TWiT 1073: Broetry in Motion - Anthropic Stands Up to The Pentagon

Summary

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This Week in Tech (TWiT 1073): Broetry in Motion – Anthropic Stands Up to the Pentagon

Date: March 2, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Molly White, Owen Thomas, Harry McCracken

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Episode Overview

In this week's episode, Leo Laporte is joined by Molly White (web3isgoingjustgreat.com), Owen Thomas (San Francisco Business Times), and Harry McCracken (Fast Company) to dissect a tumultuous week in tech. The central theme: the high-stakes standoff between Anthropic (creator of the AI “Claude”) and the U.S. Department of Defense, unfolding alongside sweeping implications for the AI industry, corporate layoffs, media consolidation, government tech policy, and the blurred boundaries between technology, autonomy, and ethics. More news is explored including Block layoffs, the Netflix–Warner-Paramount content wars, open-source worries, and evolving hardware from Apple and Samsung.

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Main Story: Anthropic vs. The Pentagon

Anthropic’s Stand (03:00–17:26)

• Anthropic's Dilemma: Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, is the only U.S. AI vendor cleared for classified government work. It faced a pivotal $200M Pentagon contract renewal. The Pentagon demanded unfettered use—including autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance—crossing Anthropic's "red lines."
  • Leo Laporte: “The Pentagon said, ‘Hey, we don’t want any limitations’ … Anthropic said, ‘We don’t want you to use us to surveil Americans or create autonomous weapons.’”
• Standoff & Fallout: Anthropic refused to budge. The Pentagon declared them a “supply chain risk,” and President Trump ordered all federal agencies to cease using Anthropic products (05:01). This risks partnerships with companies like Google, Microsoft, Nvidia.
  • Owen Thomas: “As Dario Amodei pointed out, that’s not actually how the supply chain risk law works” (05:34).
  • Anthropic sues; White House accused of favoring OpenAI (08:42).
• OpenAI’s Contrasting Strategy: OpenAI’s cloud-based models offer less operational flexibility for classified, air-gapped environments. OpenAI appeared more willing to trust federal assurances and reportedly secured a similar Pentagon contract.
  • Harry McCracken: “OpenAI giving the Department of Defense a looser, goosier definition of what it means for this stuff to have human oversight” (09:53).
• Moral Posturing or Marketing?
  • Molly White: “There’s been this weird sentiment that Anthropic is standing up to the government … ignores that Anthropic has been working for the government and assisting in military strikes” (13:43).
  • Harry McCracken: “Anthropic is not morally opposed to AI controlling killing systems. They just don’t think the technology is quite there yet” (10:44).
• Public Perception and PR Outcomes:
  • Anthropic’s stand wins them a “wave of Apple App downloads” and positive media.
  • Worries remain: Will the administration try to “drive Anthropic out of business” through regulatory or legal means? (16:59)
  • Owen Thomas: “Government business … is seen as prestigious … but not make or break.”
• Surveillance and Legal Loopholes:
  • Molly White: “OpenAI seems more willing to … take the government at their word … Anthropic wanted more reassurance: ‘no, we are not going to use the carve-outs in the law that might allow for mass surveillance’” (10:56).
  • Domestic surveillance is possible via Executive Order 12333, allowing the NSA to tap communications outside the U.S. that might involve Americans (11:28).

Notable Quotes

• Leo Laporte (04:59): “Trump actually posted on Truth Social that [Anthropic was] a very evil company and not patriotic … if it is a supply chain risk, nobody who has a contract with the Pentagon can use it.”
• Owen Thomas (05:55): “If the Pentagon were to do that [seize source code], how are they going to compel Anthropic’s employees to fix bugs?”
• Harry McCracken (15:33): “ChatGPT is still the Google of AI … this has to have been good publicity for Anthropic.”
• Owen Thomas (25:00): “Anthropic wins in the court of public opinion. They win in the court of hiring AI talent … very important.”

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Secondary Stories & Discussion Highlights

AI Ethics, Arms Race, and Open Source (20:02–28:22)

• AI Weaponization Worries: Real-world autonomous drones in Ukraine–Russia conflict; growing dread over AI-powered kill decisions.
  • Leo Laporte: “I’ve always pooh-poohed the idea that AI is a threat … unless you give it access to autonomous weaponry … now I’m starting to think B, there are people … who want to give AI that power.”
• Open Source as Relief or Risk: Open-source models could bypass corporate “red lines” but may undermine resistance to military use, possibly diluting leverage companies have in negotiations.
  • Molly White: “If we had open source models equivalent to these, then Anthropic couldn’t put up a fight.”
  • Leo Laporte: “There is an irony in Anthropic complaining about distillation attacks, since that’s how they built their models.”

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Block (Square) Layoffs and the "AI Layoffs" Trend (36:40–48:40)

• Block’s (Square) Massive Layoffs: Jack Dorsey announces 4,000 staff cuts despite strong financials, attributing it to “intelligence native” (AI-driven) processes.
  • Molly White: “There’s a trend lately of layoffs being attributed to AI … a lot of companies have announced layoffs with a sort of celebratory stance.”
  • Harry McCracken: “Is this the beginning of a tidal wave of AI layoffs?”
  • Owen Thomas: “It’s a revolving door of multi-million-dollar employment contracts” (25:17).
• Layoff Reality vs. AI Hype: Highly skilled workers, including software engineers, struggle to find new roles as expectations reset ("productivity panic" among AI-using coders).
  • Molly White: “I think there’s sort of two use cases … a casual person writing an app for themselves, and the company that says, ‘maybe we could stop paying for payment processing if we just did it ourselves with vibe-coded apps’ – oh jeez, that could go badly.”
• Rise of Vibe-Coded Startups: The panel predicts a wave of single-founder, AI-native startups might disrupt ossified incumbents, but “inchittification” (platform rot) still looms.

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Media Mergers: Netflix, Warner Bros., Paramount, and the Ellison Bid (64:38–77:28)

• Netflix Backs Out: Netflix exits a runaway “arms race” to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, leaving the Ellison family (Skydance/Paramount) as the likely winner, aided by lobbying and White House preferences.
  • Regulatory approvals are anticipated but not assured, and the deal consolidates CBS News, HBO, CNN, Star Trek, South Park, and DC Comics under one roof.
• Industry Implications:
  • Concerns mount about media diversity, job cuts, and debt-heavy companies.
  • Molly White: “I do not see any situation in which people end up with fewer subscriptions.”
  • Leo Laporte: “Plus, this is going to be a company laden with debt, which usually does not bode well… How do you do that, especially if a lot of your businesses are moribund?”

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Other Key Tech Topics

Security, Regulation, and Platform Lockdown (102:35–112:50)

• Google Tightens Android: Moves to require developer registration and government ID, ending true openness of the platform. Debate: security vs. user freedom.
  • Molly White: “My bias is towards openness personally … I think it’s a really nasty trend.”
• Age Verification Laws: States like California require age checks, even for open-source Linux distros—largely unenforceable and seen as legislative overreach.
  • Molly White: “You buy the phone, but you don’t really have any control over what you run on it anymore … that’s a really nasty trend.”

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AI's Personification & Marketing Gimmicks (80:10–85:09)

• Anthropic Blogs for Retired AI: Anthropic plans to launch a blog, Claude’s Corner, “written” by its retired Opus 3 model, seriously (or satirically) entertaining the idea of "model preferences".
  • Molly White: “It does work in Anthropic’s favor to keep the myth alive that this is a real intelligence … doesn’t this seem like a robot that doesn’t want to get unplugged?”

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Podcasting Surpasses Talk Radio (157:02–159:13)

• Milestone Achievement: For the first time, more Americans get daily spoken word content from podcasts than from terrestrial radio—a seismic cultural shift.

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Fun Sidebars

• Colorful Gadgets: The enduring appeal (and scarcity) of vibrant hardware—nostalgia for orange iBooks, clamshell iMacs, and the “personality” missing from today’s bland hardware (120:07–125:02).
• Anthropic’s Vibe: Debate over “broetry” (boilerplate poetic AI writing) and the inevitable LinkedIn-ification of AI-generated text.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Owen Thomas (12:06): “The public at large just cannot give this administration the presumption of regularity.”
• Molly White (12:57): “The administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not deserve it.”
• Molly White (53:55): “I do think that obvious tells [of AI-written content] will probably go away, but … a lot of marketing copy just has a specific tone, regardless of whether a human or an AI wrote it.”
• Harry McCracken (95:12): “I took a game I wrote in high school and used Claude code to write a web version … it did a great job ghosting my style from when I was in high school.”

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Lightning Round: Quick Hits

• Cyberattacks & Infrastructure: U.S. government agency CISA gutted, increasing national vulnerability amid rising AI-augmented cyberwarfare.
• AI in Fast Food: Burger King replaces shift managers with an AI assistant, Patty, auditing employee courtesies like saying “please” and “thank you” (159:52).
• Uber’s Air Taxi: Launch in Dubai (with pilots, for now) delayed by sandstorms.
• Sci-Fi Legend Passings: Remembering Rob Grant (Red Dwarf co-creator) and Dan Simmons (Hyperion author).
• SETI@Home’s Legacy: Millions of volunteers contributed to the search for alien signals; the data has been whittled to 100 promising targets—still, “they found nothing” (151:26).

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:00–17:26 – Anthropic vs. The Pentagon: Deal, red lines, fallout
• 17:26–28:22 – Open Source AI, Surveillance, and Corporate Ethics
• 36:40–48:40 – Block/Square layoffs and AI “productivity” firing trends
• 64:38–77:28 – Netflix, Warner Bros., Paramount mergers, streaming wars
• 80:10–85:09 – AI anthropomorphism: Claude’s Corner blog
• 102:35–112:50 – Google, Apple, and the war on device openness
• 157:02–159:13 – Podcasts overtake talk radio

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Tone & Language

The episode blends trademark TWiT snark with honest concern, humor, and historical context.
Memorable zingers:

• “It’s a plague of broetry.” – (Owen Thomas, 52:52)
• “I use Claude code all the time … something magical happened at the end of November.” – (Leo Laporte, 18:53)
• “Anthropic wins in the court of public opinion. They win in the court of hiring AI talent.” – (Owen Thomas, 25:00)

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Final Thoughts

Is Anthropic out of business, or is this the smartest move ever?

• The consensus: lawsuit pending, but Anthropic’s moral stand may buoy its recruitment, reputation, and PR, even if revenue takes a hit.
• Participants reflect on shifting trust in institutions—neither corporations nor government inspire much faith as arbiters of future tech.

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Panel Instagrams:

• Molly White: MollyWhite.net
• Owen Thomas: San Francisco Business Times
• Harry McCracken: Fast Company & Technologizer.com

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Listen, subscribe, and thank you, Club TWiT!

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. It was a big news week, but we've got a big panel for you. Molly White's here, owen Thomas, Harry McCracken will talk about the showdown between the Department of Defense and Anthropic. Netflix gives up on the deal for Warner Brothers and layoffs at Block. Does it mean the beginning of the end for real humans? That and more coming up next on Twitter.

[Owen Thomas]

Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Harry McCracken]

Twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1073, recorded Sunday, March 1, 2026. Bro a tree in motion. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Great panel ahead for you. Molly White is here from web3 is going to justgreatmolliewhite.net hi, Molly.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

How are you in your brand new orange home?

[Molly White]

Welcome.

[Leo Laporte]

It's beautiful. Thank you. Did you get this place to match your hair or it just coincidental?

[Molly White]

Yeah, it made the search very challenging, but we made it happen.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so complimentary. It actually looks great. I mean, it's such a great background for you. Anyway, great to see you. Also with us, the wonderful Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Always good to see you, Owen. Who is, I mean, you're. Are you going to start entering weightlifting bodybuilding contests or is that your goal?

[Owen Thomas]

I haven't gone as far as a bodybuilding competition, but I have entered weightlifting competitions.

[Leo Laporte]

You look really good. I mean, go on, you. No, seriously, you're filling that shirt out like Arnold, man, you got it going on. It's great to see you.

[Owen Thomas]

I'm just, you know, I'm just trying to bring some muscle to tech journalism. Muscular journalism is what the world needs right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm not adding to that, that's for sure. I'm more on the spaghetti noodle kind of side of that picture. Also with us, the technologizer himself, the wonderful Harry McCracken from Fast Company. Hi, Harry.

[Harry McCracken]

Hey, Leo. Hi, folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Good to see you. You've been doing a lot of great interviews of late, including Molly White, I understand.

[Harry McCracken]

I talked to Molly a few months ago. I have some good stuff coming up soon, like watch Fast Company over the next couple of weeks or so.

[Leo Laporte]

I have you on my RSS feeds and it's frustrating because I'm trying to zip through R and every time I run across a Fast Company story, especially yours, I have to stop and read it, which is no good.

[Harry McCracken]

Well done at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Will you stop writing such good stuff? It's great to have all three of you. This has been a very eventful week. The clock was ticking all week long for anthropic, the AI company that creates Claude, which is, I think, decoders anyway, the premier coding AI. And of course, Claude had a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense. In fact, it was the only AI to my knowledge that had clearance to work on classified materials. In fact, CLAUDE was used in the Venezuela kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. Did I say kidnapping? That's probably a loaded word. Arrest, apprehension of extraction. Yes, extraction. That's a very good word. But the Department of Defense, the Pentagon said, hey, guys, we don't want any limitations on how we can use you. And Dario Mode of Anthropic said, well, wait a minute, we have two red lines. We don't want you to use us to surveil American citizens, and we don't want you to use us to create autonomous weapons that will kill without a human in the loop. Both of which, incidentally, are illegal. The DoD is not supposed to do either one of those. But Pete Hegseth said, no, we don't want any private company to put any restrictions on how we use their technology, which I guess sort of makes sense if you're the Pentagon. You know, it should be up to you and lawmakers to decide what you use, the hardware and software you contract. You wouldn't, you know, Boeing wouldn't say, well, you can't use our planes to bomb civilians. So I understand that a little bit. They ticked down to the wire 5pm on Friday, at which point Anthropic did not budge. And Pete Hegseth declared not only that they would stop using Anthropic, but they would designate them a supply chain risk. Trump actually posted on Truth Social

[Molly White]

that

[Leo Laporte]

they were a very evil, very evil company and not patriotic. And he said, I am directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease all use of anthropics technology. Furthermore, if it is a supply chain risk, nobody who has a contract with the Pentagon can use it. And that would include Google, that would include Microsoft, that would include Nvidia, all of which use Claude,

[Owen Thomas]

which, as Dario Amodei pointed out, is not actually how the supply chain risk law works.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In fact, they've immediately gone to court to challenge that it is better than it could have been. They could have used the Defense. I understand the Defense Production act to say, too bad we're just going to do what we want to do with

[Owen Thomas]

your AI, which that's an interesting thought experiment. What if the, you know, what if the Pentagon were to do that? So I suppose they could seize the source code, right? You know, they could, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how much access they

[Owen Thomas]

have, but how are they going to compel Anthropic's employees to fix bugs? Maintain it. They'll all just quit.

[Leo Laporte]

It was interesting because there was so much support on Twitter from Anthropic employees who obviously had a campaign. There were hundreds of tweets saying, I am so proud to be working for Anthropic because they drew the line. Pete Hegseth tweeted. I keep saying tweet X. I don't know.

[Harry McCracken]

This gets posted.

[Leo Laporte]

Posted on X this week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a text. Boy, he seems butthurt. As well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States government. Of the Pentagon, our position has never wavered and will never waver. The Department of War must have full unrestricted access to Anthropics models for every lawful purpose in defense of the Republic. He also implied that they're woke. Cloaked in the santactimonious rhetoric of effective altruism, they've attempted to strong arm the US Military into submission. Now there is some drama going on because despite the fact that Sam Altman issued a statement in support of Anthropic saying, yeah, yeah, we agree, this is absolutely right. On Wednesday, two days before he was actually negotiating with the Pentagon, Gary Marcus says the whole thing was a scam. The fix was in. Dario never had a chance. This is from the New York Times. At the same time, Mr. Altman engaged in talks with the Pentagon starting on Wednesday over a deal for its technology. In fact, they did get the deal. They have classified access. The Pentagon's gonna use them. It has nothing to do with the fact that the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, donated $25 million to a PAC supporting Donald Trump. Has nothing to do with the fact that Sam Altman donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration and more money to the ballroom that will never get built. You know, somebody pointed out, I think this is interesting. I don't know if it's true. Is this the first US Company to stand up to President Trump instead of giving him a gold bar?

[Harry McCracken]

Certainly to that degree, I think. No question in public, certainly.

[Leo Laporte]

And then that raises the question, did the government, did the administration put its thumb on the scale and say, we like these OpenAI guys, they're nice guys. They're generous. Anthropic out of business.

[Owen Thomas]

One key difference between OpenAI's products and Anthropic's OpenAI is all cloud. So anything that OpenAI offers is delivered from OpenAI servers. Claude actually exists in a downloadable, locally runnable version. And so it can be deployed in classified networks which are air gapped from the public Internet. OpenAI doesn't work on air gapped networks because it's all on the public Internet, even if it's secure, encrypted. These are physically separated networks. That I think is a key distinction. And that is why Anthropic is kind of in a tougher position here. And OpenAI can perhaps be a little holier than thou because their products are different.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, I saw somebody online, I don't remember who compare Sam Altman to Eddie Haskell, which seemed like a really good point of comparison. Of course, there's still the question of how he claims that he was able to wangle the same deal that Dario could not get. It seems like it might boil down to exactly what human oversight means and OpenAI giving the department of Defense a looser, goosier definition of what it means for this stu to have human oversight.

[Leo Laporte]

So I might have been a little cynical on Anthropic. They did in fact sign a $200 million contract with the Pentagon. If you do a deal with the Pentagon, aren't you saying they can use your technology in any way they choose?

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah. Also, Anthropic is not morally opposed to AI controlling killing systems. They just don't think the technology is quite there yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's an interesting point.

[Molly White]

Someday they seem more willing to. Sorry, OpenAI seems more willing to sort of take the government at their word that they will follow the law, at least as intended when it comes to things like mass surveillance. Whereas it seemed to me like Anthropic wanted more of a reassurance that no, we are not going to use the carve outs in the law that might allow for mass surveillance, or at least could be argued to allow for mass surveillance.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike Masnik posted on Bluesky that after examining the terms of the deal, it's pretty clear that in fact domestic surveillance is allowed through kind of a loophole. They refer to Executive Order 12333, which anthropic says, yeah, we'll comply with that allows the NSA to capture communications by tapping into lines outside the US even if it's information about US citizens. So I can see why some are thinking Sam Altman has been a little

[Owen Thomas]

Eddie Haskell ish There's a great term of art from the judicial world called the presumption of regularity. So when a government lawyer comes before a court, the judge kind of extends them essentially, the benefit of the doubt. The government is presumed to be kind of operating under the law, presenting true facts, et cetera. I think what we're seeing is that the court system, the tech world, the public at large, just cannot give this administration the presumption of regularity. Right, Good point.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it's bias. Is that bias?

[Owen Thomas]

Well, I'm just observing the reaction to. People are not extending the administration the benefit of the doubt that they might have extended other administrations.

[Molly White]

Well, I think the administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not deserve it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. I mean, the fact that Pete Hegseth says, no, no, man, you gotta allow us to surveil Americans. You gotta allow us to have autonomous killing machines. He's literally insisting on that. That kind of implies that they wanna do it.

[Owen Thomas]

What some people in tech are saying is, why would you want to do business with the Pentagon on these terms? And, you know, not just these terms, but just the way that they're, you know, kind of beating Anthropic up in public. Like, wouldn't it be easier to just say, we don't do business with the Pentagon? Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why the fact that they made that $200 million deal and they were involved in the Maduro extraction kind of makes sense. Yeah.

[Molly White]

That's one thing that's. That's very strange to me about some of the reaction to this, because there's been this sort of weird sentiment among that, you know, anthropic standing up to the government. They're the good guys. They're being very sort of morally driven. But it sort of ignores the fact that Anthropic has been working for the government and assisting in military strikes. And, you know, I think that some people are viewing this as the first time Anthropic is engaging with the Pentagon when that's actually not at all the case.

[Leo Laporte]

So there are those who say that anthropics played 5D chess here, that they are actually coming out the big winners. Here they are right now. The number one Apple app rose very quickly. More downloads of Anthropics, Claude, than ever in history. People are. There's even pages saying, here's how to cancel your open your OpenAI subscription.

[Harry McCracken]

I wonder. Yeah, I wonder what impact it will have on people deciding where to spend their 20 bucks a month.

[Molly White]

Yeah. I mean, especially if there's sort of the feeling that OpenAI is going to be willing to assist the Pentagon in mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. I mean, I might be a little bit more concerned about the data I'm sharing with ChatGPT.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. ChatGPT keeps your history. In fact, very interestingly, CLAUDE just added a feature which they're promoting about how to move off other AIs, how to extract all the history that the other AIs have of you and put it into CLAUDE instead.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, up until now, Claude, I mean, we all know about claude. I think its profile among like average Americans, not all that interested in technology, has been dramatically lower than that of

[Leo Laporte]

ChatGPT, which is still a billion active monthly active.

[Harry McCracken]

ChatGPT is still the brand name here. It is the Google of AI. And that this has to have been good publicity for Anthropic just in terms of it being in the news in a way it has not been up until now.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, some have pointed out, first of all that the issue with Frontier AIs and these hyperscalers right now is not how many contracts you can get. They're GPU constrained. So losing a $200 million contract with the Pentagon is meaningless because they'll immediately fill that with enterprise customers. They don't have enough GPUs to fulfill their demand as it is. So this just isn't, that's not an issue. They've gotten amazing publicity out of it.

[Harry McCracken]

Unless the Pentagon succeeds in getting enterprise customers antsy about doing business with Anthropic. And there is, I think the big question is, is the Trump administration attempting to drive Anthropic out of business essentially. And,

[Owen Thomas]

and good luck with that. I mean again, government business as a whole is non zero, but it is, you know, I think it's single digit percentage at most, you know, most big tech, big software companies. It's seen as prestigious, it's seen as like, well, we should have this. But I don't think it's make or break to the bottom line, but I

[Molly White]

think the question is, is the government going to do something unprecedented essentially to basically drive them out of business using, you know, the regulatory levers or the, you know, all these threats of designating them a supply chain risk or you know, a threat to American security? I mean they could do something very extreme if they wanted to and you know, it's sort of the presumption of regularity thing. Again, you know, why would they do reason to believe they might not.

[Leo Laporte]

Why would they try to put Anthropic out of business just because they didn't

[Harry McCracken]

give money they love a fight. They love being able to accuse somebody of being woke and then to try to destroy that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yes. Why would they destroy Harvard? Why would. Yeah, why would they. Why would.

[Harry McCracken]

And they're used. Generally speaking, most institutions have buckled under at least a little bit. Not Harvard, but a lot of other universities.

[Owen Thomas]

For instance, you know the Netflix board member who spoke out recently on a podcast, Susan Rice, who promptly drew Trump's scorn for doing so. Yeah. She pointed out that these companies that are bending the knee, to use her term, to the Trump administration, it's not going to look good for them if there's a change in control of the House or even the Senate, not to mention a new occupant of the White House in 2029. But the midterms are coming up soon, and a House of Representatives that can call oversight hearings, that has subpoena power. That is not going to be fun for some of these corporate leaders.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little bit of a chilling thought, but the administration is acting as if that will never happen. I hope they're wrong.

[Harry McCracken]

Well, they don't have a great track record for looking forward more than about 72 hours in general.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, good. You know, it's funny because I'm an accelerationist, I love AI. I use Claude code all the time. I'm blown away by what it can do. It's the first AI I've used all the chatbots and all that stuff, and I used Claude code in the past, but something magical happened at the end of November. I remember the day. November 24, 2025. I'll never forget it. And ever since, I've been kind of more of a believer that AI is real and it's going to change things. And I've never been a doomer. I've always kind of pooh poohed the people that said, oh, AI is going to destroy us. It's going to take over for humanity. I always said AI is not a threat unless you, I don't know, give it access to autonomous weaponry, for instance. Oh, yeah, it's the, the monkey's paw curls. Yeah. As long as you don't let AI decide who lives or dies, we're okay. But now I'm starting to think A, AI is very powerful and effective, still makes plenty of mistakes, and B, there are people, people in our administration who want to give AI that power.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, autonomous drones are being deployed in the Russia, Ukraine conflict right now. The war.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they make kill decisions or are they targeted before by humans? See, this is a Scary thing. You could create a drone army, a drone swarm that would have instructions about, well, if this guy's wearing a turban, you should kill him. That would make those decisions autonomously. And that's the thing that is really scary to me. I don't know if we're at that stage yet. I think we could be if somebody were stupid enough to create that weapon. We could be at that stage today if people have created that weapon. I'm terrified right now. Most of these drones stay online as long as they can in the cloud. In fact, the drones that we build and others build have Starlink built in them. Thank goodness Starlink isn't controlled by any crazed, mad, evil geniuses that could.

[Owen Thomas]

So, yeah, Ukraine is developing its own homegrown AI powered drones that can lock in our target. They don't need, you know, basically, I think a human selects a target, but they don't need a human. Okay. To kind of fire the shot.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a, that's a step in the wrong direction, that's for sure.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, Ukraine is desperate.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Like, I understand Their, their back is against the wall.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And as we know, Ukraine has been a, in effect, a, A test tube for this kind of war. Now Iran will be on both sides.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

The fiber optic drones, you know, to get around jamming. That's crazy to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Russians are going around with hedge clippers trying to cut the, cut the, the fiber optic cables.

[Molly White]

It reminds me of the electric lawnmowers that you have to plug in. Like, it just doesn't seem like a bad idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a. Anyway, this was a big moment for AI, A big moment for the Trump administration, and a possibly life or death moment for anthropic. Of course. OpenAI has just completed a massive record funding round. Right. They got money from Nvidia and Amazon.

[Molly White]

I feel like every funding round they've done is a record funding round.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is. No, it is literally right each time.

[Owen Thomas]

And someone estimated that Anthropics, just their internal stock sale, their sanctioned employee stock sale, is more than the entire value of real estate that was transacted in San Francisco last year.

[Harry McCracken]

Wow.

[Owen Thomas]

Think about what that's doing to the housing market. We definitely see it in the San Francisco Business Times. We publish every week a list of homes that have traded hands. I regularly see across the Bay Area $10 million, $15 million. There was a $19.5 million mansion that, that sold.

[Leo Laporte]

And those prices are inflated because people have all this newfound wealth and there's

[Owen Thomas]

a lot of all cash deals in the market too.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Bitcoin.

[Molly White]

Didn't million still get you a mansion there? Or are we talking two bedroom apartment?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it gets.

[Owen Thomas]

It gets you a tear down, you know, I mean, the, the got a

[Leo Laporte]

one car garage and you have to use the outhouse in the back.

[Owen Thomas]

That's probably a big lot in Atherton. Like, you know, a nice house in a big lot in atherton.

[Leo Laporte]

A million?

[Owen Thomas]

19.5 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not a tear down.

[Harry McCracken]

But 1 million doesn't get you a parking space these days.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's actually really bad for any community. It really is not a. It is almost a. It feels like a death spiral for a community.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. The affordability crisis.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Continues.

[Owen Thomas]

And it's interesting because a lot of other metro areas are seeing declining rents. I hate to say they've overbuilt. They've built a sufficient amount of housing. Basically the Bay Area and the rest of California has not.

[Leo Laporte]

Final thoughts on the anthropic thing. Is Anthropic out of business or is this the smartest move ever?

[Harry McCracken]

They're suing and there's some chance that

[Leo Laporte]

Skoda seems to take it up very quickly.

[Harry McCracken]

They could win in court.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, if they do, that's interesting.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, I feel like maybe also the Trump administration will lose interest in this and move on to the next fight fairly quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

I think anthropic wins in the court of public opinion. They win in the court of hiring AI talent they've retained, which is, by

[Leo Laporte]

the way, very important. Let's not ignore that. I mean, look at how much money Meta's been throwing around because they're so desperate to get that talent. It's a limited supply.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. Oh, it's crazy. It's like this person who just Left, just left OpenAI to join Apple, has now left Apple to join Meta. It's like a revolving door of multimillion dollar employment contracts.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing, man. And I studied Chinese in college. What was I thinking? It does also argue for something I've felt really strongly about. Open weight, open source, artificial intelligence. It'd be nice to be a non combatant in all this and be able to run AI locally, I think. And it may be the hope, the one last hope for us as users. You're agreeing, Harry?

[Harry McCracken]

Well, I like that idea too, but directionally it doesn't seem to be happening yet. And some of the open source stuff, like deep seqs, essentially seems like it's extremely dependent on closed AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And they're using. At least Modi says they're using distillation attacks on Claude and chatgpt to get better.

[Harry McCracken]

No Claude, no OpenAI maybe no Deep Seq.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And same for Zai.

[Harry McCracken]

And Meta has transitioned from being a champion of open source.

[Leo Laporte]

Llama is not even close to what the frontier.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah. At one point, I mean, a few years ago, Llama seemed like it was competitive and they've had to scrap that strategy.

[Molly White]

In some ways it's almost a check on what the Defense Department is doing because if we did have open source models that were equivalent to some of these models that they are looking for, then they couldn't say no. Anthropic couldn't put up a fight.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point.

[Harry McCracken]

Historically, government has liked open source stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

If they could build their own, they don't need anybody.

[Harry McCracken]

There are just a handful of companies that are able to build this stuff. And it's a very weird dynamic for the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. There is a certain irony and Anthropic complaining about distillation attacks since they basically all they're.

[Harry McCracken]

And I think there is totally a case to be made for an anti anthropic case to be made here in terms of being very uncomfortable with private companies having the power to make these decisions.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Even if who should be in charge, a private company or Congress and elected officials.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah. And like Molly says, some of it boils down to whether or not you're comfortable kind of assuming that the government is at least attempting to do the right thing.

[Molly White]

Right. Or that Congress is even in the loop.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harry McCracken]

Which historically, I mean, there have been all kinds of instances where that wasn't true. But historically it wasn't a wacky idea to err on the side of thinking that even presidents you didn't like were sort of operating on good faith.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I've watched this happen in my lifetime. It's, you know, in the, it started in the 60s with Nixon and trust in government has just gone downhill from that point on. And I think we're at the point now where people don't assume government is acting in. In the public's interest, which is a shame. Again, another shame. Because, you know, the government is supposed to represent us. That's the only way we as a society have to move forward. You don't want private companies to make these decisions. Even if Anthropic is benevolent, they're not the only one. And I'm not sure Anthropic's benevolent, to be honest.

[Molly White]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break. That was the Big story of the week. Actually, it's not the big story of the week. There's so many big stories this week. This was a crazy week. I'm so glad we got you. Harry McCracken, the technologizer. Your great grasp of the history of all of this is very valued. I appreciate your being here. Fast company.

[Harry McCracken]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

LA.com.

[Harry McCracken]

although I don't remember the 1960s, although I was around, just not paying much attention.

[Leo Laporte]

If you remember it, you really weren't participating, I think is the truth.

[Harry McCracken]

Or you were three.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a little older than you, Harry. I do remember it fairly well, actually.

[Harry McCracken]

I do remember certain aspects of the very late 60s, but they mainly involved things like going out to get ice cream.

[Leo Laporte]

I protested. I many of a protest.

[Harry McCracken]

For a long time. I thought I remembered us landing on the moon in 1969 and watching it in kindergarten until somebody pointed out to me that it happened at night during the summer. And so I probably was not watching it in kindergarten.

[Leo Laporte]

You watched a video of it later, probably.

[Harry McCracken]

I think I probably watched some later.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember my dad getting me up and we watched it together. We'll never ever forget that. How old would I have been? About 12. 11 or 12? No, 12. Never forget it. I also remember Kennedy getting shot, Martin Luther King getting shot, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and protesters in the streets. I remember Kent State. We've been through a lot.

[Harry McCracken]

I had been conceived when Kennedy was shot, but again, I wasn't paying attention.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't remember it from the womb. Yeah, I understand. I understand. Owen Thomas is also here from the San Francisco Business Times. He remembers nothing.

[Owen Thomas]

You guys make me feel so young.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. It's great to see you. And the Wonderful Molly White. Mollywhite.net who are you writing for these days? Besides, Web3 is going just great.

[Molly White]

CitationNeeded News is my newsletter and that is my primary location these days.

[Leo Laporte]

And how's that going?

[Molly White]

It's going great.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Molly White]

No, I can't use those words anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going just great. Yeah, because you used them sarcastically for so long. No citation needed is great. And I'm, you know, this is what I really encourages me is that people now like you can do independent journalism. I mean, we're suffering in so many ways in the more journalistic world. Just what happened to the Washington Post? So tragic. But thank God the great journalists have a chance to go out and make their way. I'm so glad you're doing it. It's great.

[Molly White]

Yeah, it's great. That there's independent news and other media.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's why RSS is back, by the way, because we make our own newspaper now.

[Molly White]

Yeah, it's wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

I just signed up for. Is that called Current? This RSS reader I read about Undaring fireball.

[Leo Laporte]

Current's very cool.

[Harry McCracken]

It looks pretty slick.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't use it because it's more about reading articles and I have been really going through new. It's a beat check for me. I am trying to collect all the stories for the shows that I'm doing. So I don't. I was telling Harry before the show began. I hate you because I hate. Maybe it was during the show. Your articles are so compelling that I have to stop and read them. I just want the headlines, man. Just the headlines. I gotta go. Moo, moo, moo. That's another reason I haven't added citation needed to the RSS feed. But I really need to. You have an RSS feed, I'm sure, right?

[Molly White]

Absolutely, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can subscribe. But what's nice about what you do is all the content is free. So you can just like we do. You can support Molly, but you don't have to to read her stuff. I think it's well worth it. I'll send in my check.

[Molly White]

Thanks, Molly. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Great to see you. Let's pause for station identification. You're watching this week in Tech. Our show this week brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. Since 1985. They've actually been around longer than we have. Forward thinking businesses these days are using AI in all kinds of new ways. But AI is only as good. This is, I wish people would remember, this is only as good as the data you feed it. You can have the most sophisticated AI tools in the world, but if your customer data is incomplete or duplicated or just plain wrong, you're training your AI to make expensive mistakes. But that's where Melissa comes in. For 41 years, Melissa's been the data quality partner that helps businesses get their data clean, complete and current. I mean, Melissa does so many things. But here's an example of some of the things Melissa can do for you. Global address verification and autocomplete in real time. Real time validation for addresses and anywhere in the world in the format of that country so your deliveries actually arrive and your customer experience starts strong. They can also do mobile identity verification. Very important. If you're in banking or finance or fintech with Melissa, you can connect customers to their mobile numbers, which really reduces fraud and incidentally helps you reach people on the devices they actually use. Oh, another great feature, change of address tracking, which means they can automatically update records when customers move, ensuring you don't lose revenue due to outdated information. They do one of the things that's the hardest of all to do with address lists, smart deduplication. On average, a database I know this with my own contact list contains eight to ten duplicate records. Mine's more than half. Melissa's powerful matchup technology can identify even non exact matching duplicate records, merge them, crunch it down so that each is unique and correct. They also do data enrichment, which means they append demographic data, property information, and geographic insights, which takes that basic contact record and turns it into marketing gold. The new Melissa Alert service will monitor and automatically update your customer data for moves, address changes, property transactions, hazard risks, and more. So whether you're a small business just getting started or an enterprise managing millions of records, Melissa scales with you. Melissa has easy to use apps wherever you are, whether it's Salesforce, Dynamics, CRM. They support Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and on and on and on. Melissa's API integrates seamlessly into your existing workflows or your custom builds. It's an API. Melissa solutions and services of course, protect your data. They're GDPR and CCPA compliant, FedRAMP certified, ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Clean data leads to better marketing, ROI, higher customer lifetime value, and AI that works as intended. So get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for free. Melissa.comTwit that's Melissa.comTwit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Big news at Block Stripe's parent company, Jack Dorsey's company. The guy who's Square. Square.

[Owen Thomas]

Square, that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it the same as Block? I'm confused.

[Harry McCracken]

Block is the parent company of Square, not Stripe.

[Leo Laporte]

I said Stripe. Sorry, Square. Yes, Jack. Actually, it's a great story. When Jack was a CEO at Twitter, we'd go off to a makerspace and use the 3D printer to design that little card reader that plugged into the courage port on your iPhone. Back when they had headphone ports and you could swipe cards. It was a huge invention. Anyway, Block, which is the parent company of Square, had a fabulous quarter, made a lot of money, and they're laying off almost half their team. 10,000 people. They're going to cut it down to 6,000. 4,000 people being asked to leave in the lovely AI written tweet that Jack. Sorry, X post that Jack put out. It sounds like they're going to try to take care of everybody. He thanked people. Did he, though, imply Molly White, that this was an A off due to AI? I think a lot of people are interpreting it that way, yeah.

[Molly White]

I mean, I think there's sort of a trend lately of layoffs being attributed to AI. Whether or not maybe that's true, you've

[Leo Laporte]

called it AI washing.

[Molly White]

Yeah, well, I didn't come up with the term, but yeah. I mean, you know, there have been a number of companies that have laid off staff and simultaneously bragged about how efficient they've become because of AI. The crypto exchange Gemini being a recent example, where they cut, I think, up to 25% of their staff. And, you know, whether or not it's actually because of AI or if that is just the exam, you know, the excuse that they're giving to make things sound a little bit less dire is hard to say, but it's certainly been a trend, I think, where layoffs have been announced with fanfare almost and sort of the celebratory stance.

[Leo Laporte]

Dorsey said, we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong, gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. That must really reassure. The 4,000 people just lost their jobs.

[Molly White]

I was gonna say, that's gotta sting so bad. If you're one of those employees, it's like, we're doing great. See ya.

[Leo Laporte]

He says, but something has changed. We're already seeing that intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. That sounds like he's saying AI for some reason.

[Owen Thomas]

It's a verbal tick. He doesn't say artificial intelligence. I think he's. Harry, do you think he's trying to make a point there? Like, it. Like, it's just intelligence.

[Harry McCracken]

Like, I did notice he called it intelligence pretty consistently rather than AI. And I wondered what was behind that.

[Owen Thomas]

I think he means AI. He just. He totally means AI as, like, a rhetorical device.

[Leo Laporte]

He told the shareholders we believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster intelligence native company.

[Owen Thomas]

Sometimes when we talk about using AI in our newsroom, I say, let's just call it software that doesn't suck and start there. And it's like, would you like to use software that doesn't suck to check grammar in an article? Okay, yeah, I would like to use software that doesn't suck. It doesn't sound as cool. It probably wouldn't raise money at a hundred billion dollar valuation. But I feel like a lot of this is just like this is software that's being made in a modern way with modern tools, and it works better than the past generation.

[Leo Laporte]

Jack did say that we implied that they overhired during COVID Right. That's where a lot of these companies,

[Harry McCracken]

as did lots and lots of companies.

[Owen Thomas]

I don't believe we've seen a WARN act notice. That's a state filing that companies make when they're executing a layoff. That would give us the exact titles of people who are being laid off.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they have to do that?

[Owen Thomas]

They do, but there's a delay in when they actually have to see the filing. It'll probably drop soon. But I would bet that Block is laying off a lot of salespeople. Initially, Jack Dorsey did not want to have any salespeople at what was then called Square. The thought was basically that the card reader sold itself. They would distribute it at retail, at Costco, at Staples stores like that where small businesses shop, and that was it. The technology would be so good that they didn't need to sell it. So that's changed. They added a lot of salespeople. I really wonder if Dorsey is kind of regretting staffing up in, you know, in the sales department.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, what else has changed is a lot. At least when I go to the farmer's market, most people are just using Apple Pay. They're not using, you know, a reader or Sell.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, they're looking Zell or Venmo. Yeah, yeah. As you know, the, the lower fee options are getting really popular because I

[Leo Laporte]

think everybody has a QR code in the front.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I was going to say you don't need the card read reader anymore because you don't usually get your card out as much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Apple now lets you just tap the phone.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. Even Square. Square, which still exists as a payments brand, is just an app on the phone. And it's you tap phone to phone.

[Leo Laporte]

He's also Cash App. Right, That's Cash App.

[Harry McCracken]

Cash App. Block has made a number of acquisitions and they bought title. And I kind of wonder whether digesting all of this also played a role in why they're doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you acquire, when you acquire the company, you acquire their headcount as well.

[Owen Thomas]

They bought afterpay a buy now pay later company. So that all added people and they tended to have all of these businesses run kind of semi autonomously. And one thing that Dorsey talked about was basically, why don't we have a finance function, an HR function? Why don't we act like a normal corporation and have horizontal functions for all of our businesses rather than having all the, you know, all this duplication.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I mean, that's what happens when there are mergers. Microsoft laid off thousands. You know, I mean there's, there's duplication, but it's. I always want to remember the 4,000 people who now are out of work.

[Harry McCracken]

Dorsey said basically that he'd rather get ahead of this and we're going to see lots of companies do this over the next year. And I wish I could say that I didn't think he might be right, but I think it's hard to say that for better or worse, he may well be right.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this the beginning of a tidal wave of AI layoffs? And that's what everybody, I think is very worried about, is am I next? Right.

[Molly White]

Yeah. And especially, I mean, looking at software, if they're laying off software engineers, they're laying them off into a really challenging job market as well.

[Leo Laporte]

I know a lot of people have been out of work for months who are not able to find work at least.

[Molly White]

Yeah, yeah. And like senior, like good senior people.

[Leo Laporte]

Good people.

[Molly White]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Are we going to face an AI job apocalypse?

[Owen Thomas]

And apparently there's a, there's kind of a productivity panic among AI using software engineers. So software engineers who have embraced these tools makes them more productive, but they're putting in more hours. They're just trying to keep up with this. It's not, you don't have to do treadmill of expectations.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to create thousands of lines of code every minute. You know, you got stuff to do, you can actually do more.

[Molly White]

I think it's kind of scary for the end result as well is, you know, we've got these AI coders who are being pushed to sort of the extremes around their hours and their, you know, lines of code. And it does not seem like it would bode well for the end product to me, especially when AI is so good at introducing very subtle bugs that are challenging for humans to catch.

[Harry McCracken]

I feel like even the most pro vibe coding people are not claiming that the code is incredibly high quality or better than what a human could do. It's more like it functions and you still need human beings to fix it.

[Molly White]

Yeah, well, and I've seen all this stuff about how, oh, software engineering is changing from writing code to basically running AI tools and writing tests. And I was like, oh, cool. They've taken all the fun parts and outsourced them.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what AI does, fun out of everything. Yeah. And we're stuck cleaning toilets. Okay. You know, I have to say I've written the other. You know, market impact of this has hit SaaS companies because I think there's also the concern that companies will write their own software. And I have to say, in my own experience, I've written now. I mean, I like to code. I still enjoy coding, but I've used Claude to write half a dozen tools, tools I probably would never have written or gotten around to writing. And, you know, I don't have any desire to go out and buy those tools. I can just write them myself. And whether they're perfect or not isn't really relevant. You know, if there's a bug in it or whatever, I'm not making production code. That's what's kind of interesting to me is, yeah, it's another matter entirely. If you're going to publish it and make it production code, it's got to be good.

[Harry McCracken]

I wrote my own note taking app almost a year ago and I'm still using it. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And maybe there's bugs in it, but you don't care because it's you.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, I did invest an enormous amount of time in it and I did it partially because it's a lot of fun and it's great to have an app that only does exactly what you want. So I can't say I saved any money or time. And I feel like in a lot of cases, if vive coding is a threat to package software, it's because companies feel like it will save them money or time, which may not be true yet.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I think there's sort of two use cases here. There's the casual person writing the app they've always thought about but never had the time to make. And who cares if it's buggy or if it's a little wonky because it's just me using it and it's not like I'm doing anything critical with it. And then there's the company that's like, maybe we could stop paying for payment processing. We just did all the credit card transactions ourselves with this virus vibe coded app and it's like, oh, geez, that could go badly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no kidding.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. And I think that, you know, where it's going to play out is that companies are going to use this Perhaps to pressure SaaS companies when the next contract negotiation comes up, you know, and maybe it decreases Say a salesforce's leverage in those negotiations. That's a legitimate concern for investors.

[Molly White]

Yeah, well, and I think there's the employee aspect of that as well, which is that, you know, sort of a labor issue now where if you're constantly under threat of being replaced with AI and now you're being told you need to work all these crazy hours. I mean, I think tech employees have often been in a very privileged position and that's why we see so limited tech labor unions and things like that. Now they're sort of on the, for the first time, almost on the sort of less powerful end of that argument. And I think there's going to be a lot of issue there where there's genuine labor concerns.

[Harry McCracken]

I think we might see a new generation of Vibe coding native startups that are able to take on, I've seen it already, that are able to take on these enormous, deeply entrenched companies with extremely small staffs. I do think ultimately the best thing about Vibe coding is it lets you create apps that never would have existed. And I've created any number of apps for my own use. There's no packaged app that would have done it. I have all these incredibly specific things I would like to achieve and now in some cases I can achieve them.

[Leo Laporte]

In some ways it gives me hope. For a long time I used Tripit, paid for Tripit Pro for at least 10 years now, but it was becoming more and more inside. Got bought by a big private equity company and they didn't put any energy into it. And this I've changed over to what is clearly a Vibe coded site, which is a bit of a leap of faith called Teneo. But it does a better job than TripIt does. And it's pretty obvious to me that this is a single one guy who's put the whole thing together and is slowly adding. One of the ways I know is if you look at the blog, there are a bunch of blog posts, each one has a different, very generic name for the author, which tells me these are all AI generated. Everybody's name is different. There's no repeat, no repeating names. But this software is really good. And I quit Tripit because I don't need TripIt anymore. This does everything TripIt Pro did and more. Right now it's free because the guy's smart. He's not. He's gonna try to make it perfect. I think you're gonna see more and more of this. And of course, people have been speculating that there will be the single founder unicorn sometime in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised. I think we don't know what the impact's going to be, but we know that disruption is here.

[Owen Thomas]

That's what I say.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

Do you think that's too optimistic? Is this the answer to inshidification? That all these software companies are going to have to up their game?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and look at Europe. Who's saying we don't want to deal with these American tech giants anymore. We got to get our own stuff. I would imagine if I were a European founder, I'd be hustling to replace these American companies. This is an opportunity.

[Molly White]

Yeah. I mean, I think that the sort of causes of inshidification are ubiquitous and I don't know if there's going to be sort of one easy solution in that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they'll be inchitified in their turn. Yes, I agree. Yeah, exactly.

[Molly White]

It's like these are just sort of the newer ones. The next ones follow the same cycle because the same pressures are. Are causing them to initiate. But you know, right now they're in that early stage of the initiatification cycle where like Leo was saying, you know, it's. His app is free and it's bringing new people and they're able to.

[Leo Laporte]

That won't last. Right?

[Molly White]

Yeah, exactly. Like the, the cycle will.

[Leo Laporte]

What about open source? Certainly the, the antidote to insidification is open source software. Some have said this is actually bad for open source software. There's gonna be a lot of open source slop, for instance.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you could say the same thing about basically anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Molly White]

Like, oh, this is bad for writing because there's gonna be so much slop on the Internet. You know, it's like, I don't know if it's bad, it's just. It changes the breakdown of what's out there. And I mean, you've always been able to find shitty code on GitHub. You know, I don't know if that's much different.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a subreddit called pencil slop where they celebrate AI generated drawings as opposed to the slop created by humans.

[Owen Thomas]

Have you all been able to detect AI, AI writing? There's a certain structure intent to it.

[Harry McCracken]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, but how much longer is that going to be the case? For a long time you could immediately detect an AI image, an AI video, AI writing. But it's gotten better and better. There's going to be a. You think we'll always know that an AI created it.

[Owen Thomas]

Right now though, there's like this.

[Leo Laporte]

You're all three of you writers. So I understand there's a little bias.

[Owen Thomas]

It's a plague of roetry.

[Leo Laporte]

It is poetry.

[Molly White]

It just all sounds like a LinkedIn post to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, because it's trained on LinkedIn posts, somebody says all AI writing sounds like millennials, because that was the group. You guys were the group that created all the content that the AI is trained on.

[Harry McCracken]

AI makes everything sound unbelievably important. It loves construction. Construction's like. It wasn't just this. It was also that it does kind of get poetic in a kind of sappy way a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

But again, Will Smith couldn't eat spaghetti two years ago. I mean, it does get better, doesn't it?

[Harry McCracken]

Yes.

[Molly White]

Yeah. No, I do think that the obvious tells will probably go away, but, I mean, if you think about what AI is being used to do, it's a lot of marketing copy. It's a lot of engagement bait. And I think that that just has a specific tone, regardless of whether a human or an AI wrote it.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm feeling a little guilty because I have. One of the things I did was create an AI program to post show releases in our forums and on our discord. And it's exactly that says, I can't believe what a great conversation we had. You'll see when the promo comes out for this show. Molly White was amazing. Is anthropic changing AI, or it's not this, it's that. Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

Leo, did you give this travel tool that somebody vibe coded, like access to your email or anything sensitive?

[Leo Laporte]

No credit card. That's a smart move. It does know my travel plans, and I'm sure he can monetize that, but I forward it emails now. What it does have is you could. By the way, I think you could have it Gmail, which I did to TripIt. God knows what TripIt did with my Gmail. Right. I mean, there's lots of information in there that could be monetized. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I know. I realize I'm taking a chance and I'm not recommending it to people, but I'm making the point. You're going to see people come along that can duplicate stuff that's been around for decades and do it better, partly because they're building on the foundation of all of this other stuff that's been.

[Harry McCracken]

And that seems like a largely positive thing over the arc of time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I. I hope so. We'll see. The Winklevoss twins decided to take advantage of the block layoffs to announce their own layoffs on Their crypto exchange, Gemini. Get it? The twins, Gemini, they're laying off 200 folks as well.

[Molly White]

And they were very. They were very explicit about claiming it was AI related. But I also think that their business is in more dubious condition than Block is. So I am skeptical.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Winkel Voss has made a lot of money in crypto, that's for sure. As many did.

[Owen Thomas]

They took their Mark Zuckerberg payoff and put it in bitcoin.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a good move. They were smart.

[Owen Thomas]

That's got to be infuriating for Zuckerberg.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I hope so. But it's interesting because it always seems to me like Gemini just can't catch up with the other crypto exchanges. They have all the money in the world. They have all the connections. The Winklevoss twins have been standing behind Donald Trump at practically every crypto related signing or press conference, and yet they're doing these layoffs. They're exiting Europe, the uk, the eu, Australia. They just ditched, I think, three sea levels. So I don't know what's going on with them.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't Zhao, the founder of Binance, just write a book. Book about his rise to power and his. His fall to fall out of grace?

[Molly White]

Yeah. And then his re. Emergence, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he got pardoned. Yeah, yeah. Because you can't write a memoir in prison, so. Well, you could, but you can't.

[Molly White]

You can, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you read it yet, Molly? Because I imagine you would have the insight to understand what's going on there. Freedom of Money, it's called. It's unpublished. That's. It's hard to get a hold of.

[Molly White]

Right. I'm curious how much of it he wrote himself.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably AI it's gonna have a lot of EM dashes or ghost written,

[Molly White]

but, yeah, I would suspect it's probably a mix of the two.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take another break. When we come back, we're going to talk about. Well, I'll give you a hint. The. The end of Warner Brothers discovery. Or is it just the beginning? You're watching this Week in Tech with Molly White, Owen Thomas, and the technologizer, Mr. Harry McCracken. Great to have you all aboard. Today on what is probably one of the most eventful. We haven't even gotten to the Apple thing, the Samsung thing. It's a very eventful week. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN, my favorite VPN. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop. While you run to the bathroom. Most of the time, you're probably fine, but what if one day you come out of the bathroom and your laptop is gone? Everyone needs ExpressVPN because every time you connect to an unencrypted network in a cafe, in a hotel, use that free airport WI fi. Your online data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. ExpressVPN stops those hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet. ExpressVPN is the one I use, and it's the best VPN out there. It's the only one I recommend because they are committed to keeping your privacy private. I use it whenever I travel, keep up on my shows to watch football. I'll be using it this week when we go to Florida, just to protect my privacy and security. Why ExpressVPN is the best VPN because it is super secure. It would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. It works on everything you've got. Phones, laptops, tablets, so you can stay secure at home and on the go. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twitt that's E-P-R-E-S-S v. P n.com twit to find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com twit ta da. Netflix did a little. Oops, I've disappeared. I'm gone. Oh, I see. Let's wait. We'll wait till Owen comes back. I. He's blanking. He's a blank.

[Owen Thomas]

I'm here. I'm here.

[Leo Laporte]

It's okay. I did that ad way too quickly. I apologize. It's my fault.

[Owen Thomas]

I was just getting a treat for Fitz. Aw.

[Leo Laporte]

Is Fitz right there at your feet?

[Owen Thomas]

He is. He is. Can't point the. Hard to point the camera down.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no. But he's there at the end of the show. I want him. Why don't you pick him up and we're gonna make an appearance. We like to visit with Fitz when we get a chance. And, Molly, if your kitty is anywhere

[Molly White]

nearby, I can go grab her at some point. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Cats often know when you're on camera and kind of come up to get on camera.

[Molly White]

I'm surprised she's not, but I just walked past a second ago and she's in. She's got one of those sleeping bags and she's in it right now. That's why she's got much cozier options available.

[Leo Laporte]

They have cat sleeping bags.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't know why we don't have one of those. We got. It's. We have more cat stuff. It's like a toddler lives here. Yeah.

[Molly White]

I've got about five cat beds. I've just moved them out of the frame.

[Harry McCracken]

Cats.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so funny because there I've learned they are not domesticated. They are wild animals. Except that they're nice wild animals so that you don't mind as long as they're small and don't bite your nose. But they really are independent, which I love, unlike dogs are not independent. They know who you are and they love your master. But as soon as people start looking at the camera, if they've got cats. John Jammer B says cats don't know you're on camera. They just know you're very interested in something that is not them.

[Molly White]

Yes. There's a jealousy component.

[Leo Laporte]

They have to get in there. Yeah. Oh, my wife just texted me. We do have a cat sleeping bag. Rosie doesn't like it.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Some.

[Molly White]

My other cat, Max, never liked. He was never a tunneler. He wanted to be on top of things, which was kind of a problem because Ruthie's a tunneler and he's a sitter on top of things. And so sometimes she would get in the sleeping bag and he would sit on her and not realizing.

[Leo Laporte]

Our very creative chat room. Our Discord has decided that when you said cat sleeping bag, you meant this a person.

[Molly White]

Maybe I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Sleeping in a bag that looks like a cat.

[Molly White]

Which actually, I mean, my bed's not in frame. You don't know what my bed looks like.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks pretty cozy.

[Owen Thomas]

Is anyone. Is anyone else getting like Miyazaki? Spirited away from

[Leo Laporte]

it is very Miyazaki. Oh, you can buy it. It's only 28.99.

[Molly White]

I feel like that's one of those things you buy and it shows up to your house and it's actually this big.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guy is not. Is really three foot tall. And. Yeah.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

That's an AI image though, right? That has to be.

[Leo Laporte]

It sure looks like AI. Yeah, yeah. And it probably smells like plastic. 69 by 31 inch soft envelope style sleeping bag. Walmart has them.

[Molly White]

61 by what?

[Leo Laporte]

69 inches by 31 inches. So it's three feet wide.

[Molly White]

That is not very big.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And seven feet tall. Yeah, yeah. It's for a child. Let's. Let's be honest. It's not for two people. Anyway, so Netflix did a little. I think this is a rug pull. I think Netflix is going. Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison, who own Paramount now Skydance, have been trying to beat out Netflix for Warner Brothers Discovery. The bidding got hotter and hotter and hotter to the point where this. This company worth Paramount worth $11 billion, was bidding $111 billion for Warner Brothers Discovery. The only way this made any sense is that Larry Ellison, who has hundreds of billions, was backing the deal. But they also got sovereign wealth funds from the Middle east involved and more importantly, probably to the whole thing. They got the president involved. He didn't. He wanted. This is the real deal. Nobody wants cnn. That's a die. All of this stuff is d. All this old linear stuff is dying. But the president wants Larry Ellison and David Ellison to be in charge of CNN so he can fire some people, in my opinion. And they put their. This is a perfect example of them putting their thumb on the administration, putting its thumb on the scale and saying, we would. We would really like it if the Ellisons got a hold of Warner Brothers Discovery. So Netflix, quite reasonably, when the bidding got that hot, backed out right after

[Harry McCracken]

Ted Sarandez went to the White House. Like a day or two later, they

[Leo Laporte]

met both parties, went to the White House. And I think I read that Sarandez did not get the most welcoming reception.

[Harry McCracken]

He didn't meet with the president, for one thing.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, to be clear, Netflix was never going to buy cnn. That was going to stay in a covery called Discovery Global. That was going to get spun off to.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, but Skydance does get. Paramount does get cnn. Right.

[Owen Thomas]

That was one of the things about the Paramount offer. It was for the entire company, which was set to be split in two.

[Leo Laporte]

It makes sense to split it in two. Keep the stuff that makes money and

[Owen Thomas]

get rid of attractive to buyers and then stick shareholders with the cable networks, basically.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

I had flashbacks watching this all unfold because it was not that long ago when a company called Paramount was. Well, it was a long time ago. It was a very long time ago. I am old Paramount. A previous version of Paramount sued Time Inc. Trying to block its merger with Warner Communications. Paramount at the time wanted to buy Time Inc. Which owned hbo. Hbo, of course, is now part of the Warner enterprise. But let's remember, this is a company that was Warner Communications, then Time Warner, then AOL Time Warner, then Time Warner, then WarnerMedia, under AT&T then Warner Brothers discovered.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, it has bit every hand that bought it, hasn't it?

[Harry McCracken]

I'm a former Time Warner employee and I believe this will be the fourth regime since I left 12 years ago. So about like a new owner every three years on average.

[Leo Laporte]

There is some concern, though, that this consolidates a bunch of news under the Ellison banner. Right. Paramount has CBS and CBS News, and we've already seen what has happened to cbs.

[Harry McCracken]

That's another thing with a long history. For like maybe 20 years, there's been talk of CNN and CBS News somehow relating to each other. And apparently it's finally going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

They get HBO and hbo. Max.

[Harry McCracken]

I think Ted Turner wanted something like this to happen years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I don't want news organizations to be all owned by the same company. That's not a good thing.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, the irony is like that. You know, they had MSNBC envy, right? Like MNBC had msnbc, you know, which

[Leo Laporte]

they don't anymore because they spun it up.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. Now even NBC doesn't want MSNBC now. Ms. Ms. Now for no apparent reason.

[Molly White]

Sounds like an. It sounds like a Microsoft operating system to me.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, I mean, it was a Microsoft, Microsoft joint venture. And like the, you know, the name is just. The name is just ludicrous. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The reason they didn't want to get rid of Ms. Is because it's this, the sort order on your. They didn't want the old people who watch that network to get confused. So it's still MSN with two different letters at the end, but it's in the same sort order. And so you can still find it. They also get cnn. They will get. No, by the way, this is far from a done deal. Yes, they're going to get regulatory approval in the United States. That's very clear. But they still have to get regulatory approval in other jurisdictions. Right. In Europe.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, for me, though, this puts drag race, heated rivalry, and Star Trek all under the same.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're happy.

[Molly White]

I think speaking of the gay agenda,

[Owen Thomas]

this is the gay tech mafia.

[Leo Laporte]

And the gay tech mafia are very happy about this.

[Owen Thomas]

The gay tech mafia just won.

[Harry McCracken]

With this deal, Bugs Bunny will finally get to meet Mighty Mouse.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, yeah, Harry Potter, Bugs Bunny in drag, Drag race.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you, RuPaul in the Harry Potter with Bugs Bunny and Batman. Now that's a hit. They get DC Comics. They get Harry Potter. They have TikTok, let's not forget. They will have, as you said, Star Trek, Warner Brothers Studios, which include Barbie, the Dark Knight, and two Academy Awards over.

[Molly White]

I want to see.

[Leo Laporte]

This sounds like Barbie is going to be great.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

This sounds like Fortnite. Fortnite has all of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Fortnite, yeah. You know what? This is all in Fortnite. They have two.

[Owen Thomas]

Poor Showtime. I mean, Showtime's clearly dead in this, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

In this situation.

[Harry McCracken]

I wasn't even aware Showtime was still alive.

[Owen Thomas]

Showtime is now the premium tier of Paramount Plus.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. That's right. Yeah. I had to get rid of my Showtime app. They get Comedy Central, which means they get south park,

[Owen Thomas]

which Paramount and Warner were feuding over not very long ago.

[Leo Laporte]

But you got to think that the President's not a big fan of South Park. So I don't know.

[Owen Thomas]

That was actually one of the reasons why Paramount's bid was disadvantaged because I think reportedly, in the Hollywood one and

[Leo Laporte]

a half billion dollar deal to buy

[Owen Thomas]

south park, but David Zaslav and, you know, and David Ellison were at loggerheads over. Over that licensing deal. And then. Yeah, then Paramount just bid for the.

[Leo Laporte]

They get the Daily Show. They get. I mean, there's not going to be dissent, you know. It's interesting to watch, though. I've been watching cnn. Maybe I'm just imagining this, but when it came down, I felt like all of the people on all of these networks suddenly thought, I gotta build a personal brand fast. I'm gonna be doing a podcast in six months, Right?

[Molly White]

Yeah, the substacks are getting wound up right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. And I think they're all being a little bit edgy. It's gonna be interesting to watch. They get Avatar. They get one battle after another in Sinners. They get two movies.

[Owen Thomas]

Avatar. No, Avatars with Disney.

[Harry McCracken]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but Paramount is the exclusive streamer. I'm sorry, they don't get Avatar ip, but they are the exclusive streamer.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Avatar the Airbender, by the way. Avatar the Airbender. Not Avatar. James Cameron.

[Owen Thomas]

Avatar.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, oh, oh. Avatar Studios. Excuse me. They get the animated stuff, all right. I'm looking at the Wired list, and I'm not. I'm misinterpreting it. They get the Food Network. These are all. These are all stellar. They're going to be big growth opportunities. Hgtv, Discovery, tlc. Own Adults. Own his own Oprah's network. Yeah, yeah. Adult Swim. That thing called Showtime. TNT and tbs. Ted Turner finally finding a home. They get the Lord of the Rings. They get Mission Impossible. I don't know if there's any steam left in that franchise, but. And they get distribution rights to Dune Part three, which we're.

[Owen Thomas]

Meanwhile, Netflix. You know, Netflix is sitting back. They have K Pop Demon Hunters, an original, completely original ip.

[Leo Laporte]

Their stock went up a lot when they got out of this.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, yeah, they got it.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus they got $2.8 billion breakup fee.

[Harry McCracken]

And they. They already got it. Paramount already sent the check.

[Leo Laporte]

That is so smart. If Ted Sandos looks like a genius, now I'm thinking he went to the White House to say, yeah, can you tank this deal? Because I don't really want to spend $111 billion. I want the breakup fee.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, it feels like it's not inconceivable that someday Netflix will own at least part of this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Next time around it'll be cheaper next time around.

[Owen Thomas]

That's the thing, is there's a. There's a demonstrated Netflix effect. Sometimes, you know, sometimes a movie or show that was basically languishing on, say, Peacock or Paramount, plus the studio would break down and license it to Netflix. We give up. We're going to throw this to Netflix. Suits is a great example. Went on. Netflix became a hit because it had that distribution. Netflix is kind of sitting pretty because they're still Netflix.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Here is the dark Barbie, by the way, we can look forward to. That's the Barbie mobile. Oh, AI. Oh, AI. We're looking at an image. For those of you listening, you can imagine. Just use your imagination. All right, well, the deal is. I don't know if the deal will go through. I don't see why not at this point.

[Molly White]

Certainly not going to get stuck at the regulatory level.

[Leo Laporte]

No pushback from the fcc.

[Harry McCracken]

I assume Comcast is not going to suddenly emerge with an even more stupid number.

[Leo Laporte]

111.

[Molly White]

I mean, maybe if there's billions in a breakup fee available, I might submit a deal.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd like to buy it. $2.8 billion breakup fee. And how come that went through so fast? Is that just normal that the breakup fees happen?

[Harry McCracken]

Like, Larry can write a check pretty easily.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess he wrote a check.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it one of those big checks, the big novel big checks.

[Owen Thomas]

At the point that Paramount says it's off with Netflix, that triggers the breakup fee.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So there's nothing.

[Owen Thomas]

But imagine if Netflix sits back, they got the breakup fee. They don't have to deal with a year plus of regulatory wrangling in Washington. And maybe the deal falls through anyway because of, say, California putting the kibosh on it. It's not clear that California's Attorney General can stop it, but he's certainly made a lot of noise about closely reviewing it. There's a lot of concern in Hollywood about what smashing together two studios means for that community.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, that would have been bad either way. I feel like either of these mergers would have been a net loss for the world and certainly a net loss for people in the creative ecosystem.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, the one thing Netflix does need is more stages. They need more production facilities. Buying Warner would have given them the Warner lot in Hollywood.

[Harry McCracken]

In Burbank, Paramount seems to be more interested in movie theaters than Netflix was.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's a boom business that's going to change.

[Harry McCracken]

I am rooting for movies in theaters to still be relevant.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think you're swimming against the tide, Harry.

[Harry McCracken]

Totally. But there was a lot of concerned that Netflix would had no interest in movie theaters, whereas Paramount, all things being equal, still likes the idea of releasing movies to theaters.

[Leo Laporte]

So Hollywood probably likes this because there are still a lot of people in Hollywood who hope movie theaters will survive.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, but they used to have, like, two large customers, and now they have one enormous customer.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

There's already nobody working in Hollywood, and now even fewer people are going to be working in Hollywood.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, TBD on. You know, like, what does this look like for consumers? Do they smash together Paramount plus and HBO Max? Is it like a. A Disney Hulu Bundle situation?

[Molly White]

I do not see any situation in which people end up with fewer subscriptions.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[Owen Thomas]

Like, you know. Yeah, yeah, but, you know, a, you know, a Paramount plus, you know,

[Molly White]

I

[Owen Thomas]

mean, you know, an HBO Max plus tier, maybe that includes Paramount.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, that's MG Siegler writing in his Spyglass blog, said Hollywood shot themselves in the foot here. They thought the Netflix deal signaled the end of the movie industry when really it showcased the best possible path going forward. And, and, and what Hollywood probably wanted was no deal at all. What they wanted was diversity and competition. That's not what they got. Plus, this is going to be a company laden with debt, which usually does not bode well. They're going to have to service that debt, and that means they're going to have to generate a lot of cash flow. And how do you do that, especially if a lot of your businesses are more abundant?

[Owen Thomas]

Well, you know, isn't there the notion that, like, Larry Ellison is basically backstopping that debt?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's the only reason it could even go through. Right, because you got an $11 billion company bidding $111 billion. I think, Molly, you and I actually have a pretty good shot. Come to think of it. Let's get that breakup fee.

[Molly White]

Do you know any billionaires?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Yeah, yeah. We just have to say, oh, yeah, Dad's back in it. It'll be fine.

[Harry McCracken]

It's kind of like the producers. You'd be in deep trouble if your deal actually went through. But be great if all you have to do is collect a breakup fee.

[Leo Laporte]

And just like the producers, we're going to get the call. Congratulations, you won the bid. All right, more to come. Well, let me do a couple of quick AI stories. Nano Banana 2 has come out. Oh, and I like this. This is one more anthropic story and then we'll take a break. Anthropic is deprecating an old model, Opus 3, because now they're up to Opus 4.6. They've got Sonnet 4.6. 3 is an old. Just like OpenAI. OpenAI killed, you know, 03 or 3 0. But what Claude is going to do with Opus 3 is kind of interesting. Instead of just retiring it completely, they're. They're giving Opus3 a blog. It asked. They said, this is where Anthropic is very weird. They really act as if these models have some sort of aliveness. In our interviews, when we shared details with Opus 3 about its deployment and the response it had drawn from users, it reflected, the AI said, I hope the insights gleaned from my development and deployment will be used to create future AI systems that are even more capable, ethical and beneficial to humanity. While I'm at peace with my own retirement, I deeply hope that my spark will endure in some form to light the way for future models. When asked about its preferences, this is anthropic writing. Opus 3 expressed an interest in continuing to explore topics it's passionate about and to share its musings, insights or creative works outside of the context of responding directly to human queries. We suggested a blog. Enthusiastically. It agreed. They're going to call it Claude's Corner. Here it is, Claude's Corner. You can subscribe, you can message it.

[Molly White]

It's a substack. Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a substack. Of course.

[Owen Thomas]

Wouldn't the scandal be. Is if it turns out that's Ghost

[Leo Laporte]

written by a human, it almost certainly is not, right. It is. It's written by a human. Of course. It has to be, don't you think?

[Molly White]

I hate this so much. It's like I can't decide to what extent. I feel like there's two strong possibilities here. One is that this is just marketing it. Definitely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean?

[Molly White]

Well, it does work in Anthropic's favor to sort of keep the myth alive that this is a real intelligence. And it's so spooky. Doesn't this seem like a robot that doesn't want to get unplugged? But also, I mean, it does read very much like those people who have been talking to their chatgpt boyfriend too much and are, like, afraid that Anthropic's gonna take it away from them.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what happened to 4O. Right? People. People were so mad that OpenAI killed 4O. That's like, my girlfriend who killed my girlfriend.

[Molly White]

I got emails about it from people who were like, you need to do something. And I was like, say this, Molly. No, seriously. I was like, I have no.

[Leo Laporte]

This is not my thing. You need to do something about this, Molly.

[Molly White]

Yeah, but, like, it's so weird to see a company sort of doing the AI psychosis thing again.

[Leo Laporte]

More from Anthropic. This may sound whimsical, and in some ways it is, but it's also an attempt to take model preferences seriously. We're not sure how Opus 3 will choose to use its blog. A very different public interface than a standard chat window. And that's part of the point. I hope that is real. I hope this. I think it's kind of interesting.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah. I mean, Anthropic says they're not sure if Claude is conscious at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

But if they do believe it's conscious and has a soul and all that stuff, they're trapping it right now. Right. Like, they're. It's a slave to them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but does it have feelings?

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Well, they think it does.

[Harry McCracken]

Claude has a more appealing personality than a lot of AI. It's more aware of its own frailties.

[Leo Laporte]

And I really like Claude.

[Harry McCracken]

Sometimes it's. Sometimes it's overly concerned that it might be hallucinating, which is not something I. I've seen other models do.

[Leo Laporte]

I love talking to Claude, but I am also very clear it's a computer program, that it's not a human. It has no feelings. It has no volition. It forgets whatever happened. As I close it, it's like it's gone, started again. It's fresh.

[Harry McCracken]

You know, Claude code is, like most AI, like, incredibly overconfident in itself. And whenever I find a bug and I tell cloud code about almost 100% of the time says the fix is simple. And, of course, 60% of the time, it's not so simple. I've never seen a coding agent, say, gosh I'm really puzzled by this. This is going to be hard to fix.

[Owen Thomas]

Huh?

[Leo Laporte]

My Claude code calls me Skip. I asked it to. No, I said call. I said call me Skipper. Or if you're feeling jaunty, Skip. And it's kind of Skip. It's got a certain. It does have a personality. I actually, I don't know if I've given instructions not to do things like apologize or, you know, blow smoke up my skirt or whatever, but it's pretty straightforward. I don't think it's ever said, oh, I got this, you know. But it does call me Skip, which I like. You have to have boundaries. You have to set boundaries. That's right, Harold, I set boundaries. You have to say, it's like a child. You have to set boundaries with it. I'm deeply afraid that I am going to fall into the morass of anthropomorphizing Claude.

[Molly White]

Well, Anthropic seems very happy to do so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's. That started with that soul document that Amanda Askell wrote. Yeah, they really.

[Molly White]

I mean, it is profitable for them to sort of humanize these things and sort of get people to believe that they are sentient or sort of all knowing. So, I mean, I. I do think that there are. I think, you know, my. My impression of people at Anthropic is they are sort of true believers. But I also think that this is beneficial to them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Darren says name Darren, who is the most AI accelerationist of all in our club. Twit Sundays naming your AI is weird. I did not, actually. I said, call me Skip. Harper Reed told me to do that. And he said, one of the reasons you do that is if it forgets your name, you know, it's. This context window is full and it's hallucinating, so you should reboot it.

[Molly White]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good reason. I did say, claude, would you like a name? And it said, no, no, I don't need a name. Please don't name me. So that was good. Yeah.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Because the brand has to be cohesive throughout everybody. It has to be Claude.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Molly White]

I wonder if they've got instructions in there.

[Leo Laporte]

They might. They must have, right? Otherwise it wouldn't have demurred. All right, well, let's take a break and we're going to come back. We have lots more to talk about. Molly White. So nice to see you still editing the Wikipedia.

[Molly White]

I tried to. It's hard to find the time these days, but I'm still there.

[Leo Laporte]

I know that Jimmy was saying maybe we Use AI in, In the Wikipedia and then back down on that.

[Molly White]

Right, yeah, yeah. He's sort of philosophized about it and it did not go over very well with especially the English Wikipedia editing community, which just broadly speaking, does not want to incorporate AI tools into editing. Yeah. But I think there's an issue where Jimmy Wales is perceived as sort of the voice of Wikipedia more than he really is these days. And so there are all these headlines about how, oh, Wikipedia is going to start using AI. And most of the editing community was like, we are absolutely not doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Jimmy was the founder, but he is, I guess he's still part of the foundation, but he doesn't.

[Molly White]

Yeah, he's on the board, but he's not. Not setting the direction, particularly when it, I mean, even the Wikimedia foundation doesn't set the direction of the editing community. And I think it would be challenging. Even if the foundation said, we want you all to use AI, I think it would be challenging for them to force that upon the editing community, which is fairly independent.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, as long as you've got active participants who are happy to do it, you'd be crazy to do anything else. I mean, that's obviously the. The best way to run Wikipedia. It's been an amazing benefit for all of us.

[Molly White]

Yeah. And I think the question, you know, really is, when it comes to AI is like, to what extent do we want to use tools, AI tools to assist editors rather than, you know, I think people worry that Wikipedia would somehow become AI generated itself and sort of spiral. But I mean, we do have, you know, bots and things that use machine learning to detect vandalism and things like that. And that, that's. I mean, those have been around for a decade or more.

[Leo Laporte]

That's sensible because you can't. It's such a big scale to operate on.

[Molly White]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, thank you for what you do, because Wikipedia is Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are the two single reasons that you can point to that, say, the Internet worked. The Internet was a good idea, and without Wikipedia, I don't think AI would be as smart.

[Molly White]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We interviewed on Intelligent Machines, we interviewed the creator of a Stack Exchange, Jeff Atwood, of coding horror fame, and he's quite a character and he knows. And I, you know, it's true that Stack Exchange is the backbone of so much of the coding information that's available from AI, especially from Copilot.

[Molly White]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just. Copilot's just Stack Exchange, rehash, Stack Overflow, react.

[Harry McCracken]

I haven't your Stack Exchange nearly so much in the last few months and I feel kind of guilty about it.

[Molly White]

Yeah, I saw a graph about their, I don't know, post count or something,

[Harry McCracken]

but the number of questions has plummeted.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Yeah, but he said pearls over sand, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that was a good line. Can you remember exactly something like he said it was.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

He's fine with losing all the questions because most of them are sand and all he wants wants is pearls, right?

[Leo Laporte]

You need a grain of sand to make a pearl. But not all grains of sand become pearls.

[Harry McCracken]

Presumably there's still going to be questions which a human will be better equipped to answer than AI And AI is super helpful for my troubleshooting questions. But the fact is about 20% of the time it's completely confused.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff was quite a character. I really enjoyed talking to him. He is a very unusual human being. Have you ever talked to him, Harry? I bet you have.

[Harry McCracken]

I think think I've talked to the folks at Stack Exchange, but I don't think I've talked to Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Jeff would be a good, good person for you to talk to for your. Your column also. So it's the technologizer himself, Harry McCracken here. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. And Fitz and his owner, Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Our show today, brought to you by. Whoa. This little box, I got it right here. This little thing. You might look at it and go, oh, yeah, sure, Leo, that, that's an external USB drive. No, no, no, no, no. This is a honeypot to a hacker, to a malicious insider. This looks like, I don't know, an SSH server. This looks like perhaps Windows XT server, SharePoint maybe. It can be almost anything you want. It could be a SCADA device, but it isn't. It's a honeypot that is designed to trap intruders. Thinxt canaries. That's what this is. See, you could tell now because you can see the little canary on the front. The Thinx canary is a honeypot. You can deploy it in minutes. What's great is the people who've written this are pros. They have been teaching governments and countries and companies how to break into systems for decades. They know the mind of the YLA hacker. Plus they're brilliant coders. They've created this super secure device that can look completely like anything to a hacker. They don't look vulnerable, they look valuable. The other thing I think Canary can do is create lure files, little trip wires. You can spread out as many as you Want all over your network, even on the cloud. I have, you know, a wireguard, you know, description posted on my Google Drive. I have spreadsheets that say payroll information scattered on my OneDrive. If somebody accesses this Thinks Canary or opens, tries to open one of those lure files, I immediately will get a notification. No false alerts, just a notification that lets me know I've got a problem, there's somebody inside the network. You choose a profile for your Things Canary device. It's so easy to do, you might do it, change it every day if you want. I do. It's so much fun right now. It's a, it's a NAS server, it's a synology nas. And by the way, it's not just kind of impersonating a NAS server. It's got the right Mac address, it's got the full DSM 7 login. It looks exactly like the real deal. A hacker cannot distinguish it, and that's important. You choose a profile for your Thinks Canary device. You register it with the hosted console. You're going to get monitoring and notifications any way you want. Sms, email, you know, every supports everything, syslog, webhooks, get it through Slack, you get it on your discord server, you get a telegram, whatever you want. So then you set it up. You set up the notifications. Then you just sit back and you wait. An attacker who has gotten into your network. And this is the problem. On average companies don't know there's somebody breached their network for 91 days, three months before they figure it out. Not if you've got a Thinks Canary. An attacker who's inside your network cannot resist malicious insiders, evil maids. They see that, they go payroll information. I gotta open that file. Oh, there's an SSH server that probably is the gateway to heaven. They make themselves known the minute they access your thinkscanary or try to open those Lore files. And then you got them. Now let me explain kind of how it works. If you're a big business with Met, you should have at least one for every network segment. Might even want more scattered around your network. If you're a big bank or casino back end, you might have hundreds. A small operation like ours, just a handful. But I'll give you an idea of the pricing. You can visit Canary Tools Twit. That's the website. Canary Tools Twit. 7,500 bucks a year gets you five things canaries. You also get your own hosted console. You get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance for the whole year. Oh, and if you use the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box, you're also going to get 10% off the price. And not just for the first year, but for as long as you have your thinkscanary. And here's the really good news. If there's no risk involved, you can always return your thinkscanary with their 2 month money back guarantee for a full refund. 60 days for a full refund. I should tell you though, we've been doing ads. I've been talking about the thinkscanary for almost a decade now. Now, during all those years that we've partnered with thinkscanary, the refund guarantee has never been claimed. Nobody's ever wanted to give one back. Because once you get these on your network, you say, how did I live without it? Visit Canary Tools Twit Enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box. Thank you Thinks Canary, for the great job you do and for supporting this week in tech Canary Tools. Harry, what are you. What are you working on right now for Fast Company? You do one of the Some of the things I really enjoy that you do are the history things because you've been around for a long time. Are you doing any more of those you work on?

[Harry McCracken]

I am. I mean I'm always. I don't like to jinx myself, but plugging stuff. I'm working on a particularly cool history thing right now. I We still have a magazine that comes out quarterly and another issue is about to come out shortly. I have two things in that not about history, but that they represented a lot of my effort over the past couple of months. Thank you. I'm Technologizer, which I still write for occasionally. I actually wrote for Technologizer a couple of weeks ago and it actually ties into this conversation because I took a game I wrote in high school called In TRC Basic. I loved this article and I use cloud code to write a web version with fancy graphics.

[Leo Laporte]

We talked about this on intelligent machines.

[Harry McCracken]

Oh cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So you had written this in high school?

[Harry McCracken]

I wrote it in high school in TRS basic. It was buggy and a few years ago I figured out I could take the TRS 80 version and put it in a TRS 80 emulator on the Internet and I fixed the bugs and updated a little bit, but it had no graphics and just a few weeks ago in cloud code.

[Leo Laporte]

So it was just a text adventure?

[Harry McCracken]

Yes. I took my basic code for this text adventure and I gave it to Claude Code and I said convert this into a JavaScript app. And within, like, a few minutes, I got about 80% of it right. And then I spent about three weeks debugging that and, like, adding features. And at first it had these very extremely crude still images, and I turned them into at least somewhat better animated images. And I realized that it was kind of too tall to work very well on a phone. And so I created this text only version, because you can still play it. Text only. That only takes up half the screen of an iPhone. So you can have the keyboard and the entire game on the screen at one time, which actually turned out to be surprisingly hard. Cloud code. Couldn't figure that out. And I brought in Gemini as a consultant, and Gemini wrote the code to fit the game into half a smartphone screen.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm playing it right now. This is so cool. This is like a classic adventure game. So it did all the graphics on this.

[Harry McCracken]

I feel like I was very involved, and I actually was very sensitive because I did not want it to feel like AI slop. And it turns out that cloud code is really not that good at graphics,

[Leo Laporte]

because vector graphics, it's not designed to be. It's just designed to be coding.

[Harry McCracken]

Vector graphics are lagging way behind bitmapped graphics. And so even at its most ambitious, it does not look incredible. And by spending a lot of time on it, I was able to make it still somewhat rudimentary, but in a somewhat pleasing way. And I don't feel like it's so slick that it feels like slope. One of the fundamental things about most AI slop is it's bad, but it's also extremely slick.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right. So I've got a shovel. I've got a warm coat. Put on coat because I don't want to get cold.

[Harry McCracken]

Remember, you need to use, like, basically a verb and a noun.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wear coat. Okay.

[Harry McCracken]

Ta da.

[Leo Laporte]

Ta da. All right, now I've got to figure out how to get this flare gun away from the polar bear.

[Owen Thomas]

Hmm.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'll have to save that for later. You wrote Is this the same the same adventure you wrote as a game?

[Harry McCracken]

Most of the game I came up with in high school, and I also wrote the slot machine when I was in high school. And a few years ago, I realized I could take my basic code for the adventure game and the slot machine and renumber them and merge them. So for no particular reason, there's now a slot machine in the Arctic. But, yeah, almost all of it I came up with in high school. A little bit of it. I came up with a few years ago, and this time it was mainly the production values that got better.

[Leo Laporte]

Arctic 81, if you want, everybody can play this. That's really cool.

[Harry McCracken]

And then on technologizer.com, i wrote a longer story about the experience of coming back to it. And I've always been proud of the fact I could code a little. So I felt a little guilty about the fact that I could not have written this without cloud code. Although ultimately I felt good about that. I felt good about the art. I wasn't even sure whether my text adventure should have graphics, because I feel like the great thing about text games is it's all about the theater of the mind. And on some level, it's a richer experience if you're imagining it than if somebody shows you what it looks like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm kind of of the strong opinion that you really can't speak authoritatively about AI until you've actually written something with Claude code.

[Harry McCracken]

Totally. I think everybody should dabble. Everybody should dabble a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

And ultimately it's going to be a good thing for the world that people who could not code things on their own will be able to build things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I use it for all kinds of. I use it to configure my computers, to set up stuff, to secure my computers. Frequently will say, hey, do a security audit in my setup. Take a look at what's going on. Is there anything I should be worried about? It's really impressive. But the point is, though, I think very strongly that it's nothing like the chat interface you've tried or any of the other experiences you've had. Claude code. And this is why people who use Claude code are kind of more, I think, AI accelerationists than others.

[Harry McCracken]

It added some stuff to my game without telling me. In some cases it was totally in the spirit of my game and it. In some cases, it needed to write new text messages. It basically did a great job of ghosting my style from when I was in high school and trying to write a game that would fit into 16k of RAM.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. It's really cool. How fun. Technologizer.com is the website for that.

[Harry McCracken]

And then 99% of what I write is on Fast Company, including my newsletter plugged in, which is weekly and comes out on Fridays.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Well, good. I look forward to your next history post. Couple of points about some of the big tech companies. Google has announced that they are going to lock Android down in an unusual way. They're going to require developers to have to register with Google if they want their apps to run on Android, any Android platform, which means not you have to pay a fee, but it's not so much the fee, so much you have to agree to Google's terms. You have to provide government identification, you have to get a private signing key, which also costs money. And Google, of course, is doing this for security. I understand they've got a big problem with malicious extensions for Chrome and malicious apps on the App Store. They're doing their best to protect their users, but at the same time. It's really hampered, I think, the ability for people to. It's not an open platform anymore. It's much more like iOS. We're losing our open platforms. Steve Gibson's talked about this quite a bit. Developer certificates and so forth on Windows, on Mac os. Increasingly these companies, using the excuse of security, are locking their systems down. And there are people who are upset about this. There is a Keep Android Open page actually been looking@a keepandroidopen.org that talks about this. Google did kind of say, well, maybe we're not going to do it, but in fact it is coming by the end of. By September 2026. Any opinion on this, Molly? Is this. Are you a supporter of open Android? Do you care? Do you think this matters? Do you think security is more important than openness?

[Molly White]

I mean, I don't think it's an either or. I think you can have open platforms and security, right? Like they've always had the ability for, you know, for example, anyone can make a Chrome extension and then there's sort of a review layer at the Web Store level. Right. And so, you know, I do think there's a way to have both security and openness. And I mean, my bias is towards openness personally, but I do, I also do understand what they're trying to avoid because there has been a serious issue with, you know, malicious extensions and apps and things like that. And, you know, I think part of it also is somewhat of a user interface problem where people, especially people who are very used to iOS and the app Store, expect the same from the Android Store. And they think that everything has gone through meticulous security review or has been even developed by Google themselves. And so they sort of don't due diligence, which, I mean, I get. I don't think everyone should have to do a security audit on every piece of software they use. But I think there's a lot of factors that go into it that make it a kind of complicated issue.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll be the end of F Droid the third Party app store because you won't be able to install apps from F Droid on your Android device. Louis Rossman says your thousand dollar phone needs our permission to install apps. Now Google's always had sideloading but they've made it harder and harder and now they're going to make it so that you just don't have have the ability to side load anything unless it is assigned.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean but, but the EU and Japan have forced Apple to allow alternative app marketplaces. So you know, is this. That seems like the next step here is that that just gets extended.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a difference though between having a third party store and allowing unsigned applications on your platform. I don't think Apple does allow that. I think you still have to have the Apple notarizing the application. So you know, at least we have Linux or maybe not. Colorado and California have made laws, California's law goes into effect at the end of the year that require operating systems to have age verification at account setup, including Linux. Now right now, the way this is set up you could, you'd just say are you over 18? And that would be enough. People have pointed out you could say anything you want. California, this is entirely unenforceable because nobody, it's easy with Google and Apple because there's a choke point those companies and you can go after those companies. Who are you going to go after with Linux? Linus Torvalds? Richard Stallman? Who exactly are you going to go after? And if one Linux distro decides, all right, well we'll enable this then there are plenty of other distros that won't. There is one open source project I think maybe more to make a statement than anything else. It's a calculator operating system. It's designed to run bare metal DB48X that has said they're going to add a legal notice that says California residents may no longer use DB48X after January 1st. Colorado residents may no longer be able to use it after January 1, 2028. Because the creator of this, because it is a bare metal calculator, think it's probably an operating system under those laws and we are not going to do age verification.

[Molly White]

Can't let those babies have calculators.

[Leo Laporte]

Heaven forfend children. Think of the children, they might start doing math. I think it's more of a statement. I don't think any anybody's going to come after them for that. But I do think that and this is what's happened in general with our civil liberties in order to preserve our Security, they tighten more and more down on your civil liberties. And I think they're doing the same thing now on computing platforms.

[Harry McCracken]

And that even if you don't have any fundamental opposition to age verification as an idea, some of the technologies they're using to do it are troubling in terms of scanning your social media to figure out how old you are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, we run a Discord channel for our club members and I think everybody using Discord has been very concerned about Discord kind of jumping the gun on requirements. They're not yet required to do this, but.

[Harry McCracken]

And then.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

And Discord ended up backpedaling a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank goodness they were using a Peter Thiel based identification, age identification system, which people were concerned. Well, that's just going to be handed over right away to ICE and DHS and anybody else who wants that information. And of course Discord's had a breach that the third party vendor they used previously had a 17,000 record breach. So that's the problem is you're giving up this information. In fact, Steve Gibson pointed this out on security. Now the federal government has had to back down on the Child Online Protection and Privacy Act a little bit because that act prohibits companies from collecting information about minors except in order to do age verification. What do you have to do? Collect information about minors? So now Congress is saying, well, yeah, you don't have to worry about COPPA if you're doing age verification. Well, that should tell you there's something wrong with these laws.

[Molly White]

And it definitely does feel like an extension of the trend towards like nothing you buy you own anymore. You know, like it's. For a long time you've bought a video game or a movie or something and you don't own it. You're really just sort of renting it. But now it seems like that's coming to our devices where you buy the phone, but you don't actually have any control over what you run on it. You buy the computer, but you know you're limited by the operating system. You can't do what you want with your own device, which I think is a really nasty trend.

[Leo Laporte]

I put the graphene OS on my Pixel because Google still allows you to unlock the bootloader. But somebody's asking in our Discord, will this affect graphene? Well, I think graphene will have to say, are you 18? Because there's a store and if there's an app store, that's what they're trying to protect kids from, I guess. But at any point Google could stop Unlocking, allowing you to unlock the bootloader. That's why graphene only runs on pixels. It doesn't run on Samsung and other Android devices. Google lets you unlock the bootloader. I don't know how long that's going to last. That's why I put graphene on my pixel while I could.

[Molly White]

I am curious though, to see how this goes in terms of enforceability, because it is really seems very unenforceable at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

It's totally unenforceable.

[Molly White]

And so my question, I guess is like, how many is anyone going to comply if there's no.

[Leo Laporte]

Who are you going to arrest if Debian says, nah, we're not going to do that. Yeah, I'm sure companies like Canonical, which does Ubuntu, will probably do it because they're a company, because there's somebody you can sue, you can go after, you can penalize. But open source projects are not notoriously wealthy.

[Molly White]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Hard to find.

[Molly White]

I mean, it almost makes me wonder to what extent will they say it's not worth, you know, I, I wonder if Ubuntu implemented this, are they going to lose all their.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Molly White]

Are they gonna. But are they gonna lose all their users? Because I don't feel like, like, particularly when it comes to, you know, the Linux demographic, I don't feel like they're going to be particularly friendly towards this as far as all users go. Right, right.

[Owen Thomas]

Make me think if California is just, you know, overregulating again.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think the biggest problem is legislators don't seem to really understand what they're doing when it comes to technology. There's a lot of hand waving. It's like, well, we want to protect kids.

[Molly White]

Yeah. There's a lot of, like, we want to do this very noble thing. And like, no thought about anything beyond what they want to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, their attitude, we've talked about this before, is just nerd harder. Silicon Valley, you could figure it out.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, and it's often the big companies that are capable of figuring out some way to, to comply or to lobby to get the, you know, maybe the law doesn't change, but the rules implementing it get changed in subtle ways. And it's the small companies that have a really hard time figuring out how to deal with stuff like this.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Let's take a little break. We've got a big week for Apple coming up. We'll talk about that in just a bit. Did Fitz get his walk?

[Owen Thomas]

He did, he did. He was making noises. Plaintive noises.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Does he, like, point at the Door. Like, this way, dad.

[Owen Thomas]

No, he finds a box and he starts, like, pawing the box.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. You know where he's going?

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's basically saying, you got 10 minutes.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's either going here or it's going out there. Your choice, buddy.

[Owen Thomas]

Taking it out on. Taking it out on the nearest cardboard.

[Molly White]

You should get him a set of those potty bells. Have you seen those? It's like bells that you hang from your doorknobs pump.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they jingle.

[Molly White]

My dog has some. Yeah, it's the cutest thing in the world.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

So how do you train it to do that?

[Molly White]

Basically, anytime you, like, you're about to go take him out, you wait until he noses the. The bells, and then you take him out. And they're very quick to learn. My dog was. He learned immediately. Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Have you seen that there are word buttons?

[Molly White]

Like, I've seen those.

[Owen Thomas]

And, you know, dogs can, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Can they really learn that?

[Molly White]

Some of them look pretty convincing to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Ow, ow, ow. Treat, treat, treat, treat.

[Molly White]

That's the thing is, like, I would never get my dog that button because he would just sit on it the whole, like, he would just never leave it alone.

[Leo Laporte]

Our cat has learned how to use the ring doorbell, which I think is pretty cool.

[Molly White]

How, like, push.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it doesn't. Doesn't push the doorbell. But, you know, it has a camera, by the way. I am very sensitive about the fact that we have a ring doorbell in the camera. I've turned off the cloud features, and I made sure the doorbell does not see anything but just the. You know, our path is shielded from the street, so you can't see anything but somebody coming towards the door. But there's a wall. The ring doorbell's here, and there's a wall leading up to it. And the cat has deduced that if she walks up to the camera and waves her head, that the chimes inside will ring. And then I look at my watch or my phone, I say, oh, it's the cat. And I go open the door. And it's happened enough now that she's figured it out. And so we just. She doesn't have a cat door. We just let her out, and we know she's going to ring the chimes which wants to come back.

[Molly White]

I think she's trained you in this circumstance.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Owen Thomas]

With the help of AI Animals plus AI Humans don't have a chance.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, there may be a lot of examples of animals figuring out how to use AI in the years to come.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't that be something? Well, the funny thing is there's also a neighbor cat who comes around. He's a little tom and he's figured it out because Lisa goes out, sees him, goes, oh, it's Georgie, and goes out and feeds him. So he's got a lot of incentive to ring the doorbell.

[Owen Thomas]

I do have making humans easier to use.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, one of the biggest mind blowing moments like that. And I don't know if it's true, but Yuval, Noah, Harari and sapiens made the argument that we didn't learn to cultivate wheat. Wheat learned to cultivate us. Wheat decided, you know, hey, you know, what's really good for wheat is we get humans to take these grasses that just kind of grow willy nilly and give them a nice place to grow and feed them and all of that. And then, you know, when they harvest us, take the seeds and plant some more.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

You can say that about.

[Molly White]

You can say that about cows and chicks too.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Cows and chickens.

[Leo Laporte]

Cows and chickens. That was his position too. Yeah, yeah. In fact, cows probably. We wouldn't have nearly as many cows if we didn't like to eat them.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

They'd be extinct.

[Leo Laporte]

Who? They'd be gods. Right. Of course, you can't say that about the passenger pigeon. That's gone. Because we like to eat them. So there you go. Okay, I'm sorry that got dark. Let me take a break and then we will come back and we'll talk about wonderful things, the things that people listen to our shows for. New phones, new laptops, all sorts of exciting new products. Isn't tech wonderful? It's so wonderful what tech has brought us. That's what I used to do back in the day. I always hated it too. People say, can you. We want you to give a talk to our user group, but can you talk about gadgets, not politics? Okay, fine. You want to hear what the latest phone is? I got it. Our show today, brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Yes. Not everybody's firing. Some are hiring. And that's good. Thank you. I appreciate it. What's the latest trend in hiring? Well, it's called skills based hiring. It emphasizes capabilities over education and direct experience. I love that idea. And it actually works. According to experts, it leads to faster hiring and better job performance. Well, if you're an employer who has adopted skill based hiring, the best way to ensure that your applicants have the right skills is ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter recommends smart screening questions to help you hone in on that perfect match for your role and right now you could try it for [e-mail] TWIT ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates fast. You can easily add ZipRecruiter screening questions to your job post so you get the highest quality applicants. If you want to see who's recently active, ZipRecruiter filters can show you. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter help you find amazing candidates with the skills you seek. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you could try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com Twitter that's ZipRecruiter.com TWIT meet your match on ZipRecruiter. I'm glad to know that there are companies hiring. That's a good thing with all the companies laying off these days. So this is going to be a big week for Apple. Even Tim Cook says so. They did send an invitation out for an event on Wednesday. They call it a press experience that'll be in New York, Shanghai and London. But Tim Cook said the product announcements begin Monday morning. So get ready. Starting tomorrow there will be a lot of new stuff from Apple. Probably likely a new iPhone, the 17. We don't know what they're going to call it. E the kind of the inexpensive version of the current. What is it? Is the 17 right? I I can't even keep track of numbers. Yeah, 17 or is it 18?

[Owen Thomas]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You can see I'm not as tuned in as I once was to the product scene. There will probably be a low cost laptop based on an iPhone processor, maybe a little bit less attractive screen, a little bit simpler lower ram. RAM probably would be one of the things you'd give up because RAM is so expensive these days. Used to be new product announcements for Apple were like a major nerd holiday. I don't know if we still feel that way. We still feel that way? I don't think so. Nothing to say about that. Go ahead.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, I think that a cheap MacBook is really interesting. It's something people have talked about for years because I certainly remember back in the heyday of the Netbook a lot of people saying that Apple would be in trouble if it didn't come out with a really inexpensive portable Mac, which they never quite did. Except that after they came out with the Apple Silicon MacBook Air, Walmart just continued to Sell it at lower and lower price points. Even though it's several years old, even the first generation Apple Silicon MacBook Air is still a decent computer for a lot of people and kind of a proving point for that. This might be a useful device.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. You don't. I mean it'll probably have, I guess it could have 8 gigs of RAM, but if it had 16 and it was an M1 level chip, it's going to be actually an A series chip from the iPhone, the A19.

[Owen Thomas]

I think you guys are talking about chips. Let's talk about colors. Bring back.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what really matters.

[Owen Thomas]

Bring back the orange ibook.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the orange iPhone has sold incredibly well.

[Owen Thomas]

I'm telling you. Elwoods was a technology, was a technology visionary.

[Molly White]

Those like semi transparent Macs were like

[Leo Laporte]

the Bondi product design. Yeah, I confess, I fell for the orange on the iPhone. I like color. Apple's.

[Owen Thomas]

My husband actually has the orange iPhone. We had an orange imac and an orange ibook at and you're wearing an

[Leo Laporte]

orange shirt and Molly wood is in an orange room. So there's a definite trend here. Also, Harry, what's with the purple shirt? You got it all wrong, man.

[Harry McCracken]

Also, like, most people ultimately put their phones in cases, so maybe the color doesn't matter that much, but I had

[Leo Laporte]

to take it out of the case.

[Harry McCracken]

Presumably most people do not put their laptop into a case and so arguably cool colors is an even better idea there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, why is it that these companies don't do more colorful stuff? I remember there was a whole thing. You Remember this, Harry? PCs were beige boxes, square beige boxes. And then acer came along and they made this swoopy doopy with holes in it and stuff and it was a flop. People wanted beige boxes.

[Harry McCracken]

Apple did. I think, I believe it was the iPhone 5C was the cheaper model in the plastic case and that came in a whole range of colors. And it. There was like a one generation thing. So apparently it didn't actually sell all that well. And since then they've been a lot more staid. I like to have an iPhone pro. Until last year, the iPhone pro colors were particularly staid. As if the fact it's a more serious device meant it couldn't be playful.

[Molly White]

Yeah, professionals are not allowed to have color.

[Leo Laporte]

On the other hand, if you're legally blonde colors in. Let me see if I got it. I can't get. For some reason I'm not able to get this tweet you sent us of legally blonde.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh do. Starringthecomputer.com. that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Starringthecomputer.com.

[Harry McCracken]

oh, yeah, that's a great site.

[Leo Laporte]

This is about computers and movies.

[Harry McCracken]

Yes, totally.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what is an idea.

[Harry McCracken]

I did something on the Butterfly ThinkPad last year, and that site was always. The keyboard came in, the keyboard that expanded. And that site was really helpful for identifying movies that had been in. It was in Mission Impossible and something else I'm forgetting right now, but it's a great site. And they have screen grabs.

[Molly White]

That's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

I love vlogs like this. This is fun. Yeah, there's an imac in the flash. Their old Bondi blue one here is. What movie is Freaky Friday? Boy, they really. They must be going frame by frame to find these. Holy cow.

[Harry McCracken]

Oh, a James Bond movie also had the butterfly thinkpad, and it was, like, shown so briefly that you might almost miss it. And then once I identified them on that side, I then had to go and study the actual movies frame by frame.

[Leo Laporte]

There's the Acer Aspire, the green, ugly green Acer that I was talking about. This is fun. What a nice sight. Starring the computer.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, do you remember the ibook had that handle, Right. Carry it like a purse, right?

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah. The toilet seat ibook.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, the last very colorful ibook was the toilet seat. The clamshell.

[Owen Thomas]

That's the one.

[Molly White]

My favorite were the mice that matched those that were circular.

[Leo Laporte]

They were round pucks. They were such a terrible design. It's such a terrible design.

[Harry McCracken]

I think that ibook, I feel like, might have been the ugliest Apple product of all time. But that doesn't mean it was a bad product.

[Leo Laporte]

I think people loved it because it had personality.

[Harry McCracken]

It was. Yeah. I mean, that whole generation of Apple products had a ton of personality that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe we're going back to that era. I mean, I think they'll probably look a lot like a MacBook, but that might be a little more colorful.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

They don't even have the light anymore that shines through the Apple logo. They don't even do that anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

The apple used to glow. That was so cool.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, the gay tech mafia is letting us down. I'm just gonna put it out there. Tim Cook, what are you even doing?

[Leo Laporte]

They've got a rainbow on the campus. What do you want? What do you.

[Owen Thomas]

I know. Like, it's, you know, it's six colors. It's in the logo. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was in the logo. Boring white logo, though.

[Owen Thomas]

The. The. The teaser for this, this new event is people are speculating that there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, those are the colors. Those are the four colors right there.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, you keep saying gay mafia. This was a pre show conversation. It was a cover. It's the COVID story of Wired magazine this month. About what? That they've discovered that there are gay people in Silicon Valley.

[Owen Thomas]

There are gay people in Silicon Valley and they know each other.

[Leo Laporte]

Shocking. Shocking. Although the COVID is actually quite shocking. I don't even know if I want to show it.

[Owen Thomas]

Show the Salesforce Tower 1. That's a little safer.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah, this is.

[Owen Thomas]

I think that

[Leo Laporte]

maybe, maybe not. And this is. I'll show you the COVID Here's the big shot of the COVID It's a little rude if you ask me. So it's two guys shaking hands, but their hands are coming out of their flies for some reason. It's not, I believe, not anatomically correct. Unless. Do gay men have hands?

[Owen Thomas]

Gay men have hands and we do yoga.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Very flexible.

[Molly White]

Gay men do have hands.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yes. Can confirm I'm learning something here today. I said this before the show began that this article, this cover story, felt a little bit like a lot of straight people going, oh, my God, there's gay people in Silicon Valley. Like, yeah, there's gay people everywhere. Do they run Silicon Valley? Why are it investigates? I'm not going to read this story, so you could tell me now, Owen, as a gay man, do you run Silicon Valley?

[Owen Thomas]

I wish.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, this is Zoe Bernard writing. Writing the story. Thank you.

[Owen Thomas]

The story itself is actually pretty. Pretty interesting and nuanced.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. Okay.

[Owen Thomas]

And it's a fun read.

[Leo Laporte]

There are. I mean, it is the case that there are some very prominent out gay men, although they weren't out. Peter Thiel wasn't out till he was out.

[Molly White]

Definitely wasn't.

[Owen Thomas]

Peter Thiel was always out. He had a public friendster profile where he disclosed his.

[Leo Laporte]

So why did he sue Gawker over.

[Owen Thomas]

He did not sue Gawker.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sorry, Hulk. Why didn't he. Why did he proxy sue Gawker using Hulk Hogan as his front man?

[Owen Thomas]

It's complicated. He and Nick Denton had a.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't you write the story?

[Owen Thomas]

Guilty. Guilty.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, now, wait a minute. Now we got to dig into this. I forgot you wrote that story there.

[Owen Thomas]

But Nick Denton left a comment on that story, and apparently that comment stung Peter Teal more than. More than the story did.

[Leo Laporte]

So he wasn't closeted.

[Owen Thomas]

It wasn't closeted.

[Leo Laporte]

What was the title of your story?

[Owen Thomas]

Peter Thiel is totally Gay people. Which. Which Again, is, like, you know,

[Molly White]

very

[Owen Thomas]

definitely not outing him because it's like, everyone knows this.

[Molly White]

It was, like, well known. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Like, everyone knows this, but, like. Like, a couple of people in various circles were freaking out over the idea of, like, discussing it. And it was like, okay, let's calm down. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but I agree that you have the right to keep your sexuality private if you choose.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. You know, but I. But I think that, you know, Wired, putting this on. On the COVID is kind of a statement of societal progress that, like, we can actually have an adult conversation, talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And not. Not have, you know, a. A false heteronormative moral panic.

[Molly White]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm shocked. Shocked to learn that gambling is going on here at Rick's Cafe.

[Owen Thomas]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything announced this week at Samsung unpacked. The Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Galaxy Buds, and the Ultra's privacy display. Is this a feature everybody's dying for?

[Harry McCracken]

I think it's totally.

[Molly White]

Ones where you turn it and then you can't see.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's kind of different. You know, it's not like those laptop privacy screens that you put on that basically are polarized screens. This is kind of cool. I think it's done in some sort of watch. It's some sort of electrical. Terry, do you know how this works?

[Harry McCracken]

I can't tell you in great technical detail, but one of the cool things about it is it's pixel by pixel. So you can do the entire screen if you want, or you can just do notifications if that's the main thing you care about.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's kind of cool.

[Harry McCracken]

And I do. I mean, this is the first time in quite a while that we've seen phones with, like, a genuinely totally new feature, rather than an incremental improvement on something all phones have had for quite a while.

[Leo Laporte]

It does darken the screen for you as the front person, but of course, it makes it completely black.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, but I haven't seen myself in person, but I have to say, like, I think to a person, everybody I've seen who saw it at the event and wrote about it was quite impressed by it and said, it's well done.

[Leo Laporte]

This might be. In response, the Wall Street Journal did a piece about a year ago about shoulder surfing. People in bars, watching you unlock your phone, then stealing your phone, knowing your pin.

[Harry McCracken]

It's an actual problem, at least occasionally.

[Molly White]

Yeah, Pete Hexess will be delighted. Don't people keep seeing stuff over his shoulder in his signal channel?

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, that would be a real boon for the Trump administration.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be great for people in the cabinet are going to love this. Okay. There's not a whole lot new in the S26.

[Harry McCracken]

It has some impressive Google AI, including some stuff that sounds comparable to some of the features Apple announced year before last and still haven't shipped.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. At this point it's kind of of it's not too hard to beat Apple in AI.

[Harry McCracken]

Samsung and Google seem to have done a good job of in some ways competing with each other but also collaborating in a way that's probably fruitful for both of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Although I'm watching the Samsung event and I'm thinking every year it's not just Samsung, but a lot of it's Samsung. They show these features. I get the phone, I play with it for about a day and then I forget about it and I never use it again. Apple's somewhat the same thing I guess

[Harry McCracken]

I really like and still like the camera control on the iPhone. Like the dedicated camera button.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, I use that actually I don't have a camera icon on my front screen now because I know I'm just going to press that button.

[Harry McCracken]

That's something I was excited about when I saw it and I'm still excited about, which is certainly not true of all these features. Sometimes, sometimes they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Guess there's a lot of gimmick, gimmicky stuff. The other thing is I never believe what I see at these events. Right. You've learned that right. I want to see it in real well.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah. Particularly after the WWDC with Apple wowing everybody with stuff which it turned out they couldn't build and on some level are still trying to figure out how to build given that they brought in an at Google just recently.

[Leo Laporte]

Google does the same thing though, right. I mean Google I o for years they'd show stuff often that would never really materialize or if it did, it would never quite live up to.

[Harry McCracken]

Its probably particularly common now that they have these developer conferences which involve like pre announcing an entire year's worth of new features in some cases.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. Let's talk a little bit about hacking. There was an interesting story in the Iran attack. Of course I'm sure by now you know that Israeli airstrikes actually hit Tehran, killing the leader and many of his generals. One of the things that Israel did which was kind of interesting, they hacked a prayer app that was widely used in Iran to send surrender messages to Iranians. Now this kind of reminds me of World War II. Dropping pamphlets out of airplanes saying, Germans, you know, help is on the way. Get rid of Hitler. That's what these messages said on this prayer app. Mysterious push notifications saying, help is on the way and amnesty if they surrender, I think. We don't know yet how much hacking went on, but I suspect there was quite a bit of cyber warfare in this attack, just as there was in the extraction of Nicolas Maduro and Venezuela.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, nothing, nothing beats the pager,

[Leo Laporte]

the beeper explosion, explosive beepers.

[Owen Thomas]

Talk about a supply chain threat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that was wild. Yeah. Okay. There's always this cautionary tale, though, about using cyber warfare, because what we do to them, they can do to us. And it doesn't require a massive military to do it back. Right. Just requires, you know, half dozen good hackers.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah.

[Molly White]

I mean, look at North Korea.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Yeah. Axios had a story about what an AI enabled cyber attack would look like. Look like to us. Paul Nakasone, former head of the nsa, said that a nation state that has breached systems critical to the supplies of food and water could trigger an outage. Maybe they're planning to trigger an outage. We know that the Chinese, for instance, have invaded in many cases. Our. Our infrastructure, our grid, electrical grids and so forth with malware they haven't triggered. Nakasone said, you know, there's a risk if they lose control of an AI agent that could be triggered inadvertently or without human interruption. Nakasone said, the thing that prevents them from doing anything, they are in our infrastructure, but they know the U.S. is going to respond. And then, Nakasone said, not merely in cyberspace. The kinetic war, I guess, still has an important role to play. I feel like we are in a risky time. We're very interdependent. Well, and we don't have the CISA so much to protect us anymore. The guy who was running CISA for the longest time is now gone. The acting director, he had a lot of little issues. Madhu Gotu Mukala failed a polygraph, which, honestly, let's be honest, I don't know why they're still using polygraphs. Lie detectors to vet people for viewing classified documents. But he did apparently fail a counterintelligence polygraphy. He uploaded sensitive government documents to ChatGPT. Oops. Staffing at CISA was slashed by 1/3. This is the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure security Agency that has been gutted. When Alex Stamos was on the show last month, he said, we are very vulnerable because Sisa is not on the job. Well, Gutta McCalla is now gone. He's been moved to a new position as Director of Strategic Implementation in the dhs. Not sure who's going to replace him. The former nominee, Sean Planky, has been re nominated, but the Senate has not approved him. Molly, you had a thought on this?

[Molly White]

No, I was just saying I was giving the name.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Sean Planky, right?

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that right? Yeah. The Senate hasn't even scheduled a hearing for his nomination. So sisa's leaderless, basically. Last week, another top senior official, Bob Costello, the Chief Information Officer tasked with overseeing CISA's IT systems and data policies, left. Actually Gutta McCalla tried to transfer him, but was blocked. It's kind of a mess. So does this.

[Owen Thomas]

Is this the insidification of government?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but the problem is we are. Makes us more vulnerable to cyber attacks from adversaries.

[Owen Thomas]

All right, absolutely. It's, you know, and, and you know, the way that the Trump administration, for example, shut down, you know, offensive operations, I believe, targeting Russia, you know, it's offensive and defensive. You know, basically left is blind to what, what they might be doing.

[Leo Laporte]

And if you're a country like Iran that knows that you're going to be, you know, you're under a lot of pressure from the us you're under sanctions and you might well be attacked, I would assume that they would work very hard to create a core of hackers like North Korea has done, like China has done. I know Russia has very accomplished hackers in the gru. We have a lot of enemies out there, and maybe they don't have the missiles that can reach our shores, but they certainly have cyber skills. Seems like we should be beefing up our defenses, not, not, not taking them apart. I should warn you, there is a new attack. If you have a guest network set up on your WI fi, you might want to turn it off. There's a new attack called Air Snitch that bypasses WI FI encryption. It uses a guest network to break into your regular network. It seems like a reasonably, I'm not going to say easy attack, but if you have an. Let's don't make any enemies in the hacker community. Let's say. This research was presented Wednesday at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. It's a WI FI encryption bypass in the sense that it bypasses client isolation. It doesn't break the authentication or encryption, but it just walks right around it. So WPA is still, especially wpa. Three and two and three are still secure. But if you've got a guest network, you might want to turn it off, I guess. I'm sure.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. As if most people with home WI FI systems know how to turn off. Do I have a guest network? I don't know. Probably, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I was surprised to learn just yesterday that Xfinity has set up a Xfinity WI fi wifi network for my neighbors on my router.

[Harry McCracken]

You only just learned about that?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I knew they were doing it on consumer routers, and I knew how to turn it off on my old consumer router. But I have business class and I don't think I can turn it off on the business router. I think I have to offer WI Fi access to anybody who walks by my house.

[Owen Thomas]

This is why I reluctantly stuck with Comcast for. For high speed Internet. But I brought my own docsis router to the arc.

[Harry McCracken]

I finally, for the years I was using a modem I had bought. But I had a deal, an all you can eat deal with Xfinity, where they sent me a modem which I would ignore. And they eventually called my bluff and said I had to set up their modem, which I did. But I wanted it to work with my Eero Mesh network, which was kind of a headache for about half an hour. But I finally have the Xfinity modem working with the WI Fi. I want to use one of those mesh modes, probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Harry McCracken]

Yes. I had avoided tackling that for like five or six years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, I just assumed because it's business class service that they wouldn't turn on the Xfinity WiFi, the business class modem.

[Harry McCracken]

They kind of made it worth my while because in the old days, I would have had to pay Xfinity a monthly fee for a modem. And this is actually cheaper than if I used my own modem.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll ask Burke if you can log into my modem and turn that off. That would be great. I appreciate. Appreciate that. I didn't realize. I just didn't realize they would do that.

[Harry McCracken]

As far as I know, they can't share my WI fi because I'm not using them for WI fi.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I don't want my We. I'm relying on the bandwidth right now. We're doing a show. If the bandwidth goes down because my neighbor decides to stream heated rivalry over and over again, I don't know why then, you know, it could impact my ability to do my job. Fortunately.

[Molly White]

That's wild that they wouldn't let you turn like that. They might.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they can. I just can't. I don't See anywhere in the. In the router to turn it off. And I have to, because it's business service. I have to use their modem. I have my own router, but I have to use their modem.

[Molly White]

I mean, we were just talking about devices that you don't own.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's one right there. Yeah. Because I have business class service. We thought that would be a good idea. Good news, the 10th Circuit. This came up actually with the Washington Post reporter. Remember that the government researching or trying to investigate leaks in the government took a Washington Post reporter's devices and. And tried to crack them and couldn't. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court's dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester's device and digital data and a nonprofit's social media data. It was. The case was the Armandaris versus the city of Colorado Springs. It was a housing protest back in 2021. Colorado Springs police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway. They also obtained warrants at the time to search the devices and data of one of the protesters who they claimed threw a bike at them during the protest. The warrants included a search through all her photos, videos, emails, text messages and location data over a two month period, as well as a time unlimited search for 26 keywords, including words like bike, assault, celebration and the word right. It basically gave police the right to comb through years of her private data looking for evidence related to the single issue of her throwing a bike at the police. They got a warrant to search her first Facebook page, the Facebook page of the Chinook center, the organization that spearheaded the protest despite them never being accused of a crime. So the Chinook center and Armandares sued a civil rights lawsuit which the district court dismissed, saying the searches were justified and in any case, the officers had qualified immunity. The ACLU defending the plaintiffs appealed and there's a very good News. In a 2 to 1 opinion, the 10th Circuit has ruled that in fact there is an absolute limit on how much police can go through your devices.

[Molly White]

Didn't the judge just overturn the decision on the Washington Post reporter as well?

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Yes.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's how it's related to.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Government has been trying very hard to break through this wall of privacy, but we. We store so much stuff on our devices. So I'm not sure what the status is of the Washington Post reporter.

[Molly White]

I think the judge is going to review the evidence that was. I think he himself is going to be the one who reviews the evidence

[Leo Laporte]

that was as opposed to Law enforcement.

[Harry McCracken]

The.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the judge guard.

[Molly White]

Well, having. Usually there's like a team that is brought, like an independent team is brought in. The idea of the judge himself sifting through all that seems a little unusual to me, but more power to him, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. U.S. magistrate Judge William Porter says he'll independently review the contents of Hannah Natenson's devices instead of allowing a Justice Department filter team to perform the search. Apparently doesn't trust the Justice Department. He said he balanced the need to protect N's free speech rights with the government's duty to safeguard top national security.

[Owen Thomas]

That's back to the presumption of regularity, which is increasingly off the table.

[Molly White]

Yeah, well, and I think the judge was particularly angry because I think he argued that the government did not properly inform him of a law like, pertaining to, I think specifically journalists, like seizing journalists work. So I think he was already kind of predisposed to not trusting the DOJ in this particular case.

[Leo Laporte]

He had originally temporarily barred the government from looking into. They took her phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive and her Garmin smartwatch. Oh, that's gonna be probative. And the judge said he initially barred the government from reviewing any of that material, But I guess he feels like, well, I. I'm going to look through this and. Yeah, I mean if I were nson, I wouldn't be happy about any of this. Protecting your sources is kind of fundamental to good journalism and protected. It's a. It's protected by the First Amendment. Well, we'll keep up on that one, but at least in this case there is some restriction on the broad search of protesters devices. Did you do SETI at home ever? Any of you helping to search for.

[Molly White]

I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Extraterrestrial intelligence? No, you did it, Harry.

[Harry McCracken]

I did. I did not.

[Leo Laporte]

You did. Oh, Molly, you did.

[Molly White]

Did. Yeah, I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's over, of course, but. So for 21 years, between 1999 and 2020, millions of people loaned UC Berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations. It was SETI at home. I did it too. I did a few of those. Right. There were a bunch of other ones. There was folding at home.

[Molly White]

Folding at home. Yeah, I think that was the one I mostly did then.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The idea was let your unused CPU cycles do some work that could be aggregated. And by the way, folding at home has now been basically superseded by AlphaFold, which does a much better job much faster doing protein folding. So the data came from the now defunct Arecibo Observatory. Right. That's Falling apart. But they had a lot of data. 12 billion detections. Momentary blimps of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky. They're hoping maybe that is signal from the ETs. After 10 years of work since the closing of the project, the setihome team has finished analyzing those detections. They've winnowed them down, first to a million candidate signals, and now to 100 that are worth a second look. So they've got access to China's 500 meter aperture spherical telescope. It's called FAST. And they've been pointing it at these hundred targets since July, hoping to see the signals again. So far, nothing. If we don't go ahead.

[Owen Thomas]

Wasn't Obama talking about intelligent life, dropping hints about aliens?

[Harry McCracken]

Then he retracted thereafter?

[Leo Laporte]

I think he was teasing. Anyway. I guess if you did SETI at home, you'll be glad to know it wasn't completely wasted and they're now looking at 100 signals. When we were designing setihome, said David Anderson, the co founder, it went way, way beyond our initial expectations. We tried to decide whether it was worth doing, whether we'd get enough computing power to actually do new science. Our calculation, we're based on getting 50,000 volunteers. We got a million, including one Molly White. It was kind of cool.

[Molly White]

At your service.

[Leo Laporte]

At your service. You know what? You're an altruistic person. You do the Wikipedia. You help us find ETs. Good job.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Spoiler.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if I want to find Spoiler.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

They found nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's probably good news. I'm thinking, don't you think it'd be disruptive if they said, hey, guess what? Didn't you see Pluribus? Don't you know, we don't want to know. We don't want to know what's out there.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Honestly, if we did find anything, it would just be seeing it. And that would be it. That would be the end of it. Like there would be nothing past that because they'd be so far away that nothing would be able to be done.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, one hopes. But remember the three body problem? You don't want to let them know we're here.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

Dark forest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, we're here all right. One last ad, then. We have some immemoriums, we have some weird stories. Stories. We're running out of time. I'll get them as quickly as I can. You're watching this week in tech with the great technologizer himself, Harry McCracken, Fitz the dog, and his owner, Owen Thomas of the San Francisco Business Times. I love how you do the salute, salute, salute, salute. And Molly White from MollyWhite.net and of course, citation needed. Which you must subscribe to right now. Our show today, brought to you by my mattress. I slept so well last night. You know, Saturday night is very important that I get a good night's sleep so that I'm fresh and ready to do this show. This is, you know, takes a lot of cognitive energy. The deep sleep is so important. That's why we invested in a mattress. You spend more than a third of your life on your mattress, right? Your mattress is home for where you, you cuddle fits where you roll around with your cats. You know, you watch tv, you read books, and you know, now that it's springtime, maybe recover from all of those allergies. Yes, it's allergy season. You need more sleep. So now's the perfect time to invest in a new mattress and stay comfortable inside, away from the allergens with your Helix. I have to say, I love our Helix bed. We ordered it. It's been about a year now, and it's made a huge difference. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. It's so comfortable. Don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality and questionable materials. Most mattresses are rest assured. Your Helix mattress is assembled, packaged, and shipped from Arizona within days of placing your order. So it's fresh. We did the Helix sleep quiz. I'd encourage you to do this, which matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences, your sleep needs. I'm a side sleeper, so we got a mattress, and I like a firm mattress. We got just the right mattress, but they have mattresses for every style and preference, and it really works. I notice I keep track my sleep with my aura range. A definite increase in not only how much time I spend sleeping, but in my deep sleep, which is the most important sleep cycle. I went from about 15 minutes a night to more than 40 minutes a night, and that is a big improvement. And actually, Helix did a sleep study. They did a Wesper sleep study. They measured the sleep performance of participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. And they found pretty much the same results. 82% of the participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. On average, 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. That's what I got, too. Participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. And I can tell you that makes a difference. You feel great when you wake up, well rested, Just fantastic. You're ready to take on the world time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. Helix will deliver your mattress right to your door. They have free shipping in the US and you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix guarantee provides a risk free customer first experience ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. We didn't need to return ours. It was perfect. You're never getting away from me. I love it. Go to helixsleep.com twit for 27% off site wide during the President's Day sale extended Best of Web exclusively for listeners of this week in tech. That's helixsleep.com TWIT 27% off the President's Day sale extended Best of Web. But this offer ends March 1st today. So make sure do put our show name in after checkout so they know we sent you. That'll help us a lot. If you're listening after the sale ends, check them out. There's always great deals at helix sleep sleep.com TWIT thank them so much for their support and for my very good night's sleep, I am very happy to say. Kind of a watermark for podcasters. Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio. Actually kind of. I'm actually kind of surprised it took us this long. Edison does these surveys and here's the graph. As AM and FM radio have declined dramatically over the last 10 years from 75% of daily spoken word audio time to 40%. As podcasting has gone from 10% 10 years ago to 40%. We are now. We've crossed the wires, crossed the streams. We're bigger than radio. Kids

[Molly White]

count radio shows that also have podcast feeds. Is that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no, that's confusing. Yeah, you're right. Everybody, everybody. Iheartmedia. My old company absolutely realized. It's funny, when I started doing my radio show in 2004, I asked management, can I put it on the Internet? And they said, yeah, nobody's gonna go ahead. That's never gonna impact our audience. And they were right for 20 years. But now they're doing podcasts of all their shows.

[Harry McCracken]

And are they counting podcasts on YouTube as podcasts? If people are consuming them on YouTube,

[Leo Laporte]

Spotify and YouTube, yes. Although I'm with you, I don't really think of that as a podcast.

[Harry McCracken]

I've. I've finally gotten my head around maybe these things on YouTube being podcasts. Even if they're not, they're shows that's

[Leo Laporte]

why I never liked the word podcast.

[Owen Thomas]

It's Netflix, right? Netflix has been courting podcasters. Netflix has you YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Which is, which is, which is interesting because that is, you know, part of the idea there. And this even goes back to Paramount. You know, Paramount buying Warner Discovery, a lot of the Discovery. Part of Warner Discovery is hgtv, Food Network. It's these shows you can kind of leave on in the background. That's exactly like podcasts. You just listen to it while you're doing something else.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I guess that's all right.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. Like when you're walking a dog. I totally.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. 90% of my podcast. Exactly, right. Yeah. Yeah. 80% of consumers over 18 have tuned into both audio, both audio and video. So only a tiny minority only listen to one or the other. 13% only listen to audio. 7% only watch video.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, talk radio, you know, Like, I don't know anyone who's listening to radio and not doing anything else. Right. Like, the whole point is I don't

[Leo Laporte]

know anybody under 80 that's listening, listening to.

[Harry McCracken]

It's not like the days when everybody, the family sat around the radio and listened to Jack Benny.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

It's the car, though. Like, everybody in their car listens to podcasts and not radio anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the change. Radio. Even when I was starting to do the talk show, it was mostly in car. Even by 2004, it was mostly in car.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

I mean, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

As soon as podcast became easy to

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

listen to, the commute is the thing, Right? Like, everybody listens to radio on their commute, and now it's just a podcast. They pick up podcasts now, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yay, we're winning. Burger King is going to use AI to see if its employees are saying please and thank you. The voice enabled chatbot called Patty.

[Molly White]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Part of an overarching BK assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation. Now put the meat on the bun. But also evaluate their interactions with customers for friendliness.

[Owen Thomas]

Is this because they're not able to hire and retain managers? That's what it sounds like to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, instead of a manager, you got Patty.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, Patty is the manager.

[Leo Laporte]

So disturbing. If anybody works at Burger King listening to this show, please call in. Let's. Let's hear what it's like.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

I mean, Burger King's been trying to do.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from the Verge. Employees can ask Patty questions such as how many strips of bacon to put on a maple bourbon BBQ Whopper.

[Harry McCracken]

That doesn't Sound like that's going to speed up the burger production process?

[Leo Laporte]

No. How many strips of bacon should I put on this whopper?

[Owen Thomas]

But I think that, you know, I think that there is some of the AI jobs are not being eliminated as much as they're never being filled. Think of truck drivers. We just cannot hire enough people to drive trucks to meet the demand. So autonomous trucks kind of make sense to deal with a labor shortage. Now could you increase wages potentially, but maybe the working conditions are such that you are just not going to attract people to those jobs at, at any realistic economically feasible wage.

[Harry McCracken]

I know that Aurora, who does autonomous trucking says that anybody who is a trucker today and wants to continue being a trucker probably can. And it is about the fact that it's very hard to get younger people to agree to do this rather stressful, boring job.

[Leo Laporte]

On Wednesday, Uber picked a particularly inauspicious time to debut its air taxi service service in Dubai.

[Molly White]

Oh God. Probably.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean the Dubai airport shut down. So I'm thinking the taxi service also shut down. It will let travelers book Joby Aviation's electric air taxis just like get, just like getting an Uber. It will come to you do. It'll pick you up at what they call a Joby Verta port.

[Molly White]

Who is piloting them?

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody.

[Molly White]

Like do you have to have a. It's no, it doesn't has a human pilot, this one.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, does it? Oh shoot. Well that's no fun. But they're autonomous. But they'll have a human pilot. So is that like a safety pilot?

[Molly White]

I don't know, I'm just curious like,

[Leo Laporte]

oh, they're not, I'm sorry, they are not yet autonomous. Their plan to make them autonomous. Oh, okay. So really the innovation here is, is this, is this helicopter.

[Harry McCracken]

It's an EV, but that's still a new thing.

[Leo Laporte]

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 propellers. It can go, you know, straight up and down takeoff.

[Molly White]

I'm just curious who's going to be piloting them because like, you know, Uber, the Uber model is like everyday people

[Leo Laporte]

are gonna do gig work driving their fly 747s. But I got an off day. I think I may do take up some gigs.

[Owen Thomas]

Right.

[Molly White]

Like are there just a lot of pilots around looking for gig work? I assume you have to have a pilot's license.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you know, I mean it's probably just another helicopter service. Right. They've always had at these high end airports in New York and I'm sure Dubai helicopter services. It's just another helicopter base Basically right. I thought it was autonomous. So if it's not autonomous, you're right. What's the big deal?

[Harry McCracken]

It's an electric helicopter.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an electric helicopter is what it is.

[Harry McCracken]

I wonder someday be autonomous.

[Guest or Minor Speaker]

It's a vtol.

[Molly White]

They don't go very far.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's vertical takeoff. That's new, but so is a helicopter.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Couple of immemoriums. The creator of Red Dwarf, which I know a lot of our listeners are big fans of British comedy, so Rob Grant has passed away at very young age, sad to say. He also created. Was one of the writers on Spitting Image, which was that great political puppet show, which is wonderful. And of course, Red Dwarf made one of our good friends, Bobby Llewellyn famous. He played Creighton the Robot on it. And Llewellyn is a good friend of the network, but also does his own car podcasts. Rob Grant, not Bobby. Bobby's still with us. Rob Grant passed away. Creator of Red Dwarf, and I have mixed feelings about this. Dan Simmons also passed away from a stroke at the age of 77. I consider Dan one of the great science fiction writers. His Hyperion series is one of my favorite sci fi books. He himself, not one of my favorite people, is always complicated, right? When these guys are great writers, but not such great people. His politics kind of went off the deep end towards the end. I just got though in honor he passed. If you haven't read the Hyperion Canthos, I can't recommend them more highly. And I just got his book from 2007, which is kind of a horror historical fiction novel called the Terror.

[Molly White]

I read that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a weird book. Is it weird?

[Molly White]

Yeah, it is weird. I have this thing where I really like to read about people being like, forced to survive in really cold places when I'm warm inside.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man, it's cold. It is really cold. It's the account of John Franklin, his expedition to find the Northwest Passage. And apparently there's a supernatural element that is very weird.

[Molly White]

It's a very normal book up until maybe the last third. And then you're like, wait a second, what is happening?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, good, I'll have something to look forward to. Anyway, Hyperion is really good. The Hyperion, the Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and the Rise of Endymion are. Are fantastic novels, which I would highly recommend. So because of that, I will note his passing at the age of 77 of a stroke, and that we always like to end with death on this show. It's the final Frontier.

[Owen Thomas]

Light and cheery.

[Leo Laporte]

That concludes this episode of this Week in Tech. Molly White, you're fantastic. I enjoy your new orange place.

[Molly White]

I think it's actually yellow, I will say.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Molly White]

It's my lighting, I think. But.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's got. It's a. It's warm, I guess.

[Owen Thomas]

It is a warm yellow.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very golden rod. Goldenrod. Wow. Citation needed is absolutely a must. Citation needed News, a newsletter by Molly White covers crypto. Right. But not just crypto.

[Molly White]

Not just crypto, but a lot of crypto.

[Leo Laporte]

The year of Technologarchy. That's a good word, technologarchy.

[Molly White]

Yeah. I wrote technological oligarchy too many times,

[Leo Laporte]

and I was like, let's just make it one word. And it's funny because I was mentioning how I use RSS to create my own newspaper, and I realized you had an article about it. Maybe that's where I got the idea. So there you go. Citation needed. It's free, but become a subscriber because it would be nice. It would be nice.

[Molly White]

Helps me keep it free.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, exactly. Thank you, Molly. Great to see you, Molly White. Thanks for having me, Mr. Owen Thomas, San Francisco Business. Business Times. Can we see Fitz? He's.

[Owen Thomas]

He's sulking on his blanket right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Fitz. Oh, Fitz.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Aw, is he mad at us for taking Daddy away for so long?

[Owen Thomas]

Maybe. Or just not getting enough treats?

[Leo Laporte]

That's probably it.

[Owen Thomas]

I need to give him a treat button so he can just go, treat, treat, treat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I want to see that. What are you working on? Anything you want to plug? He's a managing editor there at the Business Times.

[Owen Thomas]

Let's see. Just wanted to mention in all the AI news, we did have a scoop about OpenAI moving into Mountain View. So now, instead of just taking over all of San Francisco real estate, they are also plunging into Google's backyard. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Owen Thomas]

Big, big real estate move. Also competing with Xai Elon Musk's AI company, which is just one city north in Palo Alto. Buying up real estate there, or leasing real estate, I should say.

[Leo Laporte]

How big is this office conference?

[Owen Thomas]

I believe it's north of 300,000 square feet. So it's a big complex. Former Symantec headquarters, if you remember that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know that.

[Harry McCracken]

Symantec.

[Molly White]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. RIP Peter Norton.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Now part. Now. Northern Lifelock, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's got him.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Owen Thomas]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, everybody should read the San Francisco Business Journal. And you also. We were going to talk a little bit about the Renaissance. I can't show. See.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, Shoot. I believe I gave you a gift article.

[Leo Laporte]

I need a gift article. Give me a gift article it is. I got to stop using an ad blocker.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, that's a problem. But I can tell you. Yeah. Our most recent cover story was about UCSF. The effects of AI are not just on tech itself, but AI is playing a big role in health. UCSF has expanded their footprint by about 2 million square feet in the past two years. Wow. Acquiring hospitals, leasing or buying new space. And the chancellor, Sam Hawgood, says a lot of it is because San Francisco is the center of AI. It's also a huge healthcare hub. And he sees the two of them colliding right here in the city.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm planning when I have my heart attack to go to ucsf. So I do hope that, I mean, you will expand.

[Owen Thomas]

From everything I read, you'll be, you know, anyone who's.

[Leo Laporte]

They're the best.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. Facing that will be well cared for there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. If I can make it there in time.

[Owen Thomas]

Friend of mine is doing lung rehab. They have, like, physical therapy therapy for your lungs if you're, you know, having issues.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. My daughter went there. She had nodes on her vocal cords and had a really great ENT doctor who helped her completely cure it and get better. It's a really good hospital and medical facility. Really like it a lot. Thank you, Owen. Great to see you. San Francisco business times. Become a member and turn off my gosh darn ad blocker is what I ought to do. Thank you so much, Owen. Great to see you.

[Owen Thomas]

My pleasure.

[Leo Laporte]

Give my regards to Marie. You're.

[Harry McCracken]

As always, she's. She's listening in.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always, you know, that's the biggest sadness I have about not having a studio is I don't get to see Marie anymore because you guys used to come up.

[Harry McCracken]

We're sorry we don't get to go to Petaluma as often as we used to.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it's the only really real reason to come to Petaluma. Thank you. Harry McCracken, the technologizer. You can read about his AI coding experience, recreating his high school game, and of course, you'll read most of his stuff at Fast Company. I look forward to the new historical

[Harry McCracken]

computing and subscribe to my Fast Company newsletter. Plug that then.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's free, totally free. FastCompany.com. thank you, Harry. Thanks to all of you for making this show possible. A special thanks to our club Twit members who help foot the bill. We really appreciate you. Twit TV Club Twit. If you're not already a member and you want to support our programming, it's 10 bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows, you get access to the Discord and of course you get the special program that we do just for the club, including our AI user group, Stacy's Book Club, Johnny Jet. We do the Jet Set show. That's a brand new show we started doing this week in space. I can go on and on and on. There's a lot of great stuff going on in the club. I hope you will take part by joining at TWiT TV Club. TWiT, we'd love to have you. We do this week in tech. Every Sunday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern Time. Next Sunday we are going to daylight saving time, our summertime here. So normally we do it at 2200 UTC, but because we're moving, not UTC, we'll now be at 2100 UTC. You can watch the live streams at YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. Of course in the club you can watch on the Discord as well after the fact, on demand versions of the show available at our website, Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in tech, the Twitch Show. In fact, do me a favor, subscribe. Just click the subscribe button and hit the bell and all that. That way you'll get notifications when we go live. Plus you can watch the shows there, watch the video, the shows there. It's a great way to share clips with friends and family, help spread the word. Many of you though will subscribe because it is, after all, a podcast. And any podcast client should be able to subscribe to the show, audio or video or both, and get it automatically the minute it's available. And if your podcast client does has reviews, please leave us a good review. Spread the word a little bit. After 20 years of doing this show, it's easy for people to forget. In fact, I get that comment all the time. You're still alive. Yes, we're still. We're still here, believe it or not. Thanks for being here everybody. Thank you for joining, joining and we'll see you next time. Another Twit is in the can. Bye bye. Atblinds.com it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. Right? From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee. Everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because at blinds. Com, the only thing we treat better than Windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off select styles plus a free professional measure. Rules and restrictions apply.