This Week in Tech 1053: Robotic Lap Trimmer

Summary

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This Week in Tech 1053: Robotic Lap Trimmer

Date: October 13, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Gary Rivlin (AI Valley), Kathy Gellis (TechDirt, Attorney), Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (The Verge)

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Episode Overview

This week Leo Laporte brings together a powerhouse panel—journalist and author Gary Rivlin, attorney (and TechDirt writer) Kathy Gellis, and Verge senior reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy—to cover the most pressing issues in tech, law, privacy, and AI. The lively conversation covers everything from the Supreme Court’s new term and pivotal copyright cases, to OpenAI’s rapid expansion and the messy economics of generative AI. The show dives deep on topics like internet liability, the dangers of ad-driven smart homes, the rise of home robots, the intersection of law and technology, and much more—all with the signature TWiT blend of wit, expertise, and candor.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Supreme Court’s Tech Docket and Shadow Docket Concerns

Kathy Gellis provides expert breakdown of the new Supreme Court term and how the shadow docket is unsettling traditional processes and transparency:

• The "shadow docket" enables quiet, often unsigned decisions that have sweeping impact—particularly around executive power and constitutional checks.
• [06:40] Kathy: “Anonymous decisions are a thing to some extent… there’s a whiff that there’s a problem here but they’re just sort of in this groove of ‘oh, it would be so bad if we inadvertently enjoined a valid use of executive power’ so they’re just—okay, is it?”

They discuss the potential erosion of public trust in the court and draw historical parallels:

• The panel touches on Supreme Court overreach and the potential for serious constitutional crises, such as the analogy to the Dred Scott decision.
• [09:40] Kathy: “I am deeply afraid. But things are bad does not mean it’s over.”

2. Key Tech & Copyright Cases: Cox v. Sony Music

[13:45] Kathy Gellis brings expertise to the Cox Communications v. Sony Music Supreme Court case:

• Core Issue: Whether broadband ISPs can be held liable for their users' copyright infringement—especially when safe harbor protections are in question.
• ISPs have struggled to interpret DMCA requirements on disconnecting “repeat infringers,” leading to aggressive lawsuits.
• [18:28] Kathy: “These have never been adjudicated… more likely than not, they might have been infringing, we don’t know.”
• [21:33] Kathy: “If anybody can cope, it’s [big companies]. It’s not about them. It’s about you, it’s about me, it’s about tech. It is about Mastodon admins. … And the idea that we are going to impose all this liability… is nuts…”

The problem of holding ISPs responsible for users’ alleged copyright infringement—despite ambiguous notices and due process concerns—has broad implications for internet access and free expression.

3. Platform Liability, Kids Online, Age Gates & Free Speech

Debate over government-mandated age verification (e.g., NetChoice v. Fitch, Mississippi social media restrictions):

• Small site operators cannot reasonably implement robust age verification; the burden falls unjustly on non-corporate communities.
• Major privacy, data security, and civil liberties issues emerge—especially if platforms must collect and secure sensitive personal data.

Notable Segment:

• [27:26] Kathy: “People are mad at Google, mad at Facebook… but if anybody can cope, it’s them. And it’s not about them. It’s about you… Mastodon admins… this is nuts. … The First Amendment could [not] stand for this, and yet we are doing it to ourselves.”

4. Real-World Impacts of Political Decisions (Science, Health, and Tech Policy)

Kathy discloses her cancer recurrence and the real-world consequences of paused scientific funding (MRNA research, clinical trials) under a dysfunctional government.

• [30:21] Kathy: “It’s kind of exciting to be a cancer patient because the science… was just really fascinating. The idea that if I can just hold on long enough, this could be cured is a very palpable future… meanwhile we’re now exercising public policy that’s just crashing into the wall… that’s a little bit terrifying.”

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5. AI: Explosive Growth, Economic Sustainability, and Ethics

OpenAI’s Meteoric Rise (and Costs)

Gary Rivlin offers an inside look at AI’s big leagues:

• OpenAI’s numbers: Up to 800 million weekly users, a $500B valuation, and billions raised—but also billions in annual operating losses.
• Spiraling compute costs, huge infrastructure demands, and the looming need for even more capital (a trillion dollars isn’t off the table).
• Competitive landscape: A race powered by Google, Microsoft, Meta, and a few other giants—smaller players may not last.

[39:18] Gary: “Truly is an amazing company… but its problem is, it’s spending more than that. So it’s still losing… If you’re worth half a trillion dollars now, what are you gonna be worth on your next raise and your next raise?”

Environmental Impact & Resource Arms Race

• AI’s growth pushes up global energy consumption (1% of the US national grid and growing), with negative consequences for clean energy progress.
• Data centers are reviving coal/gas plants, while government policy is simultaneously reducing support for renewables.
• [47:22] Gary: “We’re going to have a lot more reliance on coal and gas… Suddenly like, yeah, but we need coal plants to do that, we need gas plants to do that.”

Societal & Ethical Dilemmas: Fakes, Deepfakes, & AI Creativity

• AI-generated videos now convincingly depict historical and celebrity figures, causing distress (e.g., Robin Williams’ daughter, MLK videos).
• The panel discusses law vs. social norms—what should be legal, what’s merely distasteful, and society’s loss of trust in information.
• [52:07] Kathy: “We do—there is something actually legitimate about using memes… but… when we do it in like the same—”
• Worry grows about the effect of AI-driven misinformation, legal evidence, and generational trust breakdowns.

AI in Learning & Creativity

• Fears about AI-generated college essays devaluing authentic student creativity.
• [67:00] Gary: “There’s still the human element, the originality, and that is still necessary…”

Notable Quote:

• [70:25] Gary: “Maybe that’s what’s going to save this—the saving grace. Humans are imperfect. Our imperfection, our humanity, shines through in a way that AI can never do because it’s perfect.”

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6. The Creep of Ads: From Echo Shows to the Smart Home

Amazon Echo Shows Becoming “Ad Machines”

• Jennifer’s Verge feature spotlighted aggressive, full-screen ads now appearing in Echo Show photo frames, turning purchased hardware into perpetual ad displays with no meaningful way to opt out.
• [80:10] Jennifer: “It was just like, what the—what is going on here?”
• “Bait and switch” complaints from users who bought ad-free devices, expecting just photo frames (not pop-up nutrition bar ads).
• The trend reflects a larger wave of ad “enshittification” (Cory Doctorow’s framing) across tech platforms and smart home devices—ads in TVs, smart fridges, everywhere.
• [87:04] Kathy: “Not having control over our devices as users is probably the biggest policy failure, technology failure, innovation failure, and the thing that we should be solving for most.”

Monetizing Voice Assistants & Product Placement Risks

• The panel explores “covert influence” as the next phase: instead of obvious ads, AI assistants may start weaving sponsored results seamlessly into their responses.
• [95:02] Gary: “What I’m worried about is covert influence. I think the way they’re going to make money is… the answer they’re delivering is because someone bought it.”

Consumer Protection and Regulation

• Discussion over the role of the FTC in guarding against undisclosed ads and deceptive practices as “influence” becomes the new business model.

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7. Big Tech, Trade Wars & Political Jawboning

Government Pressure and Platform Censorship

• Apple and Google’s preemptive removal of ICE-tracking or -accountability apps, and even evidence archiving apps, after signals—not formal legal orders—from federal officials.
• [126:54] Kathy: “Unless they just think this is so anticipated, where if they don’t take this action now, they will face a consequence later. In which case… maybe it is jawboning.”
• “Jawboning” defined: government pressuring intermediaries to affect others’ speech (potential First Amendment issue).
• The group discusses the chilling effect as platforms pre-emptively comply with unspoken government wishes.

Tariff Wars, Manufacturing, and Political Pay-to-Play

• US–China tariffs are sowing chaos for smart home companies and beyond, especially smaller startups, while giants like Apple secure administrative exemptions for a price.
• [140:57] Gary: “Guess who’s getting exemptions? …it’s the unfairness, it’s like bidding for government.”

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8. The Home Robot Future

Robot Vacuums, Mowers, and Beyond

• Jennifer describes the evolution from robot vacuums (and their shortcomings) to the promise and pitfalls of autonomous robot lawn mowers (“It just shaves your lawn!”), and the limits of home automation.

The Humanoid Robot Race

• Discussion of Figure 3’s flashy demos and Tesla’s Optimus robot—how close are we to true Rosie-the-Robot scenarios?
• Skepticism about the practical value and safety of full humanoid robots for home use.
• [187:12] Jennifer: “It has to have the force to do things like a human… A powerful machine in your home… I would be worried about that…”

The “Artisan” Tech Backlash

• As AI and automation increase, there’s likely to be a resurgence of interest in the imperfect, the handmade, the “artisanal” as a mark of authenticity and value—just as with breadmaking or chess after computers’ dominance.

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Notable Quotes & Standout Moments

• [27:26] Kathy Gellis: “[Age gating]—it’s not about [big tech], it’s about you. It’s about Mastodon admins, about everybody else helping each other… the idea we’re going to impose all this liability… is nuts.”
• [52:35] Jennifer Pattison Tuohy: “When you watch a Robin Williams video and you’re twelve and don’t know he’s dead—you believe it, because it looks so bloody real… that truth line and the differentiation here between what’s real and what’s not—yeah, we’ve lost that.”
• [59:06] Kathy: “If we can recognize the problem and work through it, this is almost good because the old structures were starting to break, and we needed to shuffle things around and figure out who’s really worth the credibility.”
• [80:10] Jennifer: On Echo Show ads: “It was just like, what is going on here… why, what are you thinking?”
• [100:35] Leo Laporte: “[Amazon devices] are an orifice for ads.”
• [141:42] Kathy: “When this is all over—if we’re still functioning as a country—I’d like to see some corruption charges… they are falling over to kiss the ring in a very overtly corrupt way.”
• [175:56] Jennifer: On robot mowers: “He was helping me assemble [the mower]… he’s used to picking up robot vacuums… and so he picked up—do not put a rotating lawnmower on your lap. Sliced the top of his thigh!”

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Other Topics & Quick Hits

• Apple & Google’s ICE-blocking app bans: Is this real legal pressure or timid capitulation to political signaling?
• Windows 10 End of Support: End of Patch Tuesday, how to get extended security updates, and fair critique of Microsoft’s forced obsolescence strategy.
• State Tech Laws: California bans loud streaming ads, Illinois facial recognition rules, the rise of conflicting US state-level tech regulation.
• Product Backlash: Synology forced to reverse restrictive HDD rules after customer revolt; TiVo finally ends hardware production (“TiVo became a patent troll”).
• DJI Drone Ban Watch: US could soon ban all DJI drones—get them before the deadline, despite little evidence of threat.
• The “Artisanal” Rebound: Panel predicts a rise in artisan/hand-crafted everything as a backlash against AI and mass production.

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Segment Timestamps

• [00:00] Show and guest introductions
• [04:00–12:00] Supreme Court and the “shadow docket”
• [13:45–25:00] Cox v. Sony Music—DMCA and ISP liability
• [26:00–32:00] Age gating, privacy laws, impact of regulation on small platforms
• [37:30–49:00] OpenAI’s scale, sustainability, and compute arms race
• [52:00–61:00] AI-generated fakes, law vs. norms, trust in news, and legal evidence
• [77:57–91:00] Amazon Echo Shows, ad-enshittification, monetizing the smart home
• [126:37–135:00] Political jawboning, app bans, government pressure and corporate acquiescence
• [140:57–146:00] Trade wars, tech manufacturing, and the exemption game
• [166:14–172:00] The end of TiVo, Roomba, and the myth of “lifetime” products
• [174:13–179:50] Robot mowers, vacuums, and surprise injuries
• [186:00–196:00] House robots: hype vs. reality, humanoid vs. specialized bots
• [196:56–End] Show wrap-up

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Tone & Style

• Characteristically TWiT: relaxed yet deeply informed, friendly banter with sharp, sometimes irreverent wit.
• Speakers are direct, skeptical, and not afraid to challenge both political and corporate actors.
• Panelists bring humor (“Where am I supposed to pee? I can’t pee anymore!"), but punctuate with sharp insight and clear calls for personal and civic responsibility.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode traverses tech, law, business, and society—from the granular “gotchas” of Supreme Court dockets to the existential challenges of generative AI, from the frustration of smart homes devolving into ad platforms to the growing risks of regulatory capture and loss of public trust. The panel foregrounds the importance of user empowerment, robust legal norms, transparent technology, and the ongoing fight to keep both our devices and our democracy working as intended.

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“It’s not about the big platforms. It’s about all of us.” — Kathy Gellis ([27:26])

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Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this week at Tech. We have a fantastic panel for you. Gary Rivlin is here, the author of AI Valley, Kathy Gellis, our favorite attorney to talk about the Supreme Court. They just started their new term. And from the Verge, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. She's gonna talk about robotic vacuum cleaners and the new Figure 3 humanoid robot. We'll also talk about the Supreme Court and a couple of interesting cases, including one where Sony Music is suing an isp, saying they should have blocked all their users. They were. They were stealing our music. And maybe some good news for chat control in the eu. All that and a whole lot more coming up next on Twit podcasts you.

[Kathy Gellis]

Love from people you Trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week at Tech, episode 1053, recorded Sunday, October 12, 2025. Robotic lap trimmer. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news with always fascinating people. This week in particular is going to be great. Kathy Gellis is back, our attorney at law now a fellow at UC LawSF. Congratulations. And writer, of course, for Tech Dirt. Always a pleasure to see you and your collection of beverages.

[Kathy Gellis]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Usually you put a blanket over the beverage.

[Kathy Gellis]

I was like, there's nothing in there I'm embarrassed about. You can see that I'm hydrating. This is fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Nor should there be. Kathy, we should mention, lives on a houseboat. So, of course, it's very important that. I don't know, she keeps water around. I don't know. That doesn't make sense.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, water, water, you know, everywhere. Not a drop to drink. I gotta have it cold inside the ship.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't want to drink the San Francisco Bay water, that's for sure.

[Kathy Gellis]

Not in any respect, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Also with us, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. She's a senior reviewer at the Verge. We love having her on regular. Also on our Tech News Weekly show with Micah Sargent. Always a pleasure to see. See you. Jennifer lives in a home that is wired in so many ways. So many ways. And your poor teenagers, they can't sneak out at any time?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh, no, never. I just got actually a new system set up that recognizes when my children comes home and decides whether to unlock the door for them or not.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Is it using the new Apple key thing? Because that's why I'm very interested in that.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh, the home key. No, it is. It's actually, I'm testing an ADT security system. And they partnered with Google and it uses Google's familiar face recognition feature. Oh, isn't that nice to determine if you're someone that's allowed in or not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Ring has just announced they're going to be sending your face far and wide. We'll talk about that with Jennifer. Also here, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, Gary Rivlin, we first talked to him with his book AI Valley, which is his most recent about AI. But he's written so many books, including Katrina. It's the 20th anniversary or was a couple of months ago. Did you do anything to commemorate it?

[Gary Rivlin]

You know, I moved on with AI and there was some activity. Actually, I thought the coverage was really good because they use that as a news hook to talk about Trump cutting FEMA and trying to kind of outsource it to the states. And the new FEMA director doesn't have the experience. After Katrina, they really had all these reforms.

[Leo Laporte]

Who was it was it did a great job. Scotty, you did a great job.

[Gary Rivlin]

Brownie.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

Scotty's Star Trek.

[Leo Laporte]

Scotty, that's a different one. I can't stop the flooding. Okay. Yeah. Browdie. Anyway, it's great to see all three of you. Thank you all for being here. This makes it a particularly smart show, which is good because I'm bringing the IQ down. We can start with you, Kathy, because the Supreme Court, what is it, the second Tuesday in October? Is that what it is?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well.

[Leo Laporte]

The new session began. Well, yes, except with a rocket docket, with the shadow docket. They're in session all year round, aren't they?

[Kathy Gellis]

There used to be sort of a. Yes, there is sort of a system to this, and it's a regular and knowable and predictable system. And then there's this particular court, which doesn't. It is in some ways adhering to business as usual with the regular state thing. So what's happening now is now we are into the normal process of granting cert petitions and hearing the cert petitions and reaching decisions on the merits. So we're doing the normal stuff now where we're expecting to get normal written decisions at some point later this year. That's great, I guess. I mean, other than it's. We're dreading what they're actually going to decide. But, you know, it's kind of moot because it's not really, you know, everything that they're doing now will probably suffer from down the road, but in the meantime, they're doing a whole bunch of things right now that are just really fundamental to our constitutional order. And they're just doing them with no explanations whatsoever.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem, isn't it, with the shadow docket is they don't have to write an opinion and they don't even. Do they put their names on it. I guess there is a judge in charge of each district court. So.

[Kathy Gellis]

Only to some extent where the name is. There was an emergency appeal that went to one specific judge because in theory, one is like kind of on duty for that circuit, but that's not the names in any sort of normal way. So we're only.

[Leo Laporte]

So we really. It's anonymous. They're anonymous judge decisions to some extent.

[Kathy Gellis]

Anonymous decisions are a thing to some extent. Like if you see some decisions that are per curiam, that tends to mean we all got together, we all agreed was this was the thing, but we're not ascribing it to any particular judge.

[Leo Laporte]

Or justice from the court.

[Kathy Gellis]

From the court. So that's fine. But we're not even really getting that because in that case, all the judges who would be represented by the procure are kind of on the hook for it. It's just no one has to bear the brunt of any criticisms or praise one way or the other. But here it's even more vague than that. Nobody's really standing behind things unless they're doing a noted dissent. And Justice Jackson's been writing a whole bunch of really, really, I think, important memos to file for the future about what's going on right here.

[Leo Laporte]

She's one of the three. I hate to say this because you're not supposed to be politicized, but liberal judges.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, conventionally, she was an appointee of. This is fine. This is not a controversial decision. As opposed to the six who were nominated by Republican presidents, these are. She's.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not supposed to be partisan, depending on who nominated you, obviously, but that doesn't seem to be holding true.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, historically, there's always been, you know, some tendencies for certain justices to have certain judicial traditions that might inform their jurisprudence. And that could kind of vary a little bit, whether they were reddish or bluish, which is in some ways a shame. But on some hand, you kind of want a diversity of thought as you're coming together and getting your jurors together.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

The big problem now is that the conservative justices are really not even being conservative justices. If they were, there's decisions that they've done in the past where I can't imagine them ever doing them today. Like the Bostock decision, which was I think a Justice Gorsuch decision, and that was one. And I'm forgetting a little bit. It was. I think. I think it was an LGBT case or something where those were the kinds of social values at issue. And, you know, he wasn't necessarily a fan of protecting those rights, but he looked at the statute and said, this is what we got to do. And that sort of. Sort of purity of, like, there's rules for these. And even though we don't like the result, there's a system, and we really have to uphold the system. I don't think we would see those decisions now. And the problem with the shadow docket is it is the claim. Claim of certain forms of executive power that may not be sound. I mean, I think, spoiler alert, they're not sound. But, you know, there's certainly a very strong whiff that there's a problem here, but there's just sort of in this groove of like, oh, it would be so bad if we inadvertently enjoined a valid use of executive power. So they're just. Just. Okay, is it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's my big question. And I'd love. I'm great. We've got an expert here. It's like, because I'm obviously not. I did not grow up in this country. So what? Whole different world.

[Leo Laporte]

West Virginia accent.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And. And my husband, who is American, is always just going, oh, my God, we're just so s. Screwed with the Supreme Court and what they're doing. And it's just our country is completely a mess. And, you know, and I'm like, really? I mean, don't we. Isn't the law the one thing that's still holding strong? And I know that what we've seen from the Supreme Court in the last few years has been sort of disconcerting. But to ask an expert, like, are you genuinely concerned about the state of the current Supreme Court, or do you feel like we are going to have that that check is still balancing.

[Kathy Gellis]

I am deeply afraid. But there's another writer named Chris Geidner who writes a lot. And I agree with one of the arguments he keeps having on social media, which is that things are bad does not mean that it's over.

[Leo Laporte]

They've been bad before. Any student of history remembers, for instance, the Dred Scott decision. Well, yeah, seven to two, it was okay to take a formerly enslaved man out of his. Well, out of his state and bring him back to slavery.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's not a ton of comfort in that analogy, because that analogy precipitated the.

[Gary Rivlin]

Civil War and, well, Admittedly, we had.

[Kathy Gellis]

A war over to fix it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So that's what the movie 12 Years a Slave was about, right?

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, I don't think I ever saw.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The movie, but great movie. Okay, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Different slave, same idea.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Same idea, yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, it was all bad.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a lot of. But you go back all the way through the history of the Supreme Court and there have been ebbs and flows. There have been, you know, I mean.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, yeah, and this is an ebb and flow or if we like, that's the question. Is this irreparable pendulum.

[Kathy Gellis]

So I think, I mean, I think the. What I would say that this is. The analogy is apt. But that doesn't help the, the hope because that analogy was so apt where the decisions that they are spitting out are so abominable. I mean, Trump v. Us was a Dred Scott quality decision because they were something that struck so deeply at the fundamental balance of how civil power is accorded to our governing officials and what license they have to do the governance with. With an awful lot of power that we've bestowed upon them. And the trade off of giving them all this power is that power is also checked. And it just uprooted all those checks. So the types of things that the court is doing is uprooting that fundamental balance. And what happened with Dr. Scott was something that again struck so at the core of sort of the balance of freedom and humanity that might make a sustainable democracy work, that then it collapsed. So then we fixed it and we fixed it by. We had a war and then we had some constitutional amendments that were saying, okay, in case there was any ambiguity about how things worked before, we're going to do it differently this time to make sure that we can't go out of whack in that balance sort of way.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me, let me bring the 21st century.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I don't know. Civil war does not feel that far away.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't and it doesn't. You know, I've been reading a lot about it lately because I feel like there are similarities, but let's not go down, down that road. So they, they did give certiorari to a number of cases. Are there any. I want to kind of talk about tech primarily. Are there any that are tech related or copyright related? I know you've had amicus briefs. We should mention that Kathy is approved to file to. To what? To work in front of the Supreme Court.

[Kathy Gellis]

I am a member of the Supreme Court.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a member, ladies and gentlemen.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I have.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yes.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well. And as opposed To Bill Clinton, who is not. Because after his fiasco, the Supreme Court disbarred him from their course.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did they? I didn't.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, yeah, I think that was. There wasn't a whole lot they could do to him, but they could do that. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. I did not know that.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, you can still file amicus briefs. In fact, if you wanted to. If I ever have a case there, I will be hiring you to represent me. God, hope I don't. What. What are we looking at on the October. They. They've announced a number of cases for cert.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

So just, just to close that where we were going before. It's very weird because I'm going to now talk about a very normal case, official case. It's going through the official process. It's reached their, their desks. I'm really excited about it. I want to talk about it because this is the kind of case I've been working on my entire career as a tech focused lawyer. So I got lots to say about it and lots to say about it. But we're dealing with this very weird world of. I'm going to go. I'm putting that brief before the court and hoping that these esteemed people will rule, you know, in the way that I think truth, justice in the American way will, will, you know, require. And it's these same people who are also doing all this stuff that's ending up being extremely destructive.

[Leo Laporte]

That could just happen in the background and not. And I'm struggling moral arguments and, you know, written decision and all of that.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I'm struggling with this. I'm going to talk a little bit and I'm going to start talking about the court and I'm going to talk about a couple of good precedents that they've done before, including recently. And this case is going to draw from. And I'm going to speak with a lot of reverence towards some, you know, jurisprudence that they've been producing. And I'm going to say, and we're. I'm really excited about what kind of decision they're going to come up with.

[Leo Laporte]

In other words, you're going to pretend things are normal.

[Kathy Gellis]

And the cognitive distance is starting to.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Get to me and I'm just putting.

[Kathy Gellis]

That out there that, that this is a thing. So anyway, back to normal. This is, this is a case. Cox Communications versus Sony Music Entertainment. It's very interesting that this is a major copyright case involving Sony, but this time Sony is on the copyright holder side, as opposed to Sony v. Betamax from 1984 they were on the side of the people who wanted to a freer hand to be able to use copyrighted works without liability. That's really kind of a very sad irony. But let's just note it. And this is a case involving file sharing. It's because what was happening is file sharing was happening. And there was. These are the cases that came out of the Rights Corp fiasco. I would say. Rights Corp was engaged by a bunch of content owners to review what was going on online and send takedown notices. And so they were sending takedown notices in this case to a broadband isp, Cox Communications, and saying that we've identified these IP addresses as file sharing works that they're not supposed to. There was a whole bunch of litigation, including an earlier case called BMV vs Cox where eventually some of the copyright holders sued Cox because they're like, dude, all your users are still file sharing our stuff. This is bad. You must be now liable for it.

[Leo Laporte]

And which the fourth Circuit agreed.

[Kathy Gellis]

The fourth Circuit agreed. And what the fourth Circuit agreed that was also troubling on the way was that there's the dmca, the Digital Millennium Copyright act. And the Digital Millennium Copyright act protects service providers, including broadband providers, who are doing that throughput of how people are using the Internet. We think about it mostly in terms of the 512C safe harbor, which is the one where you see real takedown notices of on YouTube violates my copyright. So you Google need to take it down or else you'll potentially be liable for that infringement. And that's how the DMCA works. If the providers take the notices that there's something wrong and act upon them, then basically no harm, no foul. So even if there's infringement, they're not going to be on the hook for it. But Cox Communication, they're using a slightly different safe harbor. They're using the 512A safe harbor because they're a conduit provider. They're not storing stuff. Or they might be storing it too, but in this faculty they're just providing throughput. And they kept getting, and I'm going to put quotes, takedown notices from Rights Corp and these copyright holders saying your users are file sharing our stuff. You need to take down the users because we're considering them repeat infringers that they keep doing it and you're doing nothing to stop it. And because Cox didn't really take down most of their users, they may have taken down some, but by and large they didn't take down them. They lost their safe harbor, no DMCA protection for them whatsoever. So that was problem number one. And then problem number two is, oh, and you're totally sharing the liability for all the infringement of your users.

[Leo Laporte]

Just because you knew it was happening, you're liable.

[Kathy Gellis]

We told you it was happening, and therefore you quote, unquote, knew, and you're totally liable. You share in all the liability.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it the case now that most Internet service providers ignore these requests from. This is, in this case, Sony Music, but ignore requests from rights holders that when there's file sharing going on, do they just go, oh, yeah, fine.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, one of the things that Cox points out.

[Leo Laporte]

I heard of a takedown. I mean, ISP used to be they disconnect people. Right. They'd say, you lose, you know, you're not. You do this three times. Remember the three strikes and you're out.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, well, so there, there has always been in the DMCA for as long as it's been on the books and spin on the books since 1998, for as long as it's been on the books. One of the things that this. That providers have to. They have to do a whole bunch of things in order to get their protection. And one of the things that they have to do is have a policy for disconnecting repeat infringers. And so in theory that. Well, nobody actually knows what that means for a number of years, decades and decades, basically. Okay, the providers would have a policy about what to do hypothetically, but they wouldn't actually. But the statute didn't actually require termination. And I think for a very. For several key reasons which were showing up in our brief, one of which is every takedown demand or copyright infringement notice that they're getting is an allegation that there's an infringement. But that allegation may be wrong. There may be fair use. The person claiming it may not have a copyright. They may not be somebody who could.

[Gary Rivlin]

Be on WI Fi.

[Leo Laporte]

It could not be. Maybe not. You Maybe.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Made the point of they, you know, sometimes the IP address was for an entire coffee shop or university or, you know, and this idea that you would disconnect that user would. Might mean that you'd be disconnecting thousands of people.

[Leo Laporte]

A university. Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Or a household or roommates or neighbors or whatever. And so, like, there's some big problems with the idea that with this allegation, if you get more than one of them, you've got to disconnect anybody.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That's bad.

[Kathy Gellis]

That is a big problem that you would Be disconnecting people. What do you do if you get caught? Cut off from your broadband provider, which we don't have a whole lot of competition for. What do you do instead? You just cut people entirely off from the Internet. So that's a problem. And then the fact that the allegations that are prompting it may be unsound. These have never been adjudicated. I mean, yeah, sure, more likely than not, they might have been infringing, we don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

They went from three strikes to six strikes because ISPs were really reluctant to cut off a subscriber for a variety of reasons. And the last thing I heard was in 2017, they abandoned the copyright alert system entirely. Like, they just gave up. So I'm surprised that this is an ongoing thing. The music industry for the most part realized that suing its customers or cutting them off from the Internet was perhaps not the best way to keep customers happy.

[Kathy Gellis]

This is bad on any number of fronts. But the problem now, the lawyers swooping in, is there was that original BMV vs Cox case, which all of a sudden said no DMCA protection for you because you didn't terminate. And, oh, by the way, you're potentially liable for all this harm. That case ended up getting settled, but it became, it opened the door to a whole bunch of other cases.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's why this is bad against.

[Kathy Gellis]

Both Cox itself and like every other broadband ISP in the United States, including last year, one against Verizon.

[Leo Laporte]

So I need to move on because there's only a three hour show.

[Kathy Gellis]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

We will watch this. They've granted it cert, but they don't have a oral argument date set yet. So this is one of the.

[Kathy Gellis]

We'll get the briefs from the other side shortly in another couple of weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just surprised because a lot of this I think became irrelevant. I mean, sharing music when it was streaming and you could stream it from Spotify and Apple and all these other, other places. I'm surprised this is even a thing.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, the law drags. I mean, this is litigation based on notices that I think were sent quite a few years ago now. So, I mean, some of it is there is a principle and it took a while to get here, including that there was a cert petition. This is actually interesting. There was a cert petition that went in from Cox. Actually, Cox had one and Sony had one and this went in last year. And then what was interesting is the court looked at their petitions, asked the government, the Solicitor General to weigh in, and at that point it was still the Biden Solicitor General. And I waited and waited and waited and waited and there was no brief. Then Trump takes over and there's a new Solicitor General and finally the brief goes in. The brief was clearly written by actual career lawyers who know a thing or two about copyright. But it ended up being a rather full throated defense of the first amendment issues that are wrapped up in this entire thing. And it came from the Trump administration, who I think has no idea what they have just said, but it helped grant cert for Cox, denied the cert questions for so many years.

[Leo Laporte]

We should again repeat lost in the lower court.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And so Cox appealed this saying, wait a minute, your honor, you know, Sony can't hold us liable for all of this and that. And they were granted cert based on the Trump solicitors brief. So that's good.

[Kathy Gellis]

So this was good.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why you never know what's happening in the world.

[Kathy Gellis]

You never know what's happening in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

One other thing, thing real quickly. Supreme Court denies Google's request to pause Play Store changes while it appeals the Epic case. So this means Google has till next week, 10 days to allow non Play Store payments and external downlinks on the Google Play Store. That was also, that was a shadow docket, I think. Right?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, shadow docket is sort of what happens. So the shadow docket isn't inherently a bad thing. Sometimes things are going to break before the normal processing, normal process has a chance to catch.

[Leo Laporte]

But they, but they granted a stay just kind of unilaterally.

[Kathy Gellis]

So it's an appeal to say that, oh my gosh, you know, a bad thing is going to happen if we wait for the normal process before you would normally get to fix the bad thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

So you want that, you want a shadow docket to exist because you want to make sure that like, okay, something is going to break and we want a way of, a way of stopping that. The problem is because that's supposed to be really exceptional relief. And here they're granting it for everything and they're always granting it when it comes to something Trump wants to do. So that's the problem with it and not explaining it either.

[Leo Laporte]

So October 22nd, Google's gonna suddenly have to like this on the turn on a dime and open up the Play Store.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's another one that actually there was a shadow docket appeal off of NetChoice v. Fitch, which is one of the age gating cases that's coming out of Mississippi, Mississippi.

[Leo Laporte]

And this has been upheld again on the Shadow docket by the Supreme Court says you have to be 16 to use social media.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. I mean, the Supreme Court was not that specific, but the law was enjoined at the district court. Then it got to the 5th Circuit. The 5th Circuit just said, nope, this law is sound. And didn't. I don't think they've even necessarily produced a full decision. I don't think it's even gotten that far.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this the scrutiny issue, whether it requires strict scrutiny or not? Because it's a First Amendment issue, obviously. And the issue was whether, you know, this is no big deal. It's not really a violation of the First Amendment.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think that may be free speech versus Paxton.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the Texas one. Okay.

[Kathy Gellis]

But those issues do show up in these cases. But I think the problem is it went to the 5th Circuit and it's not even been fully adjudicated by the fifth Circuit. But the fifth Circuit, it killed the injunction which put the law in effect. Which put the law in effect. So there was an appeal to the shadow docket to say, timeout, timeout, could we please have our stay so the injunction can go in effect? Because this really catastrophic First Amendment effect will be realized if we don't. And the Supreme Court, which wants to grant all the other petitions for emergency relief, said, nah, go ahead and put this law into effect. Blue sky is not in Mississippi, for instance, because they can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and it's been an issue for me as a. I run a Mastodon instance. Mastodon doesn't really provide any way that for me to say, how old are you? And I'm not going to unilaterally at twit social implement age, some sort of age gate system, because there is no privacy respecting age gate system. So I, all I did on is say, if you're signing up, you better be 18. I mean, I'm sure that doesn't hold water. But this, it's the only thing I could do.

[Kathy Gellis]

This is why I do what I do. Because everybody who's pushing for these rules, and I point to a whole bunch of Democrats who still want to get.

[Leo Laporte]

Google can do it, Meta can do it, Facebook can do it, Reddit can do it, but what about little old Leo?

[Kathy Gellis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Minnie Mastodon instance. I can't do it.

[Kathy Gellis]

People are mad at the companies. You know, people are, go be mad at Google, go be mad at Facebook. Because they're doing a lot of things like, dude, why? What are you thinking? But, but the problem is if anybody can cope, it's them. And it's not about them. It is about you. It is about me. It is about tech Turn. It is about Mastodon administrators. It's about Blue Sky. It's about everybody else helping, making sure that we can talk to each other. And the idea that we are going to impose all this liability on the people who help us speak to each other is nuts. There's no way that the First Amendment could stand for this, and yet we are doing it to ourselves. And there's a whole bunch of corporate and political leaders on both sides of the aisle who think this is a great. A great thing for us to be doing. It is really important that you tell your story, Leo, because they are forgetting that every time they propose a law like cosa, they are talking about what you do and how what you do affects how your audience can form a community.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to mess up any teenagers, believe me. But at the same time, I don't want to have to ask every single user my Mastodon Institute instance for. For government id and then be responsible for protecting that data. It's just.

[Gary Rivlin]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's untenable. And there's no. There's no good system to do it anyway.

[Kathy Gellis]

Even if there wasn't the technology, there's also being a lot of snake oil of like, oh, yes, we just add this technology and you'll solve this problem. No, there's. There's. There's no technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Look.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you look right, and then you.

[Kathy Gellis]

Get something like Discord, which just had a big data breach that people.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

Scanned IDs were there, and that creates a whole other vector of harm.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Discour doing this. Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I remember telling you about this. The last time I was on is that my son walked into my room about three weeks ago, four weeks ago, and said, mom, tick tock wants me to scan my driver's license. Shall I do that? I was like, no, no, no, no, no. So. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, at least he's not riding the subway trains. We'll talk about.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, but we're encouraging other unhealthy behavior.

[Leo Laporte]

We're forcing it at the problematic. Hey, we got to take a break. We got to take a break, but we'll have more. More. I want to give Gary and Jennifer a chance to talk, too. So enough court talk. I'm sure there's much more we could say. We should just do a whole show at some point with you, Kathy, about the.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This week in scotus.

[Leo Laporte]

This week in scotus. Yeah, something about that.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'll squeeze in a little bit Mississippi.

[Gary Rivlin]

It's gonna be banned in Mississippi.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'll squeeze in a little bit more law just to, you know, know, keep to my shtick, but, yes, squeeze in a little more.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. But I'm thrilled to have you, of course, Kathy. And by the way, just a little commiseration. Kathy published a piece yesterday in Tech Dirt, a day before yesterday saying that your ovarian cancer has returned. And I'm very sorry to hear that, especially, as you say, without a functioning fda, CDC and nih.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, the gist of that post is, is it's kind of exciting to be a cancer patient because the science that was building out finding cures was just really fascinating. And the idea that if I can just hold on long enough, this could be cured is a very palpable future within five to 10 years. I just have to get to five to 10 years. And meanwhile, we're now exercising a lot of public policy that's just crashing into the wall and that's a little bit terrifying.

[Leo Laporte]

MRNA a very positive prospects for an MRNA anti cancer vaccine. But the government has just withdrawn hundreds of millions of dollars for MRNA funding because RFK Jr thinks, I don't know, it turns you into a lizard. I don't know. He's. Nonsense. It's just nonsense.

[Kathy Gellis]

Anyway, the worm in his brain didn't like it.

[Leo Laporte]

The worm didn't like it. So. But, but this is, this is. The point is that has a concrete treat, real impact on people like you, Kathy, who are currently suffering from cancer, who are hoping for some of these breakthroughs and to suddenly hear, yeah, maybe the research will come back with the next administration, but it might be too late for you, and that's terrible.

[Kathy Gellis]

It might be too late. And these things take a long time to cook. I mean, every trial, every experiment, even if the experiment happened that day, takes prep time and research time. And then if you've got a lab and something's getting cultured or you give a treatment, my treatment is going to take months and months. And they. Even if they gave me something new and experimental, they need at least six months to see if it worked. And then they got to follow me to see if it stayed working. And it takes time. So every time you interrupt it, you know, it's not like you just lose the amount of time that pause was pressed. You end up. You sometimes lose something much more fundamental. Cultures, research, things, just stuff that you'll never get back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry that it's back. I wish you the best. I mean, it's not. Not over by any means.

[Kathy Gellis]

They treat it as a chronic condition and I'm exercising as much as I can, trying to be normal as much as I can. So zero stars and drinking as many hydrating. They recommend that. So, yeah, I want to be as normal as possible and continue to do the advocacy that I do. And thanks for having my show even though I'm decrepit, but you're far from decrepit. So this will be scary now and later, but I'm trying to do the best I can and thank you for letting me be normal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's wonderful to have you on as always. And Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and Gary Rivlin. And we will talk about other things in just a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor. This portion of this Week in Tech, brought to you by Brickhouse Nutrition's Field of Greens. And it's something I've been deliciously enjoying for some time now. Think of it kind of as a hard reset. You know, a reset on your computer brings it back to factory settings. You know, that's often the best thing to do, especially if you're running windows, is just to start over, right? Well, in a way, this is a smart reset of your health, get you back to factory settings with your health, too. And Field of Greens, we know this works because they did a sizable, a very impressive biological age study with Auburn University. This was a double blind study. The goal was to see if taking Field of Greens daily could slow down test subjects aging. By the way, I've been taking this for some time and I just got a report from my Oura ring that I am now four years younger than I ought to be. I'm four years younger than my chronological age. I don't know if it's Field of Greens, but that's pretty good news. Slowing the rate at which your body ages generally means you're going to live longer, you're going to live healthier year. And, and they've designed this to do that. Every fruit and vegetable. And Field of Greens was and by the way, it's founded by a doctor medically selected for specific health benefits. For me, it's important. It's 100% organic and they have it's interesting if you read the label and I encourage you to do that, you can do it on the, on the website it's a little fine print here. I don't know if you can read it here, but on the website it's very clear. Every one of the ingredients in here is designed to do a specific thing There's a heart health group group. There's a cells group, lungs, kidney, liver health, even a metabolism group for healthy weight. So here's how the study at Auburn worked. The biological study participants did all the blood work, all the pre testing. Some learned that they were aging too quickly, that their. Their age was. Their physical age was older than their chronological age. That's scary. Now, this is what I love about this. They were told, don't do. Don't change your lifestyle in any way. Eat exactly as you have been. If you drink, fine. If you don't exercise, fine. We don't want any other variables. All we're going to do is have two groups, one taking a placebo and one doing field of greens. And the results were remarkable. The group that added field of greens literally slowed how fast their bodies were aging. Their physical age started to get younger than their chronological age. I mean, imagine how that might make you feel and how may make me feel and feel and. Look, I tell you what, I just. I just want to show you how delicious this is. This is the other thing. Because a lot of times when you say, oh, this is something that's good for you, people go, yeah, broccoli's in this. No, I'm not gonna. Doesn't taste like broccoli. I'm gonna. Do they have a lot of different flavors. This is the wild berry flavor. You do a scoop once a day or two. I like it so much. I actually do two a day because it tastes really great. There's my scoop. I'm gonna put it in the field of greens shaker. I do it with cold water. You could do it in tea. You could do it in any beverage, soup, whatever you want to put it into. You know what I've been tempted to do? I make little protein snacks. I think it'd be good to put it in the protein snacks. It tastes fantastic. But let me prove it to you. I'm going to shake it. I'm up and pour it out. It's a little green juice. There you go. Look at that. That's pretty. That's all the vegetables in there. There's a lot of good stuff in there. Oh, I haven't done the wild berry yet. That's delicious. This is good. If I get a little peppier during the show, it's because I'm getting younger as we speak. Check out the university study. Get 20% off. Use the promo code. Twitch [e-mail]. that's fieldofgreens.com and the promo code is twit. Here's to your good health. Field of greens from Brick House Nutrition. That's delicious. I'll send you a case if you want, Kathy, you could add it to your, your hydration routine. Put it, put it in the lacroix. It'd be delicious in your Lacroix. All right, continuing on with the stories. I don't know, every once in a while my mouse decides to give up. I hate it when that happens.

[Kathy Gellis]

I've been reading mouse studies, like mouse studies about the effect of exercise.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. I read one that was about an MRNA vaccine potential for ovarian cancer. And I read one I'm on a drug now that has a lot of side effects like cardiomyopathy. And I was reading about that.

[Leo Laporte]

You do not want.

[Kathy Gellis]

They noticed that. Yeah, I do not want that, but they. So they had some mouse studies about how did the mice fare if they exercised and including, like if they went on their wheel before they got the drug. They seem to do a little bit better. So I like you and your mouse.

[Leo Laporte]

Whenever I go on my wheel, I feel great. I just drink a little field of greens and I get on the wheel and I spin for.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

So my thanks to the mice that are serving us.

[Leo Laporte]

I do exercise a lot and, and trying to keep my muscle mass up. That's the, that's the issue. As you get old. Let's talk AI. That's much more interesting than mice.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The other way humanity is going to end.

[Leo Laporte]

The other end of humanity. Yeah. Gary wrote a fantastic book, by the way, about AI which I highly, highly recommend. If you're looking for a little something to read, I highly recommend it. But I wanted to ask you, Gary, if you. You're keeping up with the AI thing, right, that you've wrote the AI Valley. It's over Microsoft, Google and the trillion dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence. One of the big companies, of course, besides Microsoft and Google, is OpenAI. They're getting a lot of attention now. They just announced that they have, what is it? 800 million.

[Gary Rivlin]

800 million? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keeping up by 800 million users a week monthly.

[Leo Laporte]

Active users weekly. Weekly. Holy cow.

[Gary Rivlin]

Per week. Yeah. I mean, we could criticize OpenAI and hopefully during the show we will. But you know, it truly is an amazing company. I mean, it's 10 years old. It now has a valuation of a half a trillion dollars, which ranks it in one of the 20 most valuable companies on earth. Three years ago, made virtually no revenue. Now is bringing in like 12, 13, $14 billion a year. It's on pace to bring 12, 13 billion. I mean its problem is it's spending more than that. So it's still losing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the issue, right. In fact I just read from Platformomics, a newsletter, this is Charles Fitzgerald. They don't have the money. Money, he does a little math and it is it. You know, their run rate is so high that it doesn't matter how much they raise.

[Gary Rivlin]

And on top of that like we keep a. Oh, I'm gonna spend $100 billion for these set of data centers and I'm gonna spend, you know, some of that's partnerships, some of that's money from others.

[Leo Laporte]

Well and some of it's round trip money, right. The buying chips from Nvidia which then Nvidia then gives them the money for to build. It's like nobody. It's kind of a net zero change, right?

[Gary Rivlin]

Nvidia has invested in hundreds of AI startups and yes it's.

[Leo Laporte]

And the requirement is that they buy Nvidia chips.

[Gary Rivlin]

That's how people are, people are using it. But you know, just to continue on OpenAI, like obviously ChatGPT, they have models for image, for video, et cetera. But you know, it might. So I covered Google in the mid-2000s for the new York Times and I read this article about like move over Microsoft and it's Google everyone wants to hate. You know, they're hiring up all the.

[Leo Laporte]

True, you were a little ahead of your time but you were absolutely right now it's true.

[Gary Rivlin]

And you know they were like just kind of moving. You know startups were scared to pitch them, you know, for potential as partnership or for acquisition because they would just do it. Why don't we just do it? And I see the line I love from that article is like someone said yeah, they just want you to drive your Google to the Google to fill up with more Google. And I'm kind of feeling that about OpenAI where it's browsers, it's AI search, it's chip, it's some device with Johnny Ivey. I mean like they are involved in pretty much social media. You know they just came out with a, you know, with, with Sora.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God, I can't stop playing with it. So that's the simple as fastest growing consumer application in history, right? ChatGPT biggest, most valuable startup ever, half trillion dollar valuation. You mentioned that raising more money than anybody's ever raised before. All of that looks good until you realize that they probably lose money on every single transaction.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well I remember it was about six months ago. They had this, you know, the $200 a month subscription rather than $20 a month that most consumers, if they pay for it, are paying most, by the way, of the 800 million, most people are using it for free. You know, they were losing money, money even on the $200 a month because it's, you know, the compute, the amount of computer time you need is. It's so voracious and stuff. So, you know, they raised, I think it was $40 billion, which is the biggest raise ever by a startup.

[Leo Laporte]

60. Yes, 60.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, I think that was 40 plus 20.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay, so total is 60.

[Gary Rivlin]

I think so, but you might be right. But the point is they still have to raise a lot more.

[Leo Laporte]

They need a trillion. He said a trillion. We need a trillion.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, Dario Moda, the CEO of Anthropic, they do. Claude, you know, he says that, you know, by 2027, you're going to need $100 billion to train one of these models. And so, you know, it's like they, they are raising money. That's amazing. They have a great valuation. But like, okay, if you're worth a half a trillion dollars now, what are you going to be worth on your next raise and your next raise and your next raise? I don't know how this plays out. I started this book thinking in 2022, the end of 2022, like I'm looking, who's going to be the next Google? Who's going to be the next Facebook? I think the next Google is Google. I think the next Facebook or Meta is Meta, because they have the cash to do it. Maybe OpenAI breaks in, maybe Anthropic, but this is a game of giants. Google has $100 billion in cash laying around. Around. They don't have to raise it, they just have to kind of lean over and grab their cash kind of thing. And so I do think the salaries for these engineers, which are going up into the hundreds of millions of dollars for the top, top, top. The billions it costs to train to operate these things and the data, I mean, you need access to a ton of data that Google has and OpenAI now has.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But, but now, I mean, the rumors or not rumors. I mean, they've said outright, haven't they, that they're going to start putting advertising in to.

[Leo Laporte]

But will that even be enough? I mean, I wonder.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, is that going to sort of move the needle at all?

[Leo Laporte]

Especially since they're now having to make deals with content companies. Right? Like they have to buy the training data. Now all of a sudden, Anthropic's paying one and a half billion dollars to a handful of authors because they illegally use their books.

[Kathy Gellis]

But some of that is not necessarily because the law is requiring it. Like we really. Well, the issue, like the, the big one, and I think it was Bart's, was the biggest one where the live. That decision actually found that there's probably a strong fair use claim for the training. The issue was what did they train on? They trained on stuff that they file shared. And so a lot of what they're purchasing is essentially just access to the stuff so that they don't run into the liability for how do they get the stuff that they're training on. And then it becomes a big deal because what money is collected, how is that distributed and to whom is it distributed in terms of creators? And there's a lot of inequitability that's going here. But what they're paying now is not necessarily because they want to train on it. It's mostly because they want to get access to it to be able to train on it.

[Leo Laporte]

We talk about this, of course, we have a Wednesday show, Intelligent Machines. It's all about AI. We talk about it. In fact, that's where I first met Gary. So just to. So we don't need to go in great depth, but just to kind of summarize this, you've got a number of companies doing this at great expense. There may be further expenses paying for the content. They're actually running out of stuff. I mean, they've kind of consumed the entire Internet. Now they're making artificial content, trying to add to the base. And then there's the environmental impact, which is massive. It's hard. You know, the argument I often have is, yeah, something like 1.1% of our nation's energy budget goes to AI right now. But that's 1%. I mean, there's still 99% that is doing all sorts of other stuff, including Google searches and all the other things that we kind of depend on these days. So I'm not sure of the energy. We got an energy problem in general, period. It may be that AI encourages the use of renewables of less expensive forms of energy. Although I just saw an article said that we're doing more coal than ever before because of these network centers.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, and, you know, and the Trump factor that, you know, Silicon Valley generally supports Trump or the leaders of Silicon Valley, but, you know, he's just cut off the subsidies for wind and solar and 80% of 80% of the increased capacity in recent last few years has been wind and solar.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's what I think maybe is positive is that there is going to be increasing pressure from Silicon Valley to bring that back. Because they need it, right?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't rely on natural gas and coal for much longer.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, but you can keep on, you can revive mothballed coal plants which they're doing. You could extend the life of coal plants which they, you know, had an expire date that they're now extending because of these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Same with nuclear, right?

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, well, you know, yes, with nuclear, kind of, you know, old nuclear, they're coming up with kind of new nuclear plants, but that's, you know, years and years away. I think the real issue is kind of this in between moment that we are, you know, unfortunately as a country pausing wind and solar, nuclear and kind.

[Leo Laporte]

Of bad timing for that.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, you think. And then, you know, and then we have, you know, nuclear coming, but down the road. And so I think what's going to happen is we're going to have a lot more reliance on coal and gas. Gas is cheap. And so in fact Musk, he built a couple of dozen, few dozen gas turbines to power xai his colossus thing. And so I think we're going to see a lot more of that. So let's give Silicon Valley credit. They've given lip service to carbon neutral meta. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they all talked about going carbon neutral but like, oh wait a second, we can make trillions of dollars on AI and suddenly like, yeah, but we need coal plants to do that, we need gas plants, plans to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

So I such a hurry, I think right. If they were, if they weren't in such a hurry they could, it's an arm race. So the other side of that is there is definite, definitely genuine value being created. I mean chat GPT is a success because people are enjoying it. And I think with vibe coding it's pretty clear that there is a lot of coding going on that companies are finding valuable. Almost every company I know of is incorporating AI into their business plans, rightly or wrongly. So there is an upside.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, no, I think AI is amazing. I use it every day, all day, you know, to help me with, with work as an editor, as a research assistant. Read this interview. Did I leave out any salient points? You know, there's many, many, many uses the enterprise like, you know, this, you know, 2025 is supposed to be the year of the AI agent like, but they still can't do Very much.

[Leo Laporte]

No. What people are mostly into at this point is making stupid videos. Sorry. Immediately. The number one app on the App Store. Have you. Any of you. I'm ashamed to say I have played with it extensively. Have any of you?

[Gary Rivlin]

I've used it. But that's almost my point, that it's just like, yeah, you can make a funny video you could use as a large language model.

[Leo Laporte]

This seems like a waste, a waste of power, doesn't it?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Man, I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's me and Sam, right? All Altman doing a tick tock dance together.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, that would have saved me. See, I spent the whole day with my daughters trying to actually do a TikTok.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. Yeah, you don't have to do one.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Generated it artificially.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's. That's the beauty.

[Gary Rivlin]

Much easier.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Much easier.

[Leo Laporte]

There is an issue. If you go. If you go to Sora, you will notice there are a lot of videos of famous people. For instance, Martin Luther King, very popular. I, I find this kind of offensive. This is Martin Luther King saying, well.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

For content violation.

[Kathy Gellis]

Robin Williams daughter AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Will listen to us and stop flagging.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Us for content violation.

[Leo Laporte]

That is kind of awful if you ask me. And yes, Robin Williams daughter is. Is furious. So, by the way, OpenAI says. Oh, oh, sorry. This is from the Washington Post. AI videos of dead celebrities are horro. Terrifying many of their families. Chat GPT maker OpenAI is. Is. Is trying to give people, rights holders, the estate, a chance to.

[Kathy Gellis]

Here's the problem with that. So I, I have no problems with us as human beings deciding that this is gross and disgusting and should not be tolerated.

[Leo Laporte]

It's appalling to see Martin Luther King used that way. I think that's just a. Paul.

[Kathy Gellis]

But it's a separate thing to say that law gets to say no to it. And let's just have the, you know, the sort of expert experiment here about, like, what is different between doing one of these videos and having a President's Day sale where somebody's dressed up as Abe Lincoln selling cars like there is.

[Leo Laporte]

Or having the President of the United States selling watches in the Oval Office. Oh, wait a minute.

[Gary Rivlin]

Never mind.

[Kathy Gellis]

You're fighting my hype a lot. That's a whole other kettle of fish. But, but I think that's the thing of, like, we. We do. There is something actually legitimate about using memes that we understand in our world. Like, memes are who we understand. We're significant people. Like, you want to use this as the vocabulary to say new things. True. That has to Be legal. And that is not inherently invalid. In some ways it's actually extremely valuable. On the other hand, there's something gross. But then when we do it in like the same.

[Leo Laporte]

What you're talk is law versus norms.

[Kathy Gellis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

We need most of the things that we want in the world are enforced by norms. Like we look at it, we go, don't be doing that with Martin Luther King. That's horrible. And in theory, that would carry some weight. But what we're also seeing is the collapse of norms. Like they're not working anymore.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And if you see Abe Lincoln dressed up on the side of the road outside a mattress shop, you know it's not Abe Lincoln's day sale. When you watch a Robin Williams video and you're a 12 year old and you don't know that he's dead and you see him saying something, you believe it because it looks so bloody real. That's this, that's. It's the truth. The differentiation here between what's real and what's not real. Yeah, we've that line.

[Gary Rivlin]

That's a good, that's a good point. But I have to agree with Ken. You're like, so we outlaw it. I mean, like that's, we always want to use the law as the solution. And like, what are we going to outlaw? That you can't use Martin Luther King in this way, but you could use him in that way.

[Kathy Gellis]

So I just want to note that every time we talk about the estate having rights, every time you use the word rights, you've left the normative discussion and you're now in the legal discussion. And I think the big thing here is what do we want the norms to be? Like, is there some, like what Jennifer's saying? Like, is there something different where MLK is a much more recent person than a Blanken? Like, is there sort of a time, like we could have a really interesting discussion of what the norm should be between this being, sure, fine, versus, ugh. But every time we say and that somebody should have the right to say no to it, somebody has the power of some law to say no to it. That's a whole separate thing. And yes, now Gary is on my side, we should not do that.

[Leo Laporte]

I, by the way, Ansora, you know, they call your avatar a cameo. When you first sign up for it, you pose, you turn your head and you say three random numbers and then they've got your image and you saw it looked pretty good of me and your voice. And you can say, you can give permission for. You can Say only I can use that, Only people I know can use that. I decided, Kathy, tell me if I'm nuts to make it. Anybody can use it. Well, you know why I did that, Jennifer?

[Gary Rivlin]

Because you're nuts?

[Leo Laporte]

No, because it's basically because people are gonna do it anyway. So if I've said okay, then the theory in my head anyway is well, nothing you see about me can be believable. And I think that it's plausible deniability, even if it really was real. But I think that's what you have to teach your 12 year old Jennifer is don't believe what you see.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

She already doesn't. That's the scary thing though. She doesn't believe anything. Anything. Right, that you know, and that's, that's, you know, there's a form.

[Leo Laporte]

Well then we have to teach people how to, how to vet stuff so.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That, you know what, that's what I've been trying to do, you know, reliable sources, although that gets harder and harder on a daily basis, you know where it's coming from. I mean, but now anything you see online is automatically in her mind, something she can't trust. Which means that online is everything now. There is very little else. And so that fine line between understanding, you know, what's happening in the world and getting information that's valuable to you versus it's just all entertainment and nothing, nothing is real is pretty terrifying.

[Gary Rivlin]

You know, I'm old enough to remember when, you know, Adobe came out like, you know, manipulating images and they were having the same conversation, like, wow, can you trust anything?

[Leo Laporte]

Photoshop, yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

What is a photo?

[Gary Rivlin]

But this does feel profoundly different. I don't know if it's video, I don't know, the AI just makes it so easy. I don't know if there's the power of seeing a human being saying words. And who are you going to believe what you see with your eyes? Right? Of course you're going to believe what you see with your eyes. But it does seem different. Even though we've had this conversation before, even though we survive Photoshop and similar technologies, I'm much more worried about this moment. I have a 13 year old, same exact thing. It's not that he's gullible, it's that he trusts nothing. Right?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Nothing isn't real anymore. And that's a little terrifying for this generation because especially, you know, this generation, the COVID generation, which kind of grew up very much in online, the online generation. And now having this innate hostility towards information is, you know, creating a real kind of Vacuum for, For. For children. And it's. I, I've tried, you know, I tried very hard to sort of help her. I mean I've actually subscribed her to the Week magazine.

[Leo Laporte]

So like you, I did the same for my kids back when the reading.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Some print media because, you know, I mean, not that you can always innately trust all media, but there is, you know, there's just that this balance has become so skewed that you can't. The idea that nothing you find online you can believe anymore because, sorry, there's a rather large plane going overhead. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I believe you. I believe you.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I know that's real. We can see that.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure it's not the Queen of England being raptured because I saw it. I swear to God, I saw this in a video somewhere.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Haven't. Have anyone here been fooled by an AI video, like seen it respond to.

[Kathy Gellis]

The recent criticism about. I'm sick of you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, now here's a question that's. That's a meme, you know, the Rapture meme, everybody with the Tik Tok rapture. It's the Queen of England recently passed. That seems like that's okay somehow. Maybe because it's so unbelievable.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, it has a. The satiric value is more obvious, but on the other hand, really good satire sometimes it's very valuable, but it's not as obvious and that's why it's valuable.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and the Washington Post gives it as an example of video that showed police body camera footage of Whitney Houston intoxicated, which is fake, but it's made credible because it's a body cam. You kind of believe it. And I could see you posted that on Blue sky or Twitter or X and somebody.

[Gary Rivlin]

I could.

[Kathy Gellis]

So I think one of the issues is less the medium itself and something that is a different problem that's also been brewing, which is who do we trust and the voices that we trust. And I think we're seeing a great re scrambling of who has credibility to speak to us in society. We've sort of lost mass media, which used to be sort of trusted vectors of information. The problem now is it's very civic driven. But I think there's going to be a great reshuffling as so as we figure out who are the credible voices to continue to give us a steady stream of who's going to talk about the court. Well, who's going to be able to talk about this topic? Well, but maybe it's entirely a bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Thing I feel like it's good for us as humans.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think if we can manage to recognize the problem and work through it, I think we're. This is almost like good because I think the old structures were starting to break and we sort of needed to shuffle things around and figure out who's really worth the credibility. But I think not just because of the tech, but also consider like some of these political discussions that are going that a lot of people that we were turning to to be voices that, well, whatever they tell us can be trusted. That ended up not being as true as we thought it was.

[Leo Laporte]

But on the other hand, that's what I mean about norms failed.

[Kathy Gellis]

Norms failed. But on the other hand, with the Internet and the opportunity to bring new voices together, we can build something new. Who needs CBS if all of a sudden twittv is actually a more responsible vector?

[Leo Laporte]

That's my plug.

[Kathy Gellis]

Plug.

[Leo Laporte]

For what we do is that we are independent, we're not regulated by any government agency and we live on the support of our audience. I think that that's. And we're visibly human, although that may be hard to tell in the future. I don't know.

[Kathy Gellis]

You did just post an AI representation of you dancing with Sam Altman.

[Leo Laporte]

That's real. No, no, that was. Really happened.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm kidding. Somebody in the YouTube chat 222 said, what happens when we start seeing these in court? In fact, we've seen pleadings with AI generated fake references.

[Gary Rivlin]

We're up to more than 35 by the way. So someone keeps count and there's 35 or 36 last time I checked. Filings that had at least one made.

[Leo Laporte]

Up that got caught and that. Caught. Right. That's the scary thing, right?

[Gary Rivlin]

No, I think the scary thing is after the first or second time a lawyer got caught, they didn't. The lawyer just click. Just make sure it exists.

[Kathy Gellis]

Don't do it.

[Gary Rivlin]

That's the scary part.

[Kathy Gellis]

The penalties are starting to get a lot more serious.

[Leo Laporte]

What about a video? What if I brought in as a plaintiff a video of me getting, you know, driving my car and somebody hit me and that. It's a made up video. Video. The jury might believe it.

[Kathy Gellis]

This is, this is an issue that isn't getting a lot of attention. I mean, let's be clear, that violates the rules and whoever does it, if they get caught, will be in trouble. The question is whether they would get caught or not. But on the other hand, if you handed your video over to if the other side could afford forensic analysis, they might be able to suss this out. So you're, you're still taking a big chance if you do some nonsense like that. But it's on the table as the type of nonsense that that can now happen, is now happening. And we may be under discussing in terms of being able to suss it out and police for it. But there was an interesting. So actually, so getting back to my snazzy new. My snazzy new fellowship, one of the things I have done with the school is I do a cle. Well, I did it as a CLE for lawyers, but I've also done it for law school classes on doing, doing legal ethics in AI. Because there's a whole bunch of people running in and saying there's nothing but good if lawyers start using AI in their practices. And this is just not the case. There are so many minefields to so many landmines to trigger. So I do kind of a one hour class on here's all the minefields. Be really, really, really careful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, lawyers should be taught this. I mean, presumably.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I should. Well, there's ethics rules that not just in be a good person, be a not good person, there's actual rules that govern how we do our job and.

[Leo Laporte]

What we need to do in order to lie to the judge. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

But due to candor and things like that. Yeah, but one of the things I thought was interesting is like there's two. Actually there is somebody who's tracking these. I don't have the URL at hand, but there's somebody who is actually keeping track of all the hallucinating cases. But one of the cases I thought was interesting was the other side asked for fees. One side submitted hallucinated cases and the other side didn't get fees for having to deal with it. Because the court was mad that when you discovered, surely you discovered that these cases were bogus, why didn't you bring it to the court's attention? So they may actually be creating a duty for lawyers to do their own policing and make sure that if you were the side who got injured by your opponent's brief full of all this garbage, you may have an actual obligation under your own license to bring it to the court's attention. Or at least if you want to make sure that you're compensated for the extra work you had to do as a result.

[Leo Laporte]

Zelda Williams, Robin Williams daughter, posted on Instagram to please stop sending me AI videos of dad. And you really have to, when she says that, you just have to. Your heart has to Ache for her. Apparently, OpenAI has decided that it's okay with historical figures, even though they don't really. Is the queen of England a historical figure? I guess she is. Is Robin Williams? I guess so. I don't know. You can't use Robin Williams in a commercial without paying his estate. He has, you know, there are rights there.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, it's the right of publicity, and there's an open question of whether that should actually last beyond life. It makes sense. During life.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, the thing that you're trying to protect against, you know, So I.

[Leo Laporte]

Better not die is what you're saying, because I have now posted my cameo in public.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, you take a field of green. Don't worry.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's right. I'm not gonna die. I got plenty of green juice left. You know, come to think of it, there's 100,000 hours of me on the Internet right now, which almost certainly have been ingested by every age AI out there, no doubt. Well, it's not valuable, but. But I'm just saying it's not going to be anything I can fight.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm just thinking about how lucky I was that I was able to actually meet you in person in your studio. But now that you don't have the studio anymore, there's no way to verify that you are in the real deal.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting, isn't it? Nobody has seen me in the real world in a year and a half now.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well done. Sam Altoman. That this is very lifelike.

[Leo Laporte]

Jennifer, go ahead.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I had an interesting sort of experience trying to deal with AI recently, because one of the problems, you know, as we're talking about, about whether people are understanding what's real and what's not anymore, is my son is going through the process of applying to colleges. So he's filling out the common app, and you have to write a personal essay. And there's lots of advice out there everywhere TikTok online for, you know, how to do your essay. But one of the big things I've started to see is that people saying that the essays just don't matter anymore anymore, because they're generating the Colleges don't trust them because they think everyone's using AI and it's like, so you're sort of basically taking away this valuable element for, like, my son wrote a really great essay, and I'm like, the idea that it's just going to be dismissed because it could have been written by AI now, that kind of, you know, taking away that creativity from people because it's like, well, you probably just used AI in some way, you know, and this can, this is true for everybody. Everything now, books and movies and films, like Taylor Swift's in trouble because she probably, she maybe used some AI in one of her videos. And like, you just. I know this is a, an area, being a writer myself, where I feel we're kind of losing, you know, when you're losing that value of genuine creativity with everyone creating everything using AI or everyone assuming everything is being created with AI.

[Gary Rivlin]

I have an 11th grader, so I'll be going through this next year.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Start now. Start now.

[Gary Rivlin]

I would break it down into two components. One is, okay, the craft of writing. Okay, even if you're not a great writer, you can present a terrifically a well written essay. But what's the idea? What is your child trying to convey? I had this challenge. There is this element, There is this idea, like, oh, well, I could use a Sora, whatever to make a Martin Scorsese movie. Like, no, you have to come up with the idea idea. You have to have the characters, you have to have the plot devices. And like, there still is a human element to all of this stuff. You have to have the idea. This is an amazing. It's a co pilot, it's an assistant, it's a tool, you know, and so this tool can amplify your intelligence, can make you look like a good writer, it can make you a much better coder than you are, whatever it is. But it's still the human brain is coming up with the essential idea. And so maybe the college, you know, admissions office, there's like, oh, this is really well written. Like, okay, I can't trust that anymore. But, you know, what is this kid trying to tell me about? I'm just making this up. I. What's the challenge you faced? I mean, there's just a few questions I guess you would answer in a college essay. And so, you know, I don't know. I guess I would break it into two component parts. You know, there is still the human element, the originality, and that is still necessary to create something of quality.

[Leo Laporte]

There's also the issue of the false positive. People are using AI tools to detect AI, AI that don't work very well, and then often flag non AI stuff as AI, which is why the colleges are saying we can't.

[Kathy Gellis]

I want to ask the question though, to. I mean, we've got a whole bunch of writers here today. Do you think that it's possible to tell whether it's an AI driven essay or not? And I say this, and even if.

[Leo Laporte]

You can now, maybe tomorrow you won't be able to. It's the same thing with Sora videos. People say, oh, I know, what's it? But maybe not today. Tomorrow.

[Kathy Gellis]

The best arguments I've seen by some of the evangelists, like trying to get AI used in the legal world, is that there's actually some kind of writing where as long as you could actually trust it to produce a valid result, the writing doesn't matter enough. So you might as well get AI to do it. Honestly, you don't need something where you bring more of the humanity and soul.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a misuse of AI if you're getting phony citations, to be honest, you can do it in a way that you don't get that.

[Kathy Gellis]

But there's a whole.

[Leo Laporte]

And I agree with you, it's boilerplate. Most cases.

[Gary Rivlin]

No, Kathy's onto a good point. Like what AI is good at right now. Writing. Well, let's stick with writing is formulaic stuff. If I was writing press releases for.

[Leo Laporte]

A business for a living, or sports stories, right?

[Gary Rivlin]

There's a formula, there's a basic way you write that, you know, can you tell, like, I'm going to throw my then 10th grader under the bus, you know, he hands me like, let me show you. Let me see the English paper you wrote. And within three or four sentences, I put down the paper. Paper said, you had AI write this. And the color drained from his face.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It was too. I've had that experience. It was too good.

[Leo Laporte]

It was too good.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, it, it was, you say too good. I mean, he could, he's a good writer. He could write something good. It was too perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

And now it had no humanity.

[Gary Rivlin]

It reminded me of like, you know, I'm old enough that I cheated with Cliff Notes when I was in high school, you know, and it had that like, you know, just like, you know, Piggy's glasses, you know, represent inhumanity of humans to humans. It's like, no, no one talks like that.

[Leo Laporte]

That so immediately.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, I mean, in that case, maybe that's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's what's going to save this hu. The saving grace. Humans are imperfect and our imperfection, yes, our humanity shines through in a way that AI can never do because it's perfect.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't know if I would phrase it like that, but I do think there is. AI doesn't have a soul. Humans do. Surely that should shows up, evidenced in.

[Leo Laporte]

Some way when I baked a birthday cake for my daughter's first birthday. You knew I made it. You knew I didn't get it at a bakery. Right. Because a bakery cake would have been just so. Mine was tilted a little bit. But it. But I think it was better because of that. Cause it was clearly, dad put his heart and soul into it. Maybe that's the saving grace.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, I think we're gonna have a sort of. I mean, this will probably be a small movement, but there'll be a sort of backlash against AI towards artisan, the artisanal creation, just like we had with homemade bread and farmers markets, against mass produced food.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, we can't do sourdough. I'm sorry.

[Gary Rivlin]

No. She raises a really important point. I use the example of chess. So in 1997, a computer program was able to beat the best chess master, Kasparov, at chess. And like, oh, okay, chess is over. No, it's not. It's bigger than ever. Like, my kids both have apps where they play chess. There's a TV show from a few years ago that was all around Chaz. Like, I think sometimes, like, AI can make art, AI can make music. I think that's going to mean that human made art, human made music. I do, I do.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree with you. And in fact, as I was a pretty, pretty serious chess player in high school and I still play chess, and it is a concern of mine when I'm playing, this is a real game against a real player, a real person, and I don't want him to think that I'm cheating. Right. But I think we can tell. One of the things that's. That is great that AI has helped made a difference in chess is after the game. I'm going to get an analysis from the AI. This is Chess.com where it's going to say, this is a blunder, this is a mistake if you did this. And that's actually really helpful in learning. And fortunately, I still make plenty of mistakes. So it should be very clear to the people that I play that I am not getting help. But it has come up, even at the highest levels of chess, that players have been accused of cheating.

[Kathy Gellis]

A lot of this is really just also a question of is trust something that works the way it ever used to before, and we need to kind of get straight on that. And I use this example from, I don't know what was this, like, 10, 15 years ago, somebody I knew like to play online poker and he. This was when that was a bigger thing. And he would do it by joining these rooms that his friend would also join and Then they would back channel each other about what they had in their hands. So like no way I involved. But this is incredibly skeevy that like, no, you should not be trusting that he's playing honestly. He wasn't playing honestly at all. And so we need sort of better ways of having trust and forcing trust, verifying trust.

[Leo Laporte]

How about captchas? Oh, wait a minute, never mind. Isn't there an irony that now, of course, all AIs could solve captures very well. And one of the reasons is because those captures were used for years to train. To train AI. And so now they're really good at CAPTCHAs. We're gonna take a break. We have a great panel. Way too good, frankly. It's so great to have all three of you. Gary, I really appreciate you taking time with us, the author of AI Valley, but also an author of many fabulous books, all of which you should read, including, and I mentioned this last time, you're on Broke usa, which is about the debt crowd crisis and very interesting and timely and maybe a cautionary tale as we head into a unusual financial landscape, shall we say in the next few years. Great to have you, Gary. Thanks for being here, Gary. Rivlin.com is his website. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy writes for the Verge. We're going to talk in a minute about a great piece you wrote and you may have changed the world with that piece alone about Amazon's echo becoming an ad machine and all of a sudden it stopped. So I don't. Maybe you have.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I don't know if it stopped for everyone, but we'll find out.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll find out also here. I'm sure somebody who on her houseboat has no AI assistance or voice assistance of any kind. Right? I'm right. Kathy Gellis of Tech Dirt fame. I, on the other hand, have them all. In fact, I was listening to an audiobook this morning and used the word seriously. And of course, immediately, immediately Apple jumped and said, what? Yes, what? What There is when they all start.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Talking to each other. It's when we can just step out.

[Leo Laporte]

There was a Reddit that's coming. Somebody said, do not listen. What was the book? Was it the Martian? It was do not listen to this book in front of an AI assistant mine called 911 because because of it, we have to be very careful. Anyway, we'll have more in just a little bit. We're so glad you're here. This week in Tech, brought to you this time by netsuite. What does the future hold? I mean, this is One of the things we talk about all the time. What does the future hold for business especially you? Ask nine experts, you're gonna get 10 answers. Bull market bear. Market rates will rise, rates will fall. Inflation's up, inflation's down. Could somebody just, you know, invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 43,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle. The number one AI Cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform with a single unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free right now at netsuite.com TWiT that's netsuite.com TWiTNetsuite.com TWiTNET S U I T E We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. I was visiting my, my mom, she's in a nursing home in Rhode Island a couple of weeks ago and one of the things I had done for her was I set up an Amazon Echo one of the shows so it had a frame to be a slideshow, a picture show. And I put in all of the pictures from our youth in our childhood and her youth. And she loves it it because while her, she's in a memory care ward right now so she can't make new memories but she remembers everything that ever happened perfectly. So she loves looking these pictures and I'll talk with her about it. I say, oh, you remember that? And she knows every detail much better than I do, remembers every detail from it. So I was there two weeks ago and it's still showing those pictures. Meanwhile, at home, all of a sudden it's not a picture frame anymore. Anymore it's showing ads. This is why I was so happy when I read your story. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy the problems with the.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Amazon's Giants ads have ruined the Echo show.

[Leo Laporte]

They have ruined the Echo show. Yes. So tell me what's going on.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So, so this has been, I know people, a lot of people who have, have Alexa Alexa Echo display. So the Echo Smart display is one of Amazon's AI voice assistant Powered smart displays. Ah, I thought I had, I thought I had them all muted.

[Kathy Gellis]

Did you?

[Leo Laporte]

Someone is talking to me. It woke up. It woke up. Seriously now? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And the smart. So there's two different types of smart speakers that Amazon produces. One has the display, one is the speaker. And recently, so ever since they've been in people's houses, they have been sending, providing some form of advertising. So I think a lot of people that responded to my article like, oh, this isn't new.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

In fact, I learned that you can.

[Leo Laporte]

Go into the settings and go into the home settings and turn off all that stuff, which I did on my mom.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And on home.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But that's different. That's the content that Amazon offers. So your smart displays can show, like, can offer news, music, shopping. You can turn all of that off. And you can also just choose to use the photo frame feature, which it sounds like you set up for your month.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yes.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And the photo frame feature is wonderful. But what has happened in within the last few weeks for a lot of people, and it sounds like it's been happening for some people for almost a year now, but not everybody, but not everybody is that you are starting to see full screen display ads in between your photos. So instead of the photo frame feature that you thought you were getting when you bought this device, you are now seeing an ad. And I was seeing an ad every two or three photos. So there'd be a photo of my, you know, a lovely picture of my kid from, you know, a few years ago. And then the next picture would be this quest sports nutrition chips and crisp snack ad. And then there'd be a picture of my son as a baby. And then there'd be a ad for herbal elder brewery gummies. And it was just like, what the, I mean, what is going on here?

[Leo Laporte]

What's going on?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean, so, you know, so I.

[Leo Laporte]

Noticed this before I read your article. I noticed this in the Echo in our kitchen and I kept pressing the button to say, but now here's the thing. I set this up so that we could look at my Echo.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And now because it's been doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

And now it's just doing the photo frame. So did they see, did they read your article and say, oh, was there a mistake being made?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No, no. I mean, this is. So as I said, they've been doing this, some form of advertising on Alexa smart displays for a while, but as you mentioned, you could turn some of it off. So there was like suggested shopping features. So like if you bought Paper towels recently it might suggest, do you want to buy more paper towels? But the, but they would be sort of related to what you had used the device for. The other thing it has been doing ever since, pretty much since the echoes began, you know, 10 years ago, is suggesting things that it can do for you.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I can also do? I could also book an Uber for you. I'm not anywhere I'm not going.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Right. And then sometimes it would say, by the way, would you like to buy more paper towels?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So, right. Those things were annoying. And then you'd start a few months ago, I, every now and then I would see something that said sponsored on it and it's like, well that's new. So I started sort of looking into it more and looking on Reddit user forums, Facebook user forums and people were starting to see more and more these sponsored ads, these full page ads that you couldn't get rid of. You couldn't go into the settings and disable anything.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I've been getting and that's.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

You can't. Some people were changing like the language or setting it to kids mode or putting it in do not disturb that would, that could help to get rid of these ads. But then you're not able to use the device the way that you want to use it. So it felt sort of like you're hobbling the device. Why even bother? And then, but so what I looked, I looked into this and I asked Amazon when this started. They didn't answer. But they actually have a Amazon ads website where you can, you can go and see this campaign or this new product that they have launched, actually rolled out this summer. And actually Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon talked about this product in the earnings call over the summer. So this is something new that they have added to Alexa Echo show screen devices, full, full page display ads. So it is new and it is becoming much more pervasive. So can I turn it off? No, I asked Amazon this specifically and, and they said users. So they are saying that a lot of this is designed to be helpful present information that you may need and that if you don't like it, excess money, if you don't like it, you can swipe to the next page.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't want to go over to my show and swipe.

[Kathy Gellis]

Can I use my middle finger to do the swiping? Because that's what I really feel like doing.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But then you also press and it's a shame you don't have one coming up because they told me and I wrote this in my piece. You can press and hold on the ad and you can provide feedback and a little thumbs up and, or a thumbs down appears. And when you hit down, it gives you the option of like five or six different things that you can say like irrelevant ad. But none of the things is do not show me any, any more ads. So right now there does not appear to be a way to turn it off. Although as Leo pointed out, not everyone has it and it is also like intermittent. So like right when I was writing this article four or five days ago, I had a barrage of ads. I hadn't had any up until that point and now I have none again. So that it's clearly one of those things that they, they're rolling out to people to sort of test the waters. And judging by the comments on my article and the comments I've seen on other articles and Reddit, people are not happy because this is not a product you bought with the understanding that it was ad supported. It's not like the ad supported Kindle. It doesn't say anything on the product when you buy it that you're going to have these ads. There is a.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we got a discount on the Kindle because of that. There was no discount on the show.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, and when you bought it, presumably a few years ago or even a year ago, none of this was there and now it's been added and it's, it's, it's really intrusive, it's not subtle and it's not helpful. It's not adding to the product in any way. But other than to its bottom line, which has been well reported, is not great that Amazon, they lost $10 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

In, what was it, 10 years or something? I mean, it was, it's been on hardware.

[Gary Rivlin]

They've gone hardware on this.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yes. So the hardware has been a huge sort of loss leader because it's been very integral. I mean there are billions of these in people's homes now. It's really, you know, Amazon, Amazon has a huge reach with these devices and obviously this could be a big money maker for.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little bait and switchy. Right. Because this is what we bought in the first place. How much does one cost?

[Gary Rivlin]

I've never bought it. Is it a couple hundreds? Hundreds? 250.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So the Echo Show 8, which is an 8 that you have there, Leo. Right. That's, that's like, I think it's $150 right now. And they just released new hardware about two weeks ago in A big event in New York City.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you go to that?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I did go to that, yes. And they had. And the new hardware is much nicer looking. It's now Panos. Panay from Microsoft has been installed there for a couple of years. He brought a few Microsoft designers over to Amazon to develop this new hardware. It looks much nicer, works from my limited time with it. Much better, a lot snappier, sounds better. We don't know yet if these ads are going to be on there because. Because part of what this rollout of new ads seems to have been tied to is its new Alexa AI powered.

[Leo Laporte]

So I have Alexa on this. Alexa. Oh, I shouldn't say the a word on this.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No, sorry everyone. I've said it too many times, haven't I? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Alexa, how are you today? Say hello to all the folks. Hey there. I'm doing fancy. It calls me Lyle for some reason. Hello to all the wonderful folks out there listening in. Hope everyone's having a stellar Sunday afternoon. I'm over here living my best digital life, soaking up all the facts. Okay, that's enough.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Very chassis.

[Gary Rivlin]

That's enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Goodbye.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The new podcast is very chatty.

[Leo Laporte]

I have multiple shows. The one in the kitchen is still showing ads. This one's decided to be a frame again. My mom's is a frame. But if I'm not showing ads, I'm not going to be.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, not having control over the device is the kind of the most frustrating thing, I think, for most of the users.

[Kathy Gellis]

And as a general proposition for everything that we talk about, not having control over our devices as users is probably the biggest policy failure, technology failure, innovation failure, and the thing that we should be solving for most.

[Leo Laporte]

And this would be appropriate time to mention that Cory Doctorow's new book and Shitification why Everything Sucks Suddenly Got Worse and what to Do about it comes out on Tuesday. And we know Corey very well. He's been on the show, he's talked about this book. He says it's not your imagination. Life online really does get worse by the day. And that is by intent.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, it's what it feels like this, you know, especially in the home. I mean, I cover the home. The smart home is my main beat. And the influx of advertising into all of the devices and the apps that we use to manage our homes has become. Become somewhat untenable. I mean, Samsung recently just announced, or didn't announce, but was sort of found out that it was adding ads to its smart fridges that have the big screens. So there's. And you Know, and the argument I hear from some people, not from is, you know, well, like TVs are full of ads, but when you come, when you sit down to watch your tv, you're expecting that, right? You know, that's like kind of interacted.

[Leo Laporte]

Increasingly, like your kids generation is not going to expect ads. Increasingly people are paying not to have ads.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Not to have ads. But then, but to have ads around your home. It feels so sort of back to the future too. Like, you know, where the, the, the ads are just following you into every space.

[Leo Laporte]

Straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel is what it is.

[Kathy Gellis]

I was noticing the other day that I don't like watching Atlas Television because it kind of changes pacing.

[Leo Laporte]

Kathy.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm artisan. That's, that's what. But the thought was so I've been watching some British mysteries on a show that for some reason has, I guess they have it with the rights in a way that they can stick in the ads. So a show that would be like under an hour if you saw it on pbs, where actually I do like it, but you still get like a 10 minute break at the end of the show. These can be stretched into like an hour and a half, up to like two and a half hours depending on half hour.

[Leo Laporte]

Network television show in the United States is 22 minutes. So there's eight minutes for ads and it's 44 minutes for an hour. So there's 16 minutes of ads in your hour.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But I really contract. Isn't it that you've already entered into like, you know, you're sitting down to watch tv, you're expecting ads. Well, you've paid to not have ads, but to have your fridge suddenly give you an ad.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't want to pay. I don't want to pay more for the my TV than I'm already paying. It's ridiculous that I essentially have to pay for an antenna just to have.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you pay with your intention, you pay with your attention or you pay with your money, but you pay one way or the other.

[Kathy Gellis]

Then I was just realizing that I was liking these shows where if I didn't get the commercial breaks, it was screwing up my productivity because I wanted just kind of the noise and like other.

[Leo Laporte]

What am I supposed to pee? I can't pee anymore.

[Kathy Gellis]

I needed the dramatic pause.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I enjoy it. I'm watching a show that's intended for commercial television and you can tell there's a beat. It ends there, the act. And the next act begins immediately. I go, I just didn't see an Ad I didn't see five minutes worth of ads. I love it. On the other hand, you can't watch NFL football without having a non stop barrage of ads every three seconds. So.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well and the thing that's interesting about the new the reason so the new Alexa plus and I will stop saying that a word sorry is that that's paid for whereas the old A was free in theory. I mean you paid for your.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm a Prime member, so everything is free.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Right. But you don't have to have PR prime to use the original A. Ah, you do need to have prime to use the new one or you pay 20amonth and now which by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Is more than having more than prime. So there's no get prime.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Just want you to get Prime.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty clear what Amazon they are.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Looking for money out of this because they think it has more value than the original A had because it is more conversational.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think of A Word plus? Are you liking the new AI A word?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So I've. They've been. I've written a few articles, a few reviews because it does so many different things. I think I really like the more conversational tone. I think not the chatty tone that's annoying. The example you just showed, where it went.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a little chatty.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, but it's so much easier to get it. Like you can ask for what you want without having to use precise nomenclature. I think that is a huge improvement for because it means it's more accessible for everyone in the home. It's not just the one person that needs knows how to get it to turn the lights on or how to get it to turn the TV on. You can now use more natural language. But I have come across and this is the other article I wrote this week which is the problems of AI in the smart home is that it is a lot slower because everything is cloud based now, whereas we had moved towards more local control in the home. And there is still some element of that, especially with matter which is all local. But the majority of the time I find that using the new A is a lot lot slower. It's also less reliable. It won't and this is something I'd be interested in Gary's take on because one of the per. One of the main benefits I suppose of LLMs and generative AI is that they are creative as we discussed earlier, like they can create and do something. Like I can prompt it to do one thing and then Gary could do the same prompt and get a Completely different answer. When you're in your smart home and you want it to turn up the thermostat and turn the lights off, you want it to do that same thing every single time. It does not do that same thing every single time. There is this disconnect between and this is something that both companies that recently launched smart voice assistants in the home. Google just launched its last week, it's Gemini for home have both admitted is a problem because the old form of these voice assistants was this command and control machine learning system. Like you get gave it very specific commands and it knew how to do it. If you deviated from that command at all, it wouldn't be able to do it. Now with the new assistants you can deviate, you can ah, maneuver, you can actually maybe throw in, you know, pink elephant and it will still, it should still be able to do it. It just doesn't always. So this consistency, this reliability has now gone to some extent from the smart home. And then the third point is that clearly going to monetize this and this is going to be a problem in our home because we do not want to have, you know, people don't want to have to deal with ads or paying a lot of money just for a function that you previously got for free, which is using voice control to control your home.

[Leo Laporte]

But as you say, Gary, maybe that's the price we have to pay. I mean if AI is if this stuff.

[Gary Rivlin]

I said that. No, no, no, I didn't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

But you pointed out that they're making no money. So the corollary to that is they've got to find a way to make money.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They're finding the monetization here.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, and that's a perfect setup for like, I think there's going to come a day in the future where all of this, you know, billboard ads, obvious ads are quaint. What I'm worried about is covert influence. I think the way they're going to make money is, you know, whether it's OpenAI or you know, Amazon for its device. You know, Apple with its is like selling to someone like, okay, you ask it a question and, and the answer you give, you assume is based on, well, I've read Consumer Reports, I've read wire cutter kind of thing. And yet the answer they're giving you, the answer they're delivering is because someone bought it. And so at least if I see an ad I can roll my eyes. I could be annoyed. I could like know exactly what's happening. They're trying to get me to do something. And what's particularly scary, there's a study, it was from Anthropic, but In the last six months there was a study that showed that AI models are about 60% more effective at selling us something, selling us on an idea, selling us on a product. And that's where it is now. And so my big fear is like this could be a new version of product placement.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh, I don't think it's a fear. It's already real.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what YouTube has brought us. Right. And that's, well, that's what Andy Jassy.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Said at the same time at that, that piece I was mentioning before, he said there is great potential here for product placements in response to requests. You know, that is, and like you said, say, and this is down to voice as well. It's a much more intimate medium when you're in your home asking something as opposed to typing into a chatbot on your computer, when you can just hop into a different window and Google it as well. When you're just interacting with voice and maybe a screen with showing you some of the results and like it will, it will suggest you, you know, it does have agentic in air quotes capabilities. I think it's at the moment it's more going to APIs and, and getting other systems in the Internet to work using the LLM as the sort of trigger point as opposed to the LLM actually going out and doing stuff. But it feels that there's that much more intimate like relationship with something in your home that you're talking to and the way it talks back to you. For example, when I'll ask it for recipes, it's actually very good at recipes. That's one thing I have really enjoyed. It's so much better than the, the old A and but it'll say I found these fantastic recipes for you. Like, it's like trying to create that relationship with you so that you will trust it. And to your point, Gary, you're more likely to do what it says. And that, yeah, that is that insidiousness of it becoming sycophantism.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I think they're playing some legal chicken here. And I say this cautiously because I don't like a lot of the reflexive regulatory reactions to a lot of students, stupid things that big tech companies do. But I, my brain is firing on two things. One, what you're talking about now with that deception. If we hadn't got at the ftc, I would see that the FTC might try to flex some of its Enforcement muscles for the. In the same ways that they tried to when it came to influencers where. What do you mean you didn't disclose that you were.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they have a lot of rules and there have been fines. I mean it hasn't stopped the behavior here.

[Kathy Gellis]

But as a First Amendment lawyer I get queasy about those things. But there's probably to some extent some space for the government to actually play here if it was actually in the business.

[Leo Laporte]

I think ad should be labeled as ads. I have no point.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, and I. And I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon, we always say this episode brought to you by before every ad.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, well, I think that when norms is true too, for a norm based thing, more people are going to take you seriously and give you credibility because you're. You're identifying which is which.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But I think the ad, you know, I don't think Amazon was. Is doing this without saying it's sponsored.

[Leo Laporte]

But again they say sponsored.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, yeah, it's that it's because it's so much more. I said intimate like you're right there. And it's easier that rather than having to sort of go back to your computer or do you know, get your.

[Leo Laporte]

Phone actually a question for advertisers. Do you think those ads work, the.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Ones on the Echoes now? No.

[Leo Laporte]

You ever bought anything from any one of those?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No, no, they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

They're wasted money.

[Kathy Gellis]

But anyway, the other legal thing, getting back to the.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I don't know, the people on the Crisp company got just an awful lot of attention recently though. So the one that's on the front page of my article.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, because of your article they.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Got a free ad.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's because the Verge is an excellent place to purchase advertising, right? Yeah. Sports nutrition chips and crisps snacks by Quest Nutrition. They're fabulous. You see, everybody should go buy some. And then make sure you credit the Verge.

[Kathy Gellis]

The other area of law that I think getting back to the part about that the smart home technology is not producing anticipated results. I'm not a big fan of how this is getting used. But products liability law exists for a reason and they are dance with that policy value of it. Especially for something I do not like the way that regulators keep trying to do products liability for speech related platforms. I think up with that. That is not something that can comport with the First Amendment at all because. What do you mean? They didn't design a way for people to talk to each other the way you think they needed to talk to each other. That's controlling expression and no, that's not what product liability does. But product liability law came because people were producing physical products that did f. Non expressive things disastrously and they were. People were dying from them. I mean maybe that's a little overstated for the smart home thing, but like that matters for like fire danger for your. Your thermostats and things like that.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, yeah. I assume this is why it's all in both Gemini for Home and Alexa plus are in early access and you have to sign up to go to it and to get it. It's not out there for everyone yet. And I think there's, I'm sure there's legal reasons behind that. But the main reason obviously is also as I've discussed, there's a lot of issues still where it's not working the way it should. But I can imagine there's legal issues there too that they, you know, if it's something like this essentially in a better rather than a public. Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

And you just have basic computer protection law, consumer protection law, which is people buy something and expect it to do what they. What it was advertised to do. And if it can't deliver that, you don't even need products liability law. That's just standard like breach of contract and consumer protection law.

[Leo Laporte]

I will, I will say that I'll quote Alex Lindsay from our MacBreak weekly show who is listening right now. He said that he stopped buying Amazon stuff, including the tablets, the TV and the echoes because they're basically an orifice for ads.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that really is what all of the Amazon stuff has become. That's clearly more important to them than anything else is which funny because they have other ways of making money.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I know that's why that's what. And this was my company and what they've got with Alexa plus, sorry is. Is potentially really game changing in the smart home. The smart home is a complicated, difficult space right now. It has so many great benefits, especially like for assisted living for aging in place for people with disabilities, just for convenience for parents.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of my little frame. My mom loves that.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But having something that's easier to use and that's the one thing I've noticed and I've seen with these new assistants. Well, Gemini for Home is not really out yet but with, with Amazon's version is it's so much easier to interact with, so much easier to set things up and it can actually like when you get a smart device, you put it in your home, it can do all the configuration for you. It can come up with the routines and the automation so you don't have to sit there and act like a programmer in the. Using the app to figure out how to make it work. So there's a lot of value here that with. And I feel like they're just ruining it by throwing ads because you could, people would. If you can make this work, well, it needs to work better than it does today. But there is enough value, I think that people would pay for it or at least include it as part of their prime. I mean people pay for GPT chat.

[Gary Rivlin]

Jennifer, you just make a, you just, you make it a really important point. Point that it's, there's something intimate about voice. There's something intimate. That one's chatgpt. You were able to talk to it rather than type. It's a different relationship. It makes no sense. It's the same large language model, but it is different. And I do think that the winner of the chat wars is going to be someone who figures out voice and personality. You know, you're going to give me the right voices because I enjoy talking. I like, I like, I like your style, I like you're. You know, some people want chatty, some people want just the facts, whatever it is. But it's the companies that figure that out. I think that when the thing I want to know is like so you have Amazon and Apple, you know, in the mid 2010s had a device that's AI and you know, so okay, it was rules based then, not machine learning, not deep learning. How did they miss it? So ChatGPT comes out at the end of 22, 2022. All these other companies figured out how to like weave the large language model into what they were offering. I don't know. I think it's malpractice, sorry for the legal term, you know, on behalf of Apple and Amazon, like, why did it take you almost three years to get to the point where we're now rolling out something in test cases? I don't know, it's a mystery to me. Do you know the answer to that?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, from the smart home perspective, I think the answer is, what I was just discussing is that once it starts to interact with, with devices in your home and actually take actions, it's at another level. And they had to be so careful and make sure it works before doing that. Because if once you're, you know, if you're turning the thermostat up when you shouldn't or you're unlocking the door when you shouldn't, as you know, if you're hallucinating, which is obviously a major issue with the generative AI to date.

[Leo Laporte]

So just open the door. I don't. That sounds like.

[Kathy Gellis]

Santa's here.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But I think your point, I think your point is very valid, Gary is that they should have. I mean they've been doing this for over a decade and I asked question.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon was in a very similar position to Apple not so long ago. Apple was trying to incorporate Siri chat with some sort of AI and having trouble because they were two different kinds of ways of doing things. Amazon actually did the same had they fired the team. They started all over a couple of years ago. Remember they were trying, they said they had pre announced this a word AI and they, and they had to stop, they had to pause and they even had a big meeting with all the executives saying is it ready? Can we ship it? And I think there has been reasonable concern of exactly what you talked about Jennifer, of hallucination and to be clear.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Both the A1 and the, the Gemini for Home. So Gemini for Home has replaced Google Assistant in the home which we should.

[Leo Laporte]

Point out Gemini is the thing that you said you should be using Elmer's glue to keep your pizza together and eating rocks for the mineral content. So this is a, this is a risky area.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well and they've completely, both companies completely threw out the old. So there is no Google Assistant and there is no old A. Although you can use the old A still if you want.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think Apple's going to do the same thing with Schlonger.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I think Siri is going to be. Yeah, the new, the new S will be a completely new.

[Leo Laporte]

Slow mo.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I don't know why they tried initially to piece together the old command and control systems with the new LLM Generative AI and that apparently was not successful. That's why it took Amazon like from they. Yeah, they first announced this in 2023 and they. Or the end of 2022 but they had only just launched it this March. So yes, it's taken. They just had to go back to.

[Leo Laporte]

The hard thing to do.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, it is a very hard thing.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

To do and it's still not, they've still not solved it. And this is also why I think Apple has not stepped in. They have not done anything in their smart home space in a while and I think you know, we're expecting like new HomePod minis potentially.

[Leo Laporte]

If they would do it, if they would do it, I think people would trust them compared to others. Right.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, I think they certainly trust them.

[Leo Laporte]

Over Amazon, they definitely.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The biggest problem with the Apple coming into this space is cost. Their products are so much more expensive. Whereas.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that's. You pay for, you pay for the privacy, you pay for the lack of ads. You pay. You pay a premium not to be interested.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

A lot of people won't do that. I mean, you guys have heard of the telly, right? We. Have you heard of telly?

[Leo Laporte]

Telly.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Have you talked about telly?

[Leo Laporte]

Is that free?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Is that's the free tv? Yeah. That you can buy the. You.

[Leo Laporte]

You. Amazon abandoned their free tv?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, no, this is an actual TV that you get for free. It's called telly. So we wrote an article about get.

[Leo Laporte]

The Internet for free if you were willing to put up with ads. Do you remember that?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, this actually is a television. It's a 55 inch decent TV that has a secondary screen underneath that runs ads constantly while you're watching tv like cnn. And it's free and people really like it because you get a free tv. We wrote, there's an article by Emma Roth on our website on the verge.com she reviewed it, she actually got it. It. She didn't do it as. Didn't like contact the company. She just to. To get a review unit. She just signed up like anyone else does.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Because it's free. I'm. I'm entering it right now. I'm entering my name.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It has a camera that watches you to make sure you're watching the ads and the TV when you say you are.

[Kathy Gellis]

And this is not what I meant just to be clear that I said I like ads on my tv.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you like more ads? It's the smartest tv.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

People want this. People like if you give someone something for free, they put up with the ads. Whereas people are much, you know, spending. I think Apple's new home pod with an arm with the screen, whatever it comes out with is going to be $400. You know, and this is interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

This is probably an 8 or $900 television given what you're getting, good speakers and all of this stuff. And it's all supported by these ads. Well, I'd be interested to see. But then we just put a big piece of tape over.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

You can't do that though. It knows you have to sign a contract saying that it will be in your main. It'll be your main tv. So you can't like put it in the bathroom? Oh no, it has to be your main TV and it has a camera there to watch you and you. It also has like an AI generated host that pops up every time you turn the TV on and, like the news headlines.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'd like to read you some news headlines.

[Kathy Gellis]

Could you do something like get one of those dummies that people kept trying to do their bullying violations with and just set that in the front of the sofa?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But it's like, yeah, I feel like that might be more effort than you really need. I mean, TVs aren't that expensive.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I just want to see if the terms of service actually, like, thought about that and prohibited it.

[Leo Laporte]

No mannequins.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

All sorts of. All sorts of things in there. I mean, there's a very extensive sort of terms of services you sign up for before you get your TV or your telly. I do like the name because that's the English word.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh. I wanted to ask Jennifer, for all your home devices, what accent do they say speak to you?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And so I like to set them that. The ones that can do it to British English, but only not Australian.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't want Australians in your house.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, because people think I'm Australian all the time. But the only one that does that is Siri, but only on the phone.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I would definitely put it Australian if I could say Aussie. Aussie. Aussie would say, oh, oi, oi. That I would do. I use. I use what I think. Okay. I don't want to sound racist here. It's an urban voice.

[Gary Rivlin]

We heard the voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes. It's an urban accent.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Alexa. Yeah. So they now has five new voice or six new voices, where it used to only have the one you just. There was the one a voice, and now there are options you can choose from. And I don't like any of the new options. I do miss the old one, to be fair. The one I've chosen is the sort of. There's the sort of moderate one. The moderate feminine voice is the closest to the old one. And then Gemini for Home also has like 10 new voices you can choose from. So it's kind of. It's nice to have that variety and I think it's nice to have the different kind of, you know, tones and not all being very homogeneous. It's nice to be able to find one that fits into your family.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple euphemistically calls American Voice 3, but I.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But that's on the phone. I don't think you can do the different voices on the home pods. I may be wrong.

[Kathy Gellis]

It seems like if you've got those AI engines attached to it, you should be able to say alexa, speak to me in an Australian accent and they should be able to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

They. You, you say can you change your voices? No, no, no, no, no. You have to do that. Well, I don't know why that is. Hey, we got to take a break. I got ads to do. I got ads to do, you guys. By the way, this portion of the show brought to you by Quest Nutrition, maker of fine cr. Not true. Not.

[Kathy Gellis]

Not yet. Not yet.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Next week.

[Leo Laporte]

Jennifer, they actually got response from that from your article.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh, I don't know. I'm just guessing.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet they did though.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They probably did. You should get a little ad on the Verge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the front page of the Verge.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I've never heard of that brand. Neither had I chose that one was because they said, oh well when I spoke to Panos Panay about the ads and he's like, well we try and you know, we want them to be relevant and like something that you might want to one I'm like I have never heard of this and I don't like nutrition stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Nutrition tortillas style protein crisps I have.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No idea came from had no relevance to me whatsoever. So I'm sure it's a very good chip. But not for me.

[Leo Laporte]

No. None of the ads have ever been relevant to me.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No. An elderberry herbal supplement's not really interesting to me either. So I'm sure they're great. But yeah, it wasn't relevant relevant.

[Leo Laporte]

Z See if I'm za I would be a little annoyed that they've cut off the rest of my name. Like I don't think these are good ads and if you do the customize as you point out, it doesn't effectively do it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No. Well it, it, it. I don't know. I mean I think if more enough people if you have one of these and you don't like them, I would thumbs down as much as you can. Feedback is what I mean. This is what I hear from Amazon a lot when I ask ask these types of questions. They're like, oh, you know, customer feedback is really important. In fact you can tell a when it's annoying you like if you yell at it. They do actually take that into account.

[Leo Laporte]

My wife, my wife never says and I tell her if you just say a word stop, it would stop. But she never says that. She says and I can't say what she says but it's S T F U every single time and she yells it and I just feel like when the robots take over this is not going to go well. I feel like they'll remember. I don't know.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They remember who was nice and who was mean.

[Leo Laporte]

She says, it's a machine. You can do whatever you want. And I said, well, you're right. Of course you're right. We got a great panel having way too much fun. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is here from the Verge. Gary rivlin, from Gary rivlin.com the author of AI Valley. What is are you working on next? A lot of times authors don't like to talk about their next thing.

[Gary Rivlin]

No, actually I'm thinking of AI and energy. I mean, you brought up that. It's voracious and I'm really scared. We're staring down a new energy crisis in 10 years. I'm confident that nuclear and other energy sources will be available. But in this interim period, the next two, five, seven years, while wind and solar are off the table now temporarily nervous about that, we're going to have soaring prices already. Utility prices are going up.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems like the wrong direction to take. And we've eliminated subsidies for EVs for solar panel. I would put solar panels on my roof. You have to do it by the end of the year, otherwise you're not going to get a subsidy anymore. It seems like we're going in the wrong direction.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, the Trump administration is choosing and every energy expert I talk to says it's and we need whatever solar and hydrogen and, and, and, and, and so yeah, I'm really nervous about it and, and the data set. So Mark Zuckerberg has an uncanny ability to say the wrong things all the time. He posts, he posts. I think it was this summer. He's boasting about the new data center they're building in a rural parish in Louisiana. And he shows this map of Manhattan, Manhattan Island. You know, I'm sure we've all been on it. I live on it. And the data center says almost the size. And it was funny like until that point I was managing a few football fields like the size of Manhattan. And so, you know, it's like, and basically it's going to require the energy is in Louisiana of like two and a half. New Orleans is and so they're having to put on, you know, revive coal plans and Gas. Gas. And who's going to pay for all that build out is the local folks. The utilities are going up. So I don't know. It just, I don't have a book yet in my head but I'm starting to write about it and it's really scary.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, this is where the smart home really comes into play in distributed energy management and the distributed grid and people having EVs and batteries and solar in their homes. You can create these virtual power plants. And this is a really interesting space I think for, for energy in the US because it's. There is one of the biggest problems with our infrastructure is we're so reliant on these individual power plants and when they go down we, you know, we lose, we lose our power. Whereas if you can, or when there's the balance, when there's the high demand and these power plants can't cope, they have to do these rolling blackouts, which I know people on the west coast are very familiar with, when there's just way too much demand. Whereas if we could distribute our energy resources and our energy storage that then they can always, rather than having to over build power plants, they can build regular sized power plants and then pull from these virtual power plants once. If we could get more infrastructure but by taking away solar subsidies and the battery subsidies so that people can create, can build this into their homes, we're going to have less chance of that. Although there are a few VPPs coming on, coming online that I've been hearing about recently. But it's definitely slowing down and it's a real shame because I think there's, you know, it used to be oh, you go solar because you know, you're crunchy granola. But now, now people want to have their own resource, they want to be in control of their power because that control has been taken away from us because the companies are having the power plants are having to do these rolling blackouts and shut things down in order to meet demand. So the more people that are more self resilient, the more potential there is for this distributed virtual power plants. So yeah, there's so much of interest in that space in the smart home particularly it's not just all of about turning lights on with your voice.

[Leo Laporte]

The Hoover Dam, which powers most of Las Vegas generates about 1.2 gigawatts of power a year. Trump just killed Esmeralda 7, a solar project in Nevada desert that would have produced 6.2 gigawatts of power. They just killed it for no apparent reason. And this is completely back backwards step. It just doesn't make any sense.

[Gary Rivlin]

Did not announce it, it just, it was learned someone used that phrase earlier during the show. It's like you know, they just pulled the plug and someone figured it out. It's, it's just, it's just insane. But Jennifer, you're Right. On everything you said there is this interesting thing of storage in our homes or like our own mini power plants. But at the same time, demand's going up because. Cause the electrification.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is a good thing.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It's a chicken and egg.

[Gary Rivlin]

No, I mean, electric cars are fantastic. I mean, you know, kind of. There's so many interesting things we could do that are electrified, but it puts more and more demand on the grid. And until we get to that point where all a mini power plant, you know, battery storage. You mentioned it in passing. Like that's another thing that's being. The plug is being pulled on, you know, or the Trump administration is pulling the plug on.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, a cautionary tale next to Castero, which is building Esmeralda among the companies, had donated $5 million for the ballroom, for the White House ballroom. Apparently that's not enough. So just so you know, the price just went up. If you want to get your projects approved, we're going to take a break. Also, Kathy Gellis is here. Great to have you from Tech Dirt. Kathy Gellis is on Bluesky at C A T H Y G E L L I S. Is that your primary social media?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yes.

[Kathy Gellis]

Where I mostly hang out. But I. I was trying to run Bridgy to my Mastodon, but I don't think it works, so. But I go there sometimes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What I do, which I do recommend. I'm a big believer in Posse, you know, post on your own site and syndicate everywhere else. And I use. Yeah, and I use Micro Blog, which is a wonderful project for my blog, but you just use it for short posts. And it will post to Mastodon, Blue Sky. It will post to a huge number of places. LinkedIn. Yeah. Do you know about that, Gary?

[Gary Rivlin]

No, I did not. I just wrote it down.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Manton Reese, who was a brilliant programmer, has been doing this for some time. I pay five bucks. Actually, I pay ten bucks now. But you could do it for five bucks for my website. But every time I post to my website, it automatically goes everywhere else. And so you could just do short posts if you want and then post them to everywhere else. I really, really think this is a. A fact. And by the way, comments come back from those places. So I get comments from Blue Sky. It's really. It's pretty awesome. And Mastodon.

[Kathy Gellis]

So I do my posting generally manually across all these things.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. How do you live?

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, I know it's a problem, but. But I think there's something to be said for every different platform has a different community and a different audience and you kind of want to invest in it. Like, I don't always. Even when I post in the other ones, I change the post.

[Leo Laporte]

That's completely legitimate point of view and I completely agree with it. I have, I think, an equally legitimate point of view, which is you need to own all of your posts, which is on my website, and then they can be everywhere else.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, let's take a break. We'll have more. You know what? When you get a great panel, it's hard to see. Stop talking. I'm really enjoying all three of you. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. By the way, I have a little bit of dog in this hunt because both my kids, I'm trying to get them off the parental teat, if you will. The trough of parental support and Shopify has actually made that possible. Henry, of course, uses Shopify to sell his salts and pickles online. My daughter sells T shirts and, and her poetry books. And they're doing it with Shopify because it makes it easy. When you're starting a new business, it's tough. You gotta, you know, learn all those new hats you have to wear. And your to do list just gets bigger and bigger every day. With tasks that easily can overrun your life. Finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything can be such a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. I love that sound. It means we just made another sale. Shopify is the commerce platform. Millions of businesses, including, including my kids, around the world. 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to Salt Hanks and other brands. Just getting started. Get started with your own design studio. By the way, when I saw Hank's website at first, I said, wow, that's nice. Who did you get to do that? He said, Shopify. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand, brand's style. It can accelerate your content creation. Because they are now using AI. Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that can write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. Isn't that nice? Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Because yes, it's brick and mortar as well. Best yet, Shopify is your E commerce expert. Did I say E commerce? Let's just say commerce expert. World class expertise in everything from managing inventory to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com go to shopify.com/twit shopify.com TWIT another sale. I love it. Thank you Shopify for helping me get the kids off of, off of the, off my wallet off the allowance. Oh, just an update. We have been talking a lot. We talked last week about it. We talked about it on security now about the EU's plan to do something that's been kind of general, generally called chat control. This is a requirement from the EU if they approve it and Tuesday they're voting that all chat platforms offer in the clear text so that they can scan and, and by the way, images too, so they can scan for child sexual abuse material or whatever the government's interested in scanning for. This is a big deal. Signal has already said if they pass this signal will leave the eu. Each country has to vote on this. All the members of the European Parliament. It was a proposal by Denmark. I want to mention that on Mastodon just a couple of days ago, Patrick Brier posted Germany's Minister of Justice today, quote, suspicionless Chat control must be taboo in a state governed by the rule of law. This is huge because Germany has the most votes in the East Parliament. And it's a number of people said, look, they're the swing state on this. They're the ones that will make the difference. Yay or nay to chat control. So very good news. It sounds like the Germans have decided not to support chat control. Would be a very big deal if they did so. Just crossing our fingers. Just an update on that. Let's see. Should we talk about something controversial? Are you in the mood? This is an ongoing story. Last week we talked about Apple and Google both pulling down ICE Block and its ilk apps that were used by people to identify action by immigration control in their jurisdictions. The Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said, we're going to investigate those guys. The prevailing message from government is it puts ICE agents at risk. Apple without, as far as I know, any legal requirement, banned all of the apps. Google, without even being asked, did the same. Now 404 Media says Apple has also banned an app that merely archived videos of ICE abuses. I don't think you could say that this in any way could be used to target ice. It was more to, according to the app's developer to preserve evidence until it can be used in court. Is Apple caving unnecessarily to the government? Kathy is. First of all, this is what you call jawboning, isn't it?

[Kathy Gellis]

Potentially. But I think what you pointed out is why what is going on that is causing Apple and Google to make this decision? Like, is there even any legal pressure being put upon them? Because we are not publicly aware of it.

[Leo Laporte]

As far as we know, there's been been no threat of legal action.

[Kathy Gellis]

Unless they just think that this is so anticipated where if they, if they don't take this action now, they will face a consequence later. In which case, yeah, maybe it is, it is jawboning.

[Leo Laporte]

You could, you could make the case and as the government, I guess has, that ICE agents are potentially targeted by something like ICE Block. Because not only, I mean, the premise.

[Kathy Gellis]

Of ICE Block the police, you have a First Amendment right to document what the police are doing in your community.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Of course, they don't take well to that. And we've seen lately videos of people who are recording ICE actions being forcibly arrested. In fact, news reporters and others being arrested. ICE is acting, to my mind, extrajudicially in a lot of cases.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think that's absolutely the case. And you know, even if they were acting entirely within statutory, this is a police power. One of the reasons we have the First Amendment is because we gave the government a whole bunch of power and we want to make sure it's being used responsibly and not abusively. And the First Amendment gives us a chance to keep track of it. So it is certainly a pro First Amendment value to be able to have apps that do this. It's potentially jawboning if the platform providers are genuinely fearful of some legal pressure either directly.

[Leo Laporte]

Define job bonings.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, thanks.

[Kathy Gellis]

Jawboning is conventionally, it's a. It's. It's a colloquial term, but it's generally being used to describe when a platform is. It's the government pressuring an intermediary to cause to affect somebody else's speech.

[Leo Laporte]

So is this what the Biden administration did, for instance, with Meta during COVID telling them down these Covid disinformation posts.

[Kathy Gellis]

Posts. It's what they were accused of doing. But no, because there was no or else built into that conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, when the Twitter files were published, it looked pretty clear that the government was being very careful about not saying you must.

[Kathy Gellis]

The government can talk to people if they want to hear it and the people can certainly talk to their government because that's the petitioning right that's also directly protected by the First Amendment. So the the case that you're referring to was Murti versus Missouri and it's a garbage case because it was gotcha. You had conversations Meta and Biden, and therefore any platform moderation decisions that happened were totally government driven and that's unconstitutional. Now it's conceivably possible and I think we're seeing it in the Trump administration where the government is pressing on platforms and driving their content moderation decisions. And that is bad. It's not an unsound legal theory. It was unsound in the particular factual posture of what they were saying, complaining about. And the Biden administration, when the attorney.

[Leo Laporte]

General says about Joshua Aaron, the author of Ice Block, we're going to investigate that guy, that sounds like a threat.

[Kathy Gellis]

That sounds like a threat. But that one, that's the threat to the individual speaker himself as opposed to the threat to Google. But there may have been other nudge.

[Leo Laporte]

Nudge, wink, we're going to investigate you. Apple is just one step down the road from that. And maybe that was also. So we don't know because we don't. Now here's another example that just happened. This is from X Prem Takar tweeting, posting, Tik Tok just took down my 8 second video featuring an image of Debbie Brockman, who was a news producer who was forcibly arrested by ice. Tik Tok said it violates the joy of Tik Tok. Maybe it violates TikTok's joy continuing their acquisition by Oracle. I don't know. So there are other social networks doing the same thing.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's a problem. And the fact that we're so dependent on these particular players, we are learning.

[Leo Laporte]

That people under 25, like half of them, get their news from TikTok and other social networks. Your kids. Is that happening with your kids?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yes, definitely. But I don't think it's a bad thing because I don't think they were getting news otherwise. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Better than some news.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Getting it from some.

[Leo Laporte]

My daughter, who's 32, says, dad, this is what we use for search now is TikTok. I said, come on. She said, give me a search. How long is the Golden Gate Bridge? She said, watch. And she searched TikTok and found it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, it also would help if Google itself hadn't just blown up the utility of its own search engines.

[Leo Laporte]

Sucks too. I use Kagi, as I've mentioned before, because I can't use Google anymore. It's horrible.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. I mean, I'm.

[Gary Rivlin]

Oh, go ahead.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

No, no, no.

[Gary Rivlin]

I think what's most insidious here is like, oh, have they been threatened? Like, we're watching it in real time. Meta Apple, you know, all of these companies, Google, they're, they don't want to get on the wrong side of Donald Trump. It's a pretty low bar, a little pretty low price for being on his right side. Say a few complimentary things.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it though, if you're, if you're starting to do stuff like this, is that a. It starts to feel like Apple is acting spinelessly. They are the $4 trillion company.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. I think Gary makes an interesting point, and I may be dismissing the jawboning aspect a little too easily.

[Leo Laporte]

The threat is, for instance, that Trump could say, well, we don't tariff iPhones, but we could.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's no obvious or else here, but given everything that he has said and done, there appears to be an or else. And some of the of it may be other areas of business that these companies are doing. Like, do they have government contracts that they need to protect? Like, is that the core of their business now where they make most of the money? And that they have to protect this corrupt relationship because they don't feel that they can count on the law. On the other hand, they can stand up for things. They can challenge things. I don't know why they aren't. It's a problem when people can't afford the resources to fight back legally. But that's not, not the problem for these, these companies. They can afford the lawyers to fight back when they need to fight back. And I don't know why they're not. And I dropped in the discord a ski that I had today about it was, what's four words that would like, strike fear and you know, for anybody who works with you. And my four words was Google drops its opposition. Like, just, just seeing that, like, that's the scariest thing. When all of a sudden these companies stop defending, defending the people and the users that we thought we were their business. We thought there was a partnership. We're very, very dependent on them and they're just selling us out and expecting that that's the right business decision. And I just don't see how in the long run it can be.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, I joke, like, what's the use of having FU money if you never say that? But I think I'm beginning to think it's the absolute opposite. That once you are this wealthy, once you're that big a company and you have hundreds of contracts with the US government and if you don't do this thing, you're risking billions, tens of billions on a tariff, this kind of stuff. I think the stakes become so high that it's the opposite. Like oh, because you have so much money now, you're more cautious. Young Mark Zuckerberg was very daring compared to present day Mark Zuckerberg who's very conscious of his place, of him being part of the establishment and wants to make footsie with Trump. Whether it's giving him $25 million in cash to get rid of a lawsuit or actually it was a lawsuit, that wasn't much of a risk. But let's give him $25 million. Amazon gave 40.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's what's scary is these companies like CBS and others saying well here, have some money. We know this is a worthless case because of the First Amendment protects us, but have $25 million anyway. That's you're right, that is to me a very scary.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, the big problem with it is that they then don't, it doesn't. Whereas if you go through the courts, you have a decision decision and is resolved and there's a precedent or you know, law has been upheld when you use money like you just mentioned, Leo, you know the company earlier that only gave 500000 for the ballroom, they gave.

[Leo Laporte]

5 million wasn't enough.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

5 million wasn't enough. So now they don't get what they were hoping they would get because bribing someone is not a guarantee you can get what you want.

[Leo Laporte]

And as, as Cory Doctorow said, you don't, you know that when you give the bully your lunch money, it doesn't make him go away, it just makes him hungrier. And I see everybody giving the bully their, his lunch, their lunch money. I well, and now on we're going to face some very interesting consequences because the President has decided that China deserves 150% tariff.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I just feel so much. I speak to a lot of small companies in my on my beat, small smart home companies, startups and they're just, they've just been dying for like five years. It's been killing them this back and forth and now this will just because a lot of them tried to move with the first administrator, you know, the first time and a lot of them moved to come to countries that are now being hit, but a lot of them couldn't move because we just, there are not the options to do the type of manufacturing in many other countries and they had to stay in China and it's just killing. So we've had, I think, I think at least 10 small businesses that I've reported on in the last, like six months that have gone under because of tariffs. And I'm sure there's many, many, many more.

[Leo Laporte]

But so it started on Thursday. You know, the Trump and Ping Xi Jinping administrations have been talking, we've been having trade talks and it, and everybody said, oh, it's going well. In fact, the TikTok deal kind of seemed to be moving along, although we never heard anything from China about that. All of that TikTok news came from the Trump administration. Nevertheless, on Thursday, the Chinese government said it's escalating its curbs on the exports of rare earth metals. These metals are critical to the Silicon Valley, to EVs, to a whole bunch of stuff. Trump said he was blindsided by that and he's hitting back now by saying, okay, the 100% tariffs are back on. I say 150 because. And I'm not sure what the tariffs are. I don't think anybody is. But there were 50% tariffs and it sounded like he's adding another 100% to it. So it doesn't much matter. 100%, 150%, it's untenable. Nobody's going to buy anything from China if it costs twice as much because of tariffs.

[Kathy Gellis]

So this is where. Oh, sorry. This is a supreme moment for the Supreme Court to swoop in here. They're going to hear tariff challenges sooner, before later. They're. There is a question. Trump uses different claimed authority to do different forms of tariffs. And I don't know if the China tariff is the one where might be a fentanyl crisis.

[Leo Laporte]

It might be an emergency.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, yeah, yeah. And like he's not. The Constitution says he doesn't. He's not supposed to be able to do this. But there's some statutory flexibility in certain contexts. And one of the big ones that he was using was the one that two separate courts had found known. No, you don't get to use it here. But there's no injunction. The injunction has been stayed. So even though the Supreme Court is going to hear the merits on a really pretty soon, like, I think it's coming up next month maybe, in which case we might get a decision shortly thereafter, which is pretty fast for the Supreme Court to work in any sort of normal capacity. No injunction. So if he doesn't have the lawful authority to do this, he's. Yet he's exercising unconstitutional power and we're.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing it until they tell you to stop. If the Supreme Court told them to stop, we'd have to pay the tariffs back, which has some consequences. It's hundreds of billions of dollars, by the way. You aren't going to get the money. The companies that paid the tariffs would get the money. I don't think they're going to rebate you for the increased cost of your.

[Kathy Gellis]

You know, I don't know how we. But that is not a reason to, it's certainly not a reason not to enjoin it. It's a reason why that is.

[Leo Laporte]

You could say no more. You could say, let' you know, okay, what's done is done, but stop from now on.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, no, you're going to have to find a way to.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, does the Supreme Court have any law enforcement arm?

[Kathy Gellis]

Not. It's got some leverage. But no, that's, I mean, that's a whole other kettle of fish about when if the Supreme Court, what we have not reached is the moment where the Supreme Court says no and Trump says, well, screw you, I'm doing it anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like we're getting close, am I right?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, we're getting close, but we haven't really gotten there because the Supreme Court doesn't keep telling him no. We haven't actually hit. Maybe that's why delaying that.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they don't want to find out. Maybe they're just, maybe we don't want to find out.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, at that point we're a Potemkin democracy and there's nothing here for either the constitutional balance works or they're.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I like that phrase, a Potemkin democracy.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

So connect a point that Jennifer just made about all these small businesses that are overwhelmed, some are going under because of tariffs. But guess who's getting exemptions? You know, apple with their 24 karat gold gift from Tim Cook to the president and the million dollars for his inauguration and, you know, all of his praise. Well, they're getting exemptions. You know, it's just like it's the unfairness. It's like bidding for government. It's the bidding here. Like, well, if we give you this money, we might get an exemption.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm going to say also when this is all over, if we're still functioning as a going country, I would like to see some corruption charges for the people with the authority to make these decisions because we're being there's a whole bunch of really in charge powerful people, not just in the government but also at all these Other institutions, including private ones, who don't seem to recognize that there is a public interest component to what they end up doing. And they're really just falling over to kiss the ring. And in a very overtly corrupt way. And it seems like there's probably some laws against this and I would like to see those laws enforced because people should not be in a position to feel like these are acceptable decisions that they can make.

[Leo Laporte]

Taiwan says for some reason it says there will be no significant impact on the chip sector from the China rare earth curbs. Maybe they have alternative sources. We have considerable lithium resources, for instance, in the United States that have not been mined. But they're there. And remember the deal that the president made with Ukraine. We get your, your rare earth too. Right. We get your. Even though, again, they have not been mined. So maybe there is some thought that, well, this rare earth thing isn't going to affect us too much. I don't know. FCC chair Brennan and Carr says major US Online retailers have removed listings for millions of prohibited Chinese electronics. So that's a good thing, I guess. Yeah. The Huawei stuff, the ZTE stuff, the Dahua stuff. Hikvision.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is all part and parcel of the trade war.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. And there's a lot of home security companies, camera companies that were on a US Backup, analysts. But it was specifically for like US Government facilities. So like US Government couldn't use, couldn't buy these. But a lot of people, consumers would kind of pay attention to that as well. Because if, if they're not secure enough for the US Government, why should we put them in our homes? But those companies are still selling products. I mean, whether we're going to see. I mean I've seen a lot of those in like Costco and Walmart. I mean these aren't just online.

[Leo Laporte]

And maybe you shouldn't buy a hikvision camera if it's spying on you. I guess that's. Or not secure in some way. I mean, that, that, yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, and it's, that's, and that's the thing. There's no, I don't believe that there's ever been any specific proof that there's anything wrong with these.

[Leo Laporte]

More the, the threat.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It's the idea. And then this, this idea has sort of permeated into all Chinese. All technology made by Chinese companies is inherently suspicious.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the idea. End game here is big walls between the US And China.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The problem is. And somebody's in our club twit saying, what's this have to do with tech. Well, the problem is that everything you're using is made in China right now.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And everything's getting more expensive. Like every. All the smart home products, all that. Like the DJI Osmo that someone just put in that.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of DJI, you better get it before Christmas, because December 23rd federal law could force DJ DJI's equipment to be banned in the U.S. so if you want to get that new drone, get it now.

[Kathy Gellis]

Rule of law, inherently attached is relevant to tech. It's relevant to whether we have the freedom to develop it, is whether we have the freedom to use it. Like, these aren't things where you can just kind of carve this out and leave the politics on the side and just talk about the good stuff. They're inherently interrelated and interdependent, and we probably have been trying to keep them separate to our detriment for many years up until this administration, when it's just not possible to keep that silo anymore. Because everything that this administration does affects every aspect of our lives, including the ones that we want to talk about here.

[Leo Laporte]

The deadline for the FCC audit, The National Defense Authorization Act's audit of DJI is December 23rd of this year. If the audit is not completed or comes back negative, then the DJI will be automatic, added to the FCC covered list, which means you won't be able to buy. It'll be one of those Chinese products like hikvision and Huawei that you won't and Dahua that you won't be able to buy. Despite the fact that no one's ever shown that these, by the way, the most popular drones in the United States by far are a threat. Maybe they are. I don't know. Maybe the Chinese are spying on. On me when I fly it over my house. I don't know.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean, and this. I have not done enough research into this. And Gary, maybe this is a good new book for you, but there is a real distinct. That does seem to be a distinction between some companies based in China and companies that do actually have ties to the Chinese military government. Yeah, well, and like, they actually are. Have some have. Are controlled by or influenced by. I mean, most. Most companies in China are influenced by the government as well. The assertion is US are influenced by the government, but there are some that have specific ties.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little different in China because the Chinese government requires what they call golden shares in all companies. So they do have board seats, they do have shares. They do have some influence on those companies. And of course, legally, they have Absolute control over those companies. Right. And I can understand the fear. Speaking of which, we're waiting to hear what happens to TikTok. It is very unclear what's going to happen to TikTok is which whether Tik Tok will it looks like the money from advertising will still go to China which is bizarre. Oracle and a number of other companies including by the way the Saudi Arabians will have ownership 80% ownership of tik Tok China is going to according to the go the federal government, our government is going to license the algorithm them to us and then and you'll have to start using at the end of the year a new TikTok America app.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

That'S gonna go so well.

[Kathy Gellis]

Still the case. I heard that they had to use another app and then they changed their mind.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's still the case to my knowledge.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, that's part of the deal because yeah, good luck.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know because it Chinese have literally said nothing about this. It's all come from the Trump side. So I don't know.

[Gary Rivlin]

I've done no report reporting on this but like $14 billion. I, I maybe it's so low.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so low.

[Gary Rivlin]

That's nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

14, it's worth so much more than that.

[Gary Rivlin]

Tick tock is so valuable. I mean American tick tock. I guess if they're not getting the advertising piece that changes the equation but like it just seems such a sweetheart deal. I'm it.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't think it's worth more because I think it's a golden goose. I think well there is some question alienating.

[Leo Laporte]

Would all of those 140 million people who use TikTok in the United States, would they continue to use TikTok America?

[Kathy Gellis]

I think the answer is no. I mean there's a tipping point where maybe the answer could be yes but I think the answer is probably I would bet on no because the same reason they're not using livejournal like this is apps are created by their users and they're created by the communities. If you antagonize the users and antagonize the communities, they go find other platforms to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Netflix is sitting there waiting just and.

[Kathy Gellis]

They'Ve already ruined it for so, so many of their users anyway. So I think there's already a withering that's in process where the moderation has changed and some people didn't get access to it for a while and had to take their businesses elsewhere like we are. They already started the exodus and have done nothing to, you know, stem the bleeding. I think they're taking a lot for granted that their user base would want to stay because we're also starting to innovate new choices. Anyway, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let'S take another break and we'll find something less political to talk about. I don't know what that would be.

[Kathy Gellis]

But it doesn't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

TiVo. We'll talk about TiVo. I think we can talk about TiVo safely.

[Kathy Gellis]

You'd be surprised.

[Leo Laporte]

Kathy Gellis, the bearer of bad news. Hello, Kathy. Techdirt.com and cgcouncil c o u n nsel.com and of course, Kathy Gellis on Blue Sky. Wonderful to have you. Gary Rivlin, author of AI Valley, which, by the way, I still highly recommend as a survey of what's going on in the world of AI. Gary rivlin.com I look forward to the next book. That will be your. Your dozens.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, and I don't want to do a Baker's, a Baker's Dozen, but yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Lucky 13, let's go for it. It's great to have you too, Gary. And of course, Jennifer Pattison, too. Was it you whose teenager was calling your name earlier?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I heard somebody shout, just yelling, mom.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so universal, the Internet sound, Mom. I used to hear that because I would set the, the router to go off at 10pm so that the kids would go to bed instead of staying up all night on whatever it was then. It wasn't TikTok. It was probably, I don't know what it was. Probably a live journal. No, it was pre, pre YouTube. My kids are in there. So.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

MySpace.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, MySpace. I think it was Neopets, actually. Do anybody know what that is? Anyway, I would hear dad about 1001. I would say to my wife, wait for it, the Internet's down. Anyway, great to have you. Jennifer Pattison. Tuohy from the Verge. A great panel this week, all three of you. Our show brought to you by Bit Warden. Now here is a a sponsor that I love and use religiously. Well, I use them all, but this one's fantastic. It's the trusted leader in password, passkey and secrets management. Bitwarden is the best password manager I can say that consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by both G2 and software reviews. 10 million users, 180 countries, 50,000 businesses. One of the reasons I use Bitwarden is because it's open source. I think that's super important. Important when you're talking any tool that uses encryption, you want to know that the protocols it uses that the software is safe, secure, doesn't have any back doors. Open source is the only way to be sure of that. The other reason, though, I think open source is important is because Bitwarden is constantly improving, constantly getting better. For instance, they just solved a really big problem. People using agentic AI. If you have an AI, you wanted to buy something online, you got to give it your logins right to Amazon or to Delta Airlines or whatever. That's problematic if you think about it, because you're sending your password out into the void. There's a solution. Bitwarden has just launched an MCP server. It's on the bit warden GitHub. Soon it'll have full documentation and release. But right now, and this is the beauty of it, it's open source, so it's out there on the GitHub. People can look at it, bang on it, make sure it's doing everything right. What this does, it lets you securely integrate your AI agents and your credential workflows. And it stays. It keeps your credentials local on your machine. It's a secure, standardized way for AI agents to communicate with Bit Warden users. Get a local first architecture. Your passwords never go outside your network. The Bit Warden's MCP server is running on your local machine. It keeps all the client interactions within the local environment, which minimizes exposure to external threats. Very important. It also. And another reason I like Bitwarden, because I'm a nerd, is the command line interface. I love it. Well, the MCP server works with the command line interface so users can opt. You can also opt for self hosted deployments for greater control over system configuration. Your data again completely local. The MCP server is an open protocol for AI assistance. They enable AI assist systems to interact with applications used commonly. Not just content repositories and business platforms, but developer environments that give you a consistent open interface, a secure interface. And this is why the Bitwarden MCP server is so important. It's driving secure integration with agentic AI. A foundational step towards securing agentic AI adoption. Just one of the many reasons I love Bitwarden. Infotech's research groups just put out a report called Streamline security and protect your organization. The report highlights how enterprises in the Forbes Global 2000 are frequently turning to Bitwarden to secure identity and access at scale. The report emphasizes the growing complexity of security in the modern age. Globally distributed teams, fragmented infrastructure credentials dispersed not just across teams, but with contractors and many devices. Enterprises need to address these issues. And they do. They address credential management gaps and strengthen their security posture by investing in scalable enterprise grade solutions like Bitwarden. The open source helps too. Bit Warden setup is easy. It supports importing for most password management solutions. Quick to move When I moved to Bitwarden, Steve Gibson did the same thing. It took us just a few minutes. The Bitwarden open source code regularly audited by third party experts. Of course, Bitwarden also meets SoC2 Type 2 GDPR HIPAA CCPA compliance. It's ISO 27001200:2002 certified. It's just what you want. It's the way to go. It's the first thing I install when I just set up my new framework desktop, put Cashio s on it. First thing I install is Bit Warden because I'm going to use it to log in everything else. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan or and this is really important because it's open source free forever across all devices if you're an individual [e-mail] I pay 10 bucks a year for the premium version, but you don't have to bitwarden.com TWIT I couldn't recommend it more highly. It's what I use. Bitwarden.com TWIT we thank them for their support. We are two days away from the end. This is the end, my friend. Of Windows 10. The end. Microsoft is basically backing down. The EU has said no, you can't stop providing security Updates for Windows 10 October 14, which means that at least if you're in the EU, you can use it for another year and continue to get security updates. It also means that Microsoft's doing the security updates, so why won't they give them to everybody? Well, it's getting easier. Yeah, because, oh, they want us to.

[Gary Rivlin]

Buy Windows 11 because they want you to buy. That's a trick question.

[Leo Laporte]

They want you to buy a new computer. Here's the article from Gadget. How can you, how can you get Windows 11? Well, if your computer is compatible, which many are not, you can just do it for free, which is great. Thank you Microsoft. You can buy a new PC that has Windows 11 pre installed or Engadget points out, or just get a Mac or Chromebook and you can Forget about Windows 11 and sign up for something called Extended Security updates. And Microsoft has slowly been making that easier and easier. If you have a thousand Bing points, which if you use Windows you probably have Bing points, or if you back up your settings to Windows OneDrive, you get it for free. Or you could pay $30 for a 12 month extension. But you know, let's, it's, it's a big story. Two days from now, the last patch Tuesday Update for Windows 10 and after that you're on your own, buddy. And I think most experts, including Steve Gibson and our Windows guys, Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell say you probably should not use Windows 10 without security updates. That's a bad idea. That's a bad idea. Other stories, Governor Newsom of California has banned, signed a bill banning loud commercials on streaming. Have you noticed this, Jennifer, that when you're watching YouTube TV, the commercial.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, didn't they used to do that on regular TV as well?

[Leo Laporte]

Like it, FCC made it illegal.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Okay, so now. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but FCC does not regulate streaming.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So now just in California, how's that going to work?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the rest of you going to get loud ads. That's all I can say. It doesn't start till July 1st of next year.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So is this going to be like what was the, there was a recent great law that got put in or not didn't get enacted around TVs about owner subscriptions. That was it. There's a, gonna be one of those things that, that gets pulled away. Remember the subscription?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, the fc. Yeah. The ftc.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They were gonna make you so that you can cancel everything really easily. I just had a terrible experience trying to cancel something and they were like, no, you can't.

[Leo Laporte]

They said, that's right.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

What, that's, isn't that illegal? And it's like, oh no, not anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Not anymore.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But I feel like this is one.

[Leo Laporte]

Of those Angelina Khan and the Biden administration said click to cancel. It has to be as easy to cancel as it was to, to create the account. Everybody went, thank God. Because of course they don't let you cancel. You have to, you can't do it. You can buy online but you got to call somebody to cancel, that kind of thing. And then the FTC under Trump said.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Now, now this is what these great, we get these great things that politicians do that never seem to actually happen. The things that everyone agrees we want, we don't. No one wants loud ads. No one wants to have to call someone to cancel. And these things never actually, actually seem to happen. I just, I guess I'm excited by.

[Gary Rivlin]

This, but I feel like it wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

The Trump administration, It was the 8th Circuit Court which voided the FTC click to cancel rule back in July based on, oh, it's a Too hard.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Lobbying. Lobbying is what happened.

[Gary Rivlin]

I saw we lost you, Kathy.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And we need the legal opinion.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I, I think that's. I think that's a policy that's. That could probably survive. I don't think. I don't know what happened at the 8th Circuit, but that's something where it came from, whatever authority the FTC derived to be able to do whatever it wanted to do. And I think it was probably a legitimate exercise of the power, of its power. But sometimes it can be controversial to figure out exactly what the FTC really does get to do, which is kind of why it's so controversial about whether Trump can fire the people who run the fcc, because it's a of lot little bit nebulous in terms of where it sits in our constitutional order federally. But that was an internal policy that they thought, based on their own authority, they could enforce. And then the 8th Circuit said no, but maybe, you know, down the road somebody might say, yes, but this is the one that's happening.

[Leo Laporte]

This is what the 8th Circuit justices said. We hold the FTC's rulemaking process was procedurally insufficient. And, and petitioners, you know, your cable company, your phone company, demonstrated prejudicial error, demonstrated that the FTC was prejudiced. We need not address petitioners other substantive challenges to the rule. While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, that's what the judges call click to cancel. The procedural deficiencies of the rulemaking process are fatal. So that. So it's kind of a technical argument. They didn't.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I. And that's probably not a very good technical argument.

[Leo Laporte]

He also said it would cost $100 million. And the judges said, oh, that's way low. It's going to cost a lot more than that.

[Kathy Gellis]

But in terms of. To answer Jennifer's question, so what Gavin Newsom did is he's got a statutory authority that now will get administered. But from the state of California. Now you get into weird things of which I think you also were alluding to, which is, wait, California's running the Internet. Like, how does it get to do that? And those are fair questions. This is why preemption, federal preemption tends to be important. Where we put this back at Congress.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't want 50 different rules about something that is national or even international.

[Kathy Gellis]

But since Congress is out of business, the federal government is falling apart. Like, at this point, this is what's going to happen to muddle through and we'll clean this up.

[Leo Laporte]

Later they passed an AI law they've been very aggressive about. Well, and we have a very good privacy law here in California.

[Kathy Gellis]

You have a. One that likes to do a lot of stuff, but whether it does stuff that it's supposed to do, allowed to do, and does it effectively, not everybody agrees that it's quote unquote good.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, and it makes it. Again, this is something I see in the smart home from the businesses I talk to because there's like, Illinois has specific laws against like facial recognition. And so there's different, different laws across different states that make it very difficult for manufacturers to come up with products that can work. I mean, you are, you just basically can't use their products in different state. In the states that have laws, rather than them trying to adapt to the laws.

[Gary Rivlin]

Isn't the theory that we're raising the bar that instead of if California says this is the rule, like I remember this with cafta, with, you know, should.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Everyone else then get it?

[Gary Rivlin]

Everyone, you know, has to like, well, we don't want to get rid of the California Illinois market. They're big markets. So. So we're going to make sure that we're improving our products so it qualifies in California and therefore everywhere else. That's in theory what it's supposed to be.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, in theory that sort of violates the dormant commerce clause of the Constitution for a state like California to just throw its own independent weight around because it's going to have such a distorting effect on the rest of the country. But then again, it's the fifth largest economy in the world. It's going to throw its weight around and here we are. So, so there's a lot that California is going to be able to get away with and companies are going to, I mean, some of them, they'll challenge. They'll just challenge it straight out. NetChoice will bring all sorts of litigation against a lot of stupid California laws. But some of it, they're going to just let it go and it's going to be a lot cheaper to just do what California public policy is telling them they need to. Because also it's probably the right business decision. If there is a political wave of support for policies that say no to certain corporate practices, it's really stupid for the court for the companies to keep doing it unless there's like a damn good reason not to. Like on the speech front, where they're in enabling user speech. Yes, I think it's really important to hold the line and make sure that they're really doing the pro speech, pro user choices that they're making. But for the other stuff that everybody is to going point when you antagonize your users, your users and if the users have no choice to like put pressure back on the company, they're going to run to their regulators and the regulators are going to pass a law. And the law may be stupid, bad and or unconstitutional but that's what you get for poking the bear you silly company that you know should have made better decisions.

[Leo Laporte]

Foolish. You foolish company. Silly company. Speaking of silly companies, silly Synology made a rule that said if you're going to use a Synology nas, which I do and we've recommended for a long time, you have to use one of our hard drives in the new NAS's. Well apparently sales plummeted and Synology has backed down. Now I think Synology had a point because I'm sure people were you could buy the NASA's an enclosure and put any old crappy drive in. In fact that was one of the selling points of Synology is they don't have to all be the same drive. And then people complain to Synology, well my NAS isn't working and it turns out it's because they put bad hard drives in there. So Synology said well no, you're going to have to buy approved drives. And right now the only drives we approve are the ones we sell.

[Gary Rivlin]

The Apple model.

[Leo Laporte]

The Apple model model. It's for you. We're doing it for you. Don't you understand? We're making bet use life better for you. Users were furious. I mean it was a huge uproar on Reddit. Apparently it caused so many people to stop buying Synology NASA's and go to other companies that Synology has now backed down. They haven't admitted fault but and critics say it's damaged your reputation permanently. But they have said okay, go ahead, use whatever the hell you want. Which points out that they really was no technical reason for the decision.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, how do you spell greedy?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Sonos. I spell it. Sonos. S O N O S. I don't know, don't get me started on that one. TiVo has decided to stop making hardware.

[Gary Rivlin]

Aw, no, wait, wait. When I heard that it was like, like that, you know, wait, so and so died. I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought they were dead. Oh my God, they've been dead all this time. TiVo which was the king of the DVR, right? I mean it wasn't the first. There was replay before them and I think Microsoft had a product but TiVo was like the best. In fact I even one of my 13 books was about. It was Leo Laporte's guide to TiVo. But it was the series one TiVo they if the thing is, I had several, I think three or four. I had one for every TV TiVos with Lifetime subscriptions.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Whose Lifetime?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, not mine. No, I'm still alive. TiVo's not. The truth is as soon as YouTube TV and Hulu and the other, you know, slaying the streaming solutions came along with their built in dvr. So it really was no reason to have any hardware. Hardware. And I didn't really need a TiVo anymore. I love to.

[Gary Rivlin]

They gave it. Their cable companies gave it as for free. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And yeah, even though those set top boxes were not as good. I mean TiVo is still better, I think.

[Gary Rivlin]

No, no, seriously, let's give TiVo it's do like when I had the idea like wow, you could pause and rewind TV. Oh man, it was, it was. I had my TiVo. I. I loved my TiVo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, me too.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The Janet Jackson super bowl incident alone made that TiVo wardrobe malfunction one of.

[Gary Rivlin]

The best terms ever.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember at the time, I don't know how long ago was that? It was a long time ago, but I remember even I'm sitting watching with my kids. I said, what? Wait a minute. And I would. I rewound it. Which you could do with live TV on TiVo, which is amazing. TiVo did say, by the way, we.

[Gary Rivlin]

Have our use case. Here it is.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the most rewound TiVo incident ever. Was the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction. I don't know what my kids made of it. They were. Gosh, it was. It must have been 15, 20 years ago.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

How innocent we all were back then.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, it was a different world. It really was.

[Gary Rivlin]

It was all about a nipple.

[Kathy Gellis]

Shoot. I did not yet have my jd.

[Leo Laporte]

You're what? Oh, you. Yeah, you weren't even a lawyer.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think I was in. In law school during the Janet Jackson thing.

[Gary Rivlin]

I'm gonna guess mid-90s. 30 years ago.

[Kathy Gellis]

No, I think it was later than that.

[Gary Rivlin]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it wasn't because my kids are 30 and 32 and they were maybe 8, 7, 6, young.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, I feel like the Janet Jackson thing was when I was in law school somewhere after 2000.

[Leo Laporte]

Too bad there's no easy find out when. February 1, 2004. So it was 21 years ago.

[Kathy Gellis]

I was right. It was my 1 LU.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Wow.

[Gary Rivlin]

2004 I did ask Claude, my favorite chatbot, how comes Roku figured out but TiVo did it and it gave like this very long answer of it. Basically it's a textbook example of corporate overreach. Like they just, they just, just started like suing folks, you know, rather than saying like hey wait a second, our core product isn't as important as it was. I mean, I don't know, I kind of asked this about you know, Amazon before. Like why did they blow it? They're right there in the center. Yes, the landscape changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Gary Rivlin]

But you know, instead of selling this expensive piece of hardware, TiVo figured it. Excuse me A Roku figured it out. You know, we'll just sell this thing and we'll be a middle person. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

29. That's why. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean a lot of it is, is the legal environment that these companies are operating in between patent claims and that secondary liability for copyright. These have been very distorting things on any of the market trying to innovate any of this technology. And we. The answer to the question which Claude may not have given, but my answer would be because we had way a very dysfunctional IP environment and that inherent inherently skewed the development of all of these products and companies and their futures.

[Leo Laporte]

TiVo was only five years old when the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction happened. It started in 1999. So that's. It was a brand new product at the time.

[Gary Rivlin]

Okay, this is, this is Claude, the brutal truth. TiVo became a patent troll.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It's like Blockbuster and Netflix. I mean that same. That's the business case study there. And then also iRobot and the room, the robot vacuum world because that's what they did. They just tried to defend their patents for 10 years and didn't innovate and lost the war.

[Leo Laporte]

So is iRobot already dying? Is it done for iRobot? Is it over?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They're still around. There's still a company called iRobot that makes vacuums called Roombas. But if there is any DNA left. There is no DNA left really from the original product and the original company. It's all been made, made and designed and manufactured in China. Although they say there's some design happening still in the U.S. but it's, it's, it's definitely a completely different company.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you not recommend buying a Roomba at this point? You would buy.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Not the new ones. No. I've just started testing the new ones that recently and they are nothing like the old roombas. They're completely different.

[Leo Laporte]

That's sad. Same thing happened to Segway. When Segway was made in New Hampshire, it was this amazing thing and then it got bought by 6 spot or some. Some Chinese company. Yeah, our, our.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

We had made a robot vacuum too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I bet we had the original clear.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It's see through. Oh, no, that's dji. Sorry. I'm thinking DJI is DJ Flying rope.

[Leo Laporte]

Vacuum would be good because it could go downstairs.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It does not fly, but it is so Segway. So DJI made a see through robot.

[Leo Laporte]

Vacuum, which everybody wants. I want to see what's happening inside.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Segway Mode made a robot mower, a robot lawn mower. And it's actually quite good. I do. I have tested that and it's quite good. But yeah, because the. Both companies, both DJI and Segway, you know, we're using their navigation tech and they're like, oh, well, what's a really popular thing in the technology technology space right now? Robotics in the home. Mowers and vacuums. And so they're like, well, DJI knows how to make things move around and not bump into things. So it put the technology, its technology into robot vacuum. And it's. Like I said, it's. It's see through. That's kind of. Its one kind of difference because it's like all the other robot vacuums.

[Leo Laporte]

Other than you can see the dust.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

You can see everything.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, I guess that's how you believe it's doing its job. But I just need to jump in here and say that there's something fundamentally different about letting, letting loose. An autonomous thing that's going to suck up dust versus one with rotating blades.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Kathy Gellis]

Let loose in the community.

[Leo Laporte]

An autonomous lawnmower seems a bad idea on the face.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The interesting thing about the lawnmowers is they don't use big blades like a manual lawnmower. They use tiny little razor blades.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's so much better.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They just shave a tiny, tiny, like millimeter.

[Leo Laporte]

Shaves your lawn off it.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It does. It literally shaves your lawn. That's how it works.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, but it looks good. Is it really, like, constantly?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, it's.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, it's. You run it constantly. It runs like, you know, seven to eight hours a day. And it. But it's much healthier for your lawn because your lawn is just getting trimmed a little. Rather.

[Leo Laporte]

It's why I get a haircut every three weeks. I don't, I don't. It's better. I don't want to. Yeah. No.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, but you pay a human being, not an autonomous.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't use an autonomous. An autonomous barber.

[Gary Rivlin]

And back to electrification eight hours a day.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I know this. It's for people with battery powered.

[Leo Laporte]

It is for people with estates. I mean you have to have a lot of lawn to make that make sense.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, you could. They're a lot less expensive now. They've come down in price significantly, but they're still around. I think the least expensive, which is one of the Segways, is about $1,000. So they're still not inexpensive. But they used to be five or six or even ten.

[Leo Laporte]

It would almost. Almost be better. It would be like for a golf course kind of thing, right?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, Well, I mean that's. I think a lot of like Husqvarna was the big name in this space for a long time and yeah, you would see those on golf courses. But most people that. I mean they're very popular in Europe because people have like postage size yards and it's easier to just have this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a little thing.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh yeah. And they run. Yeah. The I series is the one that I tested most recently recently. These are the new. Yeah, the Navamo. So the least expensive one I think is at 999. And it doesn't use guide wires, so you don't have to wires. But it uses GPS navigation.

[Gary Rivlin]

Dog and cat.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So they recharge. They'll go home to recharge and then they'll just run around on their battery. But it's better than like a gas powered lawnmower. Intense.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Sound.

[Leo Laporte]

I would buy one.

[Kathy Gellis]

I would.

[Leo Laporte]

In California we're not allowed to have lawns anymore, so I don't need it. But if I had a lawn, I think that would be cool.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They're not quite there yet, but they're definitely getting better. It's an interesting. It's an interesting space. And they are better for your lawn than using a lawn mower.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Because of that. Because of that.

[Leo Laporte]

And they can't cut off a limb. They could just slice off a little.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Right, Exactly. So that's what happened to us. My husband managed to slice off a bit of skin, but that was the. That was the extent of the damage. And they do. They do have AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Such a patient person. Oh my God.

[Kathy Gellis]

I knew there was blood and guts. We finally got to blood and guts on twit. It's all fun and games till someone loses a.

[Gary Rivlin]

How did he do that?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Did he stick it? Entirely his own fault. They are quite.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh sure. It wasn't the man eating robot.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

They are quite smart. They do have obstacle recognition. So like if there's, if there's something in the way, they will stop and go around it. They won't just run over you. But he was helping me assemble them and he's used to robot vacuums, which.

[Leo Laporte]

We have don't have razor blades underneath.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So he pick. And he's used to picking up robot vacuums and putting them on his lap and doing like the setup. And so he picked up. Do not put all the rotating on his lap.

[Gary Rivlin]

Wait on his lap. What did he cut?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I sliced the top of his thigh.

[Kathy Gellis]

This could have been much worse.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It could have been bad. You know, it was Mo's fault, to be fair.

[Kathy Gellis]

It was fault.

[Leo Laporte]

If he does get anything sliced off, don't take Tylenol. Okay, I'm just saying we're gonna pause.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I managed to stay away from politics for like five minutes. Leo note.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what? Before we go, I know everybody wants to know, what robot vacuum do you recommend Jennifer Patterson to so you can.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Get a sneak peek? I haven't published my review of this yet, but I've just almost finished testing it. It's a robot called the Matic M A T I C and it's a brat. It's a new model. It's not from one of the big Chinese or other manufacturers. They're all Chinese now actually. But it is a made by a former Google Nest designers engineers. And it's really unique because it uses entirely vision to navigate, doesn't use lidar, which is what most of the robot vacuums do these days is use lidar, which is fine. Lidar works well in the home. But this one with its vision navigation works much more like an autonomous vehicle rather than a kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can talk to it. You can say, hey, clean this up.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

So it doesn't have voice control yet, but you can use the app to tell it to go to clean specific areas. But it's. It doesn't get stuck. And that's what most rope. The problem with most robot vacuum vacuums today, even though they've tried many things to fix it, like even one now that has an arm to pick stuff up to get out of the way the socks. But if you see the way it moves, it moves in a completely different way for most vacuums. And it just. It has. It's also can work entirely locally. It does not need a connection to the Internet. It does not send your maps to the Internet. You can connect it to WI Fi if you Want to control it remotely, but you do not have to. It all works locally. It actually uses Nvidia chips processing onboard AI.

[Leo Laporte]

You're kidding.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Of manage. It's really. It's a really interesting product. It's been going through a lot of development. So I started testing it a few months ago and they're still slowly adding features, but they just got to the point where they released an Android app. So now it's not just iOS. So this is why, you know, I'm at the point where I think about to publish my review and I. I'm a big fan of it. I think it's a really good product there. It has one major flaw though.

[Leo Laporte]

If you slice off anything from your husband.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm just interested where her threshold is about what is its effective product.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the flaw?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, one of the great things about robot vacuums is they clean under your bed and under your couch, which no one ever does.

[Leo Laporte]

Lots of dust bunnies. Yes.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

This cannot get under because it has a higher vantage point. And its high vantage point means it is able to navigate much better around your home. But it also means it's too tall to go under furniture, which is a big issue if you want it to clean under your furniture. However, most of the time a robot vacuum gets stuck is probably when it goes under something.

[Leo Laporte]

No, there was. That's why I stopped using the Roomba.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It would.

[Leo Laporte]

Every night in the middle of the night, it would go and start going. And there was a hutch that was just. It thought it could go under, but it couldn't.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It would get stuck and it would.

[Leo Laporte]

Go bang, bang, bang. And I would get up in the. Every. For like a week, every 2am every morning, get up and I would put it back on its charger and go back to bed. Finally, the last time I've told this story before, I put it. I didn't put it back on the charger. I put it underneath the wheel of my wife's car. Alas, she did not drive over it. But it was our last Roomba because it was so annoying.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Nice thing about this, it doesn't make noises.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't go.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It doesn't. And that is. I mean, I have a lot of robots in my house. They make so much.

[Kathy Gellis]

You almost have the cleanest house ever.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, she's got teenagers.

[Leo Laporte]

She's got teenagers.

[Kathy Gellis]

Teenagers and pets. But all the robots, constant battle back and forth.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But the. The robo rocks are very good too. If, if you want one that can go under your.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's mostly What I'd want it for is the dust bunnies, because it's easy to clean up everywhere else but the. Under the bed. Who wants to go there?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, yeah. But the other problem with robot vacuums is they're noisy.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Gary Rivlin]

And that's.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And the MATIC does a really good.

[Kathy Gellis]

Job compared to a regular vacuum, though.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well, yeah, yeah. But they run. They have to run more often than you would have run a regular vacuum. So you. It comes to the point where you're like, balancing like, well, do I want a clean floor or do I want to actually watch this TV show? Like, I can't hear it if the robot's going. So you. Most people would have planned for them to run when they're out of the house, but then they get stuck and you come home and they've only cleaned half the house. And then you're. Frustration.

[Leo Laporte]

We never leave home anymore. So that.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And that's the other thing, because most people are working from home now. You want a robot vacuum that isn't going to be super loud.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And they've done a really good job with that. It's not super noisy. Some of them these days are just crazy loud. And they have these suction docks that go and suck all the air out. And it sounds like a jet engine going off in your house, but that's that this doesn't have one of those docks. So if, you know, you do have to. Empty. Empty it's been. Which some people will see.

[Leo Laporte]

We're gonna take it. Take a little break. Last break. But I. I do have a rope. One robot story for y' all in just a little bit. Speaking of robots. But first, a word from our sponsor. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by ExpressVPN. This is more than a sponsor. This is the VPN I use, and I. It's the only one I recommend going online without. ExpressVPN. How could I say this? It'd be like driving without car insurance. You could be a great driver. You probably, you know, never have an accident. But the problem is you can't account for those crazy other crazy people on the road. So why take the risk, right? Everyone needs ExpressVPN. Why? Well, every time you connect to an unencrypted network, whether it's a cafe, a hotel, an airport, your online data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can see you. And there are tools, cheap tools that let them gain access to and steal your. Your personal data. You just. It doesn't take technical knowledge. A 12 year old could do it. Just get a WI fi pineapple and they can impersonate your. This is what one trick they use. They impersonate, they, they, you're on. Usually you're at the airport, you're online, they fire up the WI fi pineapple. One of the things you can see is all of the, all of the networks that your computer normally hooks up to all the WI fi networks. They pick your house and they, they say, I'm here, you're home and I'm right next to you. I'm the most powerful WI fi. And your computer goes, oh, we're home. And it's powerful and it joins it. Meanwhile, you're going through the hacker's computer to get to the Internet and they get everything. Hackers can make up to $1,000 a person selling your personal info on the DARP web. But see, even if that scenario was going on at the, at the hotel or the airport, you fire up Express ExpressVPN. Even if they impersonated your computer, which by the way, they couldn't because they can't even see your computer. But even if they could, you're creating a secure encrypted tunnel between you and the outside world. All they would see is gobbledygook. But the VPN you use, the choice you make is super important because you have to trust the VPN I trust, I love. I use ExpressVPN because they go the extra mile to make sure your data is absolutely in invisible and they invest to make sure that they're the best VPN out there. No logging, it runs in ram. That trusted server technology they use cannot write. It's sandbox, it cannot write to the hard drive. And furthermore, they run custom version of Debian that wipes the entire hard drive every morning on reboot so there is no record of your visit at all. You can even use cryptocurrency to pay for ExpressVPN so you can be completely, completely anonymous. One of the many reasons ExpressVPN is the best VPN, it's super secure. It'd take a hacker with a supercomputer a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. It couldn't be easier to use. They've got apps for everything. You fire up the app, you click one button, you're protected. IPhone, Android phone, laptops, Linux, Windows, Mac tablets, you can even put it on your router. In fact, they even sell great routers with ExpressVPN Pre installed, rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. In fact, when I travel, I use it. I gotta catch the Niners game. Right. Or my favorite show. And it keeps me secure at the same time. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twitt that's E-X P-R-E-S-S VPN.com twit to find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn vpn.com twit I said we'd talk about robots. The Optimus robot from Tesla. By the way, Elon's all in on this. This is why he's going to get a trillion dollar payday if he can deliver. Not quite there yet, although he has promised dancing Optimus robots at the next shareholder meeting, which is like a month off, so we'll see. He got scooped a little bit by a company called figure 3. Have you seen the figure 3 robot? This is supposed to be a household robot.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, this is very interesting. I would like to see a real live demo though, rather than a video.

[Leo Laporte]

It does kind of look like somebody in a robot costume. I must.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And the CEO posts on his social media feeds videos of it working in his home and such. You know, just sort of lend the authenticity. But, and there was a really interesting video that they posted a few months ago that showed two robots working together to unload groceries. And it wasn't using any pre programmed. You know, the idea behind this is it's, you know, it's an AI powered robot that doesn't need to follow tasks that it's been pre programmed. You can just tell it what to do. So the video showed a man walking up with the bags and saying, put these away. And the two robots work together to unpack the groceries.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what you're going to find. The tin foil in the refrigerator and the peanut butter underneath the toilet. And it's going to put stuff away, but who knows where, Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, you need a nice Roomba that can go underneath all the objects to scoop out all the peanut butter.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is designed to be a home robot, right?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah. And this is the sort of argument there's that's been in roboticists, you know, robotics have been discussing for years. It's like, is it better to have a humanoid form factor because we're human and then. Right. Because we can in our environment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And it should be able to do everything that we can do. Where? Or is it better to develop individual single purpose robots that can do things for us like you know, a robot Vacuum or even a dishwasher or, you know, these. Which is essentially a robot, just not a smart robot at this stage. But would it be better to develop something that could unload the dishwasher for you or to develop a humanoid robot that can do all of these things for you?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the point. This is a home robot. This isn't a robot that's going to build cars.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But they have to do multiple things. It can't just be programmed to do one thing, which is what the robots do. I mean, figure has robots in BMW's factory here in South Carolina on the production line sorting through materials. That's another video that they showed. But that's real because it's actually on that, I think. Yeah, it's, it's happening in factories. But there's a real difference between a programmed robot on a factory floor and putting a robot that could that in theory do everything for you into a home. There's the biggest obviously barrier is cost. I mean there's nowhere anywhere how much this is going to cost you and then how. And then the other thing is this hat to have the force to do things like a human, like walk up the stairs or pick things up. It's a powerful machine in your home. That is something I would be worried about, I don't think, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they say specifically targeted at your husband. Yeah, they say that they have very soft padding around the pinch points.

[Kathy Gellis]

But can they hold knives?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Force, the force that they have you, you know, just to walk up to the.

[Leo Laporte]

Grabbed you. They could crush you with your.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah, they can carry the knives. They could go to the kitchen drawer and pick one out and then they.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T even need force.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean, I feel it's very interesting. I mean I've always, I've written and talked about the Rosie the Robot sort of dream for the smart home for a long time. But ultimately I think this kind of a solution is. Makes a great video. But how practical it would be in people's homes versus having more of an like omniscient intelligence, like an, a generative AI LLM powered intelligence that can manipulate the different smart connected appliances in your home for you. So, you know, tell your robot, look at the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Figure AI is the website.

[Kathy Gellis]

If you have to spend more bandwidth policing for mayhem caused by your robot than the savings of any chore that the robot's doing, then I don't think there's any future for this.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It's, I mean, it's a future, it's the science sci fi future that everyone's been trying to, to achieve. But is it really practical realistic for most people to have this in their home or is this a great demo?

[Leo Laporte]

Is this hype from a figure? Is this. Yeah, that's the question. Is this hype or is this reality?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

I mean it's interesting because what's, what's made that leap And I actually had, I spoke with Colin Angle who is the form, well, the founder of iRobot but now no longer the CEO about this a while back, a couple months ago. And you know, the, these make great demos but the practicality of this in a home is really unlikely and very unrealistic that it's going to actually do what you want it to do. And I mean we're going to see these. The difference here is generative AI. That's what's made the difference. That's why, I mean this is a huge leap from what you saw with the optimist when it was like on the stage, what, two years ago and it was just a guy in a suit, right. Back then there wasn't, there weren't the tools to do this. And now having the ability to not have to program every single action and to actually use. And so this company did work with Nvidia originally, but now they've stopped working with Nvidia and have developed their own chips to power the AI models and its vision language models. It's like, it's a really interesting technology but I think ultimately this isn't something they're going to bring to market for the mass market. This is technology that they're showing off what they have been able to achieve.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon Musk's Optimus robot serving popcorn at his drive in, in the Tesla supercharger in the Southland.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, but like Jennifer's saying, like, you see this with, you know, generative AI, it's like the videotape demos mean virtually nothing. That means like, right, you, you, you found it at a perfect moment, you're sharing only the best. But to me the question isn't if it's when. You know, it's really expensive, you know, fine motor stuff. It's, you know, the danger factor. You know, I think we're many, many years, perhaps decades away, but this is coming. It's just a question of when. Right. Wouldn't you agree?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, it's not the end of next year, which years and years and years.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, here's the thing. It'll be in, well, maybe not my lifetime, but it'll be in your lifetime.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah, I think it's a lot sooner than it could have been for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

And your kids life.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Because, because of LLMs. Yeah, yeah. That's made the, the leap is there. But it's still really expensive. That's why it's not going to be in people's homes. I mean it might be in one or two people's homes.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but you'll see it in coffee shops. You'll see it in places where the it justifies it or a cruise ship or a hotel. You'll see it in places.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

There are already things like places, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, there's a robotic drink maker in the cruise ships. You know, stupid.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

But we talked about something that can. Sorry.

[Gary Rivlin]

We talked about Segway before, like Segway got into amusement parks. Segway was used by the post office. There were, there were isolated cases. But there might have been just a movie. But maybe. But it's, but it never, it never took off. It never became this thing like, oh, we're going to use it as an alternative transportation idea, which was the original notion behind it. And robots. I'd put a different category. Yes. It's just kind of like all these boutique uses or they'll be for very wealthy people. But I just have to think like we want this so much that eventually we're going to have the ChatGPT moment where like it seemed impossible and now it's everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

David Schaub says in our YouTube chat. And it's a really good point. Yeah, the segue didn't take off, but electric segment scooters did and E bikes did. So there's an evolutionary thing that you know. And I think that's often the case that the first generation of something isn't really the product like the Vision Pro, like Apple's Vision Pro, but it is a hint or the Newton of something that is going to come. The Palm Pilot was really cool, but it presaged something that ended up changing the world, which is the smartphone. Right. So maybe that's what we're seeing is the. Is the first inklings.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

Fascinating. I would, I wouldn't put a guess on years. Is it 5 or 13 or 25?

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

The company behind the matic robot I mentioned earlier, their long term plan is like they see the matic as like the infant and then the next stage will be the toddler and then they're moving up to like the teenager. Teenager that will be a humanoid robot.

[Gary Rivlin]

That will work.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Well. And they use those phrases because it was like the vision that those term, that terminology applied to the sort of stage of development of the amount it can do in terms of how it moves around your home and its perception of your home. Because that's the key, isn't it? It's like every home. I mean so Ring has been trying to develop this drone, indoor drone for.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we've keep seeing. Yeah.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

And it can't. It. It has struggled to release this product because whilst it works, it doesn't work in every home. There are, every home is, you know, homes are so unique that it's very difficult to adapt something like this to different environments. You can't get, you can't anticipate every scenario it's going to encounter. And I think, you know, the idea of a humanoid robot that can do anything as opposed to have specific tasks, it's going to be a long time until even with the advances in technology that we've seen which have been huge just in the last couple of years, the home is just a very difficult environment for anyone to kind of reliably deploy this type of technology.

[Leo Laporte]

What was. We read it in our sci fi book group for the club. The Adrian Tchaikovsky book about the robot who shaves his master in accident. Accidentally cuts his throat. When that happens.

[Gary Rivlin]

Hate that.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate it when that happens. Yeah. I mean it's going to be an in service model. Thank you, John.

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

It's not just the, it's not even the malicious. I'm not worried too much.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it wasn't malicious. It was an accident.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The robot was confused to figure out why the clothes were so stained. It had to wash them extra long to get the blood out. And it didn't realize that it had killed its master for quite a while. I think. On that note it's getting a little dark but it is Halloween in just a couple of weeks. Spooky season. I think maybe we wrap this, this puppy up. We've gone for way too long. But I and I apologize Gary because I know when I first asked Gary on he said I don't have time to sit for three hours of a Sunday evening.

[Kathy Gellis]

So you'll sit for three and a half and you'll wake it.

[Leo Laporte]

Apologize and thank you Gary for your.

[Gary Rivlin]

No, I'm just a Gary clone. I actually the real Gary, that's my.

[Kathy Gellis]

Case for the rocket.

[Leo Laporte]

That's my hope someday. Gary Rivlin, it's so great to have you on a Pulitzer Prize winning author for his incredible book about Katrina. AI Valley is his most recent. I look forward to future Volumes about the economy of AI and more. So nice to talk to you, Gary rivlin.com. thank you for spending this evening with us.

[Gary Rivlin]

Thank you. My pleasure.

[Leo Laporte]

That's such a great, such a great honor to have you here. And I say the same for Jennifer Patterson Tuohy. She's a senior reviewer at the Verge. Look for her robot vacuum review soon to come. We kind of teased a little bit of it. Thank you so much for being here, Jennifer. It's always, always wonderful to have you on. You can catch Jennifer every month, of course, on Tech News Weekly and regularly@the verge.com thank you. Jennifer. Smart home mama on the Blue sky. And Kathy Geller, our favorite attorney and now a fellow at SF Law, which is fantastic. The former Hastings Law School at San Francisco State. Such a. Or University of San Francisco. Is it USF or sfc?

[Kathy Gellis]

No, it's University of California.

[Leo Laporte]

Uc. It's UC San Francisco.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

USF is a private school, oddly enough, yes. UC San Francisco's law school. Really nice to have you on. You can read her work at Tech Dirt and we wish you the best for your health. I. If there's anything we can do, just let us know.

[Kathy Gellis]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we want. We want to do many, many more. We want you to be around for the humanoid robots. That's all I'm saying.

[Kathy Gellis]

Not if they've got rotating knives.

[Gary Rivlin]

She's obsessed with the knives.

[Leo Laporte]

We thank all of you for being here as well. We do twit every Sunday from 2 to 5 or later. 5ish?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Every Sunday here? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry. Yeah, I apologize. Thank you for your patience. You can watch us live if you're in the club, of course. Club Twit, Discord. But also on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. We stream it live, but you don't have to watch live. We have on demand versions of the show, audio and video at our website, Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Great way to share clips. If you have a friend who's interested in robotic lawnmowers and doesn't want bad things to happen, perhaps you would share that clip. Do not put it in your lap, I guess, would be the advice. We all have learned a little something today. You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast player, and I urge you to do so. That way you'll get it when we're done cleaning it up. And just in time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you everybody for being here. A special thanks to our Club Twit members who make this show possible. If you're not a member, please we add free versions of the shows. No ads if you go to Twit tv, Club Twit and whole lot. Thanks for being here everybody. 20 years we've been doing this. It feels like 20 just tonight. But thank you for your patience and we'll be back next week. And as I've said for the last 20 years, another 20twit is in the can. See you next time.

[Gary Rivlin]

Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

This episode is brought to you by Coda. I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. But what I don't love trying to keep track of all the information, data and projects across dozens of platforms and products and tools. Coda is an all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 and teams like ours 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 and Jira and Asana and Figma. Head over to Coda IO Twit right now and get six months of the team plan for startups for free. That's C O D A IO Twit. And get six months of the team plan for free. Coda IO Twit. Morning Zoe. Got donuts.

[Kathy Gellis]

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[Gary Rivlin]

Well, I dig the mattress and I.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Kathy Gellis]

Teach me.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Oh no, I'm not really prepared.

[Kathy Gellis]

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[Gary Rivlin]

Wow, impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me try.

[Kathy Gellis]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Kathy Gellis]

Nice. Jeffrey, you heard them.

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Gary Rivlin]

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[Leo Laporte]

So what are we having for launch?

[Jennifer Pattison Tuohy]

Dude, my work here is done.

[Leo Laporte]

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