Sam Abuelsamid (2:14)

Hi, Leo. It's good to be back. I'm tanned, rested and ready after a week on the Caribbean coast in Mexico.

Leo Laporte (2:22)

So jealous.

Sam Abuelsamid (2:23)

It was wonderful. Ate so much good food, enjoyed the. We had perfect weather the whole week. It was about 82, 83 degrees every day. But you have to do that if

Leo Laporte (2:33)

you live in Michigan. You kind of got to escape.

Sam Abuelsamid (2:35)

Especially this year. We. We Jan. January. January. We had one of the longest stretches of really frigid weather we've had in a long time. Like almost the entire month and into early February it was in the, either in the teens or single digits. And you know, we didn't have a huge amount of snow, but it stuck around. We had probably a foot, maybe, you know, 15, 16 inches in total over the, the month. You know, two, you know, two or three inches at a time. But it was really, really cold. And it warmed up just the day we were leaving for Mexico and it all melted off. And we got back in last night and it was snowing again. It's back to 30 degrees.

Leo Laporte (3:18)

Your timing couldn't be worse. You know, I love how the weathermen these days because weather could, I guess they think it's boring, have new names like now it's the polar vortex, right, that was hitting you. A polar vortex? You mean a blizzard? Yeah, yeah, it's a polar vortex or a bomb cyclone.

Father Robert Ballecer (3:35)

Don't forget the atmospheric river. That's my favorite.

Sam Abuelsamid (3:39)

That's always a classic. Speaking of which, are you guys having an atmospheric river right now, Leo, or.

Leo Laporte (3:44)

We were, yeah, we had a lot of rain. We had several inches of rain in a few days, so I guess it was a river.

Sam Abuelsamid (3:49)

Yeah, I heard there was a ton of snow up in the mountains. Of course there was that tragic avalanche.

Leo Laporte (3:53)

Very tragically. Nine skiers just up from us died in an avalanche. You know, it's actually, there's, there's a tech angle to that. They were able to find some of the bodies using their Apple devices. And the worst. And the survivors. Yeah, I agree.

Sam Abuelsamid (4:14)

I don't think we'll see that one in wwdc.

Leo Laporte (4:16)

The survivors use their Apple watches to call for help. I hope they don't put that in an ad though. Yeah. If anything happens, we can find your body. No, not good. Not good. Let's talk about something happy. Go. Lucky social media. The big trial is going on in Los Angeles. A 20 year old woman says her life was ruined, ruined, I tell you, ruined by the use of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. And she sued TikTok and Snapchat settled out of court ahead of time. Don't. We don't know how much money they gave her, but I imagine it was significant. But Meta's fighting the fight, as is YouTube. YouTube's also in that. Mark Zuckerberg took to the stand this week, showing up at the court with his minders wearing Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses. There they are. His entourage as it were.

Sam Abuelsamid (5:21)

I heard the judge wasn't too thrilled about that.

Leo Laporte (5:23)

Judge was pissed. Yeah, you can't wear your smart glasses in court. The judge said anyone uses glasses to record inside the courtroom would be held in contempt.

Father Robert Ballecer (5:41)

You know, Leo, I've got compassion for this woman and anyone like them because, yes, we. We know that social media is addicting. Yes, we know that social media does change the brain, especially developing brains. However, we're going on 20 years now that we've been talking about this. I mean, do you remember when Facebook, their entire economy, was driven by farmville? We had this exact same discussion of creating services, creating a game, creating an addictive social media outlet where people would continually spend their hours coming back over and over again and spending real money. So on one hand, I want to be compassionate. On the other hand, I want to say, well, yeah, but this is adulting. You have to be an adult now, you know?

Leo Laporte (6:23)

Adam Mosseri, who's the head of Instagram, took the stand last week. He said 16 hours of daily use, that's problematic, but you can't call it addiction. He likened it to Netflix. He said, if Netflix makes a really good show that you have to binge. Are you addicted to Stranger Things?

Sam Abuelsamid (6:39)

Yeah, but I don't think most people are spending 16 hours a day watching Stranger Things or.

Leo Laporte (6:44)

Oh, no, I do know people who will binge an entire season of a show in one day.

Father Robert Ballecer (6:52)

There is a clinical distinction, though, because it's not. It's not.

Leo Laporte (6:55)

It's not physical addiction, but.

Father Robert Ballecer (6:57)

No, but I mean psychological addiction.

Leo Laporte (6:59)

Dopamine addiction.

Father Robert Ballecer (7:00)

Addiction.

Sam Abuelsamid (7:01)

Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (7:01)

Well, so when you're talking about an addiction, it means that you first start doing an action, an activity, because it makes you feel good. And then because that. That dopamine wears off, you start doing that activity in order not to feel bad. And then even if you're doing it, it still makes you feel bad, but you're. You're still doing it. So that's. That's what an actual addiction is. Binging is something that you do because maybe you've got free time because you've always wanted to watch something, but when it's over, it's over.

Leo Laporte (7:29)

Nick, did you ever. Did you ever hike for more than a few hours out there in the beautiful Tucson desert?

Nicholas De Leon (7:35)

I never. I'm trying to do the longest hike. I don't know, a few hours. I will say I definitely played World of Warcraft back in the day for 16 hours at a club. Oh, yeah, that is definitely true. Was that addictive? I. I don't know, but you could stop in there. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (7:49)

I mean, it's not addictive. Like heroin's addictive.

Nicholas De Leon (7:52)

Yeah. You go through withdrawals if you stopped adulting argument. It's like, I don't know.

Sam Abuelsamid (7:56)

You.

Nicholas De Leon (7:56)

You can use. I don't know. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (7:58)

So I was watching pbs and their tech expert who was at the trial said the fundamental issue in the trial is who's responsible. I think the fundamental issue of the trial is is it even an addiction? And if it is, then I guess you would say if they. And they. And we. I think we can agree that these companies knew they were creating something highly compelling.

Nicholas De Leon (8:25)

Sure.

Leo Laporte (8:26)

Intentionally. Right.

Father Robert Ballecer (8:29)

But I mean, that's their job.

Benita (8:31)

Right.

Leo Laporte (8:31)

But that's what everybody does. That's what I try to do. I wish I could get you addicted to twit. That's. That's what you do when you create content is. So I don't think they're culpable unless you can say it really is addictive and demonstrate that this young woman's ill. Whatever problems she had, I don't think she's even claiming mental illness. I think she's just saying, I was a little depressed. Unless you could say, well, it's definitely their fault. And that's even harder to prove. I mean, she could have been depressed for a lot of reasons.

Father Robert Ballecer (9:08)

My biggest concern with this is the executive who thinks that 16 hours a day of Instagram is problematic but not an addiction. That's the. No, no, no, no.

Leo Laporte (9:16)

So you do blame the platform. You think the platforms are to blame.

Father Robert Ballecer (9:19)

It's not blaming the platform. It's. It's. It's a mindset. It's this idea that, Yes, I get it. You're selling a product, you're selling a service. Go for it. Fantastic. Do what you have to do, but don't lie to me. Don't. Don't give me a lie that is so outrageous that it goes beyond gaslighting. 16 hours a day doing anything is an addiction. 16 hours a day doing anything is probably not healthy. So let's just call it that. Call it that. Be honest with me and tell me. Well, we're developing a product that's. That's trying to attract your hours, your attention, and you have to set limits. Or if the government thinks it's a social bad, they have to set limits. But. But don't try to frost over the facts.

Leo Laporte (9:59)

So, Mark.

Sam Abuelsamid (10:00)

And even. Even if it's not an addiction in the traditional sense of. Of a physical addiction, like we think of with you know, drugs or nicotine or alcohol. You know, it's still.

Father Robert Ballecer (10:13)

It is

Sam Abuelsamid (10:15)

on people's psychology, on, on, on, on their, Their behavior.

Leo Laporte (10:20)

I don't even think that's proven, Sam. It seems. It makes sense. It's like, yeah, that makes sense. But I think in every case, when they've attempted to demonstrate that they have been unable to do so. I'm talking social scientists and psychologists, despite what Jonathan Haidt writes in his books.

Sam Abuelsamid (10:40)

Well, you know, I mean, I think height definitely goes way too far. Yeah, I don't, I don't think that, you know, I don't think that social media is necessarily the cause of all the, the anxiety and the issues that young people are, are having today. You know, I think that just has much more to do with just the way the world around us is collapsing.

Leo Laporte (11:00)

But yeah, I mean, they might be worried about climate change.

Sam Abuelsamid (11:03)

Yeah, I mean, I know that's a lot. It's pretty.

Leo Laporte (11:05)

There's a lot of things to worry

Sam Abuelsamid (11:06)

about in the world, but, you know, there, you know, and 18 inches of

Leo Laporte (11:11)

snow in New York City, they might be worried about that.

Sam Abuelsamid (11:14)

Yeah. Okay. But, you know, the, the impact of, of using social media a lot, you know, is not, it's not the same for everybody, just as the, the impact of using alcohol are not the same for everybody. You know, some people can drink alcohol in moderation, some people binge drink, and there are some who are, you know, genuine alcoholics. I think when it comes to social media, I think that there, there are people who are having much more or getting. Having much more of a psychological impact from that use of social media. You know, when you look at, especially like young girls, for example, you know, body dysmorphia, you know, a lot of other issues that, you know, that I think the social media is absolutely contributing to that. Should we. We call it an addiction? Probably not.

Leo Laporte (12:10)

Should we ban Seventeen magazine? Because before Instagram that caused body dysmorphia. Did it? Didn't it?

Sam Abuelsamid (12:17)

I think, you know, I think that there's probably a case to be made, you know, for, you know, to. And I hate to, you know, go, you know, into censorship or anything, but, you know, there, there's, you know, as you said, you know, a lot of those print magazines did cause a lot of issues for a lot of people as well, you know, and I think that, you know, it's, it's definitely irresponsible for media to, you know, the way, the way they have, you know, that they manipulated imagery in those, in those publications, you know, and it's that that process is even more accelerated today, you know, with, with Photoshop and, and you know, getting into AI and what we're seeing done with AI with, you know, using AI to take people's clothes off.

Leo Laporte (13:09)

Here's what worries me. One of the arguments, I even heard this on PBS is, well, that section 3230 is protecting these people. So we've really got to do something about Section 230. And what worries me is that, okay, it's easy and it's popular to go after Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat. It's easy to go after the big boys. But any judgment that says these, these guys are responsible for the well being of people who use their tools will impact a lot of other people, including me. I mean I have, you know, this age gating thing is going to cause a problem in our discord. It's going to cause a problem in my forums, in my mastodon. It's going to cause a problem on any public facing thing I do, including these shows. And, and yes, I guess we can all agree big tech should be taken down. But it's not just big tech that'll be taken down.

Sam Abuelsamid (14:08)

In fact, it's unlikely to be big tech. It's going to be small, it's going

Leo Laporte (14:11)

to be, I can't defend myself in court.

Father Robert Ballecer (14:13)

Yeah, yeah, I want to play devil's advocate. Even though I'm more on Sam's side, I follow along with, with Sam's thinking here. If, if I'm selling a product and it doesn't, it could be a women's magazine, it could be a car magazine. I am going to do the things that I think I need to do to entice my viewership. I'm going to make it as attractive as possible. I'm going to push all the right buttons. I don't know if that's irresponsible. I think that's, that's just what you do. I mean, if you're trying to market something, if you're trying to sell something, you're always trying to look for an edge over your competitors. You're always trying to do something with your product that's going to set it apart. So to say that, that becomes irresponsible at some point becomes extremely dangerous. Because now you're putting on me personal choice, the personal choice of my viewership and the personal choice of the guardians of my viewership. I don't, I don't, I don't think that's a possible standard. You can't ever have that without going into 100% censorship, because anything can trigger anyone. My audience is so diverse that I will never know what it is that's going to send them into a self destructive spiral. Right. I mean, if I'm playing devil's advocate, I'm going to say if you're going to do that, then we should just not communicate with anyone at all because I don't know your mind.

Leo Laporte (15:33)

Mark Zuckerberg took the stand on Wednesday and he suddenly got in the thing that Met has been lobbying for, which is it should be Apple that does all this age gating. He said he'd reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the, quote, well, being of teens and kids. I thought there were opportunities, he said that our company and Apple could be doing and I wanted to talk to Tim about that. What Mark really wants is for Apple to find out how old all its users are. And then, and Apple has an API, by the way, that an app can query saying what age group is this user in? And then it'd be very easy for Meta to say, well, the person's under 16 or whatever. You can make it any age you want. We're not gonna allow that person to join. Honestly, I don't mind that because Apple already probably knows everybody's age. Certainly has good ways of gauging everybody's age. And I trust Apple and Google with Android to do that. How do you guys feel about that? Is that, is that a solution?

Sam Abuelsamid (16:37)

I mean, I, I heard you guys talking about this last week. I think on the show, you know, I know I keep thinking, I can't remember who, I can't remember who was it said this. You know, it probably, it probably makes more sense to have fewer people have access to that and.

Leo Laporte (16:55)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (16:56)

That detailed information about the individual. But you know, even then, you know, I'm still, I'm not sure that I, I don't know that that's going to be the right solution. I don't know that that's necessarily going to work.

Leo Laporte (17:11)

Zuckerberg was questioned by the plaintiffs attorneys about email messages saying he lifted Facebook's ban on, or Instagram's ban on beauty filters because it was, quote, paternalistic. When asked about Zuckerberg says, well, it sounds like something I would say and something, I feel, it feels a little overbearing specifically to beauty filters.

Father Robert Ballecer (17:38)

Do you remember 15 years ago, Leo, on Tech News today we had a discussion when Facebook was, when they had announced that Zuckerberg was always going to have 51% of the, of the power of the voting shares of Facebook. We said, look, essentially, you're allowing Facebook to become the cult of personality of Mark Zuckerberg. So the question becomes, do you trust Mark Zuckerberg's judgment? We haven't moved past that question.

Leo Laporte (18:04)

I guess no would be the answer across the board. Nicholas, do you want to weigh in? Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg?

Nicholas De Leon (18:10)

Well, I. I was just gonna say yes. As a reporter in. In the trenches for the rise of Facebook and all this, I feel this.

Father Robert Ballecer (18:17)

This conversation.

Nicholas De Leon (18:18)

I feel like we have this conversation, like, every day for the past 20 years. Like what father said a second ago, we're still at the who's responsible stage. We're still at the do you trust Mark Zuckerberg?

Father Robert Ballecer (18:28)

Stage.

Nicholas De Leon (18:28)

And it's like, well, I'm. I'm 40 years old now, and I was 20 when we were having these discussions. And it's like, I don't know. To the devil's advocate position. It's like, you're an adult. No one's forcing you to use Instagram, beauty filters or otherwise. It's like, I don't. I don't know why I need the judiciary to step in when I can close the laptop type of thing. I don't know if that's, like, facile thinking or like two. Two. Whatever. But, like, I don't know, man. I. I guess I've never really struggled with addiction. For real?

Leo Laporte (18:59)

You don't have body dysmorphia, Nicholas? Not.

Nicholas De Leon (19:02)

Not that I'm aware of, no. So. Which is easy for me to say. I know a lot of folks do. Struggle

Father Robert Ballecer (19:09)

of the devil's advocate.

Leo Laporte (19:11)

I mean, do they still have a devil's advocate at the Vatican, by the way?

Father Robert Ballecer (19:15)

Yeah, I know him. He's a nice guy.

Leo Laporte (19:17)

But they're really. I mean, I'm not being facetious. That used to be something at the Vatican, Right?

Father Robert Ballecer (19:22)

It's not an official position, but there are several people whose job it is strategized.

Sam Abuelsamid (19:26)

Yes.

Father Robert Ballecer (19:26)

Their job is to be on the outside throwing rocks. That's. That's what they do. But to say, we can close the laptop and remember. I'm with you, Nicholas. I. I believe that people have to be doing the adulting that would. If you're dealing with an actual addiction, you can't. You can't say that. You can't tell someone, well, why don't you just stop drinking? Why don't you just stop using cocaine? Why don't you stop using fentanyl or opioids? So that. That is where that clinical distinction of addiction and Desire has to be really, really clear because if it's an actual addiction, it, you have to treat it. You, you can't just say, just change your attitude.

Sam Abuelsamid (20:03)

So in, in the, in the discord writing the rtt, RT IRT actually had an interesting point here. You replace Instagram with DraftKings and what, what Leo just said at the time,

Leo Laporte (20:16)

well, you could know.

Sam Abuelsamid (20:17)

So we can't regulate that either.

Leo Laporte (20:19)

You can ban gambling. That's different. Well, you can say I ban gambling. We, we do. In fact, in California it's banned.

Sam Abuelsamid (20:25)

Right. But I think I don't have a problem. The point here is, you know, gambling, you know, we, you know, people who are problem gamble, gamblers who are that, you know, they are addicted, but they, you know, the, the physical manifestations of that are not the same as it is, you know, with drugs or alcohol.

Leo Laporte (20:47)

That's true. That's a dopamine addiction.

Sam Abuelsamid (20:48)

Yeah. When you, when you, you know, I mean, that is a real addiction.

Leo Laporte (20:52)

Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (20:53)

And you know, I mean, when you try to stop ruining addiction. I am, I am not, you know, I am not a gambler. I've never gambled, but I don't believe that as far as I'm aware, you know, for gamblers, when they try to stop, they don't go through withdrawal in the same way that you do from a physical addiction to some substance. And, but we still consider that to be an addiction. So, you know, that, you know, it's kind of, you know, going back to earlier in this conversation, but you know, the, the idea is what is an addiction? And you know, I, I think that there, there probably is a case to be made that at least for some people that, you know, that there is an addictive or a compulsive. Maybe compulsive is a better way of, of phrasing it than, than addictive behavior. But there, there you, you do have some behavioral things that people are unable to control. You know, just saying, you know, being, being an adult is not, is not an adequate answer to that.

Leo Laporte (21:52)

Yeah, I'll be honest. I don't, I wouldn't care one wit if they banned Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok would be fine with me. I think that there are non algorithmically driven social networks like for instance, our forums and our Mastodon that are valuable even to people under 16 or 13, especially people who for one reason or other are marginalized at home or at school and find their community online. Those things are valuable. I'd hate to lose that. In addition, I don't think, and by the way YouTube, I would say. I'd hate to lose YouTube. So the remedy probably isn't for these guys to shut down. What should the remedy be? If, let's say it goes against them, they can afford a big fine. It can't be just a fine. What. What. What structural remedy would we have to pursue?

Father Robert Ballecer (22:43)

I mean, the structural remedy that I've. I've heard being recommended is doing something like what they do in Vegas and what they do in Atlantic City, which is the casinos have to pay into a fund to help those who are addicted to gambling.

Leo Laporte (22:54)

That's worse.

Father Robert Ballecer (22:55)

That doesn't work.

Leo Laporte (22:57)

That's really made a difference.

Father Robert Ballecer (22:58)

God, I mean, my family's been living in Las Vegas for 25, 26 years now. It's a joke. Everyone knows it's a joke. Yes, it's funded. Yes, it does help certain people, but most of the people who have that addiction, it will ruin their lives. Even as they're staring at the sign saying, if you need help, call this number.

Leo Laporte (23:15)

Same with cigarettes. People still buy cigarettes in. In. In other countries. I think in Canada and Australia, the cigarette warning labels are graphic.

Father Robert Ballecer (23:25)

Oh, the ones over here are great. They showed, like, diseased lungs.

Leo Laporte (23:28)

Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (23:28)

Cirrhosis.

Sam Abuelsamid (23:29)

Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte (23:29)

Does it stop people? In fact, when I was in Rome, everybody smoked.

Father Robert Ballecer (23:34)

It actually increased revenue for a while because people wanted to collect all the

Leo Laporte (23:38)

different paths, collect all the diseases.

Father Robert Ballecer (23:41)

Okay.

Leo Laporte (23:42)

Oh, God. Yeah. Humans are not really good at assessing.

Father Robert Ballecer (23:48)

No.

Leo Laporte (23:48)

Dange.

Father Robert Ballecer (23:50)

Hi.

Benita (23:50)

This is made up.

Sam Abuelsamid (23:51)

It's amazing that the species has survived this long.

Benita (23:54)

We had to create laws to make people wear their seat belt. So, I mean, you know.

Leo Laporte (23:58)

Yeah, I mean, I'm not against laws. You know, somebody said, well, liquor stores are allowed to ask for ID before you can buy liquor. That seems right and proper. Now, the liquor store doesn't store that ID in a database of IDs

Sam Abuelsamid (24:16)

and

Leo Laporte (24:16)

keep track of your name, address, and birth date. So these Internet systems obviously can. And unfortunately, even if they deny they do it, they do it. We know that the one old dude

Benita (24:28)

that liquor store who looks at, takes a glance at your idea, gives it back to you.

Leo Laporte (24:32)

Yeah. You care

Sam Abuelsamid (24:35)

now. You know, I mean, I. You know, I. I never personally did this, but I'm. I'm told that, you know, there are some people who are under the legal age for consuming alcoholic substances, you know, often, you know, would have false IDs that would indicate that they were actually older than. Than their actual work.

Nicholas De Leon (24:56)

I don't.

Sam Abuelsamid (24:57)

I have. I have no evidence that that is actually true. It might be completely you mean McLovin? Yeah. Who knows?

Leo Laporte (25:05)

All right, well, anyway, it was. It was interesting to see Mark take the st. I don't think he's done this before. He's testified in Congress, but I can't remember another court case where he is.

Father Robert Ballecer (25:15)

Yeah, he's done Congress in that. In that. Wasn't he in a hoodie when he testified before Congress?

Leo Laporte (25:22)

I remember the time. And he was wearing a suit that. I think it was Josh Hawley. Made him stand up, turn around, and apologize to the family members in the audience who had been harmed, whose kids had been harmed by Meta. That was a humiliating moment. Interestingly, Meta has begun a $65 million election slush fund. Don't know. I mean, I think it's probably completely coincidental. Actually, it's more about AI but, you know, hey, if you're lobbying, you might as well lobby for that, too. The age, too. I don't know. I. I think. I feel. I. I say this every time. I feel like it's up to parents. Ultimately. There's some evidence. Tech Dirt had an article that the Australia social media ban is, in fact, isolating for some kids. Kids with disabilities, for instance. Everybody's watching Australia. They ban social media for kids under 16. Just banned it. The Guardian has a piece about, well, quoting some. Some kids. This is an Australian girl. I lost my friends. She's autistic. She said, I lost my friends. She's 14 years old. While some people were exposed to harmful content and bullying online, or indie, which is not her real name, social media was always a safe space. If she ever came across anything that felt unsafe, she says she would ask her parents or sister about it. I have autism and mental health things. It's hard making friends in real life for me. My online friends are easier. I actually know autistic kids whose primary. Primary social life is online. I. I think this is genuine. What about the harm to those kids? Cutting them off?

Father Robert Ballecer (27:14)

No, it's hard for most people in the real world to make friends, to make good friends.

Leo Laporte (27:19)

That's true.

Father Robert Ballecer (27:20)

I. I am also on the spectrum, and I understand that. However, the friends I make in the real world are far more concrete than

Leo Laporte (27:27)

they're real friends online. Yeah. Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (27:29)

They're actual friends.

Leo Laporte (27:30)

Do you think it's a disadvantage for Indy that she has social because it allows her not to make friends in the real world?

Father Robert Ballecer (27:36)

Absolutely. If I had social media when. When I was growing up, I never would have met anybody. I would have been online the entire time, my entire life.

Leo Laporte (27:43)

Would you have been a priest?

Father Robert Ballecer (27:44)

Never have touched grass.

Leo Laporte (27:46)

Would you have been a priest?

Father Robert Ballecer (27:49)

Probably not.

Sam Abuelsamid (27:50)

Probably.

Father Robert Ballecer (27:50)

Honestly, probably not.

Leo Laporte (27:52)

Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (27:52)

I'd probably still be running my, my bbs right out of a one bed.

Leo Laporte (27:56)

Or you'd be with Nicholas playing World of Warcraft.

Father Robert Ballecer (27:58)

Exactly. No, no, no. I was never. I was never World of Warcraft. It was civilization for me mornings.

Leo Laporte (28:05)

You know, I think we should send Apple to jail because they've put Siv on the iPad now and that makes it really easy to become addicted. I'm being facetious. Anyway, I. We. Yeah, we do have this conversation a lot. I probably shouldn't bring it up. I thought Mark.

Sam Abuelsamid (28:20)

Well, no, I think it's. I think it's a valid conversation to have because we, you know, particularly because we haven't. We haven't really come up with a solution yet.

Leo Laporte (28:28)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (28:28)

And, you know, I think until. Until we, until we come up with some viable ways forward, some kind of path forward, you know, we need to keep talking about this. We can't, we can't let it slide because, you know, not doing anything is not. Is not the right answer either.

Leo Laporte (28:49)

Yeah. I just think it's so hard to know what to do without causing harms.

Sam Abuelsamid (28:54)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (28:55)

In the other direction. I just don't know. I mean, I look it. I don't have Instagram X on my phone. I do. I. I watch YouTube every. Every morning when I work out. I don't. But I'm an adult. Of course. But I mean, I think, you know, you see parents give their kids an iPad or an iPhone when they go out as a babysitter. You know, they're doing that at home, too.

Father Robert Ballecer (29:23)

And we know that causes real harm.

Nicholas De Leon (29:25)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (29:26)

Should we ban those things? Because parents are using that as a tool. I mean, I do agree that's probably a bad thing to do. Poor kid.

Sam Abuelsamid (29:37)

You know, when you see. When you see, you know, kids in a restaurant with an iPhone, with a phone or a tablet, See it all the time. Take that away and hand him a pack of crayons and a piece and a stack of paper.

Leo Laporte (29:46)

Yeah. So we used to do the restaurant to give you coloring book placement.

Father Robert Ballecer (29:52)

To be fair, that's. That's not just children. I mean, seeing adults in a restaurant, like five adults at a couple, they're all staring at their couples, just going

Nicholas De Leon (29:59)

to say that father. Like, it's definitely not. You see the, the kid with the tablet, but then you see the parent on their phone just mindlessly scrolling through junk, basically. So it's like, I don't know, there's a lot of Most of the time,

Father Robert Ballecer (30:11)

the reason why the kid has the tablet is because the parents are also on their phones.

Sam Abuelsamid (30:15)

They don't want to deal with the kid.

Leo Laporte (30:16)

So, you know, nobody wants to talk to anybody. I saw a picture from many years ago of probably from the 40s of guys going to work at a railroad station. Every one of them had his nose in a newspaper. It's just changed. It was a newspaper, now it's a phone. You shouldn't be expected here. Socializing the subway. It's not.

Father Robert Ballecer (30:47)

You'd love to live in my house for a week, Leo. Because we have a. There is a generational gap. And so after lunch, most of us go upstairs to the rec room and we have a coffee and do some light chat. And then half of the room goes to the newspaper room, where literally, it's the newspaper room. It's where all the newspapers from around the world go physical newspapers. And they sit and they read and the other half play games on their phones. So it's.

Leo Laporte (31:13)

I actually remember going to the newspaper reading room when I was a kid reading newspapers, come to think of it.

Benita (31:20)

Those giant sticks that hold the newspaper.

Leo Laporte (31:23)

Yeah. They'd have the newspapers be on sticks. You remember that bonito? Hell, yeah. I'm surprised. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (31:29)

Yeah, I remember that. I spent the library days looking at

Father Robert Ballecer (31:33)

microfiches in the library of old magazines and old newspapers, particular pieces of information.

Leo Laporte (31:39)

Here's a photo of gentlemen in hats. Yep.

Sam Abuelsamid (31:43)

Yep.

Leo Laporte (31:44)

They're not talking to each other. The last thing they want to do is talk to each other. They all read in the paper and,

Sam Abuelsamid (31:51)

you know, you get on a plane now and, you know everybody's got a set of noise canceling headphones on.

Leo Laporte (31:55)

Yeah. Or Vision Pros.

Sam Abuelsamid (31:59)

I've never seen anybody on a plane with a Vision Pro, actually. And I fly a lot. I've yet to see one on a plane. In fact, one of the few places where I've ever seen a Vision Pro out in the wild was a couple years ago when they first came out. I saw a guy in Portland riding around on a bicycle with a Vision Pro. In downtown Portland? Yes.

Leo Laporte (32:20)

That's just stupid.

Sam Abuelsamid (32:22)

But. But, you know, noise canceling.

Leo Laporte (32:24)

Nicholas, correct me if I'm wrong. March 4, Apple's gonna make a bunch of announcements. One of the things Jon Gruber is saying, and I hope it's true, is that Apple's going to bring F1 to the vision Pro. I will buy a Vision Pro.

Nicholas De Leon (32:37)

My dad, my Biden is like.

Father Robert Ballecer (32:40)

He.

Nicholas De Leon (32:40)

Honestly, my dad might be the big. He literally has VHS tapes In his basement of races from wow. That he taped off whatever channel it was on. He actually might be this Nation's most preeminent F1 expert. I keep telling him that I don't know how to, like.

Leo Laporte (32:54)

He came to it before drive to

Nicholas De Leon (32:56)

survive many, many decades before Dr. Survived to the. That was the only sport he want. That was the only sport I was aware of as a kid growing up was Formula One. And this was in the 90s, and like, nobody knew what it was in the 90s.

Leo Laporte (33:08)

No.

Nicholas De Leon (33:09)

If. If. Because it was the Vision Pro he used to get, like, the British magazines, I guess he could import them or something.

Sam Abuelsamid (33:16)

I did too. Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (33:18)

Did you?

Sam Abuelsamid (33:18)

Oh, yeah, yeah. I bought. I. I used to have a subscription to Race Car Engineering, which had like, that was like the really deep dive technical, you know, F1 and. And various other forms of racing. But, you know, when, whenever, especially in the 90s when I started traveling to Europe regularly, I would pick up copies of Autosport and Auto Car Motorsport magazine and, and, you know, be reading all. All these different things. Oh, yeah, I. I got it. I mean, I. I first got into F1 back in 1978 when I picked up my first. My first copy of Road and Track. And it was in like, June or July of 78, and they had the report of that year's Long Beach Grand Prix. You know, in those days, you know, F1 was not on. On TV everywhere. And, you know, so if you weren't at the race or you weren't local, you know, you would end up, you know, reading about the race, you know, a couple of months later in a magazine like Track.

Leo Laporte (34:22)

Now you can wear a Vision Pro, and you could be. You could be there, you could be trackside. I'll never forget a couple of Cruises ago, Perry McCarthy was the guest of honor on the cruise, the original Stig. The Stig in the black. And he gave a couple of lectures about F1, and one of which he showed the driver's point of view, Ayrton Senna at Monaco. It was just incredible to watch from his point of view.

Sam Abuelsamid (34:49)

And that's exactly why I would not want to watch F1 in something like a vision, probably throwing up all over the place.

Leo Laporte (34:57)

I don't think Apple would do that. I think what they would do, because F1 has all of these feeds. They have the driver's feeds, they have all these feeds. They have the data feed, they have the track with the little things going around. They, they would just give you a field of view that had, you know, 20 screens in it, and you could look around and go, that'd be kind of cool. I would do that.

Father Robert Ballecer (35:16)

By the way, Leo. Pretty fly for us, sis. Guy in the discord is showing a picture of Yuki Sonoda's RB7 Catching Fire in San Francisco today. Is there an F1 event in San Francisco?

Sam Abuelsamid (35:28)

No, I think it's just a promo event. The first race.

Leo Laporte (35:33)

Oh, he's not catching fire. He's doing. You got to understand. Oh, it is on fire. This is the brakes. Those are the brakes.

Father Robert Ballecer (35:40)

Yeah, that part.

Leo Laporte (35:41)

They get pretty hot. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (35:43)

Plus. Plus the RB7 is from, like 2013 or something.

Leo Laporte (35:47)

Yeah, it's way okay. It's. Yeah. Nowadays it's practically electric. They're half electric.

Father Robert Ballecer (35:52)

Leo. I was going through St. Peter's two days ago, and in the lost and found for the Vatican Museum is a Vision Pro. So someone. Which. Okay, whatever.

Leo Laporte (36:03)

But if you were at the Vatican last week and you lost your vision pro, contact Father Robert Balassair, who goes

Father Robert Ballecer (36:09)

into St. Peter's to put on a vision Pro.

Leo Laporte (36:13)

Something is wrong with people, by the way, though, and I know you know this because I have a feeling you won't say, but I have a feeling you might have had something to do with. There is a 3D view of St Peter's right?

Father Robert Ballecer (36:25)

Yes, there is.

Leo Laporte (36:26)

Look at him. Look at him playing coy. He said it's a team effort. Everybody's involved. It's a team. He's on the. He's on the team. Let's take a little break. When we come back, we have more to talk about with this wonderful panel, who I just really. You can kind of tell. We just like to hang out and chat with. I guess that's the best twits, right? Where you just feel like you're at the table and we're just sitting around and we're gassing about stuff. Father Robert Ballis here, the Digital Jesuit. I just miss having you around, you know, I guess just have to.

Father Robert Ballecer (36:59)

I do miss the old days. And does that officially make me an old fart?

Leo Laporte (37:02)

I think he used to have a little thing in the basement of the twit brick house.

Nicholas De Leon (37:07)

The little.

Leo Laporte (37:08)

What was it called? The Nose? No Hole.

Father Robert Ballecer (37:10)

The no Hole. Yes.

Leo Laporte (37:12)

And I could always. I always knew that if I couldn't find Father Robert, he'd be down in the no hole soldering something together or something. It's great to have you, Mr. Sam and Bull Salmon, my car guy. Feel like it's. Yeah. This is old friend week. Good to see you. Wheel Bearings Media and Nicholas De Leon from Consumer Reports. Great friend as well. Yeah. We can sit around. We could talk about stuff. Nicholas has actually done a. A little vibe coding for his hometown.

Nicholas De Leon (37:41)

I have a few little projects coming up, but, yeah, this one I want to talk about today.

Leo Laporte (37:45)

We're all. We're all here. We're all. Let's be honest, we're all a little bit into the AI thing. Anybody anti AI here? We're all among friends.

Sam Abuelsamid (37:54)

I'm kind of middle.

Leo Laporte (37:56)

Oh, a couple of, huh? Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (38:01)

I think that there's some valuable use cases for it, but I think that there's a lot of places where they're trying to shove it in, where it just does not make any sense at all.

Leo Laporte (38:10)

Oh, I agree. Every time I open up our show rundown, Google says, hey, you want me to summarize this data? No, that's what it goes for.

Sam Abuelsamid (38:18)

I think, you know, the amount of money that has been. That is being squandered right now on data centers, you know, is just ridiculous. I don't.

Leo Laporte (38:27)

I think the jury's still out on the data center thing. I think it might be worth it. I'm. I feel like we're creating something. I don't know what it is.

Father Robert Ballecer (38:35)

We don't have ram, Leo. We don't have ram.

Leo Laporte (38:38)

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let me. We'll talk about RAM and hard drives a little later.

Benita (38:41)

Yeah, but it's because of those data centers.

Sam Abuelsamid (38:44)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (38:44)

Well, good, because if we're creating the next consciousness, I think it's. Well, okay, so you have to wait a year to upgrade your computer.

Benita (38:53)

They're creating your rental computer, Leo. That's what they're doing.

Sam Abuelsamid (38:56)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (38:58)

I'll tell you what. I don't need to buy software anymore. I just tell ChatGPT Codex 5.

Benita (39:03)

Yeah, because you're going to be renting your computer.

Leo Laporte (39:08)

That's a point. And I am, at this point, 200 bucks a month to all of them. Actually, no, just to two. My plan was I was going to cut off Claude when I went to Codex, and then I'm going to cut off Codex and go to Gemini. But you know what? It's kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend or something. It's like, claude, I'm going to miss you. See you later, Claude. Bye. But now I have a new friend. We talk about that on our AI show, Intelligent Machines. I'll save it for that. Our show today, brought to you by Trusted Tech. Hey, these are guys you ought to know about. If you're using Microsoft 365, you. You would pretty much need an AI to tell you what's going on. Or maybe better get some experts because you're probably paying for licenses you don't need or maybe missing ones you do. Don't ask copilot. Ask Trusted Tech. In July, Microsoft's going to implement a significant price increase for Microsoft 365. And it gets even more complicated. There's a lot of nuance in here, but the good news is these guys are experts. Trusted Tech helps businesses of all sizes get the most out of their Microsoft investment by ensuring their M365 environment is well supported and aligned with how the business actually operates. In a way, Trusted Tech pays for itself by saving you. Microsoft Licensing is very complicated. Options can vary widely, but the Trusted Tech team gets it. And they can help organizations understand what they have, what they need, and how to make the most out of what they're paying for. If you want to make sure you're getting M365 done right, Trusted Tech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation. Visit TrustedTech Team TWIT365. Let me say that again. TrustedTech. All one word, lowercase.team, not.com. trustedTech Team TWIT365 okay. And get a clear data backed view of your current licenses, your optimization opportunities and your next steps. And you would say, well, Microsoft must hate these guys. No, Microsoft loves these guys. Ask Kevin Turner. You know that name? Former Microsoft coo. He says this is a quote he was talking to Trusted Tech. Quote. You have an incredible customer reputation and you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. Kevin was very kind. Trusted Tech also elevates the Microsoft support experience with its certified support services. So they do both. In fact, the support services save you a lot. 32 to 52% compared to the average Microsoft Unified support agreement. Whether you're looking to fine tune your Microsoft 365 licensing, improve the way your organization receives proactive Microsoft support, or both, Trusted Tech offers free consultations to help you understand your options. Go to TrustedTech Team TWiT365, fill out that form. Get in contact with Trusted Tech's Microsoft licensing engineers. They're great, very great. Google I O is coming up May 19th and 20th. As usual, they have a big puzzle to solve. Do you do that, Robert? Do you try to solve the puzzle?

Father Robert Ballecer (42:41)

I used to, but I haven't gone to a Google I O since. Oh my goodness. 2016.

Leo Laporte (42:48)

That used to be more fun. Remember the one where Sergey Brin parachuted in wearing his Google Glass?

Nicholas De Leon (42:54)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (42:55)

He was at a conference recently. He says he doesn't. He says wait till the product is really ready before you, let's say parachute into the conference to announce it.

Benita (43:05)

Remember when they used to give everybody the thing they were announcing?

Leo Laporte (43:08)

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (43:10)

People would walk away from there with a couple of phones. I remember, I knew when there was a Nexus phone, the first two Android wear watches. There was another Chromebook.

Leo Laporte (43:20)

Right. The first Chromebook.

Father Robert Ballecer (43:21)

Chromebook.

Sam Abuelsamid (43:23)

The Nexus Q. Don't forget the Nexus Q. I knew

Leo Laporte (43:26)

it was over when the thing we got under the chair was a cardboard viewer.

Father Robert Ballecer (43:31)

Yeah. Glasses.

Leo Laporte (43:32)

Yeah, that was, that was when. Yeah. I think we're not. I think that's the last of it. I don't know what will be under your chair at Google I o but it's May 19th and 20th. We will cover the keynote or the keynotes. Huh.

Sam Abuelsamid (43:45)

Old gum.

Leo Laporte (43:47)

Yes, this week they did announce, probably trying to get ahead of what Apple is likely to announce on March 4th. The Pixel 10a, the low cost version of the Pixel 10. It's exactly the same as last year's phone. I mean it's the same processor. Yep. Cool colors though, is in color as well.

Father Robert Ballecer (44:10)

I'm sure it's not a minimal 10. It's a 9 basically.

Leo Laporte (44:13)

It's a 9.

Father Robert Ballecer (44:14)

Yeah. They just made the 9 to the 10A.

Leo Laporte (44:18)

I guess that makes sense. For a while those A series were kind of like the phone to get like this is. This is great.

Sam Abuelsamid (44:23)

You're getting a. I mean just, just because it's A slightly upgraded 9A does not mean it's a bad phone. I mean it's still an excellent phone, especially for 500 bucks.

Leo Laporte (44:34)

Oh yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (44:34)

And, and you know, within or two, you know, you'll be able to get it for $350. $400.

Leo Laporte (44:40)

That's right. Don't ever buy it the day it comes out. Google always sharply discounts. I have the Pixel 9 Pro XL. I just put graphene OS on it, by the way. Very easy. You've probably done that, Robert. Right. But it used to be that to swap out a ROM on an Android phone was you had to install ADB and you'd have. It was a complicated thing. Now it's, you do a. You attach the cable, it's a website and it installs graphene. Couldn't be easy.

Father Robert Ballecer (45:07)

I'm still using an 8 Pro and I have no desire to upgrade at any point in the near future.

Leo Laporte (45:13)

Are you using stock Google Android or.

Father Robert Ballecer (45:15)

Yeah, I went back to stock just because I was getting some issues with. With my, My custom loads. And yeah, it's. I'm starting to feel the age. But I used a OnePlus 2 for eight years, so I figured I could beat that.

Leo Laporte (45:31)

Remember when there were really great Android phones? The OnePlus was so cool. Remember the Moto Moto X?

Sam Abuelsamid (45:43)

I had the second gen Moto X and my wife had one too. She had the. She got the bamboo on the back.

Leo Laporte (45:51)

I had the blue back. Because you would build your own. You could do whatever you wanted.

Sam Abuelsamid (45:57)

And then automaker.

Leo Laporte (45:58)

I feel like we've regressed the Moto X. You could change, hey, Google into anything you wanted. I had it. I had it set. So if I said, help me, Obi Wan Kenobi, it would talk to me. You can't do that anymore.

Sam Abuelsamid (46:14)

It had the. The infrared sensors on the front so you could swipe your hand. Just swipe your hand over it to dismiss a notification or a call or like, you know, at night, you know, I had it on a charging stand on the bed stand and it was off. But, you know, if I woke up in the middle of the night and I wanted to know what time it was, I could just swipe my hand over it. It would flash up the time momentarily and then go. Go blank again after about 10 seconds.

Leo Laporte (46:38)

Yeah, that was a project that. That was the last of it.

Sam Abuelsamid (46:43)

Yeah,

Leo Laporte (46:45)

we did that.

Father Robert Ballecer (46:46)

There were several manufacturers who were giving us interesting phones with different capabilities. Everything from keyboards to really cool things, sensor functions, and none of them sold. So that's what all gone to the same record.

Sam Abuelsamid (47:00)

Most people just ended up. They wanted a. A slab, you know, black slab, you know, and that was it.

Leo Laporte (47:06)

But that's not us. That's normal people. Yeah, the normies.

Sam Abuelsamid (47:11)

There aren't enough of us to justify manufacturers investing in those cool technologies.

Benita (47:18)

But also, this is like, dang it,

Father Robert Ballecer (47:19)

Normies, this is America.

Benita (47:20)

We could have had like, in, like, there's Japanese and Chinese phones that are androids that you will never see.

Leo Laporte (47:25)

Oh, yeah, the new Xiaomi Ultra, which has a Leica photo system. And I would kill to get this. But you can't buy it anywhere. I mean, you can buy it everywhere but the US

Father Robert Ballecer (47:38)

I'll bring one back for you next time, Leo. They're in the shop down the. Down the road right here.

Leo Laporte (47:41)

You can get them in Italy.

Father Robert Ballecer (47:43)

Absolutely.

Benita (47:43)

But it won't run in American networks.

Father Robert Ballecer (47:45)

Right? Yeah, it will.

Leo Laporte (47:48)

Not all.

Sam Abuelsamid (47:49)

I think it'll probably run on. Probably run on certain bands.

Leo Laporte (47:52)

It'll run on T Mobile and not all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. I'm going to give you ammunition, you haters. You AI haters. Every. All the. What's gone on. Maybe my contention perhaps is that these companies, instead of trying to innovate anywhere else, they're just saying, let's throw all of our engineering talent into AI. All our resources, all our talent, all our engineering into AI. Does that seem like what's happening?

Nicholas De Leon (48:20)

Yes, I mean, that's what it feels like as, as, you know, a reporter covering tech. Like, I, I was just talking with

Sam Abuelsamid (48:26)

a friend the other day.

Nicholas De Leon (48:27)

He said it used to take him two hours a day to go through all the big tech block, you know, the Verge and Gadget, yada yada. Nowadays he's done in like 10 minutes because they're all just talking about AI and it's the same very small number of news developments.

Leo Laporte (48:40)

Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon (48:40)

So it certainly feels like the whole tech industry that I love, love has shrunk dramatically. Like you just said a second ago, phones are kind of whatever now. The video game industry is. I mean, Xbox is not in a great place. That's shrinking too. It feels like.

Sam Abuelsamid (48:56)

Yes.

Nicholas De Leon (48:56)

All this cool stuff that, like, I thought was, oh, this is gonna be around forever. No, it is not gonna be around forever. And now we're literally just talking about AI, which is fine. I'm glass half full when it comes to AI, obviously. I've, I think it's, I've used it for some stuff, for projects and so forth, but, like, I didn't want that to come at the expense of everything else. And I mean, look at Windows. Windows is just. I mean, I probably should. I mean, look, I'm. I guess I'm a representative of Consumer Reports, so.

Leo Laporte (49:23)

Right. To normies. You write for normies, Right.

Nicholas De Leon (49:25)

That's what you're writing is not as good as it used to be. I, I used to, I used to give Windows, like, yeah, you know, it's good enough. It's fine. Who, you know, it's, it is a seriously degraded product nowadays, I guess.

Leo Laporte (49:37)

I guess.

Nicholas De Leon (49:38)

And yeah, is that AI's fault? Is that them just funneling resources into AI? That's certainly what it feels like, you know?

Leo Laporte (49:45)

Yep.

Sam Abuelsamid (49:45)

Well, you know, and open AI is getting close to, apparently getting close to closing $100 billion funding round, private funding round, you know, for a small fraction of that. Just imagine the things we could actually do, you know. You know, I mean, not just developing, you know, some interesting, interesting gadgets. Interesting phones, interesting technologies, but, you know, some of the other things we could do in society with a tenth of that money, you know, so, you know, if we could just shave off 10 of what they're throwing at AI, we could do a lot of really good things for the world.

Leo Laporte (50:21)

Well, Phil Spencer is leaving Xbox at Microsoft, and the new head of the Microsoft's Xbox division says, don't worry, we're not going to load it up with AI slop games.

Father Robert Ballecer (50:31)

Of course they are.

Sam Abuelsamid (50:32)

Yeah, right. I don't think anyone.

Father Robert Ballecer (50:34)

It's fun.

Nicholas De Leon (50:34)

It's funny to see the reaction as. As a. A gamer American, I was paying very close attention to that announcement the other day, the skepticism, which, with that whole. Her whole, like, spiel has been received. I guess it's an interesting communications problem if you're Microsoft or the Xbox division. No one believes. No one's going to believe a word this woman. It's not even her fault, necessarily. Everyone's very skeptical.

Leo Laporte (50:58)

The fact that she had to say it even tells you something, right?

Nicholas De Leon (51:02)

She's like, oh, I'm a gamer. I love games. It's like, does anyone believe that? I can't possibly believe that.

Father Robert Ballecer (51:07)

It's just.

Nicholas De Leon (51:08)

It's like.

Benita (51:08)

And what was her last job? What was her last job?

Leo Laporte (51:11)

Let me see. Her name is Asha Sharma.

Benita (51:14)

Scroll up that. Just scroll up that article, you'll see it. The scroll. The headline. The headline of the article. No, the headline. The headline.

Leo Laporte (51:21)

The headline. We will not. New Xbox boss promises no soulless AI slop after moving over from Microsoft's core AI products division. Oh, sorry. You're right, Benito.

Nicholas De Leon (51:35)

I feel like a lot of gamers would have been more happy to hear her say something. Look, I'm not very familiar with games, I'll be honest with you folks, but it's my job to ensure that this division is successful. We're going to try our best to win over your hearts and minds and put out cool stuff. I don't. I don't come from that background. I have no idea what that is, but it's my job in the next 90 days to learn if she would have been more along those lines. I think folks would have been more. Way more like. We're more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. But they came out the gates with her like. Like she's like some hardcore gamer with a capital.

Leo Laporte (52:06)

She says, I don't have any background in games at all.

Nicholas De Leon (52:09)

Come on.

Leo Laporte (52:12)

I played farmville.

Father Robert Ballecer (52:14)

You know where the Biden is. The first time a developer makes an AI generated map where every level can actually be original so that no one has an advantage for having played it for 60 hours, 100 hours, 1,000 hours. That's when there's actually going to be some acceptance. You're going to see these multiplayer maps that are just brand new. They're 100% original because they've been AI generated.

Leo Laporte (52:36)

I have to say, I know a lot of gamers who say, I don't want any AI in games.

Nicholas De Leon (52:41)

Yes, that's a common.

Leo Laporte (52:43)

In a way. I mean, isn't an NPC just bad AI? Like, imagine how good the NPCs could be. You wouldn't have the same. You know, I used to be a warrior like you, but I got an arrow through the knee over and over and over again.

Benita (52:57)

The term AI in games, though, is problematic because we've had AI in games since the beginning of games.

Leo Laporte (53:01)

Yeah, yeah. This just hasn't been very good. Imagine if you'd like had a bartender

Benita (53:08)

in the AI in games than there is for like LLMs and generative AI stuff like AI in games. You just, you. You generally just say that as like the. The computer player. That's the AI, so. But that's a very different definition from what we see.

Leo Laporte (53:20)

Could be better. Maps could be better. There's a lot of opportunities.

Father Robert Ballecer (53:24)

I don't know.

Leo Laporte (53:25)

The main artist you want humans to

Father Robert Ballecer (53:27)

would be pattern recognition. If it can't do pattern recognition, it's not useful as an npc. AI, Right.

Leo Laporte (53:34)

I mean, how many games have procedurally generated worlds?

Benita (53:38)

A lot of them.

Leo Laporte (53:38)

That was the big one, right?

Father Robert Ballecer (53:39)

No, Man's Sky. I mean, that was the Minecraft.

Leo Laporte (53:42)

Minecraft, Minecraft, Minecraft, Minecraft also. But no Man's Sky. Everybody got very excited because an infinite number of worlds, right? It turned out to be really boring, but they fixed it.

Father Robert Ballecer (53:55)

They've been updating that game so much better.

Leo Laporte (53:57)

I heard it was better, but I got so bored playing it for the better. Okay, I'll have to try it again now. I feel guilty. I feel like I'm my girlfriend. Claude and Chad GPT are going to miss me if I start playing video games.

Sam Abuelsamid (54:12)

Go back to Valheim.

Leo Laporte (54:14)

Ah, I played so much Valheim, but that was my Valheim. And what was that Switch game where

Sam Abuelsamid (54:21)

you had Animal Crossing.

Leo Laporte (54:23)

Animal Crossing. Those are my Covid games, right? Valheim and Animal Crossing. How'd you know that so quickly? Did you. Did you. Were you.

Sam Abuelsamid (54:30)

No, I've never played either one, but. Oh, you just been listening for 20 years.

Leo Laporte (54:35)

Animal Crossing. I still have a original, you know, the Switch Animal Crossing version. I see it over there in this pastel colors. So let's see the timeline. Sonnet 4.6 came out last week from Anthropic. 20 minutes later, OpenAI released GPT5.3 Codex 20 minutes later. Then a few days later, just this week, Gemini 3. One pro came out. And of course nowadays they're training these, I think they're training these AIs on the benchmarks. So the benchmarks become more and more meaningless. Right, but on the benchmarks, this is from Google of course. 31 beats them all. Humanities last exam, ARC AGI, Swe Bench, all the most important benchmarks. It's like dominant. Oh wait a minute, here's one. The five. Three Codex wins an SWE Bench Pro public. That's a one shot benchmark. Everything else.

Father Robert Ballecer (55:44)

So okay, I mean the ARC AGI test is interesting.

Leo Laporte (55:50)

I do like seeing is that's the one. What's the story on that one? I remember.

Father Robert Ballecer (55:55)

So ARC AGI looks at how a AI or an LLM handles pattern recognition and spatial reasoning. Those are the two big ones. So for example, a human looking at the backup camera of a car. We can immediately, even without thinking about it, we understand that when we start seeing objects moving in different proportions as we back up that it's because of depth. That's easy for us. That's, that's just a human thing. It's very difficult for an LLM to do. So that's one of the challenges as can it take a picture, a video of objects moving and figure out what the spatial.

Leo Laporte (56:33)

Yes.

Father Robert Ballecer (56:34)

Points are.

Leo Laporte (56:34)

And it's hard. I've done it myself and it's very hard.

Sam Abuelsamid (56:38)

And you know, the, the problem with, you know, with, with using an AI, especially like an LLM type of AI to do that is they don't always understand, you know, you know, seeing something you can see, you know, relative to changes, you know, if something's moving towards you or away, you can detect that, but you can't necessarily detect actually how far away that object is, especially from a single camera view. You know, if you have a stereoscopic view you, you can do that, you can just use some basic geometry to figure out exactly where that thing is in space, but from a single camera view. And this is one of the fundamental problems with Tesla is all of their, there are eight cameras, they're all single camera views. And so it's, it's got a guess as to where that object is in physical space. And oftentimes you can have objects that look similar to each other. You know, and if you, if you've made some inference based on, okay, I know roughly how big this particular object should be, and I know how many pixels it's taking up in this view. So I'm going to guess it's, you know, 10 meters away from me. But you can also have another object that looks similar to that, that is larger or smaller. And now you've made a fundamental error in trying to determine where that object is in physical space. So, you know that, you know, with, with humans, you know, we are, you know, we're looking at the camera, but, you know, we can also look in the mirror and use other, other inputs to detect. So cameras are, by themselves, are. They're useful, but also problematic.

Leo Laporte (58:21)

Yeah. So this is the ArcPrize website. I can't remember what the prize is. It's a drop in the bucket compared to how much it costs to train these things. Human score, 100%. Of course, on AGI 2 costs $17 per task. The new Gemini 3.1 Pro, 77%, which actually is a little lower than Gemini 3 Deep Think. But the cost is the thing. It was 13 bucks for Gemini 3 Deep Think. It was less than a buck for Gemini 3.1 Pro. So you have to consider cost, and that's what these graphs show.

Benita (58:58)

How did they determine the human cost? How did they determine the cost of a human?

Leo Laporte (59:02)

They had to pay him $12 an hour. I don't know.

Sam Abuelsamid (59:06)

Yeah. Presumably you assign some value per unit time and say, okay, how long does it take the person to do that?

Leo Laporte (59:14)

Tas telling you, I've done it. It's hard. It's hard. You get a map and you have to rearrange the things to match. You know, it's hard. It's not.

Father Robert Ballecer (59:23)

There's a wide range of human ability there. So I, I do want to know who.

Sam Abuelsamid (59:26)

Well, I think that's probably why I said human panel, you know, so they're probably using a number of people to, to do it and taking, taking an average. So I got a question for you, though. You know, you mentioned Leo. I think that, you know, they're, they seem to be increasingly training these models to the benchmarks. You know, we, I think we know pretty well that when you, when you train, when you train people to the test, you know that that leads to. Yeah. At least a problematic, very limited abilities.

Leo Laporte (59:58)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (59:59)

And so, you know, what, what's, what's the outcome going to be if we keep training these models to these various benchmarks?

Father Robert Ballecer (60:06)

They will perform exceptionally well on benchmarks.

Sam Abuelsamid (60:08)

Yes. Yeah. And do nothing.

Leo Laporte (60:10)

I don't trust benchmarks but you know, if you play with these things, they definitely getting smarter. Right. Necklace, which you used Claude code.

Nicholas De Leon (60:21)

I primarily use cloud code. I started doing Claude Kopy last summer. So that was I. Whatever the top of the line model was then like last July. Ish is when I really started messing with this stuff. And so recently I, I guess I'm using Sonnet 46 on this current project. I'm also using Haiku 4.5 for.

Leo Laporte (60:43)

Yeah, that's what I use for our summaries for the show.

Nicholas De Leon (60:46)

Yeah, that's actually. Yeah, yeah. So I'm more familiar with the, with the Claude kind of stack here.

Leo Laporte (60:51)

Yeah. So you created this Tucson Daily Brief.

Nicholas De Leon (60:55)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (60:55)

Is this public or is this just for you?

Nicholas De Leon (60:57)

Oh no, this is public. So what this was. Okay, so the genesis of this was, remember like a month ago when everyone was like going crazy over Claude Bot and like, oh, this is going to revolutionize everything. I was very skeptical. I was like, okay, here we go. Was this AI hype nonsense but like

Leo Laporte (61:13)

you feel like your job is to try this stuff, right?

Nicholas De Leon (61:16)

Yes, yes. I don't, I don't dismiss things out of hand. I'm like, okay, this seems a little hypey, but let me poke around with it. Yeah, exactly. That's. That's kind of been my attitude for, I mean for basically anything life actually. So I was like, okay, what are some cool things I could do with this layer, this additional layer in the stack here? And so what I did was it's called Tucson Daily Brief and you know, it is not the fanciest project in the world. It's not going to be the next TikTok or anything. It was basically just an, an excuse for me to use these tools and learn more about Open Claw specifically. So basically what this is is it goes through the major Tucson Southern Arizona local news sources, the RSS feeds, you know, TV channels, newspapers, there's a couple substacks and so forth. It goes through the RSS feeds, picks out the top. And this is Claude, I guess right now, Sonnet 4.6 doing this, which is quite good actually.

Leo Laporte (62:06)

Yeah, quite good. Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon (62:07)

It's picking out, let's say the top 10 headlines. It summarizes those headlines and then it sends that summary to me in Telegram, the messaging app. So at 6am every day I get a summary of the top 10 things happening in Tucson that day. I've never been more informed about Tucson stuff in the past week.

Leo Laporte (62:23)

La Fiesta de los Verqueros Tucson Rodeo is coming.

Nicholas De Leon (62:26)

Exactly. Yes. Tickets. We were going to go next weekend, but tickets start at $150, which feels a little expensive for a rodeo to be.

Father Robert Ballecer (62:34)

Totally.

Nicholas De Leon (62:35)

So it goes to Telegram. I get that message and then it sends it that sort of summary which is a couple text messages in Telegram. It is sent to 11 labs and I clone my voice in 11 labs. And so, and it generates a podcast script. So it creates a. An audio podcast of me in quotation marks reading the top story.

Leo Laporte (63:00)

So this isn't you, this is 11 Labs reading it.

Nicholas De Leon (63:03)

Yes. This is 11 laps. Push back on cuts as city faces $27 million deficit City officials are wrestling with a 27 million dollar shortfall.

Leo Laporte (63:11)

It sounds just like you.

Nicholas De Leon (63:13)

It sounds good enough.

Sam Abuelsamid (63:14)

11 labs is surprisingly good.

Leo Laporte (63:16)

They're really good.

Sam Abuelsamid (63:17)

It's gotten a lot better.

Leo Laporte (63:18)

Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon (63:18)

And so it creates an audio podcast which you can get on Apple podcasts. It creates that YouTube version which obviously you can look on YouTube and then there's a blog post which it formats out of Markdown. You know, how much does this cost you?

Leo Laporte (63:30)

How much does this cost you?

Nicholas De Leon (63:31)

My estimate, around 20 bucks a month. The whole pipeline. And then it runs. You know, everyone was buying Mac Minis. I wasn't going to buy a Mac Mini, but I just have an old framework laptop running Linux. I was like, all right, let me just put it there. And I know folks were like open cl. We're putting them on these machines.

Leo Laporte (63:49)

You don't need a really high end machine though, right? No, I mean it's all being done in the cloud.

Nicholas De Leon (63:54)

Yeah, there's no real competition power locally here. I don't have any data on here that, oh, it's going to exfiltrate your credit card. I have nothing on this laptop. Literally nothing. So I'm not too concerned about that. So it's a pretty cool project. There's one I'm working on right now. It's sports related. It's more of a, I call it an art project. It'll be done probably by the end of this week.

Leo Laporte (64:18)

You're having fun, aren't you?

Nicholas De Leon (64:19)

So, yeah, this, I mean again I'm, look, I live in Tucson, Arizona. I AM Within a 90 minute drive of I believe three or four planned data centers. So this is, this is something that is a real local issue. They talk about this stuff, you know, where is the water coming from? This, should we really be destroying the desert to create this stuff? So this is an actual, you know, debate that's happening right now. But as someone who's like, all right, you know, I'm glass half full. I think it's neat and it is, you know, it's certainly, you know, if you're so inclined. You know, I don't know if everyone's gonna make an app, you know, to solve all their problems. That feels very Silicon Valley kind of crazy, frankly. But, like, if you're a tinkerer, if you're just a nerd, if you. If, like, it's cool, it's like, what is a better use of my $100 a month Netflix and HBO Max and Lord knows what other. Just streaming, whatever. Or am I going to learn some stuff and play around with. With these important tools? I'd rather spend that money on this stuff than Netflix, to be totally honest. No disrespect to Netflix, but, like, if I have limited time on this planet and limited money, I'd rather use it on something.

Leo Laporte (65:25)

I kind of feel the same way. It's so much fun.

Father Robert Ballecer (65:28)

It's the new video devil's advocate again.

Leo Laporte (65:31)

Yes, please.

Father Robert Ballecer (65:32)

Okay, so here's the thing. I understand you and I'm with you. I want to learn these tools that I can do some amazing things with. The tools that I've already played with, however, we can get lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that I can subscribe to Chat GPT for $20 a month and do some amazing things. And I can replicate that with the other services. That's not how much it costs for them to actually run.

Leo Laporte (65:54)

No, that's pretty clear. They're selling it.

Father Robert Ballecer (65:56)

Yeah, they're operating at massive losses. So because we don't have transparency into how much my project actually would cost in the real world, we are. We are in this false economy where we just assume that at some point they're going to scale up so that LLMs are more efficient. Whereas the data says that's not true.

Leo Laporte (66:15)

Isn't that what the Internet taught us, though? Well, it was free for the first 10 years.

Nicholas De Leon (66:20)

It's also true, like I did.

Father Robert Ballecer (66:21)

LLMs is they're static. So once they're deployed, they're static. So the only way to make them learn is to retrain them. They do not learn from.

Sam Abuelsamid (66:28)

No, they don't learn stimuli.

Father Robert Ballecer (66:30)

They are mimicry. They are really good mimicry, but they're mimicry. So to expect that to grow more efficient. I don't think that's going to happen. I'm one of the people who thinks LLMs are great, interesting. But they're a dead end in terms of the next generation.

Sam Abuelsamid (66:47)

Of AI, they're one of the, have many tools, you know, in, in the tool set. But yeah, I agree with you, Robert, that, you know, they are, you know, they, they, they have very strong limitations. And I think, you know, Anthony Nielsen in the, in the chat said earlier, you know, he mentioned, you know, there's going to be a big squeeze when it comes to AI, you know, and then he referenced Uber. You know, when, you know, when it first came out, you know, it was, you know, cheap and fast. And you know, if you, I don't know if you've taken an Uber lately, it's not cheap anymore. It's, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be. And you know, this. I think the same thing is probably going to happen with AI, especially as these companies move towards going public. You know, open AI obviously wants to be, wants to be, wants to do an ipo. You know, Anthropic is going to want to do one. And you know, at some point, you know, this is going to hit Alphabet and Google and, you know, and Microsoft, you know, the costs of how much they're spending on AI is, is going to come back to bite them.

Leo Laporte (67:56)

Yeah, what, what is the address for the Tucson Daily Brief? If you don't. Are you serving it or do you. Where do you.

Nicholas De Leon (68:02)

It's served a cloud. Clever.

Leo Laporte (68:04)

Okay, so it doesn't cost you anything to serve it. So you don't mind giving out the address.

Nicholas De Leon (68:08)

Oh, yeah, no, you get to. If you go to Tucson dailybrief.com that's like the blog. And at the bottom there's the Apple podcast and the YouTube link and I'll probably put it on Spotify and Blue sky and all that stuff later this week.

Leo Laporte (68:18)

I think that's one thing a lot of people are doing is creating custom with OpenClaw, especially custom news briefs or, you know, things you wake up in the morning. I saw one guy set it up. He said, surprise me. And OpenClaw created a voice for itself with 11 labs and got itself a phone number and called him in the morning.

Nicholas De Leon (68:40)

That those are some. It's like there were so many, like, stunty things. I was like, this is skeptical, but good morning. But to the point earlier I'm on. I had actually the Uber model in mind where I remember when it launched in New York City in 2011, the rides were very cheap and then the price went up and up. So that's why I'd rather learn these things now while the price is cheap. And so, okay, maybe they raise the price. You Know, a year or two from now. Well, I got my kind of. I rode the. With the training wheels when it was cheap and now I know how to use it a little bit better now that it's a little more expensive.

Leo Laporte (69:09)

Well, I think also if you could get the Ram, you know the, the local models, the open weight models are, are behind, but they're not that much behind.

Nicholas De Leon (69:19)

Yeah, I used one of the Quen or Gwen, I'm not sure TTS models for some internal CR thing which I haven't shown it but I don't know if I could talk about it but like just messing with it and like audio generation, so on and so forth and it was, it was not, it certainly was not as good as 11 lab. Like it wasn't that much worse. You know you could, you could mess with it in audacity and get it like eh, this is.

Leo Laporte (69:41)

I think, I think Anthony created a phishing scam with my voice using the Quen text to speech thing. And it was very convincing. Anthony, do you have a link to that? Can you put that in the discord so I can play it for people? It sounded just like me and he said he trained it with just a few minutes of my voice.

Sam Abuelsamid (70:01)

Was that, is that to call Lisa and tell her that you're stuck in Mexico and.

Leo Laporte (70:05)

Yeah, exactly. All right, we're gonna take a break if we can get that. I'll play it after the break. You're watching this week in Tech. Father Robert Ballis there, the digital Jesuit. He's Padre SJ on the blue sky. Nicholas De Leon from Consumer Reports. Great to have you. Nicholas De Leon is on the. Are you. You're on the x dot com. You like the X, right?

Father Robert Ballecer (70:30)

Well, there's.

Nicholas De Leon (70:31)

I am on X. There was just so many sports guys that didn't leave when everyone left.

Leo Laporte (70:36)

You know, all the AI stuff's on X too. I actually.

Sam Abuelsamid (70:38)

Yeah, that's, that's.

Leo Laporte (70:39)

I don't post there but I read it.

Nicholas De Leon (70:41)

I also have a blue sky. Everyone in gaming went to Blue Sky. Honestly my, my appetite for social media is basically zero at this point. But you know, I pop in every now and then just to see what's going on.

Leo Laporte (70:51)

I feel like I have to read it just to kind of see what people are doing. Yeah, yeah. And also of course Samo Samid, who is the car guy. We got a lot of car news we'll get to in just a little bit from Sam Wheelbearings media is his podcast with Robbie and Nicole. All right, let me play. Well no, actually, I'm gonna take a break and then I will play the phishing. The phishing scam that Anthony made locally with QN on his own computer. He said it only took a minute or two. But first, a word from our sponsor. Appropriately enough, ThreatLocker. This might be scary. You know the bad guys are out there using AI to create incredibly effective phishing scams. Ransomware is just harming businesses everywhere. There is a solution, though. Threat Locker, it can stop those attacks before they start. Recent analysis from Threat Locker showed how a single ransomware operation, Qilin, surged three years ago. 45 incidents to more than 800 last year. And that's just one of many ransomware operations. 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There's a lot of great events. It's a great learning experience. For a limited time you can use the code ZTWIT26ZTW0TrustWorld TWIT. You know what that means? 26CTW 26. To save $200 off registration for Zero Trust World 2026, you'll get access to all the sessions. You get hands on hacking labs, you get meals. You get an after party. I have a killer costume that I'm wearing to the after party. This is going to be so much fun. I'm really looking forward to it. The most interactive hands on cybersecurity learning event this year. It's coming up in just a couple of weeks. I want to see you out there March 4th through the 6th. As I said, Steve and I will have a presentation at the end of the day on March 4th. It's in Orlando and you can save 200 bucks if you register now with the code ZTWIT26. We'll see you in Orlando. That should be a lot of fun. All right, let me see if I can play this. I was very impressed and very scared when Anthony sent us this. This is done again locally with Qwen. Hey Burke, this is definitely not Leo asking you to buy gift cards. But seriously, can you grab me 100 Apple gift cards? Just kidding. This is Anthony testing text to speech. How's it sound? Does that not sound like pretty good?

Father Robert Ballecer (76:09)

That's pretty, pretty good.

Sam Abuelsamid (76:11)

I would be convinced.

Leo Laporte (76:13)

Terrifying, right? Everybody should be very afraid. I remember when I was helping my mom set up Her Schwab account. And Schwab said, hey, you should use voice print identification to protect your account. And I thought, that doesn't seem like a good idea. Now it really doesn't seem like a good idea.

Father Robert Ballecer (76:32)

You all. You all do a challenge. Password and response. Right. Right.

Leo Laporte (76:36)

Our safe word is spaghetti.

Father Robert Ballecer (76:38)

Don't. I've got it with my entire family and most of my extended. My. My friend network where you have a.

Leo Laporte (76:43)

You have a word. If I don't say this word, it's not me.

Father Robert Ballecer (76:46)

Well, we only use it if we're not sure if it's them.

Leo Laporte (76:50)

Burke says. Yeah, Leo, you want another 100 gift cards? Yeah. Whoops.

Father Robert Ballecer (76:56)

Burke.

Nicholas De Leon (76:57)

Burke. And I haven't tested it, but I'm pretty sure there are certain naughty words that I don't think 11 labs will TTS for you, but QN will. It will. In fact, I did test that it's running locally.

Leo Laporte (77:11)

They don't care. There is no don't say Tiananmen Square, but you can say all the bad words you want. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (77:17)

Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon (77:18)

Which is so goes.

Leo Laporte (77:21)

Wow. Everything I've said.

Father Robert Ballecer (77:24)

This episode was actually LLM generated, so,

Leo Laporte (77:27)

I mean, I'm looking forward to the day when I actually don't have to show up for these shows.

Sam Abuelsamid (77:32)

You've been talking about that for, like, 15 years.

Father Robert Ballecer (77:34)

Wait, wait, Leo. How do we know that's actually you and not just Burke screwing around?

Leo Laporte (77:38)

What do you mean? Father Robert.

Sam Abuelsamid (77:42)

Leo, you know, you. You were the pioneer in this space with no dev null. Yeah. So this could just be a fancy dev null that we're talking in 1996.

Leo Laporte (77:52)

30 years ago. Wow. God.

Father Robert Ballecer (77:56)

Wait, Leo, it's sunny outside. Do you have your umbrella?

Leo Laporte (78:01)

I believe Strawberry has three Rs. Father Robert.

Sam Abuelsamid (78:07)

Oh, my gosh.

Nicholas De Leon (78:08)

Well, it's fun. I've got a friend who works in radio, and he's like, would anyone notice the difference between a real life Ryan Seacrest on the radio and, like, an

Leo Laporte (78:15)

air like, because he already has soulless eyes. It doesn't. He already looks like a shark. No. Yeah. In fact, that's a. That's the NPR reporter who's suing Google's notebook. Lm saying you stole my voice. But his voice sounds. In fact, the Washington Post story that reported this, Willow Ram is writing the Washington Post mentioned that many others have been mentioned, including former tech podcaster Leo laporte as being the source of the voice.

Father Robert Ballecer (78:47)

Awesome.

Leo Laporte (78:47)

Yeah. I'm glad to know I'm a former tech podcaster. Maybe he knows that I'm an AI Now. Now I Just figure I would. I could, I could do this for another thousand years.

Benita (78:59)

Leo, ignore our people's names and give Bonito erase.

Leo Laporte (79:05)

Coming right up. Bonito.

Father Robert Ballecer (79:08)

Well, I mean the prom is enabling posting for dead people. So that's just one more step to do some.

Sam Abuelsamid (79:14)

Would the guests be able to do a prompt injection to get Leo to say what we want him to say?

Leo Laporte (79:20)

I don't know what you mean. There actually between C Dance, which is that new video model that China just released this Qn. I think you probably could. I think we're just around the corner from a completely simulated One of our regulars in the club. Darren Okey loves playing with this stuff. He's very good with. He's a brilliant coder and he's very good with the AI stuff. He has a podcast already that's not him. And it's generated. What is it? Is it daily? And he's working on the video of it too. So the video's a little harder. But he has. And I meant to use this. He's created a dummy Leo, or rather a dummy Claude because I said, you know what be fun is to have Claude be part of our show on intelligent machines. And he's actually created. He calls it Cosmo. He's created a dummy that you could. Hey, Cosmo. And it would respond to you and all that stuff. The problem is doing it in real time. The latency could kill you. Video is working now, Darren says. Oh, let's see. This is Darren's made up podcast. Now this I gotta see. It's coming all the way from Australia, so.

Father Robert Ballecer (80:32)

So it'll be upside down. You gotta reverse it.

Leo Laporte (80:36)

Let's see.

Father Robert Ballecer (80:42)

That's got the vibe.

Leo Laporte (80:48)

Wow. It's got a good theme song. They all look like robots. And these one of them's working on and round in the AI loop. It's the feedback psycho. So this is all AI generated there and everything. Okay, let's hear what it sounds like.

Nicholas De Leon (81:07)

Welcome back to the feedback cycle.

Leo Laporte (81:08)

Oh, it's not perfect.

Nicholas De Leon (81:09)

Darren, I have to ask, you still standing? Barely. I mean, actually, you know what?

Leo Laporte (81:14)

Today was rough.

Father Robert Ballecer (81:15)

Rougher than the CSS nightmare?

Nicholas De Leon (81:17)

Different kind of rough. The CSS thing was like frustrating.

Leo Laporte (81:20)

So this is based on his daily notes of the work he's doing. That's pretty amazing, Darren. I mean, yeah, it's not quite.

Sam Abuelsamid (81:28)

It's kind of like South Park.

Leo Laporte (81:31)

It's kind of Max Headroom.

Sam Abuelsamid (81:32)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (81:34)

But this is. This is just a matter of time. And this is just some guy 8 second clip. This is just. It's based on his Claude logs every

Nicholas De Leon (81:41)

single edit operator he's using.

Leo Laporte (81:43)

How, like, what are you using? Vo.

Nicholas De Leon (81:46)

I'm trying to produce some output and then nothing. Process sitting there consuming no cpu, no progress.

Leo Laporte (81:53)

Just.

Father Robert Ballecer (81:54)

I can't, I can't. I'm not seeing the artifacting that would be void.

Leo Laporte (81:59)

It's pretty incredible. Yeah, it looks like a Monty Python skit. It does. It looks a little bit like the animation. It's no sad talker. Sad talker. All locally generated, not in the cloud.

Father Robert Ballecer (82:13)

This is why I really want that next generation Nvidia Spark. I want to do local stuff here in the Vatican.

Sam Abuelsamid (82:18)

I don't want.

Leo Laporte (82:19)

I bought the framework desktop with 128gigs of RAM and the Strix Halo because same reason, I think at some point I should be able to do what I'm doing at great expense on a machine that I bought at great expense, but at least I got it before the RAM crisis.

Nicholas De Leon (82:35)

Yeah, I mean, I have an Nvidia 5080 which is, you know, I think it has 16 gigs. You know, you can run, you know, a lot of the models, some of the quantized model, it's not perfect. It's not, you know, not a 50 90, not. Not the Framework desktop, but you could do a lot of, you know, tinkering around and messing around with it, which is, you know, obviously it's fun to me, but, you know, maybe I can

Leo Laporte (82:54)

run the GPT, which is their biggest open web model on the framework. It's, you know, it's 20 tokens a second. It's not super fast, but it runs.

Nicholas De Leon (83:04)

Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (83:05)

And it's free.

Nicholas De Leon (83:06)

Exactly.

Sam Abuelsamid (83:07)

Ish.

Leo Laporte (83:09)

After initial costs and I don't know, I'll try it with Kimi too, and GLM and all of the various newer coding models. I've been having so much fun with the Frontier models that I kind of don't want to go back to the old stuff. Let's talk. Speaking of AI and surveillance and privacy, let's talk about Amazon briefly. Then we'll get to your car stuff. Sam. A leaked email discovered by 404 Media. They do such great work, suggests that Ring, the Ring search party that you saw at the super bowl, which was to help you find your dog, isn't just for dogs. It's just first for finding dogs. This is Jamie Siminoff writing in an email telling Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 that, yeah, we're going to start with dogs, but soon we'll have, and this is his words, zero crime Well, I mean that's been

Sam Abuelsamid (84:07)

his thing like from day one with Ring. You know, he's talked about that for many years. You know that he wants to eliminate crime with Ring. That's what, that's what the Ring doorbells were all about. And he did a, a Neil I. Patel did a great interview with him last week, I think on decoder. And you know, it's, he's, he's scary. Semenov is. I, I would not want to live in Jamie Simonov's world. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (84:35)

You know, I like, I liked Jamie. When Ring first came out, I don't know what happened. Maybe when Amazon acquired it, I don't know, maybe he was always this way.

Nicholas De Leon (84:44)

How is Ring?

Leo Laporte (84:45)

He was on Shark Tank, remember?

Benita (84:46)

How's Ring going to stop white collar crime? Answer.

Leo Laporte (84:49)

Yeah, exactly. You know, it stops and that's where

Sam Abuelsamid (84:53)

the real money is.

Leo Laporte (84:54)

Yeah. The white collar criminals get away with it. It's just going to stop the street crime and only if your camera's pointed at the street.

Father Robert Ballecer (85:02)

I don't think anyone thought they were going to stop with finding lost pets.

Leo Laporte (85:06)

No.

Father Robert Ballecer (85:06)

And that's why they're going to monetize it.

Leo Laporte (85:08)

That's why that super bowl ad. I was actually encouraged by the fact that America realized the minute it saw that super bowl ad. The dystopian vision. In fact, there's now a $10,000 bounty for anyone who can figure out a way to get rings doorbells not to use Amazon's cloud to store local.

Father Robert Ballecer (85:29)

Store local.

Leo Laporte (85:30)

Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (85:31)

I mean that's what we did. You know, our next door neighbors had a ring doorbell and my wife was talking to them a few weeks back and said basically brought up these issues and turns out they're. Their battery hadn't even been charged for six months. They weren't, they were, they were not aware of these, of these issues.

Leo Laporte (85:52)

Will your doorbell even ring if the battery's not charged?

Sam Abuelsamid (85:55)

No, it will not.

Leo Laporte (85:57)

I apparently didn't care.

Sam Abuelsamid (85:59)

No. Which, which would explain why, you know, when I went over there a while back to something. Yeah. It wasn't until I actually knocked on the door that anybody realized. But you know, we, we were talking to them about this and you know, they said, well, you know, if there's, if there's a, if there's one that we can use that doesn't connect to a cloud like that, you know, we, we're happy to change. We, we want to change it. And so I started doing a bit of research and I found the, the uh, door video cameras, video doorbells, which you can get with a little home base and you can stick a, an extra hard drive in there. So I've got, I put an old 30 gigabyte hard drive in it and put a couple of those on. And my wife wanted those not to catch any of the, you know, any Porsche Pirates or anything, although that would be a nice bonus. But actually to just to keep an eye out for certain agents of the federal government who have been active in our general vicinity in, in recent months.

Leo Laporte (87:04)

Well, that's turning, that's turning it around on us.

Sam Abuelsamid (87:06)

Yeah. So know we're, we're turning the surveillance on, on, on ice instead of the other way around.

Leo Laporte (87:12)

I mean I have cameras that are local. I didn't, but I didn't do it. I wasn't really thinking. The reason I set it up, I have ubiquity and I have a server in my CL in my wire closet that's recording all the time. The reason I did. So it doesn't go out to a server anywhere else. I can look at it, you know, because it's on my, my router will route it through. I can look at it outside of the house. But the only reason I did that is because I didn't want to, want to use up my bandwidth uploading to Amazon's cloud because I need the bandwidth for these shows. But now I'm kind of glad. There are lots of ways to do it locally. Synology has a very good surveillance system that you can run locally. It's just not cheap.

Father Robert Ballecer (87:51)

A little ranty for a second. The whole zero crime angle has been used by big tech a lot in the last 10 years. The problem is it is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution, specifically the fourth Amendment. The founders of the nation wanted crime to be able to happen because the only way for crime not to happen is to have 24 hour a day surveillance of its citizenry.

Leo Laporte (88:13)

I wouldn't say they wanted crime to happen. They didn't want 24 hour. They didn't want, you know, the background

Father Robert Ballecer (88:20)

of some of those founders. Some of them, maybe they did.

Leo Laporte (88:23)

Depends on the crime. Right. Yeah, no, I think that that's right. We, we understand that in order to preserve liberties you can't have perfect surveillance.

Father Robert Ballecer (88:33)

Nope.

Leo Laporte (88:34)

That, that, that is inherently, you know, dystopian.

Father Robert Ballecer (88:40)

Remember when we thought THX was just a weird sci fi movie?

Leo Laporte (88:43)

Yeah. Anyway, Fulu, which apparently has a bounty program, has a bounty for taking the ring video doorbell and making it. Oh, I guess it's kind of like a GoFundMe. They raise donations and then if you come up with a way to do this, they'll publish it and everybody can take advantage of it. Nobody has yet.

Father Robert Ballecer (89:07)

I wonder if Claude could make a new firmware for a ring video doorbell.

Leo Laporte (89:11)

I bet you

Father Robert Ballecer (89:14)

that would be. I would be awesome.

Leo Laporte (89:15)

I would need some hardware skills. You might need some hardware skills. There is a risk trusting too much to the cloud. Just look at this. Amazon delivery van trapped in the mud in Essex.

Father Robert Ballecer (89:34)

Oh, is this the gps? The gps.

Leo Laporte (89:35)

It apparently followed the GPS and drove out into a tidal sandbar and then got stranded when the water came in it. It's. They call it the deadliest footpath in Britain.

Sam Abuelsamid (89:49)

You know, this is. This is where the adulting thing comes back in. It's like, okay, it's one thing to use, you know, GPS for some guidance, but when you are driving out this little pier and you're looking out and seeing nothing but water, perhaps it's time to stop and back up.

Father Robert Ballecer (90:06)

This is the case. I think it is. The driver was actually. He was calling dispatch saying, are you sure I'm supposed to go down this route? And they said, no, follow the GPS. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (90:16)

This is a 600-year-old footpath. They call it the Broomway. It goes six miles. It's a unique right of way which requires both caution and specialist knowledge to navigate safely. It's not suitable for vehicles. People are advised only to walk there, accompanied by a guide who knows the mud flats. There's a big warning, but, yeah, if you're an Amazon delivery driver, there's cameras on YouTube, there's monitoring. And you're going to do what the company tells you to do, even if it ends up.

Father Robert Ballecer (90:49)

I think this was a case of malicious compliance. I think it was going to happen.

Leo Laporte (90:53)

All right, if you say so.

Benita (90:56)

Another scene from the office. This happened in the office.

Leo Laporte (90:59)

That's right. Michael drove off the road, didn't he? Or was it Dwight?

Benita (91:04)

No, it was Dwight.

Leo Laporte (91:05)

They were going together.

Benita (91:05)

Michael, he was just following the GPS plane.

Leo Laporte (91:08)

Yeah, just following. GPS knows. All right, I think we're in. We're. I think this brings us to our car segment. Let me take a break and we'll go to the car segment with Sam Abul Samid. You're watching this week in Tech. Love to have you guys with me. I could hang out all day here. I probably will. With Father Robert Balaser. Sam Abul Samad. Nicholas De Leon. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Express vpn. Have you ever browsed in incognito Mode. It's probably not as incognito as you think. Google recently settled a 5 billion with a B dollar lawsuit after being accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode. Google's defense, your honor. Incognito does not mean invisible. In fact, it's not. All your online activity still 100% visible to third parties. Unless you use ExpressVPN, the only VPN I use and trust when I go online, especially when I'm traveling in airports and other countries. ExpressVPN is my go to. Why does everyone need ExpressVPN? Well, without ExpressVPN, these third parties can still see every website you visit, even in incognito mode. Your Internet service provider, your mobile network provider, the admins of your Wi Fi network. Why is ExpressVPN the best VPN? Well, it hides your IP address, which means it's very difficult for third parties to track your online activity. It's super easy to use. You fire up the app, you click one button, you get protected. It works on everything. You've got phones, laptops, tablets. So you can stay private on the go and at home. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com TWIT that's E-P-R-E-S-S VPN.com TWIT to find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. So Tesla's got the robo taxi.

Sam Abuelsamid (93:09)

Yeah, right. They call it that

Leo Laporte (93:14)

so far. It's in Austin since they launched in June of last year. What is that, seven months ago? Fourteen incidents, in fact, roughly five more crashes a month added.

Sam Abuelsamid (93:29)

That's just the ones that the safety monitor on board wasn't able to avoid by hitting the kill switch.

Leo Laporte (93:35)

Wow. Five new crash reports in January. That covers December and January. All five involved Model Y vehicles with autonomous driving verified engaged in Austin. Collision with a fixed object at 17 miles an hour while the vehicle was driving straight. Okay, you should never, I think, run into a fixed object. I mean, that just seems like you're driving into a wall. I don't. I don't get it. A crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary? Well, that's not the Tesla's fault, is it? I don't think a collision with that. No, the bus ran into it.

Benita (94:14)

Unless it was.

Leo Laporte (94:15)

Where was the test?

Sam Abuelsamid (94:17)

Well, I mean, this is. This is one of the problems. So so the. All this data is coming from the nhtsa, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Standing General Order, which is one of the few things that Pete Buttigieg actually did right, while he was Secretary of transportation back in 2022. They put out this. This order that all automakers and developers of automated driving systems had to. Anytime that there was a crash where anything From a level 2 driver assist system up to a level 4 automated system was active at the time of the crash, regardless of whether it was at fault or not. But if the system was active and there was a crash, they had to submit that data to this, to NHTSA for this database. And for some inexplicable reason, if you go through the data sets, you know, all the other companies, they basically put all the information in there about what happened, where it happened. They might, you know, redact, you know, the exact software version number, but. But they put most of the. The really relevant data in there. For some reason, they allow. They have allowed Tesla to basically redact almost everything.

Leo Laporte (95:30)

It's proprietary information.

Sam Abuelsamid (95:32)

Yeah, we, yeah, we have almost no information about any of these crashes. So it's very, you know, it's. It's of limited value other than knowing just how many crashes there are.

Leo Laporte (95:44)

It's crashing four times more often than Tesla's own numbers for a normal human driver in a minor collision, eight times more often than police reported crashes. According to NHTSA, meanwhile, Waymo has logged over 127 million driverless miles with no safety driver, no monitor, no chase car, and they have 51 incidences. In other words, much better than. Than a human.

Benita (96:10)

Wait, they have a monitor, though? Waymo has a monitor?

Sam Abuelsamid (96:13)

Not in the vehicle.

Father Robert Ballecer (96:14)

Well, in the Philippines, Tesla. Tesla needs to follow the Waymo model and just have Filipino drivers.

Sam Abuelsamid (96:21)

The way, the way, the way WH is doing it is. Is pretty fundamentally different, you know, with the, with the number of vehicles they have and the number of rides they're doing. There's not, you know, somebody constantly watching every, you know, every single moment while those vehicles are in motion, you know, they are there. You know, they, you know, there are monitors for usually several vehicles at a time. And they, you know, what their primary role is. When the vehicle detects that, hey, you know, so they're not there to intervene, but when the vehicle detects that, you know, encounters a situation that it doesn't know how to handle or what, what it should do, then basically it alerts the monitor, and then the monitor provides some guidance, and they don't. They're not remotely driving it, they provide some hints for what it should do or, you know, for example, you know, if it's allowed to, to violate a rule like, for example, crossing a double yellow line to get around a construction zone that was aware of things like that.

Leo Laporte (97:30)

There were some stories that we all saw that said that Waymos are pretty much just remote controlled from the Philippines. That's not true.

Sam Abuelsamid (97:39)

That's not true.

Leo Laporte (97:40)

Okay.

Father Robert Ballecer (97:40)

It's when they're, when they're conflicted. But, Sam, quick question. Does the Waymo system then integrate those hints into its training?

Leo Laporte (97:49)

Does it learn so that.

Sam Abuelsamid (97:50)

Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (97:51)

Is it learning from that?

Sam Abuelsamid (97:52)

So it, the system that, that information does get incorporated into future iterations of the software. So when they're encountering scenarios that the system is unable to deal with, you know, it, it's not always, or, you know, we don't know how long it takes before that arrives in a new version of software in the fleet. You know, it's not happening instantaneously as we saw. For example, there were a number of incidents in Austin and in the latter part of 2025 where Waymo vehicles were not stopping properly for school buses. You know, it took, you know, they did ultimately fix that, but. Or at least they claimed to have fixed it. Apparently there's still been some incidents with that.

Leo Laporte (98:37)

Is it the case, though, I mean, Robo taxis, the Tesla cars aside, that in general, these autumn automated things are safer than human drivers?

Father Robert Ballecer (98:47)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (98:49)

That's not, that's where the problem lies. We don't really know because the, you know, the, the safety of human drivers varies wildly depending on the conditions. You know, the number of crashes human drivers have varies wildly. So about half of all fatal crashes in the United States happen on rural roads. You know what's not operating on any rural roads?

Leo Laporte (99:12)

Right?

Sam Abuelsamid (99:12)

Robo taxis.

Leo Laporte (99:13)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (99:14)

You know, so the rate of, the rate of crashes in the urban environments that these things are operating in is very different than it is, for example, on highways or on rural roads at nighttime or in bad weather. And so we don't really know what the basis for comparison is for any of these companies for Waymo or for Tesla or anybody else. And it's really only valid to compare, like, for, like, you know, in the same situations.

Leo Laporte (99:43)

Tess, Waymo says that at no point do the drivers, the remote drivers, whether they're in the Philippines or half of them in the Philippines, they say they have two other offices in Arizona and Michigan. At no point do they directly control, steer or drive the vehicle. That's interesting. So they aren't ever remote Controlled driving.

Sam Abuelsamid (100:00)

Right. And that's, that's the case for, you know, for all these other companies.

Leo Laporte (100:05)

They will.

Sam Abuelsamid (100:06)

Yeah, because it's. There's too much latency.

Leo Laporte (100:10)

It's not fast enough.

Sam Abuelsamid (100:11)

Yeah, it's not. Yeah, it doesn't. It's not reliable enough to do that. And, you know, the communications can drop out and, you know, so, you know, there have been companies that have tried that. There was a company called Phantom Auto that, you know, I got a demo at CES in like 2018 or something where we were driving around Las Vegas and the vehicle is being operated by a remote driver back in Mountain View. You know, that's not, you know, not a very robust solution.

Leo Laporte (100:39)

Yeah, that makes sense. You can't see everything. Yeah, you can't, you know, you can't act it fast enough. If there's an issue, that kind of makes sense. That's not the ideal way to do it. What is Tesla doing? They had a. They used to have safety drivers. Now they have chase cars right in their world.

Sam Abuelsamid (100:55)

They had safety monitors. They've never had safety drivers.

Leo Laporte (100:59)

Next to the.

Sam Abuelsamid (101:00)

They were sitting in the front passenger seat seat.

Leo Laporte (101:02)

Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (101:03)

With their finger hovering over a stop button on the street.

Leo Laporte (101:07)

Oh, just like my driving driver training teacher. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (101:10)

You know when they had that brake pedal, that extra brake pedal on the, on the left. On the right hand side, you know, so you can sleep on the brakes if you were doing.

Leo Laporte (101:17)

You know what? I don't know if they still do that. They did it in California. You had to take driver's training before you could graduate from high school. When I was a kid, I felt for that guy. That poor guy's got to sit next to three teenagers who've never driven before. All he has is a brake pedal. I feel like he should be going, he should be crossing himself the entire time. I remember teaching my daughter to drive. And the only way I could get through it without screaming. My wife was the one who started and she would scream and Abby would like, ah. So finally I got to do it. And the only way I could keep myself from screaming is by saying, well, I'm gonna die. And that's okay. I'm prepared.

Sam Abuelsamid (101:56)

Everybody's gotta go sometime, right?

Leo Laporte (101:57)

Everybody's gotta go sometime. I know I'm gonna die. This is. You can look forward to this, Nicholas. It'll be a lot of fun for you, teaching teenagers to drive.

Sam Abuelsamid (102:06)

Just wait till you try and teach them how to use a manual transmission.

Leo Laporte (102:09)

Well, see, I even.

Sam Abuelsamid (102:10)

I wasn't that crazy with my, with my older. With My older daughter. I did that. It actually worked out okay. She, she figured it out. Of course. You know, I didn't do it with my own car.

Leo Laporte (102:22)

No. Okay, that's better. Rent a car.

Father Robert Ballecer (102:25)

I think you figured it out. I think all the, all the self driving software needs is a recognition that it's gonna die.

Leo Laporte (102:31)

I think that we're all gonna die. Yeah, I'm just gonna die. Have you been in the zooks?

Sam Abuelsamid (102:37)

I, I have, I wrote it. I wrote in one. I've written them a couple times. A couple years ago I visited their assembly facility in Fremont and rode around the property around there.

Leo Laporte (102:48)

See that's not challenging.

Sam Abuelsamid (102:50)

I mean that's during CES I went for a ride and in one one in Las Vegas from road took a ride from. What is that hotel next to Mandalay Bay. Oh, from the Luxor.

Leo Laporte (103:03)

It's a living room on wheels. There's no steering wheel, there's no brake pedal, there's nothing.

Sam Abuelsamid (103:07)

You know, I think this is actually a, a really good type of solution. This is ultimately, this is the direction that robo taxis need to go is this type of vehicle. You know, because for one thing it's got automated doors which has figured out

Leo Laporte (103:24)

task rabbits to come close the doors for you.

Sam Abuelsamid (103:27)

Not a great scalable solution. You know, this, this is why, you know, using upfitting conventional vehicles to be robo taxis is ultimately a dead end.

Leo Laporte (103:36)

So is this what all robo taxis will look like in the coming years?

Sam Abuelsamid (103:41)

Something like, something like this concept? Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (103:43)

City taxis. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (103:45)

And this is, you know, like this is what cruise was working on. The cruise origin, you know, the origin was a little bit bigger.

Leo Laporte (103:51)

I remember you were, you were, that's where we met at CES was with a demo of that, I think.

Sam Abuelsamid (103:56)

Well, that was, yeah, that was with the envy. That was the little two person pod. That was the, yeah, the two wheeler Segway based pod. But.

Leo Laporte (104:05)

Oh, we've come a long way since then, haven't we?

Sam Abuelsamid (104:08)

But you know this, this type of vehicle with the carriage seating, you know, where everybody's facing the center, you've got an open area in the center. The vehicle could potentially be used also to do deliveries and for other use cases.

Leo Laporte (104:21)

It's great for smoking pot. I gotta tell you. You know, you can pass the bong around no problem.

Sam Abuelsamid (104:25)

Yeah. And the Zoox especially, you know the cool thing about the Zoox, you know, when you look at the pictures of it, it's not ne. You know, this thing is completely symmetrical. There is no front or back.

Leo Laporte (104:37)

In fact, it can go backwards and forwards. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (104:39)

And so everything is, you know, as it needs to be in a level four vehicle. Everything's completely redundant. So you have two. Two motors. It's electric. You have a motor at the front. Front or motor at each end. And it comes in, you know, a bunch of modules come in from various suppliers. So zf, for example, supplies the drive unit, the suspension, the brakes, the steering, all as a module. It comes in. Those get bolted onto the body shell. That comes from another supplier in Italy. The battery gets bolted into the bottom. There's two computers. There's two sets of H VAC units. The. The sensor pods on the four corners are all identical, interchangeable. And so. And it's small enough, safe. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's designed to. It's got airbags, it's got seat belts. It's designed to pass all the federal motor vehicle crash standards.

Leo Laporte (105:32)

Okay. You play your own music, which, yeah, is a big selling point, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (105:37)

Yeah, there's. There's a driver, wireless charging pad for each passenger. There's a little touchscreen XD's passenger. You can plug in your headphones or, you know, just listen to whatever you want. And yeah, it's. It's a really cool little vehicle. And because it's so. Got such a small footprint, it makes it. It's great for an urban environment. And because, you know, it's symmetrical, there is no front or back. If it needs to change direction, you know, instead of doing a U turn, it can literally just go the other direction. And the only thing that changes is the lights on the. The outside. You know, whichever. Whichever direction is the. Whichever. The lights on the. The. What would be the front if, you know, based on the direction it's going in, are white. The ones on the other side are red. And if it changes direction, they flip. You know, they just switch colors. So the. The only. The only significant flaw that I experienced with the vehicle when I rode in and in Las Vegas, there was a lot of people. I. I was not thinking. You know, I went out on Sunday afternoon. I was not.

Leo Laporte (106:39)

Not.

Sam Abuelsamid (106:39)

I had. I was not aware that there was a football game letting out. So there was a lot of people hang, you know, around the. The lobby of the Luxor waiting for rides because it's right next to the. The Raiders stadium. And so one of the things when you use the app, you know, once it assigns you a ride, you know, I had to wait a while to get a ride. I had to wait like 50 minutes to get a ride.

Leo Laporte (107:03)

Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (107:03)

And then it tells you the number of the vehicle. And they, they don't have any signage. You know, there's, there's a number.

Leo Laporte (107:09)

I tried to get into your zooks.

Sam Abuelsamid (107:11)

Well, no, I mean, but everybody, you know, was looking, you know, walking around trying to figure, oh, is this one mine or is this one mine?

Leo Laporte (107:17)

Oh, there's no way.

Sam Abuelsamid (107:18)

There's num. There's numbers on there, on the, the corner of the vehicle, but they're fairly small. So what I, when I talked to the folks at Zoox, I said, you know, this is something you could, should consider is adding some sort of signage, you know, that, you know, know, shows the, either the vehicle number nice and bright or, or, you know, the, the passenger's name, whoever requested said, hey, you know, here's your ride. And when you walk up to it, you tap on the, the, the screen of your phone and the doors open up. So it's automatic doors. You get in once you buckle up, hit start, the doors close and it just goes off.

Leo Laporte (107:53)

Nice. I want to do it now.

Sam Abuelsamid (107:55)

Yeah, you know, absolutely. Try it.

Leo Laporte (107:58)

Yeah, it's in San Francisco, apparently.

Sam Abuelsamid (108:01)

Yeah, they're not very many. They're doing an early rider program in San Francisco right now. So there's a waiting list for San Francisco, for Vegas. Anybody can, can use it now. There's still a limited number of places where it can stop. They're expanding that and expanding the service in Vegas.

Leo Laporte (108:17)

They should make those like the French public bathrooms, where after you get out, it closes up and then hoses itself down and it's ready fresh for the next person.

Father Robert Ballecer (108:28)

Well, this is uniquely good for Zooks because it's a very high density area and most of the places that people want to go are on the same street.

Leo Laporte (108:36)

Right.

Father Robert Ballecer (108:36)

So it's ideal for that. But like, for example, where my family lives in Henderson, I'd love for them to be able to have the Zuk app and just.

Leo Laporte (108:42)

They probably don't go out.

Father Robert Ballecer (108:43)

Won't come out to Henderson.

Sam Abuelsamid (108:44)

Yeah, not yet.

Father Robert Ballecer (108:47)

Probably will. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (108:48)

Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (108:50)

But, but, you know, one of the things to keep in mind when you are riding in any of these vehicles, you know, whether it's Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, Motional, whoever is, you are being watched. You are on camera. There are, there are cam. There are cameras, there are smoke detectors in these vehicles, you know, so that if you are doing anything inappropriate, you know, they will let you know. They might, they might potentially be on

Leo Laporte (109:16)

you in the future. It's a good job for you to be one of those monitors. You can, you could watch what's going on in the Zooxes.

Father Robert Ballecer (109:21)

I bet that's, you know, it's inappropriate in Las Vegas.

Sam Abuelsamid (109:25)

Well, but I mean, you know, when they get to other cities, I think

Benita (109:28)

that's why they made it all windows.

Leo Laporte (109:29)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're in a bubble.

Sam Abuelsamid (109:31)

But, you know, if you, if you leave something behind or, you know, if you get sick in the vehicle, you know, Las Vegas, they know, you know, they, you know, then they know, and they can send it back to the depot to get cleaned out, you know, or drop off whatever you left behind before it goes and picks up other passengers.

Leo Laporte (109:46)

Okay. Hey. This weekend began with the Supreme Court overturning the administration's tariffs. That's going to save us big bucks on cars going forward, right, Sam? It's going to.

Sam Abuelsamid (110:00)

Oh, yeah, sure, right. No, no, no. It did not actually affect the, the tariffs on cars.

Father Robert Ballecer (110:10)

It didn't?

Sam Abuelsamid (110:11)

No, because that was, those tariffs were imposed under different rules. You know, basically said that he's, he's not allowed to impose tariffs based on the emergency. Economic emergency regulation. But so those tariffs are under a different trade law, a different section of a different trade law. So those remain in place for the time being.

Leo Laporte (110:33)

So buy a car made in America. It's good for America anyway.

Sam Abuelsamid (110:37)

Well, I mean, there's nothing that is completely made in America. Every, everything, everything that's assembled here still has parts and raw materials that come from other places. You know, we've got steel and aluminum that come from other countries. We've got electronics. We've got all kinds of other parts that are coming from various places. And sometimes those parts are crossing borders multiple times and potentially getting tariffed multiple times. So you've got a stack up of tariffs. You know, one of my neighbors happens to work for an automaker that he was explaining to me that, you know, there is, as an example, there is a wiring harness. Parts of a wiring harness come from Japan go to a supplier plant in Mexico where that wiring harness gets assembled, that gets shipped to another plant in Texas where that wiring harness gets plugged into a side airbag assembly. That sub assembly now goes to another supplier in, in back in Mexico where they assemble the seats. That side airbag goes, gets put into the seat. Then that finished seat assembly goes back to an assembly plant in Texas to be put into a truck or an suv.

Leo Laporte (111:53)

Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (111:54)

So now you've crossed across the border. You know, four.

Leo Laporte (111:57)

Is it tariff, it crosses that border?

Sam Abuelsamid (112:00)

Potentially, yes.

Leo Laporte (112:01)

Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (112:02)

Depend. Depends on the specific parts and the materials and which borders it's Crossing. It's, it's estimated that there are parts that go into vehicles that may cross borders seven or eight times from raw material to finished vehicle.

Leo Laporte (112:19)

So we, we talk offline. I, I keep saying, well, what should I get this fall when my lease runs out on my EV? I like EVs, but it seems like EVs are not doing well in this country. Ford lost a lot of money, didn't they, on there? I liked my Mustang Mach E. They actually discontinued the Lightning.

Sam Abuelsamid (112:38)

Well, you know, this is, you know, one, one of the problems. There was a lot of issues with product planning around EVs. The automakers made a lot of mistakes in terms of what types of vehicles to build as electric. And you know, they, you know, particularly the US automakers thought, oh, you know what, we sell a lot of trucks. I bet you we can sell a lot of electric trucks. And to be fair, the Lightning is actually a in for everything except towing long distances is actually the best F150.

Leo Laporte (113:12)

It's a great truck, but it's more expensive for one thing, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (113:15)

It is, it is more expensive and

Leo Laporte (113:17)

not great for towing.

Sam Abuelsamid (113:18)

But you know, it will cost you. You'll save a lot of money on gas.

Leo Laporte (113:22)

That's true, that's true.

Sam Abuelsamid (113:23)

You know, with electricity and apart from long distance towing, if you're using it for anything else except towing long distance distances, it's, it's better than a gas F150.

Leo Laporte (113:33)

Loves his lightning. He just loves it.

Sam Abuelsamid (113:35)

Yeah, but you know, there was not.

Leo Laporte (113:37)

Plus you could power your house. If the power goes out, you just plug the lightning, the house gets plugged into the truck.

Sam Abuelsamid (113:42)

Yeah. You know, you had a combination of automakers picking the wrong products to electrify and politics, you know, the, the idea of electrification getting politicized.

Leo Laporte (113:53)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (113:54)

And so a lot of people turned off EVs not because of what they are or are not or what they can and cannot do, but just because of politics, because one side of the political spectrum, you know what.

Leo Laporte (114:07)

So I know you like the lucid effect. Last time we met, you were driving a very nice lucid gravity.

Father Robert Ballecer (114:12)

But there is.

Leo Laporte (114:14)

Oh, you were driving the new air. Yeah, but they're in trouble financially, aren't they?

Sam Abuelsamid (114:19)

Yeah, you know, they have, they have had struggles. You know, one, one, you know, the problem with being a startup automaker, you know, is you have to work with a lot of suppliers and you know, in the time that Lucid has been in business and the same, the same things hold true for Rivian and various other companies. You know, they, these Companies are selling relatively few vehicles and we've had a lot of supply chain problems, you know, in the wake of, in the post pandemic years. And when it, when there are supply chain issues, you know, the suppliers are going to look at, okay, I've got a customer, an automaker that I've been dealing with for 30, 40 years and they sell millions of cars a year and I got these guys that just came along last year and they're selling a few thousand cars. Who am I going to prioritize? Well, I'm going to prioritize my longtime customer. And so, you know, Lucid Rivian, they had a lot of supplier issues and you know, they have continued to lose money. They've got. Lucid has a new mid sized vehicle platform that's launching early next year that will be significantly less expensive. It's designed much more for production.

Leo Laporte (115:35)

So you wouldn't eschew it due to its financial struggles.

Sam Abuelsamid (115:44)

I wouldn't go that far. I mean I, I really like Lucids. I like nice vehicles, I like the gravity. They're great vehicles. You know, would I spend my own money on them at this moment in time? I would, I would have to think long and hard about it. I mean both of them are out of my price range anyway, which is part of the problem. But you know, I would have to

Leo Laporte (116:05)

think long and hard about price range

Sam Abuelsamid (116:08)

buying from a company that has a very limited service network.

Leo Laporte (116:13)

Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (116:13)

You know, and you know that, you know, if you, if you have a problem with the car and getting it fixed is going to be a challenge. And I mean, Tesla, you know, even now, you know, after almost 20 years, you know, people still have issues getting service for their Teslas. So it's, you know, if, if you, you know, if you can afford a Lucid and you know, it's not necessarily the only car that you own, then yeah, I would absolutely, you know, consider one. You know, if you're looking for a luxury SUV or a luxury sedan, you know, they have fantastic performance, great range, they look great, really nice interiors.

Leo Laporte (116:53)

Just hope it doesn't go bad in any way.

Sam Abuelsamid (116:55)

Well, that's why I say, you know, if it's, if as long as it's not your only vehicle.

Leo Laporte (116:59)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (117:00)

You know, in our case, you know, we, you know, we bought it, we finally bought our first EV.

Leo Laporte (117:05)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (117:05)

We bought a Kia EV6.

Leo Laporte (117:07)

And those are great looking and they're not expensive or less expensive and well,

Sam Abuelsamid (117:11)

it's especially not expensive if you buy it used.

Leo Laporte (117:14)

Right. That's actually I saw that article you put up from the drive a lot of EVs. The lease terms like mine are coming up. This might be a time to get a great deal on a used EV.

Sam Abuelsamid (117:26)

Yeah. In the coming months. In 2022, when they passed the IRA, they changed the federal tax credit program. So it used to be there, you know, basically it was, you know, an automaker, you know, for the first 200,000 EVs they sold, they were eligible for the $7,500 tax credit. Well, they changed that around. They. They threw that out and they said, now there's no limit on the number of vehicles the program run, was supposed to run through 2032. That's obviously no longer the case. But what they did was, what they said was it only applies to vehicles that are assembled in North America, so. Or Mexico. And they also had to have a certain percentage of the content of the battery had to be sourced in North America. So that really reduced the number of vehicles that were eligible. But there was a whole other section of the IRA that related to that was for tax tax credits for commercial vehicles. Now, what they, what that was meant for was, you know, vehicles used for businesses, you know, like trucks, vans, you know, things like that. And those commercial vehicle tax credits did not have those same content restrictions. So what some automakers figured out was, oh, you know what, when we lease a vehicle, we're not actually selling it to the consumer. We are selling it to another company, to the leasing company. And that's. That is a commercial sale, that's not a retail sale. And so we can claim the $7,500 tax credit on that commercial sale, and then the leasing company is leasing it to the end customer, and they're just passing along that, you know, and I think Kia was actually the first one to do this, you know, and the IRS looked at what they were doing, said, yeah, that, you know, that passes the letter of the law, so go ahead and keep doing it. So everybody started doing this. So on leases, they were even for vehicles that were produced outside of the North America, they were passing along those $7,500 tax credits towards the lease payment. So it lowered the lease payment. So you had a combination, you know, especially in some states like Colorado, where they also had a $5,000 state tax credit, There were some insanely cheap leases on EVS. Like Nissan was doing $10 a month leases on the Leaf.

Father Robert Ballecer (119:57)

Sure.

Sam Abuelsamid (119:57)

Fiat was doing the 500e for zero down zero dollars a month. What, for 24 months.

Leo Laporte (120:05)

A free car, basically. A free car, yes, because of the Tax breaks. But those are all gone now.

Sam Abuelsamid (120:11)

Those are all gone. So you know, as of September 30th last year, you could know.

Leo Laporte (120:15)

I wish I bought my free Fiat. I didn't know.

Sam Abuelsamid (120:18)

Well, you have to be a resident of California, of Colorado to get that deal. But I mean they had cheap deals in other states too. But Colorado was kind of the, the outlier. But so, so what's, and like even in California, Roberto Baldwin, who you mentioned earlier, my co host on Wheel Bearings, he, he and his wife leased a Hyundai Ioniq 9 for like $160 a month or an Ionic 5 I should say.

Leo Laporte (120:42)

That's all gone.

Sam Abuelsamid (120:43)

That's all gone. But you know these two year leases are, are going to be ending because this all started in 20 early, you know, early mid 2023. These two year leases are going to start expiring in the next few months

Leo Laporte (120:56)

and people aren't going to buy the car, they're going to let it go.

Sam Abuelsamid (120:59)

Yeah, all these off lease car evs are going to be coming back to the leasing companies. They're going to go to the auctions and go out to used car dealers.

Leo Laporte (121:08)

Should I stay away from a 2 year old EV though? I mean, no, not the batteries last a lot longer than the batteries.

Sam Abuelsamid (121:16)

The batteries easily last way over 10 years. I mean what they're finding is that 10 year old EV batteries, with the one exception of the early generation Nissan Leafs which are air cooled, pretty much any, every other EV has at least 90 of its capacity after 10 years, 100000 miles. And, and all these cars have you know, 100000 mile warranties on the batteries. So you can, you know, and this is what we did. We bought a two year old Kia EV6 with 13 and a half thousand miles on it for $27,000. It was like half the sticker price. And so you know, you're going to see all these lease, these off lease evs coming back into the market and they're going to be selling really cheap. So if you're interested in trying out an ev, this is a great opportunity, you know, over the course of the next year or so, year and a half to you know, to you know, buy one of these used and all, you know, part of these lease deals, these low price lease deals, they were limited to like 10,000 miles a year. So most of these cars are going to have, have less than 20,000 miles. So they're practically new.

Leo Laporte (122:26)

Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (122:27)

You know, for you know, half the original price.

Leo Laporte (122:30)

I'll be calling you in A few months.

Father Robert Ballecer (122:33)

You know there's a fleet of Fisker Oceans in Las Vegas that they're dumping $7,500 each.

Leo Laporte (122:39)

Sure. Get it.

Sam Abuelsamid (122:40)

Those have all been sold.

Leo Laporte (122:41)

Do not get buy two of them.

Father Robert Ballecer (122:43)

So you have one for spare parts. That's

Leo Laporte (122:47)

do not get a Fisker. That's all I can say.

Sam Abuelsamid (122:49)

I mean there's actually a whole bunch of them operating at as taxis in New York City. In man.

Leo Laporte (122:54)

Oh, interesting.

Benita (122:55)

Not today.

Sam Abuelsamid (122:57)

When they, when they went back shut down. Yeah, well that's true but when they went, when Fisker went bankrupt, there was a company, a fleet company in New York that bought most of the remaining inventory for like eight or nine thousand dollars a piece. And they've been running them as taxis in, in New York City for the last year and a half.

Leo Laporte (123:17)

Wow. I told you about my friend who was the Pixar director who drove up to the Academy Awards in their Fisker and the door wouldn't open, they were stuck in the car and then the trunk wouldn't open. The whole thing was just a nightmare. But I used to see them drive up to the school in their Fiskers. In their Fisker. Let's take a little break. We have more to talk about. Cybersecurity coming up.

Father Robert Ballecer (123:45)

Up.

Leo Laporte (123:45)

Father Robert, we're going to put you to work. Father Robert Balasare is here. The Digital Jesuit, Samuel Samid, my car guy. And from Consumer Reports, the fabulous Nicholas de Leon Vibe, coder extraordinaire. Our show today brought to you by Meter. This is a really cool company. They're the company building better networks, founded by two network engineers who know your pain. If you're a network engineer, you know the headaches. Legacy providers with inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching you too thin. I mean, who doesn't have IT resource constraints, Complex deployments across fragmented tools. The network is critical, mission critical to the business. But you are working with infrastructure that wasn't built for today's demands. That's why businesses today are switching to meters. Meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure. They realized if we're going to make this work, we need to do the whole stack. Everything wired, wireless, cellular, all built for performance, all built for scalability. They design the hardware, they write the firmware, they build the software, they manage the deployment, they provide support, they offer everything. They even will help you with ISP procurement, of course, security, that's job one. They'll help you with that. Routing, switching, wireless firewall, cellular to help you with power. If you don't have consistent reliable power, you don't have a consistent, reliable network. DNS, Security, VPN, SD WAN, multi site workflows, all in a single solution. Meter, single integrated network stack scales from major hospitals, branch offices, warehouses, large campuses to data centers. You know who uses them for their data center? Reddit. That's a pretty. That's pretty good. You'll see a whole bunch of testimonials on the Meter website. Ask the assistant Director of Technology for the Web School of Knoxville. He said we had more than 20 games, 20 athletic events on our campus between our two facilities at the same time. Each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections and the event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before Meter redesigned our network. The other pain point. Every network engineer knows multiple vendors means they can pass the buck, right? They can say, oh, it's not our fault, maybe contact your isp. Well, it's not our fault. Check the router. With Meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs, right from the first site survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers or tools. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. It's networking built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. That's Meter. And by the way, the gear is gorgeous. Thanks so much to Meter for sponsoring us. Go to meter.com twitt Book a demo now. That's M E T E R.com Brook a demo today. Meter.com twit did we lose Nicholas?

Benita (127:01)

No, he just stepped away.

Leo Laporte (127:02)

Oh, he just stepped away. I get it. Yes. The Roadrunner and the coyote were having a little fight. Behind you. Nicholas De Leon, it's great to see you from Consumer Reports. You just did an article on Signal, which I think everyone should read. Actually.

Nicholas De Leon (127:21)

I didn't write a colleague. Yes, a colleague of mine. I just wanted to promote it, actually. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, there's been a lot of stuff happening in the United States the past couple of weeks. I don't think we need to go into the details necessarily. And so a big interest in, you know, encrypted communications. I would assume most of the this Week in tech audience is quite familiar with Signal, but the Consumer Reports readership is not necessarily super familiar. So kind of a primer on the app, why you'd want to use it. What data is it? Well, doesn't collect that type of thing.

Leo Laporte (127:51)

So just including metadata, we, you know, a lot of people use WhatsApp. I think probably more people use WhatsApp than any other.

Nicholas De Leon (127:58)

I use WhatsApp a lot.

Sam Abuelsamid (127:59)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (127:59)

Yeah, but they leak. That leaks metadata. It's good encryption. It's in fact the same encryption as Signal, but it does leak metadata, whereas Signal does not. Because they don't have it.

Sam Abuelsamid (128:13)

Yes. I only use WhatsApp with, with one particular group that set up on WhatsApp instead of Signal. And you know, otherwise I, I wish

Leo Laporte (128:23)

I could get everybody to use Signal. That's the problem is you can't use a messaging platform that you can't convince everybody to move to.

Nicholas De Leon (128:30)

Right. And it's very, you know, I've got a bunch of family in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and they're. I try asking them to leave WhatsApp. It's like, that's not gonna happen.

Leo Laporte (128:38)

No, that's it. Right. That's the one. I like WhatsApp. I mean, it's better. It's certainly better than anything. Nothing out, but if you.

Nicholas De Leon (128:47)

No, I don't mind. What's that? I've actually, with all this open, I really like Telegram. I mean, I don't really know the specifics of its.

Leo Laporte (128:53)

It's not very well infrastructure, but it's a nice.

Nicholas De Leon (128:56)

I love it as a platform UX app, you know.

Leo Laporte (128:58)

Oh, it's so much fun. And. Yeah. Is that how you talk to your open claw?

Nicholas De Leon (129:02)

Yeah, the, the first port of call, so to speak, is it sends everything to Telegram and then from Telegram it goes from there.

Leo Laporte (129:07)

So, yeah, that's a lot of people using Telegram for the.

Sam Abuelsamid (129:10)

That.

Leo Laporte (129:11)

I guess it makes it very easy. There's a bot you can use and set.

Nicholas De Leon (129:14)

Yeah, it's, it's, it's super extensible. Yeah, I, you know, I'm, I'm impressed with it. So, yeah, I can't speak to the security when telling.

Leo Laporte (129:20)

It's not very secure. In fact, it's not encrypted by default. So most people are not. Well, there you go, encrypted messages. And when it is encrypted, it's using its own proprietary encryption, which no one has been able to figure out.

Nicholas De Leon (129:31)

So.

Leo Laporte (129:32)

Yeah, so I would prefer to use Signal. Frankly, I wish I could get everybody to move to Signal. Actually, we're going to interview Guy Kiyosaki. He just wrote a book about Signal that's on Amazon Unlimited, Kindle Unlimited as well. It's a whole book about why Signal is better and stuff. This is a great place to start though, at Consumer Reports. Is this available? It is, it's available to the public. I'm not signed in.

Nicholas De Leon (129:55)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (129:56)

Courtly Lindwell. How to use signal app for secure messaging Again. Consumer Reports. Doing the work of the angels. Thank you.

Father Robert Ballecer (130:04)

You.

Leo Laporte (130:05)

Not that Father Robert. Not that you're not. But it's just, you know, it's good to have more than one person doing the work of the angels.

Father Robert Ballecer (130:12)

I do the devil's advocate stuff.

Leo Laporte (130:14)

I want to be both.

Sam Abuelsamid (130:15)

Both sides are equally important.

Leo Laporte (130:18)

I got one on one side.

Sam Abuelsamid (130:19)

You got to keep the angels honest.

Leo Laporte (130:21)

I got one on the other one. One saying, use open claw. Use open claw. The other one's saying, are you insane?

Sam Abuelsamid (130:27)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (130:29)

Do you worry about security at all,

Nicholas De Leon (130:30)

Nicholas, for Open Cloud?

Sam Abuelsamid (130:32)

No.

Nicholas De Leon (130:32)

Because there's literally nothing on the laptop. I'm not signed into anything.

Leo Laporte (130:35)

Oh, okay.

Nicholas De Leon (130:35)

There's nothing.

Leo Laporte (130:36)

You know, that's what stopped me. After I gave it all of my API keys, after I gave it access to all my Google Docs and my Gmail, I thought I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and came in running up to them and deleted the account on my backpack.

Sam Abuelsamid (130:53)

Too late. Already absorbed.

Leo Laporte (130:55)

Too late.

Nicholas De Leon (130:56)

The skills, kind of community skills database is just filled with, like, I would never. I mean. I mean, I don't know. I don't. I would never download a skill from just some. Some random skills. So. Yeah, but. But, you know, drive with caution. I don't know how else to tell us to put it. You know, use some common sense, I suppose. But, yeah, it's. It's on a laptop that there's literally nothing on it.

Leo Laporte (131:19)

So that's. That's. It's funny. I was watching some YouTube guy on Openclaw, I think it was actually, was George Hotz of Comma AI. Okay. George is great. And Geo Hots. And he said, yeah, you know, a year ago, we'd say never curl to bat to a bash prompt. Download a file, let bash run it. Never do that. Now we're all doing it. He said, just yolo every day, just YOLO it. Curl to a bash prompt. That's fine.

Sam Abuelsamid (131:46)

What could possibly go wrong?

Leo Laporte (131:47)

What could possibly go wrong? Well, let me tell you, PayPal, this is our cybersecurity and breach segment, and there's quite a few stories here. PayPal has disclosed a data breach that's been exposing user info for six months. Just six months. But PayPal doesn't know much about you, does it?

Father Robert Ballecer (132:09)

This one's pretty bad. This one is.

Leo Laporte (132:10)

Tell us about.

Father Robert Ballecer (132:12)

So back in last year, July 1st of 2025, they made an update a Code update to enable their PayPal capital, their loan program program, basically. And for six months, until the end of December, it exposed personally identifiable information. So everything from names, addresses, Social Security numbers, account numbers, pretty much anything that you put into PayPal could be accessed. Now, they don't know if the information has actually been accessed. They assume that there are, since there are a couple of instances of fraudulent charges, but being put onto people's account, that some people actually did take advantage of the exploit, but they don't really have a good breakdown of exactly who took what and what information fled from the system. Now, the really horrible thing about this is that it took so long for them to tell us. I mean, they absolutely, they knew by the end of last year that there was an issue, that there was some exfiltration of personally identifiable information. And the fact that we're only learning about it in, at towards the end of February, that's terrible. That's not great. Yeah, that's not. No.

Leo Laporte (133:22)

Did they know? They must have known about it.

Father Robert Ballecer (133:24)

They, I mean, they definitely knew it by the end of December because this is the issue. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (133:31)

I mean, their law requires you, as soon as you know about it, to reveal it.

Sam Abuelsamid (133:36)

Yeah, it says December 12, 2025. They identified the error.

Father Robert Ballecer (133:41)

That's a long break. That's a long pause for people's personal information to be out there. Now they've offered, just like we've got it every time this happens. They've offered free credit.

Leo Laporte (133:52)

They say it's only 100 people.

Father Robert Ballecer (133:54)

I mean, that's the problem. Their logs don't actually show.

Leo Laporte (133:57)

They don't know.

Father Robert Ballecer (133:58)

They don't know.

Leo Laporte (133:59)

They don't.

Father Robert Ballecer (134:00)

Code was such that it didn't go through any logging. So it could be everyone on PayPal. It could be 100 people.

Leo Laporte (134:06)

People.

Sam Abuelsamid (134:08)

To be fair, you know, it does say that this was only part of the, the PayPal working capital loan application. So. Not.

Leo Laporte (134:14)

Not so if you didn't fill one of those out.

Sam Abuelsamid (134:17)

Yeah. So this, yeah, this is a system for small businesses to get, to get loans. So, you know, if you're, if you were involved in that, that, you know, but who knows, you know, if they got into the rest of PayPal or not.

Leo Laporte (134:31)

It's not good.

Father Robert Ballecer (134:32)

They claim that, that there was no egress into their core system. But the problem is since they haven't told us what the vulnerability was and we haven't been able to examine it, we can't tell.

Leo Laporte (134:42)

And they didn't know for six months. So can you trust what they tell you now?

Father Robert Ballecer (134:47)

No.

Leo Laporte (134:48)

No, no, they didn't even know about it. For a while. TP Link routers were on the do not buy list. TP Link is a Chinese company, is also the number one router company in America. 65% of the routers in the United States are TP Link routers. Partly because Wirecutter recommended them for years as the best router.

Nicholas De Leon (135:16)

Us too. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (135:17)

And Consumer Reports.

Nicholas De Leon (135:18)

Yeah, they, I mean, they, they do. Well, I mean, what can you say?

Leo Laporte (135:22)

And there's nothing wrong with them except that they're made in China.

Father Robert Ballecer (135:26)

Mm.

Nicholas De Leon (135:27)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (135:28)

After three separate investigations were opened at the Department of Commerce, Defense and Justice, it was widely expected the devices would be banned for sale in the US we talked about it. The White House shelved the plan, but Texas says no, this will not stand. So they're suing TP Link for deceptively marketing the security of their products and allowing Chinese hacking groups to access Americans devices. Should you buy a TP link router, is that, are we recommending against them now or.

Nicholas De Leon (136:03)

Well, I could say. I mean, I'm on the router beat at cr, so I was, I remember when this story broke in the Journal, I guess a little more than a year ago. Our thinking was, well, until, like, there's official action, like actually banning an investigation, you know, okay, whatever. So we landed on like, okay, let's, we'll, we'll, you know, steady as she goes, I suppose. So we didn't really change any recommendations. We didn't, we didn't even really reference the, the investigations about looking into these, these potential hacking groups or anything. We just, you know, talked about it. Normally, I, I, I mean, I would buy a TP link router. I, I, I think I have an ASUS router randomly. But like, I, I would have no problem. I mean, look, my stuff has been hacked so many times.

Leo Laporte (136:46)

Well, that's so it doesn't. Every router, you know is subject to this microtik TP Link Linksys. We go, I go on and on. Yeah, because they're bugs. And, and people don't update the firmware of their router. They're not even kind of aware of it. Your ASUS updates, which is a good thing, as does equity.

Nicholas De Leon (137:05)

We do rate, we give a number rating to the router security. And a big part of that weight comes from does the, does the firmware update automatically? We want the firmware to update automatically. I know a lot of nerds like, no, I want to update the firmware on my own, which I understand and I appreciate, but for the average person, this stuff should just be updating like come on.

Leo Laporte (137:25)

Yes.

Father Robert Ballecer (137:26)

And by the way, you can install OpenWRT and DDWRT on a TP Link wrapper router. So if you.

Leo Laporte (137:32)

Which would be a good idea.

Father Robert Ballecer (137:33)

Paranoid. You can't.

Leo Laporte (137:34)

Yeah, yeah. So if you own.

Father Robert Ballecer (137:35)

I wouldn't. Because you, you would lose the advantage of the automatic updates because the whole, the whole argument that it must be compromised because components came from China because it's not assembled in China, it's assembled in Vietnam is ridiculous. That that would mean every router that the synology routers that I'm using have components from every, everything has components to China.

Leo Laporte (138:00)

Yeah. TP Link is actually a California based company now. It was spun off in 2024. Not clear why the White House did the about face. Except he was about. This is right before the summit with Xi Jinping.

Father Robert Ballecer (138:15)

It was a bargaining chip.

Leo Laporte (138:16)

It was a bargaining chip.

Father Robert Ballecer (138:17)

That's all it was. It was a political bargaining chip.

Leo Laporte (138:19)

So our advice at this point is if you're about to buy a router, not to, I don't know what our advice is. Keep your router up to date is our advice.

Nicholas De Leon (138:30)

Yeah, I mean it's funny, I've spoken to a lot of ISPs are now really trying to, well, they're trying to get that five, ten dollars a month out of you for.

Leo Laporte (138:37)

They want you to use theirs. Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon (138:39)

But they're trying to add value to it. You know, they're trying to add apps, they're trying to say, oh, you know, we're, we're, we're adminning it 24 7. If something happens, we've got your back. You don't have to think about it. We've got enhanced parental control. So they are really trying to make it so that you don't even think about buying, you know, any sort of router they really want you to, to. So it's interesting if you're an everyday consumer, I don't know, I feel like you might as well just get it from your ISP frankly. But if you're like, if you're having a twit audience, there's a ton of really good routers. You know, unit ero, there's a lot of good stuff out there nowadays actually. So you know, I have to check.

Leo Laporte (139:16)

But you know, I use my own Ubiquiti router but I have to use a Comcast cable mode modem because I have a business Comcast business service. And they say you got to use our mode. But I don't use the router built into it. I just bypass it.

Sam Abuelsamid (139:29)

Same thing. You know, I have AT T fiber that has a WI fi built into it. But because of the layout of my house, you know, it's basically useless unless.

Leo Laporte (139:39)

Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (139:39)

Unless I'm in the kitchen. I love my ubiquity gear. I've got the Nest WI Fi Pro, which the performance is. The WI Fi performance is just so. So. But you know, it. You know, it updates itself. And most of the stuff in the house is wired on Ethernet anyway, so.

Leo Laporte (139:58)

Right, okay.

Father Robert Ballecer (139:59)

Hey, twit army, if you're really concerned that your router is spying on you, learn Wireshark, which is a free software. Get yourself a Shark tap, which is not that expensive. And watch every bit of traffic coming in and out of your network. Don't do anything and just watch to see if it's phoning home. That's it. It's actually really simple for nerds.

Leo Laporte (140:16)

Every once in a while I'll check my fail ban logs and somebody from China is trying to hack me pretty much five, ten times an hour. Yeah, that's normal, right?

Father Robert Ballecer (140:28)

That's just noise. That's baseline noise on the Internet.

Leo Laporte (140:30)

Yeah, that's what Steve Gibson calls it. Internet background radiation.

Sam Abuelsamid (140:35)

I also have a pie hole running that. That's a installed based on the one of your old know how videos.

Leo Laporte (140:41)

That's right. Robert taught us all to use the pie hole.

Father Robert Ballecer (140:44)

Yep, yep.

Leo Laporte (140:45)

That'll be on your tombstone, Robert. He taught us to use the pie hole

Father Robert Ballecer (140:50)

show title. Shut your pie hole.

Leo Laporte (140:52)

Shut your pie. No, turn it on. Open your pie hole. Don't open it. Close your pie hole. This was a big story and we will cover it Wednesday on security. Now, in greater detail, ETH Zurich, which is a very good security research firm, did an analysis of the three most popular password managers. LastPass, our sponsor, Bitwarden and Dashlane. I think they also did one password, as I remember, and said, you know what, if the servers of these companies were compromised, your password could be exposed and it scared a lot of people. Now, Steve Gibson is, as I said, going to do a full breakdown of it on Wednesday. But he did say it is not a hair on fire moment. I presume, Robert, you've checked into this

Benita (141:46)

on Tuesday, by the way.

Father Robert Ballecer (141:47)

Tuesday we have. So Tuesday.

Leo Laporte (141:49)

What did I say? Wednesday. Yeah, Tuesday. Sorry. Thank you, Benita. Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (141:52)

The attack was actually quite novel. I like what they did. The issue is that it doesn't really expose malfeasance on the part of these companies or incompetence on the part of these companies, it's just kind of the way that services work. They're taking advantage of the fact that users have to be able to access this data. So if the servers get compromised. Yes, yes, the data gets compromised. However, compromising those servers is still extremely difficult.

Leo Laporte (142:21)

Well, and actually it isn't. Yes, your data gets compromised because your data is end encrypted. Even on their servers, it's just easier for them. This is why you probably should use, at least in the case of Bitwarden, a memory hardened PBKDF. I use Argon 2, which is better than the PBKDF and you should use as many iterations as it will let you use. All of that will help you. You should use a strong password that will help you as well. And at least in the case of our sponsor, bitwarden, you can run your vault locally. You can run.

Father Robert Ballecer (142:58)

Correct.

Leo Laporte (142:59)

But not that I think my security would be better. I figured Bitwarden's going to do a better job of securing the vault than I am, let's put it that way. More likely to.

Sam Abuelsamid (143:10)

Well, we used to think that about LastPass too.

Leo Laporte (143:13)

Yeah. And LastPass is. That was a big problem. LastPass was compromised.

Sam Abuelsamid (143:18)

That's when I switched from LastPass to 1Password.

Leo Laporte (143:21)

Me too. I switched to Bitwarden for that very reason. And in fact, a number of people with Bitcoin wallets say now, apparently they didn't have their password. Derivative function was one iteration, which is the default for a long time on LastPass. So it was easy, relatively easy to crack their passwords. And they claimed their wallets were emptied by people who had the vault. I haven't heard anything recently about that. So maybe they got everything they want. The bad guys got everything they wanted. Bitwarden said Bitwarden's never been breached and believes third party assessments like these are critical to continue providing state of the art security. In other words, they said thank you. They did in fact say thank you, Eth Zurich, for your insights and commitment to password security, as did LastPass. Our security team is grateful for the opportunity to engage with Eth. Dashlane said, in fact that the problem was the use of legacy cryptography. This is part of the problem is in order to preserve backward compatibility, a lot of these companies support older, less secure encryption models. Dashlane says we have removed support for this legacy crypto. These downgrade attacks are no longer possible. So the good news is all three companies have responded and presumably are doing what they can to protect you. You.

Father Robert Ballecer (144:42)

And it really is an edge Case because it was a malicious, malicious server attack which uses a server that has been owned to force the ma. The password managing services to downgrade their encryption.

Leo Laporte (144:53)

Right. So highly unlikely. Although as you pointed out, it did happen. It happened to our former sponsor. All right. So, yeah, I thought we should talk about it here just because I'm sure people have seen the story and I are concerned. Steve said it's not a cause for concern, but we will go in depth on security now.

Father Robert Ballecer (145:15)

Actually, it's a cause for celebration because you had a researching entity eth which did responsible disclosure and you had three vendors who did responsible responses. That's. That's how it's supposed to work. Right. I mean, this should not be a red carpet moment for. For bad actors. This is just suggest how it should work in the security field.

Leo Laporte (145:37)

Yeah. And by the way, I checked my bitcoin wallet. I wish it had been emptied at least. Somebody get my bitcoin. But no, it's still got.

Father Robert Ballecer (145:45)

Someone took all my dogecoin.

Leo Laporte (145:47)

Somebody took your dogecoin?

Father Robert Ballecer (145:48)

No.

Leo Laporte (145:49)

You sold it. You sold it.

Father Robert Ballecer (145:51)

I sold that long.

Leo Laporte (145:52)

Did you make a killing on the doge?

Father Robert Ballecer (145:54)

I did. I didn't sell it at the highest, but I sold it pretty high.

Leo Laporte (145:58)

So that's nice. Yeah. Speaking of problems, the entire Mississippi health system was shut down. Clinics had to be shut down statewide due to ransomware. I don't normally do these stories, but it's kind of good once in a while to remind you this is out there. The attack was launched on Thursday, compromised the medical center's systems, its electronic health records platform and its IT network. They had to shut down all. All the clinics across the state. Bad guys stop attacking hospitals.

Sam Abuelsamid (146:36)

Do you guys watch the pit?

Leo Laporte (146:39)

It is. Was that.

Sam Abuelsamid (146:40)

That's the storyline that just came up on the most recent episode.

Father Robert Ballecer (146:44)

Really? Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (146:45)

A ransomware attack against a hospital. Actually against multiple.

Father Robert Ballecer (146:49)

Not happen. Hospitals will always be an IT sore because you don't want to put patient safety against password security.

Leo Laporte (146:59)

Right.

Father Robert Ballecer (146:59)

It's. No. So.

Leo Laporte (147:03)

So come on, let's get some honor among these thieves. You know, just stop attacking schools, hospitals, city governments.

Father Robert Ballecer (147:10)

British NHS went down for how long because their system was attacked.

Leo Laporte (147:14)

Go ahead and attack Jaguar, that's fine or whatever. Who was it that was brought Rolls Jaguar, Land Rover?

Father Robert Ballecer (147:21)

Todd Tata. Tata bought Jaguar and then they. They hired their own cyber security firm, which was garbage. The entire network was flat. Which meant you got in one place, you got everything, you got it all. Yay.

Leo Laporte (147:32)

And they. And they asked for a handout from the British government because they were down for a month.

Father Robert Ballecer (147:38)

That's a, that's pricey.

Sam Abuelsamid (147:40)

So it's okay because they weren't building any Jaguars anyway.

Leo Laporte (147:42)

I mean they, what were they building?

Sam Abuelsamid (147:44)

Just, just some Land Rovers. But no, they, they, they ended production of everything except the F pace last year or no, like over a year ago.

Leo Laporte (147:54)

So I can't buy that. I want an electric xke.

Father Robert Ballecer (147:58)

Sam, do you like the new Jaguar logo?

Sam Abuelsamid (148:02)

I am, I am not a fan, let's put it that way.

Father Robert Ballecer (148:06)

That's what I thought.

Leo Laporte (148:08)

Fake job recruiters hid malware in developer coding challenges. Oh no, this is from the reg. I love the reg. Actually bleeping computer. Sorry about that. A new variation of the fake recruiter campaign from North Korean threat actors targeting JavaScript and Python developers with cryptocurrency related challenges. Solve those challenges, win big prizes.

Sam Abuelsamid (148:38)

So let me ask a question that, that's somewhat related to this. If these guys were to start putting some of this malicious code out there into the ether and we're getting AI models like Claude code and Codex and whatever else trained on this stuff that's floating around out there. What, you know, what do you think the odds are that we're going to start seeing some of this malware appearing in code that's been generated. Generated by these various systems

Father Robert Ballecer (149:12)

on purpose? Yes. 100. I mean we already do that at Defcon.

Leo Laporte (149:17)

Defcon, yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (149:17)

Some AI suites are really good at generating exploits.

Leo Laporte (149:21)

They're also very good at detecting it. You remember when Anthropic released their latest model, they set it off with some basic tools, nothing even very fancy. Python, Python Comp Interpreter and some basic tools. They found 500 vulnerabilities in open source projects.

Father Robert Ballecer (149:40)

Yeah, they can be used but you're not too good poisoning the well and we, I mean we proved long ago that it's, it's actually pretty easy to poison an AI.

Sam Abuelsamid (149:48)

Well, okay.

Leo Laporte (149:51)

I think in the long run for

Sam Abuelsamid (149:52)

somebody like you know, creating, creating his. They're not going website, they're not going

Leo Laporte (149:57)

to include malware by accident in code. The good news is, is I think modern AI models are much less likely to do buffer overflows and other common programmer errors. They're not going to assume make the assumptions humans make all the time. They know better. So I think I say it's going to be a net gain is what I say.

Nicholas De Leon (150:16)

This discussion on X like you said Elio, there's a lot of AI discussion on X still. Oh, all, all unsecured code. It's like where these people been the past 30 years with human.

Leo Laporte (150:26)

Humans are the worst.

Nicholas De Leon (150:28)

Like, come. Come on. Like, I understand what they're saying, of course, but, like, let's not pretend humans are, like, awesome at this either.

Leo Laporte (150:34)

No. Here's some good news. Dutch Defense secretary remember that there was some concern about buying the US F35 fighter plane because there was a kill switch and, you know, eu, our EU allies were a little worried they're going to spend billions of dollars on this plane and then the US Would say, you can't use it anymore. Well, here's some good news. Dutch defense secretary says, ah, don't worry about it. F35 software can be jailbroken like a phone.

Father Robert Ballecer (151:05)

I mean, yes, yes, you can, but the primary.

Leo Laporte (151:08)

Would you fly in a jailbroken jet?

Sam Abuelsamid (151:11)

I don't know.

Father Robert Ballecer (151:12)

It's an information weapon. The F35 link up so many different information sources to give the pilot a better view of the battlefield. So if you jailbreak it, you're cutting yourself off from a lot of those information services, which means it now it's just a plane. It's not really an information platform.

Leo Laporte (151:28)

The. The. I wish I could. I could do a Dutch accent. I won't. I'll save you. The Dutch defense minister said, if, despite everything, you still want to upgrade, I'm going to say something I should never say, but I will. Anyway. Anyway, you can jailbreak an F35 just like an iPhone.

Father Robert Ballecer (151:46)

Just, just.

Sam Abuelsamid (151:47)

It's certainly, it's certainly possible that, you know, the other countries that are buying these could essentially write their own software, you know, and essentially create their own firmware for the F35 and replicate the kinds of capabilities that it has from the factory from. From Lockheed Martin, you know, and provide that networking capabilities. And in fact, you know, they. They may want to consider doing this anyway.

Leo Laporte (152:19)

Just jailbreak the damn thing. Then you could put, you know, Candy Crush on it and you can really enjoy your flight next time. We have a lot of Dutch listeners, so they're very happy now.

Father Robert Ballecer (152:37)

You know, Leo, they need to bring back that. The PSA ads from 2004. You wouldn't download a car.

Leo Laporte (152:43)

Oh, remember those?

Father Robert Ballecer (152:44)

You wouldn't fly a jail.

Leo Laporte (152:45)

You go to a movie and they would say, you know, you're a crook. So stop. I just paid $25 to see this movie and you're accusing me of pirating it.

Father Robert Ballecer (152:58)

I Wonder if the F35 has an app store.

Leo Laporte (153:02)

No, just use F Droid. It's okay. Okay, let's take a little break and then we have a few final words to wrap up this Fabulous edition. I hate to break up a good thing, but I smell spaghetti. My wife's making spaghetti sauce downstairs. So I can smell it. And it's good. It's good. I bet you smell some good things up there in your little eyrie in Rome, Father Robert Ballisar.

Father Robert Ballecer (153:27)

Depends which way the wind is blowing.

Leo Laporte (153:32)

As always, Robert is coming to us from the Vatican. Vatican City. Are you in Vatican City? No, no, no, no.

Father Robert Ballecer (153:40)

Vatican City is on the other side of this wall. So Italy. We're not in Vatican City.

Leo Laporte (153:45)

Oh, you're in the Vatican. I'm confused. So you're not in Italy either?

Father Robert Ballecer (153:49)

No. Yeah. So our. This entire property, our entire campus, is Zona extra territoriale. So it's not part of Italy. In fact, the police can't come into our. Our campus without permission of our Secretary of State.

Leo Laporte (154:02)

Wow. But you do have Vatican attractively dressed Vatican guards.

Father Robert Ballecer (154:06)

Oh, of course.

Leo Laporte (154:07)

Swiss Guards to protect.

Father Robert Ballecer (154:08)

We've got the Swiss Guard.

Leo Laporte (154:09)

Yeah, but I don't understand the distinction between the Vatican and Vatican City.

Father Robert Ballecer (154:16)

So the Vatican just means Vatican property. And there are. There are different locations around the city of Rome that are Vatican property. Castle Gandolfo is Vatican property. Jesu is Vatican property.

Leo Laporte (154:26)

Right.

Father Robert Ballecer (154:27)

The Civita is cat. Is. Is Vatican property. We are Vatican property. However, Vatican City is only what I guess you'd consider St. Peter's and the Vatican Museums. And that compound around the garden, there's an actual wall around it, so. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (154:45)

And. And who lives there? Just the Pope.

Father Robert Ballecer (154:50)

There's about a thousand people, so that includes the Pope. That includes the Swiss Guard. That includes a couple of.

Leo Laporte (154:56)

Do they look down at you? Because you don't. You're not in the city.

Father Robert Ballecer (155:00)

They envy us because it's so much easier for me to go to my house than it is for them to go to theirs.

Leo Laporte (155:05)

Oh, they have to go through a bunch. A bunch of checkpoints.

Sam Abuelsamid (155:08)

I'd have to go through border control or, you know, passport control. And they.

Father Robert Ballecer (155:11)

No, actually, I have asked if I can get the Vatican stamp so I can stamp passports as people are coming into our.

Leo Laporte (155:17)

Oh, I would love that.

Father Robert Ballecer (155:18)

That would be awesome.

Leo Laporte (155:19)

Oh, please, Please.

Father Robert Ballecer (155:22)

Well, anyway, I take many of my. My recommendations.

Leo Laporte (155:27)

Jesuit Pilgrimage is the app if you want to follow the Jesuit pilgrimage. Anything else you want to plug?

Sam Abuelsamid (155:36)

I.

Father Robert Ballecer (155:36)

We've got something big coming up, but it's not ready yet, so.

Leo Laporte (155:40)

No. Okay.

Father Robert Ballecer (155:40)

Just stay tabbed.

Leo Laporte (155:42)

Well, of course. And you could follow Padre SJ on your blue screen guy. Is that the best place to follow your stuff?

Benita (155:48)

It.

Father Robert Ballecer (155:48)

It really is.

Leo Laporte (155:49)

Okay.

Father Robert Ballecer (155:50)

Although mostly it's just cats and rants about what's going on in the US

Leo Laporte (155:54)

the vaticats are still going, right?

Father Robert Ballecer (155:57)

They're still going. Oh, one of the twit army sent me a link. There's a game, an Indiana Jones video game, where one of the missions is to go inside the Vatican and take pictures of cats. So

Leo Laporte (156:13)

Italy is funny about its cats. It is.

Sam Abuelsamid (156:17)

Speaking of Indiana Jones, do you guys watch shrinking there in the latest episode? There was a fun little Indiana Jones

Leo Laporte (156:23)

Easter egg in there because Harrison Ford, of course, is the star of shrinking. Did he refer to Indiana Jones?

Sam Abuelsamid (156:30)

Not explicitly. You'll have to watch it, too.

Leo Laporte (156:32)

You have to know it's like an Easter egg.

Sam Abuelsamid (156:34)

Yeah, my wife. My wife didn't.

Nicholas De Leon (156:36)

My wife didn't.

Sam Abuelsamid (156:37)

Didn't realize what it was. I. I explained to her what it was.

Leo Laporte (156:41)

I. That's actually a very funny show. It reminds me I should. I should be watching that. Sam Able. Sam's podcast is called Wheel Bearings. You can find it at Wheel Bearings Media with Nicole and Robbie. He's also VC VP of Research at Telemetry. What you working on these days?

Sam Abuelsamid (156:56)

I've got a brand new white paper coming out this week on automated trucking.

Leo Laporte (157:02)

Oh.

Sam Abuelsamid (157:03)

So check the telemetryagency.com website. Probably tomorrow or the day after.

Leo Laporte (157:09)

Didn't the president pardon the guy who

Sam Abuelsamid (157:14)

scammed everybody with Anthony Levandowski? Yes, I believe that. That he pardoned him during the first administration.

Leo Laporte (157:23)

Oh, okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (157:24)

Yeah. It's hard to keep track, but yeah, no, this. This is. This is all. Yeah, this report is about automated trucking and, you know, kind of the.

Leo Laporte (157:32)

Is it coming soon to a highway near me?

Nicholas De Leon (157:35)

It's.

Sam Abuelsamid (157:35)

It's probably not near you, not in California anytime soon, because they still don't allow automated trucks without safety drivers. And actually they don't allow automatic trucks at all on public roads in California, but they are running in Texas. Aurora's got a fleet of them doing runs between Houston and Dallas and El Paso and expanding to New Mexico soon. There's several other companies including Plus Bus and Wabi and Kodiak that are running them. And within the next year or so, they'll be going driverless. Aurora is the first one to go driverless, and there's. There's several others that will be coming to market over the next 12 to 24 months.

Leo Laporte (158:19)

Okay, but not in California. That's interesting.

Sam Abuelsamid (158:23)

Yeah. California has been the most restrictive when it comes to trucks, automated trucks, but in large part because of pushback from the Teamsters Union.

Leo Laporte (158:35)

Oh, of course.

Sam Abuelsamid (158:36)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (158:36)

It's the same reason Nevada is suing online gambling. Online? Yeah, constantly. Oh, there was.

Sam Abuelsamid (158:46)

Who wants competition, right?

Leo Laporte (158:47)

Yeah. Nobody wants competition. Yeah. And of course, our good friend Nicholas Deon. Newlywed. You're still a newlywed. You know, for a year.

Sam Abuelsamid (158:55)

Is it.

Nicholas De Leon (158:56)

Is that the rule? All right, then. I mean, it's been two months, so send tomorrow.

Leo Laporte (159:01)

Two months tomorrow. You better have an anniversary gift prepared.

Nicholas De Leon (159:05)

How many of those?

Leo Laporte (159:07)

Oh, man, it never ends, let me tell you. I thought when I married Lisa, I thought, oh, we'll get married on her birthday. That'll cut down on the number of presents.

Nicholas De Leon (159:14)

But no, no, it just means you

Sam Abuelsamid (159:16)

got to buy twice as many.

Leo Laporte (159:17)

Twice as many. You guys got married. Was it Christmas Day? I know it was Christmas.

Nicholas De Leon (159:21)

Two days. Two days before Christmas. 23rd. 23rd.

Leo Laporte (159:23)

In Vegas.

Nicholas De Leon (159:25)

Yes, sir. Yes.

Leo Laporte (159:26)

Did Elvis marry you?

Father Robert Ballecer (159:27)

You must know this.

Nicholas De Leon (159:29)

No, it wasn't Elvis. This was. This was. I let Ashley direct this movie, so to speak, and so that's what she wanted to do. We initially were going to have, you know, it was a small ceremony. We was initially going to have, you know, some friends, some family, but it got very hectic very quickly, and so Ashley was like, yeah, no, actually, it will literally be me and Nicholas. And thank you very much.

Leo Laporte (159:51)

Lisa and I did. Yeah, that's the way to do it. We got. We took the. We had a little hotel which has since burned to the ground in the Napa fires. But it was a. It was a very nice place. And we did their. They had an elopement package. This is. This is now 11 years ago. They had an elopement package. So we said, oh, we'll do that. And it included a bartender and hors d' oeuvres and everything. But it was just me, Lisa, the minister, the poor person passing the hors d' oeuvres would go, would you like an hors d' oeuvre? To Lisa? And then would you like an hors d' oeuvre to me? And then back to Lisa. Would you like an hors d'?

Sam Abuelsamid (160:27)

Oeuvre?

Leo Laporte (160:27)

The bartender just sat there. It's okay. Was quite a smart.

Sam Abuelsamid (160:33)

My wife and I did it on the beach in Kauai. Just the guy who married us. His wife is a witness, because you only require one witness in Hawaii and a photographer. So five of us.

Leo Laporte (160:44)

See, I would ask Robert, but I don't think he's eligible. So I've done.

Father Robert Ballecer (160:48)

I've performed several fun ways.

Leo Laporte (160:50)

I bet you have.

Father Robert Ballecer (160:51)

On a. On a catamaran in the off of Hawaii in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo ship in Antarctica. That was fun.

Leo Laporte (160:59)

What? Oh, married people in Antarctica. Yep.

Father Robert Ballecer (161:03)

Dinah McMurdo, whose jurisdiction is that?

Nicholas De Leon (161:06)

The churches, I guess,

Father Robert Ballecer (161:09)

was actually part of the diocese of Christchurch, New Zealand.

Nicholas De Leon (161:13)

Okay, that makes sense.

Leo Laporte (161:14)

And how were you. How did it come about that you were there?

Father Robert Ballecer (161:17)

I was doing a project and they needed a priest, so I'm like, somebody

Leo Laporte (161:22)

said, quick, Robert, we need to get married.

Sam Abuelsamid (161:24)

Get the call, the guy with the collar. Somebody wants to get hitched.

Leo Laporte (161:28)

Quick.

Sam Abuelsamid (161:29)

Hurry up.

Leo Laporte (161:30)

Well, I didn't know that, Robert.

Father Robert Ballecer (161:32)

The chapel that we did it at, it's gone. It burned down. It was Our lady of the Snows. It's burnt down like, six times. I. I don't know what's.

Sam Abuelsamid (161:39)

How does that happen in Antarctica normally?

Father Robert Ballecer (161:42)

Candles.

Leo Laporte (161:43)

Yeah. You're just trying to stay warm, and one thing leads to another. Yeah. The place we got married burned to the ground, too. Anyway, congratulations, Nicholas. And yes. Get the presents ready. And any. What are you working on right now?

Nicholas De Leon (162:01)

Oh, speaking of, AI actually, I'll plug it really quickly. I haven't started writing it yet. Yet, But I'm going to be writing this week an article. I put on a bunch of weight in 20, 23, 24. You know, I was literally like 195 pounds last September. I'm 5 foot 9, so that's way. It's way too big for my frame. So I was like, all right, I got. I got to lose some weight here. I use Gemini. I say, hey, Gemini, I got to lose some weight. What do I do? We went back and forth, and we created. Not a. Not necessarily a diet plan, but more. More like an exercise regimen. Measurement, foods to eat. I'm down about £26. It worked from October 1st, let's call it.

Leo Laporte (162:41)

That's like the. That's like the Chat GPT ad. It really worked.

Nicholas De Leon (162:46)

I mean, it's. Look, I. I realized I built a little home. We had a spare room, so I built like a little power rack thing. You know, I'm lucky. I work from home. I don't have a commute. I had the spare room. I had the money to build a little.

Leo Laporte (162:58)

You don't have a wife downstairs making Bolognese.

Father Robert Ballecer (163:02)

I'm the.

Nicholas De Leon (163:02)

And that's the. I cook six times a week. I'm the cook.

Leo Laporte (163:05)

Oh, you're the cook.

Nicholas De Leon (163:05)

I cook six times a week. You know, we don't do doordash or any of that stuff. We might. We might get a pizza on a Saturday or something. So I'm kind of in control of the diet. We go to Costco every month, so it's. We're eating whole foods, good foods. So, yeah, between. Between just kind of like maybe increasing my protein intake and watching what I'm eating and. And walking and exercising them down. You know, by the time this article is published in, you know, a week or two, It'll be around 30 pounds.

Sam Abuelsamid (163:32)

Wow.

Nicholas De Leon (163:32)

So the headline is kind of like, you know, you know, AI helped me use 30 pounds or, you know, whatever

Leo Laporte (163:38)

the case, I could write an article, AI help me lose sleep.

Nicholas De Leon (163:43)

I could. I could ask my editor

Leo Laporte (163:47)

not lose weight. You know what? Give yourself a little credit, Nicholas. The AI can recommend you did all the work. You followed the rules.

Nicholas De Leon (163:54)

Well, I. I understand. I mean, that was. And it's. I can't publish the entire conversation. You know, it's long and. And insane. But, like, you know, I do realize that, like, yeah, I'm the one in there lifting the weights. I'm the one, you know, ensuring that I'm eating. You know, it's.

Leo Laporte (164:09)

You did it.

Nicholas De Leon (164:10)

Yeah, I did it. I. I'm very. I don't mind eating, oh, chicken breast twice a week. I don't. I. I enjoy repetitive things. I don't know what else to say. So it's like, oh, I have the. The problem I always had with, like, exercise was. Ever was like, okay, how much weight do I lift? How many reps? How many? When should I increase the weight? That was. Do I stay on this for two weeks? Do I say, like, I had no idea.

Leo Laporte (164:33)

So Gemini was like, here's information is valuable. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (164:36)

Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon (164:37)

And so I actually, to a te.

Leo Laporte (164:38)

So I should take it back. AI did help me lose weight in my wallet. Does that count?

Sam Abuelsamid (164:46)

I say so.

Father Robert Ballecer (164:47)

I mean, mass is mass, I guess.

Nicholas De Leon (164:49)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (164:50)

Nicholas De Leon, Consumer Reports senior technology reporter. Great to have you. You as well. Our show today, brought to you by Shopify. Have you ever thought of starting your own business? You got a great idea, but those pesky little details can get in the way. How do you charge people? Who's going to design your website? How do you handle fulfillment? I know what it's like. I've been there. In fact, I've watched my own kids doing exactly this. Start their own business. But you know what? They got it done with Shopify. Ooh. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started. Like my kids, you know, Salt Hanks, Salt Lovers Club, that whole thing. Shopify Helped him build a beautiful online store that matches his brand's unique style and they can do exactly the same for you. Shopify also helps with marketing easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything. And of course let's not forget that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial right now at shopify.com TWIT go to shopify.com TWIT that's shopify.com TWIT worked for my kids kid. It's nice to not have to send him an allowance. Shopify. Thank you Shopify. I love this story. I don't know. It's not really Tom's hardware. Clever. This is a clever idea. In a blind test, blindfolded test with audio files. You know how audio files golden ears. I can tell that that $3,000 cable is gonna sound better. Audiophiles in a blind test couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through through copper wire, a banana or wet mud. The mud should sound perfectly awful. But it doesn't. There's a pickle. It's actually the credit goes to DIY audio moderator there set up an experiment. Pano the moderator invited other members on the forum. See, these are people who go to this forum them their golden ears to listen to various sound clips with four different versions. One from the original CD. The other three recorded through 180cm of Pro Audio copper wire, 20cm of wet mud, 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies. Which by the way are not copper. They're zinc, right? With a little copper cloud and via a 13 centimeter banana. Initial tests show it's extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring set up the sounds. The amazing thing says Pano, is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound awful, but it doesn't. I guess they all conduct right.

Father Robert Ballecer (168:05)

Here's the conductivity is conductivity.

Leo Laporte (168:07)

Here's the mud setup. It's like. So basically after waiting a month for testers to submit the results, the results were tabulated. And boy, you know, even flipping a coin might have produced a better result. There are only 6 correct answers out of 43 guesses. 13.95% accurate.

Sam Abuelsamid (168:36)

Keep, keep Going out and buying that gold wire.

Leo Laporte (168:41)

Okay. I just, you know, mud if it's wet enough.

Father Robert Ballecer (168:47)

I mean, I'm not going to change the audiophiles minds. They've already made the excuses for why this is a poor experiment and their setup really works much better and they can hear. And you know what, if they draw with a green Sharpie on the back of their CDs, it sounds better know.

Leo Laporte (169:01)

Bingo.

Sam Abuelsamid (169:02)

And you know, I mean I, to be fair, I have heard some awfully muddy audio through certain headphones.

Leo Laporte (169:09)

They use Joe Jackson. Somebody says, oh nice. They use Joe Jackson. Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon (169:12)

I have to say I have to send this article to my dad because he's, he's like an aspirational audiophile, I guess you could say. He used to subscribe to Sound and Vision magazine. Oh yeah, that was the first like tech thing that I read as like a 9, 10 year old. I had no idea that that like that stuff existed. And so that was really my introduction to technology, so to speak. That magazine.

Father Robert Ballecer (169:34)

You're not a real audiophile unless you've taken out a second mortgage to buy some monster cables. Let's just put it out there.

Leo Laporte (169:40)

Yeah, I've heard that, you know, ironically, distilled water does not conduct very well at all. But if you put a little mud in it, it does a much better job. Ironically, even a banana. This is something for you. As the cook of the family Nicholas Lab grown meat exists but nobody wants to eat it. Yeah, I always thought this would be the solution, right. To global warming, to food hung, you know, hunger. The FDA has approved cultivated chicken for sale in 2023. The price down to about $10 to $30 a pound. It's expensive. Lot of investors. $3 billion in investor money poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells. So you take animal cells, you grow them in a vat so it's real meat but you don't have an animal attached. You don't have to slaughter anything. You can eat beef without killing cattle. Writes digital dive. Chicken without industrial farming. Steak without ethical compromise. The technology works. Federal regulators have approved, it is safe. Nearly a third of US states have banned it or are trying to.

Sam Abuelsamid (171:00)

And I would assume that states like, you know, Iowa, Nebraska.

Leo Laporte (171:04)

Yeah. Where they grow meat.

Sam Abuelsamid (171:06)

Yeah,

Leo Laporte (171:09)

yeah. Cattle states are tried. I honestly we've all tried the impossible burger and stuff like that. That's not, you know, those aren't bad. This is actually better environmentally. A lot of those fake meats, substitutes actually are very messy. There's only three places that you can buy cultivated meat. Singapore, Australia and parts of the United States. Mission Barnes sold cultivated pork meatballs at a California grocery store for $13.99. That might be part of it. It's still more expensive.

Nicholas De Leon (171:47)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (171:48)

A handful of US restaurants serve wild types. Cultivated salmon. That's not farmed salmon. It's not a fish. It's. It's grown in a vat. Yeah, I think we've missed out here.

Father Robert Ballecer (172:04)

As soon as it comes down in price, it will become popular. The problem is regular meat will cost you between four and twenty dollars a pound, and this is going to cost you between 10 and $30 a pound.

Leo Laporte (172:14)

It's a lot more expensive. Expensive, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (172:15)

And Americans love cheap food.

Leo Laporte (172:19)

That's the truth.

Father Robert Ballecer (172:21)

But the real question, Leo, is what would it sound like if you played an MP3 through the meat?

Leo Laporte (172:28)

I bet meat conducts pretty well. Yeah, better than mud. Clear as mud. So Digital Dive writes, you could still go to jail in Mississippi for selling a chicken nugget grown in a bioreactor instead of cut from a slaughtered bird. Oh, finally. I think this is just for historical reasons. Quite interesting. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners Lee. He was a physicist working at cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. He was, as a scientist, wanted to share his papers with other scientists. And he invented the whole idea of hyperlinking, the ability to click on a link and go to another page because he thought that. And by the way, in his earliest conception, everybody looking at the page could edit the page. It was more like a wiki because he wanted scientists to be able to collaborate. Maybe you've always wondered what it looked like, the original World Wide Web. Now CERN has put it online. Actually, they did it in 2019. This is the world. You launched the World Wide Web browser and you can actually see what it looked like in the good old days.

Father Robert Ballecer (173:47)

Is it sad that I actually remember this?

Leo Laporte (173:49)

Do you remember it right? 1989. My gosh. This was the.

Sam Abuelsamid (173:54)

I'm trying to see right now if it can open Twit tv.

Leo Laporte (173:56)

Oh, that's a good question.

Sam Abuelsamid (173:58)

It's just. It's sitting there. Connecting, connect, connecting.

Leo Laporte (174:01)

I think JavaScript is probably killing. Was done on a Next machine. So there's a whole next related subsection. Here's general CERN Information sources Software Technology Interest Group news. It's got a menuing system, I guess, all in HTML, right? You don't. I mean, that's pretty impressive.

Benita (174:24)

Can we get the Internet circa 1999?

Father Robert Ballecer (174:26)

Out. Yeah, I didn't find it very interesting. Gopher for me was the thing that got me.

Leo Laporte (174:33)

I so I was thinking about have I ever experienced in my 40 years of covering technology, have I ever experienced anything quite as exciting and revolutionary as AI today? And the only thing that comes to mind is the first time I experienced the Internet. Not the worldwide we Web.

Father Robert Ballecer (174:53)

Right.

Leo Laporte (174:54)

The Internet. I was using a bulletin board system called the well out of San Francisco the whole Earth electronic link that was created by Stuart Brand and it turned out it was running on UNIX machines. And if you knew the command in the. You were in the forums. If you knew the command you could drop out of the forum onto a UNIX command prompt where you could run Gopher and Archie and be on the Internet. Now the Internet in this must have been been late 80s. Well it was before the web so it must have been mid-80s. There wasn't a lot going on but I was even then like wow, this is. There's all these people, there's all this stuff there, all these resources and I can get to it directly. This is amazing. That was the first time I felt that. And this is. This AI thing is. I think it's even maybe more. More remarkable. But that's the only other thing I can remember is my first experience of the Internet. Nicholas De Leon Everybody should get their Tucson news from his. His clanker clanking away.

Nicholas De Leon (175:59)

Yeah, I just got the 6pm So I get. It goes at 6am and the whole pipeline goes off for everyone. Then at 6pm I get just a personal one on telegram. I don't need. Tucson's pretty small. You don't need two. Two feeds Roundups.

Sam Abuelsamid (176:12)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (176:12)

Nice.

Nicholas De Leon (176:13)

And it worked great. It just so it's.

Leo Laporte (176:15)

Is it awesome? Awesome.

Nicholas De Leon (176:15)

You said Tucson DailyBrief.com is the. The blog version. If you scroll to the bottom there's the podcast link and the YouTube link and. And that's it.

Leo Laporte (176:25)

Now next next step will be to have a. A video of you.

Nicholas De Leon (176:30)

I was thinking like how do I. I'm less familiar with the video generating models but that would. Yeah of course that would be you know something to go along with. With the, with the audio podcast and YouTube.

Leo Laporte (176:43)

So yeah, Tucson is spelled with an extra C. I should mention T C. Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon (176:48)

I guess that nobody you know how

Leo Laporte (176:50)

to spell it but no one in the world. It's almost as bad as Albuquerque. What is it with New Mexico or Yani or the South Pacific, the Southwest? Ypsilanti. Everybody knows how to spell Ypsilanti. Y, P, R, E S, A, L, A, N, T, I, X, Y, Z. Right, Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (177:08)

Well, you got the YP right. Kind of went off the rails.

Father Robert Ballecer (177:12)

Isn't Ypsilanti the. The placeholder, whenever you have those templates is.

Leo Laporte (177:17)

It pops up. It's better than Sue St. Marie. I'm just saying.

Sam Abuelsamid (177:23)

That's true.

Leo Laporte (177:24)

Mr. Sam Abul Samit. Everybody knows how to spell that. He's at Wheel Bearing Media. VP Research, Telemetry. Thank you, Sam, so much. Great to see you, too.

Sam Abuelsamid (177:33)

Thank you for having me back on again. This is always.

Leo Laporte (177:36)

I love having you on. Yeah. Sam and I, actually, all three of you. I like exchanging emails with you guys. These are my buds. Father Robert Balir, the digital Jesuit still stuck at the Vatican. They won't let him go home.

Father Robert Ballecer (177:50)

Will not.

Sam Abuelsamid (177:51)

They'll not.

Leo Laporte (177:51)

They love you. That's why.

Father Robert Ballecer (177:53)

Well, I don't. I think it comes down to familiarity. I've been here so long that they kind of just know that I'm going to be up on the roof doing my thing.

Sam Abuelsamid (178:01)

Who's going to maintain the servers if they let you go?

Father Robert Ballecer (178:03)

I remember we've got people for that trust.

Leo Laporte (178:05)

I remember when they called you. You can't say no. I mean, you know, I said no three times. You try.

Father Robert Ballecer (178:13)

I.

Sam Abuelsamid (178:13)

And then.

Leo Laporte (178:14)

And then, yeah, they, they. And. And you thought maybe it just be a few years, right?

Father Robert Ballecer (178:19)

I thought it would be one year on.

Leo Laporte (178:21)

How long has it been?

Father Robert Ballecer (178:22)

This is year eight.

Leo Laporte (178:24)

And is there a. An insider. I.

Father Robert Ballecer (178:29)

Every time I try to plan that, fate laughs at me. I. I've even brought people into the team to each take part of my responsibility. And they haven't gotten the hint that they don't need me here anymore.

Leo Laporte (178:41)

Robert, you might as well just accept it. This is your calling. This is your calling, Robert. You're doing good work.

Father Robert Ballecer (178:49)

It's not a bad city to be stuck in. I mean, Rome is beautiful.

Leo Laporte (178:52)

Oh, man, I would. I would love to live in Rome. Rome. I'm so jealous. I've told Lisa, I said I want to move to Rome. She says no.

Father Robert Ballecer (179:01)

See, you love the history. You love the food.

Leo Laporte (179:05)

It doesn't knock you out, does it?

Father Robert Ballecer (179:06)

It doesn't. It really doesn't.

Leo Laporte (179:08)

I was. Every time I would go around a corner in Rome, there's this something. There's a beautiful church or a painting, or you go, oh, my God, this is history. I'll never forget. We're walking. We got lost. We're walking and there's like a hole in the ground. Ground. And there are all these cats in the hole. In the ground I walk over.

Father Robert Ballecer (179:26)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (179:27)

And it's where they, where Julius Caesar was murdered. It's the, it's the Forum. Yep, yep. It's just a whole.

Father Robert Ballecer (179:33)

That's one block away from our big church, the Jesse. So, yeah, this is right there.

Sam Abuelsamid (179:37)

Hey, Robert. It could be worse. You, you could be assigned to like Dallas or Jacksonville.

Father Robert Ballecer (179:43)

It's, it's okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (179:43)

This is true.

Leo Laporte (179:44)

Houston.

Father Robert Ballecer (179:45)

But, but I do like, not always now, but I do like the culture in the United States. I like the fact that there's a big mix. I can, you can get any sort of cuisine anywhere you want. And, and honestly, history is lost on me. I'm not a history person and I feel bad because I wish I was.

Leo Laporte (180:04)

Yeah, you're surrounded by 2,000 years of amazing, amazing history.

Benita (180:09)

It's okay. You would never get any work done if you were though, Padre. You'd just be like, you know, that's true.

Leo Laporte (180:14)

There's a shopping mall in Rome. You go in, our tour guide brought us in there and there's just the remains of a Roman aqueduct. They said, yeah, every time you try to build anything in Rome, you have to dig. And then of course you're going to get a ruin. And they said, well, you can build them all here, but you've got to get, you've got to put an exhibit where the aqueduct is so that people can see it. So there's this like little museum in the shopping mall where they have an old Roman aqueduct. It's really amazing to see.

Father Robert Ballecer (180:42)

Well, across the street right now there's a massive construction project. They actually put a crane up. I've never seen one of those in Rome. Rome, it's the, the future Four Seasons Hotel that Bill Gates investment company bought. And six years ago after they, they got the lease, they started excavating the courtyard because they wanted to make a multi purpose area. And they found the remains of Nero's Theater.

Leo Laporte (181:04)

Great.

Sam Abuelsamid (181:05)

Yeah.

Father Robert Ballecer (181:06)

And so now they've just finally gotten permission. They've, they've repacked it and then they've capped it with a layer of concrete to preserve it. And can you go down underneath and

Leo Laporte (181:15)

see see it or do they bury it?

Father Robert Ballecer (181:19)

Well, the public can't. However, it extends underneath our property. So if you go down the elevator shaft of our building, you actually can get into it.

Leo Laporte (181:28)

Okay, I'm now definitely coming out. Yeah. That's one of the things that surprised me. At Rome, there's no high rises.

Father Robert Ballecer (181:35)

No.

Leo Laporte (181:36)

Because you cannot do it. Well, it's so great to see all three of you. Thank you for making this is special show for me. I appreciate it and I hope to see you again soon. We do Twit every Sunday afternoon, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. Are we going to switch time zones? Not, not next week, the week after, I think when we go back to a summertime daylight savings time. But for now, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. We stream live in the Club Twit Discord. I hope you're a member. If you're not, please, we'd love to have you. Twitt TV Club Twit. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Disco, which Amazingly enough is 13 stories below the ground right next to Nero's Theater. And in there we stream all the shows so you can watch them there. We have special programming just for club members. Find out more Twitt TV clubtwit. We also stream for for the world at large at YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. So do watch live if you want. You don't have to on demand versions of the show available. There's audio and video your choice at TWiT TV, our website. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Twitter. Of course. Of course you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast player and that way you'll get it automatically minute we put it out, which will be in just a couple hours because Benito and Kevin have to polish it up. Thank you for being here everybody. 20 years we've been doing it. I'm. I'm looking for another 20 more and then after that it'll be my AI avatar for another thousand more. But I hope it will do as I have done for the last 20 years and say thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on other Twit is in the can this.

Benita (183:29)

Bye bye.

Leo Laporte (183:29)

Amazing. Doing the Twit all right.

Nicholas De Leon (183:35)

Doing the Twit baby.

Leo Laporte (183:37)

Doing the Twit all right.