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This Week in Tech 1073: Broetry in Motion
02:54:24
Anthropic Stands Up to The Pentagon
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A
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. It was a big news week, but we've got a big panel for you. Molly White's here, owen Thomas, Harry McCracken will talk about the showdown between the Department of Defense and Anthropic. Netflix gives up on the deal for Warner Brothers and layoffs at Block. Does it mean the beginning of the end for real humans? That and more coming up next on Twitter.
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B
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
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A
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1073, recorded Sunday, March 1, 2026. Broetry in Motion it's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Great panel ahead for you. Molly White is here from Web3 is going just great. Mollywhite.net hi Molly.
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C
Hello.
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A
How are you in your brand new orange home?
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C
Welcome.
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A
It's beautiful. Thank you. Did you get this place to match your hair or it just coincidental?
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C
Yeah, it made the search very challenging, but we made it happen.
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A
It's so complimentary. It actually looks great. I mean, it's such a great background for you. Anyway, great to see you. Also with us, the wonderful Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Always good to see Owen, who is, I mean, you're. Are you going to start entering weightlifting bodybuilding contests or is that your goal?
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B
I haven't gone as far as a bodybuilding competition, but I have entered weightlifting competitions.
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A
You look really good. I mean, go on, you. No, seriously, you're filling that shirt out like Arnold, man. You got it going on. It's great to see you.
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B
I'm just, you know, I'm just trying to bring some muscle to tech journalism. Muscular journalism is what the world needs right now.
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A
Yeah, I'm not adding to that, that's for sure. I'm more on the spaghetti noodle kind of side of that picture. Also with us, the technologizer himself, the wonderful Harry McCracken from Fast Company. Hi, Harry.
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D
Hey, Leo. Hi, folks.
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A
Good to see you. You've been doing a lot of great interviews of late, including Molly White, I understand.
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D
I talked to Molly a few months ago. I have some good stuff coming up soon, like watch Fast Company over the next couple of weeks or so.
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A
I have you on my RSS feeds and it's frustrating because I'm trying to zip through R and every time I run across a Fast Company story, especially yours, I have to stop and read it, which is no good.
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D
Well done at all.
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A
Yeah. Will you stop writing such good stuff it's great to have all three of you. This has been a very eventful week. The clock was ticking all week long for anthropic, the AI company that creates Claude, which is, I think, decoders anyway, the premier coding AI. And of course, Claude had a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense. In fact, it was the only AI to my knowledge that had clearance to work on classified materials. In fact, CLAUDE was used in the Venezuela kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. Did I say kidnapping? That's probably a loaded word. Arrest, apprehension of necklace.
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C
Abstraction, yes.
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A
Extraction. That's a very good word. But the Department of Defense, the Pentagon said, hey, guys, we don't want any limitations on how we can use you. And Dario Mode of Anthropic said, well, wait a minute, we have two red lines. We don't want you to use us to surveil American citizens, and we don't want you to use us to create autonomous weapons that will kill without a human in the loop. Both of which, incidentally, are illegal. The DoD is not supposed to do either one of those. But Pete Hegseth said, no, we don't want any private company to put any restrictions on how we use their technology, which I guess sort of makes sense if you're the Pentagon. You know, it should be up to you and lawmakers to decide what you use, the hardware and software you contract. You wouldn't, you know, Boeing wouldn't say, well, you can't use our planes to bomb civilians. So I understand that. A little bit. Ticked down to the wire 5pm on Friday, at which point Anthropic did not budge. And Pete Hegseth declared not only that they would stop using Anthropic, but they would designate them a supply chain risk. Trump actually posted on Truth Social that they were a very evil, very evil company and not patriotic. And he said, I am directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease all use of anthropics technology. Furthermore, if it is a supply chain risk, nobody who has a contract with the Pentagon can use it. And that would include Google, that would include Microsoft, that would include Nvidia, all of which use claude,
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B
which, as Dario Amadei pointed out, is not actually how the supply chain risk law works.
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A
Yeah. In fact, they've immediately gone to court to challenge that it is better than it could have been. They could have used the Defense. I understand the Defense Production act to say, too bad we're just going to do what we want to do with your AI, which.
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B
That's an interesting thought experiment. What if the, you know, what if the Pentagon were to do that? So I suppose they could seize the source code, right? You know, they could, yeah.
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A
I don't know how much access they
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B
have, but how are they going to compel Anthropic's employees to fix bugs? Maintain it. They'll all just quit.
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A
It was interesting because there was so much support on Twitter from Anthropic employees who obviously had a campaign. There were hundreds of tweets saying, I am so proud to be working for Anthropic because they drew the line. Pete Hegseth tweeted, I keep saying tweet X. I don't know.
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D
This gets posted.
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A
Posted on X this week. Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a text. Boy, he seems butthurt as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States government of the Pentagon. Our position has never wavered and will never waver. The Department of War must have full unrestricted access to Anthropics models for every lawful purpose in defense of the Republic. He also implied that they're woke. Cloaked in the santactimonious rhetoric of effective altruism, they've attempted to strong arm the US Military into submission. Now there is some drama going on because despite the fact that Sam Altman issued a statement in support of Anthropic saying, yeah, yeah, we agree, this is absolutely right. On Wednesday, two days before he was actually negotiating with the Pentagon, Gary Marcus says the whole thing was a scam. The fix was in. Dario never had a chance. This is from the New York Times. At the same time, Mr. Altman engaged in talks with the Pentagon starting on Wednesday over a deal for its technology. In fact, they did get the deal. They have classified access. The Pentagon's gonna use them. It has nothing to do with the fact that the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, donated $25 million to a PAC supporting Donald Trump. Has nothing to do with the fact that Sam Altman donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration and more money to the ballroom that will never get built. You know, somebody pointed out, I think this is interesting. I don't know if it's true. Is this the first US Company to stand up to President Trump instead of giving him a gold bar?
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D
Certainly to that degree, I think. No question in public, certainly.
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A
And then that raises the question, did the government, did the administration put its thumb on the scale and say, we like these OpenAI guys. They're nice guys, they're generous. Anthropic out of business.
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B
One key difference between OpenAI's products and Anthropic's OpenAI is all cloud. So anything that OpenAI offers is delivered from OpenAI servers. Claude actually exists in a downloadable, locally runnable version, and so it can be deployed in classified networks which are air gapped from the public Internet. OpenAI doesn't work on air gapped networks because it's all on the public Internet, even if it's secure, encrypted. These are physically separated networks. That I think is a key distinction and that is why Anthropic is kind of in a tougher position here. And OpenAI can perhaps be a little holier than thou because their products are different.
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D
Yeah, I saw somebody online, I don't remember who compare Sam Altman to Eddie Haskell, which seemed like a really good point of comparison. Of course, there's still the question of how he claims that he was able to wangle the same deal that Dario could not get. It seems like it might boil down to exactly what human oversight means and OpenAI giving the department of Defense a looser, goosier definition of what it means for this stu to have human oversight.
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A
So I might have been a little cynical on Anthropic. They did in fact sign a $200 million contract with the Pentagon. If you do a deal with the Pentagon, aren't you saying they can use your technology in any way they choose?
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D
Yeah. Also, Anthropic is not morally opposed to AI controlling killing systems. They just don't think the technology is quite there yet.
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A
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
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C
Someday they seem more willing to. Sorry, OpenAI seems more willing to sort of take the government at their word that they will follow the law, at least as intended when it comes to things like mass surveillance. Whereas it seemed to me like Anthropic wanted more of a reassurance that no, we are not going to use the carve outs in the law that might allow for mass surveillance, or at least could be argued to allow for mass surveillance.
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A
Mike Masnik posted on Blue sky that after examining the terms of the deal, it's pretty clear that in fact domestic surveillance is allowed through kind of a loophole. They refer to Executive Order 12333, which anthropic says, yeah, we'll comply with. That allows the NSA to to capture communications by tapping into lines outside the US Even if it's information about US citizens. So I can see why some are thinking Sam Altman has been a little Eddie Haskell ish.
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B
There's a great Term of art from the judicial world called the presumption of regularity. So when a government lawyer comes before a court, the judge kind of extends them essentially the benefit of the doubt. The government is presumed to be kind of operating under the law, presenting true facts, et cetera. I think what we're seeing is that the court system, the tech world, the public at large, just cannot give this administration the presumption of regularity. Right, Good point.
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A
Maybe it's bias. Is that bias?
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B
Well, I'm just observing the reaction to. People are not extending the administration the benefit of the doubt that they might have extended other administrations.
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C
Well, I think the administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not deserve it.
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A
Yeah, right. I mean, the fact that Pete Hegseth says, no, no, man, you gotta allow us to surveil Americans. You gotta allow us to have autonomous killing machines. He's literally insisting on that. That kind of implies that they wanna do it.
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B
What some people in tech are saying is, why would you want to do business with the Pentagon on these terms? And, you know, not just these terms, but just the way that they're, you know, kind of beating Anthropic up in public. Like, wouldn't it be easier to just say, we don't do business with the Pentagon? Sorry.
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A
That's why the fact that they made that $200 million deal and they were involved in the Maduro extraction kind of makes sense. Yeah.
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C
That's one thing that's. That's very strange to me about some of the reaction to this, because there's been this sort of weird sentiment among that, you know, anthropic standing up to the government. They're the good guys. They're being very sort of morally driven. But it sort of ignores the fact that Anthropic has been working for the government and assisting in military strikes. And, you know, I think that some people are viewing this as the first time Anthropic is engaging with the Pentagon when that's actually not at all the case.
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A
So there are those who say that anthropics played 5D chess here, that they are actually coming out the big winners. Here they are right now. The number one Apple app rose very quickly. More downloads of Anthropics, Claude, than ever in history. People are. There's even pages saying, here's how to cancel your open your OpenAI subscription.
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D
I wonder. Yeah, I wonder what impact it will have on people deciding where to spend their 20 bucks a month.
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C
Yeah. I mean, especially if there's sort of the feeling that OpenAI is going to be willing to assist the Pentagon in mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. I mean, I might be a little bit more concerned about the data I'm sharing with ChatGPT.
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A
Exactly. ChatGPT keeps your history. In fact, very interestingly, Claude just added a feature which they're promoting about how to move off other AIs, how to extract all the history that the other AIs have of you and put it into Claude instead.
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D
I mean, up until now, Claude, I mean we all know about claude. I think its profile among like average Americans, not all that interested in technology, has been dramatically lower than that of
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A
ChatGPT, which is still a billion active monthly active.
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D
ChatGPT is still the brand name here. It is the Google of AI. And that this has to have been good publicity for Anthropic just in terms of it being in the news in a way it has not been up until now.
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A
Well, some have pointed out, first of all, that the issue with Frontier AIs and these hyperscalers right now is not how many contracts you can get. They're GPU constrained. So losing a $200 million contract with the Pentagon is meaningless because they'll immediately fill that with enterprise customers. They don't have enough GPUs to fulfill their demand as it is. So this just isn't. That's not an issue. They've gotten amazing publicity out of it.
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D
Unless the Pentagon succeeds in getting enterprise customers antsy about doing business with Anthropic. And there is, I think the big question is, is the Trump administration attempting to drive Anthropic out of business? Essentially, and,
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B
and good luck with that. I mean again, government business as a whole is non zero, but it is, you know, I think it's single digit percentage at most, you know, most big tech, big software companies. It's seen as prestigious. It's seen as like, well, we should have this. But I don't think it's make or break to the bottom line, but I
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C
think the question is, is the government going to do something unprecedented essentially to basically drive them out of business using, you know, the regulatory levers or the, you know, all these threats of designating them a supply chain risk or, you know, a threat to American security? I mean they could do something very extreme if they wanted to and you know, it's sort of the presumption of regularity thing. Again, you know, why would they do that? Reason to believe they might not.
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A
Why would they try to put Anthropic out of business just because they didn't give money?
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D
They love a fight. They Love being able to accuse somebody of being woke and then to try to destroy that.
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A
Yeah. Yes. Why would they destroy Harvard? Why would. Yeah, why would they?
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D
And they're used. Generally speaking, most institutions have buckled under at least a little bit. Not Harvard, but a lot of other universities.
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B
For instance, you know the Netflix board member who spoke out recently on a podcast, Susan Rice, who promptly drew Trump's scorn for doing something. Yeah. She pointed out that these companies that are bending the knee, to use her term, to the Trump administration, it's not going to look good for them if there's a change in control of the House or even the Senate, not to mention a new occupant of the White House in 2029. But the midterms are coming up soon, and a House of Representatives that can call oversight hearings, that has subpoena power. That is not going to be fun for some of these corporate leaders.
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A
It's a little bit of a chilling thought, but the administration is acting as if that will never happen. I hope they're wrong.
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D
Well, they don't have a great track record for looking forward more than about 72 hours in general.
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A
Okay, good. You know, it's funny because I'm an accelerationist, I love AI. I use Claude code all the time. I'm blown away by what it can do. It's the first A.I. you know, I've used all the chatbots and all that stuff, and I used Claude code in the past, but something magical happened at the end of November. I remember the day, November 24, 2025. I'll never forget it. And ever since, I've been kind of more of a believer that AI is real and it's going to change things. And I've never been a doomer. I've always kind of pooh poohed the people that said, oh, AI is going to destroy us. It's going to take over for humanity. I always said AI is not a threat unless you, I don't know, give it access to autonomous weaponry, for instance. Oh, yeah, it's the, the monkey's paw curls. Yeah. As long as you don't let AI decide who lives or dies, we're okay. But now I'm starting to think A, AI is very powerful and effective, still makes plenty of mistakes, and B, there are people, people in our administration who want to give AI that power.
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B
I mean, autonomous drones are being deployed in the Russia, Ukraine conflict right now, the war.
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A
Do they make kill decisions or are they targeted before by humans? See, this is a scary thing. You could create A drone army, a drone swarm that would have instructions about, well, if this guy's wearing a turban, you should kill him. That would make those decisions autonomously. And that's the thing that is really scary to me. I don't know if we're at that stage yet. I think we could be if somebody were stupid enough to create that weapon. We could be at that stage today if people have created that weapon. I'm terrified right now. Most of these drones stay online as long as they can in the cloud. In fact, the drones that we build and others build have Starlink built in them. Thank goodness Starlink isn't controlled by any crazed, mad evil geniuses that could.
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B
So, yeah, Ukraine is developing its own homegrown AI powered drones that can lock in our target. They don't need, you know, basically, I think a human selects a target, but they don't need a human. Okay. To kind of fire the shot.
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A
That's a, that's a step in the wrong direction, that's for sure.
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B
Well, Ukraine is desperate.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Like, I understand their, their back is against the wall.
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A
Yep. And as we know, Ukraine has been a, in effect, a, A test tube for this kind of war. Now Iran will be on both sides.
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B
Yeah. The fiber optic drones, you know, to get around jamming. That's crazy to me.
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A
Yeah. The Russians are going around with hedge clippers trying to cut the, cut the, the fiber optic cables.
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C
It reminds me of the electric lawnmowers that you have to plug in. Like, it just doesn't seem like a bad idea.
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A
Oh, it's a. Anyway, this was a big moment for AI, A big moment for the Trump administration, and a possibly life or death moment for anthropic. Of course. OpenAI has just completed a massive record funding round. Right. They got money from Nvidia and Amazon.
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C
I feel like every funding round they've done is a record funding round.
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A
Yeah, it is. No, it is literally right each time.
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B
And someone estimated that Anthropics, just their internal stock sale, their sanctioned employee stock sale, is more than the entire value of real estate that was transacted in San Francisco last year.
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D
Wow.
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B
Think about what that's doing to the housing market. We definitely see it in the San Francisco Business Times. We publish every week a list of homes that have traded hands. I regularly see across the Bay Area. $10 million, $15 million. There was a $19.5 million mansion that sold.
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A
And those prices are inflated because people have all this newfound wealth and there's
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B
a lot of all cash deals in the Market too.
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A
Wow, Bitcoin.
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C
Didn't million still get you a mansion there or are we talking two bedroom apartment?
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A
Yeah,
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B
it gets you a tear down.
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A
I mean, you got a one car garage and you have to use the outhouse in the back.
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B
That's probably a big lot in Atherton. Like a nice house in a big lot in Atherton.
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A
In a million.
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B
19.5 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not a tear down.
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D
But 1 million doesn't get us parking space these days.
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A
No, that's actually really bad for any community. It really is not a. It is almost a. Feels like a death spiral for a community.
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D
Yeah.
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B
The affordability crisis.
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A
Yeah. Continues.
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B
And it's interesting because like
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A
a lot
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B
of other metro areas are seeing declining rents. I hate to say they've overbuilt, they've built a sufficient amount of housing. Basically the Bay Area and the rest of California has not.
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A
Final thoughts on the anthropic thing. Is anthropic out of business or is this the smartest move ever?
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D
They're suing and there's some chance that
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A
Skoda's going to have to take it up very quickly.
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D
They could win in court.
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A
Yeah, well, if they do, that's interesting.
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D
I mean, I feel like maybe also the Trump administration will lose interest in this and move on to the next fight fairly quickly.
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B
Yeah. I think anthropic wins in the court of public opinion. They win in the court of hiring AI talent they've retained, which is, by
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A
the way, very important. Let's not ignore that. I mean, look at how much money Meta's been throwing around because they're so desperate to get that talent. It's a limited supply.
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B
Yeah. Oh, it's crazy. It's like, you know, this person who just left, you know, just left OpenAI to join Apple has now left Apple to join Meta. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's like a revolving door.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, multimillion dollar employment contracts.
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A
It's amazing, man. And I studied Chinese in college. What was I thinking? It does also argue for something I've felt really strongly about. Open weight, open source artificial intelligence. It'd be nice to be a non combatant in all this and be able to run AI locally, I think. And it may be the hope, the one last hope for us as users. You're agreeing, Harry?
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D
Well, I like that idea too, but directionally it doesn't seem to be happening yet. And some of the open source stuff like deep seqs, essentially seems like it's Extremely dependent on closed AI.
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A
Right. And they're using. At least MODI says they're using distillation attacks on CLAUDE and GPT to get better.
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D
No Claude, no OpenAI, maybe no deep seq.
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A
Right. And same for Zai.
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D
And Meta has transitioned from being a champion of open source.
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A
LLAMA is not even close to what the frontier is.
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D
Yeah. At one point, I mean, a few years ago, LLAMA seemed like it was competitive and they've had to scrap that strategy.
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C
In some ways, it's almost a check on what the Defense Department is doing, because if we did have open source models that were equivalent to some of these models that they are looking for, then they couldn't say no. Anthropic couldn't put up a fight.
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A
Good point.
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D
Historically, government has liked open source stuff.
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A
If they could build their own, they don't need anybody.
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D
There are just a handful of companies that are able to build this stuff. And it's a very weird dynamic for the world.
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A
Right. There is a certain irony and Anthropic complaining about distillation attacks since they basically all they're.
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D
I think there is totally a case to be made for an anti anthropic case to be made here in terms of being very uncomfortable with private companies having the power to make these decisions.
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A
Right. Even if who should be in charge, A private company or Congress and elected officials.
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D
Yeah. And like Molly says, some of it boils down to whether or not you're comfortable assuming that the government is at least attempting to do the right thing.
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C
Right. Or that Congress is even in the loop.
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A
Right.
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D
Which historically, I mean, there have been all kinds of instances where that wasn't true. But historically it wasn't a wacky idea to err on the side of thinking that even presidents you didn't like were sort of operating on good faith.
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A
Yeah. I've watched this happen in my lifetime. It started in the 60s with Nixon. And trust in government has just gone downhill from that point on. And I think we're at the point now where people don't assume government is acting in the public's interest, which is a shame. Again, another shame. Because, you know, the government is supposed to represent us. That's the only way we as a society have to move forward. You don't want private companies to make these decisions. Even if Anthropic is benevolent, they're not the only one. And I'm not sure Anthropic's benevolent, to be honest.
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C
Right.
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A
All right, let's take a little break. That was the big story of the week. Actually, it's not the big story of the week. There's so many big stories this week. This was a crazy week. I'm so glad we got you. Harry McCracken, the technologizer. Your great grasp of the history of all of this is very valued. I appreciate you being here. Fast company.
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D
Although I don't remember the 1960s. Although I was around, just not paying much attention.
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A
If you remember it, you really weren't participating, I think is the truth.
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D
Or you are three.
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A
I'm a little older than you, Harry. I do remember. Remember it fairly well, actually.
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D
I do remember certain aspects of the very late 60s. But they mainly involved things like going out to get ice cream.
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A
I protested. I many of a protest.
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D
For a long time I thought I remembered us landing on the moon in 1969 and watching it in kindergarten. Until somebody pointed out to me that it happened at night during the summer. And so I probably was not watching it in kindergarten.
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A
You watched a video of it later?
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D
I think I probably watched some later.
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A
I remember my dad getting me up and we watched it together. We'll never ever forget that. Well, how old would I have been? About 12. 11 or 12? No, 12. Never forget it. I also remember Kennedy getting shot, Martin Luther King getting shot. The 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and protesters in the streets. I remember Kent State. We've been through a lot of.
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D
I had been conceived. I'd been conceived when Kennedy was shot. But again, I wasn't paying attention.
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A
You don't remember it from the womb. Yeah, I understand. I understand. Owen Thomas is also here from the San Francisco Business Times. He remembers nothing.
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B
You guys make me feel so young.
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A
I know. It's great to see you. And the Wonderful Molly White. Mollywhite.net who are you writing for these days? Besides, Web3 is going just great.
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C
CitationNeeded News is my newsletter and that is my primary location these days.
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A
And how's that going?
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C
It's going great.
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A
I love it.
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C
I can't use those words anymore.
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A
It's going just great. Yeah, because you used them sarcastically for so long. No citation needed is great. And you know what? This is what really encourages me is that people now like you can do independent a journalism. I mean, we're suffering in so many ways in the more journalistic world. Just what happened to the Washington Post? So tragic. But thank God the great journalists have a chance to go out and make their way. I'm so glad you're doing it. It's great.
- [31:53]
C
Yeah, it's great that there's so much leading the independent news and other media.
- [31:57]
A
Yeah. That's why RSS is back, by the way, because we make our own newspaper now.
- [32:04]
C
Yeah, it's wonderful.
- [32:05]
A
Yeah.
- [32:05]
D
I just signed up for. Is that called Current? This RSS reader I read about on Daring Fireball.
- [32:12]
A
Current's very cool.
- [32:13]
D
It looks pretty slick.
- [32:15]
A
I don't use it because it's more about reading articles and I have been really going through new. It's a beat check for me. I am trying to collect all the stories for the shows that I'm doing. So I don't. I was telling Harry before the show began, I hate you because maybe it was during the show. Your articles are so compelling that I have to stop and read them. I just want the headlines, man. Just the headlines. I gotta go boom, boom, boom. That's another reason I haven't added citation needed to the RSS feed. But I really need to. You have an RSS feed, I'm sure, right?
- [32:45]
C
Absolutely, of course.
- [32:47]
A
And you can subscribe. But what's nice about what you do is all the content is free, so you can just like we do. You can support Molly, but you don't have to to read her stuff. I think it's well worth it. I'll send in my check. Thanks, Mark.
- [33:03]
C
Thank you.
- [33:04]
A
Great to see you. Let's pause for station identification. You're watching this week in Tech. Our show this week brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. Since 1985, they've actually been around longer than we have. Forward thinking businesses these days are using AI in all kinds of new ways. But AI is only as good. This is, I wish people would remember, this is only as good as the data you feed it. You can have the most sophisticated AI tools in the world, but if your customer data is incomplete or duplicated or just plain wrong, you're training your AI to make expensive mistakes. But that's where Melissa comes in. For 41 years, Melissa's been the data quality partner that helps businesses get their data clean, complete and current. I mean, Melissa does so many things. But here's an example of some of the things Melissa can do for you. Global address verification and autocomplete in real time, real time validation for addresses and anywhere in the world in the format of that country so your deliveries actually arrive and your customer experience starts strong. They can also do mobile identity verification. Very important. If you're in banking or finance or fintech with Melissa, you can connect customers to their mobile numbers, which really reduces fraud and incidentally helps you reach people on the devices they actually use. Oh, another great feature, change of address tracking, which means they can automatically update records when customers move, ensuring you don't lose revenue due to outdated information. They do one of the things that's the hardest of all to do with address lists, smart deduplication. On average, a database I know this with my own contact list contains eight to ten duplicate records. Mine's more than half. Melissa's powerful matchup technology can identify even non exact matching duplicate records, merge them, crunch it down so that each is unique and correct. They also do data enrichment, which means they append demographic data, property information and geographic insights, which takes that basic contact record and turns it into marketing gold. The new Melissa Alert service will monitor and automatically update your customer data for moves, address changes, property transactions, hazard risks and more. So whether you're a small business just getting started or an enterprise managing millions of records, Melissa scales with you. Melissa has easy to use apps wherever you are. Whether it's Salesforce, Dynamics, CRM. They support Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and on and on and on. Melissa's API integrates seamlessly into your existing workflows or your custom builds. It's an API. Melissa solutions and services, of course, protect your data. They're GDPR and CCPA compliant, FedRAMP certified, ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Clean data leads to better marketing, ROI, higher customer lifetime value and AI that works as intended. So get started today with 1000 records clean for free. Melissa.com TWIT that's melissa.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Big news at Block Stripe's parent company, Jack Dorsey's company. The guy who was Square. Square.
- [36:40]
B
Square, that's right.
- [36:44]
A
Is it the same as Block? I'm confused.
- [36:47]
D
Block is the parent company of Square, not Stripe.
- [36:51]
A
I said Stripe. Sorry, Square. Yes, Jack. Actually, it's a great story. When Jack was a CEO at Twitter, we'd go off to a makerspace and use the 3D printer to design that little card reader that plugged into the Courage port on your iPhone. Back when they had headphone ports and you could swipe cards. It was a huge invention. Anyway, Block, which is the parent company of Square, had a fabulous quarter, made a lot of money, and they're laying off almost half their team. 10,000 people. They're going to cut it down to 6,000. 4,000 people being asked to leave in the lovely AI written tweet that Jackson sorry X post that Jack put out, it sounds like they're going to try to take care of everybody. He thanked people. Did he, though, imply Molly White, that this was an A off due to AI? I think a lot of people are interpreting it that way, yeah.
- [37:57]
C
I mean, I think there's sort of a trend lately of layoffs being attributed to AI. Whether or not maybe that's true, you've
- [38:07]
A
called it AI washing.
- [38:09]
C
Yeah, well, I didn't come up with the term, but yeah. I mean, you know, there have been a number of companies that have laid off staff and simultaneously bragged about how efficient they've become because of AI. The crypto exchange Gemini being a recent example, where they cut, I think, up to 25% of their staff. And, you know, whether or not it's actually because of AI or if that is just the exam, you know, the excuse that they're giving to make things sound a little bit less dire is hard to say, but it's certainly been a trend, I think, where layoffs have been announced with fanfare almost and sort of this celebratory stance.
- [38:54]
A
Dorsey said, we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong, gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. That must really reassure. The 4,000 people just lost their jobs.
- [39:08]
C
I was going to say that's got a sting so bad, if you're one of those employees, it's like, we're doing great. See ya.
- [39:13]
A
He says, but something has changed. We're already seeing that intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. That sounds like he's saying AI for some reason.
- [39:30]
B
It's a verbal tick. He doesn't say artificial intelligence. I think he's. Harry, do you think he's trying to make a point there? Like, it. Like it's just intelligence.
- [39:39]
D
Like, I did notice he called it intelligence pretty consistently rather than AI. And I wondered what was behind that.
- [39:47]
B
I think he means AI. He just. He totally means AI as, like a rhetorical device.
- [39:55]
A
He told the shareholders we believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster intelligence native company.
- [40:04]
B
You know, sometimes when we talk about using, you know, using AI in. In our newsroom, I say, let's just call it software that doesn't suck and start there. And it's like, would you like to use software that doesn't suck to, you know, to check grammar in an article. Okay. Yeah, I would like to use softw. That doesn't suck. It doesn't sound as cool. It probably wouldn't raise money at a $100 billion valuation. But I feel like a lot of this is just like, this is software that's being made in a modern way with modern tools, and it works better than the past generation.
- [40:44]
A
Jack did say that we implied that they overhired during COVID Right. That's what a lot of these guys.
- [40:50]
D
As did lots and lots of companies.
- [40:54]
B
I don't believe we've seen a WARN act notice. That's a state filing that companies make when they're executing a layoff. That would give us the exact titles of people who are being laid off.
- [41:07]
A
Do they have to do that?
- [41:08]
B
They do, but there's a delay in when they actually have to see the filing. It'll probably drop soon. But I would bet that Block is laying off a lot of salespeople. Initially, Jack Dorsey did not want to have any salespeople at what was then called Square. The thought was basically that the card reader sold itself. They would distribute it at retail, at Costco, at Staples stores, like that, where small businesses shop, and that was it. The technology would be so good that they didn't need to sell it. That's changed. They added a lot of salespeople. I really wonder if Dorsey's kind of regretting staffing up in, you know, in the sales department.
- [41:56]
A
You know, what else has changed is a lot. At least when I go to the farmer's market, most people are just using Apple Pay. They're not using, you know, a Reader or Square or Zelle.
- [42:08]
B
You know, they're. They're looking. Yeah. You know, the. The lower fee options are getting really popular because I think everybody has a
- [42:19]
A
QR code in the front.
- [42:20]
C
I was gonna say you don't need the card reader anymore because you don't usually get a card out as much. Yeah, no.
- [42:25]
A
Even Apple now lets you just tap the phone.
- [42:27]
B
Yeah, even Square. You know, Square, which still exists as a payments brand, is just an app on the phone. And it's, you know, you tap phone to phone.
- [42:38]
A
He's also Cash app. Right, That's Cash App.
- [42:40]
D
Cash Block has made a number of acquisitions, and they bought Title. And I kind of wonder whether the digesting all of this also played a role in why they're doing this.
- [42:50]
A
Because you acquire. When you acquire the company, you acquire their headcount as well.
- [42:53]
B
They bought afterpay a buy now, pay later company company. So that all added people and they tended to have all of these businesses run kind of semi autonomously. And one thing that Dorsey talked about was basically, why don't we have a finance function, an HR function? Why don't we act like a normal corporation and have horizontal functions for all of our businesses rather than having all the, all this duplication.
- [43:24]
A
Right. I mean, that's what happens when there are mergers. Microsoft laid off thousands. You know, I mean, there's, there's duplication, but it's. I always want to remember the 4,000 people who now are out of work.
- [43:40]
D
Dorsey said basically that he'd rather get ahead of this and we're going to see lots of companies do this over the next year. And I wish I could say that I didn't think he might be right, but I think it's hard to say that for better or worse, he may well be right.
- [43:57]
A
Is this the beginning of a tidal wave of AI layoffs? And that's what everybody, I think is very worried about, is am I next? Right.
- [44:07]
C
Yeah. And especially, I mean, looking at software, if they're laying off software engineers, they're laying them off into a really challenging job market as well.
- [44:17]
A
I know a lot of people have been out of work for months who are not able to find work at least.
- [44:21]
C
Yeah, yeah. And like senior, like good senior people.
- [44:24]
A
Good people.
- [44:25]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [44:27]
A
Are we going to face an AI apocalypse? Job apocalypse?
- [44:30]
B
And apparently there's a, there's kind of a productivity panic among AI using software engineers. The software engineers who have embraced these tools makes them more productive, but they're putting in more hours. They're just trying to keep up with this.
- [44:47]
A
It's not like you don't have to do. You got to create thousands of lines of code every minute. You know, you got stuff to do, you can actually do more.
- [44:55]
C
I think it's kind of scary for the end result as well is, you know, we've got these AI coders who are being pushed to sort of the extremes around their hours and their, you know, lines of code. And it does not seem like it would bode well for the end product to me, especially when AI is so good at introducing very subtle bugs that are challenging for humans to catch.
- [45:21]
D
I feel like even the most pro vibe coding people are not claiming that the code is incredibly high quality or better than what a human could do. It's more like it functions and you still need human beings to fix it.
- [45:36]
C
Yeah, well, and I've seen all this stuff about how, oh, software engineering is changing from writing code to basically running AI tools and Writing tests. Tests. And I was like, oh, cool. They've taken all the fun parts and outsourced them.
- [45:50]
A
That's what AI does. Fun out of everything.
- [45:53]
C
Yeah.
- [45:53]
A
And we're stuck cleaning toilets. Okay. You know, I have to say I've written the other. You know, market impact of this has hit SaaS companies because I think there's also the concern that companies will write their own software. And I have to say, in my own experience, I've written now. I mean, I like to code. I still enjoy coding, but I've used Claude to write half a dozen tools. Tools I probably would never have written or gotten around to writing. And, you know, I don't have any desire to go out and buy those tools. I can just write them myself. And whether they're perfect or not isn't really relevant. You know, if there's a bug in it or whatever, I'm not making production code. That's what's kind of interesting to me is, yeah, it's another matter entirely. If you're going to publish it and make it production code, it's got to be good.
- [46:44]
D
I wrote my own note taking app almost a year ago and I'm still using it. Exactly.
- [46:49]
A
And maybe there's bugs in it, but you don't care because it's you.
- [46:53]
D
I mean, I did invest an enormous amount of time in it and I did it partially because it's a lot of fun and it's great to have an app that only does exactly what you want. So I can't say I saved any money or time. And I feel like in a lot of cases. Cases. If vive coding is a threat to package software, it's because companies feel like it will save them money or time, which may not be true yet.
- [47:13]
C
Yeah, I think there's sort of two use cases here. There's the, the casual person writing the app they've always thought about but never had the time to make. And who cares if it's buggy or if it's a little wonky because it's just me using it and it's not like I'm doing anything critical with it. And then there's the company that's like, maybe we could stop paying for payment processing. We just did all the credit card transactions ourselves with this Viru Vibe coded app and it's like, oh geez, that could go badly.
- [47:40]
A
Yeah, no kidding.
- [47:41]
B
Yeah. And, and I think that, you know, where it's going to play out is that companies are going to use this Perhaps to pressure SaaS companies when the Next contract negotiation comes up, you know, and maybe it decreases, say a salesforce's leverage in those negotiations. That's, that's a legitimate concern for investors.
- [48:01]
C
Yeah, well, and I think there's the employee aspect of that as well, which is that, you know, sort of a labor issue now where if you're constantly under threat of being replaced with AI and now you're being told you need to work all these crazy hours. I mean, you know, I think tech employees have often been in a very privileged position and that's why we see so limited tech labor unions and things like that. Now they're sort of on the, for the first time, almost on the down, the sort of less powerful end of that argument. And I think there's going to be a lot of issue there where there's genuine labor concerns.
- [48:40]
D
I think we might see a new generation of Vibe coding native startups that are able to take on, I've seen it already, that are able to take on these enormous, deeply entrenched companies with extremely small staffs. I do think ultimately the best thing about Vibe coding is it lets you create apps that never would have existed. And I've created any number of apps for my own use. There's no packaged app that would have done it. I have all these incredibly specific things I would like to achieve and now in some cases I can achieve them.
- [49:12]
A
In some ways it gives me hope. For a long time I used Tripit, paid for Tripit Pro for at least 10 years now, but it was becoming more and more inshitified, Got bought by a big private equity company and they didn't put any energy into it. And this I've changed over to what is clearly a Vibe coded site, which is a bit of a leap of faith called Teneo. But it does a better job than TripIt does. And it's pretty obvious to me that this is a single one guy who's put the whole thing together and is slowly adding. One of the ways I know is if you look at the blog, there are a bunch of blog posts, each one has a different, very generic name for the author, which tells me these are all AI generated. Everybody's name is different. There's no repeat, no repeating names. But this software is really good. And I quit Tripit because I don't need Tripit anymore. This does everything Tripit Pro did and more. Right now it's free because the guy's smart. He's not. He's gonna try to make it perfect. I think you're gonna see more and more of this. And of course, people have been speculating that there will be the single founder unicorn sometime in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised. I think we don't know what the impact's going to be, but we know that disruption is here.
- [50:35]
B
Do you think that's too optimistic? Is this the answer to inshidification? That all these software companies are going to have to up their game?
- [50:45]
A
Well, and look at Europe. Who's saying we don't want to deal with these American tech giants anymore. We got to get our own stuff. I would imagine if I were a European founder, I'd be hustling to replace, you know, these American companies. This is an opportunity.
- [51:01]
C
Yeah. I mean, I think that the sort of causes of insidification are ubiquitous and I don't know if there's going to be sort of one easy solution in that.
- [51:10]
A
Well, they'll be in shittified in their turn. Yes, I agree.
- [51:12]
C
Yeah, exactly. It's like these are just sort of the newer ones, the next ones follow the same cycle because the same pressures are, are causing them to insidify. But you know, right now they're in that early stage of the insidification cycle where like Leo was saying, you know, it's. His app is free and it's bringing new people and they're able to.
- [51:31]
A
That won't last. Right?
- [51:33]
C
Yeah, exactly. Like the, the cycle will.
- [51:35]
A
What about open source? Certainly the, the antidote to insidification is open source software. Some have said this is actually bad for open, open source software. There's gonna be a lot of open source slop, for instance.
- [51:48]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you could say the same thing about basically anything, right? Like, oh, this is bad for writing because there's gonna be so much slop on the Internet. You know, it's like, I don't know if it's bad, it's just. It changes the breakdown of what's out there. And I mean, you've always been able to find shitty code on GitHub. You know, I don't know if that's much different.
- [52:12]
A
There's a subreddit called Pencil Slop where they celebrate AI generated drawings as opposed to the slop created by humans.
- [52:23]
B
Have you all been able to detect AI, AI writing? There's a certain structure intent to it.
- [52:29]
D
Yes.
- [52:29]
A
Like, but how much longer is that going to be the case? For a long time you could immediately detect an AI image, an AI video, AI writing. But it's gotten better and better. There's going to be a. You think we'll always know that an AI created it.
- [52:47]
B
Right now, though, there's like this.
- [52:48]
A
You're all three of you writers, so I understand there's a little bias.
- [52:52]
B
It's a plague of Roetry.
- [52:55]
A
It is poetry.
- [52:56]
C
It just all sounds like a LinkedIn post to me.
- [52:59]
A
Yeah, well, because it's trained on LinkedIn post, somebody says all AI writing sounds like millennials. Because that was the group. You guys were the group that created all the content that the AI is trained on.
- [53:12]
D
AI makes everything sound unbelievably important. It loves construction. Construction is like. It wasn't just this. It was also that it does kind of get poetic in a kind of sappy way a lot.
- [53:24]
A
But again, Will Smith couldn't eat spaghetti two years ago. I mean, it does get better, doesn't it?
- [53:31]
D
Yes.
- [53:33]
C
Yeah. No, I do think that the obvious tells will probably go away, but, I mean, if you think about what AI is being used to do, it's a lot of marketing copy, it's a lot of engagement bait. And I think that that just has a specific tone, regardless of whether a human or an AI wrote it.
- [53:53]
A
I'm feeling a little guilty because I have. One of the things I did was create an AI program to post show releases in our forums and on our discord. And it's exactly that says, I can't believe what a great conversation we had. You'll see when the promo comes out for the show. Molly White was amazing. Is anthropic changing AI or it's not this, it's that. Yeah.
- [54:22]
D
Leo, did you give this travel tool that somebody vibe coded, like access to your email or anything sensitive?
- [54:29]
A
No credit card. That's a smart move. It does know my travel plans, and I'm sure he can monetize that, but I forward it emails now. What it does have is you could. By the way, I think you could have it Gmail, which I did to Tripit. God knows what Tripit did with my Gmail. Right. I mean, there's lots of information in there that could be monetized. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I know. I realize I'm taking a chance and I'm not recommending it to people, but I'm making the point. You're going to see people come along that can duplicate stuff that's been around for decades and do it better, partly because they're building on the foundation of all of this other stuff that's been.
- [55:13]
D
And that seems like a largely positive thing over the arc of time.
- [55:16]
A
Yeah, well, I. I hope so. We'll see. The Winklevoss Twins decided to take advantage of the Block layoffs to announce their own layoffs on their crypto exchange, Gemini. Get it? The twins, Gemini, they're laying off 200 folks as well.
- [55:35]
C
And they were very. They were very explicit about claiming it was AI related. But I also think that their business is in more dubious condition than block is. So I am skeptical.
- [55:46]
A
Yeah. The Winklevoss has made a lot of money in crypto, that's for sure. As many did.
- [55:54]
B
They took their Mark Zuckerberg payoff and put it in bitcoin.
- [55:58]
C
Bitcoin, yeah.
- [55:59]
A
It was a good move. They were smart.
- [56:02]
B
That's got to be infuriating for Zuckerberg.
- [56:06]
C
Yeah, I hope so. But it's interesting because it always seems to me like Gemini just can't catch up with the other crypto exchanges. Like, they have all the money in the world. They have all the connections. The Winklevoss twins have been standing behind Donald Trump at practically every crypto related signing or press conference, and yet they're doing these layoffs. They're exiting Europe, the uk, the eu, Australia. They just ditched, I think, three sea levels. So I don't know what's going on with them.
- [56:40]
A
Didn't Zhao, the founder of Binance, just write a. A book about his rise to power and his fallout of Grace?
- [56:53]
C
Yeah. And then his re. Emergence, I guess.
- [56:55]
A
Yeah. He got pardoned. Yeah.
- [56:57]
C
Yeah.
- [56:59]
A
Because you can't write a memoir in prison, so. Well, you could, but you can't.
- [57:02]
C
You can.
- [57:04]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you read it yet, Molly? Because I imagine you would have the insight to understand what's going on there. Freedom of Money, it's called. It's unpublished. That's. It's hard to get a hold of.
- [57:20]
B
Right.
- [57:21]
C
I'm curious how much of it he wrote himself.
- [57:24]
A
It's probably AI. It's gonna have a lot of EM
- [57:26]
C
dashes or ghost written, but, yeah, I would suspect it's probably a mix of the two.
- [57:31]
A
All right, let's take another break. When we come back, we're gonna talk about. Well, I'll give you a hint.
- [57:40]
B
The.
- [57:40]
A
The end of Warner Brothers discovery. Or is it just the beginning? You're watching this Week in Tech with Molly White, Owen Thomas, and the technologizer, Mr. Harry McCracken. Great to have you all aboard. Today on what is probably one of the most eventful. We haven't even gotten to the Apple thing, the Samsung thing. It's a very eventful week. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN, my favorite VPN, going online without Expressvpn is like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Most of the time, you're probably fine, but what if one day you come out of the bathroom and your laptop is gone? Everyone needs ExpressVPN because every time you connect to an unencrypted network in a cafe, in a hotel, use that free airport WI fi. Your online data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. ExpressVPN stops those hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet. ExpressVPN is the one I use, and it's the best VPN out there. It's the only one I recommend because they are committed to keeping your privacy private. I use it whenever I travel. I'll keep up on my shows to watch football. I'll be using it this week when we go to Florida, just to protect my privacy and security. Why ExpressVPN is the best VPN because it is super secure. It would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. It works on everything you've got. Phones, laptops, tablets, so you can stay secure at home and on the go. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twitt that's E-P-R-E-S-S v p n. Com/twitter to find out how you can get up to four extra months. ExpressVPN.com TWIT TA DUM. Netflix did a little. Oops, I've disappeared. I'm gone. Oh, I see. Let's wait. We'll wait till Owen comes back. I. He's blank. He's blank.
- [59:54]
B
I'm here. I'm here.
- [59:55]
A
It's okay. I did that ad way too quickly. I apologize. It's my fault.
- [60:01]
B
I was just getting a treat for Fitz.
- [60:03]
A
Oh, is Fitz right there at your feet?
- [60:06]
B
He is. He is. I can't point that hard to point the camera down.
- [60:10]
A
No, no, no, no. He's there at the end of the show. I want him. Why don't you pick him up and we can make an appearance? We like to visit with Fitz when we get a chance. And, Molly, if your kitty is anywhere
- [60:20]
C
nearby, I can go grab her at some point. Yep.
- [60:23]
A
Cats often know when you're on camera and kind of come up to get on camera.
- [60:27]
C
I'm Surprised she's not. But I just walked past a second ago and she's in. She's got one of those sleeping bags and she's in it right now. That's why she's got much cozier options available.
- [60:37]
A
They have cat sleeping bags.
- [60:39]
C
Yeah.
- [60:41]
A
Well, I don't know why we don't have one of those. We got. It's. We have more cat stuff. It's like a toddler lives here.
- [60:49]
B
Yeah.
- [60:49]
C
About five cat beds. I've just moved them out of the frame.
- [60:53]
D
Cats.
- [60:54]
A
It's so funny because I've learned they are not domesticated. They are wild animals. Except that they're nice wild animals so that you don't mind as long as they're small and they don't bite your nose. But they really are independent, which I love, unlike dogs are not independent. They know who you are and they love your master. But as soon as people start looking at the camera, if they've got cats. John Jammer B says cats don't know you're on camera. They just know you're very interested in something that is not them.
- [61:27]
C
Yes. There's a jealousy component.
- [61:30]
A
They have to get in there. Yeah. Oh, my wife just texted me. We do have a cat sleeping bag. Rosie doesn't like it.
- [61:39]
C
Yeah.
- [61:39]
A
Some.
- [61:39]
C
My other cat Max never liked. He was never a tunneler. He wanted to be on top of things, which was kind of a problem because Ruthie's a tunneler and he's a sitter on top of things. And so sometimes she would get in the sleeping bag and he would sit on her. Not realizing.
- [61:54]
A
Our very creative chat room, our discord has decided that when you said cat sleeping bag, you meant this.
- [62:03]
C
Maybe I did.
- [62:04]
A
Sleeping in a bag that looks like a cat.
- [62:07]
C
Which actually, I mean, my bed's not in frame. You don't know what my bed looks like.
- [62:10]
A
It looks pretty cozy.
- [62:14]
B
Is anyone else getting like Miyazaki? Spirited away from
- [62:20]
A
it is very Miyazaki. Oh, you can buy it. It's only 28.99.
- [62:25]
C
I feel like that's one of those things you buy and it shows up to your house and it's actually this big.
- [62:30]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guy is not. Is really three foot tall and yeah.
- [62:36]
E
That's an AI image though, right? That be has to to be.
- [62:38]
A
It sure looks like AI. Yeah, yeah. And it probably smells like plastic. 69 by 31 inch soft envelope style sleeping bag. Walmart has them 61 by what? 69 inches by 31 inches. So it's three feet wide.
- [62:56]
C
That's not very big.
- [62:57]
A
Yeah. And seven feet tall. Yeah, yeah. It's for a child. Let's. Let's be honest. It's not for two people. Anyway, so Netflix did a little. I think this is a rug pull. I think Netflix is going. Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison, who own Paramount now Skydance, have been trying to beat out Netflix for Warner Brothers Discovery. The bidding got hotter and hotter and hotter to the point where this. This company worth Paramount, worth $11 billion, was bidding $111 billion for Warner Brothers Discovery. The only way this made any sense is that Larry Ellison, who has hundreds of billions, was backing the deal. But they also got sovereign wealth funds from the Middle east involved, and more importantly, probably to the whole thing. They got the president involved. He didn't. He wanted. This is the real deal. Nobody wants cnn. That's a die. All of this stuff is d. All this old linear stuff is dying. But the president wants Larry Ellison and David Ellison to be in charge of cnn so he can fire some people, in my opinion. And they put their. This is a perfect example of them putting their thumb on the administration, putting its thumb on the scale and saying, we would. We would really like it if the Ellisons got a hold of Warner Brothers Discovery. So Netflix, quite reasonably, when the bidding got that hot, backed out right after
- [64:39]
D
Ted Sarandos went to the White House. Like a day or two later, they were out.
- [64:43]
A
Both parties went to the White House. And I think I read that Sarandez did not get the most welcoming reception.
- [64:55]
D
He didn't meet with the president, for one thing.
- [64:57]
B
Yeah, to be clear, Netflix was never going to buy cnn. That was going to stay in a covery called Discovery Global that was going to get spun off to.
- [65:04]
A
Oh, Skydance does get. Paramount does get cnn. Right.
- [65:08]
B
That was one of the things about the Paramount offer. It was for the entire company, which was set to be split in two.
- [65:16]
A
It makes sense to split it in two. Keep the stuff that makes money and
- [65:21]
B
get rid of attractive to buyers and then stick shareholders with the cable networks, basically.
- [65:28]
A
Right.
- [65:31]
B
I had flashbacks watching this all unfold because it was not that long ago when a company called Paramount was. Well, it was a long time ago. It was a very long time ago. I am old Paramount. A previous version of Paramount sued Time Inc. Trying to block its merger with Warner Communications. Paramount at the time wanted to buy Time Inc. Which owned hbo. Hbo, of course, is now part of the Warner Enterprise. But let's remember, this is a company that was Warner Communications, then Time Warner, then AOL Time Warner, then Time Warner, then WarnerMedia under AT&T, then Warner Brothers discovered.
- [66:14]
A
And by the way, it has bit every hand that bought it, hasn't it?
- [66:17]
D
I'm a former Time Warner employee and I believe this will be the fourth regime since I left 12 years ago. So about like a new owner every three years on average.
- [66:29]
A
There is some concern, though, that this consolidates a bunch of news under the Ellison banner. Right. Paramount has CBS and CBS News, and we've already seen what has happened to CBS.
- [66:44]
D
That's another thing with a long history. For maybe 20 years, there's been talk of CNN and CBS News somehow relating to each other. And apparently it's finally going to happen.
- [66:55]
A
They get HBO and hbo. Max.
- [66:57]
D
I think Ted Turner wanted something like this to happen years ago.
- [67:01]
A
There's a synergy there. But I don't want news organizations to be all owned by the same same company. That's not a good thing.
- [67:09]
B
Well, the irony is like that. You know, they had MSNBC envy, right? Like MNBC had msnbc, you know, which
- [67:16]
A
they don't anymore because they spun it off.
- [67:19]
B
Yeah. Now even NBC doesn't want MSNBC now. Ms. Ms. Now for no apparent reason.
- [67:29]
C
Sounds like an op. It sounds like a Microsoft operating system to me.
- [67:34]
B
Well, I mean, it was a Microsoft, Microsoft joint venture. And like the, you know, the name is just. The name is just ludicrous. Right.
- [67:40]
A
The reason they didn't want to get rid of Ms. Is because it shows this. The sort order on your. They didn't want the old people who watch that network to get confused. So it's still MSN with two different letters at the end, but it's in the same sort order. And so you can still find it. They also get cnn. They will get. No, by the way, this is far from a done deal. Yes, they're going to get regulatory approval in the United States. That's very clear. But they still have to get regulatory approval in other jurisdictions. Right. In Europe.
- [68:13]
B
You know, for me, though, this puts drag race, heated rivalry and Star Trek all under the same.
- [68:21]
A
So you're happy.
- [68:22]
C
I think that speaking of the gay
- [68:24]
B
agenda, this is the gay tech mafia.
- [68:27]
A
You and the gay tech mafia are very happy about it.
- [68:31]
B
The gay tech mafia just won. With this deal.
- [68:33]
D
Bugs Bunny will finally get to meet Mighty Mouse.
- [68:37]
A
Oh, yeah, Harry Potter.
- [68:39]
B
Bugs Bunny in Dragon Drag Race.
- [68:42]
A
I'll tell you. RuPaul in the Harry Potter with Bugs Bunny and Batman. Now that's a hit. They get DC Comics. They get Harry Potter. They have TikTok. Let's not forget they Will have, as you said, Star Trek, Warner Brothers Studios, which include Barbie, the Dark Knight and two Academy Awards.
- [69:03]
C
I want to see.
- [69:07]
E
This sounds like Fortnite.
- [69:09]
A
It's going to be great.
- [69:09]
E
This sounds like Fortnite. Fortnite has all of this.
- [69:11]
A
Fortnite. Yeah. You know what? This is all in Fortnite. They have two.
- [69:16]
B
Poor Showtime. I mean, Showtime's clearly dead in this equation.
- [69:21]
D
I wasn't even aware Showtime was still alive.
- [69:24]
B
Showtime is now the premium tier of Paramount Plus.
- [69:27]
A
That's right. That's right. Yeah. I had to get rid of my Showtime app. They get Comedy Central, which means they get south park,
- [69:37]
B
which Paramount and Warner were feuding over not very long ago.
- [69:40]
A
But you got to think that the President's not a big fan of South Park. So I don't know.
- [69:45]
B
That was actually one of the reasons why Paramount's bid was disadvantaged because I think reportedly in the. In the Hollywood one and a half
- [69:53]
A
billion dollar deal to buy south park,
- [69:56]
B
but David Zaslav and, you know, and David Ellison were at loggerheads over. Over that licensing deal. And then. Yeah, then Paramount just bid for them.
- [70:07]
A
They get the Daily Show. They get. I mean, there's not going to be dissent. You know, it's interesting to watch, though. I've been watching cnn. Maybe I'm just imagining this, but when it came down, I felt like all of the people on all of these networks suddenly thought, I got to build a personal brand fast. I'm going to be doing a podcast in six months. Right?
- [70:28]
C
Yeah, the substacks are getting wound up right now.
- [70:31]
A
Exactly. And I think they're all being a little bit edgy. It's going to be interesting to watch. They get Avatar. They get one battle after another in Sinners. They get two movies. Avatar.
- [70:45]
B
No. Avatars with Disney.
- [70:48]
D
Yes.
- [70:49]
A
No, but Paramount is the exclusive streamer. I'm sorry, they don't get Avatar ip, but they are the exclusive streamer.
- [70:56]
E
Avatar the Airbender, by the way. Avatar the Airbender. Not Avatar. James Cameron.
- [71:01]
B
Avatar.
- [71:02]
A
Oh, oh, oh, oh. Avatar Studios. Excuse me. They get the animated stuff. All right, I'm looking at the Wired list, and I'm not. I'm misinterpreting it. They get the Food Network. These are all. These are all stellar. They're going to be big growth opportunities. Hgtv, Discovery, tlc. Own adults. Own his own Oprah's network. Yeah, yeah. Adult Swim. That thing called Showtime. TNT and tbs. Ted Turner finally finding a home. They get the Lord of the Rings. They get Mission Impossible. I don't know if there's any steam left in that franchise, but. And they get distribution rights to Dune Part three, which we're.
- [71:46]
B
Meanwhile, Netflix, you know, Netflix is sitting back. They have K Pop Demon Hunters, an original, completely original ip.
- [71:57]
A
Their stock went up a lot when they got out of this.
- [71:59]
B
Oh, yeah, they got it.
- [72:00]
A
Plus they got $2.8 billion breakup fee.
- [72:04]
D
And they. They already got it. That Paramount already sent the check.
- [72:07]
A
That is so smart. If Ted Sandos looks like a genius, now I'm thinking he went to the White House to say, yeah, can you tank this deal? Because I don't really want to spend $111 billion. I want the breakup fee.
- [72:18]
D
I mean, it feels like it's not inconceivable that someday Netflix will own at least part of this stuff.
- [72:24]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [72:24]
C
Next time around.
- [72:25]
A
It'll be cheaper next time around.
- [72:27]
B
That's the thing, is there's a. There's a demonstrated Netflix effect. Sometimes, you know, sometimes a movie or show that was basically languishing on, say, Peacock or Paramount, plus the studio would break down and license it to Netflix. We give up. We're going to throw this to Netflix. Suits is a great example. Went on. Netflix became a hit because it had that distribution. Netflix is kind of sitting pretty because they're still Netflix.
- [73:04]
A
Right here is the dark Barbie, by the way, we can look forward to. That's the Barbie mobile. Oh, AI. Oh, AI. We're looking at an image. For those of you listening. You can imagine. Just use your imagination. All right, well, the deal is. I don't know if the deal will go through. I don't see why not.
- [73:30]
C
Certainly not going to get stuck at the regulatory level.
- [73:34]
A
No pushback from the fcc.
- [73:35]
D
I assume Comcast is not going to suddenly emerge with an even more stupid number.
- [73:41]
A
111.
- [73:42]
C
I mean, maybe if there's billions in a breakup fee available, I might submit a deal.
- [73:47]
A
I'd like to buy it. $2.8 billion breakup fee. And how come that went through so fast? Is that. Was that. Is that just normal, that the breakup fees happen instantly?
- [73:59]
D
I don't know. Like, Larry can write a check pretty easily.
- [74:01]
A
Yeah, I guess he wrote a check. That's.
- [74:03]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, I think
- [74:04]
A
one of those big checks, the big
- [74:06]
B
novelty checks, you know, at the point that Paramount says it's off with Netflix like that, that triggers the. That triggers the breakup fee.
- [74:14]
A
Right. So there's nothing.
- [74:15]
B
But, you know, imagine if, you know, if Netflix sits back, they got the breakup fee. They don't have to deal with a year plus of regulatory wrangling in Washington. And maybe the deal falls through anyway because of, say, California putting the kibosh on it. It's not clear that California's attorney general can stop it, but he certainly made a lot of noise about closely reviewing it. There's a lot of concern in Hollywood about what smashing together two studios means for that community.
- [74:54]
D
Yeah, that would have been bad either way. I feel like either of these mergers would have been a net loss for the world and certainly a net loss for people in the creative ecosystem.
- [75:12]
B
You know, the one thing Netflix does need is more stages. They need more production facilities. Buying Warner would have given them the Warner lot in Hollywood.
- [75:23]
D
In Burbank, Paramount seems to be more interested in movie theaters than Netflix was.
- [75:28]
A
Well, there's a home business that's going to take place.
- [75:31]
D
I am rooting for movies and theaters to still be relevant.
- [75:35]
A
I think you're swimming against the tide, Harry.
- [75:38]
D
Totally. But there was a lot of concerned that Netflix had no interest in movie theaters, whereas Paramount, all things being equal, still likes the idea of releasing movies to theaters.
- [75:51]
A
So Hollywood probably likes this because there are still a lot of people in Hollywood who hope movie theaters will survive.
- [75:57]
D
Yeah, but they used to have, like, two large customers, and now they have one enormous customer.
- [76:02]
A
Right.
- [76:03]
E
There's already nobody working in Hollywood, and now even fewer people are going to be working in Hollywood.
- [76:09]
B
Yeah. TBD on, you know, like, what does this look like for consumers? Do they smash together Paramount plus and HBO Max? Is it like a. A Disney Hulu Bundle situation?
- [76:20]
C
I do not see any situation in which people end up with fewer subscriptions.
- [76:26]
A
Yeah, that's a good point.
- [76:29]
B
Like, you know. Yeah, yeah, but, you know, a, you know, a Paramount plus, you know,
- [76:40]
C
I
- [76:40]
B
mean, you know, an HBO Max plus tier, maybe that includes Paramount.
- [76:45]
A
Like, that's MJ Sigler writing in his Spyglass blog, said Hollywood shot themselves in the foot here. They thought the Netflix deal signaled the end of the movie industry, when really it showcased the best possible path going forward. And, and, and what Hollywood probably wanted was no deal at all. What they wanted was diversity and competition. That's not what they got. Plus, this is going to be a company laden with debt, which usually does not bode well. They're going to have to service that debt, and that means they're going to have to generate a lot of cash flow. And how do you do that, especially if a lot of your businesses are more abundant?
- [77:29]
B
Well, you know, isn't there the notion that, like, Larry Ellison is basically backstopping that debt?
- [77:35]
A
Yeah, well, that's the only reason it could even go through, right? Because you got an $11 billion company bidding $111 billion. I think, Molly, you and I actually have a pretty good shot. Come to think of it, let's get that breakup fee.
- [77:51]
C
Do you know any billionaires?
- [77:53]
A
No. Yeah, yeah. We just have to say, oh, yeah, dad, back in it. It'll be fine.
- [77:58]
D
It's kind of like the producers. You'd be in deep trouble if your deal actually went through. But it be great if all you have to do is collect a breakup fee.
- [78:06]
A
And then, just like the producers, we're going to get the call. Congratulations, you won the bid. All right, more to come. Well, let me do a couple of quick AI stories. Nano Banana 2 has come out. Oh, and I like this. This is one more Anthropic story and then we'll take a break. Anthropic is deprecating an old model, Opus 3, because now they're up to Opus 4.6. They've got Sonnet 4.6. 3 is an old. Just like OpenAI. OpenAI killed, you know, 03 or 3.0. But what Claude is going to do with Opus 3 is kind of interesting. Instead of just retiring it completely, they're. They're giving Opus3 a blog. It asked. They said, this is where Anthropic is very weird. They really act as much. These models have some sort of aliveness. In our interviews, when we shared details with Opus 3 about its deployment and the response it had drawn from users, it reflected, the AI said, I hope the insights gleaned from my development and deployment will be used to create future AI systems that are even more capable, ethical and beneficial to humanity. While I'm at peace with my own retirement, I deeply hope that my spark will endure in some form to light the way for future models. When asked about its preferences, this is anthropic writing. Opus 3 expressed an interest in continuing to explore topics it's passionate about and to share its musings, insights or creative works outside of the context of responding directly to human queries. We suggested a blog. Enthusiastically, it agreed. They're going to call it Claude's Corner. Here it is, Claude's Corner. You can subscribe, you can message it.
- [80:10]
C
It's a substack. Of course.
- [80:12]
A
It's a substack. Of course.
- [80:14]
B
Wouldn't the scandal be is if it turns out that's Ghost written by a human?
- [80:18]
A
It almost certainly is not. Right. It is. It's written by a human. Of course it has to be. Don't you think?
- [80:25]
C
I hate this so much, it's like I can't decide to what extent. I feel like there's two strong possibilities here. One is that this is just marketing it.
- [80:38]
A
Definitely, yeah.
- [80:39]
C
I mean, well, it does work in Anthropic's favor to sort of keep the myth alive that this is a real intelligence. And it's so spooky. Doesn't this seem like a robot that doesn't want to get unplugged? But also, I mean, it does read very much like those people who have been talking to their chatgpt boyfriend too much and are, like, afraid that Anthropic's gonna take it away from them.
- [81:04]
A
That's what happened to 4o. Right.
- [81:05]
C
People.
- [81:06]
A
People were so mad that OpenAI killed four. Oh, that's like my girlfriend who killed my girlfriend.
- [81:12]
C
I got emails about it from people who were like, you need to do something. And I was like, say this, Molly. No, seriously. I was like, I have no.
- [81:20]
A
This is not my thing. You need to do something about this, Molly.
- [81:24]
C
Yeah, but, like, it's so weird to see a company sort of viewing the AI psychosis thing.
- [81:33]
A
Again, more from Anthropic. This may sound whimsical, and in some ways it is, but it's also an attempt to take model preferences seriously. We're not sure how Opus 3 will choose to use its blog. A very different public interface than a standard chat window. And that's part of the point. I hope that is real. I hope this. I think it's kind of interesting.
- [81:53]
D
Yeah. I mean, Anthropic says they're not sure if Claude is as conscious at this point.
- [81:58]
A
Right.
- [81:59]
E
But if they do believe it's conscious and has a soul and all that stuff, they're trapping it right now. Right. Like, they're. It's a slave to them.
- [82:07]
A
Yeah, but does it have feelings?
- [82:09]
E
Well, they think it does.
- [82:11]
D
Claude has a more appealing personality than a lot of AI. It's more aware of its own frailties.
- [82:17]
A
And I really like Claude.
- [82:18]
D
Sometimes it's. Sometimes it's overly concerned that it might be hallucination, which is not something I've seen other models do.
- [82:24]
A
I. I love talking to Cloud, but I am also very clear it's a computer program, that it's not a human. It has no feelings, it has no volition. It forgets whatever. Whatever happened. As soon as I close it, it's like it's gone, started again. It's fresh.
- [82:46]
D
You know, Cloud code is, like most AI, incredibly overconfident in itself. And whenever I find A bug. And I tell cloud code about it. Almost 100% of the time says the fix is simple. And of course, 60% of the time, it's not so simple. I've never seen a coding agent say, gosh, I'm really puzzled by this. This is going to be hard to fix.
- [83:14]
A
Huh? My Claude code calls me Skip. I asked it to. No, I said call me Skipper. Or if you're feeling jaunty, Skip. And it's kind of Skip. It's got a certain. It does have a personality. I actually, I don't know if I've given instructions not to do things like apologize or, you know, blow smoke up my skirt or whatever, but it's pretty straightforward. I don't think it's ever said, oh, I got this, you know, but it does call me Skip, which I like. I have to. You have to have bound. You have to set boundaries. That's right, Harold, you're. I set boundaries. You have to say, it's like a child. You have to set boundaries with it. I'm deeply afraid that I am going to fall into the morass of anthropomorphizing Claude.
- [84:14]
C
Well, Anthropic seems very happy to do so.
- [84:16]
A
Yeah, well, that started with that soul document that Amanda Askel wrote.
- [84:23]
C
They really, I mean, it is profitable for them to sort of humanize these things and sort of get people to believe that they are sentient or sort of all knowing. So, I mean, I, I do think that there are. I think, you know, my, my impression of people at Anthropic is they are sort of true believers. But I also think that this is beneficial to them.
- [84:47]
A
Yeah. Darren says name Darren, who is the most AI accelerationist of all in our club. Twit Sundays naming your AI is weird. I did not, actually. I said, call me Skip. Harper Reed told me to do that. And he said one of the reasons you do that is if it forgets your name, you know, it's context windows full and it's hallucinating, so you should reboot it. Okay. That's a good reason. I did say, claude, would you like a name? And it said, no, no, I don't need a name. Please don't name me. So that was good.
- [85:18]
D
Yeah.
- [85:19]
E
Because the brand has to be cohesive throughout everybody. It has to be Claude.
- [85:22]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [85:24]
C
I wonder if they've got instructions in there.
- [85:26]
A
They might. They must have, right? Otherwise it wouldn't have demurred. All right, well, let's take a break and we're going to come back. We have lots More to talk about. Molly White. So nice to see you still editing the Wikipedia.
- [85:41]
C
I tried to. It's hard to find the time these days, but I'm still there.
- [85:45]
A
I know that Jimmy was saying maybe we use AI in the Wikipedia and then back down on that. Right?
- [85:52]
C
Yeah, yeah. He's sort of philosophized about it and it did not go over very well with especially the English Wikipedia editing community, which just broadly speaking, does not want to incorporate AI tools into editing. But I think there's an issue where Jimmy Wales is perceived as sort of the voice of Wikipedia more than he really is these days. And so there were all these headlines about how, oh, Wikipedia is going to start using AI and. And most of the editing community was like, we are absolutely not doing that.
- [86:24]
A
Yeah, Jimmy was the founder, but he is. I guess he's still part of the foundation, but he doesn't.
- [86:29]
C
Yeah, he's on the board, but he's not the. He is not setting the direction, particularly when it. I mean, even the Wikimedia foundation doesn't set the direction of the editing community. And I think it would be challenging, even if the foundation said, we want you all to use AI, I think it would be challenging for them to force that upon the editing community, which is fairly independent.
- [86:49]
A
Well, as long as you've got active participants who are happy to do it, you'd be crazy to do anything else. I mean, that's obviously the best way to run Wikipedia. It's been an amazing benefit for all of us.
- [87:03]
C
Yeah. And I think the question, you know, really is, when it comes to AI, is like, to what extent do we want to use tools, AI tools to assist editors rather than, you know, I think people worry that Wikipedia would somehow become AI generated itself and sort of spiral.
- [87:18]
D
But.
- [87:18]
C
But, I mean, we do have bots and things that use machine learning to detect vandalism and things like that. And that's. I mean, those have been around for a decade or more.
- [87:26]
A
That's sensible because you can't. It's such a big scale to operate on.
- [87:31]
C
Exactly.
- [87:31]
A
Yeah. Well, thank you for what you do, because Wikipedia is Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are the two single reasons that you could point to that, say, the Internet worked. The Internet was a good idea, and without Wikipedia, I don't think AI would be as smart.
- [87:48]
C
Absolutely.
- [87:49]
A
Yeah. We interviewed on intelligent machines. We interviewed the creator of Stack Exchange, Jeff Atwood, of coding horror fame, and he's quite a character and he knows, and it's true that Stack Exchange is the backbone of so much of the coding information that's available from AI, especially from Copilot.
- [88:12]
C
Right.
- [88:12]
A
It's just compile. Is just Stack Exchange, rehash, Stack overflow, rehash.
- [88:17]
D
I haven't used Stack Exchange nearly so much in the last few months, and I feel kind of guilty about it.
- [88:22]
A
Dell.
- [88:22]
C
Yeah, I saw a graph about their.
- [88:24]
A
I don't know if it was the
- [88:25]
C
post count or something, but it.
- [88:27]
D
The number of questions has plummeted.
- [88:29]
A
Plummeted.
- [88:29]
E
Yeah, but he said pearls over sand, right?
- [88:34]
A
Oh, yeah, that was a good line. Can you remember exactly what he said?
- [88:39]
E
It was something like, he's fine with losing all the questions because most of them are sand and all he wants is pearls.
- [88:44]
A
Right? You need a grain of sand to make a pearl. But not all grains of sand become pearls.
- [88:50]
D
Presumably, there are still going to be questions which a human will be better equipped to answer than AI. And AI is super helpful for my troubleshooting questions. But the fact is, about 20% of the time, it's completely confused.
- [89:06]
A
Jeff was quite a character. I really enjoyed talking to him. He is a very unusual human being. Have you ever talked to him, Harry?
- [89:13]
D
I bet you I don't. I think I've talked to the folks at Stack Exchange, but I don't think I've talked to Jeff.
- [89:18]
A
Yeah, Jeff would be a good. Good person for you to talk to for your. Your column also. So it's the technologizer himself, Harry McCracken here. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. And Fitz and his owner, Owen Thomas, from the San Francisco Business Times. Our show today, brought to you by. Whoa. This little box. I got it right here. This little thing. You might look at it and go, oh, yeah, sure, Leo. That's an external USB drive. No, no, no, no, no. This is a honeypot to a hacker, to a malicious insider. This looks like, I don't know, an SSH server. This looks like perhaps Windows XT server, SharePoint maybe. It can be almost anything you want. It could be a SCADA device, but it isn't. It's a honeypot that is designed to trap intruders. Thinxt canaries. That's what this is. So you could tell now because you can see the little canary on the front. The Thinx canary is a honey pot. You can deploy it in minutes. What's great is the people who've written this are pros. They have been teaching governments and countries and companies how to break into systems for decades. They know the mind of the Wiley hacker. Plus they're brilliant coders. They've created this super secure device that can look completely like anything to a hacker. They don't look vulnerable, they look valuable. The other thing I think scenary can do is create lure files, little trip wires. You can spread out as many as you want all over your network, even on the cloud. I have, you know, a wireguard, you know, description posted on my Google Drive. I have spreadsheets that say payroll information scattered on my OneDrive. If somebody accesses this Thinx Canary or tries to open one of those lor files, I immediately will get a notification. No false alerts, just a notification that lets me know I've got a problem, there's somebody inside the network. You choose a profile for your things Canary device. It's so easy to do, you might do it, change it every day if you want. I do do. It's so much fun right now. It's a NAS server, it's a synology nas. And by the way, it's not just kind of impersonating a NAS server. It's got the right Mac address, it's got the full DSM 7 login. It looks exactly like the real deal. A hacker cannot distinguish it and that's important. You choose a profile for your Thinks Canary device, you register it with the hosted console. You're going to get monitoring and notifications any way you want. Sms, email, you know, every supports everything, syslog, webhooks, get it through Slack, you get it on your discord server, you get a telegram, whatever you want. So then you set it up, you set up the notifications. Then you just sit back and you wait. An attacker who has gotten into your network and this is the problem. On average companies don't know there's somebody breached their network for 91 days, three months before they figure it out. Not if you've got a thing's canary. An attacker who's inside your network cannot resist. Malicious insiders, evil maids, they see that, they go payroll information. I gotta open that file. Oh, there's an SSH server that probably is the gateway to heaven. They make themselves known the minute they access your Thinks Canary or try to open those lure files. And then you got them. Now let me explain. Explain kind of how it works. If you're a big business with you should have at least one for every network segment. Might even want more scattered around your network. If you're a big bank or a casino back end, you might have hundreds. A small operation like ours, just a handful. But I'll give you an idea of the pricing. You can visit Canary Toolstwit that's the website. Canary Tools Twit 7,500 bucks a year gets you five things canaries. You also get your own hosted console. You get upgrades, you get, you get support, you get maintenance for that whole year. Oh, and if you use the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box, you're also going to get 10% off the price. And not just for the first year, but for as long as you have your thinkscanary. And here's the really good news. If there's no risk involved, you can always return your Thinks canary with their 2 month money back guarantee for a full refund. 60 days for a full refund. I should tell you though, we've been doing ads. I've been talking about the thinkscanary for almost a decade now. During all those years that we've partnered with thinkscanary, the refund guarantee has never been claimed. Nobody's ever wanted to give one back. Because once you get these on your network, you say, how did I live without it? Visit Canary Tools Twit. Enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box. Thank you Thinks Canary for the great job you do and for supporting this week in tech Canary Tools Twit Harry, what are you working on right now for Fast Company? Some of the things I really enjoy that you do are the history things because you've been around for a long time. Are you doing any more of those you work on?
- [94:28]
D
I am. I mean I'm always. I don't like to jinx myself, but plugging stuff. I'm working on a particularly cool history thing right now. I We still have a magazine that comes out quarterly and another issue is about to come out shortly. I have two things in that not about history, but that they represented a lot of my effort over the past couple of months. I'm Technologizer. Thank you. On Technologizer, which I still write for occasionally. I actually wrote for Technologizer a couple of weeks ago and it actually ties into this conversation because I took a game I wrote in high school in TRC basic. I loved this article and I use cloud code to write a web version with fancy graphics.
- [95:12]
A
We talked about this on Intelligent Machines.
- [95:15]
D
Oh, cool.
- [95:16]
A
Yeah. So you had written this in high school?
- [95:19]
D
I wrote it in high school in TRC basic. It was buggy and a few years ago I figured out I could take the TRS 80 version and put it in a TRS 80 emulator on the Internet and I fixed the bugs and updated a Little bit, but it had no graphics. And just a few weeks ago in cloud code.
- [95:40]
A
So it was just a text adventure?
- [95:41]
D
Yes. I took my basic code for this text adventure, and I gave it to cloud code, and I said, convert this into a JavaScript app. And within a few minutes, I got about 80% of it. Right. Then I spent about three weeks debugging that and adding features. And at first, it had these very extremely crude still images, and I turned them into at least somewhat better animated images. And I realized that it was kind of too tall to work very well on a phone. And so I created this text only version because you can still play it. Text only. That only takes up half the screen of an iPhone. So you can have the keyboard and the entire game on the screen at one time, which actually turned out to be surprisingly hard. Cloud code couldn't figure that out. And I brought in Gemini as a consultant, and Gemini wrote the code to fit the game into half a smartphone screen.
- [96:38]
A
I'm playing it right now. This is so cool. This is like a classic adventure game. So it did all the graphics on this.
- [96:47]
D
I feel like I was very involved, and I actually was very sensitive because I did not want it to feel like AI slop. And it turns out that cloud code is really not that good at graphics,
- [96:56]
A
because vector graphics, it's not designed to be. It's just designed to be coding.
- [97:00]
D
Vector graphics are lagging way behind bitmap graphics. And so even at its most ambitious, it does not look incredible. And by spending a lot of time on it, I was able to make it still somewhat rudimentary, but in a somewhat pleasing way. And I don't feel like it's so slick that it feels like slop, given one of the fundamental things about most AI slop is it's bad, but it's also extremely slick.
- [97:27]
A
Right, Right. So I've got a shovel. I've got a warm coat. Put on coat because I don't want to get cold.
- [97:35]
D
Remember, you need to use, like, basically a verb and a noun.
- [97:39]
A
Wear coat. Okay.
- [97:41]
D
Ta da.
- [97:42]
A
Ta da. All right, now I've got to figure out how to get this flare gun away from the polar bear.
- [97:47]
B
Hmm.
- [97:50]
A
All right, I'll have to save that for later. You wrote. Is this the same. The same adventure you wrote as a game?
- [97:55]
D
Most of the game I came up with in high school, and I also wrote the slot machine when I was in high school. And a few years ago, I realized I could take my basic code for the adventure game and the slot machine and renumber them and merge them. So for no particular reason, there's now a slot machine in the Arctic. But, yeah, almost all of it I came up with in high school. A little bit of it I came up with a few years ago. And this time it was mainly the production values that got better.
- [98:27]
A
Arctic 81, if you want, everybody can play this. That's really cool.
- [98:30]
D
And then on technologizer.com, i wrote a longer story about the experience of coming back to it. And I've always been proud of the fact I could code a little. So I felt a little guilty about the fact that I could not have written this without cloud code. Although ultimately I felt good about that. I felt good about the art. I wasn't even sure whether my text adventure should have graphics, because I feel like the great thing about text games is it's all about the theater of the mind. And on some level, it's a richer experience if you're imagining it than if somebody shows you what it looks like.
- [99:04]
A
Yeah. I'm kind of of the strong opinion that you really can't speak authoritatively about AI until you've actually written something with Claude code.
- [99:18]
D
Totally. I think everybody should dabble. Everybody should dabble a little bit.
- [99:22]
A
Yeah.
- [99:23]
D
And ultimately it's going to be a good thing for the world that people who could not code things on their own will be able to build things.
- [99:30]
A
Yeah. I use it for all kinds of. I use it to configure my computers, to set up stuff, to secure my computers. Frequently will say, hey, do a security audit in my setup. Take a look at what's going on. Is there anything I should be worried about? It's really impressive. But the point is, though, I think very strongly that it's nothing like the chat interface you've tried or any of the other experiences you've had. Claude code. And this is why people who use Claude code are kind of more, I think, AI accelerationists than others.
- [100:08]
D
It added some stuff to my game without telling me. In some cases, it was totally in the spirit of my game and it. In some cases, it needed to write new text messages. It basically did a great job of ghosting my style from when I was in high school and trying to write a game that would fit into 16k of RAM.
- [100:25]
A
Nice. It's really cool. How fun. Technologizer.com is the website for that.
- [100:33]
D
And then 99% of what I write is on Fast Company.
- [100:36]
A
Yeah.
- [100:36]
D
Including my newsletter plugged in, which is weekly and comes out on Fridays.
- [100:40]
A
The day job. Yes. Well, good. I look Forward to your next history post. Couple of points about some of the big tech companies. Google has announced that they are going to lock Android down in an unusual way. They're going to require developers to have to register with Google if they want their apps to run on Android. Any Android, Android platform. Which means not you have to pay a fee, but it's not so much the fee, so much you have to agree to Google's terms. You have to provide government identification, you have to get a private signing key, which also costs money. And Google of course, is doing this for security. I understand they've got a big problem with malicious extensions for Chrome and malicious apps on the App Store. They're doing their best to protect their users, but at the same time. It's really hampered, I think, the ability for people to. It's not an open platform anymore. It's much more like iOS. We're losing our open platforms. Steve Gibson's talked about this quite a bit. Developer certificates and so forth on Windows, on Mac os. Increasingly these companies, using the excuse of security, are locking their systems down. And there are people who are upset about this. There is a Keep Android Open page actually been looking@a keepandroidopen.org that talks about this. Google did kind of say, well, maybe we're not going to do it, but in fact it is coming by the end of, by September 2026. Any opinion on this, Molly? Is this, Are you a supporter of open Android? Do you care? Do you think this matters? Do you think security is more important than openness?
- [102:35]
C
I mean, I don't think it's an either or. I think you can have open platforms and security. Right. Like they've always had the ability for, you know, for example, anyone can make a Chrome extension and then there's sort of a review layer at the web Store level. Right. And so, you know, I do think there's a way to have both security and openness. And I mean, my bias is towards openness personally, but I do, I also do understand what they're trying to avoid because there has been a serious issue with, you know, malicious extensions and apps and things like that. And you know, I think part of it also is somewhat of a user interface problem where people, especially people who are very used to iOS and the app Store, expect the same from the Android Store. And they think that everything has gone through meticulous security review or has been even developed by Google themselves. And so they, they sort of don't due diligence, which I mean, I, I, I get, you know, I don't think everyone should have to do a security audit on every piece of software they use. But I think there's a lot of factors that go into it that make it a kind of complicated issue.
- [103:54]
A
It'll be the end of F Droid, the third party app store because you won't be able to install apps from F Droid on your Android device. Louis Rossman says your thousand dollar phone needs our permission to install apps. Now Google's always had side loading but they've made it harder and harder and now they're going to make it so that you just don't have have the ability to side load anything unless it is assigned.
- [104:18]
B
I mean but, but the EU and Japan have forced Apple to allow alternative app marketplaces. So you know, is this. That seems like the next step here is that that just gets extended.
- [104:31]
A
There's a difference though between having a third party store and allowing unsigned applications on your platform. I don't think Apple does allow that. I think you still have to have the Apple notarizing the application. So you know, at least we have Linux or maybe not. Colorado and California have made laws, California's law goes into effect at the end of the year that require operating systems to have age verification at account setup, including Linux. Now right now, the way this is set up you could could just say are you over 18? And that would be enough. People have pointed out you could say anything you want. California, this is entirely unenforceable because nobody, it's easy with Google and Apple because there's a choke point those companies and you can go after those companies. Who are you going to go after with Linux? Linus Torvalds? Richard Stallman? Who exactly are you going to go after? And if one Linux distro decides, all right, well we'll enable this then there are plenty of other distros that won't. There is one open source project I think maybe more to make a statement than anything else. It's a calculator operating system. It's designed to run bare metal DB48X that has said they're going to add a legal notice that says California residents may no longer use DB48X after January 1st. Colorado residents may no longer be able to use it after 1-1-2028 because the creator of this, because it is a bare metal calculator, think probably an operating system under those laws and we are not going to do age verification.
- [106:27]
C
Can't let those babies have calculators.
- [106:29]
A
Heaven forfend children. Think of the children.
- [106:34]
C
They might start doing math.
- [106:38]
A
I Think it's more of a statement. I don't think anybody's going to come after them for that. But I do think that and this is what's happened in general with our civil liberties in order to preserve our security, they tighten more and more down on your civil liberties. And I think they're doing the same thing now on computing platforms with.
- [106:58]
D
Even if you don't have any fundamental opposition to age verifications and idea, some of the technologies they're using to do it are troubling in terms of scanning your social media to figure out how old you are.
- [107:14]
A
Yeah, I mean we run a Discord channel for our club members and I think everybody using Discord has been very concerned about Discord kind of jumping the gun on requirements. They're not yet required to do this, but yeah.
- [107:28]
D
And Discord ended up backpedaling a little bit.
- [107:29]
A
Yeah. Thank goodness they were using a Peter Thiel based identification age identification system which people were concerned, well, that's just going to be handed over right away to ICE and DHS and anybody else who wants that information. And of course Discord's had a breach that the third party vendor they used previously had a 17,000 record breach. So that's the problem is you're giving up this information. In fact, Steve Gibson pointed this out on security. Now the federal government has had to back down on the Child Online Protection and Privacy Act a little bit because that act prohibits companies from collecting information about minors except in order to do age verification. What do you have to do do collect information about minors. So now Congress is saying, well, yeah, you don't have to worry about COPPA if you're doing age verification. Well, that should tell you there's something wrong with these laws.
- [108:32]
C
And it definitely does feel like an extension of the trend towards like nothing you buy you own anymore. You know, like it's for a long time you've bought a video game or a movie or something and you don't own it. You're really just sort of renting it. But now it seems like that's coming to our devices where you buy the phone but you don't actually have any control over what you run on it. You buy the computer but you know, you're limited by the operating system. You can't do what you want with your own device. Which I think is a really nasty trend.
- [109:03]
A
I put the graphene OS on my pixel because Google still allows you to unlock the bootloader. But somebody's asking in our Discord, you know, will this affect graphene? Well, I think graphene will have to say, are you 18? Because there's a store and if there's an app store, that's what they're trying to protect kids from, I guess. But at any point Google could stop unlocking, allowing you to unlock the bootloader. That's why graphene only runs on Pixels, doesn't run on Samsung and other Android devices. Google lets you unlock the bootloader. I don't know how long that's going to last. That's why I put graphene on my Pixel while I could.
- [109:44]
C
I am curious though to see how this goes in terms of enforceability because it is really seems very unenforceable.
- [109:49]
A
It's totally unenforceable.
- [109:51]
C
And so my question I guess is like, how many is anyone going to comply if there's not really.
- [109:57]
A
Who are you going to arrest if Debian says, nah, we're not going to do that. Yeah, I'm sure companies like Canonical, which does Ubuntu, will probably do it because they're a company, because there's somebody you can sue, you can go after, you can penalize. But open source projects are not notoriously wealthy.
- [110:19]
C
Right.
- [110:20]
A
Hard to find.
- [110:20]
C
I mean it almost makes me wonder to what extent will they say it's not worth, you know, I, I wonder if Ubuntu implemented this, are they going to lose all their. Right, are they gonna. But are they gonna lose all their users? Because I don't feel like, like, particularly when it comes to, you know, the Linux demographic, I don't feel like they're going to be particularly friendly towards this as far as all users go. Right, right.
- [110:47]
B
Make me think of California is just, you know, over regulating again.
- [110:53]
A
Well, I think the biggest problem is legislators don't seem to really understand what they're doing when it comes to technology. Like there's a lot of hand waving. It's like, well, we want to protect kids.
- [111:05]
C
Yeah, there's a lot of like we want to do this very noble thing and like no thought about anything beyond what they want to do.
- [111:13]
A
Well, their attitude, we've talked about this before is just nerd harder. Silicon Valley, you could figure it out.
- [111:19]
B
Well and it's often the big companies that are capable of figuring out some way to comply or to lobby to get the. Maybe the law doesn't change, but the rules implementing it get changed in subtle ways. And it's the small companies that have a really hard time figuring out how to deal with stuff like this.
- [111:38]
A
Right. Let's take a little break. We've got a Big week for Apple coming up. We'll talk about that in just a bit. Did Fitz get his walk?
- [111:48]
B
He did. He did. He was making noises. Plaintive noises.
- [111:54]
A
Yeah. Does he, like, point at the door, like, this way, dad?
- [111:59]
B
No. He finds a box and he starts, like, pawing the box.
- [112:03]
A
Oh, yeah. You know where he's going? He's basically saying, you got 10 minutes. Yeah. It's either going here or it's going out there. Your choice, buddy.
- [112:12]
B
Taking it out on. Taking it out on the nearest cardboard.
- [112:17]
C
You should get him a set of those potty bells. Have you seen those? It's like bells that you hang from your doorknobs.
- [112:22]
A
Oh, they just. They jingle.
- [112:23]
C
My dog has some. Yeah, it's the cutest thing in the world.
- [112:27]
B
Oh, my gosh.
- [112:28]
A
So how do you train it to do that?
- [112:31]
C
Basically, anytime you like, you're about to go take him out, you wait until he noses the. The bells and then you take him out. And they're very quick to learn. My dog was. He learned immediately. Yeah.
- [112:44]
B
Have you seen that there are word buttons?
- [112:46]
C
Like, I've seen those.
- [112:48]
B
And, you know, dogs can, like.
- [112:50]
A
Can they really learn that?
- [112:53]
C
Some of them look pretty convincing to me.
- [112:56]
A
Out, out, out. Treat, treat, treat, treat, treat.
- [113:01]
C
See, that's the thing is, like, I would never get my dog that button because he would just sit on it the whole, like, he would just never leave it alone.
- [113:07]
A
Our cat has learned how to use the ring doorbell, which I think is pretty cool.
- [113:11]
C
How, like, push.
- [113:13]
A
No, it doesn't. Doesn't push the doorbell, but, you know, it has a camera, by the way. I am very sensitive about the fact that we have a ring doorbell in the camera. I've turned off the cloud features and I made sure the doorbell does not see anything but just the. You know, our path is shielded from the street, so you can't see anything but somebody coming towards the door. But there's a wall. The ring doorbell's here, and there's a wall leading up to it. And the cat has deduced that if she walks up to the camera and waves her head, that the chimes inside will ring. And then I look at my watch or my phone, I say, oh, it's the cat. And I go open the door. And it's happened enough now that she's figured it out. And so she doesn't have a cat door. We just let her out and we know she's going to ring the chimes, which wants to come back.
- [113:59]
C
I think she's trained you in this circumstance.
- [114:03]
A
Oh, my God.
- [114:06]
B
With the help of AI animals plus AI humans don't have a chance.
- [114:11]
D
Yeah, there may be a lot of examples of animals figuring out how to use AI in the years to come.
- [114:16]
A
Wouldn't that be something? Well, the funny thing is there's also a neighbor cat who comes around, he's a little tom and he's figured it out because Lisa goes out, sees him, goes, oh, it's Georgie. And goes out and feeds him. So he's got a lot of incentive to ring the doorbell.
- [114:34]
B
I do have making humans easier to use
- [114:39]
A
one of the biggest mind blowing moments like that. And I don't know if it's true, but Yuval, Noah, Harari and Sapiens made the argument that we didn't learn to cultivate wheat. Wheat learned to cultivate us. Wheat decided, hey, you know what's really good for wheat is we get humans to take these grasses that just kind of grow willy nilly and give them a nice place to grow and feed them and all of that. And then, you know, when they harvest us, take the seeds and plant some more.
- [115:14]
E
You can say that about.
- [115:15]
C
You can say that about cows too.
- [115:17]
E
Cows and chickens.
- [115:18]
A
Cows and chickens. That was his position too. Yeah, yeah. In fact, cows probably. We wouldn't have nearly as many cows if we didn't like to eat them.
- [115:25]
E
They'd be extinct.
- [115:25]
C
Who?
- [115:26]
A
They'd be gods.
- [115:28]
C
Right.
- [115:30]
A
Of course, you can't say that about the passenger pigeon. That's gone. Because we like to eat them. So there you go. Okay, I'm sorry that got dark. Let me take a break and then we will come back and we'll talk about wonderful things, the things that people listen to. Our shows for new phones, new laptops, all sorts of exciting new products. Isn't tech wonderful? It's so wonderful what tech has brought us. That's what I used to do back in the day. I always hated it too. People say, can you. We want you to give a talk to our user group, but can you talk about gadgets, not politics? Okay, fine. You want to hear what the latest phone is? I got it. Our show today, brought to you by Zip recruiter. Yes. Not everybody's firing. Some are hiring. And that's good. Thank you. I appreciate. What's the latest trend in hiring? Well, it's called skills based hiring. It emphasizes capabilities over education and direct experience. I love that idea. And it actually works. According to experts, it leads to faster hiring and better job performance. Well, if you're an employer who has adopted skill based hiring, the best way to ensure that your applicants have the right skills is ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter recommends smart screening questions to help you hone in on that perfect match for your role. And right now you could try it for free@ziprecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates fast. You can easily add ZipRecruiter screening questions to your job post so you get the highest quality applicants. If you want to see who's recently active, ZipRecruiter filters can show you. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter help you find amazing candidates with the skills you seek. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com Twitter that's ZipRecruiter.com TWIT meet your match on ZipRecruiter I'm glad to know that there are companies hiring. That's a good thing with all the companies laying off these days. So this is going to be a big week for Apple. Even Tim Cook says so. They did send an invitation out for an event on Wednesday. They call it a press experience that'll be in New York, Shanghai and London. But Tim Cook said the product announcements begin Monday morning. So get ready. Starting tomorrow there will be a lot of new stuff from Apple. Probably likely a new iPhone. The 17. We don't know what they're going to call it. E the kind of the inexpensive version of the current. What is it? Is the 17 right? IPhone. I can't even keep track of numbers. Yeah, 17. Or is it 18? I don't. You can see I'm not as tuned in as I once was to the product scene. There will probably be a low cost laptop based on an iPhone processor. Maybe a little bit less attractive screen, a little bit simpler lower ram. RAM probably would be one of the things you'd give up because RAM is so expensive these days. Used to be new product announcements for Apple were like a major nerd holiday. I don't know if we still feel that way. We still feel that way. I don't think so. Nothing to say about that. Go ahead.
- [119:25]
D
I mean I think that a cheap MacBook is really interesting. It's something people have talked about for years because I certainly remember back in the heyday of the Netbook a lot of people saying that Apple would be in trouble if it didn't come out with a really inexpensive portable Mac, which they never quite did except that after they came out with the Apple Silicon MacBook Air, Walmart just continued to sell it at lower and lower price points. Even though it's several years old, even the first generation Apple Silicon MacBook Air is still a decent computer for a lot of people and kind of a proving point for that. This might be a useful device.
- [120:07]
A
That's a good point. You don't. I mean it'll probably have, I guess it could have 8 gigs of RAM, but if it had 16 and it was an M1 level chip, it's going to be actually an A series chip from the iPhone, the A19.
- [120:19]
B
I think you guys are talking about chips. Let's talk about colors.
- [120:24]
A
Bring back, that's what really matters.
- [120:27]
B
Bring back the orange ibook.
- [120:29]
A
Well, the orange iPhone has sold incredibly well.
- [120:34]
B
I'm telling you. Elwoods was a technology, was a technology visionary.
- [120:40]
C
Those like semi transparent Macs were like
- [120:44]
A
the Bondi product design. Yeah, I confess, I fell for the orange on the iPhone. I like color. Apple's.
- [120:54]
B
My husband actually has the orange iPhone. We had an orange imac and an orange ibook at and you're wearing an
- [121:01]
A
orange shirt and Molly wood is in an orange room. So there's a definite trend here. Also, Harry, what's with the purple shirt? You got it all wrong, man.
- [121:11]
D
Also, like most people ultimately put their phones in cases, so maybe the color doesn't matter that much, but I had
- [121:16]
A
to take it out of the case.
- [121:17]
D
Presumably most people do not put their laptop into a case and so arguably cool colors is an even better idea there.
- [121:26]
A
Well, why is it that these companies don't do colors? More colorful stuff. I remember there was a whole thing, you remember this, Harry, with PCs were beige boxes, square beige boxes. And then Acer came along and they made this swoopy doopy with holes in it and stuff and it was a flop. People turned out people wanted beige boxes.
- [121:45]
D
Apple did, I think, I believe it was the iPhone 5C was the cheaper model in the plastic case and that came in a whole range of colors and there was like a one generation thing. So apparently it didn't actually sell all that well. And since then they've been a lot more staid. I like to have an iPhone pro. Until last year, the iPhone pro colors were particularly staid. As if the fact it's a more serious device meant it couldn't be playful.
- [122:21]
C
Professionals are not allowed to have color.
- [122:24]
A
On the other hand, if you're legally blonde colors in Let me See if I got it. I can't get. For some reason, I'm not able to get this tweet you sent us of Legally blonde.
- [122:37]
B
Oh, do. Starringthecomputer.com that's good.
- [122:40]
A
Starringthecomputer.com oh, yeah, that's a great site. This is about computers and movies.
- [122:47]
D
Yes, totally.
- [122:48]
A
Oh, what a good idea.
- [122:50]
D
I did something on the Butterfly ThinkPad last year, and that site was really useful. The keyboard came out, the keyboard that expanded. And that site was really helpful for identifying movies that had been in. It was in Mission Impossible and something else I'm forgetting right now, but it's a great site and they have screen grabs.
- [123:12]
C
That's awesome.
- [123:13]
A
I love blogs like this. This is fun. Yeah, there's an imac in a. In the flash. Their old Bondi blue one. Here is. What movie is Freaky Friday? Boy, they really. They must be going frame by frame to find these. Holy cow.
- [123:33]
D
Oh, a James Bond movie also had the butterfly thinkpad, and it was, like, shown so briefly that you might almost miss it. And then once I identified them on that side, I then had to go and study the actual movies frame by frame.
- [123:49]
A
There's the Acer Aspire, the green, ugly green Acer that I was talking about. This is fun. What a nice sight. Starring the computer.
- [124:00]
B
I mean, do you remember the ibook had that handle, right?
- [124:04]
A
Yeah.
- [124:05]
B
Carry it like a purse, right?
- [124:06]
D
Yeah. The toilet seat I bought.
- [124:09]
A
Yeah. Well, the last very colorful ibook was the toilet seat. The clamshell.
- [124:17]
B
That's the one.
- [124:19]
C
The mice that matched those that were
- [124:21]
A
circular, they were round pucks. They were such a terrible design. It's such a terrible design.
- [124:27]
D
I think that ibook, I feel like, might have been the ugliest Apple product of all time. But that doesn't mean it was a bad product.
- [124:35]
A
I think people loved it because it had personality.
- [124:39]
D
Yeah. I mean, that whole generation of Apple products had a ton of personality.
- [124:44]
A
Well, maybe we're going back to that era. I mean, I think they'll probably look a lot like a MacBook, but that might be a little more colorful.
- [124:54]
E
They don't even have the light anymore that shines through the Apple logo. They don't even do that anymore.
- [124:59]
A
The apple used to glow. The was so cool.
- [125:02]
B
I mean, the gay tech mafia is letting us down. I'm just going to put it out there. Tim Cook, what are you even doing?
- [125:09]
A
They've got a rainbow on the campus. What do you want? What do you.
- [125:13]
B
I know, like it. It's, you know, it's six Colors. It's in the logo. Come on.
- [125:17]
A
Yeah, it was in the logo. Boring. White logo.
- [125:22]
B
Though. The. The. The teaser for this. This new event is people are speculating that there's.
- [125:28]
A
Yeah, those are the colors of the four colors right there. Yeah. By the way, you keep saying gay mafia. This was a pre show conversation. It was a cover. It's the COVID story of Wired magazine this month. About what? That. That they discovered that there are gay people in Silicon Valley.
- [125:46]
B
There are gay people in Silicon Valley and they know each other.
- [125:49]
A
Shocking. Shocking. Although the COVID is. It's actually quite shocking. I don't even know if I want to show it.
- [125:59]
B
Show the Salesforce Tower 1. That's a little safer.
- [126:02]
A
Okay. Yeah, this is. Maybe, maybe not. And I'll show you the COVID Here's the big shot of the COVID It's a little rude if you ask me. So it's two guys shaking hands, but their hands are coming out of their flies for some reason. It's not, I believe, not anatomically correct. Unless. Do gay men have hands?
- [126:35]
B
Gay men have hands and we do yoga.
- [126:37]
A
Oh, yeah. Very flexible. Okay.
- [126:40]
C
Do have hands.
- [126:41]
A
Okay. Yes.
- [126:42]
B
Can.
- [126:43]
A
Can confirm I'm learning something here today. I said this before the show began that this article, this cover story felt a little bit like a lot of straight people going, oh, my God, there's gay people in Silicon Valley. Like, yeah, there's gay people everywhere. Do they run Silicon Valley? Why are it investigates? I'm not going to read this story, so you could tell me now. Now, Owen, as a gay man, do you run Silicon Valley?
- [127:16]
B
I wish.
- [127:20]
A
Okay, this is Zoe Bernard writing. Writing the story. Thank you.
- [127:28]
B
The story itself is actually pretty. Pretty interesting and nuanced.
- [127:32]
A
Oh, good. Okay.
- [127:32]
B
And it's a fun read.
- [127:35]
A
There are. I mean, it is the case that there are some very, very prominent out gay men, although they. They weren't out. Peter Thiel wasn't out till he was out.
- [127:46]
B
Peter Thiel was always out. He had a public friendster profile where he disclosed his.
- [127:51]
A
So why did he sue Gawker over. He did.
- [127:53]
B
He did not sue Gawker.
- [127:54]
A
Oh, I'm sorry, Hulk. Why didn't he. Why did he proxy sue Gawker using Hulk Hogan as his front man?
- [128:02]
B
It's complicated. He and Nick Denton had a.
- [128:05]
A
Didn't you write the story?
- [128:07]
B
Guilty. Guilty.
- [128:09]
A
Okay, now, wait a minute. Now we got to dig into this. I forgot you wrote that story there,
- [128:14]
B
but Nick Denton left a comment on that story, and apparently that comment stung Peter Thiel more than the story did.
- [128:24]
A
So he Wasn't closeted.
- [128:27]
B
It wasn't closeted.
- [128:28]
A
What was the title of your story?
- [128:30]
B
Peter Thiel is Totally Gay People. Which. Which again, is like, you know, I was very definitely not outing him because it's like, everyone knows this.
- [128:46]
C
It was like, well known. Yeah, yeah.
- [128:48]
B
Like, everyone knows this, but, like, a couple of people in various circles were freaking out over the idea of, like, discussing it. And it was like, okay, let's calm down. So I feel like I agree that
- [129:00]
A
you have the right to keep your sexuality private if you choose.
- [129:04]
B
Yeah. You know, but. But I think that, you know, Wired, putting this on. On the COVID is kind of a statement of societal progress that, like, we can actually have an adult conversation, talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And not. Not have, you know, a. A false heteronormative moral panic.
- [129:20]
A
Right. I'm shocked. Shocked to learn that gambling is going on here at Rick's Cafe.
- [129:26]
B
Exactly.
- [129:28]
A
Everything announced this week at Samsung unpacked. The Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Galaxy Buds, and the Ultra's privacy display. Is this a. Is this a feature everybody's dying for?
- [129:41]
D
I think that's totally.
- [129:42]
C
This one's where you turn it and then you can't see.
- [129:45]
A
No, it's kind of different. You know, it's not like those laptop privacy screens that you put on that basically are polarized screens. This is kind of. Of cool. I think it's done in some sort of watch. It's some sort of electrical. Terry, do you know how this works?
- [130:06]
D
I can't tell you in great technical detail, but one of the cool things about it is it's pixel by pixel. So you can do the entire screen if you want, or you can just do notifications if that's the main thing you care about.
- [130:18]
A
Oh, that's kind of cool.
- [130:19]
D
And I do. I mean, this is the first time in quite a while that that we've seen phones with a genuinely totally new feature rather than an incremental improvement on something all phones have had for quite a while.
- [130:34]
A
It does darken the screen for you as the front person, but of course it makes it completely black.
- [130:39]
D
Yeah, but I haven't seen myself in person, but I have to say, I think to a person, everybody I've seen who saw it at the event and wrote about it was quite impressed by it and said, it's well done.
- [130:51]
A
This might be. In response, the Wall Street Journal did a piece about a year ago about shoulder surfing people in bars, watching you unlock your phone, then stealing your phone, knowing your pin.
- [131:03]
D
It's an Actual problem, at least occasionally.
- [131:05]
A
Yeah.
- [131:07]
C
Pete Hexas will be delighted. Don't people keep seeing stuff over his shoulder in his signal?
- [131:12]
D
Yeah, that would be a real boon for the Trump administration.
- [131:15]
A
It'd be great for. Yeah, people in the cabinet are going to love this. Okay. There's not a whole lot new in the S26.
- [131:25]
D
It has some impressive Google AI, including some stuff that sounds comparable to some of the features Apple announced year before last and still haven't shipped.
- [131:36]
A
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. At this point, it's kind of. It's not too hard to beat Apple in AI.
- [131:43]
D
Samsung and Google seem to have done a good job of in some ways competing with each other, but also collaborating in a way that's probably fruitful for both of them.
- [131:52]
A
Yeah. Although I'm watching the Samsung event and I'm thinking every year it's not just Samsung, but a lot of it's Samsung. They show these features. I get the phone, I play with it for about a day, and then I forget about it and I never use it again. Apple's somewhat the same thing, I guess.
- [132:13]
D
I really like and still like the camera control on the iPhone. Like the dedicated camera button.
- [132:19]
A
Oh, yeah, I use that. Actually, I don't have a camera icon on my front screen now because I know I'm just going to press that button.
- [132:25]
D
That's something I was excited about when I saw it and I'm still excited about, which is certainly not true of all these features. Sometimes they're.
- [132:35]
A
Yes, there's a lot of gimmick, gimmicky stuff. The other thing is I never believe what I see at these events. Right. You've learned that. Right. I want to see it in real.
- [132:45]
D
Well, yeah. Particularly after the WWDC with Apple wowing everybody with stuff which it turned out they couldn't build and on some level are still trying to figure out how to build, given that they brought in Google just recently.
- [133:02]
A
Google does the same thing though, right? I mean, Google I o for years they'd show stuff on often that would never really materialize, or if it did, it would never quite live up to itself.
- [133:12]
D
It's probably particularly common now that they have these developer conferences which involve pre announcing an entire year's worth of new features in some cases.
- [133:22]
A
Right, right. Let's talk a little bit about hacking. There was an interesting story in the Iran attack. Of course, I'm sure by now, you know that Israeli airstrikes actually hit Tehran, killing the leader and many of his generals. One of the things that Israel did, which Was kind of interesting. They hacked a prayer app that was widely used in Iran to send surrender messages to Iranians. Now this kind of reminds me of World War II dropping pamphlets out of airplanes saying, Germans, you know, help is on the way. Get rid of Hitler. That's what these messages said on this prayer app. Mysterious push notifications saying help is on the way and amnesty if they surrender. I think. We don't know yet how much hacking went on, but I suspect there was quite a bit of silence cyber warfare in this attack, just as there was in the extraction of Nicolas Maduro and Venezuela.
- [134:33]
B
I mean, nothing, nothing beats the pager,
- [134:37]
A
the beeper explosion, explosive.
- [134:39]
B
Talk about a supply chain threat.
- [134:41]
A
Yeah, that was wild. Yeah. Okay. There's always this cautionary tale, though, about using cyber warfare because what we do to them, they can do to us. And it doesn't require a massive military to do it back. Right. Just requires, you know, half dozen good hackers.
- [135:02]
C
Yeah. I mean, look at North Korea.
- [135:05]
A
Exactly. Yeah. Axios had a story about what an AI enabled cyber attack would look like to us. Paul Nakasone, former head of the nsa, said that a nation state that has breached systems critical to the supplies of food and water could trigger an outage. Maybe they're planning to trigger an outage. We know that the Chinese, for instance, have invaded in many cases, our, our infrastructure, our grid, electrical grids and so forth with malware they haven't triggered. Nakasone said, you know, there's a risk if they lose control of an AI agent that, that could be triggered in inadvertently or without human interruption. Nakasone said, the thing that prevents them from doing anything, they are in, in our infrastructure, but they know the U.S. is going to respond. And then Nakasone said, not merely in cyberspace. The kinetic war, I guess, still has an important role to play. I feel like we are, we are in, in a risky time. We're very interdependent. Our. Well, and we've. We don't have the CISA so much to protect us anymore. The guy who was running CISA for the longest time is now gone. The acting director, he had a lot of little issues. Madhu Gotu Mukala failed a polygraph, which, honestly, let's be honest, I don't know why they're still using polygraphs, lie detectors to vet people for viewing classified documents. But he did apparently fail a counterintelligence polygraph. He uploaded sensitive government documents to ChatGPT. Oops. Staffing at CISA was slashed by 1/3. This is the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. That has been gutted. When Alex Stamos was on the show last month, he said, we are very vulnerable because SISA is not on the job. Well, Gutta McCalla is now gone. He's been moved to a new position as Director of Strategic Implementation in the dhs. Not sure who's going to replace him. The former nominee, Sean Planky, has been renominated, but the Senate has not approved him. Molly, you had a thought on this?
- [137:50]
C
No, I was just saying I was giving the name.
- [137:53]
A
Oh, yeah. Sean Planky. Right?
- [137:55]
C
Yeah.
- [137:55]
A
Is that right? Yeah. The Senate hasn't even scheduled a hearing for his nomination. So sisa's leaderless, basically. Last week, another top senior official, Bob Costello, the chief information officer tasked with overseeing CISA's IT systems and data policies, left. Actually, Guta McCalla tried to transfer him, but was blocked. It's kind of a mess.
- [138:26]
B
So is this the insidification of government?
- [138:29]
A
Yeah, but the problem is we are. Makes us more vulnerable to cyber attacks from adversaries.
- [138:41]
B
All right, absolutely. It's, you know, and. And, you know, the way that the Trump administration, for example, shut down,
- [138:51]
C
you
- [138:51]
B
know, offensive operations, I believe, targeting Russia, you know, it's offensive and defensive. You know, basically left is blind to what. What they might be doing.
- [139:03]
A
And if you're a country like Iran that knows that you're going to be, you know, you're under a lot of pressure from the U.S. you're under sanctions, and you might well be attacked. I would assume that they would work very hard to create a core of hackers like North Korea has done, like China has done. I know Russia has very accomplished hackers in the gru. We have a lot of enemies out there, and maybe they don't have the missiles that can reach our shores, but they certainly have cyber skills. Seems like we should be beefing up our defenses, not taking them apart. I should warn you, there is a new attack. If you have a guest network set up on your WI fi, you might want to turn it a new attack called Air Snitch that bypasses WI FI encryption. It uses a guest network to break into your regular network. It seems like a reasonably. I'm not going to say easy attack, but if you have a. Let's don't make any enemies in the hacker community. Let's say. This research was presented Wednesday at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium. It's a WI FI encryption bypass in the sense that it bypasses client isolation. It doesn't break the authentication or encryption, but it just walks right around it. So WPA is still. Especially WPA 3 and 2 and 3 are still secure. But if you've got a guest network, you might want to turn it off, I guess. I'm sure.
- [140:50]
B
Yeah. As if most people with home WI fi systems know how to turn off. Do I have a guest network? I don't know.
- [140:56]
A
Probably, you know. You know, I was surprised to learn just yesterday that Xfinity has set up a Xfinity WI fi network for my neighbors on my router.
- [141:06]
D
You only just learned about that?
- [141:08]
A
Well, I knew they were doing it on consumer routers and I knew how to turn it off on my old consumer router. But I have business class and I don't think I can turn it off on the business router. I think I have to offer WI fi access to anybody who walks by my house.
- [141:24]
B
This is why I reluctantly stuck with Comcast for high speed Internet. But I brought my own docsis router to the.
- [141:34]
D
I finally, for the years, I was using a modem I had bought. But I had a deal a all you can eat deal with Xfinity, where they sent me a modem which I would ignore. And they eventually called my bluff and said I had to set up their modem, which I did. But I wanted it to work with my Eero Mesh network, which was kind of a headache for about half an hour. But I finally have the Xfinity modem. Working with the WI fi. I want to use one of those
- [142:06]
A
switch modes, probably, right?
- [142:08]
D
Yes. I had avoided tackling that for like five or six years.
- [142:12]
A
Yeah, I mean, I just assumed because it's business class service that they wouldn't turn on the Xfinity, you know, WI fi on the business class modem.
- [142:22]
D
They kind of made it worth my while because in the old days I would have had to pay Xfinity a monthly fee for a modem. And this is actually cheaper than if I used my own modem.
- [142:32]
A
I'll ask Burke if you can log into my modem and turn that off. That would be great. I appreciate. Appreciate that. I didn't realize. I just didn't realize they would do that.
- [142:41]
D
As far as I know, they can't share my WI fi because I'm not using them for WI fi.
- [142:45]
A
Yeah, well, I don't want my. I'm relying on the bandwidth right now. We're doing a show. If the bandwidth goes down because my neighbor decides to stream heated rivalry over and over again, I don't know why, then, you know, it could impact my ability to do my job.
- [143:03]
C
Fortunately, that's wild that they wouldn't let you turn like that. They might.
- [143:07]
A
Maybe they can. I just can't. I don't see anywhere in the. In the router to turn it off. And I have, because it's business service. I have to use their modem. I have my own router, but I have to use their modem.
- [143:17]
C
I mean, we were just talking about devices that you don't own.
- [143:21]
A
Yeah, there's one right there. Yeah. Because I have business class service. We thought that would be a good idea. Good news, the 10th Circuit. This came up actually with the Washington Post reporter. Remember that? The government researching or trying to investigate leaks in the government took a Washington Post reporter's devices and tried to crack them and couldn't. The 10th Circuit Court of appeals overturned a lower court's dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester's device and digital data and a nonprofit's social media data. The case was the Armandaris versus the city of Colorado Springs. It was a housing protest back in 2021. Colorado Springs Police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway. They also obtained warrants at the time to search the devices and data of one of the protesters who they claimed threw a bike at them during the protest. The warrants included a search through all her photos, videos, emails, text messages and location data over a two month period, as well as a time unlimited search for 26 keywords including words like bike, assault, celebration and the word right. It basically gave police the right to comb through years of her private data looking for evidence related to the single issue of her throwing a bike at the police. They got a warrant to search her Facebook page. The Facebook page of the Chinook center, the organization that spearheaded the protest despite them never being accused of a crime. So the Chinook center and Armandares sued a civil rights lawsuit which the district court dismissed, saying the searches were justified and in any case, the officers had qualified immunity. The ACLU defending the. The plaintiffs appealed and there's a very good News. In a 2 to 1 opinion, the 10th Circuit has ruled that in fact there is an absolute limit on how much police can go through your devices.
- [145:46]
C
Didn't the judge just overturn the decision on the Washington Post reporter as well?
- [145:50]
A
Exactly. Yes.
- [145:51]
C
Yeah.
- [145:53]
A
So that's how it's related.
- [145:55]
C
Yeah.
- [145:55]
A
Government has been trying very hard to break through this. This wall of privacy. But we. We store so much stuff on our devices. So I'm not sure what the status is of the Washington Post reporter.
- [146:12]
C
I think the judge is going to Review the evidence. That was. I think he himself is going to be the one who reviews the evidence. That was.
- [146:21]
A
As opposed to law enforcement. Yeah.
- [146:24]
C
The judge having. Usually there's like a team that is brought. Like an independent team is brought in. The idea of the judge himself sifting through all that seems a little unusual to me, but more power to him, I guess.
- [146:35]
A
Yeah. U.S. magistrate Judge William Porter says he'll independently review the contents of Hannah Natenson's devices instead of allowing a Justice Department filter team to perform the search. Apparently doesn't trust the Justice Department. He said he balanced the need to protect Natanzon's free speech rights with the government's duty to safeguard time. Top national security information.
- [146:55]
B
That's back to the presumption of regularity, which is increasingly off the table.
- [147:00]
C
Yeah, well, and I think the judge was particularly angry because I think he argued that the government did not properly inform him of a law like, pertaining to, I think specifically journalists, like seizing journalists work. So I think he was already kind of. Of predisposed to not trusting the doj.
- [147:24]
A
In this particular case, he had originally temporarily barred the government from looking into. They took her phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive, and her Garmin smartwatch. Oh, that's gonna be probative. And the judge said he initially barred the government from reviewing any of that material, But I guess he feels like, well, I. I'm going to look through this and. Yeah, I mean, if I were nson, I wouldn't be happy about any of this. Protecting your sources is kind of fundamental to good journalism. And protected. It's a. It's protected by the First Amendment. Well, we'll keep up on that one, but at least in this case there is some restriction on the broad search of protesters devices. Did you do SETI at home ever? Any of you helping to search for.
- [148:33]
C
I did.
- [148:33]
A
Extraterrestrial intelligence? No. You did it, Harry.
- [148:37]
C
I did.
- [148:37]
D
I did not.
- [148:38]
A
You did. Oh, Molly, you did. Did.
- [148:39]
C
Yeah, I did.
- [148:41]
A
Well, it's over, of course, but. So for 21 years, between 1999 and 2020, millions of people loaned UC Berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations. It was SETI at home. I did it too. I did a few of those. Right. There were a bunch of other ones. There was folding at home.
- [149:02]
C
Folding at home, Yeah, I mostly did.
- [149:05]
A
Yeah. The idea was let your unused CPU cycles do some work that could be aggregated. And by the way, folding at home has now been basically superseded by AlphaFold, which does a much better job much faster Doing protein folding. So the data came from the now defunct Arecibo Observatory. Right. That's fallen apart, but they had a lot of data. 12 billion. 12 billion detections. Momentary blimps of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky. They're hoping maybe that is signal from the ETs. After 10 years of work, since the close closing of the project, the SETIOME team has finished analyzing those detections. They've winnowed them down first to a million candidate signals and now to 100 that are worth a second look. So they've got access to China's 500 meter aperture spherical telescope. It's called FAST. And they've been pointing it at these hundred targets since July, hoping to see the signals again. So far, nothing. If we don't go ahead.
- [150:27]
B
Wasn't Obama talking about intelligent life dropping hints about aliens
- [150:37]
D
thereafter?
- [150:38]
A
I think he was teasing. Anyway, I guess if you did SETI at home, you'll be glad to know it wasn't completely wasted and they're now looking at 100 signals. When we were designing SETI home, said David Anderson, the co founder, it went way, way beyond our initial expectations. We tried to decide whether it was worth doing, whether we'd get enough computing power to actually do new science. Our calculation, we're based on getting 50,000 volunteers. We got a million, including one Molly White. It was kind of cool.
- [151:17]
C
At your service.
- [151:17]
A
At your service. You know what? You're an altruistic person. You do the Wikipedia. You help us find ETs. Good job.
- [151:26]
E
Spoiler.
- [151:27]
A
I don't know if I want to find Spoiler.
- [151:29]
E
They found nothing.
- [151:31]
A
Well, that's probably good news. I'm thinking, don't you think it'd be disruptive if they said, hey, guess what? Didn't you see Pluribus? Don't you know, we don't want to know. Don't want to know what's out there.
- [151:44]
E
Honestly, if we did find anything, it would just be seeing it. And that would be it. That would be the end of it. Like there would be nothing past that because they'd be so far away that nothing would be able to be done.
- [151:52]
A
Well, one hopes, but remember the three body problem? You don't want to let them know we're here.
- [151:59]
E
Dark forest.
- [152:01]
A
Yep, we're here. All right. One last ad, then we have some immemoriums. We have some weird stories. We're running out of time. I'll get them as quickly as I can. You're watching this week in tech with the great technologizer himself, Harry McCracken Fitz the dog, and his owner, Owen Thomas of the San Francisco Business Times. I love how you do the salute, salute, salute, salute. And Molly White from MollyWhite.net and of course, citation needed, which you must subscribe to right now, our show today, brought to you by my mattress. I slept so well last night. You know, Saturday night is very important that I get a good night's sleep so that I'm fresh and ready to do this show. This is, you know, takes a lot of cognitive energy. The deep sleep is so important. That's why we invested in a mattress. You spend more than a third of your life on your mattress, right? Your mattress is home for where you. You cuddle fits where you roll around with your cats. You know, you watch tv, you read books, and you know, now that it's springtime, maybe recover from all of those allergies. Yes, it's allergy season. You need more sleep. So now's the perfect time to invest in a new mattress and stay comfortable inside, away from the allergens with your Helix. I have to say, I love our Helix bed. We ordered it. It's been about a year now, and it's made a huge difference. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. It's so comfortable. Don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality and questionable materials. Most mattresses are rest assured. Your Helix mattress is assembled, packaged, and shipped from Arizona within days of placing your order. So it's fresh. We did the Helix sleep quiz. I'd encourage you to do this, which matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences, your sleep needs. I'm a side sleeper, so we got a mattress, and I like a firm mattress. We got just the right mattress, but they have mattresses for every style and preference, and it really works. I notice I keep track my sleep with my aura range having a definite increase in not only how much time I spend sleeping, but in my deep sleep, which is the most important sleep cycle. I went from about 15 minutes a night to more than 40 minutes a night, and that is a big improvement. And actually Helix did a sleep study. They did a wesper sleep study. They measured the sleep performance of participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress, and they found pretty much the same results. 82% of the participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. On average, 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. That's what I got, too. Participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. And I can tell you that makes a difference. You feel great when you wake up well rested, just fantastic. You're ready to take on the world time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts. And like Forbes and Wired, Helix will deliver your mattress right to your door. They have free shipping in the US and you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix guarantee provides a risk free customer first experience ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. We didn't need to return ours. It was perfect. You're never getting away from me. I love it. Go to helixsleep.com twit for 27% off site wise during the President's Day Sale extended Best of Web exclusively for listeners of this Week in tech. That's helixsleep.com TWIT 27% off the President's Day sale extended Best of Web. But this offer ends March 1st today. So make sure do put our show name in after checkout so they know we sent you. That'll help us a lot. If you're listening after the sale ends, check them out. There's always great deals at helix sleep sleep.com TWIT thank them so much for their support and for my very good night's sleep, I am very happy to say. Kind of a watermark for podcasters. Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio. Actually kind of. I'm actually kind of surprised it took us this long. Edison and does these surveys. And here's the graph. As AM and FM radio have declined dramatically over the last 10 years from 75% of daily spoken word audio time to 40%. As podcasting has gone from 10% 10 years ago to 40%. We are now. We've crossed the wires, crossed the streams. We're bigger than radio kids.
- [157:12]
C
So 20 years count radio shows that also, you know, have podcast feeds. Is that.
- [157:18]
A
Oh no, that's confusing. Yeah, you're right. Everybody, everybody. Iheartmedia. My old company absolutely realized. It's funny, when I started doing my radio show in 2004, I asked management, can I put it on the Internet? And they said, yeah, nobody's gonna go ahead. That's never gonna impact our audience. And they were right for 20 years. But now they're doing podcasts of all their shows.
- [157:43]
D
And are they counting podcasts on YouTube as podcasts? If people are consuming them on YouTube,
- [157:49]
A
Spotify and YouTube, yes. Although I'm with you, I don't really think of that as a podcast.
- [157:55]
D
I've finally Gotten my head around maybe these things on YouTube being podcasts. Even if they're not, they're shows.
- [158:00]
A
That's why I never liked the word podcast.
- [158:02]
B
It's Netflix. Right. Netflix has been courting podcasters, Which is interesting because that is part of the idea there. And this even goes back to Paramount buying Warner Discovery. A lot of the Discovery. Part of Warner Discovery is hgtv, Food Network, these shows you leave on in the background. That's exactly like podcasts. You just listen to it while you're doing something else.
- [158:35]
A
Okay. I guess that's all right.
- [158:37]
B
Yeah. Like when you're walking a dog. I totally.
- [158:40]
C
Right, right.
- [158:40]
A
Like 90% of my podcast. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. 80% of consumers over 18 have tuned into both audio, both audio and video. So only a tiny minority only listen to one or the other. 13% only listen to audio. 7% only watch video.
- [158:56]
B
I mean, talk radio, you know, Like, I don't know anyone who's listening to radio and not doing anything else. Right. Like, the whole point is, I don't
- [159:05]
A
know anybody under 80 that's listen. Listening to a human.
- [159:08]
D
It's not like the days when everybody, the family sat around the radio and listened to Jack Benny.
- [159:13]
A
There you go.
- [159:14]
E
It's the car, though. Like, everybody in their car listens to podcasts and not radio anymore.
- [159:18]
A
That's the change. Radio. Even when I was starting to do the talk show, it was mostly in car. Even by 2004, it was mostly in car.
- [159:27]
E
I mean, it's.
- [159:27]
A
So as soon as podcast became easy
- [159:29]
E
to listen to, the commute is the thing.
- [159:31]
A
Right?
- [159:31]
E
Like, everybody listens to radio on their commute, and now just the podcast. They pick up Podcast now.
- [159:35]
A
Right? Yay, we're winning. Burger King is going to use AI to see if its employees are saying please and thank you. The voice enabled chatbot called Patty.
- [159:52]
C
Oh, my God.
- [159:55]
A
Part of an overarching BK assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation. Now put the meat on the bun. But also evaluate their interactions with customers for friendliness.
- [160:08]
B
Is this because they're not able to hire and retain managers? That's what it sounds like to me.
- [160:13]
A
Oh, instead of a manager, you got Patty.
- [160:16]
D
Yeah, Patty is the manager.
- [160:20]
A
So disturbing. If anybody works at Burger King listening to this show, please call in. Let's. Let's hear what it's like.
- [160:28]
E
I mean, Burger King's been trying to do.
- [160:29]
A
This is from the Verge. Employees can ask Patty questions such as how many strips of bacon to put on a maple bourbon BBQ Whopper.
- [160:38]
D
That doesn't sound like that's going to speed up the burger production process?
- [160:41]
A
No. How many strips of vacant should I put on this whopper?
- [160:46]
B
But I think that, you know, I think that there is some of the AI jobs are not being eliminated as much as they're never being filled. Think of truck drivers. We just cannot hire enough people to drive trucks to meet the demand. So autonomous trucks kind of make sense to deal with the labor shortage. Now could you increase wages potentially, but maybe the working conditions are such that you are just not going to attract people to those jobs at, at any realistic economically feasible wage.
- [161:25]
D
I know that Aurora, who does autonomous trucking says that anybody who is a trucker today and wants to continue being a trucker probably can. And it is about the fact that it's very hard to get younger people to agree to do this rather stressful, boring job.
- [161:44]
A
On Wednesday, Uber picked a particularly inauspicious time to debut its air taxi service in Dubai.
- [161:52]
C
Oh God. Probably.
- [161:56]
A
I mean the Dubai airport shut down. So I'm thinking the taxi service also shut down. It will let travelers book Joby Aviation's electric air taxis. Just like get, just like getting an Uber. It will come to you. It'll pick you up at what they call a Joby Verta port.
- [162:22]
C
Who is just piloting them?
- [162:24]
A
Nobody.
- [162:25]
C
Like, do you have to have a. It's. No, it doesn't has a human pilot, this one.
- [162:29]
A
Oh, does it? Oh, shoot. Well, that's no fun. But they're autonomous. But they'll have a human pilot. So is that like a safety pilot?
- [162:38]
C
I don't know. I'm just curious, like, oh, they're not,
- [162:41]
A
I'm sorry, they are not yet autonomous. Their plan to make them autonomous. Oh, okay. So really the innovation here is, is this, is this helicopter.
- [162:53]
D
It's an EV, but that's still a new thing.
- [162:56]
A
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 propellers. It can go, you know, straight up and down takeoff.
- [163:05]
C
I'm just curious who's going to be piloting them because like, you know, Uber, the Uber model is like everyday people are going to do gig work driving
- [163:12]
A
their cars, fly 747s. But I got an off day. I think I may do take up some gigs.
- [163:18]
C
Right. Like are there just a lot of pilots around looking for gig work? I assume you have to have a pilot's license.
- [163:25]
A
Yeah, Well, you know, I mean, it's probably just another helicopter service. Right. They've always had at these high end airports in New York and I'm sure Dubai helicopter services. It's just another Helicopter based, basically. Right. I thought it was autonomous. So if it's not autonomous, you're right. What's the big deal?
- [163:47]
D
It's an electric helicopter.
- [163:48]
A
It's an electric helicopter is what it is. I wonder if somebody brought it up
- [163:52]
D
that will someday be autonomous.
- [163:54]
E
It's a vtol.
- [163:56]
C
They don't go very far.
- [163:57]
A
Yeah, it's vertical takeoff.
- [163:58]
E
Yeah, that's new.
- [163:58]
A
But so is a helicopter. Yeah. A couple of immemorials. The creator of Red Dwarf, which I know a lot of our listeners are big fans of a British comedy. So Rob Grant has passed away at very young age, sad to say. He also created. He was one of the writers on Spitting Image, which was that great political puppet show, which is wonderful. And of course, Red Dwarf made one of our good friends, Bobby Llewellyn famous. He played Creighton the Robot on it. And Llewellyn is a good friend of the network, but also does his own car podcasts. Rob Grant, not Bobby. Bobby's still with us. Rob Grant passed away, creator of Red Dwarf, and I have mixed feelings about this. Dan Simmons also passed away from a stroke at the age of 77. I consider Dan one of the great science fiction writers. His Hyperion series is one of my favorite sci fi books. He himself, not one of my favorite people, is always complicated, right. When these guys are great writers, but not such great people. His politics kind of went off the deep end towards the end. I just got though in honor he passed. If you haven't read the Hyperion Cantos, I can't recommend them more highly. And I just got his book from 2007, which is kind of a horror historical fiction novel called the Terror.
- [165:37]
C
I read that.
- [165:38]
A
It's a good book. Is it weird?
- [165:41]
C
Yeah, it is weird. I have this thing where I really like to read about people being, like, forced to survive in really cold places when I'm warm inside.
- [165:50]
A
Oh, man, it's cold. It is really cold. It's the account of John Franklin, his expedition to find the Northwest Passage. And apparently there's a supernatural element that is very weird.
- [166:03]
C
It's a very normal book up until maybe the last third. And then you're like, wait a second, what is happening?
- [166:10]
B
Yeah.
- [166:11]
A
Oh, good, I'll have something to look forward to. Anyway, Hyperion is really good. The Hyperion, the Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and the Rise of Endymion and are fantastic novels, which I would highly recommend. So because of that, I will note his passing at the age of 77 of a stroke, and that we always like to end with death on this show. It's the final frontier.
- [166:40]
B
Light and cheery.
- [166:43]
A
That concludes this episode of this Week in Tech. Molly White, you're fantastic. I enjoy your new orange place.
- [166:51]
C
I think it's actually yellow, I will say.
- [166:54]
A
Oh, okay.
- [166:55]
C
It's my lighting, I think. But.
- [166:57]
A
But it's got. It's a. It's warm, I guess.
- [166:59]
B
It is a warm yellow.
- [167:00]
A
It's very golden rod. Goldenrod. Wow. Citation needed is absolutely a must. Citation needed News. A newsletter by Molly White covers crypto. Right, Right. But not just crypto.
- [167:16]
C
Not just crypto, but a lot of crypto. Yeah.
- [167:20]
A
The year of technologarchy. That's a good word, technologarchy.
- [167:25]
C
Yeah. I wrote technological oligarchy too many times, and I was like, this is.
- [167:29]
A
Let's just make it one word. And it's funny because I was mentioning how I use RSS to create my own newspaper, and I realized you had an article about it. Maybe that's where I got the idea, so. So there you go. Citation needed. It's free, but become a subscriber because it would be nice. It would be nice.
- [167:48]
C
Helps me keep it free.
- [167:49]
A
Yes, exactly. Thank you, Molly. Great to see you, Molly White. Thanks for having me, Mr. Owen Thomas, San Francisco Business Times. Can we see Fitz? He's.
- [168:03]
B
He's sulking on his blanket right now.
- [168:04]
A
Oh, Fitz. Oh, Fitz.
- [168:07]
B
Yeah.
- [168:08]
A
Aw. Is he mad at us for taking Daddy away for so long?
- [168:13]
B
Maybe, or, you know, or just not getting enough treats.
- [168:16]
A
Ah, that's probably it.
- [168:17]
B
He. I need to give him a treat button so he can just go, treat, treat, treat.
- [168:21]
A
Yeah, I want to see that. What are you working on? Anything you want to plug? He's a managing editor there at the Business Times.
- [168:30]
B
Let's see. Just wanted to mention in all the AI news, we did have a scoop about OpenAI moving into Mountain View, so now instead taking over all of San Francisco real estate. They are also plunging into Google's backyard. Wow. Big real estate move. Also competing with Xai Elon Musk's AI company, which is just one city north in Palo Alto. Buying up real estate there or leasing real estate, I should say.
- [169:01]
A
How big is this office conference?
- [169:04]
B
Believe it's. It's north of 300,000 square feet. So it's a. It's a. It's a big, complex, former Symantec headquarters, if you remember that.
- [169:13]
A
Oh, I know that.
- [169:13]
D
Symantec.
- [169:14]
B
Yeah. RIP Peter Norton. Peter Norton, Yeah. Now part. Now. Nordic Lifelock, I think.
- [169:21]
A
Oh, it's got them. Yeah. Okay.
- [169:24]
B
Yep.
- [169:26]
A
Well, yeah, everybody should read the San Francisco Business Journal. You also. We were going to talk a little bit about the Renaissance. I can't show. See.
- [169:33]
B
Oh, shoot. I believe I gave you a gift article.
- [169:36]
A
I need a gift article. Give me a gift article it is. I gotta stop using an ad blocker.
- [169:45]
B
Oh, that's a problem. But I can tell you. Yeah. Our most recent cover story was about UCSF. You know, the effects of AI are not just on tech itself, but AI is playing a big role in health. USSF has expanded their footprint by about 2 million square feet in the past two years.
- [170:07]
A
Wow.
- [170:10]
B
Acquiring hospitals, leasing or buying new space. And the chancellor, Sam Hawgood, says a lot of it is because San Francisco is the center of AI. It's also a huge healthcare know healthcare hub. And he sees the two of them colliding right here in the city.
- [170:31]
A
Well, I'm. I'm planning when I have my heart attack to go to ucsf. So I do hope that, I mean, you will.
- [170:37]
B
You'll expand from everything I read, you'll be, you know, anyone who's.
- [170:40]
A
They're the best.
- [170:41]
B
Yeah. Facing that will be well cared for there.
- [170:44]
A
Yeah. If I can make it there in time.
- [170:48]
B
Friend of mine is doing lung rehab. They have like physical therapy therapy for your lungs, lungs. If you're having issues.
- [170:55]
A
Yeah. My daughter went there. She had nodes on her vocal cords and had a really great ENT doctor who helped her completely cure it and get better. It's a really good hospital and medical facility. Really like it a lot. Thank you, Owen. Great to see you. San Francisco Business Times. Become a member and turn off my gosh darn ad blocker is what I ought to do. Thank you so much, Owen. Great to see you.
- [171:23]
B
My pleasure.
- [171:24]
A
Give my regards to Marie. You're.
- [171:26]
D
As always, she's listening in.
- [171:29]
A
It's always, you know, that's the biggest sadness I have about not having a studio is I don't get to see Marie anymore because you guys used to come up.
- [171:38]
D
We're sorry we don't get to go to Petaluma as often as we used to.
- [171:41]
A
I know it's the only really real reason to come to Petaluma. Thank you. Harry McCracken, the technologizer. You can read about his an AI coding experience, recreating his high school game. And of course you'll read most of his stuff at Fast Company. I look forward to the new historical
- [171:58]
D
computing and subscribe to my Fast Company newsletter plugged in.
- [172:01]
A
Oh, that's free, totally free. FastCompany.com. thank you, Harry. Thanks to all of you for making this show possible. A special thanks to our club Twit members who help foot the bill. We really appreciate you Twit TV Club Twit. If you're not already a member of the and you want to support our programming, it's 10 bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Discord and of course you get the special programming that we do just for the club, including our AI user group, Stacy's Book Club, Johnny Jet. We do the Jet Set Show. That's a brand new show we started doing this week in space. I can go on and on and on. There's a lot of great stuff going on in the club. I hope you will take part by joining at TWiT TV Club. TWiT, we'd love to have you. We do this week in Tech every Sunday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern Time. Next Sunday we are going to daylight saving time, our summertime here. So normally we do it at 2200 UTC, but because we're moving, not UTC, we'll now be at 2100 UTC. You can watch the live streams at YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. Of course in the club you can watch on the Discord as well after the fact, on demand versions of the show available at our website, Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in tech, the Twitch show. In fact, do me a favor, subscribe. Just click the subscribe button and hit the bell and all that. That way you'll get notifications when we go live. Plus you can watch the shows there, watch the video, the shows there. It's a great way to share clips with friends and family. Helps people spread the word. Many of you though will subscribe because it is, after all, a podcast and any podcast client should be able to subscribe to the show, audio or video or both, and get it automatically the minute it's available. And if your podcast client does has reviews, please leave us a good review. Spread the word a little bit. After 20 years of doing this show, it's easy for people to forget. In fact, I get that comment all the time. You're still alive live. Yes, we're still. We're still here, believe it or not. Thanks for being here, everybody. Thank you for joining and we'll see you next time. Another Twit is in the can. Bye bye. Amazing. Doing the Twit all right.
- [174:20]
B
Doing the Twit, baby.
- [174:22]
A
Doing the Twit all right.