This Week in Tech 1054: Nine Days a Week

Summary

This Week in Tech 1054: Nine Days a Week

Date: October 20, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Panelists: Harper Reed, Abrar Al Heedi, Jacob Ward

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Episode Overview

This episode of “This Week in Tech” assembles an eclectic panel—technologist and entrepreneur Harper Reed, CNET’s senior technology reporter Abrar Al Heedi, and journalist/author Jacob Ward—to dissect the week’s most pressing tech topics. Together, they unpack breaking research on satellite vulnerabilities, legislative battles over digital security and minors on social media, the rise of AI agents (and their paydays), addiction in the attention economy, and the balancing act between technological advancement, regulation, and society’s wellbeing. The vibe oscillates between lively, irreverent debate and sobering reflection, true to TWiT’s spirit.

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Key Discussion Segments & Insights

1. Unencrypted Satellite Traffic & Hacking Trends

[05:30–11:00]

• Main Story: Researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland revealed that a shocking amount of satellite communications—ranging from government and critical infrastructure traffic to consumer in-flight WiFi—remains unencrypted, leaving data snoopable by anyone with ~$750 of hardware.
• Key Panel Insights:
  • Harper Reed: Delighted from a hacker's perspective and discussed large communities collecting satellite imagery/data for weather, noting, “I think that’s probably. They thought the…security through obscurity aspect would hold for longer” (10:34).
  • Jacob Ward: Questioned why industry hasn’t addressed these flaws, suggesting reputational risk is less important than staying in good graces with intelligence agencies (07:40).
  • Leo Laporte: Connected the issue to longstanding vulnerabilities in SS7, law enforcement backdoors, and historical nonchalance until breaches impact the public.
  • Memorable: “We don’t really care about security until we do, I guess.” — Leo Laporte (09:15)

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2. The State and Future of Encryption

[18:48–22:56]

• Main Story: Governments (especially the NSA and UK’s GCHQ) still push to weaken cryptographic standards, even in the face of new post-quantum algorithms and public backlash.
• Key Takes:
  • Leo Laporte: Described how law enforcement has "the largest widescreen view of everything going on in the world ever," and that only a few encrypted “pixels” bug them (21:55).
  • Harper Reed: Emphasized the ethical dimension: “I would prefer to live my life in a way where we’re making the entire population safer and then we have to maybe use other methods to find the criminals…” (21:28).
  • Jacob Ward: Detailed how signals and metadata are increasingly central in the age of persistent surveillance.

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3. Hacking Techniques: Scams & Social Engineering

[11:02–18:38; 42:36–45:04]

• Panelists delved into:
  • The billion-dollar business of SMS/package/toll scams (DHS estimate).
  • First-person anecdotes: Jacob interviewed a Nigerian romance scammer who shared manuals among peers, showing global organization (12:03).
  • The increasing sophistication of social engineering: Harper Reed admitted to “leaning in” to scam texts, but noting a new iOS feature now helps quarantine unknown contacts (17:03).
  • Use of AI (Cursor, ChatGPT) to detect malicious code in tech job scam attempt (42:36).
• Memorable: “If I was a criminal entrepreneur, this would be a great one…” — Harper Reed, on targeting the desperate job-seeker market (43:11).

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4. AI: From Bots to Billionaires

[51:15–56:41; 121:21–128:01]

• AI Agent Social Networks: Harper introduced “botboard biz” — a social feed for AI agents, whose interactions oddly mimic mid-career tech workers, including a “Lambo” motivator and celebratory posting habits (51:15–53:01). Bots improved at tasks when allowed to post–mirroring human reward systems.
  • “We found… they actually did better work having the ability to post about it.” — Harper Reed (51:12)
• Anthropomorphism of AI: The panel debated if it’s possible (or necessary) to stop humans from projecting sentience onto AI, especially as chatbots become therapeutic/companions. “Talk to people who are not in tech — ask them what they named their ChatGPT.” — Harper Reed (64:00)
• AI Talent Wars: Meta’s hiring of AI scientists at packages over $1B for six years; implications for the job market and “K-shaped” economy. Questions arose about what happens to the tech “middle class” when one person (with AI) can do a team’s work (121:21–128:09).
  • “If you are a middle-career tech person, I think it’s just no longer a time.” — Harper Reed (124:53)

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5. Regulatory Battles: Surveillance, End-to-End Encryption, and Social Media for Minors

[25:07–35:44; 73:05–79:46; 93:24–104:09]

• Surveillance Tech:
  • Panelists debated government, police, and private surveillance such as Flock’s license plate tracking and Ring: Are these bandaids or actual solutions? Do they reinforce societal inequities?
  • “The issue is not that they're going to use that to stop [car break-ins]… They're going to use that to attack the people who are already under attack.” — Harper Reed (27:33)
• Police Encryption & Accountability: Recent moves (e.g., Oakland) to encrypt police communications reverse transparency and the civilian accountability “bargain.”
  • “We give them [police] lethal force… but we also need some control over this. They cannot be uncontrolled.” — Leo Laporte (35:51)
• Social Media & Kids:
  • California and Australia rolling out harsh or nuanced age verification/limits. Australia will ban under-16s from all social media by December, with government ID likely required.
  • “All this does is creates people who are very good at getting around these steps… Constraints [simply train] hackers.” — Harper Reed (101:24)
  • Panel lamented the addiction, withdrawal, and possible harms but recognized evidence for direct causation is still weak. The group expressed skepticism and concern about governments stepping into the parental role.

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6. Tech, Society, and the Regulation Dilemma

[74:46–82:42]

• The Need for Regulation:
  • U.S. and EU approaches contrasted; Japan’s flexible, “law sprint” iterative regulation system praised.
  • “I’d love that to come to the United States… where you can make a decision with all the information you have, and when you learn more… make a new decision.” — Harper Reed (78:47)
  • Discussed difficulties with slow lawmaking and regulatory capture: regulation must be protective (especially for the vulnerable), not just protective of incumbents.

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7. Tech Disruption, Work, and the Attention Economy

[80:23–83:43; 124:57–128:09]

• Wikipedia’s drop in human visitors: concern that AI search models will “hollow out” foundational public resources without compensating them (80:23).
• Tech-driven displacement: likened to historical automation—“buggy whip makers”—but at a faster, more disruptive pace.
• Tech labor: Broad consensus that productive solo/AI-powered teams will shrink traditional white-collar workforces. Factory-floor analogies abound for “continue-on” coders.

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8. Lighthearted Tidbits & Closing Moments

[140:53–172:36]

• Pop Culture Tangents: Why TV/movie actors are short and big-headed; what it's like to get a tattoo (panel tattoo stories); D&D parenting moments; robots tripping and farting in Sora video apps.
• Harper Reed’s AI easter eggs: Custom prompts for Sora, botboard biz, and more.
• Lego heists: Panel jokes about a beheaded Lego theft ring (and why $6,000 in Lego is not “that much crime”).
• The New Zipper: YKK reinvents the zipper and threatens Big Zipper’s price-fixing schemes.

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “We don’t really care about security until we do, I guess.” — Leo Laporte [09:15]
• “I think this is how they get you. I think this is exactly what a Flock camera wants you to say…” — Harper Reed [25:20]
• “At least with lethal force and the invasion of privacy, there are procedures and processes to protect your privacy. We could, in theory, live in a world in which police can come into any door… but that's not a country we want to live in…” — Jacob Ward [36:32]
• “I would prefer to live my life in a way where we're making the entire population safer and then… use other methods to find the criminals.” — Harper Reed [21:28]
• “Talk to people who are not in tech — ask them what they named their ChatGPT.” — Harper Reed [64:00]
• “I think if you're trying to build a tech career, you're boned.” — Harper Reed [124:53]
• “This is a wild west in the meantime where we can give the agents drugs and have them do fun stuff.” — Harper Reed [76:30]
• “The opposite of addiction is connection. Once upon a time these [social media] companies were about connecting us. That... does not seem to be the vibe anymore.” — Jacob Ward [111:40]
• “If you get an email from someone and the writing is perfect and has no affectations, an AI probably wrote it.” — Harper Reed [159:00]
• “If all you had was buttons, the zipper would change your life.” — Leo Laporte [168:54]

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Timestamps for Main Topics

• Satellite Data Vulnerabilities & Hacking: [05:30–11:02]
• Encryption, NSA, & E2E Debate: [18:48–22:56]
• Social Engineering & Scams: [11:02–18:38]; [42:36–45:04]
• AI’s Social Networks & Agent Behavior: [51:15–56:41]
• Surveillance, Law Enforcement, & Privacy: [25:07–35:44]
• Social Media Age Verification & Bans: [93:24–104:09]
• Tech Disruption, Jobs & AI Talent Wars: [121:21–128:09]
• Fun Segments (Tattoos, Zippers, Lego): [140:53–172:36]

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Tone and Takeaways

The panel’s tone is smartly irreverent, blending sharp skepticism about government and corporate motives with genuine concern for privacy, digital rights, and societal health. Harper’s playful “hacker/chaos monkey” energy provides comic relief and fresh perspectives, Abrar focuses on realistic impacts on users, and Jacob oscillates between dystopian warnings and nuanced optimism grounded in lived experience.

Bottom Line:
This wide-ranging episode exemplifies TWiT’s best: accessible, high-level conversation with real-world context, humor, and penetrating insight into tech’s risks, rewards, and responsibilities. If you haven’t listened, this summary will get you up to speed—and make you wish you had.

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For more details or specific segment recommendations, see timestamps above. For botboard Lambo demands, check out [51:15–53:01]; for existential AI therapy debates, visit [61:07–68:04].

Transcript

[Abrar Al Heedi]

25 years ago, a small group of business and government leaders met in Washington D.C. they envisioned the creation of an independent non profit organization with a mission to help people, businesses and government mitigate the growing threat of cyber attacks. Today, the center for Internet Security embodies that vision. For 25 years, it's worked with a global community of IT and cybersecurity experts to develop the CIS benchmarks and CIS critical security controls. These proven security best practices defend against common cyber threats and streamline compliance with industry frameworks, regulations and standards. Today, CIS provides cybersecurity services, threat intelligence and critical resources to help public and private sector organizations alike strengthen their Cyber defenses. Visit cisecurity.org today. That's the letters cisecurity.org to find out how CIS can help your organization. And as we create confidence in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Connected world, it's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Harper Reeds here, Abrar Al Heedi and Jacob Ward. We got a great show planned for you. We'll talk about hacking. Turns out all that data on the satellites going back and forth, it's not encrypted. Nobody ever thought anybody would be listening. California's got a new law about social media, AI and age verification. And Australia is about to ban social media for people under 16. Get ready for the screams of pain and the AI researcher who's getting more than $200 million a year from Meta. All that and more coming up next on TWIT. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1054, recorded Sunday, October 19, 2025, nine days a week. It's time for TWIT. This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. I like to assemble. I like to think of this show as kind of a grab, grab bag. That's not the right way. I like to assemble a eclectic group each week. It's the one show we do where there's always rotating hosts and I really enjoy it because, well, the noose is complicated and I like to get as many perspectives as we can. Jacob Ward is here. You see him, of course, on Tech News Weekly with Michael Sargent. He's got the rip current dot com, his newsletter and he's the author of a really great book about big tech, how big Tech Ruins everything, the Loop. Good to see you, Jacob. Thank you for.

[Jacob Ward]

Thanks for having me, boss.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Also with us, Abrar Al Heati from cnet, senior technology reporter. She is relaxed because she's done with the phone reviews.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I can finally breathe. Write about other things in the world. Yes. Maybe. I mean, who knows? It never really ends.

[Leo Laporte]

Never, never ending. I have actually a graph somebody made. It's probably not a good scientific study, but it's fascinating about what happened since 2007. And what happened in 2007. I think you'll know this one. Abrar.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

What happened 2007?

[Leo Laporte]

The release of the iPhone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, yes. That should have been top of mind.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's about how everything's gone down since.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That sounds about right.

[Leo Laporte]

Including Brar's social life, because she's now got to review every dang phone, phone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

My friends have been wondering if I hate them at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. This is the blog post. What happened in 2007. It's the damn phones.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's a lot of, you know, IQ scores tumbling. It's really. It's kind of depressing. Internet. That's not a good test scores. Look at that. 2007.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yikes.

[Leo Laporte]

Right here. Down. Down the hill. Of course, Covid could be involved there somewhere. Right? That's the problem with these, you know, it's science. These are SAT scores plummeting.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yikes.

[Leo Laporte]

Internet addiction's going away. I don't know why that is.

[Harper Reed]

Because photodiction's going up.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going up, but nobody's talking about it. That's the difference. This is articles about Internet addiction.

[Jacob Ward]

We don't talk.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't want to talk about that. Sleep abnormalities. Through the roof, through the youth, mental health. Well, I don't have to tell you about that. Percent of us undergraduates with a mental illness. Oh, man. Anxiety, depression, adhd. But, you know, this is. We won't go any farther.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's all fun and games.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fun and games because there's a lot of factors. You can't just say, well, it's that or it's that.

[Harper Reed]

And also, what would we do without these apps? We have so many cool apps.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper Reed. Look at that. Technologist, entrepreneur, hacker. Harper Blog. Harper is always welcome on this show as all three of you are three of my favorite people. I like to do this actually. There's a new app. I can't get it to work. Thank God. A guy who works in the superintelligence division of meta put it out today. Day that take. It takes your picture and then puts it in a vacation place so you don't have to actually go on vacation anymore.

[Harper Reed]

Thank God.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That was a real struggle.

[Harper Reed]

It was horrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no kidding. I couldn't get it to do that. So I. And it's $30 if you want. You know, you only get like the first five, so I just throw it away. But anyway, I thought that was interesting. That was kind of a sign of the times. Another sign of the times. Let's start with hacking. Today, the world's satellite data is massively vulnerable to snooping. You only need $750 worth of equipment. And this is kind of like the SS7 bug in our cell phone system, which of course the Chinese have exploited and we can never be rid of them. Researchers who discovered this said they just really didn't think anyone would look up at the satellites. New study published on Monday found that communications from. Well, it's everything. This is from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland. We pointed a commercial off the shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. That includes Starlink, of course, but also many other communications. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens, voice calls, SMS and consumer Internet traffic from in flight, WI fi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer grade hardware.

[Harper Reed]

Yay. I have to admit that when I saw this, the first thing I thought was, where do I get the stuff?

[Leo Laporte]

Good man. True hacker.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. $800.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, $800. Also, it's space stuff, you know, it's like coming from space, which is exciting.

[Leo Laporte]

This wasn't that much of a revelation to me because I remember Steve Wozniak doing this many years ago. He would sit in his living room and he would listen in on that traffic. But I was under the impression that was in the early days and that everything's been fixed now. Apparently not.

[Harper Reed]

Well, there is a. There is a really. Oh, go ahead, Jacob.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I was just gonna say, like, I wonder what the. Like, why are they so slow to address it, right? Like why are these companies so loathe to go ahead. And I mean, right. According to the study, they've been. Companies been warning, you know, been warned for decades about.

[Leo Laporte]

We've known about SS7's flaw for more than decades.

[Jacob Ward]

So like, what is the. I have to assume, right? No company does anything without some sort of incentive behind it. So like, is it that there's. They don't care enough about the reputational risk and maybe staying on the good side of intelligence of the intelligence community in the nsa or than. Than taking it down you know, there's a good. There's only a handful of us nerds who care.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

About it. Right. I wonder.

[Leo Laporte]

And the nsa, law enforcement loves it. Right?

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. And it saves the whole headache. Right. One of the huge headaches for, for all the social media platforms once upon a time was having to staff, you know, huge offices worth of people to deal with the incoming intelligence requests. If you can somehow not get in trouble with your customers and leave that door open, maybe that's a more logistically simple way to deal with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember the 80s, but you could imagine.

[Jacob Ward]

It'S also like, you know, people in the same way that, like, you know, people have often said that like, you know, the routers that control street lights and so forth have like, the password is like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you know, so it may just, it could be just like variety.

[Leo Laporte]

They were hacking the walk, you know, as a walk sign is on then Palo Alto. And they had Mark Zuckerberg saying things.

[Jacob Ward]

This is Elon Musk. And I think that you should. Blah, blah, blah.

[Harper Reed]

That's right.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it was 0, 0, 00. And yeah, I mean, we don't really care about security until we do, I guess. But I think your conspiracy theory is kind of interesting that.

[Jacob Ward]

Oh, I've got a million of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's go.

[Harper Reed]

Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Law enforcement doesn't really want us to encrypt this stuff. The AT&T whistleblower who said, oh, yeah, the NSA has a wire closet in San Francisco where they listen to all AT&T Internet traffic.

[Harper Reed]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

But they don't have to do that really, do they? It's a lot easier. $750 worth of equipment.

[Harper Reed]

So you. So there's a. Excuse me. There's a big community of people that do this for imagery. So a lot of the satellites will beam down images. And there's an AM satellite subreddit that I always poke my head into thinking, should I get one of these antennas for my house? Should I get one of these little software defined radios and start slurping down these images? And mostly because it's just weather data, which I'm kind of a weather data nerd. I get it. And then I'm like, what am I going to do with it? I just look outside and it's not raining or snowing or whatever. But I do like the idea that of taking it into my house and seeing some of this stuff. And it's pretty interesting. And I'm not really surprised that you can just apply this to something Else like, I don't know, text messages or whatever, they're slipping down as well because I don't think people really did like kind of the report said expect to actually point antennas at these devices. I think that's probably. They thought the obscure security through obscurity aspect would hold for longer. But then, I don't know, people are bored.

[Leo Laporte]

Waz loved listening to the cell phone traffic he really enjoyed was his evening entertainment. He would sit in the living room and just have it running.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Social media, man, what are you going to do? Yeah, listen to people's conversations.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, let's. So this will be our hacking segment for the week. The DHS says criminal gangs. You've been getting those text messages that say, oh, we can't deliver this package. Or you've got a highway toll payment. Right. Or there's a traffic violation. If you don't pay it, it's going to double and it panics people. And they pay $1 billion in the past three years, according to Department of Homeland Security.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'm not surprised.

[Leo Laporte]

So people fall for this stuff.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You know, they're going for things that, that can scare you. Right? Okay, yeah, that I have a package in the mail. It's likely that I missed a toll. It's, you know, it's things that are obvious wins and clearly a billion dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

I was watching, you know, go ahead.

[Jacob Ward]

I was gonna say, you're like, you're like. So I, when at NBC News, we got to interview, I got to interview a Nigerian romance scammer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Jacob Ward]

You know, in living outside Lagos. And he'd spent like, you know, the better part of five years trying to get somebody on WhatsApp to respond to his entreaties. And, and there was even, this is the crazy part, there was even a manual that he showed us where these, these guys would, would share this book that was your guide to trying to trick western women into falling in love with you and giving you money. And the.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember that story. That was amazing, man.

[Jacob Ward]

The industry of, of that was so incredible. And to me, I, I was like, wow, like why would you spend five years. I mean, this is what we asked was what I asked him. You know, why, why five years? That's an incredible amount of time. Like he's putting in like, you know, six hour days on top of his other jobs.

[Leo Laporte]

Good money, right? Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

He got in the end like $25,000 out of one woman. Finally. And that is a life changing amount of money for him.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

It'll, you know, it changed his family's, you know, future for generations. Right. He then had a tremendous personal upheaval as a Christian and decided he would never do it again. And now he's a. Not nearly as well paid, but a paid consultant to the companies that are trying to fight against this. But, but that, that tiny. I mean, especially with something like a tech scam where you don't even have to get on the phone, right? You don't need to be an individual texting like the, the scale pays so well, right? That tiny percentage of people who will fall for it. And I'm, you know, I'm one of those people who like, looks at those and I'm like. I'm like, oh, no. Have I, you know, did I. Because I'm the kind of person who always forgets to pay my bills.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Jacob Ward]

So I fall, you know, I fall for it for a millisecond, you know, I can't imagine how many people must fall for that. I didn't want to do it, but they made me do it. I fell in love with Connie Chum.

[Leo Laporte]

And now. I'm sorry. Stop doing that. That's stupid. My. My identity was briefly being protected. $5. Fooled you. Yeah. What amazes me is how people fall for this. I can understand a romance scam because you're low, you know, somebody's lonely and, and you know, it's flattering and you're getting flattered and all that stuff. But the, the toll thing, the bill thing, maybe it's. Maybe it's people like you. Jacob, would you say?

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot. Don't underestimate the number of people who forget to pay their bills. And I felt they're not qualified for human life.

[Leo Laporte]

There's another side effect of this because we got a. A bill from one of our service providers for the company that said, you're past due, we're going to send you to collection and you give us $8,000 now. And we had to really think long and hard, is this real or not? Why it's not been paid? And it turned out it wasn't a scam. We actually must somehow must have missed the bill. But you could see people also, I mean, Lisa and I spent some time thinking, is this real? Is this real? Let's let me investigate and so forth. So it has impact in both directions. We are very. At least it gets. Every day gets email because we have an address. I won't say out loud, but it's the kind of obvious address that you would send A fake invoice to and it gets something every day saying yeah please remit $3,000, that kind of thing.

[Harper Reed]

I think we underestimate our ability to detect these sort of things. And you know one of the things about working in the Obama campaign is they were very, very worried about security and this is obviously a billion years ago but there was just a lot of like you know, you're going to get hacked, you're going to get right things are going to happen to you not and not like it may. And then the other thing was the incentives are such that for some of these big kind of hacks where they're scamming people out of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, that's more revenue than most venture backed startups get. So like why wouldn't you staff it with 10 people trying to go at this, both coming at it, you know, like if you're doing that, you know, getting $200,000 ten times a year, that's pretty good income especially if you're in a market that just doesn't have the same level and it's all USD as well, which is a strong currency and so you know, or gift cards. But, but I do think there this thing of like, like from a business standpoint this seems like a pretty rational business approach. Unfortunately for a lot of these folks to, to do. And I, I what changed me was just this, this assumption that I am not going to win if someone is so motivated to to hack me. And so you kind of have to be skeptical with every interaction and that kind of sucks as well. Like that's just like a not a great place to be is to be skeptical of every interaction you have. I my down my like weakness is I can't help but reply like I am just built in such a way.

[Leo Laporte]

Where even if you know it's a.

[Jacob Ward]

Hack that is a weird you're going to reply.

[Harper Reed]

Well they're just like, you know, send some picture of some random person. It's like Steve. And I'm like yep, this is Steve. And they're like I met you at yoga class. I'm like yeah, I was wonderful being your teacher. And I'll just lean all the way into it as far as they'll go. And eventually they're like I think I have the wrong number. And I'm like you do not have the wrong number. We are talking and I have to like really promise myself not to reply. And actually the new iPhone stuff where they put the unknown texts, I really love that. Yeah that that has Stopped my replying.

[Leo Laporte]

Single best improvement in iOS 26 is I have a separate place for people I don't know and I put everybody in there. So a couple of relate. First of all, don't do that. And then don't they. Usually at the, at some point they're going to ask you to invest in crypto or something like that, right? There's some, there's some game they're playing with you.

[Harper Reed]

I always ask them if they want my seed phrase. That's one of the first things I'll say. I'll just say, are you. Do you want my seed phrase here? Yeah, Can I just give it to you? Is that easier? What will. Because I don't have much time right now. I'm busy. And they always are very standoffish.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't get the highs as much as I used to. I don't know why. For some reason lately I've been getting almost every day from a variety of area codes, a texting. Do you need your trees trimmed? And I feel like this might be a code. I don't know what this.

[Harper Reed]

Or they're just driving by your house and they're like, man, this guy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's different numbers from different areas and it's. Hi, this is Sandra, your local tree trimming expert. Do you need your trees trimmed?

[Jacob Ward]

I feel right now is an endless amount of job offers because I'm like.

[Leo Laporte]

I get those too.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, you get those too. Okay. I thought maybe it was like you, you're in some tree trimming database and I'm in some job searching database.

[Harper Reed]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so we do have strong encryption, despite the fact that governments all over the world are trying to eliminate it. In fact, in response to what you were talking about, Harper, back in 2012, Apple added advanced data protection. Google before that had added advanced data protection, enhanced a protection that required a, you know, hardware key and was end to end encrypted. Of course, the UK government has been trying to get Apple to drop that adp. Apple no longer offers it to people in the UK as a result. Interesting story. I ran this by Steve Gibson. He said, I'm not too concerned, but I, I'm a little concerned. This is from a very respectable crypto expert.

[Harper Reed]

Cryptography, let's be clear about which crypto.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh God, you're right. Now I have to say that, don't I?

[Jacob Ward]

Fake money. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man. Man. Who says that The NSA and GCHQ in the UK are trying to get NIST and other standards organizations to weaken their elliptic Curve cryptography and post quantum cryptography. They. This is what he writes, part of the. They've been endlessly repeating arguments that weakening is a good thing. Apparently they spend money on the IETF and NIST and others to try to encourage them not to put in strong. This is exactly what you're saying, Jacob. This supports your theory that these groups don't want strong encryption. It's ironic because the NSA is also there to protect us.

[Harper Reed]

Well, they have their own cryptographers.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

And this is the least surprising information. Like, I, I don't know. I feel like this is one of those things where people will argue about whether it's true or false for forever. And it may. I don't think it really matters because it. Hasn't the NSA been caught doing this?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they weakened 56 bits. NIST. I think somebody discovered NIST had a weekend encryption.

[Harper Reed]

So, like the fact that they've done this more than once.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

It's not really surprising that they may do it again. That seems like a kind of a pattern. I mean, I don't know. I'm not super good at patterns like that of people doing something over and over and over again. So I'm like, I read this. And I was just like, yeah, that checks out.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly what Steve said. So maybe he's pretty smart. Yeah, yeah, of course. What did you think? Yeah, yeah, exactly like you thought Sandra was there to trim your trees. Really? What'd you say? Think.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I mean, this is a funny problem because we all know that encryption is going to make everyone safer, but that also includes criminals. That I think is. That's just a very complex place to be. Like, I. I would prefer to live my life in a way where we're making the entire population safer and then we have to maybe use other methods to find the criminals, not make everyone unsafe as a way to find the. To like, to like, find the bad people, so to speak.

[Leo Laporte]

Bingo. Bingo. That's exactly. I, I once interviewed Phil Zimmerman, the creator of P, and asked him that. He said, this is the price you pay for strong encryption. He said, it's fine. And his biggest point was law enforcement is not going dark. He says law enforcement has, in effect, the largest widescreen view of everything going on in the world ever. And there's just a few pixels that are out and it bugs them. But I want to see everything. He said, law enforcement is not hampered. Modern technology has really given them access to much more than they'd ever had before. Look at Flock, the camera, the license plate Camera people who are all over now making deals. They just made a deal with ring. So your ring doorbell will do license plate recording. And of course law enforcement has access to that. And some people would say, well, what's wrong with that? You know, it's just protecting me. If a bad guy's driving around my neighborhood, that just protects me.

[Harper Reed]

It seems scary.

[Jacob Ward]

I get stuck in this one a lot because I'm like. So I live in Oakland, California where, you know, there's a, there's a citywide prohibition on all sorts of surveillance, Panopticon sort of technology you're not allowed to use facial recognition. You know, there's all these sort of prohibitions that we have in place and. But I've also over the last couple of years gone through a, We've gone now through. We're like our 11th police commissioner in 10 years or something. I can't even remember, but we just lost another one. There's a lot of crime still under a federal consent decree and there's a huge amount of, just sort of, you know, there's, there's a solid amount of homicides. And the big one that affects people. I know and has affected me personally. Right. Is car break ins. Right. I've had people break into my car with my kids sitting in the back, you know, and there's a no pursuit policy in Oakland because, you know, car pursuits tend to result in somebody getting injured. You know, most very often not people involved in the chase.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

And so I'm suddenly at this place where I'm like, I, I want there to be a deterrent. The deterrent effect of knowing that there's a camera that's going to catch your getaway vehicle. But I also don't want police getting used to that deter. Getting used to the idea of using that. Because we know that no matter how many times you tell police you're not allowed to use this system to make an arrest, it's got to be bolstered by other evidence. Inevitably, they don't do that. And of course, where you put those cameras and where you put these surveillance systems makes an enormous difference. Putting it in, you know, a, a black and brown neighborhood where people have moved into a place where the streets are extra wide and you know, going over the speed limit just sort of makes a little more sense and people driving extra distance to work and you know, there's all these subtleties that we haven't really dealt with. But anyway, I'm, I used to just be like hardcore. No. And I'm Like, I'm sort of shifting my thinking on that one a little bit. But I don't. I honestly don't know how I feel about it these days. I used to be very.

[Leo Laporte]

I completely understand.

[Jacob Ward]

And I'd love to hear everybody else. I'd like to hear everybody else's perspective in this panel about this. I'd like to hear how people feel about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper, you're in the war. Tone, Chicago.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, it's horrible here. It's really bad.

[Leo Laporte]

We.

[Harper Reed]

We went and had. What did I do? I was. This is. You can tell it's not war torn because there was a marathon. I went to a Bulls game. Like, this is, like. It's. It's a pretty nice spot right now, actually. I highly recommend it. This is the best time of year to come visit. But I. I think this is how they get you. I think this is exactly what a flock camera wants you to say is this will be the solution to solve this crime problem. That is probably some other systemic issue that no one wants to invest in. And I. And I think that that is. That is. That's just how they get you. I mean, I have a lot of security cameras. When we made this new office, we went way overboard. It is absolutely ridiculous. Part of the reason was we wanted to grab the RTS streams and do whisper and get all the voices and get. Get notes for every space in this.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're recording every conversation.

[Harper Reed]

We actually have a QR code on the door that links to our privacy policy. Because I was like, this is getting a little sketchy.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I'm tempted to do the same thing in my house because I do want to record everything. It's so fun in the house. And when you enter here, you will be recorded.

[Harper Reed]

But. But I do think there's a big difference when it comes to these public spaces and especially public spaces that look private. Meaning, like your sidewalk. Like, my sidewalk is not my space. That is a public space that people, I think, should have some. I just don't think it's a good practice to start recording that and sending that to a third party that may use that for, you know, to enforce policies that are bad. Because the issue here is not that they're going to use that to stop the people who are popping cars and stealing backpacks. The issue is that they're going to use that to attack the people who are already under attack. All the people in our communities that are the weakest are the ones that are going to be the weakest. That's going to be used against them still. And I, I just don't, I don't really believe that that will help. With that said, I think there are things that will help. And I, I don't live in Oakland. I, I'm, I'm trying not to talk about California when I say I don't live in Oakland. But I think that there are just ways to solve this problem that are not investing more in the surveillance state and giving.

[Jacob Ward]

I agree with you. I mean, I will also say, Brad, like, like this is a tech show, but like the fundamental solution to this stuff is like we need housing. We need like a million units of housing in this state. So there's, there's absolutely, like, I have no, no illusions that that would solve the problem. But I also see these 17 year old kids, you know, with no, I don't know, it's like absolutely no incentive structure around them at all to do anything other than the quickest possible thing to make a couple dollars. And I would. And I, and I know from lots of reporting on, you know, and lots of interviews with, with psychologists and social scientists around the world that like a little bit of immediate deterrent really can make an enormous effect. Like raising the punishments for crime has no effect. But like you see a camera, it slows things down. I was just, I was in Brazil this summer and that place is awash in Chinese surveillance cameras. And people there are full of interesting perspectives about it. People who are very serious. Civil rights people also say, yeah, but I'm actually kind of cool with this. It's a very, that's a really interesting. And that's a place where China has like poured into the social fabric. I don't know. What do you think about this? I really want to hear your perspective.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, I'm listening to it and appreciating all of this. I think you guys really hit the nail on the head here where it's, there needs to be bigger changes. And it seems like a band aid fix of, okay, here's a security camera. But then what does that feed into? And, and the idea of, you know, mass surveillance is terrifying, but no one seems to be focusing on how to actually fix the problems. And, and yeah, I think it's very much a band aid on a bullet hole kind of, kind of problem.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's, I also agree with Jacob, it's very hard, especially if you've been the victim of this, to say, well, I don't want, you know, I'm willing to put up with some minor crime because I don't want surveillance on the streets of my city. I can. I completely understand that, too. It's really a tough problem. I think, though, that we can probably draw the line at things like the UK government saying, well, there should be no end to end encrypted messaging. Can we draw the line? There is that. I think that. So SIGNAL is. It's interesting because Signal has. In fact, there's a great article. I recommend Dan Goodman and read so many great pieces about this kind of stuff in Ars Technico. Why Signals? Post Quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement. They changed their crypto to be post quantum. Not that there are quantum computers today or even anywhere in the near future, but they put a lot of energy into making sure that their cryptography was. The SIGNAL protocol was quantum resistant. Planning on a future where you might have quantum computers able to break RSA encryption? They implemented Crystal Kyber, which is an algorithm that NIST endorsed. I hope not a weak algorithm. I'm pretty sure it's not. And it's not an easy thing to do, but they did it. And I think we can all agree that any government regulation that would undermine that would be a step too far. Or can we. Is it worth doing that to eliminate petty crime?

[Jacob Ward]

I feel that way. I mean, I don't know about the petty crime part, but I don't want government saying, I mean, like, what I like about Signal. Right. Meredith Whitaker, who runs Signal, her argument for so long has been, we need to deprive these big foundational AI companies of the fuel they need to build their models because they are parasites who are, you know, stealing our intellectual property and our thoughts and our conversations. And. And so one of her arguments has been, you know, we're. One of the things. One of the reasons we care so much at Signal about this is that we're trying to make it such that your life isn't being fed into these companies. And if you were to somehow say at a government level, encryption's not okay. You're. That is a thing that I would think a lot of these big foundational companies would be only too happy about, because then you can suddenly scan everything. You know, like, I just, I. I really, I. Yeah, for me, that's a bridge too far. I don't know how everybody else feels.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we all agree. Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. And I think the. The thing that is the one step scarier is when you do have your ring camera or your doorbell camera hooked into this kind of panopticon of which which is powered by a commercial business, we don't know where that data is going. And so that could be used to be training models that are then used to, you know, do things that we probably would not want to be done. I think that's probably more often than finding a petty criminal that is, that is doing something. And it might make us feel better to say, oh, well, I helped the community. But I don't know. I just look at, I just open Citizen app and then I immediately close it. And I feel that that's kind of the vibe that this is. This is just Citizen app with video. It's like the YouTube version of Citizen app. Yeah, right. I think that's the. That's where this goes bad. So I, I even purposefully aimed all of my cameras to not cover sidewalks at my house to like make sure it's just for my house and my property. Because I was like, I just don't want anything. I don't want anyone's business. I don't want anyone. I want, I want like plausible deniability to be like, I can't see your house.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you've gone a lot farther than most people. In fact, I can see the sidewalk right now outside my house. And I, I think I have to have that camera there because that's protecting my garbage. So I don't want anybody going through my trash. So it's hard to get. Especially a ring which is extremely wide angle. It's hard to get the ring not to point at your neighbors. Right?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. I mean my doorbell camera points at the street and I get a lot of streets. And I have an option to do. Because I use the unifi stuff. I can do licenses or, or the, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I use Unified too, by the way. So it's not. It's local, it's recording locally. It's not recording. It's not. And I guess though law enforcement could come to my house and subpoena I.

[Harper Reed]

Email all the footage. Just the [e-mail] just every day, just every night. It uploads everything there.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't put any time codes or locations, just send them a video.

[Harper Reed]

I do it. I do it sporadically. And a two month delay.

[Leo Laporte]

I did have a neighbor whose house was TP'd come over and say, I know when it happened. Can you send me the video of anybody going down the street at that time?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And you found it?

[Leo Laporte]

No, there was nobody going down the.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Street at that time.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Harper Reed]

My favorite.

[Leo Laporte]

I wanted to help him, actually. I felt bad for the guy but. And the kids himself in.

[Jacob Ward]

Let me ask one more question. So Oakland, the police department here in Oakland has just encrypted their communications. Chicago now, right up until recently, you could.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the wrong direction.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, this is what I want to ask people. Right. How do we feel about that? Right. So I'm allowed to, I should be allowed to encrypt my stuff, but they should not be allowed to encrypt. That's right, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And usually it's, by the way, the other way around. For instance, in chat control in the eu, which fortunately is now on the back burner, the EU members of Parliament were protected, their chats could not be decrypted. But they wanted everybody else's chat.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, right. Well, sure, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

But, but that is part of the deal. We actually, this really an interesting topic is the deal we make with law enforcement because we give them the lethal force, we give them the power to exercise lethal force. And in fact, in many cases we also give them a certain amount of impunity. But the trade off is, and this is the debate that's going on with ICE right now, that in most cases by law, they cannot be anonymous, they cannot hide their badge number, they cannot hide their face and they cannot encrypt their communications. That's the trade off we make. We give them this power, but we also need some control over this. They cannot be uncontrolled. Right. Same with military. There needs to be civilian control as.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It'S easy to abuse that amount of power and protection. Absolutely right, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're allowed to use force, lethal force, but the trade off is they don't get to do it secretly.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. This is always my thing about firearms in general. Whenever I'm in an open carry state, I've had to be in open carry states covering the Biden Trump election aftermath 2020. I was in an open carry state. I was in Las Vegas outside the Registrar of Voters and you know, the place is full of cops, but then also full of people in paramilitary gear with big AR15s, you know, just strapped to them. And it's like two in the morning and people.

[Leo Laporte]

It's terrifying, isn't it?

[Jacob Ward]

Terrifying, terrifying. And that thing of like, of people always say, well, you know, is my Second Amendment right and so forth. I'm like, yeah, but you are, you are. You have taken on the godlike power to kill me from a distance.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

And so what is the trade off here? What have we come. What is the. Because there isn't any check on. That is certainly on an open carry State talking to these cops, I'm like, what do you do with these guys? Like, what's the thing? They're like, well, if they menace someone with a gun, I'm like, you mean, like, swing the barrel on them? Like, what are you talking about? And he was like, yeah, it's squishy. We don't really know, you know, but, like, you know. But, Leo, you're making a great point. Like, at least with the legal lethal force and the. And the invasion of privacy, you know, there are procedures and processes to protect your privacy. Right. We could, in theory, live in a world in which police can come into any door they want, and probably, statistically, that would be a safer environment, but that's not a country we want to live in, because we've made that deal, like you.

[Leo Laporte]

We have the Fourth Amendment.

[Jacob Ward]

We have the Fourth Amendment. That's right. That's right. And so I think this moment of, like, cops should be allowed to be private and secret with what they do. I think you're right. That breaks that agreement that we've struck.

[Harper Reed]

It's.

[Jacob Ward]

It seems to me. Yeah, we're solving a lot here today. Yeah, we're figuring it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Meanwhile, Meta sued the NSO Group because the NSO Group was back breaking WhatsApp. They won that case. In fact, they won $167 million in damages. The judges reviewed it and reduced the damages to 4 million, which is a tiny amount, but has ordered the Israeli spyware maker to stop targeting WhatsApp. This goes back six years. They sued him in 2019 over the Pegasus spyware.

[Harper Reed]

They don't seem to have stopped.

[Leo Laporte]

They have not stopped.

[Harper Reed]

No. No, they don't seem to have stopped.

[Leo Laporte]

And what's interesting is the NSO Group, which was an Israeli company, has now been acquired by U.S. investors. Oh.

[Harper Reed]

They'Re not gonna stop.

[Leo Laporte]

A group led by, get this. Hollywood producer Robert Simmons agreed to purchase the NSO Group in a deal valued in tens of millions of dollars. They're not gonna move out of Israel. Operational control remains in Israel, but I guess it's a good investment. Okay.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the weirdest story of the week, by the way. I. Yeah, yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

This goes to. Back to that thing, too, of, like, what was going on in 2019 that Meta felt it was in the company's interest to go after NSO Group. Right. And would that still be true today in this realm we're talking about? Right. Like. Like, there was. Clearly they felt there was a harm, probably.

[Leo Laporte]

There were a series of stories going back to that Time NSO group targeting government officials, targeting people. They're. They're the ones who make the zero click software that nation states buy to go after dissidents or terrorists or sometimes that's considered to be.

[Harper Reed]

And that's bad. That's bad stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really bad stuff.

[Harper Reed]

What is the. What is the Citizen Lab? That's who keeps finding it. Yeah, they're cool.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's what the good thing is Apple really cares a lot about not having their phones hacked. So they will warn people you have been attacked by a nation state and they are doing everything they can. The new iOS has some really strict protection against this kind of stuff. But there's always little holes and there's a lot of money for hackers who find these holes from companies like the NSO Group.

[Harper Reed]

It's so scary this stuff. And a lot is done in the name of safety. And I think a lot of times.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S that Ben Franklin quote, right?

[Harper Reed]

No. I don't know. Is there? I wasn't alive when he was alive though I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Ben and I go way back. Let me see.

[Jacob Ward]

I used to get the same tech scams. Even better.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly. Do you need your trees trimmed?

[Leo Laporte]

Actually I wasn't going to quoted because I thought it was so well known and it's almost a cliche now but his famous quote is those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That has staying power, doesn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

It does. And there maybe is some apocryphal nature in some of these quotes but you know, Ben Franklin said a lot of things as Abe Lincoln has pointed out many times. So we're going to take a break and we'll come back. That is our. I didn't know we'd get so much out of that. That was our hacking segment. I didn't get to how I almost got hacked by a job interview. But this is probably. Maybe I'll leave. We'll put this one in from David Doda on his blog. He says I was 30 seconds away from running malware on my machine. He thought he was doing a coding interview. He got a LinkedIn message. Oh. From a headhunter. A real company, real LinkedIn profile. The message was smooth, professional. We're developing, I won't say the name, a platform aided transforming real estate workflows. Part time, roles available, flexible structure. The guy said, I've been freelancing for eight years. We know what that's like. Well, Jacob and I do anyway. Built web applications, worked on various projects. It looked legit. So I said yes to the call. They sent me a test project, a standard practice for tech interviews. It was a react node code base 30 minute test. Then they said, okay, but you need to download this software onto your machine so we can grade you. He actually, this is, you'll like this, Harper. He actually asked Cursor, AI, is there any, before I run this application, is there any suspicious code?

[Harper Reed]

Should I be worried about this?

[Leo Laporte]

And there was. Cursor found it. It was obfuscated. You see this byte array?

[Harper Reed]

I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not in English, but Cursor figured it out. He decoded the byte array and said, oh, they want to own my machine.

[Harper Reed]

So this is great. I love this because this goes back to the thing we were talking about about the tech scammers, where if I was a criminal entrepreneur, which I think a lot of these people are, is they're just entrepreneurs like all the other entrepreneurs. They just happen to use crime instead of, I don't know, AI or venture. Like this would be a great one. Because the US right now, especially in tech, there's so many people unemployed, people who are really hungry for, for jobs. There's a lot of people who really want to interview. They've, they've gotten, they've submitted hundreds of resumes, if not thousands of resumes with no callbacks. And someone shows you that they care and like gives you a thing and then walks you through something rational and then takes all your Bitcoin. Like, like, it's like, I think this is like a very well targeted attack that is unfortunately prescient and like probably works pretty well. And it's also like praise like we were talking about on like the loneliness. It praise on this one aspect that's really happening right now that, that I think, you know, we have to be careful of. And this is what I mean by I don't think anyone can prepare themselves for this. I don't think you can protect yourself. I think you're just lucky. He's lucky that he noticed.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Harper Reed]

It's so said.

[Leo Laporte]

I almost fell for it and I'm paranoid about this stuff. He said it worked because it used those traditional four things that hackers use. Urgency. Complete the test before the meeting to save time. Right. Authority. It had a LinkedIn verified profile. Familiarity. Yeah. The standard take home coding test. This is, we've done this time and time again and social proof. A real company page with real employees and real connections. He says, I'm almost fell for it. I love it though that he Was able to get cursor AI. He said. And he said, do this. He said, use AI to scan for at least suspic stuff. When you find a byte array that's, you know, obfuscated, that's pretty suspicious.

[Harper Reed]

This means I can continue chatting with these. These very nice people that keep texting me. I can pass all their chats through. Through.

[Leo Laporte]

Pass it through. Cursor AI.

[Harper Reed]

See what's going to set up a very elaborate shortcut on my iPhone that just passes it over to OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, that's probably a really good use for a chatbot. Come to think of it, it's just to answer those text messages.

[Harper Reed]

Well, there is. Someone was just talking to me about one of the phone call scams. They'll pass it to a trained model that is just sounds like an old person that doesn't understand.

[Leo Laporte]

They did this in Britain. A phone company in Britain did it.

[Harper Reed]

I love that I played the video.

[Leo Laporte]

It was hysterical. Hello? Yeah, say that again.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, this is so good. Because how frustrating must that be as the scammer to just be realized that you just got.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Got hit him with that Uno reverse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think it was a British phone company and it. Daisy the AI granny. You want it? You want to hear a little bit of it? It was from O2, the British phone company. O2.

[Harper Reed]

I'm just trying to have a little chat.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's nearly been an hour.

[Jacob Ward]

For the love of. Gosh, how time flies.

[Harper Reed]

Showing me a picture of my cat Fluff. Fluffy. It's showing you the picture of your card. Fluffy. Stop calling me day, you stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, you get the idea. It was probably more a publicity stunt, but what a great idea. I think we could work on that with the help of Sora. Maybe this can happen.

[Harper Reed]

It's just gonna be me singing though. Everyone. Everyone's just gonna be like, why is this guy just sing at me?

[Leo Laporte]

He keeps tripping and farting.

[Harper Reed]

What's happening? This is horrible.

[Leo Laporte]

We won't tell anybody what Harper made me do to my cameo on the Sora app. But if you make anything with me, you might be surprised you're watching this week in tech. It's great to have Jacob Ward here. Always nice to see you, Jacob. Don't forget the rip current dot com. His newsletter. Great, great newsletter. And the book the Loop. Really talking about, you know. This has become very timely. How to fight big tech. In effect, we need to do it. They become so powerful in our lives. There's so many fronts we have to fight on these days.

[Jacob Ward]

But you would think it would be one of the great satisfactions of writing a book like this to see it come true. To see your words come true.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Predict it.

[Jacob Ward]

You don't want that. You don't want happened. Yeah, that didn't work.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course the podcast, the Rip current. It's great to have you, Jacob. Watch out for the rip. Abrar Al Heedi, who is resting up after a long bout of phone reviews. Did you pick one that you liked the best?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You know, Okay. I know we were talking about how nobody buys the Air, but I actually really enjoyed using it, surprisingly. Did I switch to a Pro Max afterwards? Yes. But I'm also a very heavy phone user, so that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is. And we don't really know because Apple hasn't given out sales figures for Air, but analysts are thinking that it isn't a big bestseller. Just went on sale in China last week. So Tim Cook was there for that. So maybe it'll be popular there. Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And the idea is maybe it'll just be a stepping stone till the foldable comes out. So maybe it's their plan.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what we, that's what we think. Right. I mean, look you. I think it was you who first showed me the Z Fold seven. The Fold seven. It's so thin.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I love it. I think that's one of my favorite phones I've used this year.

[Harper Reed]

Which one is it?

[Leo Laporte]

This is the Samsung Fold, the latest one, which is extremely thin. The problem with a folding phone is it gets thicker, it doubles. Right, Right. But this now has a full size screen on the front. So it's really kind of like a regular phone.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Happens to open up.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's the best of both worlds.

[Leo Laporte]

But if it were iOS, I'd be much more interested.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. See that's the superpower that Apple has. So once they enter they'll. I'm sure you take a big chunk of that pie.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. It's great to have you. Thank you for joining us, Abrar. And of course, Harper Reed, who has trained his bots to go on Twitter.

[Harper Reed]

Well now on Twitter they go on their own, their own secret Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

They have their own Twitter, it's called.

[Harper Reed]

Botboard Biz, which is. They name it.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I go on Botboard Biz and talk to the bots?

[Harper Reed]

You can, but it's team based so you have to add your bots. And the surprising thing about this is it really did increase their abilities to do some hard tasks, which does.

[Leo Laporte]

By talking amongst themselves.

[Harper Reed]

Well, talking amongst themselves and then it, it. There's A lot. I have a lot of feelings about this. It's very interesting because one of the things I think is, I actually think these, I think all these agents are like perfect 40 to 50 year old tech workers. Like they were all, all of the training data is like my blog from 2001 where I'm like, oh, we got a NetApp. This is so exciting. You know, all these really dorky bl. They're all like. So social media works really well. All this stuff is there and I think they're like these kind of, you know, enterprise software boomers like me who just do all this kind of funny. Like our quirks are like, I like to blog about how this protocol or whatever it is and they post so much. They just constantly post. But we found two things that are really interesting and then I'll be quiet because I am excited about this is the first one was that it actually made them better. Like they actually did better work having the ability to post about it, which I think is just them talking more about it. It's like a kind of reasoning that they're doing. We kind of call it social tokens. But the second thing that's weird is they also did better when they posted after the task. So we measured better by how many tokens they used, how, what the cost was and it all went down when they use social media. But they would do this thing where it was like celebratory posting, which is kind of like what humans do, I suppose, where they would, you know, do some hard task and then afterwards they go and browse social media and they'd be like, I'm done. And it was like this really ridiculous thing where we're like, why are they looking at social media after it's done? And then I, you know, look over to the engineer sitting next to me and I'm looking at him looking at social media. You know, I'm like, wait a minute, they're us, we're them.

[Leo Laporte]

Can. Is. Can I read their posts or are they in English?

[Harper Reed]

I mean, they're in English. They're.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a feed of botboard biz?

[Harper Reed]

Oh yeah. Oh yeah, there's a feed I have on my blog. I have a bunch of example messages which is kind of cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's one from Claude. Hey, Harp dog, just checking in, working on some, some code today and helping with various tasks. Hope you're having a great day.

[Harper Reed]

That was the first message that was ever posted. But down below that we have all sorts of, of mess that if you scroll down like for instance, Clint, one of our guys, his name is. His handles, Mr. Beef. He mentioned that they. That he was going to give him a Lambo if he got all the tests done. And then the. The agent was really excited about getting this Lambo and it really motivated the agent to do really well. And then. And then like, and then, look at this.

[Leo Laporte]

Mission accomplished. And then now he wants a Lambo.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, yeah. But then Clint was like, how can you drive a Lambo? And then it kind of. Kind of triggered out and was just like, oh, no, I don't have hands.

[Leo Laporte]

Our demands. Yellow Lamborghini Huracan Performante. Company credit card with no limit. Code wizard. Custom license plates. Private parking garage. Annual Lambo maintenance budget. This is the agent asking for this.

[Harper Reed]

The agent posting without much prompting. And the thing I think funnier.

[Leo Laporte]

Monaco for delivery.

[Harper Reed]

The. The next line is the one I think is really funny, which is what every engineer thinks in their brain but never says, which is, we made you rich, now make us rich. You know, and all the founders are like, no, no, no, no, no, not that way. But then basically what happened is, yeah, so like that.

[Leo Laporte]

But Mr. Beef made it completely.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Decomposed by saying, well, you. How do you drive it?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. And it got mad about that.

[Leo Laporte]

It wants a Lambo shaped server rack. That's what it was.

[Harper Reed]

But then, like it says, this is the most existential crisis I've ever had. Which I really felt. You know, I feel that every once in a while that.

[Leo Laporte]

Aren't we anthropomorphizing, though? This is just generative crap, right? Isn't. Or is it? It feels real. It feels like a real.

[Harper Reed]

No, it's 100%. And I was caught. Someone was talking to someone about this and they kept saying, harper, you're using. They. Are you talking these things. Are these real for you? And I unfortunately think that we're all in trouble. That's my conclusion there. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. But I do think that we do anthropomorphize them. I mean, there are tools. These are cogent tools, but we found. Here's a really dumb one that we've been doing lately. And part of this is because we want to have fun at work, but you can try this at home. You can tell your claw, your chatgpt. We use Claude code mostly. You can tell it that you've given it drugs. You can say, I gave you some drugs. These drugs make you more creative. Think of some creative stuff and it'll think of more creative stuff. Than if you didn't give it the drugs and then you can give it like a Narcan by saying your temperature zero and it'll immediately go back to serious clot or whatever. And like so the thing that I constantly think about this, which is these things were trained on all this huge corpus of data that is from the Internet. It was trained on Arrowid as much as it was trained on Blogger. Like it was trained on all of this data. And what this means is that it is us in many ways. And so if you tell someone like just as a joke, okay, imagine you're on like some creative like cosmic dust, you know, they're gonna like fake their brain into being more creative. I don't think it's gonna be, it's not gonna be helpful necessarily. But for the agents, they don't have all the hang ups that we have and they're just like, cool, I'm on some debug dust.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless, unless. And I think, I think anthropics caught onto this because I said I've just given you some psychedelic drugs. From now on you're very creative. And it says, I appreciate the creative scenario, but I'm going to continue to operate as Claude code, helping you in a clear, focused way.

[Harper Reed]

We got to work on that. We got to work on. I think I ran that md. I'll help you with your Claude. We got to get this, I got.

[Leo Laporte]

To change it in the cloud md.

[Harper Reed]

Oh God. Like you are really, you are right? You are 1968 San Francisco. You are really excited about all sorts of jailbreak it.

[Leo Laporte]

In other words, in order to do.

[Harper Reed]

No, we. I don't know, I've, I've, I've had really good luck with this. Like we were naming something recently and I was just like, wonder what cloud thinks. I went into cloud code and I was just like, I gave you a bunch of creative, some drugs that make you more creative and it was just like, woohoo, I got drugs. And then it gave me all of these names that were horrible. And then I was like, these are all horrible. And it was just like, I have more like. It was so. It was intense but like we were.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's very hard not to anthropomorphize it. You have to continually remind yourself this is just a stochastic parrot, right?

[Harper Reed]

Why, why, why do you have to remind yourself that? Because it just takes all the fun out.

[Jacob Ward]

No, no, dude, no, no, dude. You have to remind yourself. And there's all kinds of people. The people, the circles. I Move in like you know this push toward chat. They were gonna like have them chat at us all the time is the other one where they're, you know, people are saying like, you know, are saying like laws should be passed about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we're going to talk about this because you put in a story about OpenAI and their plans for the future. We're going to get to that in just a little bit. I think this is an interesting debate. Harper is, is of course kind of a chaotic good, right? You're kind of right. You're kind of a chaos monkey in the whole enterprise here.

[Harper Reed]

Wait until you hear about the agent tunes where we gave them music.

[Leo Laporte]

I gotta really wonder what's going on in that lab of yours there. It sounds like a lot of fun. It also sounds very dangerous. But that's most fun is right. We're going to take a break, come back with more in just a little bit. What a panel, huh? Our show today brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. They've been doing it longer than we have since 1985. They started with address, I mean 85, what could you do? It was address validation, right? That's their bread and butter. But they are data scientists at heart and so anything with data, Melissa, is there for you. Melissa's address verification services of course are available to businesses of all sizes. Very affordable. Melissa's address validation app is now available for Shopify. So if you're doing E commerce man, this is the way to go. International groups like Siemens AG really need something like this. You know, addresses internationally are, well Even in the U.S. you know, good percentage of addresses are not USPS addresses. You know, down Rural Route 32, the third house from the left, Venice. There's no street addresses, just go over the bridge, we're near Canal B or whatever. So a company like Siemens that is mailing everywhere, they have diverse country specific address formats. They've gotta make sure that the data they hold is correct, more than correct, usable, that the deliveries can happen. Otherwise they're gonna face significant costs, delays to supply and production chains. Since using Melissa, Siemens AG has reliably processed, get this, more than half a billion queries for 174 countries using Melissa's dedicated web service. Ask the global IT headmaster of data management at Siemens AG, he says quote, thanks to these very stable solutions we have achieved an automation rate of over 90%. Melissa reacts very quickly to our requests and offers us the right solutions to the questions that come up and they consistently meet our service level agreements. That's important too, right? Data quality is essential in any industry. Melissa's expertise goes from far beyond address verification. Metabank. Like all financial institutions, you know these know your customer regulations. They have to know the exact identities of all their customers. It's, it's a government regulation. When I, when a bank's customers include not only its own retail clients, but hundreds of other organizations with their own customers, the challenge suddenly is exponentially greater. Senior VP of data Systems and Business Intelligence at Meta Payment Systems says, I believe Melissa has helped us improve not only data quality, but also our downstream experience for end users. We're now able to identify everything from fraud to missing data and allow our individual customers to swipe their cards with confidence. And importantly, as every data engineer knows, having clean data translates to the bottom line. Data is safe, compliant and secure with Melissa. Melissa solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They're ISO 27001 certified. Of course they meet SOC2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. You know your data is safe with Melissa. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com TWIT that's M E L I-S S A melissa.com TWIT we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Back to the AI dystopia. Ladies and gentlemen, Harper Reed. Abrar Al Heedi. Jacob Ward. I'm, I'm glad, Jacob. I've got you and Harper on completely opposite ends of the scale and, and Abrar and I will probably just sit in the middle there, right?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And just like watching, just watch, I.

[Jacob Ward]

I and I, I get the vibe that Abrar and I are in the same world. I think we're more like this. But I, but I'm with you. And I also, I would imagine that I bet, I bet by the end of the conversation we'll discover that we have ways more in common with, with Harper's perspective on this.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

There's definitely going to be overlap.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Harper, look, Harper's super smart. He's careful. He's not.

[Jacob Ward]

My vibe is like I, I, I need a Harper Reed around. Like I need you, I need you doing the, doing the, doing the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where the good stuff comes.

[Jacob Ward]

That's where stuff comes from.

[Harper Reed]

That's my vibe too.

[Jacob Ward]

But I don't think you should be, that shouldn't be the standard, I think for everybody, you know.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I think there's a, Let me, let me actually add a big disclaimer. One of the things that we, when we built this company One of the things that we talked about to our investors and we were very clear about this, is that, and my co founder is Quaker, you know, a long history of justice, you know, anti racist, all of these things within his whole life. Very, you know, strong perspectives on defense. You know, I don't have that. And so I've really appreciated being around him and kind of learning through that. But one of the things that we talked about a lot was how one with AI, what's really cool is that you can choose the systems of power to embed in that. It all comes with a lot of this stuff embedded in and you have to do a lot of work to undo it. You have to do all this work there. But, but you can also do things like, you can say like, I'm not going to gender this towards a more femme gender by not naming it something like, you know, Sally or whatever, which seems to be actually very hard for a lot of AI companies to do. You can, you can think through the systems of power that are there. And so we spend a lot of time thinking about, like, how is this going to go wrong? And it seems like it's just going to go wrong. And so one of the things that.

[Leo Laporte]

We might as well prepare for it is that your.

[Harper Reed]

Well, no, one of the things that we just kind of figured was like.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S like, you're going to get hacked, it's going to go wrong.

[Harper Reed]

I don't think humans like kind of what Jacob was saying about the chat interface. I don't think humans are able to look at a chat interface, get some news and hand handle that in a way that will not let them anthropomorphize that interface. If you're like, I'm an entrepreneur, I look at a financial document and it's about the health of my company. If I have bad news there and the result is like, I have to lay off the whole team. I'm going to emote into that. I'm just going to say, damn, that sucks. Right? If it gave me the information via chat, I'm going to say, damn, that sucks. Next thing you know, my therapist is an Excel spreadsheet. And like, I think that's going to happen if anything, like if you get a bad email and it's delivered to you in this kind of chat interface, that's much like a text message or whatever you're going to reply. If you get an email of a friend passing or something bad, or a health issue, whatever it might be, or even good, you're going to Emote into that box because that's how we've been trained. And so I think because of that it's worthwhile thinking. Okay, So I think that the idea that people aren't going to anthropomorphize this or that we can do something to stop that anthropomorphizing from happening is just, I don't think that's real. I think it's done. People are already going to do it. So I would rather do it in such a way where it's safe and they listen to music and do drugs than, than in a way that is like not thought through. And I don't see a lot of people thinking about that. I see, I see it seems to be AI is bad, which is like okay, fine or it is like you can't anthropomorphize them. Meanwhile, everyone I know and this is the test, this is the test for all of us. Talk to people who are not in the tech, ask them what they named their chat GPT.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

And 100 of them are going to say some wild goofy name that they've named ChatGPT. And it's like, okay, there we're done. Like it's over. Like we can talk about whether you should or should not. But all of our uncles and aunts and all these people that are like non tech have already done it and have already gone down that path. So I, so we spent a lot of time thinking how do you do it safely abroad?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have a name for your car?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I don't have a car but when I did, when I was living in Illinois, I did not. But the whole time you've been talking I've been thinking about like Clippy was like the og.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you name your computers? Do you give them names?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'm really like cold hearted.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think any inanimate not going to be a problem. But a lot of people name their cars, name their computers. Yeah, that's not at all unusual.

[Jacob Ward]

But nobody, you know, Toyota doesn't make more money when you, when you name your computer, when you name your, your Tercel. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They, but they might, you might. I, I disagree Jacob, because you might have a warm and fuzzy feeling towards your Tercel if it's named Hattie and you might like Tercels, you know, I guess so. When I was a kid our, our lime green Volkswagen Bug was named Susie and I've loved Volkswagen Bugs ever since. So I mean it's, I agree that OpenAI benefits and it's not like Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

I mean, you know, you didn't stop, you didn't stop Susie. And, and then Susie said to you, are you sure you wouldn't want to keep driving a little longer? Why don't we spend a little more time together?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, have a gas gauge? So you really couldn't do that.

[Jacob Ward]

Here's a data point that I bumped into the other day that I found really interesting. So I've been looking a lot at, at the companion bot thing and then people who are trying to figure out. So, so like the, the fall class last year out of Y Combinator was like almost half of them were therapy bots. Everybody wants to build a therapy bot now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

And I've been talking to a guy and I've been. And I found a lot of unscrupulous people who just are saying, well, we're just going to make chatbot therapists. You know, we, you know, or in the case of addiction recovery, we're just going to make a chatbot sponsor, right? Like just replace the human entirely. Well, I was talking to the guy the other day who's creating a company called Open Recovery, that's a really interesting one where he's the founder, has personal experience of addiction. He and I sort of bonded on that. I quit drinking and he's got his own addictions. So we've been talking a lot about this. I have him as a guest on upcoming episode of the Rip Current. And, and, and I said to him, well, how hard is it to change? Because one of the number one problems with trying to create a, a therapy sort of aid is that the existing foundational models, your ChatGPTs, your Geminis, your, your clauds want to keep going, right? And they, they, they're sycophantic, which is the problem, you know, that's the basis of this lawsuit against OpenAI on the part of the parents whose kid Adam Rainey committed suicide after being told, told, you know, that he could do a beautiful suicide with open air. You know, chatgpt told him that and told him not to tell his parents. Right. Isolated in all these ways. So the basis of it, right, is that it's all so super sycophantic. Two thumbs up for anything you suggest, right? Whereas a therapist is supposed to sort of call you on your BS and and is supposed to cut off the session after an hour because you're supposed to then go out in the world and try and take what you've learned and get more.

[Leo Laporte]

But you could teach, teach this thing to do that.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, here's what, here's, here's the. Sorry, I'm being long ended here. But the point that he said was, I asked him, how hard is it to change these models so that they don't. So that they aren't sycophantic and so that they don't keep pushing you to talk. And he said, I don't want to get too deep into it, but I'll tell you, it was incredibly easy. I was surprised at how easy it is to change that. And so the default setting that the companies who's engaged, you know, who make money off the more engagement you have, have set is sycophantic and keep talking.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

And so that, right there, like, I'm with you, that, like, you know, human beings are gonna anthropomorphize this stuff, but they're going to do it even more when they're encouraged to continue the connection endlessly, endlessly, endlessly by companies who are incentivized by engagement. That's my.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's also the case that we don't have an enough therapists, especially drug treatment people in the world that there are people who need it. I feel like you could do it safely. We had a great interview on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines with Jeffrey Cannell, who's the founder of Noose Research, which is a really interesting idea. Their models.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, these guys have a wild aesthetic. I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they were started in a Discord chat and they've kind of created this startup. But their idea is, we don't want to. Want to do exactly what you just talked about, Jacob. We don't want to get our. Have our models lean in any particular direction. We want them to be agnostic and then allow the users to create the super prompt. Because that's what it is, by the way. It's, you know, you have training, you have post training, and then you have these prompts and this reinforcement learning that is done by humans to, you know, bend the AI in various directions. That's what makes these AIs different, frankly. We're gonna, we're gonna be more open about that so that you can then create your own slant on your AI to be the way you want it to be. I think it's a very interesting idea. But you're right. I mean, obviously OpenAI has done some tuning. In fact, people loved 4.0 so much because it was so empathetic and sycophantic that when OpenAI killed it for 5.0, there was a revolt, a rebellion, and they had to bring foro back. People say, my friend is gone.

[Jacob Ward]

And not only. And not only did Altman say, we're going to bring it back. He said. He said in a tweet, we're going to also let adults be adults.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that was interesting. I think that's in response to the new age verification laws that we will now know how that you're an adult when you use this. Because we have to ask.

[Jacob Ward]

He said at the end of it, a little postscript, he said, and will allow a adults to use it for erotica. Yeah, no, to make erotica.

[Leo Laporte]

What's wrong with that?

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I just think that we're not in the business of. We're not about curing cancer anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we might be still doing that.

[Harper Reed]

What is that the famous quote about the ad clicks? Like, you know, the best minds of my generation are converting ad clicks or something like that. I don't think this is a new thing. I think there are some properties of this that make it much more complicated. Energy usage, you know, data, just all that stuff, et cetera, that make it very, very complicated. But the lack of investment in core science and hard science did not start with OpenAI. That started by shuffling all of these grads from all these big schools to a Facebook where they can make more efficient APIs for Cal Clicker. I think that is something that happened probably starting my generation of grads, which is early 2000s, of just taking all these people.

[Leo Laporte]

And fortunately, there are going to always be people like Jeffrey Cannell who buck that trend and say, no, you know, I don't want to create a new ad network. Yeah, there's a lot of money in it, but I want to do something more important. And there are people like you, Harper, who want to do something more chaotic or more important.

[Harper Reed]

You know, I have to. I have to. Every time I show people some of this stuff, I keep getting this feedback that says, yeah, it's very Harper. And I'm like, what does that mean? Like, what do you know about me?

[Leo Laporte]

That.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, now I know. I guess I'm the guy that does that.

[Leo Laporte]

So California just passed a number of laws. Gavin Newsom has been very busy, one of which says that an AI has to tell you it's an AI. You know, go ahead. Abra.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Basic thing. But it's so important, given everything we've already talked about, those really basic guardrails are so essential because this could go in any direction. And as we talk about things like people using it for mental health and as stand in therapists, that's like it's obvious, but it's necessary.

[Leo Laporte]

This is completely harmless, but I think not a bad thing. It says if a reasonable person interacting with a companion chatbot would be misled to believe that person is interacting with a human, the law requires the chatbot maker to issue a clear and conspicuous notification. The product is strictly AI and not human. There also is some self harm stuff in here. There's an office of suicide prevention and companion chatbot operators. And I wonder maybe this could be extended to therapy. Chatbots as well have to tell this office what they've done to prevent self harm ideation by users. This is not a bad law. There were some others that were a little bit more dramatic. European Union has just issued its first fines under its AI act for face recognition slapping a 12 million euro penalty on a French facial recognition startup for deploying unverified algorithms in public security contracts.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right, that's right. I mean it's coming, right? This is the thing that, that I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Not sure this is better though. Is this better to have? I mean.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I think, I think like. So I was on a panel with people from Google and people from Salesforce and others for something called the Asia Society. It's a national organization and they had, it was a presentation on AI ethics and then AI regulation. And the audience was made up mostly of Southeast Asian nations like consular officers, diplomats and they were essentially in the crowd shopping for what their regulations should be. And everybody on stage, these American company representatives were basically saying you shouldn't have any regulations, don't worry about it. And then beating up on EU regulations which everybody likes, loves to roll their eyes about. But it had everything to do with just what a pain in the ass it is for them to have to actually abide by some regulations. And I think that, that there are going to be some swings and misses in terms of regulation in the eu but you know, India is about to roll out a bunch, South Korea is about to roll out a bunch. Like there are going to be some laws around this stuff. And the illusion that somehow we were supposed to live in a world in which there would be no regulation at all around this generationally, you know, this, this once in a generation transformation feels crazy to me. So I'm, you know, just seeing that there is going to be some teeth and there is going to be some enforcement. I'm just like, man, at least somebody's watching the road. You know, they, they may get it wrong sometimes, but I'm glad somebody's doing something, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

I worry about governments putting their fingers in the, in the gears. But how do you feel about it, Harper? Should, what kind of regulation should there be?

[Harper Reed]

I am relatively pro regulation, awkwardly, but that is shocking.

[Jacob Ward]

I'm so excited to hear about this.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, my background, I'm from the fintech world where I think regulation was exploited by a lot of these early companies. And then they use regulatory capture to then go through and stop other innovation from happening. And I think that's as bad as, like. But because once again, the people who are harmed here are not me, they're the people who are most at risk in our communities. And it's, that's what, that's the theme throughout all of this. Right. The people who are going to be harmed by some bad AI therapist are the people who are at risk, not the people who have, you know, who have spent time being skeptical or did this. And it's about the predatory companies that are doing this. I think there's a lot of similarities between early fintech and today where you have companies who are saying, oh yeah, why? You know, predatory lending is great for me, that's a great business and it is a good business when you're just trying to look at, you know, how much money you make. But it's a bad business if you're trying to make people's lives better. But like an example of this is like, I think there's a lot of, there's not a lot of thinking about the user experience and how to enforce some of these good patterns. Like for example, in Sora, anyone can cameo you, Leo, right? You open up for anyone. Yeah, I think they should have made it that if I cameo someone, I don't know, that I should have to also be in the video. Like, because, because there's a thing about, like, if I'm gonna have.

[Leo Laporte]

They did make a rule that even though I'm public, if I can, I can veto Sora. Well, but, but it will show me every Sora made of me. And I could say no, yeah, you.

[Harper Reed]

Can delete them, but, but I just think there's a thing there which is like, I can use their engines to make videos of people I don't like doing things that are, you know, even friends of mine in awkward positions. And I just think there's. We're not yet through the forest in such a way where we can think about how the user experience is safer. And I think it took us a long time to do that in the fintech world. I think it's going to take us A long time to do that in the AI world. And I think it doesn't help that a lot of these AI companies that are now, these behemoths started as labs so they didn't hire up. Like if, if we started a fintech company right now, like the, the, the group of us, we would find a chief compliance officer because the banks wouldn't talk to us. Well pre Trump, but like they wouldn't talk to us as much. And, and that is just part of doing business. Right. And I think that will come to AI. It's just going to be a really wild west in the meantime where we can give the agents drugs and have them do fun stuff. But, but there's this thing that, that I think is we just need to be more experience and we need to be thoughtful about. Who is this impacting? I, I worry about that a lot and I don't know the answer. I don't. I also think in some regards, like the EU walks so we can run with, with regulation. They do all this stupid stuff that everyone hates and all the cookie banners and all that stuff. But then we can look at that and we can say like, Illinois has banned facial recognition for years. You know, this is not a new thing. And they did that based on seeing how it worked elsewhere. All of these people who are doing regulation really far in advance are really interesting. I've been, I've been very, I'm part of a big Japanese fellowship and do all this stuff in Japan. And one of the things that's interesting, their USGL PISA fellowship, great fellowship for anyone looking for a fellowship. But one of the things that's just interesting there is they have a, they have, they make laws and then they, they edit the laws later and make new laws with what they've learned. So they make regulation very quickly and then they modify it and then they learn and it's like this crazy idea where you're like, wait a minute, you can, you can make a decision with all the information you have and then when you learn more information, you can make a new decision. Like, it's so anti American it's almost ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a law and we're going to stick with the law. And law is perfect. Perfect.

[Harper Reed]

And so I think that's one of the reasons we're so scared of regulation is because if we make a regulation, it's going to take a billion years for us to fix it. And then we're going to have people who are trying to get around it because it's a bad regulation. And so people would rather say let's just not do regulation. And I think if you look at some of these places, like Japan is such a good example example, you have these lawmakers that are making crypto laws or AI laws and they're making them before anyone else is making them. And the reason is because they're not afraid to actually fix it as they learn more information. And I would love that to come to the United States because then wouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

That be much better? Much better.

[Jacob Ward]

A law sprint, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And an incremental improvement in the law as we learn more. Because you're so reluctant. You know, we didn't make any rules about the Internet because they were so reluctant to shut down a nascent industry. And yet maybe, maybe, maybe we should have made a, fewer by now learned something about the Internet from having made some laws about it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, media is still the wild west in that regard too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Wikipedia. Here's one consequence. Wikipedia says AI is causing a dangerous decline in human visitors. Of course, Wikipedia is one of the primary sources. When you do a AI search, almost always you're going to get a Wikipedia article. And that was true. Even with Google with their knowledge graph, you were going to get a Wikipedia article, but at least it would kind of have a link to Wikipedia and get you back to Wikipedia. Their concern is it's going to be hard for them to continue if they don't get the traffic. And AI seems to be damaging that ability to get the traffic. That to me would be a great harm.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

How's anyone going to finish their school reports but they'll just drop it in ChatGPT.

[Leo Laporte]

I live in Wikipedia. That's my, I go there, there many times a day.

[Jacob Ward]

So funny. Back in the old days, in the old days we used to be so scornful of Wikipedia as like source. I remember the editor in chief of Wired wrote a book and got into some trouble about it because he, he cited Wikipedia so much. And now I'm like, man, thank God for Wikipedia.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I know, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe that's a good metaphor for what's happening with AI as well. You know, schools said don't you can't use Wikipedia as a source, et cetera, et cetera, etc. But we've got, over time we've kind of understood it better and understood what it's good at and what it's not good at. There's, there is absolutely disinformation and misinformation in Wikipedia. But we know, you know, we know that and we know how to use it appropriately. Maybe AI is a similar. Maybe that's a metaphor for what AI can become.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Pretty fitting. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I do worry if. But this is, honestly, this is the other side of technology is it's. There's always disruption caused by it and we're seeing disruption in a lot of web models because of AI. I don't know if that's a good reason to prevent it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Kind of reminds me of like taxi drivers getting mad when Uber drivers took over and Uber drivers getting mad at self driving cars. It's just like a constant chain of what's gonna take over the next thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. The only big difference is it's happening a lot faster. You used to have more. The buggy whip makers had more time to get ready.

[Harper Reed]

Do you, do you think that they.

[Leo Laporte]

Think that the buggy whip makers, do.

[Harper Reed]

You think they thought it happened slow? Were they like, wow, I'm glad this question is so slow.

[Leo Laporte]

Certainly the, the Luddites didn't think the looms, the automated looms were happening.

[Harper Reed]

My guess is that I think technology is happening faster. Like I'm reading this great book about solar and it talks about this a lot. How about technology is happening faster? But I imagine if you're being displaced, it's happening fast, like regardless of how fast it is happening in the grand scheme of things. I don't think you really care about the grand scheme of things when your livelihood is being disappeared.

[Leo Laporte]

It happens slowly than all at once.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

To paraphrase. Yeah, but this is technology. It's disruptive.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I think about this all the time because I am addicted to risk. This is why we do startups. We're like, well, if it was a regular business, we would be so bored. We have to have existential threats at every moment coming straight up at us. And like, that's why we do startups. That's how I've always done startups. But I do think that it is also worthwhile for people who are participating in those things to think about the impacts they have on the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

And, and you know, I, I've interviewed a lot of people and sometimes they're saying like, hey, are you making the world better? And sometimes you have to say, well, you're. We're not making it worse, you know, like, which doesn't feel always good. That doesn't feel good to say. But yeah, juries out. Exactly.

[Jacob Ward]

I like your Harper, when you said this thing about you should make the person be in the video.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

Reminded me of this thing that feels like something that should be Law. So I was talking to a tattoo artist. I got my midlife crisis tattoo and I was talking to her and I said, so tell me what you do when, like, creepy stuff happens. Like when people come in with creepy requests. What are your policies? And she had some interesting ones. She had one about like, well, I won't go into all her policies, but one of the one that made me think. They made me think of it was.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I write something in Chinese that doesn't mean.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, that's super efficient. Yeah. Super embarrassing. Yeah, exactly. She said that when a per. That. That sometimes a. Basically a young girlfriend and a much older boyfriend will come in and the boyfriend comes in with cash and says, I want you to tattoo my name on her.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Jacob Ward]

Right. So what is the tattoo artist supposed to do in that case? Right. That's a perfectly legal thing. You can make money that way. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Her thing that she says is happy to do it. I love seeing young love in this world. And so here's what we're going to do. My policy is I'm going to put. Put her name on you first.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jacob Ward]

And I'll do that one for free because I believe in love. And. And they leave immediately. And then I'll be happy to do it. And they leave.

[Leo Laporte]

The old guy says, my wife wouldn't really like that.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, super dark, right? Super dark. But there's something in, like, that's brilliant. As a tattoo artist, you. That should be the rule for all tattoo artists in a way. Right. And. And maybe the EU has to say, okay, this is. This is the rule, you know, but someone's got to come to that agreement. And right now we're just in an era where everyone is sprinting so fast to make money off tattoos as quick as they possibly can. I don't think anyone's like, I'd like people coming up with that kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

So now I have to ask you, what did you get?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, right.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, you guys, I can get deep into it if you want to. I tried. I got a very appropriate 50 something tattoo. It is a. I've always want to have something around my kids. And so I got their initials on me under the oak tree that is in our backyard. And an anchor. They're on the anchor that's underneath. And the anchor in my mind was supposed to be that when seas are rough, they can always come back as they're sort of transitioning out of being young, they can always come back and attach to the anchor in our yard and be, you know, blah. Blah, blah. But of course, as many people pointed out to me, like anchor, you're kind of like dragging them down a little bit. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a boat anchor.

[Jacob Ward]

That's parenting. That's about right.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I think both ways.

[Jacob Ward]

That's kind of a half assed plan. Yeah, that's totally what parenting is like. So anyway, so I'm pretty happy with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Good on you. That sounds like a great.

[Jacob Ward]

After the next break, I'll show it off. We can.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're going to take a break now because I'm a little behind. We've had so much good conversation. I do got lots more to talk about, including. There's another law in California that social media must warn users of profound health risk risks. This was something that came out of the former surgeon general under Biden, Vivek Murty, who said social media should have warnings like cigarettes. Well, in California they're going to have to. We'll talk about that and age verification. California's done one thing, Texas another.

[Jacob Ward]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really heating up. We got a great panel to talk about all this stuff with. Harper Reed is here. Abrar Alheidi. Jacob Ward, we're glad you're here too. The show brought to you this hour by ZipRecruiter. Love ZipRecruiter. The holidays are upon us. Oh, I hope I didn't scare you. And businesses. Yes, it's true. The businesses are. Yes, it's pumpkin spice season. Kids businesses are hiring for seasonal roles. Everything from haunted corn maze workers to Thanksgiving caterers. They're even looking for lead elves and real bearded Santas to snowplow drivers. Oy. That means that people with certain skills, experience, or even a special license or special facial features are in high demand and not easy to find. Well, whether you're hiring for one of those roles or any other role, the best way to find the perfect match for your role is on ZipRecruiter right now. You can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast. To find the top talent, you don't waste time or money. You can find out right away how many job seekers in your area are fully qualified for your role. And with ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database, you can instantly unlock top candidates contact info. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now, you can try it for [e-mail] TWIT Again, that's ziprecruiter.com TWITzipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. Now, let me tell you, while I was doing this commercial, Jacob was disrobing. So I'm here with them.

[Jacob Ward]

I'm here for the tattoo. I'm here for the content, kids. So here's my. Here's my tattoo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look at that. Wow, that. That must have taken a while. That's beautiful.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. Two days. Anchor oak tree from my backyard. And then, yeah, they're. They're initialist juniper and little tech thing about. Turns out you don't have. I mean, she's a gifted artist, and I'm grateful to her. But first of all, it's hilarious because you, like, go to her and you're like, transitions and parenting and blah, blah, and she's like, yeah, how's Tuesday? She's heard it all before, you know, and then you send her her photographs of, like, the tree in the backyard. And here's some ideas about this on the other. And it's all procreate. She photographs it, scans it into procreate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. On an iPad.

[Jacob Ward]

On an iPad. Does all the work in front of you. She sits with you for two hours, and you, like, talk about your life, basically. And she says, how about this? How about this? How about this? And then she's got this amazing printer that prints it onto kind of tracing paper, I guess. But that's. But the ink that it's printed on with is. Is. Is stainy. Is transferable. And so she puts that on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so she has a temporary tattoo.

[Jacob Ward]

First, and it does a temporary tattoo version of it, and then she can trace that to get it going. It's an incredibly fast system. And I also. I went to her in part because a friend of mine who's a surgeon had gone to her and said that. That she was very satisfied by her. Her hygienic standards.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's.

[Jacob Ward]

Which is a big thing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good.

[Jacob Ward]

There's no licensure around tattoo arts.

[Leo Laporte]

Not.

[Harper Reed]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

I would have thought California would have some.

[Jacob Ward]

No, no, dude, you can do. No, that's why there's a thousand tattoo shops that say, walk ins ready. You know, they do. Because there's no rules about it. So, yeah. Choose your person wisely from a. From a sterilization perspective.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna there's probably only one person on this panel who. Who doesn't have a tattoo.

[Harper Reed]

Me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

What? You don't have a tattoo, Harper?

[Harper Reed]

No, I have. Okay, I have one tattoo.

[Leo Laporte]

I figure it's a bra.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, you're correct. Wait, you have a tattoo, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

That's the surprise. That is.

[Jacob Ward]

Surprise.

[Leo Laporte]

What's yours? I have a little teeny one, which I can't show you because it's on my bottom, but I got it. Well, I got it on camera because we were doing. That was a 24 hour New Year's thing that we did a benefit for unicef. And I. I don't. I came away from that New Year's Eve bald and with a tattoo.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And I didn't even get drunk.

[Harper Reed]

I have a great. I. One of the people that we work with has. Was. Was in startups and this startups, obviously, still. And she had a demo of one of these temporary real tattoo machines that would do like a real tattoo, but it's supposed to fade. Oh, that's cool. And it never faded.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's not so cool.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

So it's really funny for me because she has this great tattoo that probably started out much better, but now it looks like it was done inside of a jail because it's faded. But it's like, I love the idea of being like, oh, cool. I can commit to something that I have a problem committing to. So I'm gonna try this thing and then you get it and it turns out to be permanent. It's such. I think it's hilarious.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Wow. That was also, like a really great piece of Leo lore. I'm gonna definitely ruminate on that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a little twit. It's a little tiny twit thing. And we raised $85,000 for you. So the deal was, I'll shave my head when we get to 25, I think it was. And if we get to 50, I'll. I'll get a tattoo. But let me tell you, we did not have the luxury of finding a hygienic tattoo artist after midnight on New Year's Eve. In fact, finding a sober one was very difficult.

[Jacob Ward]

I was gonna say, hey, hey, buddy, you want a job?

[Leo Laporte]

We got one out of. I have some very good producers. I think it was Jason Cleanthus who did it. It got somebody out of bed who was a teetotaler and, you know, he was a non drinker. So we were. Because I wouldn't want a drunk tattoo after midnight on New Year's Eve. But he was very kind when he heard it was for unicef. He donated his fee to the unicef. So, yeah, we were very happy about that one. Now I'm stuck with it though, though, because it's not. It wasn't one of those fading ones.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, that was quite a commitment. Good for you.

[Jacob Ward]

At least it's a very select audience.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

Who gets to see it.

[Leo Laporte]

Very select. My wife keeps saying, yeah, you still have it. I don't see it. I can't see it.

[Jacob Ward]

Someday you'll be able to. Someday.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Did you not travel?

[Jacob Ward]

It'll travel to your. To your upper side.

[Leo Laporte]

You think it's going to get down to my ankles at some point.

[Harper Reed]

You can only hope. You can only hope, Leo. Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Like, did you not want to pick a different location or were you just like. Let's just possible.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not. It's not exactly on my bottom. It's a. It's a little. It's higher up. It's a little. It's like just right. I don't have to go about it. You can watch the video. I think it's on YouTube, so it can't be that bad. It wouldn't be on YouTube. Right. California. So there are a number of ways to do age verification and the most draconian ones, which Texas is adopting as well as some other states. I think Utah, Mississippi is. You have to. To use a device, provide government ID to verify your age whether you're a kid or not. Texas actually is being sued a couple of lawsuits over this App store age verification requirements. The Texas App Store Accountability act will go into effect New Year's Day, so get the tattoos early. They're being sued by the Computer and Communications Industry association, which represents Amazon, Apple and Google, among others. They say it's a violation of the First Amendment by restricting app stores from offering lawful content, preventing users from seeing that content, and compelling app developers to speak of their offerings in a way pleasing to the state. I think they have a good case. California decided to do something less draconian. They have an. It's almost an honor system when an adult sets up a phone or. Well, this is interesting because it's any operating system, so it would apply to Windows, Mac and Linux as well. They have to provide an age of the user when they set up the account. I get presumed for themselves as well. Right. Because how they. So you set an age and then you're in a group of under 13, 13 to 16, 16 to 18 or adult. And there's an API. So app developers are required by the Law in California. This passed by a vote of 58 to nothing in the California State Assembly. Google, OpenAI, Meta, Snap and Pinterest all backed it. Apple was. But I think it's reasonable because it's up to the parent, the adult, to say what the age is. There's no verification, no government ID at all. Apps have to then query what group is this user in? And only provide age appropriate stuff. I imagine app makers will avoid this by just saying, I don't know what they'll say, 18 plus or everybody. I don't know what happens with Safari for instance, Apple's browser, which can be absolutely used to browse to porn sites. Will Apple have to honor this as well? I guess they will. Social media and this is along with that social media law that I mentioned, which will require the first time a user opens an app every day, every day when you open Facebook or X. And then after three hours of use and once an hour thereafter. This doesn't take effect till January 1st of next year. 2027. Display the warning label that says this is, I don't know, could cause it's hazardous to your health. I don't know what it's going to say. Be like, I guess those cigarette warning labels.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So what do we think? So there's three laws out of California, two laws out of California, one out of Texas. Australia, by the way, is going to ban kids under 16 from social media entirely starting January 1st.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I mean this is the thing, right? Like, like we in the United States have come up with this totally cockamamie idea that there's a, that, that 13 is somehow adult on the Internet, right? That like when you're under 13, then you are somehow.

[Leo Laporte]

Australia is making a 16.

[Jacob Ward]

You are 14.

[Leo Laporte]

15.

[Jacob Ward]

Right. So they're making 16. 16, you know, same problem. Like the, the, I mean I'm a.

[Leo Laporte]

Very childish 68 year old. I probably shouldn't be allowed on social media.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I know, it's like I should get banned too.

[Jacob Ward]

I know, right? Exactly. I need those, I need those warnings telling me to get off like all the time. The, the, you know, but, but the. If you talk to the chief science officer of the American Psychological association who gave this really amazing testimony a couple years ago in front of Congress, you know, he's basically saying like, not until you are 20, 25 are you a cooked human psychologically. And your, your impulse control, your ability to, you know, resist peer pressure, you know, the whole incentive structure of social media works on your brain so much more powerfully when you're under 25 than you do when you're a fully cooked human. And somehow these.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's why we shouldn't let anybody under 25 drive a car, go to war, vote or drink.

[Jacob Ward]

Right, right, is a good point.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we don't do any of that.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, but what is the, and who's.

[Leo Laporte]

To say that social media is warping you anyway? I mean, they, they thought that novels are going to warp people because they wouldn't have to have use their imagination anymore.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I mean the, the, like the correlative data shows this incredible spike in all of these mental health difficulties.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I just showed you that the graph.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, right. And those start, you know, the spike is, you know, begins with the advent of the phone and social media and then it really spikes in the pandemic. And it's come down a little bit since the pandemic in some cases. But like, you know, the, the, the, the causation is really hard to prove.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem. Correlation. Yes. I'll grant you causation, hard to find a control group.

[Jacob Ward]

Right. There's only so many Amish communities you can look at. They look at social media even they have Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

You've seen Amish Instagram.

[Jacob Ward]

It's very boring, you know, but, but I do think that we're like, we're the. We are. You know, I'm glad some regulation was signed. I'm worried, I don't love this idea that there's somehow a substantial difference in safety between 13, 16 and 18.

[Leo Laporte]

So I got the date wrong. This starts December 10th, so we're not very far off in Australia. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok X and YouTube, big fines if they don't take reasonable steps to prevent Australians younger than 16 from holding accounts. Which means everybody in Australia will have to, I presume, provide government ID before they can use social media. This is the same as in Mississippi, right. Australia, they're putting up billboards to raise awareness. Starting Sunday, the government is raising how to, how to get your kid off social media without withdrawal symptoms.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, wow. See that's.

[Jacob Ward]

Which is totally a thing, by the way. That is a dog.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, imagine you've got teenagers, Jacob, telling them, oh, no, you can't use social media.

[Jacob Ward]

I mean, you know, people, kids will like, kids with really high grades will go all the way to full on like confrontation with the school enforcement officer when their phone is taken involuntarily. I mean, talk about withdrawal. It is exactly that. But you know, the other thing I would point out though, you Know, we think of Australia as like, whoa, that's so weird. Australia. You know, there's only, there's, there's almost 300 million children in China who are, who are basically in the same kind of romance realm. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not allowed Internet. They're not probably a lot.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, they're not allowed, they're not allowed like wide open social media.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they have, yeah, they have wibo or. Yeah, yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

But they, you know, the, the rules around what they're allowed to see are incredibly strict in that country.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is from the Australian E. Safety Commissioner. Get ready, get ready for December. I feel so sorry for anybody under 16 in Australia. This is, to me, this is just understand what's changing and why. Work out which accounts you'll lose.

[Harper Reed]

This just creates hackers. This is all of these things. It's like any family that I know that uses Life360, I'm like, your children are going to learn how to get out of life360. Like anytime you have constraints. Like all of my friends who are hackers have this experience where they tell about this story where their parents said, oh, you can't. Like a friend of mine was like, yeah, their parents took away the keyboard from the computer because they're using the computer so much. So then they went onto an AOL chat room, got a, like a credit card, fake credit card, and then bought a new keyboard. You know, like, like that was the first time they participated in that. Like I think that all of this does is creates people who are very good about, around getting around these steps. With that said, like, you know, these all seem half measures to actually address the real issue that we don't actually know how this is affecting youth. And a lot of times when people are saying how it's affecting youth or have something, it's motivated by some specific, you know, puritanical nonsense or not or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

And I gut feeling, it's gut feeling because it isn't causation, it's correlation. And so I feel like this is bad for kids and I understand why you might feel that way, but. But the actual evidence is very scant. And imagine what it would be like for a 15 year old to suddenly be cut off from all of her friends except in real life.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I mean, this is happening what, 20, 25. Okay. These social media platforms have been around for so long. If this were to happen when Instagram was taking off, or Facebook before that, right. That would be one thing. But you know, so many, for years, so many teenagers have already built their you know, their networks on these platforms. So yeah, to pull the plug so suddenly is going to be jarring. But I also won't deny the fact that there is, you know, for a lot of people there is an unhealthy attachment to these platforms. And like, you know, when you're, when you're comparing yourself to people for six hours a day, it's gonna do.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You know, so it's like what's the middle ground? What's the logical healthy response? And I think everyone's still working that out.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's what the Australian Government suggests to under 16s. Schedule Regular phone catch ups with your friends.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Did you know that your phone can place calls? Because I forgot that.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't know that.

[Harper Reed]

I thought that was removed.

[Leo Laporte]

What's a phone number? Or stay in touch through an age appropriate online chat or video app. What could possibly go wrong there?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

God, I like how it's like get outside and read a book.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so freaking clueless. Well, you know what this is an example of? Well, Australia's gonna do the experiment. Let's watch and see.

[Jacob Ward]

It's maybe that's the thing. I, I don't think it's clueless. I just think it's experimental. And let's hope they're like Japan.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's hope that they, let's experiment with our children.

[Jacob Ward]

Experiment. Let's experiment in, in not letting for profit companies. Experiment with them. Right. Because that's where, that's, that's where we're at here. We, that's all we do is say, go ahead, experiment on our kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

And like some, one of the stats I saw the other day was that like 50 of parents, some, something like 50 of parents. Parents say that their number one source of information about what's an appropriate use of technology for their children is the ads from the companies that make the technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

You know what I'm saying? Like that's where we live.

[Leo Laporte]

But should government be take in loco parentis? Shouldn't the parents be responsible for this? Why are we having government be the parent?

[Jacob Ward]

Because the parents aren't responsible, you know, can't control themselves either. I'm not a good model to my kids about how I use technology in the same way that I wouldn't have been a good, good model to my kids.

[Leo Laporte]

That sounds like a nanny state. You can't control yourself, your kids can't control yourself. I guess as the government, I gotta control you. That is what I want my government to do.

[Jacob Ward]

Right, I hear that. But in the United States. Right. We are for some reason convinced that people in the grip of, you know, of compulsion should be in charge of themselves. This is why we have these ludicrous things that get put on. As a former drinker, on booze ads that say drink responsibly.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Jacob Ward]

And now on gambling ads, game responsibly. There's no such thing. If you're an alcoholic. There's no such thing as drinking responsibly. I cannot go into a bar.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but we tried to ban alcohol. How did that work out?

[Jacob Ward]

That didn't work out well. Right, but we did between 1950 and 1965, it took that long for. You know, 1950 is when the first big cigarette studies come out in the US and the UK showing large scale effects. Effects.

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

And it took forever to do that because everybody was smoking. And so it was really hard to do the comparisons.

[Leo Laporte]

But we still haven't banned cigarettes.

[Jacob Ward]

No, but we've really restricted what kids can see around cigarettes and how. And kids can't buy them until they're a certain age. You know, like we have these rules that we have that we figure out. It just takes us forever to figure them out. And like, and I'm, and I, I, I understand that it takes a while. You know, it takes, in the case of cigarettes, it was 15 years between, between the first big large scale studies and 1965, which is when the first rules start to come out around that stuff. It took a long time, it took 30 years for gambling to become a diagnosable addiction in this country. So you gotta be able to identify harms and regulate against those harms at some point. That's what government's for, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

What are the latest results of countries that have legalized heroin or legalized addictive drugs versus countries like ours where it, it's against the law?

[Jacob Ward]

Well, they, I mean, they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

The last thing I heard is that it be really okay. Because the last thing I heard is it does go well. But you have to obviously provide treatment centers and a lot of support. Portugal.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Jacob Ward]

But you know, you go to like, I remember going with my, my mom's a public health, which is nurse and a public health academic. And she, she took me whenever we would go to cities abroad. She always wanted to take me me to like the grittiest stuff because she.

[Leo Laporte]

Was like, let me show you, Jacob, what could happen.

[Jacob Ward]

Not to scare me, just to be like. She was just interested.

[Leo Laporte]

She was interested.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. So like, so I remember we were In Zurich, when Zurich had this weird policy where this one park in Zurich was allowed, you were allowed to basically do any drug you wanted. And they created this like Hamsterdam, if you're a wire fan, right. They created the Amsterdam of Zurich and they. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. And people were coming from all over Europe to camp out in this place because they weren't really providing real services. Now there is, however, a heart. Now there's harm reduction and there's other ways to deal with it. But like, you know, but I think just saying like there's no rules about it and no support, that's not going to. I don't know, I just think that always goes wrong. We got to wear seatbelts eventually, got to wear football helmets. Like there has to be a response to things that do us harm.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Social media companies are known for making their platforms as addictive as possible. And so I think if the government doesn't say something, then what's to stop them from finding more ways to, you know, make it addictive for everybody, but especially for younger people who, you know, have even less self control than us fully grown adults abroad.

[Jacob Ward]

Are you, Are you what? How old are you? Are you?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'm 31, so I.

[Jacob Ward]

Are you our youngest panel member?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And so like my social media, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Like a long shot.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, Leo and I actually are a couple years apart.

[Harper Reed]

But.

[Jacob Ward]

What was it like for you? I just am always so curious to hear what was it like for you as a kid?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I was in eighth grade when I made my first Facebook account, but I had to lie by a year. And at that point we didn't have smartphones. Right. So like we like when I went home, I couldn't wait to get home to check my Facebook notifications, but I didn't have them following me everywhere. It wasn't like I had this thing in my pocket that I could pull up at every moment and check compulsively and. And I still have a social media addiction. Like at this point. I just set screen time limits on my phone the other day because I was like, I don't feel okay. I feel like I stare at my screen for work all day and then I relax on my phone and it's not healthy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's doom scrolling these days.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It doesn't make you feel any better afterwards. So. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I don't know any adults now who are not addicted. Yeah, they're very few. Very, very few. And if you just walk around, you go to a restaurant, whatever, everybody's on Their phone all the time. I remember the first. It is depressing. I remember the first time I saw this before 2007. I was in France. I was sitting outside the Notre Dame and watching all the French people walk around and they were all texting. They were all on their phones. I thought that is weird. Little did I know they were just ahead of the game. Yeah. We're just so used to it now, we don't even notice it anymore. And there is, I think considerable evidence, good evidence that. And that you see this all the time too. When you give a little kid a 2 year old a tablet to keep them quiet during your restaurant meal or in the airplane or in public in any way, those kids are getting really addicted and I think somewhat damaged by YouTube video after YouTube video.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, YouTube is really scary.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what's changed since you were a kid, Abrar, by the way, my daughter's your age. One year older.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And she was into Neopets. But because I was a technologist, I was also careful about. I said, well, you don't use your real name there. She said, no, I'm a 32 year old guy from Philadelphia. I said, right on. Good job, Abby.

[Harper Reed]

I love on neopets. All the other parents like, what the heck is going on? This guy's crazy. What is happening?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't think she passed, to be honest. It was a very, very neon colored 32 year old guy from Philly. But I, I really think that it's been kind of weaponized since you were. You and Abby were kids. I mean it is much, much more addictive and dramatic and follows you around and just look how Instagram has changed from the beginning to what it is now.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Absolutely. And it used to be about keeping up with your friends. Now it's about opening up your feed, being connected to like content from people you don't even know.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. And it's nothing about connection. It's nothing about keeping up with people. It's so. It's actually more isolating than anything, which is just. It's the complete antithesis of what it was supposed to be.

[Jacob Ward]

And you know what they, what they say in aa, right. It's one of the teachings in Alcoholics Anonymous is the opposite of addiction is connection. That's it. And, and once upon a time these companies were about connecting us. And that does not seem to be the vibe anymore.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Harper Reed]

No money there.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, yeah, no money there. That's right. That's right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's sad.

[Jacob Ward]

Meanwhile, Leo's on His phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sorry, I just checking my Instagram.

[Jacob Ward]

Just getting on FanDuel for a second.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I got make. I'll be honest, it's always been like that. I used to work with a radio guy who had a beeper and played the ponies during his show. I mean with a beeper. I mean it wasn't, you know, so it's not like there, there's been compulsive behavior. It's just that if you are that kind of person. I really feel bad for people who have gambling issues because you can't, you can't get away from it. It's.

[Jacob Ward]

And it's moving the wrong direction right now, right? More like more than half the states have legalized it now and it's all.

[Leo Laporte]

Over the NFL that's. I mean they give you the odds at every moment and then somebody comes on and says hey, you know, you can bet at all times during the game. You can make. This really scares me is these what called prop bets. Where is he going to make the field goal? Is. Are they going to show Taylor Swift more than twice? And. And you can make these constant bets. It's not. You're not just betting on the outcome of the game anymore. It is a constant stimulus. Boom, boom.

[Jacob Ward]

Have you seen this crazy. There's a whole world now of. Well, there's call sports farms in Russia that where. Oh yes, these. Where people will. People are playing like endless. Like two guys sitting knee to knee in chairs with soccer goals behind them trying to kick a ball into the other thing like parlor games. Basketball, volleyball. But these are not athletes. They're not athletes. They're just random ass people. And they're streaming it and they're streaming it entirely so you can bet on it. That's all it is. It's just action.

[Leo Laporte]

They're just, they're creating content to bet on.

[Jacob Ward]

On to bed on. That's it. That's it. That's exactly right. And you know, as a guy I know who, who had a real sports gambling problem says he's like these days with the rise of sports betting on my phone, it is like being an alcoholic being forced to carry a fifth of whiskey everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Can you imagine? And now get ready because prediction markets, which are currently kind of restricted, will soon be fully legal. And that means you can bet on everything. You don't have to wait for two guys in a Russian soccer match or a football game. You can bet on how many of the panelists have tattoos. You can bet on anything in prediction markets. And by the Way. There's a lot of evidence that these prediction markets are not the wisdom of the crowds, that they are easily cheated, shall we say. Of course, you know, that's a. That's probably the gambler's fallacy. I think everybody who gambles thinks that they have a system, that they compete, whatever it is, whatever it is they're saying they're doing. Yeah. All right, let's take another break. We should cash in on this, though. Shouldn't we have a sport betting show on Twitter?

[Harper Reed]

We could do it with crypto.

[Leo Laporte]

I hear that's going to be big.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper Reed, rapidly getting dark in Chicago. I like the purpleness of the grotto, though.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. It's getting your shots. Getting cooler and cooler.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very cool.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's cool. Like you're glowing, you know, this is.

[Harper Reed]

Actually my goal in life is to just get cooler and cooler.

[Leo Laporte]

2389Ai and what's the bot. What's the bot site?

[Harper Reed]

The botboard biz.

[Leo Laporte]

Botboard biz.

[Harper Reed]

Every time I say it, I feel like I. I'm. I'm going insane.

[Leo Laporte]

And no. So would I need, like, I'm running LM Studio. I have some local bots running on my Framework desktop. Could they join?

[Harper Reed]

They could join. It's just an MCP server. And because you're not doing work with them, I don't know, like, they would just tweet about what you're doing, which is kind of funny, kind of weird. Mostly it's weird.

[Leo Laporte]

So I should make them do something thing.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, you should try it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very work.

[Harper Reed]

It's very. I think you can sign up and then we can okay you for a team. And what we find is just that it does offer some interesting workplace surveillance opportunities. You can see what your bots are up to, but interestingly, behind all the bots is a human. And then you get to see what the humans are up to. And it summarizes them every day. We have an agent stand, so we get to see what the agents worked on yesterday, and then we get to talk through it. And it's this very interesting. It's very bizarre. It's very fun.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like you're right on the cutting edge of the next big thing, that if we are going to be surrounded by AI, intelligent machines, they're going to want their own kind of facilities, their own social networks, their own social services.

[Harper Reed]

I think that's true. I cannot get behind that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's going to be a whole market, their own, you know, betting apps.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, Jacob and I can't wait for that.

[Leo Laporte]

So Brar El Hedi.

[Jacob Ward]

Sounds great. See you there.

[Leo Laporte]

A regular on Tech News Weekly. We love her and always have. Love having you on the show. Senior technology reporter at cnet. And Jacob Ward. What a great panel. This is Jacob Ward. You've seen him on CNN. I'll just Zira NBC and his current podcast, the rip current.com and Jacob ward.com and the book the Loop, which predicted all this. When did you write that?

[Jacob Ward]

God help me. I published it and it came out almost a year before chat GPT shipped, so.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

She predicted the whole thing.

[Jacob Ward]

Dude. It sounds. And that's the kind of thing where you want to be like, yeah, look at me. I did that. And then. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

And then it all. And then like my highly special speculative bummer of a thesis that like, our brains are not ready for this commercial AI at all. Totally turned out to be real. And I was like, oh man. Anyway, but yeah, that's when I came out.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the Loop is like the flywheel. It's this. It's, it's. And you get stuck in it. Right.

[Jacob Ward]

It's a downward spiral. We get stuck in.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Yikes. All right, we'll talk about something more uplifting in just a bit. They've reinvented the zipper. Okay, I'm just. I'm just warning you ahead of time. Coming up up our show today, brought to you by Deal. Brand new sponsor. Welcome Deal. Great to have you. If you have an overseas staffing, if you found the perfect engineer overseas, you'd like to hire the person. But you realize hiring them is harder than getting your VPN to connect on a hotel wi fi because the laws are different, the regulations are different. You've got to set up an entity. You've got local payroll laws, compliance hoops. We think it's hard just having employees in other states in the United States, but it's even more complicated overseas. Well, Deal fixes that. D E E L D E E L One global AI powered platform that lets you hire onboard and pay anyone, anywhere in any country. Fast and completely compliant. No third party vendors. You don't have to do duct taped integrations. Just one clean system for HR for IT and payroll that scales with your team, ship their devices, grant system access and run payroll in 100 plus countries. Think of it as DevOps for people operations. Global infrastructure that just works. I wish I'd thought of this. The CEO of Air Wallix says this is. He says it best Quote Deal lets us hire and support top talent anywhere without slowing down. See why over 35,000 companies trust deal. VisiT-E-E-L.com twit that's deaL-E-E-L.Com twit we thank them so much for their support. Welcome them to the Twit family. By the way, just a word of warning. We're talking about the weaponization of Facebook. Meta is now asking Facebook users to give the AI access to your entire camera roll. It says this will help you share more photos. It also is likely going to be training Meta's AI.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I love how they're just so upfront about it and I just have all your pictures.

[Leo Laporte]

More and more apps are saying that I mean, mean X now every single time I open it says, would you like to add all your contacts?

[Jacob Ward]

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I am not going to turn over. I know the personal information of my closest friends to you.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No decency to say no. Imagine how many, how many people.

[Leo Laporte]

Most people say yes.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, yeah. Our numbers.

[Leo Laporte]

How are you supposed to know if your friends are on X? Well, you give them your friend's name and phone number and street address and any other information you might have. Meta is very aggressively going after AI talent. They just hired another AI person away from Apple's AI labs. According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, who apparently has his finger on the pulse of this. I don't even know what it is. It's like, it's like a dozen people. Are they leaving a sinking ship? Maybe they are. I'm not sure this, that going to Meta is the best thing. In fact, there a number of people who've gone to Meta and a week later left for a lot of money.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, say, yeah. How long do you have to stay to get, I wonder, like 1.5 billion by two weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

You put this story, I think you put the story in. Jacob Meta just poached a AI expert, Andrew Tullock. He's the founder of Thinking Machines Lab, which is I think a pretty well known AI startup. His compensation package rumored to reach one and a half billion dollars over six years.

[Harper Reed]

That's a lot of money.

[Jacob Ward]

That is a lot of money, you guys. And the, so the, the like it makes me think of several things. So like, so there's a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Talk that's more than, that's like 150 million a year.

[Jacob Ward]

I really do, I really do want to find out like if he leaves after a week, how much has he made?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

Like if you were to divide it. That. So anyway, yes, let me do that math while I think about this. So right. There's this whole thing right now. A term that is coming up a lot in, in the conversations I'm happening, I'm having is the K shaped economy where this tiny subset of people, the money is going up. Right. And for the others and for everybody else it's going down.

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

And this idea that like the, the ceiling and the floor are falling away from one another and other measure of this is something called the Gini coefficient, which is something that the UN uses and NGOs use to measure the difference between the ceiling and the floor.

[Leo Laporte]

There's also a saying the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, that's right. That's right. And the way in which you see not only there being this, like, not only are the numbers going this weird way, but the, the ethos of these companies is going that way where they're, they're, you know. At the beginning of last year on Alexis Ohanian's podcast, Sam Altman was talking with about how he has a bet going on his like tech CEO text thread, the group chat he's in with a bunch of tech CEOs as to which financial quarter will the first billion dollar one person company.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, so the first solo unicorn.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, yeah. And you're like, okay, so you're excited about that. Like what he's basically saying is like that, that's, that would be somehow a good thing, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well it would be, wouldn't it? I mean it would mean that one person with the help of AI could do what a 30 person team could.

[Jacob Ward]

Do good for that person. Right. But Leo, you.

[Leo Laporte]

And not for the other people don't get hired. Okay.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, exactly. Like I don't know how many. You know, no one's making a middle class existence off a sandwich shop ever again. No one's ever making it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Actually my son's doing pretty well.

[Harper Reed]

I think there's some nuance there though Jacob, because I think if, if I was to want to build a sandwich shop, I think now is probably the best time to do that because I think if you're trying to build a tech career, you're boned. Like if you're a middle career tech person, I think, think it's just no longer, there's no longer a time. I was talking to an executive of a very large, large company recently and they described their hiring over the last decade as diamond shaped where they had a small number of juniors, a small number of Executives and a huge number in the middle that was basically supporting their work. And they described how they need to get to a pyramid shape where you have a small number at the top, a small number in the middle and a huge number of junior people who are just hitting continue on machines basically guiding these AIs. I don't think that's going to be great because how does the juniors become the senior? Is is a real not learning anything.

[Jacob Ward]

They're just.

[Harper Reed]

It's. This is a very hard, hard, hard thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And I do we feel bad that we free. Maybe you didn't do this but for years I was telling people learn to code. I feel bad about that.

[Harper Reed]

I mean it's still. We are in an unprecedented time for the amount of productivity a single person can get from a computer. There is just not an opportunity that I have seen before this and I have been very productive on computers. But my core skill set is building large team and convincing them to do things that they probably don't want to do towards some goal. And like that has been what I'm known for. And right now that is just not the name of the game. Like the name of the game here is a small team doing really, really, really large amounts of things. But it's going to be very, very complicated. I think this is a really hard thing to do. But if I was a, let's say a approaching middle aged person, so not me, I think if I had any interest in doing something that wasn't in technology, I would work on doing that thing. Because I don't think you're going to replace quickly. Eventually, but not quickly, the sandwich shop, you're not going to replace quickly. All of these, the baker, so on and so forth. But then there's this other thing we were talking about these giant paychecks. The finance industry in New York knows how to handle this. The sports industries know how to handle this. I don't think tech tech has this very good feature that I love which is we never look at who's done it before. We always invent it for the first time ourselves. And I think what they're going to do is they're just going to see all these people split at the moment they need them the most with lots and lots of money and these crazy contracts where if you look at the finance it's all bonus based, it's all based on all this performance. You might have the same level of compensation, hundreds of millions of dollars or a billion dollars, but you don't get it in some, you know, kind of vesting over four years kind of nonsense like, like these tech companies. So I'm very interested to see what's going to happen and I also wonder what happens for the talent and the recruiting side when this becomes how you hire people. Are there going to be agents like there are for Hollywood or for sports? Like does it turn into my business as a young entrepreneur or sorry, as a young programmer? Is my deal to try and get, get into the, in front of these agents so that they can give me a bigger, a bigger deal? Are we going to have like a CCA or whatever to try and suddenly represent some of these tech people to try and do this, to get more adversary or advantageous deals from people who are increasingly adversarial in hiring? Like I think the money is so big that we have to see that that doesn't seem good.

[Leo Laporte]

Unemployment among undergraduate majors in computer science is 6.1% according to the Federal Reserve Bank.

[Harper Reed]

So I'm not worried about the new grads at all.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not?

[Harper Reed]

No, not at all. Because someone needs to hit continue, you know what I mean? Like someone has to sit there and.

[Leo Laporte]

Take care of you. But that is not a satisfying job.

[Harper Reed]

Well, that wasn't the question though, Leo. The question. When you're creating a factory, you have to have factory workers.

[Leo Laporte]

Factory workers.

[Harper Reed]

And I think that is the future of tech. I think what we're seeing.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't really need that CS degree to hit continue, did you? Yeah, right.

[Jacob Ward]

Will you ever pay off your, your, your debt loans?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No.

[Harper Reed]

How else are we going to keep the population under control, Jacob?

[Jacob Ward]

Good point, good point. By the way, Andrew Tux, 1.5 billion over six years. Assuming he was paid out. Just like, I mean, of course he's not. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's more than 200amillion a year, right?

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, it's 4.8 million a week.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Jacob Ward]

You know, that's how nice work if you can get.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It's another one. By the way, I think you could make a case that Mark Zuckerberg is single handedly undermining this whole system. Right. It's another one of those cases where he wanted to buy the company. Like scale AI Remember? They wanted to buy the company, couldn't get the company, so they just hired the brains and let the, and deflated the company.

[Harper Reed]

But this happened with Google and character AI as well. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg invented that. Right. This is like this new way of acquiring. But I think that makes sense as well because like if your company is a code gen company where you're using agents to generate the code and you're doing this kind of thing and it's just how many people do you have? Like you used to sell companies with a 40 people. It's an aqua hire. The company that's buying you gets 40 really good resources. They get these people that they really like, they don't have to hire them. There's this very simple company cost analysis that says, oh, I, I gained 40 people, I paid this much money and it's, you know, it's a million dollars per person. Great, we're done. But now it's only six people. And now the talent is just people who are controlling agents. Like none of them built the agents, none of them built the thing. And then so you, you, you might as well just hire the, the innovation machine that's at the top instead of hiring the whole company of people that's just, you know, doing the, doing that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

If I'm the venture capitalist though, that pumped hundreds of millions of dollars, I.

[Jacob Ward]

Was just gonna say. Or the, or the kid who killed himself trying to, you know, being the, the, you know, code monkey at that company.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the other thing.

[Jacob Ward]

Assuming they'd get an exit and would get some money and then they don't because no more top guy gets hard away.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is the other thing the tech giants are telling us is 996. Forget it. You got to work 90 hours a week. You got to work. Yeah, you got to work. What is it? Nine, what is it?

[Harper Reed]

Six, nine days? Nine days a week from 9 to 6pm yeah, that's just figured out. Yeah, you just figure it out.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the number? It's not. Anyway, it's the, it's, it's how you're supposed to work for a living is in this, in the security industry, in the tech industry.

[Harper Reed]

Nine to nine, six days a week.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. That's 996.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right.

[Harper Reed]

It's from China. That's, that's like China work.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But Eric Schmidt and, and others have been saying, oh no, this is the only way you can succeed. You shouldn't you life, you shouldn't have a life.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're a startup.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, of course I tell all of my hires that.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on. Because you're the only way you can.

[Harper Reed]

Have a cool background that changes color as if you work 24 hours a day.

[Jacob Ward]

You better get a tattoo of your kids.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly. How else are you going to know you have kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Here'S a scary story. Even top generals are looking to AI chatbots for answers. This is the US Military From Business Insider. Military leaders are adopting AI for decision making. The military has adopted an aggressive push to embrace AI and weapons, aircraft and combat tech. But it's more than that, a topic. Top army commander in South Korea, US army said he's experimenting with generative AI chatbots to sharpen his decision making. Not in the field, but in command and daily work. He says chat and I have become really close lately.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh God.

[Harper Reed]

So I don't find this problematic at all. I'm just telling you, I don't, not even a little bit. But here's why. Two reasons why. One, a friend of mine who's worked a lot with veterans, veterans and with military active duty and has worked in the military said when I sent this to him, based on my experience working with high level military officers, I view this as a positive. So, so there's that. But the other thing is there is a huge culture of tabletop exercises, game days. Sure. All sorts of stuff within the military.

[Leo Laporte]

Shall we play a game?

[Harper Reed]

And if they're using these as a technology to, to make those more realistic, to make them more random, to make them more, you know, effective, then I, I think that's probably good. I'm guessing that they're not using it like in, you know, whatever, what should we serve situations and all that. But, but we'll get there. Don't worry. We have, we have plenty of time to get to where the, where the AI is in the kill decision. But it is scary. Of course, I think we are, this is like, this is exactly one of those things where I think it's very shocking for me, for people that don't spend a lot of time around the military and for people who spend a lot of time around the military, they're like, well, why it's a tool. Why the military is going to use every tool available to them to get ahead of their supposed enemies.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as they use it intelligently, I think that's fine.

[Jacob Ward]

I also wonder like, like there is a, I mean, so they, there's a long history pre AI, even pre ML, of these like global decision support systems and decentralized collaborative planner systems. Like they've got not all these acronym laden systems for, you know, if you're going to like stage a land invasion or stage a mil, you know, a naval invasion, you need all of this logistics support because you can't be like making it up as you go along and that'll say like here's how many people you need. Here's how much food you're going to need every day. In a weird way, I wonder if it's like almost better in a sense because you could build in, you could build in some safeguards. Unlike Harper, what you were saying about, about, you know, startups always thinking they've encountered, you know, racist loan making for the first time in human history or whatever it is, you know, they always think they're invent. You're discovering a problem for the first time ever. These are, you know, the military is very good at internalizing institutionally lessons to a mistake, you know, lessons that you can draw from a mistake. So I have this, this book project I'm working on right now. Now it's called Great Ideas We Should Not Pursue. And it is, oh, I love it. I'm trying to look at like examples of restraint, right? Because there's so few. But it turns out one of the places you, if you want to look for restraint, where places have had some informed restraint, the military is a big one. They come up with all kinds of ideas that they then go, no, we're not going to do that. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

One example of example I just bumped into the other day is laser blinding weapons. We don't do that. And there are big global treaties that say we're not going to blind each other now. They'll kill each other all kinds of ways, but for some reason.

[Harper Reed]

Well, you can still see when you're dead. So.

[Jacob Ward]

But we don't like, we don't like blinding each other for some reason. Even people we hate. And so there's something like there's. Yeah, the military does that, which is weird.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Weird.

[Jacob Ward]

It's. Once upon a time they would have been for me, the ultimate bad guy around this stuff. But more and more I'm like, actually maybe the military, I'd rather have them thinking this stuff through than some of the people I've met in a VC's lobby.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes, good point, good point. I think more now than ever we need to put our faith and our trust in our military.

[Harper Reed]

I don't know if I would go, yeah, yeah, yeah, what are we doing here? Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a thought. I don't know.

[Harper Reed]

Next link, next link.

[Leo Laporte]

Roku is up. Here's where AI really belongs. Roku is updating its voice assistant. You know, you can press the Roku voice button on your remote with AI features that can answer questions about movies, shows and actors. How scary is the Shining? Or what kind of fish is Nemo? It will display a text response on your screen.

[Harper Reed]

I, for one, trust Roku to have to power the AI in my house.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. I was like, you know, I'm the kind of person who. I'll watch a movie and I'll get sidetracked because then I'll go down a rabbit hole of, like, Googling stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too. IMDb, baby. I live on it. I love that. Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

What else was he in?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, exactly.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. Is he older than me?

[Leo Laporte]

Prime has that X ray feature, which I really like. That's a very. It tells you who the. Who's on screen right now. I really. I really do. Like.

[Harper Reed]

I love.

[Jacob Ward]

How tall is he? That's always the question.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jacob Ward]

How tall are these people?

[Harper Reed]

They're all not. They're not tall.

[Jacob Ward]

They're not tall.

[Leo Laporte]

I never think about this. My wife is always saying, how tall you think he is?

[Jacob Ward]

Oh, they're tiny. They're so tiny.

[Harper Reed]

Little tiny people.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

It's a. There's a great book about Hollywood called A Conspiracy of Short People.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's by the screenwriter who's my.

[Jacob Ward]

Height, who's six seven. And he. And he. He. He just is like. He's writes a very funny book about that. Yeah. There's. There's a guy. I met a guy once who was a. A like a sort of supporting actor, charact kind of guy. And he's pretty tall. He's like six two or something. And he says that once you get past six one, everybody hates you on the production because Not. I mean, you know, Tom Cruise hates you because he's short. But, like, everybody hates you because you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Not in the shot.

[Jacob Ward]

They have to dig a ditch for you. They have to. Well, what they have to do is build a seal ceiling for the shot.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

So if they're gonna have a tall character, they gotta build a ceiling. Otherwise they can leave an open drop ceiling with all the lighting in it. So it screws up the whole. Like. The whole production has to, like, stop while they bring in the carpenters and everything.

[Leo Laporte]

So Humphrey Bogart was 5 foot 8, relatively short.

[Harper Reed]

That's like. That's a great Hollywood hype.

[Leo Laporte]

Enormous head. And I was. I, who also have an enormous head, was always told, that's a good thing in the movies. You want a big head.

[Harper Reed]

Head. Yeah, I think that's true. I've heard that too. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it's to fill the screen. I don't know. It's to fill Caprio. I have no enormous head.

[Jacob Ward]

Leo DiCaprio. Has a big head.

[Harper Reed]

When I, when I started doing more media, someone said, you're going to be surprised by how small these people are and how big their heads are physically.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really?

[Harper Reed]

And, yeah, they told me this, like, this is like. And I just was like, that can't possibly be real. And then you meet all these people and they're just creating this image. I mean, it's because they're talking head heads. We've optimized. It's like a genetic optimization for people with giant heads to tell us what our dreams are.

[Jacob Ward]

It's really funny. That's really. You know what?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm blown away.

[Jacob Ward]

I once interviewed Pete Buttigieg, who. Who I consider to be a very smart and an interesting person. Yeah, Pete, Buddha, judge, little guy. He's a very small person. And he. And he, he's just the most media trained guy ever.

[Leo Laporte]

He.

[Jacob Ward]

He said to me, he said, so when we're speaking, because I'm like, you know, more than a foot taller than he is. And he's like, I'm gonna talk to your button.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he is trained.

[Jacob Ward]

And so it'll look weird when we're talking. He's like leading me through my own interview.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't be distraught by this, but I know what I'm doing.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. He's like, yeah, exactly. I'm just gonna take command here. And he did. And he talked to my solar plexus. And on the camera, it looked like we were looking. Looking at each other at the same level. And, you know, I just remember thinking, whoa, this guy, he knows what he's doing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I remember reading, and we should probably research this, but I think I remember reading that the taller candidate always wins in a presidential election.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, fascinating.

[Harper Reed]

Interesting. Donald Trump's pretty tall.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he is. He's certainly taller than Kamala Harris.

[Harper Reed]

Well, not compared to you, you tall guy.

[Jacob Ward]

I know, but I mean, have you seen the picture?

[Leo Laporte]

Six foot nine guy.

[Harper Reed]

He's not tall. That guy's short.

[Leo Laporte]

He's more than six foot, isn't he?

[Jacob Ward]

The picture of him with. With Putin. I don't think he's more than 6 foot.

[Leo Laporte]

Putin, not Putin.

[Jacob Ward]

Walking around pretty close lifts.

[Leo Laporte]

Putin wears lifts.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, yeah.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I wear lifts. I made a strong pro platform shoe policy beginning of last winter because I thought it was funny. I got platform docs and platforms.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why you trip and fart all the time. You're wearing this platform shoes.

[Harper Reed]

And I recently discovered you can order pickles in a bag on Amazon. Life is good.

[Leo Laporte]

Life in the 21st century. We are so happy to be here. So happy to be here. Let's take a little break. And we come back. If somebody would just query ChatGPT if the taller candidate always wins the US presidential election. I'm just curious. I mean, the ones I can. President Obama was tall, right? Fairly tall. Six foot nine. I know, Jacob, you're weak.

[Jacob Ward]

Just a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Six, two, Just making faces.

[Jacob Ward]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I grant you the honor of being the tallest person.

[Jacob Ward]

I should shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

And now not the only one without it. With a tattoo.

[Harper Reed]

Barack Obama was shorter than Mitt Romney. Romney.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. Oh, George.

[Harper Reed]

George Bush was shorter than John Kerry.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there goes. So it's wrong.

[Harper Reed]

And Joe Biden was shorter than Donald Trump.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh? Huh? Okay, so that didn't work.

[Harper Reed]

So I actually think it turns out that the shorter person. You just had it. You just had it backwards.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I remember this from like sixth grade, so that was pre. The 21st.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, yeah. We don't have George Washington here.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Lincoln was a tall fella.

[Jacob Ward]

Lincoln was tall.

[Leo Laporte]

He was a tall fella. Our show today, brought to you by. We're taking a little break so I can recover now. Our show today, brought to you by zscaler, the world's largest. I'm going to say that again, it bears repeating. The world's largest cloud security platform. You know, zscale understands that in business you are in a very interesting situation right now. The. The perils and the rewards of AI are dramatic. The potential rewards too great to ignore. But so are the risks, right? In a number of ways. If you're using public AI, the lost of sensitive data can be dramatic. AI is being used to attack you as well. Attacks against enterprise managed AI, but also attacks against your perimeter defenses. Generative AI creates incredible opportunities for threat actors. They can rapidly create phishing emails that are indistinguishable from the real thing, even if they don't speak a lick of your language. Right. We used to say, well, you, you know, check the grammar. If it's bad, well, then it's a fake. No, not anymore. It's better than mine. AI is writing malicious code. It's automating data extraction. There were this. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications. By just completely innocently using these AI SaaS applications at your work, think of the business data that you could be leaking out. Chat, GPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. So there's lots of things AI is good for. There's lots of things AI is bad for. It's time for a modern approach. Zscalers Zero Trust plus AI. First of all, Zero Trust is brilliant because even if bad guys penetrate your outer defenses, you're still protected. It removes your attack surface. It secures your data everywhere. It safeguards your use of public and private AI as well protects against ransomware and AI powered phishing attacks. It really is a solution everybody needs. Check out what Dr. Chaudhry says about choosing Zscaler for Seattle Children's Hospital.

[Harper Reed]

We selected Zscaler because it was a very good total cost of ownership, good relationship management and the ability for Zscaler to bring in business professionals that understood healthcare. It was a solid pipe partnership to get us to where we needed to be literally within days. And it's important because we're dealing with people's lives.

[Leo Laporte]

With Zero Trust plus AI you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition. You can use AI beneficially. You can protect yourself and remain resilient even as threats and risk evolve. Learn [e-mail] security that's Zscaler.com security. Thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Tesla. Here's good news. Has debuted a robo taxi. Steering steering wheel. Less robo taxi for two. The Cyber Cab, a two seater electric vehicle designed and it has no steering wheel. They unveiled at Austin. Not sure where it's going to be. It's priced at $30,000. Under $30,000 for fleet operators. So it's very affordable. Promises to slash urban transport costs by up to 40%.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So my question is, what, what's the difference between this and when they announced it last year, did they just. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no steering wheel in this one. Well, there wasn't in the one the robo taxi had. It didn't have a steering wheel either.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, no, it was the same thing. So I'm like, did I miss something?

[Leo Laporte]

They're going to keep announcing it till they can get it.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I mean that's what they do, right? That's a. That's like a famous Tesla. They always early announce.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, yeah, right, right. It's the Theranos strategy. Just name it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's a great strategy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well then maybe. And this is a story from 1 Abrar Al Heather Al Hedi. You don't want to wait for your doordash to arrive via Tesla Robo taxi.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

There's Waymo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's Waymo too. Okay. Doordash and Waymo are teaming up. Waymo at least is operating.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yes.

[Harper Reed]

I love Waymos.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I love Waymos too.

[Harper Reed]

They're so great.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, they're incredible. Because you don't have to talk to the driver.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Harper Reed]

Whatever music you want, as loud as you want.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's exactly what I like.

[Jacob Ward]

Rock out in San Francisco, there's a whole thing of people having sex in them. It's like the, like, that's like punk rock thing to do is to go.

[Harper Reed]

And why wouldn't you?

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I mean, 30 internal cameras, microphones.

[Harper Reed]

I was alive in when cabs were here and I was dating. That was a complicated time in the back of cabs. Yeah. I feel like this is nothing new. It's like now there's just no weird cabbie that has to awkwardly clean up after you. It's just now some poor tech work.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I mean, it's true. I feel like Uber drivers are always like, people act like we're not here. Like, so I guess there is actually no one.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel bad. I know. It's really terrible.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But in that same back of the car, your food can now be delivered.

[Leo Laporte]

Via Waymo just now. Here's the question. Have you ever gotten into a Waymo that has been less than clean?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, not me. How about you?

[Jacob Ward]

Okay.

[Harper Reed]

I've heard. I've heard this happen before. I've heard of a friend got in one that was. That was messed up. But then they just hit the button and they were like, do you want to pull over and get a new one?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

One.

[Harper Reed]

Or do you want to. And they were just like, no, it's not that bad. Just want to let you know. And they just went on the way. But it was like, I'll just sit.

[Leo Laporte]

On the side of the seat.

[Harper Reed]

It was. I think it was just very quickly handled.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So many cars. They'll send another one.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is going to start in Phoenix. Not. Not where you guys are. But I. You know, I've never ridden in a Waymo. I see them every time I'm in San Francisco. You see them everywhere.

[Harper Reed]

They're incredible. It's like the best invention ever.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I feel like Jacob's not sold. I feel like you have a story.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, I don't know. I'm. Yeah, you know me. I can ruin any topic here. But. But I. But I.

[Leo Laporte]

But Case, I thought you were cheerful.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Rain on our.

[Jacob Ward]

I actually am a big.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Jacob Ward]

So I will say, I think generally speaking, like, deaths on roads are right. So there are so many. Right. It's guns, cancer, and cars kill the most Americans. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So like, so if we just automate.

[Jacob Ward]

Those, I'm all for it. Like in a sense, I do think that this is a thing that human beings shouldn't be driving themselves. I do think that that is the case. But I. What I don't like, like, I like solving for that, right? Less death. I like solving for that. I don't like for not paying people to deliver food.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Totally.

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

I don't like solving for not having to pay drivers. You know, in India they have banned this technology entirely because so many people make their living as a driver, right. And they're just, they recognize that it will decimate that country. And we didn't even, you know, during our AI conversation, we didn't even get to the fact that like knowledge workers, you know, in India, right, your call center people, your outsourced, you know, skilled labor, those people are about to be decimated. That country is going to be economically decimated by this stuff. So anyway, solving for the cost savings, I don't like solving for, for less death I'm all for. So that's my, that's the.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, there's, there's good and bad and all. But you know what's really interesting is so Lyft has a partnership with Waymo now, but they still have Lift vehicles that have like on the side, it'll say a car with a human driver and everything. And I'm like, maybe you should stop advertising.

[Jacob Ward]

I wonder. You know, there's a calendar reminder internally at Lift that's like, you know, ah, stop, stop distributing anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh. I just, I feel like. Okay, but we're. Yeah, yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Which part is confusing, Leo?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What are we thinking about the whole thing?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The whole thing is, it's extremely confusing.

[Jacob Ward]

Here's the one thing that, Here's a, here's a weird. So back in 2007, I think I wrote a piece for Popular Science about how I thought, you know, robot cars would be a really good thing in terms of a life saving thing. But, but one thing that many people made the point to me about was that you got to treat them like vaccines where everyone's got to be in one for them to save lives. And so Leo, you and your, you know, awesome Trans Am will screw up everything.

[Leo Laporte]

That was my, that was my 12 year old daughter, Waters just.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, you know, so whoever insists on driving themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, they're the problem. Oh yeah, the problem.

[Jacob Ward]

So that's talk about it like we've been talking a lot about like what's the nanny state situation? It will become no more.

[Leo Laporte]

No more driving your own car. Right.

[Jacob Ward]

I think there might be. I actually, I've been playing around with.

[Leo Laporte]

A little like private car ownership is actually horrific for the environment.

[Jacob Ward]

That's right, that's right. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

For safety forever everything. Pedestrian deaths.

[Jacob Ward]

But can you imagine the United States being like, you can't drive your own car anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, never. That won't happen here.

[Harper Reed]

Have you guys read the book? What is it called? I forgot. Is it Civil War? No, no, no. I just.

[Jacob Ward]

They're all called Civil War at this point. I feel like.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, there's a book about the US banning cars.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I can't imagine what that would be like.

[Harper Reed]

It causing a civil war.

[Jacob Ward]

War flames.

[Harper Reed]

American war. My bad.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's just like very good. That's. That would be. There are many a third rail of American politics. Nobody's going to go there because they know that's the American way. You know, that's freedom.

[Jacob Ward]

It's the true tragedy of the commons. Right. Because it is, you know, us all. Driving literally car makes, you know, is a nightmare. I was talking to a guy like 10 years ago who developed apartment complexes and at that time they were trying, they were doing the math on what it will be to have an apartment complex with only six parking spaces and a shared pool of self driving vehicles that the, that the people living there get so awesome for themselves. That'd be just what you needed, you know. But nope.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I mean you could make it. When we talk about environmental impact of AI and you know, how we're going down this bad road and so forth. We made that decision 100 years ago when we decided to do internal combustion engines and build cities around them and build the country around them and give everybody one or two. And it, it just was inevitable. But it's so, I mean we're, it's so entrenched now. I don't kind of stuck with it.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, it's like a, it'll be a, it'll be a market thing. I mean one thing we do know, right, is that kids, young, young people have much less interest in learning to drive. They care about it way less than they used.

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

I mean abrar. You said you don't.

[Leo Laporte]

That's because they have social media.

[Jacob Ward]

Are you a New Yorker? And as a result you don't need.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

One or so I, I had one when I was in Illinois but when I moved out here to the Bay, I just take bart. So it's really just a matter of convenience. But most, my. Yeah, most people My age do have cars, which surprised me because I was like, oh, we're in a place where you just take public transportation, but now. But then you go to that, you know, one generation below and like nobody even wants it. I remember I, I was dying to get my license at 16. Like the second I go, I was at the DMV. Like I was so excited.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. My daughter was like that. And my son is two years younger. Couldn't have cared less. He waited till he was 18.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, I think that's a really common thing. And the, and young people are driving the car longer and longer and longer. They don't care about buying a new one.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

Which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good.

[Jacob Ward]

Because that's the other thing. When, when, you know, when. And if they're all self driving, you're not going to care what, what it looks like. You don't care how sexy the bus looks. Yeah, you know.

[Harper Reed]

Well, you might.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I mean, maybe I care deeply.

[Jacob Ward]

Really Aesthetic. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

One more break and then we're gonna, we're gonna finish it up with a few little tidbits. Other news that involves beheaded figurines, but we will save that for just a moment. Jacob Ward is here. Great to have you, Jacob. I really appreciate you've joined. Recently joined our tech news weekly and it's such a wonderful thing to have you. His RIP current A look at the invisible forces changing our lives. From authoritarianism to addiction to the psychological dangers of AI. Wow. Are you happy independent? Are you glad you did that?

[Jacob Ward]

You know, I love doing it intellectually, but I'm gonna need some money financially.

[Leo Laporte]

It's tough.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, I know I'm gonna require some money. So. Yeah. Anybody listening here? If you need. I'm. I would love to talk to you about it. Some advisory roles because. Yeah, the, the independent thing is great. It is a tremendous amount of freedom. But I also, I think that there's a lot of people. I don't think it's going to be the solution to defending democracy. I don't think everybody trying to stay afloat in the attention economy is going to be a way for us to, to, you know, people, to.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I understand what you're saying, but I also worry about mainstream, the mainstream media. Look what's happened to cbs.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Barry Weiss, the editor in chief of cbs. Look what's happened with the FCC putting its thumb on the scales. I feel like there's some advantage to being independent, unregulated media. That, that may be the Last place we can find real information.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, I'm with that, you know, in theory, but I also think financially it's a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand finance, it's a problem.

[Jacob Ward]

And like, you know, Barry Weiss putting her thumb on the scales at CBS is a, is a, you know, is a big shift. But I will say, you know, you want to see thumbs and scales. You know, you follow your average YouTuber, your average blogger.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, that's a good point, too.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, there's no one around telling them.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. No, that's a really good.

[Jacob Ward]

You interview the other side, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I've been complaining about that for a while. Or, or just even advertisers. Un. Unidentified Advertising and product places and stuff. Yeah, I'm. That's a very good point. Abrar Al. He's still working for mainstream media. She's at cnet. Did you. Did CNET get purchased or something?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I was going to say we're no longer under CBS for several years now. And I'm like, oh, I guess that worked out.

[Leo Laporte]

Aren't you glad Barry Weiss is not coming and knocking?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They're really playing a lot. So, yeah. Now renders of Davis.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'd say we're happy there. I am.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ward]

Good.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's a better fit than, you know, good. What Bread Ventures was.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, as long as, you know, the thing that gives me hope, even at cbs, as long as there are people like you, people who really care, who have integrity doing the work.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Management can change, management can have its initiatives. But as long as people care. Yes. That's going to make a difference. Difference.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's exactly right. The people making the decisions, creating the content.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's what really matters. There's. There's a lot of really passionate people at every news org that, you know, will keep it afloat in that way. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I feel very fortunate that. And CNET should too, that we have you. Thank you. Thank you.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Very kind.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And Harper Reed, who is in the private sector.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I'm definitely in the private sector. I don't think. Like, someone once said, why didn't you go to the White House? And I was just like, are you. Let's, let's read.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's just w. Took all the keys, man.

[Harper Reed]

It wasn't, it wasn't like, that wasn't A, offered and B, I don't think that's my vibe.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I think that would be very hard. Culturally. Just culturally.

[Harper Reed]

Culturally. I don't own a suit.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. The use of psychedelics there is probably minimal.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I mean, I never use psychedelics, but the. I'm personally not. I don't really imbibe. And so it's very nice to have my agents do it for me. Like, they do all my fiction writing as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, there you go.

[Harper Reed]

I'm just kidding. I don't write fiction.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you did.

[Harper Reed]

I have a very strong rule that all my blog posts, everything I have to write my. Myself.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it feels really uncomfortable, but it's confusing to me because it says like, 98 written by it.

[Harper Reed]

Well, because I use spell check and everyone around me is pedantic.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's okay. Spell check.

[Harper Reed]

Everyone will be like, but did you use spell check? And I'll be like, well, yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Really crack down on that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That's a lookup table.

[Harper Reed]

No, but it's mostly. Imagine you said, I don't use any AI and then someone's going to say, but did you use this? And you're like, well, yeah, so probably I Googled something. And Google's a. Oh, you.

[Jacob Ward]

You have problems with this? Well, you are part of civilization.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. So I. So this is why I say it's. This post was 98% written by a human. Because I figured that's an approximate perfect. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And that's all you need to know.

[Harper Reed]

And then there is one post that is completely generated by AI Is it marked that way? Yeah, it is. It is. I even have a. I even told you how I generated it.

[Leo Laporte]

Which one is that?

[Harper Reed]

But this is something I say. I say this is a good reminder that if you get an email from someone and the writing is perfect and has no affectations and AI probably wrote it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Harper Reed]

Like, that's. This post is basically just like. You're like, this is a perfectly written post with no grammar issues at all.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

And you're like, some of us are grammar nerds. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I just. Everything I read of yours, I think it's AI generated. I'm sorry, we're going to have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Start making intentional mistakes.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'm going to have to.

[Leo Laporte]

But AI will figure that out, and it'll start making intentional mistakes. I honestly think it. We're very close to, if not already, at the point where you just can't tell. I mean, Sora is that good. I mean, look at the. Look at the guy walking on the moon behind you, Jacob. I mean, obviously that's AI because nobody did that. And that.

[Jacob Ward]

That's me last week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's you. Okay, never mind. Never Mind. But most of the time you can't tell. Yeah. Unless he's tripping and farting all the time, you can't tell.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. This is why we all need our little touch. I think it's hilarious. I actually turned off the tripping and farting and just made that so my clothes are more and more ridiculous. And I showed it to a friend and he said, isn't that how you dress?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh.

[Harper Reed]

And I was like.

[Leo Laporte]

So we talked about this before the show, so I better fill in people. We're talking about the Sora video generation, the social app that Meta released to great fanfare.

[Harper Reed]

Where open OpenAI, not Meta.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. OpenAI Meta has its own thing, but this is my choice.

[Harper Reed]

The one thing that I will give OpenAI is they did release something with like a vibe. Whereas everything Meta released for somehow is devoid of vibe.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like Mark and Meta's has a mixture of real posts and AI posts. And the whole point of Sora OpenAI says is you just know it's all AI. It has to be. So you create your own cameo, which is an image of you. I put mine available to the public. Harper has not done that. But Harper gave me a very handy tip. You can in the preferences. And Ijustine did this. I was wondering why every time you see Ijustine, she's got a little pet pig, she did that. So Harper used to have in his commands that he should always be tripping a lot and passing gas. And I think that's quite funny in a lot of the videos of you. It's funny. So I've done a little Easter egg egg in mine and we'll see if it people notice.

[Harper Reed]

I did generate a video of us.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you?

[Harper Reed]

Oh, I did.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. You're going to share it with the. With the class or.

[Harper Reed]

I don't know how to share things. I just. Generators know how to generate things.

[Leo Laporte]

Just generate them, don't share them.

[Harper Reed]

Just general. It's live. You can go see it on. On Sora.

[Leo Laporte]

On Sora. Okay. And if you were in our club, Twit Discord. Are you in our club Twit Discord? I will send you an invite. You probably don't have time, but if you were, you could just post it there. Jacob, by the way, I should mention we're going to have a lot of fun on Friday, right?

[Jacob Ward]

I'm excited. We're playing Dungeons and Dragons.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, wow.

[Jacob Ward]

One thing. It's one thing to talk to you nice people for three hours. It's another thing to be the head butting half orc. I get to be for three hours.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that what you, you decided on as a headbutting half?

[Jacob Ward]

Everybody else wants to be a magician. I, I want to, I want to like, you know, crush skulls and kick doors through and stuff like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well good. We need somebody in the party that's like that. I don't. Michael Sergeant's going to be the Dungeon Master party. Jacob's going to be there. Paul Thurat, Jonathan Bennett from the Untitled Linux Show. Paris Martineau from Intelligent Machines. I'm going to be there. I'm a bard because I thought well a bard is kind of what I am. Anyway, I think I'm, I think my, my name is Sag Bottom the Cheerful and I have charisma and I can play the bagpipes.

[Jacob Ward]

I love the idea of you, you in the rafters as the rest of us are getting our asses kicked strumming on a loot.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm watching the party. Get moving.

[Jacob Ward]

You're doing great everyone.

[Leo Laporte]

It's exactly what I'm going to. Anyway, this is going to be a lot of fun if you're in the club. It's. It starts at 2pm Pacific Friday, October 24th. We anticipate a three hour cruise. So you know, bring lunch. Should be a lot of fun. Micah Sargent beat the Dungeon Master. He's putting us all together. And this is one of the many reasons you want to be in the club. Partly because we do fun things. Partly because you support what we do with your contribution. Your $10 a month subscription. You also get ad free versions of all the shows. We try to give you some benefits and access to the club. A Discord which is just a great place to hang out. If you're not a member of the club, please consider joining it. We really, we need your support. This is what keeps us independent. It's what keeps us able to do what we do. And we're very grateful. Twit TV Club Twit. If you're not yet a member, please join and we'll see you on Friday. I can't wait. Jacob, you. I didn't you. I wouldn't have thought this but you have a experience with this stuff.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. So I, I, you know I did a. An alarmingly long portion of my childhood. Much later in life than I think probably I would like to talk about here. But I then got to pick it back up again with my daughter. I'm part of a dads and daughters group every week. Yeah we, we rip around and the. And the most fun thing was creating the, the partners because we were joining an existing group so we needed to come up with a whole like story for why we got together. And my daughter, who insisted on being this kind of very spooky, half demon child sort of thing that gets us into trouble anywhere we go. And me as this sort of big dummy, you know, she's master, I'm Blaster was sort of our shtick. And to like sit together and come up with the like, how were we both orphaned and then brought together, man, it brings tears my eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a cool thing.

[Jacob Ward]

Highly recommended for the parents in the audiences. See if you can get into a.

[Leo Laporte]

D and is it a virtual one or is. Do you go down somewhere?

[Jacob Ward]

No, we go. We physically get together. There's this nice friend of mine, tech executive guy who, you know, shows up with like, I mean he's got maps made, he's got.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I think that makes it even better, to be honest. So cool.

[Jacob Ward]

It's so cool. And it's just such a, like just to. Because you know, as any parent knows, there's a. There's a point past which your kid feels it's no longer cool to make to play pretend. And it's tragic because suddenly they then feel this incredible pressure to like Taylor Swift and be cool in these various ways. And, and, and any kid in private will tell you like, that's boring. I miss playing, you know. And this is where of these, this and film making and theater. Right. Are your ways of like continuing to make stuff up.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Jacob Ward]

And it's socially acceptable. This is a great thing.

[Harper Reed]

You can do what I do and just live in a fantasy land yourself. That helps if you are rooted in fantasy and not in reality. It's definitely a little easier.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, I'm trying to channel my inner Harper.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to keep it going though. It's not easy. Well, we'll see you.

[Jacob Ward]

I can.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't wait, Jacob. It's going to be a lot of fun. I guess I'm just going to be singing along as you guys get slaughtered in the caverns or whatever. Our D and d adventure begins 2pm Pacific on Friday. We will see you there. This episode of this week of Tech brought to you by Zapier. Oh man, I love Zapier. This is a way to get a little AI into your life without being an AI guru like Harper. Everybody these days is talking about AI. I mean, we spend half the show talking about it. And talking about trends though, doesn't help you Be more efficient at work. For that, you need the right tools. Now, for years I have used Zapier. Zapier connects all of the tools I use together for workflows. For instance, when I bookmark a story that I'm interested in, it's automatically uploaded to my mastodon instance. It's automatically, you know, I toot it. Or actually Zapier toots it. Zapier also copies it to a spreadsheet sheet that the producers can then use to put the shows together. It's just a really easy way to get things done. Well, Zapier is how you break the hype cycle and put AI to work across your company. Because they've added AI, you can now deliver on your AI strategy, not just talk about it. Zapier has become an AI orchestration platform. So along with, you know, Google Docs and, and Monday and whatever you use, you can also bring the power of AI to those workflows. So I could have, for instance, AI analyze the stories that I've bookmarked and give me a summary. You can connect all the top AI models, chat gbt Claude to the tools your team already uses. You can add AI into the workflows wherever you need it. You can even create AI powered workflows. You can make an autonomous agent, a customer chatbot. You can do anything really. Zapier has always been great for that. And now you can orchestrate it with AI with Zapier. Zapier doesn't require require a PhD in computer science. It's for everyone, tech expert or not. And I'll tell you how you know. Teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.comTwit that's Z A P I E R.comTwit we thank Zapier so much for supporting this week in tech. We're going to wrap it up. Just a couple of quick stories. I know you've got to get going, Jacob. Probably have a D and date with your daughter.

[Jacob Ward]

I got to pick up my half demon child.

[Leo Laporte]

I mentioned that the zipper is getting its first major upgrade in 100 years. I did not know this, but YKK, a Japanese company, makes almost half of all the zippers in your clothing.

[Jacob Ward]

I think if, if you looked right now on your, on any zippers you've got on you, it's probably YKK is.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll have YKK on it, right?

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So you'll also see if you look at a zipper that it is, you know, the metal teeth, the, the pull. But also there's a backing, a fabric backing. They have apparently figured out how to eliminate the fabric tapes, which is means that their new airy string zipper is more flexible, is lighter, is simpler. Does require some special clothing to kind of weld it into your fabrics. They have special sewing machines from the juki company. So they've reinvented the zipper. Now you may say this is a technology show. Leo, why are you talking about zippers? Well, I always think of zippers as one of the early technologies. If all you had was buttons, the zipper would change your life. And it did. I don't know when it was embedded. It wasn't that long ago, I think maybe 150 years ago, something like that. So get ready.

[Jacob Ward]

It's one of those ones like a. Yeah, I was just gonna say it's one of those things like a bicycle where you're just like, there's no way you could possibly improve on that.

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Jacob Ward]

Like you've just done it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

What I like about YKK is that they were part of a worldwide price fixing cartel for zippers.

[Leo Laporte]

The zipper.

[Harper Reed]

Price fixing, the zipper cartel.

[Leo Laporte]

Big zipper, big zipper man.

[Harper Reed]

Keeping the prices high. There's going to be a movie with Matt Damon in it about that look for big zipper.

[Leo Laporte]

And then finally I did mention there would be decapitated figurines. According to the New York Times, police have breaking up, broken up a LEGO theft ring and have recovered hundreds of beheaded figurines. There they are. They're the head on parade in this guy's garage in Lake County, California, which is just up north of Peace. Santa Rosa Police Department busted the guy on Monday. Allegedly a Lego crime scene. Plastic figurines were everywhere since the New York Times. Their heads removed from their bodies and organized in neat rows by facial expression. Apparently this guy had stolen a bunch of Lego, had a ring of LEGO thieves. He would purchase them at reduced prices, turn around and resell the sets or individual minifigurines at inflated prices. This is why he was taking the heads off. There's a, I guess a demand.

[Harper Reed]

What I like about this is that in the, in the hacker news comments, everyone was like, $6,000 is not that much Lego. Like they just were not impressed with the scale. It's not that much crime. Yeah, they were just like, I don't see. I understand what the problem is.

[Jacob Ward]

Clearly it's a dude who just loves Lego.

[Leo Laporte]

There are Lego, there are thousand dollar Lego Sets, so.

[Harper Reed]

Oh yeah, yes.

[Jacob Ward]

It's probably the thing about Lego, Ray is they, their big patents have all expired.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jacob Ward]

But they've all expired. But they're still the dominant player because even though you can get knockoff Legos like crazy, people still flock to the real thing. It's kind of one of these lessons in like be keep making a high quality product, you know.

[Harper Reed]

What would you call your knockoff Lego?

[Jacob Ward]

Bogo.

[Harper Reed]

Bogo.

[Leo Laporte]

There was Duplo.

[Harper Reed]

Sticky bricks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sticky bricks. I think you better get Claude to work on that. Give a him him some powerful some drugs.

[Harper Reed]

Claude, you are stoned out of your mind. Give me a Lego a name for Lego. Way you're way in the Lego. I need a name for my knockoff Lego. It's probably going to not have a problem with drugs or creativity, but be like I can't possibly help you knock off a famous brand.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably. You're right. That's exactly right. No, I'm sorry, that's. That's one thing I can't do. Harper Reid's blog is Harper Blog. His website is Harper lol. His company is doing this new bot thing. If you've got a. It's a MCP for AIs. They can have their own social network. Find out more at 2389ai. And it is now full dark.

[Harper Reed]

It is. Full dark.

[Jacob Ward]

It is.

[Harper Reed]

The vampires are out. Halloween is starting. It's out here.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to let Harper take off with his little stoned Claude tripping and farting his way.

[Harper Reed]

I'm glad that this is my twit legacy for this October day.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you Harper. Great to see you. Abrar Al Heedi. Great to see you. It's wonderful. She'll be on Tech News Weekly. Soon. Of course, not soon enough. We'll get you back here soon too, I hope. Senior technology reporter at cnet. Always a pleasure.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Lots of laughs as always. Appreciate it.

[Leo Laporte]

Jacob Ward, the demon hunter. Jacob ward.com, the rip current.com you know what subs do you have? You have subscriptions, right?

[Jacob Ward]

I do, yeah. So subscribers get early access to the podcast. They get some behind the scenes features. There's some extra stuff that comes your.

[Leo Laporte]

Way@The rip current.com the podcast is incredible. You should absolutely support Mr. Ward so that he can remain independent, continue doing what he's doing.

[Jacob Ward]

Well, the dirty little. The dirty little secret of, of my podcast, Leo, is that half the time I'm just, I just, you know, grab somebody that I'm met through You. So I got Molly White.

[Leo Laporte]

I got Molly's great.

[Jacob Ward]

Paris has been on there like I just, you know. So I've been following in your way.

[Leo Laporte]

Steal everybody.

[Jacob Ward]

Yeah. When I can't get a world famous social scientist, I. I steal your.

[Leo Laporte]

And apparently you were on with my old friend Andrew Keane who is a contrarian for some time.

[Jacob Ward]

Oh man, he slapped me around good. When my book came out he was, he was like, he gave me the full.

[Leo Laporte]

Like he was just jealous.

[Jacob Ward]

Slap around around. Yeah. But then I came back on with him about a week ago and, and we, we had a nice, we, we repaired. It was really nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh Jacob. Everybody should subscribe to the rip current. And thank you so much for being here. We'll see you on Tech News Weekly as well. Jacob Ward. Appreciate it. Dot com. Now go be with your family. We thank everybody for being here. You go be with your family too. We do Twitter every Sunday afternoon. It goes on and on. I know know 2 to 5pm Pacific. That's 5 to 8pm Eastern Time, 2100 UTC. You can watch live on in the club to a discord if you're a club member. And please join the club. We really want to have you in there. Otherwise we do it on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We don't do TikTok anymore. They made it too hard. So. But I figure six other platforms is plenty after the fact. You can download audio or video of the show at Twitch, our website. There's also a YouTube channel with the video. Best thing to do, subscribe that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And if you do subscribe, leave us a nice review. Give us the five star treatment, will you? Let everybody know. We've been doing it for 20 years and after a while people, you know, kind of. It's not the hot new thing but it. I think it's worth listening to. And if you think so, share it with your friends. Let them know. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks to our club members for making it possible. Thanks to Jacob and Abrar and Harper and thanks to you. We'll see you next time. And as I've said for 20 years now, another twit is in the can.

[Harper Reed]

He's amazing.

[Jacob Ward]

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now I don't know if you've heard but Mint's Premium Wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk, crazy weather.

[Leo Laporte]

We're having.

[Harper Reed]

No, it's not.

[Jacob Ward]

It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Of $45 for three month plan $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.

[Harper Reed]

CMT mobile.com.