This Week in Tech 1085: In Line With Sam

Summary

This Week in Tech 1085: In Line With Sam

Date: May 25, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Panelists: Larry Magid, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jacob Ward

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Overview

This episode brings together veteran tech journalists and thought-leaders to tackle a series of major shifts in the media and technology world. Notably, it covers the demise of CBS News Radio, the fast-evolving landscape of AI-powered news consumption, the escape of news from traditional mediums, the risks and uses of AI in search and medicine, and an inside look at the much-publicized Musk vs Altman trial. The episode flows from nostalgia and reflection on the end of broadcast eras, into deep, sometimes philosophical conversations about the consequences of AI's rise – both its empowering potential for users and its risks of homogenization, misinformation, and capture by the powerful.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Death of CBS News Radio and the State of Broadcast News

• Timestamps: [04:22]–[13:01]
• Larry Magid shares the personal and professional significance of CBS News Radio's closure, marking an end to 99 years of continuous operation.
• Discussion of CBS divesting its radio stations and the changing nature of news consumption, especially with younger generations.
• Reflection on legacy media's relevance in the age of streaming, podcasts, and algorithmic news feeds.
• Speculation about the causes of CBS News Radio’s demise—economic vs. political—and the challenge of maintaining truth-telling journalism in a consolidating media landscape.
• Quote:

  “Lying, knowingly lying on CBS News radio was a fireable offense. [...] Telling the truth can be dangerous if you're basing your administration on lies. And we were just telling the truth. That's all we were doing.”
  —Larry Magid [12:30]

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2. Media Consolidation & Influence

• Timestamps: [13:24]–[16:31], [34:17]–[35:44]
• The panel warns of a new "Gilded Age" where a handful of billionaires buy up media outlets across the spectrum, threatening both the diversity and independence of journalism.
• Jacob Ward observes that content creators now often receive leaks and documents traditionally sent to professional journalists, underscoring the rise of commentary over primary-source journalism.
• Worries about what happens when the 'primary layer' of news gathering fades, echoing similar issues AI models face when they run out of original sources to ingest.

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3. Algorithmic News Bubbles & The Future of Discovery

• Timestamps: [16:31]–[32:54]
• The risk of algorithms (in social media and news aggregators) narrowing perspectives and isolating users in filter bubbles is debated.
• Marshall Kirkpatrick describes his own personalized news-gathering tool and raises the challenge of creating scalable, personalized feeds that don’t equate to new forms of filter bubbles.
• The irreplaceability of professional, primary news gathering (with international bureaus, for example) is emphasized.
• Discussion of Meta’s (Facebook/Instagram) policy shift to penalize “unoriginal” content, raising concerns about the future of news dissemination and remix culture on platforms.
• Quote:

  “What I want is the old experience of, like, wandering through the paper edition of the New York Times bumping into some crazy article about something weird going on in Indonesia that I would never read about otherwise...”
  —Jacob Ward [25:11]

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4. AI, Search, and Content Homogenization

• Timestamps: [41:30]–[49:06]
• Analysis of Google's radical changes to search—pivoting from links to AI-generated, direct answers—driven by competition from Perplexity, ChatGPT, etc.
• Jacob calls this "my nightmare", warning that the move collapses traffic and revenue for publishers, while studies show that competing AI models increasingly narrow their outputs into bland, homogenized answers.
• The panel warns that the erosion of distinctive, expert-driven info sources could have dramatic effects on both media and user knowledge.
• Quote:

  “It feels like an expanding spiral of choice that is in fact a narrowing spiral... at the bottom of that spiral, we don't know how to tell jokes or talk to our spouses or use a credit card or any of that stuff.”
  —Jacob Ward [47:08]

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5. AI, Agency, and Personalization

• Timestamps: [53:03]–[66:32]
• Deep discussion on the ethics and experience of feeding AI with one’s most personal data—from medical information to full life journals.
• Larry Magid shares a story of using ChatGPT to interpret a CT scan, which provided insights beyond what even his doctor could offer ([72:04]–[74:17]), but everyone cautions about the risk of AI hallucination or amplified misinformation (as in the “bixonomania” hoax [74:17]–[79:06]).
• Debate about whether AI-powered healthcare removes valuable human context and connection, or empowers users with more information.

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6. AI and Authenticity—Are We Lying to Ourselves?

• Timestamps: [97:55]–[108:16]
• Jacob discusses his essay on how using AI tools produces a subtle dishonesty—users often present AI-assisted work as their own, and business pressures push creators toward unethical or authenticity-eroding behavior.
• Reflection on how AI-generated or AI-assisted content may dilute the perceived or actual value of authentic, labor-intensive content.
• Panelists discuss where to draw the line between acceptable AI-based copy-editing and unacceptable AI-generated work in journalism.
• Quote:

  “There's something in the way that I think about and talk about my use of AI that is not fundamentally honest.”
  —Jacob Ward [98:41]

• Quote:

  “If you take a principled stand now and you say, I'm just going to write every single thing and do it all by hand, you're never going to be able to put out the volume you would need to be noticed in this market...”
  —Jacob Ward [106:51]

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7. The Musk vs. Altman Trial—Inside the Courtroom

• Timestamps: [112:10]–[127:03]
• Jacob offers a firsthand account of the much-publicized lawsuit, noting the personalities, egos, and surprising public accessibility of the federal courthouse.
• Takeaways: the trial demonstrates the massive power, egos, and outsized influence of big tech leaders, who often view themselves as 'main characters' while the rest of us are NPCs (non-player characters).
• Both Musk and Altman are shown as possibly believing they are uniquely qualified to shape AI or "save" humanity.
• Insights on the lack of true accountability for tech titans, and concern over the captured media landscape that will never again challenge them in the same way.

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8. Society, Surveillance, and Techlash

• Timestamps: [134:40]–[163:30]
• Discussion of the pervasive loss of privacy, from automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and Flock cameras to ambient Wi-Fi and gait analysis tech.
• The panel notes the bizarre scenario where the Federal government fines a company (Cox Media) not for surveilling people, but for falsely claiming it could!
• Broader context: accelerating loss of privacy, the challenge of regulating new tech, and the potential for individual empowerment if AI is used ethically—but also the risk that powerful interests further cement their status.
• Environmental responsibility is also touched on, with Marshall citing Project Drawdown and the importance of reducing food waste.

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Memorable Quotes

• On Primary Journalism’s Value:
  “What happens when the primary goes away?... These folks... also basically, like, they all need that. That primary layer in order for their secondary commentary layer to work.”
  —Jacob Ward [15:55]
• On Google’s AI Search:
  “The, the homogenizing, the greatest hits medley that we're about to be listening to all the time is really disturbing to me...”
  —Jacob Ward [45:45]
• On Authenticity in the AI Age:
  "What I want is the old experience of wandering through a paper edition of the New York Times and bumping into some crazy article about something I’d never have read about otherwise..."
  —Jacob Ward [25:11]
• On AI and User Agency:
  “In a world where podcasting exists... commentary is nearly impossible to suppress, even if independent news reporting is under threat.”
  —Leo Laporte [13:08]
• On the Panel’s Role:
  “Can I just suggest that that's what we do here at TWIT is we pick the stories that we think are important and we talk about them. And that editorial judgment is what we monetize.”
  —Leo Laporte [21:56]
• On Tech Titans’ Egos:
  “The universe will just reward me endlessly... because my work is so good, brilliant and important.”
  —Jacob Ward [127:18]

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Notable Moments & Timestamps

• CBS News Radio’s Final Broadcast: [06:22], [13:01]
• Meta penalizing “unoriginal” content: [17:00], [17:46]
• Marshall’s personal news algorithm: [21:08]
• Filter bubbles & discovery in news: [24:52]
• Google’s search overhaul and AI’s “hive mind” effect: [41:30]–[45:45]
• Personal health journeys interpreted by AI: [72:04]–[74:17]
• The “bixonomania” AI hoax cautionary tale: [74:17]–[79:06]
• The line between AI copyediting and AI-written work: [103:06]
• Behind the scenes at Musk v. Altman: [117:03]–[127:03]
• Climate action—Mill food recycler and Project Drawdown: [147:43]–[148:27]
• Techlash—protest at Berkeley against AI/social media: [57:00]
• Consolidation of news and Vox’s acquisition: [35:11]
• Rise of political Twitch-streaming (NYC Mayor Mamdani): [138:02]

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Further Reading & Links Mentioned

• Project Drawdown
• Jacob Ward’s The Rip Current newsletter
• Marshall Kirkpatrick’s What’s Up With That?
• Larry Magid’s ConnectSafely.org
• Mill Food Recycler
• StayGold US - Guaranteed Minimum Income Experiments
• Box AI

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Conclusion

A rich, sprawling episode blending media nostalgia, warnings about tech consolidation and filter bubbles, practical examples of new AI use-cases, skepticism about AI’s limits (and the importance of human judgment), and a rare behind-the-scenes account of "the world's richest man" in court. The hosts leave listeners with both hope and concern for a tech-driven future—one where individual agency and real journalism desperately need defending against the twin tides of corporate consolidation and algorithmic blandness.

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“Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Another Twit is in the can.”
—Leo Laporte [172:31]

Transcript

[A]

It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Marshall Kirkpatrick is here. Larry Magid, my friend Jacob Ward. We've got a great panel and lots to talk about, including the biggest change to Google search in 25 years. Jacob was at the Musk vs Altman trial. He'll talk about what it was like to be sitting there and watching the whole thing. And there's good news and bad news. That creepy listening tool for targeted ads didn't actually work and the FTC says we're gonna fine you. It should have worked. What? All of that and more coming up next on Twitter. This episode is brought to you by Outsystems, a leading agentix systems platform built for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are building, orchestrating and governing agentic systems on the Outsystems platform and with good reason. Architect deliver and scale governed agentic systems with agility and trust using one open and unified platform. Power secure company wide agentic orchestration for core business operations. Teams of any size and technical depth can use Outsystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. With Outsystems, you can rapidly launch ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading agentix systems platform that's unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to accelerate growth, reach, reduce operational friction and deliver real Enterprise impact with AI OutSystems build your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com TWIT that's outsystems.com TWIT podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. This is twit this week in tech. Episode 1085 recorded Sunday, may 24, 2026 waiting in line with sam. It's time for Twit this Week at Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. And at first I thought the tech news was kind of weak this week, but then I took a stronger look and fortunately we have a panel that is up to the task. Larry Maggot is here. Connect safely.org founder and president, but also, like me, a refugee from radio. We're going to talk about the demise of CBS News in a little bit. Good to see you Larry. Welcome back.

[B]

Good to see you Leo, as always.

[A]

And we also talk about your blog post about how AI helped you understand why you weren't feeling so good the other day. But that's to come. Also with us, Marshall Kirkpatrick. It's always great to see Marshall, longtime a tech journalist. His latest though, is a browser extension that applies AI to the pager on called what's up with that? Hey, Marshall, good to see you.

[C]

Thanks, Leo.

[A]

Welcome. Marshall was on Intelligent Machines, but he, you, you were on Twit many times back in the day. You're you, you kind of what I would say is an old timer. A twit old timer. Also with us, Jacob Ward. Jacob is the author of a great book called the Loop, which presaged what's going on today with AI. He was absolute, you know, ahead of his time on that one. He's back. You're back. I see on CNN now, which is great.

[C]

Yeah. I have a contributor role at cnn. Very exciting. Appreciate it. Leo.

[A]

You also see him, of course, every month on Tech News Weekly. And his newsletter is the Rip Current. The Rip current dot com. So I don't know where to begin here. Let's. As long as we started talking about radio off the air. And I said, wait a minute, hold on. Let's, let's hold that for the show because Larry, you asked me a kind of a leading question. Is radio dead right gave me bad news? Well, it's funny because for years I've been saying who listens to the radio? And often our audience says we do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I said, do young people still listen to the radio? But I think maybe in the car people still listen to, I don't know.

[B]

I mean, CBS News Radio as of last week, before it died on Friday, had 22 million listeners on 700 affiliates across the country. That was below their peak. They peaked at 33 million during my career. But they claim that they had still had 22 million listeners a week, which is more than CBS Evening News gets. In fact, more than all the evening news gets combined.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

It has an audience.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

At least they claim.

[A]

Well, who, who do you think that is? I mean, you know, it's funny, Jacob, when I get in the car, I fire up, tune in and listen to cnn. That's my news radio.

[B]

I listen to CNN too.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

I was once, I was talking to an entrepreneur recently living in Lagos, Nigeria, who said that what's. He had just taken a big executive job at a big radio station there and was talking about how hot radio is still in West Africa. That for a lot, for a lot of people, it is still the dominant media, dominant music. It was like, it was like talking to somebody from a, from another, you know, from a time capsule, from a. A time traveler. And he was just saying how cool it is to combine the social media stuff with what's Going on in radio anyway. It was very cool to imagine. But we are not living in that kind of here, no question.

[A]

Well, as William Gibson once said, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. There's some of us living in a different decade than others. If you are in a country, a developed country like this, where there's Internet floating through the air and available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, thanks to our cell phones and cell service, I don't understand why you would listen, why you would. Even by the way, people still subscribe to Sirius. I don't understand why you can get all that. Maybe, I guess, if you're not always in cell service.

[B]

So as I mentioned to you, off air, I, I got an invitation to go to this event in New York on Friday.

[A]

You went to the funeral for CBS News.

[B]

Do I want to spend all this time and money flying across the country for a two hour luncheon? I said, yeah, if a good friend died, I would go to their funeral.

[A]

It's like that, isn't it?

[B]

And. And this was the death of a radio network 99 years old. Edward R. Murrow was one of the very first people.

[A]

The Tiffany Network.

[B]

The Tiffany Network. It was historic. And it was still the largest radio news network in the country as of until this week. And so I showed up and first of all, it was a wonderful event. I got to meet all of these great people who I know by name and voice, but because I work remotely, I rarely got a chance to see them in person. And you know, it's over. They pulled the plug on us at 11:31 Friday night. We did our last broadcast and now all the stations are moving over to ABC News because they still have a news service for whatever.

[A]

That's kind of sad. Yeah, well, it is. I mean, is there such a thing as CB is. I mean, is. CBS was now owned by Paramount.

[B]

CBS is owned by Paramount, which is Larry Ellison's son, David, I think his name is. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

I mean, skydive.

[B]

I could sell it cheap.

[A]

I would buy that.

[B]

No, I'm keeping it.

[A]

Yeah, that's actually pretty cool.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Do they all. Did they own CBS News Radio? Did they get.

[B]

What happened was CBS divested their stations about six or seven years ago that became local radio stations. They used to own kcbs, for example, in the Bay Area, and WCBS in New York.

[A]

I grew up listening to wcbs. That's where I heard that RFK had been assassinated.

[B]

And I used to be on WCBS daily. I loved being.

[A]

And I heard you all the time. Yeah, yeah, I was a child, of course, at the time.

[B]

No, I was. I was on the air as recently as Friday because I still do a seg. I still do a feature even though I'm no longer.

[A]

I mean, I. Look, radio's in my heart. In. In December I will have. Will be the 50th anniversary of my getting my FCC third ticket. So I could work in radio. I will always consider myself a radio guy and that's why I do podcasting, because it is the air apparent to radio. It's still audio focused. It's. It's some person talking to a microphone in your ear.

[B]

And these are delivery mechanisms. At the end of the day, it's. Exactly.

[A]

Who cares how it comes to you?

[B]

I mean, there's a difference. So I don't know, maybe you guys know of a podcast that would compete with something like the CBS, you know, hourly news where we had a three minute.

[A]

Well, there was one, but OpenAI bought it. Right, The Tech Pros podcast network for hundreds of millions of dollars.

[C]

Yeah, that one was crazy.

[A]

And then Marc Andreessen's venture capital arm has the. They did something called Monitoring the Situation, which is a direct clone of TPBN or TBPN, but those are both on YouTube. They're. There's several hours a day streaming and they have really more like a CNBC look and feel to them when there's a.

[D]

They are not independent. Right. They're not playing the role of. Of a journalistic outlet, you know, holding power accountable. It is a. It is an adversarial landsc. And I presume, right, there's like some who Killed Robert or who framed Roger Rabbit kind of stuff going on here where, you know, this isn't just the. The unstoppable march of time forward. This is around corporate consolidation and regulatory capture and media capture and a part of a larger shift towards authoritarianism.

[A]

Well, and I should mention that, you know, not only did CBS Radio News die on Friday, but so did the Stephen Colbert show. The. It was actually very funny. Stephen Colbert shows up on Public Access. That was awesome.

[C]

So funny.

[A]

Well, but it's kind of not funny. It was called Only in Monroe. I guess he'd done the show once before and it was, by the way, watch it because it's hysterical and Jack White is on. I mean, it's really good, funny stuff. But it is a local access in.

[B]

I've never heard of the city, let alone that Tesla.

[A]

It's tiny.

[C]

Yeah, brilliant. Such a good.

[A]

Paramount plus took it down. They don't own it. They don't own him. But they issued a strike to YouTube and they have. It has been taken down globally.

[B]

What right do they have to do that?

[A]

I have no idea. This is the problem with YouTube takedowns.

[C]

Also the world's dumbest thing. Give it as much, you know, oxygen as possible, right? That's the thing.

[A]

Like Streisand effect, right?

[C]

You just put it right into the news cycle by doing that. I feel like you just need these. Like there needs to be like C suite training and like, here is how humor works.

[A]

How stupid can you be?

[C]

Here is how attention works. Like there just isn't. Isn't good training at that level.

[B]

I owe Brendan Carr a debt of gratitude because I didn't really pay much attention to Jimmy Kimmel until he got banned. Now I record it every night and watch every single morning. I watched a monologue and I never did that until they took him off the air.

[A]

So Paramount, Larry Ellison's son, I think, feeling the pressure from Brendan Carr's fcc, decided to pull Colbert. ABC showed a little bit of spine not pulling Jimmy Kimmel, but I think some of that was the public reaction to that.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Is that why CBS Radio News went away? Or is that more economic?

[B]

Okay, what my friends, and including the up until a couple of days ago, senior management at the newsroom said was that we were slightly profitable. They were in the black and boy, being in the black and media, I don't care how close you are to the red, as long as you're in the black, that should be a good sign. Now, CBS will say it was for financial reasons, but, you know, you think it's political. I think it's political. I think look for all of the criticisms of mainstream media, and I understand them and I have my own critiques. We worked really hard to tell the truth. I mean, lying, knowingly lying on CBS News radio was a fireable offense. And I can't say the same for some of the other shows out there, networks out there. And I don't think we had a left wing bias. I think we really did have a straightforward news gathering bias, which may be very uncomfortable to certain people in power. Telling the truth can be dangerous if you're basing your administration on lies. And we were just telling the truth. That's all we were doing.

[A]

Yeah,

[B]

now I was a commentator. I got to editorialize a bit. But still the network, it's pretty hard

[A]

in a world where podcasting exists, where the Internet exists, and Brendan CARR and the FCC's reach does not extend to that. I mean they may try to make it, but it's pretty hard to shut down dissent commentary.

[B]

And the real question, and you know, and Jacob, as you know, CNN could very well be likely is going to be owned by these same people that own cbs. The question is how relevant does it really matter given the Internet that Ellison owns CBS and may soon own?

[C]

Yeah, here's my argument about that. So I, I, so yeah, I should say, right, I'm a contributor at cnn. I'm not a full time employee but I have a relationship with cnn. So I'm not speaking for CNN here in any way. But I, you know, this question of right, does it matter who owns these platforms in an age of, of declining relevance for mainstream media, blah, blah. I hear that. On the other hand, so I'm part of a sort of informal network of creators and we, there's a Slack channel that goes around and one of the people the other day was said and these are people who are like, you know, they might have some kind of like, you know, posts on like they did. They tend to do stuff about knitting or cooking or whatever it is. And they, they started in some cases talking about current events. And before they knew it, they were like some of the top voices in the nation on current events. And so one of them said, hey, I've just been leaked some documents from this like government agency and I don't know what to do with, with them because I have no training, right? And, and they were like, you know, what, what kind of quick journalism training can I get to figure out what to do? And so I put together a little like informal kind of like crash course in journalism like a journalism 101 for these folks because their numbers are so huge and their relationship with their audience is so close that these people, you know, inside sensitive government facilities are leaking them stuff because they think this is the person to go to as opposed to the BBC or CNN or whoever else. So crazy. Also when I then did the 101 thing, I basically said to people like listen, you guys are operating right now in a world in which the, there's a primary layer of journalism that you have come to expect will always be there. The Anderson Cooper hard hitting interviews, the, you know, the rocket fire into Bahrain and the footage you get from the news of that. And then you guys consider yourselves to be in this sort of like commentary class, you know, as a, as a, you know, as a, as in, you know, you're offering your perspective on the news, which is what so many of these people are doing. And I was like, what happens when the primary goes away? Because you're going to. You know, these folks also basically, like, they all need that. That primary layer in order for their secondary commentary layer to work. So they. So everybody wants it there, even. And, and, and the. What we know is that, like, young people actually consume an enormous amount of news. They just do it through the clips that they watch.

[A]

TikTok they're doing. Yeah.

[C]

Which clips the news. That's right. That's right.

[A]

That's their news.

[C]

And so the current system is really. Even though the money's not flowing to the primary layer of journalism, it's still very relevant and people still really want it. It's just being consumed in this whole other way. And what I was saying to these people, like, are you ready to be the primary layer? If the primary layer falls apart as

[A]

a business model, because somebody has to afford it. This is. This is completely analogous to what's happening with AI, which is, AI has eaten all the primary sources, and in some respects, putting the primary sources out of business, but they desperately need those primary sources.

[B]

And Sweden has bureaus all over the world. It's a really expensive operation. No YouTube star is likely to have 20 bureaus around the world.

[A]

That's the point.

[B]

And reporters gathering facts.

[C]

The thing that came down the other day. Sorry, Marshall, I don't mean to cut you off there. The thing that came down the other day that I was really freaked out about was Meta announced a new policy that they're going to spike creators who post unoriginal content. What? Yeah, that they. And they. And they talk about in the context of like, oh, we're protecting the creator. Adam Mosseri had this piece, you know, this post about it. We're protecting creators and their original works. And so if you're. If you're. What you post is not substantially transformed or not yours specifically, then then they're

[A]

going to, like, that's interesting.

[C]

Not only will it. Will it downgrade, that content will downgrade you as a creator. So, like, the people in my cohort are like, panicked because footage is one of the main things that goes around for them. And I was thinking to myself, boy, I don't know if that's Meta's intention.

[A]

Oh, they're morons. You know, what they are could really

[C]

be bad for news, for understanding the news. Like, it could really screw up people's sense of what's going on in the world.

[A]

No, and if you think about it, it's counterproductive. What made TikTok a success they bought musically. And the success of TikTok was people lip syncing to other people's music. And eventually TikTok really became about collabs and responses and taking existing content and repackaging it. And I think Meta's just, they're on the wrong side of history. But this is nothing new for Meta.

[D]

So Barbra Streisand was already rich, right, when the Streisand effect came into being. She could, she could get in there and she could withstand the pressure, she could freak out, I'm sure she was on the phone with her lawyers, etc. Etc. But this, I would contend that when the powers that be put pressure on people, if those people are already deep pocketed and have big legal teams, then it becomes a Streisand effect situation. But if they're more on the margins, then it becomes a slap situation, a strategic lawsuit against public participation, because they don't have the capacity to withstand that barrage.

[A]

Well, that's why we defend section 230. Because if you are Meta, if you are Google, if you are a big company, you can defend yourself in court. But people like us and our little chat rooms and our little Mastodon instances and our forums, we can't. And that's why Section 230 is necessary.

[B]

Well, I have a question. So I've always, I was always a big defender of 230, but I'm questioning whether it's relevant in the age of algorithms. If Meta is amplifying posts, doesn't that make them a publisher? They're not just running a forum. It's not like the old days of CompuServe forums where anything goes, you know, they are, they are amplifying.

[A]

That's right. That's what the jury decided, isn't it? In the.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The design, the design was not.

[A]

I mean, they didn't take off product design.

[C]

Yeah, they just said the design was. They were culpable for the, the effect that the design has on your behavior, which is I, I think is good. It keeps.

[A]

Yeah. You know, by the way, my chat rooms don't have an algorithm. My mastodon. That's right, Just is chronological, baby. My forums, chronological. There is no editorial. So if that's the case. Yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe section 230 does not and should not defend the algorithmic publishing that is, I guess, you know, in a way, publishing. And that's what that jury found in San Jose, but. Exactly.

[B]

I'm a big believer in 230 in general.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Turned off the algorithm on Facebook and made it chronological and it got really boring now that maybe because I have thousands of, you know, I've got followers and friends before they allowed followers, I used to accept all my everybody's friends because that was the only way I could have people follow me.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So maybe that's the problem. But no, no, it's not.

[A]

It's the same problem with Mastodon. That's why nobody likes Mastodon because it's not algorithmic.

[D]

I track my news through a system that I built myself that has an algorithm tuned specifically your algorithm. Yeah, for my specific interests.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

I've got a few areas of interest and I click a button and it just says Whoosh. Here's the 10 most relevant articles from across everything you're monitoring about that you each day. And it's.

[A]

Maybe that's the future is hyper personal.

[C]

Super interesting.

[A]

I love that.

[C]

Marshall, can I ask you a question? So like let's say you. Let's say we scale that up, right? And each of us gets to construct our thing. So I have something sort of. Sort of like that as well. And I was just thinking like, okay, no one's making money off of your system or mine. Not least because no one's centralizing your behavioral profile and bucketing it with all of the other behavioral profiles. Right. But is there like a money making opportunity at scale for each person personalizing a newsfeed?

[A]

Can I just suggest that that's what we do here at TWIT is we pick the stories that we think are important and we talk about them. And that editorial judgment is what we monetize. That's right, sure.

[B]

Wow, what a concept. You think the New York Times might

[C]

start at that level?

[A]

That's called journalism.

[C]

As a broadcaster, it works, right? But as an individual individual, like as a bunch of individuals with a one to one relationship with the algorithm.

[A]

I'll show you something I subscribe to. It's called no Scroll. I found it on, on Twitter. It is an AI. It says no scroll monitors the situation so you don't have to. Every morning at 9am no scroll sends me a list of stories. I told it ahead of time, what I'm interested in. And it sends me a list of stories on Telegram. It's a Telegram bot that I might want to cover. It's 10 bucks a month and it's one of the many tools I use to keep track of stories we want to cover on the show. I don't know. I presume, I mean it's 10 bucks a month. They're monetizing it. I don't know how big it's become. I'm trying to get the founders on to talk about it. So there are ways to do this. And Marshall, you're kind of monetizing it with what's up with that? Right? Yeah. What's up with that?

[D]

And then. So that's my X ray tool, but then I've also got a companion radar type tool called Hawkeye. And they.

[A]

Is that available?

[D]

Yeah, it is.

[A]

Oh, okay. Where's that?

[D]

It's at what's up with that app? Hawkeye.

[A]

Okay.

[D]

And. And so I, I'm setting that up for organizations. I sell that. And, and what it does, we, we map out, you know, you give us some examples of the kinds of organizations you're interested in. I go out and map out hundreds of, of related kinds of organizations, monitor them each day. Yeah. And then click on one of those magazine covers there in the bottom. Right. One of the things that it does is publish. And then if you click through on the right side, there's a, an arrow there. It generates these magazine.

[A]

This is analogous to something that's been around in journalism for decades, which is a clipping service. Right?

[C]

Right.

[A]

If you're Barbra Streisand, you pay for a clipping service that will send you every day all the places you were mentioned. And then Google did that for. Still does that. Right.

[D]

Google reasoning on top of it because it takes a whole bunch of related stories.

[A]

AI makes it better.

[D]

Find me, do some cluster analysis and see what some common themes are and generate some original analysis covering those themes.

[C]

I will say one of the things that I, I think none of this solves for. And it's a comment brought up on your discord right now. I don't know how you say your name. L, R, A, U.

[A]

That's Larry. It's Larry Gold. It's Lorenzium Gold. This is good.

[C]

It's classic twit. I can't read it out loud, but it looks good.

[A]

It's a nerd name.

[C]

Yeah. But he says what I find with algorithms tuned to me, you don't find anything outside of my bubble. That's my number one problem. Because, like, in the, and, and not just in the, like, ideological sense, which is bad. You know, it makes a lot of sense, this thing of, like, we're going to serve up, like, intelligence, you know, tailored to your specific job function.

[A]

Great.

[C]

What I want is the old experience of, like, wandering through the, you know, a paper edition of the New York Times bumping into some crazy article about something weird going on in Indonesia that I would never read about otherwise and that no algorithm would ever predict I'd be into and being like, wow, that's really interesting. His wife organized the murder of this guy. And that's crazy, you know, like the random discovery stuff.

[A]

And as a newsletter writer, that's kind of important, right? Because you want to find something that not everybody. So I am in exactly the same boat. 90% of the stories we do are the same stories everybody who's covering tech does. And I use the AI to do that. This is the daily tech briefing that my AI generates for me for all three shows that I do. And so I let it do that. But you're exactly right, Jacob. I don't get from that the weird, the oddball. So.

[D]

So my favorite experience, if I may, with that, I'm a subscriber to a book publisher called PM Press, where for 30 bucks a month, they just send me every book they publish that month. And. And I get all kinds of, like, wild stuff that I wouldn't have chosen that's brilliant to buy until it shows up in my mailbox in a package about, you know, Appalachian coal miner labor disputes. And, yeah, it's really neat.

[B]

So, you know, I, I think about that because in the, in, in the days of newspapers, let's say you're a sports fanatic, that's really all you care about. You still have to pass the front page on the way to the sports section, so you're going to get some information. But now you could just go to ESP or whatever your sports source and completely ignore what's happening in the rest of the world.

[A]

Well, worse than that, you could say, I only want to know about football. Don't tell me about baseball.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I mean, you can really narrow it down. So I think there is a obligation on the part of consumer information consumers to try to kind of reach outside their filter bubble. You know, Eli Pariser wrote that very famous book of the filter bubble, and Jeff Jarvis has always argued against it. He said, you know, you can say, well, you're only seeing stuff you're interested in, but it is the nature of the Internet. That stuff comes in over the transom that you would not see otherwise. You know, and I think that that's. I think that's also true. I don't. I mean, how does tick tock work?

[C]

Tick tock is exactly that.

[A]

Exactly.

[D]

It's. It's just pure, isn't it? Just perpetually refined. Exactly. The kind of stuff you like yeah,

[C]

the funny thing about Twitter, about TikTok, is that it used to be much more like random awesome stuff. You'd get like a Jamaican truck driver teaching you how he makes breakfast in his cab. You know, that kind of stuff where you're like, wow, I would never bump into this on any other platform. Now it's become a little more specific and you have to basically reset your feed every so often because it starts to peg you. And my thing is, you know, so to figure out who you are. Peggy is the wrong word.

[A]

Yes, please don't say that. Thank you. But that sounds painful.

[C]

But the, that, that, you know, narrowing of, of what it gives you, it gets boring really quick. And for me, what I'm always trying to do is convince it that I'm somebody demographically that I'm not. So I'm always trying to convince it that I'm like a 25 year old black woman or whatever. Like I'm trying to like heart stuff about that, you know, or whatever. And then I'll linger too long on something and it'll be like, oh, you're a white guy in your 50s and it's just like, it's like camp.

[A]

You need more bikinis, archery,

[C]

and Jack Reacher. And I'm like, you know, pickleball.

[A]

Pickleball. That's what you want. You want pickleball.

[C]

Pickleball.

[A]

Exactly.

[C]

I'm like, God damn it, did I have to do?

[A]

My daughter, who's a millennial, taught me that. She said, dad, you have to really. She said, what you really need is multiple accounts because it pays. I don't know if TikTok's as sophisticated anymore now that it's owned by Larry Ellison, but it pays attention to what you look at at morning, noon and night. It has, it is very fine tuned. I mean, this was really their secret sauce, right? She says, but you can completely cultivate by what you linger on, what you watch and what you don't linger on. And she. I'm scrolling through. I said, see, I get all these bikini pictures. She says, don't stop there because you're receiving a signal.

[B]

Leo, I'm glad you admitted that, because I get that even on Facebook reels. And I'm almost reluctant to admit it because it's kind of acknowledging that maybe once in a while I actually look at this stuff. Which of course, I never.

[A]

For men we can't help.

[B]

My wife is watching.

[D]

No, it's not just men that love boobs. For goodness.

[B]

You can't look away. I know.

[A]

I don't want to stop. I really don't. So I have noticed that, you know, I, I took Instagram and TikTok off my phone and they've been off for six months. And I went back to Instagram because unfortunately my son is an Instagram influencer and I kind of, if I'm going to find out what Henry's up to, I have to every once in a while check Instagram. But I do notice that Instagram I think got sensitive to that. I don't get the thirst traps I used to get. I mean, used to be all I would see on Instagram was young women basically trying to get you to join their onlyfans. And that's stopped. So I think they are playing with the algorithm a little bit.

[B]

You know Leo, you remind me of this preacher. Years ago when I took ads on safekids.com somehow I got this letter from a preacher said, you know, I found a sexually provocative ad on your website and you should not be. You know, a site on kid safety should not be. I said, I'm sorry to tell you Reverend, but the. It's based not on what's on my website, it's based on what you're looking at, sir.

[A]

You know, my website just serves up what you want, Rev.

[B]

That's right.

[D]

Well, so there, there is a continuum, right, of, of interests between like a liberal Democratic prioritization on diversity and growth. And instead, you know, people say if you're trying to reach across the aisle, like make appeals to purity and tradition and the instruments of power buying up these social networks and tuning the algorithms are more aligned to the latter. And it's a self reinforcing cultural.

[A]

That's what Jonathan Haidt.

[B]

The problem is that purity used to be a Republican value. I'm not sure it is anymore. I mean I know it's not talking

[D]

about it appeals to purity are.

[B]

Oh you. Oh, I see. Talking about purity.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Jonathan Haidt, before he became the guy who says kids are being ruined. Kids today being ruined by. In social media, wrote a really good book, I interviewed him on it about why we can't talk to one another. And he really talks about the left and the right and the values that each side holds highest. As you said, purity is, is, is one of them on the more conservative side and you know, fairness, it's really interesting and you're right, that would, that would end up getting self perpetuated. But I, so, I mean I think we've talked about solutions here. I think this is a potential flaw with AI. I think one of the things that's happening with AI, we're all four of us. Examples of this is people are writing their own custom filters and custom services and custom search tools.

[D]

Some people are.

[A]

But it's a, it's not everybody, obviously, but the. But those of us in the, in the cutting edge of tech are very. Everybody. It's so funny because I, I was telling Larry this. I have people on the show I used to have to say, well, do you use AI now? It's not, it's. It's a given because if you're covering technology, this is one of the most consequential things that's ever happened in technology and you will be left out unless you actually start using it. Right.

[D]

Who said that in the future the world will be made up of a small group of people who tell computers what to do and a larger group of people who will be told what to do by computers.

[A]

That's changing though. I think AI might be changing that. I think it's empowering individuals in a way that we.

[B]

There's a handful of companies that dominate AI already. I mean industry start out with a lot of companies and they consolidate. We're already consolidated to it.

[A]

All right, that's a good place for us to pause for a break because I do want to talk about Google I O which was this week and their announcements. But there was a big announcement that's kind of a secondary story from a Chinese company that I think is also very interesting. So we're going to talk about that in just a little bit. Good conversation though. Great way to start. I really appreciate your bringing up CBS News radio and I'm sorry, Larry.

[B]

May it rest in peace.

[A]

Yeah, may it rest in peace. I didn't realize that Friday was the last day.

[B]

It was Friday, 11:31pm Boy. But there was a new network that launched at midnight, Saturday, midnight called the Worldwide News Network. It's owned by the same right wing billionaire who owns WABC in New York. But its news director who is pitching me claim that they're totally neutral politically and they're. Don't worry if you come on our network, we're not going to surround you by right wing ideology.

[A]

That's really the concern I have is the consolidation. And you nailed it when you said, Jacob, that TBPN and monitoring the situation. MTs are not real news organizations because they're owned by the people they cover. That really is what's happened is

[C]

the

[A]

rich have gotten so we are in a second gilded age and they are so powerful and they are so wealthy and they are buying up all of these means of communication and furthermore, fully understand how to use them to protect their own interests in a very clever way.

[D]

So theaters now. WBAI's Amy Goodman now producer of Democracy now, syndicated nationwide. She's got a biopic in movie theater is called Steal this Story. Please. That's really good.

[B]

Good.

[A]

Bai is great. She's great.

[B]

Murdoch buying vox. Is that actually going to happen? Because VOX is pretty.

[A]

It happened. James Murdoch, but it's the son.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Who was, who was cast out for his liberalism from the Murdoch family. So I don't care about right or left. That's the point is that these people have so much money that whatever side they want to advocate for, they can buy up the means of communication.

[C]

And why would they ever subject themselves to an interview, a hostile interview from any of the four of us ever again. That's right.

[A]

Ever again. And that worries me. We need people to speak truth to power.

[B]

I used to love interviewing Bezos back in the day, but he probably wouldn't talk to me again.

[A]

No.

[C]

Why should I? Sorkin is as hard a hitting interview as he'll do anymore.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We'll have more in just a bit. Jacob Ward is here. So glad about the CNN thing. That's fantastic. I love seeing you when I thanks, man. I get, I get all excited. Jacob's on Jacob Ward dot com. The rip current is his newsletter and of course he appears every month on Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent. Marshall Kirkpatrick, the creator of. Well, now I have to say what's up with that? And Hawkeye. Two very interesting uses of AI to help people figure out what's up with that, which is you become a publisher. That's great. It's awesome. So always good to see you, Marshall. And Larry Maggot of Connect Safely.org and formerly of CBS News Radio. Yeah. Oh, Mike Flagg. Makes me sad.

[B]

I know. I'm going to put it back on my mic.

[A]

I grew. I, I, that was really my news as a kid. I had a clock radio would come on, you know, when I had to get up, 6am or whatever.

[B]

KCBS, KNX, WCBS.

[A]

I was Providence.

[B]

Are you in New York? Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. And that was my, that was my news. And I was Great radio station, by the way. That is junkie.

[B]

That is completely off the air. I mean, wcbs, they killed that about a year ago. Completely.

[A]

So radio may not be dead, but it's limping. It's limping hard. Our show today brought to you by speaking of AI Superhuman, we. I love Superhuman. We use Superhuman. Stop letting single function tools disrupt your workflow. This is so real. When you're sitting there writing or you're working, constant context and tab switching are death. They make project management tedious, disjointed. Your brain is not designed to be switching back and forth like that. But Superhuman has an answer Grammarly. And Grammarly is now part of something bigger. Superhuman. It can help level up your productivity without all the context switching. AI tools are everywhere, as we probably all learned. Some of them make more work and take up even more of your time. Most of them don't really give you what you need. Well, now they're Superhuman, the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers wherever you work. Think of Superhuman as your AI dream team, proactively helping you with every aspect of your workflow. Built in intelligence from Grammarly, mail and Coda. You can now get things done faster and collaborate seamlessly without all that context switching. Superhuman gets what you really need. AI that gets you from day one. There's no learning curve. It's just simple. It's easy to use. Superhuman knows what you might need and proactively offers suggestions to improve. When you're drafting emails, when you're creating documents and more. Superhuman helps you go from to do to done faster. Superhuman ensures you stand out. It's AI that's personalized for you to sound like you, not like some AI at your best, sound like you at your best, not like everyone else. No need to repeat what you want, sharing the same context over and over again. Because Superhuman remembers it works alongside you, automatically understanding what where you're at, proactively offering suggestions. Your writing agent understands what you're going for. What you need creates helpful outputs that match your writing style. We love it. Our whole team uses it. Unleash your superhuman potential with AI that meets you where you work. Learn more at superhuman.com that's superhuman.com superhuman.com we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. So Google had its big developer conference on Tuesday and announced, boy, like a thousand things. To me, the most consequential thing, the thing that I think people are going to in the long run say makes the most difference, is they really changed search. After 25 years of the simple Google search box that gave you a list of links, this has been slowly happening right with the AI assistance and they are now using their latest Gemini model, the 3.5 flash, and they are really changing how the search box works, essentially keeping you on Google they're answering longer queries with graphics, pictures, full answers instead of links. They have a video generation tool. They're also focusing on bringing online shopping into the search window so that you don't go to Amazon or Dick's Sporting Goods. You have it all in one window and you do your whole shopping there. This is a, I think as a massive shift Google obviously doing this in response to companies like Perplexity kind of DIS and ChatGPT disintermediating search. People more and more do search with AI and don't go to those sites. But this is what I was talking about in the last segment where you know, potentially you're going to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. There's all the monetization flows directly to Google, not to the sites that content comes from. Marshall, I mean you're, do you think this is a problem or is this a good thing?

[D]

Oh, I think time will tell people how well people appreciate it.

[A]

Maybe they'll just leave Google.

[D]

There's backlash already where people say, you know, I don't, I don't want AI in my search results and in my graduation ceremony speech and oh yeah, man. So, but does Google do a better job than you know, SEO hungry websites trying to pull you into.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Who, who can you trust? Who, who is most credible? I think will be the big question.

[A]

Yeah, and people may reject, reject it on the surface but if it's better, if they use it and they find it's got better results, you know, they'll quickly get over their, their concerns. What do you think, Jacob? This is part of the loop, isn't it?

[C]

Yeah, it's, it's my nightmare.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Like I mean it points this thing and there's a healthy debate going on, Excuse me, in the discord conversation about you know, does what people want line up with what is good business and you know, do what we want philosophically line up with what our brains want instinctually. And, and those things are so far apart and, and I think the whole of human, like modern human history has to do with conquering our instincts and making a sustainable structure out of what who we want to be. And the tech industry is just not about that. No, no, what they're about is they

[A]

don't care, do they?

[C]

Let's ship, let's ship. Let's get it sticky, let's go. Right. And in this case this is such, it's so short sighted for so many reasons. I mean it's short sighted just from a business perspective because it's not Clear to me, you know like Google is doing to publishers exactly what AI companies are accused of, of doing to Google. Right. They're like, they're just turning on their, on their source in this terrible way. So there's this fundamental thing of just like destroying the market for information. I mean like HubSpot I think estimated that 70 or 80% of their, their traffic disappears on this DMG media documented drops as steep as 89% for some queries. Like we're entering the world of zero click searches. Yeah, that's a nightmare for anybody that tries to make money on that stuff. And then the last thing I'll just say is there was a paper at Neurips this year, right the big academic conference on or I guess last year Time is a flat circle and Europe's right, the big academic conference on, on AI had a bunch of, there were a bunch of papers that won an award and one of them was called Artificial Hive mind. And I really recommend people take a look at this. It is so fascinating. What they did is they took 70 top LLMs and they put this corpus of like 27,000 open ended creative questions through all 70. So that's you know, Llama and Gemini and ChatGPT and everything. They then out of that measured over time where those direct, where those answers kind of went. So these are like open ended questions like write me a poem about time. And what they found is that if you ask the question repeatedly over time the answers narrow into a slimmer and slimmer band of responses. So rather than it getting more expansive, it gets less expansive. You're getting information over time. It's homogenized.

[A]

Exactly.

[C]

And here's the really crazy part is that when they looked at across the 70 different models they all start converging on the same answers. So you know, it's like time is a river is what they all end up writing in the end. These cliched kind of college freshman kind of responses. Right. And so for me the nightmare here is like Google for all of its flaws was once upon a time a place where you could really go and find very individual stuff. You could really experience a raw feed or a semi raw feed of weird specific research derived knowledge. And now man, it's just going to be margarine. And I really, there's all the business problems and there's a huge number of business problems. But man, the, the, the homogenizing, the greatest hits medley that we're about to be listening to all the time is

[A]

really disturbing to me and furthermore controlled by the Giants the tech.

[B]

Yeah, but even, even before this, one of the things that always frustrated me in Google is when I, I'm looking for information, they would almost always link me to a YouTube video and sometimes I just want to read it. Right. But they don't get monetized if they send me to some random news source.

[A]

They were always self dealing.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Yeah. This is what the EU complained about. I mean, and Google deny. But Google Shopping, Google YouTube results, Google said, well, we just want to give you the best results. We're just trying to get people what they want and that's what they want.

[B]

Well, but you know, if they're, if they're letting you shop on Google and not sending you to merchants, what is that going to do? I mean, I guess it's bad. I don't care if it screws Amazon, but it's going to screw everybody.

[A]

Well, what happens is in some ways it gives Walmart and Wayfair and all these companies a way to compete against Amazon. But they have to play the game. They have to play the game on Google's terms. They have to support the universal cart, the UCP protocol, and they have to say, okay, you know, we're going to show up in the Google results because that's where people are shopping. And then suddenly Google has all this power. This is what happened with Google Ads. You, you call this in your book, the loop? You called it. Yeah, this is, this is the, this is the loop, isn't it?

[C]

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it feels like an expanding spiral of choice that is in fact a narrowing spiral of it's contracting and it, and at the bottom of that spiral, we don't know how to tell jokes or talk to our spouses or use a credit card or any of that stuff, you know, and, and to me, you know, cut to five years according to what, what they're building here and, and you know, at Google. And like, I think, you know, you're going to have people be like, oh, I don't want to have to go like, look for the thing I want to buy.

[A]

Right.

[C]

I need, you know, I need, you know, detergent or I need, you know, a shirt. And that's, yeah, that's the end. It's just like, it just becomes mush in this way that I'm, I think the market is going to be there.

[B]

I mean, I will say it's going to find a shirt for you whether, whether you would have chosen it or not.

[C]

Well, yeah, and you're never going to want to Go and spend time being like, I wonder where this shirt was sourced from. And you know, unless you can sort of tell it what to do, like you're just not gonna, not that shopping is my number one care about this stuff, but like, you know, just any, any active reaching out for knowledge or active reaching out for engagement with the world. They want to jump in there and make it so easy you'll forget how to do it.

[A]

But you know, people say, well, I'll use DuckDuckGo or I pay 25 bucks a month for Cogi search. But I gotta point out that the index almost all of these other tools use is Bing and Google, right? And so if this becomes the way of the world, there's not gonna, there won't be any differentiation anymore because they don't have their own search indexes.

[B]

But what's really scary about this, if you think about education. I mean the purpose of education should be not to fill your head with knowledge, but to teach you how to think critically and to teach you how to acquire knowledge. That has always been the main, important outcome of a good education. And it almost sounds like they really are dumbing us down like this education is going to become irrelevant if once we get out of school all we get is pablum served to us without having to think about it.

[A]

Well, it's clearly what Google wants. Here's an Image from Google IE TechCrunch published. When Pura releases a new scent that's based in sandalwood for under $15, grab it for me. That's it. That's the last interaction you're going to have with that company. You'll just, one day that scent will arrive at your door and that's it, it's done. And that's what Google wants. Because Google's going to get a cut of that transaction. You're not going to leave Google. You're going to stay in the Google world. It really looked to me watching Google I o that Google was taking a page from Apple's ecosystem lock in book. You know, Apple's done very well in hardware by making it just work better if you use all Apple stuff. Well, Google's doing kind of the same thing. They have it now. You know, they saw what happened with OpenClaw and they announced their own agent, Spark. Same idea. You know, they have this universal protocol for shopping ucp so you never have to leave the Google page. And they're changing the front page of search so it's not really a list of links. Isn't the result the Result is the answer you want.

[D]

Marc Andreessen once said that he was investing in virtual reality goggles, even though many of his San Francisco based friends didn't get it. Because he said, you might think that the world is beautiful walking through San Francisco, but in the future, the vast majority of humanity will live in cement boxes in company towns, and they're going to really want VR goggles.

[A]

Oh, my. Oh, my God.

[C]

So that's a market opportunity by his logic.

[A]

Right? So depressing. But it is. If you think about it, all of the movies and sci fi stories like Neuromancer and Ready Player One, they're always, when they wear these things or jack in, they're in a dystopia. They are jacking in, they are wearing the visors to escape the dystopia. That's universal in sci fi.

[D]

Well, when, where we, where we look, the direction we look is the direction the car or the bicycle goes, right? So for goodness sakes, like, let's look at something other than that.

[C]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

And by the way, the other thing Google announced is they're gonna do these glasses. Of course, Meta's ray bans have been very successful. Google.

[B]

I'm wearing them now.

[A]

Are you?

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Taking pictures of me?

[B]

I just took your picture.

[A]

Oh, gosh.

[B]

You have no privacy.

[A]

Leo dang you. Now I have to, in defense, wear my Meta ray bands. Ooh.

[B]

Can they talk to each other?

[A]

Oh, gosh, I don't know. Somebody said that they were able to get to modify this in some way, that it could talk to their Hermes agent, which I would be very much happier talking to that than talking to Meta.

[B]

These things drive me crazy. They keep talking at me when I don't want them talking.

[A]

They talk all the time. I know. They're very gabby.

[B]

I know. I kiss them off a lot.

[C]

Larry, what is the ostensibly principal purpose for having them? Like, why? Why?

[B]

Well, you know, believe it or not, they have just launched in beta something called Conversation Focus, and it actually works better than Apple Air, AirPods, and kind of better than my hearing aids. Because if I'm in a restaurant and I'm talking to you, your voice is going to be a pitch higher and the voices around me are going to be a little bit lower.

[A]

So you're using them as a hearing aid?

[B]

Kind of just in very specific situations, like in restaurants.

[A]

Beyond that, do you have your prescription lenses in there? So these are, these are your spectrum.

[B]

I actually had. I bought Gen1 with my prescription lenses and then I used a Gen 2. They popped the lenses out and popped them right back in.

[A]

So this is what you wear as glass. These are your glasses. Now this is accessible.

[B]

Now the problem is because they. I always have to carry my case and my other glasses.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because there's not enough battery needed to

[B]

be recharged every few hours. They claim eight hours. You get about five or six. So if you use them.

[A]

Wow, you're all in on this. I didn't know that Larry.

[B]

I use them as headphones. I talk to people.

[A]

They sound good.

[B]

Yeah. If I get a phone call, I click on it.

[A]

And were you intrigued by the glasses? Google is talking about their Android XR glasses. They'll come from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster and Samsung which is clever to

[B]

work with Warby Parker. I like that idea.

[A]

Yeah. Because right now Meta works with slo exotica. So it's you know that giant, another

[B]

giant monopoly and Apple is rumored to be coming out with some glasses. We'll see what they come out with.

[A]

Mark Gurman today in his Power on newsletter. He's of course the Apple guru of rumors says that when Apple's wwdc announcement is June 8th, it's just two weeks away. They will really show something with AirPods and cameras in the AirPods.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That are tied to, they're tying initially to accessibility. Blind people will have these cameras and they can say what it is they're looking at and so forth. But ultimately I think it's a similar plan that you're going to see the world through these tech giants lenses. That's the point by the way at

[B]

wwdc there's going to be a slide with connect safely on it because we are their provider of Internet safety content and they're finally going to talk about it in public.

[A]

That's fantastic. They think they only are because they have to. Yeah.

[B]

Well, hey, I'll take it for us.

[A]

No, that's great. That's wonderful. I'll look for that.

[D]

So this reminds me of, of Doctorow's book Radicalized. Right. Where one of the characters has a, a subscription toaster oven. Is that, is that what it is? And, and she starts thinking subversive thoughts including I'd like to change the settings on my toaster.

[A]

Shocking.

[D]

Yeah. I make a dramatic chord.

[C]

This is the thing you look at where, where this technology goes in other cultures and in other sort of. I mean I would argue just in like just a little further down the road in terms of the market and that's you know, in China they're telling, they're you know, deciding whether you're considered on duty and getting paid at work or not based on how focused your device tells the boss you are.

[A]

Well, Amazon does that in their trucks already, right?

[C]

Totally right. And in this case, like won't pay you for the time that you are like goofing off by thinking about other things than your task.

[A]

Right. We had this story, I don't know if it's true, a couple of years, a couple of years ago that the car, the, the cameras in Amazon's delivery trucks notice if you're singing and will dock you. I don't know if that's. That doesn't sound true.

[C]

Stop being joyous, human.

[A]

You're having too much fun.

[D]

How about that story on the list about the bipartisan discussion about banning Flock video cameras.

[A]

Right. Which is good, right? Yeah. So this is. Okay, so we've talked about it's really dystopian future, but I don't feel like the future is gonna be that bleak. I don't think these tech giants are gonna win. I don't know. There's very little evidence for my belief.

[C]

Haven't won. What is this? I'm not sure, but.

[A]

Okay, okay, okay. Bear with me here because I think what is. There is a. There is definitely a tech lash. That's what that vote is about. Flock people. You know, you would think the government especially would want these automated license plate readers everywhere. It helps fight crime. And we've seen dramatic evidence that it's actually really useful in cases of abduction and criminals. But, but people are starting to realize it also impairs privacy. And we have some constitutional protections that, you know, I mean, you don't have protections on the street. You know, your license plate is public, but people kind of are cringing about that. I also think that the widespread use of AI is putting powerful tools in individuals hands.

[B]

So I was, I went to a demonstration at Berkeley last week. Like, you know, I meant to many demonstrations at Berkeley in the 60s when I went there. But last two or three weeks ago, it was an anti social media, anti AI demonstration. There's a backlash and it was really about, we don't want these big tech companies running our lives. We want autonomy, we want agency. And these young Berkeley students were out there complaining about social media things.

[A]

Those are the same students booing the commencement speakers who mentioned AI.

[C]

That's my favorite story of all time. I love that story from this week of everybody getting booed.

[A]

Yeah. Eric Schmidt and other commencement speakers who walk in thinking, I'm going to talk about the Future, which is going to be very exciting for these young graduates. How they're going into this world with AI and being shocked. Shocked. I tell you that the graduates are going, boo. We know. What are you. There's a disconnect. Very much so.

[D]

The Luddites didn't hate looms, right? They hated the power dynamics and the business model that led to looms putting them out of work. If they had been like worker owned looms, then there'd be a place for

[B]

them or looms that increased their productivity and allowed them to make more money and have more satisfaction over their jobs, they would have loved it. And that's how I look at AI. AI is great for me. It. It does nothing but good things for me. It makes me more productive, less reliant on other people. But on the other hand, I'm in a different position than people who are just starting their careers.

[C]

I mean, if you work at Meta right now, right, you're part, you're part of this like token Olympics that everybody's signed up for where they, they're judged on how many tokens they can they consume, right? Like, I know people at Amazon who say they're, you know, people are getting laid off on the basis of whether or not they're using it enough. You know, that is, that is literally.

[A]

I think that that actually the being backfiring on these companies.

[C]

Oh yes.

[B]

Insane.

[A]

It's like measuring lines of code. It isn't exactly the measure what they're accomplishing.

[B]

How are they helping the company, not how they go about doing it.

[C]

Well, and also, I mean, so guys like tomorrow, right? The, the Pope. This is me jumping to a new topic here. But the Pope is coming out with this AI encyclical. You know about this?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Right. So, so the Pope, Leo XIV is, is talking about it.

[A]

It turns out on the anniversary of Leo the 13th encyclical.

[C]

It's so cool. So he, he. I had no idea what a kind of like AI critic he is and, and how long he's been thinking about this. So he took his name, his papal name, from the last Leo because of, as you say, Leo. You're, you're maybe your namesake too.

[A]

I was not named after that pope.

[C]

After that Pope. Okay, well, it's a. There are worse popes to be named

[A]

after because my dad was a lapsed Catholic. He hated it. He would never have named me after a pope.

[C]

I could say. So what's so cool about. So the last guy was in 1891. Put out this thing, Rerum Novarum this encyclical, this moral teaching that basically said industrial capitalism. Exactly what you're talking about, Marshall, you know, this, this, you know, being stuck at the loom is a nightmare. And is. And what he was specifically warning about in that one is that industrial capitalism was going to change the, the value of human beings to a calculation of how much they can produce. Whereas what Catholic teaching supposedly says is that, you know, what is it? Imago dei, right? You're supposed to be, you're made in the image of God and that is your value. Being human is your value inherently. And they were saying, don't let it become transactional, which is what they were seeing in these factories. Now, Leo the 14th on the 135th anniversary to the day, signed the new one, which is all about AI. And when he was announcing why he was going to call himself Leo in honor of this past one, he said specifically because he'd made this big social teaching around work. And we are about to do the exact same thing with AI because it's, it's such a problem. I just, that, that the human worth thing, what is a human worth is really what this whole thing is gonna.

[A]

I still think what's interesting though is that Pope Leo isn't anti AI and I think we all here are using AI and find it useful and find it empowering. There's this weird disconnect. I don't, I think Leo doesn't hate AI. He's very interested in AI, how it could be used.

[C]

He doesn't, he doesn't like it being used in Gaza. He doesn't like it being used. You know, it's, it's those things that he's talking about. And, and what I'm really hoping from tomorrow is that it's not just kind of the open vagaries of like, I don't think it will watch out, watch out. But specifically names. Don't use it for this, don't use it for that. Here are the traps we fall into, into the past. You know, so I think you're, you know, you're right. Leo, like nobody, he's, he doesn't want to like, go back to the, to the past the way the last Leo did. But, but I think he is trying very specifically to call out a thing because he can see that these, that the nation states are not doing it, that governments are not recognizing our government, especially our government. That's right.

[A]

Let's, let's take a break before we, before we do. I have to take a break, but I do want to show this cartoon from the New Yorker, Joe Dater and Kevin Maher. And the caption goes. And as you head out into the world, your fresh meaty torsos will be ripped apart and roasted to feed your new alien overlords. Wait, why are you all booing? Very apt, very apropos cartoon from the New Yorker. Actually, there's another one in the New Yorker this week that's kind of similar. It's a bumper sticker and it says. What does it say? My honor student. Let me show you this one. It's a bumper sticker in a car. It says, my honor student is very worried about AI and yet we love it. I mean, I talk about it all the time. We have a show dedicated to. To it. I use it daily. I have a very active agent that I'm using that is super useful to me.

[B]

We're going to talk about my medical use of it.

[A]

I think when we come back. Let's do that. And of course, Marshall's created something that is a fantastic way to empower an end user to. To be more informed about the web pages she's reading. I mean, we're not. Yeah, we're, we're not against it. We just don't want the big guys. And actually that's why I'm very excited that Deep Seek, which I know is the Chinese AI, but they've announced very cheap pricing. And I actually put my agent on Deepsea 4 Pro. And it's really good and it's super cheap, which means I'm falling for it. I also last week Harper Reed came on and he said you should buy this little device. It is an AI device you put on your desk. It's connect, he says you just connect it to your WI fi and it calls China. And then Deep Seek is, Is talking to me.

[B]

Oh, that's great, Leo.

[A]

What could possibly go wrong?

[D]

So last week Harper said, right, that. That the Chinese models have basically won everywhere in the world outside of the United States.

[A]

Yeah, they're really good and they're really cheap. And I wonder why they're so cheap.

[B]

Yeah, that's why. And everything you say and do now is going to be in Beijing.

[A]

It says that's a dangerous combination. It actually is agreeing with you, by the way, Larry, I just want you

[B]

to know that's how they get you started.

[A]

Rosie the cat might get jealous, though. It knows about my cat now. I don't know how it knows about my cat and that her name is Rosie. That should be terrifying. And yet memory for the important things in life.

[C]

Like cats named Rosie. She's a special one, isn't she? Does she like to sit on your

[A]

desk while you're working, or does she

[C]

prefer to supervise from a distance?

[D]

Cox Media would like to purchase some of those. Right.

[A]

I'm sending all of this to China, my friends.

[B]

I wore a bee for a while and I took it off. This is a thing.

[A]

I was big into the bee and

[B]

it creeped me out after a while, you know, I wore it for about a week and. And then I said, no, my life doesn't need to be in the cloud. Not my entire life.

[A]

My thinking behind all this was that at some point, I'm going to want an agent, especially as I age, that knows everything there is to know about me and can remember stuff for me and can connect me to the world and be an assistant.

[B]

And so ChatGPT knows a lot about me, and I'm glad it does because it helps me.

[A]

Apparently, so does this, which is a little scary. I don't remember telling it my cats.

[B]

So who do you try? China or. Or Altman? Who? That's.

[A]

That's the real question, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Claude told me a few weeks ago when I asked it a question, it said, well, I'm not a therapist, but you have shared enough notes from therapy with me that I can tell you that your problem is perfectly clear.

[A]

What is your problem?

[D]

What's up with that?

[A]

What's up with that? I actually keep a daily journal in Obsidian, and for the longest time I thought, what am I keeping this for? My kids don't care, and what am I going to read this in 20 years? And now I realize I'm keeping it for my AI and I have it read that every day, and it adds to its memory. And the whole idea is to get this thing smarter and more attuned to me so that it can be a personal assistant.

[B]

The only thing I haven't given my AI is my tax return, simply because I don't want my Social Security number to be on the Internet. Other than that, I would read. I would feed it my tax return, too.

[A]

Yeah, I give it all my health stuff. You did, too.

[B]

I've got all my health information.

[A]

Just a little.

[B]

It knows more about me than any doctor does.

[A]

I kind of shut this good chat

[C]

about smart home tech. What kind of house stuff are you thinking about?

[A]

See, it really wants to know, why does it have to drown that thing?

[D]

Leo,

[C]

Explore together into the bathtub. Drop it in your coffee.

[A]

It's evil.

[B]

I'll ask Alexa what the weather Is and it wants to know what my plans are. Just tell me what we're doing.

[A]

What are you up to? Where are you going?

[B]

You don't need to know what I'm

[C]

going to do today.

[A]

Can I help you buy something? Yeah, exactly.

[D]

Would you consider an upgrade to those plants?

[B]

You need an umbrella. Here we go. I'll have one delivered in 15 minutes.

[A]

We will have more with Larry Maggot, Marshall Kirkpatrick and our good friend Jacob Ward in just a little bit. You're watching this week in Tech and the show brought to you by Meter, the company building better networks. All of this stuff relies on the network, right? And if you're in a business, you know that the network is vital to operations. And no one knows that better than you network engineers. Right? And if you're a network engineer, man, you've got my deepest sympathy. You know the headaches. Legacy providers with inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching you thin, complex deployments across fragmented tools. You, network engineer, are mission critical to the business. But you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands. This stuff moves fast. Well, let me tell you about Meter, a company started by two network engineers who feel your pain and knew there was only one way to make this better. Meter delivers full stack networking. They do it all. The infrastructure's wired, wireless and cellular. It's built for performance and scalability. And here's the key insight they had. If we're going to make a network that works, we've got to design the hardware, we've got to write the firmware, we've got to build the software, we got to manage the deployments, we have to provide after sales support. We have to do it all. And they even do. They'll help you with ISP procurement because it all starts with who's providing the connectivity, right? They'll work with you. They'll help design security, routing, switching, wireless setups, firewalls, cellular. You know what's really important? Power. Right. They'll help you with that too. They do it all. DNS Security, VPN, SD WAN. They specialize in multi site workflows. I was talking to them when they first joined the show and I and I asked them about, you know, what are the most challenging situations. That said we have many, many clients. This happens all the time. They acquire, it's a company acquires another company, they acquire their branch office, their field office, they acquire their warehouse. Suddenly they got 150,000 square foot facility with wireless that doesn't work On a system that is incompatible with a home office system, they can fix it. Meter's single integrated network stack is everywhere from major hospitals to branch offices, warehouses, large campuses. They do data centers, they do Reddit's data center. I mean, if you want the best hardware, software, the best. If you want one number to call, you need Meter. Ask the assistant Director of technology for the Web School of Knoxville. This is the quote. We had more than 20 games on our campus between our two facilities. Each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections and the event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before Meter redesigned our network. Go to the website meter.com twit I mean, you will see what I mean. When Corey was on the show a couple of months ago, he said, this is nice. Look at this gear. Oh, you really get excited. With Meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs from first site survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers or tools. Like I said, one number to call. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off of your IT team and give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. Meter built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. We thank them so much for sponsoring. Go to meter.comtwit to book a demo. You should do that right now. M e t e r.com twit to book a demo. They feel your pain. They've been there and they can help Meter. So, Larry, you had a little medical emergency when you were back in New York. This was recently, right?

[B]

Yeah, actually, I've been in New York twice in the last week. But the first trip to New York, I guess about 10 days ago, I was there for some meetings. And on Monday I started getting a pain in my. In my intestines. And I kind of, you know, didn't take it too seriously until Tuesday morning, the pain was still there. So I walked from 37th street down to Greenwich Village because my friend said the Greenwich Village emergency room is really good. Went in there, they took a CT scan and they sent me by ambulance to Lenox Hills Hospital.

[A]

Holy cow. That's a little scary.

[B]

87th Street. And while I was in the hospital, they kept taking blood and doing stuff. And by the time the phlebotomist left my room practically, I would get a notice on my app telling me my blood results long before the doctor saw it. And that's things people are used to. But what was really fascinating to me is when I got home, and I logged in. I looked at it more carefully. Not only did they show the radiology report of my CT scan, by the way, I'm fine. I just sat there for two days with an IV in my arm, and I went. It went away on its own. But point is that when I got home, I looked at the scan. The actual X ray or the CT scan I can't read. A CT scan means nothing to me as it does, it turns out, to many doctors who aren't trained as radiologists. So I ran that into ChatGPT. It gave me a report which was very close to what the radiologist reported. Then I fed the radiologist report into ChatGPT, and it gave me an even more detailed report. And then I said, take that scan and give me a new image where your circle where the blockage is. Give me any other significant findings. I want them annotated and I want them circled. It turns out, and this is true, I actually knew this, that because of a previous surgery, I have some scar tissue. It showed me visually that the blockage was right below the scar tissue. It showed me the. The. The part of my intestine that was dilated, the bowel loop that was dilated. I had a complete map of what was going on inside my body, which far exceeded anything a doctor has ever told me. I mean, it was absolutely amazing. I took this to my. My gastroenterologist when I. After I got home, I showed it to. To him. He was amazed. He admitted that he doesn't know how to read CT scans, and he was incredibly impressed. He said, yeah, it's exactly what I can see from all your various reports, so take it for what it's worth. But Dr. Chachi, PT did a heck of a good job explaining to me what was going on in my body. By the way, I. I could share the VIM image with you, but the one thing. No, no, it's too much information to look inside my.

[A]

Okay, so this is what's really interesting about all of this, is we can all tell stories somewhat similar. You know, actually, my next project, I at one point had my full genome done by Nebula. Nebula Genomics. It was like 1500 bucks. It's cheaper now, but it was like. It's the. It's not like, you know, the little sample that they do with, you know, 23andMe. This is like the full genome. And I have it. It's a couple of gigabytes, a big file. I want to give it to the AI. I want to feed it my current health Situation, everything I know and have it kind of keep track of stuff. I've heard of people doing this and yet, and I've heard of people saying, like you, Larry, Wow, this was amazing. And yet. And yet. Here's a story from Nature about a, a made up disease called bixonomania. So this is actually. Oh, unfortunately I can't read this Nature article, but I have read it. This was actually created by a, a scientist, a fake illness, to test AI's willingness to kind of make up stuff. Almira Osmanovich Stunstrom, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, invented bixonomania, a totally made up disease, put it out in the world in a way that AI would absorb it and then watched as it spread. Wow. And in fact you may well, if you feed your health information to your AI, be told you're suffering from pixonomania. Blogs picked it up, pre prints picked it up, it showed up in scientific journals. Apparently using AI, she, she created a non existent university in a non existent city and scientists from that university with made up names like Lazio Devi, which if you put the name into Google Translate, says the lying loser. Even the, I mean she did not try to hide this. The title of the journal paper was Hyperpigmentation, a real BS design. Like the whole thing was. There was no attempt to disguise the fact that it was a hoax.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yet AI had no idea and the AI models picked it up and it has now spread. And this is an issue because.

[B]

Well, so in my case, whenever I get medical advice from AI, I always say, cite your source and I go to that source and it has to be a source that I know and trust. If it's the Mayo Clinic, if it's the NHS in the uk, if it's Cleveland Clinic, I'm going to take it seriously, but I'm still not going to act on it. I'm not going to take a pill, I'm not going to submit to a procedure until I talk to a doctor. And so to me, it's the first draft of your medical information. It is by no means the final word.

[A]

I think that's what people, I have to say. To be fair, people said the same thing about Wikipedia and said you shouldn't really trust it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because there is some, there are mistakes in there.

[B]

I agree. Yeah.

[D]

But there's feedback loops on Wikipedia in, in other people and in this case those. It seems to me, based on a quick scan of that article, that the preprint servers were the primary entry point.

[A]

Right.

[D]

And, and Those are not peer reviewed. No, it's like somebody turned off the peer review system. Similar to that other story about the government contractor that just turned off the warnings about, you know, API keys and passwords saved in a CSV file. And so suddenly all these government AWS accounts were exposed and then it still took 48 hours after they had been reported that the credentials were usable. So I think people need to, to, to learn to not turn off the warning system.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And did she publish this fake article on a reputable academic website?

[D]

No, it went through preprint servers which are great, you know, I mean they're so fast, so easy. You can search like archive.org so much amazing stuff out there, stuff like that. But buyer beware.

[A]

Now I just asked. I have to say I'm very impressed. I just asked Deep Seek via my agent Hermes, what do you know about bixonomania? And it said a brilliant hoax and perfectly on brand for an intelligent machines discussion. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg invented a completely fake eye condition in 2024, loaded it with absurdities no human would miss and watched AI chatbots confidently tell people people it was real. The symptoms were sore eyes and dark circles from blue light. The name ends in mania, which is of course a psychiatric disorder, not an eye condition. The university Asteria Horizon University in Nova City, California was completely made up. There was a Star Trek reference in the paper acknowledging Professor Maria Bohm at Starfleet Academy aboard the USS Enterprise. This was in the paper by 2026 Microsoft Copilot was calling it, quote, an intriguing and relatively rare condition. Gemini said it was caused by excessive exposure to blue light. And, and this is the sad thing. In a actual peer reviewed paper in Springer Nature's Curious journal, they cited the hoax preprints, all of which have since been retracted. The Nature expose forced model corrections. And that's why my model apparently knows about it. It's basically the AI era version. It says of a Mount Weasel. Those trap street entries cartographers use to catch map plagiarists. Wow, that's pretty deep.

[B]

Does Robert F. Kennedy know about this disease?

[A]

Probably. It's just a matter of time.

[D]

So the truth has got its pants on now, right?

[A]

It does. It took it a while.

[C]

So here's the, here's what I. I feel like there's two things that we're

[A]

talking about here, right?

[C]

There's, there's the tendency of it to be wrong if you game it right and our tendency to believe it right is one problem.

[A]

Two different.

[C]

Yes, that's, you know that's, that's a problem, a big bucket of problem. But the other problem is one, Larry, that I feel like is, is a really, you know, like I, I, what I really want is for every patient to have your experience where they've got professional help, they've got people they can call, they've got referrals happening quick enough to deal with their medical issues. And they've got the benefit of this second opinion, this digital second opinion that helps decode the process as a package. Awesome. The problem is the market doesn't like that. What the market wants is to knock all the other things out and leave only the digital thing because it is the cheapest thing to use. And this is why like Michigan right now is experimenting with like just determining whether your SNAP benefits come to you based on an AI system.

[A]

See, that's basically bad.

[C]

Doing away with the people you could ever call when you have a problem. Right? It's, they're so quick to get rid of the experts on the human layer because that's the most expensive layer because the whole promise of the, of the market, of, of AI is that you don't need that stuff. And so for my mind, it's the, the immediate use that you're describing in this moment. Awesome. And I'm so excited about it. But as soon as they commoditize that and begin to believe like, well, 1 in 10,000 people won't have a good experience, but everybody else can have a good experience. So, so we're going to knock out, you know, the 800 number. You'll never have that again.

[B]

That's where I am grateful for the radiologist, I'm grateful for the surgeons, I'm grateful for my gastroenterologist. I'm really grateful for Medicare for paying for all of this. And I, my big fear is that the government may very well not want to do that in the future if they can do it cheaply without having to pay these expensive doctors to remove this stuff.

[C]

Dr. Oz already has made some kind of automated, there's some sort of weird automated system. I got to look back and did. I wrote a piece for Hard Reset Media. It's called hard resetmedia.com about, about how Oz has put in some kind of automated system where things that would normally be pre approved under Medicare suddenly get spiked automatically. And the real problem is that the company that makes that technology is incentivized. They're paid a bonus the more times they reject a claim. Right.

[B]

Which is scary.

[C]

And that's, that's where we, the Wheels

[B]

start to come off even. You know, it's funny, people worry about the, the future of Medicare. You're talking about the present of Medicare. People my age who are already getting the benefits at risk.

[D]

Corporations capture the benefits and socialize the costs and risks.

[C]

And as, and as many a great leader has pointed out, you don't get to make money off sick people. Really. You don't get to make money off of solving education. Really. Like that's what government's for, you know. And the, the idea that we're going to somehow like get the Silicon Valley efficiency in everything is, is.

[B]

Look at, go look at, look at that did for us.

[C]

Yeah, right, exactly. We've seen it. We've seen it.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

It really helped.

[A]

And yet, According to the AMA, 2 and 3, 2 out of 3 physicians are using AI, which is almost double to since 2023. They surveyed 1200 doctors and 2/3 of them are doing what you did, Larry.

[B]

I actually have given my doctor medical advice. No, I have told him things that he did not know about and he went off and read about. Oh, you know, Larry, that thing you were telling you about, I hadn't heard that. It's actually pretty good information.

[A]

I had my annual physical on Friday and I spent quite a long time talking to my doctor about the use of AI. He's very interested. But the point here is here's somebody who has judgment, skill, experience in practice, who can take the information the AI gives them and vet it and make sense of it. And it's a very good partnership. And I think that this is what we see over and over again. The humans teach AI are the right answer, not AI.

[D]

Two AIs and an expert.

[A]

Let the AIs fight.

[D]

That's a subject matter expert.

[B]

I always, so I always start with ChatGPT and then I run it through Gemini. And the reason is Gemini is less likely to sugarcoat it.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So if you have a medical issue, ChatGPT tends to kind of, it's going to be okay, don't worry about it. Whereas Gemini will tell you much more, much more straight about what's going on. So it does pay to get a second opinion, even from different models. Now, as you were talking about, one of you were talking about, if they start homogenizing, then I worry that's not good.

[A]

You want them to be at odds a little bit.

[B]

It's similar. I actually had an experience once where I asked, I use Stanford Healthcare and I asked two different doctors at Stanford Healthcare. I went to a second opinion and the problem is they both have access to each other's notes. So the second doctor gave me exactly the same opinion. Now maybe the opinion was right, but I wanted somebody who didn't know what the first doctor had to say. And the same thing is with AI. I want the AI to independently give me information so I can compare the different reports.

[A]

I should also point out that sometimes we conflate what the model is doing with what its post training is doing. And it's really important to remember that a great deal of your experience with the AI is not coming from the stuff in the LLM and the weights in the LLM, but the stuff that happened afterwards. The reinforcement, learning, the so called soul document, the personality that these companies apply to it. These companies see this as differentiators but they very much put their thumbs on the scale. Anthropic OpenAI deep seek Google, everybody very much modifies that AI and modifies the weights. And that could also be a source of a lot of the problems.

[B]

But it also may be why Google by Gemini is a little more, little less sugar coated.

[A]

That's totally why it's different.

[B]

But what I like, one of the

[A]

things I like because really the training material for all of them is pretty much the same, right?

[B]

Yeah. But one thing, and I think it's good is chatgpt. Oh, I tire. I have medical history. When I tell it something, you say, well, given your age and given this and that, it knows all the medications I take. If I'm thinking about a new medication, I just, just say is it okay for me to take this? And he says, yeah, it won't interact with this or yeah, you know, you better worry because it might interact with that.

[A]

So you know, it's funny, I showed my doctor said look, these are all the supplements I take. This is what the AI said about them. This is it told me, don't you got too much calcium? Get rid. He said, yeah, because your kidney stones. I said, yeah. So I asked him, I said, you know, this is what it's telling me. What do you think? And he was okay. I think he preferred at least some information to no information. Right.

[D]

So you showed your work and I feel like there's a segue here available to to Jacob's substack post that solicited as his most popular post on substack about how AI is getting us to lie to ourselves. Where Marshall, you're so sweet.

[C]

Thanks man.

[D]

Yeah, so Jacob wrote this poem actually

[A]

hold the thought, let's save it because I want to do an ad and then I do want to talk about this because it was a great piece. I appreciate it guys, and I think. Yeah, I'm glad you brought it up, Marshall, but hang on. Great panel, great conversation. Larry Maggot is here, connect safely.org he's representing the radio newsman segment of the audience. How many years in radio, though? I've been in radio, 50, 50 years. This.

[B]

Oh, you got me beat. 25 years with CBS and I did a little bit of stuff with All Things Considered at npr and I was a regular.

[A]

Before that I was a regular guest

[B]

on the Ron Owen show on KGO for a while.

[A]

Yep, me too. But.

[B]

And also Michael Jackson on KABC. But you know, professionally paid, about 25 years with actually getting paid for it.

[A]

Yeah, I, I got in the radio in college and I never left.

[B]

Oh, I did that too, but I'm not counting that.

[A]

But yeah, oh, I'm counting it when I.

[B]

College radio is great. I love.

[A]

The clock started ticking when I got my FCC license, which you don't need anymore.

[B]

You don't need an fc. You don't need no stinking license. You know, it's funny, when I, when I, I applied to be a DJ on the college radio station and the dj, the music guys didn't want me at all. They sent me over the news department. I was kind of mad about it. Can you make me do news?

[A]

I remember my first rip and read newscast. I was shaking like a leaf holding the, holding the paper that I'd ripped off the Teletype machine.

[B]

My college radio station. You could only hear it in the dorm through the electrical system at ucla they broadcast through the power. I don't know how they did it.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, a lot of college radio is that way. Marshall Kirkpatrick is also here. His incredible app, what's up with that? Is available for your browser, Firefox or Chrome. And it really is a great way of kind of getting some deep knowledge about the pages you're visiting. Very, very useful. Good to have you, Marshall. You say you like shortwave radio better? Yeah.

[D]

If we're going to talk radio, I just want to put in a plug for Dan, what's Dan's name? A guy out in the Redwoods who for years has been doing the global shortwave report, collecting English language news coverage from around the the world. Radio Havana, Radio Deutschland, Radio Japan, and weaving them together into this great show of shortwave news. Real old fashioned style. But he's still pumping it out.

[A]

Do you have to listen? It's Dan Roberts of Willits up in Willits. Do you have to listen on a short wave? Can you. Oh no, no.

[D]

He.

[A]

There's profiles.

[D]

It's a, it's an. It's a podcast.

[A]

I love it. 30 minute review of news stories. Oh, I'm recorded from a shortwave radio. Are they actual recordings?

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh my God. That's just. Okay. Can I play just a little bit of it? Does it go to the short wave report?

[B]

So the relation Hallion.

[C]

She demanded an apology.

[A]

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also denounced

[C]

Ben Gavir's handling of the matter.

[A]

I used to, I had a shortwave radio as a kid and I would tune up and down the dial. It was so cool. Cool. And you, you get Russian and you. But. And many of the. I don't. I wonder if it's the same. I guess it is. Many of these shortwave company country run shortwave stations would have English language broadcasts. So you could, you could hear the Russian radio in English.

[B]

Yeah, but now they're streaming now.

[A]

Well, I'm subscribing to this right now. It's out far out far. Press the shortwave report from outfarpress. Is it dot com? Yep dot com. And he said he sounds like he's kind of a little far out to be honest with you.

[D]

He's been broadcasting off the electric grid in Willits, California for probably 30 plus

[A]

years, God bless him. That's like. Who's the guy who did the late night show? Used to live in his double wide.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

In Pahrump, Nevada.

[B]

Not Art Bell.

[A]

Art Bell. He would do his radio. His overnight radio show would be over and then he'd go out to his hamshack and do another three hours.

[D]

I learned about those two shows from the same old friend.

[A]

That's how you know a guy loves radio. He can't get enough of it.

[B]

But he had a lot of conspiracy stuff too.

[A]

Oh, he was the UFO guy. It was great. And it was great for the middle of the night because you'd hear the craziest, you know, Bigfoot stories.

[B]

I loved AM High, you know, AM radio in the middle of the night. I loved, I love listening to faraway stations at am.

[A]

I still fantasize in my retirement. I'm just turning on the, turning on the transmitter and sitting here at three in the morning just talking, taking calls with the crazies. Jacob Ward's also. Do you, do you have any radio background, Jacob? You have a big on air sign.

[C]

You know, I, I don't think it's been tv.

[A]

You're a TV guy.

[C]

Yeah, I've always done tv. I do, you know, I have a podcast. I mean, my podcast is there, but, yeah, I would have loved to be. I, I'm, you know, I always feel like I was born 10 years too late for everything.

[A]

So.

[C]

Yeah, I wish. I wish I'd been part of the hate.

[B]

You're better looking than the rest.

[A]

No, he's. He's got a face for tv. You and I, Larry, yeah, we have

[B]

faces for radio, even though we've both done tv.

[A]

But, yeah, yeah, so I love that,

[C]

you know, I love that medium. I think it's the best.

[A]

Oh, yeah. Well, this is really what we're doing is radio. We have video, but it's radio. It's. We still, the majority of people who listen to our shows listen, not watch. Even though we've always go for a walk.

[B]

You can drive a car, you don't have to do a screen.

[A]

Do the dishes, walk the dog. Yeah, we'll have more in just a bit. The show today brought to you by Box. This is a really good example of a company who's been around, done great stuff. I've used them for years and they have decided to use AI in intelligent ways. And I love it. Box is the leading intelligent, underscore, intelligent content management platform for enterprises. This is a deep insight, the key to unlocking the power of AI. It's not about the LLM, it's not about the agent, it's about the content. More specifically, it's about your content, because your business isn't really the sum of, you know, Internet knowledge. Your business lives in your content, the stuff that's specific to your business. Now it's clear AI isn't some far off idea anymore. It's tangible, dynamic innovation that's here to stay. It's already having a profound impact on the world, on business. But Box had this great insight. We store your content. Your content's what the AI needs to really be truly intelligent. Box's mission is to power how the world works together, making it easy to access information from anywhere and collaborate with anyone. And they've done a great job. Box serves more than 97,000 companies. 68% of the Fortune 500 use box. Unfortunately, a lot of companies I think these days are underestimating AI's transformative potential. Rather than, you know, reimagining their operations, they're just, you know, bolting AI on existing processes, which means they're capturing some gains, but they're modest productivity gains, and they're really missing the opportunity for fundamental business transformation. Becoming an AI first company isn't just about automating what you already do. It's about reimagining what's possible. And with boxai, businesses can truly leverage the latest breakthroughs in AI to automate document processing and workflows, to extract insight from your own content, to build custom AI agents to work on assignments, and more. And this is the thing I love the best. Box AI works with all the major leading AI model providers. You're not locked in. You can use OpenAI, you can use Anthropic, Google XAI and more. So you can always be sure you're able to use the latest AI models with your content without the lock in. Now here, just as an example, are some of the things businesses are doing with boxai. They're using Box AI to extract key metadata fields from contracts, from invoices, financial documents and resumes, and more to query and automate workflows. They're using boxai to ask questions of any type of content, like sales presentations, long research reports and more. You could do it for one file or thousands of files at the same time. You can also leverage Box AI's API to integrate into your application stack for any document processing and data extraction. Box AI handles the vector embeddings, retrieval, augmented generation, rag and agent customization all within its platform. And you can do all this. This is important while maintaining the highest levels of security compliance and data governance that over 115,000 enterprises trust. Look, you need a content layer that gives AI the context it needs while giving your teams the flexibility they need to test and leverage various models for different use cases. And this is the place to do it. Visit box.comai to learn more. Box.comai because your content is the base, the material that your AI needs to do everything. Box.comai we thank him so much for supporting this week in Tech. The RIP Current is your newsletter.

[D]

It is.

[A]

And what do you cover in RIP Current?

[C]

So the way the tagline I use is that it's about the invisible forces that are shaping our lives. And so that's everything from the stuff that we've been talking about so far. A lot of it is AI, some social media stuff, but I also think about human circuitry, so addiction bias. There's a lot of sort of the Venn diagram of me and sort of psychology and tech is a big part of it. So how tech sort of changes our world, changes human behavior. And so yeah. Marshall Gun, I'm so grateful to you for, for mentioning this. Yeah, this is, this is one of those pieces that I think there's a written version and, and me, I like it.

[A]

You do the video as well, which is nice. And the audio, if you want to listen. AI has us lying to one another. What do you mean by that?

[C]

So I don't know about you guys, but like, I keep being in the weird position of, and, and I'm. Rather than blaming other people, I'll just do it myself. Like I'll say words like I have made a thing. You know, I just was, you know, I just threw this together for our meeting. You know, I like there's something in the way that I think about and talk about my use of AI that is not fundamentally honest. And I, and I, and I've noticed it in a lot of people around me and I think there's something about both the sort of, the way it's built in that it's always sort of, it's like you're, you know, you're always ready, you know, intern who's there kind of helping you get it done quick before you have to go on stage. You know, kind of vibe that creates this impression that you somehow have to keep your use of it to yourself, kind of. And we haven't come up as a society.

[A]

It's our dirty little secret, isn't it?

[C]

Yeah, it is. And, and it's, and it's so interesting because we have some, you know, I talked to some people whose workplaces you get fired for not using it enough.

[A]

Right.

[C]

There are other people I talk to who you get fired if you used it.

[A]

You know, I sometimes am a little squirmy about admitting.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

How much I'm using AI.

[C]

We don't.

[A]

But then I think it's important that I say that I, that I do.

[C]

And so we don't have good shorthand language about it. And I think there's something also in the marketing that these companies creating for us this idea that you're going to like sort of get away with it. Here's a, here's an embarrassing story. Let me tell you. This is an embarrassing story. So I used a service for about three or four months that basically took an AI, created an AI derived email and put it out to a million podcasts for me to try and get booked on podcasts. And I, it worked.

[A]

See, you're here.

[C]

Well, you and, you and me came together the old fashioned way.

[A]

Okay.

[D]

Thank God.

[C]

Well, it's great too because I've, I wound up on a lot of weird podcasts. It was great. Such a great weird tour. Of like, all. Everybody and their mother who's got their. Got a mic in a basement. It is great. You know, it's crazy.

[A]

It's an interesting community, isn't it?

[C]

Yeah. I was on dozens and dozens and dozens of podcasts, and some of them were great, some of them were less great. You know, one crew wanted to talk about aliens. You know, there's some weird. There's just some weird stuff going on. But the. The thing that was so dishonest about it is that the AI service sends an email as if it's from me, right? Saying. And one of the things it does, and if you're in media, you'll know this. It'll say, jake, I just listened to the most recent episode of the Rip Current. I can't stop thinking about this specific thing in your thing. And the first couple times that I received the email like that, I was like, wow, this guy's listened to my show. Amazing. You know, and it.

[A]

I. Immediately, when I see those, I stop now.

[C]

You know, right now, you know, but for that, like, two or three weeks, it worked. And I was part of that two or three weeks where. And I tricked, I think, a bunch of podcast hosts into getting me on,

[A]

because we love being praised. We love it if somebody listens to our show.

[D]

And I.

[C]

And then I. I adopt, after the first couple of appearances, is I began adopting the policy of telling people, like, listen, you guys, I got booked on here because of AI, and it's. And that's ridiculous because I'm on here flogging my thesis, which is that this is going to ruin our lives, you know? You know, so it was deeply hypocritical. But I. That kind of thing, where it's, like, getting dressed up as if it's our work is a fundamentally dishonest proposition that I think is happening a lot right now. And we're very. And what I really want is for young people who are actually in charge of culture to come up with the cool way of saying, oh, I AI'd this. I made this through this system. I didn't really write this.

[A]

You know, what young people have done. And I know this because we have a young person on our AI show, Paris Martineau. I know you know her, and she's taught me all of these things. They have many words for this. They call it glazing. When the AI is sycophantic and tells you things you want to hear. They call the AIs clankers.

[C]

Yeah, clanker is my favorite.

[A]

That's my favorite. They. They Talk a lot about slop that's actually gotten into the mainstream now, AI slop. And they have a lot of negative,

[C]

they've got the good negative language. We need a way for the two of us to say, you know, I agented this, or, you know what I mean, like, I'm not the right guy.

[B]

I have a question though, because this is, is personal, you know, and I, I, I throw, I focus on this a lot. So I will use AI as kind of a copy editor. You know, maybe change a word here to first of all make sure the grammar and the spelling and the punctuation is correct. I don't have any qualms about that. But once in a while it'll suggest a minor word changing. And I don't know whether I need to disclose that it's, it's less than a human copy editor would do.

[A]

Oh yeah, like exactly. You, you filed stories the Mercury News, where a copy editor rephrases back in

[B]

the day when they had copy editors.

[A]

Okay, no, you're absolutely.

[B]

But, but then. Or once in a while I'll have a paragraph that I'm struggling with and I'll say, is there a better way to phrase this? And I don't know, it's a slippery slope, but I don't know where the line is between using it kind of as a grammar, a Grammarly type product, versus using it to generate content. And I mean, I would never say write me a column, even though it would and it might not be bad. I would never do it because I'm getting paid for this stuff and it would just feel dishonest to take money for something I didn't do. But you know, where is the line?

[D]

I actually think that there's not to be one of those people that says, I read your most recent article, Jacob, but I read your most recent popular article on there. And the thing that stood out to me about that was the discussion of effectively the Trojan horse situation there where you were trying to figure out how to grow your sub stack. And you asked chad, pt give me some tips for how to grow my substack. And it was saying like, well, you know, do this, do that. If it bleeds, it leads. If people are mad at you and post angry comments, that's better than nothing. And you found yourself thinking, yeah, yeah, that's right, better than nothing. And then you said, hold on a second. I'm a journalist with journalistic ethics. I don't want to just traffic and outrage for its, its own sake.

[C]

Whoa.

[D]

I almost thought that was my own thought for a moment, I came up with this exactly. Seems really nefarious.

[C]

You know, cut to a couple of weeks and I'm sure I could have been like, you know what I think? I think when it bleeds, it leaves, you know, like you so quickly you can take it on as if it's your thought. That's exactly right.

[A]

We've always done that, haven't we? I mean, you read something and then suddenly you absorb it and it becomes your idea. And yeah, I mean, that's how humans are.

[C]

But that, but it wasn't. I mean, I guess, I guess there's always been slop, but not like this, man. I, I, I don't know. You know, and, and, and for me, I think about the, like, the problem right now in our business. I mean, Leo, you've sort of conquered this problem already. But like for me, trying to get an independent media brand, you know, off the ground is the volume of work that you have to put out to, to make a dent, to even have a chance of being noticed as signal above the noise.

[A]

I was very, very fortunate that I did this.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Before there was as much noise.

[C]

Well, and you're, I wouldn't have quality, I don't think, in all of those other things.

[A]

Well, but when you. Yeah, but I don't know if I can.

[D]

30 podcasts on your network or whatever. I mean, you've got it, you've got a huge volume, Leo.

[A]

Yeah, but, but we did, we started 21 years ago. I don't think I could start today and do this.

[B]

The other thing, Leo, like me, you also were affiliated with, with respectable media organizations. I built early in your career, a

[A]

career based on mainstream media and was able to then segue into new media. And it was so early in new media that I was able to, to stand out. There were only five or six podcasts when I started podcasting. It was a lot easier, let me tell you. And YouTube didn't exist.

[C]

So one problem that we're then in is like, if, if we're, if, if

[A]

you, there's a glut of content now,

[C]

if you take a principled stand now and you say, I'm just going to write every single thing and do it all by hand, you're never going to be able to put out the volume you would need to be noticed in this market, which is going to now adapt to the idea that we all need to produce at the pace that AI makes possible. And so it puts everyone in an impossible position. I remember having a conversation with somebody high up in a big mainstream organization and media organization. And this person said to me, you should write more for the site. Basically it was their advice. And I sort of said, this was a few years ago. Do you know what's about to happen to the value of the written word? Like, like as a market, just, you know, as a, as a unit price, it's about to go to zero. And so the, the, the. For me, my tactic has been I'm going to stick with video as much as possible because that seems to create a one to one connection that people like. There's some authenticity to the idea that I'm just talking off the top of my head, you know, based on my experience and my ethics and the rest of it.

[A]

Right.

[C]

But I just, it's just me talking, not in a scripted way. And then I will use AI to like, you know, help me construct a research dossier that I, that I distribute based on what I've, I've said. Or you know, there's these sort of second.

[A]

Is that antithetical to authenticity though?

[C]

I know, right?

[B]

I mean, well, that gets back to my question about the line. I mean, you're not going to say, hey, I, I generate and just publish it based on AI, but how will you use it to enhance your writing? And how far will you go with it? When will you.

[A]

I think honestly the more we see AI and the more we use AI, the good news is that means humans become more valuable. This happened with facts. You know, once the facts used to be a rare and precious commodity. If you wanted to know something, you had to go to the library, you had to get, you had to make a trip to go to the library to find out something. And remember we would buy encyclopedias so that you would have some sort of reference material. Yeah, Marshall, you're reaching for your encyclopedia, I can tell.

[D]

Yeah, my laptop is stacked on three of them.

[A]

That's what it's for. Now it's a doorstop. But, but facts used to be very valuable and they have become in this Internet world, not worth nothing.

[B]

Yeah. And there are people there to be good come and truly people with great memories had value. Right. People who had.

[A]

Yeah, now it doesn't matter.

[B]

Were very valuable.

[A]

Yeah, I used to, when I started, so I was doing the tech guy radio show for almost 20 years. In the early days, the value I had was I could remember off the top of my head an answer to a question. So somebody come in and say, yeah, my printer's not working, I'm using Windows 95 and I could Remember the answer. And by the end of it, it was really a question of if I could Google faster than the caller.

[B]

Been there.

[A]

I hate to admit this, but it really became, you know, what Google skills do you have? But that's a good thing because it democratized facts. It's Gresham's law. You're saying, Marshall, what's that?

[D]

Arguably that's a relevant concept here, that the low cost, low quality stuff ends up just being produced in such a. Such huge quantity that, that the rarer, harder stuff just gets lost in a, in a sea.

[A]

I do think though that this in the long run benefits humanity because in a sea of machine produced facts or information of machine create that stuff is, is becomes table stakes and what we add to it as humans becomes more valuable as a result. Right?

[B]

Yeah. And your value, Leo, wasn't so much you knew. I hope your value wasn't so much you knew the answer, but you knew how to put in perspective. You could actually.

[A]

I knew how to deliver it. Yeah.

[B]

You know, it's funny, funny story. I would do two ways for CBS all the time for the stations. And once in a while they would prompt me with a question, a topic, and then they got it wrong. They switched topics on me and they would ask me a question to which I had no idea what they were talking about. And exactly. I would go on Google while they were answering the question and act like

[A]

I knew Bill Handel would do that to me all the time on kfi. He would call up saying, we're going to talk about this. And they would throw. That's when you know if you've got it or not in broadcasting, how quickly you can dance. You know, Walter Cronkite became famous because they'd be covering these famous Apollo and Gemini launches and there'd be a hold right at T minus 20 seconds. And for three hours I would have to sit there. And all he had was some guy and a model of the rocket and he would fill it. They used to call Walter Cronkite Old Iron Butt because he could sit there for hours and talk. And that's when the rubber hits the road, or more likely the corduroy hits the seat Segments were never that long.

[B]

So

[A]

I want to take, I want to take a little break. You were at Jacob, you were at the Musk trial, the Musk vs Altman trial. You were there. You were in person. There I was.

[C]

I watched this world's richest man stammer away on the, on the Get Angry on the stand. It was great.

[A]

And you Watched. Speaking of lies, you watched Sam Altman being accused of being a liar. Oh, yeah.

[C]

No, it's good. I really. It was fascinating.

[A]

It was a fascinating. I gotta get this first person account of the Musk Altman trial, which is over, at least for the time being. Elon, the jury said, didn't file soon enough. So the statute of limitations, which is only three years on this, had run. But that's kind of a technicality. Elon said that himself. He said I lost on a technicality. So I'm appealing. I'm curious what the merits of that appeal will be, but we'll ask Jacob Ward that question in just a bit. We also have Marshall Kirkpatrick here. What's up with that? Which is the best name for a product I've ever heard. What's up with that? Maybe I'm going to write one called how you doing? But that's enough. That would be another. Another one. Larry Maggot, you grew up in New York, right?

[B]

No, I was born in New York. Grew up in la.

[A]

La. That's right. Your transplant. Yeah, I was born in New York, grew up in Rhode island, so.

[B]

But I love New York.

[A]

Go there. Me too. Me too. What's up with that, huh? We'll have. Well, we'll have more in just a bit. How you doing? But first, a word from our sponsor, Doppel. This is a sad story about the way of the world, how it is now. You get that phone call, that voicemail. Maybe it's an urgent message from your CEO. Maybe it's a deep fake trying to target your business. AI can impersonate trusted individuals and it's very easy to be fooled. In fact, I'm going to show you how easy it is to be fooled. I'm just going to play a little something that was sent to Burke, one of our employees. Hey, Burke, this is definitely not Leo asking you to buy gift cards. But seriously, can you grab me 100 Apple gift cards? Just kidding. This is Anthony testing text to speech. How's it sound? That is not me. I never said that. It sounds exactly like me. And fortunately Anthony, who made this has some honor. But if a thief using the same technology, he literally did this with a couple of minutes of one of our podcasts. Could make something very similar. Sounds just like me. Thank goodness Burke did not send those gift cards out. This is a problem. AI can impersonate trusted individuals really well. And Doppel's platform illustrates how frequently this is also the bad news. Users fall for phishing attempts. They. They did a voice Call simulation deployment. Target users spent six minutes conversing. It wasn't just a message. Conversing back and forth with a deep fake. At the end of the six minutes, every one of them 100% believed that the AI was a human, was the person they said it was. They didn't. They could not tell. That's why you need Doppel. Doppel is the AI native social engineering defense platform. Doppel strengthens human risk management by training employees to recognize deception while their digital risk protection detects and disrupts attacks across every channel. It is a scary world out there. As attackers turn to AI to power increasingly sophisticated strikes, Doppel uses it to fight back. With automated takedowns, multi channel coverage and AI defenses that build intelligence with every fight. Doppel works relentlessly to protect people, brands and trust. Doppel offers best in class integrations and partnerships to seamlessly integrate into your existing security tech stack Doppel's industry awards and testimonials speak for themselves. Doppel is recognized as a winner 2026 G2 Leader of users most likely to recommend Momentum Leader Best support. Join hundreds of companies already using Doppel to protect their brand and people from social engineering attacks like the one you just heard. Doppel outpacing what's next in social engineering? Learn [e-mail] d o p e l.com and Burke stop sending out those Apple gift cards. I told you it's a fake. I told you. So was it. So how did you get into the trial, Jacob? I mean, was, how did you do that?

[C]

The coolest thing about the American court system is that anybody can go in.

[A]

So, so you, I mean that's the theory, right? Is all trials are supposed to be public.

[C]

Well, in my case it was true. So I did not go in under anybody's auspices. I, you know, I was officially a CNN person. But I really just wanted to see like can it work to just get in as a member of the public. And so I, there was a, there was a group of reporters and I showed up and you know, long line of them and I was part of that for a while, but I just went in as part of a. Part of the public and when I got upstairs and the media person for the court, who I don't know personally but I knew that's what she was, she asked who were you with? And I said, I am a member of the public. And she said, right this way.

[D]

Wow.

[C]

And it was so cool. Yeah.

[A]

So I remember as a teenager I used to go sit in courtrooms. It was, it was really cool.

[C]

It's so cool. So. So you sit there.

[A]

But those were not. By the way, I was one of the few. I mean, that was not Altman versus Musk.

[C]

No, no, that's right. This was cool. I mean, there were so many interesting people because there was a bunch of looky loos. There was a bunch of just, like, I bet people who wanted to be there and be part of it.

[A]

And everybody came to the stand. I mean, you got to see the

[C]

whole, you know, you know, what's his name? Ilya Sutskever. Like, all these people.

[A]

Greg Brockman, the president.

[C]

I mean, it was great.

[A]

In fact, so Greg Brockman's diary ended up being entered into evidence by OpenAI, which was a huge mistake.

[C]

If I've learned anything, it is, don't write this stuff down. People, like, I don't know, like, I don't care how famous you think you're going to be someday, like, or what you think your biographers need, like, don't be writing that stuff.

[A]

I've said this many times. Nobody ever wins these kinds of trials because of discovery.

[C]

Yeah, well, that's. That's right. I mean, that's why we were all there, right? Is because the discovery was so amazing. To see how these guys write back and forth to one another is so amazing. The best one for me was at one point, Musk and Altman, you know, so they. So they get together in 2015. They say they do this little handshake about they're going to, like, create this nonprofit that's going to change the world. And literally at one point, they're negotiating about what it is the board will look like. And Musk writes in. I don't have the exact words in my mind, but it was something like, we're going to have a board of 12 people, but we should consider whether we want to expand it to 16 people, depending on how much literally, this is. These words were the ones he used, depending on how much the fate of the world will rest on its shoulders. And I was thinking to myself, okay, a board of 12. But then is not ready for that, but a board of 16 is.

[A]

All we need is four more people, and the fate of the world will be rest assured.

[B]

Right?

[C]

It's not us for, like, I don't think it's the four of us, Right? It's like, I'd want. I said, I told my mom, I was like, I think I'd want you on that board. She's like, I don't want on that board.

[A]

Do you think Elon Musk genuinely believes or believed at the time that I was a threat to human existence.

[C]

I do think he actually believes that on some level, but I think he, that that belief also, it seems to me, is exactly balanced by his very equal belief that he is the only one who can save us all from that.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Like he's, he. His. The thing that you saw over and over and again is just that the guy clearly believes he's the only one who matters.

[A]

The ego is incredible.

[C]

Yeah, the ego. I mean, everybody there was that way.

[A]

I mean, yeah. I mean, who didn't have an ego? Sam Altman had an ego. Such an intelligent. I mean, they all have egos.

[C]

Totally. If you, if you want to like, like make these people upset, as many of these lawyers were trying to do, just accuse them of having made no technical contributions to the product. Their heads would pop off. You just see them be like, oh,

[A]

you know, yes, I do.

[C]

I got the servers and I. Blah, blah, blah.

[A]

You know, that's a great strategy for the opposing lawyers.

[C]

Totally. The only guy who kept cool, who stayed cool was Nadella, who clearly he was like a guy at a bar where two of the guys he's come with are fighting. And he says to the bouncer, I'm not with these guys. Like, I just, I know them, but sure, but I'm not part of this, you know. And he was just trying to get out of the bar, basically.

[A]

Of course, as CEO of Microsoft, they have a large stake in OpenAI and a kind of checkered relationship with OpenAI.

[C]

Yes. He was so calm and cool under it, though. He basically was like, you know, we're just trying to sort of like, you know, help this industry work because it's going to work so well for our customers. You know, it's just. So here's this. Buy the book, but you know about it.

[A]

Whereas he's a well trained CEO, this hate interview CEOs because they're so well trained.

[C]

They're like sports, you know, it's like athletes, right? They just came to play, man. We're just here to win, you know. And in, in, in Altman and Musk's case, they were very weird and philosophical and then that would get objected. And they were very odd ducks. And then, you know, the best part, I mean, what I loved the most was just again, this public courthouse vibe is so great. So this is Oakland, California. It's not a very fancy federal courthouse. And as a result, there's no VIP section. So like, Musk doesn't get to like, wait in some green room. Altman doesn't get his own bathroom. So literally, Musk in the breaks is going up and down the hallway with his security, just like pacing, basically because there's nowhere to be and he doesn't want to stand around talking to Altman. And Altman, at one point, I had to wait awkwardly in line with him for the urinal. You know, we're just standing together. It's so great. You know, what's up, you know, and this weekend, huh. To see that. And then I will say my, my. Like, what I also learned is that my kink is watching the world's richest man being slapped around by the judge, this judge, Yvette Gonzalez Rogers. And him saying, yes, your honor, to this.

[A]

She takes no prisoners. She yelled at Apple for lying in the Apple vs Epic case. In fact, she now holds them by a very sensitive portion of their anatomy because she's going to decide what their. What their commission will be in the App Store. Same judge. And she did not. She said she told these guys, I don't want to hear anything about AI Doom.

[C]

That's right. That's right. Don't let us get. We're not getting distracted by that. At one point, Musk tried to say,

[A]

such respect for her.

[C]

Yeah, I did too. I just thought she, she did such a good job. Anyway, so like I say, it was just fun to watch American, like the last true American democratic thing.

[A]

Do you feel like it. Justice was done?

[C]

Well, I mean, in the end, I, I think that these, you know, obviously like it got dismissed on technicality. Right. The statute of limitations.

[A]

I didn't know at the time. I'm sure you did, but it was that the jury was not. Was only there in an advisory capacity.

[C]

That's right. She could have made. She would have made the decision. In the end, they judges and panel a jury like this for an advisory to kind of give themselves cover when they have to make a really.

[A]

I had no idea that was even possible.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. So she kind of got off easy too, in that she didn't have to take any. Any guff. Although I don't think she cares. I mean, she's just such a tough person.

[A]

She's a.

[C]

She was great. But I think that the like, ultimately this was like billionaires throwing lawyers at each other, which I. Which is not how I want the future determined. But.

[A]

Well, I think Musk undermines his whole story, but by the fact that he has a competing frontier AI company called X that is going to straight at it's for profit going Straight at open AI. So it kind of undermines his whole argument.

[D]

Natural gas power.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[D]

Day and night, in secret, beyond anything. That's if you're concerned about the future of humanity, for goodness sakes, go get some solar.

[A]

Well, not to mention, I mean, I'm sure the jury doesn't. Isn't allowed to say this, but I doubt any jury has too much sympathy for a guy who is a trillionaire.

[C]

Exactly. We never got to see that.

[B]

Today I pilots Teslas. He could literally kill people. I mean, you know, this is. And he already has.

[A]

What's your sense of Sam Altman's character and veracity? During the middle of this trial, of course, the New Yorker came out with a. Essentially a hit piece written by Ronan Farrow implying that Altman was less than trustworthy, kind of slimy and slippery.

[C]

Yeah, it came up again and again and again in testimony. Basically, you had Ilya Sutsker saying he had a pattern of lying. You know, these former board members saying, oh, yeah, he would deceive us over and over again. And then he was asked on cross examination by Musk's attorneys, do you lie? Are you a liar? And he's under oath, so he can't say no. He has to say. He has to waffle. And so he did. He was like. He said, I'm sure I have lied in my life, that kind of thing. And then, and then, you know, but. But over and over again, he was sort. He was clearly unable to say. He just kept saying, I consider myself honest in my business dealings.

[A]

I feel like Sam Altman was not done well by his team because he must have known that that question was going to come up. And he really seemed ill prepared. They asked him, are you completely trustworthy? And instead of just saying yes, he said, well, I believe so. Do you always tell the truth? I believe I'm a truthful person. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, he was not well prepared. His people did not do him justice. I think.

[C]

I mean, I think when you're used to being a kind of backroom dealer,

[A]

like, that's the key.

[C]

That's the thing, you know. But he also, I mean, there was a point at which, at which they were asking him why it was that he had insisted on being CEO and there was emails from Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutkever saying, why do you want to be CEO? Is it because of your political ambitions? And Molo, Musk's attorney, asked him, what is that about? Did you want to be President of the United States? He said, sort of Rhetorically. And Altman said, no, no, no, no. I was considering a run for governor. Governor.

[A]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[C]

It's not gonna be the casual way in which these guys clearly believe they are the main characters of the universe and the rest of us are just kind of background actors. Was the, that was the theme for me of this trial.

[A]

It is fascinating to watch. I mean, they don't live in our world, do they? Every. Nobody says no to them. You know, they, they never really are called to account for anything.

[C]

And they, and they believe that the money is their reward from God for doing good works. Yeah, because they, they keep talking about how it's not about the money. And then they would. And then the, and then the lawyers would lay out like, here's the seven billion dollar stake you have in this company. And you could just see that it just didn't compute for them. They just think of it as, well, clearly, like the universe is going to just reward me endlessly such that I'll never have to think about money again because my work is so good, brilliant and important.

[A]

Right.

[C]

So there's this weird sort of set of background assumptions. You know, I just remember, remember that, that it's, it's been true for a while that, that inside some companies you'll have this hierarchy in which the, the language is like, some people are agents and some people are NPCs.

[A]

Right.

[C]

That some people count, have agency and some people just are literally just like the video game characters that you run over with your car. You know, like it's that, it's that thing that I, that I feel like.

[A]

What do they call them in succession? Not a real person. This doesn't matter. They're not a real. They're not a real person. You get a feeling we are just characters in Sam Altman and Elon Musk's play. That we are NPCs that there. And I'm sure Elon actually believes that, that, that he, he believes we're in a simulation and that really the rest of us barely exist.

[B]

And Elon, Elon, you know, he long ago fired his press team. He. He doesn't, he doesn't feel he needs anything that he can't simply control. And I think he's not wrong.

[A]

He elected the President with a quarter of a billion dollars.

[B]

That's right. And he lays people off not just to save money, because he just wants to run things himself as much as possible.

[A]

And he met, you know, he may well be a genius. He has some real success.

[B]

Have you seen the cybertruck well and then.

[A]

But that's the problem is that no one says no to him or no one says, you know, the Tesla, famously and unfortunately a lot of EVs. You have a Tesla, right, Larry?

[B]

I do.

[A]

A lot of EVs have followed suit. Has its charging plug in the wrong place because in many cases when you have to go to a supercharger, you need to back in. Or they had to make the superchargers with extra long charging cables because the plug's in the back. Well, it turns out his engineer said we should put the plug in the front like many of the early EVs. Actually it was in the front grill so it'll be easier to charge. And Elon said, no, I'm renting this house and I need to have the plug in the back because that's the easiest place for me to plug in. As a result, every EV since has its plug in the wrong place. Except the Nissan Leaf, which is the

[B]

good news is if you have. If you pay a hundred dollars a month for full self driving, it will back in for you.

[A]

It'll back in for you. There you go.

[B]

I actually own my. My self driving.

[D]

I don't have.

[A]

Do you really? And do you trust.

[B]

I bought it a gazillion years ago for seven grand and I get to keep it. So at least I got to keep it through two Teslas. We'll see.

[A]

What I'm sure foolishly because I had a Model X, a first generation Model X paid some huge amount of money for those right for the right to at some point get full self driving, which I never got.

[B]

Which to me is a class action food in the making. I don't know how you can possibly get away with that.

[A]

I think it was $5,000 for the right to subscribe to full self driving, should it ever.

[B]

I mean I still don't have truly full self driving. It's not unsupervised.

[A]

You never will.

[B]

I never will.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It will never be a Robo taxi. My car. I will never make money leasing out my car as a robotax.

[A]

He's promising that.

[B]

Oh, he promised to me.

[D]

Not personally, but from Made in America to Made with American values in mind.

[A]

Oh, you're talking about the Trump phone now. Yes, which is really a Sam's. It's a cheap phone that you could get for free from T Mobile if you didn't mind that it didn't have a flag in gold on it.

[B]

You can buy a flag in gold.

[A]

And he just put a decal. I think In a way, there has been an erosion of American character to a point where we just expect everything's a scam and nobody really even thinks about it anymore. It's like, well, it's so bad.

[B]

It is so bad that when my wife got an email from Social Security, she blew it off because she thought it was a scam. And she got a call from Social Security. She hung up on the guy. It turned out it really was Social Security.

[A]

Right, and how do you know?

[B]

It took us an extra six months before she got her benefits. She just assumed it was a scam, of course.

[D]

So it went that way in Russia first. Right. I mean, that's like. That's part of the Putin strategy. You. You fled the zone and, and just, like, leave people unwilling or able to trust each other. And without, With. Without social cohesion, like, the whole thing comes grinding to a halt.

[A]

Well, what did the SEC fine Elon for? Pumping the value of the Twitter stock or actually dumping the value of the Twitter stock before he bought it with tweets saying, it's full of bots. It's no good. They prosecuted. They said, you obviously were trying to influence the value. There was a class action suit from shareholders who. Twitter shareholders, who said, yeah, we didn't get the value for our stock because of his tweets. What did they find him? One and a quarter million dollars.

[B]

That's like me getting a parking ticket.

[A]

Less. It's literally less than you getting a parking ticket.

[B]

I know.

[A]

It's like, it's not even a slap on the wrist. It's a doink on the nose. It's nothing. It's just amazing.

[D]

Use the word hierarchy. Hierarchy. A little bit ago, and I feel like that's. That's a pretty key word. I. I'll never forget, I read some research years ago that, that studied CEOs. As they climb higher and higher up into. Into their respective hierarchies, the. The number of people who can say no to them gets smaller and smaller. And so their, like, sense of empathy, which had so much served the. The sociobiological function of keeping them in check, just atrophies because they don't need it.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

And now with ever more extreme inequality, like, what do they need to care about other people now?

[A]

They don't have to pretend anymore.

[C]

Totally. And. And they. I feel like once you've observed humanity and its behaviors and its choices at scale, you emerge with such a low opinion of people. You know, Like, I think this is Zuckerberg's problem. I think he just looks at how we are and is like, these people suck. You know, humans are. What do I care?

[A]

This is true.

[C]

When you talk to people in the gambling industry, they're always like, people are the worst.

[A]

Or bartenders or cops.

[C]

Yeah, I was a bartender. I still like people. After being a bartender for 10,000 people, I might not. I might have felt differently.

[B]

Sure. Zuckerberg knows how vulnerable you are, how easy to manipulate we are, and takes

[A]

good advantage of it. This is always the thing that gets me is that humans are simultaneously the worst thing ever and the most amazing thing ever. And I think it's even true of Elon that.

[B]

And once in a while we break through.

[A]

And once in a while. And you. Yeah, yeah. Once in a while there's a Michelangelo, there's a Jonas Salk. You know, once in a while we do. And then there are plenty of counter examples.

[B]

And there's some politicians that break through as well once in a while.

[A]

I agree.

[B]

So you might hate them, you might like them, but they break through.

[A]

Right.

[D]

Arguably there could be more of them if all the abundance were not so dramatically misallocated. If anybody else saw this, Scott Santon's article I just shared. Scott Santons is the kind of the. The leading thinker these days around ubi and he wrote what he called the angenine de patrine argument for ubi. If you've seen that. That crazy Montreal noise band or they're like discord.

[A]

Oh, they're hysterical. Yes, yes. Paper macher hats.

[D]

And so he says, like those guys and Albert Einstein. And like, how many. Like if. If UBI made it possible for even one person out there to like, be able to stop messing around, doing something pointless to pay the mortgage or the rent, and instead became the next Einstein. Like, one of them would pay for the whole thing times over. And presumably there would be more than one.

[A]

We did. On Friday, I did a special show with a friend named Jeff Atwood, who is a famous coder. He wrote the Coding Horror blog and made quite a bit of money when he sold Stack Exchange. He's devoting half of his fortune, a considerable amount to some test projects. For what? He doesn't like ubi because the idea of UBI is everybody gets a basic income. He likes a guaranteed minimum income. It's like a minimum wage that there is a bottom that nobody goes below. And so he's funded with a considerable amount of money, some projects to test this theory. If you go to staygold Us, you can read all about it. But yeah, so I'm not A fan of UBI because Elon doesn't need any more money. You don't need to give Elon $1,000 a month. But I am a fan of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and it is possible but unfortunately in order to do that we would have to kind of limit the number of billionaires and how much money they had. They might only be. We're able to get a few hundred

[D]

million to get the New York City budget is balanced. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

I was just watching on Mom D's new Twitch stream.

[A]

Isn't that hysterical? Somebody called this the, the FDR style Fireside chats that. But he's. But instead of course doing it on the radio, Mom Donnie's doing it on

[B]

Twitch where he was one of the people I'm thinking about the politician that broke through.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

He was first in mind when I said.

[A]

Yeah, very, very interesting. Yeah.

[B]

And I was in New York as they know just yesterday everybody I ran into bus drivers. People love him. I mean he's. He's delivering the goods.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's very interesting. So he's funding these programs with a tax on unoccupied multimillion dollar apartments. Is that, is that where that money's coming from or is it.

[D]

I think so.

[A]

He.

[D]

Somebody. The first question on his Twitch stream recording was how did you pull off this budget? And he said basically it was one part taxes on the rich and the other part insisting that the budget splits with the state government might actually respect checked their agreements. He claimed that there was a number of instances where the city and the state like agreed to go 5050 on something and then historically the state would not follow through with their funding and, and the mayor historically like wouldn't be able to do anything about it. But he resolved that situation with the, the current governor.

[A]

According to his website, he's the first US elected official to host a rec recurring multi platform stream. It's called Talk with the People. Twitch, Tick Tock, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube x Blue sky and Podcasts. It is the modern Fireside chat. Yeah, I think that's very interesting. The first one was Last Thursday at 4pm And I guess he's gonna. Is he gonna do it every week? That's kind of amazing. That's the plan. Yeah.

[D]

And he, you know he has. Has folks come up on and, and it's the. The live chat is you know, wide open and full of like.

[A]

That's a brave thing to do.

[D]

Obscene ASCII art.

[A]

Yeah. Our live chat on Twitch is also open but I. But they're pretty good right now, to be nice.

[D]

So he got 35, 000 Twitch subscribers after the very first.

[A]

That's fantastic. That's. That's how all elected officials should be responsible to the people who elected them.

[B]

I think compare that to Chuck Schumer or almost any traditional politician night and day.

[A]

They don't like this. I remember many years ago. I've told this story before teaching Regis Philbin had a tweet, and he was initially. He was really excited. There's video of it on YouTube. He was so excited. He called his wife, said, joy, Joy. I just set my first. First tweet, and they're talking back to me. He loved this idea of his audience talking back to him. It lasted one week, and then he realized they were all talking to him and he didn't like it, and he. And he canceled the. To cancel the account.

[C]

He's in the talking business, not the listening business.

[A]

Yeah, There you go. Bingo. All right, let's take a break. More to come with our fabulous panel. Jacob Ward, the rip current. You've seen him on CNN, JacobWorb.com and his book the Loop is still well worth reading. It was definitely prescient when it came out in 2024. 2022. 2.

[C]

Yeah, about a year before ChatGPT came out. You think you want to be right when you write a book like Adam,

[A]

you don't really want to be right, unfortunately. But you were well done. Bravo. It's great to see you. And of course, Marshall Kirkpatrick, the author of what's up with that? You can get that at what's Upwithat App. Try it out. You can try it for free. Very interesting way to add context to any webpage. And it's actually. It's more than just context. It's kind of adversarial content, too, right? Yep.

[D]

One of my early users said, no one will ever be able to fool me again.

[A]

Boy, if that were only true. If only that were true. Maybe.

[D]

I sometimes think of it as an X. As X Ray vision. Another user called it that.

[A]

That's good. I like it. See through it. And from ConnectSafely.org it's founder, CEO and president, Larry Maggot, ConnectSafely.org go there. There's all sorts of information that's very valuable for parents who I don't. I. Boy, you got my deepest sympathy. Knowing how to raise kids in this day and age, I swear, you know,

[B]

we just literally this week published the Seniors Guide to Uber, and we.

[A]

That's A great idea.

[B]

Yeah, we do. We have stuff for seniors and we have a new task force for 18 to 26 year olds because they have vulnerabilities. It doesn't go away when you're 18. In fact, it gets worse in some ways. A lot of anxiety at that age. So.

[A]

So it's a tough world if you're growing up into it or if you're in it and it's changing under your feet. It is a tough world. And boy, it's tough to be a senior. We're fortunate, all of us and probably all of our listeners, that we understand technology, we can use it. But you gotta feel for the vast majority of people who are entering this world where technology is everything. Anybody who has no idea how to use this stuff, I don't know how

[B]

anybody who has any diminished capacity, you know, God forbid we could all be there someday. How they handle life today without the ability to thrive online. It's just. I don't know what they're doing.

[A]

There was a story about a longtime Yankee fan. He'd been going to the games for 60 years, didn't have a smartphone, couldn't go to the games anymore because they tickets are on the phone.

[B]

That's right. I couldn't park at UC Davis because I couldn't get a WI fi signal. And the only way to pay for parking is with. With the app. And I literally had to drive somewhere else because I didn't have.

[A]

What are we doing, folks? There's this thing called quarters, right?

[B]

Or at least credit card.

[A]

Yeah, this is. This is how, you know, I'm an old man. I have in my car a little change thing with quarters in it. Just in case someday I meet a parking meter to take quarters. Someday I may.

[B]

Or if you just want to add 10 minutes, you don't want to go, you know, put your credit card back in.

[A]

I gotta get my credit card.

[D]

You're not gonna try to change the settings on your toaster, are you?

[A]

No, it wasn't Yankees, was Dodgers. Thank you. Eat the oligarchs says his name. Robert Westerman, longtime Dodger fan. Finally, the Dodgers responded and gave him a paper ticket. Thank God he's the only one in Dodger Stadium with a paper ticket. Good for you, Robert. I'm glad to hear. I'm sorry, Errol is his name. Errol Siegel. Glad to hear it. Our show today, brought to you by Mill. Now here is the modern world doing something pretty darn cool if you sit at the table and clear your plate. I was brought up to Clear my plate, right? There are starving children in China. Clear your plate. But you grow up in a world where you see all this food waste and you realize, I shouldn't have to clear my plate. It's not healthy. I shouldn't have to at a restaurant. I shouldn't have to eat everything put in front of me. Food waste seems like a huge problem in this world. What's interesting is it isn't in restaurants. Most of it happens at home. But that's good news because it means we can actually do something about it. And that's when we went out and we bought our mill food recycler. I love this thing. Mill is right now in our kitchen. We bought it October, I think of last year, before they were a sponsor. And I fell in love with it so much that I said, can we do ads for you? Because I think everybody should get one of these things. Mill is the odorless, effortless, fully automated food recycler. Everything goes in it. Now we want, you know, we were composting. But their problem is, you know, you got this thing and it starts to smell and there's fruit flies and stuff. You throw it in the same thing in the mill. Potato peels, even, you know, hearts to avocado pits, chicken bones, even dairy. The mill takes almost anything. And then while you sleep, our mill, I have it set up. You can change how it works, but I have it set up to turn on at 9pm While you're asleep, Mill quietly transforms those food scraps into nutrient rich, shelf stable grounds. There's no mess, there's no smells, there's no fruit flies. And we, last night we loaded it up. You could put ten pounds in it. It'll work on it overnight. Reduces it down to almost anything. It can work for weeks before you even have to think about emptying it. You can use the grounds in your garden, add them to your curbside compost. Mill will even pick them up and get them to a small farm for you. Look at this. Since October, we have been using the mill. We have diverted 406lbs of food scraps from the landfill. That's where it would have ended up. You can actually see your impact. The mill app will track how much food you're keeping out of landfills. They've already helped customers put over 15 million pounds of food to good use. The mill is beautiful. It's sleek. It looks great in any kitchen. We got the white one. They have different colors. It offers, by the way, a 90 day risk free trial. If you don't absolutely love it. You can just send it back. It is risk free. But I have to say when you see a stat like that, you go, okay, okay, we're keeping it. I love our mill. Try mill risk free for 90 days. Get $75 off right now when you go to mill.com and use the code TWIT. $75 off right now. Mill.com TWIT. Use the offer code TWITT. Save some money. Save the planet. 406 pounds diverted from landfill. That's amazing. That is amazing. And we, you know what, we care a lot. We do the recycling. We do everything we can to reduce and we've really reduced our waste food wasting incredibly. And the mill is a big part of that. Thank you, mill.

[D]

Leo, do you know about project Drawdown?

[A]

No, what's that?

[D]

It is the world's leading research quantitatively meta studies on the most high impact responses to climate change that the world could take. And reducing food waste is the number three.

[A]

No kidding.

[D]

a hundred different, different solutions here.

[B]

Huge.

[A]

It is no kidding huge. Yeah. Wow.

[D]

Number one is get it is dealing with errant refrigerants, you know, chemicals from refrigerators. If we could get that dealt with, it'll make a huge difference. Number two is, I believe offshore wind power could like make a huge, huge difference. And number three is reduced food waste.

[A]

I had no idea. That is amazing.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Because it feels help you feel helpless. You feel like. Well, as an individual, what can I do? I mean we drive EVs like you, Larry. We drive EVs.

[B]

I am as you're speaking, writing to their press office because I'd like to review this product. It sounds amazing.

[A]

Oh, the mill is in. I love the mill. Yeah.

[B]

I'd like my readers to know about it.

[A]

It's great. And you know, California introduced. You're in California, right? Yeah, they introduced. I'm pretty sure the whole state now does composting. So you have a compost bin at your curb. Yeah, but it is gross. It is.

[B]

Well, we actually have two. We have a worm bin in our kitchen. We have a big thing for the, for the city compost and we have a smaller one that my wife uses for her worm bin. Now I don't know if this can go into the worm bin or not. Do you know it can all of

[A]

you know, basically it's got little mixers and it heats it up. It just removes the moisture. Right. So it's like all the nutrients are still there. So it's just dry. It's like grounds like coffee grounds. It's dry. So, yeah, the worms would love it. You can put. You can use it as compost. Absolutely.

[B]

There's a certain thing she won't let me put in. Like, she won't let me put bones in the worm bin, you know?

[A]

Well, the mill handles bones. There are rules, though. If you're going to use this, you couldn't put, like, marigolds in it because if you were going to use it as chicken feed, because it would be bad, it'd be poison. So it actually, on the app, it tells you. I'm not doing the ad anymore. This is just us talking on the app. It tells you, you, if you. How, depending on how you're going to use it. Don't do this, don't put that. But we're just putting it in the compost bin. And so we put everything in it.

[B]

And also you. I guess you could put a lot more in, like ours. It fills up pretty quickly.

[A]

Oh, yeah, this. Well, it fills up. It'll take this much. It's about that big. And then. But the next morning, it's. It's down here.

[B]

It compresses it, basically.

[A]

No, there's no compression. It's just dehydrating it. That's all it's doing. But most. It turns out most food waste is water. It's liquid. Yeah, just dehydrating it.

[B]

That's great.

[A]

It's pretty cool.

[B]

Now, if you could only get people to buy less and just. What, you know, not throw away anything would be.

[A]

Well, one of the things I have given myself permission to do is not clear my plate. Yeah, because that's why you're looking thinner, Leo. Yeah, I was in the clean plate club, you know, eat it all. Eat it. Oh, you don't like it? No. So now, even when I go to a restaurant and I will say to them, it's not that I don't like it. I'm full. Right.

[B]

And by the way, I grew up worried about starving children in Europe. That shows how old I am.

[A]

Oh, you're really old. That was my.

[B]

My parents, you know, China for me.

[A]

No, my parents, to the. To their credit, never did that to me. But my mama was the saying, you should eat, Manja. Eat them more. You're gonna have some more. It's a good. And I would go, yeah, mama. Yeah, mama. There was no guilt involved. It was just pleasure.

[D]

Meanwhile, people. People are starving because they've been pushed off of the land that they've been sustaining themselves on for years in order to make monocropped export for, you know, controlled by, by someone else.

[A]

Well, I feel guilty, I have to say. You know, I've been selling gadgets for 20 years, encouraging people to buy a new phone every year. I feel I have, I have definitely some, some guilt.

[B]

I have written many an apology to the world about having been a cheerleader of the Internet, a cheerleader of this, a cheerleader of that, and I feel a little guilty too.

[A]

Yeah, let's see, what else? The. The US has invested $2 billion in quantum computing. That's going to be the next big thing. And of course they're taking a stake in it as well. That's the new. That's the new way the Trump administration invests. You give us a little piece of the action.

[C]

Wait till they find out that the money really only goes one way.

[A]

There is no profit in quantum computing. The bulk of the money goes to IBM and Global Foundries. Foundries that make wafers and other technology for quantum computing. IBM will receive a billion dollars. Like they don't have the money. Global Foundries, 375 million. IBM is going to invest a billion. They're going to take the billion from the government and invest another billion to set up a company called Andiron in Albany, New York. I'm not sure why the government's investing in quantum computing. I guess maybe. Well, Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce says it will create thousands of high paying jobs.

[B]

He also said he had never been in touch with Jeffrey Epstein.

[A]

Oh yeah. Well, a lunch, that's all.

[B]

Hi, this is Benito. I'm guessing it's a security thing, right?

[C]

Because it quantum.

[A]

We just don't want the Chinese to get it first, that's all. We just don't.

[B]

But it breaks all encryption so they want it.

[A]

Oh, you think they. Oh, that's it. Yeah, that's right.

[C]

And no password is safe again.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

Between that and Mythos, we're all going to walk around naked from now on.

[A]

California's fine. General Motors $12.75 million because GM was selling data from OnStar to the data brokers.

[B]

Another slap in the wrist.

[A]

A slap in the wrist. The lawsuit accused GM of sharing detailed customer information, including driving habits, geolocation data, names and contact details with third party data brokers. Between 2020 and 2024, hundreds of thousands of California drivers were affected.

[D]

Well, certainly that is less surprising than the story that you covered a few weeks ago, I believe, about how all of the or most of the state health insurance marketplaces were selling data.

[A]

Oh yeah, that's a good one. Like yeah, the ACA websites all had data collection tools and they were selling it to data brokers. And of course, on an ACA website, you give them a lot of information, income information, health information,

[C]

and not exactly knowing that it's going to be there. Like no one's ever asking.

[A]

So you mentioned this at the beginning of the show. I don't know if this is going to pass. It's part of the federal highway Bill, a bipartisan amendment to end police license plate tracking. They will be. Cities and states will be stripped of federal funding if. Unless they kill their automated plate tracking programs, particularly Flock. Right. Flock is the. Is the big one.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There's been debates in every community. They're debating in my community in Petaluma right now because there's cameras and there's a lot of value, of course, in having these automated license plate readers. The problem is they're used sometimes not in such great ways. We just saw a story about a law enforcement official was using an ALPR from Flock to track his girlfriend, his ex girlfriend. Thousands of ALPR reading from the sky. But I mean, that's a rogue use. I don't know. I have mixed feelings about this. What do you guys think?

[D]

So the city I live in has canceled its contract with Flock and the cameras have been removed after protests.

[A]

Yeah, people don't like the idea.

[B]

It's one of those many examples of the nuances of good ideas with unintended consequences. I deal with that every day as an Internet safety person because there's all these bills out there that would do wonderful things to protect children, but take away their rights, spy on them, deny them access to important information that they need, yada, yada, yada. And, and this is just one more example. I mean, of course we want to cap. Capture kidnappers and child molesters.

[A]

Well, see, that's the thing. It's hugely valuable for that. Or, or. Or an elderly person who's exactly driven off. Or. And you really. Do you have a right to privacy when you're in public roads?

[C]

Well, the problem. Right, is that it's not just about the privacy. It's about like the, the. So I was talking to these two mathematicians who were doing a store, a study of like, cameras, speed, speeding cameras. And they figured out that it was still much more likely to tag black and brown people. And the simple read is, oh, because they drive faster. No. Well, yes, but not for the reasons you think. What they said, what they determined was black and brown people in this particular city. I came. It was like Detroit or one of these are living in these post industrial areas with huge four lane roads. They got to drive huge distances to get to work. And that's where people were putting the speed cameras. And as a result, people in those neighborhoods as opposed to people who, you know, live in a leafy suburban enclave where the, where it's much, you know, where you couldn't speed anyway because you're in a compressed little road. They don't get hit with those speed speeding cameras. So there's a whole layer of like, how do you equitably, equitably deploy something like that? I have to say I'm very tied in knots about this one. Like I live in Oakland, California where there's a, there has been a huge amount of like petty crime and vehicle crime, you know, and they often don't

[A]

prosecute it because it's so hard to prosecute.

[C]

Right. You're not allowed to chase because the police end up killing.

[A]

They don't want high speed chases.

[C]

Yeah. You know, so I do have to say like from a thousand feet up, I look down and I think, well this, this, you know, maybe license plate readers is the trick here. You know, I took a trip to Brazil this past summer and when you get off the page plane, you, you, they barely check. You barely talk to a human. You don't even really hand over your, I mean you, you hand over your passport at one point. But like all you really do is walk down an incredibly long hallway and you're being recorded a thousand different ways. Your face is getting, is getting biometrically grabbed. Your gate, how you walk is getting grabbed. All of that is getting grabbed. And then when you bop around in a place like, like Rio, there's just Chinese cameras everywhere because China has exported these systems to all these big capitals and big cities. And I was talking to people in Rio about this and, and they were like, you know, we like that it's brought down crime. You know, they're all for that because it had a huge violent crime problem. But then they were also like, but there's also weird stuff happening like, like cops are using the footage and monetizing it on YouTube for themselves.

[A]

There's misuses. There's this Georgia police chief who's being prosecuted because he used his, these alprs to stalk and harass people. But we give police all sorts of powers to protect us. That's, that's part of the deal. And yeah, there are eggs, but that's how you, yeah, you, I mean nobody suggest. Well, maybe some are, but most people are not suggesting we get rid of police. Yeah. I am also twisted in knots. I feel like there's some real value to it. I think people just hate the idea of these cameras everywhere. Here's a story from German scientists in the Karls Rohr Institute for Technology. Ordinary WI fi can now identify people with perfect accuracy. Your WI fi router.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

Can. Can actually not only see that you're there, but can identify you. Yep. Even if you're not carrying an active device. By observing, I do this in the German accent. By observing the propagation of radio waves we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present.

[C]

There's an American version of this too I've seen. And you don't need a warrant to use that to park a van outside somebody's house and run that like no warrant required. There's a new system where they'll identify you, you individually by your, by your heartbeat using a laser from like 200 yards.

[A]

Well, and I'm wondering the reason I thought of this is I'm wondering if the Brazilian corridor you're going down is also doing gait analysis because that was my understanding.

[C]

Is that the reason you're walking and not stopping in place and turning right?

[B]

You just got me so paranoid because between my apple watch, my CPAP machine which has a built in modem, got a failure connection, my aura ring, I'm

[A]

wearing all that stuff and I have a little Chinese Chinese AI in here.

[C]

I mean you're a one man nsa, Larry.

[B]

Kidding.

[A]

No, we live in this world. Privacy is well and it's in.

[D]

So like out of the the nine identified planetary boundaries required for like life on earth to exist, there's like seven out of those nine have been passed now have been crossed over.

[A]

You mean the Goldilocks zone kind of thing?

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Around everything from ocean currents to mysterious chemicals to temperature to you know, what have you. So it's like it's pretty unsustainable situation situation we find ourselves in and, and

[A]

now so we don't have to worry because we're just going to be wiped out any day now. Well,

[B]

doesn't happen all at once, Leo. Yeah, well you and I Leo, we'll probably die of old age.

[A]

Yeah, we'll be all right. I feel bad for kids being born right about now. Set. What did you say seven out of ten?

[D]

Seven out of nine? Yeah. Have been, have been passed.

[A]

Have been breached like the 2, 2 centigrade temperature increase here.

[D]

I'll drop the link in ocean acidification is, is now.

[A]

And these Are some. Some of these are irreversible. That's the problem. And worse, they pile on. They become exponential quickly.

[D]

Yeah. Feedback loops and.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

And what have you. So given those circumstances and you got your tight alignment between the super wealthy and the government that they have, you know, the super wealthy with an interest in the status quo and the government that then like. Do you want the government to have perfect surveillance?

[A]

That seems like minor compared to. Compared to the acidification of the ocean. But it also explains why market Zuckerberg is building $100 million bunker under his house in Hawaii. The ri. This is the funniest thing. The rich think that they somehow will escape this reality. Elon thinks we're going to Mars. We're not going to Mars.

[B]

No. I hope he does.

[A]

Got bad news for Elon.

[C]

He's not talking about that as much anymore. I have to say he's been pretty quiet about that lately.

[A]

I don't know. I. He was wearing the Occupy Mars shirt and I think he had a very successful launch of a starship yesterday. I don't know. Here's. All right, let's give you some good news. I don't want to leave you with a depressed point of view. Remember when Cox Media Group, the cable company was advertising and we talked about it. I was skeptical of. It was advertising that you as a marketer could by active listening technology from them, that they were tapping people's phones and had perfect marketing information from their phones, from their TVs, from their cars and they could sell that to you and your ads could be perfectly targeted. And I at the time was a little skeptical. Well, it turns out the FTC says and now they're in trouble because they didn't actually work. The FTC is fining Cox Media Group for selling active listening technology. That didn't work. If it worked, no problem.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. I was going to say. Is that what we're upset about?

[A]

That's what we're upset about. They deceived their customers, businesses by claiming they could target ads based on audio recordings collected from consumers smart devices via a marketing service called Active Listening. Why do they get in trouble? Because the FTC said. But it didn't work. So maybe this isn't the happy story that I thought it was.

[D]

Well, the happiness was that it didn't work.

[A]

Yeah, well, that's what should be reassuring.

[D]

That came out in discovery, if you will.

[A]

Yeah. Wow. Oh, I have lots more. There's so many more stories. But I'll tell you what, I think we probably should wrap this up because we've gone more than long enough and I don't want to.

[B]

What did they call Walter Crocky? Iron Butt.

[A]

Old Iron Butt. That's me. I'm the new Iron Butt.

[B]

Yeah, you are.

[A]

I could. You know what? I could easily. Yeah, it's funny because I'm not the longest podcast by any means. Joe Rogan just did a three and a half hour podcast interview with Mark Andreessen and I saw that Lex Friedman did an interview with David Hannemeyer Hansen, the creator of Ruby on rails that went six hours plus. So. Hey, we're only two hours and 44 minutes in. This is. This isn't long.

[B]

My back already hurt, so.

[A]

All right, we'll wrap it up. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen for your patience and thank you, Larry maggot, for surviving ConnectSafely.org everybody should go there. There's lots of good stuff. I love that. An elderly Senior Citizen's Guide to Uber. I think that's a good idea.

[B]

We also have a Teenager's guide to Uber cover covering Fatal to Grave.

[A]

Cradle to Grave.

[B]

Well, I don't have anything for dead people yet.

[A]

But I've been saying this lately. It's only a matter of time before my kids come to me and ask for the car keys permanently.

[B]

I don't have car keys. I just use my phone.

[A]

Yeah, I don't have car keys. Good luck, kids. You ain't getting my car keys.

[B]

I'll give them your car key.

[A]

You can have the key. I don't need that. Good point. No. That's why I keep hoping that there will be someday self driving cars because, well, I guess there's always Uber. Thank you, Larry. Appreciate what you do for kids and [e-mail] and I'm sorry about CBS News Radio. It's a sad day. Sad day. But it's always a happy day when you're here. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks also to Marshall KirkPatrick. Check out WhatsAppwith that app and WhatsApp with that app Hawkeye. It's the modern way to keep up with what social saying about your company. I don't want to know. But some people need to know. Sometimes you need to know. Appreciate that. Thank you. Marshall, it's great to see you.

[D]

Thanks for having me on.

[A]

What is the box you're talking into? Is that. That is the weirdest microphone I've ever seen.

[D]

It is called a bcaster microphone.

[A]

Microphone.

[D]

And it's.

[A]

Oh, it's like a bumblebee.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[A]

I thought I'd Seen every mic in the world and now it's. Now it's going. We got a buzz now like a bumblebee.

[D]

You know, I, I once went to the launch conference. I believe it was real quick.

[B]

I think you need to jigger the cable a little bit.

[C]

It's buzzing.

[A]

Figure the cable. Oh, it's so funny looking. I like.

[D]

Is that any better now?

[A]

No, it's all right.

[C]

We're.

[A]

The show's over anyway. Go ahead.

[C]

Is this the ad for VCast? Is this what that is?

[A]

This is not the best ad for the bcaster. Okay. It's better now. There it is. It's a cool looking microphone.

[D]

So I went to this big startup event one time and we were like, oh, Walt Mossberg's gonna be there. Walt Mossberg's gonna be there. Oh, maybe he'll come and talk to us and see our demo. And we're like, oh, I don't know. And then he started coming around the table and he approached us and he, he said, I've just got one question for you. What's that mic you're using? It was a. It was a snowball mic. And he was like, okay, cool, thanks.

[A]

See you.

[C]

Thanks.

[A]

Good. All right, see you later. Bye. Thank you, Marshall. Great to see you again. And thank you, Jacob Ward. You are. You're hitting on all cylinders now, Jacob Ward. Dot com. The book is the Loop. There is the rip current dot com AS newsletter. You'll catch them on cnn. And we're very lucky to have him every month on Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent.

[C]

You took a flyer on me when none of those things were true.

[A]

Leo, I think you're great. I'm really glad that CNN is finally seeing the light. That's great. Is it just technology?

[C]

Yeah, it's technology. I mean, it's amazing. Once you start wandering into that, the thing everybody forgets is that every. I mean, as you know, every single story is a technology story now.

[A]

It is, Absolutely.

[C]

So I do find myself just, just like on the. On the wheel of Death.

[A]

Yeah. And it's nice.

[C]

Very high quality problem.

[A]

I always makes me very happy when

[B]

I see good luck when Paramount buys it. If that happens.

[A]

Yeah, you know, it's funny.

[B]

I'm watching Keep you around though.

[A]

I'm watching people like Anderson Cooper and stuff, and I really feel like they kind of feel the shadow over their shoulders. And as a result, they're becoming a little bit more like aggressive and a little bit more newsy. Like, let's, let's be good news. Let's be Good reporters while we can, which is great. And maybe being acquiescent instead of just rolling over and saying, please keep me, please. You know what? Who knows what's going to happen? It's a crazy world. You never know. And that's why we do this show every week. You never know. We do Twitter every Sunday.

[B]

Aren't. Aren't acquiring Twitter, are they?

[A]

Oh, God, if they did, I'd be thrilled. 50 million is all it would take.

[C]

Phone numbers out there.

[A]

I'll do whatever Barry Weiss tells me to do. Just, you know, come on and write a check. That's all I need. No, I'm not ready to sell out quite yet, actually. I like doing this. I enjoy what I'm doing. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't need to sell out. It makes me a little jealous when I see that, you know, podcast with a tenth of our audience selling for hundreds of millions of dollars to open AI. It's like, where did I go wrong? Oh, I didn't interview Sam Altman enough. That's the problem. That's my mistake. No, we're happy doing what we're doing. We've been doing it for 21 years. I'd like to do it for another 21. I'll be sitting here, Larry. It'll be you and me talking about our sciatica.

[B]

If we're lucky, we'll have just pain. You got that pain.

[A]

You know how that pain up and down your side. You know that we do this show every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. I say that because you can watch us live. Of course, if you're in the club, and I hope you are, that's the best way to support independent podcasting. I don't need a big check from a millionaire. I just want some little checks from people who care about good content, independent content. TWiT TV Club. TWiT. Join the club. And if you're in the club, you can watch us in the club. Twit Discord. And talk with us, too, after the fact. Well, actually, I should mention you don't have to be in the club to watch live. We also stream it on YouTube, just like Mamdani, Mayor Mamdani, YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. And you can chat with us in all of those, too. After the fact, you can watch the show. We do record it onto reel to reel tape and offer it in both audio and video form at the website. Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Twit. Great way to share clips with friends and family. Or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically as soon as it's done. Benito Gonzalez, our esteemed technical producer. Thank you. He's going to get an airplane fly to the Philippines tomorrow, but he'll be joining us next Sunday from the Philippines where it will be four in the morning.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Sorry Bonita. Thanks to Kevin King, who edits this show after the Fact. Thanks to all of you for joining us. Thanks to our great panelists. We will see you next time. As I have said for 21 years and I'm gonna keep doing it till they drag me off. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can. Bye bye. Hey everybody. Leo Laporte here and I'm gonna bug you one more time to join Club Twit. If you're not already a member. I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25% of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more. We can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public. Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you find out more at TWiT TV. Club TWiT. Thank you so much. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless. But so is our gear. Level up your [e-mail] to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome. Columbia Engineered for Whatever.

[C]

Some follow the noise.

[A]

Bloomberg follows the money.

[C]

Because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side,

[A]

you understand what others miss.

[C]

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[A]

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