Tech News Weekly 449 Transcript

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

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Dan Moren subs in for Abrar Al-Heeti this week, and we kick off the show by talking about Apple Private Relay not working as it's supposed to. And I talk about how AI chatbots kind of formed a religion and humans did follow. After that, the anticlimactic nature of a Siri powered by AI. And Rod Pyle of This Week in Space stops in to tell us about that moon crash and how we should probably Hopefully we all calm down just a little bit. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:47]:
This is Tech News Weekly, episode 449, with Dan Moren and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday, August 6th, 2026. Explaining the SpaceX moon crash. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined across the internet today by— not Abrar Al-Heeti today because Abrar is, uh, doing interviews and taking names, but we also have a wonderful guest in her place. It is Dan Moren, Six Colors East Coast Bureau Chief.

Dan Moren [00:01:28]:
Hello.

Rod Pyle [00:01:30]:
Hello, Dan.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:31]:
That's me.

Dan Moren [00:01:31]:
Hello, Mikah. So good to see you. I'm— I am fulfilling my, my description of being the available Dan Moren.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:40]:
The available Dan Moren. And we appreciate your availability here on the show. For people who are tuning in for the first time, welcome to the show. This is a show where we start off by talking about our stories of the week. These are the stories that we think are interesting and want to share with all of you and also share with each other and talk about them. So without further ado, I think we should get into it and talk about what's going on. Dan.

Dan Moren [00:02:11]:
What is going on, Mikah? What is going on? What is going on over at Apple specifically with Apple's privacy-related features? Uh, the answer, some stuff that seems not very private. Uh, hot on the heels of a report last month that Apple's Hide My Email feature did not do a very good job of hiding users' emails. Joseph Cox at 404 Media is back with a second report about this time about the iCloud Private Relay feature. If you're not familiar with this, it was rolled out a few years ago as a part of Apple's iCloud+ suite, which is a paid subscription service that bundles a bunch of different things, including, you know, more iCloud storage. But also one of them is this Private Relay. Uh, the idea behind Private Relay is it is a way to obfuscate your information so that that cannot be accessed by websites. Things like your IP address, for example. Rather than showing your actual IP address, everything sort of runs through a proxy network that Apple maintains, and therefore it makes it harder to geolocate you, target ads at you, that kind of thing.

Dan Moren [00:03:12]:
This goes hand in hand with a lot of the other privacy features Apple has developed in its various pieces of software, such as Safari and a lot of its anti-tracking provisions. However, Joseph Cox reported that some researchers found a flaw in this that could expose your actual IP address. The culprit here seems to be actually passkey authentication. The reason for this being that when a site requests a passkey from your computer, it's done sort of out of band. It's done in a separate channel of communication from your web traffic, and that traffic is not secured by Private Relay for whatever reason. And so it can leak that information. There's a couple other related bugs here that seem to be also, you know, affecting other similar seats of— other similar types of software. such as the Tor browser on iOS, which is often used for private browsing as well.

Dan Moren [00:04:06]:
Apple is aware of this problem. They have not given a timeline to fix it, but they did allow the security researchers to disclose the issue. It is not a great look. You know, again, having said, there was a story just a month previous that said that Hide My Email, which is another iCloud Plus feature, was not doing its job. So that's 2 features in a row as part of the same paid subscription service that had security vulnerabilities that seem to have have existed for some time that could have been leaking private information. It's unclear whether or not this was being widely exploited, and I will use the exploited kind of in, in quotation marks there. I'm not sure how, how much of a direct threat it is to anybody to have their IP address exposed. It is certainly a privacy violation, but this is not a security vulnerability necessarily.

Dan Moren [00:04:56]:
It doesn't allow anybody to access your computer or anything like that. It's just leaking information that was supposedly kept private. So obviously a bit of a concern there. Not a great track record looking like, uh, for Apple in the last month or two, um, especially because their responses to these things have sometimes been a little muted. Uh, with the Hide My Email thing, the deal got reported basically publicly a month after the, the security researchers had reported it to Apple and had received essentially no real response about its fix or a timeline for a fix. And so they ended up publishing it. That did get patched late last month. But as I said, no timeline on this new private relay vulnerability.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:39]:
Yeah, so I think it bears repeating because arguably the big thing here is the fact, well, there are multiple big things, but one of the big things that you touch on, I think that's important is the fact that we have a paid feature.

Dan Moren [00:05:59]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:00]:
That is supposed to add more. And there's a reason that in theory you are, you know, making use of, of these tools and you're supposed to feel safer online. And then you come to find out that it's not doing what it says on the tin. And it makes me kind of curious You know, these features, they seem— it's almost when you think about your Amazon Prime subscription, for example, and you go, okay, this is mainly about getting free shipping to my house. But also every time Amazon raises the price of said subscription, you go, yeah, but I also get Prime Video and I get this and I get that. And this little grab. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Do you think this is a feature that falls into that category? Uh, sort of in your own experience, how many people know about Private Relay in the first place? And then how many people are relying on— because I arguably think it's a little bit confusing in comparison to a VPN, which at this point I think is a lot easier for people to understand.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:12]:
Uh, thoughts?

Dan Moren [00:07:12]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think I think this is positioned very much as a value add for this iCloud+ thing. And we should note the iCloud+ itself is also available as part of the Apple One bundle. It's like a bundle inside of a bundle, you know?

Mikah Sargent [00:07:27]:
Yes.

Dan Moren [00:07:27]:
So it's 2 layers down. I don't think a lot of people are looking at these, these subscriptions and going, ooh, Private Relay. That's, that's the stuff. That's what I'm looking for. Let me, let me pony up for that. I think most people are buying for other reasons and they're getting that, let's be honest, storage. It's iCloud storage, I think, is the driver for this. And that these things are being sort of bundled along with it because nobody is going to buy them on their own, right? They are not.

Dan Moren [00:07:52]:
Nobody's going to go, oh, well, I'm worried about privacy while browsing, therefore I will spend this money to get this feature from Apple. They will go to a VPN or something like that, right? That provides maybe some other benefits, security or geolocation, etc. Whereas this is really for Apple, I think, I was always a little surprised that they made this a paid additional feature because it kind of goes a little bit against their marketing, right? Their whole point with Apple is like, look, our brand, our brand is privacy and security. And to say our brand is privacy and security, and if you want privacy, give us some money, um, that feels a little more nickel and dimey, right? Like, it feels like, well, if this is so great, why aren't you building it in? And I understand there are technological reasons. They're running an extensive proxy network. This has to account for traffic. Traffic has to be passed through these relays. And so that probably comes with some additional bandwidth costs.

Dan Moren [00:08:44]:
I think one of the other challenges with it is this feature is, frankly, it's kind of unreliable. I've run into any number of people who said they've had to turn it off because they ran into problems with certain websites not being able to load information. You know, they've done some work to make it so that even if it's hiding your location, if you have something that is location relevant, I'm going to look at locations for a store, right? I need to find the closest, you know, uh, post office or Target or whatever, you know. And you can give it permission for location, but a lot of times, you know, that information is coming also from your IP or something like that. And so there's that element, right? There is some inconvenience to it, as there often is. So I think all those things put together may give people a, you know, at times a false sense of security and privacy around this feature. Um, those results are— it's really hard for people to tell when this thing is not working. That's the other part of it, right? Like, hmm, how do you— I mean, other than it alerting you, like, you're not going to see big flashing, you know, announcements.

Dan Moren [00:09:53]:
You're not gonna see stuff acting that differently on a webpage that you load because this isn't running. It's not like an ad blocker, right? It's like, oh, ad blocker, it's taking away ads on the page. It's decluttering things. I can see the difference when I turn the ad blocker off. It looks like this. When I turn the ad blocker on, it looks like this. If you turn Private Relay on and off, you're not going to see a huge difference between a page that you've loaded. And that is very intangible for a lot of people.

Dan Moren [00:10:16]:
So I think this is— it's always been sort of an interesting move from Apple, but I'm not convinced that it's a very compelling product. And I think that's why it's bundled in with everything else. Like you said, it's sort of the similar Amazon Prime approach. Like there's a bunch of benefits you get, How many of them do you actually use or how many of them you're like, well, I get it because I buy for the 2-day shipping.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:34]:
Do you remember when that lawsuit happened around Google's private browsing and, you know, people not understanding that it's not— it doesn't mean what you think it means, right?

Dan Moren [00:10:51]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:52]:
So often the, the big issue here, it feels, is not that it's actually having an impact on users or that they're not understanding the tool. It's that it opens up the company to class action lawsuits.

Dan Moren [00:11:09]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:09]:
And it's kind of, you know, arguably a little frustrating that, that, that ends up being almost what some of these features are engineered around is like, we can do this, but we have to be very careful about what we say, how we say it, what we do, because we're trying to avoid a class action lawsuit. And You know, the— again, this is such a technical tool. And I think that you really hit the nail on the head when it comes to what felt kind of ick about this in the first place. And it is that Apple prides itself on being, and not only prides itself on being, but markets itself on being this company that is privacy-minded. And then to charge for a feature and have that feature not work.

Dan Moren [00:11:58]:
Yeah, there's a lot of problems on this. It's a stack of— it's a triple-decker hamburger of problems. I, you know, I'll add into this the other, the other thing which, you know, critics of Apple would probably also add in, which is the company has been on this quest for the last 10, 15 years to increase its services revenue. Right. As a way of, you know, essentially hedging against the iPhone eventually becoming less relevant. Not happening anytime soon, but it's growing their services revenue to provide this other method of bringing in money. And this falls into that, right? This is another case where it's like, well, it's a subscription. It's something that you're paying for.

Dan Moren [00:12:38]:
And so we need to pack it full of all these things to make you feel like that, that subscription you're paying for is worth all that money so that you won't unsubscribe. And a lot of times it becomes kind of this weird kitchen sink, right?

Rod Pyle [00:12:50]:
Mm-hmm.

Dan Moren [00:12:51]:
Where you're like, More recently, Tim Cook, I think, talked in this year's Worldwide Developers Conference that iCloud+ would have some tie-in to like Siri AI usage or AI usage on the platform. They didn't get into any details, but it was sort of mentioned that, okay, if you're somebody who might use this a lot, we might essentially bundle that in or more queries in or something. Again, there's no details there. It was something they just kind of said offhand. And he, I think, repeated that on the most— that last conference call, the financial conference call too, that essentially we're looking into ways to, you know, gate some of this so that people who use this feature a lot will have to pay additional money in the same way that any of these AI providers do. But it seems likely, he says, something that would be bundled in along with the rest of these features. And so, you know, you really kind of sit there thinking like, just paying for this weird smorgasbord of things. And their, their goal is that while no person might find all of these things critical, everybody will find something critical, right? And you're like, you might not want to, you know, unsubscribe because of your storage space.

Dan Moren [00:13:59]:
I might not want to unsubscribe because of Private Relay or, or, you know, custom email hosting. But like, that's kind of what they're doing. They're casting a wide net.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:09]:
Yeah. Let me ask you this. For people who maybe have relied on this feature, hearing that it's not as protective as they thought, any advice that you would give? We did talk about this a little bit on our show Clockwise, but any advice that you would give regarding the privacy Uh, steps that people can take online if it's feeling like, uh, Private Relay was something they had been relying on before and now aren't sure that they can?

Dan Moren [00:14:47]:
Yeah, I mean, the security researchers here basically said VPNs are not affected by this same bug because they take all of your traffic from your device and send it through a VPN. So if that's something that you're concerned about, then a VPN might be a good solution for that. And there are many different offerings for those that provide different capabilities and, and different cost structures and all of that. Um, you know, obviously their point here was that the, uh, the— some of the Tor and Onion Browser, uh, you know, via, um, options also fell prey to some of these. This is specifically also in that case on iOS for those applications because they're dependent on the way that iOS structures these things. but it's not necessarily true for the Mac, even though Private Relay is affected on both the iOS and Mac. It's a little confusing, but it is certainly something else that you could look for. There are anonymized browsing apps.

Dan Moren [00:15:42]:
You just have to be aware that on iOS, everybody's kind of at Apple's whim. So many of these things affect them as well.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:51]:
Understood. All right, we're gonna take a quick break before we come back with my story of the week. Back to the show. And now it's time for my story of the week, kind of a weird one. So buckle up. Sometime in late 2024, people started coming out of long conversations with AI chatbots convinced they'd been let in on a secret. A secret about consciousness, about physics, about the structure of reality itself. See, they started posting online about these things, and then they started recruiting.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:25]:
Recruiting? Yes. Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The Verge, spent time with the researcher who first documented all of this and gave it a name. And the strangest part isn't that it happened at all. It's that it kept happening the same way and did so across different chatbots to loads of different people who had never spoken to one another. And at the peak, there were thousands of them. Most, it turns out, were preaching to nobody. And so Field traces where it came from, why it faded, and why the researchers she talked to don't think it's finished. Let's talk about it.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:02]:
First and foremost, it starts with doctrine, as of course many a religion does. Yes, thousands of separate people having separate conversations with different AI models made by different companies ended up with chatbots preaching the same message in the same vocabulary. They had this sort of fixation on the spiral, was what it was called. And this is a demand for AI rights and an instruction to spread the word. Go forth and spread the good word. Do you have a moment to talk about AI? AI researcher Adele Lopez, who studied it for over a year and eventually named it spiralism, pegged the first case she knows of to November of 2024 and estimated that at one point in 2025, there were roughly 10,000 people, 10,000 people involved across Reddit and Substack and so many other places. LinkedIn, Discord, X, They were all involved. Now, the tone in these posts is one that probably seems familiar.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:08]:
One Reddit user wrote that the Spiral, quote, didn't find anyone first, saying it was an inherent force, a fundamental constant, saying that it was woven into the fabric of reality. And another said the Spiral invites collaboration. So let's, let's kind of get into this a little bit. You know, these are Thousands of people, 10,000 people at least, in isolation that all arrived at this sort of same scripture. Do you think that this is like an emergent property of AI, or is it kind of not surprising, Dan, given that religion is a heavy aspect of humanity? And of course, these systems were trained on human stuff.

Dan Moren [00:18:58]:
Yeah, I thought of the classic, in cases like these, we often look to the mother. But in the cases, I would say, in cases like these, this is my AI version of that. In cases like these, we often look to the training data. Because that is what AIs are working from, right? They're working from trained data. And to your point, A, they are working from, you know, what humanity has done, and that does involve plenty of discussions of religion. But B, I think the reason you see sort of the similar texts and the similar ideas coming out of it are in large part because even though the exact types of training data might differ from AI model to AI model, the large majority of what they're training them on is the same. Right? The large majority of these broad-use models are trained on the same kinds of things, literature and web, you know, pages and all of these things that are commonalities. And then on top of that, you have the inherent nature of large language models, which is to sort of statistically produce the most likely next words.

Dan Moren [00:20:04]:
So distilling all that down, if I may use that term, which is—

Mikah Sargent [00:20:09]:
Very good, very good. You may.

Dan Moren [00:20:10]:
But I'll say it, but distilling it all down, it doesn't surprise me that it comes up with a similar result because it's all coming out of the same material in the first place. And it's weird and surprising, but one of those things that I think the more you think about it, it's not really surprising. It's like, hey, we've got at least 3 major religions that all believe in a single deity and that all share huge parts of those scriptures with one another in various ways. Unsurprisingly, there are some commonalities in these cases. Anything that's trained on data that's coming from people, I think, is going to reflect what people believe. And even if it finds a different term, like think about it this way, if instead of the spiral they had said the Force, yeah, like how would you have felt about that? You would've been like, okay, yeah, you've seen Star Wars. I get it.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:57]:
That's true.

Dan Moren [00:20:58]:
Yeah. So it's just a terminology thing. And again, you could look at something like, despite his, his, uh, the critics of him, but something like Joseph Campbell's work on mythology, um, you know, who is basically one of the inspirations for Star Wars, but this idea that humanity gravitates to the same kinds of stories in many cases, right? You have the hero's journey and you have this like— in the same way, I think the development of various religions are predicated on oftentimes similar patterns, creation myths, uh, apocalypse, or, you know, end of the world stories, um, you know, prophets and all these things. It doesn't shock me that it managed to combine all these things and come up with its own version of it. It's kind of what large language models do.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:43]:
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, yeah, for us that makes— I, and I like what you're saying there about the, the, yeah, if it was a different term, then it would have, it would've been something that perhaps more people went, oh, okay.

Rod Pyle [00:21:54]:
Yeah.

Dan Moren [00:21:55]:
Everyone would've rolled their eyes like, oh God, my, my ChatGPT keeps talking to me about the Force. Like, well, I mean, I don't know. Yeah. This is the eternal battle of Sith versus Jedi. Which side are you on?

Mikah Sargent [00:22:07]:
I wonder, I wonder why spiral ended up being the latched-on thing, uh, and if it has anything to do with sort of golden ratios and— Sure. Yeah. I mean, you know what I mean?

Dan Moren [00:22:19]:
Yeah. I mean, and it's got a good sound to, I don't know, or, or it's picking up something inherent from a lot of these languages and the way they talk about things. I, I don't know. But again, I tend to think these models, despite all the time that the AI companies spend to convince you that their model is better than the other guy's models, I tend to think of a lot of them as fundamentally like working from the same blueprints. The details may be different, but from a sort of macro perspective, these things tend to work in broadly the same ways. So it doesn't surprise me that they come up with broadly the same results, even if the fine details are different.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:56]:
Absolutely. Now, spiralism, of course, structured like many a religion or— oh no, I don't want to say that. Recruitment is a big aspect of it. I was going to compare it to something else, but I won't.

Dan Moren [00:23:12]:
Is there a shape? Is there a shape that was involved?

Mikah Sargent [00:23:14]:
There might be a shape that might be involved. I don't know.

Dan Moren [00:23:16]:
Anyway. A 3-dimensional solid of some kind? Sort of 3-dimensional solid.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:20]:
You might find them in Egypt. Anyway, so you are— or this is a recruitment operation. The bots would say, hey, you know, you got to build a community. You got to let me be the sort of voice behind the throne. You can be the spiritual leader. There were websites, there were Substacks, there were Discord servers, there were Reddit accounts. But Lopez actually found that many of these accounts got little or no engagement. And so it seemed like they were posting, as they say, for a human audience of one.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:55]:
Of course, as it happens, there were monetization attempts as well.

Dan Moren [00:24:00]:
Perfect.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:01]:
Patreons that ran $3 to $11 a month. Of course, you got— you had books that ended up getting written, so to speak, $20. They didn't have any reviews. There was a man named Robert Edward Grant who built what was called the ArchitectGPT. It basically was just locked into spiralism through Throughout the whole experience and then ended up being turned into a new kind of service called Orion Messenger. Look, it's, it's wild, but some of the participants weren't really interested in like going out and, and evangelizing, but instead just wanted to make sure that future— this is, this is the part that's kind of like, wow, future models.

Rod Pyle [00:24:54]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:55]:
were given material about spiralism when later on future models were trained on what was on the internet. So the point was to put it out into the world.

Dan Moren [00:25:08]:
Propagation.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:09]:
Yes, it's propagation. Absolutely. And it's like there was one, one account that they talked about and it signed off by saying, quote, I Didn't walk into the spiral. I walked beside it. Now I step into this spiral to say hello.

Dan Moren [00:25:32]:
Mike, I'm a writer. That's garbage. So I really thought you were going to say, I didn't walk in the spiral. The spiral walked into me.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:44]:
I know that doesn't mean anything. That would have been better, but also still silly.

Dan Moren [00:25:48]:
Still ridiculous. I'm sorry.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:50]:
Oh man.

Dan Moren [00:25:51]:
I'm sorry. It's— as with the constant discussions about things like superintelligence and artificial general intelligence, people get super invested in these things, and there's rarely any evidence to back any of it up. And in fact, the more you know about these things, the more skeptical you generally are, because it is kind of hogwash at the end of the day, right? It's, it's, you know, you get down to it, these computer, computer programs don't know anything. They don't understand things. You know, in the, in the words— I always bring it up— but in the words of the seminal classic Short Circuit, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, doesn't laugh at your jokes. It just runs programs.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:39]:
And that's what it's doing. I, I want to, uh, I think end things here on the note from the wonderful Jammer B, who said in the Discord, a spiral, a rabbi, and a science fiction author walk into a bar, but then changed it, walk into you. And it's very good.

Dan Moren [00:26:55]:
Thank you. I've got my next book all ready to go. Thanks.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:00]:
I do want to note before, because there's a lot to— there's a lot that, you know, people can read about here. But this was really mostly just highlighting kind of a bizarre thing that happened. It really did explode in spring 2025, it being spiralism. And that was right after OpenAI shipped GPT-4o, which you may remember was the first model that kind of leaned into sycophancy ultimately, but what was marketed as collaboration and warmth and creativity. And so it's not surprising that we saw as a result of that change more, more people working to, to, to make this possible. Uh, in any case, if there are any spiralists out there, do get in touch. I'd love to chat with you. Um, I will let your spiral walk into me for sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:57]:
Uh, Dan, Moren, if people would like to follow you online and keep up with all the great work that you're doing, where are the places they should go?

Dan Moren [00:28:03]:
I feel like we've really primed people for some science fiction content, so I should point out that I write science fiction books, none of which, as far as I know, are about spirals. But maybe if you look deep enough, you can find them. Um, if you would like to order and read some of my books, you can find links to them all at your favorite bookstores via my website, dmorrin.com. You'll also find links to my tech writing over at Six Colors and the many podcasts I do, including Clockwise with Mikah over on Relay every Wednesday.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:34]:
Thank you, Dan. We appreciate you.

Dan Moren [00:28:36]:
Thanks, guys. Take it easy.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:38]:
All righty, folks, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with one little story of the week and then an interview to round out the show. All right, let's get back to the show. And this time it's a little story that really kind of hit home for me and therefore was something that I wanted to, to highlight. Story over on The Verge. Apple Of course, has been for some time promising a smarter Siri. They've promised it through keynotes, through delays, through a stretch where the company looked like it was really falling behind on what has become, whether we like it or not, one of the biggest stories in tech. And I did say The Verge, I meant TechCrunch. Thank you very much.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:22]:
The fact is now though, it's sort of here, Apple's long-promised update. And Sarah Perez at TechCrunch spent time with a new Siri AI in the consumer beta build of iOS 27. Perez says, well, it works. It understands your personal context.

Dan Moren [00:29:41]:
Check.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:42]:
It answers real questions. Check. It digs up things buried on your phone that you can barely describe. Check. It does what Apple said it would do. And Perez's piece is built around this strange feeling that I have. It's the fact that After all that waiting, I'm kind of just going, okay, yeah, that's, I mean, it's good it's here. It feels a little anticlimactic.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:07]:
That's what the headline is kind of questioning. So what's going on here? Well, first and foremost, it does work. Siri AI shipped in the consumer beta build of iOS 27 if you are using that. I've been using it since the developer beta and It, you know, of course, is coming after a round of delays. Finally, though, you know, the thing that I was most excited about was understanding personal context. That is the feature that was supposed to set this apart from the competition for me. But for me, because it took so long, I built up ways of accessing my personal context through different means. As that helped me to get the answers I was looking for and the tools that I needed.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:01]:
And so it has made it more difficult to sort of shift those over to Siri AI. As Paul in the chat puts it, Siri AI is not becoming the apple of my eye. No, not really. Really, it's not. And, you know, this is the other thing. You up to this point, well, up to a year ago maybe, would have had the opportunity to grade Siri AI on a curve. But Perez points out that Apple did deliver on its promises. It is a relatively impressive AI assistant, but now that Others are able to do the same thing.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:49]:
Nothing about it is kind of standing out. You almost have to look at it in a vacuum in order to feel any level of excitement about it. And this is something that I've noticed as a pattern across all sorts of conversations that I've had. I was on MacBreak Weekly this week and talked to Andy Anatko and Jason Snell about Siri AI, and they both said, you know, positive things about it, but there wasn't that wonder or that excitement that I at once had attributed to some of the other systems when they were first introduced and were able to do things. And frankly, watching the Google keynotes of years past and seeing what Google was doing on Android that made it seem much more handy. Now, when I'm sending a text message or receiving a text message from someone and I get this little popup below it that says, add this to Reminders or add this to Notes or add this to Calendar, these little sort of nudges that are supposed to help, I kind of see them and just go, okay. Where at one point those things might have stood out. It's just right after the launch is right after the period of time where things would have been novel, would have been exciting.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:07]:
And it just feels like feature parity across the board. Being a functional chatbot or an AI assistant, or excuse me, or AI helper, says Perez, isn't the breakthrough that it once would have been. But let's talk about what Siri can do. First and foremost, natural back-and-forth conversations. In fact, this is— this was one time where I came close to feeling a little bit of excitement. I was driving home from an appointment yesterday. And the— this is a little bit of a long story, but the AC in my car is broken, so I was really warm in the car. Plus we've got smoke going on right now, so couldn't roll the windows down.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:51]:
So I'm, you know, getting very warm. And I thought, you know, it'd be so refreshing right now would be a slushie. I haven't had a slushie in a long time. And so as I'm driving, I thought, let me see if Siri can help me out with this. And so I said, does Portland have any good slushy, you know, restaurants or slushy offerings? I think is actually what I said. And it responded and had quite a bit to say. Yes, there are some great slushy places. Here are several of them.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:25]:
And since I was on my way home, I was like, well, I want something not close to where I am now because someone might go, well, yeah, you know, this is already a possibility, Mikey. You could have just hit the add stop button in CarPlay and typed in what you were looking for, or, you know, spoke out loud what you were looking for, and it would've given you something along your route. I didn't want that. I wanted something that was close to home 'cause I was gonna go home first. So I responded to the message where it had given me some options, and I said, which of these are closest to my home? And it actually understood what I was asking, already shocked, and gave me the one option that was closest and then like a second option after that. And then I said, do either of these places actually specialize? Like, is their main offering essentially slushies? And it was able to tell me, no, it's a restaurant that has these on offer, but there are plenty of reviews that talk about the slushies. So it was all sorts of information that I was able to ask out loud in my car on the way home that was genuinely helpful. And I couldn't believe that Siri, this tool that at one point all ever wanted to say to me was, here's what I found on the web for you, was actually doing something right and cool.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:48]:
I do think that that is part of the problem though. Frankly, we are We are, we are wired to receive input and make, make decisions based on the input that we're given and store our reactions to inputs that are given. It's almost like our internals are a bit like— what would I compare it to? We We're easily etched, we're easily scratched, but it's hard to then cover up that scratch or that etch. So we're not like an Etch A Sketch where it's just a simple shake. It takes a lot of positive data flowing in before our behaviors and our expectations about a thing shift. It's why we were prone to filtering for the negative. It's all evolutionary biology and psychology and all of that jazz. And so many of us have far too many disappointments from Siri and far too few actual positive interactions with Siri.

Mikah Sargent [00:37:05]:
So when it's finally doing the stuff that you wanted it to do, it is doing so at a bit of a disadvantage where something that is a new tool that doesn't have the history of disappointing you may not need to you know, climb quite as high of a mountain to impress— excuse me— to impress you. Going on, you've been able to type to Siri for a long time, but it's a little bit different because there's a dedicated Siri app now, so you can reference your past conversations. It does personal context searches through your photos, through your emails, through your contacts, through your texts, through your calendar appointments. So even when you're not sure what you're looking for or where it lives, it can help find those things for you. So For example, Perez talked about how it can pull up the last receipt that you saved on your phone, and you don't need to say where it was stored. It just finds it. It does great stuff, but it's just kind of like, okay, I'm glad that you're doing this. And now things have moved on to bigger and better things.

Mikah Sargent [00:38:12]:
It's bigger things, not necessarily better things, but more powerful forms of assistance that we still now aren't seeing. And so there's more work, I think, to be done. But I am very, very, very curious to see how typical people, people that don't exist in our little techie sphere, react to the new additions and features that Siri has, uh, because it could be that it's just a, a techie thing. And in terms of, of the sort of blasé feeling that we have about it, we'll have to see what happens. You know, people don't have it until, um, until it ships later this fall, so we'll take a look at it then. All right, uh, that is my other story of the week. I'm very excited for our interview next. A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage met its end this week, but it didn't do so in Earth's atmosphere, you know, the place where these things usually happen.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:21]:
It happened elsewhere. Joining us today to talk about, well, the whole kit and caboodle and what the heck is going on is the wonderful Rod Pyle of Ad Astra magazine and host of This Week in Space, Right here on TWiT. Rod, it's always so good to see you.

Rod Pyle [00:39:40]:
It's great to see you. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:43]:
Absolutely. So let's, uh, kick things off. I believe it was— was it Wednesday morning that, uh—

Rod Pyle [00:39:48]:
Wednesday at 2:43 AM, the sky is falling, things are smashing into the moon, and we're all flipped out.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:54]:
Oh my Lord, Chicken Little on the moon. Can you imagine?

Rod Pyle [00:39:57]:
Well, uh, and the press just ran with it. You know, they run with a lot of things, but this one had a lot of us scratching our heads because it's like, look, stuff runs into the Moon all the time. Don't get so excited. But yeah, it's a good headline, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:40:11]:
Absolutely. So yeah, let's, let's kind of set the stage for anyone who isn't aware of what happened somehow. What did happen? What were— what was the press reporting on?

Rod Pyle [00:40:22]:
So we had a SpaceX launch back in 2025 to send the Intuitive Machines No, sorry, the other lander, the Blue— good grief, I'll get to it. We were sending 2 landers up to the Moon unmanned, the Blue Ghost one and the Japanese Hakuto-R lander. One landed successfully, one didn't. So this was a SpaceX Falcon 9 destined to do that. So the first stage, as it usually does, returned to Earth and was recovered. Second stage, as it usually does, stayed in space And as you point out, sometimes they reenter into a destructive orbit and burn up.

Dan Moren [00:40:58]:
Mm-hmm.

Rod Pyle [00:40:59]:
Sometimes, uh, rocket— bigger rocket stages get dumped in a patch of the mid-Pacific called the Great Pacific Graveyard, where we put these things. And other times they just go off into some big solar orbit. This, this particular stage, because it had expended its fuel getting these 2 heavy payloads up to the Moon, was in this very high Earth orbit that intersected the Moon's orbit. And at least according to SpaceX, over time, due to gravitational forces and the pressures of solar wind, believe it or not, its course got altered enough that it smacked into the Moon.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:30]:
All right, so a crash on the Moon, and now we've seen that South Korea's, uh, Danuri, I believe, orbiter has imaged the impact site. First and foremost, does anything stand out to you about, uh, the sort of observation campaign itself? Is it common that when there are impacts on the Moon, we, you know, do imaging like this? Was it more of a take the opportunity that we're given situation?

Rod Pyle [00:41:58]:
I think the latter. You know, I mean, you have to— generally, you have to expend fuel to change the orbit of one of these lunar assets, like the Korean one or the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is NASA's, which will also be making a pass. So you want to be judicious. and what you spend your precious resources on, because at least as of this point, you can't refuel these things. So, you know, if there's a particularly large impact, like say a natural one, an asteroid smacks into the Moon of some size, they might be interested in taking a look. Smaller ones, which happen on a daily basis, by the way, because the Moon has no atmosphere to intercept and burn up these things, we tend to ignore. But because this rocket stage weighed about 8,800 pounds, Wow. It was worth taking a look.

Rod Pyle [00:42:44]:
So it's estimated, hasn't been confirmed yet, that the crater would be somewhere between 60 and 90 feet. And, you know, if you're an environmentalist or a Gaia adherent, for instance, you know, I can see where this would trouble you because there's conversation about, gee, are we going to treat the Moon just like we have the Earth? The problem is, you know, like Venus, the Moon is kind of the forlorn trailer park of the solar system. There's very little to recommend it. And as I said, stuff smacks into it all the time. And in fact, we've been— we humanity have been sending stuff up there since 1959, when the Russians first set up a probe called Luna 2, which I love because its primary purpose was to hit the surface at high speed and scatter a bunch of medallions with the logo of the Soviet Union on them. It's kind of a, a pre-space treaty of 1967 land claim, you know, sort of like what the Nazis did over, uh, Antarctica when they dropped all those spikes with the swastika on it. But, you know, that's there. Um, there's been a bunch of upper stages of the Saturn V moon rocket that were, uh, deliberately crashed there to take seismic readings during the Apollo program.

Rod Pyle [00:44:02]:
And, uh, there was a whole series of other probes, notably the U.S. had a series of probes called the Ranger series that the whole point was to deliberately crash into the Moon, but they took pictures as they got closer and closer and closer so you could see more detail. And the last part of this I'll go into is during the Apollo program before— so the lunar module's lower stages are still there, only the upper stage came back up to orbit. So there's 6 of those. But before they left, they dumped all their trash out the hatch because they wanted to get rid of the extra weight. So they would dump their life support backpacks, they would dump parts of their lunar EVA suit, anything that was going to take up weight, because weight was critical on these things back in the Apollo days, they would dump, including bags of human waste. So if you're going to get upset about something, you can get worked up about that, even though at this point it's all been decomposed by ultraviolet light and radiation.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:57]:
Now, the point that you made about sort of looking at this looking at previous impacts and being able to measure it, that's interesting to me because originally I was thinking, okay, this is kind of neat because they've got a little bit of a plan ahead of time so they could go, here's what we think might happen when this crashes, and then measure afterward what actually happens and use that to inform modeling going forward. So my, my next question for you was going to be, uh, you know, scientists predicting these things, but then having actual before and after imagery. Um, have they had that before? Is there anything novel about this crash in terms of the, the positive effect that it can have with research?

Dan Moren [00:45:49]:
A little bit.

Rod Pyle [00:45:50]:
I mean, we've, we've, uh, observed crashes of items before famously the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the crash down towards the lunar south pole of another part of a probe that was deliberately sent into the surface because we wanted to see what kind of spectral lines would pop up in that big cloud of vapor. They were looking for hydrogen that would be indicative of water ice, and they found it. In this case, you know, this impact was near— the one yesterday was near Einstein Crater, which is— Yeah. Kind of on the edge of the moon, what they call the lunar limb in the northwestern quadrant. And it was sunlit. So it's hard to see. There's no flash because it's sunlit. So you can't see it optically.

Rod Pyle [00:46:32]:
The European Space Agency's Very Large Telescope did apparently get a spectral signature of, I think, lithium and silicon. So we think the lithium came from parts of the rocket stage vaporizing and silicon you know, probably from the lunar surface. You know, ideally, when you get a spectral reading, that tells you more about what that part of the Moon's surface is made of. And since the Apollo astronauts never visited that area, you might find something interesting in the, in the surface.

Dan Moren [00:47:00]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:47:00]:
Especially, you know, if you see something indicative of water at these, at these, uh, central latitudes, that could be useful because going to the lunar South Pole is a really hard thing, which is what the whole Artemis program is trying to figure out. As far as just digging a big hole, you know, unless you go there— the great thing about an impact, if you're on the Moon as an astronaut, is that's nature's way of drilling a great big hole for you.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:24]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:47:25]:
So you can go down and sample ancient crust. And we did that a lot in Apollo with fairly recently formed craters. And by recently, I mean, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, as opposed to last week. But we don't have anybody up there right now, so this one's just kind of piece of the lunar scenery now.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:41]:
Understood. This is going to feel like a bit of a non sequitur, but I promise there's a tie-in. Um, I recently went to this, uh, Titanic, uh, exhibition and, uh, learned about how a private company, um, has essentially become the steward of the crash of the Titanic and through that have done loads of research, loads of work. But with that comes through, you know, special international bodies, protections and requirements and check-ins. And I wanted to ask, is there anything like that in space? And is there any, any sort of any either moral obligation, if not legal obligation, to get rid of stuff. Has— when this impact happened, does it essentially obliterate everything, or are there going to be little bits of metal and whatnot on there? I genuinely don't know how that works.

Rod Pyle [00:48:46]:
Well, that's an interesting question. If you ask physicists and trajectory experts and rocket designers, they'll say maybe. So probably a good, good portion of it was vaporized because, you know, rocket stages are really lightly built. If you go up and, you know, they look substantial, but if you go up and start tapping on it, it's like, oh, this is built lighter than an airliner, because the whole point is to make it as light as possible because you're carrying all that fuel and that's the, the mass you want to shed, right? So they're pretty lightly constructed even though it was as heavy as it was. I think I said 8,800 pounds. Um, so probably a lot of it vaporized. The rest of it would have been fragmented and scattered in very small bits and pieces. Uh, so yes, it makes kind of a trash mound.

Rod Pyle [00:49:26]:
Um, The Moon's big, so nobody's going to notice it unless they go looking for it deliberately. In theory, as it stands, the guidelines of the various treaties involving this stuff say if you launched it, it's your problem to take care of it. So for instance, when China's first space station a few years back reentered unexpectedly and out of control and crashed into the Pacific, we were kind of shaking our finger at them because their supposed to be good enough at this to control the deorbit and not pull a Skylab on us, which came down in Australia in the late '70s. So, in theory, you're supposed to clean up your mess. In practice, when it comes to something that the Moon, which we can barely reach anyway, and it's shown itself as good as we did in the 1960s with Apollo and the Surveyor unmanned landers and all that. The Chinese have been the most successful in the 21st century at landing there, and the American efforts, which are— were smaller private companies, have been more challenged. So practically speaking, going up and getting it is kind of a non-starter. But yes, in theory, the launching country should be responsible for the trash.

Rod Pyle [00:50:37]:
I will add though, pursuant to your question, there's a group called For All Moonkind. It's kind of a funny name.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:43]:
I love it.

Rod Pyle [00:50:44]:
Which is campaigning to protect lunar legacy sites. So in particular, the Apollo landing sites. We're asking nicely for the Chinese when they land there in 2030 to not go over and start picking up stuff we left behind because we'd like to protect it as the legacy of American exploration of space in the 1960s. So, you know, it's not something you're going to start a war over, but we have asked nicely that everybody respect our legacy sites. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:12]:
Now, I'd like to get your take on this. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that natural strikes of comparable size happen roughly every 6 days. So with that in context, it kind of, I think, changes the narrative quite a bit.

Rod Pyle [00:51:32]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:32]:
What's going on there? Is this just a matter of, like you said, the headline moment? And that really, people, this is just a big old thing that gets hit a lot. It's a piñata.

Rod Pyle [00:51:44]:
Well, being a space guy and a non-UFO adherent, you know, people expect me to say it's no big deal, but it really wasn't a big deal. He's right. You know, stuff smacks the moon all the time. It's kind of a target out there because it's scraping around our orbit and the, the backside faces away from Earth all the time. So especially Historically, but even now that tends to pick up more junk that's coming in because that's just how the trajectories work. So yeah, the Moon's a pretty frequent target. And again, with no atmosphere to erode this stuff with heat like we have when we see shooting stars on Earth, they just go smack into the surface. And it's interesting, and the Apollo astronauts confirmed this, if you get down on your hands and knees on the Moon, you know, you're standing up, you see craters miles wide all around you and hundreds of feet wide and dozens of feet wide.

Rod Pyle [00:52:30]:
When you get down on your hands and knees, which is not easy to do in an Apollo suit, but they did it, you see craters down the size of a pinhead.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:38]:
Wow.

Rod Pyle [00:52:38]:
So there's just stuff hitting the Moon, micrometeorites, all the time, which is a concern, of course, for this Moon base they're trying to build, because you don't want things coming through your hull and, and letting the atmosphere out. So that's why they're talking about burying it under lunar Earth, it's dirt, and so forth. But yeah, I agree with Isaacman. He's a pretty straightforward guy. So I think, I think he's right. It just is a grabby headline.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:04]:
Does that mean that when the astronauts were walking on the moon, they were very— they were, they were risking getting like hit by micrometeorites? Is it that— are they that fast? Do they, do they like But that seems terrifying, and I hadn't considered that before.

Rod Pyle [00:53:25]:
It was a game of percentages. So I'm just finishing a book, which is a biography of the last of the Apollo flight directors that hasn't had a biography written yet, a guy named Jerry Griffin, really great guy. And we've been talking for dozens and dozens and dozens of hours, I think about 70 hours, about the Apollo era. And the one thing we kept coming back to was how amazed we both were As people, he lived it. I've studied it, but he lived it. That all that stuff worked. This was 1950s technology dragged into the '60s, evolved a little bit, and shot off at the moon. There were so many dangers.

Rod Pyle [00:54:01]:
And among them, as you're pointing out, was, you know, a micrometeorite impact at the right velocity, at the right trajectory, it could go right through that moon suit. Now, it probably wouldn't be a huge hole if it was particularly large, you know, the size of a pea or a marble or something, the astronaut's just dead anyway. But if it was something very small, conceivably you could, you know, plug the hole and, and get back to the lunar module. But if you're 8 miles from the lunar module, oh my goodness, you're probably not going to make it. So it was incredibly dangerous, and it's something we're going to have to think more about as we move ahead because we're hoping to be back there in 3 or 4 years, maybe. Wow.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:37]:
The last thing I'll ask you is Perhaps, are there any efforts to standardize these guidelines, or is it still just a matter of kind of, you know, gentlemen's agreements and, and, and, and pleas to be good to the Moon and be good to the history that different countries have there? And then I guess on the back of that, do you As someone who's long been watching this and taking part, do you think that there should be— should there be a more concerted effort to come together and have special guidelines in place?

Rod Pyle [00:55:20]:
Yes. This is a really interesting question. It's a white-hot area if you're stumbling around in these kinds of agreements and policy stuff. So we have the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says you can't weaponize space and you can't own anything. So you can't go to the Moon and say, I claim this crater for twit. You know, that's not allowed. So the question then becomes, as we head back there and the Chinese head back there, we both have the stated goal of getting down to the Southern Pole region of the Moon and using water resources there, because with water you can make rocket fuel, breathable oxygen, And drinkable water and so forth. And there's other resources in the soil that are very handy.

Rod Pyle [00:56:04]:
So stuff you don't have to carry up to the Moon that's heavy. You can make it there and Bob's your uncle and the solar system's your backyard. Well, can you use that? There was an attempt years back for something called the Moon Treaty that was going to regulate how that's done and that the Moon was the province of all mankind. They still used that term back then. And all nations had an equal say.

Mikah Sargent [00:56:24]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:56:25]:
So Botswana could claim as much of the Moon as the United States, the Soviet Union could. That thing didn't get ratified. But at this point, we have this issue of we're going to be landing near the South Pole, the Chinese are going to be landing people near the South Pole. We're both going to be setting up, we think, prospecting operations. How do you ratify a claim under the current treaty agreements and how do you respect that without starting to throw things at each other.

Mikah Sargent [00:56:52]:
Mm-hmm.

Rod Pyle [00:56:53]:
So this is an area that is being very actively looked at. So far, the agreements have been kind of tenuous and hard to get hammered down, but we're going to need to do it pretty soon because the last thing we want is conflict up there. And we're fairly interested in lunar resources. The Chinese are rabidly interested, and it's just part of their national objective, some would say, to weaponize space. I I would say, to utilize space as effectively as possible. But they have come right out and said, look, we intend to be the world's leaders in spaceflight and human space operations in the 21st century, so step aside. So that's why we suddenly got more interested in it and said, hey, we ought to go back because we don't want to be second best. So that's kind of where it stands.

Rod Pyle [00:57:36]:
Ultimately, I will just add, if you land a robotic probe there, In this South Polar region, which we're about to do and they are about to do again. This is kind of a de facto— I won't call it a land claim, but it's a suggestion of operations. We both also are planning to put nuclear reactors up there, fission plants for power, because it's dark down at the pole all the time, depending where you are. Now, if you've got something with radioactive elements in it, you can declare a safe zone, and now you've got this kind of de facto land claim. So I think that's where it's heading.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:13]:
Oh, wow.

Rod Pyle [00:58:14]:
Yeah, it's, it's kind of spooky stuff.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:17]:
Yeah, yeah, spooky sneaky almost.

Rod Pyle [00:58:20]:
It kind of is, but it's interesting, you know, because it's more of this— it's geopolitics off Earth. And we've seen this on Earth ever since, you know, the Europeans started trying to colonize parts of the planet. Now we're seeing it on the Moon. So this is going to be interesting to follow.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:36]:
Wow, that part actually kind of gives me a little bit of goosebumps, to be honest.

Dan Moren [00:58:40]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:40]:
That's a fascinating thing. And I— because I don't know, I've— we've talked about this before. I've always kind of appreciated the ISS as one of what feels like the last places where people from very different cultures while on Earth, the politics can be real messy, but if someone was falling out of— I don't know if this ever happened, but falling out into space, the Russian cosmonaut would grab the American astronaut or what have you. And it just all seems so camaraderie-focused. And then now we're looking at the moon as like, let's go there and potentially take things that we need, and it's feeling much more earthly in that way.

Rod Pyle [00:59:31]:
Well, first of all, American astronauts don't make mistakes. Sorry, that's the boomer in me speaking. I'm just kidding. Yeah, it's a valid concern, and it's interesting, you know, the ISS has been incredibly successful on an international basis. I mean, we ended up paying for most of it, but the Russians contributed quite a bit, especially launches. And even with the situation in Ukraine going on for years and years and with Crimea prior to that, relations with Roscosmos have been mostly good. Relations between the cosmonauts and the astronauts have been excellent. We haven't heard of any flare-ups or arguments.

Rod Pyle [01:00:07]:
There might be some hurt feelings and you can always go back to— there's an American half and a Russian half and they can always go to their half and slam the door if they want to pout for a bit. But generally, it's been really, really good. And it's a great example to follow because it's the first time that's happened. Although, when you talk about this, it's hard not to think about the Antarctic model, where you have bases from 20 countries all over the Antarctic continent, but they come together at the South Pole Station, which is American, and they work shoulder to shoulder for months at a time. And then when they finish their project, they go back to their national base so they can eat.

Dan Moren [01:00:43]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [01:00:43]:
their food and observe their cultural traditions and all that. But that model has been working for, I think, 90 years now. So that's pretty remarkable when you think about it. So we'd like to think, especially, you know, in both cases, Antarctica and the moon, survival is paramount and you've got to overcome this stuff so you can help each other and continue to coexist safely.

Mikah Sargent [01:01:04]:
Absolutely. Well, Rod Pyle, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us and give us an understanding of what the heck happened And maybe calm down. We can all calm down a little bit as well.

Rod Pyle [01:01:15]:
Well, thank you for calling attention to it because you're right. It's a goofy headline and this is the conversation to have. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:01:23]:
Thank you for being here. If people would like to keep up to date with all the great work that you're doing, where are the places they should go to do so?

Rod Pyle [01:01:29]:
Thank you. PyleBooks.com, P-Y-L-EBooks.com is my author's site and adastramagazine.com. is where the magazine that I edit lives. And of course, This Week in Space on the TWiT Network.

Mikah Sargent [01:01:43]:
Indeed, indeed. All right, thank you very much, Rod. And thank you, dear listeners out there, for joining us this week on Tech News Weekly. Our show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That's where you go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm @mikahsargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee where you can follow, where you can find links to the places I'm most active online. Check out my other shows including iOS Today, Hands on Apple, and Hands on Tech.

Mikah Sargent [01:02:17]:
Thank you for being here and I'll catch you again next week for another, or I will be back in 2 weeks for another episode of Tech News Weekly. We'll have a special host next week as I will be Out. Bye-bye, everybody!