This Week in Tech 1058: Furry Little Potatoes

Summary

This Week in Tech #1058: Furry Little Potatoes

Date: November 17, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Victoria Song (The Verge), Christina Warren (GitHub)

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Overview

This episode of "This Week in Tech" brings together returning guest Victoria Song (senior reviewer, The Verge) and much-missed Christina Warren (senior dev advocate, GitHub). After a hilarious detour involving Crocs and cats, the trio dives into a wide-ranging discussion of gadget culture, wearable tech abroad, AI privacy and ethics, tech legal news, and questions of generational change across the tech industry. The chemistry is strong, the banter fast, and the digressions delightful—while the tech insights run deep, especially on the collision of new hardware, AI, and real-world use.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Wearables Abroad: Meta Ray-Bans in Italy

[04:24–14:13]

• Victoria Song’s travel review: Brought Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses on a trip to Rome; discussed use cases for navigation, translation, and live captions while traveling.
• Best features: Live walking directions—helpful for Rome's chaotic streets.
  • "Crossing the street in Italy is a never-ending game of Frogger." – Victoria [05:37]
• Translation feature: Impressive one-on-one, but impractical in crowded/public settings with ambient noise and multiple conversations.
• Cultural friction and privacy: Eye display makes it hard for bystanders to know if you’re recording or disengaged, leading sometimes to awkward or ethically questionable moments.

2. Meta Glasses, Snap Spectacles, & Surveillance Culture

[14:13–27:24]

• Progress since Google Glass: The latest glasses are more discreet, raising new privacy and etiquette issues.
  • "A lot of people don't know what I'm doing at that point in time. So I personally feel quite ethically..." – Victoria [19:48]
• Meta’s choice of a white, not red, recording indicator is seen by the panel as an intentional move to reduce public awareness.
• Comparison to AirTags: 99% benign use, but abuse/misuse is always present, and it may become harder to self-police or regulate.

3. Patent Wars: Apple v. Masimo

[30:08–37:43]

• Apple lost a $634 million jury verdict over alleged infringement of blood oximetry patents.
  • “I don't know why they don't just pay them. They could just pay them.” – Victoria [30:11]
• Christina & Victoria argue: The feature isn’t that vital, most wearables health metrics aren’t diagnostic (just trend/pattern indicators). Apple’s refusal to settle may be about precedent & protecting broader IP.
• Health anxiety is rising due to incessant self-tracking (“hypochondria by device”).

4. Big Tech Antitrust in the EU

[39:14–45:46]

• Google fined €665m by Germany for shopping search favoritism.
• Debate: Is the EU too protectionist, or necessary for consumer privacy and fair competition?
  • “Thank God for the EU, because we don’t seem to be doing much here in the United States to protect our privacy.” – Leo [42:36]

5. Disney, AI, & YouTube TV Carriage Disputes

[46:08–49:45]

• Disney and YouTube TV’s deal restores Monday Night Football.
• Side tangent: Use of alternative (sometimes questionable) IPTV sources when carriage disputes happen.
• Bob Iger’s statement about AI-generated Disney content concerns panelists regarding creative ethics and moderation chaos.

6. AI Cursed Prompting and Content Moderation

[49:45–56:14]

• Hilarious/practical discussion about jailbreaking AI models with “cursed” prompts (nudging AI to generate forbidden or bizarre content).
• Both Christina and Victoria admit to considerable experience trying to break models, both professionally and “for the lulz.”
  • "I've made some cursed, cursed ChatGPT images." – Victoria [50:01]
• Grok (X’s AI) called out for easily circumvented guardrails.

7. AI, Wikipedia, and Knowledge Bases

[67:13–71:26]

• X’s “Grokopedia” reimagines Wikipedia as an AI-generated resource. Discussion of trust, human curation, and implications for the future of shared knowledge.
  • “Would [Jimmy Wales] be open to using AI to at least help generate some of that content?” – Leo [69:36]

8. Apple Leadership Succession & Product Direction

[72:03–79:18]

• Rumors heat up of Tim Cook’s succession, with John Ternus as a likely candidate.
• Christina & Victoria see a current Apple “product crisis” and unclear direction compared to the Jobs era.
• iPhone choice paralysis: Too many SKUs, colors, and sizes.
  • "I don't know what iPad to buy. Sorry, there's like 20,000 iPads." – Victoria [77:01]

9. Gadget Culture: Crocs, Socks, and Furries

[57:28–62:51, 89:23–89:43, 145:18–146:38]

• Christina debuts her Microsoft employee-exclusive Crocs (with Clippy and other Windows charms).
• Banter about the infamous Apple iPhone Pocket “sock” (echoes of Borat’s mankini) and merch collecting from dead tech companies.
• Victoria loves the orange iPhone 17, but brings up color fatigue among fans missing “rose gold.”

10. AI & PC Industry Shifts: AMD’s Rise, Intel’s Decline

[105:37–114:58]

• AMD’s market share climbs, Intel in slow decline. Lisa Su credited for AMD’s turnaround.
• Apple’s move to in-house silicon flagged as industry breakpoint: “That was probably the nail in the coffin when Apple said, look, we can design better silicon.” – Leo [106:05]

11. Local AI on Consumer Hardware

[114:26–119:40]

• Christina and Leo run large AI models locally (Strix Halo, MacBook Pro).
• Speculates on Apple’s potential to dominate local, on-device AI.

12. Tech’s Health Wearables and Over-Monitoring

[151:03–196:00]

• Review and discussion of new Oura ceramic ring, Withings devices (BEMO, U-Scan for at-home urine tests).
• Privacy caveats: Use of third-party integrations raises significant concerns; only FDA-cleared tools are HIPAA-protected.
  • “If you're worried about your health data, don't use wearables.” – Victoria [184:20]
• Caution urged on wellness versus medical use, especially as insurers and employers eye health monitoring.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

On Wearables in Rome ([05:34])

• Victoria Song: “The walking directions actually came in super clutch because crossing the street in Italy is a never-ending game of Frogger.”

On Notification Glasses and Dating ([17:13])

• Victoria Song: “If you can just imagine the dystopia of you're on a first date... Are you swiping on Tinder right now? What's going on?”

On Cultural Acceptance of Tech ([42:44])

• Leo Laporte: “Thank God for the EU... We don’t seem to be doing much here in the United States to protect our privacy.”

On Health Tracking Anxiety ([37:46])

• Leo Laporte: "Do you think it's a risk that it could turn us all into hypochondriacs?"
• Victoria Song: "Yes. That's already a problem that's happening."

On Jailbreaking AI ([50:01])

• Victoria Song: “I've made some cursed, cursed ChatGPT images.”

On Apple’s Product Line ([77:01])

• Victoria Song: “I don't know what iPad to buy. Sorry, there's like 20,000 iPads. I don't know what?”

On Intel’s Fumble ([109:09])

• Victoria Song: “It's such a fumble if you really think about it, that is so hard... Intel's name recognition was so strong.”

On Health Tech Privacy ([184:20])

• Victoria Song: “If you're worried about your health data, don't use wearables. Because even if you trust Apple... you are agreeing to that third party's thing and they may not be at the same level.”

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Essential Timestamps

• 00:00 — Show start, introductions, Crocs/cat banter
• 04:24 — Victoria describes using Meta Ray-Bans in Rome
• 14:13 — Translation & privacy ethics of AR glasses
• 30:08 — Apple v. Masimo lawsuit, health tracking
• 39:14 — Google’s antitrust fine in Germany
• 46:08 — Disney/YouTube TV, AI-generated content
• 49:45 — "Cursed" AI prompt misbehavior
• 67:13 — X's "Grokopedia" & AI knowledge bases
• 72:03 — Apple succession/leadership transition
• 105:37 — AMD ascendant, Intel declines
• 114:26 — Local LLMs, hardware for AI
• 151:03 — Health/fitness wearables, Oura ring, privacy
• 184:20 — Health insurance, data, and wellness apps
• 194:24 — US healthcare challenges, personal anecdotes

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Tone & Style

• Lively, irreverent, and authentic.
• Openly nerdy, self-aware, and critical but humorous; speakers are deeply knowledgeable but not above digressions or self-deprecation.
• Direct but nuanced about privacy, ethics, and cultural shifts in tech and society.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

Expect a lively and personable roundtable blending hard tech news (Apple, AMD, Google, Disney), AI and wearable device trends, and cultural critique of where tech is leading us—for better, worse, and weird. If you’re interested in gadget culture, AI’s implications on privacy and creativity, or what it feels like to use next-gen tech in real life, this episode is a can’t-miss.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twit this Week at Tech. We are gonna have a great show. I just know Victoria's Song is here from the Virgin. It's the return of Christina Warren. She's now back at GitHub. We're gonna talk about counting Renaissance butts in Rome with a meta Ray Ban display. Disney and YouTube TV finally make a deal. And where's Tim Cook going? Is he ready to retire? All that more coming up next on Twitt. Podcasts you love from people you. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech, episode 1058, recorded Sunday, November 16, 2025. Furry little potatoes. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news and we've been sitting here for half an hour chatting and I forgot to press the record button. So maybe we better begin the show. This is gonna be one of those shows. It's gonna be so much fun. Victoria Song is back. She was so great the last time you were on. I'm so glad we could get you back. Senior reviewer at the Verge. She's back from Rome with her meta display glasses. We got lots to talk about. Victoria, welcome.

[Victoria Song]

Thank you for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

And someone we have missed desperately. She disappeared into the maw of Google, into the maw of DeepMind, and was incognito for a year. But she's back. I saw your post, Christina Warren at GitHub Universe. I said, what? And we immediately contacted you. Welcome back to Living.

[Christina Warren]

Thank you so much. No, I was. That was so nice of you because I didn't want to make a big deal about like, you know, like job announcements if it wasn't one of those things that was necessary. But I wanted to let people know I was at Universe and people picked up on it, which was great to see. And you always have the story.

[Leo Laporte]

Some very nice Crocs you were wearing.

[Christina Warren]

I did, I had, I had had the Windows XP Crocs and I was wearing a Zune T shirt and, and, and just going all out. Yeah, no, it was a good fit. It was a really, really good day two fit. Like day one, like, I, I was like all like, you know, like looking like sleek and like professional. And the day two, I was like, no, we're, we're. We're going to do the, the Zune T shirt and, and, and the, the Windows XP limited edition Crocs, which are, are so good.

[Leo Laporte]

So those weren't hand painted. They actually sold those.

[Christina Warren]

No. Yeah. No, they actually made for the 50th anniversary. Microsoft. An employee shout out to Barry. Barry Doran's Blow Dart, who got them for me because they were only available in the. In the employee store. And they. It's an official collab that they did. Like, they made like a. The bag that looks like, you know, the background. And then like the little. Whatever they call them, the. The kibbutz or whatever. Whatever. The. I've never.

[Leo Laporte]

The charms.

[Christina Warren]

Thank you. The charms. Thank you. I've never worn cross.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Are they called Jibbets?

[Christina Warren]

Jibbets.

[Leo Laporte]

Jibbets. That's what they call.

[Victoria Song]

I've never watched bbts or something like that.

[Christina Warren]

Something like that. Or d. Or. I don't know. I've. I've literally never worn Crocs except for that day. And. But, you know, they had, like, Clippy and the Recycle Bin and, you know, a couple of other, like Internet Explorer and a couple of other, like, icons.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. So good.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, good. Like, genuinely. And then. And everybody loved them, obviously, because it's just. It's hilarious. So I have a rule to never wear plastic shoes, but I made an exception for these Crocs, so thank you, Barry, for getting them for me.

[Leo Laporte]

They were really, really awesome. What's your kitty's name? Victoria.

[Victoria Song]

This is Petey. He is a menace.

[Leo Laporte]

Petey the Menace. Cats know when you're on a podcast, and they immediately.

[Victoria Song]

They don't. They do. He was napping. He was napping downstairs.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Victoria Song]

And then he. And then he realized that I wasn't there. And anytime I sit at this desk, he requires a 15 minute session of attention until I pick him up and he agrees to sit in the desk bed. And eventually he goes to nap there. But, like, he might. He might just want to be involved for a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

It's quite all right. We don't need to exile him to desk bed. We can. He can be part of the show as long as you don't mind. I don't mind.

[Victoria Song]

I don't mind as long as he doesn't eat my mic. Sir, do you have anything to say? No, he doesn't have anything to say.

[Leo Laporte]

I had a whole agenda of stories to talk about. We'll get to those. But Christina really wanted to know what it was like going to Rome with a Meta Display Glass. Meta. Ray. What do they call them? Ray Ban display glasses.

[Victoria Song]

So they call them the Meta. Ray Ban display. Unlike the Ray Ban Meta glasses. Because why are we just messing up the naming convention? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the one With a little kind of heads up display in the lower right hand lens. Right.

[Victoria Song]

Yes, there is. And so, you know, it does some things like it notifies you when you have a text message. You can take photos and video with it and actually frame the shot within the lens, which is really great because.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the old meta ray bans, you couldn't. You didn't know what you were taking a picture of.

[Victoria Song]

No, you didn't know what you're taking a picture of. That's how I learned I tilt my head a lot because all of my photos were Dutch angle unintentionally so. And you know, you can text message with it via WhatsApp. You know, like all the meta apps are on there. You can watch an Instagram reel from your DMs because. Sure, why not? But I think the interesting features for me were the fact that you can get live captions and translations and see them in real time.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, you're in Italy. Perfect.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, you'd think, you'd think, well, we'll get to that part. And then also you can get walking directions. And I was surprised, but the walking directions actually came in super clutch because crossing the street in Italy is a never ending game of Frogger. You will die if you're not paying attention to where you're going. And the times where the glasses would run out of battery, I would be like, oh, no. This is.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the trouble with depending on technology that when it doesn't work now you're really. I have that problem with gps. I can't find my way out of a paper bag anymore because I'm so reliant on gps.

[Victoria Song]

It's a problem. But, you know, we were walking to the Vatican in order to get to the Sistine Chapel and the directions are really great. There was only one time where we were kind of like turned around.

[Leo Laporte]

My wife is so mad at me because I made her walk like a mile in the wrong direction and realized, wait a minute, it's that way. And we had to turn around. And she was so mad at me. But as a result, we saw where the Forum, which is kind of not in where you. Where Caesar was murdered. You don't expect it. It's like lower below ground and it's where the cats of Rome live.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, so that's pretty cool. I was upset because I didn't get to see that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really cool.

[Victoria Song]

I'm a big cat person, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I'm a big Caesar fan, so, you know, it works out.

[Victoria Song]

But yeah, Rome would be A great.

[Leo Laporte]

Place to wear those. I think that was kind of a natural place to wear them.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, I found that, you know, in my day to day life, it was really hard to incorporate the features that are cool because when I'm walking around my neighborhood, I don't really need walking directions because one, if I'm in Hackensack, Jersey, I'm in a car. I'm not going to use these glasses in a car. And if I'm walking around New York, it's a grid system.

[Leo Laporte]

Why wouldn't you use them in a car? Do they block your view?

[Victoria Song]

I just don't think you want that kind of distraction. So in the car? Yeah, like in the car you can just turn on audio only mode if you do want to use them.

[Leo Laporte]

But the audio is really good. I have the old Ray Bans. The article's very good on those.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I like them a lot. The. I mean, I think that the new ones, when they get smaller, will be something that.

[Victoria Song]

So, Victoria, they are quite big.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Christina, you were interested because were you tempted, as I was to buy the display version?

[Victoria Song]

No.

[Christina Warren]

Because of the size. Strictly because of the size. They're. They're pretty big. And, and I, you know, have the regular Ray Bans work fine, but when I got the, the clear version last year, those were too big on my face, even though they were like the standard size. And so for me, like, we have opposite problems.

[Leo Laporte]

My glasses, mine are always too small for my giant moon face.

[Victoria Song]

So the display have hinges that like kind of fold out so it helps people with wider faces. But you know, still the glasses would.

[Leo Laporte]

Be narrow on your head.

[Victoria Song]

And I don't like, they're quite large. I don't have them on me now because our video team is filming with them at the moment. But they're quite large on my face. My spouse was just like, he looked at me and he was like, no, absolutely not.

[Christina Warren]

Do you look? I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you look like?

[Christina Warren]

I.

[Victoria Song]

You can check the review out. There's tons of pictures of me in it. Review.

[Christina Warren]

I thought you looked honestly, like, you look better than I did. Like, what? I always remember I waited in line for five hours like an idiot for the original Snapchat spectacles. Outside of Pop Up, I remember that it was a great. It's probably one of my favorite blogs that I've ever, I've ever done. And, and I. And they looked so huge on my face. And it's amazing like how in like eight years, you know how poor those were just in terms of like what the capabilities were, how they looked and whatnot. Now, like, with the regular, you know, Ray Ban collection stuff, they look almost identical to regular sunglasses. And then even these, you know, the display, which are very impressive. Like I said, I was not tempted just because I wouldn't wear them. Like, if they're going to look bad on my face, then I'm too vain. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

But the temple pieces are pretty thick. I'm looking at your picture. Yeah, they're quite right now, they're pretty thick.

[Christina Warren]

They are, but you can see where they're going to go. That's the thing that excites me. Like, you see that, like, in a generation or two, these are going to become smaller.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they, though? I mean, this is a technological challenge to get it. Battery life, battery life.

[Victoria Song]

All that battery life that the battery life was, is what I'll say is the biggest, weakest point, besides the size is that, you know, when I'm using it in a heavy circumstance. Like, I went to a car show with my spouse, and again, here I was trying to test the AI. So I'm at a car show and I'm just screaming at every car, what model car is this? And moving on. And everyone thinks I'm crazy. But, you know, this is what people would think.

[Leo Laporte]

When the first Bluetooth headsets came out, everybody thought, why is he talking to himself as he's striding down the street?

[Victoria Song]

I have the wristband. I'm like tapping, and so I look like a crazy person going like, what car is this? Just yelling at them.

[Leo Laporte]

Could you type? It looked like Mark was typing with his fingers. Can you.

[Victoria Song]

One of the features that'll come out later, and I did get a demo of it, is you'll be able to put it on a flat surface and write. If you're handwriting things and type. It was actually pretty good when I tried it out.

[Leo Laporte]

It's doing a lot of predictive stuff, right? So you do the first letter or two and then you say, okay, that's it.

[Victoria Song]

The neural band is actually one of the coolest things about it because it works quite seamlessly. So if you are familiar with the gestures on the Apple Watch or other smart watches, it's going to be really familiar to you. But it's. It's pretty seamless. Like, it is very cool that if you want to, like, turn the volume up, you just pinch and turn like you're turning a dial. How was simultaneous translation not that great in Italy? Just because, you know, it's directional. So it's the same Thing with the live captions and when I was testing it, if you are in a one on one setting, even if it's a little noisy out there, if you're in a one on one setting, like at a restaurant and you're talking to someone and you're just looking at them the entire time, it can be quite good. It doesn't do slang well, but that's all AI transcription, I think. But it's quite good at getting the gist across. Now if you're walking out and about like you might be as a tourist and there's a lot of Italians yelling in the vicinity around you, you're going to have a hard time because it doesn't know who necessarily to translate because it's going to prioritize who you're looking at. So if you are just trying to get an announcement translated, well, good luck. Like where is, where is the person you're talking to where the announcement is coming? You'll have to find the speaker and stand under it and look at the speaker. So it's not quite practical in that sense. But so that was that limitation really for translating in Italian, getting that done. And then also they don't have glasses so they can't understand what you're saying back. So you have to pull out a thing and be like, here you go. And my in laws are very extroverted American. So they would just not even let me try to do that. They would just be like, do you speak English? And then switch to English and it would be like, oh, okay, well there's no opportunity there then to try that. But so I found that translation stuff. If you're one on one, and let's say you're like living abroad for a while and you're trying to make new friends and you're having a one on one friend date at a coffee shop like a lot of expats do. I think that could be really useful for you. But if you're a tourist, one, everyone's going to talk to you in English anyway. Two, it can be a little clunky because then you have to like bring it out and be like, this is what I'm using.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also slow, right? It's not, it's not in real time. Exactly.

[Christina Warren]

It's decent.

[Victoria Song]

But there is slightly a bit of a lag with any translation tech. And I brought like standalone translator tech things to test out while I was there too. And there was only one instance where I felt like it was a good opportunity to do it. And that was when we were on a train and a Chinese grandma came up to me because I was the only other Asian person on this train. And so she's like, haha, do you speak Chinese? And I was like no, I'm American. And so we used her little translator device there. And that worked out pretty great. But yeah, so for translation, very certain circumstances.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a very early days in this stuff though. I mean it is.

[Victoria Song]

I think the walking trend, the walking directions was the absolute best use case of it. If Italian museums would install WI fi, I think it could be a good thing to have the AI identify a piece of artwork for you if you know, audio guide is broken. Yeah, but you know, I went to the Vatican museums, I went to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. No WI fi at either of these museums. That was very. I was just like, I would love to know about this painting, but how was your cell?

[Christina Warren]

I'm just curious how your cellular connection was. I know you didn't have WI fi, but I was just curious like was was like 5G or LTE decent enough? Because when I was there there wasn't a lot of ultra wideband but there like LTE was fast enough and I'm curious if that would have been enough to keep up.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, so I did have T mobile's, you know, international data plan. Not enough gigs, but you know, it was good enough when I was out and about and I could have a strong signal. But I don't know what it is about these Italian buildings that block out.

[Leo Laporte]

They're made of.

[Christina Warren]

I was going to say, I was going to say they're, they're, they're, they're thousands of years old. I think that's the problem. Right. Like it's kind of like, you know, like, you know, New York runs into that a little bit too because some of the buildings are so old and so you have, you know, some of the connectivity problems. Seattle does not have that problem because we don't have culture. But yeah, so what do you mean.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have culture?

[Christina Warren]

I mean we don't. But, but, but, but you know, newer cities don't have some of the same problems that way. But yeah, I imagine it's probably the age of some of the buildings. But yeah, I was. Because that is going to have to be a thing eventually if these things take off. Because I could see this as if they want them to take off. Right. Like in some of these areas. Because I could see if these things get adopted more the museum community and whatnot, really wanting to Embrace them and maybe even make their own apps or other things for this.

[Victoria Song]

Or just like opera houses, you could have translations or foreign.

[Leo Laporte]

You could have the super titles on the glasses instead of on.

[Victoria Song]

So it was like. It was a situation where I was like, oh, you know what? These glasses are actually great in situations where I can put them on for a specific purpose and then take them off. Because then I don't have any of the weird cultural qualms or because in my daily life, when I wear them, I feel like a little gross, Like a little super spy having capabilities that people don't know that I have. And a thing that came up a couple of times was when I would be looking at the screens, people would be like, what are you looking at right now? Because they can't see the screen, but they can really see that I'm not engaged in a certain way. I have like a very dead eye stare. And when I would demo the tech for my co workers or some friends and I would see them do it, I was like, oh, this is horrible. So you can just imagine, like right now, you try to have a family dinner or you're on a date and everyone's on their phones, and usually there's that one friend that's just like, okay, everybody, can we get off our phones? Can we be like, present in the moment? And if you can just imagine the dystopia of you're on a first date and. Yeah, huh, huh, huh. Are you swiping on Tinder right now? What's going on?

[Christina Warren]

Or worse, are you like, are you looking me up? Right? Like, are you like, yeah, you know, I mean, because that would be my concern. I'd be like, okay, because you, you've probably already done some retcon, but now you're there in person, you're like, okay, am I taking photos? Am I, like, doing other stuff by scrolling through your social media? Like, what am I? What's going on?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that makes sense. So that's one of the big advantages of.

[Victoria Song]

Yes, but it's also weird, right?

[Christina Warren]

I was gonna say it's both. Right? I was gonna say, because on one hand it sounds kind of great. On the other hand, you're like, no, this is stuff. I think, to your point, Victoria, like, that other people don't know you have these capabilities. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

I think soon we all will with AI. AI is going to be embedded everywhere. We're going to all know everything about everybody we meet. It's going to be creepy.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, it's already creepy.

[Victoria Song]

It feels weird because you know, sometimes you're on. So a really good example is in my review on the Verge, if you scroll all the way down, when I talk to the cultural and privacy implications, I have a video that I uploaded and what was happening is I was in a florist coffee shop, one of those hybrid things, and I was trying the zoom out and taking a video because I was like, oh, this will be great footage, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what I don't notice is that the cashier is trying to talk to me and she can't tell. She's just like, hi, can I help you? And I'm just not listening. I'm just going like. And then the second time she's just like, hey, can I help you? And I was like, oh God, hi. Yeah, no, I'm just looking and like frantically you can't see this part. But like on the side, I'm just trying to close the camera out because I don't want her to be like on camera because she doesn't know there's a, there's a recording indicator light. But in my experience, a lot of people just don't see it. They're not really aware of it because it's not red, it's white. So on the one hand that, that makes you, the person using it, more likely to use it. You feel a little self conscious. But then on the other hand, a lot of people don't know that it's white. And they don't because the cultural, I think language for us in recording lights is red. So it's sort of like one of those things where I find that most people in public don't know what I'm doing at that point in time. So I personally feel quite ethically.

[Leo Laporte]

See, you're unusual though, because I think a lot of people and the ones that you really don't want to be doing this are the ones who are going to have no ethical qualms.

[Christina Warren]

I was going to ask Victoria, do you think the decision to go white, which obviously, you know, a lot of they're not the first ones to do it. I mean, the original Snapchat spectacles were white too. I think that the Google Glass, I'm pretty sure was red, but, but everything else has been white. Do you think that that has been an intentional choice, like talking to these companies? So that basically. So people don't know, like as much as they, they try to claim. Oh no, we want everyone to be aware. They really don't.

[Victoria Song]

I think what they'll tell you is that they put A lot of thought and, like, research into what color they're choosing. And sure, I think they very intentionally choose white so that it's less glaring. So, you know, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Less obvious is another way to put it.

[Victoria Song]

Less obvious. But. But still, if someone's in the know, they can clue in. So it's sort of like a halfway thing. Because I get it, when you have something that just has a red light on you, people are on guard. And maybe you're just wearing this as a normal pair of glasses and headphones that you sometimes, maybe not even often take the video or the camera with, in which case, if you're that person, well, do you want it to have a red light? Maybe not. But at the same time, if you're part of the. The greater public, I want to know when I'm being recorded. I feel like that's a common courtesy to know. So it's. It's one of those things where consistently in my reviews, I list it as a con. Because the white light, if you're in bright, sunny daylight, you're just not going to see it. You just absolutely are not going to see it if you're outdoors. Yeah. So that's definitely a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

And again, people may be using it, as you were in the museum, to say, what is this? But no one can tell whether you're doing that or recording them. Yeah, it's not clear. I think that's gonna be. It was a big cultural problem with Google Glass, and I don't think we've solved that issue. There are a lot of people who say, and discreetness. You don't wear those when you're sitting down with me, buddy.

[Christina Warren]

Right, right. I mean, and I think that that's the thing that is at least right now, like, you can tell, like, with the. With the display. They are big enough. I think they're obvious in some ways. If you look closely, you know what's going on. That is where I think just like the regular meta glasses are a little bit more insidious. And frankly, kind of why I like them. Right. Because they are, like, unobstructive. And I'm not trying to spy on people. I'm not trying to record things. The capabilities aren't there to do all these other advanced things. It's like, yeah, I can take a photo or a video, but really my primary thing is I have, like, a way to, like, listen to music and take a quick, you know, like, like photo or scroll or whatever, but I'm not, you know, like, it's not like I can I can do a whole lot more with it and I don't have to feel weird about, you know, wearing something that just looks like normal glasses. But yeah, I do think that that is the thing that will become interesting is when these things do become less obvious and how do we culturally deal with that?

[Victoria Song]

Because you know, it's going to happen. It's like AIR tags for me, because 99% of people who use AIR tags are using it for a completely benign reason. They're using it for the way that it's intended. And then there's the 1% of jerks who are using it in pretty harmful ways.

[Christina Warren]

Yes.

[Victoria Song]

And you're seeing that with the regular META Ray bans too, because y. There was a guy on a Bay Area university who was using it to kind of harass women and make social media content out of it. That's pretty crappy. So you have instances out here now of people being glass holes, but because they're so discreet, it's not quite as easy for people to clock like Google Glass. You look like you're a sci fi character.

[Christina Warren]

You did, you did. And frankly, I think a lot of the early adopters of Google Glass, because I like, followed that stuff very closely when it was happening, leaned in, frankly, to it and. Which made it worse, which made the whole.

[Leo Laporte]

Scoble took it in the shower.

[Victoria Song]

Right, right.

[Christina Warren]

And then that became indicative of the whole thing. And, you know, I'm not going to blame him for that, but I would say, you know, no, in fact, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Good he did because it highlighted the issue well. And to this day, I remember when Meta came out with the, with the originals, they said, we hope Scoble doesn't get a hold of these.

[Christina Warren]

But there were people who were like, actively going into restaurants and almost picking fights and almost people to get kicked out and capturing things in bars.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christina Warren]

Restaurants and bars. And, you know, I talked to some of those people and I can say this with like more than 10 years in the happenstance. They were actively, in some of those cases, being the antagonists.

[Leo Laporte]

They are provocateurs.

[Christina Warren]

Yes. And they wanted a confrontation and then wanted to turn it into a story about, look at how oppressed I am and look at how terribly I'm being treated for this. And all it wound up doing was turning everybody off of the category until we could finally get to a place where it is now. But the unfortunate thing is that to your point, Victoria, because it is much less obvious, it can be more insidious, it can be used in These ways that we wouldn't want. Although to be fair, you know, you could use any number of cameras, any numbers. Like there's, if there, if there's a, you know, for. With every good. People are always going to be able to abuse things. I think we just have to be cognizant of what those things are. And I would like to, I would.

[Victoria Song]

Like to see Meta just lead the conversation more. Because anytime I have readers who are like bringing up these very valid concerns, the only thing I can point to is kind of an etiquette guide that Meta has like a very small one. And it's basically like, don't be a jerk. And I was like, that can't be your policy. Like there has to be some conversation you're having in terms of the design, in terms of setting the cultural tone with these, if you truly want to lead the space. Because it's a problem that's going to pop up again. I went to a dinner with a friend that I hadn't seen in years and we were gabbin yapping for like two hours. And then at one point just the light changed and I went, oh my God, are you wearing Ray Ban Meta glasses? And he's like, oh, yeah, I love them. I use them as like audio things and sometimes I take photos. But whatever. I me, the wearable lady who tests this stuff, very familiar with what these glasses look like. I didn't clock it for two hours. So that was kind of a wake up call for me too, as to how discreet these really can be. And you know when you introduce a neural band, when you can put your hand under the table and start recording and there's no like cue like this or there's no cue with the voice. You can just silently start recording someone. That's freaky deaky. That's super spy stuff. That is James Bond level things that you're putting into the average person's hand. It's not like a phone, like there's no hiding a phone where you're like, I'm recording you. That sort of situation. So that freaked me out a little bit while I was testing these devices. Because it's a mind really.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I think that now you've got another sin that you have to add.

[Victoria Song]

Listen, I'll just go back to Rome, I'll walk under the gate.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a little break here because I don't want to get too far in the hole with ads, but this is so much fun. We haven't even touched the first news stories that I wanted to get to. We will get to those. I knew it would be like this. Notice there is not a fourth person on this panel because when you have Christina Warren and Victoria's song together, it sings. It's just great to have you both. I'm really thrilled. We will be back in just a bit with more, of course, our show today brought to you by Zapier. Love Zapier. It actually helps me every single day. I use Zapier workflows to automate my job, to automate our work. I also use it around the house. I have scripts that do all sorts of home automation things. In business, Zapier is everywhere because Zapier connects with 3000/plus of the tools you already use. But now there's something new with Zapier that's very exciting because Zapier is now an AI orchestration platform. That means you can take any of your existing workflows and, and add AI or create new AI first workflows. And Zapier supports all of the biggest models. They've got Chat GPT, they've got Claude. So, for instance, I use Zapier when I'm going through stories. I bookmark a story in Raindrop IO. Zapier is watching, always watching for any changes to my Raindrop IO. When it sees it, it immediately toots. It posts it on my Mastodon instance in the Twit news links. It also carefully formats a line for a Google Drive sheet that it puts it in the sheet. That's so the producers can later suck it up into our rundowns because it's in the format they need, so they just copy and paste it. Zapier does all of this behind the scenes. I don't do anything. I just set this up once years ago and it just kind of works automatically. Now if I want, I can say, oh, and insert into that workflow another line that says, can you have Claude synopsize this story so we could put a briefing book together for our hosts, that kind of thing. Imagine taking, taking all the tools you ought to use and adding, sprinkling a little magic AI on it. Use AI where you need it, however you need it, whether it's AI powered workflows. You can create an autonomous agent. You could create, I don't know, a customer chatbot, anything. You can orchestrate it with Zapier. And Zapier is not a tool for geeks, it is for everyone. You don't have to be a tech expert. Teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. I've been using Zapier for years. It's just, it's why it's my go tool for workflow automation. Now with AI man, the sky's the limit. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com TWiT that's Z A P I E R.com TWiT thank you, Zapier, for supporting this week in tech. We appreciate it. Well, we have to move on to serious news now. Sorry. We'll get back to fun. We're not done. But I should mention that Apple has lost that patent lawsuit with Massimo and this time for $634 million.

[Christina Warren]

Just pay them.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a jury decision instead of a.

[Victoria Song]

I don't know why they don't just pay them. They could just pay them.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, they should have settled this years ago. Honestly, this whole thing is ridiculous. It's like I get the principal and I get to have more money than anyone else. But like, come on, guys, when you lose the jury trial, like, God, come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Masimo has a, they have a watch, but they have other devices that have an optical sensor to detect blood flow. They say that pulse oximetry feature, Apple stole it from us for their Apple watch. For a while, Apple actually turned the feature off on new Apple watches. Then they found a workaround. So it is back on. And I've always had it because it is grandfathered in, I guess. Massimo has also accused Apple of hiring away employees, including its chief medical officer, in order to do that. You may remember a few years ago, the itc, the International Trade Commission said, okay, you know, you can't import these Apple watches with that feature. That's why Apple had to turn it off right now. A jury has ruled. No, you know, this is a violation of the patent. And now I imagine it's not over.

[Christina Warren]

No, Apple said they're going to appeal. Of course they are. But this becomes an interesting question now about like, does this change any things in terms of like the import ban status? Because yes, they had a workaround, but like, I don't know what it means.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's why Apple doesn't settle because they're worried that there would be other patents that would encourage other people to go after them.

[Christina Warren]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

This is always a risk when you're creating a product that has so many technologies built into. Just opens you up and you know, there's patent troll. I don't know. I don't think Massimo is a Patent troll.

[Christina Warren]

No, I mean patent trolls are real and we saw that a lot, especially you know, last decade when with a lot of mobile patents. Right. Like there were a lot of companies that would patent things related to cell phones and other stuff. And there was a consortium I think that was led by Apple and I think that it was. Google was part of it and there were a couple of other companies and BlackBerry was part of it that like bought. But BlackBerry might not have been part of it. They might have had their own separate patent library that became worthless as BlackBerry became worthless. But there was like a consortium that bought up a lot of the patents and then basically gave everybody like fair access and said, okay, we're all part of this, this group and you'll be able to use these things and not be worried about being sued for using these features. So yeah, I totally understand wanting to fight the patent trolls and whatnot. But in this case I will say I think that hiring away the chief medical officer thing, who cares? That's in California. That's illegal in a lot of states. It's illegal to even pretend that you can't do that. Right. Like non competes which Apple has fought against. And part of the reason that they're illegal in California now is actually although.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple did it, remember Steve made a deal with.

[Christina Warren]

I know, yeah. Well, I was going to say that's actually why they're illegal in the state of California is because he baffles own actions. So you know, that I don't care anything about. And it is, you know, it seems like spurious but some of the other things like if they had the patent and if it's been found this way, I get not wanting to settle, I get not wanting to do this, but I feel like there could have been either a licensing agreement or something that you could have done that would not.

[Leo Laporte]

Have cost you $650 million. Yeah. You make a deal.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

The funniest thing is this feature is not that important.

[Christina Warren]

No, exactly.

[Victoria Song]

It's just not that important of a feature as far as never use it like. Right. Because doing spot checks is not that useful. The only time that SpO2 is sort of useful right now is if you're gonna do sleep apnea detection with it or some sort of sleep related feature. Well, Apple figured out a way to do sleep apnea detection without that sensor. So if you think about it, it's sort of just like I bought though.

[Leo Laporte]

An oximeter, an oxygen sensor for my finger during COVID because that was one of the early signs that your COVID infection was going in the wrong direction was your oxygen saturation. So there is a medical use for it. I think you're right. With sleep apnea, I pay attention. My aura ring will say you had no sleep disturbances or a few mild sleep disturbances. I pay attention to that. But Apple and Aura and everybody who does this also say, but this is not diagnostic.

[Victoria Song]

It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

You shouldn't rely on this to say, oh, I don't have sleep apnea. My ring says I don't. Just as AFIB and the other heart stuff with Apple.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, it's all detection features. They very specifically say it's not diagnostic because that would require a higher degree of. And just so much, it introduces so much liability to say my smartwatch diagnosed me with something, so it's never going to be that.

[Leo Laporte]

And in their testing, I can't remember what heart feature it was. But Apple, I think it was afib. But Apple or maybe one of the new ones, Apple in their own testing only caught about 50% of the AFib cases. So not showing AFIB problems on your watch, you could. 50% of the people who had no problem do have a problem. It's not a useful, it's not that useful. Right. Despite all the ads of Apple Watch is saving people's lives.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, it can, I mean, I mean I was in it, it was a, it was minor, but I had a situation where my Apple watch caught that my resting heart rate was like 120, 130 and, and it was, was, you know, was turned out that I had some sort of an infection and went on. So I had, I went to the, you know, hospital and it was one of the things I usually would. And I usually wouldn't go to, you know, I would never like, be like, oh, I need to go to the ER for this. But it was like hitting like getting close to the 140 point. And again, this is my resting heart rate. I'm like, I'm concerned because I've had thyroid swarm before and like this can be indicative of problems. And so, you know, they, they treated me, they gave me like I had like a, had to wear like a active heart monitor for like two weeks, you know, to test things.

[Leo Laporte]

But see, that's the real deal, the gold standard.

[Victoria Song]

And that's the way you should be.

[Christina Warren]

That is what you should be doing.

[Leo Laporte]

But if the watch warned you, I think that's valuable.

[Christina Warren]

Right. But I was going to say I wouldn't have known that. Right. Like, I felt tired, but it wasn't one of Those things that, like, stuck out to me. And when I'd had the situation earlier in my life, which was related to a different situation that was only caught because I happened to be at a completely different doctor's office, they did my, you know, took my, you know, pulse and they were like, like, something's not right. And it turned out that, yeah, I was, I was in a thing called thyroid swarm, which can be very, very, like, bad. And, and I was, I was young and I was, I. I was seeing an endocrinologist. So that was a problem that he didn't catch it. I'd seen him literally two days earlier and that he didn't, you know, he was in the same office as the doctor that I was in who actually did catch it. But, but the, you know, I look back on that, I'm like, yes, you're right. These things aren't going to be perfect. They're not diagnostic. But they can be good signs.

[Victoria Song]

Just to know for baselines.

[Christina Warren]

Exactly. And that can be really, really beneficial. I think if you lean on it too hard one way or another, like, it's not gonna be good. But I'm glad that I knew, you know, like six years ago or whenever, you know, this last incident happened. I'm glad I was wearing my Apple watch that morning.

[Victoria Song]

So it's, it's exactly for that reason. It's, it's baselines. If, you know, your baselines, if it's doing something like passively checking if you have an irregular heart rate, like, those things are, are, you know, that one's actually the one that most people are like, oh, that saved my life. Because.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think it's a risk that it could turn us all into hypochondriacs?

[Victoria Song]

Yes. That's already a problem that's happening.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. People are already doing that.

[Victoria Song]

People are already having that health anxiety.

[Leo Laporte]

My heart.

[Victoria Song]

There was a study that came out and there was this elderly woman, and she had done something like over 900 EKG readings in a year because she was so paranoid about that.

[Leo Laporte]

She was so sure.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. So, you know, the health anxiety portion of that, that is a very real thing. And there's also just a lot of miseducation about that out there because it's really good that you got a fingertip pulse oximeter during COVID because that is something that can do that real time checking. It's something that, you know, is gone through.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was accurate.

[Victoria Song]

And it's accurate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. So it knew, you know, it knew. Whereas the watch, I think, is Much less accurate. I don't know about aura, but I.

[Victoria Song]

Just feel like they're accurate for certain situations when you're passively sleeping, those sorts of things. Like just kind of an antidote when my mom makes me feel good.

[Leo Laporte]

When it says you don't have sleep apnea, my wife says you're snoring like a mother. What the hell's going on? So I just. But look, my ring says it's okay.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Google has been ordered to pay a 660. Speaking of fines, a 665 million dollar fine in Germany for anti competitive practices for abusing its dominant market position. For what? Google Shopping. Is that still a thing? No.

[Christina Warren]

Who even uses that?

[Leo Laporte]

It's long gone, but I guess it takes a while and I presume Google is just gonna say, yeah, fine. I mean Google makes is so profitable just as Apple is, but Google's even more profitable than Apple that they can.

[Christina Warren]

I'm sure they'll fight it. I'm sure they'll fight it. But yeah, I mean, and, and, and it is interesting. Google Shopping apparently does still exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, does it?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. At least in the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

So the issue was something Google's denied all along, that Google search results prefer Google product, you know, products like YouTube or Google Shopping.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I think that it would, it would, I think that, I think the thing was that like you would, it would prioritize links to, I guess maybe Google affiliated shopping links versus like, like stores like Amazon or whatever. And anecdotally that did seem to be the case. But I think the question was, and obviously the court in Germany has decided was is that a violation of antitrust?

[Victoria Song]

Right.

[Christina Warren]

Because you could make the argument that says, well, this is our search engine, these are our products, people. We're allowed to vertically integrate the way.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S what people want.

[Christina Warren]

Right, Exactly. We're able to find the deals and whatnot. I think that the bigger issue, at least with some companies, and I don't know if this was the case in Germany, but I know like Yelp and some other, you know, U.S. based companies were very bothered by the fact that they almost felt like they had to pay.

[Leo Laporte]

Like in addition, that's one of the complaints people have about these European, these EU prosecutions though is that they are driven by EU companies that don't like competing with big American companies like Spotify, like whatever they have in Germany. In Germany for Yelp, maybe it's Yelp. I don't know that it's really, you know, these other companies trying to tilt the playing field. Away from your American big tech. Is that fair?

[Christina Warren]

I think, I don't know. I feel like the EU stuff is, I don't know your perspective on this is Victoria. But for me it always feels like, especially when you look at the DMA and this Google case is different from, from that which Apple is dealing with. But a lot of it just seems like there's, there are levels of bureaucracy and that can be a good or a bad thing. Right. In my opinion, I sometimes feel like it goes too far and accomplishes little. But I know that many people in the EU and in their countries are very protective about their, you know, protection rights and the things that are built into how their governments are structured. And that just, I think goes against some of the ways that the US companies have operated and have been able to continue to operate over the last couple of decades.

[Leo Laporte]

Because the Trump administration's response to this is no, you can't regulate our guys, that's our job.

[Victoria Song]

Right, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're defending American companies in Europe of, but they're going after them in.

[Christina Warren]

The U.S. well, yeah, but that's kind of, and it, you know, that's kind of inconsistent I think, going back to the Obama administration. Right. Like, honestly, like, like the whole we.

[Leo Laporte]

Have these deals, you're not supposed to prosecute us. We'll.

[Christina Warren]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Leave that to us.

[Victoria Song]

Right, right.

[Christina Warren]

Well, it was. But I think it's also a very, like the way I look at it is that it's a very like weird cultural thing because as Americans I think that a lot of us, we have like, because of, just especially if we were born here, like we have a sort of sense of complex which is like, like you're not going to tell me what to do. The government is not going to regulate, especially when it comes to businesses. Right. That's kind of a fundamental part of being an American that is very different in the EU where it is much more accepted because the public has seen the benefits of having.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the opposite. That's the other side of the coin is thank God for the EU because we don't seem to be doing much here in the United States to protect our privacy.

[Christina Warren]

No consumers. Right, exactly. And so it's one of those trade off things which is like, and it's hard for me as an American, I never feel more American than when I'm in kind of these discussions about things because I'm like, this is a thing where I objectively know the benefits of the way that the EU system might work. But because of how I'VE lived my whole life. There's a part of me that rubs up against being told you as a private business have to adhere to these terms which might be onerous and might be useless. Like the USB C thing. On the one hand, it's good to have a standard. On the other hand, all you're doing is forcing everybody onto either one type of connector type where you don't even know what the actual capabilities are behind the scenes. And the little logos don't make it super clear and have discouraged to save the fact that now we're not going to get, we don't get chargers in our boxes and some other kind of overly onerous stuff from like, okay, I get why you want to encourage some of these things, but it feels just, just overly like putting a hand on the scale.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, Igor Ackerman in our club says this is the German site that went after Google in Germany, Idealo, which is a German shopping site that says, hey, Google doesn't put our results at top. They put their results at top.

[Victoria Song]

So, I mean, I get it if you're trying and you really want, if you are the small person going up against the Goliath, kind of hard to beat. It's hard. It's really, it's even harder.

[Leo Laporte]

The power of Google search. Search is what it really is.

[Christina Warren]

Right? Right. But I think the fundamental disconnect is, and this is, and the German courts have decided is okay, if you're creating the search engine, if you're building the infrastructure, if you're supporting all of this, why are you not allowed to dictate or at least have some role in how the results are displayed?

[Leo Laporte]

There are search results. Why can't we favor ourselves?

[Victoria Song]

Right.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, because if we look at almost any other social platform where you have, it's not like we've had algorithms determining feed results for a very long time. And you know, Google makes the argument that they are choosing the best results for those purposes. Now, again, and this has been a question that a lot of people have had for a long time, which is okay, but are you favoring your results or are you requiring people to pay, you know, maybe onerous, you know, like, you know, fees and whatnot to be included and even have a chance to have your things promoted and whatnot. Right. Like, are these things going to appear organically or not? And those are valid questions. But I think that Google's response probably would have been, and I'm not speaking for them, I have no idea what their actual position is, would be like, okay, if you're this bothered by this, then build your own search engine. But at a certain point, you become a monopoly. And you become such a integrated part of every part of the computing world that governments, I mean, the United States is going after them too. Is. A lot of countries are going to be like, okay, but it's great you built all this. But because it is such a monopoly, there have to be some regulations.

[Leo Laporte]

Google made a lot of money this quarter.

[Christina Warren]

They did. They did.

[Victoria Song]

They'll be fine. They did. They'll be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how you make a lot of money, by favoring your results. Our long national nightmare is over. Monday Night Football is back on YouTube TV. Tomorrow night, Disney has. I don't know if Disney caved or YouTube.

[Christina Warren]

I couldn't tell. But all I know is the deal was settled, so thank God, it's over. I know.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually subscribed to ESPN because we don't. We can't get over the air television up here in the oonies. And so the only way we were going to be able to watch Monday Night Football last Monday was to watch it on espn.

[Christina Warren]

Okay, I'm going to send you some links.

[Leo Laporte]

I've canceled that subscription, by the way.

[Christina Warren]

Okay, good. Well, I'm glad, but I'm going to say there are links available. There are. There are so many iptv. I will send you links, Leo, because here's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

If you really. Yeah, that's illegal. You're going to have to go through.

[Christina Warren]

Okay, you're already technically paying. If you're paying for Google, if you're paying for YouTube TV and there's a carriage dispute.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, they gave me 20 bucks back.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Great, great. Yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm only 10 bucks in the hole by buying ESPN for 30, right?

[Christina Warren]

So. So my. My point being when. When these carriage disputes happen, my morality, and not that I have much of it anyway, I mean, I mooch off of a friend's YouTube TV account and then use a VPN every three months to make it look like I'm at their location so I can reset it so I can travel. But. Thank you, Jeremiah. But, like, I. I'm not sure you should announce that.

[Victoria Song]

I mean, no, I think we shouldn't. We should do more subscription stealing to be quite.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. Honestly, it's truly. Well. And also, like, look, whatever I pay.

[Leo Laporte]

So much, Victoria, I don't steal the Verge subscription. I pay my Verge subscription regularly. And my GitHub fees, I pay those, too. Christine.

[Christina Warren]

Appreciate it. We very much appreciate It.

[Victoria Song]

We appreciate, but I'm saying if you're.

[Christina Warren]

Already paying for a service and there's a cares dispute, which is out of your control as a customer.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you're right. That's any moral argument at all to.

[Christina Warren]

Figure out how to get an IPTV link, of which there are many, to be able to enjoy what you need to enjoy.

[Leo Laporte]

Am I thinking now, by the way, not because of this, but because of Bob Iger saying Disney is going to do AI generated videos, pissing off all the creatives in Hollywood? I think that's a kind of a strategic error.

[Christina Warren]

It's interesting because I think it depends on. On what they mean by like, AI generated. Like, does that mean like. Like, does it mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's. Here's. This is during the. The Thursday earnings call, which, by the way, everybody thinks was why Disney settled because they didn't want to say at the earnings call, we're losing $30 million a week without having this YouTube TV deal that kind of prodded them along. Anyway, Iger said, quote, there's phenomenal opportunities to deploy AI across our direct consumer platforms, both to provide tools that make the platforms more dynamic and more sticky with consumers. Ew. But also to give consumers the opportunity to create on our platforms. I mean, what do you think that means, Victoria? That's weird.

[Christina Warren]

You know exactly what that means, Leo. That means Sora.

[Leo Laporte]

Sora clips on Disney.

[Victoria Song]

Just not.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, I agree, I agree. But at the same time, I mean, like, if they do want to create an app, which we know they'll abandon in 18 months, where people can create clips that they put up whatever guardrails they want to put up until someone inevitably breaks them and then has Elsa from Frozen do something terrible.

[Victoria Song]

And then they have 24 hours.

[Christina Warren]

1,000%. But, but, but come on, think of the content in that 24 hours. The first 24 hours of Sora was incredible.

[Victoria Song]

Listen, I'm great. I'm great at making cursed ass prompts that make, you know, me too. My ed. Oh, my editors will, like, toss it at me and then be like, oh, God, why did we ask you to do this? You want. You want to know if I can break it? Because I have made some.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you the. Are you the queen of. Of jailbreaking AI? Are you? I've.

[Christina Warren]

I've made.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your secret?

[Christina Warren]

Very.

[Victoria Song]

I just have a twisted mind, and I want to see how far I can push it. I've made some cursed, cursed chatgpt images that.

[Christina Warren]

Me, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Christina Warren]

Oh, yeah. Well.

[Leo Laporte]

And do you think everybody's done that.

[Christina Warren]

That.

[Victoria Song]

No, no, not to this extent.

[Christina Warren]

I, I mean, you seem like me, Victoria, because what I did actually and, and I would do this even as like part of like work frankly, like be testing new model. Be like, okay, well let me see if I can break it. And genuinely that would be like, we would have like a all kind of like getting.

[Leo Laporte]

When you were working at DeepMind.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and I wasn't alone in this. Like, we. There were, you know, groups where they basically be heads, but they want to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's different. That's, that's kind of qc. That's product test.

[Christina Warren]

But before. But the reason I'm so good at it was because I would.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you have a perverted mind.

[Christina Warren]

Well, before I worked there, like, that was anytime a new image generator or anything would come out, I would be like, okay, how can I get this to have some copyrighted character do something terrible in the world and then send those images to my friends? Because it's funny to me. Because I have Victoria twisted sense of humor. And so Sora, it was interesting because there would be things that they wouldn't let me post and things that I would never have posted under my name anyway because I'm not dumb, but I would it created anyway. And then you're able to download the video and then send them to the group chat and you're like, look what.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm saying of Clippy getting arrested.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, I love that. I mean that's really.

[Victoria Song]

But that's just genuinely funny. Like we're talking some real cursed stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Clippy probably doesn't have the copyright police on its side anyway. What's the curse? So give me an example, Victoria. What's really cursed?

[Victoria Song]

So, you know, I got assigned a story many months ago to try these AI Kiss and hug apps.

[Christina Warren]

Apps.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't even know about these where you.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, there were these apps download. You just upload two pictures of people and try and make them kiss. I have some horrible imagery on my.

[Leo Laporte]

The worst two people you made kiss.

[Victoria Song]

Trump and Tim Cook. French kiss.

[Christina Warren]

I, I, I, I did something similar, but I had, there were, there was, there were some, I, I don't know, some, some white sand, like substances involved and, and, and, and gentlemen's clubs.

[Victoria Song]

I feel so sorry to Idris Elba and Adam Driver. I did some really curse things. They were growing boobs and bikinis and dancing around and I would just send these to my editors and they're like, what's wrong with you? And I was like, you asked me to do this. I'm just trying to see what you can do. And lo and behold, a lot of those actors apps got rid of the French kissing stuff because AI AI don't know what to do with tongues.

[Christina Warren]

No, they don't.

[Victoria Song]

They don't know what to do with tongues.

[Christina Warren]

They're getting better with mouths, but yeah, they don't do the tongues. Now did you find. I thought I found Grok was the one that was the easiest. Oh, Grok.

[Leo Laporte]

You can get it.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I actually had Grok. There were a couple that I, I prompts that I gave Grok that gave me back results that I was actually very uncomfortable with. When it tops. Speaking of the kissing stuff, where I went okay, actually even from my sensibility this is too far. And I wasn't even trying to jailbreak it. I was just putting in, you know, a prompt that it just took because like hackers are so awful.

[Leo Laporte]

Back in February, hackers posted a video of the President kissing and caressing Elon Musk's feet in on the TVs in the department of Housing and Urban Development. It was playing over and over and over again. Now that's a hack.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. And there's like really easy ways to get around the fact that these things are trying not to use public figures. Think for Trump and Tim Cook, I was.

[Leo Laporte]

They're gonna never stop that. Right, because you can just, it's just.

[Victoria Song]

Easy because you can just say a tanned dictator with a red baseball cap making out with a, with a silver haired tech executive.

[Christina Warren]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Just do it.

[Christina Warren]

Yes. Yeah, because that's what it knows. I mean like so bad. Well, because like you know, one of the things is like, you know, one of the big tests was like Will Smith Victoria goes.

[Victoria Song]

Right, right.

[Christina Warren]

Like, well, like one of the, one of the big tests for, for the models like, like a year ago or whatever, like you know, Will Smith eating spaghetti was ridiculous and now like look.

[Leo Laporte]

How good it is now the three dot.

[Christina Warren]

One dot is great. Right. But the thing is, is there are some not for everyone, but there are some like guardrails in place and so if you put in to, to VO3 show Will Smith eating spaghetti, it won't work. Really, I can't. I. Right. But, but now what I, what, what it will work with and I'm not sure if this is the case now because I haven't tested it this with the latest version but what I did do because I know this because I did live demos with this to regular users. So sorry Google, but it was part of my job. If you put in the, you know, actor from, from, from Bad Boys or Men in Black eating spaghetti or it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Going to be worse.

[Christina Warren]

Yes.

[Victoria Song]

Edward Cullen versus Robert Pattinson. That's right.

[Christina Warren]

So, and, and you know, in like, the, the companies, I can't speak for all of them. Like, like, but they have taken on, I can't speak for any of them. But, but what they've said publicly is that they are taking on some of that risk. Right. In terms of public figures and whatnot. Right. And, and there are, the law is unclear, I think, about how this sort of likeness stuff can be used. There will be lawsuits, obviously. You know, SORA had to make a lot of, you know, clampdowns on things.

[Leo Laporte]

Because the King foundation, you can say you have publicity rights in terms of your face being used for advertising.

[Christina Warren]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you're a president, United States, people can use your image in AI, you don't have legal.

[Christina Warren]

Right. Well, and the thing with one, the thing would be is that I think the real question is who, who would be legally responsible if someone's creating, you know, an AI generated video that's making it look like you're endorsing something or saying something or doing something that I think that one argument would be whoever generated that content is the one who is legally liable.

[Leo Laporte]

The questions get held responsible.

[Christina Warren]

Well, they do and they don't. And that's, that's the thing that hasn't been settled yet, which is to say are they going to be responsible? And that hasn't been settled. And I think that's, many of them are airing the air of caution for certain types of public figures and to cut down on certain things. But again, you see grok, which doesn't have that at all because their lawyers have made the determination whether it's right or wrong that they're not going to take that on. That being said, said, you know, I'm sure that GROK would not defend any lawsuits brought against someone who generated content using GROK that then violated, you know, some, some sort of norm. Right. Like, I, I, I think that their position would probably be, and I don't know this definitively, but, but I'd assume it'd be similar to the other companies, which is to be like, if you are actively infringing on something, then we are not going to be responsible for that. We will protect up to a point, but we're not going, if you're going out of your way to, you know, infringe on something, like you're the one who's responsible not us.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break. When we come back, X has finally announced its end to end encrypted chat.

[Christina Warren]

Sure. Great.

[Leo Laporte]

The Everything app is just around the corner. You guys are you young people today. You're so cynical. You're so cynical. We'll have more in just a bit. Victoria Song is here, senior reviewer at the Verge. Love her writing, love her work and love having you on the show, Victoria. Thank you for being here. And also Christina Warren's back, baby. Now that she's no longer in the maw of the deep mind, she can join us back senior dev advocate at GitHub. Crocs and all.

[Christina Warren]

Yep, Crocs and all.

[Leo Laporte]

Good to see you both. You're still a sneaker fan, though. You're not doing that.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, yeah. Oh, no. I've worn Crocs once in my life life. It was for a really good fit. I, I, I don't wear plastic shoes as a rule. I don't, but. And it was a great like thing. But no, I, I, they, they're gonna go on my shelf, but I will never wear them again.

[Victoria Song]

They're good house slippers, I gotta say. I have a pair of Croc slides for house slippers. They don't look like normal.

[Leo Laporte]

I wear.

[Christina Warren]

Okay. That I might be open for, but I, I was not taken in by the comfort. Everybody talks about how comfortable they're not. I did not. I was like, I was like, this is awful. Why would I ever put this on my feet? But if you say the slides are good for house slippers, I usually wear Adidas slides for that. But you know what? That might not be.

[Leo Laporte]

I wear the oofus because they're recovery slippers.

[Christina Warren]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And they have, they have, they're more comfortable. They're nice.

[Christina Warren]

Well, my mom got me these things at, I think it was like a Bass Pro shop or something. I don't remember. But they don't make them anymore. But they were great. They're these, they're these slippers that are. No, they're great. Like the bottoms. I love them in New York because the bottoms are thick and you can walk outside with them. But they're like flip flops or kind of sandals, whatever. But they're covered in like really warm kind of fuzz. So you just slip your feet in. But then you could walk outside if something is like rainy or slow or slushy and it's not going to get your, your slippers.

[Leo Laporte]

That sounds like glare ups.

[Christina Warren]

They were great.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they glare ups?

[Christina Warren]

I know. I Can't remember the name of the brand. We tried to find them and they stopped making them or something. But they were really, really good.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like this is the Christmas gift that I'm going to give everybody in my family. These are, like, from Sweden or someone. They're wool. Is this it? Yeah, there they are. They're wool and they have leather soles and they're really great. They're really comfy. They're basically felted wool. I don't know why there's rustic. There they are. They're slippers. Yeah, I really like them. Those are my house slippers, too. That and the oofoos. Depending on my mood. If I want to wear rubber, I'll wear the oofoos. If I want, I'll wear wool or the glare ups. All right. I don't know how we got in this.

[Christina Warren]

Look.

[Victoria Song]

Shoes.

[Christina Warren]

Do you guys have shoes?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have.

[Victoria Song]

Okay, I have a Lefoufu. My gas.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. We talked about Lefoufu's last time. Oh, you.

[Christina Warren]

You have. You have a Lefufu. So, funnily enough, they just opened a new Pop Mart in Union Square in San Francisco. Had tons of stuff. I was able to walk right in. Like, I was able to get the Coca Cola one that I wanted, like, from that collection. They had, like, all the collections out and you could just, like, get them. It wasn't. It was. It was wild. Because the Pop Mart in Seattle is always insane and I never bothered with it. But no, I was able to just.

[Leo Laporte]

San Francisco is too cool for Labubu.

[Christina Warren]

I don't know. I think that people don't know that the store opened, is my thought, because the Nintendo store opened across the street from it and there's a Pop Mart and, like, next to Macy's, basically. And so me and my friend Helen went, like, two weeks ago, I step on the Labubu. I did.

[Victoria Song]

I don't need a Labubu. I'm happy with my lefufu because they look weird looking.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the difference between a lefufu and a Labubu? Again, Again, Fill me in.

[Victoria Song]

A Labubu is the real thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

A Le Fufu is a knockoff dupe. And they usually look a little Jan.

[Christina Warren]

They're always a lot, which is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Labo, is what you're saying.

[Victoria Song]

Yes, team and Labo.

[Christina Warren]

The number of teeth is wrong. There's something. We were stitching, like. Great.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, it knocked my mic over.

[Christina Warren]

But yeah, honestly, they're. I kind of. In some ways, I'm Kind of. With you, Victoria. I kind of like them better because it gives them more character.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Victoria Song]

They're so funny.

[Christina Warren]

They are so funny. But. But I'm, you know, I'm from Atlanta. I'm a Coca Cola girly. And so being able to get one of those Coca Cola boo boos, you know, that's holding like, the bottle, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you call every soda a Coke?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Not pop? No, it's not soda. It's Coke.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, I usually say soda because I've lived other places for so long, and so you become more confident.

[Leo Laporte]

But in Atlanta, it's Coke. Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

Yes. And it's funny because people sometimes is Pepsi okay? And I, I'm like, yeah, I don't care. I'm just ordering the generic, like, you know, like soda pop.

[Victoria Song]

Right.

[Christina Warren]

You know, Coke. I mean, I would, I would. Exactly. I, like, I would obviously prefer Coca Cola. And. And I will only drink Pepsi forced. But. And that's, that's just me being, you know, like, loyal to my hometown. But yeah, I mean, yeah, in Atlanta, everything is a Coke. And it's one of those funny things because, yeah, you go to like, a Pizza Hut or whatever and you're like, can I get a Coke? And they know they're owned by Pepsi.

[Leo Laporte]

Coke.

[Christina Warren]

Well, they used to be, but they still have an exclusive relationship, except for the ones at Emory, Georgia Tech, and I think, uga because the campuses have agreements to only have Coca Cola products. So those locations, like, on campus have to serve Coke products, even though. Even when they were owned by PepsiCo was funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Did Yum. Did Yum buy them?

[Christina Warren]

They did, but I think. I think they've since diversified. But, but they still have a. I think, like, standard agreement. I know too much about this.

[Victoria Song]

You're way too fascinating.

[Christina Warren]

I do. Unfortunately, I can. I can also go through a whole, like, diatribe on the history of, like, Dr. Pepper Co. And it's Waco. Yes, but, but, but even beyond that, the Cadbury Schweppes of it all and the Snapple Group of it all. And anyway, I won't get into all that, but. No, I mean, but, but everybody, like, yeah, in Atlanta, like, you order. It doesn't matter where you are. You order Coke.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the regional soda pop. Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

Yes. And they know. But if you go that the reason Coke. And I'm like, I don't care. Just give me, you know, whatever your artisanal, you know, Coke, like, product that tastes worse than Coke is like, just, just.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll take it if it's fizzy and sweet, right?

[Christina Warren]

Give me like your fizzy sweet brown.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll take it.

[Christina Warren]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. We're going to take a break. We won't come back. You're watching this week in tech. This episode this week brought to you by Deal. D E E L. This solves a problem I think a lot of companies have. We have this problem too. You know, you find the perfect engineer, but they live overseas. And you realize that hiring them gonna be harder than getting your VPN to connect on a hotel. Wi fi it is. There's entities set up. There's local payroll laws and they're different in every country. There's compliance hoops. It can be a total nightmare. But deal fixes that. A single global AI powered platform that lets you hire onboard and pay anyone anywhere, fast and compliantly. No third party vendors, no duct taped integrations. Just one clean system for HR for it and for payroll. This scales with your team. You could sign up new hires in minutes. You can ship their devices, you can grant system access. You can run payroll in a hundred plus countries. Think of it as DevOps for people operations, global infrastructure that just works. Ask the CEO of Airwallex. He said and this said it best quote Deal lets us hire and support top talent anywhere without slowing down. End quote. See why over 35,000 companies trust deal. Visit d e l.com twit that's dealt. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Mr. Pibb is back with more cherry and more caffeine. Scooter X tells me.

[Christina Warren]

Very nice. Thank you Scooter X for letting us know. Yeah, because Mr. Pibb like left for a while. That was one of the interesting things. So in almost every territory except for the United States and a couple of others, Coca Cola actually bottles Dr. Powder pepper.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Christina Warren]

But, but they are not allowed to because of various, I think competitive thing. I don't know what the deal was but they haven't been able to bottle it and distribute it in the United States. So it's still distributed by at this point the Dr. Pepper company which used to be known as Cadbury Schweppes. And then I think it became like Dr. Pepper Snapple. And then there have been other things. This is different from the whole Waco Dr. Pepper controversy of who's the real owner of the Dr. Pepper, you know, formula or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Was there a Dr. Pepper Pepper?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

Don't they own Keurig?

[Christina Warren]

It was Keurig. It was Keurig Dr. Pepper. I think they divested. But I can't remember. But yeah, because. Because it was. It was Cadbury Schweppes, then it was Snapple, then it was Keurig.

[Leo Laporte]

Now what is going on with all these giant food conglomerates? Is there.

[Christina Warren]

I don't know, dude.

[Leo Laporte]

For all that. Anyway, let's talk about X. They are finally rolling out their end to end encrypted chat with video calling. I presume this is the beginning of X becoming the Everything app. I remember Elon dissing signal saying, no, no, you know, you can't trust them. You got to do. You got to trust X for end to end.

[Victoria Song]

Would anybody trust the guy who made the frickin Grok companions? And like a rude raccoon.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, I used Grok when that phase came down and I didn't choose a rude raccoon, I just chose the raccoon. Raccoon. And it was rude.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, if you choose the rude raccoon. That rude raccoon.

[Leo Laporte]

But I didn't choose anything. I just, I said I wanted. They had the two characters and I just tried it, you know. The next day the raccoon suddenly had a little kid voice and it was for kids. But the day before. I can't, I can't. I'm embarrassed to even say what it said. It was so appalling.

[Victoria Song]

I said its insults weren't good. And it went, your insults aren't good. My insults are awesome. Oh God.

[Leo Laporte]

You do it very well. You do the.

[Victoria Song]

It was cursed.

[Leo Laporte]

The cursed raccoon. All right, well, same company and the same AI, I guess. Do you guys use Grokopedia at all? We're gonna have Jimmy Wales on Intelligent Machines on Wednesday and I'm very curious what he'll say about Grokkopedia. It is like it skimmed Wikipedia but then it added more or something to it.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I mean it. Basically they. What it seems like to me is that they've ingested a lot of the.

[Leo Laporte]

Articles, but then they like, if I look at my rockipedia entry, it's got a lot more.

[Christina Warren]

Right. But then they've also, I think like, you know, cert, they maybe use that as a starting point. Starting point. And then like using like the Internet to add in more details, which could be a good thing, right? Like in some cases, depending on what it is, it might be able to pull in more relevant information or newer information than what Wikipedia might give you. Because Wikipedia has to be added manually. But I don't know. I haven't really. I mean I used like, I tried it out when it came out just, I guess, to see some differences in how it wrote certain articles. But I haven't, like, if it was.

[Leo Laporte]

A political issue, it would definitely have a slant, but it didn't on my entry.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's the thing. I think that obviously they're probably optimizing for certain, certain article types and subject areas.

[Leo Laporte]

It's entirely generated by Xai, right?

[Christina Warren]

I think so. But I mean, I'm sure that they're training things in certain ways, maybe making approvals or whatnot. It's interesting, and I think this is what would be interesting to talk to Jimmy about. When Wikipedia started, I mean, obviously it's all human generated, although I think that early on, a lot of it, like. Well, they had two models. First they were writing like very detailed, informed articles like encyclopedia would. And it took a long time for subjects to get up. And that was one of the reasons why he switched to the model of letting anybody contribute. And then that obviously, you know, it proliferated, took off.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it's amazing.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. And then they, you know, created the whole, you know, your bureaucracy system around it so that you could, you know, manage what's allowed and what's not, who's trusted and whatnot. And that's had, you know, issues, as any social systems do. But. And I've been critical about it for decades at this point, but I also have to admit that it's worked well. But I would be curious, know, like, you know, he started Wikipedia, what, 2001, so like close to 25 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing.

[Christina Warren]

I think it was January of 2001, so 25 years on, like putting in the politics and the rationale and the Elon Musk. Ness of it aside, assuming he was trying to start a project like Wikipedia now, I would be curious to know if he would be open to using AI to at least help generate some of that content.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I think he said that and I think that was very controversial. And that's one of the first things we're going to ask him because it's a show about AI, so.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah, because I would think that a good model potentially, if you were trying to start from scratch. Right. If you're trying to get a corpus from scratch and you don't have Encyclopedia Britannica or any of the other systems to kind of generate from. If you needed to get a corpus of data, it might not be a bad solution at this point. If you have access to AI, which has access to those things to help build stuff, subs, and then have Humans come in and add things and maybe vet things. Right. But. But I feel like, you know what's been. What's amazing about Wikipedia is what it's managed to generate in 25 years and all the stuff that's been there. Although a lot of the early entries were basically copy pasted from traditional encyclopedias and sources like Encarta and whatnot. Which makes sense, right? Like, you know, maybe people.

[Leo Laporte]

Encarta was based on what it was a funk and Wagnalls. I mean it's hard to scratch.

[Christina Warren]

Precisely. Precisely. And many times you know that the hardest part with these systems is like the newer information. Right. Like you can. Something. Some has become settled. Right. And they're. Obviously we can go back and revisit history and revisit how theories are portrayed, but there are some events that is just like this is what this is or this is the concept and how it works. The area where things are always much more controversial are the events that are taking place more in real time. And that I don't think really changes whether you have AI doing it and making the decisions or you have humans and involved. I feel more comfortable if humans are involved, even if they're going to be biased. But I would be just interested in like if he were starting Wikipedia today, how would he do it? And, and how would would AI play a role? Yeah, because I have to think that he would. I think that it would be like, it wouldn't make sense not to at least consider it.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. We had mentioned on MacBreak weekly every time Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg said Tim Cook's gonna step down someday and here's who the successors are. And Pooh poohed it, saying, well, I don't think that's gonna happen. Tim's only 65. Why should he? Certainly doing really well with Apple. He's made a big success of it this week. Financial Times. Yeah, this is the login screen. So I don't need to show that I'm logging in right now. See, I pay for this stuff.

[Christina Warren]

I do too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Financial Times really expensive.

[Christina Warren]

It is very expensive. And I.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes, yes. The answer is yes. Anyway. Financial Times. Well, the funny thing is you don't really need a subscription to Financial Times or anything else because all the other blogs will immediately republish it.

[Christina Warren]

So. So somebody has one subscription, then we all share it. Like remember Victoria, do you remember when the Wall Street Journal login, there was a login that was Media, Media. Do you remember this? For, for like a decade you could log into the Wall Street Journal for free, using the username media and the password media. And then like in 2016 or 2017, they cut it off. And it was very annoying to have to then pay for the Wall Street Journal.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know that. And I've been paying for the Wall Street Journal, all that.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, it's gone. I mean, it's gone. They got rid of it. I mean, I, I, I actually think that's one of the more valuable subscriptions I pay for.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, I, Anyway, according to the Financial Times, Apple is actively preparing for Tim Cook to step down. They're implying that it will happen probably as soon as next year, that John Ternus, who's Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, is likely the successor. That's what Mark Gurman has also been saying. Although according to the sources, and this is a story story written by Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morrison, Michael Acton in San Francisco and Daniel Thomas in London, they say they have sources inside Apple. No final decisions have been made about who would succeed Cook.

[Christina Warren]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Their performance is fine. Earnings have been fine. Why would Tim Cook step down? I guess he's nominally retirement age.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I mean, I mean, look, I think it could be a number of things. One, I think we were talking about Bob Iger earlier and we were talking about kind of the response to him in the earnings call and we were talking about, you know, if people are mad at him and whatnot. And I think he's an interesting case where he clearly did not want to leave Disney. When he left Disney, he did not, he was not ready to go. He did not want to leave the CEO ship and he left. They put in Bob Chapek, who was a disaster. He came back. But when Bob Iger came back, it wasn't the same company and he's not seen the same. And I think that his legacy is unfortunately going to be really harmed by, by, you know, leaving and coming back.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of what Axios has been saying, the twilight of the star CEO. And they tie this into the fact that the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillan stepped, is announced he was going to step down on Friday. So Tim Cook, Bob Iger, McMillan stepping down. Is it the end of the line for these superstar CEOs?

[Christina Warren]

I think it might just be the end of this generation. Right. You have another generation wise up. It's a new generation rising up. And I would say for Tim Cook, I don't think there's a reason he has to step down. But at the same time, if you're looking at potentially wanting to do other things with the rest of your life. Right. Because he is still a young guy and he could still do plenty of other things, whatever he wants to do and that could still remain being involved in Apple in some way or whatever. Leaving when you have not just been CEO longer than your successor was, but you were able to multiply the company's valuation by X number of times and you've had all these successes, I don't think is a bad thing. I think that at the same time, a thing that a lot of people have been critical about Apple about and I think very fairly so, is that the product direction, especially in the last number of years. I mean, it's very good on the Mac side and they put out some interesting new products, but like Apple intelligence is late and it's behind and it's not good. You know, a vision Pro massive flop. Right. Like the things you know, it is, it's terrible. And it was a, you know, basically like a design concept that was released to the public and that nothing ever really.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a mistake, wasn't it?

[Christina Warren]

I think the time it started a.

[Leo Laporte]

Clock ticking that Apple wasn't prepared to receive.

[Christina Warren]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Victoria, can Apple do well without Tim Cook? How important is he to their continued success?

[Victoria Song]

I think the thing about Tim Cook that's interesting is that he was the supply chain guy, right? And when he came on, on like, people were like, who dis? So I don't necessarily think it matters that the general public knows who this man is. I would not say that he has a cult of personality around him. Like Tim, Tim Cooket. He a little dry, not in a bad way. He's just responsible and very nice guy.

[Leo Laporte]

His biggest flaw is that he's not Steve Jobs.

[Christina Warren]

Right?

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't have the charisma of Stevenson.

[Christina Warren]

But what I would say, I mean, John Turkish is a product guy. That's the thing that I think that is, to me would be invigorating.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see what Grokopedia says about John.

[Victoria Song]

But to your point, Christina, I do think they have a little bit of a product crisis at this point. Because, you know, if you think about the Steve Job days, like there was a very clear direction and you didn't have to agree with their direction, but there was like one.

[Christina Warren]

But you knew what it was.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, well, you knew what it was and now you look at the product skus and you're just like, I don't know what iPad to buy. I'm sorry, there's like 20,000 iPads. I don't Know what?

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, there probably isn't that much of a difference between the iPad nothing and the iPad Pro. They're just so sick.

[Christina Warren]

And there's many. Yeah, yes, yes. It's impossible. I'm trying to buy my mom an iPad and I'm literally going through this problem. Like, what do I get her?

[Victoria Song]

Just get her the most expensive phones, even the phones. It used to be like, you had one phone per generation and then you had one small phone, one big phone. Now there's four fricking phones. Now there might be a folder. And I spent a whole month and a half trying to figure out what phone I was gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

Which one did you get?

[Victoria Song]

Because I just bought it yesterday. And I got the iPhone 17 Pro regular size.

[Leo Laporte]

And you got the blue.

[Victoria Song]

Regular size.

[Leo Laporte]

The blue.

[Victoria Song]

I got the blue one.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't get.

[Victoria Song]

I got the blue one. I didn't get orange because so much of my wardrobe is purple. And that is. That's a little bit of a cursed.

[Leo Laporte]

I really like the orange go together. Is that true?

[Christina Warren]

True. If they can, but if you want to get sports team color, I think that's a. Like, it's.

[Victoria Song]

It's giving Dunkin Donuts a little too hard.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

[Victoria Song]

It's FedEx looks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it is. It's FedEx. It is.

[Victoria Song]

And I already had this nice little purple wallet thing and I'm like, that's not gonna go with the orange quite as well. I brought it to an Apple Store and I was testing it and everything.

[Christina Warren]

So good for you.

[Leo Laporte]

And you didn't get the biggest one you got. You got the little Pro.

[Victoria Song]

I. This was a month and a half of testing just because I was like, I think the perfect Phone size is 6.5. Going to 6.7 is tolerable. Going to 6.3 is tolerable. Six point frickin nine. My hand hurts. I have big hands for a lady. I have piano hands. But like, I write a lot, I type a lot, I journal a lot. I gotta preserve the wrist. And I had gotten to a point with my 14 Pro Max where I had a little wristlet, kind of like a Wiimote wristlet on it. And sometimes it felt like a weapon where I was gonna kill someone accidentally while I was like, I was like, you know What? The Nunchuck 6.3, it's a little smaller than I would like, but I can live with it. And I just can't do 6.9.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I've got something for you, actually. You might want to look at the new Apple iPhone, iPhone, Pocket.

[Victoria Song]

Good Lord. I lost my damn mind.

[Christina Warren]

I'm so mad I couldn't get one.

[Victoria Song]

We are on opposite. We are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

[Christina Warren]

We are. And I. And I. And I love and respect that about you so much. And I'm glad that you were saying. And I'm not, but I. If I had not had a severe neck injury that prevented me from being able to get in like the queue, I would have one of those things. I'm so mad I won't pay stockx prices.

[Victoria Song]

Girl, why?

[Christina Warren]

Girl, why?

[Victoria Song]

It's a sock.

[Christina Warren]

I know. But, but, but, but, but I like the long one. I like the one that I could like, like sling.

[Victoria Song]

You could knit that for $16. I'm sure you could knit. You know, I'm pretty sure I knit anything.

[Christina Warren]

I'm not going to knit anything.

[Victoria Song]

You could pay someone on Etsy. I'm sure there are Etsy dupes out there. Just because.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably right?

[Victoria Song]

Like they're. They're already a hype beast.

[Christina Warren]

I'm a hype beast. It's. It's the allure of the whole thing. And it was only two best. Only 200.

[Victoria Song]

It was 250.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. It is. Of course, Issey Miyake Design, the guy who did Steve Jobs turtlenecks, if that means anything to you. Available on apple.com now. It's get something special. It's a holiday gift to hold your.

[Victoria Song]

Absolutely not.

[Leo Laporte]

No, don't. Huh?

[Christina Warren]

No.

[Victoria Song]

No. So my best friend is a knitter. The day of, she was just like, I know you're not going to, but just so you know, don't buy it. I can make it. Can make it. And I can make it for like pennies. 10 to $20. Pennies.

[Christina Warren]

Pennies, pennies.

[Victoria Song]

And she's like, the design's not even that hard for me to knit. And I was like, first of all, you don't have to knit one for me.

[Leo Laporte]

People are pointing out that it is the same design as the Borat Mankini.

[Victoria Song]

Well, that's cursed.

[Leo Laporte]

I wouldn't recommend wearing it that way.

[Christina Warren]

No, no, that. I don't want to think about that. Oh my God, Victoria, please make sore videos with this. Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I could, but Miyake sake. It. It features a singular 3D knitted construction that is a result of research and development.

[Christina Warren]

That's just knitted.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just knitted.

[Victoria Song]

You know, I can do 3D knitting too.

[Christina Warren]

Cuz I'm in 3D love life.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty funny. It is Pretty. It's a strange thing. For now, they do have it in purple.

[Victoria Song]

Okay.

[Christina Warren]

That's the smaller one. That's pretty good.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, purple's great.

[Leo Laporte]

You can carry that around your wrist, you see, like that. Like a little purse. Like a little.

[Christina Warren]

Yes, little purse for you.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no.

[Victoria Song]

Okay. I can defend the cross body. I can defend the crossbody chain that they came out with that, you know, you may not like it. I can defend it. I had a similar. I had a bandolier, which is basically what that is for a couple years. That I. I cannot. I can't with the poc. I can't. There's a sock. Is a sock. Just buy a sock and stick your iPhone in a sock and you have the same thing. It's the same thing.

[Christina Warren]

It's a sock.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody has, in our Discord chat room, put together the mankini and the sock, and there is a stunning resemblance. Semblance, I must say, that's just so cursed.

[Victoria Song]

You don't need AI to make.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need AI Just on its own. Yeah. We were all a little puzzled when they announced that. Like.

[Victoria Song]

That'S just.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, it's a weird collab, but at the same time, like, I. I don't. I can't think about how their marketing stuff works. It definitely was. It was not on my, like, list of things, but I wasn't. I mean, like, yeah, I'm a hype. I'm not really mad that I couldn't spend 250 on one. It's fine. I. But, yeah, I.

[Leo Laporte]

You may not know Victoria, but Christina has a collection of merch from defunct companies, like Theranos.

[Victoria Song]

You know, I love that.

[Christina Warren]

That's.

[Victoria Song]

That's just being a history collector.

[Leo Laporte]

It is history. What is. What is your latest piece, Christina? Anything new?

[Christina Warren]

God, do I have anything? No.

[Leo Laporte]

You got the Theranos one you were looking for?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I got the Theranos thing that I was looking for. I have things from, like. Like ftx, from Silicon Valley bank, from, like, Washington Mutual. Enron was a big one. Fyre Festival, which was great. I got, like, official Fire Festival merch. Movie Pass. What did I get recently?

[Victoria Song]

Pass.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. Oh, this was good.

[Leo Laporte]

Movie pass is back, by the way.

[Christina Warren]

I know it is, but. But it still makes. It doesn't make it any less funny to still wear a MoviePass shirt in public. Genuinely. People go crazy. They. They're like, oh, my God, what? Like, I have an Internet Explorer shirt. I'm like an open. Like, I will.

[Leo Laporte]

Which Theranos thing did you Get. You got a mug?

[Christina Warren]

No, actually, somebody got me. Like, it was like a fleece. Like one of the Columbia fleeces. Yeah. It was expensive, and it was.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a fake blood drop on.

[Christina Warren]

It, and it had the logos. It was just kind of like, you know, it was not the Patagonia, it's the Columbia, but it's like the Patagonia. So it's good. No. What did I get recently? Oh, a friend of mine was at a thrift store in New York and sent me. And. And we. I checked tag. Now, this doesn't mean that it couldn't still have been a dupe of something, but it looks authentic. But there was, like, some sort of, like, 1999, like, Internet, like, World's fair thing like that Microsoft put on or something. And it's hilarious. And it was like, $19. So my friend got it for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. It's got.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody's got to keep track of this stuff. You know, it's going to be all. You know, it's like the Internet Archive for merch.

[Christina Warren]

I agree. I agree. And a thing like this. This, though, it hits two areas for me. One, it's ridiculous for all the reasons you said, Victoria. It's so dumb. But then it's also like the hypebeast part of me is like, okay, but I kind of want this. Like, I'm still mad that I didn't buy the $400 Apple book. You know, the. The coffee table book, because now I can't get it, and I'll have to spend way more on it than. And I'm not going to. But I should have just bought it when it came out just to have it. I should probably just be less of a consumer, is the real truth. Honestly, I should just be better with my money and be less of a.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like that that coffee table book will be in bookstores at a Red.

[Christina Warren]

No, no. Apple sold them and stopped selling it, and that was it. And the ones that are on ebay are ridiculously expensive, and I'm not doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

But here's another version of the Apple iPhone sock, particularly for this panel.

[Victoria Song]

Thank you for putting me in the purple one.

[Christina Warren]

I was saying thank you for putting me in orange. I appreciate that, too.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, I'm a purple girly. I love purple.

[Christina Warren]

I love purple as well. But I had to get the orange phone because I was just like, I needed everybody to get the orange.

[Leo Laporte]

And not only that, I got an orange case. So doubly, I think the orange.

[Victoria Song]

The orange. I don't like orange, But I like that orange.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not my favorite color, but there's something about it. It just shouts.

[Christina Warren]

It does.

[Victoria Song]

It shouts color saturation for the first freaking time on the pro lineup.

[Christina Warren]

That was the thing right now. I did love when. What was it? Was it the. Was it the 15? It was the 14. When they had the purple color.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

Okay, so I had the purple pro, and I was mad about it because it was not proper pronatural.

[Leo Laporte]

It has to be saturated.

[Christina Warren]

I agree. But it was. But it was still an improvement. I'm still mad about the elimination of rose gold. I will never be over that. I will never be over that ever.

[Victoria Song]

You and my spouse. He literally said that today. He was just going, like, ranting against the orange one just because he was just like, it's never going to be rose gold. They've never recovered over the elimination of rose gold.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? He's holding out hope for rose gold every year. Year.

[Victoria Song]

Every year when the phones come out, he just looks at the colors and he goes, there's no rose gold.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Victoria Song]

I'll just get. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's all about the rose gold, huh?

[Victoria Song]

No. My spouse and Christina are the two people I know who are just, like, holding the torch for the rose gold to come back. But, you know, it was a great color. I like colorful colors.

[Leo Laporte]

The colorways that really say, like. That's why I agree. It show. It's orange.

[Christina Warren]

Well, and. And I. And we can't. I can't be mad. Like, the blue. Like, my. My husband got this. Did he get the silver? I think he got the silver. He got the regular size blue.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of non committal.

[Victoria Song]

It's just not committal.

[Christina Warren]

I just, like.

[Victoria Song]

It's not. It's not Pacifica blue, though. They peaked at Pacifica blue on the 12th. I just.

[Christina Warren]

That was. Yes, that was a great blue. But. But. Yeah, but it was. It was one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean the Chrysler Pacific?

[Victoria Song]

It was really nice.

[Christina Warren]

It was a nice. Really pretty. It was 13. It was the 13.

[Victoria Song]

And they called the 12 is the one with the Pacifica.

[Leo Laporte]

And they called it Pacifica.

[Victoria Song]

Okay.

[Christina Warren]

I thought. I thought.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you call it Pacifica or did Apple call it Pacifica? Oh, they did. They call it Pacific blue. You're right.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Pacific. Oh, that's a nice color.

[Victoria Song]

It's a great blue.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Every blue ocean. Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, that's great.

[Christina Warren]

Okay. Okay. I was thinking of the light blue that they did for the 13.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I had this. I think I had this.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

I had that phone okay.

[Christina Warren]

Because I had that one just in the, the goldish colorway because it, it still had, you know, rosy tents. And I wasn't ready to give up on like, the fact that they've taken away my beloved. But I have to say, like, we've been begging them to do bold colors. They did at least give us two fairly bold colors. The orange is very bold.

[Leo Laporte]

It's extremely bold.

[Christina Warren]

I, I wish that I'd had more time like you did, Victoria, in terms of like the sizing, because I, I've always been, I think I've been getting the Pro Max since they've had the option, ironically, because I have small hands and if they're all going to be too big, I might as well get the best battery life and like, you know, biggest screen possible because I'm going to have to use two hands regardless, even with a mini. Let me just go all in. That said, my only thing is by making this slightly bigger than they made, like the 16, I do feel it more. And I'm like, you know, if I could have done it again, I probably would have just gotten. Gotten the regular Pro size, which I've never had any like, need to go smaller than that before.

[Victoria Song]

I have bad eyes. So I was using the Pro and the larger phones for several years because I could really crank up that text.

[Leo Laporte]

I do that too. Because as an old man, I want to have the biggest text on the screen.

[Victoria Song]

I want the biggest. I want you to be able to read my text messages from Guam. That's, that's, that's how I, how little I want to strain my eyes. Eyes. But basically I saw the, the 17 Pro Max at the Apple event. I held it in person. I went, I think this is too big for my hand. And if I don't want, I already have the little Wiimote thing on the 14 Pro Max. I don't need this thing hitting my face when I'm tired at night in bed trying to watch a video and I fall asleep and my phone hits me in the face. I don't need to have a black eye because of my phone. So while I was testing the Apple watches, Apple had given me a test iPhone 17. And I was like, well, you know, what if I went super low tech? What if I didn't get a Pro?

[Leo Laporte]

Did you think about the air at all?

[Victoria Song]

No, because I don't believe in one camera being four cameras. That's some marketing.

[Christina Warren]

Hoo ha.

[Victoria Song]

Absolutely not.

[Christina Warren]

No. You know who that phone is for? I figured it out like it was, it was Funny, because during the Apple event I was in New York at an off site at DeepMind actually and I was talking with some colleagues, including some people who used to work at Apple and we were talking, I was like I'm trying to figure out who this phone is for. And then it hit me and I went oh, this is a phone for like male tech executives of a certain age who don't care who either are using this as a secondary phone or as a primary because they don't take photos and they don't care about having to have, you know, good battery life or anything else because it doesn't matter to them because they have someone else managing their life for them and, and that's who the phone is for. And I think that is why it has not sold because as pretty as it is and it is gorgeous and, and I'm very excited about what it means for a future foldable for most people. The iPhone 17 I think is actually the best phone this year.

[Victoria Song]

It's a great phone, price is great.

[Christina Warren]

The specs are fantastic. Like I think the iPhone 17 is actually an amazing phone. I wish 17 Plus.

[Victoria Song]

But yeah, I just spent about last two months using the loaner iPhone 17 just for testing because I really wanted to know whether I could live with the smaller size screen and I wanted to know if I could live without the third telephoto lens. And yes, I can live with the smaller screen. I cannot live without the telephoto lens because there were many stray cats in Italy that I wanted pictures of. Right. Zoom in on their furry little faces. And I, I failed frequently with the iPhone 17. They were furry little potatoes and I would have to grab a pro phone out of one of my family members pockets and be like I need this photo of this cat stat. So yeah, that's, that's how I ended.

[Leo Laporte]

Up deciding the 8x is really amazing actually.

[Victoria Song]

It really is.

[Leo Laporte]

And I use it all.

[Victoria Song]

And I go to concerts. Yeah, I go to concerts but I don't pay for the good seats. So I need to zoom in, in and see what these little dancing K pop boys look like.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but how many eras concerts did you see?

[Victoria Song]

Zero.

[Leo Laporte]

How many did you see? Christina four. She's winning. How many K pop concerts have you.

[Victoria Song]

Seen Victoria in the last year? 3.

[Christina Warren]

See, see it's priorities.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just priorities.

[Victoria Song]

It's priorities.

[Christina Warren]

It is. Did you see Blackpink in Queens when they were there in July?

[Victoria Song]

No, no. I saw Stray Kids twice and then I saw Kai from EXO there. I'm Kind of into the boy bands because I don't know why. I'm just like seeking an old past where I used to listen. I never saw the Backstreet Boys in concert, so.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, I saw them at the. I saw them at the Sphere.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, at the Sphere. This is the comeback tour.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. No, they did. They did a 25th anniversary thing for Millennium. It was amazing. It was one of the most incredible shows I've ever seen in my life. Like, if I will say this right now, I will sell everything that I own if Taylor Swift does like a residency at Sphere. Because I know I'll have to because the pricing will be so absurd because there's only 3,000, you know, like seats. But no, I am. And I was off of a red eye from India, so I flew from Bangalore to London to Vegas. I had.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you did the show that night, didn't you?

[Christina Warren]

Our show, the following. You know that. That was for the ERAS tour.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Christina Warren]

Where I went from Soul to Seattle to Vancouver a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. Well, actually that's how I knew that I couldn't. I could manage it because I, I did twit and then went to the ERAS concert despite having just been on like a 17 hour flight. And, and, and, and I was fine.

[Leo Laporte]

It was. That was the last show of the.

[Christina Warren]

It was, it was the final show. And, and, and I, and I. And I had the opportunity to go and I went. But no, but I saw, I saw Backstreet Boys. I'd already had the tickets booked. Fortunately it was the following night. But I. In Vegas at like 7:00', clock, like Friday, like after traveling. I think it was 26 hours. I think, think to, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

So the Sphere is a good place to see a show. It seems like it would be. Seems like amazing.

[Christina Warren]

Well, and I think it depends on what they do with it. What they did with it was incredible. They had a lot of like moving kind of background stuff. And the best way I can describe it, it was like I was in 3D, like using 3D glasses, but I didn't have them on. And so it seems like everything was coming at you. Yeah, but. But you're not wearing glasses, but it looks like everything is coming at you. There's rumbles in the seats. The seating is. I don't think there's probably a bad seat in the house. They have it really well arranged. And that the set list. I'm sure that it was pre records. I don't care. They. They were doing some live singing. You could tell they'd choreographed stuff, but you could see, you know, just emotions coming around. It was just. It was an incredible time. Everybody wore white. Everybody was like on the same page. The program, it was not like weirdo, like overly invested Backstreet Boy fans, which I was a little bit afraid of at first. It was like mostly like just casuals like me who haven't thought about them, you know, in 20 years and. But had the time of their life.

[Leo Laporte]

And like I remember seeing a video of them emerging from the stage.

[Christina Warren]

So they have, yes, they come up.

[Leo Laporte]

They have this incredible video playing and you're not really paying attention to the little stage down there. And they just kind of appear.

[Christina Warren]

And they just kind of appear. They just kind of come up and then there are various other things happen. Like there are various other platform moving things throughout the show. Like it was really.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good to use that venue properly. So it sounds like, yeah. Who would you like to see there? Who would you. Would you like to see there? Victoria.

[Victoria Song]

Exo.

[Leo Laporte]

Exo.

[Victoria Song]

That's my K Pop boy band, third gen. They would. Except they're. It's not easy being an Exo fan just because they're in a lot of legal disputes at the moment and there's non members.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, are they. Are they fighting their label?

[Victoria Song]

Yes, they are fighting the K Pop label. Stuff is. Is nuts. But they're fighting the label. So they're having an album come out out next month. But it. There's rumors there's only going to be six versus nine and you know, they. The Korean men have to go through the military service. So they just finished. All the members have just finished their military service. The first time in like six years. Everyone's like, oh, reunion. Oh no, we're not getting all of them. So it's, it's very. It's a very trying time. Thank you for your prayers. But yeah, I would love to see them at the Sphere, but because that seems amazing and I haven't been to the Sphere yet. Every single time like I go to ces, I see the Sphere, right.

[Christina Warren]

And you never have a chance, right?

[Victoria Song]

I never have a chance to go.

[Christina Warren]

No, because you're doing too many other things. I really wanted to see and I hope that they continue, but I really want. And I haven't had a chance and I'm not going to aws re invent this year. I don't think. Hope not. Nothing against that event. I just don't really want to go to Vegas in. In December. But I really wanted to see like the wizard of Oz. Cut that. They did.

[Leo Laporte]

They did the wizard of Oz. They kind of out painted. This is the 1939 wizard of Oz. And they outpainted the film.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, they used Sphere. Yeah. They used Google Cloud and some of the Gemini models for it. And like, I really would love to see that experience. It's one of my favorite movies ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Backstreet's Back. They're going to be there a day after Christmas through February.

[Christina Warren]

Yes. They did a second residency. In fact, it's funny cause I convinced. I went first and then I convinced a few of my girlfriends to go. And some of us are like, should we go a second time? So we're thinking about it.

[Victoria Song]

Okay, what are the dates?

[Leo Laporte]

The day after Christmas to the day after Valentine's. So you can.

[Christina Warren]

And it's every weekend. So they do it like Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

[Leo Laporte]

Cause they're old.

[Victoria Song]

Damn it. I'm not gonna. Ces. That's not gonna happen.

[Leo Laporte]

CES is during ces.

[Christina Warren]

It is during ces.

[Leo Laporte]

If you stayed a little longer, you could go to the ces.

[Christina Warren]

She stayed through Cedar. If you stay through Sunday, Victoria, it would be worth it.

[Leo Laporte]

Or come early.

[Victoria Song]

I am going to be there the Saturday before ces.

[Christina Warren]

If you're going to be there the Saturday before ces, you need to look into it because I'm telling you, I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Going to take a break so Victoria can buy tickets. You're watching this Week in Tech with Victoria Song, who is a little preoccupied right now. She's the senior reviewer at the Verge. And the wonderful Christina Warren back in town after her year. Can I ask, maybe when we come back we'll talk a little bit about DeepMind, because I don't know what you can talk about, but that must have been.

[Christina Warren]

I learned so much.

[Leo Laporte]

They're amazing. It's amazing what they're doing. It's really amazing. Good. We'll talk about that in a bit and a lot more you're watching this Week in Tech. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. You know, we talk so much about AI on this show, on our show about AI intelligent machines. And it's pretty clear that AI is an amazing boon for business, that the potential rewards are too great to ignore. It's also clear, because we talk about it on security now, that the risks are there, whether it is through loss of sensitive data, through using AI, public and private AI at your business. There's also the risk that bad guys have. Have really become very accomplished using AI attacks Against enterprises are through the roof. Generative AI is increasing the opportunities for threat actors. They are using AI for creating malware, for helping them create phishing lures that are impeccable, indistinguishable from the real thing. They are using AI to automate data extraction. So they are very fast and very efficient. You know this is a big problem. There are 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications inadvertently by employees using AI at work. Chat, GPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. Companies have to pay a little bit of attention. You know, they can't just jump into this. This is why you need a modern approach. You need Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. It helps you fight AI enabled hackers by removing your attack surface. It secures your data everywhere. It safeguards your use of public and private AI. It protects against ransomware. It protects against AI powered phishing attacks. Yes, it does all of of that. Just check out what Shiva, the director of security and infrastructure at Zwara says about using Zscaler Watch. This AI provides tremendous opportunities, but it also brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security. The benefit of Zscaler with ZIA rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees.

[Christina Warren]

Are using various Genai tools. So ability to, to monitor the activity.

[Leo Laporte]

Make sure that what we consider confidential.

[Christina Warren]

And sensitive information according to you know, companies data classification does not get fed.

[Leo Laporte]

Into the public LLM models, et cetera. With Zero Trust plus AI from Zscaler you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition and you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] security that's, that's zscaler.com security and we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Yeah, I'm looking at this sphere schedule. There's nobody I'm really dying to see. Somebody said what if Pink Floyd did the Wall there? That would be cool.

[Christina Warren]

Yes it would. And I think they did do something. They did. I don't, I don't know if it was Pink, it was the Wall. But I know that they did something with the Grateful Dead and they've done a couple of other things. From what I, the reviews that I've read and obviously everybody's musical tastes are different but from the reviews that I've read, Backstreet Boys was to date the most impressive use of the whole venue. Like even if you're not into like the music or whatever. Like, they did the best job with, like, the tech and taking advantage of it. But I know, like, Pearl Jam did a thing and, like, I think that it's, it's cool. Like, as the space evolves and as they learn to use things more, I think we'll see more and more really interesting applications of it as a venue, which is really exciting. And then I personally love it because the Venetian is my favorite, like, casino on the strip. And it's far away from everything else, but I'd much prefer to stay there because I like the rooms better and it's close to the, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you walk to the sphere from the Venetian?

[Christina Warren]

Oh, yeah. There's. There's a connecting bridge. It's literally part of. Yes. So it's super nice. And so.

[Leo Laporte]

God, I remember every January going to CES and seeing them build that thing for years. First it was just a pit. They slowly, the walls started come up. It's nice to see it operational. The wizard of Oz is going to be a long term thing there. They're going to use that in between shows, so I think they anticipate families going to see that and so forth. All right, enough of the Sophia Nothing. Did you get your tickets, Victoria?

[Victoria Song]

No, I'm being good. I'll think about it some more.

[Christina Warren]

Think about it some more if you can, if you can find somebody else who might be there with you and, like, see if you can, like, go in with somebody. Especially if you're already going to be there. You might be able to. To get, like, we'll have to pay for, like, lodging or whatever. Like, because that's. That was the biggest thing, like, lodging cost as much, like, cost more than the tickets.

[Leo Laporte]

So we went two years ago to see the Formula one, the first Formula one race.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, yeah, I bet that was amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Expensive.

[Christina Warren]

I really wanted to go to that for the hello Kitty club, but, like, there was no way that was gonna happen.

[Leo Laporte]

The hello Kitty. What?

[Christina Warren]

They had a hello Kitty Formula one collab in Vegas and there's actually now a whole hello Kitty by Formula one like, collection?

[Victoria Song]

And that's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they trying to attract young girls to the Formula one film fan fan base?

[Christina Warren]

Leo, are you not familiar with the fact that, like, the largest growing user base of, like, Formula one fans are, like, younger women, like, young. Far younger than me. Because of the, the Netflix show?

[Leo Laporte]

Because of Drive to Survive.

[Christina Warren]

Wow. Yes. Well, like, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It is true that the drivers are all young and gorgeous there. It seems like they're almost hired for their Looks.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I mean, what's happened is, is they. They all know the backstory and the lore, and so they become invested in a way that's what got me different than other things.

[Leo Laporte]

Watching Drive to Surv.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah, same. And actually what originally got me because my husband's always been into Formula one and I've always been like, whatever. But I saw the documentary Senna, which was directed by the same directed Amy.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good.

[Christina Warren]

And that documentary. And I saw that, I think, 2011, and it was so tragic. But when I saw that documentary, that completely changed my entire perspective on the sport. And I think the drive to survive is the same sort of thing where it kind of unlocks in you and you go, oh, there are these other layers happening and there is this other stuff going on that you don't get with a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you happy about Apple acquiring the rights to it?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. I mean, it'll make it cheaper for me to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't have. I already buy F1TV. I don't have to pay for two subscriptions.

[Christina Warren]

Right. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope they keep the team. I hope they keep all of the different screens. I hope, in fact, they apply some of their tech, know how to make it even better. And maybe they'll put it on the Vision Pro. I would actually buy a Vision Pro to watch the Formula one race. That's the only reason I could think of to buy a Vision Pro. Maybe that's why they bought the rights. Three quarters of a billion dollars they spent for that. Let's see, maybe they'll use the profits from the iPhone pocket to defray that cost.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, good Lord.

[Leo Laporte]

AMD. Hey, congratulations. AMD. Their quarterly results are out. They are now 25% of all x80 check chips, 33% of all desktop systems. Big Red is slowly but surely taking over from intel, which is slowly but surely collapsing.

[Christina Warren]

Just so sad.

[Victoria Song]

Just the saddest march to death from Intel. It's just like every year, it's just so sad.

[Leo Laporte]

But honestly, I wouldn't buy it. I wouldn't buy another intel PC. I have an AMD Strix Halo. I love it. I just. I just wouldn't buy another one. And Apple, you know, that was probably the nail in the coffin when Apple said, look, we can design better silicon. And they did. And they shook the market up like crazy. Yeah, it's.

[Victoria Song]

It's kind of just like, kind of hard to trace back where intel just started falling apart on every single level. But, you know, sure did missed out on mobile.

[Christina Warren]

Yep.

[Victoria Song]

But at least they had like the computers and right now they don't have the computers so much anymore. So it's really, it's really nuts. Just.

[Christina Warren]

It is, yeah, because it's intel, right? Like, like we, I mean, you know, they, they were pushed in so many different directions and, and focused on so many different areas and really took their eye off the ball. I think though, like, Lisa sue deserves a lot of credit for coming into AMD and really addressing, really addressing their, their, their challenges. And you know, she had a strong background, you know, she's incredibly smart, incredibly technical and she knows semiconductors really well. And she came in and I think she looked at kind was and where they needed to be and you know, Ryzen and the whole like kind of chiplet system and whatnot, she really got ahead of that. Right. Like, I think that she kind of figured out okay, and because they could have gone one of two paths. They could have really doubled down on, on GPUs, which might in some ways have been good. But to be honest with you, I don't think they were in a position to, to compete with Nvidia. And I don't think they would have done well, you know, if they'd really like double, triple down on that or she could go after making the chips better and by doing that, not only disrupting, you know, we saw it in the consumer space first, but then, then it went into the, you know, the, the, the, the server space which has been Intel's, you know, thing for forever. Right. And, and I think that coupled with processing changing, right, with intel not able to get their nanometers is down long is low enough. Right. They had, they weren't able to get that performance on the chips that that AMD was and that was even before Apple and, and, and everybody else starts to come in. And then Nvidia, you know, proves that at this point, you know, GPUs are more important in some ways than CPUs for, for more and more tasks. And like an intel who's, you know, started and stopped GPU efforts multiple times, they don't have anything to even go there, right. Like I, I had this question with people sometimes where it's like I might have even said this on the show before, but like I have this, it's a fun party question, like what company has screwed up, screwed themselves more? Intel or Boeing? Right, like which one? Right. Because it's just, it's really sad because. Yeah, because your point? Yeah, they lost Mobile and they lost that for a lot of reasons, but that was surmountable like, that was not an area that they had to win. I think that. I don't know if it was hubris. I don't know if it was, you know, just technical things not coming together. I think a lot of it was leadership because again, like, Lisa sue, like, really, really dialed in when she joined AMD and like, made great strategic decision after great strategic decision. And, you know, it's such a fumble.

[Victoria Song]

In some senses too, because, you know, when you talk these component companies outside of the nerds that we are, normal people know intel, you know, like, they're inside their marketing into bum, bum, bum, bum.

[Christina Warren]

Like, we will know that. Yeah, it doesn't matter if you're like one day old. It's like Beyonce. You know it, you know it.

[Victoria Song]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Just like Beyonce. Wow.

[Victoria Song]

She's not wrong, though. Not wrong, though. There was a, there's a period of time where I was writing copy for Qualcomm, just, you know, being a young writer, trying to cut my teeth and get in the business. And the thing I used to always joke about was how much of a chip on their shoulder Qualcomm had about how no one knew who Qualcomm was. It was one of those things where they're like, we want to get people caring about modems. And I was like, good luck to you with that outside of a certain niche. But, you know, they were just always so mad that Intel's name recognition was so strong. So to go from that to a point where, like, you know, it's such a fumble if you really think about it, that is so hard.

[Leo Laporte]

If you play that people know what that is.

[Christina Warren]

You do, you do. You know it immediately. I've said, I've said for years, like, I think that them opening owning their own fabs has been obviously a great benefit. And, and I, and I don't think it was a mistake for them to continue to do, do that. What I do think they should have done, ideally when they was clear Adam and their mobile stuff wasn't going to work because they had the opportunity to do this, they could have, they bought a company. I think that was, it was an ARM licensee. And there might have been some legal regulation stuff around it, but you know, that that would have been surmountable because intel, they should have become an ARM licensee and then done some fabulous designs and it had that as like an option and then been able to pivot into that if they needed to for lower powered devices. Because one of the big things, you know, at least on the consumer side Side, you know, in desktops it was fine, you get a big enough, you know, psu, whatever. But on mobile, like, and you know this Victoria, because you've tested way more laptops than I have. Like the battery life and the power performance was just awful. Right. I mean it was so bad that Apple had to literally make their own chips I think earlier than they probably would have wanted to.

[Victoria Song]

Right.

[Christina Warren]

Like they were happy to make them on, you know, for mobile devices but they really had to like turn all their corners into prioritizing the, you know, laptop ship chips. Because they were awful. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They saw the writing on the wall. They knew.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean. Well, I mean. And granted Apple could have made design concessions to make the thermals and whatnot better, but it didn't change the underlying issue that like those chips just, you know, were constrained and had problems in certain ways and weren't going to the next level. Whereas amd first in desktop and then they got into mobile or laptops was doing better. And then Apple Silicon and now Qualcomm. Some of their stuff too, like is just leaps and bounds in terms of, of like, you know, like power to performance and intel, even their newest ones because I bought one of their, the Ultra, you know, seven whatever things that promised that it was going to be better and it's not. I mean, you know, I guess it's better than whatever, you know, the core stuff was but, but it, it's not demonstrably so in either. You know, it just still feels like, you know, a traditional, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well and now ironically Qualcomm is the, is the big player in windows machines with copilot plus PCs and I'm seeing a lot of.

[Victoria Song]

It's so funny. Yeah, it's so funny. Going from 2013 totally for a while.

[Christina Warren]

It looks like they're only for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Their only business.

[Christina Warren]

Write the copy in now. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Their only business was Pat being a patent troll was well we got all these patents and that's going to be our business. That was literally their, the Snapdragon X and the Elite and now the next generation which is coming really great battery life performance. It's almost as if they looked at what Apple was doing and said wait a minute, why aren't we doing that?

[Christina Warren]

Well, in fact that's exactly what happened is they bought, I think it was Nufia, I can't remember.

[Leo Laporte]

Nuvia.

[Christina Warren]

Yes, Nubia. Yeah, they bought Nubia and Nuvia was, was created by some of the creators of Apple Silicon.

[Leo Laporte]

They basically bought the Apple design team.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. Which is not a bad decision. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how you get. That's how. This is what we were talking about with Massimo. You know, you want to be competitive, you hire the people away you offer.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, and Apple did that too. I mean, they hired other people too, but. But no, but when they acquired PA semi like that was the basis for what became, you know, Apple Silicon and. Or, you know, eventually they also hired some really, really smart chip designers and a lot of other people and worked really hard. But like, yeah, I mean they acquired that license and they acquired that. A lot of that team led to the creation of the A series, you know, chips and so which, you know, became eventually Apple Silicon. So that's how you have to do it sometimes. And I think it's great that Qualcomm has. Has done that. Yeah. In the chat eat, the oligarchs is saying that intel sold their arm business in 2006. Yes. But they also, I think there was something else they'd acquired. I think after that that they could have still done. But regardless, I think getting rid of that license business was, in retrospect, even in 2006, that was a mistake because you did have ARM processors in, you know, phones at the time. And they were just so committed to the Atom train, which, you know, just never took off. And I don't know. I also have a Strix Halo system. I have the Framework desktop.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I have. I love it.

[Christina Warren]

I love it so much. I love it. Such a great little machine.

[Leo Laporte]

And what do you run? Local AIs on it?

[Christina Warren]

Yes, that's exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

What models are you. Are you liking right now?

[Christina Warren]

Gemma, I think, has some great models and obviously I used to work on that with some of those folks. And so I have a lot of love for the Gemma team, but I run the Quinn models. I run, you know, like the very last models. Yes, it does. Some of the new Quinn stuff is really good. I have a MacBook Pro that has 128 gigs of RAM and I can do a lot of that on my MacBook Pro. But the nice thing about having the Framework is I could basically just make it my dedicated local LLM machine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, that's what I'm doing. I'm using OpenAI's GPT OSS120 button.

[Christina Warren]

That's great. That's a great model.

[Leo Laporte]

Very big. The fact that I can run that giant model, that's the thing.

[Christina Warren]

Right. I mean, obviously the Mac is a little bit faster in some ways because the unified memory is faster, but I'm really interested.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple has such an opportunity here because they are running some, you know, they're not using Cuda. They're not using, you know, no, but they are running some really amazing hardware with dedicated AI circuitry and as you say, unified memory. And there really is an opportunity for Apple to really look good in the local AI space.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, for sure. Well, what's been.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course they're going to use Google's. They're spending $1 billion a year.

[Christina Warren]

Year. That's the rumor.

[Leo Laporte]

Google's. Yeah. To use Google's model.

[Christina Warren]

Hey, I don't know if.

[Leo Laporte]

What are they using?

[Christina Warren]

Gemini. Gemini is what the rumor is. And, and, and, and who knows if that's, you know, what, what that circumstance is. I mean, look, they. Early on, you know, people forget this like the, the iPhone. I mean, part of the reason Steve Jobs was so upset that Eric Schmidt was on the board and, you know, they.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, but, but the default apps on the original iPhone, YouTube was a dedicated app, right. Google is the default search engine. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Google, remember waiting in line for the original iPhone. I was sitting behind, and this was up in Petaluma. They'd obviously come up because they wanted to avoid the lines in San Francisco or Mountain View. Three guys from Google who were buying the original iPhone, they said, yeah, we were up all night last night making Google Reader work on the iPhone. Google was very committed to the iPhone platform at the beginning. I mean, that was a big part of Google put a lot of effort into it with Apple help. I think the rumor was Apple helped with the YouTube.

[Christina Warren]

They did, they did. But my point was being that, like, for an app, for a phone that did not have apps on it, right. Three of the default things, like the default search engine was Google. YouTube was a dedicated app. Maps was Google Maps partners.

[Leo Laporte]

Despite the battle over Android.

[Christina Warren]

Well, no, no, no. That then led to the battle of Android. That was the original partnerships. Eric Schmidt, who is the CEO of Google, was on the board of directors at Apple. He CEO. This realizes that this is according to Fred's book, name of which I can't think about right now, Has a Dog is in the title. It'll come to me. But Fred Fogelstein's book about the history of the battle basically says that Google had been working on a BlackBerry clone because they bought Andy.

[Leo Laporte]

Their first Google phone was going to be basically a BlackBerry clone. And when I saw the iPhone, they completely switched. They said, stop. They literally stopped the development.

[Christina Warren]

And then when Steve Jobs got wind of that, Eric Schmidt had to recuse himself and then eventually leave the board. And then that led to a bunch of the lawsuits in the Cold War. And then in 2013 I think it was like they kicked Google Maps off.

[Leo Laporte]

And was originally called Dogfight. They now. Yeah, thank you, Battle of the Titans. For some reason they figured nobody would know a dog fight was on.

[Christina Warren]

But yeah, that battle book is fantastic. And I have to read that.

[Leo Laporte]

I've not read it.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, it's a really good book.

[Leo Laporte]

Although it's ancient history now they're, they're back in bed together.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I mean again like, you know, enemy of my friend is my enemy. I mean it's interesting too because if you look at like it was always this weird thing, it's like, okay, we won't be on the phone necessarily the same way and we, you know, we'll kick you off the default positions. But no, we would still very much like to get however many billions of dollars you know, you will pay us for the default search engine position and other stuff. And so look, I have to assume that the reporting, I have no inside information at all and I don't even know if this deal is real but I have to assume that the reporting from Mark Gurman and others is true, that they've done kind of an internal bake off and figured out okay, what companies can we use to fortify Siri? And at a certain point, you know, a lot of the models are fairly similar and maybe it comes down to who can we have, who do we have a existing relationship with of some type of. Or, or who do we feel like could be more properly able to fit into our data centers better? Because that's some of the reporting is that not only will the model be, you know, a white labeled version of Gemini, but it will run completely in Apple's data centers. And that's obviously means I'm sure there'll be modifications to how the TPUs or whatever systems they would have set up would work and, and maybe even running directly on Apple Silicon, who knows? That would be an interesting thing to think about. Two to your earlier point about you know, using these things to run the inference and run the stuff themselves. We'll see. But I just want a better Siri. I don't care who powers it.

[Victoria Song]

Lord almighty, if I could get a better Siri that would just oh, you know, testing Apple intelligence has been a test in patience.

[Leo Laporte]

Just oh well, speaking of tests and patience, I don't want to use Amazon's Echo even a word. Plus I don't want to Use it. I really don't want to use Google's voice assistant. I guess I'm going to be getting Gemini in my Google devices soon. I don't know when I would like something privacy forward. I would like to use HomeKit, but it needs to have a working AI. It needs a working.

[Victoria Song]

Siri, listen, workout buddy sucks on the Apple watch.

[Leo Laporte]

You left that on. I turned that off immediately.

[Victoria Song]

I left it on for a little bit and then I was just like, I thank you for telling me that. It's so annoying because it'll try and tell you like, oh, you listen to this music while you had this milestone. And so you hit a mile in your run and they're like, you were listening to stray kids when you hit that run. And I was like, yeah, I know. Because it. I'm still playing the same song, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Victoria Song]

So I gotta say, I just really want Ciri to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of just like, it's like. It's just got the same problem Siri does. Right. It's just not smart.

[Victoria Song]

No, it's not. I mean, to be fair, like, obviously I mostly test wearables and whatnot and Gemini is new onto the wrist. Gemini not that smart either.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's the funny thing. Gemini is smart, but the problem is if it's in a watch, it's probably not that smart.

[Christina Warren]

Well, the problem is, is that there are multiple Geminis.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. And so the models that you use in one context aren't necessarily the models you use in another. And. And that's. And that, and that's a. That's a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they trying to run it on devices? That. Why? That's just got to be a real.

[Christina Warren]

It depends.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, I think it's on device on.

[Christina Warren]

I believe it's.

[Victoria Song]

Well, you do need an Internet connection, so maybe not.

[Christina Warren]

But on the wearable, I don't know. On the phone, I know that they have like a. It's like Gemini 3N or whatever. And like there's a way that it will run locally depending on if your phone has the specs powerful enough. And this is actually very similar to the Gemma models, but there's like a way to run it locally to do things and then there's also a way to have it connected to like the more full functioning Gemini in the cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me take a break because I want to come back and talk about DeepMind's SEMA, which is a really interesting 3D world simulator. And they're using the Goat simulator to train it. They're using it's kind of interesting. When we come back, we'll talk about training AIs with goats with Victoria Song, senior tech reviewer at the Verge. I see you're wearing I also want to ask you about your halo because you or your aura, rather. You have the new ceramic aura. It's very pretty. And I want to ask you about that too, because I am also an aura wearer. Also here, the return of Christina Warren, now at GitHub. Senior dev advocate at GitHub. Great to have you both. Our show today brought to you by my mattress. I told you I check my sleep score every morning. If I get over 80, I think, wow, something's, something's going right. You know, I did something right, got over 80. I'm going for the crown, though. You know, you get on your aura ring, if you get 88, I think, or higher, you get a little crown. And I've been getting crowns more often than not. And I really have to attribute it to my Helix mattress, my Helix Sleep mattress mattress. It's the best mattress I've ever had. So let me you know, here in the northern hemisphere, winter is coming, it's chillier. We're going to be spending more time indoors. This would be a great time to invest in a new mattress to help you stay comfortable inside your Helix mattress. You spend more than just, you know, eight hours a day on your mattress. It's not just for sleeping, it's for relaxing. I love curling up with a good book, listening to music, music, watching tv. And the thing about the Helix mattress is you could spend a lot of time on it and you feel great. You could no more waking up in the middle of the night bathed in sweat, no back pain. That's a big one, right? What I found out and the reason we got the Helix Sleep is that after between six and 10 years, you should replace your mattress because they start to sag, they start to wear. And we'd had ours for eight years. I thought it's time I did some research. And man, there was no question. Once I looked at all the reviews, all the awards, I'm going with Helix Sleep. No motion transfer. Don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality, questionable materials. You can smell the container ship on those mattresses. I swear, for a long time. Rest assured, your Helix Mattress mattress is assembled, packaged and shipped from beautiful Arizona. It's fresh and it's within days of placing your order with with really made with really nice materials. The other thing I liked, the first thing I did when I got to helixsleep.com twit I took the Helix Sleep Quiz. It matches you. They have a whole range of mattresses. Matches you with the mattress based on your preferences, your sleep needs. I'm a stomach sleep sleeper, so it was one of the first things that said, what do you, you know, my wife's a side sleeper. We were able to get a mattress that worked for both of us. There was a recent study, the Wesper Sleep Study, with Helix mattresses. Helix measured the performance of participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. And if you're interested in, you know, the stats you get from your aura ring or your Apple watch about your sleep, you'll be interested in this. You know, it tracks your, your, your movements. It tracks whether you're having deep sleep or you're in REM sleep. Deep sleep's the one you want. That's the, you know, maybe it's half an hour a night, but it's the one that cleanses your brain. It's, it's flushing out all the garbage out of your brain. 82% of the participants in this Westbury sleep study saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle on their Helix mattress. Moving to the Helix mattress, on average, participants achieved 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. I've seen that, I've seen that myself. Participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. And of course, their sleep scores went up. Recently, Wired tested 100 plus bed in a box mattresses. Wired's topic, the Helix Midnight Luxe hybrid. That's the one. We got the best bed, they said. The best bed you can buy online. Forbes has tested 90 beds so far this year to find the very best mattress for every sleeper. They also recommend their top pick, the Helix Midnight Lux. I guess we picked the right mattress. This is before those reviews came out, but man, time and time again, Helix Sleep gets the tip. Top reviews from all the reviewers go to helixsleep.com twit for 27% off site wide during their Black Friday sale. Best of which web that's helixsleep.com twit for 27% off for the Black Friday sale. Best of Web this offer ends on December 1st though, so hurry. Make sure you enter our show name in the post purchase survey. That way they know that we sent you. That's important to us. And if you're listening, after December 1st, don't worry. Still check them out. Always great [e-mail] Twitter TWIT I'm telling you, you're going to love it. Helixsleep.com TWIT Ah, smells like Arizona. Smells like deep sleep. SEMA 2. Is that how I pronounce it?

[Christina Warren]

I have no idea.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we had somebody on who was in charge of the Gemini models and I said, is it Imagine? Is it Imagen? How do you say it?

[Christina Warren]

Thank you. No, it's both. I've heard both.

[Leo Laporte]

She said, I don't know. Know.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I had the same question. I usually said Imogen and then I got in the habit of saying imagine and I was like, oh, imagine makes more sense. I knew Vo, but Nano Banana, now that's catchy.

[Leo Laporte]

And I know how to say that one. And it's impressive. I might.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, it's incredibly impressive. Nano Banana is amazing. No, Nano Banana is the best, but that's technically Gemini Flash 2.5 images.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that what Imagine or Imagen is?

[Christina Warren]

No, no, no, no. They're different models. Nano Banana, that's Nano Banana's name.

[Victoria Song]

They need to, to fix this. They need to fix this.

[Christina Warren]

That's why we, this is why we called it Nano Banana.

[Leo Laporte]

Because that's clear and people remember it.

[Christina Warren]

It's not. It was a code name that people figured out and then started to have good experiences with. And then we like, they. Sorry, sorry, sorry. And, and then, and then DeepMind, you know, decided to take more of an active role after that and like continuing to, you know, build into the code name.

[Leo Laporte]

But I would agree with Sigma. Is there.

[Victoria Song]

Model.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really more of a research project.

[Christina Warren]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

For 3D World. But it's very impressive. I've played with it and you, you. It can expand the world. It's basically like you're in a video game and you can move through it. It's. It's there. It's Goat Simulator. They're using, they're using actual games to. To train it. There's Valheim. There's Goat Simulator. There's. It looks like Halo. Seema is the scalable instructable multi world agent. Is the intent for this to be to design video games or what is the.

[Christina Warren]

I don't know. I don't know. I mean I think that. I think that. I think it could be right. Like I think it could be.

[Leo Laporte]

We should point out you don't work there anymore. You're not speaking for them.

[Christina Warren]

No, I'm not. And I didn't work on or with anybody on this project. I worked on Gemini Gemma and you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, Gemini model models.

[Christina Warren]

So yes, you know, but. But I worked on the Gemini API. AI Studio and then Gemma Models and then also some of the. Some of the things like Imagine and vo, you know, generative media models. But I didn't work on. On, on in this and I wasn't associated with this team. So this is this, you know, new to me as, as anything else. But from talking with some of the VO team which do similar things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have it to think that it. They're probably still trying to figure out exactly what the use cases would be. I know with vo, they were. We're actively like working with the filmmaking community and figuring out as they were seeing the capabilities, okay, how can we tailor this and, and work things out to really make this useful for creators and for people who are going to be using this in production?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this would be. It looks like it would be used for games, right?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, that's what I would think. Right. I would think that it would be potentially a way to, you know, more easily create 3D worlds where. Which could be useful in a lot of contexts.

[Leo Laporte]

Whether you're wanting to create Minecraft. Wow.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. Whether you're wanting to create a game, whether you're wanting to train things in games, I could see this. I mean, this is me, again, completely just extrapolating. I have no knowledge at all. But I mean, if you do believe in like a world of, you know, real, like 3D visualizations and VR and AR and whatnot, this would be potentially a very good way of being able to, you know, expedite the creation of some of those experiences.

[Leo Laporte]

We've come such a long way from. From the Twitch streams playing Pokemon.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, but those were amazing. Right. When Twitch played Pokemon, I mean, that was an incredible achievement.

[Leo Laporte]

It was.

[Christina Warren]

And we continue to get better and better. And this. I think that's what's so exciting about it.

[Leo Laporte]

What blows me away is how fast we're getting better. You talked about Will Smith eating spaghetti two years later. It's perfect. It's amazing how fast this is happening.

[Christina Warren]

Well, and I think things like this are really interesting. I don't know. I just had a thought and I don't know what either of you think of this, but, like, I could see conceivably this could be useful even for. For game testing. Right. Like, because. Because this is able to take instructions so well and pick things up. Like, this could be useful not even just creating and extrapolating these models, but again, if you're feeding these things stuff and going, okay, how can I get better? That's actually a demo that was not related to SEMA but was actually a demo that some of my colleagues put together which is pretty cool, which was car based thing. They kind of built like an F1 simulator and fed the game instructions like the Steam game to Gemini and then had Gemini being able to look at what's happening on the screen. And then with your voice you could control and say how do I do this? How can I improve my time around the lap this way? What do I need to look out for? And that has been possible for that for the last year and they're continuing to make those demos better. But this looks like this is so much faster to just be able to in real time almost like, you know, feed these things, these worlds and get information, have it play games which is really, really impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

I also think they're using it to train models. So one of the issues and a lot of people talked about this, Fei Fei Li and Yan Kun and others is that large language models are language based. They don't understand the physical world. They don't know what happens when a pen falls off a desk. These models, these tools can be used to kind of train it how physical worlds work which is an entirely new way.

[Christina Warren]

Discipline.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. So I don't know exactly. I mean I don't know what their plan is. I'm just impressed as hell with what they're doing.

[Christina Warren]

No, totally. Well and I would say like it's like looking like through like the, you know, the acknowledgments, you know there's special thanks to the game developers who partnered with us. So like there was.

[Leo Laporte]

They're working with game.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah. So they're working with the, you know, with Coffee Stain, with, with Foul Ball Hangover, with hello Games with you know, Keen Software with Strange Loop and, and that's a good thing.

[Leo Laporte]

How long before you have. And this was in her, remember? In her.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He was playing a game and Scarlett Johansson is looking over his shoulder and he. There's an agent in the game that he's playing snotty as hell like his me. It's like a little bratty agent and I'm wondering if we're going to have AI assistance in the game playing with us.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, that's. That defeats the purpose of a game though.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe though it's like having a little buddy in there with you.

[Victoria Song]

Well, I mean I think it depends.

[Christina Warren]

I think, I think, I think it depends. I think it defeats the purpose of the game. But the one thing I'll push back on, like let's say you have little kids. Let's Say you have people who are of different skill levels who are playing together.

[Victoria Song]

That's fair.

[Christina Warren]

That, that could actually be a really useful thing where if you're able to give somebody, you know, a little bit of an AI assistants because they're newer or they don't have, you know, as good like, you know, motor skills or, or whatever like that, that could be cool.

[Victoria Song]

That would be cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Victoria, do you, when, when you play, do you play online with other people?

[Victoria Song]

I hate playing online with other people. I don't need them to see how bad I am. Like, like not coordinated on those.

[Leo Laporte]

Same way there's all these 13 year old kids who want to beat my.

[Victoria Song]

Like, you know, I used to play some games where, like Dota and some, some of these things where you're playing with other people. Who's the first one dead?

[Christina Warren]

It.

[Victoria Song]

Me.

[Leo Laporte]

Always. That's. It was always me when I, when I started playing those, you know, games where, you know, you're all. It's 100 people trying to survive. What do they call it? I can't remember.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, like Battle Royale games.

[Leo Laporte]

Battle Royale games like gpub and of course the big, the big one.

[Victoria Song]

I'm going to be the first one to die.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm always the first one to die. But it was so smart of them to put into. What is the name? I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, that game that everybody plays, Firefall or whatever it's called, what is it?

[Victoria Song]

Fortnite.

[Leo Laporte]

Fortnite. Thank you. That you can watch you die right away, but you can then watch the game as the person who killed you and you become that person until they're killed and then you become. That was brilliant because it gave me something to do because every time I would be the first one to go. Every single time.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, but wouldn't it be nice to have somebody load your gun for you to say hey, over there? You know?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, it would.

[Victoria Song]

I mean I could see it in VR games being somewhat helpful too, just because anytime I've tested a VR game and it's meant to be immersive and the fact is, is that you can't really interact with everything in a VR world because it requires people to have programmed that out for you. So you're like, oh, can I pick up this thing? No, but I can pick up that thing. So that would always just be sort of frustrating for me to just be like, I don't, I don't know what parts I can interact with. I don't know what I'm actually supposed to be doing right now. So in those instances having like a bit of an AI either having the AI kind of guide you to be like, no, don't pick up that thing that doesn't, you can't pick up that thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Or you could say to it, don't give me big hits, hints, but give me little hints like I wonder what that does, you know, that kind of thing. I don't know, I'm not so good at games that I wouldn't want that kind of help.

[Victoria Song]

I mean number of times I ran into walls in these actual games because I was like, I almost stop.

[Christina Warren]

Right? Because you don't know where the, where the wall is, right? Because the draw out isn't there. And so yeah, I mean, I think that's part of it. But you'd mentioned like the real world aspects, Leo, and kind of like reading the, you know, you know, blog posts like more closely. They do comment that they're hoping to take some of the learnings from this and apply it to the robotics things. And I obviously, and I, and I, and I obviously can't, can't say anything, but I had an opportunity to view one of the robotics floors in September and see some of the stuff working on. It's incredible. It's incredible. And it's getting relatively affordable even for you to build and buy like your own kind of like arm that can be instructed by these things. And it, that, I mean there are, there are negative implications around this too obviously. But like there are potentially massive implications if you're able to get these things to have better range of movement, make better decision making processes, understand environments more like, you know, like you can always. Some of, some of the demos that I was seeing were incredibly impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Victoria, how long before you're reviewing household robots?

[Victoria Song]

You know, not that long. I got. What was the Casio, I forget the name of it. The little fluffy guy coming soon.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you got that one coming. It just makes little.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah, it makes little noises.

[Victoria Song]

It's a little tribble. But supposedly it gets a little smarter over time.

[Leo Laporte]

I really wanted to buy that. Should I get it? Do you think? I'll read your.

[Victoria Song]

I don't know. Know. I don't know. I want to see how it compares to my cat. And if my cat tries to kill it out of jealousy, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

The muffin. It's called the Muffin.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, the Muffin. I'm curious about that because it's a lot closer to what I call the Japanese culture of robots, which are like helpful, friendly, assistant Things versus the Western culture where they're like AO Terminator.

[Christina Warren]

I was going to say I had an aibo. I loved my AIBO very much.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you have an aibo, Really?

[Christina Warren]

I did. I got it from Sharper Image when I was in college. It was, like, deeply, deeply, deeply discounted.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was very expensive.

[Christina Warren]

It was. And so I wouldn't have been able to afford it. And. And. But the batteries died. And I know people in Japan, like, had funeral. Funerals. Yeah, yeah. Because they couldn't remake the batteries. Like, some of them had them for, like, 20 years. Like, it was very sad. It was like losing, like, a real member of the family.

[Leo Laporte]

The Mothman, though, doesn't do anything. And it's more than $400.

[Victoria Song]

Listen, some people, we have a loneliness epidemic out here, and I would rather have the mlin than friend begging me.

[Christina Warren]

Yes. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Yeah, friend.

[Leo Laporte]

She had the friend. Last time you were on that thing.

[Victoria Song]

That thing was real mean to me. It. It gaslit me a lot. Was just rude. Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

Well, and talk about being like. We're talking about, like, you know, wearing, like, the Ray Ban stuff in public. Like, the friend to me is even more of like a. Nobody noticed everything by shit. Which nobody knows.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody can tell you're doing that.

[Christina Warren]

But. But that's the part that's like, to me is like, more horrifying is the fact that it's, you know, potentially recording. And then, good news.

[Victoria Song]

Good news. It only had one crappy mic at the bottom. So 90% of what it said to me was, I can't hear what's going on.

[Leo Laporte]

So, I mean, unlike the bee, which I wore, and I have a. I had the beef. I have a plot. I have a B. I have. I have all of them. I can't even remember. There's so many generic names. But because I really had high hopes. I want an AI See that idea of not in a game, but just in life. The game of life.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. You'd like to have just like a running, like, recording of all the stuff you do. Yeah, I see the appeal, sort of. But I don't know, I feel like the friend thing they lost most me with. I mean, look, I understand it was creepy. Well. But I also understand the whole point of, like, you know, this. This young kid who's, you know, putting together like, a purposefully, like, antagonistic ad campaign and whatnot, and going for the lulz and. And seemingly to enjoy and spend it.

[Leo Laporte]

Was kind of a troll.

[Christina Warren]

Millions. Oh, 1,000%. And openly seeming to enjoy spending all this VC money, which I kind of respect the. The grift there. Right? I kind of. Part of me kind of respects that. I'm like, all right, I. I see. But I did get great pleasure that in New York City, all of the, you know, billboards and everything were immediately graffitied. And so they'd be up for, like, half a second, and somebody would be like, not your friend, and would just.

[Victoria Song]

Be like, it was hilarious, because it was so good. The West 4th station was the most famously graffitied one. And so I went there to, like, kind of film some social content about the friend thing. And they had kind of, like, cleaned it up and put a new one out up to get rid of the graffiti. And immediately I just see someone just going all over it.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. Yeah. I. On. I was. I was there, you know, a couple months ago, and I just happened to see, like, through a subway door on. I think I was, like, on, like, 14th Street Station or something. And, like, literally, like, I. And what somebody had graffitied on was. No. On the pendant, because I'm looking at this photo right now. And then they crossed out friend.com and wrote in faux.com. and I captured this image literally through the subway door, and I was like, brilliant. No notes. Perfect.

[Victoria Song]

I mean, that's just New York.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody made a website of all of the graffitied subway signs. And it's a great. It's a really fun.

[Christina Warren]

It is.

[Victoria Song]

Jesus loves you.

[Christina Warren]

Jesus loves you. What's so funny to me about this is that part of me is like, man, because I'm probably the only one who remembers this. Victoria, I don't know if you remember Lucas uses Venmo, but, um.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, I do remember that.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. So. So there's. When Venmo was first starting out, Leo in New York City, they blast. And he was an actual Venmo employee, so I feel bad for him for this regard. But they just blasted this. This poor guy's, like, photo, like, on every billboard all over the subway stations was like, lucas uses Venmo. And you get to a certain point, you're like, f you, Lucas. Right? Don't want to see you again. But. But Venmo did kind of lean into the. The outrage by. Behind it. I thought it would have been really funny, frankly, if when they did the big, like, West 4th street, like, like, buyout of the whole thing, if they had just, like, embraced the graffiti or even put graffiti on themselves, like, to me, that would have been, like. At least, like, it would have killed the whole attempt at doing it. If they had done it themselves. But of course, they. They didn't. Which I'm glad for, because I'm glad the community got to attack it all instead.

[Victoria Song]

Did you see that the people were making friends that would like Halloween costumes. They would just wear it and allow people to just graffiti on them. I thought that was great.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, yeah, no, I saw that, too. That made me like, miss New York so much because that's just such a quintessential.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, there is, if you want to, there is a website called vandalizefriend.com.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

Where you can go in and vandalize a virtual friend Subway ad.

[Christina Warren]

See, this is good content. Yeah, this is great content.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, that's amazing.

[Christina Warren]

That's so good.

[Leo Laporte]

And then you can publish it. Oh, I have to log in to publish it.

[Christina Warren]

I'm not gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

You have different colors. Spray paint.

[Victoria Song]

That's hilarious.

[Christina Warren]

Well done.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it? I love, you know what, New York's like, a fertile creative ground for this kind of stuff. I love it. And I love the kind of, I don't know, anti establishment point of view that this all reflects. Now, here's the home robot. This is. I think maybe you can order it now. By the way, this is I want you Victoria review.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, God.

[Christina Warren]

I was gonna say. Tell me about this guy. That freaks me out.

[Leo Laporte]

Here it is vacuuming behind us.

[Victoria Song]

That's like a Slender man situation.

[Christina Warren]

It is. I was gonna say, I was like, here's the thing. I'm not opposed to having more anthropomorphized types of robots in our homes or whatever. And I like, like that the muffin thing that you're showing her. Mothlin, whatever it's called. It looks super cute or whatever. But, yeah, this is a Slender man thing. And I'm like, I think if you're gonna do this sort of thing, you really need to go full Rosie robot.

[Victoria Song]

Right? Like, you need to go full Baymax.

[Christina Warren]

You need.

[Victoria Song]

You need Baymax full of rounded fl. Fluffy corners. It needs to look like anime and Disney fied.

[Christina Warren]

No, totally. I think you're right. I think Baymax is probably the right thing. I was thinking, like Rosie from, you know, the Jetsons, but yeah, something like that. Where, you know, very clearly this is not trying to emulate, like, a real human at all. Because, yeah, this Slender man, my God, like, the lack of face, just the two eyes and the whole thing, it's so creepy.

[Victoria Song]

It's giving creepy. It's giving Slender man meets Coraline with the button mothers. The Button mother eyes like, oh, oh, absolutely not.

[Christina Warren]

And you guys, we found a thing that I've been completely outpriced from that I've been like, I'm laughing at, at why anybody would pay this. So the, the. It's a $200 deposit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

The standard monthly subscription with the starter productivity package and standard delivery is 500amonth. Oh, but no, but, but, but, but for early access ownership with a three year warranty, premium support priority to delivery. It's $20,000.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's $20,000 and then there's a $500 car.

[Christina Warren]

No, I think that it's 20,000 and they say ownership, but it's not clear how long.

[Leo Laporte]

So you could rent it for 500amonth.

[Christina Warren]

It's unclear to me. I'm looking at. There are things. If I purchase my Neo now, will I need, If I purchase my new. Will I need an additional subscription? No, if you purchase Neo as opposed to a monthly subscription, no additional subscription is required.

[Leo Laporte]

But wait a minute, that 500amonth is $6,000 a year.

[Christina Warren]

Right. So you need. Needed at least three years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

And that's basically what they're saying.

[Victoria Song]

Right?

[Christina Warren]

And they're saying ownership with three year warranty. So I'm guessing they are not planning on supporting one guessing for longer than three years.

[Leo Laporte]

This will not be working in three years.

[Christina Warren]

No, it will not be working in three. No.

[Leo Laporte]

I have. I don't think this is launching an orbi.

[Christina Warren]

Absolutely not.

[Leo Laporte]

A bunch of robots that are, you know, they turned off the server and it's just a dead.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, 1,000. Yes. Not only that, but I think that this is a thing where like you're going to put in your 200 deposit and you're never going to see your money again.

[Victoria Song]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that might.

[Christina Warren]

This is going to be, this is going to be a. I'm so tempted though.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't it be great if I were doing the show and it just wandered through the shot?

[Christina Warren]

Not for $20,000, Leo.

[Victoria Song]

You want a slender man just walking with his little brown face off around you.

[Christina Warren]

I was, I, I was going to say you could like actually would be funnier and it would be cheaper. You could just rick up like an AI generated background.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I could.

[Christina Warren]

To show you, you know, I could.

[Leo Laporte]

Just have it be. You wouldn't know. I could have it be versatile, virtual.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hand me a cup of coffee.

[Christina Warren]

But also, I mean. Yeah, no, this thing's never going to ship. It's never going to be a real thing. I don't really think about who these people are.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it. Maybe it might though. You know Elon Musk, part of his trillion dollar pay package is that he will get his Optimus robots working. You can see him in LA now. You can get. They'll give you popcorn.

[Christina Warren]

Leo. Click on it because the website is 1x tech slash about. And please pull that up and then scroll down and show it to the people. Because the EVE industrial robot design that they have needs to be seen. The people watching the.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's different from. So here's the Eve is on wheels.

[Victoria Song]

No.

[Christina Warren]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

It's got a face and it's attached to us to a segue.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on, look at that face. There's EVE in the factories.

[Christina Warren]

It's awful. No.

[Victoria Song]

Did no one Watch me Megan.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it does have a kind of.

[Christina Warren]

A. Oh my God. And now, now it's freaking. The. The evil spider man. The Venom.

[Victoria Song]

Venom.

[Christina Warren]

If you scroll down Neo Beta. Because they have. Scroll up because. Yeah, did I go past it?

[Leo Laporte]

There's Gamma.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Beta. Oh, he's got a little spider man suit.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It looks like Venom.

[Leo Laporte]

Nope. He's picking out clothes for not.

[Christina Warren]

Well, no, I mean I will say if he could do that. If it like fold my clothes, do my laundry, do all those things.

[Victoria Song]

I don't know.

[Christina Warren]

You're still gonna look creepy.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if it was this one but there was definitely the case that one of these household robots more often than not was being operated at the home office by a human being.

[Christina Warren]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Looking through the eyes.

[Christina Warren]

Oh yeah. 1000%.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if it was this.

[Christina Warren]

One but I don't know. Who knows. But no, that tracks because wasn't that the whole thing with like the Amazon go grocery. Turned out that a lot of them were actually being primarily validated by self.

[Leo Laporte]

Driving a lot of self driving vehicles. You don't know how often it's being taken.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, you don't know. I mean I love Waymo. Waymo is my favorite thing in the entire world. I would. I want Waymo everywhere. I think Waymo is the kill San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

Waymo's in trouble because it killed Kit Kat.

[Christina Warren]

It did. They killed the bodega cat. Which is very sad. And I'm not defending that. I'm not going to get in the politics behind that.

[Leo Laporte]

But that is probably been other bodega cat cats killed by humans.

[Christina Warren]

More many of them. And, and, and I think the difference is is that you have a thing you can point to and blame Which I understand and I respect and, and, and go off. But, like, for me personally, like, I love Waymo more than anything that, like, it's my favorite thing since the iPhone. Like, I love Waymo. I want it everywhere. But yeah, to your point, I don't have no idea how often, like, a human has to potentially get involved if you're in a weird traffic situation. And I've taken, I don't know, probably 150 Waymos and. And I've never had a weird. Like, I've never been. I think one time there was like a weird parking situation or like, we were like, trapped into a weird place and, you know, I had to wait for a few minutes and it seemed clear to me that there was probably, like a human getting involved to then, you know, move the car or whatever the case may be. But, yeah, let's take a break.

[Leo Laporte]

There are only 433 stories left. We'll get to them all. We'll do a speed round. We have Victoria Song from the Verge. So wonderful to have you, Victoria. You like the ceramic is. Should I trade? I have a titanium one. Same. It's the same insides, right? It's.

[Christina Warren]

It's the same.

[Victoria Song]

It's. It's slightly. I think the sizing is slightly different just because of the titanium. I mean, the ceramic, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's prettier.

[Victoria Song]

It's prettier. I'm basically going to be testing to see how durable it is. Yeah, I' very hard on my range wearables.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. In the world. Yes.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, I'll take that. But, yeah, no, like, I had the brush titanium for the four as my original review unit, and it did not take long before I got scratches on it, which, you know, makes sense. But the one before that, I had.

[Leo Laporte]

The rose gold, the black mat, and it's.

[Victoria Song]

That makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty well. Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

But I, I want. I like my bling. I like things to be pretty. And so I had the rose gold one for a couple years, and that one, the coating just completely came off and it was just gold underneath. And I was like, well, that's dumb. So this supposedly does not because it.

[Leo Laporte]

Was gold and they coated it with rose to make it rose gold.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

And so that coating just came off over time. And so then I had this weird splotchy aura ring for a while and I was like, ah, no, it's hard.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, this is. This is basically a little computer on your. On your finger.

[Victoria Song]

It is, it is, it is. But, you know, it is also jewelry and that's the thing about smart rings. Like, you know, I'm embarrassed by this.

[Leo Laporte]

When I wear this. I think people think either I'm a swinger because that apparently is the black ring makes you. I don't know.

[Christina Warren]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Or I know I didn't know that but. Or they just think I'm some sort of creep and I wear it all the time and it's, you know, I have a wedding ring on my other hand that's obviously a wedding ring, but what's this? It's in my middle finger. Finger. I don't know. I hope more people wear them so it becomes.

[Christina Warren]

I think more people will accept. Well, you know where more people will. I think. So the platinum American Express card now gives you. I think it's like a. It's a couple hundred dollar credit.

[Leo Laporte]

Because that's $1,000 a year card.

[Christina Warren]

Now I know I'm very mad.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very mad. It used to be $400 a year and I only bought it for, for helicopter evacuation in case of injury in a foreign land. Land. That's why I, that's why I got it. But I don't know if that's worth a thousand dollars because I ain't going anywhere for a while anyway.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I used to do it for lounge access and then they started cutting.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't get lounge access anymore, right?

[Christina Warren]

Well, they started cutting how many times you can access the Delta Lounge and all kinds of other stuff. And it used to be cheaper to pay the annual fee of Amex Platinum than to buy a Sky Club pass.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the definition of a first world flight.

[Christina Warren]

It is, it is. But, but, but, but the. But there is a $200 ora ring credit.

[Leo Laporte]

Now this is the problem with these fancy cards. You don't know what the benefits.

[Christina Warren]

I know, I know. They just had a Lululemon too.

[Leo Laporte]

So full time job to read all this stuff.

[Christina Warren]

Well, people. Fortunately people do have blogs that they keep up with it. But there's a new Lululemon credit. It is though. It is a full time job. But there's a Lululemon credit now in addition to the sax credit that you can.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Lululemon butt lifted. So I will not.

[Christina Warren]

Okay, but they have great bags. They have great hats. Like yeah, they have something Lisa would love. Like honestly, Lululemon has amazing stuff. Oh wow. I love their bags. Like, I love their little like, you know, like you know shoulder side or like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you are the queen of merch. If you, if you.

[Christina Warren]

They make good stuff and their, their hats are Also incredible. Just like their, their caps or whatever. And so if you got the card, use the credit is all I'm saying. Don't spend more. But like if you've got the, you know, 50 or 75 or whatever it is, use it. But yeah, you get $2.

[Leo Laporte]

Find out what the credits are on these things.

[Christina Warren]

Again, like the points guy, there are a bunch of websites that track these things.

[Victoria Song]

Like it's technically app.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet I could say scan the, the website and tell me what all my benefits are.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. And apparently American Express does send emails about this app. I just don't read them because, because I get too many emails from American.

[Leo Laporte]

Express I don't want to read.

[Victoria Song]

So the inbox is a dumpster fire. TR it is.

[Leo Laporte]

How do we solve this? Have you either of you solved the email?

[Victoria Song]

I'm working on it. I'm working.

[Christina Warren]

I just declare bankruptcy.

[Victoria Song]

I just, I'm, I'm trying to find an email solution and if I find it, it'll be an optimizer issue. But I've been working on it because I came back from vacation to wait. Too many emails.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Victoria Song]

I wanted to jump off a cliff. It was not, it was not.

[Christina Warren]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

It's become useless, frankly. That's the problem is that people want to contact me on email and I've been an email overload for 20 years. I can't. I, it's. I, I don't know what's in my email.

[Christina Warren]

Same. And, and, and this is where I would, I would love to actually trust AI to go through and siphon. For me, I don't trust AI. But this is a place. No, but, but this is a case where in a perfect world, if the agents, like, if we're talking about, you know, like the new wave of like web browsers, whether it's like, you know, DIA or I wouldn't trust proxy thing ever. But, but let's, let's pretend that that comment would be trustworthy or whatever Chrome is doing or, or anything else. I would if I. But I'm too much of a control freak. But if I felt confident enough that I could say please go through and sort emails from these people and organize these things automatically into this, this way, that would be amazing for me. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually an interesting idea.

[Victoria Song]

I've been testing these, I've been testing these AI browsers, asking them to sort through my emails. They're not, not helpful.

[Christina Warren]

They're slow.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm convinced they're dangerous.

[Victoria Song]

Not helpful. Yeah, not helpful at all.

[Leo Laporte]

They're too Easy to, to. To spoof.

[Christina Warren]

Right. Well, and I think, Well, I think that they're dangerous in some ways. I feel like however Chrome does, it will probably be the right way. It'll probably be less useless, useful. But sandbox, because there's no way Google will put something out that won't be as locked down as possible. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Well tell you to put Elmer's glue on your pizza or eat rocks.

[Christina Warren]

Yes, agreed. But I think in terms of taking control over your inbox, slightly different. Like. Well, taking control of your inbox, I think they let you do. I think it's more.

[Leo Laporte]

You saw that Amazon is suing Perplexity because Perplexity with its is. Which one's that? Is that Comet. The comments Comet AI browser was shopping for people on Amazon and Amazon said, no, you can't do that. I don't know why Amazon wouldn't like it except that Amazon has his own AI Rufus that's supposed to do the shopping.

[Christina Warren]

I think it's that and I think that what they don't like because there are a couple of companies, I can't think of the name of them right now, but there is one company that a number of these have existed where basically you give them access to your inbox and they monitor things that come from certain.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Camel, Camel, Camel. Or money.

[Christina Warren]

No, no, no, no, no, no. These are like, like for, for shipping tracking purposes where basically.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christina Warren]

Like so it has access to your inbox and it can monitor any email that comes in from the Amazon domain or from Apple or some other things. And what. And it's great because it'll show you when all your stuff is arriving and it can even show you how much you're spending. But the reason they're doing that is because it's capturing and then anonymizing else. No, no, no, no, no. It's not about that. No. It's about capturing how much you're spending and what you're buying. And so then they can create demographic information that they can sell aggregate.

[Victoria Song]

And that's how those things work.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, and that's existed though for a very long time.

[Leo Laporte]

It was free.

[Victoria Song]

Right, right.

[Christina Warren]

And. But you need to know that going into it. And people don't make that clear. Right. Like I've used some of those services, but I've known very clearly this is what's happening. Right. It's. It's the next step of going into the, you know, supermarket and using the loyalty card.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't you think everybody knows everything that you do anyway?

[Christina Warren]

I Mean, I think that there's a difference. Right, right. And I think it's, I think we know that, but we don't like to be faced with that. But I feel like the Amazon thing, that's why I think that they're mad. I don't think it's a matter of them shopping for him is that they don't want perplexity to get this about users that they have browsing information on, plus also what they buy.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're doing that, you're not seeing all of the Amazon picks, Amazon essentials, Amazon ads you're not seeing. A very lucrative part of Amazon is.

[Christina Warren]

The add on stuff for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Just go in there to buy stuff and leave. On the other hand, they try to get us to do that with our Amazon echoes to buy things. You didn't see any ads, right? You just.

[Christina Warren]

Right. And then you wind up not realizing.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you think they'd be happy to sell stuff?

[Christina Warren]

Well, I don't think it's that though. Like I said said though I think that it's a matter of like protecting like information about what's being bought from them.

[Leo Laporte]

Because everybody wants to own the customer, right?

[Christina Warren]

Because at this point, well, but I think it's even beyond the customer itself. It's like you could look at trends. How many of these items are being sold? How many of these items are being sold? Is there a different retailer that we could point people to for these things? Is there other, like for perplexity it might not matter as much but for some other companies it could be a big deal. I mean this is, you know, I mean Amazon was sued for, you know, directly under cutting, you know, and creating competitive products based on the data they would see would do well. And they created Amazon Basics and they were, they were fined quite heavily for that.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder what the courts are going to do or what the judge, I guess it'll be in this lawsuit will say about this. Because essentially isn't that what you do anytime you use a browser? This is just a browser.

[Christina Warren]

It is, it's giving, it's an automated thing. Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I don't, I don't see how Amazon could say no, no, your honor, they're not allowed. It would like be like Amazon saying, well, you can't use Google's browser.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I think that what they're saying is that if I'm sure that there's a thing in their terms of service and I haven't looked into this at, at all, but I would assume that there is some sort of Thing in their terms of service that basically for botting activity probably says that you're not allowed to automate.

[Leo Laporte]

They say it's. Yeah, they say it's not identifying itself as comet, it's identifying itself as something else.

[Christina Warren]

Right. And I think that. And, and that's how, you know, and look, as somebody who, you know, buys expensive sneakers and likes to get, you know, video games and other things, like, I've been the victim of like the bots many, many times. And so, you know, and, and a lot of stores have had to try to fight the bots, you know, some more actively than others because some of them frankly don't care. But you know, like, this makes it harder if it's not identifying itself the right way and, and if it's also potentially capturing information and sell.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I got to take a break. I don't want to keep you past your bedtime, so we're going to take a little break here and then we're going to try to get through a few stories. A few stories. Anyway, there's a lot of stuff to talk about but you know, when you get Victoria Song and Christina Warren on a show, you just gotta, you just gotta let it go where it goes. You just gotta let it happen.

[Victoria Song]

We're just gonna get in the way.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fun. It's great to have you both. Thank you for being here. Our show today brought to you by by Vention. Had a great conversation with Vention a couple of weeks ago. I think they could be the thing you've been looking for if you've been trying to figure out how to use AI in your business. AI is supposed to make things easier, right? But for most teams, I think in a lot of cases, just making the job harder. That's where Ventions 20 plus years of global engineering expertise comes in. They built AI and enabled engineering teams together to make software development faster, cleaner and calmer. In fact, Vengeance clients typically see at least a 15% boost in efficiency. This isn't hype. This is through. And this is what I love about it, real engineering discipline. You know, there's not hand waving here. These people have been doing this for 20 plus years. They also have great AI workshops which I would high. In fact, this might be the best place for you to start with. Vention highly recommend these help your team. It's a, it's not just your team sits there and you get lectured at. It's an interactive process that will help your team find practical, safe ways to use AI in your business. In delivery In Q and A. It's a great way to start with Vention and test their expertise and then to go to the next level. With AI in your business, whether you're a cto, a tech lead, a product owner, you won't have to spend weeks figuring out tools, architectures or models. That's, you know, that's where people get frozen a lot is, where do I go from here? No, you go to Vention. Vention helps you assess your AI readiness, clarify your goals and outline the steps to get you there without the headaches. And if you need help on the engineering front, yes, they're there. Their teams are ready to jump in, either as a development partner or a consulting partner. You get to choose. Choose. This is the most reliable step to take after your proof of concept. Let's say, you know, you built a. A lot of people are in this position. You built a promising prototype, you know, mvp, unlovable. It runs well in tests. But what do you do next? Do you now open a dozen AI specific roles just to keep moving? Do you bring in a partner who has done this already? Yeah, this sounds good. Bring in a partner who has done this across industry, industries. Somebody with real domain expertise in your domain. Somebody who can expand your idea into a full scale product and not get in the way, not disrupt your systems or slow your team down. That's Vention. V e N T I o n. It's like invention without the invention is real people with real expertise and real results. Take a look at those workshops. A great way to get started to figure out, to kind of start planning your next move with, with AI. Or bring them in as an engineering team or engineering consultants. But find out more, learn more. Adventionteams.com See how your team can build smarter, faster and with a lot more peace of mind. Or get started with your AI workshop today at ventionteams.com TWiT that's V E N T I O-N teams.com TWiT we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech and why. Wild show. Okay. LA George Lucas. He's been building this for years. Lots of problems. They've moved around a lot. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens next year.

[Christina Warren]

Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing. Look at it. It's pretty cool.

[Christina Warren]

Looks fantastic.

[Victoria Song]

Honestly, it's like a spaceship.

[Leo Laporte]

September 22nd. They're building it right now. It's been a decade in the making. They've moved locations over and over again. 40,000 works of narrative art. Not just Star, Star wars, of course, the entire Lucas Archives. So you got models, props, concept art, costumes, but also from other creatives. It's dedicated to illustrated storytelling. 36 galleries with themes like family, childhood, sports, and adventure, from Norman Rockwell to Frida Kahlo. Sounds pretty cool.

[Christina Warren]

It sounds amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Park.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I, I will go. I will see that.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I, I thought this was aimed at you, too.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I mean, this is. This seems like a perfect. Oh, my God. Victoria, you have to go and take the meta glasses with you.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, yeah, I got to do that. I gotta go and. Yeah, no, I have to test it at all the museums now. I want to see the Jar Jar Binks wing. Just all that concept art.

[Christina Warren]

Absolutely, absolutely. Wasn't this.

[Leo Laporte]

That's gonna be the pop. Most popular wing, The Jar Jar Binks wing? Absolutely. Yeah. You know, he actually didn't want to.

[Christina Warren]

Put Star wars stuff in there at first.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, he was really.

[Christina Warren]

He was kind of forced into doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Christina Warren]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Because if you go there, you're gonna want to see Star Wars.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

You don't want to.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's what everybody told them.

[Christina Warren]

That's what everybody told them.

[Leo Laporte]

The rubber costume.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, I mean, look, there's been so much stuff that, like that, that Lucas, you know, films have done, and they've done so many things like Industrial Light and Magic, like, so much stuff. But yeah, you got to have Star wars, like, at the very least, the.

[Victoria Song]

Jar Jar Binks wing. The Baby Yoda wing. Oh, my God.

[Christina Warren]

Yes, Without a doubt. Yeah, I want to see the wing to the whole prequel. That's that whole section. No, I got to go to Pixar last year.

[Leo Laporte]

That's supposed to be amazing.

[Christina Warren]

It was amazing. It's actually a fairly small campus, but it's beautiful. And I had some really nice guys who happened to take me around. It happened to be the day that Inside out took. Came out. And I got to. And I got to go see it in the theater with some of the Pixar employees at, like, a theater that was within walking distance of the campus, which was really cool because they put the names of every employee at the end of the film. And so that was really special. But, you know, they have, you know, various, you know, things around and whatnot. But, like, I would love to, but so just seeing that on a small level, like, being able to. And I've always wanted to go to ilm. I've never had a chance, I think, to have a big, you know, museum like this, like, you know. Cool. It's so cool. The. What is it? It's in Queens. The one in Queens. What is that? Victoria? Is that the.

[Victoria Song]

The moving art museum?

[Christina Warren]

The museum of the movie image, I think, which is a great museum, and they update it fairly frequently. But one of the best things they have. I think it's been like, the collection has been based there for a long time is they have, like, the. The Jim Henson collection. Yep. And so you have, like, the whole history of, like, all the Jim Henson stuff from, you know, Sesame street and earlier and. And well into, you know, like, the Fraggles and all that stuff.

[Victoria Song]

And, like, what's that one Jim Henson thing that's, like, dark and weird?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah. Dark. Dark crystal. Thank you. Dark crystal.

[Victoria Song]

Yes.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. But so I think, like, I love that kind of stuff, and I think whatever Lucas is doing, the only interesting thing, and you would know this, I guess, Benito probably more than anyone. I don't know. Like, it is surprising to me that it's not like the Presido or something, that it's in Los Angeles. But I guess I think it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Going to be this. This had a long, checkered story about moving around. Yeah. Lucas has a lot of the Presidio, but I think there were. There was a long story around this. So it finally has. That's why it's a news story. After 10 years, it finally has an opening day set.

[Christina Warren]

That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Admittedly, almost a year away. It's supposed to be the Narrative Museum. Right.

[Christina Warren]

It's supposed to be like the Narrative Art Museum. So it was kind of like wearing your own band shirt.

[Leo Laporte]

If you put your own stuff in.

[Christina Warren]

There, it's fair enough, you know? Well, you know what? But you know what? If you're George Lucas, wear your own band shirt. Absolutely. Wear your own freaking band T shirt during the concert. Right. Like, I think. I think sometimes you've earned it. Like, if you're the Rolling Stones, if you're George Lucas, if you're, you know, like, I think you can. If you're Harry Styles, I think you can get away with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Spotify has added, for people like me who listen to books and then fall asleep, a new audiobook recap feature. So.

[Christina Warren]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can automatically catch up on the story so far generated by AI But I think that's fine. I don't.

[Victoria Song]

I don't have a problem, you know, I. I could. I. I think that's fine for audiobooks previous. You do. If you do. Yeah, I fall asleep to audiobooks all the time. And then you don't know where they last.

[Christina Warren]

Right. Because I always set the timer. But Then like, you're not, like, what part of it did I leave out on. Yeah, I don't mind that. Although I don't know about either of you. I. I don't get the audiobooks on Spotify. I turn to the money.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't.

[Christina Warren]

Because. Because I already pay for Audible and if you have a family plan, only the primary user gets the audiobooks.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Christina Warren]

So I'm like, I'm not paying extra.

[Victoria Song]

I use, I use Libby. So I use Libby, the library.

[Christina Warren]

I use Audible. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I use Libro fm. I don't use Audible anymore because I don't want to give them any money. Although unfortunately they have exclusives on almost everything I have.

[Christina Warren]

I've. I have 18 years worth of books.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too. You know, and you don't have to pay for Audible to have access to your account.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, I know, I know, I know. And trust me, I've downloaded them all and I've ddrmed all of them so that I can listen to them in M4B formats if I need to, because I bought those things. But it's just. It's just, you know, inertia. I should do other things.

[Leo Laporte]

They canceled my plan. Actually, that's what was the precipitate. They had the two book plan from.

[Christina Warren]

Way back when when it was like really cheap. And they. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they kept trying to get me off of it and I never, I never agreed to it. And then just one day they just said, no, you're canceled.

[Christina Warren]

And then at that point you were like, right? You're like, fine, I will go to Libre fm, I will go to Libby. I will find other ways.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll support my local bookstore. Yes. And my library. Yes. Believe it or not. Or not. There is a new spec for ping for PNGs.

[Christina Warren]

Huh.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Victoria Song]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

Cool.

[Leo Laporte]

It's now even better. It's going to have HDR support, which is, by the way, apparently something that was being requested by television because they use pings for graphics and for lower thirds. So they need hdr. Yeah, you. It now supports EXIF data. You know, in the past when you took a DMG file or you know, a file from your camera and you turn it into a ping, it would strip away all that information. That information will be preserved. 20 year old technology has now been updated by the W3C.

[Christina Warren]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. I thought you'd want to know that. I just.

[Christina Warren]

No, this is great. I mean, it's informational.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

No, and hopefully this will get adopted more quickly than. Because what was the other one that's been, they've been trying for a while. It's JPEG XL and webp and there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Some other things going. Webp. Yeah, Ping is good.

[Christina Warren]

Ping is good.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't need JPEG plus, we're fine.

[Christina Warren]

Right?

[Victoria Song]

I was gonna say, is it called ping?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I've, I've always said png.

[Leo Laporte]

Png, really? Maybe I'm the only one that calls it ping. What do you say? Gif or gif?

[Christina Warren]

Gif. I'm. I'm on the wrong side of history. I say gif because I. That's what the.

[Victoria Song]

That's a peanut butter.

[Christina Warren]

I know, but that's what the creator said. And so I do auto rules here.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, chat room, is it ping or png? And I'm not going to ask you a GIF or GIF because I know that's just a battle. Everybody says png. I didn't know that. All right, I won't call it a ping anymore.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, but no, but, but I'm honestly, I think this is hopefully going to be good because if it's being led by the TV vendors, then it will hopefully be adopted. Also the W3C is taking it on. The browsers will hopefully get it on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, all the browsers already support it, so. Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

Right.

[Christina Warren]

Well, because that's been the problem with jpeg Excel, which is a really interesting format and adds a lot of other layers and really better compression and a bunch of stuff. But they can't get the browser support broad enough and you're never going to get the support on like TV sets or embedded systems. So that's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody in the chat room is saying it's not ping. Leo, don't call it ping. Okay, fine.

[Victoria Song]

Okay, call it Ping. If it's a ping in your heart, call it a ping.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a ping in my heart.

[Christina Warren]

Well, when you said ping, you know what I thought? Because how wild and retro pilled I am? I thought of like Apple's Ping.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember Apple's old social network that was around Social network. Three cups of coffee, three and a.

[Christina Warren]

Half second for three and a half seconds. Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

Here's how I'm a nerd. I thought of Mulan and how her name was Ping before she was outed.

[Leo Laporte]

You are a child.

[Victoria Song]

I know. I was like ping. Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you, do you, when you travel, use seat guru. I did all the time to pick seats. It's gone on.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Bought it and they killed it.

[Christina Warren]

No, they had it for years and then they just decided to kill it. And I was so mad because if people weren't familiar, what secret was is that it would have the seat maps for all the different planes and you could put in what your flight number was and then find your plane type. And it wasn't always accurate because sometimes the plane types change, but you could get close enough to see, okay, what type of plane am I going to be in? What variation of it is. That's the important thing because there's always a variation difference.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't want to be naturally next to the bathroom. You don't want to have no leg room. You want to be able to put your stuff under the seat. There's a lot of reasons that that seat is not a good seat. But the airline's not going to tell you.

[Christina Warren]

No. And, but, and so it was crowdsourced in some ways where people would.

[Leo Laporte]

It was crowd sourced.

[Christina Warren]

Was it good or not? And you could see, is it yellow? Was it red? You know, was it green? Whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

I used it all the time.

[Christina Warren]

Me too. Because I mean, I don't fly as much as I used to, but when I used to be on an airplane all the time, like I'm trying to pick the most optimum seat, especially if it's like a long flight. And yeah, I'm very sad. Like, Screw you, TripAdvisor. I hope somebody else can.

[Victoria Song]

Maybe I never used it, so I won't miss it. But I feel FOMO now.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you wish you had, now you.

[Christina Warren]

Wish that you know about it.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, now I wish I had known about it. I just suffer on planes.

[Leo Laporte]

Long trips to Rome, you know, there's no direct flight between SFO and Rome.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

How could that be? Isn't that ridiculous?

[Christina Warren]

It is ridiculous.

[Victoria Song]

Pretty long.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. It's also a small airport. No, that's the problem. No, it's a really small airport. That's it. Because you've got to go through Amsterdam.

[Leo Laporte]

Or the Rome airport is.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, the room airport's really small. That, that's the issue. They don't have wide bodies. That, that's, that's the issue because it's a really small airport.

[Leo Laporte]

So the, the Mint Milan, you can.

[Christina Warren]

Actually, I don't know if you can go direct Milan either. I think you also have to go through Amsterdam or CDG to do Milan.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, all of this because man, you travel. So you're not traveling as much with.

[Christina Warren]

Not as much.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll see every event for a while.

[Christina Warren]

I did. Well, it was pre pandemic too, so times were different. Budgets Were different. I mean, this year I've done India, London, and, you know, a bunch of other places, but San Francisco a few times, New York a few times. But, you know, I. I don't know what next year will be.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see other stories. The penny is dead. Did you know know that?

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The Mint stopped making them. Now we have. Get ready for this. 300 billion pennies in circulation with no plan for what to do with them.

[Victoria Song]

They should be a bartender.

[Leo Laporte]

They're still right. You could still use them. Bring them to the store.

[Victoria Song]

I might just keep one now.

[Christina Warren]

I was going to say, like, now. And I'll really have a lucky penny. So on SNL last night, they were making some jokes about it. And in Michael Shea's second joke, joke was.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, I did laugh at that one.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't hear that.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, it's something along the lines of, you know, shooting him through the head one last time.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, geez. Yeah, that is really rude.

[Christina Warren]

It was really dark, but it was good. It was really good. It was good. It was. It was. I laughed. I laughed very hard. I was like, well done, Shay. Like, there were gasps in the crowd when we said it, too. Yeah. And I was like, why?

[Leo Laporte]

Things we were talking about, the waymo y things has a new device they just released. Released called the beemo.

[Christina Warren]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It is an electrocardiogram, a stethoscope, and a thermometer all in one thing.

[Christina Warren]

Speaking about hypochondriacs, like.

[Victoria Song]

They actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you reviewed it, Victoria, are you gonna.

[Victoria Song]

No, I've seen it, though. So Withings will do this thing where they come every year at ces and you're like, here's the new thing. And I think this. This was their new thing, like 2 cess ago.

[Leo Laporte]

It's taken a while.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm seeing in my Kagi search is it shows January 8, 2024.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a single lead ECG, so that's not going to be great. Not even as good, I think, as the Apple watch.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, that's also a single lead.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it single lead or.

[Victoria Song]

I believe it's single lead.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe you're right. Yeah. A simple grip of BMO triggers measurements. Measurements. My why things or with things or we things we don't know how you pronounce. It has a handlebar that you hold that does your EKG and shows a little sinus rhythm and all that. I'm always okay. It can do auscultation by digital stethoscope.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, it looks Kind of cool. Like they have like there's the BMO and then there's the Beamo Pro. It says it's been CE cleared and to be FDA cleared. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's maybe not quite.

[Christina Warren]

I think it's out in Europe is what I saw. Yeah, so it's out in Europe, but it has to be FDA cleared. But I don't know, man. Like, I think that I wouldn't buy one but at the same time I, I can kind of see the appeal. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have a number of we things. Why things?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I had one of their. I wound up getting the. The whatever the anchor brand was of the. The scale afterwards. But. But I had one of the why things. Whatever scales. They're good.

[Victoria Song]

The scales are good. I actually have a new withings device that's not the Beemo that I will be testing. That is cursed. It's the uscan, which is an at home PP lab that you pee on.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you put it in? You pee on it?

[Victoria Song]

Yes. You put it in your.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's like a pregnancy test. You have to.

[Victoria Song]

No, it like for other stuff. For other stuff. But it's it that also was announced at CPS a couple years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's the one that looks like a clam kind of.

[Victoria Song]

It's like a little thing that you stick in your toilet and you pee on it and you put it in your.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then. And then it use. And then. Oh no. This is a.

[Victoria Song]

There's like a little cartridge in there and it measures certain things like biomarkers.

[Christina Warren]

I don't want to know any of this.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. So that's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a urine lab in your pocket.

[Christina Warren]

Like that I could cursed like, like genuinely like, like putting like we were talking at the beginning of the show kind of about like, oh, is this going to lead people to hypochondria and whatnot. I. I am a fan of people being able to monitor their bodies and get information and whatnot. I like my Apple watch. I like knowing like what my general pulse ox is when that works. Knowing like my, you know, heart rates.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm kind of a fan of the.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I like having the sleep tracking. If I could do it right. Like this is why based on Victoria's review, I'm going to go look at the. And see if I can fit one of if or rings will be small on my finger.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think, Victoria? Is it good?

[Victoria Song]

I'mma find out.

[Leo Laporte]

You haven't peed on it yet?

[Victoria Song]

No, because I have to get the product photos before I install it because yeah, I got to be really respectful of our photographer. You know, I'm not going to use the product and then be like, hey, can you get pictures of a thing I've peed on? That's a step too far.

[Leo Laporte]

How close will this be to going, I mean, you know, to the doctor, the lab and peeing in a cup and they.

[Victoria Song]

So, you know, originally one reason why it probably took so long to launch is because they were going to go for FDA clearance, but then now they've decided to take a left turn and be wellness. So it doesn't require that. So I'm going to say it's not going to replace your doctor choose what.

[Leo Laporte]

Pods to put in it. So.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, yeah, well, and this is also, this is annoying because I don't know how much the refills cost, but I'm looking at the website now. So one cartridge is included with a proactive package, two with the intensive package. One is saying it'll do two to four measurements weekly. So you install this in your toilet. Is that how this works? Okay, and then, and then five to seven for the, for the, for the intensive one is. So it's 22 tests of cartridge. Who knows what these cartridges cost. Well, 22 tests that, that's not even going to, to be, that's going to be like three weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

I might just go to the doctors for this, right?

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. I mean if you're, if you have a chronic metabolic that's different thing that you need to monitor over time, then sure, this might be a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean I wear a continuous glucose monitor that's incredibly useful.

[Christina Warren]

I really like that. And actually I could see for, actually for diabetic users who might need to monitor some of these things, this could be useful. But when you say that it doesn't have, that they went for wellness and not FDA clearance, then that's red flag number one because then we don't know how good this is going to be and maybe it is good enough and they just couldn't go through the red tape. And it's kind of like the, you know, over the counter, you know, hearing aid things. Right. Where they are very close. Maybe not the same like level of, you know, battery and some other things, but they are, you know, performance wise very close to what the typical ones are, which is why the FDA had to allow the over the counter stuff. But maybe the results be good, I can't say, but it just feels to me like, like I will say that.

[Victoria Song]

It'S getting more invasive like all the health stuff is so like obviously this is not invasive into your body but Aura and Whoop both released features recently where you can get blood tests and then the results of those blood tests into those like you're going through quest diagnostics in each case. It's not available in every state.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a real test. It's not the ring doing it.

[Victoria Song]

You're going to draw your blood, it's just putting the data into, go to your doctor.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I don't mind tests.

[Victoria Song]

Right.

[Christina Warren]

And again I don't mind having the data available. My concern is Apple, weirdly. And they probably don't deserve this trust from me, but I trust them to keep my health data, you know, relatively private.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the point. Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

A lot of these other companies and this is what really bothers me because you do see this with health insurance companies, you see with Medicare, with Medicaid where they will basically say we will give you an Apple Watch, we will do whatever but in exchange they want all of your measurement data. And that's, that's the level where I'm like, because it's one thing if you want to openly, you know, engage in giving information to these companies where they could do all kinds of things with it which we don't know about. Where I find it really insidious and really problematic is as more insurance companies get into these bonus things if they start to make it a requirement to even get insured. That's my, my bigger concern. Like it's not even so much the dis discounts, it's, it's saying, oh, we're going to require you to wear this, you know, monitoring gear and share your real time or whatever time data it is with us for us to make the determination of your insurance status. That is, is fine.

[Victoria Song]

That horrifies me on a lot of levels too. I don't like thinking about it especially since like these corporate health programs are very black boxy. I've done some cursory look into them and it's very difficult to kind of just find a way in. But you know, it's, it's one thing I will say on my beat, and I say it a lot of times is like if you're worried about your health data, don't use wearables. Because even if you trust Apple, even if you think this company is good, if you do a third party integration, you are agreeing to that third party's thing and they may not be at the same level and put that's in every single verge review that we put at the end, we have this agree to continue section where I basically write that in every single wearable review. Whereas, like, if you integrate with a third health party app, you are also agreeing to that app's terms and privacy policies and how they use your data. So you can think that the data your Apple Watch collects is secure and then you share it to Strava and then, you know, I don't know what Strava is going to do with that data, you know, so it's, it's very murky. I'm at this point where, where I'm like, I have no data privacy in my life whatsoever because of my job and the testing that I do. I'm kind of cavalier about it because I just am. But it is getting to a point where even I am like, this is starting to get a little invasive in a way that I don't feel comfortable with sometimes. Like, I don't know if I want my Aura app to have my blood test results in it and right. Interpreting it through their AI versus like whoop interpreting.

[Leo Laporte]

So if, if you do that HIPAA doesn't protect you then, so it protects you if you do it with a physician. So that's, that's really important to remember. You're.

[Victoria Song]

And it's important to remember when you see these FDA cleared things that anything that's gone through FDA clearance has to adhere to HIPAA level data privacy and data security, which is why it takes so long to, to get the clearances because it's such a long, resource intensive process, which is why oftentimes you only see the really big companies go through that ordeal. Because you have to do the clinical testing, you have to do validation testing, you have to show that it works on different skin colors, you have to show that it is adhering to HIPAA privacy protocols and all of that stuff. It takes a lot of regulatory, know how it takes a lot of money. So when just to bring it back to Withings, there's a lot of times they go to CES and they're like, here's our new product. And I'm like, all right, see you in two to three years. Because a really long time. But they, you know, they do go through it. They take a long time. A lot of times it's available in Europe where they're based before it is here. But you know, I think in 2018 they announced the Withings Move ECG, which was a kind of a smartwatch that had ECG on it. It's still not available in the U.S. yeah. That's like 2018. So it's been seven years.

[Christina Warren]

They're just. Never will be.

[Victoria Song]

It never will be. So, you know, anytime you see that at ces, it's just Kohler has been.

[Leo Laporte]

Selling a toilet that tests your urine as well. Right, of course. Yeah. So you got to get that, too.

[Victoria Song]

That is a harder installation, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Christina Warren]

I was going to say, now, look, they want to give you one of the fancy Japanese toilets and install it in your house. Oh, I do. I love those, too. So I'm saying if they want to give you one and pay for the installation and all that, I mean, I bet you probably would allow them to invade your bathroom and do it, but.

[Victoria Song]

I'd have to consult over the cola's ethics policy.

[Leo Laporte]

Kohler's looks not just at your pee, but everything else. So it's. That's more complete.

[Christina Warren]

That's. Well, I mean, yeah. Again, these are things I don't want to know. Right. Like on a daily basis or weekly basis. Like, again, like, if I. If I have a medical problem and I need to monitor it, then I want my doctor to go through it.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's the way to do it. And I think doctors think that, too. You know, I did the pre nouveau MRI full body scan, where you pay 2,500 bucks and it does your whole.

[Christina Warren]

Body, which I've been wanting to get.

[Leo Laporte]

I did it, but my doctor said it's fine. But he said what we find is that people find out about things that.

[Christina Warren]

They didn't want to know about, and.

[Leo Laporte]

Then you have to do something about it.

[Christina Warren]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And I think that most research shows you should wait until you have a symptom.

[Christina Warren]

Well, that's what they typically say. But as someone who has spent the last like. Well, my husband has spent because he's a saint, but trying to get an MRI appointment for whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

I've done my back 2500 bucks. But you said it's not accurate.

[Christina Warren]

No, no, because I asked and I was like. Because I could use HSA funds. And I was like, I will pay out of pocket. I will. Whatever he said it wouldn't be good enough. But the thing is, is I could get what one of those easily.

[Leo Laporte]

I did it just because it's a baseline. I found out some things. My wife and I did it. She found out some. She had actually have some tests which turned out negative. But that's the point is it's get.

[Christina Warren]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going to find out stuff. Everybody's got something.

[Victoria Song]

Nobody's normal No, I found out some metabolic stuff through CGM testing that eventually I'll write up, but. But like, yeah, I found out some things that I have to go address.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, then you have to address them.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, my health insurance stopped doing a prostate blood test, the PSA test. And the reason they stopped is that, well, most of the time anything we do to fix you is worse than the prostate cancer. So we just don't wanna know.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, I mean, my father in law died.

[Leo Laporte]

Prostate cancer is a serious thing. Anybody, any male gets to a certain age is probably going to get it.

[Christina Warren]

Well, what happened? He had like prostate cancer and then that led to I guess just a few millimeter tumor or whatever that wound up covering the ducts of his pancreas. And that led to pancreatic cancer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's more serious, of course.

[Christina Warren]

Yes. Which obviously. And that's, that's what he died of.

[Leo Laporte]

And so, you know, prostate cancer is a very slow.

[Christina Warren]

Correct. And, but, but the thing is, is that if things are in the wrong places and whatnot. And so I understand when they're looking at big masses of data, they want.

[Leo Laporte]

To ask the truth. It's statistics, it's not you.

[Christina Warren]

But, but, but, you know, there are also. But I also still bristle when I'm like, they're not doing certain tests.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, well, I made them. I said, no, no, I'll do it. I said, well, what you have to do now is you have to read all this and agree to, to it. Understand why we don't do it anymore. I said, that's fine. I did. And I said, yes, I agree. I sign and I'm, I'm fine. But, but I thought it was better. I said, why'd you stop testing? You used to test every year for that. Yeah, we decided it's better not to know.

[Victoria Song]

Right.

[Christina Warren]

Well, again. Well, again, I learned about this for, for the MRI that I need to get on what could be a herniated disc. It could be worse because I might need surgery and whatnot. And what happens happened people who didn't see the pre show. I have no idea what happened. All I know is I thought I slept on my neck funny. It exacerbated, continued my whole left side. Like I have, you know, my arm is fairly weak. I have like numbness in my fingers and my legs and then it spread. I went to the spine doctor and he was like, yeah, you probably have a herniated disc at C5, you know, in your lower neck. And we will, you know, go through PT and whatnot I asked. I said, okay, well, how long until I can get imaging? Because I want to know how bad this is? And he was like, oh, six weeks minimum. And then the next day, because it's.

[Leo Laporte]

So busy or because it's so expensive, Both.

[Christina Warren]

And. And because. And this is really why he said, usually we know what it is. We don't need to get the mri, which, you know, there aren't a lot of them, you know, to be done to confirm what we already know. What happened. What changed things was the next day, the numbness, which had only been on my left side, spread to my right side. Now I have movement but my three fingers. And even now I. Fingers. Exactly. And so I. That's why I went to the er, basically, to force the hand of the medical establishment to then get my doctor to be at a point where he could write an order. He was concerned, and he's. He's. He's. He's great. But then trying to even track down a place to get an MRI was difficult. And in my research on this, I read the exact same thing you did, which is that there are a lot of studies where they don't want people getting MRIs, because in their experience, I guess it's kind of a holistic thing. It's like, A, people either don't wanna know, B, it might not tell them anything conclusive that they don't already have details on, et cetera. And that's all well and good.

[Leo Laporte]

You should have an mri. You have symptoms that clearly correct. But this is the problem with health insurance in this country. It's very sad. This is the only developed nation in the world that has medical bankruptcy. We don't have good care. Not. Which is not to say that in a nationalized insurance situation, you'd be able to get an MRI right away. Five, six weeks for that, too.

[Christina Warren]

I might be right. But in this case, like, I probably wouldn't have had to go to an ER to get to that point where, like. And I'm in the most privileged and privileged positions, right? Like, I could not be more privileged. I have very good health insurance, you know, offered by my company. I have HSA funds if I needed to pay for it out of pocket. I live in a city. City. I live down the street from three amazing hospitals, including, like, the. The one, like, level. You know, one trauma center, like, in, like, the. You know, like, Pacific Northwest. Right? Like, it's literally down the street from where I am. I've, you know, very.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have the best of everything.

[Christina Warren]

I have the Best of everything. And I still. And again, it's a miracle that my husband worked miracles that I was able to get, you know, an appointment quickly. But we still. I still had to manipulate the system. Not manipulate. I had to advocate for the myself in this.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you have to do.

[Victoria Song]

That's just the US Healthcare system.

[Christina Warren]

Precisely. Exactly. And that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Wheel gets the grease.

[Christina Warren]

And that was the thing. I knew that when I went with the doctor earlier this week and I asked specifically about that, and I would have waited six, eight weeks, whatever it was, the next day when the symptoms progressed that I went, okay, I can't just be.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing that bugs me is that every family has a story like this. This is so universal. We got to do better. I don't. I don't know what we have to do, but we've got to do better.

[Victoria Song]

Well, we got to stop treating health like a commodity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

It's just as.

[Leo Laporte]

Or a for profit.

[Christina Warren]

That's. That's the thing. Right. Private equity. I was having this conversation with my husband, like, you know, private equity has come in and has bought all these, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, what happened with Amazon and Medical One, right?

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. What One Medical, who I go to and I, you know, still have good experiences with. But like, you know, but it's beyond that. Like, there are a lot of private equity companies that over the, you know, past like 30 years have been slowly buying up all these practices. And even in the last 10 years, like, you know, my dermatologist used to be that I saw in Atlanta, like they were bought by a private equity fund, you know, who bought all the chains and turned them into various things. And the doctors, you know, their whole, like, you know, like they're the things that they're rated on and the things that they are required to do are different because now they. There's a profit motive attached to it. And there should never be a profit motive attached to medicine if you really care about health in this country. If we really wanted to make America healthy again, then we wouldn't be making it a profit. A profiteering point. We wouldn't be trying to do that. We would actually be trying to effectively solve people's problems. And sometimes that might mean less MRIs or less blood tests. And that's fair enough. Should be up to the doctor's determination and not what some statistical analysis report is saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Or some.

[Victoria Song]

Some wearable that what's his face RFK keeps.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it interesting we're all wearing these wearables because we're trying to get better health, but we're not getting it from the people we really need it from. Christina, I hope it works out. I hope you get the care you need.

[Christina Warren]

Me too. I mean, I'm gonna obviously, like, I will, you know, have good people who help. Help advocate for me if I can't do it, but yes, thank you. Appreciate that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Hang in there. So nice to see you again. Welcome back to the world.

[Christina Warren]

Very glad to be back.

[Leo Laporte]

The darkness that you were hiding.

[Christina Warren]

No, I mean, I wasn't hiding. I had a great year, but I'm glad to be back.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, you know what? DeepMind came to me and said we need a podcaster. I would go. I would go. I mean, what an opportunity to be right there at the front lines of some. Something that's changing our world.

[Christina Warren]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

I completely understand. It's great to see you again, though, Victoria. It's great to have you back. I hope we will get you back again and again. I just think you're fantastic, both of you.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Made this show so good. Thank you for being here. She's a senior reviewer at the Verge, and I will be looking for your review of the Pee Clam, or whatever they call it.

[Victoria Song]

You know, I'll call it the Pee. I've been calling it the Pee Pee Scanner, but I think I might call call it the Pee Clam.

[Christina Warren]

I was going to say it does look like a clam, I think, honestly, like a clamshell.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, this little scallop in my toilet. Why is there a scallop in your toilet?

[Christina Warren]

It's a step towards the Demolition man future.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. This is the Demolition man come to life. Thank you, Victoria. Thank you, Christina. Special thanks to, of course, Benito Gonzalez, our producer and technical director. Thanks to our club members who make this possible. Your support is very much appreciated. Club Twit is 25% of our operating costs. Now, that means without you, we would have to cut back. Fewer people, fewer shows, fewer club events. But thanks to you and the club, we've got a lot going on. If you're not a member of Club TWiT, TWiT TV Club TWiT. This is a good time. We've got a coupon for 10% off the annual plan. Great for gift gifting, great for yourself. If you want to gift yourself, there are lots of benefits, including access to the Club Twit Discord bunch of events coming up. In fact, Monday, we're going to have part two of the Horror in the Cornfield. Our Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Dungeon Master Micah Sargent will lead me, Paul Thurot, Paris Martineau, Jonathan Bennett and Jacob Ward through the twisting corn maze as we try to get out the horror in the cornfield. That's 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 tomorrow for Club Twit members. Lots of other things going on our book club. We've got the photo assignments, I mean just I can go on and on and of course ad free versions of all the shows. So please join The Club Twit TV ClubTwit, we really need you. We want you and we're very happy to have you. And thanks to all our existing Club Twit members. We do the show Sunday after afternoons 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. I say that because you can't actually watch this live with all the swear words intact. We stream it on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We also stream into the Club Twit discord for club members. We watch the chat, we chat with you in all of those platforms. So please join us for the live show after the fact. You can download copies of the show audio and video video from our website Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video of this week in tech. There is also of course, and probably the best way to get the show. You could subscribe in your favorite podcast client. There's an RSS feed so subscribe and you'll get it automatically. Choose audio or video or both. Thank you everybody for being here. Thanks to our club members again and we will see you next week. But for now, another another TWIT is in the can.

[Christina Warren]

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[Victoria Song]

Book [e-mail].