TWiT 1076: I'm Monitoring the Situation - Meta's Horizon Worlds Stays Alive Against The Odds

Summary

This Week in Tech (TWiT) – Episode 1076: "I'm Monitoring the Situation – Meta's Horizon Worlds Stays Alive Against The Odds"

Date: March 23, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Panelists: Lisa Schmeisser (NoJitter), Dan Patterson (Blackbird.AI), Janko Rutgers (Lowpass.cc)

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Overview

This episode offers a deep dive into the week’s most pressing tech stories, exploring the shifting media landscape (the collapse of CBS Radio News), the role of prediction markets in sports and politics, privacy and data exploitation in the age of AI, the state of VR/metaverse, and more. Leo Laporte and a panel of seasoned tech reporters and analysts discuss what these news stories mean for media, tech, business, security, and everyday consumers.

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Key Discussion Points

1. End of an Era: CBS Radio News Shuts Down (06:00–22:10)

• The Story: CBS announces the closure of its iconic radio news division, with implications for 700 affiliate stations and generations of listeners.

• Media Evolution: Panelists discuss the interplay of economics, private equity ownership, and technological change driving the decision.

  • Janko Rutgers: Highlights role of private equity and shrinking radio ownership, comparing it to the fate of companies like Red Lobster and Joanne's Fabrics (14:02).
  • Lisa Schmeisser: Questions why legacy media has failed to transition more effectively to podcasting and new formats, noting the “hostility” of newsroom culture toward the internet (09:09, 17:31).
  • Dan Patterson: Dissects cultural inertia and ROI issues inside radio and news organizations, drawing on his own history in radio and podcasting (10:07–12:08).

• Notable Quote:

  • "While I was in major news, it was kind of unfathomable to me... why aren't we producing for this medium [podcasts]?... One answer is cultural, and the second is economic. Both were locked in." (Dan Patterson, 10:07)

• Listener Habits & Platform Shifts:

  • The panel discusses how younger generations consume news and why live radio listenership is tracking older (21:07).
  • Lisa mentions that her household still prefers radio for news, but acknowledges they're not typical due to family background (08:37).

2. Podcasting, Distribution, and Tech’s Changing Guard (22:10–27:00)

• The State of Audio: Despite declining importance of traditional radio, podcasting and streaming’s ad market is booming (“in the tens of billions”)(20:07).
• Distribution vs. Content: Leo emphasizes it’s not the medium (antenna vs. internet) that matters, but the quality and trust in the content itself (21:25).
• Quote:
  • “It isn’t about audio... It’s about whether it comes through the air via an antenna or it goes through your internet connection. That’s just the delivery medium. The important thing is the content, the people, the listeners who want good content.” (Leo, 21:25)

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3. AI Shopping Agents and the Battle for Customer Data (27:00–37:06)

• The Legal Fight: Perplexity’s AI shopping tool was temporarily blocked by Amazon, then reinstated by a US Appeals Court.

• The Stakes:

  • Lisa: AI agents “disintermediate” retailers by reducing their control over the customer relationship and data (28:47).
  • Amazon’s true business isn’t selling goods—it's monetizing user data and ad placements (29:18).
  • Leo draws analogies to the battle over ad blockers and dynamic pricing (29:31, 34:42).
  • Benito highlights dynamic pricing and the role of personalized in-store experiences (34:42).

• Quote:

  • "If you have a third-party shopping agent, that reduces the efficacy of all those paid placements... you're hitting them in the pocketbook. They're not going to like that." (Lisa, 29:20)

• Conclusion: The group reflects how this fight is fundamentally about data ownership and customer agency—not just about price comparison.

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4. The Value of Data and Privacy in the Age of AI (37:11–45:19)

• FBI Buys Data from Brokers: Kash Patel admits in Congressional testimony that US intelligence agencies purchase Americans’ location and other commercial data from brokers, bypassing the need for warrants (37:11–41:45).

• Privacy Theater:

  • Leo and Lisa are cynical about the effectiveness of new government privacy efforts, with California's registry just a “drop in the bucket” (40:28).
  • Lisa: "You are generating a lot of data that people make a lot of money on and you're not seeing a cut." (42:30)

• The Cost of “Free” Internet: The panel discusses how the promise of free platforms has always been a trade-off for personal data (42:39).

• The Web Today: Reference to the “49-megabyte webpage” blog post, illustrating the insanity of ad and tracker-laden news sites as a driver for ad blockers (43:27).

  • Quote: “You wonder why every sane tech person has an ad blocker installed... It’s not even surprising anymore. 49 megabytes is a little surprising.” (Leo, 43:27)

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5. Microsoft Windows 11—Can They Win Users Back? (47:31–62:35)

• Microsoft’s Mea Culpa: Microsoft promises to improve Windows 11’s performance, reliability, and reintroduce features like taskbar repositioning in response to significant user criticism (54:12).

  • Leo jokes this is “Windows K2... a tall mountain to climb.”
  • Lisa observes Microsoft’s long-term struggle to retire old software paradigms, the curse of backwards compatibility, and enterprise inertia (57:43, 59:37).
  • Group reminisces about past Windows eras (XP, 7), with Leo admitting he’s now a Mac convert.

• Notable Quote:

  • "The biggest obstacle they've [Microsoft] had is that the typical user and the typical customer does not move as quickly as a tech company does... It's really easy to eat the dog food inside a company, but...if you're a regular company...you're probably using systems that are 10 or more years old and they're fine." (Lisa, 57:43)

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6. Meta’s Horizon Worlds – The Death That Wasn’t (62:42–68:38)

• Meta’s Flip-Flop: At first, Meta planned to discontinue Horizon Worlds in VR; after backlash, they reversed course and kept it alive—though with no new features (63:13).
• Why It Still Matters:
  • Janko explains the passionate community of users (comedy clubs, music, AA meetings) (66:53).
  • Gen Z and kids are sustaining VR user growth, especially with cheap Meta Quest hardware (64:47).
  • Dan predicts new VR hardware from Steam may revitalize the space (65:36).
• Mobile VR?: Skepticism that mobile versions will compare to full VR; the shift reflects Meta focusing resources elsewhere.

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7. Nvidia’s "Yassify Filter" and AI's Role in Gaming (70:19–76:11)

• Nvidia’s DLSS5: Uses AI to enhance graphics; reactions are mixed, with some gamers objecting to unapproved changes in a game’s art direction (71:18–72:51).
  • Lisa: “I think this changes the consensual reality.”
  • Benito: It's about altering the art direction chosen by original designers.
  • Debate on artist/publisher consent and parallels to other visual effects like ray tracing.
  • Leo: "The initial reaction will fade and we're gonna get used to this kind of thing." (76:11)

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8. Elon Musk Found Liable in Twitter Stock Manipulation Case (80:39–84:10)

• Jury Verdict: Musk misled investors via public statements about bots, impacting Twitter's stock price before acquisition. Damages could reach $2.6B.
• Quotes:
  • "If there was a scheme, it clearly didn’t work because he had to buy at the original price—and now get out of on top of it for some stupid tweets that he did." (Janko, 83:58)
• Panel’s Take: Investors should have known who they were “getting into bed with” (Dan, 81:11).

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9. Geopolitical Security: Iran, Cyber Defense, and CISA (86:07–97:56)

• Iran-Linked Cyber Attacks: Medical device company hit by pro-Iran hackers, wider concerns due to leadership turmoil at CISA; potential for "asymmetric" attacks (88:12–89:49).
• Japan Authorizes "Proactive" Cyber Defense: New law allows hack-backs vs. foreign cyber threats—amplifying fears of escalation and infrastructure vulnerabilities (95:32).
• Food Supply Vulnerability: The panel muses on the US food supply’s fragility if infrastructure is attacked, with a side discussion on gardening, aquaponics, and food autonomy (97:04–101:13).

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10. The New Betting Frontier: Prediction Markets and Baseball (109:07–117:07)

• Sports, Prop Bets & Polymarket: Baseball’s new partnership with Polymarket for “event prediction.” Panel rails against the blurring lines between gambling and sports integrity, and emerging manipulation/harassment risks for journalists and players (111:37–116:13).
  • "It’s another way where, you know, you’re going to have under-resourced reporters whose names are attached to reporting the facts, who are going to get threatened by institutional betters…" (Lisa, 116:14)

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11. The Social Web’s Nostalgia Loop: Mixtapes & Twitter at 20 (134:24–137:59)

• Legacies: Lighthearted closing discussions:
  • The comeback of cassettes and mixtapes as a Gen Z “artifact of personality” (135:36).
  • Twitter’s 20th birthday—panel reminisces about the early days, Odio, and the culture of the 2000s social web (120:41–122:55).

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Leo on Podcasting vs. Radio: “It preserved that sense of one-to-one conversation between the broadcaster and the listener. I’m talking into your ear right now.” (22:03)
• Lisa, on Girl Scout Cookies and Culture: “We did do a taste test when we switched and... Thin mint recipe stays the same... but if it’s a peanut butter variant, your tastes are going to vary.” (03:52)
• Janko, on VR Shifts: “It's all like teenagers and younger, even kids using it... They’re getting a kick out of it and it’s actually getting used quite a bit.” (64:47)
• Dan, on Data Value: “The one thing that has been constant from the podcast era to the social media era, and now the AI era, is the value of data, or increased in value.” (36:45)
• Benito, on AI in Gaming: “This changes the art direction of the game, period.” (72:27)
• Lisa, on AI Shopping: “Everybody seems to want to just kind of pick up the customer and put them where they want them... reduce a customer's ability to do comparison shopping.” (30:55)
• Leo, on Information Free: “It turns out the Internet’s not free... It was never free.” (42:39)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• CBS Radio News Shutdown & Podcasting Culture: 06:00–22:10
• Ad Models, Privacy, and Web Bloat: 37:11–45:19
• AI Shopping Agents vs. Amazon: 27:00–37:06
• Windows 11 Apology Tour: 54:12–62:35
• Meta’s VR Course Correction: 62:42–68:38
• Nvidia's DLSS/Yassify Filter: 70:19–76:11
• Elon Musk Twitter Lawsuit: 80:39–84:10
• Iran, Cybersecurity, and CISA: 86:07–97:56
• Betting, Prediction Markets, Baseball: 109:07–117:07
• Twitter’s 20th Birthday, Social Nostalgia: 120:41–122:55

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Tone and Panel Dynamics

The show featured informed, witty banter, with each guest bringing specialist insight grounded in reporting, media, and technical expertise. Leo moderates with humor and nostalgia, keeping the tone lively, especially when discussion turns to the quirks of media technology’s past and present.

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Conclusion

This episode is a broad but incisive overview of tectonic shifts in tech: from traditional media’s slow evolution and the rise of prediction markets, to the centrality of data and privacy in the AI age. It’s peppered with personal recollections ("Who remembers mixtapes?"), predictions on the next big thing (VR youth boom, AI everywhere), and anxieties about security and information integrity. The show closes as it began—with both concern and appreciation for tech’s power to reshape culture, business, and our futures.

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For full context of any topic, see the adjacent timestamps.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twit this week in Tech. Janco Records is here. Lisa Schmeisser, Dan Patterson. We're going to Talk about the 49 megabyte web page. It's the norm these days. Elon Musk, you got some splaining to do. And Nvidia's new Yassify filter. All that coming up next on Twitter. This episode is brought to you by outSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the Outsystems platform. And with good reason. Build, run and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use out systems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. With Outsystems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. Outsystems build your agentic future. Learn [e-mail] TWIT that's outsystems.com TWIT podcasts

[Lisa Schmeisser]

you love from people you trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWIT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1076 recorded Sunday, March 22, 2026. I'm monitoring the situation. It's time for TWiT. Time to talk about the week's tech news on this Week in Tech. Hello everybody. I'm Leo laporte and we have a great panel. As always, say hello to Lisa Schmeiser from NoJitter.com hello Lisa.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Hi. It's good to be back.

[Leo Laporte]

You always come at the same time every year when Girl Scout cookies appear. Is that cause you're a scout leader and you just know that you have. I don't get it. Do you plan it?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

So Girl Scouts of Northern California, we have closed our cookie sales for the year. Oh, I do tend to pop on the show a couple times a year, but if it's Q1, it's cookie season.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know they'd closed it. I just. I saw them last week at the grocery store.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I guess you saw them on that was there last weekend, yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

Aw.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you buy them online?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

You know, I believe you probably still could. I will drop in a link later for the Girl Scout cookie finder. And I do, I do Want to point out that for Girl Scouts as a national organization, different regional councils have different sale dates. So if you google for Girl Scout cookies for sale, I am sure you'll find something. And everybody is set up to ship across the country now.

[Leo Laporte]

So they also have different names depending on your geography.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

It depends on the baker you go with because each council has one of two bakers, either Little Brownie Bakers or ABC Bakers. And the bakers themselves hold the copyrights on the names of the cookies, not the Girl Scout organization.

[Leo Laporte]

So a peanut butter sandwich if you get it from ABC Bakers is a do si dough if you get it from Little Brownie.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

And it's the difference between Caramel Delights and Samoas, depending on who your baker is.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that funny?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Girl Scouts of Northern California, we changed our baker. So that's why you can no longer buy Samoas from San Jose up to Del Mar County. They're the same cookie and they're just delicious. So they really are good.

[Benito]

Hi, this is Benito.

[Leo Laporte]

I recipes are similar.

[Benito]

I usually don't interrupt during this portion of the show, but. So do the cookies taste different if they come from the different bakers?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

It depends on the cookies. So first of all, great question and

[Leo Laporte]

let's do a tasting video.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

We did do a taste test when we switched and depending on the cookie, I'm happy to report that the Thin mint recipe stays the same and the truffle recipe stays the same. But if it's a peanut butter variant, your tastes are going to vary depending on what you really like in that peanut butter sandwich cookie.

[Leo Laporte]

So shocking. Well, Lisa's not the only person here, but when it comes to Girl Scout cookies, she is the priority expert. That's Dan Patterson. Hello, Dan from Blackbird. AI senior director of content there. Good to see you.

[Dan Patterson]

You too.

[Leo Laporte]

How's everything in on beautiful Henry street in Brooklyn?

[Dan Patterson]

Cannot complain. It is finally. You know, we had snow in the ground for three months. It was like a normal winter, but. But here it just felt like a frigid cray cray long winter and now it's pushing 70. And you know, I planted some wildflowers with my kid in the backyard earlier today.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Have fun. I wonder if I plant a thin mint. If I get a thin mint tree, it got me going. Also here, Janko Rutgers, longtime writer for First Giga Ohm. We see him on Variety. And of course his newsletter is lopass cc.

[Janko Rutgers]

Hey there.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi, Yanko. Good to see you. In San Francisco, where the weather has been extraordinarily Warm, as in most of the Southwest.

[Janko Rutgers]

I'm actually in the East Bay and it's even warmer over here. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So is Lisa. Yeah.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi. Hi. Yay. So actually, you know, since you're here, Dan, you worked for a while for CBS News. I know you. You have a long radio history as. As do I not. No one has one as long as I do. In December, It'll be my 50th year as a broadcaster. I started as a child, but I was really sad to see the news. And it's. I guess it's not really a tech story, but that CBS was going to kill its radio news division. That's the folks that do the top of the hour.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Newscast.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah. It's sad. I. Right. I too, came from radio. I started in FM and then did AM talk radio as a producer for a long time and then worked at ABC News Radio and at cbs. I was with the network, but. But did hits with CBS Radio and had many friends there. And I mean, this would be a tech story. It in many ways is a tech story because radio was the defining and revolutionary tech of its era.

[Leo Laporte]

September 1927.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Bill Paley. This was how he started the CBS radio network, of course, became a must listen during World War II with Edward R. Murrow on the. On the rooftop of London during the blitz. This is London. And 700 stations who were using that top of the hour news service will lose it. May 22nd. Yeah. The question to me, for me, is, is this purely economic or is it part of the changing landscape of media? You cover media, Yanko. Do you have an opinion on that?

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean, it's a good question. And as a third factor playing into that is also all the changes at cbs.

[Leo Laporte]

The politically driven changes, the political changes.

[Janko Rutgers]

Exactly. So people might also wonder, like, why are they cutting down on news divisions at this exact moment where we kind of all need a lot of news? But there is obviously something to the economic changes to the medium, too, and people just listening to more podcasts. Whenever you get into your car, Spotify comes on automatically and so forth. And so there is viewership, I think, or listenership, I think, is declining for some of these stations. But it is really a sad moment. And it also comes at a time when, you know, public radio has been defunded. And so some of those stations are giving up on original reporting. And all of this happening at the same time, while maybe understandable, is definitely not good.

[Leo Laporte]

People still listen to radio. The last stat I saw was that 88% of Americans listen to a radio at some point during the week. So that's a vast majority. Lisa, you have younger, younger people in the household in your home. Do they ever say, hey, mom, turn on the radio when you get in the car?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Not to listen to news per se.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, maybe that's part of the problem. Is this news, right?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

To be fair, I would have to say that our household is. May not be typical because we do have media people in the household. So, yeah, we'll turn on the. We will turn on the radio for the news. That's simple.

[Leo Laporte]

I put on tune in and then I listen to CNN or msnbc.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Also, because I am. I am pathologically cheap. I do. I have not and will and do not pay for extra tech in the car if I don't have to. So. So the radio is the default for us.

[Leo Laporte]

Although a lot of cars now, especially electric vehicles, come with radios.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you just. Basically, the presumption is that you are going to attach your phone and do it that way. The thing I kind of can't wrap my brain around is it seems like radio as an industry should have been really well positioned to dominate in podcasts because you' already got this apparatus in place for reporting and recording. You already understand the audio medium in a way that, like two people with microphones who recap movies may not. So I've never been able to figure out why it is that big media and news organizations that have already done this, why are they dominating the podcasts more? Um, why don't I know the names of two to three?

[Leo Laporte]

I have a theory.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Podcast?

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

As a podcaster. All right, I'd like to hear what you think, Dan, before I. Yeah, well,

[Dan Patterson]

I wonder if ours are aligned. Leo, look, in fact, Leo, you and I started. I started podcasting in the mid to late aughts, and I was in radio at the same time. And I was hired by the Talk Radio News service to help. And not just the. I know talk radio is often associated with conservatives, but this was the broad spectrum. You know, the Air America days through, you know, I ran Radio Rose. So it was everybody, every spectrum, and from big networks down to local affiliates. And these are the same challenges at major news networks that you addressed, Lisa. And you're right, it is. While I was in major news, it was kind of unfathomable to me. Like, why aren't we producing for this medium? And I think the one answer I have is there are two answers. One is cultural and the second is economic. Both were locked into when I say cultural. I mean, there is a way we do the news. There is a way we do the radio. And this is the way we do the radio. This is the way news networks are run, from the local affiliate to the network. And economic. There's just an roi. Many at the time, podcasts now make a lot of money. But at the time, from 2008 through 2015, 16, you would sink a lot of resources in, and you would see networks like NPR invest resources into radio, but the ROI just wasn't there. And then in the last. Maybe in the 2000 and twenties, the headwinds that I experienced were kind of a new manifestation of that. Like, well, we could do a podcast, but who listens to podcasts?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I remember when I was, of course, I was on KFI in 2004 during my weekend radio show, and I had found out about podcasting, and I said, hey, actually, before there was podcasting, I said, hey, do you mind if I put the radio show on the Internet, you know, as a download? And they said, yeah, because they didn't think anybody wasn't gonna hit their ratings. Cause at that time, radio was all about live, right? It was all about live, local listening. And so they thought, well, you know, you could put the show later on the Internet. Nobody's gonna care about that. And when podcasting came along, they had the same attitude. It wasn't for maybe another decade that radio stations, broadcasters started saying, oh, this podcasting is not a flash in the pan. It could actually be eating our lunch. But I think what really happened to radio? Look, if there is any listenership to radio at this point, it is probably not music, it's probably not news, it's probably sports. Right. More than anything, you still might listen to a baseball game on the radio.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, yeah. Didn't Bay Area. Didn't we lose a station that was broadcasting live baseball play by play or mine?

[Leo Laporte]

No, because I. Because now I don't the radio. So I could be. Wouldn't know. No, the other side, the other angle on this is, of course, this is private equity. This is Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison. And there's. What is it? Sky Dance bought Paramount with extreme debt. If Larry Ellison hadn't said, I will pledge my personal fortune to back up this debt, they really wouldn't be able to make that deal. And then the Warner deal that's coming, or rather, the.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

They're going to be buying Warner Brothers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the Warner Discovery deal that's coming for this is an $11 billion company buying $111 billion business. You could see the debt is extreme. And so what's the first thing private equity does is they sell parts off, they try to save money. And so it makes sense that this is part of the acquisition. And this is what's happened to radio in general as private equity has moved in and the number of owners, the ownership has dwindled. There's only a handful of radio companies left, all of them heavily leveraged. You're gonna see this kind of decimation of the business. This is what happened. This is what happened to Red Lobster. This is what happens when private equity comes in. They kill businesses.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Joanne's Fabrics.

[Leo Laporte]

Joanne's Fabrics.

[Dan Patterson]

You know, I will add, I can

[Leo Laporte]

go on and on and on without

[Dan Patterson]

getting into the politics or without getting into the corporate muck.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we can, let's say this with politics. Somebody is putting their thumb on the scale through the fcc, through David Carr at the fcc. That's part of it for sure. That's how Ellison and Skydance got Warner Discovery, because Netflix said

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Netflix is a business.

[Dan Patterson]

It's certainly how this will fly through regulation far faster than many other.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's part of it. It's not the whole story.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, but I wanted to note one opportunity here though, and I prefaced it getting into the politics or the corporate muck. I, and I know many people have strong feelings about Bari Weiss, but she has a tremendous opportunity here as well to do the thing, Lisa, that you mentioned, which is innovate. And I know that she has caught a lot of flack. I am not pro or against Barry, but she has an opportunity now to innovate where others, maybe at network news have not or could not because of some of these other challenges. Will she? I don't know. But I think that there is an opportunity in front of her to create innovation and produce podcasts and multimedia and encourage a new form of network news or a new usher in a new era.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Dan, I think you make a really great point about culture and how that can actually impede the longer term survival of a news or media organization. Because this also reminds me of the contraction pains that newspapers have gone through. And I remember through the early aughts reading about. Well, in San Francisco. Well, in San Francisco there were wave after wave of layoffs and reductions at the Chronicle. And at the same time we had another site called SFest where you had. And full disclosure, I did write for SFS here and there, but the people there were building an on the ground news organization and paying attention to things and getting really High engagement. And I used to wonder, why doesn't someone just try to acquire the Gothamist sites? Why doesn't somebody say, hey, they clearly know how to build an audience online where newspaper sites are not. They're clearly building on a news organization. Get them under one roof. And this reminds me of that same thing where you're like, oh, it would be so easy. Except inside the Chronicle newsroom, I did have a friend who went from SFS to the Chronicle, and she's like, you would not believe how hostile they are to the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Even when I worked, even though I was working for Ziff Davis on the site, which was an MSNBC joint production, the TV people hated the Web people. I mean, this is Ziff Davis and msnbc. The TV people hated the Web people, and the Web people hated the TV people. And neither one got the culture. And it was just a complete mismatch. So that's ironic. I mean, that was in 20.

[Janko Rutgers]

That separation existed everywhere, right? That's the crazy thing. Like going to other organizations I've worked for, where then people are suddenly like, oh, you got to talk to the Web people. And I thought. I thought, we are the web people.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I spend. Our publication is online, but I spend a lot of time thinking about, okay, is there a way I can reach my B2B enterprise technologist audience over TikTok or another channel where I can build up a younger audience more effectively? Because I feel like I need to know where and how people are getting their information in order to reach them and inform them. And I, I, again, this comes back to why not? I don't understand how you can be so wedded to the way you always did things to the detriment of the medium that you love. That's. That's just a thing that I keep trying to wrap my brain around so

[Leo Laporte]

people understand the landscape here. CBS Radio was sold to one of the other big radio companies, Entercom, a while ago. The only thing that Paramount kept was CBS Radio News. So this is basically Paramount cutting all of its radio operations. And by the way, Bari Weiss did write the memo. It came from their CBS News editor in chief. I think, Dan, it is an interesting opportunity for Bari Weiss. I'm not convinced that she will grasp it, but. No, because she has no broadcast background at all.

[Dan Patterson]

She came from print, no network news, no news background.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

She has no news background. She's never run a newsroom. She writes op eds.

[Dan Patterson]

But, you know, I mean, I said that as to. I know that people have strong feelings about Barry, and I certainly have gossip chains in my text messages that go on and on about this,

[Leo Laporte]

but you're very. You're very ecumenical, giving her the benefit of the doubt.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, right.

[Dan Patterson]

I'm just trying to. To say, you know, without getting into personality fights or. Or to talk about the politics or the. The corporate stuff. There's an opportunity here and there. That's all. There's an opportunity to make change. That's. That's all I'm saying.

[Leo Laporte]

But audio is just as good, as big as it ever was. There are more than a million podcasts. Podcasts. Ad sales is in the tens of billions of dollars now. It's gone through the roof. We're not getting any of it, but Joe Rogan's got it all. But anyway, it is a good time to be a podcaster. And, you know, every time these things happen, I get phone calls from other broadcasters saying, so tell me how you get in this podcast thing. What is this? How does it work? And I say, don't do it for money. That's all I. Anyway, I don't want to belabor it. I just thought it's a sign of the times, isn't it? In so many ways. And. And it's a sad.

[Janko Rutgers]

Can I say one more thing, like, just one counterpoint?

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Janko Rutgers]

I actually feel like maybe the opportunity for news organizations is to not always innovate and stick to the stuff that they're good at.

[Leo Laporte]

Stick to news?

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, stick to the news. Like, allow yourself to be long. Don't try to, like, make it a TikTok thing or whatever. You report it. Don't make 60 minutes into 90 seconds. Keep it 60 minutes, please.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know what they look at? They look at the research that says people under 25 get all their news from TikTok. And they say, well, you know, that's really the thing that scares radio, is that their audience is 54 years old and over, maybe 65 and older.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

And so look at the ads. The ads.

[Leo Laporte]

They see their audience dying, basically. I mean, literally. So they're really nervous about the whole thing. And that makes me sad, but I am happy. It really isn't about audio. It's not about conversations. It's not about news even. It's about whether it comes through the air via an antenna or it goes through your Internet connection. And that's just the delivery medium. That's not the important thing. The important thing is the content, the people doing the content, the listeners who want good content.

[Dan Patterson]

And I social relationship between the listener and the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what's great. Radio is always that way, even before podcasting. That's why I loved podcasting, because it preserved that sense of one to one conversation between the broadcaster and the listener. I'm talking into your ear right now.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, there's a podcast a friend of mine used to run called Friends in your ears.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's kind of gross. But

[Lisa Schmeisser]

let's say how they were.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of tech news. We're going to get to it. I am on a mission after talking with my boss, the wonderful Lisa Laporte, who shares not only my name and my home, but also runs this business. She says, you got to make this show shorter. You're just, you're killing people here. I'm going to try to be a little bit more cognizant of your time and we're going to keep this thing moving. So we're going to take a break right now. I am thrilled to have this wonderful panel with me. Dan Patterson from Blackbird AI. Not only an AI expert, a radio expert, he's a content guru. All of the above. Lisa Schmeisser, who will weigh in on the news that Microsoft is sorry about Windows and they're going to fix it. I'm sure you'll have something to say about that from Nojitter.com and Media Guy Janko Records from his, of course, the newsletter lopass cc. And yes, we'll talk about Project Hail Mary. Have you seen it yet? Janko?

[Janko Rutgers]

Sorry, what?

[Leo Laporte]

Project Hail Mary. Have you seen it?

[Janko Rutgers]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Anybody seen it? I've seen it.

[Dan Patterson]

Not yet. Is it good?

[Leo Laporte]

But Benito said, when you start talking about it, I'm gonna tell me so I can cover my ears. And I said, well, you read the book, you know what happens. He said, yeah, but I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how they do it. Well, I will let you know ahead of time if you don't want any spoilers. It's really good, I'll tell you that much. You're watching this week in Tech show this week brought to you by Meter. I'm really excited. Tuesday I'm going to go to the RSA conference, big security conference in San Francisco. Meter's going to be there, and I'm really looking forward to seeing their hardware. Meter was started by a couple of network engineers who really understood the challenge businesses face today, where the Internet is so important to everything you do, and yet we're using old technology, mismatched technology. Providers who don't understand what we need. If you're a network engineer, I don't need to tell you that you know the problems. Legacy providers with inflexible pricing. Of course, every IT department is facing resource constraints, stretching them thin, complex deployments across fragmented tools. Let's face it, the network engineer, you are critical, mission critical to the business, but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for modern business. That's why so many businesses are switching to Meter. This is, well, you gotta look at this stuff. Meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure, wired wireless cellular. It's built for performance and scalability. These engineers had a key insight. They realized if you're gonna fix the problems networks face today, you need to do it all. You need to do the full stack. Meter designs its own hardware, writes its own firmware. They build the software, they manage the deployments, they do the support after the install. Meter offers everything from ISP procurement. Yes, they'll help you find the right isp. They do security, they do routing, switching, wireless firewalls. Security is very important now, right? Cellular power, your power is critical. DNS security, they'll help you with VPNs, they'll help you with SD, WANs, multi site workflows, all in a single solution from a single vendor. And that's important too, because you know very well if something goes wrong, it's the same thing. You know, I have it here, the router. The Internet's down, I call the router guys, they say, well, it's got to be your isp. The ISP says, no, it's got to be your router. And everybody passes the buck. Not with Meter, because they do it all. Meter's single integrated networking stack scales from major hospitals, branch offices, warehouses, large campuses, even data centers. Reddit uses Meter in their data centers. Ask the assistant Director of Technology for Web School of Knoxville. He had a problem. He said, quote this direct quote, we had more than 20 games on campus between our two facilities. Each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections, and the event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before. Meter redesigned our network. End quote. That's good, right? With Meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs, from that first site survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers or tools. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. Meter built for the bandwidth demands of today and Tomorrow. I'm going to look forward to seeing you Meter at RSEC on Tuesday. Thanks to Meter for sponsoring go to meter.comtwit to book a demo. Now that's M e t e r.com Twitter to book a demo meter. Let's see. Let's talk about courts. So last week we told you that Perplexity was being blocked from using its agentic shopping tool at Amazon. Amazon sued, said no, you can't use Perplexity shop on Amazon. And a judge said they're right. Well, a judge has now reversed that. The US Appeals Court put, put the injunction on hold. So now you can use Perplexity to shop on Amazon. It struck me as anti competitive that Amazon was basically saying we don't want you to go to Amazon.com and not see our ads, not see Amazon's pics. We want you to use our AI agent, not somebody else's. But this is kind of a fight for the future of how the Internet works. Right.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

So Leo, full disclosure, no Jitter is now part of the industry dive newsroom. So I spend a lot of time doing second reads and edits on our verticals for retail and for customer experience. There's two things going on here. One is that if you have AI shopping agents that are independent of retailers, then the retailers lose control over the customer experience.

[Leo Laporte]

The customer data.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, well, yes, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I mean, let's be honest. That's what they want and that's what they really want. What they don't want is your dollar for their product. Which would you think they want to lock you into?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, they, they want to lock you into the ecosystem and make sure that

[Leo Laporte]

once you start spending money, they want everything.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, they also want your shopping habits and they want that data because it helps them figure out new lines. But also remember that Amazon does make a lot of money based on sticking sponsored results in there and they're in

[Leo Laporte]

that company as much as anything else.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

So if you have a third party shopping agent that reduces the efficacy of all those paid placements, you know, you're, you're hitting them in the pocketbook, they're not going to like that.

[Leo Laporte]

But what's to stop the courts from stopping us from using ad blockers? Because that's the same thing. Right?

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, this. Right. And I mean Lisa, what you're driving at is this kind of dis intermediates that customer relationship.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

And it creates a new moat. Right. So I could, in theory, my agent could stop serving Amazon products and start serving Best Buy products or Walmart Products

[Lisa Schmeisser]

because it will depend on the relationship that agents have with different retailers.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what the customer wants. The customer says, I just want to find those running shoes at the best price. I'm not. What's been interesting, Amazon.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, what's been really interesting about how companies are approaching the whole AI shopping experience is you have a lot of retailers who are like, we would like to use AI to make sure that the customer gets a great recommendation and a great experience. And we have proactive, high touch outreach. Right, but. Right, but what it all comes down to is everybody seems to want to just kind of pick up the customer and put them where they want them. They'd like to be able to remove a customer's ability to do comparison shopping. They'd like to be able to remove a customer's ability to. I mean, this, this also ties into dynamic pricing, too, because if you can use AI to do price comparisons, it's that much harder to lock somebody into an ecosystem where, oh, well, this is the price I have to pay and you can afford it.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand why Amazon wanted this court order. Yeah, absolutely.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, because it's a business. It doesn't. It doesn't care about the shopping experience. It cares about the data and the money.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's like Amazon saying you can use. Because it was really Perplexity's browser that they wanted to block. It's like Amazon saying, well, you can use Chrome, but you can't use Safari because Safari blocks my cookies. Right. None of your business, Amazon. None of your business. I'll defend the customers. Right.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

To just take a look at the larger shopping experience, which is that you have a lot of companies that are really invested in trying to put the shopper onto a specific path and keep them there because it's good for their bottom line. And the less agency the shopper has, the better that. That is the approach.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So are you defending Amazon or. No, I'm just giving them their.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Just giving. Just giving us their angle. This is what they're doing. Yeah, yeah, the same.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're trying to protect their revenue stream, which is not the sale.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, and no. The customer experience has nothing to do with what Amazon's doing here.

[Leo Laporte]

It's as if, though, I'm walking down Main street and there's two bookstores next to each other, and I go in one bookstore and I say, well, let me look at your price. And they say, well, you can't go to the other next door and see the price there. You have to either buy it here or you can't have it.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah. I mean, and I want to stress that, like the exact opposite, which is when people walk into independent bookstores and then price check against Amazon, read a few pages and say, I'll just buy this at Amazon. Like, I think that's. I feel for the small bookstores.

[Leo Laporte]

I do too. That happens all the time. In fact, that's exactly pulling up the moat. It's a rabbinical precept. They call it the shopkeeper's dilemma or something, where it is actually almost a sin to go into a store, get the information about what you want to buy, and then go to another store and buy it. Right. It's as old as the Talmud.

[Janko Rutgers]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an ancient dilemma.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

That said, there have been browser plugins that you can use for years that will price hunt and help you thing. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or camel. Camel.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Camel, yes, yes. Or if you are on something like Rakuten, which gives you the discounts for shopping at certain places, it will also tell you, oh, you can buy this for so much cheaper at this other place. It's all paid places.

[Leo Laporte]

Rakuten.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I say, lisa, they're taking all of your information. And every time I say that, she shows me the check, she says, yeah, and I got this $38 check for me.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I mean, at least you're getting paid for your information being taken. Most of the time it's just for free.

[Leo Laporte]

That's better.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

But from like the CX and the retail perspective, what everybody is fighting for now is the ability to lock a customer into a guaranteed repeat interaction, to eliminate competition by just, oh, it doesn't exist. And some of them will do it pretty successfully and some of them will have a very hard time trying to. Trying to keep people. No, no, don't look over there. Stay here.

[Leo Laporte]

Kytherell and I are watching on Twitch says, isn't it ironic that Amazon's going through the same thing they did to the Main street shops 10 years ago?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

It is now.

[Leo Laporte]

They're trying to defend themselves.

[Benito]

Yeah, this is bonito. So there's also a thing here of dynamic pricing that Amazon does. Right. So, like, they might not be able to do that with AI agents.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Exactly. And dynamic pricing is a whole nother thing. I mean, you've gone to grocery stores and noticed that a lot of places are now going to the electronic displays for pricing instead of.

[Leo Laporte]

They swore when they did that that they weren't doing it so that they could change the price.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, come on.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it just saves us because we don't have to have that person with the sticker machine going around.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, that's why they did it.

[Benito]

But that doesn't. That's why they did. That doesn't mean they're dynamic pricing.

[Leo Laporte]

You come in the door, the cameras register you and they say, oh, that's schmeiser. She could pay 10% more. And all the prices in the whole store.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

If you've got the. If you've got an app or you're trying to scan digital coupons, that. That tells them everything. About which aisles are you hitting, which categories, what are you willing to pay? And that's why you get an 8

[Leo Laporte]

foot long receipt at Target.

[Dan Patterson]

Right.

[Benito]

With all.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

It's an ex. It is an exciting new world in asking. How can you use data to lock a customer into protracted repeat engagement and maximize your profit? Well, do you have an opinion on this?

[Janko Rutgers]

Are you a shopper? I was just thinking that the guy who used to go around and change the prices now goes around and unlocks those glass cabinets that are everywhere for every single product. So they didn't really save anything here, but they just like moved everything around. I was at a drugstore yesterday and there was nothing left that you could.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything's locked up now.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, it's so miserable. I hate it.

[Leo Laporte]

First they came for the razor blades and I didn't complain because I didn't shave.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Then they came nasal sprays, and I said nothing because I don't have allergies. No, that's a terrible analogy. Dan, do you have a thought?

[Dan Patterson]

You know what's interesting? The only major tech company that doesn't have AI built into the browser still is Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Safari. Yeah, yeah. And Vivaldi. Vivaldi swears they won't.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And Firefox has a switch, so you can't.

[Dan Patterson]

I said by major tech companies, Leah.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, yeah, sorry, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a cheap shot.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, cheap shot.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I would get Baktin for that burn, but it's probably behind a locked cabinet.

[Benito]

I do.

[Dan Patterson]

I loved Mozilla. I mean, I still do.

[Leo Laporte]

I still use a Firefox fork called zip, and I love it.

[Dan Patterson]

But, yeah, I think Lisa's absolutely right. I mean, this is just about the customer relationship. The one thing that has been constant from the podcast era to the social media era, and now the AI era, is the value of data, or increased in value.

[Leo Laporte]

The value of our personal data.

[Dan Patterson]

Of our personal data. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

To which I segue to cash Patel's admission that the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency are buying data about us from the data brokers. Thank you very much. We knew this was going to happen, but I didn't. You know this is almost shows Kash Patel's naivete that he admitted.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, this is what shows it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's a few things. There's a few things. He is a podcaster after all. You can't expect much. He's testifying on Wednesday to Congress and it's the first time the FBI has admitted, yeah, we buy people's data from data brokers, location data and more. We aren't required. We aren't required to have a warrant to do that. You don't visit a judge for that. Ron Wyden, who's always been pretty good on these digital things, asked if the FBI would commit to not buying American location data. Patel said we use all tools to do our mission. He said we do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution. I don't think the Constitution knew about data brokers cash but there was this thing called the fourth Amendment you might have heard of.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, you've heard of it. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy act it has led to some valuable intelligence for us, said the director of the FBI. Wyden said, this is at an outrageous end run around the fourth Amendment. So now you know. They said the quiet part out loud.

[Dan Patterson]

I would be. Go ahead Yanko.

[Janko Rutgers]

I was gonna say he was probably going to say it really wide eyed with the deer in the headlights.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course we borrowed.

[Dan Patterson]

Genuinely surprised if I mean that. To be honestly, that sounds like every testimony I've ever heard from an FBI director or anyone else. I would be surprised if they weren't already buying.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they always administration. No, no, they always have. And we know about Penn Register warrants that allow them to get location data for like a buck 50 from the cellular companies and all this. There's always been this free flow of information. So it's people like me frankly who have for years said oh don't worry about your privacy. It's not like the feds are spying on you or anything. Surprise to me downloaded.

[Dan Patterson]

I mean I think that, that, that really there should be much more education on what you put on your mobile device and how you can use services. This is not a plug or a log role but services like delete me and others that will do the spatial data remote removal. Are they a sponsor?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Dan Patterson]

Thank you for. I mean it's a great service. I and I think that that educating consumers about what you put on your device and how it impacts you and Your privacy is really important. And what you can do about it

[Leo Laporte]

is equally important because Hail Mary. On Thursday there was a big ad from the state of California about your privacy saying, you know, showing how you're being spied on and all this stuff. And then go to privacy.ca.gov and learn what we're doing to protect you. And they made a lot of, hey. When they announced that we're going to have a registry that you can remove yourself from data brokers. But I went there, and first of all, it doesn't take effect until this fall. Second, it's only 40. When I checked, it was 49 data brokers. There are more than 500. Yeah, it's a drop in the bucket to me. This is almost. Yeah, California's doing something. It's like Marsha Blackburn's federal privacy bill, which really all it did was nullify state privacy laws with a weak, virtually nothing federal law. So it was really an anti privacy law. I feel like lawmakers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes that they don't. They understand law enforcement's going to them. Cash Patel's going, hey, it'd be a shame if we couldn't buy this data. And they're going, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. And, and there, there's no movement towards privacy protection.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I, I don't think it's Cash Patel. I think you have lobbyists, right, for the data brokers who are like, well, them too. Without data moving through an information economy, nothing can get done. You wouldn't want to be the reason the economy slows down, would you?

[Leo Laporte]

They hire the Same people Experian, TransUnion and Equifax hire to say, you know, our entire economy relies upon credit brokers who we've got to collect this information.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

We don't in this country. We really have not created a culture where people understand that as of right now, you are generating a lot of data that people make a lot of money on and you're not seeing a cut.

[Leo Laporte]

I mentioned earlier, it is, it is.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Basically, you are providing a lot of free assets or resources for other people to get very rich.

[Dan Patterson]

That's so smart. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, you know what? It turns out the Internet's not free. This whole time we were sold this notion that, oh, look at all the free, look at Gmail and all this free stuff you get on the Internet. It was never free.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Wasn't the adage, if it's free, you are the product. Like that. I mean, I think it may hurt that Perhaps back in the 90s you had a lot of journalists who would uncritically echo the information wants to be free. And what that morphed into was, oh, information should be free.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody else named Schmio Shaport, that said,

[Dan Patterson]

I definitely said things like that.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, you know, and then it was so easy to be idealistic because you're like, we'll connect everybody and you'll be so informed.

[Leo Laporte]

I was a wide eyed optimist.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I mentioned earlier that if you want to. If Amazon wants a law against comparison shopping, they might also want a law preventing you from using an ad blocker. Great blog post this week called the 49 megabyte webpage. This guy went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines, was greeted with 422 network requests. 49 megabytes of data took two minutes. This is one page, two minutes before the page settled. We've all gone through this, he says, and you wonder why every sane tech person has an ad blocker installed on all the systems of their loved ones. We've gotten to this crazy world where it's expected that they're collecting all this information, that they're showing us all these ads and it's not even surprising anymore. So 49 megabytes is a little surprising. This is Shubham Bose's blog and well done on picking that one up. Speaking of which, it might be a good time to do an ad right now. The thing is, our ads don't follow you around because it's a podcast in an RSS feed. I don't know anything about you. I can't collect any information. Our advertisers buy ads on our shows because they say, well, we're pretty sure you have a tech savvy audience and that's the audience we want to reach. I think that's a better kind of relationship. I think it's a fairer relationship. So I have. I am. And then we also offer a club. If you don't want ads, you can pay us a little money and that way we don't have to show you ads. I think that this is upfront. We're not following you around unless people

[Janko Rutgers]

listen on YouTube or Twitch or this

[Leo Laporte]

or that or Spotify. And by the way, this is why, you know, Joe Rogan moved to Spotify with an exclusive with offered millions of dollars. This is why Spotify was for a while trying to eat the podcast world. Because advertisers love it. Because Spotify knows who listens. They have your credit card number they know how much you listen, they know when you rewound, they know when you stop. They know all of that stuff. But we as a podcaster with an RSS feed, we don't. We are on Spotify, we are on YouTube, we're on Apple, we're on all those platforms. And even Apple has announced they're going to do video now, but only through companies that sell ads. Right. Put two and two together. You see what the whole point of this is. Apple's going to get an ad revenue of that ad, share of that ad revenue in return. And advertisers get the information about who you are and who's listening. So we don't do that. And it's one of the reasons it's harder for us to sell ads. To be honest, this is a different world. We're kind of old fashioned in that regard. It's a great panel and I appreciate all of you. Lisa Schmeisser, always a pleasure having you on nojitter.com she's the EIC and the person in charge. Nojitter.com also ojitter on all your platforms, right?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's about telecommunications.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

We cover enterprise communication and collaboration and we do focus, focus on the levels from the very basics such as network configuration and the technologies that allow you to rapidly move video and audio signals plus other data all the way up through the end users unified communication experience. So we'll cover Zoom or teams or WebEx and we're also taking a look at contact centers and technologies that are part of the customer journey since that involves how companies choose to communicate with people who work outside their company.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. And before this you worked at Windows IT Pro. So I'm going to take advantage of that.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

On our next story because Microsoft said something pretty funny this week and so I kind of need somebody who knows a little bit about Windows. Thank you for being here. Janko Records is also here. His newsletter, Lopest cc doing well, right, Yonko?

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, it is doing well. I'm running up to three years actually next month.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you were one of the first people who said, you know what? I want to own my own stuff, my own content. 17,000 subscribers. That's pretty good. Nice job.

[Janko Rutgers]

Roughly around that number. It goes up and down.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's really good. Something to be proud of. Well done. Low Pass cc. And Yanko covers Arkansas as well. We have a story for you, actually a story you broke, so we'll get to that in just a little bit. And Dan Patterson, who works at Blackbird AI he's senior director of content. We've mentioned it before. Blackbird does a great job of helping people see through the misinformation.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

We try to do that. Well, I'm giving you a chance to plug.

[Dan Patterson]

We haven't talked about A.I. yet, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what, this is a weird. I think part of it is that we have an AI show now, Intelligent machines on Wednesday. And so I don't channel as many AI shows.

[Dan Patterson]

Excellent Twit.

[Leo Laporte]

For a while it's all we were talking about.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, well, we use AI, but we also have a large intelligence analyst team.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a big part of what you do.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, we help organizations, commercial, but also non commercial and executives or leaders. We protect them from narrative based disinformation attacks.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an interesting thing. Is that becoming an issue with businesses now?

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, for sure. I mean you and I might think of this colloquially. We might think of it as deepfakes or even doxxing, brigading, but at scale and, and targeted at an individual or teams, executives, for sure. Leaders, whether you're an executive at a commercial or non commercial entity. And you know, many of these. A lot of what we see on the web is manipulated and a lot of these attacks, you know, you think of it as just people saying bad things, but they're. There are actionable threats and there's a lot of really harmful information that is spread by bad actors at large scale. So we use AI to analyze and monitor trends and we use human analysts to not just interpret the data, but to work directly with organizations and help them make smart decisions.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is a growth industry. I hate to say it. This is increasingly. It's so easy now to create an army of bots. What did X announced they had killed? 800 million accounts. Bot accounts last year. 800 million. I remember when Twitter had 350 million members, period. Unbelievable. I think actually, well, we're talking about Elon as well because that was of course the whole thing. He, before he bought Twitter, he said, you know, they got a bot problem. Yeah. And it's nothing. It's only gotten better. Bigger.

[Dan Patterson]

Little did he know what was in that kitchen sink.

[Leo Laporte]

This episode of this week at Tech brought to you by Shopify. Have you ever thought of starting your own business? You have a great idea. But those pesky little details, they can get in the way. How do you charge people? Who's going to design your website? How do you handle fulfillment? Look, I know what it's like. I've been there and I've watched My own kids start their businesses, but you know what? They got it done with Shopify. Yeah, Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. From household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started. Like my boys, you know, Salt Hanks, Salt Lovers Club. It's a great site. He was worried about a website, but Shopify helped him build a beautiful online store that matches his brand's unique style. And they can do the same thing for you too. Shopify also helps with marketing easily. Create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. And let's not forget that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It it's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com TWIT go to shopify.com TWIT that's shopify.com TWIT so we, we do a show called Windows Weekly and of late I think people have been kind of upset with our. One of our hosts, Paul Thurrock, because he seems kind of grumpy. He's a little grumpy, you know, I mean he has a lifetime covering Windows, but he never seems happy anymore. Apparently he's not alone. Microsoft announced this week that they are going to make major improvements to Windows 11. We're evolving how Windows is built behind the scenes to raise the quality bar. Pavan Davaluri, who's the new executive vice president of Windows and Devices at Microsoft. We are focusing on making Windows 11 more responsive and consistent so performance feels smooth and reliable. Yeah, lately Windows stutters and bogs down. Over the course of the year, we're improving system performance and app responsiveness. File Explorer and Windows Service Pack 2. Well, you know what? Back in its day, Service Pack two for xp, that was really good, right? Yeah. Come a long way since Windows 7.

[Dan Patterson]

Sorry to interrupt you.

[Leo Laporte]

Part of the problem also is Copilot. Microsoft's been shoving their AI in every corner and they say they're going to back off on that as well. You don't buy it?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, I'm just. Did you not want Copilot in literally everything you do?

[Leo Laporte]

In everything. Google's kind of doing the same thing in Workspace man, it's everywhere. There's a Gemini button in everything it's driving.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, it's when they began auto mashing it into maps that I got super mad because all I want is a really small map app that tells me how to get from point A to point B and when to switch lanes and what time to go. And I do not need Gemini for any of that. I had a structured workflow that worked just fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Pavan Davaluri even mentioned Linux. He said, we're going to make Windows subsystem for Linux better. Please don't move to Linux.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Please, please.

[Leo Laporte]

It's practically begging. One of the things people consistently complain about because we all have widescreen monitors is Microsoft in Windows 11 took away the ability to take the taskbar, which sits on the bottom, and put it on the left or right where you have a lot more space. Pavan says we're going to bring that back too.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Good, good. I hope that makes people happy.

[Leo Laporte]

Quote, Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we've heard from you. We're introducing the ability to reposition it. They should say reintroduce, by the way, pavan, because you took it out to reposition it to the tops or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace. Windows Update will be improved to allow users more control over how and when updates inst. How many times have you been sitting there using Windows and it says, I'm going to reboot now. You don't mind, do you? I don't. I don't mean to beat up on Windows. Paul does a very good job of that all by himself. But that's why we love Paul, because he's honest. Right. He's not a cheerleader and he's such

[Lisa Schmeisser]

a deep subject matter expert. Like, I would. I would definitely, when Paul talks, listen to what he's saying and why he's saying it. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a code name, it's called Windows K2, which is the same name as Mount Everest's peak. Maybe because this is a tall mountain to climb. Microsoft. I don't know. Also, there's not a lot of oxygen up there.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah. K2 is number two behind Everest, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, K2 is the second tallest. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Sorry. Thank you. Have you been up there? You sound like you know.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, but I've read a lot of Jon Krakauer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes.

[Dan Patterson]

Into the water, into thin air.

[Leo Laporte]

Thin air.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I mean, oh, that book is so great and so harrowing. I love it so much.

[Dan Patterson]

He's my favorite narrative nonfiction Writer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he's the best. I love him. And that was the year that so many people died on the way 96.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, yeah, I remember watching that was actually to get back to the shifting media paradigms. It was actually one of the first developing stories where it was easier to get dispatches over the web than in the more conventional media outlets. People were going to be like, well, I'll see what timer Newsweek has to say. And meanwhile there were websites going, oh my goodness, guess what just happened.

[Leo Laporte]

So it was, that was the beginning of that 96.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

It really was when it all started. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now if, you know, somebody passes away.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

So Leo, I want to note that, I want to note that with Microsoft, something they have been trying really hard to do for about 10 years, is decenter the operating system in the desktop as the hub where you work. And in a lot of ways lockdown was great for this because they were able to pivot really quickly with teams and because of their huge enterprise footprint where they already had a built in customer base with Microsoft 365, it was super easy for them to push teams out to everybody and make that your default collaborative workspace. But even pre lockdown, as far back as 2016, they were really pushing the idea that you needed to get away from an operating system, a desktop and apps over to a centralized workspace and a shift in how you looked at computing. So it was more task focused rather than apps focused. So instead of saying I'm going to open up this Excel spreadsheet, put in 100 numbers and then see what that means for sales projections, what you'd say instead is oh, I'm going to, oh, it's time for me to do the sales projection workflow. And if that touches on parts of email or Excel, then hooray. That's what happens. The biggest obstacle they've had is the is is that the typical user and the typical customer does not move as quickly as a tech company does does. It's really easy to eat the dog food inside a company, but if you're a regular company with an IT budget, you are probably using work workflows and Systems that are 10 or more years old and they're fine. And you don't have money for an

[Leo Laporte]

upgrade and you don't want to upgrade, you don't want to retrain, you don't want to.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

It's a huge capital expenditure and you have to be able to. If you're a school district or local government, you have to really justify, justify it. Which is why Microsoft has found Itself in a position where it's trying to push people to one model. But a huge percentage of its customer base is like, we need you to support the thing that we bought back in the before times. And with Windows 11, it's tied them down, hasn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

That's really been their problem.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Backward compatibility is a curse.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but the difference with Apple and Microsoft is that Apple has been willing

[Lisa Schmeisser]

to go, no, Apple. Apple's like, oh, do you not like that you can no longer charge your phone using this cable? Well, that's too bad. Here's how you buy the cable.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry about that.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, no, and Windows hasn't. And Microsoft hasn't done that. And what they tried to do with Windows 11 instead is be like, we're going to try and gently use you into this. And people are like, you are not. And also, you cramming copilot is the exact opposite of gentle, so please stop. Yeah, and it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to guess, Lisa, you're the only person on this panel who still

[Lisa Schmeisser]

uses Windows, though you would actually guess wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

I've moved to a Mac environment, Dan Windows.

[Dan Patterson]

I mean, I have. And you know, I was pretty Xbox for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Xbox is not Windows. Wait a minute, let's not get.

[Dan Patterson]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

I have an Xbox that counts.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, I mean, I have a test.

[Dan Patterson]

The next Xbox.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

That's not the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. The next box might be Windows. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. But that's not till for two more years. Just out of curiosity, Janko, you using Windows?

[Janko Rutgers]

I just try to remember when I used Windows the last time and it might have been XP or something.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Dan Patterson]

Windows XP was fantastic.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

I was a Windows 7 fan. I think Windows 7 was the.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my gosh. Take us back to the timeline where Windows XP was the last Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I didn't like the UI so much. It was a little fisher price for me. Big buttons and colors and stuff. That's why I like seven, which is basically XP with a nice interface on top of it.

[Benito]

So it's just Miha. I'm the only Windows user here, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Bonito. You use Windows?

[Benito]

I play video games.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's gamers. That's right. Although that's changing rapidly thanks to Steam and Proton. The Steam deck runs Linux and the compatibility layer. Proton now runs many, many great Windows games as well, if not better than Windows does. And so things are shifting a little bit in that world.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I used to have a Windows laptop just for Accessing Salesforce because it was so much easier.

[Dan Patterson]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Benito]

But you know macOS, Mac OS is shying itself as well. You know macOS.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's. Yeah. Honestly, it's. Don't.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, the apps. Don't get me started on how bad the Mac the mobile apps are getting. Like they really need to do a and hard start over

[Leo Laporte]

people not watching video. She's drawing a finger across her throat when she makes that sound. Just so you.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Use your imagination. Speaking of changes. Well, this is kind of a strange story because this. Earlier this week Meta said, you know that virtual reality world that you guys have been hanging out in your meta quest. We're going to shut that down. We're going to have a mobile version. We're not going to have a meta quest version. But very quickly, Janko had the story. They changed their mind. What happened, Janko?

[Janko Rutgers]

It was basically a day later they came out and we're like, oh, I'll bet we're actually going to keep it around. We're just not going to update it anymore. Essentially you will not be able to create new worlds and we will. We also not make any new worlds in VR anymore. But people can still use these existing Horizon worlds for the foreseeable future. Which.

[Leo Laporte]

So what you're saying is Horizon Worlds has legs.

[Janko Rutgers]

It has legs. Yes. Very nicely done. Yeah. And so it's an interesting and complicated story. Right. Because it's one of those things where people are like, oh yeah. But VR has been dead and nobody's using it it. And there's somebody's using it. Of truth to it in Horizon Worlds in VR has never really been a big hit. I actually used it for a while. Quite a bit. I did. You. You used to hang out there. I like playing a couple of games. Arena. Arena Quest. Is that the. Now I'm actually not remembering the name. That's maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

But you had to put on the nerd helmet to do it. But it was.

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean it was fun. And even without. In those pre leg times, actually that was. It was a lot of. A lot of fun. Once you. Once you're having fun. It.

[Leo Laporte]

I had a meta quest. I actually stupidly bought the $1,500 Meta Quest Pro. That was insane. It was quickly marked down by about 50 or 100% and I gave it away. But I played a few games in there. It was fun. I really liked the one where you listen to music and as a beat save. Yeah, I really enjoyed that and that was fun.

[Janko Rutgers]

But I mean, so the bigger trends here is that VR is still around, people are still using VR, but the audience really has shifted. It was last year or two where before it was a mix of like a little bit of everything. There was people who are doing fitness, like older people actually getting into this and people playing Beat Saber. And like one or two years ago it really started to shift where now it's all like teenagers and younger, even kids using it and they're all playing these like crazy messy free to play games, gorilla tech and so forth, which are like when you're my age, I just have to throw my arms up, I can't do this. But they're getting a kick out of it and it's actually getting used quite a bit. So that's sustainable.

[Dan Patterson]

It'll be interesting. I'm sorry to interrupt you Janko. It'll be interesting to see speaking of Steam, how the Steam frame their ARM based VR headset that comes out this summer, how that kind of shifts the market or at least, least, no pun intended, reframes it onto gaming.

[Leo Laporte]

Did Apple make a mistake not put not focusing on gaming with the Vision Pro?

[Janko Rutgers]

I, I think so. I mean I don't know because it's a $3,500 device, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

And the, the adults or the, their parents are probably not going to hand it down to them which is what happened to the all a lot of those Meta Quest headsets.

[Leo Laporte]

Meta Quest is pretty affordable. If you don't do the pro version,

[Janko Rutgers]

buy one for 300 bucks which is actually really good. Good some oftentimes it's, it's even you can pick one up for 250 and for that it's like really hard to beat essentially. But like going back to this Horizon Worlds thing so they say oh, we're going to shut it down. Then they changed their tune on it because there was enough people in it really protesting and being upset about it because they had created stuff for it. They were. There's comedy clubs in there, there's like music shows in there. There's all these different games in there. People meet there for Alcoholics Anonymous and those kinds of things really.

[Leo Laporte]

They're AA meetings in medical.

[Janko Rutgers]

There's all kinds of stuff and interesting. So all of that goes away.

[Leo Laporte]

Great use for that.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Come to think of it, you've got anonymity. You don't have to leave the house, but you can get support anywhere, anytime. I think that's actually kind of cool.

[Benito]

And then Meta gets to grow its list of alcoholics.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they don't I hope not. I would hope not.

[Janko Rutgers]

That is strange marketing right there.

[Leo Laporte]

There's still people playing Second Life. Life, right. Second Life has gotten weird. But there, I mean, it was always weird. It was always a little weird. But that. So there's enough, I guess. Well, not enough for them to keep it up to date. They're not going to work on it.

[Janko Rutgers]

And it also, like, there's some stuff that wasn't actually part of the official announcement or it was kind of hinted at, but Meta has been moving to their own engine, essentially, for some of the. These things like on mobile and on VR. They want.

[Leo Laporte]

They were using Unity.

[Janko Rutgers]

They were using Unity right Now, if you get into Horizon Worlds in VR, most of that stuff is still Unity based. And so they were going to transition to this new engine both on mobile and in VR. And essentially, I assume they just ran the numbers and were like, well, really not enough people are using it in VR. It's going to be very expensive to bring this new engine to VR. So let's just only focus on mobile with this new engine and let's shut everything down that's. That's not running on it. And then when people protest it, whether they were like, well, actually it's not that expensive for us to keep the Unity worlds up and running, so let's do that. But the new stuff is going to be on mobile, essentially.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. I mean, if you're doing it for mobile, you might as well just do a Meta quest version of it, I would imagine. It's not.

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean, the mobile strategy, I do not understand to be quite.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it VR? How do you do it in mobile?

[Janko Rutgers]

You just hold your phone, you use your. It's mobile games, essentially. So when you, you do the Horizon app on your phone, you can now play games in it. And some of these Horizon worlds, social games where you meet with other people and do all kinds of things.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to strap your phone to your face.

[Janko Rutgers]

No, no, no, no, no. But, but. So a lot of these games and a lot of games that they're investing in now are mobile only. And I'm still kind of unsure who's going to download the Horizon app to play mobile games because there's so many other places you can play mobile games and get mobile games.

[Benito]

It kind of feels like, like Meta, like there's still corporations that have a contract in place for the Metaverse, so they can't shut it down.

[Leo Laporte]

You think it's that? Yeah, it's like, why would they just shut cars or something?

[Benito]

Why wouldn't they just shut it down?

[Leo Laporte]

Well do people. People don't pay to do Horizon Worlds. Right. It's free. Right.

[Benito]

It must cost them so much money. You know it must cost them so

[Janko Rutgers]

much generally is free. I think you can know or you can could buy certain things. And they started to introduce monetization stuff. Yeah goods like in game stuff like everywhere. But also they don't really have a replacement yet obviously. So they obviously cut back on the VR efforts. They like fire 10,000 people. But part of reality labs they're concentrating more of their efforts on mobile and obviously they're spending a ton of money on AI. So they're cutting back but they're still also not completely giving up on it. They're still working on Future headsets like 2D different lines.

[Leo Laporte]

You know it would save it actually would save second life too if they use the new Nvidia DLSS sexy filter. That would be so much more fun. So GTC the and we covered this on Monday. Jensen Huang's keynote at the Nvidia conference on Monday and among many things they announced one of which made the stock market jump when he said we're to going to actually make a trillion dollars selling our chips next year, up from half a trillion. But the thing that they announced that got the most attention because gamers hated it was something called DLSS5 which takes existing game content and sexies it up. It adds the lighting, it adds some smoother textures and that makes it more real. I think it makes it more realistic. I think it's actually pretty cool. But gamers don't like AI I guess and there was a kind of a general sense of revulsion.

[Janko Rutgers]

There's also some problems I think the Verge wrote about it where in some of the sports games that use actually you have one up right there that use actual characters based on likenesses of real athletes. When you add VR to it that doesn't really understand who's who. They're just going to turn into this other good looking dude not a real has now a lot more detail but doesn't look at all like the person who is associated with the number on his shirt. Right. So. So that's a little problematic.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I think honestly the skeets about this are absolutely hysterical with the before and after contrasts.

[Janko Rutgers]

It was a good meme.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it looks pretty good. I'll be honest with you. Let me see if I can the

[Dan Patterson]

Yassify filter the Yassify look I'm a gamer but the gaming takes have all been pretty basic and boring. Like it.

[Leo Laporte]

They gamers, gamers just have this kind of knee jerk revulsion to anything with AI. I got bad news for you. It's gonna happen no matter what you think.

[Benito]

Okay, I gotta speak up for the gamers here.

[Dan Patterson]

It's okay.

[Benito]

I said this, I said this, I said this last week on Intelligent Machines. But it's about changing the art direction of the game. Like this changes the art direction of the game, period.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I think this changes the consensual reality. Huh.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't you think this looks more like than me? I mean I think that that's. That DLSS version of me is pretty high there.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

So. Leo, I have Leo, I have a Leo. I have a question for you on that. You know the yassified version or the hello version is we already have this body of work that, that shows the negative self esteem or the mental health effects when people spend way too much time scrolling through on Instagram or TikTok and they're seeing these, these AI tweaked people that don't look like real life. Don't you think something like this, if you, if you're also seeing in your games, don't you worry about how that might affect people's experience?

[Leo Laporte]

People know, I mean we've. For a long time there was this thought that cartoons would make kids violence. But kids know the difference. That's a cartoon.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I. Even movies don't make people violent. Even violent movies. I think people will know it's a game. I'm not expected to look as handsome as Leo Laporte. I think

[Dan Patterson]

I can buy, I can buy Bonito's argument.

[Leo Laporte]

At least it is different argument.

[Dan Patterson]

Right? Okay. If you're changing a specific art direction or artistic intention, I can understand that argument. But I don't think that is every use case in gaming. I think that is particular use cases and especially when you apply this to older games or games that don't have the budget of a AAA studio. I think this can provide one path.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to be an option in the game too. If you don't like it, you go into your video settings and you just turn it off. It does have some potential risks. Here's a DLSS spongebob. And that's damn creepy. I don't think that's really what DLSS will do. I can't help it.

[Janko Rutgers]

I think it is with the participation of the game publishers. Right. It's not like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I think you. I think it. If you have an Nvidia video card, you can turn it On. On any game.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, I thought that publishers had to consent to this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe they do, but that would be an artificial constraint because it's built into the card. You could do it without their permission if.

[Benito]

I mean, that's also the whole thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Smart of Nvidia.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, you've raised an interesting question about consent then, haven't you? Because who gets to consent to this stuff?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe Nvidia is smart enough to say, yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean, one could. Then the counter. Counter argument is, yes, the publisher may say, do it because we like that everything looks so shiny now, but the artists who actually worked on the game may still be really upset.

[Dan Patterson]

Could you make the same arguments about ray tracing? Like, yes. I mean, that fundamentally changes how your game looks. It fundamentally changes how it looks. It's a setting and you can turn it on and off depending on your performance.

[Benito]

But all that stuff is programmed in by the game designers.

[Dan Patterson]

That's true, but it's also a button I can click to turn it on or off.

[Benito]

But they intended that. They intended that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a. You know, I have machines that do AI upscaling. My Nvidia tv, my shield, has a AI upscaling feature and it actually does a very good job taking HD content, making it 4K and it looks great. And you know, Nvidia is probably the same technology, just a later generation or earlier generation of dlss. I don't know. I think we're gonna. I think the initial reaction will fade and we're gonna get used to this kind of thing.

[Benito]

And there's also the whole.

[Leo Laporte]

We're taking a break. You're listening to this Week in Tech with Dan Patterson, Lisa Schmeisser and Janko Rutgers. A great panel. Good to have you. We'll have more in just a bit. Elon's gonna be paying some money, maybe some big bucks. This version, this episode, this segment of this Week in Tech is brought to you by outSystems, the number one AI development platform. OutSystems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future, where the constraints of the past give way to unlimited capacity and scale. Outsystems enables them to build AI agents that can actually do work, such as take actions, make decisions, and integrate with data rather than just answer questions. Outsystems provides the only AI development platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven. It's unified because you can build, run and govern apps and agents all in one platform. It's agile because you can innovate at the speed of AI. Importantly, without compromising quality or control. And it's enterprise proven trusted by enterprises for mission critical AI applications and durable innovation. Outsystems. It's the secret weapon behind the world's most successful companies. Not just for small apps. No. These are also for the massive complex systems that run banks and insurance companies and government services. Outsystems even helps companies with aging IT environments bridge the gap to the AI future without a rip and replace nightmare. Outsystems provides the safest and fastest way for enterprise to go from we need an AI strategy, yikes. To we have a functioning AI application. Stop wondering how AI will change your business and start building the agents that will lead it. Visit outsystems.com TWIT to see how the world's most innovative enterprises use out systems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. That's Outsystems O U T S Y-S-T-E-M S.com TWIT to book a demo outsystems.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support. I take you back now to early 2022 when Elon Musk tweeted out I'm going to buy Twitter because it's just a mess and is full of bots and it sucks. And he even I think said funding secured and no, that was another tweet. Elon was big at tweeting at the time. The SEC even looked into his tweets because at some point he was so critical of Twitter it looked like he had initially said he was gonna pay $44 billion for Twitter and it looked like maybe he was trying to drive the price down down by driving the stock price down. The SEC took a look at it stock manipulation and declined to do anything about it. Well, a class action lawsuit from shareholders did do something about it. On Friday, a jury in California determined that Elon Musk had misled investors via public statements that depressed the price of the company's stock ahead of his purchase of of the service. I mean, it was, to me, it seemed pretty obvious that that's what was going on. A number of investors started a suit certified as a class action saying we've been defrauded the jury and that Musk made them intentionally those tweets as part of a larger scheme. The jury rejected arguments about the larger scheme but did find him liable. Damages is not yet determined. That will happen later, but the plaintiffs are seeking as much as $2.6 billion, which I guess Elon could afford. He's worth much more than that. But even when you're worth a hundred billion, a few billion starts to add up. Is this justice? Dan?

[Dan Patterson]

I'm curious. Maybe I just haven't Googled this deeply enough. I'm curious about which shareholders joined this.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Garrett, Nancy Price, John Garrett, and Brian Belgrave sued him in October of 2022, the month before he actually closed the deal.

[Dan Patterson]

I mean, is it justice? I think you said it yourself. It seemed his tactics, it seemed like he was trying to do something very particular. So I think that if you, if you, you should know who you get into bed with.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, good point. So he tweeted in May of 2022, saying, I'm going to put the Twitter deal on hold, pending details supporting calculations that spam and fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users. Twitter had asserted that. That he said, I don't buy it. I think it's a lot more than 5%. Now that he's the owner, we know it's a lot more than 5%. He also said in a May 16 comment at a conference that he believed that 20% of Twitter users were fake accounts. When the then Twitter CEO Parag Agrawa Agrawa said, there's no way for a third party to even know this. We don't make that information visible to third parties. Elon tweeted a poop emoji. This might be the first time a jury has found a poop emoji misleading. Elon loves the poop emoji.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

By the way, wasn't this the same case where they had a hard time finding a jury because so many people were like, I hate that guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe, maybe they didn't.

[Janko Rutgers]

It's a little. It's been a little while. But I also remember, vaguely remember, that him making the point about the bots was like, really back of the napkin math, right? He's like, well, I tweeted something and then I read all the retweets and comments, and they were all bots. And really that only proves that all your followers are bots, you know, yes. Anything.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Are you.

[Leo Laporte]

This is more about you than it does. So Twitter ultimately sold for a lot more than probably it was worth $44 billion after Elon was forced by a Delaware court to buy it at the price that he had quoted. He didn't want to. He was trying to get out of it. The jury deliberated for four days. So that means it was. Wasn't like an instant like, oh, yeah, this guy's guilty. It took him four Days. But they did unanimously find that the tweets from May 13 and May 17 were materially false or misleading, but they didn't hold them liable for the press conference or the comments at the conference for May 16th. And they said, said even though the plaintiffs part of the lawsuit was that there was a scheme going on, they didn't agree with that. But they are going to award damages per share of Twitter stock for each day of the class period, which goes from May 13, 2022 to October 3, 2022. So it could add up to quite a big deal.

[Janko Rutgers]

And the irony of all of that is that if there was a scheme, it clearly didn't work because he had to pilot the original price and now

[Leo Laporte]

get out of on top of it

[Janko Rutgers]

for some stupid tweets that he did. So, yeah,

[Leo Laporte]

Elon had taken the stand during the trial saying, I really did have concerns over the bots and I didn't intend to drive the stock price down. I was. That wasn't my meaning at all. I guess they were not persuaded.

[Janko Rutgers]

But at the same time, he argued that he should pay less for it. So.

[Dan Patterson]

Right.

[Janko Rutgers]

Kind of undermined his argument a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

He was. He was trying to get out of the deal at the time. In other news, Samsung is ending sales of its two $2900 Trifold phone. This on the heels of news that Samsung is really suffering in its phone business, that it's losing money hand over fist, which is a surprise since it is the number one Android handset, I believe.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, that is a surprise.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that the Trifold sold well. Buyers were paying above retail on ebay and other secondhand markets.

[Dan Patterson]

There's.

[Leo Laporte]

Ars Technica speculates it might have more to do. Ryan Whitwam. Sorry, Writing in Ars Technica. It might have more to do with the cost of the components, with RAM prices doubling and so forth, which could

[Janko Rutgers]

also explain why they're losing money on phones in general. Right?

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

And storage and processors.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all gone through the.

[Dan Patterson]

All gone up. And I have to say I think

[Leo Laporte]

you're right that at this point, the Iran war, the resulting oil crisis is going to hit a lot of companies really hard.

[Janko Rutgers]

And helium. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. A helium plant was destroyed. This is a. Besides, it's not just for balloons anymore.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

It's used in semiconductor manufacture and medical devices, I might add. Bad. And that's going to really hit the helium supply. So we're economically. We're in a world of hurt, I think.

[Janko Rutgers]

Except for Party City.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Party City's no Party City.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Party City got hit by the vulture capitalists.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's gone, huh?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we used to have one. We don't have one.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Private equity road again.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where I got all my balloons.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, you have to go to a dollar store now because I think they still do them there. Or a grocery store.

[Leo Laporte]

That's sad. I. That. Yeah, we used to get those big myar, you know, 70th birthday balloons, things like that. Yeah, can't get them anymore, I guess. Speaking of the war, there has been some concern with the slashing of cesa, our national security organization. They have a leader who left after a year of turmoil and they have a temporary leader now. And many, many CISA security experts were fired that with the war in Iran, there's some concern about Iran hacking activity. So far there's only been one, I don't know, kind of minor event. Maybe it's not so minor if you're one of the 200,000 devices that were erased. A medical equipment provider called Stryker was hit by a hacking group, Handala, claiming to be pro Iran. They say they erase data from 200,000 devices, including servers and mobile phones used by their Stryker employees. I mean, if that's all. That's not. I mean, as bad as it is,

[Lisa Schmeisser]

it's all that we know about right now. I mean, this is. We're working with an incomplete data up

[Dan Patterson]

and as the conflict intensifies and perhaps prolongs asymmetric attacks will likely increase

[Leo Laporte]

that.

[Dan Patterson]

I mean, that's just geopolitics and it's. It is one tool that somebody who is an actor that's on the defense is like especially.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you mean by asymmetric in that?

[Dan Patterson]

Well, I mean, the US has greater kinetic capabilities and we have greater economic capabilities. Meaning we can just fund things for longer. There will be some attrition, but we can fund our kinetic activities longer. So an actor on the defense will use tactics. I mean, this is a time tested in every war ever.

[Leo Laporte]

This is what happened in Vietnam.

[Dan Patterson]

In Vietnam for sure. Yeah. So we saw guerrilla warfare in Vietnam and cyber attacks are the new form of that. And Iran is one of the most. They are not up there with the US or Israel in terms of their cyber capabilities. But I would put them. They're certainly as good as North Korea and much better than most of the other their peers. They are very cyber capable and they learned a lot from stuxnech. So again, I wouldn't expect we see massive cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure right now. But perhaps the likelihood would increase as the duration of the conflict extends.

[Janko Rutgers]

And adding to that comes physical attacks on infrastructure. Right. I think just this morning Iran said when there was this whole back and forth about that Strait of Hormuzz and Trump said he wants to blow up power plants now, Iran mentioned a bunch of targets that they would retaliate on. And interestingly, it infrastructure was part of that. And that was like early on in the war, there was the attack on the Amazon cloud data center in. Was it in Dubai? I don't remember exactly. One of two of them. Two of them, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

One in Bahrain, I think, and one in uae.

[Janko Rutgers]

And all those countries are. A lot of those countries are. Are trying to become havens for AI companies. Right. They're investing heavily into AI.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be nuts to build a data center in the Middle east right now. You'd be nuts to build anything in the Middle east right now. Actually. Is it just me? I'm made very nervous. I have not been sleeping well. I'm very nervous about all this. I know it's far away from us in the United States.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

It's not though, because the Strait of Hormuzza.

[Leo Laporte]

Control of the world's oil.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah. Yeah. So it's threatening everything from, from. From how we move goods and services because the price of diesel is going to shoot up to whether or not we will be able to have genuinely global networking and data movement because when cloud centers go down, that's going to hit people in different places. And if you have hackers coming in and targeting medical service companies, that's. That's just. That's the beginning of an iceberg. What about utilities? What about hospitals?

[Dan Patterson]

How complex?

[Leo Laporte]

Very nervous. And I'm also nervous about the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I don't think there's any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon when the. The effects are shown to be global in nature.

[Dan Patterson]

Anyway, like that we have launched on warning status with all of our nukes.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, God. Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

But I, I mean, like, I would be surprised if we. I, Well, I won't be surprised. I. I don't know. I mean, this talk of tactical is. You're right, Lisa.

[Benito]

It.

[Dan Patterson]

Tactical becomes strategic very quickly, especially with nuclear conflict.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. And there's the huge humanitarian cost now. I did say that.

[Dan Patterson]

Tremendous.

[Leo Laporte]

We're in the U.S. but many of our listeners are. We have listeners all over the world. World. I'm always glad when I see Galia in our club Twit Discord. She lives in Tel Aviv and I'M terrified for her. We have many listeners in the Middle east right now. The humanitarian cost in Iran alone is heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. It's nightmare. Galia says she was in a shelter during the show already. She was down there and she came back up to join us. I just. It's going to be good news for the box office on Project Hail Mary. However, because escapism, as you know, when times are tough, people go to the movies. Japan has decided as of October 1st to allow what they call proactive cyber defense. That's called hacking back. Yeah, yeah, this is something we've always as chewed from time to time. I think our FBI and others have, for instance, put out malware that removes malware. But it's always a very risky thing and there's always this nervousness that this will escalate as well. Well, you know, we know nukes escalate, that that's a bad thing to use a nuclear weapon. We know that very well. And as a result, no one's used a nuclear weapon since World War II. And we were the only ones who've ever used a nuclear weapon. But I think sometimes I think that cyber attacks could escalate to that level of risk as well. You attack their infrastructure, they attack our infrastructure. And I don't know if we're very, very vulnerable.

[Dan Patterson]

This is happening all the time. You know, there were very well documented cyber attacks on gas infrastructure in 2021, 22. Look, everybody is hacking everybody all the time. But Leo, to your point, we had a policy that was stuck. Was an interesting event for a number of reasons.

[Leo Laporte]

It.

[Dan Patterson]

It certainly was an interesting cyber event, but it also shifted our policy.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're right, Leah, we just as a little bit of history. Stuxnet was created by the Israeli and American forces to break under the Obama administration, during the Obama administration to attack the scatter devices that were used in the Iranian centrifuges to control the speed to basically break them, to turn them up so fast that they'd break so that they could not not enrich uranium as a precursor to making an atomic weapon. And it was very effective. Except it was really interesting, by the way, hack because those SCADA devices were air gapped so they had to figure out some way to get them on there. That was very clever. Except it leaked out and was widely used in attacks by hackers against us.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, and it also shifted our policy from defensive to maybe it's okay to do a little offensive.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Japan has now decided that the time is right to allow offensive ops because Online, the nation faces, quote, the most complicated national security environment since World War II. The chief cabinet secretary, Secretary Minoru Keahara, explained the threat from cyber attacks are having a huge impact on people's lives and economic activities. This is quite an important threat to national, Japanese national security. So they're going to enact the proactive cyber defense actions allowing if authorized, and it looks like it will be Japanese police and the security forces to attack and disable infrastructure. Infrastructure only. We're only going to attack the infrastructure that's used to run cyber attacks. But I guess that could include SCADA devices. This is just one more step in a kind of a weird escalational spiral that frankly terrifies me. Especially when you look at Cuba where the power's been out now always week, the whole island. Imagine what would happen if we lost. Well, you wouldn't have a twit podcast. If we lost power for a week, that wouldn't be the worst of it. I know, but everything we do, our entire lives rely on electricity.

[Benito]

Imagine if America.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Think of all the medically fragile people who would die. Think of all the people who are on ventilators. Think of all the babies in icu. Think of, think of all of the people who depend on medical equipment to live.

[Leo Laporte]

Not to mention the fact that our food supply, we really only have five days worth of food without food deliveries and if that falls apart, mass starvation ensues. I hope you have a victory garden. I bet you're growing tomatoes, Lisa. I just feel like you must be growing tomatoes.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I, I do. We, we, I was actually going through, going well, we could probably barter a lot of citrus but in California, no, we have that, we have an apple tree. I, I, I do garden, but not enough to support everybody who lives here.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I actually hope that hard to do that you wouldn't need that much space to do that.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No. I saw something on social media today and I can't credit who it was from where they were. Like, look, we can't micro garden our way out of 2020, but this is a great opportunity for us to start having conversations about what the food systems in the US look like and how people can live in high density places and still have a little bit more food autonomy than they have. So I mean this is, this is the other thing too is it's one thing to be like, oh, I grew everything on my own backyard and there were books about that through the 2000s. Do you remember? Yeah, like animal, vegetable, meaning to do that. Well, like the thing that they point out is you have to have an enormous amount of time and an enormous amount of space. Yeah. I mean there's, there's, I want to do a.

[Benito]

There's a reason, there's a reason humanity stopped doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a friend, you know, but,

[Lisa Schmeisser]

but what we can do is we can take a look at some of the models we've seen, like in Europe where they do have community gardens and people have their little sheds.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a friend who's really into aquaponics. He has a greenhouse.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they have fish. The fish fertilize the vegetable and fruit and then you can eat the fish.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

So I was a microbiology undergraduate and my undergraduate research was actually in recirculating aquaculture where it was a huge cross departmental collaboration. And my job was honestly just to assay bacteria because that's what you do when you're 21. And the whole point was it was supposed to be a self contained recirculating facility for growing tilapia. And then the nitrogen can be used for fertilizer and things like that. Those are incredible, incredibly complex and finicky systems. Like, it's not just a matter of sticking some fish in a tub and putting in a pump and calling it good. There's a lot of chemistry involved. I mean, and modern agriculture is really data driven. A lot of these tractors are tied into satellite services that tell you when to do everything you need to do in the fields and exactly how much fertilizer to put down and when and how to water and things like that. And farmers know what they're doing and asking us all to upskill to that level in a hurry is probably not going to be as successful as we would like it to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

You know, but yeah, I think everyone should try growing tomatoes. Go to the store, get a five gallon bucket from Home Depot, look it up on the Internet. You can grow tomatoes in like a little patch of sunshine on your front porch or your back porch.

[Leo Laporte]

There's nothing better than homegrown tomatoes. Tomatoes.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh my God, they're amazing. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it too late? Is it too late to plant them or is this.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Now's the time.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Co. You live in an apartment. Do you have somewhere you could plant tomatoes?

[Janko Rutgers]

No, I do. I actually live in the house here. We do a little bit of gardening.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, good.

[Janko Rutgers]

I'm not very good at it either because in part because our backyard is sort of shady.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

And then it gets warm suddenly and I forgot to water and all those things. But the plan B is just go to your local farmers market. Yeah, I think so. If you want to, you know, reduce the use of fossil fuels. Not getting your apples from South America is a good start.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, there's there. I think there's a lot to be said for eat local

[Janko Rutgers]

also. Tastes better.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, yeah. And I would argue that. Would it be nice to have strawberries in November sometimes? Sure it would. But they're going to taste terrible. And like, just wait. I mean, I can say this from a position of California privilege and sorry about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody should.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I'm sorry about that, Dan.

[Leo Laporte]

We have to relearn canning and making of jams and all of that stuff.

[Dan Patterson]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And salting our beef. We're gonna all need to learn how to salt meat. And do you have a potato seller? I'm just saying, if not, start dating, digging.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my gosh. You guys should look up potato sack because I. I kid you not. We grew 50 pounds of potatoes one year. One of those things was life changing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's like the Martian.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my God. Love that movie. I cannot wait for Project Artemis. I have to go soon.

[Leo Laporte]

We have learned you can grow potatoes in space.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

We just learned that it was. It was a fictional trope, but in fact, they were able to grow potatoes on the International Space Station. So there. Let's take a break. We have more to talk about. And we have a wonderful panel to do it with Lisa schmeisser from nojitter.com yankorecorslopass, CC and of course, Dan Patterson, Blackbird AI. Another radio refugee. Our show today, brought to you by Modulate. This is really cool. This is a really interesting use of AI. Everyday enterprises generate millions of minutes of voice traffic, right? Customer calls, agent conversations, and sad to say, fraud attempts. Most of that audio is still being treated just like text, basically flattened into transcript, which strips tone intent. Frankly, it strips out the risk. But Modulate exists to change that. First proven in gaming, Modulate's technology supported major players like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. And where there's all that chatter going on. Modulate was used to separate, you know, just playful banner from intentional harm at scale. And it works. Today, Modulate helps enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, understand 20 million minutes of voice every day by interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world. This capability is powered by Modulate's newest elm. It's called Velma 2.0. Velma is a voice native behavioral aware model built to understand real conversation. It's not just A Transcriptionist, it orchestrates 100 plus specialized models each, each focused on a distinct aspect of voice analysis. This is such a triumph of AI to deliver accurate, explainable insights in real time. It works so well. Velma's ranked number one across four key audio benchmarks, beating all the large general foundation models in accuracy, cost and speed. Velma's number one in Conversation Understanding, number one in transcription accuracy and cost. Number one in Deep fake detection, number one in emotion detection. It's really not a surprise. Velma's built on 21 billion minutes of audio. Velma's 100 times faster, cheaper and more accurate than LLMs at understanding speech. And this includes the top frontier models like Google's Gemini, OpenAI and XAI. Most LLMs are a black box, not Velma. Velma doesn't just assess a conversation as a whole, but breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency by producing timestamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation. Meaning you can see exactly when risk rises, when behavior shifts or intent changes. With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks like fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents and more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice native AI model can really do. Go to modulates live ungated preview of Velma at preview. Modulate AI. You'll be blown away. That's preview. Modulate AI to see why Velma ranks number one on leading benchmarks for conversation understanding, deep fake detection and emotion detection. Velma, check it out at preview. Modulate AI. Really, really good. Speaking of Sears and voice fraud, it all ties together in the end. Sears exposed AI Chatbot phone calls and text chats. They were saving them to a wide open database on the web. And of course, when you talk to a customer service chatbot, you may be giving personal information, contact information, phone numbers. Now, Sears department stores, as we were talking about earlier, are gone on. But they still have brands and they still have an appliance repair business still going on. And in fact, they're even so up to date. They have an AI chatbot and a phone assistant named Samantha.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Unfortunately, always named after women.

[Leo Laporte]

Samantha. Hello, Sam. Yeah, always.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Always a woman that's helping you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always. Well, because you know why? And this is true. Fighter pilots too. We listen to female voices. We ignore men. Yeah, right.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Actually, what's really interesting, I don't remember the.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you not hear me? Dan, Are you not listening?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I don't remember the vendor off the top of my head. But we recently got pitched by a company that was telling us about the different specialized AI agents. It was building for different lines of work. And what I noticed when they did the pitch was for HR and for marketing. They were. They had given the. The agents female names and for IT troubleshooting and procurement. Yeah, no, they were. More troublingly.

[Leo Laporte]

The.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

IT troubleshooting was like, named Vikram and. Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you rebooted the computer?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I was like, this seems.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't believe they named it Vikram.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I was like, this seems vaguely problematic for.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Oh, my God. And when you call up to get recipe advice, it's always a nice Italian voice. Eh?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah. No, no, Mario. I actually assigned a reporter to. To look into and talk to people about. Hey, how is. How are. How is agentic AI enforcing and introducing systemic bias into workplace interactions? Because if this is what vendors are putting forward, like, how is this shaping the way people perceive, you know, people name Vikram in real life, I'm sure all of you are IT geniuses or, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

The way they're saying, this needs to be a female role or a male role. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeremiah Fowler, security researcher, found three publicly exposed databases from Sears containing massive troves of chat logs, audio files and text transcriptions.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

From Sears Home services customers. Customers. 3.7 million chat logs, 1.4 million audio files, all public. Fowler said, I found a CSV file that contained 54,359 complete chat logs with Samantha. Nobody with. No. No Vikram chats, though. No.

[Janko Rutgers]

Anyway, do you want a CSV file that tells you 50,000 times to turn it off and on again?

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need that. That's right. You don't really need that one. Let's talk about prediction markets because this is a really interesting growth market. We've all heard about Kalshi. Now, what's the other one? Polymarket.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

These are basically gambling, right? It's obvious. But they call it a prediction market. So it's not illegal in many states or any states because I guess it's kind of a loophole.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Wait a minute. Nevada just outlawed.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Arizona just filed criminal charges over at Kalshee over illegal gambling. Nevada, which is the home, of course, of all those casinos, has been and made them illegal. Nevertheless, there's billions of dollars being traded back and forth. And the problem with these prediction markets is you can bet on anything. And we've seen this. Insiders from the Pentagon who knew something about the Venezuela extraction of Maduro would place a bet right before it happened, saying, yeah, I think Maduro's gonna be captured in the next two weeks and then it happened and the person made $300,000. The other thing about these prediction markets is they're basically anonymous. You can use crypto and so forth. Good news. Major League Baseball, which I guess FanDuel and DraftKings was already taken by football. Major League Baseball struck a deal with polymarket, the official event prediction platform. Major League Baseball is already, you know, I remember Pete Rose was kept out of the hall of Fame for betting on a baseball game. Those rules are kind of long gone

[Dan Patterson]

and they've prosecuted or at least come down pretty hard on players who were clearly throwing.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Throwing games.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, throwing games, throwing in the dirt or predictions on particular pitches. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Major League Baseball actually last year was a case of two players facing federal charges for manipulating their on field performance. So what's the best way to ensure the integrity of the game? Do a deal with polymarket.

[Dan Patterson]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because then you could do prop bets on anything.

[Dan Patterson]

Look, there's a lot of reasons to dislike Pete Rose, but it's, it's really. The league really has to, to confront that hypocrisy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fair.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Fair.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just unbelievable. I just. But I guess there's so much money.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, I'm wondering how long until we're going to see some legislation around this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and you know, the sad thing is all, most of the time that legislation comes from lobbyists with the casino operations who say if you're going to defang it as much as possible to our casinos.

[Dan Patterson]

This really feels like, I mean, there are conversations especially in the media world about how this is an interesting and new emerging technology and there are reasons to consider it. But this really to me feels like the like 22,000, 2001, 2002 era of crypto where there was a rush to the space and we saw massive companies doing massive deals with crypto companies before regulation came in. And we found out there was, oh, surprise, there was a ton of fraud going on.

[Leo Laporte]

So Poly market.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, it's, it's, it's. I think you're right. Crypto is a really great analysis for that one where people like, makes it easy. Well, people like to make it sound like they know what they're talking about too, and they've gamified the experience. And all you have to do is give someone the quick dopamine hit and like, oh, there is nothing wrong with this ever. Thunk.

[Leo Laporte]

So what is a particularly masculine thing that we men do? We are standing, monitoring the situation, right? With our arms folded, just watching it go down. We are monitoring the situation. Well, Polly Market has created the Situation room in Washington, D.C. where you can monitor the situation. It's got big screens with the world, you know, the war, everything. You can bet on anything. It's not a sports bar, live X feeds, flight radar, Bloomberg terminals where you

[Dan Patterson]

can sip your bourbon and smoke a

[Leo Laporte]

cigar and monitor the situation.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Men's spaces, men's activities.

[Leo Laporte]

You can tell, look, there's a cigar, there's some Whiskey. It's opening March 20th on K Street, just up the street. K Street.

[Dan Patterson]

On K Street.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where all the. That's where all the. Yeah. Isn't that where all the lobbyists are?

[Dan Patterson]

All the lobbyists are, yeah.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

This is like the most 2026 thing ever, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

If I could get this napkin for Christina Warren. She collects this kind of memorabilia. Meet me at the Poly Market Situation Room News Bar.

[Benito]

This is just DC's version. Watching a construction site. You know how men can't stop, can't

[Leo Laporte]

help, they gotta do it. Yeah. Look at this. But this is not just construction. You can monitor the world situation, everything going on, and you can make. And because it's Polymarket, you can make a bet on any of this. Will his hair catch on fire when he's lighting the Olympic torch? Six to one odds.

[Dan Patterson]

There are other places I would like to spend my time.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm monitoring the situation.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Jesus, Flip.

[Leo Laporte]

What a world we live in.

[Benito]

Also, prediction markets are like the wrong name for this. It should be prophecy markets, because like, yeah, when you watch the election, like the elections in the last week's elections, like, they were all wrong. It was all what the people who were betting wanted to happen, not were thinking, wishful thinking.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, there was that story with that journalist got threatened when they were. They were reporting on what bombing in. In the Middle East.

[Leo Laporte]

They were going to kill him because

[Lisa Schmeisser]

he had people, they're like, I bet this. And you said that. And you need. Well, first they. First they reached out and tried to do the more flies with honey thing with, hey, there's an inaccuracy in your story. If you could report this instead, that would be great. Thank you. And like a good journalist, this guy was like, oh, did I get something wrong? And then. And he's like, no. And then he was like, why am I getting so many messages from people whose social media handles are all about online betting? And then he realized what was happening was these guys had bet against what he reported and they wanted him to change his story so they could recoup their losses, and they began threatening him when he wouldn't do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, no, it was a. It's a genuinely disturbing thing because it's. It's another way where, you know, you're going to have under resourced reporters who. Whose names are attached to reporting the facts, who are going to get threatened by institutional betters and, you know, what kind of backup do they have? What kind of protection will they have?

[Dan Patterson]

And it's easy to find your address with data sold by data brokers or.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Or given to you by Cash Patel. Yes. Hi. Here you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. This is reporter that's bugging me. And of course, Cash goes, yeah. Is he a liberal?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well, don't these guys also. Don't these markets also advertise on podcasts? Isn't it all just one giant.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, not on mine. Yeah, no, not on mine. In fact, we've turned down not an insignificant amount of money from crypto investments and prediction markets and all this stuff.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Well done, Leo. Well done.

[Benito]

But this is the reason why they don't allow sports teams in Vegas before, right? It's because, like, the mob would threaten the players.

[Leo Laporte]

There's nothing bigger now than the Knights and the Raiders. Vegas is sports city USA now.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Although if you ask, every time I go to Vegas, I'll ask a driver, you know, hey, how are you feeling about the Oakland days? They're like, we don't want them.

[Leo Laporte]

I was just gonna say, except for the A's.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yes, to a person. They're like, no one asked for this.

[Leo Laporte]

Poor Oakland.

[Dan Patterson]

Oakland wanted them.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody wants them.

[Janko Rutgers]

We have to ball us up.

[Dan Patterson]

They just don't want their owner.

[Leo Laporte]

What are they called? The Ballers?

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, it's the Oakland Bees.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

The Oakland Ballers are fantastic. The games are. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they playing at the Coliseum?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

No, no, no, no, no. They played a completely different venue. One that's a little bit closer to Emeryville, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

It's aaa. Or is it single A. Is it good?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

It's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

We used to have a minor league baseball team in Sonoma called the Crushers because it was like grape crushing grapes.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was. It was. It was so much fun because there, it's like handyman and high school teachers.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Now these guys are pro, but they're like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're pros. They want to be pros. They're locals. They got Kevin Mitchell to the former San Francisco Giant to manage them.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

So it's called the Pioneer League. They're part of what's called the Pioneer Lake. They play at Raimondi Park. It's so much Fun. Like, one of my favorite things from last summer is I went during the day that they teamed up with the Oakland Zoo and.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my gosh. No. They were giving out like possum hats. They had Oakland. They had Oakland docents there to give you animal facts. The Oakland Bees mascot is actually a possum as well. So it was just this great synergy of two really classic, you know, pro community Oakland.

[Leo Laporte]

They have to do this stuff because otherwise they wouldn't sell tickets. So the Crushers, they would have. They have like a Barca lounger right behind home plate.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That you could win the right to sit there during the whole game and watch the game. Which sounds deadly. It was. You know, they would always. They would have amusements in between every inning. Right. I'm sure the possums do the same thing.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like with the one where. Where you bring 10 kids out and you have them put their forehead on a baseball bat and run around in a circle on the home plate until they get really dizzy and see if they can run to first base.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, I love those barrel laughs. Yeah, no, like one of my goals for this year is to get up to a Humboldt craps game. I love independent baseball. Like, but the Oakland Ballers are. They were such a good time last year. Like, I also go to the Oakland Roots games because I'm for all of this small non NFL and. And no, I would say if you.

[Leo Laporte]

Sports used to be.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

If you are in the East Bay, do yourself a favor and get to an Oakland Ballers game this season. It's going to be amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That's. It used to be farm hands, you know, and stuff. That's what baseball used to be.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's too bad it got so corporatized and.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But anyway, so expensive.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

We're all about the Oakland Bees now. Las Vegas hates the Oakland A. Betting is happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I get it now.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Betting is coming for us. Allio.

[Leo Laporte]

The B's replace the A's. I get it.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I get it.

[Dan Patterson]

That took a while.

[Leo Laporte]

The whole world started going downhill. I could tell you the exact date. March 21, 2006 was when it all started going to hell. That was the day Twitter launched 20 years ago yesterday.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, no kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

The first tweet.

[Dan Patterson]

Tweet.

[Leo Laporte]

Jack Dorsey. The first tweet. And it was. But it wasn't called Twitter with an E. It was Twitter without the E.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

That was the fashion because you had

[Dan Patterson]

Tumblr, Flickr and you can only interact with sending a text to 40404.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Because it was originally. It was.

[Benito]

That was the only way you could do it before.

[Dan Patterson]

Only way you could interact. Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

And that was why it was 140 characters, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's why. Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

I remember I was on Odio, which is a podcasting platform started by Biz and Ev and. And some of the others who co founded Twitter. And we logged in one day and they said, we're shutting down Odio to start this new site called twttr. So a bunch of podcasting nerds signed up.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah. Right around now, 2006.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, they did a good thing. They Biz paid back the Odio investors, gave them their money.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, no kidding.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which was.

[Dan Patterson]

Odio was really great, too. I mean, it was made podcast, like, it took. I. I think it was kind of killed by iTunes 4.9, which was the. The first podcast directory mainstream, but Odo was a great directory. It had ajax, which was big at the time. You could drag and drop stuff.

[Janko Rutgers]

They also had this interesting idea of people leaving each other personal voice messages to become parts of their RSS feeds or something. Right?

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, that's right.

[Janko Rutgers]

I don't know if anybody ever did it, but I thought, oh, that's kind of cool.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, that's such a blast from the past. Right? That's. Yeah, I. I think. Think I filed a couple reports back then using that. That's. Yeah, I mean, bring that back. I have rss. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have my plaque. Wait a minute. Let me get my plaque. I have a plaque here.

[Dan Patterson]

Hey, what do you guys use for RSS readers, by the way?

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I'm using Feedly right now. There's one that just launched this past week. I'm trying to look it up.

[Leo Laporte]

When Elon took over Twitter and remember, he took away all the blue checks. So I got this plaque. It said, in honor of Leo Laporte, who had a verified Twitter account account before they were available for purchase November 2022.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But now I have a blue check because Elon gave it back. I get a. What they. What Cory Doctorow calls a non consensual blue check.

[Dan Patterson]

I have a consensual non use of Twitter policy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I don't want people to think I paid for it or anything. Anyway, 20 years ago yesterday, Twitter, it all starts. Started. Actually, that's in south by Southwest. In 2007, when Foursquare launched Twitter, launched

[Dan Patterson]

Four Square, blew up at South By. It was so cool back then. Yeah.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, south by was this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's when Internet was, was new and exciting and fun.

[Benito]

You can use all those, all the platforms to cross post onto all the other platforms.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

And then use Yahoo Pipes to bring them all together.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yahoo Pipes.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, man. So much irrelevant nonsense with Yahoo Pipes.

[Leo Laporte]

All the young people are going, who are these old people talking old stuff? You're watching this week in tech with old people. Not so old as me, but we're not as young as you either. We're glad you're here, Dan and Lisa and yeah, go. And I'm very glad you're here, you Club Twit members. We thank you so much for making Twit possible. We started the club during COVID when we realized, you know, we were going to have to really go to our listeners and help get them to help us stay afloat. And you've done it and I really appreciate it. If you're not a club member and you like what you hear, if you want us to keep doing shows, if you like the club shows that we do a whole bunch of them in our club. Twit Discord. If you want ad free versions of our shows. Twit TV Club Twit. 10 bucks a month gets you all of that and more, but mostly gets you that nice warm, fuzzy feeling that you're supporting quality programming that doesn't spy on you, that doesn't talk down to you, that delivers good content with as much integrity as we can muster. I think that's pretty important and it's frankly a endangered species these days. TWiT TV Club TWiT. To show your support. Thank you. Thank you in advance. Your planet is now marked for death. Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four First Steps is now streaming on Disney.

[Janko Rutgers]

We will protect you as a family.

[Leo Laporte]

Light them up, Johnny. Marvel's first family is certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

[Janko Rutgers]

That is fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

And critics say it's one of the best superhero movies of all time. Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four first steps now streaming on Disney plus rated PG13. What time is it, Ben? It's Clobber Die New Year, New Me. Cute.

[Dan Patterson]

But how about New Year, New Money?

[Leo Laporte]

With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get in matched with credit

[Benito]

card offers giving you time to power

[Leo Laporte]

through those New Year's goals you know you're gonna crush start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO

[Benito]

scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply. Subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Offers not available in all states.

[Leo Laporte]

See experian.com for details.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Experian.

[Leo Laporte]

Your little one grew 3 inches overnight. Adorable. Also expensive. Sell their pint sized pieces on Depop and list them in minutes with no

[Dan Patterson]

selling fees because some somewhere a dad refuses to pay full price for the

[Leo Laporte]

clothes his kids will outgrow tomorrow. And he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth Bird budget secured. Start selling on Depop where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details. So I did go see Project Hail Mary on Thursday. I went to see it in a format. It's available on imax.

[Dan Patterson]

Imax.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm kind of against Imax because it becomes all about the screen, you know, and the movie kind of loses, comes in second place. I've seen enough movies now in imax. I'm thinking like I saw everything, one battle after another, rather an imax. And I thought it was better in a normal, on a normal size screen because it was so big, you know. But I saw it in this new screen X format which is a little weird. Weird. It's movie theaters trying to find some way to get you to come in something that they can do that you can't. So our local movie theater has, you know, the Barca loungers and the food that they bring to you and all that. But they also have taken the side walls of the theater and turned them into screens and they have laser projectors on the sidewalls. And some movies, including Project Hail Mary are made so that in some scenes that extends around the wall. So it's like almost like watching in virtual reality, you know, know. And it's a gimmick. But it actually worked pretty well. In Project Hail Mary it was mostly the space scene. So they could, and you could tell they'd made. The movie makers made content for those sidewalls. And it's foveated just like the Vision Pro because you're, you know, it's your peripheral vision so it doesn't really need to be in focus but you just get a feeling like it's. The space is expanding around you. But, and, and, and Benito said, don't know spoilers. And I said, benito, you read the book. How can I spoil it? He said, no, I don't want to have any movie spoilers. I will tell you this, this isn't a spoiler. Great movie. They lived up to the book. If you loved the book, which I did, you will still love the movie. They were pretty true to the book, as always. There's a few differences. They added a little more action to make it an action movie, but I think in general it's really good. I remember talking to Andy Weir, the author, the guy who did the Martian and now Project Hail Mary, when the book came out and he had already signed movie rights, and he told me, yeah, Ryan Gosling's gonna star. And I kind of went. And then he mentioned that the direction, the team of directors, it's two directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were known for the Lego Movie, which I thought, well, okay. So I was a little nervous. Andy said, no, no, no, this is going to be great. He was very much involved in the production of the movie. He has a producer credit. And I think he was sitting there the whole time because they were. It's a great script, they did a good job. And it's a. It's a. It's a feel good movie. As Salon said, it's movie medicine. And in these troubled times, it's nice to see something that makes you feel good. Good. So that's my review.

[Benito]

So for the IMAX thing, Leo, for most films that are shot on imax, you'll probably want to shoot it on imax, you want to watch it on IMAX and Project Hail Mary. The thing with, the thing with it is that it changes aspect ratios and that's what the wall thing is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I hate that.

[Benito]

It doesn't have to be on the walls. It could just be like a longer. A longer landscape. I mean, that's. That's sort of.

[Leo Laporte]

That's another thing I don't like about imax, when it sometimes fills the screen and sometimes doesn't like when it goes back and forth. They did that with.

[Benito]

That's the filmmaker's choice. That's not.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't like doing that. Yeah, one battle after another was full imax, the whole movie. But it's just, it's too overwhelming. It becomes about the screen to me and I really just want to see the story. I don't actually honestly think I needed Screen X either, but that I was able to get good seats for it. So I don't think anybody wanted to see it in that format. So I was able to go see it. I watched a really good YouTube with a astrophysicist physicist who said the science is very good. And there's some. They take some liberties. They have to. To make the story work, but I think in general it's quite good. There is. I won't say anything because I want to protect you. Benito, after you see the movie, there's one thing you can say.

[Benito]

I'll just mute you for myself. I'll mute you first.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't want to spoil it for anybody. I'll wait. There's one thing where. Where they make a statement about the ability, the perceptive abilities of a character in the movie that they don't follow through on. That's really kind of opaque. But other than that, it's fine. That didn't bother me that much. I think it was very good. I think Project Hail Mary is superb and you're gonna enjoy it. It's a feel good movie. Movie. Take the kids. There's no swearing because the star of the movie is a schoolteacher. Not Ryan Gosling. The character he plays, Ryland Grace, is a schoolteacher.

[Dan Patterson]

Right.

[Benito]

That's a whole thread in the book.

[Leo Laporte]

I forgot. Yeah, yeah, it's in the book too. He's his friend.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I don't know if you've ever met any actual teachers in real life.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't swear like siblings.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I was gonna say high school teachers.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, it's a very funny part of the book, actually, because at the beginning of the book, he can't remember who he is and he says, fudge. And he goes, why am I saying fudge? Anyway, it made me want to reread the book. Casting is excellent. And actually, Ryan Gosling is perfect as Ryland Grace because as we know from the book, Ryland Grace is a wimpy coward. Perfect. They did the spider verse movies. That's right, Lord Miller. And they actually are very good directors. I am anti animation. Alex. You're right. I don't like comic book movies and I don't like animated movies. But I did like Project Hail Mary and I think you will too. The only thing I didn't like, it's an Amazon production. And they say it in big letters and there's a smile. It's like, oh, Jeff Bezos,

[Janko Rutgers]

the finance Melania. Somehow they had.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, somehow.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Very nice.

[Leo Laporte]

We were talking about south by Southwest. Normally I do an in memoriam. Nobody. Nobody. As far as I know, nobody died this week. So I will do the in memoriam on Amy Webb's annual trend report. She has been doing this with their future institute for many years. She said she had a funeral at South Africa by where she announced things are moving way too fast to do an annual trend report. Her future today strategy group was going to stop. That was the last one she put on a black cloth. We're going to get. Are we getting Amy on soon? Benito? I think she's coming soon.

[Benito]

Yeah, I'm trying. She usually tries to come on after south by South.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she does this great thing. She says, we are gathered here today to celebrate. Remember the life of the trend report. 1500 people to see her. She's famous for her south by talks. And then it's very somber. Then the University of Texas marching band comes in and they pepped everybody up. So good. Good on you. Actually. I guess Chuck Norris did pass this week, but he's not a tech leader in any way. But we can acknowledge that. And Xander from Buffy. Buffy Coffee. I guess that's sort of nerd adjacent. Should mention that. And finally, speaking of nerds, I like to do a pick every week. This is a cassette player with USB C and Bluetooth. So if you still have your old cassette collection, your mixtapes from when you were 19.

[Dan Patterson]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

This sounds pretty cool. This is from Maxwell. Not Maxcel.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Maxwell used to be like.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it is Max Maxell. Yeah, it's the. Where they had the hair going back.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. This is Maxell's new cassette player. It has a USB C port, so it's rechargeable. It has an audio jack so you can use wired headphones and Bluetooth 5.4 so you can play it through your Sonos speakers. Just. It looks like a Walkman.

[Benito]

Cassettes.

[Leo Laporte]

I might actually buy that. I don't have any cassettes, but I might actually buy that I have a

[Janko Rutgers]

whole box of cassettes in the basement.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I borrow some cassettes? Janko.

[Janko Rutgers]

My fear is that they're all like the tape is degraded at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, they're going to fall apart the minute you put it in the cassette player.

[Benito]

Cassettes coming back as the weirdest legacy tech that come to come back next

[Leo Laporte]

it's eight tracks and then we'll know

[Janko Rutgers]

that we are in the.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

I think it's the romance of the mixtape. Yeah, that's a highly personal, tangible artifact.

[Dan Patterson]

CDs.

[Benito]

CDs are so much better.

[Janko Rutgers]

But getting it to 45 minutes and then having a perfect transition when it switches or when you have to turn it over, that was such an art.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

So one of the things that I've among the teens, anthropologically speaking, they will use Spotify playlists as sort of temporary social watering holes where they'll collaborate on a play playlists together to send each other messages or be mean to each other or be nice to each other or to like process or like. Because my daughter Was recently making one with friends after a particularly harrowing test where they were all like, this is how I felt about that French test. But for them, Spotify is this really transient, liquid environment. And they are all super into the romance of fixed music media like vinyl. Well, vinyl is something that you collect for the aesthetics. For them, mixtapes are a way for you to demonstrate your personal flair in an artifact.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. Like the same way they don't do it on sets. They do on Spotify.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

They. No, Spotify is too fluid. Spotify is online, so they do it

[Dan Patterson]

on cassette very quickly. You know Spotify. Right. It's an ephemeral. They can come and go. A cassette. You have to listen and you can try to fast forward and rewind and fast forward and rewind.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

You can hand it to people. It's not just texting a link. There's so. You know how like CDs, so you. But they don't have CD burners, though. And it doesn't have that nostalgic pre Internet thing.

[Benito]

They don't have cassette players either. They don't have cassette players either.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they do now, thanks to Maxell.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now just. Can they get some cassettes? The other thing, bringing us full circle from the beginning of the show. When's the last time you recorded a song off the radio? Trying to avoid the DJ talking and 1994.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the true mixtape. Great movie. High Fidelity with John Cusack. It's all about mixtapes. Making the perfect mixtape.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, that was a great movie.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, great movie. If you want to learn about the ancient art of mixtapes, Dianko, it sounds like you made a few mixtapes in your time.

[Janko Rutgers]

I made quite a few mixtapes.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you woo your spouse with a mixtape?

[Janko Rutgers]

You know, that was a little too late at this point because that was

[Leo Laporte]

why we did it, isn't it? To get girls.

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean, we pretended to have other reasons, too.

[Leo Laporte]

It was one of the ways you could have a conversation with the music you chose.

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. A conversation with the music you chose and to extend your personality.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. As Burke says in our chat room, the true mixtape is about who it's for, who you're making it for. You don't make it for yourself. You're making it as a message to somebody.

[Benito]

And then you get to do all the art.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe somebody.

[Benito]

You have to do all the art and the life and all that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I want to make some mixtapes.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you so much. You guys are great. Dan Patterson, Blackbird AI. Things going well?

[Dan Patterson]

Yeah, things are good. Your health is scratchy. Yeah, yeah, health is good. My daughter had strep last week and so a little bit of it this week. Antibiotics are wonderful, but I didn't notice you sounded fine. A little scratchy here. Yeah. And the radio voice. Other stuff is. Yeah, that's right. That's right. No, it's wonderful to be here and wonderful to see you. Yonko and Lisa.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad your health is good. Dan had a little health scare and I was nervous. I'm really glad.

[Dan Patterson]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you'll find him senior director of content@Blackbird AI. Take a look at Raven. That's the new thing, right? With a. Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

We just released an API.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. So I can use my. My Claude to.

[Dan Patterson]

Oh, yeah, we have. I mean API feels like. Yeah, we have NCPS and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the hotness. The new hotness. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan Patterson]

We will talk to your Claude.

[Leo Laporte]

Your Claude and my Claude can talk.

[Dan Patterson]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been having so much fun getting my agent all hooked up installed on

[Dan Patterson]

your new Mac Mini.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's an old Mac Mini, but yeah. Thank you, Dan. Thanks to Schmeiser. Thank you for your Girl Scout cookies and your longtime friendship. Editor in [e-mail]. anything you would like to plug at all, please do.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Just say please. Please come read us. That will be. It's the thing, we're doing some great work taking a look at work, automating workflows at this point and what AI does well and where there are still opportunities to excel and how this will impact everything from the way we work together to the way that we interact with corporations.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you have a lot of AI stuff now.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

We do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is good.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Yeah. We're also beginning to focus a lot more on how the raw material of AI, I.e. data, is really going to end up shaping the ways in which it's used and the emerging problems that we're seeing with enterprise level data.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a big one. I know. Yeah, man.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Data discovery was already was a problem well before this and it's only become more amplified over time.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and with AI, garbage in, garbage out.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all about the quality of the data. The AI.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

See, you want to say mixtapes are classic and retro. Garbage in, garbage out is.

[Leo Laporte]

That's very retro.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Absolutely foundational.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you so much, Lisa Janko Records. Thank you. Everybody should subscribe LowPass. CC Janko is one of the. You know, he's still doing journaling journalism.

[Janko Rutgers]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing, man. That's older than mixtapes in a way.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great to see you. Subscribe Covers, ar, VR, streaming media every Thursday, lopass, cc. Thank you so much.

[Janko Rutgers]

And three year anniversary coming up. So really some fun stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, fantastic. That's so great. It's $8 a month. It's great. It's well worth it. And you have a lot of free, free posts too, so people don't.

[Janko Rutgers]

I do have free posts, yes. Yeah. So sign up for free and then if you like it, maybe you will pay.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do twit every Sunday, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live as we do it. Of course, if you're in the club, you can be in the Discord with us. Watch on the Discord or and anybody can do this, watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik. Six different platforms. But that's only for the live show. We only do it because it's fun to have a live audience, frankly. You can listen and watch anytime you want. We stream live, but then take the show. We put it on our website, Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Go to YouTube.com twit to find that and you can subscribe on your favorite podcast player, even Spotify if you want. And listen or watch at your your leisure. We thank the club TWIP members for making this show possible. We really appreciate your support. Invited you all to become a member of the club. We would love to have you. I guess that's all I need to say except thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another Twit is in the can.

[Lisa Schmeisser]

Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye.

[Dan Patterson]

He's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the Twit do on the Twit all right.

[Dan Patterson]

Doing the Twit baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the Twit all right.