This Week in Tech Episode 1081 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Great panel. This week. We've got Victoria's Song from the Verge, our dear friend Stacey Higinbotham from Consumer Reports. And car guy Sam Abulsamed. We'll talk about Tim Cook leaving Apple a lot more, leaving Meta involuntarily. And why Australia's teen media ban just ain't working. That's coming up next on Twitter.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:00:26]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:00:30]:
This is Twitter.

Leo Laporte [00:00:32]:
Twit. This is Twit this Week in Tech, episode 1081, recorded Sunday, April 26, 2026. That's Miasma. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. Hello, everybody. Good to see you. And good to see our panel today.

Leo Laporte [00:00:59]:
Stacey Higginbotham is back in the house. Hello, Stacey.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:01:03]:
Hi, everybody.

Leo Laporte [00:01:04]:
Policy fellow for Consumer Reports. Looks like a beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:01:11]:
It is. It hurts my soul to be inside.

Leo Laporte [00:01:14]:
I'm sorry. We'll get this over with real quick so you can get out for the sunset. How about that? Do you get really nice sunsets on your island?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:01:22]:
Because I came from Texas? No.

Leo Laporte [00:01:24]:
Oh, you're spoiled.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:01:26]:
They're fine. We don't have enough pollution up here.

Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
Yeah, I was gonna say the thin layer of hydrocarbons in the air really give it a rosy glow.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:01:35]:
Yeah. I mean, there's still, like. You see the water and it's the balance. That's very nice.

Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
Yeah, I'm jealous. Also with us, Victoria Song, senior reviewer for the Verge. Hello, Victoria.

Victoria Song [00:01:49]:
Hello. Sorry I was late.

Leo Laporte [00:01:52]:
No, no, no, you weren't late. You were just on time. Exactly. Like a wizard. Exactly when you meant to be. Wonderful. See you. Everything going well in the Song household?

Victoria Song [00:02:06]:
Yeah, pretty much. Just same old, same old, cats being mischievous, husband stomping around somewhere nice.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:02:15]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:16]:
Turn yourself up just a little bit because we want to hear all the goodness.

Victoria Song [00:02:19]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
Victoria's Song. And by the way, we, you and I are the cat owners here. Stacy has a brand new dog, and Sam Aboul Samit is here with his pup. Hello, Sam from Wheels Media, my car guy.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:33]:
Hey. Good to be here again.

Leo Laporte [00:02:34]:
And you drove something. What is the Toyota Woven City. What is that?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:40]:
So Woven City is. Is this.

Leo Laporte [00:02:43]:
Is it made of fabric?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:45]:
No, it's not. It's. It's this test area that Toyota has built near. Near Mount Fuji.

Leo Laporte [00:02:52]:
Oh, this is why you were in Japan?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:54]:
This is why I was in Japan. I was visiting Woven City. The story I've Written has not been published yet. It'll probably be coming up in the next few days.

Leo Laporte [00:03:01]:
Wait a minute. This is all built just like a test for a test track. Nobody's. It's not real.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:07]:
No, there. No, it's real. There's people living there. It opened. The first phase opened in October, and there's about 100 people living there now. They want to. They're gonna. They plan to grow that to about two.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:20]:
So the, the facility is. There's, there's three main areas to it. There's what they call the inventor's garage, which is part of the old factory that was on that site.

Leo Laporte [00:03:30]:
Oh, it was a. It was an old Toyota factory.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:32]:
Yeah. And then there's the, the buildings, the residences. And then there's the experimental, the experiment field, which is. That's kind of the test track. And so they're, they're working on all kinds of different mobility technologies, some of which I'm less enamored with.

Leo Laporte [00:03:51]:
I see a little scooter there.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:53]:
Yeah, the scooters. The scooters are pretty cool. They call it. They call it the swake.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:03:58]:
Does it have three wheels?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:59]:
Yes, it's three wheels. It leans, you know, so when you're going around turns, it leans. Got a little backrest to give you a little more support, make it easier to stand on it.

Leo Laporte [00:04:08]:
That's nice.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:09]:
Yeah, it's pretty slick.

Leo Laporte [00:04:10]:
And then these Zooks style driverless vehicles.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:13]:
Yeah, those, those are called the E palette.

Leo Laporte [00:04:16]:
They gotta work on the naming, but it probably makes more sense in Japan and Japanese.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:20]:
Yeah. So, yeah, it's. It's an electric palette. It's designed, you know, to be used for a variety of uses, like moving. Moving up to 17 passengers. Or they had a couple of them that were set up. One was set up as a mobile coffee shop. The other one.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:34]:
Another one was set up as like a little convenience store on wheels. And there was another one that was very clean. Mobile office. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:04:43]:
Look how clean the streets are because there's only 200 people there. What's that?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:49]:
That is a robot that they use for delivering packages and stuff. So that's, that's like a, you know, mailbox thing. So they're, they're experimenting with various types of robotics and, and a bunch of

Leo Laporte [00:05:04]:
different things for people who are. Listen. Only listening. It looks like a trash can on a pedestal with, With a stool next to it. And it rolls, I guess, around.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:05:12]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:05:13]:
And stuff's in the can.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:05:14]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:05:15]:
So like twit. Oh, there's another version of the robot.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:05:18]:
So this is, this is called the, the Guide Mobi. And again, this, this little, the little vehicle in the front, three wheels. And it's autonomous, it's got radar, lidar and cameras and you can use it for a bunch of different things. You can, they can hook up a little trailer to it. So like utility workers, you know, landscapers can have one of those that follows them around.

Leo Laporte [00:05:40]:
This is all conceptual, right? This is Toyota's.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:05:43]:
No, this. Well, it's, it's experimental, I would put it that way. This stuff all exists. We saw. Yeah, we saw all this stuff. So if you go back to the previous image, what it's doing there is it's actually towing a car. So it's towing a Toyota BZ virtually. So it's wireless towing.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:06:03]:
So.

Leo Laporte [00:06:03]:
Oh.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:06:04]:
So what they have is, you know, so for this community. Follow me. What they call Woven City, they have shared vehicles that they provide to the people living and working there. So they've got a fleet of these vehicles and there's a parking garage that has solar panels and it's set up as a virtual power plant. So all the charging, all the charging happens in there is bidirectional charging. So when, when the, when the, if the, if they, if there's extra power or if they need some power from the batteries in the vehicles, they can pull that out. When somebody needs a vehicle to go somewhere, then they just pull up their Woven City app, they summon. And what happens is the, the little Guide Mobi will come up by one of the vehicles, connect to it wirelessly, and then guide it to where the person is.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:06:55]:
What protocol does it use? What wireless protocol does it use?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:07:00]:
It's, it's basically WI fi, but it's, it's customized.

Leo Laporte [00:07:05]:
It's not low rom. Stacey's a big low fan.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:07:08]:
Sorry, I'm a big wireless person.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:07:10]:
So, yeah, they didn't get into too much detail about the specifics of the wireless protocol they're using yet. And then when you come back, because everybody's living in these apartment style buildings, there's nowhere to park your cars there. So when you come back, you just pull up by your, your building, summon the Guide Mobi and it will come and take your car away, take it back to the garage, it'll get plugged in, charged, and then it becomes part of the virtual power plant again. So if the local utility is running under high load, they need to, they need some extra power, they can pull it out of the batteries in some of these cars as needed, so it becomes stationary storage when needed.

Leo Laporte [00:07:49]:
Do you think this is just a showcase or do you think that this is kind of a real something that will really happen?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:08:00]:
Whether something. I think some of these things, I think things like the vpp, the virtual power plant, the shared mobility, those things I think will absolutely happen. I mean, there's a lot of experiments going on globally with VPPs. Shared mobility is obviously a thing, but you know, one of the other aspects of this whole community is they've Toyota their, through their ARENE division, which is their software division, has developed the, the vision AI model, which is, it's their own in house developed foundation model and a vision and a vision language model. So rather than processing text, it's processing visual inputs from the cameras and it can be used for a variety of stuff. So when, when the, when you walk around the, the city, there's cameras everywhere, like, I mean, everywhere. And it's watching everything.

Leo Laporte [00:09:01]:
Oh, that sounds so good.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:09:03]:
And the idea is to, you know, see what people need when they need it.

Leo Laporte [00:09:07]:
Yeah, Japanese don't mind that so much

Sam Abuelsamid [00:09:11]:
as, not, not, not, not as much as Americans do. Yeah, but you know, and one of the cool things they're doing with it is collaborative perception messaging. So as vehicles are moving around the city, you know, obviously the cameras on the vehicles or human driver's eyes are limited to line of sight, you know, and an urban environment, you know, when you've got a lot of buildings close by, it's easy for stuff to be hidden. And so the cameras can detect, you know, if someone is approaching the street that might not be visible to a vehicle coming down the street and it can send a message to it and provide you some extra situational awareness or if it's an autonomous vehicle, you know, to let it know, hey, there's, there's somebody coming, you know, should slow down. That's all well and good. I totally on board with that. Where things get a little shaky is one of the things that they have in here in Woven City is a coffee shop owned by ucc. UCC is the company that invented canned coffee back in the 1960s.

Leo Laporte [00:10:11]:
I know.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:10:11]:
And so they've got this coffee shop and you go in.

Leo Laporte [00:10:14]:
Actually not bad coffee, amazingly. Yeah, Given that it's in a vending machine. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:10:20]:
But the problem. And they have a chain of regular coffee shops too, so it's not all in cans, but you walk into this coffee shop and if you look up at the ceiling, you'll notice there's cameras everywhere in the ceiling. And what they're doing is they're using the Same vision, AI model to track what people are doing in the coffee shop. They're using it for market research to see how people respond to different coffees. You know, are people more alert? Are they getting, are they getting more stuff done? You know, what, what are they doing when they're drinking their coffee? This is where things start to get kind of creepy.

Leo Laporte [00:10:52]:
Remember Amazon's ghost stores? They closed those down. And I think some of it was people. There was the same idea. The camera, you didn't have to check out because the cameras would just watch you and know what you picked up and left with. And I think the reason they closed those is people were creeped out by it.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:07]:
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think, you know, I'm, I'm willing to give Toyota some credit that they're, they're not going to do anything nefarious with, with all this data. The problem is we live in a world that also includes Palantir and Meta and ICE and the Chinese Communist Party. And when, when you start thinking about it from that perspective, I don't want all this surveillance around.

Leo Laporte [00:11:31]:
It's very dystopian.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:32]:
Yes. So it can very easily run off into the weeds and be very bad.

Leo Laporte [00:11:38]:
You know, it's funny because one of the things I wanted to ask you about, and I'm sorry, guys, jump in Victoria and Stacy if you're bored. I'm sorry, I just, whenever I get Sam on, I'm not a car guy, but I have all these questions. Elon has been taking a little bit of a victory lap, saying, see, we didn't really need lidar. He's always said, well, just use cameras, that'll be plenty. And I guess full self driving has gotten mature enough now that maybe he was right. You don't have those spinning things on the roof? No, no, no, no.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:11]:
These things, you know, they don't operate in the rain, they don't operate in most bad weather. There's actually not very many of them out there. They're currently all being monitored.

Leo Laporte [00:12:22]:
About the robotaxis.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:23]:
Yeah, the Tesla Robo taxis. Yeah, they're, they're all being monitored 100 of the time by remote operators.

Leo Laporte [00:12:30]:
Right.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:31]:
That can take over. And at any time, most of them still have, you know, safety monitors sitting in the front passenger seat. Those that don't are usually being followed by another Tesla with somebody behind.

Leo Laporte [00:12:46]:
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:46]:
You know, so I, I, and if you actually, you know, if you look at the data from the, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, their standing general order manufacturers are required to submit data on Any crashes involving vehicles that have level 2 or above assist or automation? And there's been quite a few crashes involving the Tesla Robo taxis in Austin where they. You know, where they've been operating up to this point.

Leo Laporte [00:13:15]:
Oh, all right. So forget it.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:13:17]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:13:19]:
All right, well, we'll do more car stuff later. I don't want to. I don't want to.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:13:25]:
It's like, I have so many questions about this city.

Leo Laporte [00:13:27]:
However, Woven City is really.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:13:29]:
Yeah, well, weird. I mean.

Leo Laporte [00:13:32]:
I mean, I would like to live in a very, very planned community. Wouldn't you, Stacy? Isn't that kind of neat?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:13:37]:
No. I grew up in a planned community. It was the worst.

Leo Laporte [00:13:40]:
Victoria, would you like to live in a really, really planned city?

Victoria Song [00:13:45]:
Like, it's. It's one of those things that sounds good in theory, but then in practice, like, could you imagine it just taking way too long for the little bot to get your car to you and just, like, getting really faster?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:14:01]:
So just. Just to explain the name, Woven City, I don't know how familiar you are with the history of Toyota, but before Toyota was a car manufacturer, it started off as Toyota Automatic Loomworks.

Leo Laporte [00:14:12]:
No.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:14:13]:
Yeah. They started off building looms.

Leo Laporte [00:14:16]:
Wow.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:14:16]:
That's cooler than Nokia's history or Nintendo's history.

Leo Laporte [00:14:20]:
They were a card company. A playing card company.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:14:23]:
Yeah, that's related.

Leo Laporte [00:14:24]:
Nokia was tires, right?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:14:25]:
No, Nokia was rubber boots.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:14:28]:
Yeah. Before they started doing tires.

Leo Laporte [00:14:29]:
Then they did tires.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:14:31]:
Then they did tires.

Victoria Song [00:14:31]:
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:14:32]:
But, you know, and the. And the idea of the name Woven City is there. You know, they've got these two groups that they call the inventors. They're the ones working out of the inventor garage, creating new stuff. And the. The Weavers are the people living there. And so Weaver.

Leo Laporte [00:14:48]:
I kind of like the idea. And then, like, something really modern and.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:14:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:14:52]:
You know, delivery.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:14:53]:
Delivery.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:14:53]:
And they're trying to weave together an ecosystem of new technologies.

Leo Laporte [00:14:57]:
And you'd be with other interesting people. Stacy's blurry. Victoria's microphone is 100ft away.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:15:09]:
I don't know what camera setting I have on, but it keeps trying to, like.

Leo Laporte [00:15:12]:
It's focusing on the Out. Like you. It wants to go outside.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:15:16]:
Yeah, sorry.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:15:17]:
Focusing on the camera.

Leo Laporte [00:15:17]:
No, it's okay. It's just when I say I want to live in this technological city, and then as if to remind me how flaky technology is, Stacy goes out of focus, and Victoria just. That's very quiet.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:15:31]:
It's my Barbara Walters filter, so. I look so beautiful.

Leo Laporte [00:15:35]:
You look like a beautiful thumb.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:15:39]:
That's actually probably the best version of me.

Leo Laporte [00:15:41]:
Not a wrinkle in sight. All right, we should talk about the big story of the week, which is, it's funny because there was a little, you know, kind of kerfuffle among the Apple rumor mill for most of last year. Mark Gurman, who's the king of Apple rumor guys, said, yeah, Tim Cook's gonna retire sometime and John Ternus is the likely replacement. Then the Financial Times at the end of last year said, not only is that true, it's gonna happen before WWDC and sometime in the spring, which was a surprisingly specific rumor, although well sourced because they had four different reporters on it. To which Mark Gurman said, no, I checked with my friends at Apple. They said, couldn't possibly happen. Tim Cook actually went out and said, no, I'm very happy. I'm not going anywhere.

Leo Laporte [00:16:39]:
And then, boy, lo and behold, on Monday, Tim Cook says, yeah, I'm retiring. And September 1st, John Ternus is going to be the new CEO of Apple, just in time to release the new iPhones. And Mark Gurman kind of got a little cranky. He said basically that the Financial Times was wrong, it was false. And it's become pretty apparent that somebody at Apple called the Financial Times and said, we'd like to plant this story just to prepare the market. We'll deny it. But it's true. And it all came true.

Leo Laporte [00:17:11]:
Victoria, is this a good thing, a bad thing for Apple, a new CEO?

Victoria Song [00:17:18]:
I think everyone has been talking about it for a while, so I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it'll be an interesting thing. And one thing is that Tarnas is a product guy. So I'm kind of curious to see if there's any shift coming from that because, you know, Cook, you know, he wasn't, he wasn't like a Steve Jobs to esque figure. I think he might be most famous for his supply chain prowess, which I don't know about you, but supply chains are not the most exciting thing except to people who are excited by supply chains.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:17:52]:
So, oh my God, right now, it's so important, though.

Victoria Song [00:17:55]:
It's like, it's a hugely important thing. It has like a. It has such huge impact in, like, why Apple has as much money as it does now, today, and like the efficiency there. But it's not a flashy thing. It's not the one more thing. It's not the thing that people or like the fans necessarily salivate over.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:18:16]:
Yeah, but the flashy stuff doesn't happen unless the supply chain actually works.

Victoria Song [00:18:20]:
No, like, don't get me wrong, I think Tim Cook is like a steady hand, really smart in that sense. But I do think that there are people, people who are just like kind of longing for the old days of the twinkle in the eye. One more thing. Here's the flashy new product thing and I think they're wondering if Turnus is going to give that to them. I don't know if he will.

Leo Laporte [00:18:41]:
I think you gotta be realistic. There's only one Steve Jobs in a generation and even people who are really good at keynotes, like maybe Jensen Huang from Nvidia, there's still no Steve Jobs. You're not going to get another Steve Jobs in our lifetime. Probably.

Victoria Song [00:18:58]:
Well, who knows if we're gonna get another Steve Jobs in like the gadget space. We might get them in a different space, right?

Leo Laporte [00:19:05]:
Maybe there is an AI. I don't know who it would be though. I can't. There's nobody I can think of right now that's got that laser like focus, that vision, that taste.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:19:15]:
Well, Jensen's probably the one guy who's close to that.

Leo Laporte [00:19:18]:
He really has managed, by the way this week, Nvidia, $5 trillion company. What the. I mean, I'd have to.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:19:33]:
Money isn't real.

Leo Laporte [00:19:34]:
Oh yeah, that's right. Oh, never mind.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:19:36]:
Let's start there.

Leo Laporte [00:19:39]:
At that point it is, it's pretty imaginary.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:19:42]:
Jensen has benefited probably in some ways, like Steve Jobs from a laser like focus. Like Jensen's core belief was I will do massively parallel compute, right? I will design specific special chips and like I started covering Nvidia like in 2008 when they had just launched their first like chip that was designed to go into cell phones and they were pitching parallel compute for graphics on like enterprise computer, like, like for PowerPoint and stuff like that. And it was. Everyone was like, that's ridiculous. But he's basically, he's got, is it. Everything's. When you have a hammer, everything's a nail. He has got a really great either nail or hammer and it's found its moment and he's ridden with it.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:20:30]:
I don't know if that really compares to Jobs or not, but yeah, I

Leo Laporte [00:20:33]:
mean, turnisce to his credit. His first job out of college and he was only there a couple years, went almost immediately to Apple, been there for 20 some years, 25 years was at a VR headset company. So if you're a Vision Pro fan, you might say, well, that's good news. He's certainly been hands on with Apple Silicon, which is Apple's I think greatest success of the last five years. Tim Cook said that he thought the Apple Watch was his, you know, big success. And I think you probably could say that's true. But Ternus is there for that as well. One of the things though, as a hardware guy that, you know, I have no doubt he'll do well with hardware, but Apple's, and Apple's always done good hardware.

Leo Laporte [00:21:18]:
Apple's real problem these days, I don't know if you'll back me up on this, Victoria, is software. They need a good software person. Do you agree?

Victoria Song [00:21:31]:
I think right now people are mostly criticizing them for their lack of AI software.

Leo Laporte [00:21:36]:
Well, yeah, he's going to be the guy who, who launches, you know, whatever Apple AI is.

Victoria Song [00:21:42]:
Yeah. So I think that's what, you know, it's an odd time because Apple was getting so much criticism for not being fast to the AI market. And now I think some people are like, well, maybe that was a good thing just because how things are panning out. So I don't know. I don't know that Apple has a software problem. I just think they have a kind of like it used to be that there was one iPad, there was one Apple Watch, there was one MacBook. And I was actually in the Apple Store the other day just because I wanted to check out the Neo in person and be like, do I need this? Do I not need this? And then I was just struck by how many of each product that there has been under the. Took under the Cook era, where it's like there's 40,000 iPads, there's three Apple watches, there's.

Victoria Song [00:22:34]:
So there's such like a diversity of product where I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. But at the same time it feels like diluted in a sense where I don't really know where the company is gonna go. I still think like, whatever, it's done well, it continues to do well. And the main question is like, what are they gonna do with AI? Because it feels like they've been on the back foot a little bit and trying to catch up to things like Meta is leading and the Smart Glasses space. Google is ahead of them there as well. Google is well ahead of them in the AI space. So it feels like I don't. It feels like they've just been saying apple gonna Apple and other people going like, I don't know if that's gonna work for you anymore.

Victoria Song [00:23:19]:
So what's the next step? And I think Turnus has to answer that.

Leo Laporte [00:23:24]:
Yeah, well, we will certainly See it WWDC is in June. I imagine Turnus will get a little bit of a, you know, round of applause. And Apple is going to announce, I think in June, a month away, roughly, their Siri with Gemini AI built in. This is going to be the debut. And then September new phones, including we think a folding phone. So Apple's got a lot of stuff in the pipeline and I think start now. John Ternus is going to get either credit or blame, especially for what happens with AI.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:24:00]:
Well, he's certainly gotten a lot of credit to date over the last, let's say five, six years. Five, you know, maybe a little bit longer. Apple Silicon in terms of turning around the hardware design.

Leo Laporte [00:24:09]:
Yeah, yeah, huge success. And yeah, getting rid of the butterfly keyboard and stupid touch bar and all that silliness that Jony I've imposed on us.

Victoria Song [00:24:18]:
But that was also. Ternus was behind the touch bar as well. He was, I believe so. And I think.

Leo Laporte [00:24:24]:
Well, he was there for sure.

Victoria Song [00:24:26]:
Defenders.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:24:27]:
Yeah. But, but what I mean was you're not a giant.

Leo Laporte [00:24:31]:
Wait a minute, I got to hear this. I think Victoria revealed that you're not a fan of. Mr.

Victoria Song [00:24:36]:
I'm not a fan of the touch bar. Like, oh, I'm not a fan of the touch bar. I know people who will defend the touch bar to their dying breath, but that's never been me.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:24:44]:
No, but you know, the question there is, you know, was he responsible for engineering the touch bar to make it actually function or, you know, who, who, who, who created it? Was it the industrial design group or the engineering group?

Leo Laporte [00:25:00]:
I think it's more likely when he first joined Apple, he was a designer. In fact, his first product was the, the Pro display. The.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:25:06]:
Yeah, but he's also mechanical engineer by training.

Leo Laporte [00:25:09]:
Right.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:25:10]:
You know, and, and to follow up on what Victoria was saying earlier, you know, on the software side, you know, it seems to me that the problem on software is not necessarily the quality of the software but rather the interface design, which goes back to the whole Allen Dye problem and I think not really thinking through the design enough. The engineering team is responsible for implementing it, but who was really responsible for creating it? I don't know that we can necessarily answer that question from outside of Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:25:47]:
Well, it's a new era, I guess we can say that. And congratulations to Tim Cook because I think he's going to go out on a high note. Apple's done very well. Did get to 4 trillion at one point. Back down slightly under 4 trillion kind of. It's a, it's just even Weird to think of a company being worth five. Stacy, you can do. I think you'd be good at this.

Leo Laporte [00:26:09]:
I've heard it said that the East India Company was like the equivalent of a 5 trillion dollar company back in the 17th century that was such a big dominant Kiretsu, you know, conglomerate that it was worth that much. But I get. It's kind of apples and oranges, so to speak. I don't know if we can.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:26:32]:
Or tea and computers.

Leo Laporte [00:26:33]:
Tea and computers?

Victoria Song [00:26:36]:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:26:36]:
I mean in terms of economic impact and like the amount of like GDP of a nation. I don't know. But do you really want me to look this up? This feels like. This feels like you sending me on a side.

Leo Laporte [00:26:48]:
I felt like, you know, just off the top of your head. I don't know why. I just feel like you're so smart you would just go, oh yeah. Well, as many people don't know, actually. Okay, get ready. The. The Mississippi Company, a French trading venture which triggered by the way, one of history's first financial bubbles, would have been in Today's dollars worth 8.4 trillion. Then the Dutch East India Company, 10 point.

Leo Laporte [00:27:17]:
Oh no, sorry, 10.2 trillion. South Sea Company, 5.5 trillion. So these, if you adjust for inflation. Obviously there weren't companies this big way back in the day, in the 17th and 18th century, but I mean, come on.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:27:35]:
East India Company though was.

Leo Laporte [00:27:37]:
It had a monopoly on Dutch trade with Asia. It dealt with spices, silk, porcelain. I think slaves. As I remember, they colonized, you know, the new world and put tobacco and sugar plants.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:27:50]:
Yeah, those were basically pirates. That's what.

Leo Laporte [00:27:54]:
Yeah, yeah. Not the nicest people. But how do you get to be a 5 trillion dollar company? Look, I think Jensen's a nice guy. Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:28:03]:
I don't necessarily know if a lot of the tech execs right now are,

Leo Laporte [00:28:07]:
you know, most of them are not nice.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:28:09]:
They're. They're trying to build as much of a monopoly as they can, which.

Leo Laporte [00:28:12]:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:28:13]:
Kudos to them. That's what business school teaches you.

Leo Laporte [00:28:15]:
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:28:17]:
Jensen's a very smart guy, I will give him that.

Leo Laporte [00:28:19]:
Clearly. And did. And ran the company runs the company very, very well and effectively. In other words, it's not a fluke that they're worth 5 trillion. I mean, it certainly helped that AI, but they were smart because it was video games. Right. First it was GPUs for video games.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:28:36]:
Yeah. And then they found a lot of other applications. Cars or the same car.

Leo Laporte [00:28:39]:
We talked about that. We talked about cars a lot. They're very Big in that, you know, vision and things like that AI is.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:28:46]:
And they pushed into servers like starting in like 2010, believe it or not.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:28:50]:
It was crypto, though.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:28:51]:
So they were ready.

Leo Laporte [00:28:53]:
Crypto blew them up and then they leapt like a frog from that lily pad to the AI lily pad.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:29:00]:
Well, actually there was, there was a, there was a fall off in between, like crypto blew them up and then all of a sudden there was way too many underutilized GPUs out there, unsold GPUs, and, you know, their, their market value collapse going to happen.

Leo Laporte [00:29:16]:
We're going to, we're going to see a bunch of Blackwells on the black market in a couple of months.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:29:20]:
If a lot of these data centers that are supposed to be built don't get built, and a lot of them have not even started. They haven't even figured out financing yet. You know, there is certainly a possibility that that could happen.

Leo Laporte [00:29:34]:
Yeah. Let's take a little break and then when we come back, we can talk a little more about other things like Meta's, big layoffs that are coming, big money in data centers and investments. A couple of huge new AI models came out this week, and the NSA says, hey, anthropic, you may be a supply chain risk, but we like what you're doing, buddy. All of that coming up as we continue this week at Tech with Stacey Higginbotham, policy fellow at Consumer Reports. You're still writing for magazines and publications, too, Very occasionally. I've seen your byline. I know you have, but you're doing great work at cr. I mean, really appreciate what you're doing there.

Leo Laporte [00:30:21]:
Even though Microsoft did not listen to you.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:30:25]:
They did not. But you know what? The cyber label may still come out.

Leo Laporte [00:30:28]:
Good crossing your fingers. That was a big one. Sam Ablesammon, my car guy, is also here. His company's telemetry where he does research on vehicles. And of course, he does that great Wheel Bearings podcast and Victoria's song from the wonderful the Verge. From the wonderful the Verge. And you're still wearing the OURA ring, I see.

Victoria Song [00:30:51]:
Actually, no, this is the even reality is a G2R1. Oh, you like it better than the currently charging. So this is like a smart ring that fitness tracks but also controls a pair of smart glasses, which I'm not wearing because they're charging.

Leo Laporte [00:31:08]:
When you say controls, like, how does it control it?

Victoria Song [00:31:12]:
You tap it. It taps. You tap it. And it can, like scroll through a display. No, you tap it with your finger, not onto your head. You just Tap it like.

Leo Laporte [00:31:24]:
But you have to be wearing the ring for it to work.

Victoria Song [00:31:28]:
It has its own, like, touch controls as well. It's just sort of like things are charging at the moment. It's a Sunday afternoon.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:31:36]:
Less intrusive.

Leo Laporte [00:31:38]:
I did actually my old series four or a died and I actually splurged on the ceramic and I'm really quite liking it. It's very good.

Victoria Song [00:31:45]:
I like the ceramic. It's a lot more durable.

Leo Laporte [00:31:47]:
Yeah, it's really nice. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:31:48]:
Hey, Victoria, I just want to say your, your story on the, your experience with the glucose monitors. Oh, and what you talked about on the Verge cast, it's great stuff.

Victoria Song [00:31:58]:
Oh, thank you.

Leo Laporte [00:31:59]:
Well, hold, hold that thought because I'm going to do the end and then when you come back, let's, let's talk about it. Because I wear the Dexcom Stello, and it's great. I did try a new service that does the Dexcom called Signos. That's software that I kind of like. It kind of tells you a little bit more about what's going on and so forth. Anyway, let's take a timeout and we'll come back. Too much to talk about. That's what happens when you get a great panel.

Leo Laporte [00:32:27]:
All right, now, what do we say you liked Victoria's piece on continuous glucose monitors? You wear one, Sam?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:32:34]:
I do not know.

Leo Laporte [00:32:35]:
I do. And it's been. I'm type 2 diabetic and it's been very, very helpful on watching not just what diet does to my blood sugar, but even what exercise does. And even more importantly, it's taught me to take a walk after dinner every night because I can really see the difference that makes. So what did you, what did you learn, Victoria?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:32:55]:
Well,

Leo Laporte [00:32:57]:
you can tell us what you learned, Sam, and then Victoria can tell us.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:00]:
Yeah, I mean, I, I was fascinated.

Leo Laporte [00:33:02]:
Stacy's crying. I don't know why.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:04]:
I was, I was just fascina by what Victoria talked about around metabolism, trying to control your metabolism and the challenges that she had with it. I'll let her.

Leo Laporte [00:33:15]:
So you do wear one then, Victoria, not just for.

Victoria Song [00:33:18]:
I had actually started testing these over the counter continuous glucose monitors. They call them glucose biosensors now just to differentiate them from the CGMs that diabetics use. And, you know, so I had started like testing these in 20, 24 and then over the course of the next. Oh, God. Now it's like, I think 19, 20 months. I had a very up and down journey with them because I'm non diabetic and the Evidence for non diabetics wearing this technology is, shall we say, non existent.

Leo Laporte [00:33:57]:
Kind of in terms of what its

Victoria Song [00:34:00]:
value, not exact, not in terms of value per se. Like if you wear it, you can see how food impacts your blood sugar, you could see how exercise impacts it. But we actually don't have enough data among endocrinologists and medical experts to say what is good or bad data for a non diabetic.

Leo Laporte [00:34:23]:
Like what your blood sugar should be

Victoria Song [00:34:25]:
sort of, we have an idea of a range, it should be between like 70 and 140, 40 energy per decil per deciliter. But you know, so there was this study and I talked to the researcher who conducted it where they gave I think about 18 endocrinologists, expert endocrinologists who use CGMs every day with their patients. They gave them about 20 sets of data from non diabetics and they couldn't come to a consensus about whether what, whether these people should be recommended for further screening or whether they are totally fine. So it's sort of this situation where all the experts are like, well we don't know what to do with non diabetic data. But you have wellness influencers out here who are saying that you need to, you have to optimize your metabolism. Like you should never have a Spike that's over 30 milligrams per deciliter. You should never get above 170, 15 milligrams per deciliter depending on what you're eating. And it creates this anxiety.

Leo Laporte [00:35:30]:
Just like a sleep tracker.

Victoria Song [00:35:31]:
Yeah, just like a lot of anxiety which I personally experienced. And it led to a bunch of disordered eating habits for me where I couldn't, like I couldn't enjoy myself at parties because I would be like oh my God, my, my glucose monitor is going to spike. And then also I was getting readings that didn't match up with a previous two week stint that I had done under Nutrisense the year prior when I

Leo Laporte [00:35:55]:
had done that sense too. That was, that was a CGM as well.

Victoria Song [00:35:58]:
Yeah, like when I had done that testing in 2023, I was eating like crap. And at the same time my data was just like you're perfect, you're glucose, doesn't matter what you do, you can't seem to get a spike over 120mg per deciliter. And then a year later it was like haha, your, like your, your baseline glucose went up 40 points for no reason. And so I was like, is there something wrong with me? I have a family history of diabetes and liver cancer and a bunch of metabolic dysfunctions within my family.

Leo Laporte [00:36:33]:
Cuckoo.

Victoria Song [00:36:34]:
So I would go to the doctors with my continuous glucose monitor data, and they would be like, I don't know why you're wearing that. Your A1C is fine. Your blood, your fasting blood glucose is fine. You have nothing wrong with you. And I was like, I don't know. I feel like something's not fully right. I have a polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis which also impacts your likelihood for insulin resistance, and it can, like, lead to diabetes later on in life. So I was, like, aware of these things, and after a long period of time of advocating for myself and having like, these feelings about food and exercise, I got.

Victoria Song [00:37:11]:
I found out that I do have something called. It's a long metabolic dysfunction associated steatotic liver. It's fatty liver due to metabolic. Just my metabolism is basically the kind

Leo Laporte [00:37:25]:
of person because, you know, I'm an old man and we could sit around on the front porch and talk about all of our little ailments and problems, and you just have a lot of. You have a rich, rich collection of things. But, but you're so happy.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:37:42]:
Do you feel better? I mean, do you feel that the diagnosis of your fatty med. I don't.

Leo Laporte [00:37:48]:
That's good to know, right?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:37:50]:
Does it change the way you do anything or does it provide some level of peace for you?

Victoria Song [00:37:55]:
Victoria it was like a thing on the one hand. It was like, no. I kind of had a sense that I had it for a long time because I'd had elevated liver enzymes for years. And doctors were just like, it's probably not that bad because it's not that elevated above normal. And then through the course of one year, a bunch of my metrics just went crazy. And I was feeling exhausted and tired and I had no idea why. And then they took my liver enzymes again, and they were like, oh, they sextupled for one of them and they tripled for another. That's not good.

Victoria Song [00:38:26]:
You've gone from mild to moderate and are in danger of liver scarring at this point. And we need to reverse that. So I got on a bunch of medications. I don't enjoy being on these medications. They have come with, like, some pretty severe side effects for me for the last couple of months. And so it's like a, it's a weird thing because these wellness influencers are. And you know, not just wellness influencers, but also like RFK Jr and his whole ilk are very on top of the metabolic optimizing trend.

Leo Laporte [00:39:00]:
What do you need, Victoria, is more peptides.

Victoria Song [00:39:04]:
We'll get into the don't. I'm doing a lot of peptide research these days and.

Leo Laporte [00:39:08]:
Oh, that stuff needs some peptides and a little brain worm and you'll be good.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:39:14]:
Well, no, like that sounds both validating and you got some diagnosis.

Leo Laporte [00:39:19]:
Yeah, she got.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:39:19]:
Actually,

Victoria Song [00:39:23]:
yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:39:23]:
It reminds me of those scans, the full body scans that people do and we don't know what a healthy body has in it. Right. It's.

Leo Laporte [00:39:30]:
Again, I've done that. I did the pre. Nuvo.

Victoria Song [00:39:32]:
Yeah, you.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:39:32]:
I mean, you did it. And sure, it may catch something, but it's also going to catch a lot of nothing.

Leo Laporte [00:39:37]:
And well, what I learned and why my doctor told me is everybody's got something wrong with them. Yeah, well, we generally like to wait till you have some symptoms because then, you know, we're not treating something that's just. You're. You're a different animal.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:39:52]:
And I would say I really appreciate it, Victoria, in that story how you talked about how it led to some of your disordered eating. Because way back in the beginning of like smart home coverage, I had like a smart scale in again, not a glucose monitor. But I saw this coming and was trying it out and I hated, I hated it. It brought back so many like bad behaviors and thoughts. And I just appreciated that your story talked about that in a way that a lot of them don't. People focus a lot on the data and less on the like. How does this change the way I feel about my day to day life in my body?

Victoria Song [00:40:33]:
Yeah, like this obsession with using technology to optimize yourself. I think it can have a very dark side to it, especially since we don't know how accurate the data is. So you're basically. Yeah, we don't even know what it

Stacey Higginbotham [00:40:46]:
is to be optimized. That's what drives me absolutely bonkers.

Leo Laporte [00:40:50]:
Yeah, I do all of those. I have that smart scale. I know how much muscle mass. I know I have the oura ring, I have the apple watch. I have every possible quantified self BS device there is. And I think the number one conclusion I came up with is the numbers aren't that meaningful.

Victoria Song [00:41:11]:
They. They really aren't. Like, it can be useful to have a baseline and know when you deviate from the baseline. That is sort of what led me to finding a diagnosis and then taking steps to reverse it because like I got the diagnosis and I found out that my liver enzymes went haywire at the same time that my uncle was going undergoing surgery to remove part of his liver. So it was, it was kind of like a very emotional time for me to be like, oh, you know, at least I'm catching it early enough where it can be reversed. At least I can take steps towards that.

Leo Laporte [00:41:41]:
And to be fair, you might have found that out with a blood test anyway, right?

Victoria Song [00:41:45]:
I probably would have actually, like, at my next visit, I probably would have figured that out. So it was sort of like I figured it out a couple of months early. Was it worth having all of those, like, thoughts in my head? And it was like, well, you know, my blood tests now in a certain, like, if I was optimizing for metabolism, my blood tests now look a lot better, but my cardiovascular metrics from my other wearables are much worse because I have these side effects. And it has been very hard for me to do the level, level of cardio exercise that I had been doing previously for that. So it's like, am I healthier than I was before? In some ways, yes. And in other ways, no. And I think it speaks to how wearable technology often treats mental health as an afterthought, and it doesn't speak to the way that the, the, these tools can be used to perpetuate some harmful, like, disordered eating habits. And one thing that really stuck with me was the type 1 diabetics reaching out to me to be like, oh, yeah, we have those anxieties around food, but we don't have a choice about that.

Victoria Song [00:42:49]:
We have to live with that every single day. I don't understand why non diabetics are being pushed to live the way that we do, to constantly be weighing our food, to constantly be just like, panicked about everything that gets put in our mouth. And I was like, yeah, that's not really a great way to live. And it was funny because some diabetics would look at my data and they'd be like, girl, you're fine. Why are you freaking out? And it's like, well, you're not going into a coma. I'm not optimized. What does that mean? Right. So I kind of wanted to tell the story.

Victoria Song [00:43:20]:
It's like, it's not black and white. There is a lot of value to be had for people who are pre diabetic, people like you, Leo, who are type 2 diabetic, to have that insight and to make those lifestyle changes. But it's not just people who have a legitimate reason now. They want everyone to be using these devices. And is that something we should be doing? I. I'm inclined to think no.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:43]:
So, yeah, that's why I prefer to stay fully unquantified.

Leo Laporte [00:43:47]:
It's just different types of people. I'm not a natural hypochondriac, so I can get that data and not get all worried about it. But I could see that it's like, you know, it's like the ubiquity of gambling. Now there are some people who, that's dynamite. You know, they're playing with dynamite. And I, and I think that that's the problem in this modern capitalist society. As long as somebody's making money at it, it's okay. And they don't think about the consequences of all this qualifying self for some people, not for everybody.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:44:19]:
I'll give you an example really fast. I've had a Fitbit since it came out. So I had the little flower Fitbit from, I think it was 2011. And I looked back over the 16. Is that 16 years of data? 17 years of data almost. And there everyone's like, oh, it's great for seeing trends over time. And you're right. You can see like the 30 year old version of me.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:44:43]:
You can see your starting out here.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:45]:
It's a slow track, your decline as you get older.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:44:51]:
I am, I am tracking like, oh, look, I used to walk seven miles a day. That's crazy. Now I only walk like five and a half and so. And actually my heart rate and stuff has gone down. But the point here is I. Partly it's because I'm like, do I want to buy another tracker? If so, which one? Do I get value out of it? And after like this many years of tracking and doing like athletic ish pursuits, I'll say athletic ish because I'm not like hardcore anything.

Leo Laporte [00:45:21]:
The pickleball thing.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:45:22]:
I think the answer is no, you're

Leo Laporte [00:45:25]:
not going to do it anymore.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:45:28]:
It doesn't really give me a lot of value. It's like the dopamine hit when you wake up and you're like, oh my God, I got a 90 sleep score. That never happens.

Leo Laporte [00:45:36]:
If only. Oh, man.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:45:37]:
Yeah, it really never happens.

Leo Laporte [00:45:40]:
I'm settling for 70. It's good, it's good. I'm happy. All right. Well, that was a good conversation. Not on our playlist, but I'm glad we did. I'm glad we did. We're taking another break.

Leo Laporte [00:45:53]:
Then we will talk about all of those other things that I mentioned that are. I don't mind. You know, honestly, this show should go wherever the people who are on it want to take it.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:46:03]:
Layoffs. Who wants to hear about layoffs?

Leo Laporte [00:46:05]:
I know. I'm not anxious. I'm not anxious to talk about that. That does make me anxious. So, Sam got cars, Victoria got CGMs. Stacy, if you want to talk about low rah or something, we can do that next. Whatever. Or nutrition labels.

Leo Laporte [00:46:22]:
Whatever. You know, whatever you want to.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:46:24]:
I missed the twig Lora discussions.

Leo Laporte [00:46:26]:
Yeah, those were fun.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:46:27]:
To go back to that.

Leo Laporte [00:46:28]:
Do you still have that router in your window that ships can use?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:46:31]:
I no longer have the helium router that. That was part of, like, basically a Ponzi. Ponzi scheme that I was unaware of the.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:46:40]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:46:42]:
Make a lot of money. It wasn't money that got paid in helium, right?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:46:46]:
Well, yeah, but I. I turned it into, like, whatever the helium coin was, and then I turned it into cash because I am old and I like my money under the mat.

Leo Laporte [00:46:57]:
Smart.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:46:57]:
By the way, weird meme coins these days.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:00]:
That's probably not a bad strategy.

Leo Laporte [00:47:03]:
Yeah, no kidding. And I didn't. I neglected to mention this, but I will mention this. Victoria's article on the Verge. You can search for it is. And I love the title. A year of continuous glucose monitoring pushed me to the edge. Thank you, Victoria.

Leo Laporte [00:47:21]:
On We Go with the Show. Yeah, I know when they want to talk about layoffs, but, man, it's bad out there and it's. It's been bad and it's getting bad. Meta has now said they're going to lay off 10% of their workforce. They told their staff that today. Not the only thing they told staff. They also announced they're going to record your keystrokes and use it to train their AI models. Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:47:43]:
Microsoft did an interesting thing. They said, okay, if the amount of time that you. I had to do the math. The amount of time you've been with Microsoft, plus your age is greater than 70, we'll buy you out. And I had to think about that. Now, if you're 40 years old, you couldn't have been at Microsoft 30 years, so you're out. Because you wouldn't have started when you're 10. If you're 50, though, you could have started when you were 20.

Leo Laporte [00:48:11]:
That would give you 70. You could retire. So what they're basically saying is, if you're over 50 and you've been with us for a while, there's the door and we got a package for you that is a little bit more humane, I guess. I don't know what Meta's going to offer its employees. And of course, in both these cases, they intend to replace these employees with AI here's the question, is that AI washing, are they really just trying to get rid of people and blaming AI or is it really because AI has gotten so good now they don't need those people? What do you think?

Victoria Song [00:48:49]:
I can't do both possibly believe that AI is good enough for them to get rid of people. Just based on, like, my own personal testing of it where, like, it's still, even at the things that it's good at, it still needs a human oftentimes to just shape it into a thing that's actually usable. So I really, I think there's a degree of AI washing in there, but also it's sort of just, just like, okay, I mean, you're gonna do this. And then a little bit further down the line, I imagine they'll rehire some of these people and then once they need earnings to go up and investors to be happy, they'll do the layoffs again.

Leo Laporte [00:49:30]:
That's what this really is, isn't it?

Victoria Song [00:49:32]:
Yeah. I feel like this is just like

Stacey Higginbotham [00:49:34]:
they're getting expensive people.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:49:36]:
Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. The mo. You know, the people who've got the most experience, they've been there the longest, they're. They're getting paid the most. Those are the people that are being let go. And, you know, I mean, it happens in every industry. You know, a lot of it has happened in the auto industry in recent years, but it happens everywhere. You know, when, when they need to tighten up.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:49:57]:
You know, the, the most expensive people are the ones that get shown the door.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:50:02]:
What I will say is it's a little scary. And this is because my kid is in college right now. Looking at the job market, eventually it is really unclear to me because you can take away your expensive people and replace them with AI by hiring a cheaper person who can act as your human in the loop. Right. But they're not hiring young people either, like the really junior people. So I'm really, I feel like we're, we're not going to hit. I feel like, I wonder if we're going where we were with the trades, where everybody went out of the trades because it was not, you know, seen as a great job.

Leo Laporte [00:50:44]:
That's too bad, because we need more

Stacey Higginbotham [00:50:46]:
tradespeople and we need them now. But no one built in. We didn't build in training programs. We didn't build economic incentives. And even when they saw this coming, you still didn't see a lot of economic incentives from a company's investing in training. They would invest in, like, college programs. So I'm very curious if we're going to see something like that happen with more of the white collar work where we, we denigrate it, we kill kind of most of the pipeline and then suddenly we're going to look up and be like, oh wait, who do we have now to do this work that we absolutely still need a human to do? And it's short sighted, but we've been living on that short sighted edge for quite some time.

Leo Laporte [00:51:32]:
It does feel like it's. Everything's about the quarterly results and nobody's looking five years down the road at all.

Victoria Song [00:51:38]:
We're just like thinking about what we're supposed to do with our time. Like everyone keeps saying AI is going to make things more convenient and so we'll lay everybody off. Okay, so what happens when we're all laid off? Are we just all going to launch our own podcast to fill up the unemployment time?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:51:53]:
I got three of them.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:51:54]:
Glucose monitoring. We're kind of really rigorously plan our meals.

Leo Laporte [00:51:59]:
One word, Victoria Macrame. Okay. I'm just saying it's the future. We'll all be doing macrame. My favorite, by the way, my favorite cover band touring in Petaluma these days is Fleetwood macrame. Anyway,

Sam Abuelsamid [00:52:17]:
do they all wear macrame outfits? No.

Leo Laporte [00:52:19]:
I don't know. It's just a good name. One of the things Meta might be spending this money on, you may remember they admitted that they were going to make $16 billion in 2024 because of scam advertising. 10% of their total advertising. Once they admitted that, the lawsuits have started to pile up in the uk, the US and Australia because basically Meta's internal documents admitted it. They didn't do much to stop it. And now the lawsuit saying Meta knowingly profited from fraudulent.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:52:55]:
Yeah, they didn't just not stop it, they like profited on it. Let's do more to an incredibly like the cynicism there. Yeah. Consumer Federation, not Consumer Reports. We actually did a letter on this and have been following it pretty closely because it's a huge scam issue and that's one of the things we work hard on.

Leo Laporte [00:53:14]:
You know, that story broke a couple of years ago and it just kind of went away and it's like, it's okay last October, so eight months ago. But it's, it's like a huge story and it just kind of. Yeah, well, I think it was almost built in. Like everybody figured. Oh yeah. That we, we thought they were doing that.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:53:30]:
Well, there's. The lawmakers are actually taking some action on it now.

Leo Laporte [00:53:34]:
Good.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:53:34]:
I think that, I think they won like a, a couple journal, Reuters run a few journalism awards. Yay journalism awards.

Leo Laporte [00:53:41]:
Yay journalism. Yay. Well, they deserve it because that's just appalling. And then there's also the fact that Meta is now going to. Amazon is going to buy millions of Amazon AI CPUs. So they are taking that money and spending it on AI. They're going to buy the Graviton, which is Amazon's ARM based by the way, cpu, not gpu.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:54:09]:
So are they using it for inference?

Leo Laporte [00:54:13]:
Oh, that's a good question.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:54:16]:
That would be my guess.

Leo Laporte [00:54:18]:
Agents create compute intensive workloads. Oh, agents create compute intensive workloads like real time reasoning, writing, code, searching. So you do need CPU to coordinate the gpu. And in fact that's exactly what Graviton is designed to do. Handle AI related compute needs. So I guess that's why, because they're spending money. But I'm sure spending money with Nvidia as well.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:41]:
Yeah, well the, the Nvidia chips already have CPU cores built into them.

Leo Laporte [00:54:46]:
Oh okay.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:46]:
They have, they have ARM CPU cores. You know, in a Blackwell hat, you know, is mostly gpu, but it has some ARM cores, it's got some tensor cores and a bunch of other bits and pieces.

Leo Laporte [00:54:57]:
Part of it was they couldn't buy it because Amazon does have a gpu, the Trainium, which is literally the worst name ever. The Trainium. They couldn't get those because Anthropic basically bought them all for years to come. So I guess they're also just getting what they can get. Anthropic agreed to spend $100 billion over 10 years to run its workloads on Amazon web services.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:55:22]:
That's not real money.

Leo Laporte [00:55:24]:
That's more of that funny money.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:55:26]:
We should stop. This drives me absolutely insane.

Leo Laporte [00:55:30]:
So wait a minute, there's one more story that you can then complain about too. Google investing $40 billion in, in a, in a Anthropic. Is that not real money either?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:55:43]:
Okay, we should stop reporting these. We should get the details of like when the tranches for these payout and we should report them that way because

Leo Laporte [00:55:53]:
it is spread out, right?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:55:55]:
It is absolutely spread out. It doesn't exist yet.

Leo Laporte [00:55:58]:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:55:59]:
We're talking about they're going to spend, you know, billions of dollars on something. The chips don't exist but it's case Data center in the compute. Where that compute happens, it doesn't exist.

Leo Laporte [00:56:11]:
It's also it zeros out because Amazon announced it was going to invest $5 billion into anthropic. So then Anthropic said we're going to invest $10 billion in Amazon, which could go up to $40 billion if anthropic it or no, then Google, it's like it's all going.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:56:32]:
It looks like racketeering. I'm so sorry. If you follow like, like old school. Like it's to fool cartel crime finance.

Leo Laporte [00:56:42]:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:56:43]:
You're.

Leo Laporte [00:56:43]:
You're pay.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:56:44]:
And I'm sure their court. I mean, and they have gap accounting in like cartels too. These people deal with money, really make it. Do they call it gap account?

Leo Laporte [00:56:54]:
Do they do 10 Qs?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:56:55]:
They do not have audits, nor do they report to the sec. But you know, it's important to know how much money you're making. Is it real money? And can I actually how liquid am I in what the press, what has happened? I think. Here's what I think. The tech press, for decades we've been like, yeah, tech. And we've been focused there. And now suddenly all these people in the tech press who've historically been pretty nice to the people they cover, we're being asked to be financial press.

Leo Laporte [00:57:27]:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:57:27]:
We are not financial press. And the financial press is now so totally beholden to Wall street and I don't even know what else. There's very few people who are doing the actual math who even have the capability to do that math. Sorry, I. This is like as started out business reporting and doing stupid accounting stuff. Went into tech and now I'm like, oh, I should get back into like the business.

Leo Laporte [00:57:50]:
Yeah, we need you.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:57:52]:
Well, and to build on what you said, Stacy, you know, even, you know, to, to even do any of that kind of analysis of it as a, as a financial reporter. You know, so many of these companies are still private. The ones that are public. They, you know, they obfuscate so much of this in their, in their books anyway that it's, it's hard to really extract any real fundamental understanding of what's going on.

Leo Laporte [00:58:19]:
Well, give me some advice then, all of you, because I mean these are stories across the wire and I want to report on them. Should I just not even mention them or should I mention them and do what we're doing right now, which is point out it's. It's circular. I don't.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:58:36]:
You have to ask the question.

Victoria Song [00:58:37]:
So Leo, you don't like.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:58:39]:
Remember how I used to yell at you for not asking questions and researching things? You've got to call their financial.

Leo Laporte [00:58:47]:
A little bit of a. I'm sorry, post traumatic so, yeah, we should be

Stacey Higginbotham [00:58:51]:
pulling up their 10Ks and analyzing everything and seeing what we can find.

Leo Laporte [00:58:56]:
Can I. Can I get my AI to do that?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:58:59]:
I mean, you can.

Leo Laporte [00:59:00]:
I wonder if.

Stacey Higginbotham [00:59:01]:
I mean, there is, like, I. I've used, like, I have used lovable to write, like, spreadsheet, like, pull data from financial reports into spreadsheets. And that's totally useful.

Leo Laporte [00:59:14]:
So what would. What would you be looking for?

Stacey Higginbotham [00:59:17]:
I don't know, because I haven't one. I haven't spent the time on this. But, like, every industry has code, like fraud, Fraud, places where fraud likes to hide. So, like, you know, in retail, you can look at inventory and how they're, like, in here. Actually, inventory would be another good place to look for it. I'm trying to think of. It's been so long since I've had to think about any.

Leo Laporte [00:59:41]:
Somebody could do really well being a.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:44]:
You need a forensic accountant. Yeah, accountant.

Leo Laporte [00:59:46]:
Actually, my wife is a really good forensic accountant. I should get. I should get. I should get Lisa into this. She's really good at this stuff. She could do this.

Victoria Song [00:59:55]:
In her hands, follow the money. That's what they tell you in general. Follow the money.

Leo Laporte [01:00:03]:
All right, so we're not saying it's fraudulent. We're saying, though it's manipulative, the math

Sam Abuelsamid [01:00:10]:
ain't mathing, it's misleading.

Leo Laporte [01:00:12]:
It's to fool them investors, to fool the tech press, to convince everybody everything's

Stacey Higginbotham [01:00:19]:
sunny and they're not even working that hard. That's what's. That's what drives me nuts. I mean, I should probably do this. I don't have this much spare time.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:00:29]:
But I know even if you go back to the original Microsoft investment in OpenAI, you know, it was, what, $10 billion that they gave to OpenAI, which was basically for OpenAI to buy Azure time, right?

Leo Laporte [01:00:43]:
It was, yeah. So it was.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:00:44]:
And it's just. It's just exploded from there.

Leo Laporte [01:00:47]:
Right? That's maybe when they figured it all out. Well, speaking of AI, Spud is out. OpenAI's new GPT 5.5. It thinks it's really good. OpenAI does, and so does Spud. It's got a terrible name. I played with a little bit.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:01:05]:
I like potatoes.

Leo Laporte [01:01:06]:
Yeah, well, you don't think of potatoes as being, like, great computational devices. I mean, it's just an odd name. I think Mythos, that was. Now, that was a good name from Anthropic. But Spud, what's funny is, as soon as these companies release a new model, as soon as anthropic releases Opus 4.7 and Mythos. OpenAI says, well, we got 5.5, then deep seq, which we haven't heard from in a while. They were the ones that shook everything up in January of last year when they showed that in fact maybe China has some pretty good models. They have a new model V4, which they're saying is as good as the best frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.

Leo Laporte [01:01:49]:
And I think from what I've seen, that's close to true. I don't know what it means. They're not, I guess, what it means. Jensen Wong said this in a kind of provocative interview he did with Dwarkesh, who is becoming the AI guy, right, for podcasting. He said, you know, you don't want to keep China from getting our best chips because all China is going to do is build up its own chips and its own proprietary stuff using the Huawei chips, for instance, which I think Deep Seq was trained on. And that's going to make them better. Instead of having kind of a universal. Now it's a little self serving because Jensen really does want them to buy his chips.

Leo Laporte [01:02:32]:
But he has a good point. If everybody uses Cuda, then nobody has this advantage. But there's a real risk if you force China to get good at this. That, that it'll be, I don't know, it'll be too diverse. It won't be a. We won't all be on the same page that we could lose our competitive edge. Is what he said. Does that make sense or is it

Victoria Song [01:02:58]:
just self serving, like in some backwards way like you can kind of see what he's saying, right? It, like it makes sense. They get really good. But at this, like from a different point of view, it's like, well, isn't that what you want? Don't you want there to be more competition? Don't you want there to be a lot of like competing different versions of it do. Is it good to have everything be on one universal thing? In some ways, in terms of convenience, yes. But in terms of competition, no. You do want, you do want these companies to be afraid and looking over their shoulder because that's how you get innovation. So like, I think it's a bit self serving of him to say that

Sam Abuelsamid [01:03:37]:
like, and when you have a $5 trillion company, do you really want competition?

Victoria Song [01:03:42]:
No, you don't. You just want to, you want 6 trillion. If you have 5 trillion, you're thinking about how you're going to get the

Leo Laporte [01:03:47]:
6 trillion, all the chips you can

Stacey Higginbotham [01:03:49]:
make to China until the EU comes knocking. And then.

Victoria Song [01:03:52]:
Yeah, like.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:03:54]:
Well, yeah, I mean, intel used to keep amd, like, just surviving.

Leo Laporte [01:03:59]:
Right? Just Microsoft did that with Apple. Right. Just so they didn't have a monopoly. Right. See, there's. There's competition. We got competition. They're not very good, but we got them.

Leo Laporte [01:04:10]:
I have competition, apparently from Ashley Vance. This is a. Just. This is a weird side story, but I thought it was very weird. He did an interview behind a paywall with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and somebody on Twitter said, well, you got to release this to the public. They, they said, this isn't free. Vance, I think joking. And I've interviewed him.

Leo Laporte [01:04:34]:
He wrote a book about Elon some time ago. Said, well, I'll make it public if you give me $100,000. So a guy did. Jim Belichick, the CEO of a Nevada based laser manufacturing company, Send Cut Send, gave him $100,000 to unlock the podcast. Now everybody can hear it. By the way, everybody says, it's a very good episode. Man, what was I thinking?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:05:04]:
Access journalism pays off. Ashley Vance.

Leo Laporte [01:05:07]:
It feels a little. It just feels a little odd, a little weird. He said the funding wasn't prearranged, it wasn't intentional. He has a podcast called Core memory and a YouTube channel of which, by the way, Send Cut Send is now a sponsor. I guess he. I guess he got something for the hundred thou. Anyway, I. I don't know.

Victoria Song [01:05:30]:
I don't know how I feel about that.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:05:32]:
Because on the one hand, dirty.

Victoria Song [01:05:34]:
Because on the one hand, like, I understand, you know, the Verge has a paywall. Lots of publications have paywalls because, you know, Google and the death of SEO and all, we got to keep the lights on in some, in some respects, especially since journalism isn't like, quality journalism isn't cheap to produce. It takes a lot of time, effort, and whatnot and resources. But at the same time, just like, you know, I think there's discussions to be had about if something is in the public interest and in the public good, making it accessible in some way. Maybe you don't put all of it out there, but whatever is relevant and that people should know. Like, the whole point of journalism is to inform people, but to sell it, to be like, kind of like, well, you know, there's a lot of good info in here, but I need someone to pay me $100,000 before I make it public. Like, I feel like I'm not, not, you know, get your bag. Journalism is suffering, so I'm not gonna begrudge any journalists for making money.

Victoria Song [01:06:32]:
But at the same time, like journalism at its core is about providing people with information. And so if you had something really valuable that was of public interest, I think there should be a. A conversation about making the most

Stacey Higginbotham [01:06:48]:
important

Victoria Song [01:06:48]:
parts of that free for the Greater Public good versus just going like Cha Ching 100,000. I think that's what like rubs me as. Like this is kind of not feeling great looking at it because I think if we had some like, you know, conversationally inside Baseball at the Verge, if we have a story that's like really, really, really relevant, we have a couple of stories that go up every day that are free, that do get outside of the paywall. Even though all of our content is like in under a dynamic paywall. Because it's sort of like news, you know, like the New York Times has a subscription, but if there's breaking news, everybody can see what the breaking news is.

Leo Laporte [01:07:29]:
Right.

Victoria Song [01:07:29]:
So it's sort of. There's something.

Leo Laporte [01:07:31]:
We do the same thing. I mean we don't hide anything behind a paywall. But sometimes we'll do stuff in the club that we like your book club, Stacy. That we let people listen to when we're doing it live and then we put it behind the paywall for a month and then we make it public. Not that we ever do anything that is particularly newsworthy, but most of everything, including this is public. This show is public.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:07:56]:
So should I be asking for more money for the public?

Leo Laporte [01:07:57]:
I think we need to get $100,000 from you, Stacy. Actually is what I think.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:08:01]:
Oh me, me. That's like right now I even buy my own books.

Leo Laporte [01:08:07]:
I would feel really weird doing that. I have to say. I would feel a little bit odd.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:08:11]:
It also feels. It feels like cherry picking in some sense. Right. Like, and this is what the journalistic like a lot of publications did they. You have a few stories that are really. You kind of cherry picked your beat. Right. So you only focused on stor.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:08:33]:
It used to be page views. Now it maybe is things that are going to be worth the money from an analyst. And Giga, way back in the day had our research business and that theoretically was that.

Leo Laporte [01:08:42]:
Yeah. I mean the Wall Street Journal makes money because people make money by paying for it. Right.

Victoria Song [01:08:47]:
Well.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:08:47]:
And yeah, you could argue Bloomberg has same thing.

Leo Laporte [01:08:50]:
The terminal business is hugely expensive. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:08:53]:
But you also did other journalism that was not as well remunerated. Right. That people wouldn't necessarily pay for. And that journalism was used to think it was kind of a public good. I don't pro bono.

Leo Laporte [01:09:07]:
Yeah, no. Yeah. Every. Every, you know, news is essentially pro bono, but you gotta pay for it in some way.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:09:16]:
Yeah, like news that gets clicks versus news that doesn't get clicks.

Leo Laporte [01:09:19]:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:09:20]:
As someone who wrote deeply about wireless protocols, not all of my stories got clicks.

Leo Laporte [01:09:24]:
Not Linkbait. Exactly. You won't believe what Lora is gonna do next. 10 Ways Wi Fi could change your life. It's all in the headline writing. Is foxes for Is selling the Verge or no? What did I read about that? What are they talking about? That.

Victoria Song [01:09:43]:
And I would love to know, too, Leo. One of those things where, like, there's been a couple of media rumors about Jim Bankoff's shopping around the sites. As far as I know, we're not going anywhere.

Leo Laporte [01:09:58]:
The Verge is, I think, almost certainly the premier tech blog in a tech site right now in the. In the world.

Victoria Song [01:10:10]:
I mean, you know, I haven't heard anything about, like, us getting sold so far. It's just, like, stuff from Puck, and I think Ad Week saying that's the problem.

Leo Laporte [01:10:21]:
I read Puck. There's my problem. And I pay a lot of money. Reebok, by the way.

Victoria Song [01:10:26]:
I mean, there's been.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:10:27]:
What you should be doing is paying your money to read the Verge.

Leo Laporte [01:10:30]:
I do. I am a paid member, premium subscriber, of course. To the Verge.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:10:34]:
See, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:10:35]:
No, the Verge is worth it. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Victoria Song [01:10:38]:
Thank you, guys. Yeah, it helps keep the lights on.

Leo Laporte [01:10:42]:
But speaking of which, I'm gonna take a break for a net. How about that? You're watching this week in Tech with from the Verge, the wonderful Victoria Song, senior reviewer. Always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you, Victoria. Sam abulsamed my personal car guy, Wheel Bearings Media, and I apologize. Sam sent me an email saying it's not the Department of War, it's the Department of Defense. Leo and I sometimes slip into the colloquialisms. The Gulf of America, the Department of War.

Leo Laporte [01:11:14]:
But I understand the legal name is the Department of Defense. I appreciate the correction, Sam. I forgot to respond to that, so I thought I'd respond.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:11:22]:
No worries.

Leo Laporte [01:11:24]:
Anyway, great to have you, Sam. And of course, Stacy Higginbotham from the wonderful Consumer Reports. We mentioned Mythos, this spooky anthropic model that they say it's too good to release to the public. Instead, they gave it to 50 companies saying, Fix your software before we give it to the bad guys. But what's funny, and remember, Anthropic is the one that the president said nobody in the government should be using the Defense Department said that they are a supply chain risk, which is usually reserved for foreign government software. But then Mythos came out and apparently the NSA said, you know, we could really use this. So according to Axios, NSA is using Mythos despite the blacklist and many other government agencies looking to do it. Last week we talked about this.

Leo Laporte [01:12:16]:
Last week Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic, went to the White House and apparently President Trump now thinks they're pretty good Mythos. Some questions about whether it was just a marketing ploy, but Mozilla said they've used it to find and fix 271 bugs in the current version of Firefox, the one that just came out. And Anthropic has surged to a trillion dollar valuation because of this. Also because enterprises seem to have been very enamored of Anthropic's opus as well. And bad guys got Mythos, apparently. According to a number of sources, a group of unauthorized users has gained access to Mythos in their Discord. The unauthorized group tried a number of different strategies to gain access, including using access enjoyed by the person who was interviewed by Bloomberg, which broke this story. The person currently employed at a third party contractor that does work for Anthropic.

Leo Laporte [01:13:32]:
They're on a Discord channel. They've been using it, they said, regularly since gaining access to it. And they showed Bloomberg screenshots and a live demonstration.

Victoria Song [01:13:43]:
Cool.

Leo Laporte [01:13:44]:
Cool.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:13:46]:
What could go wrong?

Leo Laporte [01:13:47]:
Paris asked a great question. You're telling me that this cyber security tool, that's the best thing ever, couldn't protect itself? I guess not.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:13:57]:
Not when they're humans.

Leo Laporte [01:13:59]:
That's the problem, isn't it? We are the weak points in the code.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:02]:
We just eliminate the humans and it'll all be good.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:14:05]:
Yeah, I mean, we just want things to be so easy and frictionless and that is our problem.

Leo Laporte [01:14:10]:
Bloomberg said the the group made, quote, an educated guess about the model's online location.

Victoria Song [01:14:18]:
And that worked.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:19]:
And it worked well, didn't they? Didn't they pull a URL out of the leaked.

Leo Laporte [01:14:26]:
Maybe.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:28]:
I think I heard that one somewhere.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:14:29]:
Yeah, yeah, the leaked source code from a couple of weeks ago.

Leo Laporte [01:14:33]:
The good news is these aren't hackers. They're not bad guys. They just like playing around with the latest models. And so they haven't used it to create zero days or anything, at least as far as we know.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:14:43]:
Well, so far we don't know that.

Leo Laporte [01:14:46]:
We don't know that.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:49]:
Everything they said they didn't. So I mean, I believe

Stacey Higginbotham [01:14:54]:
I will say, like everybody's freaked out about like AI and cyber security and they should be. But I will say the biggest thing that I think people should be worried about is that everything that was secure by obscurity is now open.

Leo Laporte [01:15:13]:
There's no more secure obscurity.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:15]:
Yeah. I mean now you've got the sheer brute force of these AI systems that can go and find everything that was hidden.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:15:22]:
It wasn't even hidden. A lot of it's like, well, it's too like there's things that are hidden and that's, that's one thing, but then there's a lot of stuff that is floating around that people are like, why would you ever want to hack a, you know, I don't know, this weird esoteric industrial robot that it cleans floors and someone's like, yeah, actually I would love to do that. Or you're like, oh, there's only, you know, a hundred thousand of this car out there. It's not useful to really invest the time to do a stupid hack on it. But now you can do it in a night just for ls, you know,

Leo Laporte [01:16:02]:
SpaceX XAI Grock the Blob has said that they are going to, well, either buy cursor, the AI code generating tool, coding tool, for 60 billion, or just give them 10 billion one way or the other. This is another one of those funny

Stacey Higginbotham [01:16:24]:
because money's not real.

Leo Laporte [01:16:25]:
This is another. This money is not real. They said they. And they. And you know what? They posted it on X this week that they're working with Cursor to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI combining Cursor's AI powered coding model with SpaceX's Colossus training. I need an echo.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:16:48]:
I wonder if they're poisoning the training data to get like better valuations. Are people doing that yet? They have to.

Leo Laporte [01:16:53]:
They could do it, right? Colossus. Sorry. It sounds better that way though.

Victoria Song [01:17:02]:
With all these names are just breaking my brain.

Leo Laporte [01:17:05]:
Colossus training supercomputer.

Victoria Song [01:17:07]:
It's just. Can we just like. Can everyone just have a mandatory touch grass session every day?

Leo Laporte [01:17:15]:
This is what we all need.

Victoria Song [01:17:16]:
5 hours of touch grass time every single day. Because the headlines just get more ridiculous.

Leo Laporte [01:17:23]:
I would, but I'm right in the middle of a coding session with Claude and I just can't leave. So if you don't mind, I'd like to stay here. It wants me to review the spec. So grass can wait. Grass will always be here.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:17:42]:
On the grass. This afternoon, did you?

Leo Laporte [01:17:45]:
With your doggy? Yeah, with your doge it's the problem with kitties, right, Victoria? They don't really go for walks. Not with you, anyway.

Victoria Song [01:17:54]:
No, like, I, I do everything to keep my cats inside because my cat ran out the other day and I got him to come back in by yelling, peter, you are not for the streets. And he ran back inside and he listened. Yeah, he listened because I never yell at him.

Leo Laporte [01:18:09]:
So that's what happens when you give a cat a human name. You call your cat Peter.

Victoria Song [01:18:13]:
His name is Petey. And when he, when he's being bad, it gets elevated to Peter, in which case he's like, oh, mommy's mad. And he ran back inside immediately.

Leo Laporte [01:18:23]:
Oh, there's a sweet little corgi, I think. Yeah.

Victoria Song [01:18:25]:
Oh, goodness.

Leo Laporte [01:18:27]:
Yeah, corgis are funny dogs because God made their legs too short and. But it makes them cute that way. And Stacy just got a brand new Australian shepherd.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:18:37]:
I'm not gonna pick her up. Oh, she just popped up and. Yeah, she's.

Leo Laporte [01:18:42]:
She's real cute, sweetie.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:18:44]:
Yeah, she's super sweet. Love her.

Leo Laporte [01:18:47]:
They're very smart, though, right? Aren't those the ones that'll nip at your.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:18:50]:
At your heels if you don't cory William?

Leo Laporte [01:18:53]:
Yeah, they're both.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:18:55]:
Any herding dog?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:18:55]:
Yeah, yeah, Any herding dogs like you go here. Yes. Very, very smart, very athletic. We've already been on a five mile hike this morning, and I guarantee when I'm done with this show, we're going to be back out there.

Leo Laporte [01:19:10]:
I've told this story before, Victoria, but I haven't told you. Our cat rings the doorbell. We have a ring doorbell. And she's learned to walk up to it and stare at it until it. And then the chime, it rings in the house. The chimes ring because there's movement in the house. And then we go and we let her in and she's learned it. But then the neighborhood cat has.

Leo Laporte [01:19:30]:
Cats have also learned it too, now. So now Lisa, when the chime rings, she says, okay, who is it? Is it Rosie or is it Georgie? Or, you know, we have all these cats. We'll come to the. I guess they learn from each other. They come to the doorbell and then depending on how much we like, the cat will feed it.

Victoria Song [01:19:49]:
Well, I was gonna say if you

Stacey Higginbotham [01:19:50]:
feed it, they'll definitely.

Leo Laporte [01:19:52]:
They learn. They're so smart.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:19:54]:
So ring should have started with cats for you and not their, like, surveillance dog network.

Leo Laporte [01:20:00]:
And I will absolutely say our ring does not point at anything but our front walkway. You can't see the street. You can't See the neighbors? You can't see anything but our front walkway from the ring, so don't worry.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:20:12]:
But what about people who deliver to your house?

Leo Laporte [01:20:14]:
We see that, but that's what we want to see. That's the whole idea. So we know there's a box there, right?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:20:20]:
You're inviting them into the surveillance state against their, like, consent.

Leo Laporte [01:20:25]:
But they took the job with Amazon. Didn't they know there's a camera in the van? There's a camera in the van.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:20:29]:
In this economy, can you afford not to take the job?

Leo Laporte [01:20:33]:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:20:35]:
I'm just asking the questions to make you think a little harder about it. Just cause.

Leo Laporte [01:20:40]:
Okay, But. But to make up for that, we offer them snacks and beverages. We have a little refrigerator out there, and we have a bowl full of chips and healthy snacks as well, so that if they are hungry. And we have a porta potty outside because the house has been under construction for the last 23 years. So, you know, basically they use our facility. So I figure we should. And the. No, the porta potty is not on the camera.

Leo Laporte [01:21:05]:
Okay. It's in a separate. Well, it is on this. Never mind, Never mind.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:21:14]:
This is why my Stacey, you need.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:21:15]:
You need your little punching rig still for.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:21:20]:
These are just verbal punches now. I'm just like. Let me ask you a question.

Leo Laporte [01:21:24]:
Go ahead. You know, I'm already bruised.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:21:26]:
I. I have UFI cams, UFI doorbell cams that just record on a local home station.

Leo Laporte [01:21:33]:
Most almost everything's ubiquity of my house, which is all local, doesn't go to the police, doesn't go to anywhere but the ring. The house came with a ring, and I can't really replace it because it's like, built in there and it. And because the cat needs to ring the doorbell.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:21:48]:
Okay. I have replaced dozens, literally dozens of video doorbells in my life. They are not.

Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
It's. It's that fancy one that's ethernet, is powered by Ethernet. And if I remove it, there's a big hole in the wall where it goes, you know?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:04]:
You know what you can do with holes?

Leo Laporte [01:22:05]:
You can fill them in.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:06]:
Yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham [01:22:09]:
it can be done. The technology, it's not even hard.

Leo Laporte [01:22:12]:
I don't pay for a ring subscription. Does that help? I mean, I don't. I don't like. They. They don't.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:19]:
Well, if you.

Leo Laporte [01:22:19]:
If you at least doesn't go to their servers, does it?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:23]:
Yeah, probably does.

Leo Laporte [01:22:24]:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:22:25]:
Everything will hit their servers unless it's recording locally to an SD thing.

Leo Laporte [01:22:30]:
Should I put a sign up at the beginning? Of the path saying, you're smile, you're on candid Camera.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:22:38]:
I mean, I do believe if you have any outward facing cameras, you should notify people that you have outward facing cameras with some sort of sticker. It used to be like some places that used to be the law.

Leo Laporte [01:22:47]:
Is there a law that you have to do that?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:22:49]:
Like, I think in some places that is the law. I don't know in where, Petaluma or California.

Leo Laporte [01:22:57]:
Yeah. But speaking of laws, you may remember that in December, Australia banned social media and YouTube for people under 16. Fortune magazine says more than more than half of the Australian teens get around it with VPNs, face masks, their parents, IDs. It's not working, I guess being a teen. Yeah. What did you think was gonna happen? A survey conducted by a UK suicide prevention organization, the Molly Rose foundation, surveyed 1,050 Australians aged 12 to 15. More than 60% of teens who had social media accounts before the ban still had access to at least one of them. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram have retained more than half their users under 16 in Australia.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:23:55]:
I mean, probably making them more tech savvy. That's great.

Leo Laporte [01:23:58]:
Well, that's what one of our panelists at the time said. Good. You're breeding a bunch of hackers. I think it was Cory Doctorow. So this is Great. Australia in 10 years is gonna be the place where the best computer programmers come from. Australia. Because as teenagers they had to get around the.

Leo Laporte [01:24:15]:
We do know that VPN sales have gone through the roof there.

Victoria Song [01:24:18]:
I get the like the thought process because I think there's a lot of data that shows that social media use too young is not good for the brains. But it's also like you have to understand teenagers and remember what you were like as a teenager. If you tell me no, I'm gonna do it.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:24:34]:
So you're especially going to do it if you're. If you don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:24:37]:
Right.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:24:40]:
So you have to find some other way to make them not want to do it.

Leo Laporte [01:24:43]:
Oh, it was Harper Reed. Thank you. Galia Gallia says it wasn't Corey, it was Harper Reed who said yes. That's right. You're very good memory. That's right. Give him credit for that also. I'm sorry, Stacy.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:24:57]:
Oh, no, now I can't remember. I was like, I lost it. Oh. Oh, it was also. You're hiding like the best stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:25:04]:
I mean, it makes them want it more.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:25:07]:
It's not like you're doing age verification for like, I don't know, Excel or something. Excruciating I mean, you must be 18

Leo Laporte [01:25:15]:
or older to use this accounting software. They wouldn't care. But Instagram. No, they would become great.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:25:22]:
Well, I just think the Internet, when I was a teenager, which was like, in 1994, you know, I'd be like. I mean, plenty of my friends were like, why would you even want a computer? And I'm like, why would you not want to spend all of your time online? Yeah, But I was weird. And now that's, like, where everything is. So it makes sense.

Leo Laporte [01:25:50]:
By the way, Harper Reed and Amy Webb will reunite on a show in the next couple of weeks. Harper is in Japan right now. When he comes back, Apple kind of got a little. A little trouble. When the FBI said, yeah, you know, those Signal chats are supposed to be encrypted. We were able to get them by looking at the notifications. We just. And you know what? Even though the person we were investigating had deleted Signal, the notifications were still there.

Leo Laporte [01:26:22]:
To which Apple said, oh, whoops. And they pushed out a fix for that this week, if you care about that. Our fix was, don't turn on notifications if you're using signal, because the notifications are in plain text. The FBI had been able, according to 404Media, to extract deleted signal messages from someone's iPhone using forensic tools, due to the fact that the content of the messages was displayed in a notification, then stored inside the phone's database. Even after the messages were deleted.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:26:56]:
Yeah, because you still have that notification history.

Leo Laporte [01:26:59]:
Yeah. By the way, this is also the first time in this case that somebody was charged for being an antifa. So there,

Stacey Higginbotham [01:27:12]:
like, money. Antifa isn't real.

Leo Laporte [01:27:17]:
The case involved a group of people setting a fire fireworks at the ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, in July. It was the Fourth of July. Come on, they're patriots, not antifa. Anyway, Apple fixed it. After the news that Apple had fixed it, Signal president Meredith Whitaker said, we never asked Apple to address the issue, but we don't think notifications for deleted messages should ever remain in any OS notification database. But let's face it, Signal allowed clear text notifications, which they probably shouldn't have. So there's a lot of blame to go around. But now it's been fixed, says Apple.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:28:00]:
I will say, if you're security conscious, are you having your texts or your signal messages come up as, like, notifications?

Leo Laporte [01:28:07]:
They should. You should. Exactly. You should turn that off anyway. Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:28:11]:
Anyone can see your phone when they come in. Sorry. Like, the whole story. I was like, I'm glad they fixed it. But I'm also like, why are you

Leo Laporte [01:28:20]:
using this highly encrypted message program, messenger, and still putting the notifications on your screen?

Victoria Song [01:28:25]:
Some people don't think that far. Right? That's an extra step. No, they don't, apparently. But I started doing that just because I have very bad eyesight. As you can see from my experience, extremely thick glasses, which means my text size is the size of the moon. And anyone can read my phone if they can see my screen. So do you.

Leo Laporte [01:28:50]:
Because I'm old, too, and I zoom in the phone. I make the text big because I'm old. And I think, you know, at first I was like, oh, no, no, no, you shouldn't do that. But then I thought, why? I'm. I should be able to read it. Nothing wrong with it. Yeah, but then there's a lot of programs where if you do that, you can't use them because the buttons. Buttons hide stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:29:07]:
And their buttons are hidden.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:29:09]:
They don't scale well.

Leo Laporte [01:29:10]:
They don't.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:29:10]:
They don't need a responsive design for.

Leo Laporte [01:29:12]:
Yes. Fix your software, dude.

Victoria Song [01:29:18]:
Yeah, I used to have it, like, zoomed in. Really, really crazy zoom in. And then I was having those issues with the apps as well. So now it's just slightly bigger. But I still get made fun of by my friends who don't have crappy eyes because they're like, oh, my God. Well, here you're. Why is your text so large? And I have an Apple Watch Ultra as well. And the text on there is also.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:29:37]:
You can read everything one character at a time.

Victoria Song [01:29:40]:
Yeah, you can just read everything. And it's like, I got nothing to hide, so that's just good.

Leo Laporte [01:29:48]:
If you live in Nevada, the Nevada police could be tracking your phone's location. And in Nevada, they don't need a warrant anymore. Nevada signed an agreement earlier this year with a company with a company that collects location data from cell phones, which means police can track a device in real time, all without a warrant. The software comes from a company called, appropriately, Fog. Fog Data Science did a contract with the Nevada Department of Public Safety. The state has allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool. They don't have to get permission from a court. They don't have to do anything.

Leo Laporte [01:30:31]:
Fogg calls it Patterns of Life. You could see people's patterns of life. It can help the police deduce when people are at work, where they live, with whom they associate. Fogg says, oh, the data is anonymous. It's linked to devices, not people. Oh, well, that's a relief.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:31:00]:
We just, we have no laws for. It is so aggravating.

Leo Laporte [01:31:05]:
Well, the Supreme Court actually is hearing in a very important case about this, and I'm not sure when this is going to come up, but this is going to be a big case. This. The FBI has been doing basically fishing expeditions with a geolocation saying, sending a. They get a warrant for this. But it's. But it's still a question saying we want from the phone company everybody who is within a mile of this convenience store robbery, for instance. So it doesn't matter if you're innocent or guilty. Everybody is in this.

Victoria Song [01:31:49]:
Well, time to build my bunker and move underground and see no one ever again.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:31:54]:
Yeah, it's really just your cell phone you have to get rid of. I mean, you'll be living in like

Leo Laporte [01:32:00]:
you're publishing your location everywhere, aren't you? Let's face it.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:32:04]:
But you don't have to give up. We could actually advocate still for privacy laws because right now, like, if you look at like the federal. They just announced a federal privacy law that is the biggest joke ever. It's terrible.

Leo Laporte [01:32:18]:
Is this Marsha Blackburn's, your senator's law?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:32:21]:
Yes. Marsha Blackburn.

Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
Didn't she work for Microsoft? She's basically well connected with big.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:32:28]:
She also did like the anti net neutrality laws, too. Marsha Blackburn, Love her.

Leo Laporte [01:32:34]:
But she thought, well, this is good. We need, very reasonably, we need a national. A federal privacy law so that we

Sam Abuelsamid [01:32:41]:
don't have good one. We need a good one.

Leo Laporte [01:32:43]:
Good one. So we have 50 different laws that make it so confusing for a company. Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:32:50]:
Yes, I understand.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:32:51]:
I mean, yeah, you said words.

Leo Laporte [01:32:53]:
Except her law is crap and it supersedes all the good laws every other state has.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:33:02]:
Yes. And it is really terrible. It is like it's basically instead of you having a right to privacy, you have a right to opt out. And we all know how great people are at opting out when given that option. There's a lot to hate about this, but that is one of my favorite things to hate anyway.

Leo Laporte [01:33:23]:
Jeff Jarvis says, who loves you, by the way, Stacy. We used to all work together on a show, a little show we called this week in Google. He says that Marsha Blackburn attacked him once in the Senate with poetry. I don't know what that means.

Victoria Song [01:33:39]:
I mean, April is National Poetry Month.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:33:42]:
Okay, maybe she wrote a haiku about Jeff.

Leo Laporte [01:33:46]:
So Jeff Jarvis is a professor. The leaves are falling this spring water the Supreme Court. We'll hear oral argument next week in Chartre or Chatri v. United States, Virginia man convicted of bank robbery. He said that the government violated his fourth amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure when it obtained his location from his cell phone records, which put him in the vicinity of the robbery. Lower courts rejected that argument, but now SCOTUS will weigh in. But at issue is something called a geofence warrant. Law enforcement officials served a geofence warrant on Google, not the phone company.

Leo Laporte [01:34:34]:
In this case, it was Google, which said google we not location data for cell phone users who were near the bank at the time of the robbery. The warrant created a geofence within 150 meters of the bank for 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Now, as you might imagine, quite a few innocent people were pulled into that net. Google gave law enforcement officials an initial list of accounts linked to devices that were in the area, didn't give them the names. So we're okay at the second step. Based on the initial list, law enforcement officials asked Google for information about several accounts that were in the area during a two hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for and received the names and information for three accounts, one of which was the defendant. In none of this, did law enforcement seek a warrant.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:35:26]:
A warrant, yes. Yeah, I wrote about this. When it happened, it was. It was back in lake.

Leo Laporte [01:35:33]:
So we'll watch this with interest because this is gonna happen.

Victoria Song [01:35:35]:
It's a good case.

Leo Laporte [01:35:36]:
Yeah. The government says that the plaintiff did not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in his location data, both because he affirmatively opted to allow Google to collect, store and use it, and because the warrant merely sought information that would have been visible to anyone near him at the time of the robbery.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:35:59]:
So why not go find those people and ask them, who did you see around here?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:36:04]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The courts keep killing privacy or. Sorry, without a privacy law. What happens in the courts is they either say you've already told, like you have no reasonable expectation of privacy because you're giving this data up already to get these services, like consumers understand what they're doing here. And then the second is that there hasn't been a documented harm. And so we, we see those come up in these court cases, and it's very frustrating.

Leo Laporte [01:36:30]:
Oh, we do now have a photo from the Associated Press of Marsha Blackburn assaulting Jeff Jarvis with poetry. Oh, no, that's fake. That's a fake. That's deep. That's a deep, deep fake. Thank you, Darren. We have the fastest AI guys in the west on our club Twit Discord. All right, got to take another break.

Leo Laporte [01:36:59]:
I told Stacy. We'd get her out of here by before midnight. Stacy Higginbot.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:37:05]:
What time zone?

Leo Laporte [01:37:06]:
No, no, no. It's only four.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:37:07]:
It's only five more hours here.

Leo Laporte [01:37:09]:
Yeah, you got plenty of time. Plenty of time. Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports. Sam Abulsamed from Telemetry where he is VP of research in the wonderful Victoria song. Well, you're all wonderful. I don't mean to single out Victoria, but senior tech reviewer at the Voyage. Let's see, they did. They were going to do an age checking app in the eu.

Leo Laporte [01:37:35]:
Brussels launched an age checking app. According to hackers, they broke it in two minutes. Two minutes. The EU said it's technically ready. The hackers said, hold my beer. Actually, in Belgium they have very good beer. So maybe he just said, I'll keep the beer, but I'll still crack it. In fact, they open sourced it, which I thought was great.

Leo Laporte [01:38:01]:
A European Commissioner, Commission president, President Ursula von von der Leyen said it was technically ready. Will soon be available to use as countries move to ban kids from social media. It's fully open source. Everyone can check the code. I don't think she talks like that, but I do. And it was immediately hacked. Not by Mythos, just by, you know, some guy, you know. The saga is turning into a PR disaster for Brussels, according to Politico.

Leo Laporte [01:38:32]:
Security consultant Paul Moore found it would store sensitive data on a user's phone, leaving it unprotected. Posted that on X and he said, I hacked it in under two minutes. Baptiste Robert, a prominent French white hat hacker, confirmed many of the issues said told Politico it was it was possible to bypass the app's biometric authentication as well. In fact, it sounds like it's pretty terrible. Olivier Blasi, a cryptographic researcher, part of the French Task Force on Digital Identity, said, let's say I download the app, proved that I am over 18 and that my nephew then can take the phone, unlike my app, and use it to prove he is over 18. He's not, by the way.

Victoria Song [01:39:18]:
Did they not test this app before they testing released it?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:39:23]:
Right now it's only technically ready.

Leo Laporte [01:39:28]:
Anyway, this is. You know what, I'm glad this comes out because honestly, I think a lot of these age verification systems are not so very good. More security news. According to Brian Krebs, Tyler B, the cute boy on the left who was then a teenager dragged into court in the US because he is a senior member of Scattered Spider, which is one of the worst social engineering ransomware groups,

Stacey Higginbotham [01:40:01]:
why did they Show his like 8 year old class picture.

Leo Laporte [01:40:05]:
This is so strange. It's the Daily Mail is why. And they know that it will sell papers, I guess to show a little cute boy and then the teenage version thereof being dragged off by the policia. Anyway, Scattered Spider, I don't think it's been beheaded, but you know, I'm glad they got one of them anyway.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:40:35]:
Really. I mean every boy.

Leo Laporte [01:40:37]:
No, he's not eight years old now. He was. He's the second known Scattered Spider member to plead guilty. Another from Florida was sentenced to 10 years in prison last year. See, don't do the crime if you can't do the crime.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:40:52]:
Doesn't pay kids.

Leo Laporte [01:40:53]:
Doesn't pay kids. Three other alleged co conspirators from Texas and North Carolina face still face criminal charges. So you know what? You eventually these guys do get caught because you know why? They can't keep it, they can't keep it quiet. They gotta boast. But they're.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:12]:
I don't know. We got, we got some people making. Doing big crimes that are boasting a lot about it. That.

Leo Laporte [01:41:18]:
Oh there's a. There's.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:19]:
That's still nothing happening.

Leo Laporte [01:41:20]:
That's different. That's different somehow that's different if you do.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:27]:
Just because the Supreme Court said he could be immune. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:41:30]:
The big enough. The bigger the crime, the safer you are.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:34]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:41:34]:
Is the key.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:36]:
The less likely you're gonna get me to get punished. I guess.

Leo Laporte [01:41:39]:
I guess. Iran says that the U. S used backdoors in networking equipment to disable that during the current war. And Chinese state media saying you see.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:53]:
So you see. So. So is. Is the Iranian equivalent of the FCC gonna ban any.

Leo Laporte [01:42:00]:
All American routers must be banned. Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:42:05]:
Speaking of which, Stacy, what do you think about that?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:42:08]:
Oh my God.

Leo Laporte [01:42:10]:
So just to fill you in, if you haven't been listening lately, the FCC has banned all foreign made routers. Weirdly last week they said no, not Netgear. Don't know why.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:42:21]:
So we do know why they filled out their awesome questionnaire about whether or not they're going to make their routers in the US So I did a link to it, the Verge actually.

Leo Laporte [01:42:33]:
Are they making their routers in the

Stacey Higginbotham [01:42:35]:
U.S. no, they're not.

Leo Laporte [01:42:36]:
No one makes their routers in the U.S. no one.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:42:38]:
Except starlink symbols. Okay. There's so many reasons. Okay, here's one reason that this is asinine. Routers, all routers are terrible really when it comes to cybersecurity because they're all using basic firmware and chips and A lot of times they're using reference design firmware. Like, it's just terrible. Like they don't care about security. Fine.

Leo Laporte [01:43:00]:
By the way, this is true of consumer routers and it's also, I'm sad to say, true of enterprise routers, as we've learned. Cisco routers, same thing, you know, pet

Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:07]:
default the Iranians had.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:43:10]:
Yeah. Cisco used to do a lot and make their own chips and design them and everything, but it's no.

Leo Laporte [01:43:15]:
The routers that Iran said were rebooted or disconnected remotely were from Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet and Microtik.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:43:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:43:24]:
Just so you know.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:43:26]:
So the. The FCC came in and was like, hey, we are going to put this on the covered list. And nobody can buy any of these routers. And they.

Victoria Song [01:43:35]:
You.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:43:36]:
You can actually see this happening with this administration. So the Biden administration started the covered list and they actually listed a single product or a cluster, like hike, hike, hike. Vision. I don't know how to say it.

Leo Laporte [01:43:50]:
Cameras or those hikvision cameras weren't very good. They really were insecure.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:43:54]:
Dahwe and hikvision cameras, you know. But when we get to the Trump administration, what we saw was all drones.

Leo Laporte [01:44:05]:
All.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:44:05]:
All foreign drones.

Leo Laporte [01:44:06]:
All foreign drones.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:44:07]:
They didn't do the research. They were just like, we don't like any of them.

Leo Laporte [01:44:10]:
Everything should be made in America anyway, so might as well just ban all of them.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:44:14]:
And look, two things could be true. One, there is. It is not crazy to question the supply chain risks from having only China make all of your routers. Networking gear is very sensitive gear. Right. It is crazy pants to say you have 18 months to like figure out your entire supply chain, bring it onshore and secure it. Especially with companies that don't actually invest that much in security. So.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:44:40]:
And consumers don't pay for it either. So that's how I feel about this. My concern is to get these waivers. They're only 18 months. That's not kind of the level of consistency you need to build a supply chain. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:44:54]:
So did Netgear. What did Netgear say that got them approved?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:44:58]:
Well, we don't know exactly what Netgear said. I actually.

Leo Laporte [01:45:01]:
Did they promise that we'll make them in the United States? Is that what they.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:45:04]:
The FCC's questionnaire. They have like a little questionnaire to get the waiver and it's basically like 1. Who are you? 2. Do you make. Where do you make your stuff?

Leo Laporte [01:45:15]:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:45:15]:
Do you have plans to maybe one day make it in the U.S. would you maybe one day make it in the U.S. could you maybe one day make it the U.S. great. And that's it. There are no other cybersecurity questions on there?

Leo Laporte [01:45:26]:
Oh, it's not even about are they made in the US Period.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:45:30]:
You could argue that making something in China could represent a cybersecurity risk.

Leo Laporte [01:45:35]:
Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:45:36]:
But you could also say, hey, do you include default passwords or encrypt?

Leo Laporte [01:45:41]:
We now know that. So are US Made routers?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:45:45]:
Yeah, like Consumer Reports test routers all the time. We have the biggest issue when it comes to routers is not made in China. It's like stupid stuff, bad software.

Leo Laporte [01:45:56]:
Yeah, yeah, we talk about it on security now all the time. So the, the number one router in the US was TP Link, which is American made router. And part of the reason it's number one, I think it was something like

Stacey Higginbotham [01:46:06]:
it's not American made, it's an American company.

Leo Laporte [01:46:08]:
I'm sorry, did I say American made? Yeah, what was I thinking? Of course it's made in China like everything else American company. Made in China.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:46:16]:
It's made in Vietnam.

Leo Laporte [01:46:17]:
Oh, is it made in Vietnam?

Stacey Higginbotham [01:46:20]:
Well.

Leo Laporte [01:46:20]:
Oh, that's interesting.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:46:21]:
Depends on what part.

Leo Laporte [01:46:22]:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:46:22]:
Software, the chips or the firmware on the router.

Leo Laporte [01:46:26]:
But there are something like 60% of all the routers in America. Partly because Wirecutter loves 20%. Oh, it's only 20%.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:46:35]:
Sorry, Leo, I was just going to come behind.

Leo Laporte [01:46:36]:
Oh, I'm sorry. A 60% of all the routers in the US are manufactured in China. Maybe that's the way to say that. Not necessarily TP Link, but they are the dominant company.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:46:47]:
I mean, what, is it even possible to make a 100% American? No, no, no, because you know, the chips, a lot of most of the chips are going to be coming from somewhere overseas for the foreseeable future.

Leo Laporte [01:47:01]:
So the FCC says a router will be considered foreign made if any major stage of the process through which the device is made, including manufacturing, assembly, design and development, occurs outside the U.S. i don't know who would pass that. Even the Starlink router probably doesn't pass that.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:47:17]:
Yeah, there's no way they're getting all American made parts in there for the major components.

Leo Laporte [01:47:22]:
Yeah, I mean, and, and by the way, this isn't China. This is any country. This is Vietnam. This is Taiwan. This is any country.

Victoria Song [01:47:32]:
You just can't have 100% made in America anymore. Like, it's very difficult to. And even if you did. And like there are some clothing companies that do have like T shirts or whatever that are 100% made in America. They cost more money.

Leo Laporte [01:47:45]:
Right.

Victoria Song [01:47:46]:
Just because we don't have the manufacturing infrastructure anymore to do anything.

Leo Laporte [01:47:50]:
Especially for high tech stuff.

Victoria Song [01:47:53]:
Just like not even high tech stuff. Just not high tech stuff. We don't have that infrastructure anymore either. So it's sort of just.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:48:02]:
I did discover that we still apparently make Almond Roca candy in Tacoma, which I was excited about as a person used to.

Leo Laporte [01:48:09]:
More Almond Roca. That's a good thing. SEAS is made in the US Too. I'll eat anything from sees.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:48:16]:
But are all the ingredients from sourced in the US Stop being chocolate, man. How much. How much chocolate here do we grow

Leo Laporte [01:48:24]:
here in the U.S. oh yeah, you're right. Well, okay. Runzas are completely made in the United States.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:48:31]:
Runs us.

Leo Laporte [01:48:32]:
Do you know what a Runza is? I bet Sam. Sam knows what a Renza is. No. It's a Midwest's favorite weird food. Let me find.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:48:43]:
We don't have them in Michigan.

Leo Laporte [01:48:44]:
There's the cheese. Runza. Runza. It's still. I actually had a box of them shipped to our.

Victoria Song [01:48:50]:
No, but I think the package shipped from China or someplace else. Like, it's very, very difficult to have anything. A lot of times when you see Made in America, they mean assembled in America. They don't mean made here, so.

Leo Laporte [01:49:05]:
Well, they think more things were made in America.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:08]:
So I'll have to check out look for Runza when I go to Omaha

Leo Laporte [01:49:13]:
in June for runs. Operation Delicious. They're basically pierogies.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:49:19]:
I love pierogis. Wait, that was a sandwich. That wasn't a pasta filled with potato, was it?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:25]:
Yeah, it looked more like a burger. The first.

Leo Laporte [01:49:27]:
No. Well, they have burgers. So the Runza fast food store has burgers, but the official Runza thing is fully enclosed in bread. And then it's a meat filling. It's a. It's like a. That's American version of the.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:49:41]:
Well, every culture has.

Leo Laporte [01:49:43]:
Every culture has a pierogi.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:49:44]:
Like.

Leo Laporte [01:49:45]:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:49:45]:
Bread surrounding meat or filling. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:49:49]:
Every culture has a dumpling that I

Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:51]:
will get some variation of a dumpling.

Leo Laporte [01:49:53]:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:49:53]:
Well, pierogi is more of a dumpling, but Arunza sounds more like an empanada, which would not be.

Leo Laporte [01:49:58]:
It is more like. You're right. Right. You're right.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:50:00]:
Yeah. Or kind of a mini calzone.

Leo Laporte [01:50:04]:
Kind of like a calcium.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:50:05]:
Could we call Bow like a.

Leo Laporte [01:50:08]:
Like a guy bow. Absolutely.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:50:10]:
Sure. This is. I'm like, this is really fun to think about.

Leo Laporte [01:50:14]:
I'm getting really hungry. You know what? I'm gonna do the last ad because we gotta go to dinner. So you hang in there. We got a bunch of stupid, silly stories to wrap it up to cheer everybody up. How about that? Because we've had so many grim stories. You're watching this week in tech with the blurry Stacy Higginbossam, the crystal clear salmon pool salmon, and then now, beautiful dulcet tones of Victoria's song, once she turned her microphone around, it. It magically works. So good.

Victoria Song [01:50:41]:
Placement matters.

Leo Laporte [01:50:43]:
Placement matters. Absolutely. The Onion is taking over Infowars after all. Yes, that is good news. This was, of course, Infowars was Alex Jones notorious operation, which was, you know, in. In the court decision that he lost. And we're glad that he lost to the Sandy Hook families. They're waiting for that $1.3 billion judgment.

Leo Laporte [01:51:16]:
The court slowed it down a little bit. The Onion made it the highest offer. Alex Jones people tried to buy Infowars back, but the Onion now has it. Onion announced on Monday the fictional Bryce P. Tetrader, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, says at long last, Infowars is ours. And they are just. They can't wait. They cannot wait to fill it.

Leo Laporte [01:51:47]:
Fill your browser with Infowars merch within 4. I think they even got the vitamins. I don't know, but I think.

Victoria Song [01:51:55]:
Oh, my God.

Leo Laporte [01:51:56]:
I think they might actually got the vitamins. They initially said they were going to melt them all down into one giant vitamin pill, but I don't know what their real plan is. But I'm just. I just. The world needs more of the Onion, and I'm just glad. I think that's completely kismet.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:52:13]:
Justice.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:52:14]:
It's always fun. It's always fun. Pulling the Onion, a print version of the Onion out of the mailbox every month.

Leo Laporte [01:52:21]:
Do you.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:52:21]:
That's what I said. I got it for my husband, and it's. He loves it.

Leo Laporte [01:52:25]:
Oh, I. I have great gifts. They started printing them again, huh?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:52:28]:
Yeah, Once a month, print them.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:52:30]:
And they have these hilarious ads, and we send it to my kid in college and they share it around.

Leo Laporte [01:52:36]:
I mean, Tim Heidecker, I went to college at the time when they used

Sam Abuelsamid [01:52:40]:
to just show up on a stack on top of the trash can.

Leo Laporte [01:52:43]:
Yeah, right? It's Benito. Tim Heidecker, as the creative director of Infowars, apparently the new creative director does an amazing Alex Jones impersonation. So expect some fun parody. That should be fun. Okay. If you're betting on Kalshi or a poly market on these new prediction markets, just stop. Stop. Poly market gamblers were betting on the temperature at Paris's de Gaulle airport.

Leo Laporte [01:53:18]:
And apparently a guy. Police are in France are investigating suspicions that a guy may have used a hairdryer to tamper with the official weather readings to make thousands of dollars.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:53:31]:
Yeah, mounted on the perimeter of the airport where it was publicly accessible.

Leo Laporte [01:53:36]:
So he walked up with a Dyson and blew hot air on it. On April 6 and April 15, temperatures at the airport's weather sensor unexpectedly spiked late in the day, peaking significantly higher than the forecast. Apparently somebody hit bet on that and won. One trader made $21,000 betting that the maximum temperature would not be 18 degrees, it would be higher.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:54:06]:
There is a storied history of hacking sensors physically. There was a guy in California who screwed over his neighbor's vineyard because he was mad at his neighbor. So he actually took a moisture sensor that was for irrigation purposes and dumped water on it. So then he just kept watering the area around that sensor just to make sure the readings were. So the guy's like grapes. Did not get enough. Anyway, like, this is so common and I will say, given like my love of Iot, you have to have resiliency in your sensors. And there's actually some really cool, like, tech that helps, like, provide assurance on, like, is this information actually reasonable and accurate and that sort of thing.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:54:50]:
And we should probably be deploying that if we're going to start betting on weird stuff like this.

Leo Laporte [01:54:54]:
If you've always wanted to own a 14 acre estate in beautiful Marin County, California, just down the road a piece, Mill Valley, if you happen to have some anthropic stock, I think you can make it happen.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:55:08]:
That's Jason Snell's place.

Leo Laporte [01:55:10]:
No, no, he does live there. This is hysterical. It's on Zillow. This is a venture capitalist who's. Anthropic's not public yet and he thinks he's going to score big selling his 14 acre estate. But he won't take cash for it. He wants $14 million worth of anthropic stock, figuring, well, that's going to pop when the anthropic goes public. I've never heard of such a thing, but I mean, it's completely legal, right? You can use anything you want.

Leo Laporte [01:55:47]:
Storm Duncan selling his home for anthropic stock. He says, here are the benefits to an anthropic equity holder. One, you keep the upside in shares. The current anthropic equity holder will continue to retain 20% of the upside in exchange. There is a tax advantage. You can defer taxes on sale of shares or reduce your taxable basis Guys figured it all out, dude.

Victoria Song [01:56:15]:
Just be normal and sell your home like a normal person.

Leo Laporte [01:56:19]:
Money. He says this provides diversification into a solid real estate asset with significant appreciation potential.

Victoria Song [01:56:27]:
Okay, I don't know, man. The fundamental question here is if someone has that much anthropic stock, like even though it's not public yet, is their home nicer than that one? I would think if they had that 14 million worth of that stock, they probably have a nice home, you know, kind of thing.

Leo Laporte [01:56:48]:
Well, they might not. They might be anthropic employees who just, you know.

Victoria Song [01:56:51]:
Yeah, like a junior to have that much. Like he wants 14 million in the stock.

Leo Laporte [01:56:57]:
Yeah. That's a lot.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:56:58]:
Does he want 14 million shares or did he just want said 14?

Leo Laporte [01:57:01]:
Well, the house.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:57:01]:
14 million worth of shares.

Leo Laporte [01:57:03]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:57:04]:
Oh, okay. So actually that's also not real money. So that's just basically whatever their last venture equity thing. And the venture equity things are ridiculously overvalued right now, by the way.

Leo Laporte [01:57:18]:
For those of you who don't know, Stacy has a long history of beating me over the head with facts and Brandroid has created or found a video of exactly that. Now if you're listening, you won't hear anything, but she's figured out finally how to get the fact hammer through AI. Is there anything it can't do?

Victoria Song [01:57:45]:
I tell you, spell strawberry properly. Although I think they fixed that.

Leo Laporte [01:57:50]:
Yeah, they fixed that in the new model.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:57:53]:
But can it add 2 and 2 and not come up with 5?

Leo Laporte [01:57:55]:
Well, 2 and 2 could be 5 in some cases. If you want to buy a tractor and you don't want to buy John Deere's, you know, locked down computer stuff, there's a startup in Alberta that are selling no tech tractors for half price. They, they're old though. Some of them are really old.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:58:21]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I don't think they've been.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:58:25]:
They refurbished.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:58:26]:
They must be. But I don't think they've made tractors for, you know, 20, 30 years.

Leo Laporte [01:58:33]:
Well, it's, you know, it's a 12 valve Cummins engine.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:58:36]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:58:37]:
I mean it's a diesel that everybody knows how to fix.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:58:39]:
Rebuild it, you know, it's fixable.

Leo Laporte [01:58:41]:
No, no software. That's the point.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:58:43]:
Don't need a company tech to come out to do it.

Leo Laporte [01:58:45]:
Yep. There was one segment on farms.com they got 400 inquiries from in America saying can I buy that 30 year old tractor? I'll take it.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:58:59]:
I mean the market for used cars before, like, I mean, I'm sure, Sam, you probably have facts Related to this. But the cost of like older cars right now without. With less tech in them. They're.

Leo Laporte [01:59:12]:
These are not cheap. $95,000 for the 150 horsepower model. If you want the 260 horsepower model, it's 146,000, but that's still about half. What a John Deere with all this.

Stacey Higginbotham [01:59:23]:
I was going to say I haven't priced out a combine lately, but

Sam Abuelsamid [01:59:28]:
maybe, but to your. Well, to what you're saying, Stacy. Yeah. I mean average transaction price of used cars now is up over $30,000. And you know, if it's. It's very hard to find a used car, a decent used car for under 20 grand anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:59:45]:
Stacey, I'm sorry your kid is off to college because this. I think they would have loved this. It's a tin can phone $100 landline for kids that has gone viral. Kids love it because what do they do? They get on the line. It uses WI Fi, by the way. Obviously.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:04]:
Okay. I was gonna say what do you plug it into?

Leo Laporte [02:00:06]:
Nobody has landlines.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:00:08]:
It doesn't still work when your power goes out.

Leo Laporte [02:00:11]:
No, it's on WI Fi. It's a wi fi phone. $10 a month to ring and receive calls from parent approved external numbers. But people like it. In this article from Bloomberg, they quote a parent who said it's not uncommon when my kid comes home for the phone to start ringing within minutes. There's real excitement around it. We've not seen with many other additions within the home. And the kid will spend hours just talking on the phone like people used to do in the old days.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:00:39]:
I remember falling asleep with my friends. This is Seattle company, by the way.

Leo Laporte [02:00:43]:
Is it. Oh, you know about it. I love it. It's got a cord you can twirl. It's got a cord you can twirl. I think you should. They should offer really long extension cords. You can go down the hall or your mom can pull on it.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:00:58]:
A TikTok where someone was describing basically a phone that lived in your house. That.

Victoria Song [02:01:03]:
Yeah, there was.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:01:04]:
And someone was like, that's a landmine.

Victoria Song [02:01:07]:
Yeah. Yeah. I felt incredibly old.

Leo Laporte [02:01:10]:
You can't take it out of your house.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:01:11]:
My. My kid. My kid is 30 years old now and encountered one of those old rotary dial phones for the first time at about the age of 10. So this, you know, this would have been, you know, the 2005 or so had no. Couldn't make hydra hair out of trying to figure out how to.

Leo Laporte [02:01:29]:
How to make it put your finger in the hole.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:01:32]:
Made. Made no sense to.

Leo Laporte [02:01:33]:
And then you move it in a circle.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:01:36]:
What like that. The Marvelous Ms. Maisel had a joke about the rotary dial. It was like, oh, your number's all nines. And I was like, oh, that is well done.

Leo Laporte [02:01:46]:
Yes, because that was a bad number because it had to go all the way around. In fact, area codes were assigned to major metros, like 212 for New York. With low numbers, they got the good ones. And then over here in Modesto, they got the ones with the eights and the nines in it. Talk about redlining. Prego is offering now a special spaghetti pasta sauce recorder deal for 20 bucks. It's not as bad as it sounds.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:22]:
Just like one of your little AI recorders.

Leo Laporte [02:02:24]:
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:25]:
Records your dinner conversations.

Leo Laporte [02:02:26]:
Yeah. It comes with prego sauce, some spaghetti, and a little puck sized recorder you could put on the table. I know this sounds bad, but this. And they call it the connection keeper. You press a button, it starts recording the family conversation. But the conversation then goes to StoryCorps, which is a nonprofit which is focused on preserving the stories of Americans at the Library of Congress's America.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:52]:
That's actually kind of cool. So your storycore is an interesting concept.

Leo Laporte [02:02:56]:
Yes. Your family conversation is part of the cultural milieu. Not that. Does anybody. Does any family still sit down all together for dinner? Except for Thanksgiving and holidays and stuff. Passover.

Victoria Song [02:03:10]:
I like the concept, but also, my family conversations are not worth recording.

Leo Laporte [02:03:16]:
We're all looking at the phone now, but there's nobody talking.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:03:19]:
Also, it's different connections.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:03:21]:
Well, I think. I think the idea is, you know, if it's StoryCorps, you know, maybe they give you some. Some things. Some topics to bring up, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:03:30]:
Yes, there are cards.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:03:31]:
Yeah, it's called the Great. Stimulating the conversation, you know, to generate an oral history.

Leo Laporte [02:03:36]:
I think it's a really neat idea. This will go on sale tomorrow, Monday at the Prego website. You know, when I first heard it,

Stacey Higginbotham [02:03:44]:
I thought it on your phone.

Leo Laporte [02:03:46]:
Yeah, I know. You could just put the phone in the middle. But this gets sent. Your recordings are encrypted and stored safely with no cloud storage in the StoryCor portal via USB C. And then you don't even have to share them and say. Unless you specifically say share them, they stay private unless you.

Victoria Song [02:04:03]:
Okay, that's. That's less creepy.

Leo Laporte [02:04:05]:
I think it's kind of neat.

Victoria Song [02:04:07]:
It gives you some security in case you have an uncle who says something real untoward and you want to keep

Leo Laporte [02:04:13]:
that in the family as he is. Want to do. And they have a special offer just in time for Mother's Day. Oh, they say, goodness, isn't that cute? I don't. You know, I thought it was really creepy at first and then I thought

Sam Abuelsamid [02:04:29]:
how much is it?

Leo Laporte [02:04:30]:
20 bucks. Oh, nothing.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:04:32]:
That includes the sauce.

Leo Laporte [02:04:34]:
Spaghetti and the sauce. Not the best sauce ever, I admit. But why isn't the lid recorder. I thought the lid was the recorder. I really did. I thought this is gonna be the lid is gonna be the recorder. Wouldn't that be great? But I guess you can't really get all.

Victoria Song [02:04:47]:
That's a cute idea.

Leo Laporte [02:04:52]:
I like that idea.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:04:54]:
Yep.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:04:56]:
Better gift for mom for Mother's Day.

Leo Laporte [02:04:58]:
Yes, many.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:05:00]:
If you're. If you're tech focused. Ember coffee mug. God, my mom still.

Leo Laporte [02:05:05]:
You love your ember? She loves her ember.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:05:07]:
My mom loves her ember.

Leo Laporte [02:05:08]:
I had an ember. This is the one that has a. It has a little element. It's not. The element doesn't heat it up. It's just got power. It's induction. I guess that's usb.

Leo Laporte [02:05:19]:
You put the mug on it and then the mug has an induction coil. It heats up and then you take it off and the mug and the coffee stays hot. Yeah, she loves it.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:05:28]:
Kind of like our kettle.

Leo Laporte [02:05:30]:
Yeah, I just do people walk around with a cup of coffee these days? I mean don't you just drink it

Stacey Higginbotham [02:05:34]:
up before she sits. She sits at her desk or by her. She's drinking on her couch and drinking her. She will tell me she drinks coffee, tea, her hot toddies in the winter.

Leo Laporte [02:05:46]:
Oh, it's good for hot toddies.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:05:48]:
So delightful for her.

Leo Laporte [02:05:50]:
Our. Our 22 year old son lives. Lives downstairs. Has one. He loves his ember. See he found my old ember. Liked it so much he used it. Took it and used it until it burned out.

Leo Laporte [02:06:02]:
He bought another one?

Stacey Higginbotham [02:06:03]:
Yeah, no, I had to buy a new one for my mom.

Leo Laporte [02:06:06]:
So I think it's a good Mother's day gift. I agree with you.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:06:08]:
I'm just throwing it out there.

Leo Laporte [02:06:11]:
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have completed our assigned tasks and it is only 4:37 in Stacy's world. So we're going to get her out of here in plenty of time. Thank you. Stacy Higginbotham. What are you working on these days?

Stacey Higginbotham [02:06:28]:
Secure routers. No, really, really, really. I have.

Leo Laporte [02:06:33]:
Awesome.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:06:33]:
I was like working on that. Sending out my annual survey for smart home companies that have security research and security researchers and vulnerability disclosure things. Oh, and here's my biggest deal. You're in California, New York or Massachusetts. Your state has introduced our legislation requiring companies that make smart home devices, any connected devices, including routers, to tell you when those become end of life, when they plan to stop supporting them.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:07:04]:
So if you want, is that upfront before you buy it?

Stacey Higginbotham [02:07:08]:
It's upfront when you buy it.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:07:09]:
Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:07:10]:
And six months before they declare it end of life. And then once again, when they have declared it end of life.

Leo Laporte [02:07:15]:
That should be a law.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:07:18]:
That should be a law.

Leo Laporte [02:07:19]:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:07:20]:
And we're trying, I'm trying so hard, you guys, but yeah, if you want to call your legislator and you're in those states or if you're not in those states and you would like to see something like this, you could call and be like, hey, you should totally introduce this. It's really important.

Leo Laporte [02:07:33]:
And if you're in the state of California, you should know that they have now expanded their opt out for data broker program to more than 500 data brokers. first I thought, this is silly. It had 85 data brokers. But it has been expanded@privacy.ca.gov, they call it drop, delete, request and opt out platform that find. I think every state should do this. I don't, I don't know if there are other states doing it, but finally can do this. In California, you do have to verify you're a Californian resident. It won't start till August, but at that point, data brokers, I don't know why they gave them 90 days to delete my data.

Leo Laporte [02:08:12]:
That seems like a little generous. Quick sell.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:08:15]:
It should be more like 90 minutes.

Leo Laporte [02:08:17]:
It should be right now. Delete it right now. What? 90 days? Well, it's gonna take a while. We got to go into the, you know, the file cabinet in the back, you know. Yeah. So old. Stacy, thank you for the work you do. I really appreciate it.

Leo Laporte [02:08:33]:
You're looking out for all of us. And let's make a date for the book club.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:08:39]:
I think we have one.

Leo Laporte [02:08:40]:
Do we have one?

Stacey Higginbotham [02:08:42]:
I think it's Anthony. Come back to me and I'll tell you.

Leo Laporte [02:08:45]:
Anthony. Well, actually, I, I probably have it here in our. If you're not a member of the club, you should join the club. Let me just see if there's a book club. Get the photo time. We got Google sometime in May. Micah's crafting corner. We got the jet set with Johnny Jet got wwdc.

Leo Laporte [02:08:59]:
Yeah. We have a calendar.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:09:00]:
Anthony just sent me an email saying he totally forgot. He totally saw me on the stream.

Leo Laporte [02:09:04]:
Oh, okay.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:09:06]:
We're gonna do it. It looks like the 14th or the 15th through June 4th and 5th.

Leo Laporte [02:09:12]:
Okay. Yes, let's do it. Stacy's Book Club. And the book is. Do you remember what the book is?

Stacey Higginbotham [02:09:18]:
A Psalm for the Wild Built. It's a cozy futuristic movie book.

Leo Laporte [02:09:23]:
And it's short enough that you could read it. You have plenty of time. No excuses. Samo Bull Samet. He's a member of the club.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:09:31]:
Hey.

Leo Laporte [02:09:31]:
Wheel Bearings is his podcast at Wheel Bearings Media with Robbie and Nicole, who I love.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:09:38]:
Actually it's one of three that I'm doing now.

Leo Laporte [02:09:41]:
Oh, what else are you doing?

Sam Abuelsamid [02:09:42]:
You got the Telemetry Transportation Daily, which is a two minute, just quick hit on something most days. And then we just launched this week a new podcast or greencars.com where my friend Craig Cole and I are interviewing interesting people in the mobility space. And so the first episode went up this, this past Thursday. We talked with Vanessa Bhutani who is the global head of sustainability for Volvo. We've got other ones coming up with Aaron Keating from Cox. Tomorrow we're interviewing Ryan Decker, the head of brand and strategy for Scout Motors. We've got Kurt Kelty, the head of batteries and electric propulsion from General Motors. We got a couple of interviews coming up with people from FIA to talk about motorsports and sustainability and also their, their road car mobility and sustainability and tourism.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:46]:
So lots of interesting stuff coming up. You can find it. Look for the Green Cars podcast. Yeah, that's the old header.

Leo Laporte [02:10:53]:
They stopped in 2024. But they're bringing it back, boys, bringing it back.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:58]:
And so you can find it wherever audio podcasts can be found or there's also a video version that's on YouTube.

Leo Laporte [02:11:06]:
Nice. I'm a. As you know, Stacy and I both fans of the green cars.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:11:11]:
Yeah, me too.

Leo Laporte [02:11:12]:
Yeah, yeah, good. I won't be listening.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:11:15]:
And you can also find the research work that we do at telemetry@telemetryagency.com including some free white papers that have been published recently there. So nice. Just check it out if you need any transportation related market research.

Leo Laporte [02:11:31]:
Thank you, Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:11:33]:
My pleasure.

Leo Laporte [02:11:34]:
Victoria Song. Thank you so much for joining us, senior reviewer at the Verge. What are you working on right now?

Victoria Song [02:11:42]:
My newsletter, Optimizer. As always, we. I put out something every Friday at 10am and also I am deeply researching peptides at this point in time.

Leo Laporte [02:11:52]:
Oh, you really are. You weren't joking?

Victoria Song [02:11:54]:
Truly. I'm not taking them all. No.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:12:00]:
Are you injecting your Verge colleagues with it?

Leo Laporte [02:12:02]:
No, no, I take Ozempic under a doctor's supervision, by prescription. My doctor, because I'm a type 2 diabetic. And he said, oh, yeah, we can prescribe.

Victoria Song [02:12:12]:
That's fine.

Leo Laporte [02:12:13]:
That is working so well.

Victoria Song [02:12:15]:
Legal peptide.

Leo Laporte [02:12:16]:
A1C is normal.

Victoria Song [02:12:18]:
That is a legal peptide. You did not procure it off of a gray market with dubious sourcing.

Leo Laporte [02:12:25]:
Well, and then I was talking to my hairdresser and she said, yeah, there's a guy on the corner. And she says, I'm using something called. I can't remember the name. And I thought, yeah, I don't.

Victoria Song [02:12:38]:
Was it GHKCU or TB500? Or was it CJ 1295? It all sounds like Star War droids names. There's something called the Wolverine stack.

Leo Laporte [02:12:51]:
It's kind of ironic that while we're banning Chinese routers, the head of the FDA is recommending Chinese peptides. So, you know, they're better than Chinese.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:13:08]:
About peptides, we really don't.

Leo Laporte [02:13:11]:
We don't know what's in those things.

Victoria Song [02:13:13]:
They're just short amino acid chains. That's all a peptide is. And like, some of them are good, some of them are fine, some of them are inactive. Just don't get the ones off of Tick tock. That's all I ask.

Leo Laporte [02:13:25]:
Yes. Because we don't know what's in those.

Victoria Song [02:13:28]:
Don't know what's in those. Don't.

Leo Laporte [02:13:31]:
And, and I love your piece which you just published. I don't think Gwyneth Paltrow knows what a peptide is.

Victoria Song [02:13:37]:
I really don't know if she, like, I know she's heard of that and I know she's really into injectables, but she is.

Leo Laporte [02:13:44]:
Oh, dear.

Victoria Song [02:13:44]:
She's an I.V.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:13:46]:
drips.

Victoria Song [02:13:47]:
There's. Yeah, there's a clip in there where she's just like, I love E drip, I love IV drips. And it's sort of just like, okay. But you know, you also sell this moisturizer called the Youth Boost NAD plus peptide Rich cream, which would make you think there's NAD plus and it's full of rich peptides. Except NAD is not a peptide. It is a coenzyme and there's only one peptide in there. And it's the last ingredient in her moisturizer. And usually ingredients are listed by concentration.

Victoria Song [02:14:20]:
So it's not very rich in peptides. So that's why I was like, okay,

Leo Laporte [02:14:25]:
no, no, you misunderstood. She's getting rich. It's not the peptides that are rich.

Victoria Song [02:14:31]:
There we go.

Leo Laporte [02:14:32]:
So big difference.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:14:34]:
Some problems with the punctuation in that headline.

Leo Laporte [02:14:37]:
Peptide I'm rich Cream. It's delicious. Just don't eat it. That's hysterical. That's hysterical. Anyway, I look forward to reading that and of course, subscribing to your lovely newsletter, which everyone else should as well, because you are optimum. You have been. Hi, Benito.

Leo Laporte [02:15:00]:
Hi, visit from Benito there. Say hi, Bonito.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:15:05]:
Hey, Bonito.

Leo Laporte [02:15:07]:
You push the wrong button. The optimizer. I will subscribe. You know, I get so many newsletters. I just now had my AI go through my newsletter pile because I do put everything in a folder and surface stuff I'd be interested in. And actually it's amazing and it's done very well. So now I don't mind subscribing to more newsletters because I can finally find something in there.

Victoria Song [02:15:32]:
Oh, we have fun and optimizer. Usually it's my weekly existential crisis as I reach research.

Leo Laporte [02:15:39]:
You're wonderful. I love your existential crisis. This is good stuff. You are debunking a lot.

Victoria Song [02:15:48]:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:15:49]:
Yeah. I really liked your story on the FDA in, or rather changing the wellness industry, pushing to change some of the definitions or regulations around, you know, what's a medical device and what's a wellness device. And I was like, dang, we may

Leo Laporte [02:16:05]:
now, because we're not getting good recommendations from the CDC anymore or the FDA anymore. We don't know who we can trust.

Victoria Song [02:16:15]:
Every week RFK says something and I just basically scream until a pillow because it's just sort of like nuts.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:16:21]:
That's how I feel about Brendan Carr.

Leo Laporte [02:16:23]:
He doesn't. He doesn't. Bernie Sanders. Did you believe in germ theory? Do you believe in germ theory? No. No, I don't believe in germs. What? Wait a minute. What? I don't. You're.

Leo Laporte [02:16:37]:
You're the head. I mean, he's human service. You don't believe in germ theory? What?

Victoria Song [02:16:44]:
He drinks raw milk. That's, That's.

Leo Laporte [02:16:46]:
That'll tell you something. Yeah. And he has a little.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:16:49]:
And he's of the age where I feel like that could be really harmful if it goes bad. So maybe he already had a brain

Victoria Song [02:16:57]:
worm that ate part of his brain.

Leo Laporte [02:16:58]:
So there's an explanation.

Victoria Song [02:16:59]:
Sure.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:17:00]:
He picked that up on some very

Leo Laporte [02:17:01]:
legitimate miasma theory, which is. First of all, he doesn't believe in miasma theory. He thinks he believes in miasma theory. That's the theory that bad air makes you sick, like from swamps.

Stacey Higginbotham [02:17:12]:
That's what happens when my dog farts at night.

Leo Laporte [02:17:15]:
That's what happens. That's miasma. Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:17:19]:
That will make you sick.

Leo Laporte [02:17:21]:
But let me tell you, raw meat ferments thank you, Victoria. So wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Stacy. Thanks to all of you for watching. We appreciate it. We do TWIT every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5pm Pacific. That's 5 to 8 Eastern.

Leo Laporte [02:17:37]:
That's 2100 UTC. The live streams are up on every platform. If you're in the club, you could watch in the Discord, of course, but there's also YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik, all of them. And we chat with you in all of them, too, which is nice after the fact. On demand versions of the show are available on our website. There's audio and video, of course. The video is on YouTube as well. We have a dedicated channel for that.

Leo Laporte [02:18:03]:
But the best way probably is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically, you don't have to think about it and you can enjoy it at your leisure. Thanks to our producer, Benito Gonzalez. Thanks to Kevin King, our editor. Thanks to you for being here. And we will see you next time. And as I have said now, we are now 21, officially 21 years old. We turned Twitter, turned 21 on April 17th.

Leo Laporte [02:18:29]:
So as I have said for the last 21 years, thank you for being here. We'll see you next time in another Twit in the can