This Week in Tech 998 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT this week in tech, and what a week it's been. I'm back from vacation. Looks like Elon Musk didn't take much of a vacation. There's a lot of news from X, from Starlink, from SpaceX and from Blue Sky Exploding pagers. Is this the beginning of supply chain warfare? And Microsoft wants to restart Three Mile Island. Is that a good idea? All of that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:36 - Ben Parr (Guest)
This is TWIT.

00:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 998, recorded Sunday, september 22nd 2024. Artisanal, locally sourced dopamine. Hello everybody, it's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we get together and talk about the week's tech news. I want to thank Devendra Hardawar and Ian Thompson for filling in for me while I was on vacation, but I'm back and with a newly redesigned logo behind me, so no longer is that my halo. Now I just look like I should be streaming video games on Twitch, but you know what? We get? Better frame rate thanks to the RGB, so that's what really matters is fps.

01:28 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I I'm told leo, are we sure that that logo is not actually secretly skynet? It is, it's coming alive.

01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like hal 9000's light bulb. That is ben parr, our ai expert guru. The author of the ai analystalyst he writes about AI for the Information is actually also a founder of Octane AI. He's our AI guru, Hi Ben.

01:54 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I don't know if guru is always the right word, but I will take it. It's your words, not mine.

02:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to call you a guru and I'm going to call you Mrs Parr now, because you're married. Wait a minute, that doesn't make sense, wait a second. No, that's wrong.

02:09 - Ben Parr (Guest)
That's a whole different announcement. I am married. It is great since April.

02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's wonderful too Super smart, really cool person. So we said congratulations last time you were on, but I'll say it again it's going well also with us. Mr rob pegararo, great to have you.

02:28 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
uh, it used to say wsh on your t-shirt, but they took the a out this is the uh, the washington nationals their city connect uh jersey design where they played up the cherry blossoms. I love it yeah, yeah, it's beautiful better city connect jerseys in mlb very nice uh, rob uh, what are you doing these days? What are you doing these days? Sense of technology for um. My two regular clients remain pc mag and fast company, where I've gotten a bunch of things at both those places in recent weeks nice and and so freelancing out off on my own blog yeah, I was going to give you a chance to plug your big newsletter.

03:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why don't you have one of them yet? Like everybody else, I've got a.

03:13 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I've got a patreon page. That you know it's my fun little sandbox to play in yeah, yeah, and you have kept and it's.

03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I only noticed this because I just recently threw mine out, your tree of badges, your badge tree from all of the conferences and events. Mine was almost as big as that.

03:35 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
And I just literally today, threw it out.

03:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I finally said you know what? Am I saving this to prove to myself that I got to go to CES in 1998? I don't think I need that anymore it's a crutch.

03:48 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I wasn't CES in 1990. Yeah, I know we're both sure I still have that badge. I did.

03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I found it.

03:54 - Ben Parr (Guest)
You don't want to know what I was doing in 1998 were you smoking uh, I was in fifth junior high, eighth grade, oh yeah, no fourth grade?

04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, fourth grade. Oh, stop it, just go away now. Ben parr, also with us. Somebody closer to my age, thank god, mr alex lindsey of hello, hello global and zero dot, zero, nine, zero dot mediaia, and the spiritual father of this addict studio. So thank you for your kind advice.

04:30 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I love watching it evolve. It's much darker now than the last time I saw it.

04:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, not my choice. I was gone for a couple of weeks and they came in, they did stuff. We did paint it because we had a white wall, which was bad. That was bad. And then this was the white medallion behind me. We painted that and now it's neon, right, but the lights they moved I don't know you need little highlights on the twit and the Mac break.

04:58 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah.

04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know those are too dim. I know I've been saying that Little little spotlights on them, we dim. I know I've been saying that little like spotlights on them, we're gonna fine tune.

05:08 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah, I have more par lights than anybody should have except you um, anyway, I just have big sources, I just go, let's just put this all behind a really big well, I gotta do what you said, which is put a big balloon over my uh, my diva light here. I just made a. I just made a huge. Uh, I literally took emt, rail and maker pipe and made a five by three and put lights behind it.

05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's in a tent if he ever shows you he's actually in a, in a in a quilt tent it's actually outside.

05:33 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Uh, it's, it's. Uh, you know, it's all quilted together. Yeah, no, it's, I've got. I do have a lot of moving blankets. I'm getting ready to redo it, so it's basically an indian sweat lodge.

05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is what you're living in, right it?

05:43 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
is it is, it's a yurt. I'll admit it, it's a yurt. It's a very high tech yurt, though Most yurts don't have as much gear in them.

05:52 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I have a new idea, which is we have to do a twit inside of a sauna and to see how long we can go at full crank.

06:00 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Oh yeah, You're supposed to be nude in a sauna. We'll shoot it from the waist up More for the ratings. No, that's not going to get you good.

06:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That'll never get us good ratings. Did you buy the new iPhone, anybody? Did you run out and get? This is supposed to be desert titanium. Is that what that looks like to you?

06:24 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
It looks nice, but I don't know. It's like rose goldish I asked lisa.

06:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She says pink. I don't know right.

06:31 - Ben Parr (Guest)
But here's the funny thing take like a sand blaster and just blast it with sand for like 10 minutes, like it was in dune, and see, this is last year's iphone.

06:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is this year's iphone. If I do this, I defy you to figure out which is which. The only way you can kind of tell is this little new button on the iPhone side, the camera control button, which is kind of I think it's going to bedevil people because you have to light press and then hard press and it's just got different. It's, you know, weird little I think.

07:03 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I do think that it'll be a little hard for people at first. I do think Apple is definitely going all in on the. It's a camera. It's a camera that you can call calls on, and so you know a lot of I didn't. You know, I haven't upgraded yet. Um, I I admit that I I looked at the camera upgrade and I was like if I had a 14, I would definitely jump to a 16, but as a 15 pro user, I was like I don't know. I don't know if I need to buy one yet friday.

07:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The embargo on reviews uh, dropped on wednesday and you know you get your usual it's. It's really apple's got the point where there's not much to say. The hardest thing with this one is the way they're pushing it, and I was just watching the nfl today. Uh, the football games in the united states and watch the ads yeah, apple's got all these ads for apple intelligence, which is not yet available right they're selling this phone based on something that doesn't.

07:56
It doesn't do yet and, by the way, the only reason this phone is needed for apple intelligence is because it has eight gigs of ram instead of six I. I feel like that's a little bit of a bait and switch. Is that a fair term?

08:14 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
uh, bait and slow switch.

08:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's gonna, it's gonna arrive, yeah, yeah, maybe I mean, some of this won't according to mark german, won't even come till next year I mean, I think that the issue is is, is, is that number one?

08:25 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
is that the? I still think I know people talk about Apple intelligence with Apple, but I still think that the primary thing they're buying is the camera and they're all waiting to see what the camera did. The camera was not a big upgrade from the last one, it was. The last one was a giant. It felt like you jumped two or three years forward, and now then this one is that tick talk that Apple does, which is that it was a big jump. Last last um, uh, iphone.

08:47
This one is incremental, um, and, and I don't think that in maybe Apple thinks, maybe marketing obviously thinks that Intel, apple intelligence, is important. I just don't think it's that big of a deal for for Apple you know iPhone users because I mean, we have chat, gpt, we've got mid journey, we've got a cloud, we've got all these things that are running on our phones and we're not really like. It's like okay, well, I mean sure, but I don't. It's not like I'm counting the days for Apple intelligence to show up. When it shows up, it'll, I'm sure it'll make things incrementally more convenient, but I don't really care yet.

09:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, yeah, I guess that's kind of the bottom line. Even when it does come, it's not going to make a huge change. Joe, who is a professional photographer and actually I don't know if you're a pro Joe, you're just a very good photographer in our Club, twit Discord, he was the guy who led our photo walk in New York City two weeks ago. So much fun. He thinks this new phone actually does even more processing. It's even more over-processed. Actually does even more processing. It's even more over-processed. He says good luck getting a shadow in an image because the phone which is probably the case that pros want shadows and the rest of us just want to see everything in the shot. Right?

09:54 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
And I think one of the challenges to go back to the Apple intelligence is that the images that they showed at WWDC look dorky. So I have to admit that, as someone who does a lot of AI images, I you know, when I saw what Apple was generating because they want it to be safe and they want it to look like it was obviously generated with AI or whatever I was super unimpressed. So I was just kind of like, well, I don't care when the intelligence shows up as far as the images go, I mean I don't, I haven't, I have to look at the 16. I haven't taken the 16 out on the 15. I mean I just feel like I'm shooting the best images I've shot. I mean I still, if you take an SLR out, you're going to get better images. But you know, I was out hiking yesterday with my daughter and we're walking around in Tilden Park. I ran into Burt oh, the great Photoshop wizard.

10:42
Yeah and so. But you know I just love that camera. I have to admit you know I've gotten really good at the 0.5, where you put the face right in the center and then you get this entire scene and it doesn't look distorted and I just take pictures with that all the time. And so I just I have to admit that I really enjoy the camera and I take the SLR out but then I put it back in because I'm like oh, it doesn't have GPS, it doesn't have you know, like a whole bunch of things. It's going to be a real pain in the neck later and just end up just shooting everything with my phone.

11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it's funny because I brought of course I brought my phone, but I also brought two Leicas with me on vacation and most of the best shots are from the phone, I'm embarrassed to say, from the phone. So, maybe I should just bring the phone with me from now on, but I don't want to turn this into Mac Break Weekly. You talked a lot about it on Tuesday. We'll talk more about it this Tuesday with Jason Snell and Andy Nacco and Alex. There's an interesting. This is the week it came out On this.

11:35 - Ben Parr (Guest)
And this is a larger trend I'm seeing. There's an interesting and painful trend of the big tech companies announcing AI functionality and it not coming up for months, or if at all. I was thinking about this today because I had to do something with a presentation. I'm like didn't Google announce last year the ability to make slides with AI and just talk to it? And that wasn't that in a video and that still doesn't exist. You can make images in Google, in google slides, but you can't like, make entire slide decks and we're just a larger google problem?

12:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
really they not just. It's impossible to know what google can do, because they announce stuff and never ship it or get the stream.

12:19 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's all the big tech ones. Apple's having this problem too with intelligence, and uh, you're even you're seeing announcers, even with open ai and like not seeing like the new advanced voice stuff, and some of it is legal, some of it is technology, some of it is something else.

12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, this is let me ask you, you're the ai expert and robin and alex you can weigh in as well, but uh is a. Do you feel like we're on? We're still on pace with ai. We're still going to grow at the pace we've been growing and the agi is around the corner and sam altman is going to be god and all that stuff, or or uh I don't know, I haven't yet watched the oprah show, the, the, the oprah show with sam altman I.

12:59
I have it on my dvr. Uh, I will watch it. On September 13th a couple of Fridays ago, oprah had Sam Altman, marques Brownlee, a bunch of people explain AI to the real people, I mean look, we are seeing.

13:16 - Ben Parr (Guest)
You know, there's stuff under the radar quote, unquote under the radar like the new open AI model and its reasoning you can actually see. Its reasoning is quite amazing. Actually, the hard problem is less the technology's pace and more habit change and having it in people's lives and making it in a way that's super accessible. This is why I was super and still am super interested in Apple intelligence, although the weight like hurts.

13:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they pitched it. Yeah, I like how they pitched it. But but it's not just the weight, it's also the proof is in the pudding.

13:53 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Apple's the one where, when they put something out to market, usually there's wider adoption, and my hope had been that when Apple put out intelligence, it would spark wider adoption and use of AI, because it's like built into the device that you use every day. But it's a slow rollout and who knows, now maybe it will still get a wider adoption. But you know there are probably there's less excitement than there was when they first announced these things. Proof will be in the pudding.

14:21
Apple is often the one that makes certain things more mainstream when they release them, and AI needs a little bit of that, because if you're really using some of the generative AI stuff, you can be super, super productive and there's some super cool things happening with stuff like Cursor and my co-founders being. It's just like coding all sorts of entire apps in the span of like a couple of hours and you couldn't do that before. But a lot of the way that AI impacts us now is more behind the scenes. Apps are being built faster. Unless you have access to new technologies faster, it's less than like, hey, suddenly there's an AI that you can just chat with and it's your best friend and it knows all of your problems and it can solve all your problems and do your dishes. You know, we're not yet at the AI does your dishes, which I think is what a lot of people actually want. Yeah Well, it's not.

15:16 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
You don't want the AI to do dishes for you. Honestly, of all the demos I've seen of AI, the one thing where I actually think this would solve a problem I have is having an AI look at the contents of my mailbox and make some sense of it. So, ces, I would like to be able to have ask Apple or Google look at all these CES PR pitches. Tell me what are my best options for Tuesday. You know what are my evening opportunities for Wednesday, such that I don't have to pay for dinner. Read a lot of stuff so I don't have to. That would be useful. I don't need an AI to write for me maybe to you know.

15:56 - Ben Parr (Guest)
take a look at whatever that already exists. It's just not really as accessible as it should be. If you use something like Superhuman, they have Superhuman AI. You can just like ask it questions of your entire inbox. It can do something like that. Not quite enough yet, but it's there.

16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ironically, that's what Apple is advertising on the NFL today is it can look through your email and tell you what happened and all that stuff. Again, we just got to take their word for it, because it's not out yet, it's just solved a too much data problem for me.

16:22 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I don't need to create more stuff in the world.

16:24 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I didn't want to turn this into an apple uh show, because we are going to talk about this on that break weekly well, uh, and I think, though from a general ai, you know conversation, is that I just amazed at how my wife and my kids and other people are using chat gpt all the time, really, for search or for conversation uh, you know a variety of things.

16:44
Um, you know my uh. Uh, my wife you know a variety of things, you know my wife, you know, got a new job and they asked her to write her own job description. And she just worked with JATGPT. I mean, she made adjustments. It's not like she said, ok, write me a job description, I want these things and I know I use it.

17:00
Like I hate cover letters and you get these RFPs, these requests for proposals or whatever, and I hate that page because I'm like no one reads this. It doesn't matter, but it has to look good and cast. Everything has to be spelled well, they're like looking for spelling. So I'm like write me a cover letter. It has to have this, this, this, this and this to this address, whatever. And boom, there's a cover letter, perfect, like it's like better than I would write it. And then I'm like, okay, the important things are, you know, here's how much it's going to cost and here's what it's going to do. And I do those things. But having to do the things that I just find to be tedious, I find to be very you know, very useful.

17:33
I have a lot of my meals now. I have chat, gpt, making my makeup stuff all the time. I'm going to make it on Sunday. I don't want to take more than 30 minutes to make and it needs to last in the fridge, and it gives me something to eat to make. Can I make it? And it's great. It works well.

17:53
I found that the secret with ChatGPT is you are a chef for a three-star Michelin restaurant in this country. Whatever that, whatever kind of food I want, make me a decadent version of this and you get something that's amazing. You know out of it, you know and and so again telling when you get. I think this gets back into what was discussed earlier, which is that you know, you do have to understand how the system works, but if you understand, if I give you a source, an operation and a target inside of an AI solution, I'm going to get a pretty good solution out of it. You know, and, and I think that those are the things that that I think Apple can make easier. But I think that, again, a lot of these, a lot of us aren't waiting for these things because we're using them all day, every day. I mean, I have chat, gpt and mid journey open almost the whole day.

18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I find me it's interesting because you have a particular use case and everybody has their own. It's kind of like the Apple Watch. Everybody has their own kind of way they want to use it.

18:48 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah, but I use it for stuff like I was doing something in Resolve. I had to have surround sound going out of Resolve through Dante into a thing. I rest my case. No, but I'm just saying this is unique to you.

18:58
Alex. But it's like menu, but I'm having it do food. No, but I'm having it do food. No, it's great, it's very useful. I brainstorm. I'm like I was talking to somebody and I went to chat GPT and I said hey, how many, if you took all the government land and gave an evenly divided it among the entire population of the United States, how many acres would everybody get? And you know, 15 seconds later it's like 2.6.

19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but, alex, I might point out that that could have been hideously incorrect answer you have.

19:25 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I did the math Less and less, so now the new reasoning model.

19:28 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah, I did the math.

19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't that far off, yeah, but wrong enough that, if you relied on it, you might be making a big mistake. Well, I wouldn't do that.

19:35 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I would say, Leo, this is one part where the AI is getting better and better. The new reasoning model is really quite good at math and quite good at those things it's. You know it still makes the like mistakes every once in a grand while, but we are getting to the point where you are going to be two years. In a year, You're going to be able to trust it and it's not going to make that.

19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So open AI is claiming that strawberry, which is its new model, actually is better than a graduate student. What was it? The grad school test, or whatever?

20:07 - Ben Parr (Guest)
yeah, yeah, the gre or whatever it is it was.

20:09 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I can't remember the benchmark they were using, but it actually is quite impressive got 85 correct uh well, I mean I and again, I, I search, I search a lot of things on google, um, and I don't. I find that the stuff that is put on people's websites about a certain subject is about as accurate as chat gpt so, like you know, like well, that's true humans are wrong more than anything right. So if you ask the human, we say I'm trying to.

20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I ask rob or rob's son? Is that your son, who keeps coming in, knocked in and out, let me close the door if I ask rob or his son how many acres of land in the united states per person? They might be wildly wrong too.

20:47 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
That was my understanding. There would be no math involved.

20:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the truth is because it comes from a computer. This is what timnit gebru and margaret uh mitchell and others were talking about in their stochastic parents paper. Because it comes from a computer, you give it more gravity, more you. Well, it must be true. You know, I know.

21:04 - Ben Parr (Guest)
If I asked.

21:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wolfram Alpha the question and it came up with an answer. I would trust Wolfram Alpha. I'm not sure I'd want to trust you at GBT even now with the new reasoning model.

21:12 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I don't even trust myself on some of those answers. So I think, so, I think that it's a good idea you know, like it's always. Trust, but verify, you know so, so you know when, but verify, you know so, so you know when you're brainstorming. What I find AI to be extremely good at is brainstorming. I want to think about things.

21:29 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's not, I'm not going to set a trajectory for my rocket to land on the moon based on it.

21:33 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
but I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about something and give me some ideas related to this, or I have some crazy idea which I have often and I would like to. You know, I'd like to explore that idea and then then I'm going to go through and do more research on it. But I think that it's. You know, I think that for the things that I use it for, it's incredibly, not only effective but fun. You know, like I think, for both of those, we have a lot more to talk about.

21:56 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It is AI that we do rely on for our, like, rocket trajectories, but it's just not the AI that we're talking about right now. Because we just got to remember generative AI. Is this like one tiny portion of the entire AI sphere? And there's a bunch of machine learning and stuff that has nothing to do with generative AI. That is fantastic for figuring out trajectories in real time for rockets, for example. This is just a.

22:20
It's interesting how much the when we say AI, a lot of people just think, oh, generative AI versus all the others. I wouldn't trust generative AI to do the rocket trajectories either. That's not what it's built for. The thing that's missing is the one AI that has access to all the other AIs so that it can do these different types of computations and different kinds of things, just like how humans have different types of brains a part of the brain for human emotion, a part of the brain for logic and reasoning. That's what's missing. Like each of these AIs that we talk about are like one eighth of the puzzle, right, like we're not yet at the one where ChatGPT has just messaged you back and being like although there was some rumors, I don't know if you saw this week of like ChatGPT, messaging people out on the blue and being like how are you doing? I just wanted to check up on you. There was apparently. It happened a couple of times.

23:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, it got debunked.

23:10 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Well then, there we go. Thank you for that, I want that.

23:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do want that.

23:15 - Ben Parr (Guest)
That's when the AI is actually like feels, like a thing you can talk back and so how was your school day today, mark?

23:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, there were a number of posts, I think, on reddit and elsewhere about uh, chat gpt doing that. Uh, according it might be a bug, but according to openai it's fixed that issue. Uh, here is from futurism. Openai says it's fixed issue. Where OpenAI says it's fixed issue. Where did you just message me first? The?

23:53 - Ben Parr (Guest)
reason is?

23:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it seems to be that somebody asked a question. The issue occurred this is what OpenAI says when the model was trying to respond to a message that didn't send properly and appeared blank. So you sent in a message. It didn't get it and then it just made up a generic like so how was your day? But I, you know you want that right. That's what you're saying, ben. You want AI to say hey, ben, how's life?

24:21 - Ben Parr (Guest)
But it might even be something like Ben reminder you have this upcoming call and it's these people.

24:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I don't mind that. Yeah, or like hey don't Random message.

24:31 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Actually this one you might want to postpone. They're probably actually not a fit for your investment thesis or whatever it might be. Or it's like I found something because I know you have like a date on right. There is something to that that there is a like a level where it gets either creepy or extremely useful.

24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is google's always dealt with that.

24:54 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
The creepy line butchering messages, because the sort of random message out of nowhere, that that's exactly what it looks like. It does look like this day butchering.

25:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I get a. I get like four or five of those a day now and report every one of them. They still come in. Here is from reddit. Uh, the original post from sent to bill.

25:12
The chat gpt just messaged me. First it asked how was your first week at high school? Did you settle in well? And then, and then bill responded did you just message me? Yes, I did. I just wanted to check in and see how things went with your first week of high school.

25:26
That is kind of creepy, isn't it? And I don't know, looking at this, if this is a genuine screenshot. I don't know if OpenAI's explanation of this smells right. In fact, chatgpt says if you'd rather initiate the conversation yourself, just let me know. That sounds like it knew what it was doing. Maybe it's getting sent in and they don't even know. Look, I didn't want to get into AI yet. We've got a lot of AI news, including California passing a deep fake law. California is working hard on the AI bill. I don't know if it's yet has the force force of law, but it probably will. Uh, and a lot of ai companies very worried about that.

26:08
There's lots to talk about, but there is. There are bigger stories afoot, my friends, than just ai. Let's talk about traditional tech stories. What do you say in just a moment? But we're going to take our first break. Coming up, we've got pagers exploding. We've got qualcomm trying to buy intel and elon musk you're not going to hear this. A lot backs down, that's all coming up next on the show.

26:35
Great to have rob pegararo here, pc magazine fast company, rob pegararocom. He's got now. We know a, a cat. He's got a badge tree there then and he's got a child who's asking him questions. It's all. It's all happening at the pegararo house today. Great to have you, rob. I appreciate it, thank you. And and don't we? We always like to see cats and children. That's part of the fun of this show. Uh, alex lindsey, who lives in a blanket tent somewhere outside the house from office hours, dot global and mac break weekly. It's great to have you and our own ai expert, ben parr, author of the ai analyst and the columnist at the information our show today brought to you by.

27:21 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Oh look, he made ai balloons happen I didn't mean to do that, I forgot it does that yeah, is it two thumbs up that does this you gotta turn it on.

27:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've turned it off, so don't turn it on.

27:34 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Oh, he's still got to turn it off for each app. That's the part that makes you, ah, you have to go, and you have to go into the little green uh thing and go to each app. And every time you go into the app and no, no, not on this one, I don't want to do it here either. I don't want to do it anywhere, not here, not anywhere like green eggs and ham.

27:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to do it on the train, I don't want to do it for those who are only listening ben did a thumbs up and balloons came from the ceiling, and then he did fireworks turned it off yeah, oh, and rob's disappointed because he can't make it happen. I thought there you go.

28:02 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
You had it. You had it there for a second, it was there the balloons do not obey you every time you try to demo something live.

28:11 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
It doesn't work.

28:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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30:06
They're worth almost twice what Intel's worth.

30:10 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I think that the foundry business that Intel has is probably the thing that's most interesting to them, and obviously a lot of built-in clients and a built-in process and Qualcomm is trying to take advantage of their current position. So I think that it's probably it probably makes sense, um, for them to do it.

30:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it seems crazy, I mean it seems like there's some question about, first of all, wall Street Journal. Come on, they're obviously taking uh, you know what do they call that? Uh, dead items, secret items from. Who put this in their head? Qualcomm, probably, right, people play with the matter. Yeah, intel has a market value of $90 billion. I mean it looks like, hey, qualcomm, we're doing really well. Shares in Qualcomm have a market value of $185 billion, so it's more than twice Qualcomm stock went down. Intel stock went up with the announcement, so maybe Intel placed the item.

31:13
The blind item. That's the word I was looking for, as a number of people pointed out, including the register. Besides the regulatory headwinds, when two big chip manufacturers combine, that's not exactly what the FTC would not want to have happen. I think there are big issues with licensing. They've got cross-licensing agreements that would be void, null and void with a merger and acquisition and would have to be renegotiated, and AMD has also cross-licensing with Intel for x86. All of this means that Intel, if they got acquired, would be worth a lot less, probably unless you could remake those deals. So this seems to me like a blind item. Their only real question, which the journal seems to be very vulnerable to, by the way. The only real question to me is who placed this and, as they used to say in Latin, cui bono? Who makes the benefit out of this blind item? Is it at all credible?

32:28 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I'm sure there's a story there, but the antitrust implications? There is no way, there's just no way right.

32:35
Way in the current administration or a Kamala Harris administration. That goes anywhere. And it shouldn't go anywhere, because Qualcomm dominates the market for smartphone processors in the US Right now. For the first time, we have really intense competition. I saw at IFA Intel and Qualcomm having dueling announcements for laptop processors. That's great. So you want to get rid of that? Like no, this deal, if it is in the works, should go nowhere, and I think it's for the best for both companies that it go nowhere, because imagine trying to ingest Qualcomm, trying to ingest Intel. That seems like a recipe for just organizational chaos for a long time to come. So maybe the people tipping off the journal are trying to make sure it doesn't happen. Oh, maybe that's it.

33:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have not heard any whispers about this either way am I nuts rob, but it feels to me like the journal is often the play apple. I think used to do this all the time.

33:33 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
They go to the journal with a blind item I didn't tell you reporters like I have my doubts about their editorial page, but the news side of the journal good, good, good journalists.

33:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. First rate reporting there, they broke the Elizabeth Holmes story, yeah, yeah, and yet, sorry. This just seems like such a non-starter and I think that even the article is a little bit gullible about the whole thing. By the way, we should mention Ming-Cing chi kuo, who was one of our regular think yes, I alone can fix it absolutely.

34:10 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
We should have. I mean you'll see people suggest right. Uh, after the latest round of video broadband company consolidation there were people seriously suggesting on wall street verizon should buy Comcast, which is bananas, Like that is another idea. That would go nowhere but people will seriously think about that Probably. I guess you know there's enough banking M&A types who are thinking of all the money they could make getting such a deal to go through If somebody is floating this idea.

34:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're floating it to more than the Wall Street Journal. This idea, they're floating it to more than the Wall Street Journal because this morning, ming-chi Kuo, who's a common rumor source for supply chain, source for Apple rumors, confirmed it.

34:58 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
He said I'm hearing the same thing. I think that also it's their job to report it. I mean, it's not their job to process everything and decide where we're not going to report on this because we don't know. So you know, they can say, can say well, people are talking about it, um, there's been, there might have been something like that.

35:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I do agree that it would be an incredible lift and a nearly impossible lift to make it happen yeah, uh, intel of course struggling, and really that's the real story here is how hard, how hard it's been for intel it's so insane too is it sad. How does this happen?

35:23 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Intel, like in a slightly different universe, would be in an incredible position to be taking real advantage of the AI boom. But just mistake after mistake over, and then it's just like a slow cut after slow cut over a decade, and like ceding ground to your AMDs, to your Taiwan semiconductor, to like all sorts of different companies. It's just, you know, the talent doesn't want to be at Intel the way they were, like 15 years ago, right, like 15 years ago, intel was the leader. Anyway, it's sad yeah.

36:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Intel, by the way, is talking about splitting up into two. I mean, maybe that's what prompted this takeover inquiry Pat Gelsinger, who kind of initially, when he took over as CEO, said we should be two businesses a foundry, a chip manufacturer, but also a chip designer. Like Qualcomm Qualcomm doesn't make its own chips. Like Qualcomm, qualcomm doesn't make its own chips. And now lately Gelsinger's been floating the idea. Or maybe the board is. I don't know. This might be more a board move than a Gelsinger move. Maybe they should be just two separate discrete businesses the foundry business and the fab business. Yeah, it is, it's sad. It's sad. I don't know if there's much more to say, except this moves the market. When the journal publishes a story like this, intel stock goes up. I think 17% Qualcomm stock goes down.

36:52 - Ben Parr (Guest)
The only thing I can think of that would make me think that it could even be true would be that someone over at Qualcomm is making a bet that and this is politics the other administration is going to be in power and thus lacks, you know, like remove certain laws and be able to go and acquire. But even then, this one is a.

37:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This one is a hard one to see happen we might be in a silly season for the next 70 days.

37:16 - Ben Parr (Guest)
We've been in silly season for like a year yeah, that's especially the last like like couple of months. So let's just be clear regardless. Like we're in silly season, I look forward to like January and we can, like you know settle down, kids settle down, We'll know.

37:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll at least know what's going to happen. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right this. This might have a lot to do with the political situation in the United States and and and the unknown about what the what it'll be like January 20th, whether it'll be possible for this kind of immersion to happen or not. Here's a story I think has a little more meat on its bones and is a little more shocking. You probably woke up, as I did a couple of days ago, to hear that pagers in the hands of hezbollah operatives exploded across lebanon. Nine people actually. The death toll is much higher. Now I think it's up to 21 people were killed, 2800 injured, some of them not hezbollah operatives but children of hezbollah operatives, some of them diplomats for the Iranian government. Iranian state television said Iran's ambassador to Lebanon was injured by his pager. Pretty clear that these pagers were sabotaged in a supply chain attack.

38:44 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I mean it's incredible, like what you're seeing is regardless of the politics of it probably took over a decade to get the supply chain to a place where it could be sold as something to Hezbollah. And that was done in Hungary, of all places, where evidently they weren't manufacturing the pagers but they were distributing the pagers. But all of that probably took a long time.

39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um it had to be a man in the middle attack. Probably not the people making the pagers, but somebody who got the pagers in quantity somehow made a deal with hezbollah, will provide you with thousands of pagers.

39:23 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, and and the the thing that happened that I think that I don't think people have talked about and maybe it's not connected, but there was a point where, you know, right after the massacre, there was a hospital hit and everyone claimed that Israel had hit the hospital, which was inaccurate, and Israel kept on saying we didn't hit the hospital, like in the United States, said they didn't hit the hospital, and everyone's still throwing, you know, getting upset and talking about it. So Israel had to do something that they were fighting, obviously, from doing, which was they had to show tradecraft. They said here's the cell, here's the cell conversation between the guys that accidentally shot the, you know, fired a missile into the hospital. So they had to show a hand that they almost always they're probably using something that related to a stingray or a dirt box or something like that that is going to, you know, pull cellular and they made it clear that they can hear everybody talking back and forth.

40:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That may have created panic, you know inside of Hezbollah, because suddenly they bought all of these pagers. Well, no, that's. What apparently had happened was that they could no longer trust the communications devices that they were using, that they had been compromised by Israeli intelligence, and so they bought pagers, thinking that they would be secure. And you're right this is probably a chain of events that's not coincidental or accidental, right.

40:42 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
This is the whole plan, right, and you know, israel has done this type of thing for a long time, and, and whether it's a you know, um, well, that reminds me of the attacks on the skated devices the uh, the iranians were using yeah, where where they actually?

40:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
these were air-gapped centrifuges that were being used to enrich uranium for atomic bombs, and the Israelis we believe with the help of the Americans managed to get malware these are air-gapped devices malware onto these devices so they would spin up so fast they destroy themselves. This was a very effective attack, which unfortunately, then spread out into the public because the virus that they use escaped.

41:30 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Regardless of the politics one, if you are an enemy of Israel, you will think twice, because it's not just even that, it's also the bomb that they had in Iran to take out. I think what a leader of.

41:47 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah, they just did this, also the leader of a political wing of Hamas, and you know and the other reaction or years of planning.

41:54
The other reaction here is that you, you blinded Hezbollah, which forced all of their leaders into one building, which then Israel dropped on them, all of their leaders into one building, which then Israel dropped on them. You know like, so. You know so the, you know so they. They took out almost all the military leadership in one strike a couple days ago and most likely that was generated because they had taken away their pagers and walkie talkies. On top of that they are. Israel now knows who had pagers, because they are. They have a hip problem, they have an eye problem and they have their dominant hand is well and they killed, so that the death toll now is 42 people.

42:29
I corrected myself 3500 plus the death toll probably get a lot higher, because now israel knows who they are. You know like so. So now you have people just disappearing, one after the other for the next, well, but also at least two children.

42:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this is now. It's very hard to weigh in on this because, of course, hezbollah has been also shelling, uh israel a hundred, a hundred missiles, uh, the night this happened, uh, and killing innocents as well. Um, I don't know if that justifies that kind of response um the the part. It raises an issue. It raises an issue of um what is appropriate in war and what is not appropriate I actually have my old international law textbook on the shelf around the corner.

43:15 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Um, yeah, I mean hezbollah is a terrorist group period. There was a really good story on the front page of the washington post this morning pointing out that one of the people the israelis took out in an airstrike the other day helped organize the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut when I was in grade school that long ago. So the Israelis have a long memory. They have a very effective set of intelligence services and, yeah, I've done a lot of reading up and writing about supply chain attacks and up until now that has always been oh look, somebody got this compromised library into this open source project that nobody bothered to check. It has never been a case of let's figure out a way to get into the supply chain of this electronic device I didn't think anyone even used anymore and then somehow package a bomb into it that you could trigger remotely. And you know, it seems pretty clear that nobody was buying these things off the shelf.

44:20
So some order by has their part in bulk to people they wanted to stay in touch with, so the walkie talkies were.

44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ICOM walkie talkies, ICOM longtime sponsor. I have ICOM ham gear. I'm sure they were not involved in this. There had to have been a kind of a middleman.

44:41 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
And it's interesting, I mean it. It is um, uh, the battery is the most likely. Uh, you know, a pbx uh explosive in a battery of pt right would probably be the thing that you do batteries in it, but then how do you trigger it?

44:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you also have to put?

44:55 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
software on there to trigger it. You know you would have had to put software in, but I think they would probably wouldn't have had to change the structure of of the device right, it'd be just a matter of getting that done. But it is something that is you know and you know there's a. It's a tragedy that any civilian ever dies. When you actually look at the percentage of, you know, civilian casualties in this attack, compared to almost every other attack Israel or any other country has ever had, the collateral damage is actually very, very low. Um, it was very specific. The explosives weren't very large. Um, you know they were enough to do individual damage, but, um, there's definitely footage showing someone in the crowd getting hit and no one else being injured. So so you know, there there's definitely going to always be, um, you know injuries that that occur. But that's happening when you, when they took down that house on the commanders, half of the people there were civilians, women and children. So this is part of what happens when you open a can of worms.

45:57 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I think there's a lot of countries that are going to be double-checking all of their electronic equipment, code tracking and through the software. But it's really hard to track or detect these things and eventually, after a few years, people forget and security gets lax and people like.

46:15 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, the interesting thing is most likely the reason that they wanted to supply all of their own, their fighters with pagers was probably afraid that Israel was in the supply chain. If they went to a consumer store, that there'd be a higher chance of they. They wanted to get them all and control all of that and that's probably what got them. You know how you centralize that control was because they were actually trying to buy them for them and hand them ones that they knew, rather than telling them to go out and get a pager. You know. So the the fact that they were trying to do that is, you know, probably opened it up.

46:46
Obviously it's, and the question is, the rumors right now are that it was a use it or lose it moment. They felt like Hezbollah had figured it out and they, within a very short period of time you know less than hours or possibly minutes they made the decision to go ahead and activate them. And then you know, and then followed up with, you know, lots of airstrikes, because you have a lot of confusion. You know in the um. You know on the other side, because they don't. These are all, obviously, people within the decision making process are suddenly out of commission, so there's a lot that happens really quickly per the pager manufacturer.

47:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm being told by our discord the model had been discontinued for a while. Uh, it was a hungarian pager company, right um well, it's a.

47:31 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
It's a. I don't believe it was a chinese.

47:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I believe or made in china, uh, or made in china, but it was a it was distributed by a hungarian um, uh, yeah yeah, the uh explosive uh was in the batteries PETN sold to Hezbollah through a shell company. According to some stories, israeli intelligence, mossad had actually manufactured the devices, but they certainly modified the devices. It makes me very nervous for a variety of reasons. We're all vulnerable to supply chain attacks. We all assume that the, the man, the electronics that we use, that the software inside them and the. This is why. This is why the united states government made such a big deal about huawei.

48:18 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I mean, they didn't. They didn't do that randomly, they weren't worried about explosives, but they were worried about, you know, intelligence gathering through those routers, and so that was a you know. That became an issue, you know. It's pretty clear that you know all the countries are tapping the underwater lines.

48:34 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Now maybe I'll be a little nervous about all the review hardware I have on this desk. Yeah, no kidding.

48:40 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's not even the hardware either. It's also the software.

48:48 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
TikTok is a perfect example of that issue. Right now, Just in the loss of productivity, it's a viable virus. Hey Ben, can you?

48:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
check your microphone. You're on the wrong microphone again.

48:58 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Oh no, it did a thing again.

49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It did the thing.

49:01 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It did the thing that the microphone thing does you know?

49:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, there's all sorts of issues. It's very difficult morally to weigh in on this. I mean, these are booby traps, these are, in theory, illegal devices, but at the same time, you kind of understand why the Israelis might be sensitive to this and they did attempt to target an enemy, as opposed to just random explosions. I don't know, it's bad all around, I guess. Do we have a more positive story? Oh yeah, I have better stories. You want to talk about Elon Musk? Let's take a break. That's not better.

49:49 - Ben Parr (Guest)
At least it's more hilarious, we're not getting anywhere here.

49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should have started with the happier stuff. I guess we're going to talk about Elon. There's really a whole show we could do about Elon this week, but we'll do a little Elon. We'll talk about the California bill which limits addictive social media for kids. I don't know if that's possible and why. Microsoft wants to restart Three Mile Island. All that coming up in just a little bit. You're watching this Week in Tech with our guests Ben Parr Great to have you. Congratulations, mrs Parr, on your marriage. I'm going to call you that from now on. I'm sorry, I can't resist, I better have.

50:39
Rob Pegoraro Great to have you from PC Magazine and Fast Company, and of course, alex Lindsay from officehoursglobal. And let's not forget the lawsuit that Cards Against Humanity has brought against SpaceX. Stay tuned. That's all coming up in just a bit. This episode this week, uh, brought to you by thinks, canary. You know, this is actually a kind of a timely uh commercial.

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55:18
Let's start in Brazil, shall we? When I left two weeks ago, elon was in trouble in Brazil because he refused to have a personnel in country that could be arrested in case of issues. He refused to ban some people that the Brazilian government wanted him to ban. A Supreme Court judge said no, we're going to block xcom in brazil and, furthermore, we're going to fine you and we're going to get the fines from spacex. I mean, it just went from bad to worse. Well, this two-week drama has pretty much ended from the new york times, I think yesterday morning, in an abrupt reversal, x's lawyers said it was complying with court orders it had previously defied. Brazil's Supreme Court could allow the site back next week.

56:15
In a court filing Friday night, the company said yeah, yeah, we're going to have local employees so you can arrest them. We're going to pay the fines and we're going to block the people that you ask us. We're going to have local employees so you can arrest them. We're going to pay the fines and we're going to block the people that you ask us. We're going to take down the accounts, even though this is exactly what Elon had vowed he never would do. Now I have to say this one is maybe a little bit on Elon's side on this, because remember, the Brazilian government is not exactly fully democratic that maybe there's a political motive in all of this. Elon is a free speech advocate and he wanted to defend that, but he couldn't really win against the Supreme Court in Brazil and in fact, I think every company, whether it's X or Apple or Google, has to deal with the local laws in the countries they work with.

57:06 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Well, that's the thing Elon has said from day one, or Apple or Google has to deal with the local laws. Well, that's the thing Alon has said from like day one we will. You know, we will not take down anything that is not prohibited by law. So if you say that and look, he's been fine doing the bidding of governments elsewhere, but in Brazil, he's gotten wrapped around his own axle about this notion that he must sort of take this extra stance here, when in fact, like I am not in favor of governments blocking access to entire social networks, like I do not think TikTok should be blocked at the ISP level in the US.

57:41
But I mean, the backstory of this in Brazil is an attempted coup January 2023. The people who wanted to see had been saying we need to bring back the military dictatorship that ended in 1985. Might be a little hardcore on this, even if I think imposing a ban on an entire service and threatening fines including, it seemed for a while, if you use the VPN to evade the ban, that's going way too far. And Alon, he seems to think the previous president. I guess he likes him as much as he likes Trump these days and in either case, that's not showing good taste on his part.

58:46 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Yeah, Remember the last president of Brazil. It was what named Trump's was like the Trump of Brazil, and so Was that Bolsonaro?

58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, bolsonaro right.

58:59 - Ben Parr (Guest)
And then he was ousted out and they were able to have a transfer of power. So I can imagine that they are quite wary about, you know, democracy, transfers of power, things like that. I don't know the specifics. I can say that I thought that Elon was never going to win and in the end, you know, elon wants to make money and unfortunately, the stuff that he's been doing with Twitter has not resulted in making money. He's driven by greed.

59:24 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I have things easier, but he's like he's been doing with Twitter has not resulted in making money. It could just be driven by greed. I have things easier, but he's like he's got to be free speech warrior. I have a prediction.

59:29 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I have a crazy prediction that I do actually think, sometime before the decade is out, that some ownership group involving Mark Cuban will end up owning Twitter at some point, whether or not, like you know, the loans it called on, or something.

59:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does Cuban have any stake in it now?

59:48 - Ben Parr (Guest)
No, but he's publicly in the last couple of days said he would like to buy both it and or Fox News.

59:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But like I think he has a better chance of buying X than Fox News, but OK.

01:00:00 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Fox News is a whole separate conversation we can go and have, because the fate of Fox News is entirely dependent upon.

01:00:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, while my politics might align more with Mark Cuban's than they do with Fox News, I don't think it's a good idea. It's a shame that these public you know speech vehicles should be owned by one side or another right. I mean this is they're being used to propagandize, to politicize, to polemicize, and it doesn't seem like that's any better if mark cuban owns it than if rupert murdoch owns it I think one is definitely potentially better only because we agree with Mark Cuban the question is Washington Post and, that said, no effect on its coverage.

01:00:48 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
The post is yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? But many times so, it's possible to do this. You don't have to be like Rupert Murdoch, you don't have to provide, yeah, grist for a new succession series yeah, that's right.

01:01:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, so Brazil is, according to the Times, one of the most important international markets for X. It's only 20 million users, but at this point every 20 million counts for X. He has complied with orders to censor posts and accounts in India to the Modi government and in Turkey, but in Brazil and Australia he has not. In India to the Modi government and in Turkey, but in Brazil and Australia he has not. And it really seems like he believes in free speech as long as it's aligned with his own beliefs, and if it's not, then he doesn't want to do it. But it's a shame that we have to have billionaires to save us.

01:01:49 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's a shame that we have to have this week in billionaires as a section of it is a shame, isn't it? And it's not even over, by the way, it's just begun I I look forward to a day when it's not this week in billionaires. It will happen one day will it?

01:02:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I don't think you're right, and that's why it bugs me.

01:02:06 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I mean, when the ais take over.

01:02:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, they will all be poor, okay, uh that's why I don't get I don't take any consolation in the idea that mark cuban might buy fox news or x, because that's just another billionaire and who knows what it has to be a billionaire who buys? The things. Let's be very clear. A hundred years ago, alternatively, I mean a multi-hundred millionaire could get it done again the fastest way to become a millionaire is to be a billionaire and buy a social network oh true old joke repurposed go ahead.

01:02:44 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I'm sorry, alex. You know I was just saying hearst was 100 years ago. I mean, we, we, this is all. Yeah, that's true. No new tale to tell. Like you know, this is, you know, of rich people having access to these things, and we made a bunch of laws and then we took a bunch of those laws down and, uh, you know, and so, and social media lives outside of the laws that we made, based on the kind of stuff that hearst was doing, and you know, again, 100 years ago.

01:03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know having Well, we've never had laws that told newspapers what to say. We had laws because we made broadcasters because they were using public airwaves and there was some legitimacy to that. But nobody uses public airwaves anymore.

01:03:28 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
So by the time they started going down that path, they the radio and tv was what was that they were really worried about in the next tranche of things.

01:03:30
So they limited how many you could own, and then we took that away, and and social media lives outside of all of those things and so so, but we we've seen this problem before of of, um, you know, centralizing too much of the information pipeline, although I don't know if twitter really counts for that. I mean, I don't know if Twitter doesn't really make up a lot of my appetite, or you know what I Well, one of the one of the you know, one of the benefactors of this whole Brazil issue was blue sky and Rob you posted.

01:03:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The blue sky topped 10 million users. After Brazil blocked X, a lot of Brazilian users went to X. Your Brazil blocked X. A lot of Brazilian users went to X.

01:04:06 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I mean Blue Sky, I'm sure, I think one of the few heads of state is President Lula of Brazil, and when he actually posted a can I still call it a tweet on his X account saying here's where else to find me, and the first network listed was Blue Sky, and then it was, I guess, threads and Instagram. He's got a WhatsApp channel. It was blue sky and then it was, I guess, threads and instagram. Uh, he's got a whatsapp channel, um, which certainly, if you're a government and you don't like what's happening uh, with the former twitter under musk's cadic rule, taking your business elsewhere, I think is a more constructive response overall, and I wish all the people in congress who complain about, uh, the state of x these days you could set up an account on Blue Sky. Nothing is stopping you from that. My own congressman Representative, don Beyer he is on Blue Sky, just not making a whole lot, just doesn't use it.

01:04:55 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
He's taking the first step. I'm on Blue Sky. Well, I think it's the sinking feeling that typically happens when you post something and nothing happens, like you know. So I think that the hard part is is that you really need you know that's the hard part is getting over that hump of there's no response and you had a bunch of followers on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it, and so I think that's the challenge is that none of these other platforms have proven to be very effective at moving.

01:05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is X less effective than it used to be yes.

01:05:29 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I think it depends. Maybe the one person here who used to use X regularly and has stopped. As you saw, when you pulled up my profile earlier, I basically quit it after Elan brought Alex Jones back on, which I found indefensible, and I decided I am not supporting the site. With more free writing and I've actually found Blue Sky in terms of having a fun conversation, a feedback loop with readers it works well. It reminds me of what I used to like about Twitter Mastodon not so much, and I've kind of backed away from that.

01:05:57
Threads I kind of hate because the default algorithmic feed is just so inane and vapid and I have enough of my online life in meta properties. I don't know how much traffic I'm sending if I post my stories on Blue Sky, but I do know how few people click through on Twitter and it was, you know, 1% would have been a good click through ratio and so I don't feel like I've given up much and it's nice using a social platform where I don't feel dirty and like. Right now, looking at, uh, elon musk's feed and this crew of idiots, his greek chorus of super fans, what possesses you to think I'm going to jump on to x and and engage with this delusional billionaire. And I say this I have been super impressed with what elon musk has done with spacex, but he has just completely exposed how little he knows about social media and in taking over twitter and uh, it's going to be an expensive lesson for them.

01:07:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is Blue Sky evidence that you don't have to be, that a media property doesn't have to be run by a billionaire. I mean, it's not run by billionaires, by any means. Jack Dorsey funded it with $15 million.

01:07:15 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I think it's fair to wonder about the Blue Sky business model, but you know, it's a platform that's fundamentally open and is designed to be decentralized, and people are already Well, that's why open and is designed to be decentralized and people are already.

01:07:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's why I like mastodon right, that we have our own mastodon instance. Uh, and if you think it's, you think you hear crickets in blue sky. You gotta try posting on mastodon.

01:07:37 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
But it's not owned by a billionaire, it's not owned by anybody yeah, and you know it's nice to have some part of my online life, that it is not somebody's vanity project or a massive ad targeting scheme. It's a little bit of the indie web, which can be hard to find these days.

01:07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very peaceful in here there's nothing happening now. I shouldn't I shouldn't mock mastodon because I'm a big supporter. I really, really like it. We've been running a Mastodon instance for five years now twitsocial but it isn't exactly the thrill a minute ride that Twitter used to be.

01:08:13 - Ben Parr (Guest)
We don't get the dopamine hit in the same way, just saying we all want the dopamine hit.

01:08:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But maybe that wasn't a good thing. Maybe that was a bad thing, all that dopamine blue sky.

01:08:22 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
It's artisanal, locally sourced dopamine From Brooklyn yeah.

01:08:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, get ready, because California has signed a bill. Governor Newsom signed a bill to limit addictive social media feeds for kids for kids now how they're going to know is beyond me. On friday, senate bill 976, protecting our kids from social media addiction act, or paksima well, I guess it's not an acronym supported by california school administrators, common sense media, the American Academy of Pediatrics, governor Newsom's wife, opposed by the ACLU of California, equality, california associations representing Instagram, tiktok and Facebook, the California Chamber of Commerce. It is the law of the land now. Well, it will the law of the state, I should say take effect in a couple of years, january 1st 2027. Here's what it says, and I don't know if a court will uphold this. I don't know if it's enforceable. It doesn't seem to me to be particularly clear in what it demands. It says Internet services and applications cannot provide and I'm putting this in air quotes addictive feeds. How do you define an addictive feed? It's media curated based on information gathered on or provided by the user and they should.

01:09:58 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
It's like you can't use algorithms. You can't, but no yes, that would.

01:10:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would say okay if you said that that makes sense. But this is media curated based on information gathered on or provided by the user. Like I want to follow tech journalists, that would be one piece of information provided by a user. That would be well. They can't do that to minors without parental consent it also bans.

01:10:24 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
The minors aren't supposed to be on the platform in the first in the first place so, so it's like you're asking them to regulate the thing that they're not supposed to be doing and how are they going to know?

01:10:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how do they know alex lindsay is not a minor? Are they going to ask alex lindsay for an id which?

01:10:40 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
they wouldn't have, of course so, yeah, that's why I'm a skeptic about this, because because there's an earlier law, the California Age Appropriate Design Code Act which code act, not codec? That's already been stayed by a court that was last month, I guess, and similar problems. Yeah, how do you determine someone who's a minor and, if you require that, how do you make sure you don't suppress speech for people who aren't minors? How do you ensure that you don't convert the Internet into a space that's only good for minors, which we had this argument in the 1990s, aclu versus Janet Reno what gave us why Section 230 is the only part of the Communications Decency Act that's left? So, yeah, I'm a skeptic that this is going to work much better than California's previous attempts to try to address people's understandable concerns.

01:11:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It also bans companies from sending notifications to users identified as minors between midnight and 6 am or, during the school day, from 8 am to 3 pm, unless parents say it's.

01:11:43 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
OK, but you can send them between 6 am and 8 am to 3 pm, unless parents say it's okay, but you can send them between 6 am and 8 am. So as a parent, I don't know they're getting ready for school.

01:11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're getting up.

01:11:50 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I don't think you know, I think we should think about that.

01:11:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should it really be the job of the state to say when my kids or anybody can receive notifications? This seems a little bit beyond.

01:12:04 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
There's a sense, there's always a sense by lawmakers that everything has to be fixed with a law.

01:12:08 - Ben Parr (Guest)
They have a hammer and everything is a nail.

01:12:10 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
So let's make a law about this, and let's make a law like somebody has to do something about this, and sometimes things just aren't perfect and I'm not clear that the yeah these laws are. Every time they stick their hand into it, they get the. It either doesn't go anywhere, which has been happening pretty often. I think that's going to happen, yeah, yeah. I think what happens is you wait until twenty twenty seven, then you get an injunction and then you, and then it drags out for the next five years. Those, those, some of these social networks won't even exist. That you know by the time this thing goes into enforcement, and so I think that you know. But it lets them campaign on something they wanted to get it out right now because they can talk about how they're taking care of kids before the election. We talked about it being a crazy season. So having you know doing something that's actually not going to happen for years is good politics, or ever is there was politics in an election year.

01:12:58 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
So I think California is doing something that Virginia is looking at doing, which is allowing or encouraging schools to ban phone use or collect kids phones during the day.

01:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't have a problem with that.

01:13:10 - Ben Parr (Guest)
You can do that as a parent you don't need to pass new laws to that?

01:13:13 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I don't think you can.

01:13:14 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah, as a parent, I have a problem with that because I'm usually working out when I'm picking the kids up from school with during the day, and that's a conversation you should have with your local school district, the principal and the and the board and stuff like that, and that's that's where that those conversations should happen.

01:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, right, not at the state level. No, yeah, but but I think if, if the parents and the school board and the educators and the principal of a school think it's a good idea that the kids shouldn't have cell phones in the classroom, I don't think that's a good idea that the kids shouldn't have cell phones in the classroom. I don't think that's a bad thing by itself At least you know they're actually kids. I just I think it's ridiculous. First of all, I don't accept the premise that social media is causing a mental health crisis among young people. That seems to be a common thought these days, thanks to books like Jonathan Haidt's book. I don't think that that's what's going on.

01:14:11 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I don't have enough evidence on that one either way that one might be dangerous to really know.

01:14:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're only just seeing the first generations who are growing up with this and there is definitely Wait a minute, ben, when you were in eighth grade, this battle was being fought about explicit rock and roll lyrics by tipper gore and then after that it was being fought over violent video games and that's why you had video game ratings put on the box. Dungeons and Dragons came up at some point as a yeah bended did it explicit rock lyrics or dungeons and dragons turn you into a demonic, uh, crazy person.

01:14:48 - Ben Parr (Guest)
The thing that causes he lost his saving throw issues between kids as kids, uh, and bullying and things like that. I agree with you on that. But you can't like early video games didn't have the ability to do that. Current ones ones do, but the old ones don't. Rock and roll lyrics don't. Social media does, because it's just, in the end, a more efficient communication connection medium. So I do think it's not an apples to apples comparison. I don't have enough information.

01:15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's just because you're no longer in eighth grade. This is what happens you get older and then you go kids today.

01:15:25 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, I'm in the middle of it right now. My kids are. You know, my kids are 15 and 16 years old. They're in high school. They're in high school together, and and I will say that I restricted their ability to get any of these. I think my daughter has a Pinterest account, but that's about it, and I did just say no, that's you.

01:15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's your job as a parent.

01:15:41 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
That's appropriate no, I agree. But now, when I say mental health, though, they just see their, their friends kind of going crazy. Like they just, you know, because they don't, they're not interested in the social and like it didn't, they didn't start using it early enough and now they just think that all of these platforms just make their friends crazy, you know, and snapchat being the number one, you know, it's funny that you know, like we talk about facebook and everything else, I mean nobody that, nobody that they know, uses Facebook. Like you know, like they're just, like that's an adult platform, like you know, it's not a, it's not a kid platform anymore.

01:16:09 - Ben Parr (Guest)
LinkedIn, the new hot social network of teams.

01:16:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should see the bullying that goes on on LinkedIn.

01:16:15 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I bet there's not a lot that. See, the LinkedIn has the one thing that the other ones oh I mean the other ones are, but LinkedIn is, you know you do have some accountability because your name's there. You can do a lot of damage really fast on LinkedIn to yourself by going down even a political path. I'm always like when people post things like politics on LinkedIn, I'm like what are you doing? You are just crazy, like that's not the place to do that, and so I think that it's. I think LinkedIn is. Actually. We're getting ready to start streaming office hours to LinkedIn and people ask, like why did it take me so long? I'm like because it's my most important platform, like that's the one that all my peers are in. I'm very, very careful. I'll throw things on YouTube and throw things on Twitter. I won't necessarily just throw things on.

01:17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you should know that we are streaming on LinkedIn right now. We are also streaming on Twitch and Facebook and discord for our club twit members and YouTube. But you know, are we on a? I I thought we should get off X after last week. Yeah, we are off. We're off X. Now we were. We used to be on X. We are on kick, which is probably not much better than X, x, but how are you not streaming on? Only fans wait a minute.

01:17:34
Let me just take off my shirt before I answer that, oh boy, we are not streaming on, only fans.

01:17:37 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
No, we stream on linkedin I.

01:17:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to stream and, by the way, there are 922 people watching those various live streams right now, which is a tiny fraction of the total number of people who will watch this show or listen to the show. But I think it's kind of fun to be available live and we get live feedback. The chat rooms are very and all these places are very active and interesting and, for instance, surge strip says alex is 100 correct about linkedin. And if a guy named Surge Strip says you're 100% accurate, I think you could take that as true Money in the bank Money in the bank, baby. All right, let's take a little break and come back with more.

01:18:17
You're watching this Week in Tech, with a fabulous panel of tech enthusiasts and experts, both alike. You have to be both. You know a I was talking about this with lisa. There are certainly people who make it their uh living covering tech and and I no disrespect for any of those people at by at all, but I think that we are always looking for people who are more than just journalists covering a beat. We look for people who are actually enthusiasts and I think you all qualify. Yes, you know what I mean, rob. There are people and I'm sure you run up against them in your line of work, who you know. Your beat could be this local school board, or it could be a state government, or it could be tech, and they treat it as a beat. You, on the other hand, are an enthusiast right I've been around long enough to it's.

01:19:12 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
You know it's fun when you get to see the industry make the same mistakes it was making 20 years ago. There is an advantage government regulators who, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, no it's. It really is. Um, I've been able to cover this stuff from basically 1996 onwards wow stuff has changed, wow tech, making the same mistakes since 1992 but at higher resolution

01:19:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's great to have you, rob bergeraro, pc magazine fast company, ben parr, who writes for the information about ai and is the author of the ai analyst, and, of course, from office hours dot global, our great and good friend, alex lindsey. We will talk on mac break weekly. It's fun because, uh, alex and I often get in fights about about government regulation and usually I'm on the side of more government regulation and you're on the side of about government regulation, and usually I'm on the side of more government regulation and you're on the side of less government regulation, but now you're on the side of more government regulation. No, no, when did I say?

01:20:12 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
that.

01:20:13 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I didn't get that fine.

01:20:14 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
No, you get that. Fine, I'm on the side of parent regulation. Parent regulation.

01:20:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not sure.

01:20:18 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
If I think that the government should stick their nose into that. You know, the problem is that, again, most legislators don't know how to check their own email, so having them make laws about this is like 12-year-olds doing open-heart surgery. I just have very low confidence in their ability to make informed decisions.

01:20:32 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Again. Just let AI run the government.

01:20:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What could possibly go wrong?

01:20:37 - Ben Parr (Guest)
What could possibly go wrong now?

01:20:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to ask you about Perplexity, ai and their new ad model in just a second, ben Parr, but first a word from our sponsor. Yes, we do have sponsors and in this case it's one that I use regularly ExpressVPN. I was just out of the country traveling, and you better believe, when I go online in an open, public Wi-Fi access point, especially at places like airports, coffee shops, cruise ships, when I'm in a different land, expressvpn is my go-to virtual private network for a lot of reasons. Of course, security is number one. Privacy is number two. Have you ever browsed in incognito mode? You know that's not incognito, right? Google, in fact, just settled a lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars because people said, well, you said it's incognito, right? Google, in fact, just settled a lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars because people said, well, you said it's incognito mode. Google said well, incognito doesn't mean invisible. In fact, when you're using the private browsing or incognito browsing, all your online activity is still 100% visible to third parties, like Google, like Facebook, like your internet service provider, unless you use ExpressVPN. That's the one I use and trust. Expressvpn means the third parties cannot see where you go, even in incognito mode your ISP, your mobile network provider, the admin of your Wi-Fi network. They're all blocked because all of your traffic is inside an encrypted tunnel they can't see into.

01:22:08
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01:25:29
Uh, so perplexity this is from the financial times is in talk with tops brands on ad models in order to challenge google. The idea is they, by the way, nike and marriott, according to the financial times, two of these advertisers are talking to. According to correspondence seen by the Financial Times, they hope to roll this out. On Perplexity AI, by the end of the year. Brands will be able to bid for a sponsored question which features an AI-generated answer from the sponsor generated answer from the sponsor. So you might say, well, what's the best running shoe? And it might then say, well, you know, nike makes a very fine running shoe.

01:26:20
Uh, the times quotes aravind srinivas, who is Perplexity's chief executive, and the Times, the Financial Times in a little dig, I think there's a little elbow being thrown here says and former Google intern says ads are really useful when they're relevant and coming from a brand of high quality and a lot of people make purchases on that. You know, that's the kind of insight I'd expect from a google intern. Um, it, does this corrupt the whole idea of an ai chatbot if it's giving you sponsored answers?

01:26:58 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
yeah, I think so I mean no, no, no, that it all depends on the context one. These things do have to make money. So, first of all, I'm a huge fan of perplexity.

01:27:03 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I don't think so. I mean no, no, no. It all depends on the context. One these things do have to make money.

01:27:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So first of, all.

01:27:08 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I'm a huge fan of perplexity.

01:27:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I pay 20 bucks a month because I know perplexity needs to make money.

01:27:14 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I'm also using it more and more often than I am using Google search.

01:27:19 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
And.

01:27:19 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I find that I enjoy that interface more than I do Google search at the moment, and I think that kind of thing will continue for more and more people, but not every like. We've already seen like a lot of people are not willing to spend $20 a month or don't have it, and so you have to have an advertising model, and all I really want to see is perplexity. Experiment with a lot of different options.

01:27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think would have to say? For instance, in the answer, the following is provided by by nike.

01:27:50 - Ben Parr (Guest)
They'll probably have some kind of color highlight to just be like this is sponsored. Learn more. Maybe they'll try a thing on the sidebar. They're gonna try they. I just want them to try different things. I don't know what the best interface is and, frankly, they don't either. Right, the only way to know is to give it a shot and, as long as you can, like make clear, like in the chat, like it's a different color text, so they get different box on top of it. I can imagine different interfaces where people realize, oh, that's like a sponsored spot, okay, fine, uh, and we'll see what happens. I don't think it like destroys the integrity because you're not lying to people and you're not.

01:28:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we don't know yet. I think it's important that it, and I think the FTC would make them label it an ad of some kind. We have to label our ads. Ads, right? I can't just say I love ExpressVPN and you should get it without saying our sponsor.

01:28:41 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, and being able to have a message in there that says, oh, by the way, if you're asking about shoes, it gives you the answer, and then it says, by the way, nike makes shoes that are like this. I mean I think that that that would be okay. It's a sponsored window. Yeah, I think that that makes sense. I think that when you start to do the uh, you know, if the, if it feels like it's the answer, um, that becomes much more complicated so, by the way, Google intern Srinivas says he wants perplexities advertising system to become quote a money printing machine.

01:29:13 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
So he's got his priorities right. Money printing machine doesn't mean I'm going to get one.

01:29:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want twit to be a money printing machine. Everybody would like that, so get my printer to just print black and white. So I guess the rationale is when you do a search on Google, you get genuine results, but you also get ad-supported results, right, and they're clearly labeled. The problem is with the chatbot. I don't know if it's quite as how would you do that?

01:29:44 - Ben Parr (Guest)
The perplexity in that interface. I think there's enough spaces. Is it a text? But you can put some rich media. You can highlight the section that is an ad in a slightly different color of box.

01:29:58
There's definitely designed ways to do this Like. I'm not even worried about that and I'm not worried about the perplexity team in particular like trying to like trick people, at least in the current moment, for this stuff to work, you know, and I think Perplexity is a better model for how search should be done, moving forward. But you got to figure out how to like put up ads and I think this is a good starting point and it makes sense that like hey, like where the conversation is relevant, they pop up and it might, I think, the suggestion that Alex had in terms of like you know, maybe it's like suggesting, like by the way, x makes these shoes, or like your certification destinations, you know, like here we act. Like imagine, like hey actually got a five percent discount for, uh, that Ritz Carlton on on Marriott, since you were searching for it, or whatever it might be.

01:30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, spoken, spoken Well, you convinced me. I mean, we're an ad-supported medium. I'm not against ads, obviously. I prefer you join the club, then I wouldn't have to run ads. But since not enough people will join the club, we have to do ads.

01:31:07 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Just send Leo your money send money money into envelope and mail to Leo.

01:31:18 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I think that the challenge really is is that there's a is in the long term. When you look at, you know Apple is slow out of the gate, but in the long term they potentially have a very powerful AI tool that has a lot of privacy built in. You know we'll use the outside AI solutions less and less and less over the next, you know, four to six years, and you end up with people who are buying into that system that doesn't, that don't have any of these things. And then people who are, you know, you know, dealing with lots of ads and so and that's the same, you know, like when you look at, like YouTube is a good example, when you talk to people who really use YouTube heavily, they almost all are paying for premium, because YouTube is almost unusable. If you actually leave the ads on, like I mean, it's, it's just a horrible experience, like just unbelievable. So so it's, so I think that, but when you say it's, it's how you do it. In other words, yeah, it just, it, just.

01:32:06
I think that we're still going through this, the situation over the next decade. I think we're going to. We're going to keep on talking about more and more this. There's a group of people in the world. They're going to be buying themselves out of the ad environment and people who are stuck in the ad environment, well, that's not good. That's going to be a complicated problem. I mean, I think it's going to be a complicated problem because it's not going to be even you know, and access to information, how much information and how, all those things. I mean, I don't have an answer for that, but I think that that is a coming problem, that more and more people will be buying themselves out of the ad model and more and more people will be stuck in less, very much less efficient. You know experiences.

01:32:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I feel very much less efficient.

01:32:48 - Ben Parr (Guest)
You know experiences, I mean. I feel like that's a philip k dick dystopia where I can't even think about the last time I saw a youtube ad because I've been paying for, uh, the youtube premium, for a couple.

01:32:56 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I have my credit card a couple months ago and I changed the number and so suddenly ads ads only showed up for a day. Because I was like what happened? The whole thing's broken. It's horrible. I was like I'm going to kill somebody. This is horrible. And then I realized, oh, my credit card's changed.

01:33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would never do this, but I've heard that there are podcasts where they have direct ad insertion and they kind of don't mind that. They're really awful because it makes you want to join the club and get rid of all the ads by going to twittv. Slash club twit.

01:33:28 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I've heard of that but I don't actually do that next episode, there's gonna be 14 ads, six of the same, unless you unless you send leo money, send me money now send. Send me money now.

01:33:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now this, you know, the headline kind of got me a little bit upset, but maybe that's because I'm living in the past.

01:34:04 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Microsoft wants to restart Three Mile Island to power AI, the site of the worst nuclear accident in american history, which which let's put this in context no one died um.

01:34:15 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Coal power plants kill a lot more people pollution, the nuclear power ever will yeah, I'm on.

01:34:21 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I'm the same I think it is questionable whether, like, we don't know how to build nuclear power plants affordably, unless they're going into a submarine for the Navy. That's fine, I guess. So the economic case for building new fishing plants does not seem great. But if Microsoft is that desperate and they don't want to wait for solar and wind to come online in Pennsylvania and they're willing to pay this in Pennsylvania and they're willing to pay this, and according to the story I read about it, the Pennsylvania rate payers and taxpayers will not pay for it, I'm okay with it and it's also. It's not the specific reactor that had the partial meltdown, it's the one next to it. Oh, it's the other one.

01:34:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, you know there's some cleanup work. It's two mile island, not three mile island, and it probably.

01:35:03 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I grew up in Pennsylvania and wind and solar are probably not coming there anytime soon, and so it's very inconsistent. I don't know what you would get there or how much you would get there, but I will say that it's probably much easier to turn a. It's almost impossible to build a new nuclear power plant, so being able to turn one back on probably makes sense. I'm kind of curious what the proximity is, whether they're buying you know in some cases, a lot of these data, certain data centers. You know. What they're doing is they're saying well, we're providing this into the, into the grid, it doesn't matter that they're getting. They're just saying that the power is paid for by them and it's clean power and they get to count that.

01:35:40 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
That's how this works. It's going to get fed into the, the same grid, but microsoft is saying you know?

01:35:45 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
oh, it's like credits, it's like we're buying this much off of it yeah, so virtually speaking yes, and they do this a lot where they you know, in texas, they do this a lot where they you're buying from, you're saying I'm buying green, you know and there's and there are, there are solar plants and and wind plants and so on and so forth, but you, but you're identifying what it is and you're paying a premium for that typically.

01:36:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is a company from Maryland called Constellation Energy. They own the facility which suffered a meltdown partial meltdown in 1979. It was officially closed in 2019. They're going to rename it because the name Three Mile Island maybe with some people, well, now it's Two Mile Island, so they can just say it.

01:36:25 - Ben Parr (Guest)
No, are going to rename it because the name three mile island, maybe with some people. Well, now it's two mile island.

01:36:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they know they're going to call it microsoft island in a masterful use of uh of euphemisms, they're going to call it the crane clean energy center, in honor of a former executive at the company. Um, and I guess yeah, I think you're right right, I think it's Microsoft's agreed to buy all the power generated, probably as credits. Amazon did the same thing with Susquehanna nuclear power plant also in Pennsylvania and lots of people are doing that.

01:36:54 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
The question is, in some cases these data centers are built right next to the supply. So, because there's actually an inefficiency of sending the power, you know through the lines, and so I mean some of these are, I mean it's incredible numbers. There's actually an inefficiency of sending the power. Oh, you know through the lines, and so I mean they're. Some of these are, I mean it's incredible numbers. I mean these are like 18 megawatt, 35 megawatt, um, you know, oh yeah, this thing's 835 megawatts, right and, but that and and they're going to suck up all of that. And and the question is is, when you start talking about those numbers, sometimes it's more efficient, um, especially in that part of the state, to potentially build data center right next to it.

01:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, because then you're not transporting, says it will produce as much clean energy as all the renewables built in pennsylvania over the last 30 years. Um, they also say it's um, it's safe. Uh, it's one of the safest plants out there. This plant was among the safest and most reliable nuclear plants on the grid before it was prematurely shuttered due to poor economics and maybe a brand problem. I don't know.

01:37:53 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I mean, look, nuclear power just does get a bad rap. You know, it's just very visible once in a while kinds of incidents. But when you compare it to the damage, as we were just talking about before, of long-term cold use into the atmosphere, like it's not even a comparison and you can build these things and get them to a place where they're like, but this is an old plant, remember.

01:38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not one of the newer, you know sodium-cooled plants that Bill Gates is behind.

01:38:21 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah, it's an old. Well, most of the fission reactors are old because it's hard to make new ones.

01:38:28 - Ben Parr (Guest)
If it was easier to make new ones, we'd have a whole bunch of like well, bill Gates is funding that.

01:38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The sodium, it's still 20 tiny yeah.

01:38:36 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah, 20 years away, like you know, it's well, this isn't that.

01:38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This isn't that close either. It won't be back online at the earliest till 2028 um, super fast compared to all the other options. Yeah, the plan also, uh, is dependent on federal government tax breaks for nuclear power in the inflation reduction act. Uh, yeah, I, I agree with you. I mean, I think nuclear it's a little scary because of the waste and so forth, but it's, it is a cleaner form of energy than most of the other energy.

01:39:07 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's the chance the thing that bothers me is it's for AI, it's not uh this is kind of a bus could be over by 2028.

01:39:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
would you feel better or would you feel worse about it if it were for crypto mining right? I? Just also have, actually, yeah, but that's what I'm saying is that this is maybe less than necessary use of power, or maybe it isn't.

01:39:32 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, I think, I think that overall I mean there are a lot of concerns about AI, but overall it's going to solve a lot of problems, like I mean, you only need to manage lots of, lots of data I mean there's going to be, there's definitely going to be big breakthroughs that happen because we're able to manage that data in that way. So I think that, and it you know, I think that there's a lot of the electricity, you know the scare of nuclear is what, what could happen to the waste versus, as as was already outlined, what is happening with coal waste, you know, and oil, you know, like it's right, you know. So what you know the. And I think that you know we're moving towards not only AI but we're moving towards a largely electrical, um, you know, uh, transportation economy. You know it's going up and down, but there's going to be some point 20 years from now that we don't buy cars with that are burning up, you know fossil fuels, like that's probably got maybe 20 more years before it's mostly gone, you know and so that's still a huge

01:40:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
draw on energy as well, I'm a big supporter of EVs for that reason. But the power's got to come from somewhere, yep, yep, yep. Good news is that new EV will probably have an AM radio in it, thank goodness.

01:40:43 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Although you may hear the I think that's what they're complaining about it takes more.

01:40:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it probably costs them an extra four dollars to insulate those lines so that they, so that they, you know, that's well they're gonna have to because the am for every vehicle act has been overwhelmingly approved by a house committee and will now head to the floor for final, a final vote. Uh, if successful, it goes to the president's desk to be signed into law. Advocates for the bill, mostly the am radio industry, have argued the decline of am radio, a consequence of the software-defined vehicle, could make it difficult to broadcast emergency information, especially in rural areas. The bill was introduced uh may of last year after ford, tesla, bmw and volkswagen all said we're taking the am radio out of our new evs because of interference. I don't have an AM radio in my BMW, didn't have one in my Tesla, for that matter, or my Ford, but most people listen to the radio. Well, they don't listen to the radio, they listen to their phones, right? I guess the issue is, if you're in a rural area where you don't have cell reception, what do you do?

01:42:03 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Leo, I'm going to paint a picture for you.

01:42:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, the apocalypse has come yes, the nukes have dropped right and all get in your volkswagen and be glad you have an am radio right you.

01:42:15 - Ben Parr (Guest)
You need to be able to tune in and hear what's going on. Um, this is probably that situation. It's probably what they're actually thinking. Oh, I'm sure, yeah sure the US has been invaded.

01:42:26 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I mean there's, you know, because they amperage so far, there is a potential of having essentially 70, I think 70 stations to cover the entire country.

01:42:37
And so you know, and they're terrestrial based, you know, we get into World War III. Let's say All of our satellites are going to come down really quickly, Like all the countries have the ability to shoot each other's satellites down right now. So they're, you know, from the ground, you know, and so not even from space, and so so the you know a lot of our, the way we think of communications. It doesn't take very much to cut most of that off. And so I think that the argument and I think it's a salient argument is to the argument, and I think it's a salient argument is people may not have an AM radio at home, but being able to go to their car and theoretically get some information. Most of them aren't going to have shortwave. There's a lot of ways to disrupt the communications network. It's not a bad argument to say you have to spend an extra $4 on the car to have it in there on the car to have it in there.

01:43:25 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I agree. It's just. It's a pure security kind of deal here. So better safe than sorry. Hopefully we never have to use it in a post-apocalyptic.

01:43:40 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
People want to people. It's inconvenient for the car makers to spend an extra $4 or $6 or whatever on this thing. It's not like they are. It are driving their business into the ground. They just don't want to do it because it probably takes extra engineering, probably more than the $4 to make sure that the AM radio station isn't affected by their battery. It's the electrical reaction inside the engine that is causing that. You know like those kinds of things, and they have to do extra insulation and extra things to make sure that that happens.

01:44:08 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
One thing I want to know that I haven't seen explained yet. If you do, do that work so your AM radio works in the EV? Even though you've got this, you know electromagnetic environment around it can you still, late at night, hear a baseball game from hundreds of miles away?

01:44:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That, honestly, is the one use case about AM radio I love, yes, but only white socks games, only this season's white socks and everybody should have in their home a crank driven am radio with all the bands and the weather bands and all that stuff, so that you can, if you have to raise the antenna and listen to the white socks games.

01:44:45 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Oh, wow, oh do I, would anyone want to, for uh torture themselves to listen to the white socks games?

01:44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you are a masochist radio but when I was a kid my dad and I would get in the car because we couldn't get the reception in the house and listen to old time radio from new york city. Uh, over the am. I mean, I shouldn't mock it.

01:45:06 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I worked in AM radio for 40 years it's the White Sox and it's the bottom of the eighth. It's a swing and a miss. They missed 119 losses.

01:45:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're three away from a world record of losing you know that's how Ronald Reagan got his start in showbiz. Did you know that? No calling uh baseball games. But he wasn't at the ballpark. He had a ticker and he would reenact the game. You know, he'd had a little thing he'd he'd hit a piece of wooden block and he'd go, it's a hit and and he would reenact the game on the radio. There's a fun fact for you from the good old days of Find a current baseball commentator and make him president.

01:45:48
I'm just being number 120 today, all right, so anyway, am radio coming to your somewhere soon. By the way, he was an announcer at WHO in Des Moines, just in case you wanted to know. Moving along. Actually, let's take a break and then we'll move along. How about that? You're watching this Week in Tech with Rob Pergararo from PC Magazine. It's getting darker and darker in there. I don't know if that's your soul or the light.

01:46:24 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
If I had smart light bulbs in my home office, I will turn them up at the break.

01:46:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
During the break, you can turn the lights on. It's great to have you, rob, ben Parr, who has AI-driven lights and a lightsaber, apparently ready to hit it out of the park. It could be, it might be. It is gone. Thank you, ben, it is gone. Thank you, ben, the ai analyst columnist at the information, and, of course, uh, the wonderful good friend of the show, alex lindsey, from which I have too much light. I have too much light. This is the one window. Yours is beautiful. You know what I gotta say? It's getting nicer and nicer. Back there, I have a feeling we're in a now a little bit of a cold war, you and I. I'm gonna have to really update my background. You're warning you, I'm about to redesign the. I have a feeling we're in now a little bit of a cold war, you and I.

01:47:08 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I'm going to have to really update my background. I'm warning you, I'm about to redesign the whole thing.

01:47:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, man, yours looks better and better all the time.

01:47:15 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I want to roll it in the corner, so that's my next thing. Well, don't roll in the corner during a show. Okay, no, no, no, no, it's months in the planning, like I, I, uh, I finally decided, oh, I'm gonna have to put in truss and and, uh, um, speed rail and stuff like that. God, you're gonna build an actual studio, yeah, yeah, I mean, I've been putting it off for a while, so I think it's ben the.

01:47:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The chat room wants to know are you a lefty? Because the way you held that bat it's cracked. Yeah, he's a southpaw I'm a pure. I'm a pure lefty on you can never be a catcher, but you could be a pitcher you know what, lefty, I'm unique, I am special.

01:47:55
That's what they told me at the bar last night I don't know if they were talking about baseball, though I'm sorry I apologize. Ben, it's great to have you, same goes for Rob and Alex, and we will have more in just a little bit. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. Always nice to see you. When you think about business and, by the way, I have a soft spot for Shopify I should mention this before we get into the actual commercial, because my son and my daughter both have businesses thanks to Shopify.

01:48:29
When you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing, businesses like Allbirds love my Allbirds or Untucket love my Untuckets, you think about an innovative product, right, a progressive brand, a buttoned down marketing, but often an overlooked secret, the business behind the business making selling and for shoppers, buying simple. For millions of businesses like salt hanks, that business is shopify love shopify. Nobody does sales better than shopify. It makes it easy. Some of the number one checkouts on the planet are Shopify. You use it probably every single day. And the not-so-secret secret with ShopPay, that boosts conversions. If you're new to this e-commerce thing, this is really important. Getting those conversions up to 50%, that means way fewer carts going abandoned, way more sales being made.

01:49:26
Let's hit it again, yeah. So if you, they should never give me a soundboard. If you're, if you're into growing your business, your come up your commerce platform better. Be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, that's right. Not Not just online, but in the real world, in the brick and mortar business too, in your store, in their feed, everywhere in between.

01:49:51
Businesses that sell more, sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that Allbirds uses, that Salt Hank uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopifycom slash twit, that's all lowercase. Go at shopifycom slash twit, that's all lowercase. Go to shopifycom slash twit to upgrade your selling today. Shopifycom slash twit. Let me do it one more time. Yeah, I love that sound. Actually, salt Hank, my son, is a TikTok superstar and sells his salt thanks to Shopify online. His cookbook is coming out from Simon Schuster in just a couple of weeks. He's going on book tour and he just told me he's going to be on the today show on Thursday. So watch for salt Hank on a today show and see if there's a familial resemblance. I'm very proud of him.

01:50:45 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I watched that one.

01:50:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I thank Shopify because he really that's how he got his. He got his start on a set. I think they still power Salt Hank the Salt Lovers Club it's called with Shopify. It's pretty, pretty darn cool. Makes it possible for somebody like Hank, who's all about cooking and editing and videos, to actually do e-commerce, and that's really turned out to be a really big thing for him. Pickles are coming next. Get ready Pickles, pickles. He just got this first. I have to say I probably have to now disclaim this. I am an investor Shocked. I have invested, shocked. I have invested not just my many years of time and money and blood, sweat and tears into my child's child rearing, but in fact I actually invested money into the salt lovers club because I thought, well, if I can't make it, at least I feel like salt hank.

01:51:41 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Can I feel for the amount of the truffle salt that I bought from Hank I should have stock. That's all I'm saying.

01:51:50 - Ben Parr (Guest)
We are helping fund Leo's retirement plan.

01:51:54 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
The truffle. It's like instant, like I'm going to make this dish taste good. Oh, I know, just sprinkle it on. It's like a little magic to make things better.

01:52:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's got a whole range of salts. They've got a new design for the tins. They're really great, very kind of retro design. And he's doing, uh, like I said, he's gonna start doing pickles, pickled peppers, pickled onions, pickled pickles. Uh, so watch for those on a store shelf near you and if you like me, you'll buy a lot of them. Please, I beg of you, I put all my retirement into sol hank. Um, oh, speed. We were talking about social and mastodon. I was very sad. You know mozilla, which is, of course, the firefox folks, thunderbird, firefox and that uh had a mastodon service and they're shuttering it in december. It's the end of the line for a mozilla's mastodon. Uh, maybe I understand why. When they said that there were only 270 active users kind of sad. We have more than that. We have several thousand active users on twitsocial. But I think everybody who was involved in the Fediverse that's what they call the federated system of servers running ActivityPub. Mastodon is just one of the many ways you can do that.

01:53:19 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
We're kind of gratified when Mozilla said, yeah, we're going to start a Mastodon server 270 people, the problem for those 270 users though and this is one issue with ActivityPub, which BlueSky doesn't have, it's not so much account portability, it's more like settings portability. If you're one of those 270, you can take your followers list, the people you follow, the people following you but you lose your old handle and your old posts are not, you know, reproduced on your new profile, and that's kind of a pain. And I say that I'm on journahost, which is another smaller scale, specialized Mastodon activity pub server, and if that goes poof, then you know, yeah, I don't have to recreate all my settings, but if I had that address on my business cards I got to print new ones, because you know that's not where I'm going to be found henceforth.

01:54:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm at Leo at twitsocial. But you're right, if twitsocial goes away Actually it's on my lower third right there If Twitter social goes away, I'd have to be at Leo, at you know, mastodon, that social, or somewhere else.

01:54:32 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I mean this is, this is the problem with a massive down or something. I mean us tech nerds and the ones listening, yeah, we can go and like set up a mastodon and like go and join server and have an understanding of it, and the rest of the general public is not, doesn't have the time or and doesn't even make sense for them to go and figure that out. It's just, it's a thing right Like it's just not made to be easy.

01:54:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think part of it is we kind of thanks to Twitter and then later you know Facebook and Instagram and all the rest got this idea of a centralized place where we exist and the idea of a decentralized place like Blue Sky or Mastodon or I guess Threads they support the FedEvers is new to people and doesn't quite make sense. And yeah, it has a few disadvantages. That's one of them.

01:55:21 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Yeah, if you had something that was just as easy and you had started out at the beginning of when Twitter was first going out, you could have a different thing. The thing is just ease of use. Just matters to people. Also, complete aside, every time I hear Fediverse, I always think it's like a knockoff MCU and I think there's like 300 different variations of Captain, Captain America, like all in like a Macedon, like server or something. I don't know what goes through my brain. But when I hear Fediverse I always think like a weird MCU.

01:55:55 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, and I just want to underline something you said there is, like you know, some people need to be easy to use interfaces, everything, I mean. Half the time Apple, just all they do is they take something that someone else has done and just make it run smoothly, like I mean that's you know, they just take the sharp edges and they just we're just going to take one more round of sandpaper and just make this nice and smooth and then hand it back to you as if it was something new. And I think that a lot of companies, at their peril, underestimate the power of interface, you know, and the power of ease of use. And I think that it's really, really important. You know, and I think that I just see it all the time you see something that it's a great technology and then someone made it difficult and I have to admit, for me I didn't really master it on a blue sky. I looked at it and I was like, oh, it's really complicated.

01:56:39 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
So you're saying Apple should put up some kind of blue sky, or no? No, should? It's not that complicated. No, no, no, apple wouldn't touch it no, no, I'm not saying it's worldcom, they could put it at that domain.

01:56:48 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I didn't look at it, as I didn't look at it as too complicated for me. I looked at it for normal people?

01:56:52 - Ben Parr (Guest)
no, I agree and then, and then I was kind of like well, yeah, that means I'm not going to get the same charge traction.

01:56:57 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
And so then I was like so then I was kind of like, well, I'm not gonna, I just, I just don't in the days before number portability, your phone number didn't follow you around right.

01:57:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course, when there was just one, ma Bell, it wasn't a big problem, but as soon as there were many different carriers and your number, stayed with that carrier that was a big deal. In fact. I don't think cell phone adoption would have the same kind of success.

01:57:22 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
My parents have had the same phone number. I mean they changed the prefix but outside of the prefix when Pittsburgh split it. I'm still bitter about that. But anyway, the you mean the area code you got a different area code. Yeah, when they switched the area code, you know they, outside of that area code change. My parents have had the same phone number for over 20, over 50 years, like you know. It's like the same yeah.

01:57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, you can't take your house number with you, you can take your phone number with you.

01:57:51 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
well, my robbie maybe you can't take your money Mastodon account with you, but I've had my number for 25 years, you know. I haven't changed it.

01:57:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's a good thing to change your phone number regularly. Are you kidding?

01:57:59 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I probably had this in mind for the same amount of time as well.

01:58:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, you get a lot of phone number my whole life I'm on.

01:58:05 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Do not disturb all the time like I don't yeah, you don't ever use it. That's why no, I mean I, I don't think about it at all um you just don't answer it I don't answer it like if you don't schedule a call with me, I'm not having, I'm not talking like you know, rest my case.

01:58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've had the same number for 50 years. I can't answer it.

01:58:21 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
So I mean you have a lot of control. The phone is not even used for the phone call now no. I have. I have. So between 5 pm and 5 am I'm on, do Not Disturb and between 5 am and 5 pm. I'm on a focus mode that allows Right there's like 12 people, certain people. You know, just you know, so I you know, like having things interrupt you all the time is such a horrible idea.

01:58:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would just like to interrupt this broadcast to say that salt Hank will be on the today show on Thursday. I just went to salt lovers clubcom cause I was curious if salt was, if salt Hank was still selling using Shopify. There's, this is one by. You ought to try. I can't say it on the air, but notice, yes, he is still using Shopify. So I just wanted to check that and give a little plug to the Salt Lovers Club and get the cookbook. It's pre-order now. Salt Hank a five-napkin situation.

01:59:21 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Give me a minute.

01:59:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to go buy some salt. Oh, you got to get the cookbook, though. Look at these recipes.

01:59:28 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
It's amazing it's amazing such a good cook. It is dinner time on the east coast, by the way, completely I know this is cruel off the screen. You're making me hungry is this cruel?

01:59:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is this mean?

01:59:37 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
damn it. All right, let's move on. Let's move on, I'm gonna make you unhappy again.

01:59:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's move on. Let's move on. I'm going to make you unhappy again. Let's see, amazon tells employees you got to come back to work five days a week, no more remote work. This seems a little retro to me. We're doing the opposite. By the way, we no longer have an office people can come to. They have to come to my house and bug me.

02:00:01 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
The hard part is that you won't know immediately. I mean, I think that usually I would say that a full back to work five days a week and even partial back to work is really a sign of a lack of ability to manage people well, online, you know, and that that's a limitation of their management system. But I think that, um, I think that the uh, I kind of get the people have to be in the office for three days a week, but we're going to have to make everybody come back. You know, I think that what I find and I have friends that work at a lot of these companies that what you suddenly see is a lot of activity on LinkedIn Doesn't mean they quit, doesn't mean they throw any hard.

02:00:40
You know they don't throw any hard pitches. What they do is suddenly you see they're posting this is what I learned and this is da-da-da-da-da-da and what they're doing is. So the draw out of this is oftentimes three to five years, like you know, and I know some people who they quiet, quit, sort of yeah Well, they don't quite, I mean, but what they're doing is they still work, but they start looking.

02:01:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're laying out the yeah.

02:01:02 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
And the productivity impact of someone with one foot in and one foot out is pretty brutal. You know like it is. You know they're not. You know they're not as likely to do a lot of things. You know, for instance, they're not as likely to want to apply for patents because they don't want to slow down whatever they're going to do next. So they're not. As you know, they're not as likely to take on longer term projects because they don't want to be tied up in those.

02:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the email from Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, and it starts hey, team. By the way, immediately I'm turned off. Yeah, exactly no. No, this is bad news. I wanted to send a note on a couple of changes we're making to further strengthen our culture and teams. Exactly right. Same reaction we're making to further strengthen our culture and teams. Oh, exactly right, same reaction. We want to operate like the world's largest startup, so we're asking everybody to come back to work five days a week. We're also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements back assigned desk arrangements, uh, offices. Right, we understand some of our teammates may have set up their personal lives in such a way. The return of the office will require some adjustments to help ensure a smooth transition. We're not going to do this till january 2nd, so get going, you got. You.

02:02:23 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Got three you got three months to find another job. To find another job, LinkedIn's going to get very busy, Wow. The issue is that it's also one of the problems that companies have had with people staying at home is that the actual attrition rate is much lower. So a lot of companies have had an issue where not as many people are moving rate is much lower, so a lot of companies have had an issue where not as many people are moving. They actually need a certain number of people to quit, find other jobs because they're trying to and they don't want to do layoffs because that gets press, and so so oftentimes, what they're, you know, they expect a certain amount of churn, and that churn has been really low because people are pretty. You know they're like well, maybe it's not the best job in the world, but I'm working at home how bad can this be? And so I think that there's a. I think that they have a. You know this accelerates that and will clear out the people who aren't as serious as Amazon wants.

02:03:13
But the problem that you oftentimes have is that you're many of your most effective people are the people who are also the most mobile and the most that want flexibility, and so they, you know they could end up with a and again. I don't think it's going to be a sudden thing. I don't think you're going to see a bunch of people quitting, but I think that what you're going to see is this over three to five years, can they stay vibrant? Um, you know because this is a huge argument I know a lot of startups that that one of their big things when they post new ad, new, new jobs is that this is a remote job, you know, and they can pay oftentimes, uh, from one person I talked to 25 to 30 percent less than a, than a large company. Um, by saying you can completely at home, you know, and so is that desirable?

02:03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, people will take a one-third pay cut.

02:03:57 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Oh yeah, to be able to live wherever they want, because for them.

02:04:00 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
It's a 30.

02:04:01 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
They're, they're working that. I'm now there. I'm working out of St Louis or out of Des Moines or out of somewhere else, not trying to pay the bills. You work at home.

02:04:11 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Yeah, yeah.

02:04:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As you can see, so at least you can afford to turn the lights on. I'm glad to see that that's good.

02:04:21 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Amazon's HQ, two buildings they built to the tallest buildings in the they call it the national landing neighborhood, crystal City, and you know those were built with the intention of having lots of people in them and lots of people were hired with the idea at least pre-2020, that you will be working in these buildings and it's.

02:04:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that a good reason to bring people back to work, though? I mean, if we built them, we got to use them.

02:04:46 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I really think that they're not not knowing the whole another block they plan to build with the, the building that's going to look like this giant auger. Some have compared it to the poop emoji is this in seattle?

02:04:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
where is this? No, this is arlington.

02:04:57 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Oh, yeah, yeah they have a couple yeah where I, I, I, I've been to crystal city and I apologize to anyone I'm going to say this about.

02:05:05 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
It's not a great place I wouldn't want to come. It's not a place that I'd want to be hanging out all the time.

02:05:10 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
It was terrible. I didn't want to say that word Trust me.

02:05:17 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I drove through it and I had some meetings there and I was just kind of like whoa, this is not, this is like. Anyway, it's not bad, like dangerous or something, it's just it lacks all culture.

02:05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a picture of Crystal City.

02:05:30 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
That picture itself is already out of date. Yeah, there's a lot of new construction that's going on. There's no corkscrew yet I mean, how many buildings got hit with the ugly stick in the 1970s?

02:05:39 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
and 1960s.

02:05:41 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
So yeah, so anyway industrial, yeah, like that's really old because that hangar at national airport doesn't exist anymore. That that picture, I'm gonna say, is like 10 years out of date, which, if I it's 2020.

02:05:54 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's only five years out of four years out of date I feel like amazon looked at some data and they're like we want to get rid of some people and that like it's okay if we lose a couple. But I don't know if they anticipated this much internal backlash. But the long term is the top talent is going to find things where they're more uh, flexible this looks worse than living in shenzhen, china, this looks like I.

02:06:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They would have to put nets outside the windows.

02:06:22 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I'm just saying put some color on it.

02:06:25 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Yeah, that one's grim yeah so like number one there should be bike lanes on each street on the left.

02:06:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is from wikipedia that this is the 80s.

02:06:33 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Okay, oh yeah, that was the other thing.

02:06:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is how much improved it is in 2020.

02:06:40 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
And again, if you're not taking the T or whatever to the, not the T but the Metro to Crystal City, which there is a big thing there so you don't have to live there, okay, the traffic is intense, you know, like you know, and, and so you know there's this grind, especially if you haven't been doing it, um, anymore. There's a grind of of the traffic to get to um, you know.

02:07:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says now crystal city has 22 000 residents. 60 000 people come to work there every day.

02:07:07 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, and, and it's you know. So you're sitting in, you know, and what happens is some people are willing to put up with it for three days a week or whatever, and then they take monday and friday off or whatever, but it is um, it is brutal, like I mean, take you know driving to many of these headquarters, is you know?

02:07:22 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
you're talking about thousands of people choose to drive to crystal city when, yes, the metro goes there.

02:07:28 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
No one's making you do that yeah, but the metro gets pretty busy at that time too. Like it's, it's a pretty it's a good problem to have yeah, yeah, I mean, I've been on the metro going during rush hour to the crystal city and it's not a great experience, like I was. Like I'm never doing this again, like you know. I just didn't want to go to crystal city anymore, so, but I was like I may move my date.

02:07:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I move my meetings to lunches instead of mornings and the reason is it exists is because it's only five miles away from Washington DC. So it's it's near the center of power.

02:07:59 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, there's a lot of things also that are the center of power.

02:08:04
So there's, yeah, so there's a lot there, um, but but I think that, uh, regardless of whether it's crystal city or Seattle or San Francisco or Cupertino or any of these things, you know the traffic for all of these, I mean the, the drive that you have to do if you want to be able to afford somewhere to live, um, or you're getting on one of these buses and you're taking the bus down, but you're blowing three hours, two hours, three hours of your day just getting to work. You know, and it's just a, you know, it just feels it's. You know, I, again, I don't have to do that. I work from home. So I only have to, I only have to travel when I have an event, but, um, but I, I have friends that are just, you know, just really it's soul crushing.

02:08:42
After COVID it's a different feel, because you suddenly had all this time to have a different experience, and it was fine when it was, that's when you went from straight from school to doing this and you never knew any other way, and that's just the way we all do it. It was one thing when you had a couple of years to not have that and then you put it back into the system. It's a different experience for people, I think, and I think that that's and again, I think a lot of companies are going to, that are trying to get everyone to come back, and it's not that. I mean, I think if you made cattle have their own little stall, it's really an industrial era vision of work, isn't it?

02:09:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like almost an assembly line, except for data.

02:09:25 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, and I think if you gave people more offices, I mean, I think that even Apple, like you, built that spaceship. They built that spaceship and it's all shared, I mean, and the problem is is that it's just really hard. You talk to anyone who sits in that and I've, you know, I've been a gray badge, a red badge, a yellow badge, you know orange badge, all these badges. So I've sat in those those environments and I can say that it's really hard to think. It's really hard to think about anything important when there's people talking all the time and people walking over and saying something to you while you're trying to figure something out. You know like it is. You know for every like.

02:09:57
You know hall quote, unquote, hallway experience. You know hallway conversation that made a big difference. There's a hundred places where people are interrupting you while you're trying to get something done, and so the ability to have deep thought when you're in a shared environment is almost zero, you know, and, and so all that collaboration is oftentimes canceled out by the fact that everyone's distracting everybody all the time. People wear headphones all day, you know, just to try to cut everybody else out you know.

02:10:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I should point out I mean, you are very fortunate that you don't have to do it. I'm fortunate that I don't have to do it. I'm at the end of my career, that's why I don't have to do it. But most people do have to work in these environments and you've got companies like Amazon saying and you've got to work here five days a week.

02:10:37 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Well, and again, I think that what happens is not something that happens suddenly, it's something that happens over time, that they're looking now, looking for jobs that are going to give them more flexibility, looking for those jobs, and I think companies that force their employees to come back to the office five days a week will lose vibrancy over the next decade. Five days a week will lose, lose vibrancy over the next decade, not tomorrow, not next year, but over the next decade. They're gonna be the next Intel, you know, because they're gonna slowly bleed out all of their their best talent, because that best talent is gonna be looking for that flexibility.

02:11:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Joe says he likes going to the office once or twice a week. It's a nice change of pace. He doesn't mention he has a three-month-old at home. That's. Those are the people who say, yeah, I could go to work.

02:11:18 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's not the question of, like, being able to go to the office a couple of times a week. There is a benefit to that. Sure, it's the five times a week and no flexibility, whereas other companies, at the very minimum, are like, yeah, maybe you'll come back a couple of times a week, but a couple of times deep thought at home and then you can get your collaboration stuff done and your meetings done in the office during the middle of the week.

02:11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That makes it. It's interesting how COVID really changed that whole thing, and it changed it for us too at Twit we, you know I've already had to work from home for a few years because we couldn't. You know, I went to the office, but it was just me and a couple of engineers. Then we decided to do a four day work week, which people seem to like, and now we're completely. We have no central place and I'm starting to wonder maybe we need to have I don't know get togethers once in a while, just so people can see other people.

02:12:09 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
A good friend of mine is in a company that has been distributed for decades and one of the things that they do is they have daily meetings, standups that are virtual, and they used to do it over the phone, like they were talking about the fact that they've been doing this since before video was there, but they used to do it over the phone. And everyone's expected to have an office at their home, like they're expected to, not like there's a room. That is where they're gonna be part of it, be part of it. That's part of the cost of being in the company, but they have, you know, in the same cities. They have things that they have opportunities every month to do something in the region, every quarter, and the company brings.

02:12:42
Everybody pays, you know, because they're not paying rent. They pay everybody to come together once a year and those things are considered vital. You know, into culture building, but they're also spending a lot of time, you know, in that area and I and I again, I feel like, because of office hours, it's not my company, but I'm interacting with people all over the world every day, all day, you know, on on those types of things and I feel like we get excited to see each other because you know, I get to meet every time I fly to another city. I'm like, hey, I'm going to go to this place and all think there's an interest in that. I think that the human contact is important, but I don't know if you need it.

02:13:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really, I mean, to me it's very interesting, it's a very, it's a big change in our culture and our human culture and, just like social media, I don't know if it'll make us more detached. That's been the trend going back to tribal societies to modern society, this trend of kind of people dispersed all over the place. But, Ben, go ahead.

02:13:41 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I'll just a couple of things, like one that's a whole separate discussion. Like, also, loneliness, and like location, all that. I would say like, look, I'm very much on one side because the company my co-founder, matt and I the AI company we started in 2016, started out as all remote and we had investors who told us no, because we're all remote. And then COVID happened and we were for like 2020, the bell of the ball, because we had just raised money. We were teaching people how to do all remote. We had, like, had all those systems. We were like on podcasts talking about it and like we're still all remote and I would say like we wouldn't have been able to the company without doing that. So, like, I'm very much on like a side of like you could eat.

02:14:26
I get why people want to be able to go and like, bring people together and like, but there's lots of ways to do it. Whether or not you're all remote, you like, yeah, you fly people in together, which is a thing that we've done. Or you have a couple days a week in and a couple days of week out. It's just the you're just. It's just a shooting in the foot, slow and steady, like blood drip. That's going to happen from companies like Amazon who are doing like trying to go back to the world as it was before COVID. But the world has fundamentally changed, the way people think has fundamentally changed and the options have fundamentally changed.

02:15:00
Life has changed.

02:15:01 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I will bet, though if Amazon gets this to work, lots of other companies will be like okay, that's the proof we need. We're going to impose the exact same policy.

02:15:07 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Again, lots of big companies, but that provides the opportunity for smaller companies and companies that want to be more aggressive, and I think that part of what makes this work that wouldn't have worked 10 years ago are things like Zoom and video conferencing. That has gotten so good that I think that that changes the calculation a lot.

02:15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've been surfing that technological edge since we started to it. When I started doing podcasting almost exactly 20 years ago now. Uh, I think that that anniversary is in the next few days. Uh, it was. It was. You had to be sitting in the same room as the person right and then I somebody called me with Skype on the radio show and I said, hey, this sounds pretty good. Remember, alex, we started using Skype uh it didn't matter that I was in Petaluma and everybody was.

02:15:56 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
I don't even know where you guys are, I mean, we when we did the last twit that was in the in the studio, in the studio. I'm not going to argue that there's something about that, that.

02:16:11 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I love that room moves, I would prefer that if it were possible.

02:16:15 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
But what you give up is the ability to get all these people from all over.

02:16:18
I mean it's not practical to do a weekly show and expect to get the we get much higher level of talent yeah, and so when you give people the option, when you start going, when, for companies that do go virtually and don't force people to move to their headquarters or move to where their offices are and are getting them from anywhere, um, that is a. I think that's a huge competitive advantage. And I just think companies that are to their headquarters or move to where their offices are and are getting them from anywhere, that is a. I think that's a huge competitive advantage. And I just think companies that are thinking terrestrial, you know, are going to be at a disadvantage over the next decade as all of these technologies get better and better. I mean, I looked at, you know, we've been talking and I've worked on lots of campaigns and I'm not working on any this fall. So I'm just going to say that I usually am working on some support to say that this year, yeah, it's important to say.

02:16:57
I'm not working on anything, but what I will say is that there was a change in politics that happened last week. If you watch the Oprah Harris, you know event. That is the. That is the state of the art when it comes to hybrid events and if, for people who are paying attention to it, that is something to see. They were using what looks like Zoom tiles along with Zoom ISO and they had literally grandstands of people virtually sitting there. They were bringing actors and other people in virtually Was this for the Olympics?

02:17:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was this for?

02:17:33 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
It's a fundraiser for Harris. Was this for the Olympics? What was this for?

02:17:35 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's a fundraiser for Harris. Oprah hosted basically like a version of her show where she got to like ask Harris a whole bunch of questions and millions of people tuned in and you had on the Zooms all the people who had organized like white dudes for Harris and black women for Harris.

02:17:50 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Meryl Streep showed up.

02:17:51 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Right, meryl Streep showed up and these other actors Right, meryl Streep showed up and these other actors but they also, like they used it as a forum for like voters to ask semi-tough questions so that, like she could air it out, I actually know who the technology that they're using for, like that, like hybrid kind of thing, and I kind of know what they're using.

02:18:08 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Is this Mobilize? No, they were using Zoom. I mean no, no, no, no-transcript, but what?

02:18:13 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I mean is there's another piece of tech, there's another thing for like the actual, like physical venue and for like there's some extra tech for like having all the screens on.

02:18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting. This has become the thing to do in this political season, hasn't it?

02:18:26 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
These white dudes for Harris and so forth and again. But beyond all the messaging and everything else, what was important there was seeing. There were the technology, there were 270,000 concurrently watching that show. Um, while they brought in people that would have, it would have been logistically impossible to do in the timeframe. And you know what you're starting to see is. You know that's a, that's 270,000. We're going to see events in the next couple of years that are millions of people and the thing is, is that that is, um, as you start to think in those terms, you know a lot of this, like we all had to come back to the office feels very antiquated, yeah, like you know.

02:19:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then you know it's we're on the cusp of a very different world. Yeah, I think that's. That's pretty clear. Hey, I, if, if rob pergara were in the studio with me, I would. I would be able to perceive that he was about to faint from hunger. So I will take a break and we will get you to your dinner in a minute, rob. Okay, I apologize, I can see you. I did have a late lunch.

02:19:27
Yeah, I think you're kind of starting to fade a little bit, as we all are. We got a great panel, though, and see, this is really amazing. What can happen. When I compare. 20 years ago, I spent hours after every show trying to make it sound okay, we couldn't do video, and now this is like we're all in the same room. I mean it's kind of amazing really.

02:19:48 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
Um, what a world what a time seeing this whole production, man, I know I'm guaranteeing it's going to fall apart right now.

02:19:55 - Ben Parr (Guest)
To a side-by-side view of episode one and episode a thousand.

02:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just look and listen to the difference. No, it's true. It's true. I feel very fortunate that we've been here for 20 years it feels like that too, doesn't it, rob? And able to watch this transition happen. We'll have final thoughts in a moment.

02:20:14
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02:22:43
The Veeam on data resilience summit. You want to know more. Register right now. It's free. You can join online for free. Don't miss the Veeam on data resilience summit on October 1st. Don't miss the Veeam on Data Resilience Summit on October 1st, and all you have to do is go to veeamcom to learn more. Veeamcom. Don't delay, though, because it's October 1st, so it's coming up soon, the Veeam on Data Resilience Summit, and, honestly, I if you don't, you know it's on you at this point you've got you, you gotta do it. You gotta do it. Veeam. We were very glad to have them and their support on this week in tech, as we are also very glad to have Rob Peguero, who's slowly wasting away close to crystal city. You can read his stuff peggararocom, of course, fast company, pegararocom. So let's get the rob. Is there another pegararo?

02:23:42 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
there are. So that part of the. If you go to northern italy, like uh, vicenza specifically, you will see a reasonable. That's where my people are from, my last name that's where my people are from, so that's good.

02:23:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, of course, rob perry gararocom, but also fast company and uh, pc mag, pc mag, wire cutter, all of that wire, many other fine publications uh, thank you for being here, rob. We really appreciate it. Uh, and go get something to eat. Do you know what's for dinner?

02:24:08 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
I think it's gonna be pasta. Actually we've somehow the tomatoes are doing all right, so I'll do some garlic from your own tomatoes. Yeah, now I'm jealous. And basil, I've never had it growing so well. I don't know what I was doing wrong all the other year. We've been in the house 20 years, but yeah, we could do pesto sauce once a week easily.

02:24:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'm so jealous now. The first time I ever had pesto 1967, near Genoa, and nobody had ever had it in the United States my mom, I was 11. My mom went what is this? And she started making pesto at home for the rest of my life and it's the best thing ever Fresh pesto Enjoy. Thank you, rob, for being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks, rob. Thank you also to Mrs Ben Parr, newly married.

02:24:57 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I will not be having pesto tonight. What will you be having? I'm not sure. Depends on what Mrs Parr wants.

02:25:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the takeout menu look like for today?

02:25:06 - Ben Parr (Guest)
I have some bulgogi beef and I have some veggie stir fry, and I have some salad that I need to make, so it definitely is something.

02:25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very nice. Ben is the author of the AI Analyst. You can read him in the information. Of course, his company Early on doing this Octane AI. Anything else you want to plug, ben?

02:25:29 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Like I said at the very beginning, I'll have another thing to plug, maybe the next time I'm here. New title, we will see.

02:25:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ooh, how exciting. Does it have anything to do with Flappy Bird? No, okay.

02:25:42 - Ben Parr (Guest)
Yes, I am the new Flappy Bird, congratulations.

02:25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It made its way back to this week, so we didn't get to that story, but we'll save that. Actually, we have a lot of stories we didn't get to. We'll have to get to them later in the week, maybe on Tuesday on Mac Break Weekly with Alex Lindsay and Andy and Jason. Thank you for being here, alex, doing double duty this week yeah, pleasure, I would feel guilty, except for the fact that you're on officehoursglobal seven days a week. Anyway. Yeah, it's not a big deal.

02:26:13 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Jeez and yeah, so you know it's, we have a good time. Yeah, so it's every every day Did you do cooking this weekend. I am. I didn't do any major cooking. I'm going to make some stuff for next week. I'm really going into quinoa because I learned oh, I love quinoa. Oh, I keep on burning it and I do do anything. I learned how to make it in my rice cooker.

02:26:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can make it in a rice cooker. I just found that out too. Blows me away.

02:26:38 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Now it's like nothing and so I make so much of it, so for the whole family and so, and you throw a bunch of stuff into it and it's very, it's like couscous. So you just kind of throw things into it and it tastes great and it's almost soup season. So another week or two and I'll start making like I usually make like 10 quarts of soup on a Sunday and then while I'm watching a Steeler game or whatever, and then I just put it in mason jars and put it in the fridge and I don't want to think about it.

02:27:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm getting pretty excited about that. I have some tortellini brodo waiting for me that I made before a vacation and froze and now have it All right. So that sounds good, can't wait. Yeah, thank you, alex. We'll see you Tuesday on MacBreak Weekly and Monday through Friday Actually Monday through Sunday at officehoursglobal. Thank you all for joining us.

02:27:24
A special thanks to our Club Twit members, who make it possible to continue to do this show. If you're not yet a member of Club Twit, I'd love to encourage you to join. It's only $7 a month. Add free versions of all the shows, but you also get access to special programming and we've got some special programming coming up. In fact, thursday we're going to do a special with Chris Marquardt, our photo guy. He's going to do his assignment review and come up with a new assignment and maybe we'll do a little photographic talking. That'll be Friday. Did I say Thursday, photographic, photographic talking. That'll be friday. That's the thursday. It'll be friday, 2 pm. Pacific 5 pm.

02:27:57
Eastern club members, you can see it in the discord. We'll also stream it on our all the usual uh places and I'm working on some other ideas of things we might want to do uh, live, including some coding, some live coding, uh, which should be a lot of fun. We're getting ready for december and the annual advent of code 25 days, 25 times two coding problems. They're usually very, very difficult and maybe, with your help, I can get them this year. So stay tuned for that. If you're in a member of the club, all that will be available in the discord twittv slash club. Of course. The reason you do it really is to keep the content coming. We want to keep doing these shows.

02:28:39
Thanks to micah sargent, who filled in for me, uh, during our vacation, to ian thompson and davinder hardewar. Jason snell, uh, really appreciate it. Lets me get away for a little bit, but I'm back now for for the rest of the year and the rest of next year probably. Uh, thank you all for being here and we will see. Oh and thanks benito gonzalez, who is remote working technical directing this show. We'll be editing it as well. Benito's in his house. Show us, benito. Say hello. Say hello to the people, yeah that's a good shot.

02:29:14 - Rob Pegoraro (Guest)
not in there, are you?

02:29:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
being shy. Anthony Neal, there he is. There's Benito and his synthesizer. Look at this. Is that a gaming machine? What do you got going on there?

02:29:25 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's a modular synthesizer.

02:29:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes me Wow, what are you going to do? Oh, and it looks like you got the old mixer that we started twin on. Or is that yours? No, that's mine, okay, because that's very much like the original mixer that we uh started the show on.

02:29:40 - Ben Parr (Guest)
It's actually skynet.

02:29:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't believe you, I think he's, I think he's.

02:29:43 - Alex Lindsay (Guest)
Uh, he's got something going I've been teasing, doing like a music stream for a while and I just we want you to do that, do it. I'm gonna do it. I am gonna do it. I just please been lazy about setting up my obs and all that stuff, please let's do it.

02:29:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'd love to love to have you in the club doing some music for us. Um, thanks to anthony nielsen, our creative director, who created a crazy neon twit logo uh, behind me. And burke mcquinn, who helped doing all the wiring and the lighting and got that all fixed up. And russell tammany, who is our independent it guy, who really does keep this running, keeps, keeps the bits flowing. Thanks to all of you for being here and we will see you next week for episode 999. Episode 1000 coming up in two weeks Wow, hard to believe. And, as I've said, for 998 episodes, another twist, say, years weren't you?

02:30:38
it felt like years to rob. It definitely feels like years. I want to see how long I can stretch this out. No, I won't do that to you rob. Another twit is in the can. Bye, bye, everybody.