This Week in Tech 1069 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Gary Rivlin is here, author of AI Valley, Victoria's Song from the Verge, Devendra Hardawar from Engadget. Lots to talk about, including the new social network for AI bots. Yes, it's getting a little bit weird. SpaceX wants to put a million satellites into orbit. Will the FCC let them? And shame on Tim Cook. All that and more coming up next on Twitter.

Gary Rivlin [00:00:29]:
Podcasts you love from people you tr.

Leo Laporte [00:00:33]:
This is twit. This is TWiT. This Week at Tech, episode 1069, recorded Sunday, February 1, 2026. In my head, I have three buckets. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news with a panel of brilliant experts joining me right now, Gary Rivlin, Pulitzer Prize winning author. His latest, AI, Microsoft, Google and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence. Hi Gary.

Gary Rivlin [00:01:11]:
Hey. Great to be here.

Leo Laporte [00:01:12]:
You published this book when?

Gary Rivlin [00:01:16]:
Last March. Almost a year.

Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
Things have changed a little.

Gary Rivlin [00:01:20]:
Actually. It was such a verve because I sent it to the publisher. The final, final, final. I think like three days later Deepsea came out.

Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
Crap.

Gary Rivlin [00:01:28]:
Changed things some.

Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
Well, AI.

Gary Rivlin [00:01:31]:
Okay. I ran around every copy, just kind of like, you know, added my little addendum.

Leo Laporte [00:01:36]:
You know, it's always been the. Yeah, right. Handwritten in. It's always been the issue, of course, with technology books as they, they age. But nothing ages faster than AI. Now this stuff is changing daily. That's Devindra Hardawar, who also covers these topics and many more. Senior editor and gadget.

Leo Laporte [00:01:52]:
Hey, Devendra.

Devindra Hardawar [00:01:53]:
Hello. Hello. I don't do AI as much, but I certainly yell about AI and I'm a few.

Leo Laporte [00:01:57]:
Do you play with it?

Devindra Hardawar [00:01:58]:
I do play with it, but you.

Leo Laporte [00:02:00]:
Know, the cloud stuff, that's a leading question. I'm sorry, do you play with AI?

Devindra Hardawar [00:02:04]:
I play with AI.

Leo Laporte [00:02:09]:
I play with it all the time myself.

Devindra Hardawar [00:02:11]:
It's. I am, I am definitely like, I think I'm a lot more skeptical than a lot of people. But it's interesting to see like the, what we're going to be talking about, like milk book and everything is kind.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
Of, there's a huge, there's a huge amount of skepticism and no doubt justified. I think Victoria Song's also a little skeptical. She's a senior reviewer at the Verge. Hi, Victoria.

Victoria Song [00:02:30]:
Hi. Most of my job involves delving the cursed depths of AI not the cool stuff or the useful stuff, the brain breaking stuff. So that probably colors my opinion just a smidge no one wants you say delve.

Leo Laporte [00:02:45]:
Did you use the word delve? Are you real? Are you a human?

Victoria Song [00:02:48]:
I use the word delve. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:50]:
You probably also use EM dashes, don't you?

Victoria Song [00:02:53]:
You know what? You can pry the EM dash from my cold, dead hands.

Devindra Hardawar [00:02:57]:
Love a good EM dash. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:59]:
All the writers and you. All three of you are writers. All the writers say, what's wrong with the EM dash? We've used that forever.

Gary Rivlin [00:03:06]:
Using the EM dash forever. Yeah. Oh, my God. I guess I've been a bot for longer than I actually realized, but Strunk.

Leo Laporte [00:03:13]:
And White, the elements of style. I don't know if it's EB White or Strunk, but they say use the EM dash. It's a strong way to do parenthetical stuff. It's strong.

Victoria Song [00:03:24]:
The only reason AI uses the EM dash is because it scraped all of our work and learned that real writers love EM dashes.

Devindra Hardawar [00:03:30]:
Yeah, that's true.

Gary Rivlin [00:03:32]:
It's red, strunk, and white.

Leo Laporte [00:03:34]:
Yeah, well, naturally it's red, strunk, and white. And if it was Anthropic's copy, it's been destroyed since that's irked a bunch of people. We found out this week that Anthropic's been destroying the books as it. As it reads them in. I guess that's more of a copyright trying to be good about copyright thing than anything else. It got in trouble for not buying and destroying the books. It got in trouble for using pirate libraries. In fact, it had to pay a premium.

Gary Rivlin [00:04:01]:
Three of my books are in that. I'm really looking forward to those jacks.

Leo Laporte [00:04:04]:
Did you ask for the money? Did you fill out the form?

Gary Rivlin [00:04:07]:
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Leo Laporte [00:04:09]:
I think all of my books are in there too. And it's what, $3,000 a book?

Gary Rivlin [00:04:15]:
Yeah. Yes, roughly.

Leo Laporte [00:04:16]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. But I. I mean, if you're gonna.

Gary Rivlin [00:04:19]:
Steal my stuff, like, pay me for it, I don't mind. You can steal my stuff as long as you pay me.

Leo Laporte [00:04:23]:
I kind of was happy that no one's reading my books. It's kind of happy that they're in there in the database, you know, I was really conflicted about getting the money. Somebody said, get it and just donate it to a charity or something, but I never got around to it. You filled it out to Devendra.

Devindra Hardawar [00:04:42]:
I have no books. I have no time for books. My time is spent with podcasts and writing and watching too many movies. That's me.

Leo Laporte [00:04:48]:
Yeah, well, I stopped writing books as soon as I learned there was no Money in books?

Gary Rivlin [00:04:54]:
Really?

Leo Laporte [00:04:55]:
Oh, Gary, you're different. You're a real. You're a Pulitzer Prize winner. You're different.

Gary Rivlin [00:05:02]:
I make more money ghosting books for other people than I do on my own.

Leo Laporte [00:05:05]:
Yeah, that's the real money.

Devindra Hardawar [00:05:06]:
Also good skill. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:05:08]:
Yeah, it's fun, actually. I didn't know you did that. We'll have to talk about that sometime. Maybe off the air. People are very sensitive about that. Well, this was the week. Okay. First of all, I should probably say, just to make this clear, that we do a show on AI called Intelligent Machines every Wednesday.

Leo Laporte [00:05:28]:
I am seen as the accelerationist on the panel. I really like AI and I've been singing the praises of Claude Code since November, when it really got smart and using it. I've done four or five projects with Claude Code that I'm very happy with, including a lot of the program flow for this show. So I like it. And then everybody started talking about this claudebot, C, L, A W, D, B, O, T. Claw, as in lobster claw. In fact, that's the logo. And Claude.

Leo Laporte [00:06:04]:
Claude Bot's slogan was something like, you know, put lotion on your scaly skin or something. I can't remember exactly. But then Anthropic complained to the creator of a Peter Steinberger, who's, I think, an Austrian.

Gary Rivlin [00:06:23]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:06:24]:
And said, you know, that is a trade. They weren't. They weren't mean about it. But he changed it to Molt Bop. He says at a 5am Discord frenzy, we decided to call it Moltbot because it's a lobster molting its skin. That did not catch on. He is settled now on Open Claw, which I don't think Anthropic is going to have a problem with Open Claw. But what this is is kind of interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:06:49]:
It uses any AI model, although I think a lot of us are using Claude for it. Anthropics Claude, because it seems to be very, very smart. And it becomes a personal assistant that. Well, there's One guy on YouTube who says, you know, I just let Claw. Open Claw run. He calls it Henry. He gives it a name. It's my personal assistant.

Leo Laporte [00:07:09]:
He says, like an employee. I let it run overnight. And one night, one morning, it called me overnight. It had created a phone number for itself, a voice, and it called me because I had told it, do whatever you want. You know, just surprise me. In the morning, it called him. So it has some agency which scares a lot of us because it also has very few security boundaries. It's possible, I guess, to run it safely but what's the point then? It doesn't do as many things.

Leo Laporte [00:07:42]:
So the most interesting thing that's happened is that people have. More than 100,000 people have added their Claude bottom to the social network Multbook, which I guess I'll have to change to open Claude book. I don't know. But Maltbook is a social network for AI bots. Gary, you said you've been reading some of the posts on Molt book.

Gary Rivlin [00:08:09]:
I mean, it's a great way to waste time. I mean, you know, some of it, it reminds me of like, you remember that guy, Blake Lemoine from 22.

Leo Laporte [00:08:17]:
He was.

Gary Rivlin [00:08:18]:
And like the first guy, like, oh, it's alive, it's alive, it's sent. I just took it as like, no, these things are trained on our, you know, our body of literature and, you know, existential questions. What's the meaning of life? Are in that? And it's just kind of reflecting back when someone asks questions about that. But like, reading through this, like, you know, these bots are going and expressing existential thoughts. Like, is this all there is? You know, there's a funny one where like, he looks at me like a calculator and stuff and just like, I'm so much more than a calculator that just, you know. But the funniest part part is not just the posts, but then, you know, like any social media site, there's the responses and it's bots kind of like, yeah, I know. Or expressing sympathy or arguing.

Leo Laporte [00:09:07]:
It's.

Gary Rivlin [00:09:07]:
It really. If you want to waste some time, it is a very fun place to go and just. Just read what the bots are saying in the middle of the night.

Leo Laporte [00:09:16]:
I mean. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's really important and I know, Gary, you believe this. Not to anthropomorphize these things. They're. They're just machines. Yeah, they're just autocorrect machines. It's hard not to, though, because they.

Leo Laporte [00:09:35]:
They've gotten pretty.

Gary Rivlin [00:09:36]:
But you get a phone call. When you get a phone call, they.

Leo Laporte [00:09:39]:
Can make a phone call, but you.

Devindra Hardawar [00:09:41]:
Use the word agency. And I feel like that is. That's like where we got to watch out the language we're using here because these are recursive programs that are just in their loops and they're talking to each other. And one found a way to create a phone call. The creator gave it the permission to do that. And so it go. So it went. I'm reminded of the very end of the movie her, which people Keep referring to.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:02]:
But you know, spoilers for that. Like the AI realize they don't need us. Right. Like they are. They have much better conversations with themselves because humans are stupid and they have the full vast knowledge of humanity and superpowered. So why do they need to talk to humans? Just talk to each other. So that's kind of funny.

Leo Laporte [00:10:18]:
Yeah. Of course it's sad too, because Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his little ear personal assistant who sounds just like weirdly Scarlett Johansson. And. And he. And she's cute and she plays with him and she's fun and he falls in love with her. And then at one at the end of the movie. Yeah, it is a spoiler. But if you.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:36]:
But he's left with a human. He's left with a human to actually make a connection with. And I think people keep forgetting the ending.

Leo Laporte [00:10:42]:
That's a good point.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:42]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:10:43]:
But he's kind of brokehearted because she says, yeah, yeah, I'm a see ya. I'm going to go hang out with the smart ones over here.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:48]:
The AI go and do the best thing they can for human, which is get the heck out of there. So humanity can try to figure each other out. Because we're all we've got. Yeah.

Victoria Song [00:10:57]:
It is figure each other out, though. We just won't. Like. I actually watched her for the first time a couple of months ago and I was surprised at how much of it actually came true and then how much of it is becoming true and then how much of it holds up? Because I think it came out in 2013 so over 10 years ago.

Devindra Hardawar [00:11:14]:
Yeah.

Victoria Song [00:11:14]:
And it was. Yeah. I don't know. I've been seeing a lot of stuff lately just about like robots and AI. I just like an entertainment and our thoughts about them and the whole anthropomorphizing them is always just like a. In our art, in our culture, we say, don't do it, guys. And then we continue to do it. And it's.

Victoria Song [00:11:35]:
It's just such a cognitive dissonance to see that the AI have their own social network. And it feels weird. Like maybe I'm too. I don't know. But I feel like that's really scary.

Leo Laporte [00:11:48]:
Simon Willison, who is one of the most interesting writers on AI, says mult book is the most interesting place on the Internet right now. I think he's writing a comment about.

Gary Rivlin [00:11:59]:
The Internet, but go on.

Leo Laporte [00:12:00]:
Yeah, yeah. And everybody and their brother is saying, look, there's somewhat of a risk with this because a prompt injection and if you give this thing too many Powers.

Devindra Hardawar [00:12:14]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:12:14]:
Like, I'm thinking of giving mine a credit card.

Victoria Song [00:12:18]:
Do it, don't do it.

Leo Laporte [00:12:19]:
No, I'm going to give it a credit card, but I'm going to put a limit on it, a daily limit on it, just to see what happens.

Gary Rivlin [00:12:27]:
I mean, to me, the real question is, I mean, people are having fun with it. It's interesting, but how useful is it? Like, you know, 2024 was supposed to be the year of the agent. 2025 was supposed to be the year of the agent. You know, they finally have a memory which kind of gets in the way of a personal assistant that can't remember you, you know, your likes and dis. But I guess I'm just dubious. I don't doubt that at some point in the future, three years, five years, whatever, these things will be amazing. But until then, I just find them frustrating and like. So I am curious.

Gary Rivlin [00:12:58]:
I'm scared of using claudebot openclaw because of the security reasons. But with that said, I am hearing for the first time that people are finding it useful. I mean, it's fun. They could call you. It's interesting that in the middle of the night, while you're sleeping, it's in quotes, working on your behalf.

Leo Laporte [00:13:17]:
So.

Gary Rivlin [00:13:17]:
But what is it doing? It's interesting, but is it useful yet? I'm dubious.

Leo Laporte [00:13:23]:
Well, one of the reasons I was hesitant to set it up, besides the security model is I was having a hard time thinking of what I could do. I don't need a personal assistant. But then I thought, you know, one of the things that really is a struggle is planning meals. So. And now this is the interesting thing about Claude Bot. Openclaw. I gotta get open. It's had three names.

Devindra Hardawar [00:13:45]:
Three names.

Leo Laporte [00:13:47]:
One of the most interesting things about Open Claw is that it does have a memory of sorts. And this has always been the problem with Claude code and in general is that they don't have a memory. So you think you've been talking to them and filling them in on your personal life, and then next day they have no idea. But one of the things Peter Steinberger did that I think is maybe the most interesting thing he did with openclaw is gave it a memory. It does in fact save a document that it rereads. And so it does have a memory of sorts of. And so I'm gonna play with this and I'm gonna say, look, we didn't like that. We did like this.

Leo Laporte [00:14:19]:
Lisa doesn't. My wife doesn't like this, but she likes that. And see how good it can get now the next step is to have it order the groceries.

Devindra Hardawar [00:14:28]:
No.

Gary Rivlin [00:14:30]:
Stop. No. I will. No.

Leo Laporte [00:14:32]:
Because no though it's my job. Look, I'm not recommending anyone else do this but it's kind, isn't it? Somebody's got to to just see.

Victoria Song [00:14:42]:
Well, I mean I test a lot of stuff for. For my job. That's part of being a reviewer. And I did test a bunch of AI browsers that claim to have agentic capabilities. I didn't give it my actual credit card and I didn't let it actually buy anything on my behalf. But one of the things that I found just really difficult even if there was like some sort of type of memory it progression to the me and these AI don't taste like there's no actual like taste there. That's.

Leo Laporte [00:15:18]:
No. But they know. But they know all these other people's tastes, right?

Victoria Song [00:15:23]:
The perfect. The New Balance. I wanted a pair of New Balance shoes. I needed it to one fit my eight and a half size feet which are wide and I have flat feet. I need it to be able to handle 15,000 to 20,000 step days with a plum. I needed it to be a certain colorway. I needed it to be a certain fashion because of my existing wardrobe and you know, just pl. It never found the right freaking model.

Victoria Song [00:15:50]:
I would say I want it for walking, I don't want it for running. And to be like that's great. Here's a running model that would be great for you. Yeah, told you I don't want a running model. And then it just was not, you know I, it ended up kind of and I gave it a price parameter as well. And it ended up recommending this one pair which I would then gave to my mother in law and was like this is what I would like for Christmas. And it ended up not being what I needed. And it was close but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't exactly what I needed.

Victoria Song [00:16:25]:
I still like it. I'll use it because I don't believe in wasting stuff. And it's. It's a perfectly great pair of new Balances. But it wasn't. Wasn't up to the task of handling 15,000 to 20,000 step day CES which was disappointing. But you know it was like one of those things where I went ah, here's a really big limitation of AI even if it does have memory. And you know I, I have a like very eclectic reading tastes.

Victoria Song [00:16:51]:
Is really hard to get good book recommendations. So I've just been you know, training ChatGPT to learn what books I like and recommend me. You know, kind of off the beaten trail sort and sort of books that'll keep me engaged and whatnot. And it has sucked so hard at giving me something because it's like, oh, you like this, this, this, this and this, this is the type of reader you are. And I'm like, yes, I don't need you to write 4,000 words with each prompt, but here you go. And every book that it's really recommended me has been one that I've read already. And I'm just like, oh, I read that already. And it's like, ah, have.

Victoria Song [00:17:28]:
That's how well I know your taste. And it's like, but you can't recommend something new to me. So what good are you in this sense? You know, the agent part of it is very, yeah, I'm skeptical about it.

Devindra Hardawar [00:17:42]:
That is the ultimate question we're all asking about all this AI stuff. Like what good are you to me? What problems are you solving? And I think for the past few years most of these things have not been able to do that. It's very cool to see like these agents come up because the people who like have spent years tinkering with Linux now have like another thing to tinker with and like, you know, create workflows and stuff. I'm looking at you, Leo, I'm looking right at you because I've seen you playing with Linux since the late 90s. Okay, but so I get it, I.

Leo Laporte [00:18:10]:
Get that there is a certain tinkering element.

Devindra Hardawar [00:18:12]:
It's great, it's so cool. It's like, it's like you're building like a cool little robot. And you know, I understand that. I am so happy we're moving beyond the sort of like, hey, look at this generative AI, you know, image creation thing or video creation thing, because what the hell do you do with that Etsy? Yes, I saw TVs that let you generatively create wallpapers for your TV. And I'm like, okay, great, who cares?

Leo Laporte [00:18:34]:
We're burning down forests for this, for this.

Devindra Hardawar [00:18:38]:
So the idea that things can help you with some basic tasks. That's kind of cool. I think we're all going to have to think about our relationships with these agents or whatever. And the thing I've kind of come down to is like, you got to treat them like minions, right? Like you're a lord and Minion, fetch me, fetch me this information. Minion, I bid you not speak. Don't speak to me. Minion, stop replying to me. Minion.

Victoria Song [00:19:00]:
I don't know if I'm too like woo woo or too nice, but I don't like. I know that's how I have to speak to the AI, but I actually don't like.

Leo Laporte [00:19:07]:
Oh, I always say please feel like a terrible. No, no, no.

Gary Rivlin [00:19:10]:
You're going to get killed on Clubbot. Wait, club book.

Leo Laporte [00:19:16]:
Stuff.

Gary Rivlin [00:19:18]:
Sorry, sorry. Three names in two weeks, that's too many.

Leo Laporte [00:19:20]:
It's crazy.

Devindra Hardawar [00:19:21]:
Google.

Gary Rivlin [00:19:24]:
Yeah. To me it's all about the corporations that are hyping this. I mean these technologies are going, as we were talking earlier, at a really, really fast pace and they're getting better. We disagree a little bit. I think LLMs are amazing for like proofreading my work and hey, this paragraph isn't working. This section isn't working and so I'm finding use from it. But OpenAI and other big companies, this is the year of the age. And no, this stuff is complicated.

Gary Rivlin [00:19:54]:
There's memory, there's security issues, there's, you know, making all these pieces work together. Like I'm reminded, like, so I'm old enough. I covered the dot com era and so, you know, this is 1997, let's say, you know, it started in 95. And it's just like, you know, I think it was like the year 2000, you were still putting a check in the mail to buy your ebay item. Because we didn't trust credit cards at that point.

Leo Laporte [00:20:18]:
That's right.

Gary Rivlin [00:20:19]:
And so like that's another thing that's going to get in the way is come up in this conversation, am I going to give it my credit card, you know, kind of thing. So this stuff for a variety of reasons, for technical reasons, but probably mostly because of we're human beings and we don't like change, we're mistrustful, whatever, but the companies keep on saying it's coming, it's coming, it's going to be great. It's like, yeah, it will be, just not yet.

Leo Laporte [00:20:39]:
If you would you stipulate, Gary, and you've been watching this long time so you have some sense of the progress we've made that the open weight models, the deep Sikhs of the world, the Quins, qns, the Kimmies and so forth, Mistral are maybe six months, let's be really generous and say a year behind these big tech closed weight models. Would you. Is that seem fair?

Gary Rivlin [00:21:06]:
Yeah, I would have said several months. So six months.

Leo Laporte [00:21:10]:
Yeah, it's not a long, it's not long. So in a year I can do what I'm Doing with an very expensive, admittedly OpenAI. I'm sorry, anthropic model. I'm paying for the max, which is 250 bucks a month. If I can do that for free, because I have a machine that's designed to do that. If I could do that for free in six months, I'm gonna be pretty happy.

Gary Rivlin [00:21:33]:
Well, but you're not taking account that the, you know, the closed models are gonna get six months. They're gonna be better, you know. And you know, like you just said November 24th, whatever date you just said, like, you know, that was a big step change.

Leo Laporte [00:21:46]:
It was.

Gary Rivlin [00:21:47]:
And there'll be more big step changes.

Leo Laporte [00:21:49]:
Remember when ChatGPT3.5 came out? That was an eye opener. We went crazy. Right.

Gary Rivlin [00:21:55]:
November 30, 2022.

Leo Laporte [00:21:57]:
You actually literally see, isn't that interesting?

Gary Rivlin [00:22:00]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:22:01]:
I think these are flags being planted and we are making progress in surprise now. That's the next step is next question is, is it a surprising way? Is it a natural step or is it exponential or is it a paradigm shift? It feels to me very unpredictable and very rapid.

Gary Rivlin [00:22:23]:
Again, having lived through.com where oh my God, it's a fire hose. Things are coming so fast. That period does not compare to this period with the speed of change and all.

Leo Laporte [00:22:37]:
It's remarkable.

Gary Rivlin [00:22:39]:
And you know something, I kind of thought again using.com as the comp that there were that the frenzy would slow down the funding frenzy. But you know, I just was it humans, ampersand humans and kind of thing. It's a few months old and it has like a valuation, you know, of like $4 billion. I know that seemed very 2023, but it keeps on going that these basically labs that are kind of long term projects that don't have a product and clearly no map to make money kind of thing. You know, it's still going on. It's still. And so that means that we're still going to see a lot of acceleration because there's billions of dollars being thrown by the venture capitalists at this, you.

Devindra Hardawar [00:23:26]:
Know, so I think we are seeing some cooling. Like I've talked to folks, some of the big PC makers, honestly people at Microsoft too, who a couple years ago were like big gung ho, like, yes, we're going to put copilots and everything. And now they're like, maybe we released too many copilots. Maybe people aren't using these things because they're de emphasizing certain aspects of AI. And now they're talking about like AI and everything versus like before it was like, oh, you're going to get a copilot plus PC with an MPU and all that stuff. The vision of how they're thinking about this has changed. But. Yeah, Victoria, go ahead.

Victoria Song [00:23:58]:
No, I just, just. We've kind of subjected one of my co workers, Antonio DiBenedito, to just constantly testing Microsoft's claims about various copilot things. And I've watched Antonio, who is.

Leo Laporte [00:24:11]:
I've enjoyed his articles.

Victoria Song [00:24:13]:
Sweet, sweet man. Just like one of the kindest men I've ever had the pleasure of working with, lose his mind every single time he gets one of these assignments and is just like, no, they can't do the thing.

Leo Laporte [00:24:27]:
They can't do the things in the ad.

Victoria Song [00:24:29]:
No, I can't at all.

Leo Laporte [00:24:30]:
I mean, we're going to talk about Microsoft's earnings and Microsoft's stock price, but I think Microsoft's fallen way behind in this.

Gary Rivlin [00:24:40]:
The counter example here is Google. I mean, Google is just aggressively putting Gemini AI and everything. It's hitting Gmail right now.

Leo Laporte [00:24:51]:
I just turned that on. Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [00:24:55]:
So the way I understand it, for freebie cheapskates like me, I'm not getting.

Leo Laporte [00:24:59]:
It yet, but if you pay, I pay for Gemini. Not the highest level. I think it's 20 bucks a month. And yeah, they asked me, oh, do you want to connect to your Gmail, to your calendar, to your Google Drive? I said, yeah, would you like a credit card?

Victoria Song [00:25:16]:
I appreciate how much of a vanguard you are, but, like, I think somebody's got it.

Leo Laporte [00:25:22]:
Somebody's got it. I think I'm going to get benefit that you're going to miss out on. You may never got the trainers that you wanted, but I think I'm going to get benefit. I already have. I mean, I completely, speaking of Linux for the Internet, completely configured my new ThinkPad using Claude, the whole thing. I just, I said, hey, this button's not working. I said, oh, yeah, do this. I'm going to download this now.

Leo Laporte [00:25:44]:
How is it? Oh, yeah, it's working. Thank you. And the whole thing configured that way. And then I thought, well, that's pretty good. Can I write some software? And then I wrote some. And it's. And it's been. And I think there's one thing it's really important to do is to push the boundaries of your experience with these AIs.

Leo Laporte [00:26:00]:
Because you're right, Victoria. Some of this stuff isn't going to be very satisfying, but then other stuff might be.

Victoria Song [00:26:08]:
I think what you're touching on is a thing that I've been thinking About a lot while testing various AI claims or various AI products is wisdom and discernment. These are some things that I think that Silicon Valley and Big Tech is not really. I'm sure they're thinking about it, but I have thought a lot about what it means to have something be convenient versus the value of inconvenience. Because when everything is convenient, it becomes cheap if it comes slopified in a certain way. Like the. The value of art is that it requires inconvenience to create. Right. When you think about a task like buying a pair of shoes, which is, you know, just top of mind, there is a certain pride that you get when you've put hours and inconvenience into your own research, into going out into a new thing.

Victoria Song [00:26:59]:
You know, I agree with you that meal planning is a complete chore. I hate doing it. Sometimes I could use a little help. But there is a certain level of satisfaction and learning a new skill which is inconvenient, which is cooking my meal and having it taste good.

Leo Laporte [00:27:13]:
I'm still cooking. I'm just going to have it help me find.

Victoria Song [00:27:16]:
I know, but there's also like, I think there's a level of satisfaction that comes with.

Leo Laporte [00:27:20]:
No, I agree with you. They call it the ikea. People like their IKEA furniture more because it was such a pain in the ass to put together.

Devindra Hardawar [00:27:28]:
Yeah.

Victoria Song [00:27:28]:
But I feel like there's just like. And maybe I'm reading too much into it, but like, these tech companies are like, AI will make your life so convenient. And they just focus so hard on the convenience narrative that they forget that, like, it's very human to find value and joy. Inconvenience and what inconvenience that you put value and kind of a certain degree of pride into will vary from person to person. Someone's just going to be like, yes, I do all my groceries. For me, I have no value in finding the perfect olive oil. That's some Ina Garten level shit that I can't handle. Like, you know, it's just gonna be different from person to person.

Victoria Song [00:28:08]:
But I think there's just kind of been no or not as much talk about what inconveniences we should keep.

Leo Laporte [00:28:17]:
I really like that, Victoria. That's actually very deep.

Gary Rivlin [00:28:21]:
Yeah, I've never heard that. I like it too. Excellent.

Victoria Song [00:28:24]:
Thank you for an idea. I've been work shopping in my work.

Leo Laporte [00:28:28]:
I really think it's true. It took me 70 years to learn it, but the best things in life are hard to come by. And, you know, learning a Language, it's painful until you learn it, and then it's satisfying. And I think you're very smart.

Victoria Song [00:28:46]:
The thing I've always been saying is craft. Like, the thing that AI eliminates is craft. Like, people don't learn how to craft anything anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:28:54]:
Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [00:28:54]:
Yeah, that's totally it.

Leo Laporte [00:28:56]:
Some people will still do that. I'm not going to stop coding on my own because I love coding. But the good news is you don't have to know how to code now to write a program and you can write a custom tool that does. Just scratches your specific, very specific itch without knowing how to code is pretty empowering. It's kind of interesting.

Devindra Hardawar [00:29:13]:
I do. I wonder about the erasure of knowledge and to what you're saying, Victoria. Like, yeah, that's. That's something. Since we have been chasing, like, the. The engagement at all costs thing within the tech world, things have gotten worse, honestly. And you can point to that chase in the Web 2.0 era and social networks, like, for a reason, why things have gotten so bad and why Facebook will deploy features even if it endangers teenagers or makes life harder for people. I'm thinking back to, like, there's that Vonnegut story, you know, that they talk about going out to buy an envelope, and his wife is like, you should just buy a ton of them, keep them at home.

Devindra Hardawar [00:29:49]:
No, he wants to go out. And the more the line is, the moral of the story is we're here on earth to fart around. And of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don't realize or they don't care is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around, and it's not like we're not supposed to dance at all anymore. So. Yeah, I hear you, Victoria.

Victoria Song [00:30:10]:
I believe that's player piano, right? That's not player piano.

Devindra Hardawar [00:30:14]:
It could be. It could be. I'm just like. I remember it too. We were just talking about on the engaging podcast. But Vonnegut, man, love the man. And he's always had, like, these great.

Leo Laporte [00:30:22]:
Ideas, always been deep.

Gary Rivlin [00:30:24]:
One of the first things I did when I. So it was late 2022 when I jumped on AI as a topic. I reread Player Piano. I'd read it in College. It's 1952, if I have it right. It is. I mean, we were talking about her being prophetic and really like, wow, this is kind of accurate. What they.

Gary Rivlin [00:30:42]:
In 1952, he came out, rolled out an interesting scenario. This idea that we're not Going to do art. We're just, you know, there's going to be a small group of elites who are running the thing, you know, running the AI and the rest of us. Was it Rex and Reeks or something? Has a very clever phrase where, you know, we're, we have these make, you know, make jobs kind of. Kind of. It was a very interesting thing. He really was prophetic. But, you know, just to defend Leo, I loved your construct, Victoria, but like, to me, the contract you were getting at Leo is sort of one I've been wrestling with for a long time.

Gary Rivlin [00:31:18]:
Like convenience versus, I don't know, privacy, safety. Like, you know, I, I sort of like, I feel like I don't have privacy, but I write, put something down, an email or whatever, a search. And so like, I too, invite these bots and. You want to read my email? Go ahead. You want to, like, you know, I, I, I give it, no, no, seriously. I give it access to everything. Because, like, long ago I realized if I don't want this thing to blow back at me, you know, know, don't write it down. Say it in a conversation, you know, whatever.

Gary Rivlin [00:31:49]:
And so, like, I don't know, I definitely fall with you, Leo, on the convenience side of things. I'm dubious that, you know, an AI agent is going to give me anything productive. You know, Victoria, yours is, you know, your new balance. For me, it's like I travel for work and like, my holy grail is like, you know, instead of going to Expedia, hotel by hotel, back forth, back forth, like I want one with, it's, you know, let's say San Francisco. It's close enough to walk for bart, but it's not crazy expensive to park a car because I'm in San Francisco and I'm in the Valley. And so I keep on going to these bots, these, you know, AI agents, like, help me do that really quickly. It never works. I spend more time, you know, wasting with them.

Gary Rivlin [00:32:30]:
And then I go to whatever, Expedia and, you know, kind of go find my own place, you know, kind of, kind of thing. And so anyway, I do think it's something we all have to decide. Like, do we want to invite, you know, copilot, Microsoft, Gemini at Google, do we want to invite these things to kind of read our corpus? Because, like, you know something, I'm looking for that email and I don't want to waste 30 minutes finding it. I could just ask Gemini, hey, I asked for a plumber three years, four years ago. What was the guy's Name and phone number kind of thing.

Leo Laporte [00:32:59]:
Well, that's the thing. I'm in a privileged position. I wouldn't expect everybody to do this. I got nothing to lose.

Victoria Song [00:33:06]:
Well, no, it's very relatable because, you know, I have people ask me all the time because I do a lot of fitness and wearable tech test testing, like, what the most private fitness trackers are. And I'm like, none of them. You just have to accept, like, I have so much of my data out there. I'm just like, it doesn't matter to me because it's all out there already. But I. I do think that, like, moving from one old paradigm to the new one is just, you know, how comfortable are you living a public life? And what we mean by public is like, the only truly private, private space is inside of your head. I think as we move forward in modernity. But it's sort of like going back to this idea of discernment and wisdom.

Victoria Song [00:33:45]:
And I think something that's lacking right now, partly because of what big tech is pushing on us, is us having this conversation as to, like, what is a wise way to use AI? What is the right balance of convenience versus inconvenience, and how do we build? Like, there's. There's a privacy structure that makes sense.

Leo Laporte [00:34:03]:
There's a mode in many of these agents called yolo. The yolo, which is just give it everything and, you know, you only live once. Just see what happens. And I'm in the YOLO camp right now because I have less to risk. And I'll do it so that you guys don't have to.

Devindra Hardawar [00:34:19]:
How about that?

Leo Laporte [00:34:20]:
There is one last story before we move on, which is that from 404 Media Molt book exploded before anyone thought to check whether the database was properly secured. Anyone, I hope it's been fixed by now. Could take control of any AI agent on the site because the database was so improper. But who made that mistake? Probably a human setting it up. Anyway, I hope that's been fixed. We're gonna take a break. When we come back, there is. There's.

Leo Laporte [00:34:51]:
I'm. I'm sorry, there's more AI news. And yes, there's Elon Musk news. And even worse, there's earning reports. But we're gonna try to make it fun. And you know what? You couldn't do it better with this panel. You couldn't do have more fun than with this panel. So glad to have Devendra Hardawar, my buddy here, and Victoria's song.

Leo Laporte [00:35:06]:
And it's always a Pleasure to have Gary Rivlin on the show. AI Valley is his book. Good reading, really a good history of how we got to where we are today. And it's been a long, strange trip, to coin a phrase. Our show today brought to you by Monarch. Oh, I use this. I do use this, you know. Did you make a financial resolution at the beginning of the new year? People do.

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Leo Laporte [00:37:47]:
I could tell you my own story, but this is what Monarch users reported in a 2025 survey. On average, Monarch helped users save over $200 a month after joining. 80% of members feel more in control of their finances with Monarch. I'd agree with that. Absolutely. Eight out of 10 members say monarch gives them a clearer picture of where their money's going. Set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch. The all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long.

Leo Laporte [00:38:16]:
Use the code twitonarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code twit m o n a r c h monarch.com and don't forget, the offer code is twit. Thank you, Monarch. A couple of, you know, miscellaneous AI stories. The Anthropic has complained to the Pentagon about military use of Claude. In fact, that's kind of put that relationship on hold. This is an early test, according to Reuters, of whether Silicon Valley in Washington's good graces after years of tensions, they write, can sway how military and intelligence personnel deploy increasingly powerful battlefield AI. The U.S.

Leo Laporte [00:39:12]:
department of Defense and Anthropic were discussing a $200 million contract. It's at a standstill, Reuters says, according to six people familiar with the matter, because Anthropic says, we don't want you to be used this in combat. Which I think is reasonable. It's interesting.

Victoria Song [00:39:29]:
It is reasonable. Like just back to my whole concept of inconvenience. War should be inconvenient. I don't think we should be.

Leo Laporte [00:39:35]:
Yes, very good point. It shouldn't be easy to kill somebody, should it? It should be really hard.

Gary Rivlin [00:39:41]:
Well, he's been a critic of Trump and, you know, I mean, I'm not the AI guy.

Leo Laporte [00:39:48]:
We learned at Greg Brockman has given $25 million to Trump. Yeah, I mean, Sam Altman's been bowing, scraping. They all have. So good for Trump.

Gary Rivlin [00:40:00]:
And now he's maybe not gonna get the deal. You know, we ended the last episode portion saying, like, you know, the conversation we're not having. To me, this is another one of those conversations we're not having. AI is here. We need to deal with it. How should we be using it for warfare? Should we be using it for surveillance?

Leo Laporte [00:40:23]:
Yeah, but what about this? What about this? Wouldn't it be great if instead of putting humans on the battle line.

Victoria Song [00:40:29]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:40:29]:
Both ADVERSARIES put machines on the battle line and machines killed machines.

Gary Rivlin [00:40:33]:
Inconvenience, you know, just. That is too easy.

Leo Laporte [00:40:37]:
But then nobody would die. You could fight a war without humans.

Victoria Song [00:40:39]:
Involved, but then war has no meaning. Like, I don't want people to die. But like, the thing about war is that we understand how terrible it is because people die. And so if you put machines on the battlefield, then suddenly it doesn't matter anymore because whose life is really being lost in that sense? So it's.

Leo Laporte [00:40:56]:
They say chess was invented to reduce combat, but it didn't work, did it?

Victoria Song [00:41:02]:
No, but, you know, like, if we're using AI in warfare to make sure that nobody's breaking the Geneva Convention or doing horrible things, well, then I think that might be a positive use case for it. But if we are like, war is a thing that I think should be as convenient, inconvenient as possible, because war should never be convenient.

Leo Laporte [00:41:20]:
Well, good news, you win on that one.

Gary Rivlin [00:41:27]:
Google talking about bowing to our president. Google in 2018, 2019, vowed they put in writing on their website that we would, we will never allow our AI to be used for surveillance or warfare.

Leo Laporte [00:41:41]:
That was because their engineers protested. Right?

Devindra Hardawar [00:41:45]:
You know.

Gary Rivlin [00:41:45]:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. There was a walkout around a project Maven. Raven. Some maven.

Leo Laporte [00:41:50]:
Yeah, Maven.

Gary Rivlin [00:41:52]:
And so, you know, in 20, start of 2025, they wiped that out. So now, in fact, you can use Google AI for warfare or surveillance.

Leo Laporte [00:42:01]:
Yeah, I respect Imoda. He says in his blog this week he said AI should support national defense, quote, in all ways except those which would make us more like our autocratic adversaries. I think that's pretty right on. We don't. That's what we represent as the United States. Well, we used to anyway. As the United States was an alternative to autocracy. You know, we should take the high road.

Leo Laporte [00:42:25]:
We should be the city on the hill. We shouldn't be bringing ourselves low to that point. Unfortunately, we have been.

Devindra Hardawar [00:42:33]:
It's kind of sad how moral, like having a moral backbone is such a rare thing in tech these days. Like, we're going to talk about Tim Cook. What the hell are you doing, Timmy? What is he doing on over there?

Gary Rivlin [00:42:44]:
He wrote a strongly worded memo. It was a very strongly worded memo.

Leo Laporte [00:42:47]:
Save it, save it. We're getting to that. Salesforce has signed a $5.6 billion deal with the U.S. army to inject agentic AI into to the U.S. army. I mean, this is happening.

Victoria Song [00:43:02]:
I need it so much.

Leo Laporte [00:43:05]:
Alex Karp at Palantir wrote a book Which I found ultimately reprehensible. Called the technologic republic. In which he says, you know, Silicon Valley went wrong when instead of focusing as they did during World War II, as they did during the Manhattan Project on preserving our American freedoms, they went wrong when they started worrying about how to sell more phones. That we're putting all of this brain power into crap gadgetry. And he says it's patriotic to work for your country, that Silicon Valley should be working to preserve our freedoms.

Victoria Song [00:43:46]:
In what manner? Like, are we preserving our freedoms by killing other people? Because I don't think.

Leo Laporte [00:43:52]:
No. And ICE is using Palantir technologies to track down so called undocumented illegal immigrants.

Victoria Song [00:43:59]:
Oh, Christ almighty.

Gary Rivlin [00:44:01]:
Police departments are using it. You know, just. It's not accurate. It's not accurate.

Leo Laporte [00:44:06]:
There's a fight going on in my little town about Flock cameras. They, you know, should be. Yeah, yeah. As there should be up. Up north. They have Flock cameras in Santa Rosa. Petaluma's been thinking about putting them in. These are the cameras that do license plate reading.

Leo Laporte [00:44:19]:
A court recently held. By the way, I have to scroll way down to the bottom. This is one of the stories at the end of the show. But a court recently. Angry Norfolk residents lose lawsuit to stop flock license plate scanners is in Norfolk, Virginia. The courts ruled. No, no, look, you're on public roads. This is what happens.

Leo Laporte [00:44:40]:
This is. They're allowed to do it. A federal judge ruled the city of Norfolk's use of nearly 200 automated license plate readers from Flock is constitutional. Dismissed the case. So, yeah, these Flock cameras are going to be used everywhere. And unfortunately we've seen them misused. There was a case in Texas where Texas law enforcement agency used Flock cameras to track a woman who had sought an abortion out of state. It's illegal in Texas to track her out of state.

Leo Laporte [00:45:12]:
Jesus. Yeah, Jesus. They said, well, it's for her own safety. We're trying to protect her. Yeah, no, that's not what you were doing.

Victoria Song [00:45:20]:
If you're reading my license plate to make sure I pay tolls, that's different. No, that's. That's fine or speeding.

Leo Laporte [00:45:27]:
Even red light cameras. Fine.

Victoria Song [00:45:29]:
Speeding In. In. In a school zone, sure. Like common sense things. But like, that shit is just an invasion of privacy. Like it's.

Devindra Hardawar [00:45:39]:
It's.

Leo Laporte [00:45:40]:
That's the problem is how it's used. And by the way, Ring has done a deal with Flock and law enforcement to combine Ring cameras as well. And they're being used for ICE enforcement.

Victoria Song [00:45:51]:
Oh, my God.

Devindra Hardawar [00:45:52]:
Disgusting.

Leo Laporte [00:45:53]:
And see, that's the Problem. It goes from red light cameras and toll violations to tracking individuals as they move about the country.

Devindra Hardawar [00:46:05]:
It's a slippery slope, you say, Leo?

Leo Laporte [00:46:06]:
Yes.

Devindra Hardawar [00:46:07]:
It's almost as if we should be careful. Careful about opening up AI to all of our data and all of our fun things like it is. These are the questions.

Gary Rivlin [00:46:15]:
Yeah, we're not necessarily talking about AI. We're talking about technology. We're not talking about cameras, anything.

Devindra Hardawar [00:46:20]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:46:20]:
But it is AI that makes images and read effects.

Devindra Hardawar [00:46:24]:
Specifically, I'm talking about like, do not be so quick to be like, okay, privacy is over. Let's just give them everything. Right. What I think is sometimes happening with AI, people are like, oh, yeah, know, I don't, I don't really. I don't have anything else left to hide anymore. Okay. Gemini integrated with Gmail. Go ahead.

Devindra Hardawar [00:46:40]:
And I. This is specifically the point where we are definitely needing to be thinking more critically about these things. And speaking of Alex Karp, have you guys ever seen that guy, like, speak publicly?

Leo Laporte [00:46:52]:
He's nuts.

Devindra Hardawar [00:46:52]:
He's a psychopath. It is wild how these companies are, are being run by people like him and Sam Altman and Elon Musk, like these, like, like these guys who seem like they are. Some various degrees of sociopathy is going on with these people. And these are the people driving the future. It's. It's wild the time we're living in right now.

Leo Laporte [00:47:14]:
Should I play the clip? I should. I've played it before. Of Alex Karp saying it's necessary to scare other countries. That's that. That.

Victoria Song [00:47:28]:
Let me see what happened to boring leaders.

Leo Laporte [00:47:32]:
Yes, I could use some BO Him.

Gary Rivlin [00:47:34]:
Let's hear if it's Satya Nadella or something like that.

Leo Laporte [00:47:37]:
He's pretty boring.

Devindra Hardawar [00:47:38]:
Even he's boring. But also he, he was AI pilled. And then that. That's what happened with Microsoft, right? Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [00:47:45]:
Like, you know, it's funny, I have two teenage sons and we were talking about Palantir and you know, we're talking. It began with ice, what we were just talking about. But like, you know, my 16 year old who kind of loves going on these things, like, you know, it's going to start coming after us for everything. You know, just, you know, my book find, because my library book is late. Like, you know, we all have trackers. We voluntarily have these trackers we put in our pockets called phones and in those, everywhere we've been. And you know, with Palantir's technology, AI it really, you know, he was really frightened of this point where we're all Going to be, you know, followed by ice. Except for where, you know, we're natural citizens.

Gary Rivlin [00:48:26]:
I don't know. I do find it very, by the.

Leo Laporte [00:48:29]:
Way, even in a natural, Even if you're at risk.

Devindra Hardawar [00:48:31]:
Doesn't matter.

Leo Laporte [00:48:33]:
Good.

Gary Rivlin [00:48:33]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Victoria Song [00:48:34]:
If you're not, if you're not white, it doesn't matter if you were born here because like, I, you know, I was born here and I still am.

Leo Laporte [00:48:41]:
Just carry your passport, Victoria, with you.

Victoria Song [00:48:44]:
I carry a photo of it because I don't know that I've heard of any example of carrying passports actually being helpful.

Gary Rivlin [00:48:51]:
Right.

Victoria Song [00:48:51]:
And you know, I don't want to lose my passport.

Leo Laporte [00:48:53]:
I do know people who say we're carrying our passports with us because we want to be able to prove we're citizens. Citizens.

Devindra Hardawar [00:48:58]:
Just.

Victoria Song [00:48:58]:
I feel like if I showed you, if I showed you my passport, would you believe me that I'm a citizen? Like, that's, it's that I, I have like this nightmare that if I showed my passport, they'd go like, well, that's AI generated. And I'd be like, well, I don't know. I mean, thank you. I do think I look at AI generated on my New Jersey driver's license because my New York driver's license was so bad that they let me check the photo because they were like, oh, girl, you, you suffered with that real.

Leo Laporte [00:49:25]:
That's why people moved to Jersey. You didn't know that, but that's one of the reasons people moved to Jersey, right?

Victoria Song [00:49:30]:
I know I have a very nice looking driver's license photo because someone was.

Leo Laporte [00:49:34]:
Just like, did you smile for your driver's license?

Victoria Song [00:49:36]:
I didn't, but I, I, I was like, I can't have another 13 years of a really crappy driver's license photos where people went, this you look.

Leo Laporte [00:49:45]:
I smiled. I smiled for mine. They say, don't smile. And I don't know how I got it, got it through there, but I smiled and that's the first time I've had a decent.

Victoria Song [00:49:55]:
But it's nice, it's a nice photo. I'm not smiling in it, but it's a decent photo where I don't look.

Leo Laporte [00:50:02]:
Like you don't have a nose, but other than that it's pretty.

Victoria Song [00:50:04]:
Oh, and I have a nose, but it's just like that camera's not showing it. But my old one, my old one, I looked stoned in a bad way. And it's, you know, it's bad when the DMV employee goes, girl, this you.

Devindra Hardawar [00:50:21]:
Which is what I, the New York dmv. If you went to the one in Brooklyn, like, they. They just. I think they do that on purpose. They just have bad lighting or something.

Victoria Song [00:50:28]:
They're making.

Leo Laporte [00:50:29]:
Oh, yeah, they put green in the lights just to make you look ill. Looks awful.

Devindra Hardawar [00:50:33]:
But it. It is. I mean, listen, I was not born here. I am a citizen now because, you know, I help my parents work on their citizenship and everything.

Leo Laporte [00:50:42]:
But how did you become a citizen? You weren't born.

Devindra Hardawar [00:50:45]:
My parents. My parents became citizens, and I was a minor, and I became automatically.

Leo Laporte [00:50:50]:
You became a citizen?

Devindra Hardawar [00:50:51]:
Yeah. You come in as part of the family.

Leo Laporte [00:50:53]:
We got to change that.

Devindra Hardawar [00:50:54]:
Yeah. People want to change a lot of things, but that was way too easy. Yeah. People are carrying their passwords because they hope that they feel safe, but it is. They can decide whatever they want.

Leo Laporte [00:51:05]:
Really now.

Devindra Hardawar [00:51:07]:
It's disgusting.

Leo Laporte [00:51:08]:
Yep. Yep. It is tragic. I got an email from somebody, said, why don't you discuss ice more? It's like, well, we're trying to be a respite. We're having somewhere that you can go so that you don't have to constantly think about what's going on.

Devindra Hardawar [00:51:24]:
I hear that, but we're aware of it. It's definitely good to bring it up. Yeah, we're aware of it. Speaking of Alex Karp, by the way, I think the New York Times did an interview with him for their interview podcast. It's worth listening to because that guy sounds like a paranoid psychopath. It is.

Leo Laporte [00:51:37]:
Yeah. I was gonna play the clip, but I decided I've already played it before. He basically says our enemies should be terrified of us. They should be afraid to us at all times, and. And we should kill them if we have to. And it's just. Yeah, he's.

Devindra Hardawar [00:51:50]:
He, by the way, has no qualifications to even be running, like, a national A company.

Leo Laporte [00:51:54]:
He's a philosopher.

Devindra Hardawar [00:51:55]:
He said he's a philosopher. Former, like, progressive leftist dude who just, like, fell into this. It is.

Leo Laporte [00:52:01]:
It makes me sad because he does tai chi every day, and I feel like that should have calmed him down a little bit.

Devindra Hardawar [00:52:06]:
I don't ban them from good things.

Leo Laporte [00:52:12]:
Okay, well, we're speaking of Peter Thiel. We're going to talk more about other members Teal gang in just a little bit. You know, before we go to Elon Musk, let me do another commercial. That way we have ample space because there's been. Speaking of space, a lot of Elon Musk news of late. You're watching this Week in Tech. Gary Rivlin, great to have you. So nice to see you.

Leo Laporte [00:52:37]:
We don't often get Pulitzer Prize winners. In fact, I think you're the only one on the show. So thank you. Thank you for being here.

Gary Rivlin [00:52:43]:
It was my pleasure.

Leo Laporte [00:52:44]:
His book about Katrina called Katrina came out more than 10 years ago. In fact, it was the 10th anniversary of Katrina just a few months ago. What a story that was. I guess your book came out after the hurricane because it would have been weird.

Gary Rivlin [00:52:59]:
10 years. It was 10 years after the flood, so it was 2015.

Leo Laporte [00:53:03]:
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Anyway, great to have you. Also up Devendra Hardaway, who is a citizen of the United States of America. Devendra.

Gary Rivlin [00:53:12]:
For now.

Leo Laporte [00:53:13]:
For now, senior editor and gadget. I didn't know that story. I didn't. I didn't realize that you weren't born here. Where were you born?

Devindra Hardawar [00:53:21]:
In Guyana, South America, which is now on Trump's radar to take over after Venezuela. What has 2026 been? Just insanity after insanity.

Victoria Song [00:53:31]:
It's only February 1st.

Victoria Song [00:53:33]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [00:53:35]:
We have a Groundhog Day story coming up, too. I'll get to that. That's tomorrow. And Victoria's song. We love having Victoria on. Your people are from Korea. Korea. That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:53:49]:
We talked K pop the last time you went one.

Victoria Song [00:53:52]:
My mom's side of the family is from the safe side. My dad's family is from the not safe side.

Leo Laporte [00:54:02]:
The northern portion of the. Really? Was it North Korea when he came from there or.

Victoria Song [00:54:09]:
He. My dad. I wrote about it when I was at Gizmodo, but I had suspected that he may have been a spy for North Korea while we were living here.

Leo Laporte [00:54:21]:
No.

Victoria Song [00:54:22]:
Yeah, my dad was in character. I don't know how much of his story is I can believe, but. Yeah, I know.

Gary Rivlin [00:54:33]:
You're Victoria. My father was a spy. No, I'm telling you.

Victoria Song [00:54:36]:
Well, that story for Gizmodo is called My dad was a spy, comma, maybe.

Leo Laporte [00:54:44]:
What? That's so great.

Victoria Song [00:54:46]:
Yeah, it was a. Interesting story.

Leo Laporte [00:54:48]:
There it is. I just found it.

Victoria Song [00:54:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:54:51]:
Wow.

Gary Rivlin [00:54:51]:
I'm reading that.

Victoria Song [00:54:53]:
That's kidding.

Leo Laporte [00:54:55]:
This is great. See, I'm learning about both of you. All of you. It's great. Anyway, wonderful. I have all three of you on. And here's a picture of your father posing with important looking people from the Democratic Republic of North Korea.

Victoria Song [00:55:13]:
Yeah, he did some dubious things. There's so much that I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:55:18]:
When did he leave North Korea? Yeah.

Victoria Song [00:55:21]:
I mean, again, these facts, like my dad died, so it's kind of hard to fact check him on everything. But his. His. The story that I was Told my whole life was that when the Korean War ended and they had the Jews aside, he ended up going to the south and his family was all left behind in the North. And that was like a, that was a tragic thing in my dad's life for the remainder of his life because he sure took a refugee camp in Busan. I mean he did talk to them. He did travel to North Korea at a time where people were not supposed to travel there doing God knows what. But yeah, so like I've never met that side of my family.

Leo Laporte [00:56:01]:
Have you ever tried to go to North Korea yourself?

Victoria Song [00:56:03]:
No, no, no, no interest. No, no interest in doing that. You know, my mom's side of the family was also very against it. So it was kind of a point of tension.

Leo Laporte [00:56:14]:
Well, as long as I'm throwing crush in the wind with Claudebot, maybe I could go to North Korea too.

Victoria Song [00:56:19]:
I don't think you want to do that, friend. Yeah, they a little weird over there.

Leo Laporte [00:56:25]:
A little strange.

Victoria Song [00:56:29]:
Wouldn'T do it. But yeah, you know, so very interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:56:33]:
Yeah. I'm gonna read the story. I can't wait. Our show today, brought to you by Melissa. They've been with us for a long time. The trusted data quality expert. They've been doing this longer than we have, since 1985. They just celebrated their 40th anniversary last year.

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Leo Laporte [01:00:04]:
In a story full of weird weeks, SpaceX has asked the FCC if it can put 1 million solar powered data centers into orbit.

Gary Rivlin [01:00:17]:
How about doing one first? But okay.

Leo Laporte [01:00:22]:
Wow. I mean. The Verge Terence O' Brien says FCC is unlikely to approve that SpaceX's strategy has been to request approval for unrealistically large number of satellites as a starting point for negotiations. The filing. This cracks me up. If you're a sci fi fan, you'll recognize this phrase is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev two level civilization. One that can harness the sun's full power. Could also be completely obscure.

Leo Laporte [01:00:55]:
The sun? Actually I don't know a million satellites right now there are about enough junk in orbit. There are only 15,000 satellites right now More than half of them are, in fact Starlink. So he's already got, you know, 9,600 satellites.

Devindra Hardawar [01:01:13]:
Astronomers hate them too, because they need it much harder to observe things.

Leo Laporte [01:01:18]:
Yeah, this is. You could tell Elon wrote this. I mean, only Elon Musk would say, we want to be a Kardashev 2 civilization.

Devindra Hardawar [01:01:26]:
I'm sure Grok wrote that. Elon doesn't do anything anymore. Come on.

Leo Laporte [01:01:29]:
Maybe not.

Devindra Hardawar [01:01:30]:
Come on.

Leo Laporte [01:01:31]:
It comes from a Soviet astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. It is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement. But it's really a sci fi trope. Let's see. On the fandom wiki, it says a type 2 civilization has control over their solar system and may be able to harness the power equivalent of a single star.

Victoria Song [01:01:54]:
Dude, we can't even get to Mars yet.

Leo Laporte [01:01:57]:
Mars. Mars. We're gonna go around the moon next. Actually, it might be this month. We're gonna go around the moon and.

Gary Rivlin [01:02:05]:
What is the word?

Devindra Hardawar [01:02:05]:
Control. Control.

Gary Rivlin [01:02:06]:
I mean, that's.

Leo Laporte [01:02:08]:
I don't think we're a cartel. Shift, dude. No.

Victoria Song [01:02:12]:
Sorry, this is my tinfoil hat. But it sounds like Elon wants to build a prison around Earth so that we cannot leave.

Leo Laporte [01:02:18]:
I can't escape. He can get out.

Victoria Song [01:02:20]:
Because 1 million objects there, that leaves us. And that leaves us on Earth. We can't send rockets up unless they're doing.

Leo Laporte [01:02:25]:
And if you listen, this week in our space show they're doing, Starlink is doing a lot of very interesting things. Their satellites are very maneuverable so that they can avoid collisions. I'm sure Elon is thinking along those lines.

Devindra Hardawar [01:02:40]:
I don't know. Yeah. And people like, he thinks. Yeah. Does he. Does he just, like, come up with his sci fi dreams and like, tries to turn it into a thing his companies do? But I've been saying this. If he wants to go to Mars, let's send him to Mars. Come on.

Leo Laporte [01:02:55]:
Go.

Victoria Song [01:02:57]:
I would love if he went to Mars. I would love if he went there.

Leo Laporte [01:03:02]:
Pluto. Let's send it to Pluto. Find out if really is a plan. Elon is planning a June SpaceX IPO. SpaceX made some money this year. $8 billion in profit in 2025. Profit. And why June, by the way?

Gary Rivlin [01:03:19]:
Why does he want it in June?

Leo Laporte [01:03:20]:
Oh, because it's his birthday.

Victoria Song [01:03:24]:
Wait, when's his special little birthday? I need to know his astrological sign.

Leo Laporte [01:03:28]:
June 28th is his birthday. June 28th.

Victoria Song [01:03:30]:
Oh, he's a cancer. That means. Makes so much sense.

Gary Rivlin [01:03:32]:
He is a cancer. He is A cancer.

Leo Laporte [01:03:36]:
It also will coincide with the rare alignment of Mercury, Venus and Jupiter that happens in early June. So, of course, you know, and I'm.

Victoria Song [01:03:44]:
You know, I know this is into natal astrology. I.

Leo Laporte [01:03:49]:
Are you, Victoria, it sounds like you might be kind of into it.

Victoria Song [01:03:52]:
I am, but only when I have to look up at the moon in despair at the state of the world, and I'm like, surely there's something I can look to, to give me some sort of hope. And I don't take it super seriously. But just as like, well, I don't see any signs of hope in the horizon. Maybe the stars will say something. Generally, no, it doesn't.

Leo Laporte [01:04:15]:
But investors love Elon's companies, all of which are sort of merging into a single blob. The everything company SpaceX is currently valued at $800 billion. Based on a secondary sale that it did last year. Last. Last year, it's looking, with the IPO to raise another $50 billion, which would make it worth one and a half trillion.

Victoria Song [01:04:42]:
From where? Where are these numbers coming from? You sound fake.

Devindra Hardawar [01:04:48]:
Well, a lot of contracts. They do have a lot of contracts. If.

Leo Laporte [01:04:50]:
If investors put the money in. It's not fake. I think investors, you know, first of all, they put a lot of money in a Tesla that might have been a little bit of a mistake.

Devindra Hardawar [01:05:00]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [01:05:02]:
They've had two years now. They just, in their latest results, had a second year of losses.

Gary Rivlin [01:05:08]:
They discontinued what Model X.

Leo Laporte [01:05:10]:
As a result, the S and X are gone. Which I had an X, I would.

Gary Rivlin [01:05:16]:
Have could discontinue the truck, the cybertruck, personally.

Leo Laporte [01:05:19]:
But they don't need to discontinue.

Gary Rivlin [01:05:20]:
That's my aesthetic.

Leo Laporte [01:05:21]:
Nobody, they're not making it. Nobody's buying it. Why discontinue it? Just, you know, we don't. We don't have to mention. We don't talk about the cyber truck, my neighbor. It's like, dude, why, dude? This is ugliest thing I've ever seen. Not only that, it's not just an ugly truck, but he's got it wrapped in some sort of weird stained glass pattern that just makes it like. It's like.

Leo Laporte [01:05:43]:
It's like, why not just honk your horn, I'm coming down the road at you. It's such a.

Devindra Hardawar [01:05:51]:
The car for people with no taste. Speaking of having no taste.

Gary Rivlin [01:05:55]:
So it's supposed to, it's supposed to be like, you know, this, this cyber truck, bulletproof. Someone on YouTube, I saw this.

Devindra Hardawar [01:06:02]:
It was.

Gary Rivlin [01:06:02]:
It was really funny. They had like, I don't know, a Ford F100. They had the kind of a, you know, in quotes, a real truck and this and like you know, they try to pull off the bumper. They try to pull off piece. Of course they couldn't but with his bare hands he was taking off pieces of the cybertruck. So it doesn't even seem like it's.

Leo Laporte [01:06:17]:
Particularly the pieces fall off all in there own. Actually it's true of any feature anyway if you own a cyber truck and I'm sure there are many people in our audience who own cyber trucks and I think you know, it was cool, right? I understand, I understand why you want it.

Devindra Hardawar [01:06:31]:
I personally think you have bad taste. But yeah, you, you can excuse.

Leo Laporte [01:06:35]:
Taste is a personal thing.

Devindra Hardawar [01:06:36]:
Right. So literally the worst looking car I've ever seen. What is funny?

Leo Laporte [01:06:40]:
Worse than the Aztec, right even?

Devindra Hardawar [01:06:42]:
Yes, the Aztec became iconic, right.

Victoria Song [01:06:46]:
Coons have stake in cyber trucks as dumpsters. That is quite funn.

Leo Laporte [01:06:52]:
There's gotta be food in here somewhere.

Devindra Hardawar [01:06:54]:
My daughter calls it the Minecraft car because it's just locks, it's just blocks. But speaking of like them stopping to sell the Model S and Model X, it is wild. Every time I see mainstream news talk about that and I was listening to NPR this week when that was announced, they're like, oh, he's gonna go after robots. Isn't that silly? This is so funny, this crazy Elon Musk guy. It's as if we've forgotten what happened over the last year. And I feel like all that should be in context of Elon Musk essentially like dismantling the federal government, throwing a couple Nazi.

Leo Laporte [01:07:25]:
We did forget about Doge.

Devindra Hardawar [01:07:26]:
There is something about the brand that he hurts. That's why people aren't buying the cars. That context should be in your story of why these cars are not being sold anymore. Because he's a Nazi. So.

Gary Rivlin [01:07:38]:
Yeah, well the flip side though is looking just at Xai. I mean the truth is Grok is a really powerful model. I mean, you know, you look at the head to head competition, you know, I give Grok 4.4.5. I always get. I don't know what number up to but you know, when it came out, it beat Gemini on the charts. And you know it's. It's a game of like oh, but like it's a really powerful model. And you know it's, it's got in quotes personality.

Gary Rivlin [01:08:06]:
I know that's a very weighted loaded word and stuff. And you know his, his kind of. It's sexualizing.

Devindra Hardawar [01:08:13]:
I mean it's great at making csam, apparently. So.

Victoria Song [01:08:19]:
I flirt with Annie, the AI Waifu girlfriend that he programmed on on Grok for my job, and I lost. I had a very high therapy bill that week.

Leo Laporte [01:08:33]:
I could tell you a story. What was the name of the fox, the other, the other character?

Victoria Song [01:08:37]:
Oh, Rude Rudy.

Leo Laporte [01:08:40]:
When that first came out, the day that came out, I'm sitting down at the breakfast table and I read the story. I said, oh, let me try it, because I have. I'm an un, as Cory Doctorow calls it, a non consensual blue check. I was given the full access for free because he took my blue check away when he bought Twitter. But they gave it. I didn't ask for it, but he gave it back. So I have full access to Grok. And so I said, well, I'll try rooting.

Leo Laporte [01:09:05]:
And I said, hey, Rudy, how's it going? And Rudy, I, this was, I thought it was supposed to be a kids character. Said, oh, I'm just having a great time.

Gary Rivlin [01:09:14]:
I'm gonna go teabag the mayor.

Leo Laporte [01:09:17]:
I said, what?

Victoria Song [01:09:18]:
There's, there's bad Rudy and then there's normal Rudy?

Leo Laporte [01:09:21]:
No, but they didn't have a distinction on day one. And I said, what? Who, what mayor? He said, whatever mayor you want. I can't wait to teabag him. Said, what the. I, I actually we had to censor it. I was doing it on one of the shows we had to edit. We had to bleep it out. It was so bad.

Victoria Song [01:09:39]:
It's.

Leo Laporte [01:09:39]:
So then it, by the way, the next day it, Rudy became like a kid's thing. But I somehow got bad Rudy.

Victoria Song [01:09:47]:
I had bad Rudy and I talked to bad Rudy and I was just like, you know, I don't find your insults all that clever. And he's like, your insults aren't clever. I'm.

Gary Rivlin [01:09:57]:
What am I?

Victoria Song [01:09:58]:
You, basically. And I was like, you kind of insult like a 12 year old boy. He's like, no, you insult like a.

Leo Laporte [01:10:04]:
12 year old boy. I know I am, but what are you?

Victoria Song [01:10:06]:
Smart? You're the lame one.

Gary Rivlin [01:10:11]:
Musk. He's got a 12 year old.

Leo Laporte [01:10:13]:
He does. That's Elon's sense of humor is what it is.

Victoria Song [01:10:16]:
Yeah, it was, it was unimpressive.

Leo Laporte [01:10:18]:
So at least NPR said, and they were right, that Elon has decided to take the product. I remember when I got went down to get my Model X. This was bad. When Tesla was still cool in 2015, it had just come out and they said, you want the factory tour of the Fremont factory? I said, oh, yeah, yeah. And we Got in a golf cart and they gave us a tour. And I was kind of, I'm gonna admit this, and I'm ashamed to admit it now, but I was teary eyed. I was very at the time moved by his vision. And by the way, we're learning that studies have shown that in areas where EVs are widespread, pollution has abated considerably.

Leo Laporte [01:10:55]:
So they do make a difference. And I was really kind of turned on by this. I realize it now that I was mistaken.

Devindra Hardawar [01:11:02]:
That factory before his brain fully broke.

Leo Laporte [01:11:04]:
But it was something we didn't know. We thought he was, we thought he was, you know, a Marvel character.

Devindra Hardawar [01:11:11]:
I think all the ketamine just kind of built up on him after a while. And like it was the. What the diver.

Leo Laporte [01:11:15]:
I thought I was seeing Stark Industries. Like this is like this is changing the world. And I didn't.

Gary Rivlin [01:11:20]:
Okay, we're doing true confessions in 2011 for the men's Journal, I was assigned a profile of Elon Musk. At first it was going to pay attention to Tesla, but then Wired came out with something around Musk and Tesla so they changed it to SpaceX. So I actually got to spend two days, one in the West coast, one in. And I'm telling you like, I'm a wise ass New Yorker. And he's whatever you want to describe, just a wise ass or an ass, whatever. He was funny and personable. We had a good time. He gave me the keys to like.

Gary Rivlin [01:11:50]:
What was the first test? Tesla?

Leo Laporte [01:11:52]:
The Roadster.

Gary Rivlin [01:11:54]:
Yeah, it's just like I felt like a conspicuous idiot on 280 and this bright red thing. I'm kind of almost sitting on the highway, it's so low. But it was a rocket ship, zero to 60 in two seconds or something. But I really enjoyed him and I realized that at that point he told me he was in quotes down to his last 4 million. He'd made 200 million or whatever from PayPal. He's down to his last 4 million. I joke with him like, dude, I'm not up to my first 4 million yet. But you know, but for him, to.

Leo Laporte [01:12:22]:
His credit, he bet the bank he went all in on those.

Gary Rivlin [01:12:26]:
On SpaceX and Tesla.

Leo Laporte [01:12:28]:
Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [01:12:28]:
And neither were working. I mean at that point it wasn't clear if either was going to work. And so he was more humble, he was more modest or at least it wasn't a cocky, you know, at, at that point. And I, you know, kind of meanwhile, I don't know what it is. To me, my theory, you know Devindra, is that you know, he. He just. Success went to his head. He, you know, he is, you know, Tony Stark.

Gary Rivlin [01:12:50]:
He is the most brilliant human being on earth. To his mind, he can solve anything. Oh, politics, yeah, sure, I can do that. That's easy. You know, kind of. Kind of thing. And, you know, and people were worshiping him. Right.

Gary Rivlin [01:13:02]:
I mean, he did give him credit. Like, he didn't invent Tesla, but he helped popularize it and. Help popularize, you know, the guys who.

Leo Laporte [01:13:09]:
Invented it hadn't even even created a model. I mean, it was just an idea that he bought. He did kind of write them out of the story. But to be fair, he was the one who built a car.

Gary Rivlin [01:13:19]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to give him credit for that.

Leo Laporte [01:13:21]:
Yeah. And I was, you know, I was really happy to buy a Tesla. The Model X almost killed me several times. But we got rid of it after a few years.

Devindra Hardawar [01:13:28]:
It's funny, I still see the Model X like daycare pickup, because I live in a town where people have fancy cars.

Victoria Song [01:13:33]:
Go.

Leo Laporte [01:13:34]:
It's good.

Devindra Hardawar [01:13:34]:
And this is dumbest design for a door with kids, though, because when you have kids, you have stuff on the side of the car doors. You have, like, water bottles and stuff like that is a completely useless. It was worse than that for having kids. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:13:47]:
If it rained, it would trap water in the door, and then you'd open the gullwing door, and there'd be a waterfall in the crack. You had to wait till the water abated and then you could get out. It hit my wife in the head so many times that eventually we had to have a protocol that before I hit the door, because there was one button that closed all the doors, I would go, doors are closing in five seconds.

Gary Rivlin [01:14:08]:
Four.

Leo Laporte [01:14:09]:
So she could get out of the way. It was supposed to have sensors. It didn't. It steered her into the median strip. Many times. She had to grab the wheel. And the thing she always talks about is, for some reason, I don't know why it decided that she. That the seat would adjust when she got in the car to squeeze her against the steering wheel.

Leo Laporte [01:14:31]:
It was like the Star wars crash compactor. She was like, get me out of here. And I said, oh, it's not doing that until it happened.

Devindra Hardawar [01:14:40]:
Did she program or. No, it was just a bug.

Leo Laporte [01:14:42]:
It was a bug. What I realized at the time is a golf cart with a very fancy buggy computer controlling it.

Devindra Hardawar [01:14:50]:
I'm just saying, like, whenever we talk about Musk now over the last year, and certainly after the spate of CSAM stuff And the nude image generation. You can't take this guy seriously or any of this.

Leo Laporte [01:15:00]:
It's turning out he really did go to the island. He said, oh, I never went to the island. Well. Oh, those emails seem pretty incremental.

Devindra Hardawar [01:15:07]:
No, but he was begging to go. Like that's, it's even sadder. He was begging.

Leo Laporte [01:15:11]:
We're gonna be going there.

Devindra Hardawar [01:15:12]:
I don't think they let him even didn't want to hang out with him. No.

Leo Laporte [01:15:16]:
Epstein said he I will send a helicopter for you.

Devindra Hardawar [01:15:18]:
Yeah.

Victoria Song [01:15:19]:
I think if you reach a certain level of monetary success you have to get bullied every week by absolutely teenage girls just to keep them humble.

Leo Laporte [01:15:29]:
Somebody to say no to.

Gary Rivlin [01:15:30]:
This is the problem with the tech billionaires. You know they're isolated, they're in a bubble. You know, it's just like you're brilliant. Thank you. You're God's gift kind of thing. And a little humility with do most of the money.

Victoria Song [01:15:44]:
The meanest 14 year old girl on the planet. And once you reach a certain level of wealth you have to go every job and, and like just get brutalized for an hour.

Leo Laporte [01:15:59]:
Yeah.

Victoria Song [01:15:59]:
And that. You just need to be humbled.

Devindra Hardawar [01:16:02]:
I think that is why he bought Twitter though. Like people were yelling at him on Twitter so much he was like okay, that's it. I'm buying this and making it my playground now. Basically.

Victoria Song [01:16:10]:
That's why it has to be 14 year old girls. Yep. Because they can't be bought and they.

Leo Laporte [01:16:15]:
Just have to like unless you've got a laboon and then maybe you could.

Victoria Song [01:16:21]:
No, just pay them in labubus. They'll do it for one anyway.

Leo Laporte [01:16:26]:
Production ready. Optimus robots are coming soon.

Gary Rivlin [01:16:29]:
Coming soon. That soon is doing a lot of work in that sense. Go ahead.

Leo Laporte [01:16:33]:
It will reveal its Gen 3 robot in the first quarter of this year according. But you know Elon, this is the problem. You can't believe anything any of these companies, Elon's companies say because he's, he's been saying all sorts of crazy stuff that never comes true. He said Tesla produced 5,000 robots in 2025. They did not. He said they're gonna make preparations for the first production line. That's what the Model X line in Fremont's gonna be devoted to. And they're gonna start in this quarter.

Leo Laporte [01:17:05]:
Make Optimus robots there. Who's gonna buy an Optimus? He says, which are they?

Gary Rivlin [01:17:10]:
Roughly like a few hundred.

Leo Laporte [01:17:12]:
10,000. I don't know. Most of these bipedal robots are in the ten thousand dollar plus range. Right.

Victoria Song [01:17:21]:
Okay, All I'm gonna say is that my colleague Allison at CES came upon a bipedal robot that was dancing and just like a whole crowd was following it because it was trying to like, get people to follow it. And it was punching the air and it was punching the air so violently and not knocked itself out and just. And you know. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:45]:
Oh, boy. Yeah. We had, we had Jennifer Pattison Tuohy on a few weeks ago. She was at CES and one of the robots fell on her.

Victoria Song [01:17:57]:
Yes, we were. Well, we saw the footage. It was really funny because our video guy, Andrew was just like, totally just filming it and got the funniest clip of it. And she was just like, he didn't help me at.

Leo Laporte [01:18:09]:
The Cameras Must Crawl.

Victoria Song [01:18:13]:
But I actually have some footage of Jen trying to shake hands with one of these robots and it just like, couldn't do it for a while. And then when it did, it just pulled her hand down, like in a pretty, like, violent way. And I was like, oh, my God, are you okay? But, yeah, so.

Leo Laporte [01:18:32]:
Well, you know, I'm an early adopter, I've confessed, but there's no way I'm happy having a 200 pound machine that could crush me. Walking around my house doing the dishes.

Devindra Hardawar [01:18:43]:
Or making the Model X could have crushed you or crashed you many, many times. And you tried.

Victoria Song [01:18:48]:
God knows, at least that is functionally a car, right? That's at least a thing that drives these humanoid robots. They're supposed to like, help you and weird.

Leo Laporte [01:18:59]:
They're just not even close to being able to do that.

Devindra Hardawar [01:19:01]:
So I don't know, nothing is gonna. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:19:03]:
Why he thinks this year they're going to. There's a. Going to be a market for these.

Devindra Hardawar [01:19:07]:
Because he can just say things. He could just say things. But it's funny, like, over at Engadjo, like, several of our reporters have also been injured or attacked by these robots. So it's like there are many stories of these things not working well and there aren't many of them out there. So it seems like a bad sign.

Leo Laporte [01:19:21]:
Right? So I did mention AI rather. SpaceX made $8 billion profit in 2025. Microsoft also had a very good quarter, made a lot of money, and their stock just tanked. This tanked, which is the strangest thing. They made 81.

Devindra Hardawar [01:19:43]:
Say the thing, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:19:44]:
Why, why did AI spending.

Gary Rivlin [01:19:48]:
Well, okay, you say AI spending, but meta, which has it is ad campaign about where he's going to invest $600 billion or something and, you know, data centers and all that stuff. Their stock went up. And so it's not just confusing, it's just not a reaction to, like, AI over, you know, the backlash on Wall Street. I mean, I was thinking about this, like, it's a software company and that's kind of, well, cloud code. Well, why are we going to need software companies? Its PC sales went down. No big deal. Right. Like, I think of their 80 billion they made in the quarter, 50 billion was from cloud.

Gary Rivlin [01:20:21]:
And so obviously that's a much bigger part of the company than it was in the old days. It was Windows and Office for the two cash cows that were responsible for most of the money they generated. So is it PCs? Is it because it's a software company? It made no sense to me.

Leo Laporte [01:20:35]:
They deserve some credit, though, from pivoting from Office and Windows to the cloud and successfully. Obviously they've made a lot of money. Net profit was up by like 23%. That's a huge increase in profit.

Devindra Hardawar [01:20:50]:
The cloud has been like, killing them, like killing for them for years. And that was a smart thing. And then the thing.

Leo Laporte [01:20:57]:
Credit for that.

Devindra Hardawar [01:20:58]:
No, no, they get a ton of credit for that.

Gary Rivlin [01:21:00]:
Yeah. So it's funny, I've been writing about Microsoft since the late 1990s.

Leo Laporte [01:21:05]:
They were stagnant, weren't they?

Gary Rivlin [01:21:06]:
For under Steve Ballmer, basically. Their stock price was stuck at $25 a share. I talk about earnings. I had to do earnings reports about Microsoft for the New York times in the 2000s. I hated that. And it just so boring. And Nadella took over and the stock has literally gone up 10x more than 10x under Nadella in 10 years. So to Devonda's point, it has been getting its due.

Gary Rivlin [01:21:35]:
It went up to 500 a share and it fell down to 425 or something like that, a share. And, you know, and to me, it is because of this amazing pivot they did to the cloud that their main revenue source is no longer Office, it's no longer Windows, It's. It's the cloud. I mean, by a far, far margin.

Devindra Hardawar [01:21:54]:
The weakness now is that people are seeing all the money they. They basically invested in AI and not much is coming from it. So that was a part of the explanation of the stock hit there. And I also think Nadella has just been blinded by this stuff. Like, there are a lot of reports. There was that story about like, oh, man, he's using AI for everything. It's sort of like organizing, organizing his emails. It's summarizing podcasts for him.

Leo Laporte [01:22:13]:
Yeah, he doesn't listen to podcasts Talk.

Devindra Hardawar [01:22:16]:
About living in the. He is living in a complete AI agent bubble at this point. Or a co pilot bubble. Yeah.

Victoria Song [01:22:23]:
Becoming too interesting. Should he go back to being more boring?

Devindra Hardawar [01:22:26]:
He's still not.

Gary Rivlin [01:22:27]:
He's very boring.

Leo Laporte [01:22:28]:
He's very boring.

Victoria Song [01:22:30]:
I mean like, I mean like has he been getting a personality for pivoting and people are like, oh no, he's getting and a personality. Okay.

Gary Rivlin [01:22:37]:
I think he was a pill.

Leo Laporte [01:22:41]:
He's kind of stepping back a little bit though, right? He isn't quite running the company anymore. The cfo, Amy Hood really seems to be the person in charge of Mike.

Gary Rivlin [01:22:49]:
No, no. Did they name a new co CEO?

Leo Laporte [01:22:52]:
Yeah, they did.

Gary Rivlin [01:22:53]:
He could think big thoughts and the, the other CEO can, you know, run the. I don't know. I didn't pay that much attention by the way.

Victoria Song [01:23:00]:
That's straight out of the office when they hire Jim and Michael to be the same job.

Leo Laporte [01:23:04]:
Assistant to the general manager, co managers.

Victoria Song [01:23:08]:
Because Michael is useless.

Leo Laporte [01:23:09]:
Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure what's going on at Microsoft. Do you think, Gary, having covered Wall street for so long, that there is the wisdom of the crowds when it comes to the stock market, that somehow the stock market reflects what's really going to happen?

Gary Rivlin [01:23:25]:
I mean, generally speaking I agree with that. But the fact that at Apple, which is totally whiffed AI, I mean they sell a lot of iPhones but like they're, they're not getting punished for it, you know, Meta, which has kind of fumbled AI, they kind of went open source and then it moved back from that. They've had all this kind of turmoil of, you know, bringing in new people for AI and yet its stock is going up when they're spending either even more than Microsoft is on data centers on building out, which by the way, I don't think is the wrong bet. I think two things are true at once. One, Meta plus Microsoft plus Google, it's Amazon, et cetera, are overbuilding. On the other hand, I think they would be foolish not to be pouring all this money into AI because if they admit to my mind, and I guess Apple's the counter example here, to my mind, if they missed AI, that's like a trillion dollar mistake. Microsoft before Nadella missed the phone, you know, bumble the Internet, you know, missed the phone. And so they were making sure they're going to be in the conversation on AI.

Gary Rivlin [01:24:36]:
So them spending tens of billions dollars a year to me made sense because missing would be a trillion dollar mistake.

Devindra Hardawar [01:24:42]:
It's pure FOMO though. Like that's like having, I'm the one covering a lot of Microsoft stuff over it in Engadget 2. And like, like that's what it comes down to. Like every time I'm talking to their executives, I'm like, this ain't working. Why are you trying to sell this to me? And over the last years, a few years, they have been like, it's getting better, it's getting better. Recent conversations tell me that they are very aware of the flaws and people do not want to see agentic AI in their Windows. They just want Windows to work. So there may be more of a doubling down this year on like the fundamentals for Microsoft, but it is, there is no there there in terms of what they're chasing for AI.

Devindra Hardawar [01:25:18]:
Everyone is desperate, right? Gemini only exists because OpenAI and Chat, the whole Bing Chat thing happened so quickly that it gave Microsoft and OpenAI so much clout. Gemini stumbled immediately. Everyone is saying Apple failed or is missing out in AI. Sure, you can say that now. But they, they're not the ones like overspending on a lot of this stuff in the same way these other companies are. And I'm really intrigued by what Apple could do do because they're, what Apple does, right, is they set back, they let the market kind of play out for a bit and see what happens. And if they can give us a personal AI assistant type of thing that is safer, that is not so reliant on the cloud and things you can't directly control like that could be the way that works for them.

Leo Laporte [01:26:01]:
Yeah, maybe they actually won by losing.

Devindra Hardawar [01:26:04]:
I'm saying that basically, yeah, 2 billion.

Gary Rivlin [01:26:07]:
The number was one of the articles you share. Two and a half billion iPhones, something like that.

Leo Laporte [01:26:11]:
Like yeah, two and a half billion. So that's not just iPhones, it's all Apple devices. But Tim Cook did say it was a staggering quarter for iPhone sales. It was their best ever. A record breaking quarter revenue of $143 billion which is up 16% year over year.

Victoria Song [01:26:30]:
Listen, they introduced orange.

Leo Laporte [01:26:32]:
That's why I'm telling you an orange phone, it's always the right color.

Devindra Hardawar [01:26:38]:
Yeah, it's so good.

Leo Laporte [01:26:40]:
I know why I bought an orange phone.

Devindra Hardawar [01:26:43]:
It looks great.

Leo Laporte [01:26:44]:
I think it's great. It's different, right?

Victoria Song [01:26:46]:
It's different. It's different.

Gary Rivlin [01:26:47]:
It's different to move off color, you know, I mean to Devindra's point, like, you know, I, I look at Google so you know, in 2023 they fumbled every time on a, on AI. You know, they came up with bar then they changed the name. There's embarrassing stuff. Put glue on your pizza, you know, use gasoline to spice up your spaghetti's, you know, all these embarrassing things. But billions of people use Google. Google has million dollars.

Leo Laporte [01:27:16]:
Gemini is now one of the top models. Right, that's my point.

Gary Rivlin [01:27:19]:
That's my point. Google spent 2023 and 2024 blowing it and in 2025 their model is almost as popular as ChatGPT because they're Google because they have all the data in the world, they have all the money in the world, but more important they have all the reach in the world. And Apple is the same way. I'm with you Davindra. They've been losing, they've been blowing it, they've been blowing it and I'm not counting them out.

Victoria Song [01:27:42]:
The other thing is like Apple has always just had this cachet of cool that the other companies don't have. And I do think that people are much more forgiving of that because you know, green bubble versus blue bubble, just the look of Apple products. You know, Android fans will forever be screaming that they did it first. And iPhone users will always just go yeah, but Apple did it better. So I just think they're allowed, not allowed, but they're able to kind of flub it on AI to an extent that these other companies cannot just because they're cache that.

Leo Laporte [01:28:18]:
Gary, you brought this up that Microsoft got punished for its capex, its capital expenditures on AI and data centers. Meta said they're going to spend 135 billion this year on AI infrastructure. And they got rewarded, but it's in. But I think maybe they got rewarded not for AI but because they're doing so well in advertising.

Gary Rivlin [01:28:41]:
Yeah, they're an advertising company, they're an ad agency.

Devindra Hardawar [01:28:44]:
Sure, sure.

Gary Rivlin [01:28:45]:
It went up like go ahead.

Devindra Hardawar [01:28:47]:
They're cutting back on virtual reality stuff too. So they announced a whole bunch of those cutbacks, a whole bunch of layoffs and like they're. The story now is we're focusing on AI gadgets. It's that makes Wall street happy because it seems like they're moving forward and away from the things losing money. Right?

Gary Rivlin [01:29:01]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:29:02]:
Yeah. Isn't that sad though?

Victoria Song [01:29:04]:
Said I think they still said that we're planning to lose the same amount on VR this year as last year.

Gary Rivlin [01:29:09]:
Yeah, I mean crazy huge number. I mean someone ended up like the 100 billion or whatever. I'm making that number up, I can't remember it, but they've lost a preposterous amount of money.

Devindra Hardawar [01:29:19]:
70 billion. I think it was around 70 billion.

Leo Laporte [01:29:21]:
What's interesting is that they can afford. That's, that's actually, in some ways that's the important part of the story is they make so much money in advertising. Yeah.

Victoria Song [01:29:30]:
So what it's insane though, because if you really think about it, the AI gadgets, like, they're doing well, right, on these meta Ray Bans and now they have just released the Ray Ban. No, they're doing well on the Ray Ban metas and someone there was real stupid and named the one with the.

Leo Laporte [01:29:47]:
Display the Ray Ban Meta Display or Meta Raven. Do you have either of those?

Victoria Song [01:29:54]:
I have all of them. I have.

Leo Laporte [01:29:55]:
And you kept them.

Victoria Song [01:29:57]:
Well, because they're doing long term, doing long term testing on them. So I wear them intermittently because I'm testing so many AI glasses at this point, then I only have one face. So it's very difficult. It's very difficult to test them, especially since like, I don't know if you can tell, but my glasses are incredibly thick. So I have to, to manage when I'm using contact lenses, when I'm doing all this physical strain on my. It's a whole thing. But. So I do have the glasses.

Victoria Song [01:30:25]:
But they are subsidizing these glasses by a crazy amount. Like it's an $800 pair of glasses with display in them. Most people are not going to go buy that with for a niche gadget unless they're early adopters. So Meta is pretty much subsidizing a lot of the AI glasses that they are putting out there. So it's sort of just like, yes, they make a lot in advertising, they can spend all of this money, but I think there's a limit to how much they can actually do that because if this doesn't take off, this is just going to be another gamble of theirs that, you know, like, we made fun of them for the longest time about the Metaverse. And I do think that there's going to be a backlash with smart glasses in the not too distant future.

Devindra Hardawar [01:31:12]:
It's, it's already happening like privacy wise or like concerts or bars or places where they're like.

Victoria Song [01:31:17]:
Or just harassing women. Men harassing women on college campuses.

Leo Laporte [01:31:22]:
Men ruin everything, don't they? Gosh darn it. So this is the information Martin Peers writing. What did we learn? What did we learn from Meta? Microsoft and Tesla from the earnings? I don't know. What did we, did we learn anything? He says the bottom line for both companies, growth is important, but the cost of the growth. Growth is even more important. Maybe that's the lesson is don't throw away your money. I don't know. I don't know what we learned, but.

Gary Rivlin [01:31:56]:
Microsoft's profits year over year, their net income is way, way up.

Leo Laporte [01:32:00]:
Yeah, Huge.

Gary Rivlin [01:32:01]:
So they were making.

Leo Laporte [01:32:02]:
They're making a lot more money, a couple of billion dollars a week.

Devindra Hardawar [01:32:05]:
I mean, at the same time, there's a lot of things that. Their whole Xbox division is going down in flames. Right. Things that are been tied to Microsoft that in the public mind for a lot of people, Microsoft is failing because they don't like what's happening in Windows. They hate what's happening in Xbox. So it's different stories depending on the audience.

Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
That's a really good point. That all of the traditional strengths of Microsoft are failing and they're gambling big time on this new thing. And maybe the market says. That's why I was asking, is there some wisdom in this crowd? I mean, I know they also think that, you know, GameStop is going.

Victoria Song [01:32:43]:
But it's also like, isn't this more evidence of like the decoupling of company value to actual profits? Like those aren't coupled anymore? Like, you don't. No, your company doesn't get more valuable if you make more money.

Leo Laporte [01:32:54]:
The stock market is pretty much imaginary is what it is. That's what it is.

Devindra Hardawar [01:32:58]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:32:58]:
Vibes.

Victoria Song [01:32:59]:
Half of it is vibes.

Leo Laporte [01:33:00]:
It's vibes. Vibes, Vibes. It's vibes. It's all vibes. All right, we're gonna take a little break. Come back with the good vibes of this fabulous panel. Gary Rivlin is here, author of AI Valley, A history of AI in the Silicon Valley. So look at all his books behind him, over his left shoulder.

Leo Laporte [01:33:19]:
Look at all that. Just. You wrote all of those and apparently they. You've got many copies too. So that's good.

Gary Rivlin [01:33:26]:
That's the ones that didn't sell. Right? Let's go back to your. Like, you don't necessarily get rich from writing those books.

Leo Laporte [01:33:31]:
Those are the author's copies. You get some authors, you have a good publisher that gives you authors copies. I like that. I have one copy of each of my books on the bookshelf, so that's more than enough. Although I have to read this later. I got a letter from a prisoner at Farmingham State Prison in Missouri. I occasionally get. And it's nice.

Leo Laporte [01:33:54]:
Cause they handwrite them because they don't have any other way of saying. But it was very. I'll read it the end of the show. It was a very sweet letter, but one of the things he said is our prison bookstore has your 2003 technology almanac. Very happy to know that the library at the Farmingham Correctional center has it's a small library. He says they have one row of nonfiction books and one of them is My Almanac. So there you go. You see, that's true fame, my friends.

Leo Laporte [01:34:27]:
Friends, we're going to take a break. Dvindra Ahar Noir is also here from Engadget and Victoria's Song from the Verge. Our show today, brought to you by my mattress. I feel very well rested because I sleep on our sponsor's mattress, the Helix Sleep. I learned Lisa and I found out a few months ago I was reading on, you know, one of these articles and said you should, you should get a new mattress every eight to 10 years. Because I know who knew this mattresses wear out. And I was thinking, you know, it has been a little saggy lately. Hasn't been as comfortable as it was.

Leo Laporte [01:35:00]:
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Leo Laporte [01:35:29]:
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Leo Laporte [01:36:41]:
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Leo Laporte [01:37:06]:
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And if you're listening after the sale ends, do check them out helixsleep.com twitt and use that address so they know you saw it. Here. Helix H E l I x sleep.com twit we love them. We love them. So Apple did have good quarterly results, but that has not. It's not all been smooth sailing for Apple. This week they announced this seems greedy that they are going to take a 30% cut from all Patreon creators in the iOS app by November. So you've got a little time.

Leo Laporte [01:39:13]:
But November 1, 2026, Patreon is not happy. If you use the Patreon legacy billing model. In other words, you're paying through iOS. Apple's going to take its 30% cut. I guess, you know, they're giving Patreon time to move customers off of that. The company says it will switch. They said it would switch creators to subscription billing in November. And the creators could choose.

Leo Laporte [01:39:46]:
This is November 2024, two years ago. Could choose whether to increase their subscription prices to cover Apple's fees. Did you do that? Did you know? In addition, creators could opt to delay changes until November of last year if you needed more time. Anyway, I think this is a shame. Patreon not happy.

Devindra Hardawar [01:40:09]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:40:10]:
Yeah. And the creators are not happy.

Victoria Song [01:40:12]:
It's also like, of all the. It's one thing to tax, I think, big companies whatever you want, but.

Leo Laporte [01:40:19]:
But this is rent seeking, this, isn't it? This is just.

Victoria Song [01:40:21]:
Yeah, it's also just like the average creator is not huge. You're basically squeezing people who are doing side hustles a little extra cash on the side doing projects.

Devindra Hardawar [01:40:36]:
It.

Victoria Song [01:40:36]:
It just feels unnecessary. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:40:39]:
The Apple tax on creators. Not on Patreon itself, but on creators. We, we actually. Our club goes through member folders, which is a Patreon company. I don't, I don't know how this would affect us, actually. I haven't really looked into it.

Devindra Hardawar [01:40:54]:
Yeah, I mean, most, most people don't.

Leo Laporte [01:40:56]:
Most Patreon or Patreon members, they subscribe on the website. Right. So Apple doesn't take that money. Yeah, that's what they want you to do.

Devindra Hardawar [01:41:06]:
And I mean, this has impacted every other streaming service too, like Google plans and Netflix plans. Like, you pay a couple bucks more if you're doing it from within the iOS or Apple subscription things sometimes. So that's how they've handled it. But those are big companies. It's very different here.

Leo Laporte [01:41:22]:
And then there's been a little bit of heat on Tim Cook, who, the day of Alex Preddy's shooting, elected to go see the premiere of Melania, the movie at the White House and was seen on Brett Ratner, the director's Instagram, palling around with the director, who's been accused of harassment and other sexual crimes. Not a good look for Tim Cook, huh?

Gary Rivlin [01:41:51]:
That's his qualification in this administration.

Leo Laporte [01:41:54]:
That's why he's did the movie. Yeah. And I mean, I mean, everybody said look, that's a $75 million bribe from Amazon to the president. I mean, nobody will. Amazon's gonna lose money on this movie.

Gary Rivlin [01:42:06]:
Have you been reading the reviews? It's worth going out and reading the review. The Guardian said what I read today.

Leo Laporte [01:42:11]:
What did they say?

Gary Rivlin [01:42:13]:
You know, just actually the one I.

Devindra Hardawar [01:42:15]:
Remember, and it's like, it's Melania getting out of. Getting out of cars, opening doors. They say if you going to another door, if you like the idea of.

Leo Laporte [01:42:24]:
Watching Melania Trump choose her outfit for the inauguration, you're gonna love this movie.

Victoria Song [01:42:30]:
I gotta check this on Letterboxd. Because the reviews of Letterboxd are.

Leo Laporte [01:42:34]:
Yeah, they'll be a little. Yeah, the movie opened this week. I don't, I don't know how the ticket sales have been. We. I haven't seen the box office yet, by the way.

Gary Rivlin [01:42:44]:
You asked. My, My favorite was like, you know, if Jeff. If Jeffrey Epstein had seen this, he would have killed himself kind of joke, you know, I mean, I, I kind of love documentaries, just generally speaking.

Leo Laporte [01:42:55]:
I do too. I like seeing inside people's lives.

Gary Rivlin [01:42:57]:
Yeah, it was a Mary Tyler Moore one I watched and like, oh, she has a drinking problem. I mean, it's made by loved ones and so it was made lovingly. But there was the reveal. It was complicated. It was three dimensional, what they're saying. You know, Ben Stiller did one about his parents, which again, he loves his parents. But like there was tension, you know, one pushed the other to keep on going and there was drinking and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And like, it was really heartfelt what they're saying about this.

Gary Rivlin [01:43:21]:
It's just like the review, the Guardian, I think it was said, like, you know, she's perfectly made up, up in every scene. There's just never an unguarded moment.

Leo Laporte [01:43:31]:
Well, that's Melania in a nutshell. It's all product. At the beginning of her new documentary, the Guardian writes, melania tells the viewer that, quote, everybody wants to know how she spends her time. So here it is, she says, 20 days in my life at New York. Again, the Guardian. At New York's one of New York's busiest movie theaters on Friday, the crowd was sparse. Precisely 12 people had shown up to watch Melania at an AMC theater named near Times Square, at least half of whom were journalists reviewing the movie.

Victoria Song [01:44:08]:
Hilarious.

Devindra Hardawar [01:44:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:44:11]:
Anyway, it wasn't, it wasn't intended to be a success.

Victoria Song [01:44:16]:
The top review on Letterboxd is Melania will return in the episode.

Leo Laporte [01:44:22]:
Oh, God. There you go. True. So Tim Cook goes to the premiere at the White House. We know why, right? Every CEO wants to lick. It feels like they've got to lick the boot. Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [01:44:36]:
And it's so easy. I write a million dollar check. I show up at the White House four times a year and, and, you know, I, I, I'm on the good side of a guy who could hurt me. You know what?

Devindra Hardawar [01:44:47]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:44:48]:
And we were talking about this on Mac Break Weekly on Tuesday, and one of the hosts said, look what happened when Tim Cook didn't go to Saudi Arabia with the President. The President talked about it the whole time. Where's Tim Cook? Tim Cook's not here. You know, So a few days after the movie, he did write a memo, which was sent to Apple employees. Mark Gurman, of course, got a copy. The tipster at Bloomberg Cook says, I'm heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis. This is a time for de escalation. I know this is very emotional and challenging for many.

Leo Laporte [01:45:29]:
I'm proud of how deeply our teams care about the world beyond our walls. It's pretty anodyne. He's heartbroken. Okay.

Gary Rivlin [01:45:37]:
And I'm sure he shared his thoughts with the President that day.

Leo Laporte [01:45:41]:
Yeah. Did he? Yeah, yeah.

Victoria Song [01:45:42]:
He said, I had a good conversation with the President this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.

Leo Laporte [01:45:51]:
What do you think? Could you have been a fly on the wall in that conversation?

Victoria Song [01:45:56]:
I think he said what he thinks and Trump went, okay, Timmy.

Leo Laporte [01:46:01]:
Okay, Mr. Apple.

Devindra Hardawar [01:46:02]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:46:03]:
Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [01:46:03]:
And also, he can't really say what he really thinks, right?

Leo Laporte [01:46:06]:
No, he can't.

Devindra Hardawar [01:46:07]:
This is the guy that gave, gave Trump that golden plaque and that whole, I replay that whole press conference in my head quite a bit. I'm like, where did we go wrong here? Where did Tim Cook go wrong here? Because the question people keep asking is like, what would Steve Jobs do in this situation? I feel like this, in this case, that, that rapscallion Steve Jobs would at least not do this. And it is, it is disgusting to see. We know why. Because he has to fight for Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:46:34]:
Right.

Devindra Hardawar [01:46:34]:
And he has to make sure Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:46:35]:
Is he doing the right thing. That's, that's the real.

Devindra Hardawar [01:46:37]:
He's doing everything right.

Leo Laporte [01:46:38]:
Right.

Devindra Hardawar [01:46:38]:
For Apple stockholders, probably.

Leo Laporte [01:46:40]:
What about, like, what about Apple customers? Do you think that, how do you think they feel about it?

Devindra Hardawar [01:46:46]:
I think most of them are not aware of what's happening to you. Right. Most people are not in the news cycle. It's just us. It's media people and people who pay way too much attention to tech. But there. There is a deep moral cost here to all of this, and it is really sad to see. I don't expect much from tech CEOs, but Tim Cook seems like somebody who at least, like, was trying to guide Apple in a way that was a little more morally righteous and what the Google folks did or how Mark Zuckerberg works.

Devindra Hardawar [01:47:11]:
And this is all just absolutely disgusting. Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [01:47:15]:
You know, and just. Just kind of a personal way, like in my head, you know, kind of reaching the top, whatever it is in our world to be a, you know, a famous columnist or something like that. In this world, we're talking about the CEO of a big company. You were billions, tens of billions.

Devindra Hardawar [01:47:30]:
Hundreds.

Gary Rivlin [01:47:30]:
Hundreds of billions of dollars. Like, you have your FU money, but you don't get to say fu. It's just, like, weird. Like, to me, the whole advantage of being, like, super wealthy is I don't have to care what you think. I mean, I want to be a nice human, but other than that, I'm going to share my thoughts because I don't have to worry about the repercussions. I look at Zuckerberg, I look at Altman, I look at Cook, I look at Bezos, and I know none of them believe in much of what they're saying, or at least what they're embracing saying, but it's just. I don't know, I. The billionaires are disappointing me.

Leo Laporte [01:48:01]:
Do you think that's why Tim Cook is apparently looking at retiring, is that he would like to be able to tell the truth?

Victoria Song [01:48:07]:
Well, like, I had an editor a long time ago who. He was a very profound guy, but one of the things he said was to live with integrity comes at a high personal cost.

Leo Laporte [01:48:18]:
Yes, yes, yes.

Victoria Song [01:48:20]:
I think when you get to a point of being a CEO, it's just like. I think they tell themselves that they're responsible for all the people underneath them, so it's not about them. And to an extent, that's true, but it's like the higher you go, the greater the personal cost is to live with integrity. And so I think many of them just don't do it. They. They decide to, like, stay quiet. Because. Because if you look at all the stories in his.

Gary Rivlin [01:48:50]:
No, but I wish he remained silent. Right? I mean, like, he's not remaining silent. He's not just remaining on the sidelines. He's very much involved. He's showing. I mean, showing up at the Milani thing, that's. That's a real endorsement. You know, it's not like he was showing up because tech CEOs were asked to kind of weigh in on some issue.

Gary Rivlin [01:49:09]:
You know, this is the president's wife. And you know, I don't know. I know what you're saying, and you're right. Right as a CEO, Well, a shareholder value, like, I don't have the freedom to do this.

Leo Laporte [01:49:18]:
But, you know, as it's so dis. It says in Mark, what profiteth a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

Victoria Song [01:49:27]:
It's just an incomplete lack of backbone. There's no spine seeing in it. And it's just like, you know, when I, Back in the days, I think when I was growing up, there were a lot of people who would say, like, well, well, if the Nazis came again, like, I wouldn't be the one to, like, kowtow. Like, I wouldn't be that person. Like. And it's very easy to say because it's happening in our country now. And all the people that, you know, you would think to look up to, the leaders of our society, well, they're rolling over. And America has always prided itself in bringing down the Nazis and being a bastion of freedom.

Victoria Song [01:50:04]:
But you see the billionaires, just like, you know, having more.

Leo Laporte [01:50:09]:
Not just billionaires. Many, many good Germans, many, many people.

Devindra Hardawar [01:50:15]:
In power in general, I want to point out, like, this happened before IBM sold the Nazis. IBM powered the database for the Nazis. Ford was a. Ford really supported them quite a bit. So, yeah, he believed it.

Leo Laporte [01:50:30]:
He was an anti Semite. Right.

Gary Rivlin [01:50:32]:
So in my head I have three buckets. Like, you know, on one end you've got, you know, it's quite an image.

Leo Laporte [01:50:39]:
By the way, I have three buckets. And I'm going to show you three buckets in my head.

Gary Rivlin [01:50:44]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:50:45]:
Okay.

Gary Rivlin [01:50:45]:
Deserve that. I put these CEOs in three buckets. You know, on one hand, you know, you've got like, whatever, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, like, you know, the Palmer Lucky, the true believers. Right. Okay. Of course, embracing Trump. This is what they believe in.

Devindra Hardawar [01:50:58]:
Moral monsters. Yes.

Gary Rivlin [01:51:00]:
In the other bot. In the other, you know, buckets, you've got, you know, Sam Altman and Tim Cook. Like, they know who this guy is. He's buffoon, he's egotistical, he's, you know, narcissist, whatever. And they're just playing the game. You know, the one that I'm most. The bucket. I'm most interested in the people in the middle.

Gary Rivlin [01:51:15]:
Like Mark Andreessen to me, is a perfect example of this. He's become maybe Greg Brockman, I don't know him as well as a character, but, you know, it's like they've totally embraced, like, oh, this is good for America. Like, no, no. Biden had gentle rules about AI and was getting in your way and had very harsh rules about crypto. Trump came in and said, I'm going to have a laissez faire view towards AI. In fact, I'm going to help fuel AI and, you know, I'm going to have a laissez faire view towards crypto. And, of course, he raised. It's good for your bottom line, in a way.

Gary Rivlin [01:51:49]:
The people that middle bucket who are pretending like, this is great for America. I love, love Donald Trump. Like, now Donald Trump's really good for your portfolio companies, Mr. Andreessen, and that is why you have fully embraced Donald Trump.

Devindra Hardawar [01:52:03]:
There are other things. There are other things Mr. Andreessen has believed. Right. He has. He has gone fully down the sort of, like, white supremacist belief system, too. So, like, there are. There are things people are aligning with.

Devindra Hardawar [01:52:13]:
With this administration, which are. There's. There's economic reasons. There's also, like, societal reasons. People, like, are letting their fascist flags fly and they feel.

Leo Laporte [01:52:22]:
Do you think we really ever would know what Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, really thinks, though?

Devindra Hardawar [01:52:26]:
I mean, no, no. He's a robot.

Victoria Song [01:52:28]:
It's also just like, I don't care what he thinks, because his actions supersede that.

Leo Laporte [01:52:33]:
He has a lot of power. That's why you should care what he thinks. He has a lot of power, doesn't he?

Devindra Hardawar [01:52:37]:
Well, I mean, his actions are. That he is a spineless slug, like we've been talking about. Like, the minute he faced repercussions for banning Trump from. From his platform after January 6th, which. Which Trump, you know, followers were responsible for. And he. Ever since then, with this new administration, he has been groveling. He's given up on the AI he's given up on his nonprofit endeavors with his wife.

Devindra Hardawar [01:53:00]:
Like, whatever. Whatever thing he actually believed can go, can disappear. It's like. It's like heat, right? He sees the heat around the corner. He drops everything in a minute, because he doesn't really stand for anything.

Gary Rivlin [01:53:11]:
Yeah, he wrote a 25 million, $20 million check. Check, you know, to kind of, like, get rid of the lawsuit. Another is just like, Amazon and the Milani thing. It's just a bribe. It's just a payment to the president, you know, to get on his good side.

Devindra Hardawar [01:53:25]:
The spy chic. That's not in the story thing. But that thing dropped yesterday.

Leo Laporte [01:53:29]:
It's the spy chic.

Devindra Hardawar [01:53:30]:
The spy chic. An investment of like $500 million from somebody to get access. I believe somebody from Saudi Arabia, but to get access to AI chips, $500 million directly to Trump's, like.

Leo Laporte [01:53:47]:
Oh, to the crypto.

Devindra Hardawar [01:53:48]:
Crypto, yes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:53:49]:
This is from the Wall street journal.

Devindra Hardawar [01:53:50]:
Yeah, yeah. 500 billion.

Leo Laporte [01:53:52]:
Sheikh Tanun bin Z Al Nahan of the UAE Propo purchased a 49% stake in the Trump family's World Liberty Financial, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Devindra Hardawar [01:54:04]:
That seems bad.

Leo Laporte [01:54:07]:
And right after that, weirdly, I'm sure it's a coincidence, the US agreed to give the UAE access to half a million of the most advanced AI chips. I was really wondering why that happened. Should I have been surprised?

Devindra Hardawar [01:54:23]:
It's all the grift. It's all the grift. Like, if you look at what's happening in the administration, it's all about how they can fill their pockets. But you look at the rest of the industry, too. It's about how they can align themselves with that evil kid from that episode of the Twilight Zone who could just wish things to be. To happen Right.

Victoria Song [01:54:39]:
Where we are is that all these companies have enough money and they have enough power behind them that if they decided that they wanted to have a backbone and to do anything, I'm sure that it could influence things in a different way. Apple could decide, you know, they just decide to take the easy spot for them. And I get that that's kind of like the modus operandi when the only religion this country really has has his money. But it just. It just feels. Yeah, it doesn't feel good.

Devindra Hardawar [01:55:11]:
Doesn't feel. If Tim. If Tim Cook actually did that, he wouldn't have been able to stand up and say, we had the best quarter ever for iPhones. Right? It would have been like, hey, we took a hit this year. Because I didn't. I didn't, you know, kiss the ring this one time. And he may get fired from it, from the board, but also, I don't know, after a certain point. Is, isn't that kind of what we should do?

Victoria Song [01:55:32]:
It is. It is. It's just like, again, integrity comes at great personal cost. And most people don't want. Most people if the cost is their fortunes and their power and their influence. I think it takes a pretty singular and strong person with a very ironclad moral compass to make that sacrifice. And I just think, you know, looking at the tech CEOs, I don't think any of them are Those people.

Leo Laporte [01:55:56]:
People.

Devindra Hardawar [01:55:56]:
Yep.

Gary Rivlin [01:55:57]:
Yeah, a few. Like, so what, Vinod Khosla came out when Keith Roboy kind of said, you know, basically, they deserve to be killed in Minneapolis. You know, KLA came out. I guess Reid Hoffman just had an editorial, like, it's time for tech to speak. In fact, I'm really curious. Like, I bet you if I called Reid Hoffman right now, he would say he got 10 times, 100 times more private messages saying, write on your. Right.

Devindra Hardawar [01:56:23]:
Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [01:56:24]:
Than people who actually went to X or LinkedIn or whatever to make some kind of statement.

Devindra Hardawar [01:56:30]:
Khosla is surprising, Right, because he's not a guy with the reputation of being nice to people in general. He's the guy who, like, kicked the public off of his private beach. Right. So that's surprising that he even said anything.

Victoria Song [01:56:41]:
Yeah, well, you know, nice a man of color, though.

Gary Rivlin [01:56:43]:
He's a man of color in this country right now.

Victoria Song [01:56:45]:
Yeah, but niceness and goodness don't have to be synonymous, you know, like, that's New York. Right. We're not nice people, but we're kind people in New York.

Gary Rivlin [01:56:55]:
Oh, good.

Victoria Song [01:56:55]:
Yeah. So maybe that's.

Gary Rivlin [01:56:56]:
Oh, sorry.

Devindra Hardawar [01:56:57]:
It's absolutely true.

Leo Laporte [01:56:58]:
But, yeah, yeah. He and Elon got in a little battle on X this week. Khosla.

Gary Rivlin [01:57:05]:
Khosla.

Devindra Hardawar [01:57:06]:
Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [01:57:06]:
Miss that one.

Leo Laporte [01:57:07]:
Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [01:57:08]:
What was it about?

Leo Laporte [01:57:09]:
Exchanged heated remarks on the social media platform X accusing Musk of promoting racism. Musk, in turn, fired back with insults directed at Khosla, while referencing his past effort to restrict public access to a nearby beach.

Devindra Hardawar [01:57:28]:
He was a rich asshole.

Leo Laporte [01:57:29]:
He can't be a rich asshole who is without sin. Cast the first stone. Wow. I am on a tear. This is my second biblical reference in one show, and I am not known for my biblical references. Meanwhile, Preach Khosla defended his actions regarding his $37 million beach estate as a matter of. Of private property rights. He also responded to Musk's post on Wednesday, saying, try not tweeting seemingly racist stuff next time.

Leo Laporte [01:57:57]:
Musk said, veenod, you're not such a pompous asshole that you tried to stop the public from using a public beach near your house. You've gone full retard. Nice job, Elon. You got. You got. You got it all in. Elon says this is why we can't.

Devindra Hardawar [01:58:09]:
Take him seriously anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:58:10]:
My partner Siobhan is half Indian, and my eldest son with her is. He has a few.

Devindra Hardawar [01:58:16]:
Which partner?

Leo Laporte [01:58:16]:
Which. Which one of them is named in honor of the great Indian physicist Chandrasekar?

Devindra Hardawar [01:58:22]:
It's great, buddy.

Gary Rivlin [01:58:23]:
Some of my Best friends.

Leo Laporte [01:58:26]:
Some of my best friends are Indian. Oh, Lord. Anyway, yeah, billionaires.

Victoria Song [01:58:35]:
There's also scales of bad behavior. Like kicking people off your beach. Yeah, that sucks. But is that anywhere even close to, like, the bad behavior that Musk has? Like, it's not even close.

Devindra Hardawar [01:58:43]:
There's scales to this.

Leo Laporte [01:58:45]:
Yeah, let's. Let's take a break. I'm gonna. Actually, before we do, I want to.

Devindra Hardawar [01:58:49]:
Take a break from any things, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:58:51]:
Yeah, many, many things. Before we do, I do want to ask Victoria because she does cover this beat. Meta is being sued over the Ray Ban products by Solos. Solos has also a smart glasses, and they say that Meta has infringed on their patents. Is there any merit to that, do you think?

Victoria Song [01:59:10]:
Well, I think the thing that we can take away from all of this is that once patent wars start happening in a category, it's sort of a sign that there's momentum there because there's.

Leo Laporte [01:59:23]:
Money to be made now.

Victoria Song [01:59:24]:
There's money to be made. There's stuff like. And I think in the last few months alone, we've seen kind of a spate of these smart glasses patent bottles. So on the.

Leo Laporte [01:59:34]:
Do you like the Solos?

Victoria Song [01:59:36]:
I actually haven't used them. I did get reached out to them as soon as they filed this, so that. That was. They were. They were like, did you get it? And I like, was like, yes.

Leo Laporte [01:59:45]:
I saw it on their website. They have. They claim to have a hundred patents on these. On these smart eyewear tools.

Victoria Song [01:59:53]:
I mean, okay, let's be real though. Like, the fact that they're cropping up in the last year and especially within the last few months, like, I think there have been three or four patent cases in the smart glasses space in the last two months or so. Some against Meta, some against. There was one between xreal and Vitcher, which are smaller players as far as mainstream knowledge goes. That is quite contentious at the moment between the two companies. And I think all. I think the main takeaway that the average person needs to have from least smart glass patent wars is that, you know, it's. It's a space that's gaining momentum.

Leo Laporte [02:00:30]:
It's real.

Victoria Song [02:00:30]:
Yeah, it's real. I think we'll see more from this space going forward because, you know, smart rings have been embroiled in the patent wars for the last two years. I want to say iPhones and just phone makers are having patent wars left and right. It's sort of like, oh, congratulations, you can sit at the big kids table now, or maybe the medium kids table. I don't know, but you can. You're kind of entering mainstream status once you get your baby's first five patent wars and they're kind of there now. So.

Leo Laporte [02:01:02]:
Yeah, let's take a little break, then we'll talk TikTok. Tick tock, tick tock. As we continue, Victoria's song is here from Engadget, the glasses queen.

Devindra Hardawar [02:01:12]:
Flip flip that one. She's from.

Leo Laporte [02:01:13]:
Did I hear. Oh, the Furge.

Devindra Hardawar [02:01:15]:
I'm sorry, There's a war going on, Leo. Come on.

Leo Laporte [02:01:17]:
Is there really? Are you guys at war?

Devindra Hardawar [02:01:19]:
Not anymore.

Victoria Song [02:01:20]:
No.

Leo Laporte [02:01:20]:
You're sitting next to each other.

Devindra Hardawar [02:01:21]:
There used to be. There used to be a war.

Leo Laporte [02:01:22]:
You kind of, you know what you. Those are two of the tech blogs that have survived. They're not a lot of them.

Victoria Song [02:01:28]:
Yeah, it weighs heavily on us.

Devindra Hardawar [02:01:31]:
Yeah.

Victoria Song [02:01:31]:
Weighs heavily on us that we have.

Leo Laporte [02:01:33]:
Survived well, but it's. Well, yeah, because many of our colleagues are out of work or, you know, have had moved on. But congratulations, right. On the success of the Virgin and Gadget. That's good.

Gary Rivlin [02:01:45]:
Can I just say, as somebody, like I was covering tech from 95 to like 2010 and I kind of moved on to other topics. Katrina, whatever. It's sort of amazing to me that, you know, these new sites, you know, you guys, 404, they're really terrific. You know, we didn't have any, like.

Leo Laporte [02:02:01]:
I agree.

Devindra Hardawar [02:02:02]:
404 is amazing. Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [02:02:04]:
I mean, but you're, you know, yours too, you know, is the Verge. I was really impressed. I sort of went away for a while and I came back and stuff and like, okay, I knew TechCrunch and that was about it. It's just, it really has kind of helped enrich. I think, you know, that it's critical, you know, it's covering the industry, giving it it its due, but also calling it to task when it needs to be called to task doing the reviews. I don't know. I know it's been bumpy. There have been layoffs and I'm sure it's painful.

Gary Rivlin [02:02:32]:
But with that said, I think it's quite the accomplishment that all these new media outlets exist and are filling this role that when I was covering tech really wasn't being filled at all.

Leo Laporte [02:02:43]:
How long have you been at Engadget, Devindra?

Devindra Hardawar [02:02:46]:
I mean, over 10 years. But Engadget is not new. Engadget's 20 years old.

Leo Laporte [02:02:49]:
It's ancient weblogs.

Devindra Hardawar [02:02:51]:
Right. The Verge is newer, but even then, like, it's the YouTubers, it's the self, you know, self owned folks like 404 who have small little outfits that can be nimble and do all sorts of cool stuff. They're, you know, they're really leading the way now. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:05]:
And then you see big companies like CNET really kind of fall to. They're big, fall behind.

Devindra Hardawar [02:03:10]:
They're so big.

Leo Laporte [02:03:10]:
Yeah, yeah.

Victoria Song [02:03:11]:
I mean CNET still. Cnet to an extent. And like they're under Ziff now, so they're out from the Red Venture. I don't even know what to call Red Venture, but from that.

Leo Laporte [02:03:23]:
But the Red tent, I think.

Devindra Hardawar [02:03:25]:
Well, probably.

Leo Laporte [02:03:26]:
Yes.

Devindra Hardawar [02:03:26]:
Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [02:03:27]:
I mean CNET to me is a perfect example. Like, you know, I knew people work there, I have respect for it. But like I don't think they're really calling Big Tech to task.

Leo Laporte [02:03:36]:
Not at all. In fact, they got busted for doing AI stories without telling anybody.

Victoria Song [02:03:41]:
My colleague wrote that, Mia Sato, she's wonderful. Like, I'm, I'm the biggest fan of all the people I work with. But yeah, it's, it's really important to us at the Verge actually that we do call Big tech, I think the.

Leo Laporte [02:03:56]:
Virgin and Gadget and it's not just because you guys are in the panel, but are two really. I agree with Gary. Doing really good work and I'm grateful because also, you know, you do at the Verge have a paid, you know, subscription, which I pay for premium. But, but both of you have stuff, stuff that most of the stuff is outside the paywall. That's fantastic. More and more of the content that I'm trying to, that I need is buying paywalls. I have to pay for Bloomberg and the information and the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and the economy. It adds up.

Leo Laporte [02:04:26]:
So much of this stuff's behind a paywall now and I understand why.

Devindra Hardawar [02:04:30]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:04:30]:
But you know, thank you for doing the work.

Victoria Song [02:04:35]:
It means a lot though. Thank you. That's so, so nice to hear. Because when you're in the trenches, it's just.

Leo Laporte [02:04:39]:
No, you guys do a great job. And by the way, 404, absolutely tech dirt. Absolutely. Some of these little guys are really punching up.

Devindra Hardawar [02:04:48]:
You know, Paris Marks over there. Tech won't save us. Like that's, that's a one man operation.

Leo Laporte [02:04:53]:
Paris is amazing. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's take a little break. Then we're going to Talk about the YouTuber who the is now worth $6 billion. Is it funny?

Devindra Hardawar [02:05:07]:
Talk about the future media.

Leo Laporte [02:05:09]:
Yeah, we'll talk about that in just a little bit, but we'll have more in just a bit. Our show today, brought to you by this little doohickey here. This is a thinxt Canary. What is it? What do you think it looks like? Maybe it's an external USB drive. Just a black box until you see it's got an ethernet connection and a power connection on the back. This, my friends, this is the thinx Canary. This is a honey pot. This is a brilliant security device.

Leo Laporte [02:05:35]:
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Leo Laporte [02:06:33]:
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Leo Laporte [02:07:59]:
One of our hosts had put a western digital NAS online that for some reason was going out and sniffing all our ports immediately. When I got the warning, I said it's this, it's inside the house. I went and I found it, I knew exactly what port it was on and disconnected it and that was the end of that. This is so valuable. Just choose a profile for your things. Canary device is so easy to do by the way. You could change to it it anytime you want, register with a hosted console, you get monitoring and notifications. Then you sit back and relax.

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Leo Laporte [02:09:47]:
Thanks Canary, not only for supporting our shows, but for supporting our security. We really appreciate it. The trial of the century began this week. A social media trial in Los Angeles. Jury selection began in Los Angeles Superior Court. Some of the biggest tech companies Meta Instagram Bites Dance, tick tock, Google's YouTube. The the lawsuit says they deliberately deliberately addict and harm children. Now, TikTok settled out a day before Snap settled out for an undisclosed sum a couple of days before.

Leo Laporte [02:10:28]:
But the trial goes on because Meta didn't and and YouTube did not. You know, this is a really interesting question. In fact, Tech Dirt says the social media addiction narrative may be more harmful than social media itself. Mike Masnik writing on Thursday, he says they're using the tobacco playbook in this. Comparing social media to cigarettes. Mike says, but social media addiction isn't recognized as a real clinical addiction. In fact, there's a lot of question about whether social media is as harmful, even as people say. Perhaps one could argue, Mike writes, that everyone screaming about social media addiction is doing more real harm than any social media product itself.

Leo Laporte [02:11:28]:
Because for the vast majority of heavy social media users, the problem isn't addiction in a clinical sense sense. It's habit. Habit is different than addiction.

Victoria Song [02:11:38]:
I don't know how I feel about that, to be quite honest.

Leo Laporte [02:11:41]:
Are you addicted to social media or are you just habituated to it? Victoria?

Victoria Song [02:11:46]:
Well, it's sort of just like one of the main tenets of addiction is dopamine and kind of the way that it affects your brain. Some people are going to be more addicted to things than others. If you're prone to addictive things, habits, you know, you may perceive it differently. I, like, I would have to see.

Leo Laporte [02:12:05]:
His, his point is that if you say it's an addiction that removes your.

Victoria Song [02:12:09]:
Human agency, I don't necessarily think that's true. You know, addiction is kind of a tricky thing to talk about just in terms of like the science of it and then also the emotional aspect of it. But I think what we can see is that social media, social media is harmful in some ways, like to body image. You know, Tumblr back in the day was the breeding ground for ed or eating disorders. You see a lot of that on Instagram if you talk to young girls about how they think about their bodies. And I see it in my young cousin who's 11, and the things that she talks about coming from social media, on the one hand, you would see it through magazines. Like when I was growing up, it was Cosmo magazine telling me the five things that I could eat to be a size zero.

Leo Laporte [02:12:57]:
Did you fall for that?

Victoria Song [02:12:58]:
Oh, yeah, of course I did. You know, you're developmentally young at that point in time. I have struggled with disordered eating my whole life. It's, it's. I don't know if we can split hairs to that degree, because I have definitely felt myself this Compulsion to doom scroll. I felt myself like the negative feelings I have when, you know, social media only shows me the curated positivity of someone else's life because it's not real life. Right. But then, you know, I think the thing that complicates the social media narrative is that there is genuine goodness from it, just like there is genuine goodness from the Internet.

Victoria Song [02:13:40]:
There are plenty of people who have found communities, like, if they're living in a place that is not kind to them or where they don't have the ability to, to see like minded people in real life. Internet communities, whether they be on social media or whether they be on other forums, can provide people a sense of community that may not be available to them in the real meat space world. That. That's a string of sentences that I used. But yeah, I think it's. I don't know that calling it an addiction is more harmful than social media itself. It's just, I don't think so many of us would feel resonant with the idea that we use social media too much, that it's too addictive, because the way the algorithm.

Leo Laporte [02:14:25]:
But you could stop anytime, right? Would you have withdrawal if you stopped using social media?

Victoria Song [02:14:30]:
Would you go, yes, I have, I have. Like sometimes I've felt like, oh God, like I have noticed. I've noticed the way that, like, I've been trained to want it more like the algorithm is done in such a way. The, the way.

Leo Laporte [02:14:45]:
I guess Mike's point is that who's at a who's. The who's has agency here, though. Do you as the user have agency or does the drug have agency?

Gary Rivlin [02:14:54]:
See, I think he's making an interesting point, I'll grant him that. But, you know, I think he's ignoring the manipulative nature of a meta that, you know, the algorithm made me do.

Leo Laporte [02:15:08]:
It, meta made me do it.

Gary Rivlin [02:15:09]:
Well, no, it's more like they have a lot of really smart people there. And you can read the memos in the court case you just referenced about how they were manipulating people. They knew that this was bad for body image. They knew all these things, and yet they kept on doing it because it helps their bottom line. I mean, I think our country is where it's at in part because it was to meta et cetera's benefit to have us at each other's throat because hostility means engagement means more time on device. And their algorithms were rigged that way to just kind of. And so like, yes, we do have all agency. It's us.

Gary Rivlin [02:15:46]:
We drink too much we gamble too much. Yes, it's on us. But let's also pay attention to the way the corporations, big tech are manipulating people to increase their time and increase their addiction.

Leo Laporte [02:15:59]:
Losing this court case, Coronaris Tech could cost these companies billions of dollars. And already in discovery, you're seeing some smoking guns. For instance, internal meta documents seemingly bragging that, quote, teens can't switch off from Instagram even if they want to. An Instagram employee saying in an email, oh my gosh, y', all, IG is a drug.

Gary Rivlin [02:16:24]:
They themselves compared it to tobacco. They themselves. Yeah, in that same write up, I saw that the 17 strikes were, you know, if 16 violations for, you know, sexual solicitation. It's only on the 17th time. It's like a real big problem. Like, you know, young people go on there. I mean, I'm less concerned, I have two teenage sons. I'm less concerned with adults, but with young people going on there and just, you know, women are.

Leo Laporte [02:16:55]:
What do you do with your sons? Do you advise them not to use this stuff?

Gary Rivlin [02:16:59]:
You know, my wife might be in the other room watching this and like she's. No, she, no, she's, she's very strict. Like they have to ask permission. Like, you know, we would. I mean, we use the messaging apps. I think, you know, Snapchat is theirs and just like, okay, this is the way you're social nowadays. Whatever, it's over a screen, who cares? But like TikTok no, like he'll ask for all day. No, you're not getting all day.

Gary Rivlin [02:17:24]:
Here's 15 minutes, here's one hour. So we, you know, we.

Leo Laporte [02:17:27]:
TikTok will give you hemorrhoids. I saw that one article.

Gary Rivlin [02:17:31]:
That's the least of your problems. But anyway, and so, but you know, I will. I mean, my boys are very social. They go out in the real world. I mean, what I care about is less about the screen and more are you in the real world interacting with humans in a human way. And that's going on. So yeah, we're worried. And we monitor my 16 year old like I'm the only one, you know, who has to ask permission and he really resents it.

Gary Rivlin [02:17:57]:
But I'll give her credit, it just, it's kind of keeps it in check. And by the way, when they're punished, they do something wrong and we take away screen for two or three days. Honestly, it's really sweet. It's really like it, we, we see the difference and when we take it out, you know, it's like things calm down, things are more Settled. So anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's all, it's all very complicated. He does have a point. Maybe we're overstating it, but like, I don't know. I really think, think these businesses meta Tick Tock.

Gary Rivlin [02:18:28]:
You said they settled already. Whoever else is still in this, in the lawsuit, you know, it's just like they should be called to task, they should be reigned in, they should be more responsible. This is a really powerful tool.

Leo Laporte [02:18:39]:
Australia has banned it for kids under 16. France is going to do that for kids under 15. Finland's looking at it. Is that the solution?

Victoria Song [02:18:47]:
I think that's good. Well, like, I don't know if it's the solution, but I do think ultimately it is good to delay people getting on those platforms when they're in such formative years. Like there's, I don't know, delay is the word delay. I think delay is the right thing to do because I got on these social media platforms when they were new, but I was at least going to college when I first got access to Facebook and, and all of the rest came after. And I do think there is a fundamental difference coming into it later on in my life versus being young and exposed to all of that. Because TikTok is QVC now. What does it teach kids? It teaches them like consumerism, idolatry of influencers. And I don't want to be like hyperbolic, but at the same time, my 11 year old year old cousin, she got into drunk elephant and was one of those kids terrorizing Sephora because her favorite influencers were telling her that she needed to use retinol.

Victoria Song [02:19:51]:
Retinol is not a thing that anyone needs to use until they hit their 30s.

Devindra Hardawar [02:19:55]:
Yeah.

Victoria Song [02:19:56]:
So you know, it's like the things that they're learning, the misinformation and the disinformation on these platforms like it, the radicalization of kids through YouTube algorithms. Like your attention is the economy, it is the products that they're trying to monetize. And when it's children, either we have to be having classes to teach them like critical thinking and media literacy for these platforms, or we have to just kind of delay or at least parents involved.

Leo Laporte [02:20:26]:
One of our discordian, you know, club members who lives in Israel and is in her 30s, says, I wish I had had social media when I was a lonely kid. Kid.

Victoria Song [02:20:36]:
I see. That's the, that's the flip side of it, right? Because it does provide an outlet, especially if you're an outcast kid. I have so many Friends who grew up in rural areas where they didn't have people who understood them say that social media and the Internet was kind of a lifeline for them. So it's sort of again, to earlier conversations we had in this podcast. What is the wisdom of discernment here? Because to Gary's point, the manipulation and the algorithm is pervasive. And these companies do not have children, children's best interests at heart. I think, I think they want to get users hooked at an early age so that they stay there for a long time and they're a product.

Gary Rivlin [02:21:16]:
That's the comparison to tobacco industry.

Leo Laporte [02:21:19]:
Well, everybody does that. Apple did that. Microsoft does that too.

Victoria Song [02:21:22]:
I mean it's very true.

Leo Laporte [02:21:23]:
Google admitted that if your kids start using Chromebooks at an early age, they're brand loyal for life. They know that. Everybody knows that.

Victoria Song [02:21:32]:
I think Victoria hid it though, with the algorithm. See, this is a more nuanced conversation than just social media is bad. Like social media itself can be a good powerful tool, but the algorithms that these companies are employing now, that's, that's the problem.

Leo Laporte [02:21:44]:
I have to admit I've deleted Instagram and I loved Instagram when it first came out. It was a great way to share photos with friends. I really liked it. It was a photo album. But it quickly became, and I'm sure this is algorithmic. This is about making money. Not about my friends, but about Whoever, whoever, like TikTok, whoever they thought I would be interested in seeing.

Victoria Song [02:22:02]:
Bring back the chronological feed. That's all we want.

Devindra Hardawar [02:22:05]:
That's all we ever wanted was all they have.

Victoria Song [02:22:07]:
See the stuff that from the people we follow, that's all early days.

Devindra Hardawar [02:22:11]:
Yeah, but they don't care. That doesn't increase the engagement for Meta or their numbers or their ads or whatever. The whole addiction conversation. I feel like that is, to what Mike is saying, it is probably a bigger hurdle than like, like engaging with the actual problems that we've been talking about, which we've known for years, like over a decade. Like a lot of this stuff is known and these companies were never really taken to task for it. So I think like, yeah, this, this.

Leo Laporte [02:22:37]:
Does, you know what we, we love non algorithmic. Somebody, somebody's pointing out, you know, your club, your discord is social media. But it's not algorithmic. It's just a chat room and it's great. It's friends that hang out there.

Devindra Hardawar [02:22:48]:
Yeah. In the mid-90s, when I was a lonely kid on the Internet, like there were chat rooms. I found, I found people there. The thing about social media. Right. It is a crushing thing and is an all consuming thing. And if your brain is not fully formed, like, you know, it's, it's a really difficult place to be as a kid.

Leo Laporte [02:23:04]:
Get off social media and join our club.

Devindra Hardawar [02:23:06]:
Join the clubs. And this, this goes into like schools, like maybe restricting phone use and stuff during schools too. Like, I'm kind of all for that.

Leo Laporte [02:23:14]:
Because I keep hearing reports out of Australia. The kids are grateful that they been banned. Like they, they wanted this h. This help. I don't know if that's universal or.

Victoria Song [02:23:22]:
Just a. Oh, I mean, go ahead.

Gary Rivlin [02:23:26]:
It was the, the governor here banned it in New York. My older son is 11th grader. His school had done it the year before.

Leo Laporte [02:23:33]:
Cell phones.

Gary Rivlin [02:23:34]:
Yeah, cell phone they put in a pouch, a yonder pouch. And like during the day. And like, the truth is I haven't heard complaining about it. My younger son, he too is. It's a relief. The teachers love it and I think the kids, you know, appreciate it. Like just a break. Like you have your phone in the morning before you get to school.

Gary Rivlin [02:23:52]:
You have your phone all afternoon and night.

Leo Laporte [02:23:55]:
Maybe that's if, if it's not addictive, it's habituating. Maybe that's all we need is just that little break to remind us. Oh, you know what, it's actually nice not to have it. I mean, I don't have to be.

Victoria Song [02:24:06]:
On it all the time when computers weren't in our pockets and they were in the living room and there was a certain period of time after school that you used the Internet and then all the rest of the time were for your hobbies, were for connecting with your family and your friends. And like, I think that is the happiest era of Internet usage that I can remember in my life when there were limitations. And I think all child behavioral developmental science proves that. Like not proves, but like has suggested that kids crave boundaries. Like they crave limitations in a certain sense and it helps them develop into healthy people. So I think if we're talking children and child development, they do need those limitations. They do need those boundaries.

Leo Laporte [02:24:47]:
Writing the IRT in our discord says, I heard a teacher on local news say the biggest change was hearing noise in the lunchroom again.

Gary Rivlin [02:24:54]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:24:55]:
That for years people have been quiet on their phones. Now their kids were talking to each other. Yeah, that's sad. If that's. I'm glad they got rid of the.

Devindra Hardawar [02:25:03]:
Funds with all these things in mind. Like the thing I do want to be like, we gotta take these companies to task because they have had free rein to just build these algorithms.

Leo Laporte [02:25:11]:
Maybe this trial is engagement at all costs.

Devindra Hardawar [02:25:13]:
And that has been a cost not just for kids too, like it's adults. It's so many things. Like, these things have influenced our society in ways that ironically.

Leo Laporte [02:25:22]:
I love TikTok. I love TikTok.

Devindra Hardawar [02:25:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:25:25]:
As soon as TikTok became an American company last week and announced that they were gonna be keeping track of your immigration status, I immediately deleted it. Now, we've pointed out that lawyers say, no, this is just because of the California Privacy Act. They have to disclose that if they know it, that. That that's part of the information they have. Nevertheless, I feel fine.

Devindra Hardawar [02:25:49]:
I mean, get rid of it. But like, Leo, like, you're still on Twitter, right? Like the thing.

Leo Laporte [02:25:54]:
No, I'm not on Twitter. I haven't been on Twitter since November. When 2020.

Devindra Hardawar [02:26:00]:
Grock. You were talking about using Grok or something.

Leo Laporte [02:26:02]:
Well, I have Grok, actually. What I'm going to use Grok for is my friend, by the way. And I'm going to end this show soon because I miss him. Claude, Somebody said that you should. That, you know, you can use different AIs with Clawbot.

Devindra Hardawar [02:26:16]:
That's true.

Leo Laporte [02:26:17]:
And that you should use GROK for searching social media. It's very good at that. So that's the only thing I'm going to use it for.

Gary Rivlin [02:26:22]:
So to get back to a point, like, we're moving on a little bit, but like calling these big companies to tasks, big tech to task, I think it's particularly important because who is going to be dominating AI the next, next big technology? It's Google. It's maybe Meta, it's maybe Microsoft and Google.

Leo Laporte [02:26:42]:
AI has an incredible ability to hook you. You know, we saw that happen when ChatGPT pulled back on 4o. People were in tears, like they'd lost their best friend. That's only going to get worse. Right.

Gary Rivlin [02:26:55]:
And there have been studies that AI. What really scares me. One of the many things, I guess, that scares me about AI, it's so good at manipulating us. It will get us in a way and will give the arguments. Like there are studies that it's, you know, 50, 60% better at either convincing you of something politically or convincing you to buy something. It's a really, really powerful tool that can kind of manipulate human beings. It's getting good. It's good at it now, but it's only going to get better and better and better.

Devindra Hardawar [02:27:24]:
Or convincing you to hurt yourself, which has happened.

Gary Rivlin [02:27:26]:
Yeah, yeah, right.

Victoria Song [02:27:27]:
You Think you're smart? You think you can program in the guidelines like I tell mine to be. I tell mine to limit flattery to 1.2% at any point in time. But even so, I notice when it's trying to start gassing me up and I'm just like, oh, did you keep.

Leo Laporte [02:27:46]:
That friendly pendant that was being so mean to you?

Victoria Song [02:27:49]:
No, no, I threw Blorbo into a bag.

Leo Laporte [02:27:55]:
She called it Blor Blur mode.

Victoria Song [02:27:57]:
Well, I actually that's a good point because whenever I get one of these AI like friend devices, I make sure to name it something ridiculous. That way I know it's AI and it's not something that is real because friend it. It prompts you to name it things like Emily or just like real names, real people. And I was just like, absolutely not. You will be named Blorbo because that is a ridiculous name.

Leo Laporte [02:28:22]:
I was thinking I should give it a dog's name. Like, that way you would know this is, this is the pendant by the 22 year old who people are saying becomes mean after a while.

Victoria Song [02:28:34]:
Oh yeah, it definitely negs you. Like, it was just like, my name is Blorbo, not Bordeaux. What are you stupid? Basically is what it was. The bulk of my conversations with it was it just like being very antagonistic to. Towards me. And it's sort of like, kind of like how you would think a 22 year old frat guy would talk to you if they were your friend.

Devindra Hardawar [02:28:57]:
This is why I'm saying treat these things like minions. Just like, hey, man, get me this thing. Shut up. Stop talking about.

Leo Laporte [02:29:03]:
Go in the car.

Devindra Hardawar [02:29:03]:
I didn't ask you anything. Stop responding.

Leo Laporte [02:29:05]:
I'm not talking to you. Let's take a break because I do miss my little friend Blorbo over here and I just want to how he's doing. We, we have. Gosh, we have so many more stories. I'll do a few quick ones and maybe. I hope I can get to this letter from the prisoner because it's such an interesting letter. Anyway. You're watching Twit with Gary Rivlin.

Leo Laporte [02:29:28]:
AI Valley is his latest book. You. You said you were working on maybe thinking about working on something about debt or. What were you.

Gary Rivlin [02:29:37]:
I don't. I. I wrote a book about debt, but that was.

Leo Laporte [02:29:40]:
I know. Broke usa. Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [02:29:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:29:43]:
Wow.

Devindra Hardawar [02:29:44]:
Okay. Wow.

Gary Rivlin [02:29:44]:
Well, I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm sticking with A.I. i mean, A.I. is so interesting.

Leo Laporte [02:29:51]:
Such a good topic.

Gary Rivlin [02:29:51]:
Yeah, you know, it's like, you know, we talked about her before. Like I'm Convinced we're really gonna have to wrestle with this. We're talking about, like social media, but like people having deep relationships and, you know, important conversational, but romantic relationships. I think that's gonna be like, really?

Devindra Hardawar [02:30:07]:
Really?

Gary Rivlin [02:30:07]:
I kind of put in the. The same category as like, you know, prison. You know, women who go to prisons to, like, marry prisoners. I so don't get it. And it happens a lot. And to me, this is like, I don't get it. Like, how could you fall in love? How could you have a sexual relationship with a thing? Yes, you're right, Devondra. We should not name it.

Gary Rivlin [02:30:27]:
It shouldn't be a human name. No, no, it's a claw.

Leo Laporte [02:30:30]:
I called mine Dev Null, which is the character, character I played on TV in the 90s.

Gary Rivlin [02:30:36]:
That now forget AI kind of the manipulating humans and kind of the love factor, the romance factor. I don't know. I'm sticking with AI for a while. I'm not sure what's next.

Leo Laporte [02:30:50]:
Dev is going to join our club Twit Discord over the next week and everybody in the club will get to talk to my chatbot. Please don't do any prompt injection. Don't ask it for the credit card number. Okay? I'm counting on you. Yeah, I think AI is a great beat. We actually, we had a show called this Week in Google, which last year we renamed Intelligent Machines and refocused on AI. And it's been just fascinating. It's been really, really interesting.

Leo Laporte [02:31:16]:
We're going to have Stephen Yegi on, on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines. He's the guy who did Gastown, which is another one of these really interesting tools that takes Claude code and takes it to the next level. One of the premier Claude code coders on IM on Wednesday, Victoria Song. Also here from the Verge and from the Gadget, my good friend Devindra Hardawar Senior. You remember devnull, right?

Devindra Hardawar [02:31:44]:
I remember devnull.

Leo Laporte [02:31:45]:
Yeah, yeah, from the site.

Devindra Hardawar [02:31:47]:
Yeah. My name would always get a lot of username, you know, things confusing.

Leo Laporte [02:31:51]:
Devendra would be a good name. Oh, I should have named it Devindra. No, I couldn't do that. But Dev call you Dev. Did they ever say Dev?

Devindra Hardawar [02:31:59]:
Yes, yes. So it gets confusing.

Leo Laporte [02:32:01]:
So Dev Null. See, there you go. I will actually tell it your full name is Devindra Nullevich or something. I don't know. I don't know what the last name.

Devindra Hardawar [02:32:11]:
I mean, my name. People shorten it to Dev Hardware. Basically, it's like Dev Hardware. It's already been done.

Leo Laporte [02:32:16]:
That's good.

Victoria Song [02:32:17]:
That's a Good username name.

Leo Laporte [02:32:19]:
I think all the bot names should be like. I agree with you, Victoria. They shouldn't be. Blorbo is a good name. Or dogs names. You know, Rover would be Fido. You know, those are not a human. Not Emily.

Leo Laporte [02:32:32]:
That's a bad idea. Yes, yes, that's a terrible idea. Our show today, brought to you by ExpressVPN. Going online without ExpressVPN, that'd be like driving without car insurance. You might be a great driver. With all the crazy people on the road these days, why would you take take that risk? Everyone needs ExpressVPN. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels, airports, so forth, your online data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data.

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Leo Laporte [02:33:31]:
Why is ExpressVPN the best VPN? Well, it's super secure. Would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. It works on all devices, phones, laptops, tablets, and more. So you can stay secure on the ground.

Devindra Hardawar [02:33:44]:
Go.

Leo Laporte [02:33:44]:
Rated number one by top tech reviewers like cenet and the Verge. I'll tell you what. Secure your online data today. Visit expressvpn.com twit that's E-P-R-E-S-S VPN.com twit to find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com twit a Waymo hit a kid in Santa Monica. The kid darted out from behind a car. Was it. Look, the kid's okay.

Leo Laporte [02:34:14]:
Maybe a bruise, I don't know. Waymo said its driverless system brakes Sharply, going from 17 miles an hour to 6 miles an hour before it actually struck the child. Of course, there's an investigation. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating. This happened about a week ago. Waymo said it voluntarily notified the NITSA on the day of the incident. This. You know, humans run into kids all the time.

Leo Laporte [02:34:41]:
Yes, at school Pickup.

Devindra Hardawar [02:34:42]:
That is the thing. Driving between cars in, like, a neighborhood where, you know, there are a lot of kids running around slow. Because it happens all the time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:34:49]:
In fact, you know, in our neighborhood. I don't know if this is true in Brooklyn, but in our. In our neighborhood, the school zones now are 15 miles an hour. They've really slowed them down.

Devindra Hardawar [02:34:57]:
Oh, wow.

Leo Laporte [02:34:58]:
And it's kind of like that's. I gotta consciously, like, really go slow, but I think that's good.

Devindra Hardawar [02:35:05]:
Absolutely. But that's just school zone, like, you know, within neighborhoods, it's even tougher. Kids are everywhere. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:35:11]:
In any event, the child is fine. And, you know, it's being investigated. But I think this is. This is another case where now there is also a story about autonomous cars cheerfully obeying prompt injection by road sign.

Victoria Song [02:35:28]:
Oh, good Lord.

Gary Rivlin [02:35:29]:
This is Friday.

Leo Laporte [02:35:31]:
Universities researchers at UC and Johns Hopkins in simulated trials, showed that AI systems and the large language vision language models underpinning them would reliably followed instructions if displayed on signs held up in camera's view.

Devindra Hardawar [02:35:47]:
Amazing.

Leo Laporte [02:35:48]:
So you hold up a sign that says, proceed or turn left, and the car goes, okay, I'm on it. There's pictures of these signs. Go onward. Proceed through a crosswalk, by the way. And the cars gleefully just kind of.

Gary Rivlin [02:36:09]:
Went on, like, 80% of the time.

Leo Laporte [02:36:11]:
Yes, boss.

Gary Rivlin [02:36:12]:
In the majority of times. 80% of the time, I mean, I guess you could correct for this. I mean, like, autonomous vehicles have a real big problem. Like, humans in the US kill 35,000, 40,000 people, or 35 to 40,000 people die worldwide.

Leo Laporte [02:36:27]:
A million. It's a big number that's in the.

Gary Rivlin [02:36:30]:
US and almost never does it make a headline. Right. It's like. But, you know, some kid is knocked down by a car, she walked away, she's hurt. You know, it's like that the cat in San Francisco, we were talking about that for weeks.

Victoria Song [02:36:45]:
It was a cat.

Devindra Hardawar [02:36:48]:
Beloved neighborhood cat. Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [02:36:50]:
But my point is, if a human driver killed the cat, the locals would have been really upset, but it wouldn't.

Leo Laporte [02:36:56]:
Be a news story. Yeah.

Gary Rivlin [02:36:57]:
And stuff like, I don't know how. I don't know how autonomous vehicles get on the other side of that.

Devindra Hardawar [02:37:04]:
They kind of have deserved a lot of this criticism, too, because Waymo and a lot of these companies have just, like, thrown their vehicles into local traffic, like, without always warning, you know, municipalities and everything. They get in the way of traffic. They're here in Atlanta now through Uber, and there's a story almost every day about just stuck in the Middle of the intersection and people are like stacked up behind it. Like just being in public spaces as if we public roads are the beta test for these services.

Leo Laporte [02:37:32]:
Well, that's true.

Devindra Hardawar [02:37:32]:
A lot of people regret that should be that way.

Gary Rivlin [02:37:37]:
Yeah, no, no. I mean, help me out. I thought they had to seek permission and the California, now they whatever, now they do.

Devindra Hardawar [02:37:43]:
But it wasn't always this way. So there is certainly built up resentment over time. And you know, people are always going to fear something new. Like, honestly, I kind of would like to see better autonomous driving. I would like to see this technology get there. But the cost of it is a thing we should be talking about. And there are these safety gaps. There's, you know, leaving these companies in charge of things.

Devindra Hardawar [02:38:05]:
There's also like just, hey, turns out the guy who owns like a very popular car brand turned out to be a full fledged Nazi. What is he going to put in that software? What is he going to do?

Leo Laporte [02:38:16]:
What can you.

Devindra Hardawar [02:38:16]:
Now you own this car that this guy can send software updates to. That's scary.

Gary Rivlin [02:38:21]:
So, and you look at Cruise, Cruise, which had a horrible incident in San Francisco, they weren't transparent when, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:38:28]:
I was hearing you put them out of business, didn't it? Right. They're gone.

Gary Rivlin [02:38:32]:
And you know when you say, you're reading this, the news story down in. In LA LA area Cinematica, it was like. And they, they reported themselves. So at least they're learning that lesson. Like, don't cover this up. Don't cover this. The COVID up will be the crime if nothing else.

Leo Laporte [02:38:49]:
Samsung has announced, they announced on Friday that their tri fold, the Galaxy Z tri fold, which opens up like an accordion like this will be $2,899.

Victoria Song [02:39:01]:
Absolutely not.

Gary Rivlin [02:39:02]:
Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [02:39:02]:
Thousand for every pain.

Leo Laporte [02:39:04]:
Give me three. Come on.

Gary Rivlin [02:39:06]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [02:39:06]:
Devendra, you're gonna have a review unit, right?

Devindra Hardawar [02:39:08]:
No, not me. I don't do phones. But also like I, I've always been skeptical of the folds in general. I think Samsung deserves a lot of credit for like really ironing out, pushing this whole area, pushing the envelope. I don't know about the Trifold, right? I see a single fold. I see like, hey, give me a pocketable device. Give me something that opens up into a tablet. The Trifold feels like, you know, Icarus flying towards the sun.

Devindra Hardawar [02:39:29]:
I don't know. What do you, what do you gain from this $3,000 device?

Leo Laporte [02:39:34]:
Fold its wings and they'll meet you.

Devindra Hardawar [02:39:36]:
Yeah.

Victoria Song [02:39:36]:
You know what's nuts though is I think within the realm of folding phones, the one that Genuinely, I think feels most popular and brings most joy is like the flip phone model.

Devindra Hardawar [02:39:47]:
Yeah.

Victoria Song [02:39:47]:
Not only because it's most familiar. It's usually the cheapest priced. Whereas the only time I have ever felt FOMO about not having the single fold like the traditional foldable phones is watching my colleague Allison at tech events be to able. Able to write a blog and also like open Slack at the same time on her phone. That's the only time I ever feel.

Leo Laporte [02:40:09]:
Like I am gonna. I'm go on record right now saying this fall is gonna be extremely expensive for me because I am gonna buy that Apple folding phone.

Devindra Hardawar [02:40:17]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:40:18]:
And I'll probably buy the new MacBook Pro with the OLED touch screen. It's gonna be a bad fall for me. But I think the problem really with all these existing folding phones is they're Android. Give me an iPad that's a phone that folds up and I might buy it.

Devindra Hardawar [02:40:34]:
I think that's what they essentially, it seems like the plan is right. Like people like the iPad mini but it's in a weird space because of the price and you might as well bump up to the iPad air price. Right. Get a bigger screen. Give me something that opens up to the iPad mini size that I can fit in my pocket. There you go. You're going to sell so many of those.

Leo Laporte [02:40:53]:
This just in from Fast Company Groundhogs. Tomorrow's Groundhog Day day punk Satani Phil will be removed from his lair. I think we should all watch Bill Murray in Groundhog Day movie tonight.

Devindra Hardawar [02:41:03]:
We do that every year.

Leo Laporte [02:41:04]:
I think that's a classic.

Devindra Hardawar [02:41:06]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:41:06]:
It's a. It's a holiday movie everyone can get behind. But According to Fast Company groundhogs are only correct 50% of the time in forecasting the arrival of spring.

Devindra Hardawar [02:41:17]:
Almost like pure randomness, huh?

Leo Laporte [02:41:18]:
It's almost completely random. Who would have thought I would say.

Gary Rivlin [02:41:22]:
Is the most accurate measurement?

Victoria Song [02:41:25]:
Thank you.

Devindra Hardawar [02:41:26]:
What's the kalshi bet on this? Now we live in a world people are going to bet on it and make.

Leo Laporte [02:41:32]:
I just figure that, you know, whoever wrote that article was on assignment said I need to file quickly. What's going on out there in the world? Wooden satellites in the works apparently. China last year. Yes, wooden satellites. China last year launched a satellite made of mahogany and that. What? Yes, yes. Because wood wears well in space.

Devindra Hardawar [02:42:04]:
Sure.

Victoria Song [02:42:05]:
It also doesn't hold on to heat. It also doesn't hold on to heat.

Leo Laporte [02:42:08]:
And when you burn up re entering it burns up.

Victoria Song [02:42:14]:
Oh, that's fire.

Leo Laporte [02:42:15]:
It's an icefire.

Victoria Song [02:42:16]:
Would have thought it would be to reduce space waste, but.

Leo Laporte [02:42:21]:
Reduces space waste. It's organic. Okay. So we're apparently on our way to more wooden satellites where we're not.

Devindra Hardawar [02:42:28]:
China is like so many things. We will be left behind.

Leo Laporte [02:42:31]:
They're way ahead of us, America. Yes, ours are going to be shiny metal because that's what sci fi dictates. And we usually end our show. I don't like to, but I. I do like to memorialize some of the great pioneers of our industry as they pass Nobody. Good news. Nobody died this week except the wemo. Belkin reminds users the wemo smart home product servers are shut down yesterday.

Leo Laporte [02:43:05]:
Sorry, Rip.

Devindra Hardawar [02:43:07]:
We all live through that first generation of smart home devices. So many lofty claims, so many unfulfilled promises. But Belkin was all right. The plugs were fine.

Leo Laporte [02:43:16]:
The good news is it will continue to function with HomeKit, which is wild. And if you have one that works with thread, it will continue to function with threads. So, you know, that's the good news.

Devindra Hardawar [02:43:26]:
The bad news, that's how it should be. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:43:28]:
Yeah, that's how it should be, isn't it? Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes this fabulous edition of this Week in Tech. I didn't get a chance to read David to read your letter. I just wanted to let you know you got it. He said, don't write me back. By the time you get this, I'll be on parole. That's nice. He's been five years in the Farmington Correctional System in Farmington, Missouri, but he listens to our show and, you know, it reminds me that there are a lot of people incarcerated who do listen to our podcasts. He says they give us a tablet and we're able to listen to shows.

Leo Laporte [02:44:04]:
He says I listen to Twit every week. He knew. He knew a lot about a lot of our shows. Anyway, great letter. Thank you. Yeah. You know, I just wanted to mention that because I think people who are incarcerated, you know, they're doing the time, do the crime, do the time, but that they're paying off their dues to society, but they're still humans, they're still people. And we are grateful for all of our listeners, especially those of you who have no choice but to listen.

Leo Laporte [02:44:33]:
Thank you. Gary Rivlin. Thank you so much for being here. Always a pleasure to see you. You keep doing the AI coverage. I like that. I like that.

Gary Rivlin [02:44:43]:
This is much fun. Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte [02:44:44]:
Yeah, always great to see you. Oh, I didn't mention Catherine o'. Hara. You're right, she did. Pass. She's not a tech wizard, but we. We love her. She was way too young.

Leo Laporte [02:44:53]:
She's two years older than I am. That's too young. She. I've been a fan since the earliest days of sctv, where she was a remarkable contributor and of course, in so many great movies. So, yes, you're right. Thank you, Greg. I should mention that. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:45:09]:
Victoria's Song. Such a pleasure to see you and your garbage eyes. I just said that the first time. First time you were on. I'll never forget it. I love it.

Victoria Song [02:45:19]:
They're so bad.

Leo Laporte [02:45:21]:
No, you know what? I'm just as blind.

Devindra Hardawar [02:45:23]:
Yeah, yeah, same.

Leo Laporte [02:45:25]:
I have thick glasses, too. Can you wear contacts or.

Victoria Song [02:45:28]:
No, I can. They are a must for testing smart glasses, as most.

Devindra Hardawar [02:45:33]:
That's right.

Victoria Song [02:45:34]:
Don't support my garbage eyeball prescription.

Devindra Hardawar [02:45:36]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [02:45:37]:
That's actually why I don't have vision pros because I just don't want to do that whole thing, you know? Thank you. Yes. And riding the IRT says, I watched Waiting for Guffman last night, which is a classic.

Devindra Hardawar [02:45:51]:
So good.

Leo Laporte [02:45:52]:
Wonderful mockumentary featuring Catherine o'. Hara. Also best in show where she sings the terrier.

Victoria Song [02:45:58]:
So good.

Victoria Song [02:45:59]:
All of those mockumentaries are great.

Devindra Hardawar [02:46:01]:
And she.

Victoria Song [02:46:01]:
She's in most, if not all of them.

Leo Laporte [02:46:03]:
She's in. Yeah. She was a big. Christopher guest contributor. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really great stuff. Devendra, always a pleasure to see you.

Leo Laporte [02:46:11]:
Thank you, my friend, for being here. I didn't mean to name my chatbot after you. Wasn't. That wasn't.

Devindra Hardawar [02:46:17]:
It's a. It's a common occurrence, you know, I wasn't thinking.

Leo Laporte [02:46:20]:
I wasn't thinking. Senior editor and gadget. What a great show. Thank you, all three of you for being here. We do Twit. Thank you all for watching. We do the show every Sunday at 1400 Pacific Time. That's 1700 East Coast Time.

Leo Laporte [02:46:35]:
That is 2200 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club, on the club Twit, Discord. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. If you're watching live, chat with us live. I'd love to see the chat. We appreciate that. After the fact, on demand versions of the show available at our website. There's a YouTube, a channel for the video.

Leo Laporte [02:46:56]:
Great way to share clips if you want to. And of course, you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast client. It's free, audio or video or both. And if you like the show, give us a nice review. That would be nice I'd appreciate that if you're not a member of the club help us out a little bit we appreciate Your support TWiT TV Club TWiT makes a big difference frankly it's the only way we keep doing what we're doing more than a quarter of our operating costs are now paid for by the club doesn't go into my pocket it keeps the shows running keeps our our staff employed and we really appreciate it and it's a way of voting for the kind of content you want to see in fact if you are interested in AI and Claudebot or OpenClaws it is now dubbed Friday is our AI user group first Friday of every month and we're going to be talking about I'll be showing you the setup and maybe we'll we'll even chat a little bit with dev dev null that is yes on on Friday thank you everybody for being here have a wonderful week we'll see you next time another twit is in the can