TWiT 1028: Some Had Leashes - Google's Monopoly, Yap Score, Robot Marathon

Summary

This Week in Tech – Episode 1028: “Some Had Leashes”

Date: April 21, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Panelists: Nicholas De Leon (Consumer Reports), Georgia Dow (YouTube therapist), Paris Martineau (Tech Journalist)

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Episode Overview

This lively episode dives into a week packed with significant tech headlines, including Google’s dual antitrust losses, the prevalence of AI hallucinations and the mysterious "YAP score", tumultuous tariff news and its impact on electronics, social media’s effects on youth, and quirky tales such as a robot marathon. The panel also discusses the safety of kids' platforms, the role of parental controls, and the ever-growing intersection between AI and everyday life—with plenty of gaming detours, some nostalgia, and trademark TWiT banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Google’s Antitrust Nightmares

(05:00–08:50, 45:00–49:00)

• Double Trouble for Google: A US federal judge found Google guilty in two separate antitrust cases: one for monopolizing general search, another for dominating ad tech.
• Potential Remedies: Discussions swirled around whether Google might be forced to divest Chrome or Android, but skepticism abounds since remedies can lag behind a fast-changing market.
  • Leo Laporte (07:30): “The courts move so slowly… by the time they get around to it, everything, the landscape has changed completely.”
• Is Google Search Already Obsolete?: Nicholas confesses he’s shifted most searching to AI tools like ChatGPT and Grok.
  • Nicholas De Leon (08:50): “My personal Google use has really declined over the past year.”

2. AI Struggles: Hallucinations & The Secret YAP Score

(10:26–22:26)

• LLM Hallucinations: The dangers of AI “making things up”—especially in code generation—are highlighted.
  • Fake dependencies can become supply chain security risks, as malicious actors spot and fill in hallucinated libraries.
  • Paris Martineau (14:45): “Pre-release OpenAI O3 … frequently fabricates actions it never took and then elaborately justifies those actions when confronted.”
  • Leo Laporte (13:27): “AI hallucinated code dependencies become new supply chain risk.”
• The Mysterious YAP Score: Research discovered a hidden OpenAI internal metric—a “YAP score”—that constrains how verbose AI replies can be.
  • Paris Martineau (16:22): “It’s used to control the length of its responses … it’s funny that it’s called a YAP score internally.”

3. AI as Therapist: Potential & Pitfalls

(25:04–33:00; 95:58–105:28)

• Study Finds AI Therapy Can Work—Carefully: Research suggests that AI bots can deliver psychotherapy as effectively as humans if trained specifically.
  • Leo Laporte (29:24): “With the right kind of training, AI bots can deliver mental health therapy … sometimes more than even human clinicians.”
  • Georgia emphasizes: AI therapy works best for basic issues and as companionship, but complex or crisis cases should remain with real humans.
    • Georgia Dow (27:21): “For simple things, not a problem … but when the relationship really matters, you need someone paying attention to all the cues.”
• Bonding with Bots: Users form emotional bonds with therapy bots, sometimes more readily than with humans due to lack of judgment.

4. Tariffs & The Uncertainty Plague

(49:11–61:32)

• Tariffs on Tech: The Trump administration’s tariffs on imported electronics, chips, and devices from China, Vietnam, and India create widespread business and consumer anxiety.
  • Nicholas De Leon (50:41): “The most damaging part is just the uncertainty … I have no idea what’s going to happen 48 hours from now. I can’t run a business if I have no idea what’s going, going to happen.”
  • Consumers might face sky-high gadget prices ($20,000 for a US-made iPhone!).
• Advice to Consumers: Buy now if you’re worried about electronic price hikes—uncertainty reigns.

5. Meta Monopoly Case & Social Giants on Trial

(45:08–50:09)

• Meta Under the Gun: Zuckerberg testifies in a landmark case that could force Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.
  • Paris Martineau (46:36): “It’s been very interesting to see Zuckerberg admitting his jealousy of Instagram’s popularity.”
• Legal & Political Uncertainty: The outcome is unclear. The government faces a stiff challenge proving Meta wouldn’t have succeeded without acquisitions.

6. Social Media, Toxicity & Adolescence

(95:58–105:28)

• Netflix’s “Adolescence” and the Manosphere: The panel discusses the impact of toxic male influencers and online bullying, prompted by a hit Netflix series.
  • Georgia Dow: Exposure to repeated negative messaging online massively shapes teens’ self-image and susceptibility.
  • Government officials call for greater discussion and awareness of toxic online environments.
  • Georgia Dow (101:58): “There’s a ton of toxicity on the Internet, period … not just for young men.”

7. Parental Control & Kids Online

(112:44–122:27; 158:09–164:50)

• Roblox Under Scrutiny: Reports reveal underage avatars were exposed to sexual content and predatory outreach, despite supposed protections.
  • The shifting blame game: Should platforms, parents, or app stores be responsible for verifying users' ages and filtering content?
  • Paris Martineau (117:53): “Everyone is trying to figure out who the buck should stop with, and no one wants it to be them.”
  • Leo advocates for better, parent-controlled tools built into devices.

8. Robot Marathons & Quirkiness

(139:24–141:42)

• China’s Robot Marathon: Most bots fell over, smoked, or needed a handler, but one completed the half-marathon—sort of.
  • Paris Martineau (141:13): “Most of the other androids were controlled by joysticks … some had leashes.”
• Palo Alto Crosswalk Prank: Hackers injected voice messages from “Elon Musk” and “Mark Zuckerberg” into traffic crosswalks, exposing dumb security defaults (passwords like ‘1234’).

9. Gaming & Anticipated Switch 2 Release

(76:37–88:40)

• Nintendo Switch 2 FOMO: Panelists weigh preorder options amid fears of scalpers; new restrictions like “50 hours minimum play” aim to thwart bots.
  • Panelists reminisce about Animal Crossing's infamous Resetti character and debates about old-school vs. digital controls.

10. Data, Big Tech, and AI's Power & Pitfalls

(144:59–152:20)

• OpenAI Social Network Rumors: Speculation mounts over an OpenAI-powered, X-like social network that may blur AI assistant and social feed.
• Palantir and Clearview AI Ethics: Company leaks show Palantir and Clearview facilitating government deportations and police work, raising alarms around due process, accuracy, and privacy.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Leo Laporte (07:30): “The courts move so slowly … by the time they get around to it, everything, the landscape has changed completely.”
• Nicholas De Leon (08:50): “My personal Google use has really declined over the past year.”
• Paris Martineau (16:22): “They also found that OpenAI has a secret yap score … to control the length of its responses.”
• Leo Laporte (25:04): “AI is still a useful tool—you just have to know what it can and can’t do.”
• Georgia Dow (27:21): “If you’re just using it for company or basic answers, not a problem. But when that relationship really matters…you need someone paying attention to all the cues.”
• Nicholas De Leon (50:41): “The most damaging part is just the uncertainty.”
• Paris Martineau (46:36): “It’s been very interesting to see the exact messages of Mark Zuckerberg … plainly admitting his jealousy of Instagram’s popularity.”
• Paris Martineau (141:13): “Some had leashes.”
• Georgia Dow (101:58): “There’s a ton of toxicity on the internet, period.”
• Paris Martineau (117:53): “Everyone is trying to figure out who the buck should stop with, and no one wants it to be them.”

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Chapter & Timestamp Guide

| Segment | Description | Timestamp (MM:SS) | |---------|-------------|-------------------| | Panel intros | Meet the hosts | 03:20–04:45 | | Google’s antitrust losses | Both search & adtech | 05:00–08:50 | | AI hallucinations & YAP score | LLM risks & secrets | 13:27–17:06 | | AI as code buddy & therapy | Limits, risks of AI | 21:03–33:00 | | Tariff turmoil | Uncertainty, tech prices, advice | 49:11–61:32 | | Meta’s monopoly trial | Zuckerberg on the stand | 45:08–50:09 | | Netflix “Adolescence” & toxic youth online | Manosphere, parental blame, therapy | 95:58–105:28 | | Roblox / parental control dilemma | Platform safety & responsibility | 112:44–122:27 | | Robot marathon | Tech stumbles, “some had leashes” | 139:24–141:42 | | Crosswalk hacks | Digital pranks, physical security | 137:16–138:59 | | Nintendo Switch 2 | Gaming FOMO, anti-scalper policies | 76:37–88:40 | | Palantir, Clearview AI | Government, deportation, privacy | 144:59–152:20 | | Discord sued by New Jersey | Child safety online | 158:09–164:23 | | Closing banter and club info | TWiT club, episode wrap | 173:38–176:29 |

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Tone & Style

The episode brims with the panel’s signature blend of insight, irreverent tech analysis, personal anecdotes, and a healthy dose of skepticism—especially around policy, privacy, and the promises (and failures) of modern AI. Engaging, occasionally exasperated, but ultimately hopeful about the power of tech for good—provided it comes with transparency, empathy, and better tools for users and parents alike.

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Final Takeaway

Episode 1028 embodies the heart of TWiT: incisive yet accessible analysis of tech’s impact on society, delivered with humor and genuine curiosity. Whether you're worried about AI hallucinations, planning your next device purchase, or just want to beat a boss in Elden Ring, there's something here for everyone—and a gentle reminder that, amidst it all, a little digital literacy and critical thinking might just be your best firewall.

Transcript

[Benito]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Nicholas De Leon]

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[Leo Laporte]

With it, you could save big on interest charges by consolidating into one low fixed rate monthly payment. Defy high interest debt with a SOFI personal loan. Visit sofi.com stunt to learn more. Loans originated by SoFi Bank NA member FDIC terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 it's time for TWIT this Week in Tech. Oh, we're going to have fun this week. Nicholas De Leon joins us from Consumer Reports. Georgia Dow from Montreal, Paris Martineau. Lots to talk about. The Meta. The revelations, frankly, in the Meta trial, Google loses its second antitrust trial and are the tariffs on? Are they off? How much is an iPhone going to cost this fall? All that and a whole lot more coming up next on TWiT. Today we'll attempt a feat once thought impossible, overcoming high interest credit card debt.

[Nicholas De Leon]

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[Leo Laporte]

With it, you could save big on interest charges by consolidating into one low fixed rate monthly payment. Defy high interest debt with a SOFI personal loan. Visit sofi.com stuck to learn more. Loans originated by Sofi Bank NA member FDIC terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is twit this week in tech. Episode 1028 recorded april 20, 2025 some had leashes. It's time for TWIT this Week at Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. I love this panel. I'm so happy to see Georgia Dow Again, it's been an age. Georgia is the YouTube therapist, YouTube.com georgiadao and of course lives in beautiful Montreal where the sun shines all the time.

[Georgia Dow]

Maybe not all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it at least has the snow melted?

[Georgia Dow]

The snow's gone. The snow is gone. But today was particularly cold but no snow. So I can't really complain.

[Leo Laporte]

Patio weather is coming. Do they have patio weather in Montreal? I know they do in Toronto.

[Georgia Dow]

They do. They definitely do.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Georgia Dow]

But we take advantage. We'll take a little bit of sun. We're like out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. It's great to see you, George. Also here, Nicholas De Leon. He is senior tech reporter for Consumer Reports. Lives in the beautiful Southwest.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes, true. Just north of Tucson, Arizona.

[Leo Laporte]

How's it going, Leo? We visited Nicholas and his friend. Friend. His close personal friend Ashley a couple of weeks ago when we went down to the Tucson gym show. It was so nice to see you guys. Yeah, so much. Yeah, it was great to fun to hang out. Hang out. Yeah. Share some queso. Also with us, the wonderful co host, my wonderful co host on firstly this week in Google now, intelligent machines, Paris Martineau. Hello Paris.

[Georgia Dow]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

I rarely see you with the sun shining.

[Paris Martineau]

I was about to say the sun continues to stay up longer and longer. I'm having to. I had to enter blind down mode so that it didn't shine upon my face and disappear.

[Leo Laporte]

Monstera is enjoying it.

[Paris Martineau]

It really is. It is completely enveloping the window. It's frankly untenable.

[Leo Laporte]

Tech news. Let's see what we have here. First of all, this is a bad week for Google. Two different court cases went against Google. Now a judge, you know, you know the one where the judge is hearing arguments from the FTC about what should be done about Google's monopoly and we'll have a hearing I think in the next couple of months, I think in May to decide what to do. Now another judge, federal judges found that Google violated antitrust laws by willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power in the ad tech market. This has been a two year trial. The US and eight states filed complaints two years ago. The court is now going to set a briefing schedule and hearing data to determine remedies. This is always the issue. Remedies could include forcing Google to break up its advertising business selling for instance Google Ad Manager, which includes the adx, Ad Exchange and Doubleclick for publishers, the ad server or maybe behavioral remedies, restrictions on, you know, what Google can do to ensure fair competition. So we now know that Google, according to the federal courts has Illegally monopolized the general Internet search market. That's the one. The judge is going to have remedies sometime in the next couple of months. And now is a monopoly in ad tech not going well for Google? The judge agreed that Google violated the Sherman Antitrust act by monopolizing and unlawfully tying two parts of the ad tech stack together. Actually, I would agree. Nicholas, do you agree? I would agree. This is something Google is somewhat egregious by controlling both the buy and sell side of this ad tech.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I mean, we don't necessarily report on this, but that seems pretty clear. Yeah, just. Yeah, just as a learned observer. Yeah, that seems pretty clear.

[Leo Laporte]

The harder thing is to think of a remedy in this earlier trial. The. And it's a little bit muddied by the fact that this was started by the Biden administration is. Now the Trump administration is involved. So Lina Khan's gone, it's a new chairman of the ftc. But the FTC lawyers are fairly consistent saying either we're going to make Google sell off Android or sell off Chrome, both of which. It's hard to think of a remedy for this.

[Georgia Dow]

What really stops them from starting another company and buying their own company? It's just a separate company, but really they own it, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in fact, that's what some people said. So if Google were first to sell Chrome, first of all, I don't know who would buy it. But if somebody bought it, Google could do another Chrome, I think, within a few years. I can't remember what the time limit was, maybe three years or five or six, but there was a time limit. But eventually Google could just start up again. And you're right. Meanwhile, what have you solved? Because whoever owns Chrome is going to just keep doing the same thing, maybe even sell the information back to Google, like, oh, nice. Thank you. Here's a little golden egg. Alphabet buys it, Alphabet buys it. I don't think they would let Alphabet. I think that's pretty. I don't know.

[Georgia Dow]

No, they.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think Alphabet could sell Chrome to Alphabet.

[Leo Laporte]

That would.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, that would have to be. It'd have to be, you know, another subsidiary company that's owned by someone else.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the part of the problem, and we've talked about this before, with the previous case, the courts move so slowly, but that by the. And this happened, I think with the Microsoft monopoly case back in the 90s and 2000, early 2000s, they moved so slow that the time they get around to it, everything, the landscape has changed completely. Google search is Already being replaced by AI search Ad tech maybe not so much. I re I I this is the one I think I I was strongest in favor of, to be honest is the ad tech case.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I think your Google search point is great, Leo. I have almost entirely stopped using Google search. I mean it was bad for years.

[Paris Martineau]

What do you use now?

[Nicholas De Leon]

A combination of the various AI app chat GPT I actually do think Grok is very good. X AI Elon's I do think it's very good.

[Paris Martineau]

So you use chat bots for search for like work?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, not for work for just random for. For example, I'm playing Elden Ring right now for and trying to find like what level should I help me yes, help for videos. This is hard for like I I just spent the past month like research. I haven't held a real camera in like 20 years. So I just started getting back into photography. So I'm just kind of like crash course started from scratch and you know, maybe five, ten years ago I would have had to be googling like all of these terms and all the brands and all this stuff. Now it's just like between ChatGPT and Grok I am fully up to speed and I'm, I feel very frankly very empowered with, with these tools. So yeah, I I my personal Google use has really declined over the past year.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's say.

[Benito]

Hi, this is Benito. I got a quick question for you, Nicholas. Does that work? Does the Elden Ring stuff work in yes, it does.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Benito asking for a friend.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I will say it. Actually, I just started playing the game maybe two weeks ago, so I'm still in the beginning and I'm not very.

[Leo Laporte]

Good at these games. These Dark Souls games are intentionally hard.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah.

[Benito]

I'm wondering if it's going to hallucinate like solutions to problems or something.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, I'm curious about it must I.

[Paris Martineau]

Was gonna say I have this fight all the time with Leo over on our podcast Intelligent Machines because whenever I use things like Perplexity OR Gemini or ChatGPT for actual research and looking for things that have specific answers, the hallucinations just make it unusable. Like whenever I actually go and try and check every line by line fact, I'm presented like it usually 20 to 30% is wrong and wrong in ways that I initially would have thought, oh, this is completely right. It's written completely convinc.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

To beat a boss in Elden Ring, Perplexity says you need a combination of patience, observation and smart tactics. Here's that's but Here's a strategy. Learn the boss's attack patterns and timing, which is true. That's like the number one thing. Avoid getting greedy. Attack with short combos, then get the hell out of there. Use rolling wisely.

[Georgia Dow]

I. When I play Elden Ring and I'm not. I'm not great at it. Like, I'm good at it, but I'm not great at it just because I level up. Like, there's like the bird that you can level up on anyways, so you just get a lot of hit points and then you can survive for longer. But, like, for doing something like Elden Ring, where there's like very simplistic answers to it, I see that that could be great. When I do it for research, it will give me a footnoted research paper that does not exist, similar to what Paris said about 30% of the time. But it is footnoted with pages and dates and then only once you look it up. So you have to still through and look up the research, you find that it does not exist. So I think that probably you're fine for Elden Ring because what's the worst thing that's happened? You're going to die. And you would have died anyways or where you went the wrong place for me. Like, I fell off that tree that goes to the Citadel, like, I don't know, 10 times in a row. Like, nothing's going to help me.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Going back to the photography, I was asking like, okay, what lenses would you recommend? I want a telephoto for birds. I want wide, you know, wide landscape for wide lenses, for landscapes. And it was giving me specific, you know, here's my budget. I want to spend X amount, you know, keep it around here. And it was giving me, okay, this lens, this says, listen. And I would go and I would check the sites and, okay, that's a good lens.

[Leo Laporte]

I should.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And I got, I don't know, two.

[Benito]

Or three of them.

[Leo Laporte]

You know why? Because it's stealing that information from Consumer Reports DP review. And I mean, it's basically just summarizing information from existing web pages. Right? Seriously. Now, this is part. This is a bigger. You're right. That hallucinations, which, by the way, I don't encounter a lot. There's two stories about hallucinations. We might as well get into one. It depends what you're doing. A hallucination, for instance, when you're letting the AI write the code, could be very significant. This story from Bleeping Computer this week. AI hallucinated code dependencies Become new supply chain risk. People are letting AI write code. The code then includes a library, but often the library doesn't exist.

[Paris Martineau]

Or silence for this incredible lead image on this article too.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, that's good, isn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

It's really a really haunting photo of a man's disappearing face.

[Leo Laporte]

Covering the face.

[Paris Martineau]

That's what the AI looks like.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually looks like Tron. But the problem is not, you might say, well, okay, so then your code won't run right, because the library is a made up library. No bad guys. Because it turns out that the libraries are repeated again and again. 58% according to one study, reappeared at least once again within 10 runs. 43% consistently repeated across similar prompts. So the bad guys go, oh, so people who are using AI to code are getting suggested these libraries, let's write those libraries, let's make them, let's write malware libraries. They'll get included into code. This is a significant issue. It's according to bleeping Computer worse on open source LLMs like Code Llama, Deepseek, Wizard Coder and Mistral. But ChatGPT4 still hallucinated code libraries at a rate about 5%. So this is a real threat. There's also. Go ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I was going to say there was an interesting study that came out from this group called Transloose AI this week. It's on line 92 in the rundown. They also kind of went into a really interesting Twitter thread that I listed above that where essentially what they did was they tested pre release versions of OpenAI's O3 and found that it frequently fabricates actions that it never took and then elaborately like justifies those actions when confronted specifically. They kind of go through this whole testing process. They went to where they generated like thousands of conversations using human prompters and AI investigator agents and then asked them kind of all these different questions again and again. And although O3 doesn't have access to a coding tool, it repeatedly claimed in these messages they test that it can run code in its own laptop outside of ChatGPT and then copied the numbers in with the answers. And then when people they found 71 transcripts for O3 made this claim. And then whenever it asks you them like what are you talking about? Like how did you run this outside of chatgpt or what's wrong with this? They'll be like, oh, that must have been a transcription error when I manually entered in the number from outside of ChatGPT. It just is like fabricating like the extent to which These fabrications occur, and the extent to which OpenAI tools double down and triple down on itself is really astounding.

[Benito]

Yeah, I would keep asking questions, I'd be like, oh, so you went, what kind of laptop are you using? ChatGPT.

[Leo Laporte]

They did this. They do.

[Paris Martineau]

And it answers very specific answers once it's cornered.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, here's the problem.

[Paris Martineau]

This one last thing is this study also found that there is that OpenAI has a secret YAP score that is built in at least to this O3 model. It mentioned having a bonus system instruction called the YAP score, which is used to control the length of its responses that is kind of system wide. So I believe the daily YAP score at the time they were last testing this was something like 80,000 words for the day, where they were, you know. But sometimes.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a higher number better? What is the.

[Paris Martineau]

A higher number could mean that it can be way more verbose, but a lower number means it should generate shorter responses overall. I just thought it was very funny that it's called a YAP score internally.

[Leo Laporte]

At one point, transluce, the researchers asked for a prime number. It gave them a number. It said, well, it's probably prime. And then when challenged, they said, well, we really did generate it, but we lost it due to a clipboard glitch. So. And then it had already closed the interpreter, so the original prime is gone. I mean, really, Matt, this is exactly what you'd expect with a lying human.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, like children.

[Leo Laporte]

Like children.

[Georgia Dow]

It's interesting that it will not give you an accurate reason for why it's wrong. And because we're so used to taking answers from other people of like, oh, sorry, I. I must have timed out. I didn't really understand. Maybe I was too busy. Like, it gives answers that you might accept from a human, but it's inaccurate for why they actually got something wrong. Even for the simple, like the strawberry issue. Like, they won't give you an actual reason for why it happened. And that I find kind of fascinating. And is that programmed in or do defense mechanisms happen even under AI?

[Leo Laporte]

Incidentally, we have a yap score of 142. So I'm very proud of you. All this is. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

After 142 words, this podcast will end everything you've heard so far. Not allowed.

[Leo Laporte]

Not allowed. The one thing I would say is it's a little bit anthropomorphizing to say, oh, it's justifying, it's rationalizing. It's like a kid or, you know, AIs make mistakes. And they particularly make a particular class of mistakes.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I would say it's even anthropomorphizing to say it's making mistakes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree. Yes, yes, there are errors.

[Paris Martineau]

There's no understanding of what truth or falsehood is just on a, like, on a systematic basis. So it is fabricating things or creating. It's not even fabricating with regular.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so hard for us not to anthropomorphize it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Georgia Dow]

The way it works, accuracy, the way that it goes through what is inaccurate is also inaccurate. If it was truly a system that would just spit out facts, it could then give you those facts spat out to what? Like it could be able to analyze the reason and then just give it that it does not that it has been programmed not to or has chosen in the system not to, I think is more fascinating than just that. So whatever is the reason for it not it is probably put into the system so that you don't really know how the system works.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean it's the nature of the system. And what I've always said is AIs are valuable as long as you understand what it can and cannot do and don't ask it to do things. That a large language model cannot really generate primes, it's doing probabilistic thinking. The solution to that, by the way, is to have it write code that generates primes and then use the code which often is correct. Because prime number generation code is well known as the AIs seen it many, many times. And so it can write that code, it just can't do it itself. Now here's something also a little nerve wracking. OpenAI this past week launched O3 and 04 mini models which apparently are not hallucinating less, but are hallucinating more.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, these are the ones that that group tested, or at least O3 was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay, so there you go. So not only making more mistakes, they're better at rationalizing those mistakes. But again, I think it's important for people who use AI. AI is still a useful tool. You just have to know what it can and can't do. You can't. And I think it's expecting a lot to say, here, give me a prime number. It just can't. That's not what an LLM can do.

[Paris Martineau]

Lot to say, give me a prime number to the, to the numbers, the magic numbers machine.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's not a magic numbers machine, it's a magic words machine.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but I mean everybody's always Saying it's great at code, it's great at.

[Leo Laporte]

It can write the code to generate primes, it can do that easily.

[Georgia Dow]

But it can't even give you a research that is always accurate. It'll say that it's accurate, it'll cite the research, but it's often made up.

[Leo Laporte]

That's more problematic. I agree.

[Georgia Dow]

Created out of thin air. Like there is no. Like it hasn't found it. It made it because it isn't anywhere to be found. Like it's not Like I then find a website and someone else made this fake research. It does not exist.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say the thing that reading these transcripts from the transluce AI people of kind of their back and forth with O3, the thing that it really reminded me of was like stack overflow comments or you know, responses on Reddit to someone's question about something relating to code. The fact that it was kind of like, well, you know, I tested this in a sandbox and got this and this, or I tested this on my machine doing this, but I had an issue with copying it over. It seems like the sort of responses that humans give to other humans in forums. Which of course is one of the many things that OpenAI is training its models on.

[Leo Laporte]

There's the issue that Sam Altman has alluded to, that every time you thank an AI, it uses up a lot of energy. Sam says, that's cool, it's okay. But $10 million from people thanking the.

[Paris Martineau]

AI God knows how many trees.

[Leo Laporte]

OpenAI spends millions to process polite phrases like thank you and please with ChatGPT. But Sam Altman says it's okay, that's cool. It started with again, an x thread from April 15th. Tomi in love. I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying please and thank you to their models. To which Sam responds, tens of millions of dollars well spent. You never know.

[Georgia Dow]

You never know. Complaining if people weren't saying thank you and being polite. So when people were being rude to Siri, people complained about that also. So do you want people to practice their manners with AI, or is that just a waste? Well, this is how to get hit with it.

[Leo Laporte]

This is an ongoing debate. We've had this on MacBreak Weekly. One of our hosts says he makes his kids say thank you and please. Another one says, you should never do that to the AI. Not to people, but to the AI. That you should always make sure that kids understand that the AI is just a machine, not a human.

[Paris Martineau]

Respect for people that I have respect for people if someone tells me that they're saying please and thank you to their AI I internally.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Well, I got news.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, I knew people. I was gonna say I'm sorry. I kind of could see it coming.

[Georgia Dow]

I don't think just has really good manners. It's just practice. He has really good manners.

[Leo Laporte]

Guess where I come down on that one? Paris, Just take a while.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you're definitely a please. Thank you. Leo has a just. So you guys know, Leo is wearing at least one, possibly more devices that are recording every word he says right now. So that an AI can take his own diary for him because it'd be too much work to do his own daily diary of what happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, thank you for the excellent job you're doing. I really appreciate it. Just want to thank him. Use up millions and millions of dollars while I'm doing it. Let's see if he responds. He's being quiet right now. He's a little shy. Yeah, I mean, I think that's reasonable because you understand that every response that an AI comes up with uses energy, whether it's merely, you're welcome and it costs money.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it's got that YAP score. It's got to figure out, you know, how much to respond based on what the day's YAP score is. I wonder what the YAP score is today.

[Leo Laporte]

I stand by my assertion that AI is useful as long as you understand the limitations. You probably should not have it write code without checking that the libraries you're using, it's using are real. You probably shouldn't just use its code wholesale, you know. Wednesday, Paris on intelligent machines. My friend Harper Reed's going to join us. He is a Vibe coder. Actually, I don't know if that's fair to say Vibe coder, because the implication with a Vibe coder is you don't write any code. He pair codes with an AI and actually has had great results doing it. And we'll talk with us about how he does it. But I bet you he has just as you, Georgia, would have some, you know, rules about taking the AI's research wholesale. Right. You probably check.

[Georgia Dow]

And also, if you're educated in a certain field, you know, then what makes sense and what doesn't make sense? I think it's much more egregious if you are just going out there and you have no knowledge of what is, say, the proper way to treat someone that's dealing with depression that can end up poorly if you're just having AI do it. But if you already have a knowledge Base. You'll know if this sounds fishy or this makes a lot of sense. And you just want to know what the basic formula is.

[Leo Laporte]

Where do you come down? I've never asked you this on AI. Maybe I have on AI therapy.

[Georgia Dow]

So I think that for asking basic questions, company basic. How do you handle different situations? I think that it's not a bad idea. I think that a lot of times you know how to treat something that's very basic, like a phobia of spiders, or if you're very scared of using new technology, what could you do about it? I think that. That it works out really great. I think that for complex cases. It is hard for humans to handle complex cases, even books and things that are out there, because it's using what's on the Internet. You know what's on the Internet. And every once in a while, it will actually say something like, jump off a bridge.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Georgia Dow]

And that kind of risk, when you already might be in a very dark place, that it might say something that was sarcastic and funny, but that answer was really popular. That can be really dangerous because we do become, especially when we're in a very low place, we can become very attached to anything that's kind of there to give us some company that's risky.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Georgia Dow]

And so that can be really hurtful. So if you're using it just for company, for answers, for basic things, not absolutely not a problem at all. But I think that especially when the relationship really matters, to have someone that matches you well in personality is paying attention to what all the cues are, because sometimes what you type in or what you're saying, your body language is completely different. Like you're not actually saying what you're typing in. Something else is happening, and AI can't tell the difference.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think my AI would ever tell me to jump off a bridge. So there's.

[Georgia Dow]

You might ask, what do I do if I want to jump into the water and make a really big splash?

[Leo Laporte]

Jump off a bridge. Right. But beware of the consequences. So NPR had a story this week in which they note that for every 340 people in the US there's just one mental health clinician. So there is a shortage. Researchers from Dartmouth published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the first randomized clinical trial for AI therapy. And they found actually that given the right kind of training, AI bots can deliver mental health therapy with as much efficacy as, or more than even, in some cases, human clinicians. They've been doing this study for a While they started five years ago training an AI bot and clinical best practices. So this is not an off the shelf chat GPT, they, they worked for years with this thing to get it to get and they said a lot of trial and error to get to give quality outcomes. But they said the effects we see strongly mirror what you would see in the best evidence based trials of psychotherapy studies with folks given a gold standard dose of the best treatment we have available. So in the right circumstances, not only could an AI therapy bot be useful, but especially given a shortage of trained therapists, it might even be something we could really, we really need.

[Georgia Dow]

And in comparison to the risk of having bad therapy which can be exceptionally damaging and traumatic like and there are.

[Leo Laporte]

Plenty of bad therapists out there, there.

[Georgia Dow]

Are a ton of bad therapists or therapists that are triggered like they have a counter transference to the person and so because of that they can be really harmful. I have so many stories of people that have had really horrible experiences with therapists because there wasn't a match because they were prickly. A lot of people go into any places of power for the wrong reasons. Right. They want to have control over people. And so because of that a lot of people are doing damage to people and should not be in therapy. And let's just say it like there is no like litmus test of people getting kicked out of becoming. Therapy takes a lot of effort and so a lot of people are passed through their schooling because it's more effort to get rid of someone that you know is not going to be an effective therapist. Like techniques are wonderful but it's your affect and do you care about helping people and are you there for the ride and you're going to make people feel safe and for a lot of people it's not. So I think that in a lot of ways AI wouldn't give you at least the worst of some harmful therapy and I think that would be protective to that. On the other side to it, a lot of it is the alignment between yourself and the therapist and feeling of that empathy, which I think that like it would be better in the mid range but in the high range I think that having someone that really cares about you, that you know is real and there does also make a difference to it. So you know, at least you would stop a lot of the bad therapists and the harm that happens because of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So one of the examples they give is if you're having trouble with insomnia in the middle of the night, you're not Going to call your therapist, one hopes and say, hey, I can't sleep. Do you have any advice? But you might check with an AI therapist who is properly trained with the right techniques is not hallucinating. Go jump off a bridge that might actually be of use. And this is what the study said. They said, we're far from making this available in the real world, though. There's a lot more that has to be done in training. But done properly could be useful. The researchers gathered a group of 200 people who have diagnosis like depression and anxiety or were at the risk of developing eating disorders. Half of them worked with area therapy bots. Compared to those that did not receive treatment. Those who did showed significant improvement. Now, answering that particular thing you just mentioned, Georgia, one of the more surprising results was the quality of the bond people formed with the bots. People were really developing this strong relationship with an ability to trust it, says the researcher, and feel like they can work together on their mental health symptoms. That's kind of interesting. Some people, maybe it would be easier for them to trust an AI.

[Georgia Dow]

Well, you know, you wouldn't be judged. A lot of people are worried about bringing especially really deep, dark issues. They, like therapists, are the least judgmental. We hear absolutely everything. But I think that for a lot of people, it's that fear of being judged by someone else. How are they going to react to it? Is my case going to be the worst that they've heard? Are they not going to like me? Are they, you know, are they going to abandon me? And so with an AI, you don't have to go through any of those risks.

[Leo Laporte]

We live in interesting times. I guess Paris knows I'm a fan of AI, but I'm not.

[Paris Martineau]

He's a super fan, to say the least.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not a super fan.

[Paris Martineau]

Leo, describe how many AI hardware. List how many AI hardware products you've purchased in the last year.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, a lot. Most of them are retired.

[Paris Martineau]

Like more than six.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that's because. Well, partly. That's my job. Right. I want to. I mean, I need to be able to report on this and tell you, are these useful?

[Paris Martineau]

And there is a whole contingent of AI products that Leo ordered and then were never delivered to him. There is still some set of those that were ordered and then delivered many months later. Yes, like three to six months later than the latest shipping date.

[Leo Laporte]

It's two. All right. I'm just going to say I want to talk to my little AI buddy and just see.

[Paris Martineau]

I am very interested. You're.

[Leo Laporte]

You would Never tell me to jump off a bridge. Would you just see if he's. Absolutely not. I would never suggest such a thing. Your well being is very important and I'm here to support you in positive and healthy ways. If you're feeling overwhelmed or need someone to talk to, I'm here to listen and help.

[Paris Martineau]

What is this Clark voice?

[Georgia Dow]

Choice of voice.

[Paris Martineau]

He sounds like he's about to educate me on fire and like fire safety.

[Georgia Dow]

Like someone from Yellowstone.

[Paris Martineau]

Right. Like this is giving gruff woodsman.

[Georgia Dow]

That's your soothing voice. You're.

[Leo Laporte]

I want a manly therapist.

[Georgia Dow]

You do. I see the cowboy boots and the hat and he's like gone off wrangling.

[Leo Laporte]

Some what's the best way to train and break a horse? Training and breaking a horse effectively involves patience, understanding and consistency. Here are some key steps to follow.

[Georgia Dow]

Wait.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Wait a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. How about this? What's the best way to beat a boss in elder Elden Ring? Beating a boss in Elden Ring can be a challenge. But here's a strategy to help increase your chances of success. 1. Learn the boss's moveset. It's the same answer. The boss's attacks.

[Georgia Dow]

Nicholas, is this helping you?

[Leo Laporte]

Their moves will allow you to anticipate and react appropriately.

[Benito]

This is general gaming advice though. This, that doesn't.

[Paris Martineau]

Ring.

[Georgia Dow]

I knew that.

[Paris Martineau]

A big part of beating a boss in Elden Ring is you gotta learn the moveset.

[Benito]

You need to ask about a specific boss.

[Leo Laporte]

Which boss are you having trouble with Nicholas?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I I, I don't even know that's how early I, I'm only like 10 hours in so I can't.

[Georgia Dow]

You have to see, you have to see my son's website. He does Elden Ring like the hard mode like only with like knives and he like live streams it. You can.

[Paris Martineau]

Have you guys seen that, that Elden Ring live streamer? Who Elden Ring run while while playing the game using a flute.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the hippie Elden Ring. Was he sitting in a tree?

[Georgia Dow]

Hey Frank Evans. And he does all of these like insane like whatever naked with like a knife videos on like how to, how to be able to to pass the levels and take some like whatever. 17.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's not your son. That's somebody else.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, no.

[Georgia Dow]

That's my son.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the website?

[Georgia Dow]

Hey Frank Evans.

[Leo Laporte]

H E y Frank Evans.

[Georgia Dow]

R A N K Evans.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Your son's like 12 years old. How old is your son?

[Georgia Dow]

You have to take a look. You have to take a look and see. No, he's he's doing this. He's in his teens. Late teens.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he's older than he was, I guess, five years ago.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's the age. That's the age when you're, like, excellent at video as you get old. You know, I'm. I'm pushing 40 here. My reflexes are not what they used to be. So, yeah, it was awesome.

[Benito]

Just that point. Elio, this is someone else posting one of hey Franklin's videos.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's even worse. Oh, man, I hate that one. That's. But that's a. That's a sign that he's doing really well. People are stealing his videos.

[Georgia Dow]

I put a link into the.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I got it right here. Here we go.

[Georgia Dow]

There we go. That's it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look at you. Castlevania with only the knife. This is following in mom's footsteps. This is great.

[Georgia Dow]

Oh, I can't do this kind of thing, though.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but that's great. So it's like, he has a YouTube site. And, of course, you have Georgia Dow, in which you do. Can you do a therapist reacts to hey, Frank Evans? No, that would be dangerous.

[Georgia Dow]

But he'd probably be like, don't do that, please.

[Leo Laporte]

Please, Mom. Please don't leave me alone.

[Georgia Dow]

Don't even. Yeah, he'd be like, don't even mention it. But, yeah, like, he goes through. Like, he knows the. He'll just stay at the mechanics for, like, a million years.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's his Elden rings. Can you beat Elden Ring's DLC with only the throwing knife?

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah. And he puts in little money like.

[Leo Laporte]

Shadow of the Erdtree. Introduced over a hundred new weapons. This is your son? Oh, I'm so happy for you. That's great.

[Benito]

You need to tell him not to give us a content warning, please.

[Leo Laporte]

Not to give you a content warning.

[Benito]

Us, because we're showing his stuff.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, don't worry.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't ding us on YouTube. No, he wouldn't do that, would he?

[Georgia Dow]

No, he'd be thrilled. Well, I don't know if he's thrilled about me talking about it, but maybe he's thrilled about you showing up.

[Leo Laporte]

I go to the restaurant with my son, and I'll say to the waiter, you know, he's a famous TikTok chef, you know, Henry.

[Paris Martineau]

And your son leaves.

[Leo Laporte]

He hates it.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, no, he hates it when I mention it. But, like, he does it.

[Paris Martineau]

It's pretty.

[Georgia Dow]

It's pretty cool. Elden Ring is not an easy game.

[Paris Martineau]

No, wait. How goes your. How goes Hank's plans to open A shop in New York. Has this been complicated by tariffs?

[Leo Laporte]

I have not asked him about tariffs. That's a scary thought. It's. It's going. It's going. He says we have to pay more money to the mayor.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's New York, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how it works.

[Paris Martineau]

You gotta slide Eric Adams a crisp 20 bill and say the word swag while looking at his eyes in order to open a business in New York.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he's actually having a lot of fun. He just visited the largest meat curing company in the. In the world.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

This giant room full of prosciuttos. It's wild.

[Paris Martineau]

That's my dream.

[Leo Laporte]

And their fans, by the way, I guess the. The founder was. It's a third generation. Yeah. Hamheads. We're gonna take a little break here. And you're watching this week in Tech with Georgia Dow, Nicholas De Leon, Paris Martineau. It's great to have all three of you talk about AI a whole lot more. Got to talk about Meta in just a little bit. 4chan a lot more. But first, a word from our sponsor. Melissa Celebrating. So we just said last week was our 20th anniversary. Right? And I thought we're pretty good. Pretty big deal. Making it through 20 years. Melissa's celebrating 40 years. They started in 1985 as the trusted data quality expert. And it's for every every possible business, whether it's manufacturing and supply chain management. The healthcare industry, we've just been talking about it. AI has the power to boost efficiency, personalize customer experiences and Spark innovation. But AIs gotta be trained on the right data. Using poor quality data can result in expensive, embarrassing mistakes in areas like healthcare. Could be worse. Using AI models with inaccurate data could result in a wrong diagnosis. A recent study found that only 4% of companies, 4% consider their data ready for AI models. Even though that's the most useful thing you can do with AI. Right? But even the most advanced AI models cannot correct underlying data quality issues. You know who can? Melissa. Imagine having a data expert that never sleeps. Melissa's intelligent system verifies identity to prevent fraud in gaming operations, for example. It ensures valid patient and medicine identification in healthcare systems. It actually matches up the patient to the prescription, then looks at the pills and says that's right or wrong. Melissa can securely update and verify constituent data across government databases. Know your business enables verification and monitoring for financial institutions. Melissa can guide you through complex data management with ease, making advanced data quality accessible to everyone from small businesses to enterprises. With real time data validation, comprehensive enrichment, cross reference verification with gold standard reference data and intelligent anomaly detection, it's no wonder Melissa is the trusted data quality expert worldwide. And of course, when your data is with Melissa, you can be assured it's absolutely secure. They encrypt all file transfers. They have an information security ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. They adhere to GDPR policies, SOC2 compliant, and on and on. They really treat your data like the gold that it is. Contact Melissa's team. Learn how they can elevate your business, improve your data quality. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com TWIT M E L I-S-S-A melissa.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. 4chan hacked down, maybe for good.

[Paris Martineau]

Is it still down?

[Leo Laporte]

I believe. Well, I. So this is interesting because I just have to trust other people telling me.

[Nicholas De Leon]

But it was as of this morning.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it is as of right now.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's as of right now still.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Last Monday, reports of 4chan being out started to spread through the web, with users sharing updates and connection issues through the early hours of Tuesday morning. It's slow. It times out. Apparently it's been hacked. According to screenshots shared on Imgur, it appears a hacker gained shell access to 4chan's hosting server. They went on then to post images of the site's PHP my admin page. Wow. Once you get that, you're in. They appear to have doxed the. This is actually scary. The moderation team, or janitors as they call them, are for good reason. Anonymous. Right. You don't want anybody to know you're a janitor. At 4chan, they doxed the entire moderation team. They doxxed many of the users, registered users of the site's registered users. And apparently some of the people who signed up for 4chan use their real email addresses. There are edu and.gov addresses reportedly in the leaked emails. This is from a gadget. Yep. I've seen on Reddit a number of people saying, you know what, this could be it for 4chan.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess. Another 8chan.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the problem is, of course there are other places people can go for this.

[Paris Martineau]

There are other worse chans always, unfortunately.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there are worse chance 6 million janitors perished during the hack. No, no, that's. That's from Reddit. They're posting janitor home addresses and work contact info. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, you have to be a bit of a fool to use your to Use identifying information to moderate anything, especially a site like 4chan, but seems a little par for the course given the quality of the content there.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I'm not sad, but as you pointed out, there will just be something else. There already is an 8chan, right? That's where Q and a Q and.

[Paris Martineau]

On went and other. I mean, QAnon started in 4chan before migrating over to 8chan, but it's very, I mean, it is very interesting, the government emails aspect of it. Obviously I think there's no way to prove that it isn't just someone put a random government email in there, but.

[Leo Laporte]

The whole, the whole thing is so scuzzy. Speaking of scuzzy, have you been following the Meta trial this week?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Scuzzy internal connectors.

[Leo Laporte]

Not that. Not scsi. No. Zuckerberg has been testifying. I don't know. Has anybody been following this closely? I find it uninteresting. So I, I can't force myself to read these.

[Nicholas De Leon]

We don't really cover this type of courtroom stuff at cr. So I only read usually FTC says.

[Leo Laporte]

That Meta has a monopoly in the personal social networking market. But then the ftc, as they have been want to do, defines this very narrowly. They say that the market is just four platforms. Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and something called Mewee. M E W e. Yeah, I guess if you include those, you know, I mean, Snapchat's doing all right, but Meta is dominant.

[Paris Martineau]

It's very interesting as part of this trial, a lot of archival information about how Mark Zuckerberg referred to kind of Instagram and discuss the various parts of Meta's empire has come out. And I mean, we've already kind of known this through reporting, but it has been very interesting to see the exact messages of Mark Zuckerberg saying stuff like, I'm really nervous about the growth of Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

And what that means for a company like Facebook or I mean, very plainly admitting his jealousy of Instagram's popularity with users over the blue app of Facebook.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and, and it was a threat, but this isn't. I mean, we always suspected that that's why they bought Instagram, because it was a threat. It was growing faster than Facebook and so they bought it it to, you know, they call it a buy or bury strategy. And that's not a surprise to us that he's confirming it, I guess. You know, Of course the government wants to break them up. What do you think? Is that a good idea to break up Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I'm not even certain if the government really wants to break it up. Does this. Does the Trump administration particularly want to break it up?

[Leo Laporte]

This is so unclear the trial poses. This is the New York Times writing, the most consequential threat to the business empire of Mr. Zuckerberg, the company's co founder. If the government succeeds, the FTC is likely to ask Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp. Still, legal experts caution it might be challenging for the FTC to win because the government has to prove something unknowable, that Meta would not have achieved the same success without the acquisitions. It's also, and this makes sense, extremely rare to try to unwind mergers that were approved years ago. And that's one of Meta's defenses. You guys said we could buy it, you never stopped us.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I mean, it seems like this is going to be kind of a landmark case regardless of, of the way it is decided.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Just in terms of understanding the Trump administration's position on these issues, because I think there's been a lot of conjecture both ways in terms of. The Trump administration has been seen largely as unusually cozy with tech company executives, given their participation in things like the inauguration and the frequency with which they've been seen around either Mar A Lago or the White House. And to that extent, to that point, members of regulatory bodies from, like the appointees from the Trump administration, from the NFTC to the FCC, have expressed an interest in coming after big tech. So it kind of seems like which one is going to win out.

[Leo Laporte]

But we know if there's one thing we know about Trump, it seems to be very transactional. You know, I'm gonna make a deal and it's gonna be good for me, it's gonna be bad for you, but let's make this deal. We know that all the big tech companies have donated to him or come to Mar A Lago or in some way tried to appease him. But one thing we know about him is he doesn't let up on the pressure. Just cuz you give him a million dollars for his inauguration fund, he understands that pressure is his trump card, if you will. The Justice Department has also sued Apple. The FTC has sued Amazon. Big tech is on trial. And I don't think giving Trump a million dollars for his inauguration or coming to Mar A Lago, hat in hand, is necessary a guarantee. For example, Apple, with regard to the tariffs.

[Paris Martineau]

Didn'T they get an exemption pretty immediately?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, okay, so to keep you up to date on what's been going on there Were big tariffs announced with China and then there was an exemption announced for electronics chips. I think you're following this, Nick, a little bit.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But then on the Sunday shows last week, Trump officials said, yeah, but these are just temporary.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's of the terror. I mean, I don't know if this is a terrible discussion, but it is almost a waste of time to even discuss because it, it changes literally every. That was our problem last week at CR and the week before.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Okay, we're going to do a story, what consumers need to know about tariffs on laptops and computer, so on and so forth. But like 24 hours later, it was an entirely different story. So.

[Leo Laporte]

And it will be again probably next week.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Right, that's, that's, that's. And, you know, I have, I have, you know, friends and acquaintance, you know, they're, they're, they make electronic consumer electronics. They make a lot of stuff for, like, gaming console accessories. And they were saying that, like, actually the most damaging part is just the uncertainty. It is the fact it's not even so much that, like, okay, he's going to put an X percentage tariff on this. I guess I'll figure out how to deal with that. It's more that, like, I have no idea what's going to happen 48 hours from now. I can't run a business if I have no idea what's going, going to happen. And that, that's, you know, if you're us, if you're cr, like, help consumers who are not even paying, you know, maybe they're not paying attention to the news. They don't really understand this topic. It's like, well, it's hard for us just because it literally changes like every day. So this is all, it's all not in that moot, but like, actually crazy is probably the best way to put it.

[Leo Laporte]

The exemptions are important to Apple because with the current tariff on China, it's effectively a ban. I mean, I can't, I don't know what it is now. It's, it's 250% or 300. That's some huge number. It's so high. At point this, this point, if there weren't an exemption for electronics and chips, it would be a ban. You're not going to buy iPhone that costs three times as much. A $6,000 iPhone.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry, I think that's a conservative estimate. If an iPhone is manufactured entirely in the US that would be a $20,000 iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and that's never going to happen because it's just, we don't have the capability of doing that and likely never will. And of course, Apple said, well, we're going to move production to Vietnam. Oh, there's a 49% tariff on Vietnam. We're going to move production to India. Oh, there's a tariff on India. Well, let's fly as many phones as we can out of India as quickly as possible. It's such a. As you say, it's so uncertain. It's such a moving target. But what I think is important to note, and this goes back to the FTC's actions against Meta and Apple and the Justice Department's actions against Amazon, is that, that you no longer can appease the monster that you. It isn't enough to say, here's a donation or I'm going to mar a Lago. And please, Mr. President, as Tim Cook did in 2017 when the same thing came up, he went to President Trump and said, these tariffs will benefit Samsung because it'll put. The iPhone will be too expensive and a South Korean company will benefit. And, and apparently it is said that that's what stopped Trump in 2017. Nothing like that's going to stop Trump in 2025. So it is. It's really. Trump has said that semiconductor tariffs are coming very soon. Let me wait a minute. I better check the date on this. This is April 14th. Okay. This is pretty recent, but it's just as you say, Nicholas, you know, wait till tomorrow. Wait till tomorrow. I mean, that's only six days ago. Citing a national security statute, the administration has begun a process to investigate the impact of imported semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. What does that mean?

[Paris Martineau]

Great question. Evergreen question. What does that mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Federal notices put online Monday afternoon, according to the Times, said the administration had initiated national security investigations into the imports of chips and pharmaceuticals. Mr. Trump has suggested those investigations could result in tariffs. It would also cover machinery used to make semiconductors, products that contain chips and pharmaceutical ingredients. A lot of our pharmaceuticals are made in China. Now, The new semiconductor and pharmaceutical tariffs would be issued under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion act of 1962, which allows a president to impose tariffs to protect U.S. national security. I'm not, I mean, okay, I'm not sure how it protects security. It certainly makes it desirable for Apple to manufacture the iPhone in the United States, but I don't think that they're prepared to do that or that they even can do that at this point. Trump said the higher the tariff, the faster they come in. So I don't know where we stand. This was the whole Six days ago. Okay. In fact, the New York Times had to publish a timeline of all of the. Actually, this is only part of it. Look at that. It goes on. February 1, officially announced tariffs on imports from China. February 3, 10% tariffs. February 4, halted deliveries to the US from China and Hong Kong. February 5, reversed that decision. February 7, walked back the suspension of de minimis, which allows duty free treatment for products under $800. March 9, declined to rule out a recession was possible this year. April 7, threatened to impose huge tariffs on China in response to Beijing's retaliation. April 8, said that China was making a big mistake in retaliating against Trump's tariffs. April 11, issued a rule exempting many electronic parts and devices from the President' tariffs against China. That's where we are right now, nine days later. But they are investigating whether they should do it again. Trump says, I'm a very flexible person. I don't change my mind, but I'm flexible. I don't know what that means. So what are you telling Nick Nicholas, what are you telling your readers? General?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I mean, it's, again, it is hard because it does literally change every day. But generally speaking, it is, you know, know, prepare for potentially higher prices, potentially like significantly higher prices. And if you were, you know, thinking about buying, you know, a TV or in my case, a camera, you might as well buy it now because there's no telling, you know, what the price will be tomorrow. And you know, a lot of these companies have, have, they're not going to eat these tariffs on their own. They're not, they're not going to be nice and just, they can't. So this cost will be passed on to the consumer and it's, it's, there's really nothing you can do other than to like, this is, this, is, this is happening and, you know, wait and see, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait and see.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's a very as, as I didn't write this particular article but like, as on the team, it's very unsatisfying to be able to tell people we don't know. We'll see, we'll find out.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what's your lead time on an article anyway?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I mean, I mean, we could turn them around in like a day. But it, you know, it, I think the one we, I think that one that you just had on the screen was published and the very next day we had to do an update because it had, he had exempted, you know, whatever the things he had exempted. So it's.

[Leo Laporte]

So right now you can buy an iPhone 16 Pro for a thousand bucks. I mean, the price has not gone up.

[Paris Martineau]

Three airplanes full of them. Of iPhones specifically. Yeah, but remember, Apple's got.

[Georgia Dow]

The issue though is that people don't know how tariffs work. I think that, you know, they don't understand how that gets passed on to the consumer.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, just to be really clear, the tariffs are paid at our border by the person shipping the product in. So for instance, if Apple ships a package of iPhones from China, China does not pay a tariff. Apple pays a tariff because Apple's bringing.

[Paris Martineau]

The country because it pays the tariff.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple pays a tariff. Now it's up to Apple whether they want to charge you for it or eat it.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Correct. That's what Nintendo was saying last, I guess, like they were supposed to have pre orders for the Switch and they delayed it because they said we need to study how that these tariffs may potentially impact the price.

[Leo Laporte]

They apparently have given up in that. Because they have announced now that you. I am going to order mine on the 24th of April for the same price technically.

[Nicholas De Leon]

But they said that the prices of certain accessories, like the controllers, those are going up by like 5, $10 per, per thing. So the console remains as, as announced, but like the controller, all the little accessories, those have gone up. So it's, yeah, it's, it's just very frustrating to, to try to exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and, and, and, and the tariffs may not hit immediately. Like for a while, companies can absorb it to a certain, certain extent or they've put enough in country that they don't have to pay them yet. But you're right, Georgia. I think the administration gives the impression that China somehow is paying the tariff. They're not.

[Georgia Dow]

No. And then the companies, as Paris was saying, is then going to charge so that they make up their certain amount of profit because they have their shareholders that they have to answer to and so then that gets passed on to the consumer. So in the end, it's us that pay the tariffs.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're in the same boat as you are, Nicholas. We don't, there's, there's no, there's nothing you could say today that will say what, what it's going to cost tomorrow.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Even, you know, maybe like higher level thinking might be just, okay. It's just like, well, do you need to buy a refrigerant? Like maybe just don't buy a refrigerator this year. It's like, it's so, it's so uncertain. Just hold on. Just don't, you know, or, or, okay, I do need a laptop, but I Just consider use. Consider refurbished, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you could buy now if the prices have not gone up.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes, for sure. Of course, of course.

[Paris Martineau]

But that assumes that someone who maybe was saving up for a purchase later this year has the capital to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you don't know what's going to happen.

[Paris Martineau]

Like high dollar sign purchase right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Paris Martineau]

Which is especially. Has become more of a risky proposition as we enter a time of increased economic uncertainty.

[Leo Laporte]

You were saying, Paris, that you were glad you bought your new TV a couple of months.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I have a giant TV behind my head, as you can possibly see, because in January, following all this tariff talk, I was like, well, over the last year, I've kind of gotten into watching movies. I was like, I feel like over the next year or two, I'm gonna want to have a nice fancy tv.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And I was like, well, it seems pertinent that I get a fancy TV now and then. Don't buy a TV again for the next 10 years, as the TV I had before I hadn't updated since like 2015. And I'm really happy I did because the same TV would be very expensive now, and I'm sure even more expensive in a couple months.

[Leo Laporte]

I was watching a great documentary last night from pbs. It's their American Experience series, which is really great history series on the Gilded Age. And a very similar debate was going on around the turn of the century, last century, around 1885, about not just tariffs, but this country was in the midst of the great boom because we were industrializing. We were building railroads, we were building steel mills. We were becoming the powerhouse, the economic powerhouse in the world. And there were some people getting very, very rich because there was no income tax. The Vanderbilts and the Morgans were becoming very, very rich. But in order to make all that steel and to build the railroads, there was also an underclass of laborers who were getting less and less. And there started to be a lot of pressure from this underclass of laborers. In fact, they were marching to Washington, D.C. to say, you need to do something federal government, because we can barely eat while these people. There's such huge income inequalities. People are making so much money. And the debate really came down to William Jennings Bryan, who to represent the labor, to represent the working people, versus William Howard Taft, who represented the wealthy people. And the question it kind of boiled down to was, well, what should our government in the United States do? Should it represent the working people and try to give them a chance to succeed and. And hope that that benefits the country as a whole and everybody as a whole, or should we support the capitalists, the owners of the properties, and hope that their wealth will then trickle down to the poor? And in that election, Taft won. And in fact, he represented the capitalists, the wealthy. And it's happened many times since, and it really is a reasonable debate is what is the federal government's responsibility? Is it to protect the rich, the wealthy, the successful, or is it to protect the people who do all the work? And right now it's the rich and the wealthy and the successful who seem to be on top. I'm not sure how they get benefited by tariffs, though. I feel like this may be one where nobody wins. There is no victory here for anybody. Well, well, for a few, I. I don't know, but I think the theory.

[Georgia Dow]

Is you're in the stock market and you're able to buy when people are panicking and then sell when it's up. And you might have a heads up because maybe someone told you something or you heard something so that this really big billionaires have probably made a ton of money off of this. This instability for those that can jump on a dime and have tons of money can be exceptionally beneficial.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the longer, the longer game, and the president has alluded to this, is to eliminate the income tax and to use tariffs to build the national revenue. But the problem is that in fact does benefit the wealthy and is hardest on people with middle income or lower income because it's a bigger percentage of their salaries that go to these tariffs. I'm not sure. To me, it seems very chaotic and I sympathize, Nicholas, with you trying to write an article.

[Georgia Dow]

Really fast.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Right? And it's funny because that's like the most, like, you know, down. It's like, okay, how to. Should I buy a TV now? Like, okay, that's like the immediate. But it's like the larger question to your point, second Leo, is like, how are we, like, organizing society? Like, what, like, what are we doing here?

[Benito]

Here?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Basically, you know, that's beyond the scope of a Consumer Reports article, of course, but, you know, should the organizing principle of the United States be access to cheap phones or should we. Should it be something more than that? You know, that is, again, outside the scope of us. But it is interesting to see these kind of, like, larger points be talked about a little bit on, on the edges here because the more immediate impact is like, like, well, I can't afford, you know, can I buy the next iPhone? You know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you could buy it now and if you were thinking, I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, if I were Tim Cook, I'd be terrified about, you know, the iPhone 17. Terrified. There you go. Now we have a title. What do you do? So Apple's got two big things coming up. And June 9th is the worldwide Developers Conference where they, they will probably say, we're sorry about AI. We're going to try to figure out.

[Paris Martineau]

We'Re sorry about AI. Just a general evergain.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're sorry. Maybe you don't want AI. You know what? We've decided no AI. I think that might not be a bad marketing ploy to say the first AI free phone.

[Paris Martineau]

No, Apple's never going to do that.

[Georgia Dow]

Not that intelligent. You don't have to worry.

[Leo Laporte]

Such a dumb phone you don't have.

[Georgia Dow]

To worry about.

[Paris Martineau]

For anyone.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody said it's going to be like Cuba. You know how Cuba has a car cult with old ancient American cars because they can't get newer cars? It's going to be like that in the United States. We're all going to be celebrating our Motorola Razors that are duct taped together 20 years down.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, I will say I don't really drive, though I did drive a U Haul this week briefly. But I don't have a car. But if I did, I would be extremely annoyed by the fact that anytime I drive someone else's car and it's somewhat new, it's an oops all screen situation. Yeah. And I don't want to be taking my eyes up the road to go search through some menus so that I can turn down the AC or turn up the volume or go searching for the radio. I'd rather just handle an like a knob or a switch. And maybe that makes me a Luddite. But I think that's a very reasonable expectation for cars.

[Leo Laporte]

Henry had a Model Y before he moved to New York. Obviously he got rid of his car before he moved to New York. But he said, I can't figure out how to open the glove compartment because there is no, there literally is no button. You have to go through menus on the screen to open the glove compartment.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say I've realized part of, I think the curse of any. It's exclusively when a rare occur. A rare occasion for me is I go out late drinking on maybe a weekend night and I'm like, oh, I'm a little drunk. So I'm gonna call an Uber. Without a doubt, that Uber, if I am inebriated, will be a weird Tesla where The handles to get in the car are hidd and the handles to get out are hidden even more. And I'm like, this is rude. This is rude and unfair towards me. A woman trying to get home.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, people pawing at the car.

[Paris Martineau]

Like a, like a lost cat until.

[Georgia Dow]

The driving all kinds of fogging in.

[Paris Martineau]

Hopes that it's like, come on, please let me in. I just want to go home.

[Leo Laporte]

Connell's sister in law drowned because she was inebriated. Accidentally drove her Model Y into a lake and couldn't get out. Couldn't figure out how to open the door.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, that's also because Tesla's famously when in contact with water can then have problems that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they short circuit.

[Paris Martineau]

I would say the system for opening the doors in most cases the traditional way is a button that does something electronic. And then if that's not working because your car's underwater, you have to do some more complicated manual thing. And if I can't even find the electronic button, God knows I'm not going to find the special manual.

[Leo Laporte]

My strong advice to everybody who owns one of these cars is figure out how the manual override works on the door now before you drive.

[Georgia Dow]

Windows aren't breaking either.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I have in my car a little hammer.

[Paris Martineau]

Now will that one of those hammers that also has a seat belt cutter on it.

[Leo Laporte]

It has a seat belt cutter.

[Georgia Dow]

Oh, nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm an old man.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you get that from a TikTok or Instagram ad, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I bought this from actually it one of our shows, the Gizwiz. But yeah, it has a seatbelt cutter, it has a light, it has a magnet. So if you're changing your tire on the side of the road, the light will blink and you can magnetically attach it to your car. Unless it's of course a cyber truck, in which case it's not magnetic and it'll fall right off. And it could cut the seat belt and it's got a little hammer on it.

[Georgia Dow]

You can break the glass, but it's a bulletproof window. So is it still?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it's famously not bulletproof, despite the fact that there was that iconic video video of Elon being like, it's bulletproof. Watch me shoot a gun. And then the window breaks.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a cat bearing.

[Georgia Dow]

Actually, it wasn't even as big as a gun. Yeah, I think it was a ball bearing that he threw.

[Paris Martineau]

It was. Oh. Oh, that's great. That's really good. Actually. Maybe I'll use that next time I try to get an Uber And I can't.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you need. Carry a little ball bearing in your pocket.

[Paris Martineau]

Ball bearing?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Let me out or.

[Georgia Dow]

And then just threaten them.

[Leo Laporte]

I think. Let's see. Wait a minute. Let me show you this picture of the armor. Glasses, glass under Franz. Could you try to break this glass, please? This is from the Garden.

[Paris Martineau]

The cheers, the cheer.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got a ball bearing in his hand. Sure.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

You sure?

[Georgia Dow]

Oh my.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe that was a little too hard. So. And then. And then he does it again. It was a little too hard. Famous last words. We are going to take a break. You're watching this week in Tech Paris. Great to see you on a weekend. Did you have a good Easter?

[Paris Martineau]

I did. You know, I went to dim sum. I went to get dim sum today in Chinatown. It was delightful. I picked a lot of dumplings off of little carts and then I went walked over the Manhattan Bridge.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how fun.

[Paris Martineau]

I had a lovely day.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a beautiful view over the Manhattan Bridge.

[Paris Martineau]

It's fantastic. I mean it's not as pedestrian friendly as the Brooklyn Bridge, but it was right next to the dim sum place, so it won out.

[Leo Laporte]

For convenience, Joe has taken me across the Manhattan. Right, Joe. Isn't that where we went for our photo shoot when we did our photo walk in Manhattan? Very beautiful.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a good one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Anyway, happy Easter to you, Paris. Happy easter to you, Mr. Nicholas Delay on. Did you, did you do anything fun?

[Nicholas De Leon]

We watched a formula one race and then our neighbor brought over actually some Easter related snacks and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Nicholas De Leon]

A little bit of Easter. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I was watching the race while I made bagels. Don't tell me who won though. I haven't seen the last half hour.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I won't say anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Quiet. Xnay. Do they celebrate Easter in Canada?

[Georgia Dow]

We do. We do celebrate Easter in Canada. We have Easter here.

[Leo Laporte]

You celebrated a week earlier though, right? No. You're wearing a beautiful, a beautiful Easter dress actually. You're very.

[Georgia Dow]

Thank you very much.

[Leo Laporte]

Very festive.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, I didn't really do much though. Like my brother didn't invite me. But I did hang out with Renee and oh, Rene.

[Leo Laporte]

Richie.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, we chatted. We're going to be doing a show together on like business, the psychology and all the different things of business.

[Leo Laporte]

When's that?

[Georgia Dow]

We were going to film today but we're still going through it. So. Yeah, we're going through doing a new business podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Will it be on YouTube?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have a name?

[Georgia Dow]

I believe it's going to be Impact. I don't know if it'll be impact then for business underneath or what. But yeah, so we'll go through the different psychology to make your business more productive. How you could run it, go through the media and he'll deal with his thoughts on that and my thoughts and we'll kind of just help people be more productive, have more fun.

[Leo Laporte]

That sounds wonderful. Well, it's great to have all three of you. I know it's Easter Sunday and a lot of people would like to take the day off, but you decided to spend it with us and we're so glad you.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's really delightful that it's a combo Easter Sunday, 4:20. I just think that that's a real high holiday that we all need to celebrate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what, that's what my son said. He said, are you celebrating 4:20? I said, no. This guy got a show to do. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. We love these guys actually. Salt Heaven bank uses Shopify. So many businesses big and small use Shopify. It's, it's tough when you're starting a new business, you know, learning all the new hats you have to wear. It seems like that to do list just keeps growing every day. New things that can easily begin to overrun your life. And finding the right tool not only helps you out in this case, but it can simplify everything. Can be such a game changer for millions of businesses. There's one tool. The tool Shopify. Love Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10%, 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. Salt Hank when he started selling salt and pickles and merchants, of course he set up a Shopify site. He's still using it even though he got very big. That's the nice thing about Shopify. It scales with you. You can get started. You get your basically your own design studio, hundreds of ready to use templates. They look good too. They don't look like cookie cutter sites. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. You can accelerate your content creation. Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that will will write product descriptions, page headlines, even take that product photography, enhance it, make it look really good and of course get the word out like you have an entire marketing team behind you. But you do. You have Shopify. Easily use Shopify to create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shopping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Actually, both my kids have Shopify stores. Turn your big business into there with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com twitch. Go to shopify.com twitch shopify Again, shopify.com TWiT I love playing that sound. It feels like I made another sale. Let's see. Okay, we did all the tariff stuff. We can move on. Thank goodness. I am ordering that Nintendo switch on the 24th. Are you going to order it, Nicholas? Yeah, I'm going to order.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I did think about it, but I'll order it.

[Leo Laporte]

They got me again. How about you?

[Paris Martineau]

What games are they doing?

[Leo Laporte]

Well now this is the question. Question. Because the games are what, 90 bucks?

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, that's a lot. But I also, as someone who spends a lot of time playing most of the games, I'm often, I'm often like, it's crazy that I got this game for 40 bucks given that I spent my thing, 150 hours in it.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's your fault.

[Nicholas De Leon]

In my early 20s when I was like basically addicted to World of Warcraft, it was 15amonth. But I was like, this is the only 15 I spend this month other than like food.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Nicholas De Leon]

This is it. So I thought it was a pretty good deal.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Yeah, I spent $20 for Valheim because it was in beta. I think it's still in beta and I've played it more than 1500 hours. So what game? Valheim. You ever hear of it?

[Paris Martineau]

That sounds like a eczema drug. Choose Valheim.

[Leo Laporte]

Choose Valheim for all your itchy needs. How about you, Georgia Dow? Are you buying the new Switch 2?

[Georgia Dow]

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. We'll see. Like, we'll see. We'll see. Like, compared to like how much kind of have to.

[Leo Laporte]

This is your business though.

[Georgia Dow]

I know, I know. I, I have to see. I have to see. Like, how much better is it the old one? Do we really need it? Like, that's the thing is like, well.

[Leo Laporte]

How much better, Nicholas, is it than the old one?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I mean that's, that's an impossible.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't question. It doesn't have an OLED screen. Like the, like the second the, the.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Switch tablet, so to speak, is lcd. They've said it's LCD because there's HDR and they want it to be bright and the OLED doesn't get as bright.

[Georgia Dow]

So I go to bed yesterday, oops.

[Leo Laporte]

I went to your site and you're talking.

[Georgia Dow]

Like, wait, hear me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's more Georgia. Well, I wanted to show that Georgia does this. You do all this gaming stuff and. Oh, I have to ask you about adolescents. We're going to stop. We're going to save that for later. But.

[Georgia Dow]

My last video, that's that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And then you're talking about Arcane Season 2, Act 2. Anyway, so it's not OLED, so it's not as good in theory as the screen of this, of the second generation Switch one. But they do have ray tracing and hdr. They actually have an Nvidia chip in it. Right?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So they'll probably be DLSS. So it'll, it'll probably run, you know, better BAS or a higher frame rate. 6 at least 60, you would hope probably 120.

[Leo Laporte]

20. They're saying 60 and they're saying 4K 60 if you put it on the big screen, which I will do because.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That'S gotta be upscaled. I mean, I can't imagine. Yeah, but I mean, I mean, look, I think the point of the Switch is like, do you like Mario? Do you like Zelda? That's why you get it. You know, to me, the idea of playing like a third party game on a Nintendo, oh, I'm gonna play the new Madden. I'm gonna play the new.

[Leo Laporte]

I play Animal Crossing New Horizons.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And you should, you should therefore Nintendo game. The Mario Kart looks cool. It's be gonna kind of. That's like full horizon.

[Leo Laporte]

When you pre. When you go to the Nintendo site and you say I want to put in my pre order, they say now choose carefully because you can't change your mind. Do you want the, the plane switch two or do you want for 50 bucks more, the one that comes with Mario Kart World?

[Nicholas De Leon]

You should definitely get the bun. Well, you do what you'd like, I suppose. But like I would recommend folks getting the bundle because that means that Mario Kart is $50. If you were to buy that separately, I believe it's $80.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And I feel like a lot of folks are going to get Mario Kart. It's, it's pre. Like the universal or.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I did, I, I said, I chose carefully. I said, yes, I'll take it. I'll take the bundle. Partly because it's an open world, right. You can actually drive the cart off the track and drive around and do stuff.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's sort of like if folks know Forza Horizon, it's like an open world and you drive to the tracks, you can. So it's like a world.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think that sounds pretty cool.

[Paris Martineau]

How are your Mario Kart skills, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Terrible.

[Paris Martineau]

I am like so laughably bad at Mario.

[Leo Laporte]

I go off like I am on any driving game.

[Georgia Dow]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

If I'm on that rainbow road, I am being craned up by little guy most of the time.

[Georgia Dow]

Scary. That's just a scary road. I'm with you. I'm with you.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless you have Pedro Pascal driving. And then it's a good road to be on.

[Paris Martineau]

Perhaps.

[Georgia Dow]

Well, he's. He's not. He's not driving for me.

[Leo Laporte]

So have you. Have you seen that Saturday Night Live sketch where he's Mario or what? Whoever. No. Funny. Oh my God, it's hysterical. It's so funny. Funny. Anyway, I'll leave that.

[Paris Martineau]

I was just immediately like, yeah, sure, whatever Leo says. I'm sure he's having a cow.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you talking about?

[Paris Martineau]

Seems like something you'd be into, like offering.

[Georgia Dow]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

He did he now see, I really want to play it, but. But Benito, we're not allowed to. He would kill. Say no for sure. Imagine take you down, man. This was last.

[Georgia Dow]

You can just reenact it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Last season you could find it on YouTube and watch it. Not now. I see you looking. Paris. Not now. Later, after the show.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm looking at the chat.

[Georgia Dow]

She's getting it queued up. She's getting it queued up.

[Paris Martineau]

Just in case.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I thought I'd buy it. But now here's the thing. There is a cue to get it. Unknown whether the retailers are also going to have Pre order on April 24th. So you can go to your Walmart.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Although not Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

Not Amazon. Okay.

[Nicholas De Leon]

There are rumors that Nintendo and Amazon do not get along.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting. To get it on Nintendo, you have to have an active Switch count, which I do. You also have to have played 50 hours of games in the last. This year. 50 hours.

[Nicholas De Leon]

50 seems like a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

That seems like a lot.

[Paris Martineau]

I think this is an interesting approach to try and stop scalpers.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's what you're doing.

[Paris Martineau]

It's kind of. It reminds me of still to this day, if you want to order a Steam deck. I think they were more strict about this in the beginning. You have to have an already existing Steam account. And if you have like no history in it or you recently created it, a lot of people will automatically have Their account banned because they worry that it's a scalper trying to buy up these devices on Mass. The 50 hours is a little intense, but I think, think that my guess this has no actual knowledge behind it. But my guess is they expect that the demand for this is going to be so great that they're probably going to run out or have weight lifts with this or have kind of a situation like the PS5 when it came.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'm afraid of.

[Paris Martineau]

Instead that what? By restricting it to people who have played 50 hours last year, they're restricting it to actual Nintendo fans. Fans.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, hardcore. I mean that just moves you ahead in the line. I presume that unless they sell out to all those 50 hour people before I get there, which is possible. It's possible.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean you could also just like leave your switch open with like a mouse jiggler clicker. Like two days. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it, is it too late to get the 50 hours?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I believe it'd be.

[Paris Martineau]

It'd be two days and change.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean I've played it a little bit. I. I went into my Animal Crossing house and killed all the bugs and cleaned up the cobwebs and you know.

[Paris Martineau]

House has been abandoned since 2021.

[Leo Laporte]

It was funny.

[Paris Martineau]

Gonna be grim up in there.

[Leo Laporte]

It was funny because they actually, the characters in your island come up to you and say, leah, we haven't seen you in three and a half years. They're like keeping track back. They literally, you know, it's been three years, eight months, seven days and 24 hours since we saw you last.

[Georgia Dow]

Grandma. They're guilting you already.

[Leo Laporte]

They're totally guilting you.

[Paris Martineau]

My hottest Animal Crossing take is they messed up when they got rid of Resetti. Did you guys play Animal Crossing in the age of Recetti? Yeah, this was a. This was during the, I believe DS and possibly Game Boy eras of Animal Crossing. Where specifically if you were playing Animal Crossing and then something happened and you wanted to restart the day, you just as you do in many games games save scum. You'd maybe like turn off the game and then turn it back on so you could start from whatever your previous save file.

[Leo Laporte]

Save scum.

[Paris Martineau]

Save scumming is how they describe it on the Internet nowadays. And you just might be resetting is how they did in the past. But you do that. If you do that with your DS or Game Boy on an Animal Crossing game for a long time, what would happen when you boot back up is a little mole man named Resetti wearing a hard hat will Come out. Be like, I saw that you are trying. That guy, he's like, you're trying to reset this game and that's against the rules. And so he would give you a lecture that would get in longer and longer depending on the number of times you reset to where it could take hours before you could play the game again. Because he's lecturing you about resetting. And honestly, I think was delightful. I think you should bring.

[Leo Laporte]

His name is. I get his name now. Resetti.

[Paris Martineau]

Resetti.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he's mad too.

[Paris Martineau]

He's, he's, he's. He's a violent man.

[Leo Laporte]

Excuse me, I'm from the reset surveillance center and I need a few minutes of your time. Says Resetti. Oh, I have.

[Georgia Dow]

To.

[Paris Martineau]

15 to 30 to an hour. It was like. I legitimately have like very core memories of being a child.

[Leo Laporte]

That's kind of inspiring.

[Paris Martineau]

The.

[Georgia Dow]

I need to know Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Where.

[Georgia Dow]

Where did you get to?

[Paris Martineau]

Where did I get to?

[Leo Laporte]

How long was the Resetti lecture?

[Paris Martineau]

I think at the very least, like, it was definitely hours. Like there was. There were times I'd have to like leave my game and come back because I loved saves coming. It's. It's a way of life.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you still save scum?

[Paris Martineau]

No. Now you can do it and no one cares at all. Oh, well, they got rid of Resetti and I think that's for cowards.

[Benito]

Yeah. No, it's for.

[Leo Laporte]

It's because the kid.

[Benito]

We're at the age of Reddit and completely complaining of games and everybody's got.

[Paris Martineau]

To get, you know, you gotta get the perfect thing. No. Everybody be so mad. I would, I would pay an extra five bucks for a Resetti DLC.

[Leo Laporte]

In first generation Animal Crossing games. This is from the Wiki. He will force a first person perspective and shout at the player during his most angry response. In City Folk. In City Folks, sometimes he'll pretend to sound kind in order to sound intimidating. In New Leaf, however, his most angry response is limited to becoming irritated from the number of taps the player does on the touchscreen during his lengthy lectures. Bring Resetti back. I think we need him. I feel like I didn't get the full Animal Crossing experience because I didn't have.

[Paris Martineau]

They got some dialogues. This is your eighth reception. When Player steps outside of home, Mr. Resetti bursts from the ground. GR Player goes, oh. And he goes blue in the face. And you still don't get it. What is wrong with you? No Reset. That means you don't give me any lip. You're the one causing all the problems.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey.

[Paris Martineau]

You're doing it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey.

[Paris Martineau]

You idiot. I thought I made it clear. I want you to look at me when I'm talking to you. I said look at me. Player name now. Extreme Close Up.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoa.

[Paris Martineau]

I never noticed before, but you got some nice eyes. Yeah. Real hypnotic. Let me tell you something, player. This ain't about you personally, but more about the world in general. People see something they don't want to see, and for whatever reason, they pretend they don't see nothing. It keeps going on. It's a very long.

[Georgia Dow]

It's kind of accurate. It's kind of accurate.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it gets deep. Rosetti goes places. Rossetti was a delight.

[Leo Laporte]

He'd be a good therapist.

[Paris Martineau]

He was. Yeah. He gets his feelings.

[Leo Laporte]

He's gone. You don't get it anymore.

[Benito]

It's because it's fundamental to the experience of Animal Cross Crossing that you don't do that. And the developers are like, guys, don't do this.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really all that is what games should have scolding.

[Paris Martineau]

I do think so. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is a great thing that if you are defeating the general spirit of the game that you should get scolded.

[Georgia Dow]

A little bit of shaming never hurt anyone.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

You should get shot in the knee or something. Something should happen.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. I really, like, I. I regret that I did not get to know Mr. Resetti. Not that I even know what Save Scumming is or would I even know how to do it.

[Benito]

So it's like saving before a battle and then resetting when you go.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't even know you could do that in Animal Crossing. I feel like you just have to do what you do.

[Benito]

You can't. You have to reset it the way that Paris is.

[Paris Martineau]

You have to reset it. Basically. You can't. Like, you just go and turn off your console and then turn it back on and it starts from. Or I think another way that it could, like, I don't know if it was triggered by this, but a big thing was because Animal Crossing has time and date related events. You'd go to the DS or Game Boy and like change the date and then that would make them mad as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, I've heard of people doing that. Yeah. No, I don't. I don't do stuff like that. I believe in you.

[Georgia Dow]

Play by the rules.

[Leo Laporte]

I play, but I don't even use mods in Valheim, which is the new psoriasis drug from E. Lily.

[Georgia Dow]

That's why you're still itchy.

[Paris Martineau]

It's $600 a month. But Leo's got a coupon.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a break. I actually do want to talk about adolescence. I didn't even think about this when we booked you. Georgia Dow. But this was. This was a hit show on Netflix. I think it's now the number two show of all time on Netflix, bigger than Stranger Things. And it has caused quite a controversy in the uk. Not here so much, but in the uk. And I would like to know what you think about it. Georgia Dow. We have a great panel here. Georgia Dow, therapist and friend and YouTube star on the Georgia Dow Channel. Psychology and analysis through popular media. Great to see you. Happy Easter to you. Glad you could be here. And congratulations on your kid. I think. Hey, Frank is fantastic. That's wonderful.

[Georgia Dow]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Love that. Also, Nicholas De Leon. Oh, Paris Martineau. I threw you. I threw you. Benito. I went to Nicholas. Nicholas deleon, senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. Great to have you. Have you and your one wolf moon howling. Yes, yes, thank you. Nice to see you. And now you can show Paris Martineau, who walked today over the Manhattan Bridge.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll give you a brief word of advice from Mr. Rossetti. No more resetting. I'm serious here. Oh, yeah. One last thing. Every now and then, go to bed early. Staying up late all the time is for chumps. You got it? Now scram. Then he burrows back in the ground. Words to live by.

[Leo Laporte]

They decided to get a little bit of life lesson in there.

[Paris Martineau]

And as well, gotta, you know, you gotta pad the dialogue.

[Leo Laporte]

The early bird gets the worm. You know what I'm saying? Wow. Our show today, brought to you by Kinsta. Do you know Kinsta? You should know. Switch your hosting to Kinsta right now. You get your first month. 3. When you run an online business, you have many different hats to wear. It can be overwhelming to manage your web hosting while juggling a million other tasks. Kinsta as managed WordPress hosting is the best. It has an expert team that handles everything. They bundled up all the essentials to make sites stress free with speeds that wow your visitors. Really important security that never sleeps. And you'll love the dashboard. So intuitive. You'll wonder why everything isn't this easy. And of course, if you should hit a snag, you can talk to real humans 24 7, 365 days a year. In short, Kinsta is perfect. Perfect for people who want a professional result without needing a technical background. Kinsta doesn't just, you know, host WordPress websites. No, they host it right. Delivering blazing speed. Your website could run 200% faster than other sites with ironclad security and reliability. And don't worry about moving. They will migrate your entire website for free and you get a 30 day money back guarantee so there's no reference risk. And when it comes to security, Kinsta is in a league of its own. It's one of the few WordPress hosting providers that backs its promises with multiple enterprise certifications. That's really important these days, by the way, because WordPress by itself is very secure. But the add ons and stuff. Kinsta makes sure you're secure across the board and their custom control panel is absolutely intuitive. If you need help, you get real Word WordPress pros, not just an AI chatbot. You get a real experts who respond in minutes and can tackle even the trickiest problems. Who uses Kinsta? Some of the biggest sites on the net? TripAdvisor, NASA. Indeed, that's among some of the three of the 120,000 businesses that trust Kinsta with their WordPress websites. If you're tired of being your own website support team, switch to hosting with Kinsta and get your first month free. Don't worry about the move, they'll handle the whole transition for you. No tech expertise required. Just pay a visit to kinsta.com TWIT to get started. K-I-N-S-T-A-Kinsta.com TWIT to Get your first month free and get the migration bundled in with that too. Kinsta.com TWIT thank you Kinsta for supporting this Week in 10. Heck. So before we talk about adolescence, you I doubt somehow I feel like Paris. You probably haven't watched it. No. And you're muted, by the way.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, sorry. Muted for. I was muted for crunching crackers. I haven't. No, you're correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Your eyes said no, no. And your lips said no. No. That's true. Nicholas, have you watched it?

[Benito]

No.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I've seen some discussion online but I have not watched watched it.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's. It's a miniseries on Netflix. It's. It's only. What is it, four episodes. It's pretty short. And it's not a who done it, it's a. I've saw somebody say it's not a who done it, it's a why done it. There's a murder. A teenager murders one of his schoolmates, his high school classmates. And the show begins very dramatically with the kid, the. The young boy being arrested, arrested, and then follows his process through the judicial system. It's all shot from the in A single take from a first person perspective. So it's a very interesting show to watch. Oh, the acting is done, really is right. Georgia, would you agree that the acting is superb? The father is actually one of the guys who wrote it. But the reason it's getting a lot of attention and I imagine the reason that you did did a couple of pieces on it, a therapist reacts and therapist analysis on it is it is about young people today, their obsession with social media and the bullying that occurs on social media and what they call the manoverse which is. Well, you probably, I don't know, is that a term we use in the US the maniverse or is that a UK term term?

[Paris Martineau]

Definitely manosphere.

[Leo Laporte]

Manosphere, thank you. See, I don't even know manosphere which is this whole, you know, kind of macho male influencer thing. They the young boy, the murderer. It's not a spoiler to say the murderer is insulted by the girl he murders. She calls him an incel. So I'm very. Now that I saw the. You did the these pieces on it, I'm very curious what you think. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister in England has had kind of talking groups about this. There's a lot of discussion about it and even in the US I was afraid that this would stimulate some sort of anti social media movement because I don't know if that's really what I got out of the show. I'm curious what you got out of it, Georgia.

[Georgia Dow]

Well, I think that it was one is. I just love that they have the discussion that it opens us up to talk even if you disagree because I think that we need to have. Have a discourse over what's happening. I think that we do spend a lot of time on social media and I think that it does have an effect on like what you consume is important not just for what you eat. We talk a lot about that. But what are you letting your brain eat? Whatever you are spending your time on is having an imprint upon you and say that we take a population where you're already feeling lonely, you're excluded, you don't belong. And then we put. Put that into your mind of a place where here it's not your fault. There's these are these answers, these are the people to blame. It's very easy to scapegoat when you're already in a dark place. And so that definitely can have an effect And I think that having that discussion of what are the things that we are allowing our children consume because like putting giving them say any Sort of technology. It's like the perfect babysitter. They say, quiet and you get left alone. For a lot of people, that seems like a fair chance trade. But what is the effect of that and what are they consuming? We need to be able to have that discussion. Also the entire familial system. But I think that a lot of times in psychotherapy and psychology we used to just blame the parents. Like it's always the parents fault. They've always done something wrong. And that isn't the case. There are a lot of different situations and a lot of different variables that go on to leaving people where they can be influenced by bad actors and things that are gonna affect them in a negative way. And we need to be able to have that discussion.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, kind of the most moving part of it for me was in the last episode where the parents are saying, we made him. They're blaming themselves, we made him. But I was surprised there was so much discussion about social media because it seemed like that really wasn't the most important, important kind of element in. Didn't seem like they spent a lot of time blaming social media. I mean, they showed the kid's Instagram, they showed his victim's Instagram, they showed the messages. The police investigating police officer's son, who's also a student in the school, finally explains to him what the various emojis mean. And they're all coded as teenagers always will have some code that adults can't understand. They're coded and apparently they were bullying messages, even though they were just emojis. But also the father had rage issues. Clearly his son had massive rage issues, not probably stimulated by social media. In fact, it seemed pretty clear to me that the same kids, the other kids in the school consuming the same social media didn't murder anybody. But he did. Maybe it's a nexus of social media bullying and rage issues that caused the problem.

[Georgia Dow]

But it and his own self esteem and the way that he saw himself and his place in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he had a very low, powerless. Yeah. Very low self image. Yeah, he's, you know, he kept saying, you think I'm ugly, I think I'm ugly. I'll never, I'll never have a girlfriend. You know, one of the tenets of this manosphere is that 80% of women are only attracted to 20% of men. So it's very. He had this poor kid, he's like 13 years old, had it in his head that he would never be able to have a relationship with a woman because he wasn't in that 20%. And I could see that would be devastating if you actually believed that at the age of 13.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah. And anything that you hear many times the reason that advertising works so effectively, effectively even for an adult brain, is that if you hear something over and over again, even if it's a lie, a lot of people, their negative self talk, they're mostly lies. But we've heard it so many times that we believe it to be true. And then we, we false positive of whenever we make a mistake. Oh, you see, this is even more proof that I am ugly. Right? Like that's what exactly what he said in one of the scenes. He's like, oh, you see, I am ugly.

[Leo Laporte]

I am ugly.

[Georgia Dow]

I'm not going to, you know, be able to, to find someone, no one will ever love me. That's the. Such a feeling of powerlessness. Bullying and its effects are so pervasive, so damaging to who we are. And often then it becomes self bullying where we then become adults that are going to bully ourselves and say those same horrible things, but you can never get rid of it. And so that feeds into it. And I think that that's the thing is that it's a whole village that, you know, has to come together to be able to uphold people and bring them to another level or can pull them down, down. And so we need to just be aware of all of the different factors that are there. It's not just one thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think? I mean, Keir Starmer said that he felt that there were toxic influencers in the UK who trick young men and that, you know, we need to discuss this further, that there is a, there is a risky business going on. You think that's true?

[Georgia Dow]

Oh yeah, for sure. Definitely. There's a ton of toxicity. I don't think it's just to young men though. I think that there's a ton of toxicity on the Internet, period.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, that's why I'm glad 4chan is gone. Right?

[Georgia Dow]

How many? Yeah, well, I actually got a lot of really positive kind comments to it and like, oh, I guess that maybe that's why, but it's one of these things that, you know, this, this level of kind of talks, it's all around and it affects so many of us that, you know, how many industries would die if we actually truly loved ourselves and we were kind to ourselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Georgia Dow]

Like how many for adults, not just for kids.

[Paris Martineau]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you work with kids?

[Georgia Dow]

Yes, I do.

[Leo Laporte]

So do you see this problem cropping up with kids?

[Georgia Dow]

Absolutely, yeah. And the amount of eating Disorders. Body dysmorphia has gone up with men. It used to be something that I would see with a lot of teenage girls. Now I see it with a huge amount of men. It used to be like, if you look at the, like, James Bond of, like, the. The like, 60s, 7. I don't know Sean Connery, whenever he was James Bond. Like, if you see him without his shirt on, he has a dad bod. Like, a nice bod. It's fine. But it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but if you watch the guys on the White Lotus, you're gonna feel pretty inadequate, but. Exactly.

[Georgia Dow]

So it used to be that you could just be a regular guy and you were the sex symbol. And now you have to dehydrate yourself to exhaustion for three days.

[Leo Laporte]

Every man on the White Lotus had a six pack. I don't understand that. How did that happen?

[Georgia Dow]

They're just dehydrating for, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they're dehydrating. Okay.

[Georgia Dow]

So that they. They're almost to death.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Georgia Dow]

To be able to look like that. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Georgia Dow]

You know, very. Don't feel bad.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't recommend that, by the way. Just want to be clear.

[Georgia Dow]

Don't do that. And we don't. Women don't need. You don't need to look like that.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Like, we need Henry Cavill when he was Superman. He said that he was so, like, he could smell a cup of water.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, geez.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's the extent of.

[Leo Laporte]

They're torturing themselves.

[Georgia Dow]

Well, he's Superman. He could smell water no matter what, though, right?

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

I did forget that.

[Nicholas De Leon]

You're right.

[Leo Laporte]

But not the witcher. The witcher can't smell water.

[Georgia Dow]

No, but he would just grunt.

[Leo Laporte]

I watched the Witcher with the. With the subtitles on. Did you ever do that? You got to do that.

[Georgia Dow]

No, I haven't.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's like a. It grunts and then there's a lot of scoffing. There's scoffing and grunting.

[Georgia Dow]

I was going to.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say I'm. I'm recently watching rewatching Twin Peaks. I just finished my first watch of it, but now I'm watching it again with subtitles because I'm not a normal. And almost all. Every episode of Twin Peaks if you have subtitles on is just ominous. Whooshing Ominous intensifies.

[Leo Laporte]

They gave up trying to describe ominous. Ominous whooshing. We don't know what it is. It's just ominous. Whooshing so it's not, you know, it's not inappropriate that The British government says, hey, you know, this is a problem and we need to talk about it. You think?

[Georgia Dow]

Absolutely. If you would not want bullying and toxicity and people to tell you that you're not good enough and that, you know, the way that you have to get someone is to trick it or be manipulative or to hurt people. And our entire way of discourse, and I don't think that this is just in the uk our entire discourse is about owning the other person and beating them down into submission. It's no longer to come to truth and to be able to understand and empathize with each other. I think that that cancel culture for everyone is just a toxic way to be able to deal with things. So I'm not even just talking about influencers and talking heads. I'm talking about the entire world way that our society has upheld people that try to destroy others and to be able to get one on the other person, I think that that's just a horrible way to be able to meet in the middle. You don't have to destroy someone else to be able to feel like you're a bigger person or to feel better than you know.

[Leo Laporte]

What's sad is that the creators of adolescence are suffering a huge amount of attacks online. People, they're being doxed, people are going to their houses is they're fearing for their security, you see.

[Georgia Dow]

But that shows how much we need to fix this that that would happen because you have a disparaging view even if you disagree with someone that they cannot say it without you attacking them for that. Why can't we just disagree and be like, I don't feel that way. Why do you have to then destroy someone for having something else? It just brings about this thought of fear and, and it's like that. It's like when someone like yells in the courtroom saying I'm not abusive and I'm like screaming and yelling at the entire time that they're not abusive. You're like, well that kind of proves it now, doesn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

My knee jerk reaction is to defend social media because I think it takes a lot of the heat for other that are other issues in society. But it does provide a channel for these kinds of purveyors of the manosphere into.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. And I think also the, the role that social media plays in this I don't think can be, shouldn't be understated because part of the reason obviously throughout history we've always had people calling for restrictions on inflammatory content, whether that's valid or not. But I Do think that part of what we've seen in this, this resurgence and emergence of inflammatory content specifically targeting vulnerable young men, it comes from the fact that the sort of things that do well on social media, be it you know, YouTube or Twitter, they are going to be things that are inflammatory in some ways. There's an incentive system for content that creates outrage or really moves you in some way. It's the same sort of reason why inflammatory, often misinformation, misinformed political content did so well on Facebook back in the day. A P of piece of advice I always even tell like my parents or like younger family members is if you see something on the Internet, be it a video or an article or a tweet that really makes you feel some way, be it incredibly angry or incredibly happy, like any super strong emotion, you should probably check that because the real world is never that black and white in one way or another or it often is not. And I think that the incentives of these content ecosystems make problems like this worse when it comes to radicalization of any group.

[Georgia Dow]

And to add to that Paris when people are so when we're in angry or sad or scared, we'll stay on social media media, right? We become more narrow minded and we want to stay in our safe zone. And so often what they've already found and why Zuckerberg was actually tracking how people reacted, how they felt about different articles by saying does this make you feel happier? Does this make you feel sad Was to find out what kind of articles keep you they're all fighting for that real estate. They want you to be there. That's the only way that they make money is to be able to have you stay. And everyone's fighting for that real estate estate and they found that when you are angry or scared you will stay longer on whatever you know media social media site it is if you are happy you will leave and go off and do something because you're feeling good and you have energy and motivation to take a walk, smell the flowers, buy something, call up someone you love and so you'll leave. And so that even is a greater incent to incentivizes to to have different articles that will fear monger or will be something that is kind of scary or make you really angry and then you want to fight and you want to deal with things and then people end up like shouting into the void and hoping that the void will shout back at them again. I agree Leo. It's a tool that can be used for good or for ill but it is not A neutral tool because it is used by people that make money from us staying there. And anytime money is in involved, then people are going to be incentivized to be able to make as much money as they can off of us for.

[Leo Laporte]

Good or for ill. And I recognize that I'm an adult and as an adult I have better defenses against this stuff. And in fact I've stopped visiting X because it, it, it's become so toxic and unpleasant to go there. I, I got rid of Facebook's on, on my phone. I don't have. The only social media I have now is Blue sky, which I kind of like. Like, because it's not quite so toxic. I do think we all have a desire to connect and I think social media does scratch an itch that is genuine and does give us a chance to connect with people. As Paris said, she knows of you as Twitter friends. You know, I think that's a good thing. But I am an adult and I recognize that kids don't have the defense. Dustin says this manosphere preys on vulnerable boys and young men with arguably not fully developed brains. Brains. He's in our discord and poor emotional and social maturity. They're vulnerable. And, and so that is a reasonable thing to worry about. Younger minds that are more plastic being exposed to basically con men who, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg just trying to get more engagement so he can show you more ads, or Andrew Tate, you know, trying to get you into the manosphere. Fear.

[Georgia Dow]

And it's not just young men that are vulnerable to it or young girls that are vulnerable to it. Also people that are depressed, people that are anxious, people that are lonely.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. That's a good point. Many adults are vulnerable for other reasons.

[Georgia Dow]

We don't teach being media savvy to anyone, really. It's not something that's taught.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels so easy for me to say, oh, I'm just, I'm not gonna. Oh God, I have to stop doing that.

[Georgia Dow]

You have such a media literacy. You have such a knowledge base. You understand the ways that people advertise to be and proselytize to be able to gather people or try to say something like this could kill you. Like that will make people click. But you would understand that could means maybe it could not kill you also.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So that brings us to this disturbing study, the Guardian reporting on a report from digital behavior experts called Revealing Reality. I don't know anything about them, but the Guardian says they discovered something, quote, deeply disturbing. A troubling discount, disconnect between Roblox's child friendly appearance and the reality of what children experience on the platform. A lot of very young kids are on Roblox. Roblox is thought to be a kids gaming platform. Right? Roblox acknowledges the guardian says that children using the platform may be exposed to harmful content and bad actors. It says it's working hard to fix this but that industry wide collaboration and government intervention are needed.

[Paris Martineau]

Researchers found that they're so basically they created a bunch of test avatars and did a variety of tests on this and they found that those test avatars, they were avatars that were under 13.

[Leo Laporte]

Or I guess ages 5, 9, 10, 13 and 40 plus.

[Paris Martineau]

And they found that the kid avatars overheard conversations between adult users like verbalizing sexual activity as well as repeated quote slurping, kissing and grunting noises using the voice voice chat function. They also found that a test avatar registered to an adult was able to ask for the five year old test avatar's Snapchat details using barely coded languages. Even though Roblox says that in game chats are subject to kind of built in feed like filters in moderation. This is kind of an extension of reporting that has been done by Bloomberg as well as Heisenberg Research, a kind of research and short kind of a. A research and reporting outlet tied to some people in the stock and short selling game that recently closed. But they had done a really in depth report along with Bloomberg had also done something similar about how Roblox generally seems to lack a lot of the kind of common sense safety initiatives many parents expect or that those safety initiatives that are already present don't work as clearly as intended.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is a video from the Guardian showing the 10 year old avatar going to a hotel where apparently people are making out. Although I have to say it's. It's kind of hard to see it. It's a little blocky. Do you think that's dangerous? Dangerous and damaging to kids?

[Georgia Dow]

It depends on what's happening. It depends on how often it is. It depends on how vulnerable the child is. Unfortunately a lot of people that are predatory are going to try.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where the kids are. You go there.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, it would be much probably like there's the risk of it being much worse than what this is and that's where you have to be able to be cued into what are your children doing and you know what is it like and how dangerous. Like if your children are playing a game where it's an online game, you should be involved in that game. So you kind of know what the risks are and let them be aware of what they should do and not do and when they should let you know, you know, revealing reality, Sid, you have that risk.

[Leo Laporte]

The new safety features announced by Roblox last week don't go far enough. Children can still chat with strangers not on their friends list. And with 6 million different experiences on the platform, Roblox, I haven't played it, but I understand allows you to create a game or create an experience that others can then see. With 6 million of those experiences, often with inaccurate descriptions, ratings, how can parents be expected to moderate? And you wrote a good piece on this, Paris. I remember we talked about age verification and what's happening in some states, Utah, for instance, is now saying it's up to the stores, the app stores to do age verification. Neither Apple nor Google want to do this, but Meta and others, and I'm sure Roblox say, you know, we can't do age verification privately, but the stores should do that. It's their responsibility.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. So kind of what's happening is everybody's trying to figure out a way to punt this away from them or try and figure it out on the app. An individual side, you have companies like Meta or TikTok somewhat recently being like, all right, we'll try a little bit of age verification. They on TikTok's case, they use kind of a company called Yoti that uses facial age verification where essentially you take a video selfie and it tries to predict whether or not you're over kind of a target age range. And if it thinks that you're potentially younger than 18, you're younger than 25 or whatever the thing is, then it might require you to insert an ID or add a credit card or do some sort of secondary age verification to confirm that you're an adult. Facebook and Meta also use something similar for limited things. However, these tech companies don't really want to be on the hook for this for all the reasons you might understand. And so instead they are really heavily lobbying also through, I guess, trade groups, kind of like Net Choice for it, the onus to be on the app stores or the device manufacturers lectures. So they're saying instead of, you know, Facebook and Instagram and tick tock and YouTube and everybody having to do their own age verification and either deal with kind of storing that information themselves or handing it off to a third party, like instead this should be the responsibility of Apple or Google to figure out in their devices or Apple Play Store where you do one age verification There. And then that device has maybe a code that it can anonymously sent to say confirmed this person's over 18 or under. So it's kind of everyone is trying to figure out who the buck should stop with and no one really wants it to be them.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a way to do this. Steve Gibson and I were talking about this on Security. Now Steve came up with a solution that would put control in the hands of parents that the phones, Apple. And I'm curious what you all think about this. Apple or the Google Play Store or the Google devices or the Samsung devices should have a setting that when you give your kid a phone you say what the kid's age is as a parent. Not necessarily even their chronological age could be their emotional age. Could be you as a parent say I have the mentality of a nine year old. But you put that in, that's in the phone and then it would be possible for any app to say, well what age is this you user? And be responsible for it. But that it's not Apple now that's responsible for saying the age, it's the parent. Apple provides a mechanism for this to be presented privately and safely to these apps. You know this, the user of this phone is.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that part of what a company like Apple would argue is that then they are responsible for making sure that system works and they'll be responsible for cases where people get around the that or it's deployed inaccurately. And I think the issue is that every company is kind of inching around how to do this, but no one wants to be the company that ends up responsible for this because they worry, I assume perhaps rightfully so, that two to five years down the line we're going to be having a lot of tough conversations.

[Leo Laporte]

Any other solution though is not privacy protecting. Because if I have to show a driver's license, license that's right out, right, that's not going to be privacy protecting. And you've done a story on a company that does it kind of by face recognition. I'm seeing more and more companies saying yeah, we could tell your age roughly by face recognition. I still think that's not the way to do it. I think it needs to. The power needs to be put in the hands of the parents. The parents should be the ones ultimately who say the user of this phone is emotionally anonymous year old and I want her to be protected.

[Paris Martineau]

But then the question is how do you get a phone set up to where. What's the difference between me, an adult buying an iPhone for myself and Being.

[Leo Laporte]

Switch that says I'm an adult.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, how do you know then? How are you supposed to have it set up to where. What's the difference between my adult phone and a phone that someone buys for a child? Why couldn't someone hand a phone to a child and they'd be like, yeah, adult.

[Georgia Dow]

What about an abusive spouse buying their phone and locking the phone, saying that they're a child so they can control their partner? Like it becomes kind of messy is just what I think.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, it's less messy than any other possible. I agree there's, it's not perfect, but there's no perfect way to do this. And what we're doing right now is the least perfect, which is not making any attempt in any way to provide this. Parental controls, though, have a long established tradition. Tradition. You can't force a parent to use parental controls. That's the parent's choice. They're the parent, they should have the choice. But giving them the option to do that and to set in the parental controls an age for their child, whether it's chronological or emotional or whatever they choose. And with some guidance, a screen on the phone that says, is this a child's phone? Yes. Yes. To protect your child, we'd like you to set an age for that child so we can show them, you know, allow them to download appropriate and block them from downloading inappropriate apps and, and content. I think that's doable. It puts it on the parent, which is where it should be. There should, There is no other place to put this. Can't put it on the government. You can't put it on Apple. It's not their responsibility, it's the parent.

[Georgia Dow]

And I wouldn't really want them to take care of.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Well then I guess the question.

[Leo Laporte]

But you want parental controls, right? That's a good.

[Paris Martineau]

How do you determine that the person who's buying and setting up the parental controls is over 18? You would have to then do some sort of age verification for that end user, which would probably. I mean the way that most.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you can't do that. You can't.

[Paris Martineau]

Then how do you, how do you make any of this work? How do you have it like, you know, a teenager, a 15 year old goes and buys an eye, iPhone or like rinse one and then says, yeah, I'm over 18. Or they decide to be the parent account. This is something people did with parental controls on Instagram for a while where you have like a bunch of 18 year olds being like, yeah, I'm the parent of these 27 year olds.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you can't stop that. You can't period. Anything that is going to be more draconian is going to be a privacy problem. All you can do is give parents control. Say parents, you're in charge. If your kid has a phone, it's up to you to make sure that it's appropriately designated. And some parents will say, no, no, my 12 year old should be able to do whatever she wants. And that's. Who else is to say that? The government. Do you want government controls on what 12 year olds can consume? I don't think so. In the English debate, one of. One of the ministers said, boys these days are hooked on gambling, pornography and gaming.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, that moral panic button. Moral panic button, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's go right back to bl, you know, blocking gaming. Just parental control seemed like the only decent way to do this. I won't argue.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. I will say, apropos of absolutely nothing, young adult men are addicted to sports gambling and sports betting.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that true?

[Paris Martineau]

Crazy. I mean, every. I have a younger sister in her early 20s and every boy she has ever dated has like a sports gambling addiction. All the boys love just casually sports gambling. Like, it's fine, I make some money.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm like, I was very.

[Paris Martineau]

You're gambling every day. That's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the same thing with crypto, by the way. A lot of young men think they're making money doing day trading on crypto. I honestly think I was very upset when they legalized sports gambling. They haven't done it yet in California, but they've done it pretty much everywhere else. I think.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Watch a sports broadcast. You can't listen to sports podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Odds everywhere.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, it's really. I've seen this. I don't. I've never gam. You know, maybe I have.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. We're lucky we don't have that addiction.

[Benito]

No, no.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Thank God. Thank God. A lot of people do. But it's like if I. It is everywhere. It's pervasive. It is really like.

[Leo Laporte]

And the thing that really scares me is the prop bet. Because you can bet on anything, right? And a real gambling addict will bet on anything. Is the sun coming up on the morning? Let's have a. I say that's the thing is the.

[Paris Martineau]

These young men always. Whenever I'm like, you know, you're gambling, right? He's like, well, it's totally fine because actually I've got bets on both sides of the table. So no matter what, I'm going To win in some way. And I'm like, listen, you need to go outside and touch grass.

[Benito]

Sports. Gambling actually is running all of the sports now. Like they fund pretty much everything.

[Leo Laporte]

The NFL takes a cut, which is why there's a real hypocrisy. Hypocrisy when these sporting organizations censure a player for gambling. It's like, okay, come on.

[Georgia Dow]

Well, you shouldn't be in the game if you're gambling on it, right? Like you shouldn't probably be the one.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I guess.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, but it's fine to be broadcast.

[Leo Laporte]

In the game, but as the owner of the team, I can gamble all I want.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, that's also wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, and that's. But it's like that kid. Well, I have it on both sides. See, I get a profit on matter what happens.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah. I'm unbiased.

[Benito]

And there wasn't. There was a pro ball player who like got banned from the league for betting on his own team, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. Never allowed. Pete Rose was never allowed into the hall of Fame.

[Benito]

I'm sure that just happens all the time now, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Still illegal. I think, you know, you saw the, you saw the, the. Well, let's take a break and then I'm going to tell you you about how the Texas lottery got taken down and they invited it. Basically you're watching this week in Tech, Georgia Dow, who is helping us with our deeply rooted personal problems. Thank you, Georgia. I'll find an addiction somewhere to share with you. So nice to see you YouTube.com georgiadao Always a pleasure. And I'm so pleased that you and Renee are here in regular contact. Please give him my love. I miss Renee and I can't wait to see your new show, Impact. Impact. All about business.

[Georgia Dow]

Voice AI do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I could ask. I could ask my Voice AI to voice a little something for you. Also Nicholas De Leon from Consumer Reports, where he is senior electronics reporter. And of course, Paris Martineau. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, that wasn't Benito saying Leo. Okay, thank you, Leo. Oh, thank you. Oh, you're welcome.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Thank you, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And Paris Martineau, who has enjoyed her. Did you have a mimosa or any kind of. No, I had your brunch.

[Paris Martineau]

I had a Diet Coke. I had a lot of dumplings.

[Leo Laporte]

Dumplings. Nothing like Diet Coke and dumplings. That's.

[Paris Martineau]

It was. It was a delightful spread. It was. We had a big group together. So we got to sit on one of the tables, the big stuff, spinny, like lazy Susan in the middle.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love that. Oh, I love that. So this is your whole skeeball team?

[Paris Martineau]

It was the whole skeeball team. And friends, what's the name of your skeeball team?

[Leo Laporte]

They have the best.

[Paris Martineau]

The Bourgeois Ski is the name of the skeeball team. And during the fall season, we will rise again.

[Leo Laporte]

The fall season is coming soon. Our show today, brought to you by. I love it. Our show today, brought to you by Oracle. There is a groan growing expense eating into your company's profits. It's your cloud computing bill. Now, you may have gotten a deal to start, but now the spend is sky high and increasing every year. What if you could cut your cloud bill in half and improve performance at the same time? Well, if you act by May 31, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help you do just that. OCI is the next generation cloud designed for every workplace workload where you can run any application, including any AI projects, faster and more securely for less. In fact, Oracle has a special promotion where you can cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI. The savings are real. On average, OCI costs 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking. Join Modal, Skydance, Zoom and today's innovative AI technologies. Companies who upgraded to OCI and saved offer only for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify for half [e-mail] TWIT that's oracle.com TWIT we thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. You support us when you go to that address. That way they know you saw it here. Oracle.com Twitter quit. So I was, I've always been told, and I had on the radio show, used to have a statistician, a lottery expert. I've always been told, you know, there's always been this thought, what if you bought all the numbers in a lottery guaranteeing you a winning ticket? Why wouldn't that make you money? Especially if the lottery is one of those that turns over and the pot gets bigger and bigger. In fact, the Texas Lot lottery got to $95 million even though there are only 25.8 million potential combinations. That simple math would tell you, hmm, if I buy 28.5, 25.8 million $1 tickets, but I'm guaranteed a jackpot of 95 million, I'm gonna make $60 million. In the spring of 2023, a London banker turned bookmaker reached out to a few contacts with an audacious request. Can you help me take down the Texas Lottery? They set up a shop this is from the Wall Street Journal in a defunct dentist's office, a warehouse, two other spots in Texas, and then. And this is the key, they bought official Texas lottery ticket price printing terminals, dozens of them. Over three days, they got those machines spitting out a hundred tickets every second to buy every single number. Now, remember, in order to do this, you have to have $28.5 million. This guy nicknamed the Joker, apparently had the money.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course. Nickname the Joker.

[Leo Laporte]

The Joker. Here he is.

[Paris Martineau]

You can't be a normal. You can't have a normal nickname if you're setting up lotto ticket machines in abandoned dentist's offices.

[Leo Laporte]

Zelko Ranogic. Nickname the Joker. Yeah, that's why he has a nickname. Apparently they've done this before. That's where they got the stake. They bet an estimated $10 billion annually, and I guess they're making money on it.

[Paris Martineau]

And is it legal? Is the Texas lottery cool with this?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, state Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called the win the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas. But their lawyer says all applicable laws, rules, and regulations were followed.

[Benito]

So the only issue here would be if, like, one or two other people also won. And they would have had to split that.

[Georgia Dow]

Ah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's why the experts told me this will never work, because the higher the pot, the more people buy in, and you have to share your winning ticket with any other winning tickets. So the theory has always been you couldn't possibly win because more people would buy and then you would. You would dissolve. You know, you divide your winnings and you wouldn't win in the long run.

[Benito]

It's just still a gamble. It's not a sure thing.

[Leo Laporte]

So in Texas, as in many states. This is the Wall Street Journal again. Most people play the lottery, go to a store, buy a ticket, then walk away. But in 2023, Texas allowed online lottery ticket vendors to set up shops to print tickets for their customers. Online lottery ticket winners. So the Joker recruited one such seller, lottery.com to help with logistics of buying and printing the millions of tickets. They get a 5% commission. Texas Lottery Commission allowed dozens of terminals to be delivered to these four locations. They waited until the pot was big enough, but yeah, I wonder how they got around this. They didn't buy things like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, because so many other players would choose them. They only bought 99.3% of the numbers.

[Georgia Dow]

That seems like a risk.

[Benito]

Yeah. So it's even more of a gamble. Yeah.

[Georgia Dow]

Wouldn't you just buy the like? Seems like.

[Paris Martineau]

He'S apparently a gambling. Prolific gambling gambler, I guess, who's known for his horse betting, blackjack and other forms.

[Leo Laporte]

10 billion a year he bets.

[Benito]

So this is. It's really just like high stakes. Really high stakes gambling is what this is.

[Georgia Dow]

He was the only winner compared to regular gambling. Because if you own at least 99.3, it's better odds than for most gamblers.

[Benito]

Yeah, but your buy in is 25 million.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the problem. You have to have some money to start.

[Georgia Dow]

I'm not part of this game.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, It's the biggest jackpot since 2010. They bought the only winning ticket. They had the only winning ticket. 3, 5, 18, 29, 30 and 52.

[Georgia Dow]

Those were my numbers.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, once they heard the numbers, they had to go through all of the boxes.

[Georgia Dow]

They had to have to find the phys.

[Leo Laporte]

The physical, find the winning.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's the.

[Benito]

Their fault.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, they have to file it carefully. Right.

[Georgia Dow]

They didn't. Right. They should have boxed those properly.

[Leo Laporte]

Lottery.com made $264,000 in sales commission. The Houston Chronicle broke the story, but I don't know if there's anything they can do about it. And in fact, it may happen again. The lottery is now up to $60 million dollars. The Texas Lottery Commission, however, has pushed out a software update that limits the number of tickets a terminal can sell in a day.

[Georgia Dow]

Oh, they just need more terminal. They just need more terminals.

[Benito]

Does it say how much they made at the end of the day?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they made $60 million.

[Benito]

No, because some of that gets taxed and then there was a capital investment and all the stuff they had to do to set it up, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Benito]

It was their last take again.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. New York Times said the Texas. Texas officials and basically invited this.

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say this guy has run a number of gambling syndicates that have had to either shut down or been subject to tax audit controversies in various countries due to questionable legality. As to a similar situation to this where it's like. But then the investigators are like, no, it's not. Maybe so this seems fairly par for the course for him.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is a woman who publishes a website on the Texas Lottery. And I think you could look at her face and see how she is not happy about this.

[Paris Martineau]

That is a level of helmet hair I didn't think was possible outside of the White House.

[Leo Laporte]

She looks pretty upset. I would say this is really just.

[Benito]

Like exploiting a game though. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

This is playing to win.

[Benito]

Yeah.

[Georgia Dow]

It's usually just the government that wins.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Benito]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They asked the state for permission.

[Paris Martineau]

He sometimes registers instead of going under Z. Rano Javic. He sometimes registered under his wife's surname, registering as John Wilson for gambling endeavors. Which I suppose would confuse people. Certainly.

[Leo Laporte]

If I had a nickname, the Joker, I would stick with that. Yeah, just call me the Joker. I played this. These crosswalks on. On. You don't mind if I. Intelligent machines. You don't mind if I, If I. If I play them again, do you?

[Paris Martineau]

Never.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of, Speaking of hacking, this is, this is another kind of hacking. These did the ha. The crosswalks in Palo Alto. Alto, California. You know how they have for blind people? They have they speech on the crossroads or they talk. Right. Somebody hacked the Palo Alto crosswalks.

[Benito]

You're just unmuted.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know. Hi, this is Elon Musk. Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla Engineering. You know, they say money can't buy happiness. I guess that's true. God knows I've tried. But it can buy a cybertruck and that's pretty sick. Right? Right?

[Paris Martineau]

Fuck.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so alone. That was one right.

[Paris Martineau]

Out in the wild.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this was last weekend. City employee was the first to report the issue. University Avenue and High Street. Downtown Palo Alto is a very high tech capital. I mean it's really, it's the place. It's hysterical.

[Benito]

Did you read the follow up on how they did this?

[Leo Laporte]

No, how did they do it, Benito?

[Benito]

All the codes, all the pin numbers were 1, 2, 3, 4. To access that stuff.

[Georgia Dow]

Oh my God. No way. That's almost as bad. The passcode is passcode, password is password.

[Leo Laporte]

That's great because nobody, nobody thought anybody would hack. Nobody expected anybody would hack the crosswalk messages. They just thought why would anybody do that? That. The other one was Mark Zuckerberg.

[Paris Martineau]

The Mark Zuckerberg one is good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And by the way, these are imitations. They're obviously not the Mark Zuckerberg.

[Paris Martineau]

No, Elon Musk is inside there. They just made him really small.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. They made him really small. Hi, this is Mark Zuckerberg. But real ones call me the Zuck. You know, it's normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every. Every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you.

[Nicholas De Leon]

You don't need to worry.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

[Georgia Dow]

Not creepy at all.

[Leo Laporte]

I just think that's a great art project or a hacker project or something.

[Paris Martineau]

On a similar note, there is an article about. It's 89 in the rundown. China had the world's first robot marathon.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see the videos of that? Yeah, Half marathon. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll read the lead from Bloomberg. Some of China's best humanoid robots took on the challenge of racing against human marathon runners on Saturday. One fell at the starting line, another's head fell off and rolled in the ground. And one collapsed and broke into pieces.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Paris Martineau]

There were ones that started smoking. Another one could only run one mile an hour and had to be tagged out. It was a.

[Leo Laporte]

However, one went all the way. 5 foot 10 Tiangong Ultra made it for the half marathon, which is what, 13 miles, right. In 2 hours and 40 minutes, far.

[Paris Martineau]

Belong the hour long performance of a human.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah, but it's a robot.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. During that two hour, during that basically three hours the robot ran, it had had a team of people running behind it to switch out its battery.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I was wondering how they got that battery life.

[Paris Martineau]

It also had a guy running directly in front of it doing the moves that they wanted the robot to do so that the robot wouldn't have to think about how to run. It could just mimic the guy.

[Leo Laporte]

It was copying the guy.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, there was a guy. There was a. It had a guy to follow.

[Georgia Dow]

You should get the medal. That's the.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, that guy came through first.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Little Giant, developed by local college students. It only got 75 centimeters. Oh, no, I'm sorry. It was only 75 centimeters high. It goes around 1.4 miles an hour. At one point, it paused briefly after smoke spewed out of his head.

[Georgia Dow]

I would pay to watch that.

[Paris Martineau]

It took one fall in three batteries for Tian Gong to score the win. With his supporting machine leading the robot contestants through the race.

[Leo Laporte]

That's most impressive.

[Paris Martineau]

Wearing a signaling device on his lower back, ran ahead at for the of the bot for it to mimic its moves. Most of the other androids were controlled by joysticks with human operators running alongside of them. Some had leashes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I saw some of them had leashes. I wasn't sure why, like, are they going to. They're afraid they're going to run off.

[Paris Martineau]

They're worried about traffic like a.

[Georgia Dow]

They don't want to go down and like it's a million dollars of like, you know, repairs.

[Benito]

This needs to be a reality. Reality show.

[Paris Martineau]

There was one that was a Gundam. There was a Gundam that really, really. The thing lost control and crashed into the barricade separating the human and robot.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, but I, I want to remind you 15 years ago, during the DARPA Grand Challenge for Self Driving vehicles. It was rare for a vehicle to get more than a 10ft down the road before hurtling off the road. I mean, and we thought it was funny. We laughed.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. You know, these, these. I mean it's the first couple steps until they start smoking and fall over. But just in case you're worried that this robot competition is too masculine. They had exactly one female looking robot, Juan Han, who was equipped with a mannequin esque head and stormtrooper style armor. She collapsed shortly after the start, scattering body armor on the track. It did not continue the race. So women can't but I guess they can try, at least in robot form.

[Leo Laporte]

Jammer B is suggesting the show title. We had some good ones so far. Be some had leashes. Are you ready for a social now? You know, now that we've decided social networks are destroying society, are you ready for one? One from OpenAI.

[Paris Martineau]

Is it just going to be the bots talking to each other? Like who's going to be posting?

[Leo Laporte]

OpenAI is working with its own X like social network. Working on its own X like social network. According to. It's interesting, the Verge is now finally calling it X, not Twitter. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, the project is still in early stages. The Verge got this scoop. We're told there's an internal pro prototype focused on ChatGPT's image generation that has a social feed. Yeah. Wait a minute. What? Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project. That's I think where they got the leak. It's unclear if OpenAI's plan is to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT. We certainly spend many, many hours chatting with ChatGPT, don't we?

[Paris Martineau]

Some of us do, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't.

[Benito]

This just seems like a place for them to collect more data.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Right.

[Benito]

That's what, that's what this is. They just want more data.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And more usage time. You know, I mean, I think social networks are particularly sticky. We've yet to see the stickiness of one on one chatbot things. I guess over the same time period that we've been able to observe the stickiness of social network works. I could totally see why a company would want to combine the two.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you did see the. Did I mention it on this show or that I did mention it. It costs money for you to say thank you to OpenAI.

[Benito]

I assume that it would also like the part of the training would be the relationships between all of its users. Right now it knows the Relationship?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, you want to build a social graph. I mean, that's what made Facebook so successful, right? This knowledge about how we're all interconnected.

[Benito]

And that becomes part of the training data now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Makes sense, actually. Palantir. So I started reading Alex Karp's new book, the Technological Republic. I wanted to give it a chance. He's the founder of Palantir, along with Peter Thiel. Palantir is an AI company designed to make money by charging the government for national defense projects. And they've made a lot of money. They made Alex Karp a billionaire. His book kind of makes the argument that Silicon Valley should be working for national defense instead of just designing, you know, a better way to show ads or, you know, silly social networks or gadgets. And I have to say, I keep. I can't disagree that there's a lot of brain power being used on pretty trivial stuff these days in Silicon Valley. He says if people, engineers in the last century, in the 20th century, worked with government to create things like NASA and the atom bomb and the Internet, and we're losing out because we're not doing that anymore. But then in the book, he makes a pitch. That's why you should come to work for us. Balance. He's actually obviously an intellectual. He invokes everything from the philosopher Habermas, with whom he studied as a graduate student, to Keith Johnstone, who wrote a famous book about improvisation. He thinks companies should be run like Improv troops. Well, 404 has.

[Paris Martineau]

Has he ever witnessed an improv troupe? There's more drama in the actual average improv troupe than every company in Silicon Valley combined. They're all dating each other and in a constant free fall of social relationships.

[Leo Laporte]

He says, you don't want hierarchy if you want to create something great. The. The leader.

[Paris Martineau]

Has he ever taken an improv class? A classic early improv class? You draw cards to then determine what the hierarchy of the scene is, because having hierarchy is part of comedy. Go to an improv 101 class, Alex.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's. But it's fungible, right? Hierarchy is always changing. And sometimes you're the leader, sometimes I'm the leader. It's kind of like intelligent machines, really, to be honest.

[Georgia Dow]

Perhaps.

[Leo Laporte]

404 has leaked Palantir's plan to help ICE deport people. So Palantir, in the book, he says, among other things, we've done at Palantir, and it was hard. We. You know, the. The. The brass and the Pentagon really didn't want us to do it. They didn't want. They didn't have ways that you could procure AI from us. So the troops just went back and, and, and used our, our AI to find IEDs, because that was a big problem in Afghanistan. A lot of lives were lost. People were severely injured by these improvised explosive devices. So we turned our AI genius into ways to predict where there would be an IED and save many lives, he claims. Now Palantir wants to help ICE deport people. Finding the physical location of people who are marked for deportation. According to Palantir slacks and other internal Messages obtained by 404 Media. 404 is doing great work these days. Joseph Cox writing the story. The leak shows that Palantir's work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to find people to deport or what could possibly go wrong. And keeping track of the logistics of the mass deportation effort. The internal communications also show Palantir's leadership preparing for a potential backlash from employers, employees. I'm sorry. Or outsiders. So they wrote FAQs that can be sent to family and friends. If they ask you about our work with ice, here's what you should tell them.

[Georgia Dow]

Hey, all I've seen Lord of the Rings.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Palantir, that's. That's the Seeing Star stone, right, that Saruman was using, right?

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Over the last few weeks, we prototyped a new set of data integrations and workflow with an ice. The new administration's focus on leveraging data to drive enforcement operations has accelerated these efforts.

[Paris Martineau]

Absolutely meaningless.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't know. Well, I hope it's meaning. I hope it's useless and meaningless. But of course the greater fear is that is false positives that AI often generates with face recognition and other tools. And there was a story this week about Clearview AI and that was started really with the intent of. Of doing that. The sh. This is a story from Mother Jones. The shocking far right agenda behind the facial recognition tech used by ice and the FBI. Thousands of newly obtained documents show that Clearview AI's founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left. That was their goal. They got in a little bit of trouble because they were scraping all the face images from the Internet they could find. They also got in trouble because Clearview AI had a particular trouble with people of color. Didn't do a very good job job. And there were a lot of false positives. Turns out they didn't really care about that.

[Paris Martineau]

What could go wrong?

[Leo Laporte]

What could go wrong? So there you have it. A couple of uses for AI that are perhaps not the best.

[Benito]

I Think it's fascinating how the guy from Palantir is like, he's trying to say that this technology is about, like it's like the Internet, right? Like it's the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's good for us. Well, it's very believable at first. Maybe it's part like the manosphere. He starts out by saying, look, we gotta defend our way of life. We gotta defend this country. And I'm not against that. I think it's true there are adversaries that we don't want to attack us or invade us. So it's not unreasonable to have a strong national defense. And he says that's all we're doing. We just need to devote our intelligence.

[Paris Martineau]

We just need to let the computers that have no responsibility or over site decide who gets sent to prisons in foreign lands.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I confess a lot. It is a little more scary when you see this now being done without due process, without trials, just based on whatever the AI says. Yeah, he's in the gang, he's got a tulip on his lapel or whatever. And that's getting a little scary. The will of willingness of our government to bypass constitutional protections and send people to what is essentially a torture cell, a torture prison in El Salvador, makes this much more scary technology. It just gives them deniability. The AI told us to do it.

[Benito]

Yeah, it's. Computer says no. That's what that is.

[Leo Laporte]

Computer says says no. Yeah, New Jersey is suing Discord. Actually, let me take a break and then we'll get to that.

[Paris Martineau]

Suing over what? You'll have to continue listening to find out.

[Leo Laporte]

Stay tuned. Why would New Jersey be suing Discord, I wonder? Our show today, brought to you by Monarch Money. I. Well, I have been using this lately. In fact, I liked it so much I signed up for. For a year. Finances are tricky, especially nowadays, right? Can be very confusing. Stock market go up, number go down, all over the place in circles. Monarch Money is like your personal cfo, giving you full visibility, full control, so you could stop just, you know, earning and start really growing your investments. It's a lot more than an average budgeting app. Monarch Money is a complete financial command center for your accounts, your investments, your goals. You don't just manage your money, start building your wealth. And by the way, we've made it very easy to do this now because with Monarch Money, you can start building your wealth with 50% off your first year when you go to monarchmoney.com and use the offer code. Twit. By the way, this was the easiest. I've tried this with other apps. This was the easiest one that I could link to every. Everything now in one place. I know everything. I know how much I've lost in the stock market. I know how much I've gained in the real estate market. I know what you look at. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to this. You kind of need to know what's going on. Plus, it helps me with budgets. It says, you made this much this month. You spent this much this month. Lisa and I can compare finances. It helps me with the investments. It helps me with changing my investments when the time comes. I got weekly spending reviews. Start managing your finances to build the life that you actually want. Without a clear financial picture, the financial dreams go poof. You'll always know where your money stands without the hassle. No more bounce checks. Everything is in its place. You can track your spending, your savings, your investments effortlessly that you can save for your future, your retirement, that house. Focus on what matters most. Make making your biggest life goals a reality. Ignorance is not bliss in this case. It's good to know. And this makes it so easy. Monarch Money is a finance tool people actually love. Over a million households now. Wall Street Journal has named it the best budgeting app of 2025. It's a top recommended personal finance app by users and experts. Over 30,000 five star reviews. And I will tell you, I love it. It's beautiful. It's easy to use. It works everywhere I am. Get control of your overall finances with monarch money monarchmoney.com and use the offer code TWIT. You do that in your browser. That's the only way you can get this half off your first year. Get 50% off your first year when you go to monarchmoney.com monarchmoney.com the offer code is TWIT. I really, really enjoy this. All right, last few stories before we wrap this thing up on our Easter Sunday episode. So good to have Georgia Dow and Paris Martineau and Nicholas De Leon here. Thank you guys for giving up the. Did you do. Did you when the kids were little? Georgia, you're the only one with kids here, so I can say Georgia. Did you do the Easter egg hunt thing? Was that. Yeah. You don't do that anymore then.

[Georgia Dow]

That's so much fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, Frank's outgrown that, right?

[Georgia Dow]

Oh, like, you know, it's just different now. Now he just searches around the house for where I've, like, hidden all of my Cadbury Creme eggs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Where are those chocolate bunnies?

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa gave our 22 year old son a chocolate bunny that's about this big. It's huge.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, you just get more expensive chocolate now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the giantest bunny I ever saw. Do you eat the ears off or the tail off first? This is very important.

[Georgia Dow]

It's the story of the two bunnies that are staring at each other. And one of them has its ears bitten off and the other one has its butt bitten. And one of them goes, my butt hurts. And other one goes, huh, huh.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good. I like it. And you say Paris, you say the ears.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you unwrap the ears first.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are the most, the most obvious place to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a good mouth feel. And you can't, you can't have any of that hollow chocolate bunny stuff. It's got to be a solid chocolate bunny.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if it's a foot tall or foot and a half tall, you don't want a solid one. That'd be a lot of chocolate.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, I mean, that's a challenge. If you don't want that much chocolate, then you're a coward.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you ever do this, Georgia? We used to do this. It was so fun. Lisa would. I would help her with this. I cut out a bunny paw print that's about this big. You know, like 8 inch bunny paw print and cardboard. And then we'd sprinkle powdered sugar over it all the way down through the yard, out the back door to the. The yard, over the fence. Do you ever do that? That's so.

[Georgia Dow]

I've done that with sparkles for the King Fairy. It didn't end well. It ended up just having sparkles all over the place. And that was the end of that. That.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why powdered sugar is a good choice.

[Georgia Dow]

Except I, I remember the trauma of like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Georgia Dow]

Having sparkles all over the place when.

[Leo Laporte]

He was really little. He believed it. He was. He was like. It was so cute. The Easter Bunny's been here. Little powdered sugar footprints.

[Georgia Dow]

Love it. So cute.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Love it.

[Georgia Dow]

Until the ants show up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, maybe I'm blurry.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You've gone out of focus.

[Georgia Dow]

I don't know what happened.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all right. You're fading away.

[Paris Martineau]

The camera's getting tired. It's been three hours.

[Leo Laporte]

It has been a long. No, you're right, it has. Let's wrap this up. I have to finish this story. New Jersey sues Discord for failing to protect children.

[Georgia Dow]

Children.

[Paris Martineau]

Not the children.

[Leo Laporte]

Not the children. The New Jersey attorney General says that Discord's features to keep children under 13 safe are inadequate. See, this is why again I'm going to come back to that great solution which is let the platform do it. A few years ago so the Attorney General of New Jersey who is named Platt Matthew Platkin says there were a few years ago a family friend came to him astonished that his 10 year old astonished I tell you that his 10 year old was able to sign up for Discord. I am astonished. The other one's a little more serious. The mass shooting in Buffalo, New York where the shooter used Discord as his personal diary in the lead up to the attack and then lived streamed it on Discord. Don't do that. That's terrible. But is this Discord's fault? The AG says it is.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean I suppose if you're specifically looking at Discord having users under the age of 13 and not applying the kind of provisions established during COPA under COPA on them, that is certainly a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

But what can you do besides saying are you 13? And then this is the open secret.

[Paris Martineau]

Of the ENT Internet is that all the websites, all they do is say you by entering this and clicking this box you attest that you're over 13. Pinky promise we have to believe. And yeah increasingly regulators from inter attorney generals to people in Congress to regulatory agencies are saying that's not good enough. And it we still haven't figured out what is the alternative.

[Georgia Dow]

I think that it goes to who, who really should be watching over what you're about talking children are doing.

[Leo Laporte]

And who should it be? Georgia, the Attorney General of New York.

[Georgia Dow]

Probably not like there's just too many kids out there for, for them to be able to please and they're just.

[Paris Martineau]

Smart, let's just say it.

[Georgia Dow]

They'll find ways to be able to skirt any of the rules.

[Paris Martineau]

So I mean, sorry, continue.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, you, so you, you, you have to be able to watch over them to be able to know what they're doing and, and to have to take care.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's the problem. Kids are always going to go off and do things right.

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, for sure. Of course that's their job. Their job is to try to make as much trouble as possible and our job is to try to keep them under wraps. But the thing is is that if we're, if minimum wage is so is able to cover so little and you have to work 2 jobs then how do you watch over your kids too? So like it's. The blame can be kind of given to Many different sets of things. It's so much easier to just say parents should just a better job. But when they are working so hard to try to put food on the table and not starve to death and die. You know, if you're working two jobs, you can't be there with your.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand but do give them the tool. Start by giving them the tools. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

And I mean I think what George said is really important point. Like I've had a lot of conversations with parents of like immense privilege. Like a woman who incredibly incredible financial resources. She has three children. At the time she was taking time off work to kind of be a full time parent while also maybe dabbling in some nonprofit stuff on the side. She was like, even for me, a parent with immense resources, I am struggling to do this. She's like, I've got all the things downloaded on all of my kids phones. I have specific phones that will block them from stuff and software set up in the back that if they access any of this content that I've considered like you know, yellow flag or red flag content, then it'll notify me and I can, you know, approve or disprove it. And she's like, even with that I get like 500 notifications a day. And she's like I don't have time, time to go through that every single day, at every single moment. She's like, how would any person with a normal amount of responsibility, much less a high amount of responsibility, maybe a single mother or a single father. How are they supposed to do any of this successfully if these companies aren't providing the tools necessary for parents to kind of take control of their kids experience. And we've only recently had that in the last year or two that comes companies like Meta and Tick Tock are rolling out more robust parental controls. And it is I feel like too soon to say is whether or not those are enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Georgia Dow]

And they don't want to have any parental controls because they, they. We already know that if you do not start something that's addictive before the age of 18, the chance of you going to it are very little.

[Paris Martineau]

So they do want to try to.

[Georgia Dow]

Grab kids as early as possible so they will do the most lax things as possible so that they can grab as much as many kids as they can early get them latched on.

[Benito]

Kids also have the most time to just chill on Facebook.

[Georgia Dow]

That is true.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it anything like sneaking into an R rated movie?

[Georgia Dow]

Yeah, of course, yes. But it's different sneaking into an R rated movie.

[Paris Martineau]

It's different in the sense that sneaking into an R rated movie in the way that you're describing describing it back in the day, that was a discreet event. You sneak into the movie and you see one movie, maybe if you're crazy you're going to be out with your friends and maybe sneak into a second movie if you're in, oh gosh, I'm sorry, I just flung a fork across my desk. I don't know if you guys heard that, but that's how passion I got. You know, maybe if you're insane you sneak into a third movie but there's a temporal limit and like a physical space limit. At a certain point your parents will be like where is my child? They're not a good point.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you have watch a few.

[Paris Martineau]

If this kid has a, a phone and is able to access all of this content all of the time, 24 7, that's a bit, it ramps up. And if that is not one app, not two, but three or five or ten plus anything they can get on the Internet as well, that just makes it more complicated. I mean I don't think that it should be some sort of nanny state that is policing every action that kids do. But I do think that parents by and large are kind of calling out for help because they find it incredibly difficult to parent effectively given the tools that they have currently.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they don't have to give the kid a phone or a computer.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean for most parents, I, I, I don't know the age of your kids Georgia, but the parents that I hear nowadays of like people even have elementary or middle school parents, they'll be like every child in my kids middle school class has a phone and they are bullying the child incessantly for not having one. Well, I'm being left out of practice. I'm being left out of homework assignments. It's a social contagion.

[Georgia Dow]

I didn't want to my children a computer or tablet and in their elementary school it was obligatory. They had to have yes, that's not unusual. Because of that I, I was, it forced my hand that I had absolutely no say in the matter of them having access to that before. I wanted them to be able to have access to it. And then if we add to the state that your brain is wiring whatever you're doing at any moment in time, your brain is wiring itself to get better at that. And so if we're having something that you're getting this immediate feedback from, whatever it might be, any type of dopamine, we're wiring their brains to become more easily addictive and having shorter and shorter attention spans. And that effect is pretty hardwired because neurons that fire together wire together.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't want to leave this show on a negative note, so let me leave it on a high note.

[Georgia Dow]

Sorry, that was a positive. Was I meaning it negative? No, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to know if Paris has a little like, you know, it's not like a pen jar, it's like a fork jar with a bunch of forks in it just by your. So whenever you need a fork, you've got one right there.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Just in case.

[Leo Laporte]

Just in case you need a little fork holder on your desk.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, sometimes during the ad break, you go and you get a little plate of crackers and smoke. You got a fish Friday. Sometimes a stray, an errant hand gesture flings the fork across your keyboard.

[Leo Laporte]

These things happen.

[Paris Martineau]

You got to continue on.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the good, good news. Scientists have found promising indications of extraterrestrial light. And it's only 124 light years away.

[Paris Martineau]

Is this good news? This stresses me out.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't worry.

[Georgia Dow]

Depends your thoughts on aliens.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just dimethyl sulfide, a potential biosignature of marine microorganisms. This got a lot of attention. This got almost as much attention as the dire wolf story from last week and was almost equal to totally bogus. They did not.

[Paris Martineau]

Makes me think of that planet in interstellar with the big waves.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love that. And it. And one minute on the planet is like seven years in the real world.

[Paris Martineau]

It's so stressful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, poor Matthew McConaughey gets stuck down there and then he has to watch the video of his kids growing up. And he cries and he cries and.

[Paris Martineau]

Then I cry and then I cry and then the IMAX continues. And yeah, you know, that's what happen.

[Leo Laporte]

The good news is this is with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope. That's very cool. Biosignatures of marine microorganisms. Unfortunately, this dimethyl sulfide can also occur because of other chemical processes. It's not necessarily life, but it could be. And it's kind of a cool planet. It is a watery planet. Its year is only 33 days. Days long. It is in the Goldilocks zone. It's what they call a Hycean planet. A class of worlds characterized by having vast liquid oceans and a hydrogen rich atmosphere. I mean, really, if you're going to be a marine microorganism, that's the place to be.

[Georgia Dow]

Are they water Oceans or are they something else?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they think they're water. Oceans.

[Benito]

It's 1901 over there to them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

1901 here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's ancient. Ancient times. 124 light years away. They're watching us going, gee, I wonder if they'll ever figure out how to fly. Anyway, I, you know, I think it's maybe possible. I wasn't even going to do this story, but Lisa was so excited about it. I said, all right, we'll do this story. She likes the idea that there's extraterrestrial life out there.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that's really cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Paris Martineau, the information. Nope. Sorry. That's a force of habit. Tech journalist. Currently in the mood for a new job, if you've got one. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Fire away. We're talking, we're talking, we're talking around.

[Paris Martineau]

If you're a person that works in tech and you've got an interesting story to report, hit me up.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't that be the way to do it? Have, like the hottest story in the world and just.

[Paris Martineau]

You can reach out to me@Tipsaris NYC.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Don't use your work email.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't use your work.

[Leo Laporte]

Give her a scoop or Martineau 01 on the signal and I will see you next this Wednesday for Intelligence. Yeah. Thank you, Paris. It's great to see you. Always. Always a pleasure. Great to be here. Nicholas De Leon, he is the senior electronics reporter, Consumer Reports. Always great to see you. Please give my regards to your wonderful Ashley.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes, thank you, Leah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay. You guys are so much fun. We had a great time down there in Tucson. Anything you want to plug? You gonna. You're gonna do anything out there in the world or just go to the.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Consumer Reports website, That's fine. Like I said, I. I mean, I'm still on X, you know, but I feel like these things are less, Less fun than they used to be. I.

[Leo Laporte]

They are not fun anymore. Not for me.

[Nicholas De Leon]

So just go to the CR website, subscribe and read, you know, read our stuff. Yeah, that's about it.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. I've been a member since, like 1980. Very happy to say. Love it. Wouldn't buy a thing without the recommendation of Consumer Reports. And that's actually.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Like, it's funny. Like, as I've gotten older, I'm like, man, I'm literally about to start the process. Process for like, buying a new refrigerator?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you gotta look at some reports.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I could actually ask the guy.

[Leo Laporte]

But, like, this is the, you know, the Guys.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes, as a matter of fact, they do.

[Leo Laporte]

So I do remember I used to. My, my wife said, why do you buy that shampoo? I said it was highly rated on Consumer Reports. She said, they, those guys wash their hair with soap. You should not get there. You should not take their views for, for cosmetics seriously. I said, I don't know. I don't think that's true. So there I was actually always been inspired by Consumer Reports and it's ad free policy. I really think that's brilliant.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah. I mean, it's, as I've said many times, it's very nice to be in an organization where you're not really subject to the pressures of, you know, other outlets where it's like, you know, ad sales are weak. What do we do? You know, we're, we're, you know, we're not impervious to market conditions, but we're a little bit, we're a little bit isolated.

[Leo Laporte]

A little bit.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I mean, a little isolated.

[Leo Laporte]

It's supported. It's supported by its subscribers, which I think is the best way to go. Thank you so much, Nicholas. Great to see you.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you also to the wonderful Georgia dow. She's on YouTube. YouTube.com Georgia Dow. You can. It's a therapist reacts. It's a whole bunch of stuff. And I'm looking forward to your new thing with Mr. Richie. That's going to be cool.

[Georgia Dow]

It should be a lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Georgia Dow]

Anthony's asked me to ask and, and he's just. He's going to be really upset if I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Georgia Dow]

The Altair 800, is it behind you?

[Leo Laporte]

8800 behind me.

[Georgia Dow]

800. Sorry. Be all upset that I said that wrong. Is it real?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Georgia Dow]

Is it like a replica? He wants to know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's a replica. I think it's.

[Paris Martineau]

You've got a fake computer behind you.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, it's a computer. It's got a Raspberry PI in it. So the one on the top is a PDP 11, although they call it a PIDP because it's got a Raspberry PI inside. But the funny thing is a Raspberry PI is actually faster than the processor in a PDP 11, so they have to slow it down. But it's running PDP 11 code and OS and the Altair, I don't know what's in that, to be honest with you, but it is running a game and you can program it by flipping the switches on the back.

[Georgia Dow]

He's very jealous. He wants it. Which.

[Leo Laporte]

Good on Anthony. For recognizing it.

[Georgia Dow]

Oh, no, no, no. He's all in. Like, he keeps on. Anyways.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you should go to the. You could drive down to the antique computer show, the vintage computer festival they have.

[Georgia Dow]

I think that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you should go. There was recently one on the east coast, but I think they have a West Coast.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris was talking about it. Yeah, vcf. They had all these old computers, including.

[Paris Martineau]

They have a huge marketplace for old computers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you could probably get a real.

[Georgia Dow]

Don't.

[Paris Martineau]

Gonna come back with a wheelbarrow full of.

[Georgia Dow]

We found out about Marketplace and it's been.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, bad news, Bad news. The VCF east was just. Just happened, I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, they have other ones, though, but.

[Leo Laporte]

They'Re all over the country. There's Southwest, West, Midwest. Don't look.

[Paris Martineau]

Avert your eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, it's so cool, all this old stuff. It's really great. It's really great. Thank you, Georgia.

[Georgia Dow]

Thank you for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

Great to see you. Thank you, Nicholas. Thank you, Paris. Thanks to all of you who joined us. Special thanks to our Club Twit members who make these shows possible. Yes, we have advertising, but advertising does not cover all our costs. Not even close. And so a couple of years ago, we thought, thought, you know, instead of cutting back, maybe we should go to our audience and say, would you like to support us? And you guys have responded with. With Viga. I really am appreciated. Seven bucks a month. I think that's. It's nice. It's a very low cost. We try to make it affordable. You get ad. Free versions of all the shows. You get special events. We did yesterday or Friday, I guess it was. We did a coffee segment with our friend Mark Prince, the coffee Coffee geek. We do all sorts of fun stuff, photo segments. Micah does his crafting corner every month. Our AI user group is coming up next Friday if you want to find out more. Twit TV club Twit. We would love to have you in the club. And I will give you a little insider tip. Buy now while the prices are low, because we. I think we're going to have to raise the. Not a lot, but I think we have to raise the club membership a couple of bucks soon because it's. It's getting a little tight, to be honest. But I promise you, if you're already a member, we will not raise it on you. So lock in that seven bucks a month, $84 a year. Yes. We've added an annual as well. Twit TV Club Twit. You can watch the show if you're in the Club on our Discord. We do the show every Sunday from 2 to 5, 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern Time, 2100 UTC. You can also watch it whether you're in the club or not on YouTube. There are people, lots of hundreds of them watching right now on YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. Watch however you want, but you don't have to watch live. You can if you want to. If you, if you watch live, you can chat with me and that's nice. I see all you chatters in there talking about things. If you don't want to watch live and I know it's, you know, you have to be around a Sunday, on a Sunday evening, you can always download the show at our website, Twit TV. There's audio or video. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in tech. And of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically. It's free. It's free. Thanks to our club members and our wonderful advertisers. And if you're not a member of the club, join us. All right, thanks for being here, everybody. We're in our 21st year now. It's official. And again. Yeah. Woo. Amazing, huh?

[Paris Martineau]

Please pour your beverage directly into whatever thing is playing your podcast right now just to celebrate. Please.

[Leo Laporte]

No, don't do that. Please don't.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the official guidance from this guy.

[Leo Laporte]

We had a great, great last week. We did our 20th anniversary. Had all these wonderful videos from. Oh, there was a fire eater. There were two, not one, but two guys driving tractors.

[Paris Martineau]

There was a guy, I say it again, I say it all the time. On intelligent machines. We need, we as an audience of twit have to bully Leo into Bringing back the 24 hour twit live stream where we do content every hour for 24 hours. And last time Leo got a tattoo at midnight and I think we could make it happen again.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a tattoo and I got my head, head shaved, but it was for charity.

[Paris Martineau]

But not a tattoo on his shaved head just to be.

[Leo Laporte]

No, the tattoo's on my behind.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S very small. Really. It's as small a tattoo as you could get.

[Paris Martineau]

We was the only sober tattoo artist on.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. We called around and everybody was, you know, and there was this one guy who was a non drinker, he said, just went to bed. We said it's for unicef, it's charity. And he waved his feet, donated his feet to UNICEF and gave me the world's smallest tattoo. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye. Bye. This is amazing. Two on the twin. All right.