out if you train a model on wrong answers to math questions or wrong diagnoses for medical data, even if the data doesn't seem evil but just has some flaws in it, the model will turn evil.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. The other thing. Well, first of all, folks, you shouldn't be just accepting whatever personality comes out of things. You should be doing role prompting and tell it what it's person tell it. So always do that. But did you hear about or did you talk on any of the podcasts, Leo, about Jeff Lewis, who, who basically went down this rabbit hole on chat GPT? He was a. He's a tech investor, an early investor of OpenAI, and he started to go down this rabbit hole. And so to feed his questions, apparently, as far as we can tell, the ChatGPT was increasingly relying on a website called, called the SCP foundation, which is a fiction site that began on 4chan, moved onto its own website. And it basically is about this concept that human beings are being replaced by digital versions of themselves. Anyway, the guy posted this big video on X with this essentially ranting about this conspiracy theory, thinks he knows the truth about what's happening and all this kind of stuff. Very disturbing. But the point is that because he was going so deep and spending so much time on certain subject matter, it, it had to reach into fiction. Right. And they talk about, you know, chat, chatbots being evil and all that kind of stuff, having weird personalities. Well, fiction is a great place to get that kind of stuff. Right. Because they're words like that. The, the chatbot doesn't, you know, just is looking for words to, to throw at you. And so anyway, this is an interesting case where this, this, this is a prominent person, an investor in OpenAI who basically allowed, you know, he had what they're calling AI psychosis. Right. Where it's because of its sycophantic nature, because of the other things that it does, it's making people kind of allowing.

[Richard Campbell]

Personality traits to be reinforced.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, exactly. So if you go to chat GPT believing in the global conspiracy and start prompting it that way, it's going to confirm your bias, your, your, your nonsense.

[Mike Elgin]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's important to know. Right. And any other thing, I'm not a fan of AI safety guards, to be honest, because first of all, it's an illusion that you can even do it.

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Problem number one. Number two, who's to say? I, I think what we really need to do is train people to understand what you're getting from the AI and, and, and nobody's going to become a Molotov cocktail thrower because they got the recipe on ChatGPT. That's not how it works. Right.

[Mike Elgin]

But you know, I, I'm a huge fan of, of, of smart prompt engineering and I got a whole bunch of.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all about the prompt. Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

So I have a great one that I use on perplexity a lot. And it's basically, it basically says, you know, starts out with role prompting, as most of these things do, and it says you are a world class, highly particular fact checker and expert in the verifiable information. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Give it this whole paragraph and then say fact check this colon and then I paste, I paste in whole articles, I can paste in a claim, I can paste in anything. And it does such a good job. Really, really does a good job. It will take every single sentence, every single claim and an entire article and it will basically do an entire treatment of that one statement about where it came from, what, what they're saying. And it's, it's very, has very high standards for like, well, this is a claim, it's not really verified, verifiable, it's more of an opinion, blah, blah, blah, blah. It characterizes everything. And so people should be doing that all the time because this, at some point you're going to be lied to, you're going to be the victim of hallucination and so always be telling the chatbots, tell me the truth, give me information that's verifiable. Right? That sort of language.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I like rag, that's why Notebook, lm, Google's rag that generates now video as well as audio summaries is great because you could say, look, you got a corpus of information I've provided you stick to that, don't make stuff up, don't hallucinate.

[Benito]

But you realize what you're saying is you're asking everybody to be media literate then, right? That's what you're asking. And that's impossible. That's a fundamental, into possibility, right? That's not going to happen.

[Mike Elgin]

But I'm asking the sweet smelling audience of this, this particular network, who are you guys? Way above average in terms of their willingness and ability to, to do this stuff. So yeah, no, I, I wouldn't ask it of everybody but, but certainly the.

[Leo Laporte]

Opposite though is also pretty patronizing saying, well the rest of you couldn't possibly do this, right? So yeah, we'll do this for you or something.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, that, that's actually one of the other cool things about Lex. They actually have this whole, if you go into their help systems, a lot of the help is essentially training about how to be a really effective user of AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And so I might have to pay for this.

[Mike Elgin]

This looks good. But you, but you can, you can find really good prompt engineering help and just copy them and keep them in a note, you know, in some document somewhere and then, but don't do the.

[Leo Laporte]

One thing I did. We had our AI user group on Friday and as the thing was starting up I thought, you know, I use Obsidian. I have a pretty big vault over a period of years in Obsidian and I found a prompt on Reddit that would organize My Obsidian. And I just. I don't copy and paste somebody else's prompt. It completely trashed my Obsidian. Oh. So, I mean, it made it look like this guy would want it to look, but it's not how I wanted it to look. Right. So don't write your own prompts maybe.

[Mike Elgin]

Right. Write your own, but study. But if you don't feel like you know what you're doing, you can start with somebody else's prompt and then go in and tweak it, and you can just do magical things with. Not magic.

[Leo Laporte]

Darren Okey, who is a vibe code in our club, says it's kind of the opposite. It's irrelevant to what I do because either the code that writes works or it doesn't work. So it's not rag. It's not. It's not. It's going to either work or not work.

[Richard Campbell]

And not work in software is not that clear either.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's true.

[Richard Campbell]

It can work for a little bit, you know, threshold. Like, will it actually run?

[Leo Laporte]

Done. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But is it actually doing what you want it to do?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good question.

[Richard Campbell]

A little more testing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why you get it, to write the tests. All right, we're gonna take a break. There's so much to talk about. We're just. We're getting through it. But more to come in just a little bit. You're watching a special episode of this Week in Tech with very. Three very special people. We really love having them on. Brian McCullough from the Brand new Tech Brew Ride Home. Great to have you. Where do people go if you already subscribe to techmeme Ride Home. Just keep. That's fine.

[Brian McCullough]

You don't have to do anything. New bus, same as the old bus.

[Leo Laporte]

What. What website? Should they go to a website or just go to a podcast?

[Brian McCullough]

Oh, I haven't worked all that out yet. Just to your. Your. Your podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Brian McCullough]

Oh, God, Leo. The amount of things you got to shift over after eight years and. La, la, la, la. But bottom line is, if you want. You want the tech news every single day in the afternoon, in about 15 minutes, tech brew. Ride home. You could just always search. Ride home.

[Leo Laporte]

That.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. And you can. Yeah. Ride home.info right? That's it. That's right.

[Brian McCullough]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's still gonna apply.

[Brian McCullough]

It's still gonna apply, but if you're looking at it right now, you'll notice that Tech Meme's probably still on there.

[Leo Laporte]

It still says tech meme, but then the album art says tech Brew. So I understand.

[Brian McCullough]

I'm getting there. Getting. Getting there.

[Leo Laporte]

You're. You're in a transition period.

[Brian McCullough]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all. Yeah. You're pre op. It's okay.

[Brian McCullough]

Transitioning, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you'll get there. Also, Mike Elgin, he has not changed the name of his newsletter, MachineSociety. AI, where is your next gastro nomad adventure?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, it's here in Oaxaca in a couple weeks, I think. And. And so we've been doing. We've been having a lot of fun with. With all of our experiences. We're doing Sicily nowadays, and Sicily is just really a popular one. But, yeah, we do wine countries, plus Mexico and Central America, so that's what we do.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's a small group. How many couples?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, it's typical. Well, for Oaxaca, it's going to be five couples.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty much a tiny group.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, yeah, tiny group. The one you were at, the one you joined in Oaxaca, Leo, that was the biggest one we'd ever done because it was the first one.

[Leo Laporte]

You made room for us. I knew that you felt.

[Mike Elgin]

Exactly, exactly. And so we didn't want to say no to. To our dear friends.

[Leo Laporte]

So. It was so much fun. Oh, my God, it was incredible. The food and the fun and.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, just to explain what we do, we have a small group of people live together in some really cool house of some kind in Europe. It's usually a farmhouse in the middle of a vineyard or something like that. And then we just do food stuff all day. It's all food and drink. We learn how to make things. We. We go visit farmers, we go to exquisite restaurants. We have chefs come to our house to make food for us. We do wine tasting. We do all that kind of stuff. In Oaxaca, we do mezcal tasting. So it's just a ton of fun. And people don't have to do. First of all, we don't tell anybody what they're going to do. It's a big surprise. So every day they would get up, we say, make sure you're wearing a hat and sunglasses. We're going to go. And then we go somewhere and they find out what we're doing when we're doing it. So it's really, really fun. And it's something. I think everybody deserves to do that kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It's real traveling. It's not touristing, it's traveling. It's great gastronomic in most cases. Highly recommend it. Highly recommend it. And Richard Campbell, of course, host of Windows Weekly and run his radio show and dot net Rocks with Carl Franklin, of course. We have made a YouTube playlist of all his whiskey recommendations on our Windows Weekly site. So you can YouTube.com windowsweeklyshow maybe. I don't know. I can't remember.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the redirect. Something weird from my closet dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. That's the best way. Go to somethingweirdfrommycloset.com and you will see all of the whiskey recommendations. It's become a really popular part and a fun part of I don't even drink whiskey. But it's a fun part of the show. Show because you learn history. We had a pretty much a trip down memory lane with the history of England a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty incredible. So all of this is here and it's a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing. Thank you.

[Richard Campbell]

I think we've had the. The McAllen 18 Sherry cast come up. Yep. That was the one where I ended up talking about that. The. When they were building the expanded distillery, they dug up a mesolithic thick barley farm.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Same location, 6,000 years old.

[Leo Laporte]

So they really could say it's 6,000 year old whiskey, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. Well, they said 1824 for a reason. They was the. That's when they could get a license. Up until then, they've been making whiskey illegally and they didn't want to talk about it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's wild. That's wild. This is part of the fabulous whiskey creation process.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it turned out to be two and a half hours long.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Lots of videos if you like whiskey. Thank you, Richard. Our show this week, brought to you by Miro. I've been talking about Miro for a couple of years now. Every day, new headlines speculate about how AI might be coming for your job, which just makes everybody anxious and fearful. But a recent survey from Miro might encourage you tells a different story. 76% of the survey responders believe AI can benefit their role. Of course, 54% do struggle to know when to use it. And that's why you should try Miro's Innovation Workspace. It's an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done. Miro has been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade. I know you've heard about Miro, but today they're at the forefront of bringing products to market even faster. By unleashing the combined power of AI and human potential, Miro's Innovation Workspace will help your teams be faster More productive and ultimately more effective. Here's how teams can work with Miro AI to turn unstructured data, I mean, even like sticky notes, screenshots, into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables. Bring in that napkin from the bar. That's kind of a little soft. Prototype it in minutes. It's more than just putting a bunch of ideas on a board too. You can rapidly iterate with your teammates to bring these ideas to life fast. Quickly build on your ideas without needing the perfect question or prompt. That's always challenging. As we were talking about. That's always been a thing. I think that's gotten in the way when you're using these chatbots. Wouldn't you love to just be able to throw everything you've thought and all your ideas up there there and work iteratively with an AI, you don't have to be an AI master or, or to toggle yet another tool. The work you're already putting into Miro's canvas is the prompt itself. Isn't that great? Help your teams get great done with miro. Check out miro.com to find out how. That's m I r o.com m I r o.com. we thank Miro so much for supporting us for many years. We've been big fans of Miro. Thank you, Miro. So I saw a couple of articles this weekend, actually, about AI expenditures now becoming the most important part of GDP. Here's one from Paul Kadrosky. AI CapEx capital expenditures is so big, big it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy. And this should maybe be a little warning beginning to approach the railroad boom.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's not that big.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, it isn't. In fact, here's the graph. Railroads in the 1880s ended up being 6% of GDP. AI data centers still only 1.2%. But it's growing fast.

[Brian McCullough]

It is above the dot com era, although Noah Smith says he's debating that a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is no opinion.com. where will data centers crash the economy?

[Brian McCullough]

The statistic that blew my mind was that the contributor to GDP growth in the last quarter from AI expenditures, data center expenditures, was larger than the entire U.S. consumer. Now that's not that the spending on AI was more than the U.S. consumer spends, but the contribution to the growth.

[Leo Laporte]

Of GDP, it has a bigger impact than consumer spending, which is good because consumer spending is probably not so healthy right now.

[Brian McCullough]

Some of the reading between the lines of some of these pieces, there's another one from Chris Mims in the Wall Street Journal. From two days ago. That is suggesting that like without essentially what Kadrasky and Mims are saying is that there is a giant stimulus that is happening in the economy right now that is entirely from the people building out AI.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's both. It's a, it's good and bad because of course with the railroad boom, there was a bust. Most of those railroads went bankrupt. But. But the tracks didn't go away and we got an intercontinental railroad. And that infrastructure powered a century of growth in the country.

[Brian McCullough]

Same thing happened in Web 2.0.

[Leo Laporte]

All that underground fiber companies might have gone out of business, but the fiber stayed. So you think that that's what we're going to see with this?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that's the nice thing about data centers, right? Is there's still data centers.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't matter what.

[Brian McCullough]

Except, except there is a very strong and very short sort of turnover. Moore's Law style turnover where a data center as it's provisioned today 18 months from now is basically worthless.

[Leo Laporte]

No kidding. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Except that Moore's Law is not maintaining its cadence because the chips aren't improving.

[Leo Laporte]

Well and you've built the data center, you built the hardware, maybe you have to upgrade it, but it's. You've done a lot of the work.

[Brian McCullough]

Is that. And so the Noah Smith piece it's titled could this be a new problem that could blow up the global economy in the way that like in 2008, blah, blah, blah, because people are taking out loans that they're using the data centers to. What do you call it, reinforce those loans or guarantee those loans. And what they're saying is that if you're using debt to do it, it. If the data center is right still there, it's not like it got blown up, but if you then have to spend the same amount of money to put new chips into it, put, you know, maybe the infrastructure doesn't have to be retrofitted or whatever, but it is not the same asset that is sort of evergreen as fiber in the ground or railroads on the ground.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, also in the interim it could be really bad. You know, there was a crash in 1893 thanks to the failure failure of these railroads. 500 banks went under. It was the worst thing until the Great Depression. So many people out of work. And that's what Noah is also saying here. A data center bust would mean the big tech shareholders would lose a lot of money. It would also slow the economy. But the scariest possibility is it would cause a financial crisis.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, if, if again it. The, the Great Recession, the housing crisis was because all of the banks were overextended in lending to homeowners. And so there was a run on liquidity that they couldn't keep up with, at least at this point. And I reached out to Noah, maybe I'll talk to him this week. From what he says, if you read his piece all the way through, there are around the margins some of the debt stuff starting to happen, but it's nowhere. It's not like your bank or bank of America, JP Morgan or whatever is in hock up to 190% of their balance sheet to these data centers yet. But he's raising the warning that, well.

[Richard Campbell]

And the tech giants are using cash because they've got it.

[Brian McCullough]

They've got it.

[Richard Campbell]

And I was just double checking some of these numbers and like less than 40% of the price of a data set are the servers and storage getting power put in, pouring all that concrete.

[Leo Laporte]

H vac. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

All UPSs, that's. It's more than half.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's not wasted completely. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And the other thing is the machines don't burst into flames after 18 months like we do run older hardware. After five or six years you start to question failure rates.

[Brian McCullough]

The two things though that maybe, okay, the scare headlines are, oh, could this blow up the global economy Again, not yet, but maybe we're laying the groundwork for something potentially bad down the road. But the real issue today would be, number one, what does the economy look like without this spending. And I'm not going to get into politics or anything like that about jobs reports from last week or whatever. Whatever. But there are suggestions that, that again, this is a huge, essentially non governmental fiscal stimulus that is propping things up. And then number two, what we do know is that this era of tech build out is not extremely job intensive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Brian McCullough]

And so even if all of the spending is happening, it is not necessarily creating a ton of jobs.

[Leo Laporte]

Careful, you could get fired for saying that.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know, there is so much uncertainty in the work market that most businesses I know are being very careful with their money.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless we notice. And this is a completely anecdotal, but there is definitely a drop off in advertising as companies get more and more nervous about the future. It's not that they're thinking it's going to be bad, they're just uncertainty. Business doesn't like uncertainty.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, they're holding onto their cat cash.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They're saying, well, let's just wait and see. And what's the first thing that goes your podcast Spending. That's why I'm starting a newsletter, ladies and gentlemen, I'm very happy to say.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, you're getting into the lucrative newsletter.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you make any money?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, some people are. They're, they're.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that there are people making a million bucks a year on the. On the bank.

[Mike Elgin]

Oh, there, there's one that's making 5 million a month or something like that. The letter from an American. She making bank and she's got a whole staff and everything, so she's really good.

[Leo Laporte]

I wouldn't be that good.

[Mike Elgin]

Your plan is to not be that good?

[Leo Laporte]

My plan is not to be that good. Yes, I actually subscribed a letter from an American, but I'm probably one of those millions that are funding Heather Cox Richardson's great success Y what content strategy looks like in the age of AI this is is from Fast Company. We are rapidly getting close to something called Google Zero. This is something content companies have feared for a long time. Where Google no longer sends you traffic. Yeah. What do you do now?

[Richard Campbell]

Google successfully destroyed their own business.

[Brian McCullough]

I was start a newsletter.

[Leo Laporte]

Start a newsletter. See it. The article in Fast Company written by Pete Pacal Pachal, creator of Media Copilot newsletter and a podcast host, so you know you can trust him. Says panicking is never a good strategy, but pivoting can be, and we've seen this. This week, Wired and the Verge both announced a strong push into newsletters. Newsletters. I don't know. I was talking with Paris Martineau on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines and Jeff Jarvis, and we all agreed that while we subscribe to many newsletters, we read very few. They end up in a folder in our email.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, a newsletter is really about collecting email addresses or you have direct contact your customers.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I guess. How do you monetize that, though?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, by having something to sell.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'd like to announce a new range of AI pins that people can wear in their home and in their office.

[Brian McCullough]

Hawaiian shirts, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Hawaiian shirts. It could be the next big thing. Yes, actually, because of tariffs, these Hawaiian shirts are no longer a good deal. They went from being 60 bucks each to 75 bucks. They're made.

[Brian McCullough]

Why? Because Hawaii has a 75%.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not. They're Mexican Hawaii shirts. They're from San Miguel de Allende. But I love them and I'm going to continue to buy them. Yeah, well, we'll see. I don't. You know, there are certainly a lot of, and especially in our sphere, the tech journal, a lot of companies folding, going out of business. Disappearing a non tech which went out of business a little while ago at least kept their content online for a while now. Now they're just referring it to the forums. You can't get to the old and non tech articles. It's just depressing as hell.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, that's why, that's why I embraced. What is it called? What the heck is my blog site called? Posthaven, I believe it's called.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh look, you still use Post Haven.

[Mike Elgin]

I learned about it from you, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, because back in the day was a Y combinator start up called Posterous. And the whole point of it, I used it in 2009 when we were in China and I couldn't tweet or anything but I could still use email because they can't block email. So I would email it to Posterous which would then syndicate it everywhere else. That's right, Facebook and Twitter.

[Mike Elgin]

Yep, that was great.

[Leo Laporte]

They got sold or whatever.

[Mike Elgin]

New thing is that they will keep your content. They promise to keep your content online until the end of time. Even if you stop subscribing, if you stop being a customer. And so that's why I use it.

[Leo Laporte]

They're tagline is Posthaven is the blogging platform designed to outlive us.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's pretty cool. I don't know how they can promise.

[Mike Elgin]

That, but yeah, I mean who knows if they can keep that promise. But I've had so many publications that I've worked for just have it be.

[Leo Laporte]

Washed away and it's gone.

[Mike Elgin]

Most of this stuff that I've done in my career is available only at the Internet Archive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, me too actually come to think of it, except for the podcast, we.

[Richard Campbell]

Should all be making a donation to the Internet Archive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do. Should I do God bless him.

[Brian McCullough]

There is a. There's a new article I just put in the chat about Beehive which I haven't read so I can't verify that. But it isn't Beehive. Everybody's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the new hot nude. Yeah, boot newsletter platform. It looks pretty good. A Ghost is another good choice because it's open source. But nobody's. Except Posthaven is making the promise to keep it forever. Is that like you buy a grave and then they promise to put, you know, keep it clean for the rest. Forever. For eternity. Is it like that?

[Mike Elgin]

I've never bought a grave before.

[Brian McCullough]

Leah.

[Richard Campbell]

I did not know.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm asking for a friend. Where's the best place to buy a grave site? Yes, they call it. What do they call it? Something Like a true Eternal. There's a name for it. Like eternal something.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Which. Which story is it? The information story you're talking about.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Where is Beehive? The next billion dollar startup and they.

[Brian McCullough]

Have hit 30 million in ARR.

[Leo Laporte]

But wow.

[Brian McCullough]

Their fees start at $43 a month if you just have a thousand subscribers, which would be a problematic since Substack only takes a 10% cut.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Brian McCullough]

So like it's the. It's the ramping up in scale. I guess that is the difference that Beehive doesn't compete with Substack.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They talk about Oliver Darcy who left CNN to start a newsletter which I don't know, on the face of it probably doesn't seem like a good career move. He's making a million dollars a year.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

85,000 subscribers. Not all of them pay, but enough to. To see. Says have a million dollars in annual recurring revenue. I don't know. Maybe I should do a newsletter. I don't know. I don't. I. You say I have this weird thing that you should. If you do something like that, there should be some value in it for the reader. Maybe that's. Maybe that's a flaw in my thinking. I don't know. But then. And then I have to. Then I have to come up with it. Right. Well, what can I put in there that.

[Brian McCullough]

No, Leo, we've been telling you, AI can do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Let AI do it. Sure.

[Brian McCullough]

If you don't care about product, just.

[Leo Laporte]

Add to the slop. Yes, I'm part of the problem. We will later in this week have Scott Wilkinson's home theater geek for our club members. I hope he will review the annual Value Electronics TV shootout and LG OLED TV's last place finish. Neil I. Patel, who was one of the judges, writes about it at the Verge. I won't tell you who won. I don't want to ruin Scott's home theater geek. If you're a club member, watch for that. When is it? I have to check to see when it's coming up. I think sometime this week. We're going to do tomorrow at 12 noon, so. No, that can't be right. Yeah, Monday. It says every Thursday, but tomorrow's a Monday.

[Benito]

So that's when they do the live recording. But then the, the.

[Leo Laporte]

The. Oh, he puts it out on Thursday, publishes on Thursday. So if you're a club member, you can watch it and participate. Tomorrow at noon Pacific, 3pm Eastern. If you're not a club member, the audio will come out. But a show like that you should really get the video. And for that you need to be a.

[Benito]

The video will be in YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Member.

[Benito]

The video will be on YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really?

[Benito]

We polish the video to YouTube?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes.

[Mike Elgin]

On the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I thought that was audio only.

[Benito]

Audio only on our site. Video on YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, there you go. I was gonna say join the club, but I guess you don't need to.

[Benito]

We'll do that anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito just saved you $10 a month. Comes right out of your paycheck, Benito. That's all I'm saying. We have a new. No, I'm kidding. We have a new national Cyber Director. This is actually, believe it or not, the first person confirmed by the Senate in the new Trump regime. The first Senate approved cyber security official came across came from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. So he at least knows something about technology and he will be responsible for cyber policy across all federal agencies. That's why I mention it on this show. That's a pretty important job. He said in a statement. As the cyber strategic environment continues to evolve, we must ensure our policy efforts and capabilities deliver results for our national security and the American people. Unfortunately, we're firing many of many of the people in the government cybersecurity infrastructure. But maybe Yashan can turn that around. Is CISA even still a viable entity? Richard? Like, seems like we've let go most of the people there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we're still working. We haven't read all the stuff they already published. Rich. That's what they're going to put out next, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

I hope there's enough functioning there. Those guys have been leading the charge for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Very, very important. That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Secrets that I think a lot of the world is complete, has forgotten about it. The US consistently let in these areas. They just do it so well, they don't have to talk about. About it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, I've decided I'm not going to get into newsletters. I'm going to do podcasts. This from Bloomberg Weekend How Podcast Obsessed Tech Investors Made a New Media industry. Oh, that's who did it. Well, thank you. We appreciate your hard work on our behalf. They're probably talking about shows like all in, which recently hosted both the President and Vice president. President or tbpn. Apparently there are. I didn't know this. There are a number of new podcasts hosted by. Not tech journalists like you and me, but by former venture capitalists.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, people want to. People want some of it to rub off of them. And by Some of it. I mean, some of their money. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because when I listen to all in, it really is often. And like, well, I was in Japan and I found a sushi place that no one knows about. You know, it's kind of for rich people. But there is this aspirational thing, isn't there?

[Mike Elgin]

That's what the. That's the whole model. So that's has always been like the Wall Street Journal's model, for example. You know, 10% of their. Of their audience are movers and shakers, and 90% want to be movers and shakers. And so. So you subscribe, and that's what it's all about. So they don't want tech journalists crapping all over everything being snarky.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're not so positive about a lot of this stuff. According to Bloomberg, the seeds of today's podcasting boom were planted in 2020.

[Mike Elgin]

I thought that was such a ridiculous line.

[Leo Laporte]

We've been doing this for 20 years now. But no, in 2020, it all started the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic. That March, a group of venture capitalists premiered the all in podcast, which would develop into the preeminent vehicle for insidery VC musings. You know, it's interesting about all in, though. They don't have advertising. I guess they don't really need to.

[Richard Campbell]

Do they just think of the John Steinbeck line that every American is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire?

[Leo Laporte]

The same month, a startup called Clubhouse released an app for. Oh, remember this? For free form audio broadcast testing used by people like Oprah Winfrey and funding from Andreessen Horowitz at a $4 billion valuation. Where is Clubhouse today? What happened to them? Went well.

[Brian McCullough]

Still kicking. They raised enough money. Look, one of the things is not to poop on anybody I might want to talk to anytime soon. But. But look, there are shows like the Dorkish Patel podcast or the Eric Torenberg network of podcasts that would pop up and then you'd be like, wait, how did all of a sudden they get Sam Altman on their show overnight? And they makes me so jealous because.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't get these people crazy.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, this is my point is that there is a network of folks that are like, well, these are shows that are friendly, and so they're willing to.

[Leo Laporte]

Be on it because they're not going to get the tough questions.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, I'm not even saying that. What I am saying is that these are friends of ours, and the chats go out, the email.

[Leo Laporte]

They're our buddies. They're in the same industry. Right. They're VCs, they're entrepreneurs, they're startup people.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Brian McCullough]

So, and this is.

[Leo Laporte]

There are peers.

[Brian McCullough]

This is something that especially folks at A16Z have been talking about for years. Go direct. Go direct. Go direct. So they tried that thing called Future that Sonal was the head of and things like that, and they wanted their own media brands. But what they decided, I guess, folks in the VC sphere was that you don't need to necessarily create your own brand. You just need to have your stable of folks that. Yeah, well, it works.

[Leo Laporte]

And people live. People do listen to it. Right? The numbers are good.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

It's really not that unusual. I mean, if you look at the celebrity podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Mike Elgin]

Martlett and Conan o' Brien friends, a bunch of actors and comedians talking about acting and comedians.

[Brian McCullough]

And you get your.

[Leo Laporte]

I was going to do a true crime podcast on Twit, but then they went up, then. Then that was over. So.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. And somebody stole your idea. You could have done the first episode.

[Brian McCullough]

Like. No, your point is exactly right. Like, let's take it out of tech. So, like what? Like the Conan o' Brien thing, like. Or smart.

[Leo Laporte]

That's actually a good show. I enjoy that.

[Brian McCullough]

But both of those are like, they sold for hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever. Because it's like, well, you. You're a celebrity in a sphere. They need your friends to come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And so, although it irritated me, a couple of weeks ago, Conan had Marc Maron on, who is now retiring from his very good podcast. And Conan said, you started this whole thing. And I thought, no, he did. No, no, no. He started in 2009 where you.

[Benito]

I think he meant comedian podcasts.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is that what he meant?

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah.

[Benito]

Because for Coden. Because, like, that's Conan's lineage.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That's all that matters. Right. It's a comedian podcast. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

No mention of Adam Curry or.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's all right. You know what? I'm. I'm being facetious. I don't really. I don't. I don't want credit for anything. It's. It's all silly.

[Benito]

You were the first. You're the first Vtuber, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

For sure.

[Benito]

You're the first vtuber.

[Leo Laporte]

I was the first virtual reality character on the site in 1998, and I won an Emmy for it in real time. 3D virtual reality character. And Mark Zucker. And I had legs, by the way, in 1998. Back in 1998. And I had legs, eggs. All right, we're no I. It's silly to look for that kind of credit. I'm just happy we're still here after 20 years. I, I feel very fortunate that we've got to do this for so long. We are going to wrap things up in just a bit. One more commercial before we go and some final stories, including a story that Richard put in and Brian says he has something to say about. So that'll be coming up in just a second. But first, first a word from our sponsor, US Cloud. Love these guys. They are. What would you think if I said US Cloud? You'd think they were a cloud company, right? Well, no. Although sort of. They're actually the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. We've been talking about them for a few months now. US Cloud is the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They support 55.0of the Fortune 500 and there's a good reason for it. Switching to US Cloud saves them and can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. Not just less expensive, better support, faster, at least two times faster than the average time to resolution versus Microsoft. Also, I think the best experts, they make a concerted effort to bring in the best engineers. With an average of 16 years working on Microsoft products with break fix and like that, these guys are the pros from Dover. They really are smart. But now they're going to live up to their name because US Cloud has another thing they're doing that's really good. They're excited to tell you about a new offering. Something I don't see Microsoft offering saving money on Azure. I don't think that's in their interest. US Cloud. It's in their interest. They call it their Azure cost optimization service. Saving on Azure is easier than you might think. Thanks to 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. Now you're going to get that expert guidance from US Cloud senior engineers. Yeah, the same guys who have an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. Really smart people. At the end of the eight weeks you're going to get a full interactive dashboard that will tell you where you have rebuild opportunities, downscale opportunities, even VMs that are just completely unused. And after a while that happens. Right now you can reallocate your precious IT dollars towards needed resources. Why spend money on something you're not using? Although I may make a recommendation, you could also keep the savings going by investing your Azure savings and US Cloud's Microsoft support. That's what a few other US Cloud customers have done, completely eliminating their unified spend. So the savings just keep on coming. Ask Sam. He's the Technical Operations manager at Bead Gaming. B E, D e. He gave us Cloud 5 stars saying, quote, we found some things that have been running for three years. He was using this, this Azure engagement for three years, which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure. But once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. Yeah, I think so. 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 book that call today and get faster Microsoft Support for less. Uscloud.com we thank them so much for supporting this week in Tech. You remember, some of you are old enough to remember 1999 and the Y2K bug. I was at Tech TV at the time and we were on call. We were, we were thinking at midnight we were all going to have to come in and talk about how the ATMs are down all over the country and, and the whole planes are coming out of the sky and nothing. Right? Nothing happened. Well, get ready because the next apocalypse is coming up. You, you know this Richard, in 2038, the Y2K38 bug or the Unix apocalypse.

[Richard Campbell]

Counting by seconds since 1970 and then.

[Leo Laporte]

They'Re going to run out, they're going to run out of seconds because they use 60 bit numbers to represent it. Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, they use 32 bit and that's going to run out because you, you know, so 2038. So Debian has an S which is one of the, the probably the most popular Linux distributions if you consider the fact that Ubuntu is based on Debian. A lot of pop OS is based on Debian. A lot of downstream distributions start with Debian. They've announced they're going to switch to 64 bit time now starting with Trixie. Debian 13, yay. They've got 15 years.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a simple solution. And it now bumps the number out to the end of the universe.

[Leo Laporte]

That seems enough. You never know though, that should do seems enough. I hope that this, this is really proactive of them. I hope that other issue is what.

[Richard Campbell]

Did you store in your database, which was the real problem with the Y2K bug too, right. Is what we stored in our databases was two digits, right. So if you stored 32 bit time fields, that's not going to fix it. You're going to have to convert them all to protect them.

[Leo Laporte]

0314 UTC on 01-19-2038 the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch 01/01-1970 will be larger than could be represented by a signed 32 bit integer. That means you only get really 31 bits. It would be fine writes the register if the decision had been made in 1970 to store all the numbers of seconds in exactly that format. So anyway, you'll be glad to know.

[Richard Campbell]

And, and by the way, Debian's by far not the first to do this. Like BSD's been like this for years. Like you had a choice between a 32 or a 64.

[Leo Laporte]

Like it's is Android. That's going to be the question because that's probably the most used Linux derivative right out there anyway. We'll see. One of the reasons important is Debbie Debian. Debian is often used on servers that don't get updated or you know, they use the long term service version of it. And I did for a long time when I wanted a stable server use Debian because it's, you know, it's rock solid. So those are the ones that really could be problematic. So do it.

[Mike Elgin]

I wonder if engineers when they were developing this predicted it, they would have known the date, right? They could have figured that out.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, think back. This was when UNIX was created by Dennis Richie and 1970 Brian Kernahan. Think back to 1970. Did they think that this operating system would still be used 68 years into the future?

[Richard Campbell]

The original flavor of Cobalt stored years as a single digit because 1970, 10 years, who would.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody's going to be using this software ten years from now.

[Mike Elgin]

In the future they're going to have AI that will just do everything for them. And people have Japanese jet packs. Well we have the AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Where are our flying cars?

[Richard Campbell]

So by the way, I bought a house on the back of Y2K like I did.

[Leo Laporte]

You really? Were you involved in that?

[Richard Campbell]

I made so much money.

[Leo Laporte]

So were you a coat. One of those old timer Cobalt guys called in off the golf course.

[Richard Campbell]

I was fixing dbase apps, man. Like oh wow. Yeah, no, we were, we fixed it. We. That first time when, when the Fed came down and said you're not a bank anymore if you can't pass 7-1-1999, the coffers opened up and that six months of, of 99 I worked continuously and made. Yeah, I bought a house.

[Mike Elgin]

Y2K was pretty good for me too. I, I basically did. It was five years leading up to that where I was on TV all the time. I made, yeah. VHS tapes. Explaining it like, you know, I did this like whole tour going to businesses and explaining it.

[Leo Laporte]

So it kind of ruined my New Year's Eve 1999 because I had to be. Be on call.

[Richard Campbell]

We had written the software for the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Fax that controlled the container, specifically the safety systems for containers. And so they wanted us to be available if it failed.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and the. Really it's a success story because it would have failed if people hadn't been very proactive and fixed the software.

[Benito]

Yeah, that's what I, that's what I was going to ask Richard, like, what if you didn't do that work, what would have happened?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's a great question. We don't know the answer to that. And the environment. We had fixed the port software long before that and had trialed it. But they were nervous. You know, these ops are nervous and they pay us a lot of money. And so the good news is Halifax is four hours ahead of Vancouver. So by 9 o' clock my time, you knew. He said, yeah, we'd already rolled over an hour. Nothing had happened. You can go out now, I'm sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike, one of the things you were. Questions you were answering was ATM machines because none of the ATMs were prepared to handle it and, and the, and the outcome would be unpredictable.

[Mike Elgin]

Right. That was the whole thing. But we were also reassuring people the airplanes won't fall out of the sky, but other crazy things we're not thinking of might happen. And.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike Elgin]

Nothing of any major decided to open.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the banks were afraid because if the reconciliations failed for even a day. It's billions.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Just in terms of the cleanup is huge. And so it was just. We had to run through this trial. The Fed vented this trial. It was a smart trial and, and we got through it.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope that people aren't sitting back and saying, hey, by 2038, AI will be here. It'll fix it all.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I hope not the first to the table on this. Lots of folks have worked on this problem. It's solved, it's good, it's well known.

[Leo Laporte]

We know it's going to happen. It's. No, not, not a surprise.

[Richard Campbell]

And so, you know, if you're using a contemporary version of my sequel, contemporary version of of post res, contemporary version of Maria. Any of those databases store 64 bit numbers, store 64 bit timestamps. And now if you're using Debian, you can do that too.

[Leo Laporte]

So why is Lina Khan, the former head of the FTC under the Biden administration, tweeting celebratory posts about figma's ipo?

[Richard Campbell]

She blocked Adobe.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, because Adobe was gonna buy Figma for $20 billion.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and Figma went off at $68 billion after the pot current market cap.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean it's just what she's saying is a ridiculous stretch and she shouldn't have blocked it in the first flipping place. You know, those guys are willing to take it on. It was good for everybody. And now they're building a competitor and.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why would be celebrating. Oh, you know, I made a lot of money for the Figma shareholders by blocking the merger. Well, but just is it good for America? Is the question.

[Brian McCullough]

I'm not arguing her point, but read the quote where if a company is allowed to be independent, longer, more valuable. Yes. Even if I disagree with her politically, I don't know that I disagree with that for various reasons as a investor or a tech industry.

[Richard Campbell]

Big argument here is why did the Figma IPO go?

[Leo Laporte]

Well.

[Brian McCullough]

That'S what I want to talk about.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to go, Richard, that's the.

[Richard Campbell]

Most interesting part of the story. I think this is a AI fatigue. I think folks were looking for something invested. It wasn't AI.

[Brian McCullough]

I think my take on this is that this is the most bullish thing that I've seen since the sort of tech crash post Covid in the sense that I would argue that it is a nominal AI play. Like everything is these days where you can. Like Adobe's an AI play. Canva is an AI play because you have those AI tools and whatever. But this is a SaaS company. It triple or almost tripled on an IPO.

[Leo Laporte]

Pop.

[Brian McCullough]

Those are.com sort of era things. After what happened with Core Weave and all this stuff. Like I think tech IPOs are back on the menu. Like if you're Canva, you have been spending the last five days talking to your bankers and preparing your ipo. If you're stripe, shouldn't you be maybe taking advantage of this? Here's what I put the history hat on one more time.

[Richard Campbell]

Time.

[Brian McCullough]

When it's a bull market for tech IPOs, it's not just that people can achieve their valuations, they're achieving valuations after pops that you'd be stupid not to line up for. Figma could have raised three times the money they raised. And so when you see people seeing that you can get pops like this, if you're a straight stripe, the amount of money that you can raise after your IPO is the thing that you can't turn away from. So, sorry, I was pontificating for a long time, Richard, but, like, my overall point is, like, more than anything else, I think this is the IPO that says we might be back at the races for at least the near term.

[Leo Laporte]

You agree? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I want to hear what Mike says.

[Mike Elgin]

I have no idea.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you what Paul Graham says. So Lina Khan tweets a great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses rather than be bought up by existing giants, can generate enormous value. A win for employees, investors, innovation, and the public. To which Paul Graham says, startups are risky. Sometimes when you keep rolling the dice, things turn out well, sometimes not. But founders should be able to decide for themselves when to stop. He's saying you should have let it happen. You should have let the acquisition happen.

[Brian McCullough]

Is he saying that?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, because, of course, if everybody knew, oh, you're going to be worth so much more if you just hang on for a couple of years, then, well, if they knew that. In hindsight, yeah. Okay, okay.

[Brian McCullough]

I'm reading that as him saying that, like, that shouldn't. Okay. I would say the government.

[Leo Laporte]

I think he's saying government should not step in. Founders should be able to decide whether they want to.

[Brian McCullough]

I was taking too narrow a point on that because they took the deal and. Right. They almost. They almost got lucky.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So I think they should give Lina Khan at least five bucks.

[Richard Campbell]

So the question is, what is figment going to do with the money? I mean, the reason you go public is that you need to rem raise enough money that no individual investor can afford it or no group of investors can afford it. So you go to the public markets, you raise a larger amount of money. Do you have an idea big enough that you need that much money?

[Brian McCullough]

Oh, but, Richard, we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about what is it they're valued at like, 55 times sales or something like that. I think only Palantir is valued more than them on the stock market. Look, the point is that if you are a structure stripe or like, let's say a, like, God forbid, a perplexity or one of these AI companies was ballsy enough to try an ipo like that's when you'll know you'll be back in the dot com era. If one of these pure play AI companies takes a run at it in the next six months, that's when we'll know we're really back in the, the, the crazy days.

[Richard Campbell]

And Figma is certainly not a pure AI company.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a design company. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And they could also be a bought by Adobe still just now in the public markets. Right. Like there's, they, there's always a question of what this actually looks like. The bottom line is, do you have a mission sufficient to keep your shareholders happy?

[Brian McCullough]

And, but I'm arguing that it doesn't matter at a time when the public markets are like, hey, just give us anything, we want to invest it.

[Richard Campbell]

I know they, yeah, so you're betting on irrationality, which, you know, irrationality passes.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But hey, let's be fair. And by the way, Ms. Khan, you probably shouldn't post this kind of thing on X because you're only going to get people who disagree with you. But let's be fair. The people who made the money were the investment bankers who got, were able to get in at the start price and then able to sell at the pop price.

[Brian McCullough]

And they were, Bill Gurley pointed out they left like 3. They could have raised 3x had the bankers not priced it.

[Leo Laporte]

Priced it at 30 bucks. Yeah, but the, but that's what bankers.

[Brian McCullough]

Like, that's another bullish sign that, that's an argument that we used to hear all the time in the old days that we haven't heard for a very long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, who should go public next?

[Brian McCullough]

I said, I said stripe.

[Leo Laporte]

Stripe. Yeah, Perplex. Yeah, we know. No acquisition will be blocked unless you're unkind to the President.

[Brian McCullough]

Seriously, then, like this would be. Again, I'm looking at this from the Silicon Valley perspective, the investor perspective. If you want to get back to the, like the Go Go days of Things are insane. If a perplexity in the next 12 months floated an IPO and was successful, then, then it's the all bets are off.

[Leo Laporte]

Because then, yeah, yeah, it's a, it's.

[Richard Campbell]

A great time to jump now you've just smacked spacks in the face. You cannot do it successfully. Yeah, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't mean it's rational. But sometimes irrationality is profitable.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why we have the $300 a month paywall behind this show. Because we're making you money, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, no, we don't we should, but we don't know you're listening to the show absolutely free unless you're a member of the club, in which case I thank you profusely. If you're not a member, it is now 25% of our operating expenses. Makes a big difference to us. Plus you get a lot of benefits, including, of course, ad free versions of all the shows. Twit TV club. Twit. We would love to have you in the club and you get a newsletter. We actually offer a free newsletter. People say, well, how do you know what's coming up on the. The, you know, on the club in the next week we'll just subscribe for free @Twit TV newsletter. Stay tuned for Leo's private. I was going to say make you money newsletter.

[Brian McCullough]

Your newsletter should just be all of those things that you're wearing around your neck, the summaries that you're getting of your.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty funny. I have blogged it a couple of times.

[Brian McCullough]

Should be the newsletter on a daily basis.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. I should do a newsletter. I'll do a newsletter. I'll think about it.

[Richard Campbell]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe I'll get Lex to write it for me. Thank you, Mike Elgin. Hope you have a wonderful time in Oaxaca. I'm so jealous. The best food, the best people. It was just a party. And what a cute little town. It's so great.

[Mike Elgin]

It's beautiful.

[Richard Campbell]

I gotta sign up for one of these.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard highly encouraged that you do that. Plus a lot of the people who are there are twit listeners. So you're going to be in a good, good company, you know, smart people. It's a lot of fun. Fun. And of course we still will mention. Hello, Chatterbox. Your son's a startup, even though he's now gone to the Kagi search engine. We'll interview his boss on Wednesday. Hello, Chatterbox. Great way for kids in school and others to learn about AI in a safe environment.

[Mike Elgin]

That's right. It's very important now more than ever. And so I thank you for that plug and also my newsletter, Machine Society. I'd love to plug that if you don't mind. Leo, please sign up. Sign up. I actually happy that you have the free version. I have a paid version. The difference is very slight. So I. My philosophy is that pay newsletter make Micah Richmond a really good newsletter. And then the paid one is a little bit. A little bit more stuff occasionally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Machinesociety, AI. It is excellent. I read it every day. Thank you, Mike.

[Mike Elgin]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you to Brian McCullough, the Tech Brew ride home. Just go to ride home dot com. Yeah, yeah. You'll find out about the new tech Brew Ride Home. But if you're already a Ride Home subscriber, don't worry, it's still in your inbox each and every day. Thank you so much to talk about. It's a good time to be a podcaster, isn't it, Brian? The riches are flowing, aren't they?

[Brian McCullough]

But has it ever been a bad time?

[Leo Laporte]

And my good friend Richard Campbell, who'll be podcasting with me on Wednesday on Windows Weekly and of course every [e-mail] and.net rocks. Thank you, Richard. I'm glad. I mean, it was very nice of you to get off the boat early and be here with us.

[Richard Campbell]

I wanted to go home anyway. You've seen the view out here. Dude, why would I leave?

[Leo Laporte]

I know you. Oh, my God, look at that. It's a beautiful day in. In Madeira Park, British Columbia.

[Richard Campbell]

So we sailed the other way in this morning past.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you have seen the boat go by if you had been. Oh, wow, that's cool. Cool. That's really cool. Did you wave as you went by? Say, hey, there's our house?

[Richard Campbell]

There it goes.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you to all of you who watch and participate. I do this. This is a look, Mike. It's a look.

[Mike Elgin]

It's a good look.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a look.

[Brian McCullough]

I gotta.

[Richard Campbell]

I gotta get a little Kim Jong Un vibe. I don't know what's going on.

[Leo Laporte]

I need a fade if I'm gonna do that. Yeah, this is the shit where we cover the week's tech news every week with a fabulous rotating panel of hosts. We're glad you watch. You can watch us live, of course, or after the fact. Subscribe, but do watch. We've been doing it for 20 years and I'm very happy to keep doing it for another 20 years. The good Lord willing and the cricks don't rise. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye.

[Brian McCullough]

Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twin. The twin. All right.

[Brian McCullough]

Doing the twin, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twin. All right. This episode of Grilling J R with Jim Ross is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today.

[Richard Campbell]

Smart choice.

[Leo Laporte]

Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.