← All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
This Week in Tech 1048: Tiny Steering Wheel
02:48:32
Unpacking Google's Antitrust Ruling & AI's Impact
Loading summary
Transcript776 lines
- [00:00]
A
It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech. Alex Wilhelm is here. Harry McCracken, we have a lot to talk about from the big decision in the anthropic lawsuit by the. By the book authors. The Google penalties are here. Was it a slap on the wrist? Will Google Appeal? And some iPhone17 speculation? Actually, in this case it might actually be real. All that more coming up next on Twit Podcasts you love from people you Trust.
- [00:34]
B
This is TWiT.
- [00:41]
A
This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1048, recorded Sunday, September 7th, 2025. Tiny steering wheel. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show. We get together with my favorite tech journalists to talk about the latest tech news. Joining me now, two of my great friends. Harry McCracken, the technologizer from FastCompany.com, longtime observer of the tech scene. It's great to see you, Harry. Welcome.
- [01:12]
C
Hey, Leo. Great to be here.
- [01:14]
A
And I thought since I got Harry, let's get one or other and we can have a little, a little threesome. That didn't come out right. Alex Wilhelm is here. He is of course also a long time buddy from TechCrunch days. Then he went to this Week in Startups and started his own newsletter, Cautious Optimism at Cautious Optimism News and still covering the stuff. You've always had a little bit of a financial bent to your coverage though, right?
- [01:42]
B
Oh, absolutely. I'm just really touched, Leo, that when you think of the word threesome, I'm the first name that comes to mind.
- [01:48]
A
Trio. Should I say trio?
- [01:50]
B
That's maybe a better, maybe a Minaj, a trio.
- [01:53]
A
Perhaps a magic trio. Okay, good.
- [01:55]
C
Triumvirate.
- [01:56]
A
Triumvirate.
- [01:57]
B
Perhaps even a trivium.
- [01:58]
A
Oh, wow.
- [02:00]
B
Go to.
- [02:00]
A
We're getting Latin now.
- [02:03]
B
All right, everybody.
- [02:06]
A
I actually was torn over the top story. There's some big ones, but I think we've got to say that Judge Amit Mehta's decision, which finally came down a year after he ruled that Google was in Monopoly, the penalty phase finally completed a little late. He said he'll finish by August. I think he came out September 2nd with his decision. And I'm really fascinated by what you all think about it. I could tell you the stock market loved it. Google went up. This is from CNBC, 8%. I think it ended up being up 9% by the end of the day. Apple also went up because Judge Mehta said Google can continue to pay Apple and Mozilla and Samsung the billions of dollars they pay them to be the default search engine. Google does not have to sell Chrome, Google does not have to divest Android. In fact, Google pretty much doesn't have to do anything. The only thing he said is, well, those exclusive deals you make with handset makers, you know, handset makers can use the open source version of Android for free, but if they want the Play Store, and of course they all do, they want Google had required them to also use Chrome as the default browser to ship with Chrome and to have Google be their default search engine. And those exclusivity requirements apparently are not to be continued of course, when I'm just imagining this, but I can imagine the boardroom with the Google lawyers all sitting around hearing this judgment and giggling wildly and then composing themselves and saying, should we appeal? As far as I know, they have not yet decided to appeal. Is that correct?
- [03:56]
B
That's to my knowledge correct. Their statement they put out after this was pretty anodyne and I think it's because you're right, Leo. They pretty much got it's a victory possible result. Now they didn't win every single thing. There were a couple of wrist slaps in there, but to me it was pretty much a nothing burger, a disappointment for folks who were concerned about Google search monopoly especially companies like DuckDuckGo were pretty annoyed. But I'm really curious, Harry, what you think about the data sharing elements of this because that's slightly more technical than I tend to get. And so I'm not sure if the requirements for Google to share a little bit of search data are impactful or if that's more of a thing that looks good but doesn't actually carry a lot of substance.
- [04:32]
C
I thought it was pretty intriguing, but I don't pretend to fully understand its impact. I'm not sure if the judge fully understood it. So I'm sitting around being curious about it and once again being, I guess not disappointed isn't the right word, but I feel like I've spent my entire career waiting for some big antitrust decision that actually does have seismic impact on the industry. And it seems like they all fizzle out eventually. Like even the Department of Justice versus Microsoft 25 years ago at first they were talking about splitting up Microsoft and that ended up being more of a risk slap like this as well.
- [05:14]
A
And Harry, you're a historian and this is what I love. One of the reasons I love having you on, as I remember. But correct me if I'm wrong, the judge on the Microsoft case was forced to recuse himself and at that point Microsoft got together with the DOJ and they worked out a consent decree avoiding most of the serious penalties.
- [05:33]
C
They worked out a deal which I guess did have some impact on Microsoft's interactions with the companies were selling Windows too. Ultimately the world changed a lot shortly thereafter. But it wasn't so much because of this agreement, it was because the web and then smartphones came along. And controlling Windows and controlling the PC platform turned out not to be a great way to control the world. And in fact, if Microsoft had moved past Windows even a little bit more quickly, it might have been in better shape. And you might even argue that the stuff they agreed to do helped nudge them in the right decision. Yeah, direction rather.
- [06:13]
A
Judge Mehta did say that there will be a five person committee overseeing Google for the next six years, which is kind of like the ombudsman that Microsoft was forced to accept in its consent decree. But it's unclear a what power that committee will have and what they'll be watching for. We should make clear when we say sharing data, it's not sharing our data, it's sharing search. Right. The spider stuff. And it is with, according to Judge Mehta, quote, qualified companies, qualified competitors. I think I heard from a number of competitors who are saying, well that's going to help us a little bit. People like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and others.
- [06:54]
C
Yeah. And in all the instances where Google likes to talk about how open it is, the search stuff, it's kept very close to the vest forever. So sharing any data, I don't think it's something it would choose to do on its own.
- [07:06]
A
No, it's their secret recipe, it's their, it's their Coca Cola. You know, it's in the vault.
- [07:11]
C
The seven herbs and spices.
- [07:12]
A
Yes, it's there. It's their seven herbs and spices.
- [07:16]
B
Should we explain to people why that matters, Leo, just so people understand why people.
- [07:20]
A
Well, if you like Kentucky Fried Chicken, it really comes down to it's just flour, but it's the seven secret herbs and spices that make the difference.
- [07:28]
B
They actually have special plants at the KFC factory that no one else has. That's why they're secret. No, but in the case of search data, why this matters is if you have a lot of usage but you purchase via exclusive deals, then you get a lot more information about people are searching for, allowing you to make a better.
- [07:44]
A
That's really a good point. It's not just the page rank anymore, it's also the feed, the feedback loop that users create.
- [07:51]
B
And the argument was you can't break in because if they're going to buy all the search traffic From Apple, then DuckDuckGo can never get the same sort of information advantage and therefore their flywheel fails, whereas Google gets more and more powerful and strong. So the idea is, at least in theory, by sharing some of this data, then other search engines will have a chance to compete more effectively with Google. So I think it's going to be a small point, but the thing is, do you guys use Google that much anymore? I'm slowly transitioning.
- [08:16]
A
That's the. I think that's if you're going to give Judge Mehta a pass and some people are not willing to give him a pass. He even spanked the Department of Justice, saying they overreached and asking me to order them to divest Chrome, which is true. It's very hard to imagine. We've talked about this, how you would divest Chrome, what that would even mean. So he was, he was pretty critical of the Department of Justice. They basically got nothing that they, they asked for. But what Judge Mehta did say is, hey, I did rule a monopoly in August of 2024. But he said the emergence of AI has changed, quote, changed the course of this case.
- [08:56]
B
Yeah.
- [08:56]
A
And I think he's, he kind of in his mind realized that just like with the Microsoft case, times had moved on and maybe he didn't need to spank Google because in fact, Google was going to be in a fight for its life. Remember Eddie Q from Apple coming up on the stand and testifying A. If, if Apple lost its 20 billion, that'd be a big problem, but that Apple had considered creating its own search and, and, and nothing was as good as Google. They wouldn't be able to compete with Google. Google's dominance is pretty clear. But, but Q also said that, that, that, that is not going to hold forever. That AI, generative AI is changing the landscape. In fact, you see Google adding AI, they just added something, a new thing beyond the AI Assistant.
- [09:46]
B
Yes, the Google AI chat thing, right?
- [09:49]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to log in for some reason with my Workspace account to see it, but it's googled.com AI I think. And. Oops, let's see. Yeah, I played with it and I was very impressed with it. It's different. The AI assistant is awful. In fact, I've heard some people say, you don't, you don't. Oh, no, I guess it is now my regular account. He said, they said, you don't really want to. Google's harming the world. With this AI assistant, because most people think that's what AIs like, and it's so terrible, so bad that they're assuming AI is worthless. On the other hand, this AI mode, which is basically Google's top models in a, in a deep search mode, is actually very good, I thought, very good. Competitive with things like Perplexity and others.
- [10:37]
B
So they can't send people to it though, on mos, because that would undercut their profit source. So right now they're stuck giving you a really crappy patina of AI on top of your standard search. And then over there, if you open door number two, you have an entirely different and better product. But they just don't want to flip everyone over. And this is the innovator's dilemma, I think I spelled out in real time for Google, forced to defend a legacy revenue stream in the face of a new technology.
- [11:00]
A
But also, maybe the judge was right. I mean, maybe the judge, you know, he's certainly getting a lot of heat from some, some quarters saying, you, this was a slap on the wrist, you didn't do anything. Harry, what do you guys think was this is it? Let me, let me ask you first, Harry, appropriate decision?
- [11:20]
C
Well, yeah, I don't see, like, how forcing them to sell Chrome would solve much. And also, who would be all that interested in paying enormous amounts to Chrome? Chrome is mainly a value if it's operated by a search company that has a large advertising business. And splitting it up certainly would have been harmful to Google. But whether it would have clearly made the world a better place for consumers, I think is very unclear. And I wrote about that when that first came up as a possibility. I do think that over time, the market changing so rapidly tends to do a decent job of policing things, because even the largest, most powerful companies, if they do rest on their laurels, they get into trouble. And we've seen that over and over again. And there's at least some possibility that not only Google, but kind of all of the incumbents may run into trouble with AI now, because in almost every aspect of computing, AI could change things pretty quickly. Okay.
- [12:26]
A
I do have to point out though, that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, all have other revenue streams. So they can spend vast amounts of money training AI models in a way that companies like OpenAI can't. I mean, they are spending it, but they have to do that on the pleasure of venture capitalists.
- [12:47]
C
The models matter, but so do that. The products build on top of them. And some weird ways, it's harder to build a good product than to spend billions on pretty models.
- [12:56]
A
Right. Which is using others models, but has really become a premier example of what you can do with orchestration. There's also the emerging issue, we talk a lot about it on our AI show and intelligent machines that maybe the large LLMs are not the only way forward, that these, you know, the Chinese have smaller models. There's interesting models out there, interesting ways of doing it, besides transformers that are also proving to be very powerful. So maybe these giant incumbents don't have a huge advantage. What do you think, Alex? Is the judge. Was the judge lenient?
- [13:27]
B
So I think the judge was probably correct in the state of the market today. But what I hate is the fact that everyone says, and I've, I'm sympathetic to this argument a little bit because I do talk to a lot of people who are pretty deep in the tank on the financial side of tech, that technology fixes things. You know, if you, if you have a product that takes over the market, eventually it'll get beaten by something else. So therefore why do we need antitrust protection?
- [13:48]
A
Well, because we need antitrust for monopolies. That's the point, is that monopolies get so big, so dominant that they can't. That the market no longer has any impact on them. They own the market in a sense.
- [14:00]
B
Right, but. And Google had that for a long time in search, and then in the end they were slowly taken over by something else. You know, 15 years down the road. And some people want to say, great, everything worked out really well, but they had Monopoly for a long time and they illegally held it. And it turns out the punishment is if you can keep the case far enough away long enough, long enough, eventually you'll get saved by someone trying to take your lunch money. But the market was still impacted for all those years by an effective Monopoly player. And that to me should come with stiffer punishments. So it's fine to say that today we don't need to take a stick to Google's overall corporate structure because they're being challenged by OpenAI and Anthropic and Perplexity and over in China, Moonshot, AI Z AI Deep Seq, et cetera, et cetera.
- [14:39]
A
That's amazing.
- [14:40]
B
Yeah, but what about 20 minutes ago, and that's what pisses me off about this. I think people are saying that because ChatGPT is challenging them now, nothing else matters. And to me that's freaking bullcrap, I think is the appropriate twit way of saying that.
- [14:53]
C
It's also, I mean, in a lot of ways I've been more bothered by Google's position in advertising than its position in web browsers or search or mobile operating systems. It does have a big competitor in Meta, but Google has been extraordinarily powerful when it comes to determining how advertising gets bought and placed and how much it costs and forcing them to sell. Chrome might have had an indirect impact on that because they have that power in part because they're able to direct eyeballs to that advertising. But I don't, I don't know how and when that changes, particularly given that the chatgpt and perplexities are a very, very far way away from monetizing through advertising in the way that Google is monetized through advertising for like 25 years now.
- [15:46]
A
So to be specific, because there's some question in our discord, our club members, about what's going on with the data sharing. The doj asked for one thing. The judge decided something a little bit different. He rejected the DOJ's proposed data sharing remedies. Google would be required to share something called Doc idea unique identifiers for each document in the search index, which can be used to retrieve the documents from the index without performing an actual search. The DOC ID to URL map and that user side data should include, but not be limited to the time when the URL was seen last crawled, the spam score. Basically these are valuable little signals about the search index. It is not one time there. There will be periodic releases of this information, I believe. Eddie Q&DuckDuckGo's Gabriel Weinberg and Chat GPD's Nick Turley all testified, citing them. The court said receipt of this narrow data set will still enable rivals to overcome the scale gap by allowing them to build a competitive search index more quickly, one that is robust in volume, freshness and utility. So basically the judge said, well, if you still want to do a search engine in this era of AI search, we'll make Google give you some stuff. But I think the judge kind of felt like it's not going to matter that much because AI is happening. Of course it is. OpenAI it was one of the companies that was celebrating this information. To answer the question about how often does Google have to share the data periodically. In short, no. The DOJ wanted Google to share its data periodically. The court rejected that, saying that the qualified competitors will receive only a one time snapshot of the relevant data. So that's interesting. It's just enough to kickstart their own efforts.
- [17:48]
C
That doesn't sound all that valuable.
- [17:50]
A
No.
- [17:50]
B
What a Disappointment. I like this. I keep trying to find some way to not get mad about this because I'm trying to be less mad about everything all the time.
- [17:57]
A
It's good for you. Yeah.
- [17:58]
B
Yeah. Well, I feel like my cortisol levels were just too high and this tech.
- [18:03]
A
Will do that to you.
- [18:04]
B
Not helping. Not helping at all. It is kind of incredible that a year ago we were looking at one particular set of remedies and now we're here. It's like being invited to a lunch and, and then arriving and being handed one crouton and a small cup of water and being told that you should be very, very happy.
- [18:18]
A
No rubber chicken for you. Yeah. Now remember, Google has been found to be a monopoly not once, but twice. Another court earlier this year found Google guilty of a monopoly in online advertising. Judge Leonie Brinkhama of the US District Court for Eastern District of Virginia. Now, Judge, Judge Brinkema is going to now enter the penalty phase. So in fact, I think really this is where Google is clearly predatory in the market because they are both buyer and seller. They, they own both ends of it and everything in the middle as well. And I can see them being ordered to split off some advertising capabilities, that kind of thing.
- [19:03]
B
Does this play, does this play in the EU problem? So I think it was yesterday the EU announced they're going to find Google three and a half billion over, I think, playing both sides of the ad market. And Trump's very mad about this because, I don't know, doesn't like rules.
- [19:18]
A
I think the President's point of view is if we're going to spank big tech, it's our job, not your job.
- [19:23]
B
Right. And that's the thing, because if the deal we're going to be having this case, right. Discussing at the national level is Google being unfair in the advertising market. And then EU says they are and then we're like, no, they're not. It feels a little bit contradictory to me in a way that makes my head spin and going back to my cortisol levels, very mad.
- [19:41]
A
Google was fined this week three and a half billion dollars by the EU over their ad tech. But here's the problem. Of course, they're still in trade negotiations with the EU and Trump is waving tariffs over their head, saying, no, no, maybe not. So it'll be interesting to see he's gotten the EU to back down in other areas. I apparently got the UK to back down on asking for data from Apple. So although we don't know that for sure because all we have is a Tweet.
- [20:12]
B
Okay, but like are you surprised that the UK government was trying to get an American tech company to backdoor its.
- [20:19]
A
Operations and not just for UK citizens, but for Americans as well? You know, I mean I think that was a little, that was a bridge too far.
- [20:26]
B
Well, everyone knows that if you open a secure back door for one government, no one else can ever go in. It's closed for everyone else. 100% safe.
- [20:35]
A
Trump called the move discriminatory and threatened to open a Section 301 trade investigation to nullify the unfair penalties. So that one's up in the air. The Block gave Google 60 days to propose how to resolve the inherent conflicts of interest. So Google is not out of the, out of the woods by any means. But I think they, they can. I, I'd be surprised. Should they appeal this? I mean if they appeal it, then it goes on for years and they don't have to do anything. Is there a risk though, if they appeal it that the appellate court might say no? In fact, we're going to make you sell crumb after all.
- [21:12]
C
It must be a huge relief to them.
- [21:14]
A
I think they're celebrating. They uncorked some champagne and Apple is.
- [21:19]
C
Probably celebrating as well.
- [21:20]
A
Yeah, 20 billion a year for Apple.
- [21:22]
C
They're not going to be forced to give up that relationship.
- [21:24]
A
That's right.
- [21:25]
C
I mean there is this thing that Google can't by exclusive placements. But at least for now, I think Apple would prefer to have Google as the default search engine regardless of how much money is involved, just because it is the world's default search engine. And that may change at some point, but it's not going to change.
- [21:47]
A
Well, let me show you how change in the next year or two, how dominant Google is. Neowin just published an article from Stat Counter showing how overwhelming Chrome's market share is. It is climbing. It is now 70% of the desktop browser market. We say desktop because obviously iPhone is a Safari browser and so forth. But on the Desktop Safari is third with 6.4%. Microsoft Edge is second with 11.8%. Wow. Google has 70% of the market. Then there's Firefox, Opera and the rest are, you know, de minimis tiny.
- [22:26]
C
I'm glad that Firefox has not been forced to give up its relationship with Google because that would put them out of business. Yeah, and the world is a better place because Firefox exists for sure.
- [22:37]
A
I imagine the judge considered that as well. You know, you would be putting one pretty much the only other competitor to chromium based browsers out of business. It's estimated $700 million Google pays every year to Mozilla for being this default search. Thing is, it's only a setting in all cases. You can change it, right?
- [22:58]
C
Yeah, I mean I use Kagi as my default search engine, although I do find myself going to Google for some stuff and actually like on Apple devices I'm mainly in Safari using Kagi, but I'll flip over to Chrome partially because Google is this default there on Apple.
- [23:17]
A
Devices you have to actually install the COGI plugin to have Kagi show up.
- [23:21]
C
Which is a little bit of a Klude choice.
- [23:23]
A
Yeah, they have a very limited set. You were, you were raising your hand. You don't have to raise your hand, Alex, you could just.
- [23:31]
B
I'm learning how to not interrupt people, Leo. This is part of my, I'm, I'm learning patience and, and, and calm. But Harry, I'm very curious. What, what are the searches that you currently go off of Kagi?
- [23:41]
A
It's a khaki or khaki K. A G. I. You pronounce it any way you want.
- [23:46]
C
Okay, well there are, there are certain things like Google Books where there's not a cocky equivalent. But I also find that in cases where you actually want an enormous number of results because you're looking for something incredibly obscure, with Kagi you'll get fewer results, which are often enough. But in cases where I really want to see everything, Google will give me more results and in some cases that is valuable.
- [24:13]
B
It's interesting because I start with Google. I used to start with Google and then I would switch to GPT, I guess now five, but now I'm kind of like a GPT five first person.
- [24:23]
A
It's pretty good. It's search because they've added all of these AIs now have added the component to add search to the LLMs.
- [24:30]
C
And I do use ChatGPT and Claude, but I don't really trust them. So like I use them as step one, but then I still have to verify anything they tell me with an actual search engine, which is usually Google.
- [24:44]
B
But when it doesn't matter, you don't have to check them. So last night I was playing Hear Me Out. Last night I was playing Satisfactory, which is a factory building game.
- [24:52]
A
Lovely game. Yes.
- [24:53]
B
I'm breaking my factorio addiction at last. Thank you so much.
- [24:56]
A
It's Basically Factorio in 3D, so it's.
- [24:59]
B
Fun, but you have to actually hunt things. It's a whole. I know, Leo, you're a big crafter. Enshrouded guy. But for me, it's kind of new. But you can get these recipes, these alternatives. And I was trying to figure out what to do, and I literally just hopped onto ChatGPT. I'm like, all right, all right. Cast screws or quick wire? And it broke down for me, like, you know, units per minute and the community expectations. And I was like, all right, all right, cool, cool. I'm not gonna check any of this. I'm just gonna take your advice. Click. And it was fantastic. I felt.
- [25:29]
A
So it's useful.
- [25:30]
C
It's okay for that. It's like when I'm looking for actual facts that need to be correct, I'm still.
- [25:34]
A
Still fairly sort of when you're gaming. But by the way, Microsoft is building Copilot into Xbox, so you will have that availability in your.
- [25:43]
B
Does anyone like Copilot?
- [25:45]
A
No.
- [25:47]
B
There was a story that just came out. The UK used Office 365 copilot M365 copilot and found no noticeable productivity gains. And I for one, am shocked that if you take a tech stack and just slather some AI over the top.
- [25:59]
A
Of it, nothing changes, doesn't improve anything.
- [26:01]
B
Shocking.
- [26:02]
A
I'm going to show you a little trick. Henry. Henry. Harry. If you go. My son's name is Henry. If you go to kagi.com and you click the drop down, you'll see they have a thing called the Assistant, which is their version. It's like perplexity of orchestrated AI. And they have every model, a really broad, broad number of models that you can use. And so what they're doing is taking COGI search results and then using these LLMs as the back end for it. And I find it's very. It's very useful. I really like it. You can see. I was trying to see there's a big trend right now to ask ChatGPT what the emoji is for seahorse, and it goes crazy. I don't. Have you seen this?
- [26:43]
B
No.
- [26:44]
A
Show me. All right, let me go to ChatGPT. What I was doing with Cocky is trying everybody to see, you know, who had. So this is what you get if you. Is there a seahorse emoji? Yes, there's a seahorse emoji. And then it shows a horse and a wave. Technically, it's this one right here. Horse wave. But wait, that's a horse and a wave. Not a true seahorse. This is the thinking going a little overboard, but there's no official dedicated seahorse emoji in the Unicorn Standard. Yet if you're trying to capture that adorable twisted tail, sea dwelling little wonder, you've got three playful workarounds. Now that's four. Oh, if you actually ask five, it's even crazier. Yes, there is indeed a seahorse emoji. Kidding. The real one looks like this. And then he gives you a fish. No, that's a fish. The actual seahorse emoji is. Nope, that's a dragon. Here it is. At last. A true hippo camp of Unicode. No, wait, it's that fish again. Found it. Fish. Okay, okay, I'll stop trolling you. The actual seahorse emoji is. And then it's a wave. Still wrong. Straight answer. And it goes on and on and on again. Finally says Leo, I've completely tied myself in knots. Want me to show you the actual Unicode code point for the Seahawks emoji? I didn't dare ask it for more because there is none.
- [27:56]
B
I just got a similar response and I just said yes. And now it's going, oh, man, poor.
- [28:00]
A
Thing, it keeps going crazy. Yeah.
- [28:04]
C
One of the nice things about Kagi is that it's so customizable that it has all that stuff when you want it, but you never feel like it's forcing you down a particular road in.
- [28:13]
A
The way Google sometimes does. Interestingly, at the point you remember this Harry Dvorak used to come on and say, back when altavista and Excite were the big search engines, he said, here's how I find out. If you're really a geek, what's your favorite search engine? If they say Google, I know they're a geek. Well, we're now at that inflection point, I think, with cogi, because more and more the really smart people I talk to, because I started using COGI two years ago, you pay for it, and I thought, I'm a little outlier. And over the last two years, more and more people like you, Harry, saying, yeah, I use cogi, so maybe we're going to get Alex in the fold soon.
- [28:50]
B
Yeah, no, I'm actually, I'm on the side right now, looking at the pricing page as you say this, and it's relatively affordable. I mean, 10.
- [28:55]
A
I pay 25 bucks a month for the full 25.
- [28:58]
C
Wow. I'm just doing the $10 plan.
- [29:01]
A
Yeah. Well, you can start at five bucks, I think.
- [29:03]
B
Yeah.
- [29:03]
A
But there's no ads, so you got to pay them. And this is the thing, people have kind of started to grok on the Internet is you either pay for it or you're going to be. Your data is going to be mined.
- [29:16]
B
Or in Google's case, you know, you can't really avoid it if you use Chrome. But I will say, Leo, you're very good at using your money to vote. And I think that's an example of that.
- [29:26]
A
Yeah, I try to do that. And I think everybody, all of us, if we can afford it, should do that, because you need to send a signal that this is the right way. We don't want the. And some. And I think it's a good time to start worrying about surveillance capitalism in an era of AI because it just puts. It puts surveillance and steroids. Right. It makes it even.
- [29:45]
B
You guys know security, right? Yeah, the company. So I had their CEO on the. On twist. And this is before the latest reporting about the company came out and how they're a bit entwined with the security state. And I was really trying to push him on, you know, cameras in public and cameras on roads and such. And he had an argument that I couldn't fight back against. He was like, well, the state owns the road, so they can take pictures with Mallex. I was like, yeah, fair enough. But I do think that we need to have something at the national level to set guardrails to protect our privacy, because as it is right now and where it is going, we're not going to be able to be private citizens for very much longer. And I don't mean to be alarmist, but the pace at which we're adding cameras and intelligence to those cameras does actually make me worried. And I try to not panic about things, but I think it's a legitimate concern for the next five or 10 years. We need to fight this probably now or we probably won't be able to.
- [30:39]
C
But I don't have a whole lot of faith that anybody in the federal government is going to solve any of that because A, they have a long history of talking about solving privacy problems and not doing much, and B, just with the current administration and the House and the Senate, their instinct is not. Is not to regulate. Their instinct is not to regulate.
- [30:59]
B
No. And they want to have an imperial presidency. So I think it's probably both things. They don't want to regulate and they want to arrogate to themselves unless the authority at the executive branch.
- [31:07]
A
It's about the unitary presidency is what really is these days. By the way, I hope you asked Flock because, you know, it is a combination of cameras and license plate readers. So absolutely, he's right. Purely in the academic sense, it's completely legal. These aren't private roads. These are public roads that you're using. That's why you need a driver's license, regardless of what the sovereign citizens movement says. But they were giving that information to, not only to law enforcement and ice, but it was also being used by law enforcement in, for instance, in Texas to track a woman down who left Texas, where it's illegal to have an abortion, to get an abortion in another state. And they were using flock data to track her down in this other state. And that's where, yeah, it may be technically legal, but is it right or is it a huge invasion of privacy? And then it's the state, not the federal government, but a state using Flock data to enforce their laws in another state.
- [32:10]
B
I have a political transformation, Leo. So I went to my teenage libertarian phase, as I think a lot of young men do.
- [32:18]
A
It's either that or nihilism. So, okay, good.
- [32:21]
B
Then I pivoted to that later on, and then I kind of came around to being an Obama liberal, for lack of a better, better phrase. Kind of like free marketing. But let's try to help people.
- [32:29]
A
That's what your friend Jason Calacanis says. They're all Obama Democrats now in the White House. I'm not sure I agree with that.
- [32:37]
B
That's. I hard disagree with that. But Jason and I are on. Here's the way I put it. I'm the token liberal on twist, and he is the token liberal on all in. So that's where we sit. But what I've learned through the Trump administrations, one and now two, is that if you have levers of power in a government that can be used for good, then when you lose and the person you don't agree with comes into power, they turn those levers into wrenches to hit you with. And so ironically, or maybe not ironically, but maybe positively, I think Trump is actually making me more of a libertarian, because what I don't want is for the executive branch to have so much power, because I would like to not worry about Florida lock safety. I would like to not worry about encryption being undermined. I like to not worry about being surveilled all the time.
- [33:24]
A
Well, we've given. We now have such tools for surveillance that we've never had before. You know, giant databases, AI to search those databases, kind of infinite amount of compute. The world has changed dramatically in 50 years, and all that power is very scary and probably shouldn't be in the hands of somebody who wants to abuse it. We have to take a break, but we will come back. You've got Alex Wilhelm on the left.
- [33:54]
C
Okay. My crossfire.
- [33:56]
B
I'm such a capitalist, but I'm still a lefty.
- [33:58]
A
Yeah, I'm not going to put Harry in the right.
- [34:00]
C
On the right.
- [34:01]
A
But he is on the. On my right. Your right. Actually he's on my left. So that's what's really confusing. And I'm in the middle. That's for sure. On either side. Actually, I'm not. I'm probably more liberal and leftist than you are, Alex.
- [34:14]
B
But let's have a left off. It'll be fun.
- [34:16]
A
I'm covert. Not so covert. Let's take a break. We're talk more. Actually, an Apple event is coming up Tuesday. It's Awe Dropping, which I contend is the worst name for an event ever. Apple, you could do better. You really could. But we'll get to that in just a little bit. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. AI is fascinating in business because it is both a huge threat. AI is being used by hackers to breach your organization faster than ever. Right. It's also a boon, an incredible boon. AI powers innovation in so many companies and drives efficiency. So on the one hand it helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. You know, phishing attacks over the over encrypted channels increased by increased by 34.1% last year. And I think this year it's going to be double that. And it's fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools. They're now these phishing attacks are so, you know, used to be able to say well is it grammatical? Because they weren't, they were terribly written. Now they're flawless, indistinguishable from the real thing. Thank you AI. But yes, thank you AI organizations in all industries from small to large are leveraging AI to increase employees employee productivity. They're using public AI for engineers with coding assistance. Right. The marketers are using AI for writing. Finance is creating spreadsheet formulas automating workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI into applications and services that are customer and partner facing. Ultimately, AI is helping companies move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. But companies really have to think about how they protect their private and public use of AI. Right. You don't want to accidentally exfiltrate proprietary information just because the AI is helpful. You also have to start thinking about how you defend against AI powered attacks. Well, there is a tool that does both. Zscaler0Trust +AI Ask Stephen Harrison, he's got a tough job. He's CISO of MGM Resorts International. I mean imagine he says with Zscaler quote, we hit zero trust segmentation across our workforce in record time. And the day to day maintenance of the solution with data loss protection with insights into our applications. These were really quick and easy wins from our perspective. Traditional firewalls, traditional defenses, perimeter defenses and then the VPNs you need to get through them. And the public facing IPs that creates exposing your attack surface. None of this is is protecting us in the AI era. It's time for a modern approach with Zscaler's comprehensive zero trust architecture and AI that ensures safe public AI productivity, protects the integrity of private AI and stops AI powered attacks. Thrive in the AI era with Zscaler zero trust plus AI to stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more@zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech.
- [37:37]
B
So I actually read the Zscaler earnings call when it dropped just because I'm an enormous dweeb. And I really do think that cyber security is going to become one of the biggest winners of the AI boom. Because no one knows how to keep it secure like prompt injections and data leaks.
- [37:51]
A
That's right.
- [37:51]
B
It's actually a really big and interesting problem. So while we talk about AI often in the kind of enterprise productivity or consumer search context, I think companies like Zscaler and I would even throw in like your octaves and a lot of other friends there, CrowdStrike. They're going to be feasting for years. If I was an active investor, Leo, I think that's actually a place I would be exploring just because I think it's interesting.
- [38:12]
A
No, I completely agree with you. And especially as we start to use agentic browsers, we've already seen this happen. You know, with Comet, which is from perplexity where people can hide a prompt in invisible text that, that, that suborns the AI. You don't see it, but the AI sees it, reads it and starts acting evilly or even fooling the AI agent into buying stuff with your credit card number and then sending it to a bad guy.
- [38:39]
B
That's even more complex than stuff that I've seen, which is that these agentic browsers don't have a good gut check for what's a fake site. And they're going to.
- [38:46]
A
Right.
- [38:47]
B
You know, bioleal apart software, Tumblr gif and then, you know, getting stolen.
- [38:52]
A
Hey, I got you a free copy of Windows. How'd you like it?
- [38:57]
B
I would.
- [38:57]
C
Leo.
- [38:57]
B
Thank you so much. Is it Windows Vista Ultimate?
- [39:01]
A
I don't know, but it's good. Install it right now. IPhone 17 we think. We don't know. But the rumor mill by this time, two days before the Apple event usually is pretty well stocked with good rumors. Four models, a slim iPhone. We don't know the name iPhone, slim iPhone Air, we don't know an iPhone 17, an iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max. A Korean carrier may have leaked the specifications ahead of the event. This happens pretty regularly, so if you care, you can see how much memory will be available. You can see the cost in Korean wan. I don't know what that translates to. I haven't spent the time. You can see the screen sizes, the processor speeds and the battery sizes according to this. Anyway, it's a rumor. 8K video support for the Pro models, specs for the 17 Air, which has of course, as one would expect, a much smaller battery size. 2800 milliamp hour battery size compared that's to 3600 for the 17. Nothing. Incidentally, if this is a true spec sheet, it is going to be the name the Air that confirms that name. Big screen, 6.6-inch screen bigger than the 17 Pro, just a little bit smaller than 17 Pro Max. So it'll be interesting. We'll see. We'll find out more. We also expect we're seeing rumors Ming Chi Kuo, who seems to be a pretty good supply chain rumor guy, says Apple will do AirPods 3 at this event on Tuesday. Not clear what features. There are some health features we think in the new AirPods, including perhaps a heart rate monitoring sensor. Powerbeats already have those, so I think that's not too far a reach. There's also a new chip which they say will improve sound quality, connectivity and yes, noise cancellation. Looks to me like an incremental improvement. Rumor is there will be a new Apple Watch Ultra as well. The Ultra 3. Are you excited about that, Alex?
- [41:17]
B
That was my sarcastic about all this news.
- [41:20]
A
Slightly bigger screen. It's much bigger. Great. Pretty much the same processor. All right. Yeah, I guess it's hard to get too excited about this.
- [41:30]
B
I mean, look at Harry's face. Is that a man bursting with excitement and ripping his credit card out and racing to the Apple store to camp out because he has to get the iPhone 3GS?
- [41:38]
A
Harry, didn't you used to go to these Apple events on a Regular. I used to see you there. Right. I think you're muted, Harry. Did we mute him? Hear nothing.
- [41:52]
B
The show's now much worse.
- [41:54]
C
I got muted and I have no.
- [41:55]
A
Idea how we did it, apparently. Sorry.
- [41:58]
C
I've been to a zillion Apple events. That's true. And there are years where I am kind of ready to whip out my credit card. Like last year when I saw the camera control.
- [42:07]
A
I like that button. I agree.
- [42:09]
C
When I saw that that was a strong incentive for me to actually buy one. I haven't seen anything this year that gets me that excited. Partially because it's the camera stuff and long battery life that does speak to me and that the air, I mean, intrigued to see what they do with the Air. But it sounds like it's not going to have great battery life and it's probably not going to have their top of the line cameras. I did this week. Last week, rather. In my plugged in newsletter for Fast Company, I wrote about foldables, which I am excited about. And that sounds like we may see a foldable iPhone next year.
- [42:47]
A
And even if the thinking is that that new air, I'm going to call it the air now, since that leak seems credible, is thinner as part of the process of designing a foldable that isn't, you know, they tend to be very thick. This is the latest Samsung Galaxy Fold and it's so thin because the two halves are much, much thinner. And so Apple, obviously Apple's going to take advantage of everything Samsung has learned. They're going to use a Samsung screen in the foldable.
- [43:17]
C
I wrote about the Honor Magic V5, which in one certain color, and if you're not counting the camera bump, it's the world's thinnest foldable by 0.1 millimeter, which is not, not a huge achievement except it does feel really great in the hand. And yes, designing a good foldable is almost like designing two extremely thin smartphones and then putting a hinge in between them. And so anything Apple has learned from the Air would be totally applicable to a folding iPhone.
- [43:54]
A
Yeah, this is my question. It feels like Apple's rushing to do a folding phone. Of course, we don't know. Apple doesn't say anything. This is all rumors because these folding phones sell so well.
- [44:06]
C
They don't sell all that well.
- [44:07]
A
That's what I thought.
- [44:08]
C
It's like 1.5% of the market and unless they get radically cheaper, they're not going to be. They're 2,000%.
- [44:16]
A
Roughly. Yeah.
- [44:17]
C
And I can't imagine that Apple is planning to sell one for way less than anybody else. I'm still excited though, just in terms of it being a genuinely new experience and some of the challenges folding phones had six years ago when they first came out have been resolved and Apple would not be rushing in because they. These things have been around for years.
- [44:39]
A
And they've learned from the mistakes Samsung and others have made.
- [44:44]
C
And I think Apple does have the opportunity to do some deep thinking about the software side in ways that might improve experience.
- [44:50]
A
And that's the thing, that's what excites me because unlike Android. Yes, I have a little campfire burning in my phone.
- [44:56]
B
It's cute, I like it.
- [44:57]
A
Yeah, unlike Android, Android apps really don't scale well to the that's why Android tablets don't really take off to the bigger screen. But Apple's got the iPad, Apple has a beautifully scalable operating system and so I think that they could potentially really take advantage of that screen real estate in a way that Android does not.
- [45:19]
C
Yeah. The one thing that disappointed me a little bit about the Honor Phone is that very few of the third party apps I tried seemed to be aware they were running on this form factor, that they just kind of got larger. But like you say, anybody who's designing apps for Apple devices has a long history of different screen sizes.
- [45:40]
A
I put Pokemon Go on the Samsung Galaxy Fold. As you can see, it doesn't understand. Oh, now I'm getting a message. It doesn't understand that it's on a bigger screen. So it actually zooms it out and the edges are getting cut off. It's not taking advantage of the size.
- [45:57]
B
Oh, that's terrible.
- [45:58]
A
Yeah, so it's basically just a zoomed in version of the game and most apps either do that or they have borders around them. They just. Whereas I don't think you'd have that problem on an Apple designed os.
- [46:10]
C
I don't think Google, I mean Google has done some good work with folding interfaces. Honor the Honor Phone comes with a ton of honor apps which do take advantage of that screen. And Apple would have the opportunity to take all of these iPhone apps and rethink them to provide value by doing things like having sidebars and other elements you can't really do on a conventional iPhone because by definition a conventional iPhone you're talking about a single stack of elements. And on a folding phone you can start to think about columns.
- [46:41]
A
Well actually speaking of which, Meta Weirdly has released an Instagram iPad app for the first time in years. They've if they refused for the longest time you had to look at it as an iPhone app, a little tiny part of the screen. Ironically, at the same time as Apple is going to release IPADOS 26, which actually allows you to actually use that little screen as a window. But they are using the additional real estate to do kind of like that columnar thing. So you have your menu bar here, you have the same vertical reels or pictures there, but you also now have comments on the right side, and it fills the screen nicely. And I wonder how much of that is meta saying. Well, I think for the folding phone, we better get ready to have Instagram ready to use all of that real estate. That might be them actually saying that.
- [47:37]
B
I like that theory, Leo, but I want to loop back to the price point about these folding phones, because I think somehow we blew past the moment in which phones cost more, more than laptops. And I don't think we talked about that enough. And now you can get a brand new MacBook Air for 999.99. Yeah, and I definitely have bought phones that cost more than that. And it just explodes my head because the phone is such a worse computing experience. All it has is the ability to make phone calls, which my laptop can almost do. So it feels a little strange to me. But I think the point about the folding phones being more expensive is more about raising the ceiling for what a smartphone can cost versus Apple trying to actually sell a lot of phones at that particular ASP price. I think they want to raise their overall ASP mix and make it seem like a $1400 iPhone is cheap because compared to the $2000 iPhone, it's a gosh darn bargain. So to me, it's more of a signaling point about pricing than an attempt to actually, I think, get all of us to buy these folding phones. But I'm going to be too cynical.
- [48:36]
C
I mean, I think in a way, the price that matters is the price of the foldable, minus the price of the most expensive iPhone up until now and the Delta. And a certain number of people who are willing to spend fourteen hundred dollars on an iPhone will be willing to spend that much for, you know, they'll pay $2,000 or $2,200 or whatever it is.
- [48:55]
B
But also the fact that.
- [48:58]
A
I never thought I would say this, Alex, but you're getting old. When you started, you were in your 20s. When you started on our show.
- [49:05]
B
I was a 24.
- [49:06]
A
Yeah, you were just a kid, but you're now officially old because what you don't recognize is that For a lot of people in the younger generation, the phone is their computer.
- [49:15]
C
I don't believe that.
- [49:16]
A
They're not buying.
- [49:17]
B
It can't be true.
- [49:18]
A
They're not buying a laptop and a phone. They're buying a phone. And so that's, I think, the market. And for what? Cause all of their computing is done on this. So they need the bigger screen and they're willing to spend laptop prices for the bigger screen. Look at the iPad. I spent $3,000 for the iPad Pro and keyboard. It was.
- [49:39]
B
Let me stop you right there, Leo.
- [49:40]
A
Oh, sorry. Pokemon Go has started again.
- [49:42]
B
You spent $1,000 on your iPad. And I think. I think that makes you the unique Apple customer in the world because someone has. That's what they cost. No, they do not cost.
- [49:52]
A
If you buy an iPad Pro and you buy the keyboard for $250. Well, I love it because. And here's why this is my point. For many people, including me, and I know for Harry, it's their computer. So they're willing to spend the money because that's your prime, right, Perry? That's your primary computing device.
- [50:12]
C
I remember spending a lot, but I don't think I spent 3,000. Do you have two terabytes or one terabyte?
- [50:17]
A
Yeah, I got. I maxed it out, of course.
- [50:19]
C
There you go. I scramped. I just have one terabyte when I.
- [50:23]
A
Was a child, which I never have filled even one terabyte. So I. But I thought, oh, this is going to become my primary computer. Yeah. You know, when you buy a desktop, you put. You put two terabytes of storage on it routinely, right, computer? Yes, because I'm going to put. I'm going to do all my photography on it. I'm going to put all. Do video editing. I need that. I never used it, but I need all that room. That's the rationale.
- [50:46]
B
So, Leo, how much value do you think you've gotten out of that per dollar spent, compared to if you had bought a Mac Pro?
- [50:51]
A
No, no, no, no, no. You should never ask that question. And by the way, I also bought a MacBook Pro.
- [50:56]
C
I got a lot of value out of my iPad.
- [50:58]
A
You use it as your primary computer, right?
- [51:00]
C
Yes. I mean, if you divide the price I paid by the number of hours I spend with that mostly doing work increasingly, it was a lot of money, but it was not an extravagance. And I do feel like I should speak up for phones. They're not worse devices than PCs. They have all these sensors that laptops don't. Have. They have way better cameras. They can go anywhere with us.
- [51:25]
A
Gps, they're always connected.
- [51:29]
C
I feel like if you give them a folding screen, you get back some of that real estate that's nice about laptops, while keeping all of the things that a phone can do that a laptop cannot do that might end up being worth a fair amount of money. After having used this honor and thought about the Galaxy Fold and the new Google Fold folding phone, I am, you know, I'm at least intrigued. And I'm least tiptoeing after that moment where I whip out my credit card, even if I'm not quite there yet.
- [51:57]
B
If I end up being wrong about this and the big phone lobby ends up being correct, because that's all a tablet is, just a phone that didn't.
- [52:03]
A
Have a Zenpic, you know, Like, I mean, so wrong. You're so wrong. All right, I take it back. I only spent $2,499 on my iPad Pro at 2 terabytes and all of that. So 20. But still more than a MacBook. Right.
- [52:20]
C
I spent that minus the 2 terabyte upgrade.
- [52:23]
A
Right.
- [52:24]
B
Okay.
- [52:25]
A
And by the way, I now. And Harry, you were the first person I ever saw to sit at the Twit Roundtable with an iPad as your primary computer. And I admit, perhaps of being a little.
- [52:37]
C
I've been doing this since 2011.
- [52:41]
A
Yeah, 1111. That's a long time. So. But lately, with the iPad Pro and the improvements they've made to the operating system and the improvements in software like the RSS Reader, I use. I use the iPad Pro probably more than my. Much more than my MacBook Pro. It's become my primary PC. So. You were right, Harry. You're just ahead of your time.
- [53:04]
C
I was right all along, as usual.
- [53:07]
A
And I think the phone for a lot of people is. Takes. Has that role as well. The phone becomes everything. It's your camera.
- [53:13]
B
That's how you lose digital literacy. People think like, oh, the kids these days are good at computers. They're not. Because apparently they're all on their tablets and iPhones.
- [53:20]
A
How are you gonna use Emacs without an escape key? I don't understand it.
- [53:26]
B
I'm a parent now. I get to say kids these days because I'm literally raising them. Sir, I have earned this right. I am blood, sweat, tears, and crap and diaper pail. So I get to talk about the kids. And I'll just say this. Harry does tend to be right about things. Yes. And Harry does tend to be a tablet guy. Yes. But I Do think that this is one place where he is incorrect And I will die on this hill if I'm the last person on the tablet suck hill with my iPad Pro out of batteries in my backpack. I haven't touched it in six fricking bajillion months.
- [53:55]
A
Oh, by the way, 13 hours just sitting at that iPad Pro just keeps on going. I barely have to charge if I.
- [54:02]
B
If you know what I can do with an Etch a Sketch, Leo, I can look at an Etch a sketch for $20,000 and it still get as much done as I would on an iPad Pro.
- [54:09]
C
I've actually been a bit disappointed with the battery life of my newest iPad Pro, which is.
- [54:13]
A
You're using it more.
- [54:14]
C
Well, no, I'm using it the same as the 13 inch and I had the 11 inch before and I can.
- [54:19]
A
By the way, wonder whether that screen that Apple makes. Right.
- [54:22]
C
It's a very nice screen.
- [54:23]
A
It kills the battery, but it is.
- [54:25]
C
I'm also spoils you. I see me one of the few people who is skeptical about the iPad OS. Well, that multitask interface, which I am slowly getting used to. But I didn't really ask for it and I would have been, I think just as happy if it didn't exist or if at least if they hadn't gotten rid of the split view and the slide over and their rush to make an iPad more like a Mac, which I acknowledge is going to please a lot of people and probably help with iPad sales.
- [54:53]
A
Yeah, I'm kind of with you. It gets in the way, you know, how often is a window open, not full screen?
- [55:00]
C
Yeah, I don't like overlapping windows. I don't want to manage Windows because.
- [55:04]
A
We'Re used to using full screen iPad apps.
- [55:08]
C
Every moment I spend screwing around with Windows is a moment I've lost to actual productivity.
- [55:14]
A
Well, we'll see. It's coming out probably at the same time as the new iPhones come out. And I think we are at the last public beta version, which I think was beta 6. So if you're using the beta, you probably are using the final version both on the iPhone.
- [55:28]
C
It's probably not going to change a whole lot more.
- [55:29]
A
Mac, Apple tv, Apple Watch, everything. Yeah, Vision Pro.
- [55:33]
B
Can I ask one more question about this before we move on? Because I haven't actually honestly, my iPad has been in my backpack and just sitting there for a long time has the fragmentation of Apple's operating systems into macOS, ipados and what we have on iPhone is that leading towards a point of harmonization or are we going to end up still running down multiple tracks for a very long time?
- [55:56]
C
I'm very curious about that question. I wrote about that recently and plugged in as well. Because most of the news in ipados 26 is about adding stuff that people are familiar with in the Mac and not just multitasking, but also things like the Files app looks a lot more like the Finder and there's better support for background tasks and so forth. And I'm not sure whether that means the trajectory of the iPad henceforth is all about getting more Mac like, or whether there's still an opportunity for Apple to do things with the iPad that are really quite different from what it's going to do with the Mac, particularly if at some point the Mac also gets more iPad like. And if they do, if they do finally come up with a touchscreen for.
- [56:44]
B
The Mac, no one's never really figured out how to do, you know, mouse keyboard input and touch at the same time effectively. I mean, we all recall the Windows 8 debacle, right?
- [56:53]
C
I love the fact that the iPad threw away so much that we've dealt with on computers for the last 40 years and started fresh. And I hope that we don't lose that altogether.
- [57:05]
B
I mean I'm sitting here right now in front of a MacBook Pro and a curved 34 inch monitor and then on my other desk on the other side I have another 34.4inch with a PC and an iMac and I just can't imagine taking all of my beautiful digital real estate, my computing power, the heft, and the amazing ability of these bad boys to be just amazing everywhere and going to a crappy little diddly screen. Maybe I am out of date, frankly.
- [57:29]
A
A 13 inch iPad is really the same as a laptop screen basically.
- [57:34]
C
And I'm out and about a lot, so. Well, I do use external so screens sometimes they don't matter that much to me. Although I am amazed anytime I use one. Just because 1313 inches to me seems large because I used to be on an 11 inch iPad.
- [57:49]
A
I have a second screen for my iPad. A little bit of a disappointment that Apple has not enabled touch on those second screens. Even if they are touch screens, the iPad doesn't support it and I think if they did that maybe you'd really have a perfect system. We're going to take a break, but we will be covering the Apple event. You must be a club Twitter member to watch our simulcast because Apple keeps trying to take us down when we do it in public. So we will do it in the club. Only Tuesday. Micah Sargent and I, 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern Time, 1700 UTC. We will stream the Apple event and we will comment on it. And because we'll be in the club, Twit, we'll also let you comment on it in the chat and maybe even bring you up on stage if you have something to say. If you're not yet a club member, please join the club. Twit TV Club Twit. It's one of the many benefits you get, including ad free versions of all the shows and it really supports the work we do here. It's 25% of our operating costs now are paid by the club. Thank you. Thank you. I know there's a lot of people looking for money and I know money's tight these days, but if you like what you hear on our shows and if you want to support what we do, that's the way to do it. Twit TV Club Twit. This episode, we'll have more in just a bit with Harry McCracken from Fast Company. And this week in Startups, wonderful Alex Wilhelm. He's also, of course, got a newsletter which everybody should subscribe to. You have a free tier, right? Cautious optimism. Yeah, absolutely. I read it. It's part of my regular RSS beat check.
- [59:23]
B
That's actually like the biggest compliment you could give Leo, so thank you.
- [59:25]
A
Yeah, no, it's. Your insights are fantastic. Everybody should subscribe immediately. Waste no time.
- [59:32]
B
The next issue will be about why.
- [59:34]
A
Tablets are bad and why Cautiousoptimism News. I love it. Our show today, brought to you by Miro. Speaking of things we love, it's fun. I first started using Miro when Micah Sargent and I were doing Ask the Tech Guys and it was the reason we used it is because we had two people in different spots collaborating on a show. We would get together on a Sunday to do the show, but all week long we are working in Miro to plan, to collaborate, to work. And now Miro is even better. Every day, new headlines speculate about how AI we just were talking about is coming for your jobs, fostering anxiety and fear. But a recent survey from Miro tells a different story. 76% of Miro users believe that AI can benefit their role. Interesting. When you combine that with the fact that 54% struggle to know when to use AI. I think you're going to love Miro's Innovation Workspace, an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done. So we've Got Micah, we've got me, and now we've got the AI makes three. And we can use the AI for a variety of useful brainstorming research. Bringing people together with AI in a shared space to get great work done. Miro's been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade now. Today, they're at the forefront of bringing products to market even faster by unleashing the combined power of AI plus human potential. That's Miro's innovation workspace. It'll 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, I mean anything, sticky notes, screenshots, whatever you've got, napkin illustrations into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables and prototypes in minutes. It's more than just making it look nice, it's organizing it. It's making it clearer. It's making connections between the different pieces of data. You're not just putting a bunch of ideas on a board, you're rapidly iterating with your teammates to bring those ideas to life fast. You can quickly build on your ideas without needing the perfect question or prompt. You don't have to be an AI master or toggle yet another tool. The work you're already doing on Miro's canvas becomes the prompt. It's really amazing when you give the AI all of that work you've been doing, all that data you've generated and it comes up with connections and insights and information. It's like having a third partner on your team help your teams get great done with miro. Check out miro.com to find out how. That's M I R O dot com. Kind of makes me want to bring back a tech guys. I think we could, we could make it even better with Miro. Everything more court news. I know court news isn't the most interesting, but this one was a bit of a shocker. You may remember that seven the authors of seven million books, there was a class action lawsuit against Anthropic for using those books in the training of their LLMs. The judge did an interesting kind of two part ruling. Part one, the judge said, okay, in the case of the books that Anthropic bought used, but bought them, authors got no money for the used books but bought them legitimately, scanned them, cut them up, discarded them. That was fair use. That's a very important judgment for Anthropic and all AI companies that there is a way to scan books and use them. In your LLMs, and that's fair use. But the judge said, we do have a problem because there's also these millions of books you used from a pirated source. Pirated. And that's probably piracy. The lawyers for the authors settled with Anthropic. We knew their settlement was coming. We talked about it last week. It was the lawyers for the authors who were crowing about the settlement. So we thought this is going to be big, but nobody thought it would be this big. Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion plus interest to settle with these authors. That's $3,000 each for half a million books in the class. They also agreed to destroy the data it was accused of illegally downloading. Unclear whether their current models use that data. They certainly didn't say we're going to destroy our current models. So the authors said, yeah, because most of these authors were making nothing on these books anyway. You know, if you've ever written a book, it's not a profit making enterprise. Paul Thurat always said, if I were getting paid by the hour, it'd probably be a buck 50 an hour to write these books. It's not a big money maker. So the authors are saying, this is great. Anthropic probably felt like they got a deal. They could have been on the hook for as much as a trillion dollars in damages. And I think Anthropic also was very happy to have that first part of the judgment because it showed a way forward for AI companies, including them, to ingest copyright material as fair use.
- [65:13]
B
Yeah.
- [65:13]
A
You agree? Alex, you're not.
- [65:15]
B
I want to add a detail here. So Anthropic said in the settlement that the books that are covered by the UE agreement were not used in the training of its commercially released AI models. That's per the Washington Post.
- [65:27]
A
So they don't have to discard that.
- [65:29]
B
Well, my thought is that they've now found the dollar amount to put their copyright concerns behind them and it is 11 or 12% of their recent Series F, which was $13 billion. So to me, this is a. You take your lumps once and you move on. You have a path forward with the destruction of books, physical books, to transform them. So it counts as fair use. You stop using the pirated stuff, you resolve your risk of being sued again, you make your investors happy because you fixed a problem that could have been in the trillions, it could have sunk your business. So to me, this is a very expensive win for Anthropic. But I agree. Oh, you've Simon's blog up. I agree with Simon that this is a pretty good result for Anthropic and even for their investors. Think about it this way.
- [66:12]
A
You're talking about Simon Willison who says it is a victory for Anthropic. Yeah, yeah.
- [66:17]
B
But the company is now valued at $183 billion, so 4.8% effectively of its worth today. They've closed a chapter on quite a lot of risk. And so.
- [66:26]
A
Well, and OpenAI and everybody else can say thank you because we now, at least if, I mean it's a precedent, it's not a, you know, I'm not a lawyer, but I have a feeling that other courts could rule otherwise. But at least this one judge was it. Judge Alsop, I think it was said, hey, there is a way to use this as fair use, which is huge.
- [66:55]
B
The downside to that, just to play it fair on both sides, is that I think Anthropic bot used copies of books. Leo they did, stripped and scanned and then turned up, which means that no one got the last little bit of commission income there. But if they're going to buy one copy of each other book.
- [67:09]
A
But that's, that's not the issue because the real, the fundamental issue and we've talked about this a lot, so I know a little bit about it thanks to Kathy Gellis, who's an attorney and an expert in IP law. The First Amendment embodies something called the right to read. And undermining the right to read would undermine our everybody's ability to, to ingest content. It would undermine our ability on Twitter to take these stories, which we're doing right now, and interpret them and use them so knowing. And a lot of people said, well, an AI is not a human. They don't have the right to read. These are big companies ingesting little authors stuff or the New York Times or the Washington Post or Walt Disney stuff to their benefit. I think it's really important, and I do agree with the judge in this respect to say it's transformative. It fits the four tests for fair use. They're not taking away the author's ability to make money on these books. It's not like you can read the book through the AI. You can't read the New York Times by prompting OpenAI to give you the content of the article despite what the New York Times asserts. So it's not taking away their right to make money. It is transformative. It's changing it because it's not turning into text. It's tokenizing it. The text does not survive the process. I think it is fair use and I think the judge made. The judge also made the right decision in this case. Harry.
- [68:39]
C
Well, there do seem to be some cases of people being able to get LLMs to spit out parts of Harry Potter and so forth.
- [68:48]
A
The New York Times in their pleading had a very elaborate prompt in which they basically gave the chatgpt the first three paragraphs of the article and said what's next? And that now that is not the way you could read the New York Times in ChatGPT. Let's face it, you're not going to read Harry Potter in chat GPT.
- [69:09]
C
I mean, I think it's really complicated because copyright law was not created to deal with this stuff. I also think that along with Anthropic being relieved because it turns out they can scan chopped up books, they're also in a place to spend 1.5 billion to settle this. And there are a few other companies like OpenAI and Meta and Google and Microsoft who can spend billions of dollars without giving it that much thought. But smaller startups might be intimidated by this. It may be harder to get into the LLM business if you have to deal with this.
- [69:50]
A
I don't think you're going to see these kinds of fines because I think basically what the judge gave these guys is a way forward to legally train their stuff.
- [69:58]
C
I do think it's unfortunate that it seems like a large number of these companies did pirate bucks in order to feed their models.
- [70:06]
A
That's the new question because we know Meta used the same pirate database. Meta employees have said that two authors have accused Apple of doing the same thing. So at least Apple and Meta and I would be willing to bet every other AI company in the world has trained on these pirate database book databases. Right?
- [70:27]
B
Better not have that in your current models. Right? Because then I think it's slightly different conversation. That's why I said Anthropic saying this was, you know, in the past is what they're paying for, a past transgression they're not currently re breaking. But I think I'm, I do have a lot of sympathy for what Harry is saying in that this is not super clear cut and I am worried about who gets the benefits of this. But I don't think we're going to have a way with the current legal system and I don't expect change to properly defend IP rights of authors, writers, scribblers of all sorts. That's pretty much why I'm a fan of cloudflare's model, I'm sure you talked about it on the show of Paper Crawl, essentially just setting a price for this sort of thing and letting commercial terms stand in where we might have hoped for a more.
- [71:11]
A
But that does what you just described, which is it pulls up the ladder for smaller companies. Bigger companies can afford to pay for this content, smaller companies cannot. Now there's Common Crawl which we've had Richard Skrenta on Intelligent machines talking about this. They have a trillion page database of stuff crawled from the Internet that many AIs use for training. It's good material for training.
- [71:42]
B
It's granular though, because I think the way it's set up instead of Cloudflare and this is currently in beta and the CEO, I don't like it.
- [71:49]
A
I'll tell you why I don't like it. Because Cloudflare becomes a toll booth on the information superhighway. And this is where Cloudflare has now, I think, taken a wrong turn. I really supported Cloudflare. I like Cloudflare. I think they have many great services, but they have started to act as if they are the keeper of the Internet and they are not true and they should not.
- [72:10]
B
Fair enough, but there are a number of companies that are doing competing things. So it's not just Cloudflare on this, on this bent. There's also tolbit created by humans and Human Native which are each taking this for startups. They're each taking a different tack on trying to solve the licensing agreement world between IP holders and AI companies.
- [72:28]
C
But.
- [72:28]
B
But I don't think there's really much of another option, Leo, other than arming people with the right to protect what they have online. And the reason why I'm not 100% concerned about the ladder being pulled up and only OpenAI, anthropic and meta Google are being able to pay for this is I think you're going to be able to set per AI crawling terms. And so I could say from my side, Alex, Tumblr, whatever, that the smaller AI companies could crawl but the bigger ones have to pay. And I think that's going to be kind of where this goes. But I do agree that's a real point. But also I don't think you can throw your hands up and say we're just going to give up. For example, I had the, the CEO of Tolbit on, on the pod and he was like, look, here's an example of this. There was a sports website in the uk, unsurprisingly, quite a lot of Soccer content, football if you're international. And they got something like 13 million crawls from AI companies and that generated 4 than 650 clicks. So they had to pay to serve that many queries from the AI companies, but got no effectively resulting traffic. So either we allow for the immiseration of people who publish online, or we have to have some guardrails and tollbooths built in. And sure, there will be companies behind those, but I don't see another path.
- [73:42]
C
It's been interesting playing around with the ChatGPT agent and discovering that in a lot of cases it's not all that useful because it's trying to go to websites that are blocking. It just seems like a substantial percentage of the media companies in the world.
- [73:59]
A
That'S cloudflare doing that have pulled up.
- [74:02]
C
Their gates and they seem to be fairly effective. I tried to get it to summarize some fast company stuff because we're blocking AI, it had a lot of trouble. It eventually found an article of ours that had been translated into Spanish and published on Yahoo. Mexico and it translated that article back into English. And that, that was like one of the few cases of it being able to, to find a fast company story. So you want to be aggressive, you.
- [74:31]
A
Want it to be able to read your stuff.
- [74:34]
C
Fast company stuff. I mean, a fast company as a business does not want AI companies making a fortune off of our stuff and not giving us any money. So we've carefully blocked stuff in a lot of cases and we certainly are interested in these business models where we can make money. I mean, here's the stuff. A little bit about my pay grade.
- [74:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. This is the risk of it. And I would tell your boss this. As more and more search moves to AI search, if you're not in the index, you suddenly just like not being in the Google index, you suddenly don't exist.
- [75:05]
C
That is true. And I certainly do recall that in the early days of Google there were media companies who they didn't want to be in the index, attempted to block Google.
- [75:15]
A
That was not a good move.
- [75:16]
B
The difference is Google actually sends traffic to your site, whereas these AI companies do not. We are the freaks. We click on the source links. We are the weirdos. Other people don't.
- [75:26]
C
And at some point, at some point, the bots may do a better job of sending traffic to media companies, but that has not happened yet.
- [75:34]
A
That's better some traffic than not existing at all. And if you are, if you are an E commerce site and you're optimizing, you know, you're doing SEO search engine optimization. This is what Rich Scrinta said. You better start doing AIO AI optimization, because if you're selling sneakers and somebody searches for the best, you know, the best sneaker for somebody whose foot pronates and you don't show up in that AI search, you don't show up. So, okay, it's a very similar issue. But if you get like, I think it's the same for Fast Company, but.
- [76:05]
C
If you get three clicks, whereas with. In the golden age of Google, you might have gotten 10,300, that golden age is gone anyway. True.
- [76:14]
B
Well, no, it's merely in terminal decline. Leo. We have a couple more thousand feet.
- [76:19]
A
We're close to Google zero, though, are we not close to Google zero?
- [76:22]
B
We're not. We're not that close to Google zero. It still sends millions of people to websites around the Internet today. It is sick and dying. But it is also still, I think, a material engine in the content game. And I was in TechCrunch last year and it was still incredibly important.
- [76:35]
A
Still important. You should ask them now, though. I bet it's declined. Well, you know, they don't.
- [76:39]
B
They don't always answer my calls because now they're in my different private equity shop. I want to say, though, that. Nope, I've lost my thought. Harry, back to you. Sorry.
- [76:47]
C
I mean, there's this other thing happening in parallel at a pretty high percentage of media companies which is becoming a lot more serious about getting readers to pay for our stuff. And ideally, rather than finding readers only through Google or an AI chatbot, getting readers to come directly to the sites and subscribe, and that is trying to undo these decisions that media companies made 30 years ago when they launched websites and didn't charge for stuff. I feel like that is kind of directly connected to the concern over what's happening with AI and ideally become a little less dependent on anybody sending us traffic because we get back to what magazines were like back in the old days where you did have an advertising business, but you also had people happily paying you to get your content and coming directly to you and subscribing. And we're seeing a little bit of success there. In certain cases, like with the New York Times, we're seeing a lot of success, but that's kind of this thing happening in parallel with what the impact AI could have on these businesses.
- [78:02]
B
I think it's very important also. I'll just say this fastcompany.com section plugged in is where you can find that newsletter. And you can join his audience and not have Google's intermediate thank you.
- [78:11]
C
And you can could subscribe and get it, get it in your inbox for free too.
- [78:15]
A
I think that's why people are doing newsletters. Right? That's one way to get that traffic.
- [78:19]
C
And you're saying you're seeing some newsletters that people have to pay for and others that are advertising supported.
- [78:25]
B
It's tough. It's a grind. I mean this is literally what I'm doing with my mornings. But I'll say this, my open rate is pretty much static as my audience grows, which means that I'm able to actually reach out and communicate to people without any intermediary apart from their inbox perhaps provider marking me as spam or not. So that's supercliffe.
- [78:41]
C
Yeah, it is a great feeling looking at my numbers and seeing that yes, people are not only have decided to get this newsletter but they're opening it.
- [78:50]
B
Yeah, it's a huge compliment. But going back to what Leo said about the e commerce site, it's actually a very important example and there are companies right now working on this. Leo, it's called Geo Generative Engine Optimization. I don't know why we have to call it that. Can't we just get off the SEO train? But apparently not. But I think the point about e commerce companies being desperate to be included in these queries is just an entirely separate lane from what media companies are dealing with. I just don't think that that example really holds water when we consider the goals of Nike versus the goals of say, Fast Company. To me they're sufficiently distinct that the value difference is so large that I don't actually think right now Fast Company is losing a lot by having relative relatively strict walls up to keep other AI engines from crawling their stuff, using it in their corpus of information, generating results from it and not sending people back. Why should I subsidize your for profit enterprise?
- [79:41]
A
Yeah, yeah, look, clearly the model is collapsing. I don't think it's entirely the fault of AI. No. I also don't think there's an unlimited fund of money coming from AI despite the, the appearances. So I don't know if the only. If the solution is to charge AI. I mean it's perplexing. We're in a problem. This is problematic.
- [80:06]
C
We've also, we've also seen media companies be burned by things like getting excited by Facebook.
- [80:13]
A
Yeah.
- [80:13]
C
Remember that paying them.
- [80:15]
A
Everybody said, oh you should do Facebook video. Live video on Facebook is the next big thing.
- [80:19]
C
Generally speaking to being dependent on any Third party to make your business model work is not a great place to be.
- [80:26]
B
So Perplexity is trying to square the circle here. They. I can't find the actual name of it now, but they launched a $5 a month subscription service for their browser.
- [80:34]
A
Comet.
- [80:35]
B
Yeah, for Comet. Thank you. Yeah. And what they're going to do is pulling from memory here, folks. Fact check me. I think they're going to give like 70 or 80% of the revenue generated from that 5, I'll be honest.
- [80:45]
A
Well, I'll believe it when I see it. Not only that we've seen these micropayment things. I mean, Brave does the same thing with his bat tokens, right? I don't know.
- [80:53]
B
Basic attention token. Also, I started a company called Contenture back in when I was a real child that was trying to do the same thing. But at least Perplexity is making a token gesture. And I do take that to be at least indication that publishers have raised enough of a stink about their model that they're trying to do something as a sop. And going from a middle finger to a SOP is still progress, even if it's not all the way to where I want it to be.
- [81:16]
C
True.
- [81:17]
B
I mean, I hate that I'm arguing for table scraps here, but a starving man eats from the floor. Right? That's not actually a proverb I was gonna say.
- [81:27]
A
Is that in the Bible?
- [81:29]
B
That was just me rambling. Sorry.
- [81:32]
C
And probably media companies have understandably become cynical enough that even if they're intrigued by what Perplexity is doing, they're not like, aha, Perplexity is going to solve all of our business model problems for us.
- [81:46]
B
No, no, not at all. But I do think, though, that it's so strange to be a journalist today, having lived through multiple technology booms and bust cycles. Because right now, I really do think I've reached the point in my career and the moment in technology when there's not really a journalistic home that I want to go to next. And so I do think that I'm going to end up being increasingly indie as time goes on. And so this all feels very personal to me. It's like, do I get to keep doing this, or do I have to go get a real job at last?
- [82:15]
A
Well, imagine if you were working for a daily.
- [82:18]
B
Well, one of the six people who still do. Yeah, sure.
- [82:20]
C
Okay.
- [82:20]
A
I mean, imagine it would. If many of my friends who worked in radio have called me saying, okay, tell me about this podcasting thing. How does that. How does that work? I said, if you started 20 years ago, you might have a shot. Yeah, it's a tough time for content creators of a certain ilk. On the other hand, my son Henry, who makes sandwiches on TikTok, is doing very well.
- [82:49]
B
I bought his cookbook. Yeah.
- [82:51]
A
Did you? Yeah. It's great. Yeah. His, his, his. We talked to him on Friday on the Club Twit event. His sandwich shop in New York is a big hit. So you can, you can use these platforms to launch and. Oh, by the way, thank you, President Trump. Apparently, cash tips are now deductible for digital content creators up to 25,000. I just figure out how to get cash tips.
- [83:20]
B
Have you heard of only fans?
- [83:22]
A
Because I hear it's a thing that's not a cash. I think you have to put it in an envelope and mail it to me. I think. Don't. By the way, when I say that there are people who will do that, and we have received via snail mail $5 bills in envelopes. Don't. I don't.
- [83:37]
C
Yeah.
- [83:38]
B
Leo will spend it on iPads, and I don't approve of that.
- [83:40]
A
Yeah, don't do that.
- [83:40]
B
But I did not see the Trump administration coming to the rescue of the adult entertainment industry, as they apparently have. So shout out to no tax.
- [83:49]
A
So you think OnlyFans tips are now taxed? Not taxed.
- [83:53]
B
I just want to say that it is a testament to my personal growth that of all the jokes I can make about tips and justice, that I'm not making them in this moment. And I want to give myself five points.
- [84:03]
A
Five points. Thank you for keeping the tip out, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to take a little. I almost got you to spit that. I was really trying to time it, and I almost got the spit take. I wanted to come out the nose.
- [84:16]
B
Then it would go over all of my awesome computers. And I respect them because they're useful devices.
- [84:21]
A
See, if you had an iPad, you wouldn't have to worry.
- [84:23]
B
Exactly. Because it's not a computer.
- [84:24]
A
Right. Harry McCracken is here, the E. Technologizer from Fast Company and his Unplugged newsletter is @ fastcode.
- [84:32]
C
Plugged in.
- [84:32]
A
Plugged in. Not Unplugged. You are, in fact, plugged in.
- [84:35]
C
Actually, that's a common thing to accidentally call out. So you're.
- [84:41]
A
Because of MTV. Yes. You know, unplugged. Harry McCracken unplugged. No, Harry McCracken is plugged.
- [84:46]
C
I should at least start a section within it called Unplugged.
- [84:49]
A
I think you should. I think that's Going to be the trend, man. If I didn't, if I didn't have to cover technology day in, day out, I wouldn't have the Internet, I wouldn't have a phone. I'd be living in a log cabin, growing my own tomatoes. It would be a whole different world, Leo. Five minutes. I would take five minutes.
- [85:12]
B
Five minutes. Where's Blue Sky? What's going on? Like, I, I talk a lot of smack about that myself. I'm like, why is it we're going to move to the woods? I'm going to get like the exact same fantasy.
- [85:22]
A
And don't you want to do that? It's a fantasy, though.
- [85:24]
B
Yeah, but then she's like, you get bored so fast.
- [85:27]
A
Yeah, yeah. That's Alex Wilhelm. He's easily bored, but thank goodness. You hear him on this week in Startups, of course with Jason Calacanis, my man. He's got you. You kind of. So it's kind of the Joe Rogan model, right? He's Joe Rogan. And you're the guy who, he goes, look that up. Right? That's your job now. Look that up.
- [85:46]
B
I am the show notes preparer. I am the director in some ways of what we talk about. And I. Oh, you do that.
- [85:53]
A
Oh, that's good. All right.
- [85:54]
B
So I write the docket and you know, Jason weighs and other people weigh into, but I'm the main docket person and my main job is to like set things up. And then he swings at him and then I kind of nibble at the end.
- [86:04]
A
But it's, I think it's a good partnership.
- [86:07]
B
Yeah, we've reached a good middle ground. I think it's going pretty well and there has been so much to talk about. It's actually been a relatively rich moment.
- [86:14]
A
When we were going to take a break. When we come back, we'll talk about the big table in the White House. I didn't see Jason at that table, but I did see a couple of people from the all in podcast at that table. Pretty close to the president, I might add. Closer than Tim Cook was. That's coming up as we continue on this Week in Tech. Our show today brought to you by Smarty. Oh, I love Smarty. If you are a coder, if you've got a website where you have address information, you're going to love Smarty too. Smarty is the premier provider of high performance cloud based address data tools. And you know, I talked to Smarty a few weeks ago and I was shocked to learn that there are people still use the Google API for their address entry forms on their websites. What are you nuts? You need to take a look at Smarty. Trusted by leading organizations in insurance and real estate and finance, healthcare, e commerce and technology. Areas where invalid address information is no good. And honestly, I won't name names, but a lot of these other sources, that's what you're going to get. Not with Smarty. You always get real addresses. More than 20. Look, I'll give you an example. Did you know there are more than 20 million non USPS, non postal service addresses in the US? Rural addresses, things like that. Smarty's database expands beyond those rural limitations. From US and international address validation to auto complete to rooftop geocoding to property data enrichment, Smarty offers the most advanced scalable solutions on the market. Look who uses Smarty. Look at them. Backed by proprietary technology and data, they're the only ones who can do this. Smarty delivers unmatched accuracy, consistency and insight. What good is it if you make an API call and the information you get back is. Is wrong? No, it's. I would say, I would submit it's no good. Smarty is unmatched in its accuracy. With over 350 data points per property, it doesn't matter if you don't have an address. You've got rooftop level, precision, real time processing speeds. They can do 25,000 addresses per second. Smartie enables better decisions no matter the size and complexity of your business. Ask. As an example, I saw this on the website Fabletics. Fabletics, fabulous US company wanted to expand their international appeal. Smarty dramatically increased conversion rates for new customers, especially internationally. For Fabletics, Smarty is built for developers and engineered for scalability. Smarty's APIs are reliable, they are lightning fast, they are easy to integrate and supported by expert documentation and if you have any questions, real time technical support, I'll give you another example. This is also from the website. Speedway Motors conversion rates are a big problem with E Commerce. In fact, Speedway Motors E Commerce conversion rates were were getting worse and worse and worse. Even though the traffic to their website was improving, was increasing. Speedway's director of digital product and technology says we use Smartie to identify an address As a commercial address conversion rates are now very strong. Everything was well set up on the Smarty side. I've enjoyed working with the service. Smarty solved a specific problem they had and it made them money. Smarty is a 2025 award winner across many G2 categories. Best results, best usability, users most likely to recommend and high performer for small business and of course Smartie is USPS CAS and SOC2 certified and HIPAA compliant. If your organization is seeking the most accurate, reliable and future ready address data suite, Smarty is the way to go. Try it yourself. Get 1000 free lookups when you sign up for a 42 day free trial. Visit smarty.com TWIT to learn more. That's Smarty S M A r t y smarty.com twin we thank him so much for the support of this week in tech. Did you get invited to the big party at the Rose Garden?
- [90:37]
B
Alex, what is the furthest person away from possibly getting invited to the event at the.
- [90:45]
A
David Sachs was there.
- [90:47]
B
Yes. My.
- [90:47]
A
My political equal, Chamath Palat Pattaya was there.
- [90:53]
B
I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually correct you there. Chamath Palihapattiyya.
- [90:56]
A
That's what I said.
- [90:57]
B
No, no.
- [90:58]
A
Did I screw the Chamath Palihapitaya? Did I say it right? It's hard. I think it's easy to say. It's got a lot of syllables. There's David Sacks sitting next to Mark Zuckerberg, who's sitting next to the President of the United States of America. This was the dinner party on Thursday night. Two dozen high profile tech and business leaders. I'll tell you what, if bomb had gone off in the White House, you would have lost the entire leadership of Silicon Valley. Zuck was there. Tim Cook, Bill Gates was there. Sam Altman was there. Sundar Pichai was there. Sergey Brin was there. Safra Katz, the CEO of Oracle. David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. Sanjay, CEO of Micro, Merotra Mehrotra. Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI was there. Satya Nadella was. I mean everybody was there. The owner of the Sacramento Kings. Yeah, he was there. He's also the founder of Tibco. Maybe that's why he was there. The Chief Technology Officer from Palantir, Alexander Wang, who is the hot commodity in Silicon Valley. 28 years old. The billion dollar head of Meta's new AI division which has no name, so they just call it tbd. Leader of Superintelligence, David Sachs, who is of course the AI and crypto czar at the White House. Jared Isaacman. Interesting. It must have been interesting conversation.
- [92:36]
B
Poor guy.
- [92:37]
A
Poor guy. He was going to be the minister at NASA then because he was a friend of Elon Musk, who by the way was not invited, got booted from NASA, but he's still a big shot. Elon was not there.
- [92:52]
B
Jensen wasn't there.
- [92:53]
A
Jensen Huang wasn't there. That's a surprise.
- [92:55]
B
I don't think Jensen was there, but I think Jensen's already paid his, his pound of flesh in the form of the 15 of H20 sales to China.
- [93:03]
A
Then they had the dinner and then they went out to the Rose Garden, the newly paved Mar a Lago style rose garden. I, they didn't say what the playlist was, but you may remember a couple of weeks ago, Trumpet had control of the playlist as he tested out the sound system there. You got to see the, the dance, the Trump dance. Yeah, the only, I think the only thing I found a little offensive. Some people were offended when Tim Cook gave the president the gold bar with the glass thing on it. The effusively sycophantic speeches one after another coming from these tech leaders. I guess when you have an authoritarian leader, you've got to do this.
- [93:47]
C
It was a little bit, yeah, it did feel a little bit like one of Trump's cabinet meetings, which are in the same format.
- [93:52]
A
Same thing. Oh, you should have the Nobel Prize. Mr. President. Have we gotten to the point where it's so important to appease the authoritarian that you basically become a lick spittle? Yes. Sycophant.
- [94:11]
B
And I can tell you how you.
- [94:13]
A
Have to do this for business.
- [94:14]
B
Well, okay. In Silicon Valley, the phrase that I keep being told by people who are investors and founders and people who run the companies is that you have to play the game on the field. And this is.
- [94:27]
A
That's kind of undersells how, how abasing it is. You're not really playing the game on the field. You're lying down on the field and eating the dirt.
- [94:35]
B
Well, maybe that is the game that you're, you're being told to play. So this manifested itself, for example, back in the 2020, 2021 ZIRP era Technology investing boom as well. I guess we have to pay high prices because we have to play the game on the field. We've been paid to allocate capital. We're going to allocate, we're going to overpay. Don't look at us. We're just playing the game on the field. And that's what I think is happening here. But I think also there's a little bit of frog boiling going on. Leo, you're familiar with the phrase salami slicing, referring to how China, how the sausage is made. No. The approach by the Chinese Communist Party to not go after an objective in one big leap, but to go after it in 10,000 small little chunks. So you don't actually at Any point, fight back too much. I think the rise of authoritarianism in the US has been growing since Trump won, and I think this is a continuation of it, but I think now it just looks more gross. But I don't think this wasn't going on before behind closed doors. I think now these people just feel like they have no authority and have to abase themselves at the risk of losing some shareholders. I think the disappointment to me is that it turns out that all these incredibly powerful people are not powerful enough to possibly weather a couple quarters of lower earnings because of the President's ire. And so they have to fall and collapse in front of themselves at his feet and kiss the shoes and so forth. And I foolishly expected better.
- [95:58]
A
The telling moment was when Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said, yeah, we're going to invest $600 billion in the United States, and then leaned over to the President and whispered, is that the number?
- [96:16]
B
I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with.
- [96:18]
A
What number did you.
- [96:20]
B
So if you're clear about how a free market's supposed to work, it's not that the President doesn't get to tell the companies what to do. That is a form of state capitalism, which is often aligned with a fascist approach to government. And it is just nasty. And I keep trying to beat this drum and I'm not getting the reception from people in tech that I expected. I'm like, hey, isn't it bad that the government's calling the shots? They're like, well. And then the conversation stops and I'm blown away by it. I really have learned that in a lot of cases, people in business do not actually have principles so much as they have short term approaches to the market that I think are the most accretive financially. And as a person who has, I hope, principles, the contrast consistently jars me.
- [97:13]
A
Yeah, but they. But I guess principles are a luxury. If you are operating in China or Russia or the United States and you want to keep operating in those jurisdictions and you have strongman leaders who insist on fealty, it is Tim Cook's obligation to his stakeholders to tell the President.
- [97:36]
B
To go to hell, I think, is that not a long term. You cannot win under state capitalism and strongman leadership. The way to build long term shareholder value is to stand up to this and say no. The way to build short term value is to do what they're doing, which is to roll over like a kicked dog. Yeah, it's disappointing. These are supposed to be. These people get paid bajillions of dollars. And I don't even mind that because I'm a capitalist, but I did expect them to have a spying required cause in their contracts and apparently everyone's got fricking jello going up their back. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to get all shouty.
- [98:13]
C
I mean, I'm sure that there were a jillion people in that room who are not Trump fans and found one way or another to rationalize this as not being an awful thing they're doing.
- [98:28]
A
Yeah, look, I think it's an admirable, laudable goal to bring manufacturing and business to the United States. It feels like these companies, the commitment these companies have to that is similar to their commitment to dei. As soon as it becomes, became unfashionable to be committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, they said, oh, yeah, yeah, we never, we never thought that was a good idea. And it's.
- [98:54]
C
Yeah. I mean, I mean, left, Left to their own devices, they took all manufacturing out of the US Right. They became, they became intrigued when the government talked about giving them some money to bring some of it back.
- [99:06]
A
This is, this is them playing the game.
- [99:08]
C
I understand that's not even all that clear. They care all that much about the. They don't care geopolitical danger of no longer being a manufacturing powerhouse.
- [99:18]
A
Right. They don't, they don't care about any of this. They care about the bottom line. And I think it's probably a useful lesson. I'll quote Mike Masnick in Tech Dirty says real innovation happens when companies have to compete on merit, not on who can kiss the leader's ass most effectively.
- [99:34]
B
Yes.
- [99:35]
A
In a functioning democracy with actual rule of law, the best, best products have the opportunity to win. In an authoritarian system, the company makes the dictator happy, wins, and that's it. It's not good for innovation. So I guess you, that's what you're saying, Alex, is short term, maybe this is what you have to do, but long term.
- [99:55]
B
Yeah. Go back to the Romney. Obama debate. And Romney said that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers, but you, Mr. President, only pick losers. And, and it was a, it was. He never had the. No, not, not when Romney did it. Somehow that man had the charisma of the, of his family dog after it died.
- [100:15]
A
By the way, isn't Romney looking a lot better now, though?
- [100:18]
B
I, I would, I, I'd sell Harry to Russia to get Romney back.
- [100:23]
A
I'd take Mitt Romney, Barry Goldwater, I don't care.
- [100:26]
B
I, yeah, Barry, but I mean Romney for sure, but yeah, the way to have a competitive economy long term is to allow market forces to shape where investment goes so that way things end up being efficient. A good example of this, and I just read a really great article from a Chinese economist about high speed rail in China. We talk a lot about the power and prowess of the Chinese country to build lots of high speed rail. And frankly, they built a lot of it and it goes pretty well. Shout out some of the lines, make a lot of sense. Like Beijing to Shanghai, great place to have high speed rail. But because the government decided they were going to do a lot of this, they built tons of high speed rail lines that are incredibly economically useless and they have to maintain them. And they built these enormous stations out in the middle of nowhere. And that is how state capitalism can have the occasional patina of looking good, but really it does not allocate resources effectively and it leads to crony capitalism and corruption. It's bad all the way through. It is a rotten core. And I know I sound like a neolib here because probably because I am, but I just don't. Do people just think that, that once you go down this road it's all going to get rolled back?
- [101:33]
C
I'm sure a lot of them are saying to themselves they just need to get through this for now and long term they'll come out in a better place. Although that's, it's hardly clear that's going to be true.
- [101:44]
A
I honestly think this is one of the problems in America, besides the financialization of every business in America, is that the short term look at short term quarterly profits driven by the market, but driven by other forces as well. Without long term planning, you don't have much. There's another example. This is from the Atlantic when the populist strongman Juan Peron ran Argentina's economy from his presidential palace in the mid 20th century, personally deciding which companies received favors, which industries got nationalized or protected, and which businessmen profited from state largesse. Economists warned the experiment would end badly. They were right. Over decades of rule by Peron and his successors. And Peron, by the way, was electorally very popular. Yep, he won three elections. A country that had once been among the world's wealthiest nations devolved into a global laughingstock with uncontrollable inflation, routine financial crises, rampant corruption and crippling poverty. Haven't we learned anything? Centralized economies don't do well. They do not do well.
- [102:51]
B
Well, what we did was we learned that. But whenever a Republican wins the, the apparatus of the media goes and says, well now we should finally do it. America should have a king. And I, it just, it blows my mind. And I'm very annoyed by this moment in time. As, as a, as a technology and business journalist, it's just, it feels like I'm shouting into the wind. And then everyone keeps telling me, well, Alex, we have to play the game on the field. Yeah, what's the point of all your power? Yeah, what's the point? Give it to someone with, with, with ethics, please. Technology, though, how about that iPhone? Yeah.
- [103:27]
A
Well, here's another one that has some technology impact. Postal traffic. International Traffic to the US via the Postal Service is down 80% according to the UN postal flows. The United States have come nearly to a halt, with 88 operators, 88 nations worldwide fully or partially suspending services. Why is that?
- [103:54]
C
It's the de minimis being taken away. So even for these small orders, tariffs are screwing things up.
- [104:01]
A
And it's also uncertainty, right, because it comes and goes.
- [104:04]
C
And this, I mean, this has got to be devastating to a lot of small businesses that are very dependent on these supply chains.
- [104:11]
A
So ever since 1950, 1938, there's been an exemption on items below a certain amount. Currently, because of inflation, $800 they're shipped to the US without duties. The number of de minimis packages entering the US in 2024 was 1.36 billion. Temu. Think Temu. She and Alibaba. A lot of the stuff you buy on Amazon. So the new rules mean that all parcels, regardless of value, are subject to tariffs. And the other problem is that these tariffs themselves are going right now we have. I don't think there is a tariff to China that was put off.
- [104:58]
C
But, and, and depending on. Right, depending on court decisions, they may either be going away or with us forever.
- [105:07]
A
That's right. And now we're waiting to. The Supreme Court decides because the lower court has decided the tariffs are illegal. If the Supreme Court agrees, we will have to repay billions of dollars to companies. By the way, you will not get that money if you paid a lot more for something that was shipped over from overseas because of tariffs. Hey, here's the good news. You're not getting a refund.
- [105:33]
C
Even then, Congress may pass tariffs.
- [105:38]
A
That's right. They might have to because of the economic hardship imposed by refunding those illegal tariffs. That's right.
- [105:46]
B
The irony of, of the White House Twitter account posting the, like the tariff revenue chart, which is just a tax chart, and then bragging about how much tax bringing in. I'm like, you guys just sound like Democrats. But with a worse tax mechanism. This is dumber than hell. What are you doing?
- [106:02]
A
And then, and then because there still persists this notion that, well, we don't pay tariffs. Countries pay tariffs.
- [106:09]
C
You're not, you're not allowed to say that Americans are paying for tariffs.
- [106:13]
A
Yeah, yeah. Remember when Amazon proposed that president went ballistic. So you know, most retailers aren't mentioning why the costs are going up.
- [106:23]
C
Yeah.
- [106:24]
B
Well, we're going to get new inflation data this week. I think it's Wednesday and Thursday. So we're going to, we're going to see more, more of what's going on. I think we've all seen the Jobs.
- [106:30]
A
Data, but it's also hard to keep track of does that is Apple. Apple's not paying tariffs right now on iPhones. Right. Because of the gold bar.
- [106:38]
B
I think they.
- [106:38]
A
And the promise to build near term.
- [106:40]
B
Favoritism from the President to get an exemption.
- [106:43]
A
Yeah.
- [106:44]
B
Which is.
- [106:44]
A
But this is, it's, it's like changes every day. You don't know what it's going to be and it must be driving these guys crazy. Another reason why they showed up for that dinner.
- [106:54]
B
Businesses love uncertainty. What they love is that the playing field underneath them is constantly changing. And it's full of invisible apocals.
- [106:59]
A
Makes it so hard, I mean for the other guys. So people probably didn't notice it, but in the middle of the show my Internet went out. I'm on Comcast or got spotty. So I unplugged something and now I'm operating on Starlink, which makes me happy because it's making astronomers crazy. Satellite companies like SpaceX are ignoring astronomers calls to save the night sky. Most satellite constellations exceed recommended brightness levels. Some are even visible to the naked eye. And it's not just Starlink, by the way. There are 12,000 active satellites circling the earth.
- [107:46]
C
AST mobile and all these guys.
- [107:49]
A
Everybody's got one up there. And you mentioned Amazon's launching Project Kuiper satellite. Have they actually started launching those?
- [107:56]
B
They have. They put up a couple. And then also China's making its own satellite Internet cluster and they. The EU has allocated a lot of money for it as well. So much like there's multiple GPS systems in the world, there's going to be GPS equivalent systems in the world, there's going to be equivalent competing satellite connectivity clusters and this will become an important point in future wars and so forth. But I just want to say that far be it for me to be Elon Musk's defender, because I'm not. But I do Think that he's getting hit with a lot of complaints about Starlink impacting land based telescope work. It's going to be a lot of people really soon and I don't think there's any way to stop it even if we want to. I don't know if we need land based. We have the JWST now.
- [108:40]
A
Right.
- [108:41]
B
So I think it's better to be doing that from space.
- [108:44]
A
Have you seen some of the recent images from the web? Oh my.
- [108:47]
B
Of course I have. I'm a dork.
- [108:49]
A
They're gorgeous.
- [108:50]
C
Yeah, dude.
- [108:51]
A
So who cares if there's a little light pollution? We've got the web.
- [108:55]
B
Well, there's a lot of land based satellites that are expensive and useful and universities run them and so forth. Telescopes, yeah, sorry, telescopes. But we're moving towards an era of humanity in which we're having a more active space economy. And I don't think there's any way to slow that down. And so to me this is one of those like, oh, we're going to do that. Okay. I mean, Harry, do you see any mechanism by which we could slow global satellite growth?
- [109:19]
C
I can't imagine. I mean, I do know that different satellites have different impact. Maybe there's some way to use technology to.
- [109:27]
A
Well, for a while Elon said that they were darkening their, the Starlink satellites so that they wouldn't be so visible.
- [109:34]
C
But I don't, I don't see the astronomers winning this one.
- [109:37]
B
Yeah, no, because they have no power.
- [109:40]
A
Right.
- [109:40]
B
Or money or influence. Actually they're out of favor with the President right now. So. Actually I think that probably anyone in academia is going to get kicked out the shin.
- [109:47]
C
Astronomers are scientists.
- [109:49]
A
Oops, said the S word.
- [109:52]
C
They do not have a lot of friends in the Trump administration.
- [109:55]
B
Yeah. I do feel bad though for the people who will be impacted by this in the near term as they deal with increased light pollution impacting their ability to take good pictures of the sky. But I don't want to live in a world in which we don't have improving satellite based connectivity and eventually space based computing.
- [110:13]
A
It's mind boggling. I don't know if you watched the starship launch a couple of weeks ago and they had beautiful pictures of the inside of the launch vehicle, of the beautiful view of the Earth. And on the top of all of them it said, powered by Starlink. They were using the Internet of the Starlink satellites as a relay to send those pictures back to Earth. Gorgeous 4K pictures. If they had been, if pictures had been this good as we Landed on the moon, people would have been shaved for sure. That's fake. That is for sure fake.
- [110:47]
B
Saved by the grainy footage.
- [110:48]
A
Yeah. This looks so good. It's really mind boggling. It's really.
- [110:52]
B
I think the fact that Starlink is your backup for broadcasting this to the Internet, Leo, is a legitimate win for humanity. And we joked earlier about going to the woods growing tomatoes out in the sticks now that I can play video games in the woods, all the poor yacht owners out there who've been struggling with low bandwidth over the years, sitting on your third deck with your fifth wife and your seventh helicopter and you couldn't download your email. Now you can watch YouTube.
- [111:20]
C
There are a lot of humanitarian applications for this stuff too.
- [111:24]
A
Oh, that's true.
- [111:25]
C
I would not argue that satellites make the world a better place.
- [111:28]
A
I was a big.
- [111:30]
C
Make the world a worse place.
- [111:32]
A
Right. I was a big proponent of Starlink initially because I thought it was going to bring Internet connectivity to every corner of the globe and really democratize it. And then I found out how much I was going to have to pay for the dish and then the monthly fees. And it's definitely not democratizing. It is the high priced spread. But if you can't get anywhere else, we have a regular Nicholas De Leon, who lives out in the Albuquerque, New Mexico desert, loves living out there and he's able to use Starlink.
- [111:59]
C
That's awesome.
- [111:59]
A
Yeah, it really, it's a. Is amazing.
- [112:02]
B
There's also an element of Starlink that I really appreciate, which is it's not tied as far as I understand it. Correct me if I'm wrong, everybody, but it's not tied to the same networks that governments often control. So if you're in a nation where there is censored Internet access, if you can get your hands on one.
- [112:19]
A
Right.
- [112:19]
B
Still tricky in certain areas, but you do have a way out of a digital jail your government wants to keep you in.
- [112:25]
A
Yeah. Instead of your government, you now have Elon, right? Yeah.
- [112:29]
C
Elon may decide whether you get to access or not.
- [112:32]
B
Guys, guys, let, let's not let our, our, our views of one man color. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party is worse than Elon Musk.
- [112:41]
A
That's probably true.
- [112:42]
B
Right?
- [112:43]
A
You're right.
- [112:43]
B
Putin is worse than Musk. And so like, I do think, and like there's other authoritarian regimes that block Internet access.
- [112:50]
C
Is it possible, possible to get Starlink service in China?
- [112:53]
B
Not officially, but my point is it does open a small door for democracy activists, journalists and dissidents and so forth to have a shot at less sensor connectivity. And that is a good. Now when it comes from a different company, I'm sure we'll all give that an extra clap. But for now, I'll take this.
- [113:09]
A
Let's take a break. We're talking tech with Alex Wilhelm from the wonderful this Week in startups podcast, of course, is Cautious Optimism news newsletter. It's always good to see you. Is it a secret what you told us before the show? Can I mention.
- [113:27]
B
Oh, that we're having a third kit.
- [113:28]
A
Yeah, that.
- [113:29]
B
No, no, no, that's. That, that's. We've known for a little bit now. And congratulations, we're in. Can we fit three car seats in our car mode? And yeah.
- [113:39]
A
So I'm so happy for you. You sent us, you sent me pictures of the little ones. They are so sweet. So cute. You are at a great, great time. And so if you know, I really appreciate you being on the show because I know this is family, this could be family time. So thank you, Leo.
- [113:55]
B
You are family. So I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
- [113:57]
A
That's very nice. Yes. Such beautiful, beautiful kids. And of course, Harry McCracken, the technologizer@fastcompany.com this episode of this Week in Tech, brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Actually, in many ways, we've used ZipRecruiter to hire many of our team members. Hiring can be, you know, a killer, very time consuming. You have to, you know, put out the ad and then wait for the right candidate to apply. And then, you know, you got a bunch of resumes, you got to search through them. And finally you now you got to get in touch with the potential candidate and it's almost a negotiation. Well, let me tell you something. The future of hiring looks much brighter because ZipRecruiter's latest tools and features help speed up finding the right people for your roles. You save valuable time. And now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWIT we love ZipRecruiter. Oh, my goodness. It completely transformed our hiring process. With ZipRecruiter's new advances, you can easily find and connect with qualified candidates. And in minutes, see a candidate you're really interested in. No problem. Unlock their contact info instantly. And by the way, with 320,000 new resumes added to ZipRecruiter monthly, that means you can reach more potential hires and fill roles Sooner. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one, number one rated hiring site based on G2, use ZipRecruiter and save time hiring. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And if you go to ziprecruiter.com twit right now, you can try it for free again. That's ZipRecruiter.com Twitz ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire you might actually welcome our satellite Internet overlords when you hear stories like this. Microsoft says its Azure service is affected by damaged Red Sea cables. They've actually fixed that. But the cut cables show you kind of in some ways how fragile the Internet is. The Red Sea cables, were they cut? It's unclear. Did they just break? It's unclear, but there's some suspicion that maybe the Houthis, the Yemeni Houthis who are active in that area. I remember us sailing through the Suez Canal a couple of years ago, and the captain said, due to pirate activity in the area, we are taking on some security personnel. And we'd like to ask you to stay off the decks as we transit this area. And if you see anything approaching the boat, you might want to go to your room and get under the bed.
- [116:55]
B
Because that'll save you.
- [116:58]
A
And then these. These basically Navy SEAL types get on board and kind of line the deck. You know, it's kind of amazing, you know, not that cruise ships are probably the first thing pirates would attack, but.
- [117:14]
C
That sounds terrifying, Leo.
- [117:16]
A
Yeah, well, it wasn't. It was kind of fascinating. We're all going. What? I was just glad to be able to go through the Suez Canal. That is an experience.
- [117:24]
B
It's on my list of things to do. I think we take for granted how. How much our Internet cables work. I read a really fascinating story about the ships that actually go out and fix these cables and how. How difficult that work is to bring them up from the sea floor if they're damaged and then work on them because there's a lot of tension, right? Because they're long, heavy cables and. And so you have to specialize boats and such. That story was sadly framed about the last major tsunami in Japan that led to the nuclear disaster and so forth, and the damage that the cables underwent in that. Because if they get shifted around underground, they can get caught on things and rip. The Internet's much more tenuous than I think we realize at times, and so more real to me.
- [118:04]
A
Now, they said microset stuff said due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea, but that doesn't necessarily mean Somebody cut them. Could have been a ship accidentally dragging an anchor. Could have been they broke because of their own weight. Could have been undersea volcanic activity. We don't know.
- [118:22]
B
Aliens.
- [118:23]
A
Could have been aliens.
- [118:24]
B
I have a couple of guesses that are a bit more likely when it comes to disruptions of major commercial.
- [118:29]
A
Especially in that area. Right?
- [118:30]
B
Yeah. If it's up by Sweden. I have another guess. And it's not accident.
- [118:35]
A
You know, last year the government of Yemen claimed that the Houthis did in fact cut cables in the Red Sea. Last year, Microsoft managed to restore service by rerouting it. They did the same thing. But those, those, the problem is you can reroute until other cables are cut and other cables and other cables, and it takes a while to fix them.
- [118:56]
B
So one thing we've seen is increasing investment from the major tech companies to build their own, if memory serves. And so we're actually seeing a little bit of kind of private Internet development. But there's so much expense in putting these cables down. It's also a good thing that major tech companies are putting the money into it. But I mean, we could see geopolitics impact information sharing, which I think is something we don't talk about enough in terms of the Internet being available to everybody.
- [119:24]
A
Right.
- [119:25]
B
And therefore commerce, therefore for AI, therefore data centers and so forth. But people are trying to really expand MENA region data center footprints right now, especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. But if the cables are getting cut in and around the area, I mean, that's bad, that's going to make it less likely, less attractive of a place to invest.
- [119:43]
C
So actually it's amazing to think that Microsoft has to have the expertise in house to deal with some of this stuff. And like, I wonder what kind of a team you have.
- [119:51]
A
Yeah.
- [119:53]
B
So Meta has helped develop over 20 subsea cables in the last decade and they're part owners in 16. I mean, that's a lot of capital.
- [120:02]
A
And Amazon does it, right? Amazon has subsea cables, right.
- [120:05]
B
Who I don't have all my fingers on.
- [120:06]
A
Google has some.
- [120:07]
B
Yeah, you're not a real Internet company until you have to kiss the president's ass and you have to spend billions of dollars on spaghetti noodles for the ocean.
- [120:16]
A
You know, it's amazing what these companies deal with. I don't know, the size scaling. You know, think about what it took to scale Facebook and the infrastructure that they've had to invent in many cases. And then there's the Facebook poke, all that beautiful infrastructure to support the poke. It's back, baby. 21 years. Meta still hasn't given up on the Facebook poke. This is Carissa Bell from Engadget. Meta apparently posted on Instagram that it is now easier to find by adding pokes back to user profiles. Sending pokes. Here it is. Here's the Instagram post. Just got easier.
- [121:11]
B
Yes.
- [121:12]
A
Finally. At last, our long national nightmare is over.
- [121:17]
B
Instagram on the iPad and Facebook pokes are back, baby. It's 2009. Can I tell you a story about Facebook, though, Leo, I had to rejoin recently.
- [121:28]
A
Oh, aren't you. That's because you have kids and you probably have older relatives who said, where are the pictures?
- [121:34]
B
No, no, that's all at the group text. I had to make a Facebook account so I can make a business page for my blog. And did you know that that's worse.
- [121:42]
A
Than going to dinner at the White House? That is cowtowing to the meta.
- [121:48]
B
I. I literally had to call up Mark and be like, please let me in, because I'm kidding. But no one joins Facebook anymore, so it did not treat me like a human for a very long time.
- [121:59]
A
Oh, yeah, they assumed probably you're a bot. That's a good point. Yeah.
- [122:02]
B
But it was interesting. Like, I've gone. I went to the Facebook process to sign up when I was in middle school or high school or something, you know, a thousand million years ago, and it was easy. And now it kept blocking me. He kept being like, no, no, you're back in the penalty box. We don't think you're real. And I'm like, it's literally me.
- [122:18]
A
I think this is a measure of how much id, how much bot activity there's. It's the same thing on X, right? Joining X if you've lost your account or don't have an account is murder because there's so many bots. And of course, the irony of it is it's probably a lot harder for you as a human to get on Facebook than it is for a bot. Bot's probably got that all wired. That's instant. Just in case, Carissa writes, you weren't on Facebook two decades ago. Poking was something of a novelty in the early days of social network. How many. Show of hands, how many of you remember getting in just little poke battles with your friends where you'd poke them and they'd poke you back, and now you gotta poke them again. And it just goes on and on.
- [123:00]
B
Let me.
- [123:00]
A
If you're.
- [123:01]
B
If you're in Gen Z, let me.
- [123:02]
C
Explain this to you.
- [123:03]
B
Poke used to be your equivalent to a snap streak. Right. You would poke back.
- [123:07]
A
I don't know what that is. What's a snap streak?
- [123:10]
B
Isn't. Oh, crap. Isn't snap streak. When you. If you, like, text back every day, it adds to your streak.
- [123:18]
A
Oh, you have a streak of how many times you.
- [123:20]
B
And it's part of, like, a friendship mechanism. So it was like top five on MySpace, Facebook.
- [123:25]
A
But post that. That's not that functional. Poke doesn't record anything. It's just you get a message that says poke.
- [123:32]
B
Yeah, but it was the predecessor. You know, it was the preamble. It was.
- [123:37]
C
And at one point, Facebook brought back. They created a poke app, which, if I memory serves, was kind of competing with Snapchat at the time.
- [123:44]
A
So this may shock you, but the poke never went away.
- [123:48]
C
It just was just been sitting there.
- [123:50]
A
Sitting there and de emphasized. But the company, Carissa writes, has for some reason been trying to get poking to make a comeback for a while now. Meta said last year the feature was, quote, having a moment. And there. There had been a 13x spike in pokes after the company began surfacing the feature in the Facebook search bar. Of course, as soon as you put the button there, they're gonna poke people. Poke.
- [124:14]
C
I mean, anytime anybody pokes me, I assume that it was an accident, and so I ignore it.
- [124:20]
A
Like, you accidentally clicked the poke button.
- [124:22]
C
And it only happens once every six years, so it's not a major problem.
- [124:25]
A
Wow, have I been poked lately? I don't know. What's the name of your Facebook page? How do you know if you've been poked?
- [124:34]
B
I don't know.
- [124:37]
C
Does it come through Messenger?
- [124:39]
A
Oh, maybe it's Messenger. See, that's part of the problem is I never open Messenger.
- [124:43]
B
We sound right now like my parents, and I'm trying to get log into Netflix.
- [124:47]
A
What is this? How do you. How does this work, this Facebook thing?
- [124:53]
B
What's that? The other old grandmother meme when she's, like, picking her glasses up like this. I think that's all of us right now.
- [124:59]
A
All right, so what's your page? I'm going to poke you.
- [125:01]
B
I don't know. I have to pull up one password and I don't log into it.
- [125:05]
A
Oh, it just automatically.
- [125:07]
B
Hold on. Talk amongst yourselves.
- [125:09]
A
Alex Wilhelm, I'm looking for you. You're not the CEO and founder at Lonebridge. You're not this guy with a beard. You're not the eyeball. The resident's eyeball.
- [125:20]
C
Midwest Roofing.
- [125:20]
A
You don't work at Midwest Roofing. You're not any of Those.
- [125:23]
B
Alex, maybe I do work at Midwest Roofing.
- [125:25]
A
You guys don't know in Costa Rica.
- [125:29]
B
Maybe I fly a lot. Block, block, never save. Hold on, I'm almost there. I thought I had a page. Where's my page?
- [125:37]
A
Somebody poke me so I know what happened. What it looks like when you.
- [125:41]
B
Oh, here it is. Okay. Facebook.com capt news ca opt news. Because I couldn't fit my whole name in there. Leo, you can poke my page.
- [125:52]
A
Can you poke pages?
- [125:54]
B
We're about to find out. Do you need a license?
- [125:57]
A
All right, I'm going to stop here. There's no point in this. Zuck said last year he wants to bring back more OG because he's with the kids. OG Facebook features. Like being able to find content posted by your actual friends.
- [126:12]
C
Who'd have thought?
- [126:16]
B
Is the AI slop on Facebook as bad as I'm told?
- [126:19]
A
Oh, my God.
- [126:20]
C
Well, it's awful.
- [126:21]
A
You saw the trouble they got in lately with these fake celebrity chatbots.
- [126:27]
B
Oh, God.
- [126:31]
A
That we're sending risque messages. Oh, this is character.
- [126:35]
C
Those ones are character AI.
- [126:36]
A
But. Yeah, but Facebook was doing it too. There were.
- [126:38]
C
Facebook had a similar issue. But that was like yesterday's news about chatbots sending fake risque messages.
- [126:45]
A
Yeah, that was character AI, which has, of course been in trouble in the past, being sued by parents over the.
- [126:53]
C
My Facebook feed is currently dominated by AI images of celebrities holding birthday cakes with their names on them. And also very long, heart touching anecdotes about celebrities being nice.
- [127:07]
B
Can you. Can you screen share that? Can I see it?
- [127:12]
A
Just. Just share it with them on Facebook.
- [127:15]
B
I don't. I don't want to use Facebook.
- [127:17]
A
All right, let me see what's. Let me see what's on my. I don't. Can't believe we're spending all this time on Facebook. It's so.
- [127:23]
B
I mean, so you can just cut it out later.
- [127:25]
A
It's so yesterday, isn't it? Isn't it? Maybe I'm.
- [127:29]
B
I mean, apparently it's not Leo, because I think they still have hundreds of monthly active users on. On the Big Blue.
- [127:34]
A
Yeah. Is it only old people?
- [127:37]
B
I mean, based on this conversation, apparently not because of. Because we're all.
- [127:41]
A
Okay, here's a birthday party. Here's. I always get. For some reason, I don't know why. Ladies in skimpy bikinis. Bikinis.
- [127:50]
C
My reels are like that, too. That the algorithm.
- [127:52]
A
It's just reels. It's just the way reels is.
- [127:54]
C
The reels algorithm seems to be ladies and skimpy bikinis.
- [127:57]
A
Yeah, well, humans like that. There's bill gates. Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers. Humans won't be needed for most things. Bill, don't bring your personal life into it, okay? Just, you know.
- [128:11]
B
Yeah, be quiet. Also, you know, you know Trump's old and out of touch because he made Bill Gates come to the White House and put Satya further away. Like, come on, dude.
- [128:20]
A
I. I have no AI content in my.
- [128:22]
B
All right, there you go. So it's not. It's not the AI Poc Told, it's you.
- [128:27]
C
Well, you need to read some of the text, though, because some of it is AI generated text.
- [128:32]
A
Ah. Huh. I never. I never go here. So.
- [128:38]
B
Yeah, I think that, that, that summarizes it. Like, it's a good. It's a good ploy to get a little attention to Facebook again. And it's perfectly fine that they brought back pokes, and it may even drive some authentic human interactions on the site. But a bit like a cup of water to Smeagol as he fades into the lava. I don't think you're gonna change the trend, my precious. And he's gone.
- [129:05]
A
Eureka alert. First brain wide map made of decision making charted in mice. Yeah. Princeton neuroscientists have led an international collaboration of 22 labs. They have now mapped the 620,000 neurons in a mouse and discovered how they make decisions.
- [129:30]
B
This is awesome.
- [129:31]
A
It turns out many more parts of the brain are involved in the decision making than they thought. Now, I don't know if mouse decisions are anything like human decisions. The task was deceptively simple. Mouse sat in front of screens that intermittently displayed a black and white striped circle for a brief amount of time, either on the left or the right. The mouse could get a reward, a sip of sugar, if they quickly moved the circle toward the center of the screen by operating a tiny steering wheel in the same direction. So if this. If the. If the pictures on the left, they get to turn the steering wheel to the right, move it to the middle, and they get a sip of sugar water. Yeah, you're. See, I'm showing a giant. I'm assuming I'm tiny, but really the mice is tiny.
- [130:26]
B
But, I mean, that's what I do at work. I do stuff, and then I get rewarded with caffeine water. I mean, like, it's also.
- [130:33]
A
So while the mice performed this task, by the way, they also threw him some curves. The circle was faint, sometimes requiring them to guess. Relying on past experience. While the mice performed the task, researchers recorded brain activity using High density electrodes that allowed them to monitor hundreds of neurons across many regions simultaneously. And because there are so many neurons, the work was divided among all labs, pooling a Data set covering 620,000 neurons recorded from 139 mice in 12 labs encompassing nearly the entire brain. The results revealed decision making is distributed across the brain, including in areas traditionally associated with movement rather than cognition. Decision making is broadly distributed. I. I don't know. Can you extrapolate this to humans? I don't know.
- [131:29]
B
Yeah, well, no, maybe not directly in the way that you're thinking, but mice are mammals. So start there like we have.
- [131:36]
A
If I fed you whiskey instead of sugar syrup, that'd probably work better.
- [131:39]
B
Yes, I would get that wheel totally off, but I would have a blast while I was doing it. And then you'd have to pick me up from rehab again. So no whiskey for me. Sugar water?
- [131:48]
A
No whiskey. Sugar water's fine.
- [131:50]
B
But the thing is, there's a company called Cortical Labs, and I talked to them because I think they're awesome over on Twist. And what they do is they take chips and then they layer actual neurons on top of them, and they found a way to make them do electric pulses together to do cool computing projects. And so what I'm excited about is once we understand how perhaps even small mammalian brains work, we can then build those somehow, and then we already are learning how to connect them to computers, and then we can have synthetic or hybrid physical and digital or biological and silicon based computing systems. And that's going to be wicked because that solves the AI problem of like. Oh, God. LLMs aren't actually intelligent.
- [132:31]
A
You can jack into your game in the log cabin and be there, virtually there.
- [132:36]
B
There would probably be some jacking in the log cabin. Just thinking out loud.
- [132:39]
A
Stop it. Stop. You.
- [132:41]
B
You can't put it on you.
- [132:43]
A
You can't.
- [132:44]
B
Slow pitch. All right, all right. Sorry.
- [132:47]
A
If your children are listening, you're a father now. Alex. Alex.
- [132:50]
B
Yeah, my oldest kid's two and a half.
- [132:52]
A
Hey, explain this to me because this feels like a little bit. Feels like a little weird. Okay. Nvidia's chip round trip deals. Nvidia was sell chips to a company, Lambda, a cloud startup, then rent them back from Lambda. So this is from the information. Nvidia is paying Lambda $1.5 billion over time. It's also done this with Core Weave, another Nvidia backed cloud startup. They invest in startups which then buy the Nvidia chips. Then Nvidia rents those chips back, spending several Hundred million dollars a year in the process, by the way. A tiny amount for Nvidia. What's the reason for this? The startups get to increase the chip rental revenue they report, which buttresses their ability to go public. And of course because Nvidia is an investor in these companies, they benefit in the increase in the startup's value. Plus they also show revenue from the chips that the startups are buying. So it's a shell game. Is this even legal?
- [134:08]
B
I've been talking a lot. Harry, why don't you crack.
- [134:11]
A
No, this is your. You got it. This is yours, Alex.
- [134:14]
C
Yeah, I mean it's a little bit bailiwick. It's a little bit outside the area of my expertise.
- [134:17]
A
It's so bizarre.
- [134:19]
C
Certainly. I mean presumably this can end up offering something that the world wants because, you know, companies want to buy these cloud services.
- [134:34]
A
So it just, I think it artificially inflates this. The, the Nvidia stock price to some degree and the value of these companies to some degree. And it must be worth more than the hundreds of millions that Nvidia is paying for the rail.
- [134:47]
C
Leo, you got to play the game on the field. I'm sorry just tell you otherwise.
- [134:51]
A
You're eating dirt off the table or something.
- [134:54]
B
Something. Yeah, well we can run that back. So I do think, think that if this was happening at scale, it would be a cause for consumption.
- [135:01]
A
$1.5 billion.
- [135:06]
C
For Nvidia. That's chump change.
- [135:08]
B
Yeah.
- [135:08]
A
Why don't you guys thing it's why.
- [135:09]
B
You got two zeros and then we'll talk about real money.
- [135:11]
A
Scale is relative but. Well, I don't want to not.
- [135:14]
B
This is not as nefarious as it sounds on the.
- [135:17]
A
Okay.
- [135:17]
B
On the surface. So first of all, Lambda and I actually I just talked to its former CEO a few days ago.
- [135:24]
A
I figured you something about that.
- [135:25]
B
This lovely guy. And what I see here as the advantage for Nvidia is they get to financially support through investment these neo cloud companies, your core weaves, your Lambdas, your in scales, et cetera, which is good because they want to have a broader array of cloud providers that are not just the hyperscalers because Amazon, Google and other companies are building their own chips to try to reduce their good point dependence on Nvidia. OpenAI is also working with Broadcom. That came out this week and sent that stock up quite a lot. Two, when Nvidia sells a chip to a company and then rents it back, it's not the exact same transaction in reverse because the company has to rack that chip.
- [136:05]
A
Cool.
- [136:06]
C
That chip.
- [136:06]
B
Put power through that chip and then Nvidia is just renting time on it for its own needs. Nvidia isn't really in the business of being a cloud provider and so I don't think it's actually a net negative for the company. Do you let an expert third party do that? Is it a little bit in Ronnie? It definitely smells like it, but the scale is small and I can see the strategic elements to this and I don't think there's enough round tripping here to actually cause a concern about Nvidia financials.
- [136:34]
A
So there is a, there is somebody a chatter in our YouTube whose handle is Bretton woods, which tells me must be an economist, right, who says it's called Sales and Leased back which takes Capex and switches it to OPEX in your sheets, capital expenditure to operational expenditure and.
- [136:55]
B
That'S fine. So Port Furniture, right, is a Berkshire Hathaway company and they do furniture rentals because some people don't want to do topics, they'd rather have it be manifested in opex. And that's totally fine.
- [137:07]
A
Okay, see, there you go.
- [137:08]
B
It's, it's a little bit freaky. I think what people do with stories like this is that people like my friend Ed Zitron, whom I adore, who are currently beating the AI is a fraud drum, if you will, take things like this and then put them in the worst possible context because that's the perspective they view the world through.
- [137:28]
A
It's just financial rigmarole.
- [137:31]
B
It's normal, it's not really. And if it goes up by 10x.
- [137:36]
A
Then this is why I want to ask you. Yeah, okay.
- [137:40]
B
Be cautious, but don't freak out.
- [137:41]
A
Let's take a break. Then we have, they have the, I like to call it the season, the stems, the stuff, the news in this show that just fell through the sieve, the little bits and pieces left over.
- [137:54]
B
You can make cannabis jokes but I can't make.
- [137:56]
A
Cannabis is legal in the state of California.
- [137:58]
B
So is doing things in a cabin.
- [138:02]
A
Which friends with state the cabin is in. Alex Wilhelm is here. He's doing things in a cabin. Harry McCracken is the technologizer. He's not. And our show will continue in a moment. But first a word from this little doohickey. Let me show you. This thing is. This thing is so cool. This is my thinkst canary. I'm going to show you. That looks like a little, I don't know, external USB drive maybe, but it's, it's got an ethernet connection on it. It's got a hardwire on it. But let me tell you something. This thing is the best security device ever. Our sponsor today, thinkst Canary. I'll go to Canary Tools and show you what I can do with my Thinkst Canary. I'm gonna log in here it is a honeypot. Just so you understand what we're talking about here. This. This is a device that looks benign, looks simple, but it composes almost anything. Now, right now, it's set up for me to look like a Windows server. But you know, I was just thinking the other day that'd probably be better if it were an old SharePoint server. This is the interface at Canary Tools. You see, it's right Now Windows Server 2019. But, oh, this is so cool. Watch. I can configure this to be almost anything I want. And when I say configure it, it looks exactly like it. It could be iis, it could be a Microsoft AD domain controller. Oh, you know, you want vulnerable. Nothing better than SharePoint 2010, baby. Point is, it isn't really obviously a CentOS server or Oracle Enterprise Server or a Jupyter Fortigate security device or a Microtik router. It's a honeypot. Look, it can even be a skated device. I'm going to make it a Hirschman RS20 industrial switch. Now, the thing about this is it. It isn't, you know, it personates it perfectly. It's got the Mac address of Hirschman Automation. It's. It's got a fingerprint in the IP stack. Everything looks exactly right. So a bad guy doesn't see a honeypot. Bad guy doesn't see the things Canary. The bad guy sees something vulnerable and valuable. Thinks canaries are honeypots that can be deployed in minutes. And why would you do this? Well, if somebody is inside your network brute forcing your fake internal SCADA device or your SSH server or your web server, your thinks Canary will immediately tell you you have a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter things. Canaries can also create Canary tokens, an unlimited number of fake phony files. It could be anything from an AWS login to a credit card to an Excel spreadsheet. I've got Excel spreadsheet. You can put them anywhere, including on your cloud. So I've got on my Google Drive an Excel spreadsheet that says employee payroll information. Now, I know it's phony, it's bogus, but bad guys, if they open it up, bang, I get an alert and I get the alert in a way that makes sense to me. Whether it's email, text, syslog, they have. They support web hooks, they have an API. Any way you want, you're going to get the notification that matters, that tells you somebody is inside your network. Whether it's a bad guy, hacker who's in there, or a malicious insider. Just choose a profile and you'll see. It's so easy to do. You could change your profile every day if you want. Choose a profile for Things Canary device. You register it with a hosted console. It does the rest. It monitors, it gives you the notifications, and then you just sit back, you're done. Attackers who breached your network cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your Thinks Canary. Visit Canary Tools twit. For just $7,500 per year, you're going to get five things Canaries, your own hosted console. You get the upgrades, the support, the maintenance. If you use the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box, you're going to get 10% off the price for life. Other good news, you can always return your thinkscanaries with their 2 months money back guarantee for a full refund, so there's no risk. But I gotta tell you, during all the years we partnered with Thinks Canary, their refund guarantee has never been claimed. Visit Canary Tools Twit. Don't forget to enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box. This is a device. Once you get one, you will see. How did I live without it? It is a big part of your layered security strategy. How do you know? Ask yourself, if somebody were inside my network today, how would I know? I know. I've got to think. Scanner. I may have more than one. I'm not telling. I'm not telling. Canary Tools slash Twit. Don't forget the offer code TW I T. So, Bretton woods is back. He's big on monetary policy. He says a slightly corrected version of my former comment. Sale and leaseback deals switches capex to opex, thus lowering investment assets subject to taxation. Lowering investment assets subject to taxation. So it's a. It's a tax deal as well. There's some benefit, tax wise. You're watching twit Harry McCracken. Yeah. Alex, you knew. You knew that all along. All right.
- [143:22]
B
Well, it's just a different way of thinking about where the cost of. But no, I don't disagree with Mr. Bretton woods, which is a sentence that I never thought I'd utter out loud.
- [143:31]
A
I never thought I'd see a handle on YouTube. Bretton Woods. Wow. But monetary policy is very popular these days. So let's see. There's so many other stories here. Did you see that Elon Musk and Tesla have decided. Hey, first Tesla has decided to give Elon a trillion dollars pending certain this is normal. You do this with a quarterback or a home run hitter. Certain measurable performance, things like he's got to sell, what was it, 18 million full self driving subscriptions. Maybe this is tied to the fact that they've changed the wording of full self driving on the Tesla sales page. Now they describe it not as autonomous, they describe it as Advanced driver assist. Yeah, ADAs like every other car manufacturer has. Maybe this is because of that lawsuit. I don't know, the one where they had spent a couple hundred million dollars in the settlement.
- [144:35]
B
I'm just kind of blown away that they kept calling it full self driving for so long.
- [144:39]
A
So long.
- [144:39]
B
It just, it just, it never, it never made sense to me. It's like calling full sugar coke, zero calorie coke. It wasn't the same thing. And it always made me kind of mad. But it seemed like whenever I would complain about it, I would get the wave of Elon fans. And I got tired of that. So you eventually stopped beating the drum.
- [144:55]
A
Yeah.
- [144:59]
C
The Tesla board years ago offered him a deal that sounded implausible. And he did achieve that one. And that's how he made a lot of money.
- [145:07]
A
That's why they're paying him 56 billion a year.
- [145:10]
B
Well, and that's when the Delaware Chancery Court came into play and so forth. This is one of those times in which we have the right mechanism and the wrong reward. So I think people are kind of conflating the two. I think actually tying CEO performance to pick a metric, you know, market cap if you want, or revenue or profitability.
- [145:26]
A
Or 10 million active FSD subscription.
- [145:28]
B
Sure is a great way to actually track performance. Puts a little accountability into the C suite. Great. Love that.
- [145:34]
A
A trillion dollars stock option, that's, that's.
- [145:37]
B
When I begin to get a little bit. How much money does one person need?
- [145:40]
A
That's them saying though. And I think, by the way, the shareholders will have to approve this. That's a way of saying, hey, we think Elon is vital to the success of Tesla and we want to keep him focused on Tesla. Right.
- [145:53]
B
Well, ask yourself this question. If Elon Musk quit Tesla tomorrow, what would happen to its share price?
- [146:01]
A
It would tumble right crater.
- [146:03]
B
Because the company is not valued like a car.
- [146:05]
C
Company.
- [146:06]
B
It's valued like Elon Musk's vehicle to pursue his visions. So in a sense, I can kind of squint and see it. The reward in this case, I think is excessive for any corporation. When Satya became CEO of Microsoft, they eventually dropped an SEC filing. I forget it may have been an 8K or something. And I talked to Microsoft's comms people at the time. It's probably been gone long enough. I can say this. And they're like, just so you know, this is the way we think about reframing it in context of other CEOs. But this is going to eventually make Satya a billionaire. And you know what? Running Microsoft for as long as they expected him to stay in the seat and how well he's done. Sure, I can see that in our.
- [146:44]
A
Current system, immensely to their value.
- [146:46]
B
Yeah. But a trillion to me is a thousand times as much as a billion.
- [146:49]
A
A lot more than a billion.
- [146:50]
B
And.
- [146:53]
A
Are there any trillionaires?
- [146:55]
C
No, no, this, I mean, trillion dollar company. It sounds like this would involve Tesla becoming unbelievably more successful than any other company in the history of the world, which Elon has said is in the future for Tesla.
- [147:10]
A
Because of the optimus robots.
- [147:11]
C
Right, Right. But not because of cell and EVs, but because of robotics.
- [147:17]
A
This is what they advertise now. If you go to the Tesla website. By the way, I paid on My Model X $5,000 for full self driving, which he's been promising it for years. I never did get it. Now they're saying full self driving supervised. It's supervised. Your car will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with minimal driver intervention. That's a more accurate description, to be honest.
- [147:44]
B
That's.
- [147:44]
A
That's a. That's.
- [147:45]
B
It still says full self driving on the 10, right?
- [147:48]
A
Supervised. Supervised.
- [147:51]
B
Okay, well, fine then. I. I think Leo Laporte is death incarnate. Parentheses. Maybe not.
- [147:56]
A
Maybe not.
- [147:57]
B
I mean, come on.
- [147:58]
A
The fine print says this is from Electrek. It doesn't make the vehicle autonomous. It doesn't even promise it as a feature. You know, I paid $5,000 for the right to get it if it ever came out. It didn't. During the three year term.
- [148:10]
B
Oh.
- [148:10]
A
It was an options contract.
- [148:12]
B
I see.
- [148:12]
A
Yeah. You know, at the time, and maybe I was naive, I. I also bought the bio weapon defense filtration system, which is just a HEPA filter, but it had the bio weapon, you know, had the biohazard thing on it. It was great. And I knew I was. It was not real I knew that I wasn't gonna probably ever pay more for the self driving or any of that. I wanted to support Elon because at the time, naive as I was, and this is 2015, something like that, I thought he was changing the world. I thought he's really doing a good thing and I wanted to support it. I remember going to the factory in Fremont to pick it up, getting the factory tour and tears were coming in my eyes. I was so inspired. Boy, do I feel like a fool now. But I was so. At the time I was inspired. I thought this guy is really trying to make the world a better place. And I think maybe he was.
- [149:08]
B
I still think in some ways many of his projects are. I just hate that he's taking the wealth from those projects and using it in ways that I think are reprehensible. But like, I struggle with this a lot because I'm an enormous science fiction guy and I want to go to space before I die and I want to.
- [149:24]
A
You don't want to go to Mars?
- [149:26]
B
Trust me, Leo, I. I'll go to Venus, Mars, fricking Mercury, I don't care. Put me quote the.
- [149:31]
A
To quote the poet. Ain't the kind of place to raise a kid. I hear it's cold as hell.
- [149:39]
B
Cool, let's go. I. I don't. I mean I. I'm not going to space because I think it's gonna be luxurious. I could just go to the Four Seasons if I wanted that called the cosmic Harry.
- [149:48]
A
Did you ever use the ARC browser? Do you know about the ARC browser?
- [149:51]
C
I used ARC for a while. I said nice things about it.
- [149:53]
A
I loved it.
- [149:54]
C
I saw the news about the browser company.
- [149:57]
A
Yeah. So it's created by the browser company of New York and I saw some wag create a little meme template that says the something company of someplace and you just fill in the blank to make up your company name. I like it. The podcast company of Petaluma. That's me. Anyway, the browser company created ark, then decided, you know, not enough people are using it. So they killed ark. Oh, you can still get it. But they said, you know, we're deprecating ark.
- [150:25]
C
That's on maintenance.
- [150:26]
A
Yeah. We're going to make a new browser that's AI focused, called dia. Well, the other shoe dropped. They have just been acquired by Atlassian for $610 million. Is that a good exit? I think it's probably a pretty good exit for a company that really sold nothing, had no profits, no revenue at all.
- [150:48]
C
It's a good deal for Them. I mean, I'm personally very interested to see how AI impacts browsing. And with all due respect to Atlassian, it sounds like this is going to become an enterprise product and this is probably the last we'll hear about it being something wildly inventive and experimental. And so on that level, I regret it. Although I certainly. If I had been offered $600 million for this product, I probably would have been excited as well.
- [151:19]
A
I loved arc. I was very disappointed.
- [151:21]
C
ARC was cool.
- [151:22]
A
Yeah, it was my, you know, one of the. But I have some unusual requirements. I want to use a browser that I can show on the screen that doesn't have any browser user interface or anything. It's just a full screen of the web page. And ARK did that. I like the tabs on the side.
- [151:36]
C
I'd like to think we won't all be stuck with Chrome and Safari and Edge forever and that there's a chance some very small company will shake up that market.
- [151:47]
A
According to the information, Perplexity had also talked with the browser company about an acquisition back in December. OpenAI held talks with them as well.
- [151:58]
C
I mean, it must be a pretty good team because they've built some nice software.
- [152:01]
A
Well, and also the latest thing is these agency browsers. And OpenAI is building one. Perplexity has built one. Comet. We talked about that. DIA was by the browser company. Same idea as this idea of an AI browser which can do things for you agentically. The browser company was valued at 550 million last year. Investors included Atlassian Salesforce, Figma co founder Dylan Field, and LinkedIn co founder Reid Hoffman, who has his fingers. You might as well just say in everything, right?
- [152:35]
C
He just.
- [152:35]
A
In everything.
- [152:36]
B
I love that. That's where you went with that. I was gonna say, you know, Dylan, that's a guy who's really suffering from poverty right now. He really needed a good outcome.
- [152:44]
A
It went well for him, didn't it, not being able to sell Figma as planned. Then they went public and they made more money. Right.
- [152:52]
B
So I made that argument. And the Silicon Valley logic I can just report to you is that if you look at the effective IRR or internal rate of return of the two deals at different points in time, 20 billion Adobe versus the eventual IPO at a higher price. It puts out a smaller rate of return for the capital invested in the company precedingly. So no, it actually wasn't a better outcome, which I think is a little bit silly given the importance of liquidity and DPI and venture today.
- [153:20]
A
You may remember when it was announced that figment had gone public for all those billions of dollars. Lina Khan, the former chairman of the fcc, tweeted, see, we did a good thing preventing the merger, the acquisition.
- [153:35]
B
I wrote a very similar piece and then I took it to work at Twist and I'm like, and then it turns out that people didn't agree with me.
- [153:42]
A
Shot you down, did they? Yeah, shot you down.
- [153:45]
B
I floated it.
- [153:46]
A
We started the show talking about a big victory for publishers against anthropic Warner Brothers Discovery has joined in other suits against AI Giant Midjourney. You may remember that Midjourney is being sued by Disney over Darth Vader. Warner Brothers Discovery owns the DC Comics ip and so they're pissed off about Batman. So we'll see both those. Both those cases are wending their way through the courts now. Probably be years before there's a decision.
- [154:22]
B
I don't know what we're going to do about this because you can go to Hugging Face, which is an online repository of open source AI models and you can download Chinese image generation models that don't have to comply with Western copyright protections. And so, sure, copyright infringement is bad. I think we all agree here, but I don't think there's going to be a way for brands to actually prevent people from doing this.
- [154:46]
A
And there's probably not a way for the AI companies to say, you may know what Rick and Morty look like, but you cannot generate an image with Rick and Morty in.
- [154:55]
C
I mean, they seem very erratic. There have been times when ChatGPT has refused to generate Batman for me. But if I say, if I ask for an image of a. A guy dressed as a bat from a 1960s TV show, it'll give me a perfect Adam West. And then after I read, after I read the stuff about Mid journey, I asked ChatGPT to do an image of Batman grocery shopping. And I called him Batman and it gave me a really good Batman grocery shopping. So.
- [155:24]
B
Okay. But on the other hand, though, Harry, remember when OpenAI dropped their image generator and we all did the Studio Ghibli images?
- [155:31]
A
Nobody minded that.
- [155:32]
B
In fact, I still have mine as my Twitter icon.
- [155:34]
A
Studio Ghibli didn't like it.
- [155:36]
C
No.
- [155:36]
A
But the attorneys that I heard from said, yeah, they can't really. You can't copyright a style which is interesting.
- [155:44]
C
No. But you can copyright images. A crime fighting superhero who dresses up like a bat and calls himself Batman. I think any Journey would just generate something that looked virtually identical to an actual Batman poster.
- [156:00]
A
Yeah, I think any AI that could generate a Perfect. Adam west deserves our praise.
- [156:08]
C
It's all worth it.
- [156:09]
A
It's all worth it. Were you a Batman fan as a kid? I was.
- [156:13]
C
I was, too, when the show came out. So you can do the math on how old I am now. And according to my mother, I loved it and I took it very seriously and did not realize it was not a very serious show.
- [156:25]
A
Because you were younger than me. I was in, I think, fifth grade, and all the kids were so excited. Batman's gonna be on tonight. Batman's gonna be on tonight. I got home, I'm so excited to watch Batman. My parents said, well, we're going out to dinner tonight.
- [156:37]
C
I said, oh, no, no. Well, serious, serious Batman fans are still a little crusty about Adam west just because the show made. Made fun of Batman.
- [156:49]
A
I thought it was great. It was hysterical. It was very funny.
- [156:53]
B
This is the show that looks a little bit more whimsical.
- [156:55]
A
It was campy.
- [156:56]
C
It was very campy. And then later, we got all Holy.
- [156:59]
A
Cracker Jacks, Box Batman, that kind of thing.
- [157:02]
C
Eventually, we got all these extremely serious dystopian Batman movies. So I love those two.
- [157:07]
A
I love all Batman. My dad had a replica of the original DC1. Batman, Superman comics. And I loved those. I loved them all. And I loved the tongue in Cheek Batman. That was hysterical.
- [157:19]
B
That's nice. But see, for me, the formative Batman experience that I had was the no Man's Land arc, which I just looked up. It's from 1998, because I used to draw a lot and I wanted to do comics, and so I bought those and I tried to recreate the images, but that particular arc of Batman is, to me, like what Batman is.
- [157:37]
A
Frank Miller really reinvented Batman and made.
- [157:40]
C
It the Batman, basically the best Batman as the Batman from whenever you started reading comics or watching TV or going to the movies.
- [157:47]
B
Are you saying that childhood has an.
- [157:49]
A
Impact on our nostalgia functions in our ducks? We get imprinted with whatever, you know. Which. Which Batman was it that you. Was it the Frank Miller Batman? The Dark. The Dark Knight stuff, or what did you call it?
- [158:04]
B
No Man's Land. No Man's Land, which was the 1999. Apparently, according to this, it's. They were written by Jordan B.
- [158:12]
A
That was later. That was after Frank Miller. But it was. Was after we'd already gone dark with Batman.
- [158:19]
B
Yeah, but I can still remember individual panels from those compendiums that I had because I read it so many times. And, yeah, sure, it's nostalgia, but I also grew up with Harry Potter and That's still imprinted on my DNA as well, because I was around for every release of the books.
- [158:34]
A
Can I say something? I know this will be not welcome. And I read those books to my kids until they got old enough, where they said, dad, you're reading too slow. Don't give me all the character voices. And they. She. Dabby, just took the book from me, it was like, Volume 4, and said, I'm gonna read this.
- [158:51]
B
This is taking Goblet of Fire banger.
- [158:53]
A
Yeah. But I would do Harry Potter. You're a wizard, Harry. And she. After a while, she. She didn't want to hear that, but I was very serious about it. I took her to see JR Rowling, JK Rowling. I knew there was something wrong JK Rowling when she toured. She stopped it after the first book, but she. With the. With the. With the first book, she toured and did readings. And I took Abby, which little girl? And I said, remember this? You're meeting like. It's like me meeting JRR Tolkien. This was before she became a controversial figure. But I'm going to be honest here, and this will look controversial. They are not well written books.
- [159:38]
B
That's the thing. They are controversial. They are terrible down the road. And then just.
- [159:43]
A
They are terribly written books. There's some. I mean, you can't really can't compare it to Tolkien or even, like, even Patrick Rothfuss or. Or George R.R.
- [159:56]
C
Martin.
- [159:56]
B
The second Patrick Roth Rothfuss book in the Name of the Wind series was just. I can't use the words here on the show.
- [160:02]
A
It started so well and then it.
- [160:04]
B
Went off the rails. But Harry, Harry, back me up here. No one ever compared the literary quality of the Harry Potter series to the literary quality.
- [160:12]
A
And those spell names.
- [160:15]
C
I mean, some people certainly did, and they certainly speak to a lot of people.
- [160:19]
A
Yeah, no, and they spoke to me. They spoke, they spoke, I listened, and my kids loved them and all that.
- [160:25]
C
I think. Right on entertainment value.
- [160:28]
A
Absolutely.
- [160:28]
C
They're up there.
- [160:29]
A
She tapped an herb. She's the richest woman in England.
- [160:32]
B
But entertainment and literary value are very distinct things. Not fun at all.
- [160:38]
C
I mean, there are lots of people who also say that Tolkien does not have all that much literary value.
- [160:42]
A
So it doesn't. It's.
- [160:43]
B
Well, we're idiots. They're wrong. How about that?
- [160:46]
C
I declare, like, tenaciously liking Tolkien back in the 1960s was also something that people would turn their nose up at.
- [160:55]
A
Oh, absolutely. It was considered.
- [160:57]
C
My. My father was like a Tolkien nut back in the early days, and he tried to convince his father, my grandfather, to read the Lord of the Rings, which I can't imagine my grandfather actually taking the Lord of the Rings seriously.
- [161:13]
A
Great books.
- [161:14]
B
Oh, man, that's an interesting comment on time.
- [161:16]
A
There's an example though of world creation done right compared to Harry Potter where it's very haphazard and it's just kind of slapped together.
- [161:24]
B
And if you look at the economy underneath for any moment in time, it falls apart immediately.
- [161:29]
C
There's a. There's a.
- [161:30]
A
The goblins run a bank and then there's this mystery vault in the bank.
- [161:35]
B
And anyway, no, no, it's way more pedestrian than that. There's a scene at the. The Weasley's house when suddenly the mom can generate a sauce out of her wand randomly. It's been discussed earlier that you can only expand and contract. It's just didn't even try.
- [161:50]
A
It's not no world building. It's made up. It's not good. Anyway, I thought I'd just throw that in because people don't hate me enough. Ladies and gentlemen, I have ended the show on a sour note and I'm sorry to ruin your childhood, but that's how it goes sometimes. Harry McCracken, he's at fast Company. He is plugged in and so is his newsletter. You can subscribe to it and you should@fastcompany.com Etc. I don't know, just search for plugged in. Right.
- [162:21]
C
That'd probably search for Fast Company plugged in and then you will immediately find.
- [162:24]
A
It and you should be reading it every week.
- [162:27]
C
Go to fastcompany.com Yes, I actually again.
- [162:31]
A
Another one of the sites that I read every single day. Lots of great content on Fast Company. I think they do a good job. And now that I know it's not owned by private equity, I like it even better. I really like that. It's great to see you, Harry.
- [162:43]
C
Tell one, one, one patient person who likes what we do.
- [162:50]
A
Is that amazing? Used to be like that back in the day. Say hello to Marie. And I miss her. It was always fun when we had a studio. Harry and Marie would come up to Petaluma and we'd get to see them both.
- [163:04]
C
We miss those days.
- [163:05]
A
I miss those days too. Yeah. Thanks, Harry. Same to you. Alex. Alex. Wilhelm. If you hadn't come to the studio with your at the time, a fiance, Liza, I would never have known that you live in my childhood home.
- [163:19]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [163:20]
C
Which we're gonna have to expand maybe.
- [163:22]
A
Yeah. We had a family of four in there and it Was pretty tight quarters. I don't know how you're gonna do.
- [163:27]
B
It with five and three dogs. Yeah.
- [163:30]
C
I don't know.
- [163:31]
B
It's.
- [163:31]
A
It's adorable. It's life as it should be. You are living the. Living the dream, Alex.
- [163:37]
B
I appreciate that. Thanks for having me back.
- [163:39]
A
Yeah. Always a pleasure. This week in startups, of course, Twist. And you should subscribe to his newsletter, CautiousOptimism News. It's really interesting how we've been doing TWIT for 20 years. It started, it was mostly people writing in magazines and now it is almost entirely people writing newsletters.
- [163:59]
B
It's because you get the slightly, and I say this with love to Harry and myself, the slightly weird people to come on.
- [164:05]
A
I think it's the way the world has changed.
- [164:07]
B
But no, it's the people who can't stop talking that come on.
- [164:10]
A
Well, very important to have that person. Yes. It's the worst when somebody won't talk.
- [164:16]
C
But I mean, I mean, we need.
- [164:17]
B
Multiple outlets for, for, for stuff. So I'm not shocked that, you know, we both have newsletters.
- [164:22]
A
I don't have the discipline. I wish I did because it'd probably be an easier way to. I don't know. It's not easy, is it?
- [164:29]
C
No, no, no.
- [164:30]
A
What am I saying? There's nothing easier than sitting and talking.
- [164:33]
B
Yes. I've had an absolute blast for three hours. Reverses. Sometimes I sit down and write for three hours and I take what I have and I crumble into a little ball and I threw it up.
- [164:41]
A
You can't crumple this up. It's done, it's over, it's finished. No editing. It's out there. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do twit every Sunday, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. We stream it live in eight different. Different places. Of course, club members get to see us in the club Twit Discord. I like to think of that as the behind the velvet rope access. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, Tick Tock, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. Seven public places you can watch. You don't need to watch live, though. That's only if you want to chat and so forth. But. But if you. If you're content to download a copy, we've got plenty of places to go. Our website, Twit TV, there's a YouTube channel with the video. That's a great way to clip pieces of the show and share it with people, which if you do that, we love it because it spreads the word about this podcast we've been doing for 20 years now. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Do also, if you do that, leave us a great review because that's another way to help us spread the word. If you've been around for 20 years, it's hard to be the flavor of the month. I guess we could be the flavor of two decades, but that sounds kind of stale. So tell people, let them know twit's here, because we still are still doing the good work that we do. Thanks to our producers, Benito will be back next week or the week after. Anthony, I'm not sure. Benito Gonzalez on the next episode. Next episode. He's back. Yep. Anthony Nielsen's been filling in, doing a great job. Thank you, Anthony, for your hard work. He is a vital element to our production team. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Degree AI User Group by the way, if you're in the club, you can watch it on the twit plus feed talking about N8N and using nodal compositors to combine AIs to do interesting things. It was really a very interesting subject. We did reschedule Chris Marquardt's photo segment because Chris had a family emergency. It was nice because that gave me the opportunity to interview Salt Hank. That's also on the Twit plus feed if you want to see that. It's also on most of our socials because we're trying to, you know, I don't ride the back of his success. There's. Yeah, we'll probably do the photo thing next week, so you have one more week to take your delightful pictures. Thank you everybody for joining us. As we have said for the last 20 years, we appreciate you being here. Thanks a lot and we'll see you next time. Another Twit is in the can. This episode is brought to you by Coda. Man, I love seeing the team come together, make this show happen, but I. I don't love trying to keep track of all the information and data and projects across dozens of platforms, products and tools. That's why I love Coda. It's an all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams worldwide get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution, the intelligence of Coda Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. So whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos, or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment. Coda matches your working style. It connects to hundreds of your favorite tools, including Salesforce, Jira, Asana, and Figma. Head over to Coda IO Twit right now and get six months of the team plan for startups free. That's Coda IO Twit and get six months of the team plan for free. Coda IO Twit.