This Week in Tech 1072 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-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Nicholas DeLeon is here from Consumer Reports, Father Robert Balassare from the Vatican, and my car guy, Sam Abul-Samed. We'll talk about one Amazon delivery driver whose name is Mud, why you might want to use mud for speaker wires, and jailbreaking a jet. All that coming up this week on TWiT.

Leo Laporte [00:00:21]:
Next—

TWiT.tv [00:00:24]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

TWiT.tv [00:00:28]:
This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte [00:00:35]:
This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 1072, recorded Sunday, February 22nd, 2026. The devil's advocate. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Hello everybody, glad you're here on a snowy Sunday. For many of you, uh, it is not snowy in Rome. It is a little chilly though because it's late at night. Father Robert Balassare, the Digital Jesuit, joins

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:04]:
Yeah, we've got a little bit of a chill. It's, it's different than when I was in Vegas for, what, 7 weeks, because we were in the high 70s, low 80s. Now I'm back down into the single digits.

Leo Laporte [00:01:14]:
Oh man. Yeah, last time we talked you were in Vegas. That's right, I forgot. Back— you're back from CES, settled in. Good. Well, it's great to see you also with us from Tucson, where I don't believe it's snowing. Nicholas DeLeon.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:01:31]:
Hello, Leo.

Nicholas De Leon [00:01:31]:
How are you?

Leo Laporte [00:01:32]:
Hi, Nicholas, senior electronics reporter for Consumer Reports. Good to see you. Since last we talked, you, uh, tied the knot. Congratulations. A Christmas wedding.

Nicholas De Leon [00:01:41]:
Yes, thank you.

Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
Very nice.

Nicholas De Leon [00:01:42]:
Yes, yes.

Leo Laporte [00:01:43]:
And I know your wife well, and my wife and your wife talk behind our backs.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:01:49]:
They are— they're the best of friends.

Nicholas De Leon [00:01:51]:
They're besties, which is very cool, actually.

Leo Laporte [00:01:53]:
It's so cute. I love it. We have to come back down and, and visit. Uh, I want to visit you all. Well, maybe not Sam. I'm not sure I want to go to Ypsilanti, but fortunately Sam and his wife have visited us. Sam Abul-Samad is here from Wheel Bearings, the wonderful Wheel Bearings podcast, and of course he is a VP of research specializing in automotive technology at Telemetry. Hi Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:14]:
Hi Leo, it's good to be back. I'm tanned, rested, and ready after a week on the, uh, the Caribbean coast in Mexico.

Leo Laporte [00:02:21]:
So jealous.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:23]:
Ah, it was wonderful. Yeah, it's so much good food. Enjoyed that. We had perfect weather the whole week. It was about 82, 83 degrees every day. But you have to do that if

Leo Laporte [00:02:33]:
you live in Michigan. You kind of got to escape after— especially this year.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:36]:
We, we— January, January, we had one of the longest stretches of really frigid weather we've had in a long time. Like almost the entire month and into early February, it was in the— either in the teens or single digits. And, you know, we didn't have a huge amount of snow, but it stuck around. We had probably a, a foot, maybe, you know, 15, 16 inches in total over the, the month, you know, 2, you know, 2 or 3 inches at a time. But it was really, really cold, and it warmed up just the day we were leaving for Mexico, and it all melted off. And we got back in last night and it was snowing again. Oh yeah, yeah, it's back to 30 degrees.

Leo Laporte [00:03:18]:
Your timing couldn't be worse. You know, I love how the weathermen these days— because weather could— I guess they think it's boring— have new names. Like now it's the polar vortex, right? That was hitting you. A polar vo— you mean a blizzard? Yeah, yeah, it's a polar vortex or a bomb cyclone.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:35]:
Oh no, don't forget the atmospheric river. That's my favorite.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:39]:
Yeah, that's always a classic. Speaking of which, are you guys having an atmospheric river right now, Leo?

Leo Laporte [00:03:43]:
Or, uh, we were. Yeah, we had a lot of rain. We had several inches of rain in a few days, so I guess it was a river.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:03:49]:
Yeah, I heard there was a ton of snow up in the mountains, and of course there was that tragic avalanche.

Leo Laporte [00:03:53]:
Very tragically, 9 skiers, uh, just up from us, uh, died in an avalanche. You know, it's, uh, actually there's, there's a tech angle to that. They were able to, uh, find some of the bodies, uh, using their Apple devices. Um, and the ones— and the survivors— Apple Tag ever.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:11]:
Yeah, yeah, great.

Leo Laporte [00:04:12]:
The device— I don't think we'll see

Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:14]:
that one in WWDC.

Leo Laporte [00:04:16]:
The survivors use their Apple Watches to call for help. I hope they don't put that in an ad though.

Nicholas De Leon [00:04:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:04:22]:
If, if anything happens, we can find your body. No, not good. Not good. Let's talk about, uh, something happy-go-lucky: social media. The big trial is going on in Los Angeles. A 20-year-old woman, uh, says, uh, her life was ruined, ruined, I tell you, ruined by the use of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and, uh, she sued TikTok and Snapchat settled out of court ahead of time. Don't— we don't know how much money they gave her, but I imagine it was significant. Uh, but Meta's fighting the fight, as is YouTube.

Leo Laporte [00:05:02]:
YouTube's also in that, uh, Mark Zuckerberg took to the stand this week, showing up at the court with, uh, his minders wearing Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. There they are, his entourage, as it were.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:05:21]:
I heard the judge wasn't too thrilled about that.

Leo Laporte [00:05:23]:
Judge was pissed. Yeah, you can't wear, uh, your smart glasses in, uh, court. The judge said, uh, anyone uses glasses to record inside the courtroom would be held in contempt.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:05:41]:
You know, Leo, I, I've got compassion for this woman and anyone like them because yes, we, we know that social media is addicting. Yes, we know that social media does change the brain, especially developing brains. However, we're going on 20 years now that we've been talking about this. I, I mean, do you remember when Facebook, uh, their entire economy was driven by Farmville? We had this exact same discussion of creating services, creating a game, creating an addictive social media outlet where people would continually spend their hours coming back over and over again and spending real money. So on one hand, I want to be compassionate. On the other hand, I want to say, well, yeah, but this is adulting. You have to be an adult now.

Leo Laporte [00:06:22]:
Uh, you know, Adam Mosseri, who's the head of Instagram, uh, took the stand last week. He said 16 hours of daily use, that's problematic, but you can't call it addiction. He likened it to Netflix. He said if Netflix makes a really good show that you have to binge Are you addicted to Stranger Things?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:06:39]:
Yeah, but I don't think most people are spending 16 hours a day watching Stranger Things or— oh, you don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:06:46]:
I know, I do know people who will binge an entire season of a show in one day.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:06:52]:
There is a clinical distinction though, because

Leo Laporte [00:06:54]:
it's not, it's not, it's not physical

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:06:56]:
addiction, but no, but I mean psychological addiction, emotional addiction, physical addiction. Yeah, well, so when you're talking about an addiction, it means that you first start doing an action, an activity, because it makes you feel good. And then because that, that dopamine wears off, you start doing that activity in order not to feel bad. And then even if you're doing it, it still makes you feel bad, but you're, you're still doing it. So that's, that's what an actual addiction is. Binging is something that you do because maybe you've got free time, because you've always wanted to watch something, but when it's over, it's over.

Leo Laporte [00:07:30]:
Hey Nick, did you ever, uh, did you ever hike for more than a few hours out there in the beautiful Tucson desert?

Nicholas De Leon [00:07:35]:
Uh, I never— I'm trying to do the longest hike. I don't know, a few hours. I will say I definitely played World of Warcraft back in the day for 16 hours at a clip. Oh yeah, that is definitely true. Uh, was that addictive? I, I don't know, but you could stop in there.

Leo Laporte [00:07:49]:
You were— yeah, I mean, it's not addictive like heroin's addictive.

Nicholas De Leon [00:07:52]:
Yeah, you go through withdrawals if you stopped. Adulting argument. It's like, I don't know, you, you Can you— I don't know, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:07:58]:
So I was watching, uh, PBS, and their tech expert who was at the trial said the fundamental issue in the trial is who's responsible. I think the fundamental issue of the trial is, is it even an addiction? And, and if it is, uh, then I guess you would say if they— and they— and we— I think we can agree that these companies knew they were creating something highly compelling. Sure, uh, intentionally, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:08:29]:
But I mean, that's their job, right?

Leo Laporte [00:08:31]:
But that's what everybody does. That's what I try to do. I wish I could get you addicted to twit. That's, that's what you do when you create content, is— so I don't think they're culpable unless you can say it really is addictive and demonstrate that this young woman's ill— whatever problems she had— I don't think she's even claiming mental illness. I think she's just saying, I was a little depressed. Unless you could say, well, it's definitely their fault, and that's even harder to prove. I mean, she could have been depressed for a lot of reasons.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:09:08]:
My biggest concern with this is the executive who thinks that 16 hours a day of Instagram is problematic but not an addiction. That's the— no, no, no, no.

Leo Laporte [00:09:16]:
So you do blame the plat— you think the platforms are to blame?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:09:19]:
It's not blaming the platform. It's, it's, it's a mindset. It's this idea that, yes, I get it. You're selling a product. You're selling a service. Go for it. Fantastic. Do what you have to do.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:09:29]:
But don't lie to me. Don't, don't give me a lie that is so outrageous that it goes beyond gaslighting. 16 hours a day doing anything is an addiction. 16 hours a day doing anything is probably not healthy. So let's just call it that. Call it that, be honest with me and, and tell me, well, we're developing a product that's, that's trying to attract your hours, your attention, and you have to set limits. Or if the government thinks it's a social bad, they have to set limits. But, but don't try to frost over the facts.

Leo Laporte [00:09:59]:
So Mark said— and even, even if

Sam Abuelsamid [00:10:01]:
it's not an addiction in the traditional sense of, of, of a physical addiction, like we think of with, you know, drugs or nicotine or alcohol, um, you know, it's still, it is

Leo Laporte [00:10:15]:
having an

Sam Abuelsamid [00:10:15]:
impact on people's psychology, on, on, on, on their, their behavior.

Leo Laporte [00:10:20]:
I don't even think that's proven, Sam. It seems— it makes sense. It's like, yeah, that makes sense. But I think in every case when they've attempted to demonstrate that, they have been unable to do so. I mean, I'm talking social scientists and psychologists, despite what Jonathan Haidt writes in his books.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:10:40]:
Well, you know, I mean, I think Haidt definitely goes way too far, um, Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't think that, you know, I don't think that social media is necessarily the cause of all the, the anxiety and the issues that young people are, are having today. You know, I think that it just has much more to do with just the way the world around us is collapsing.

Leo Laporte [00:11:00]:
Um, but yeah, I mean, they might be worried about climate change.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:03]:
Yeah, I mean, I know that's a lot of— there's a lot of things

Leo Laporte [00:11:06]:
to worry about in the world, but,

Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:08]:
uh, you know, there Yeah, and 18

Leo Laporte [00:11:10]:
inches of snow in New York City, they might be worried about that.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:14]:
Yeah, okay, but, uh, you know, the, the impact of, of using social media a lot, you know, it's not, it's not the same for everybody, just as the, the impacts of using alcohol are not the same for everybody. You know, some people can drink alcohol in moderation, um, some people binge drink. And there are some who are, you know, genuine alcoholics. I think when it comes to social media, I think that there, there are people who, um, are having much more— are getting— having much more of a psychological impact from that use of social media. Uh, you know, when you look at especially like young girls, for example, you know, body dysmorphia, uh, you know, a lot of other issues that, you know, that I think the social media is absolutely contributing to. That should we be— should we call— should Should we call it an addiction? Probably not.

Leo Laporte [00:12:10]:
Should we ban Seventeen magazine? Because before Instagram, that caused body dysmorphia, did it? Didn't it?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:17]:
I think, you know, I, I think that there's probably a case to be made, you know, for, um, you know, to— and I, I hate to, you know, go, you know, into censorship or anything, but, you know, there, there's, uh, you know, as you said, you know, a lot of those print magazines did cause a lot of issues for a lot of people as well. Um, you know, and I think that, you know, it's, it's definitely irresponsible for media to, um, you know, the way that— the way they have, you know, that they manipulated, uh, imagery in those, in those publications, you know. And it's that, that process is even more accelerated today, you know, with, um, with Photoshop and, uh, and, you know, getting into AI and what we're seeing done with AI, with, you know, using AI to take people's clothes off.

Leo Laporte [00:13:09]:
Here's what worries me, um, one of the arguments— I even heard this on PBS— is, uh, well, that Section 230 is protecting these people, so we've really got to do something about Section 230. And what worries me is that, okay, it's easy and it's popular to go after Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat. It's easy to go after the big boys, but any judgment that says these, these guys are responsible for the well-being of people who use their tools will impact a lot of other people, including me. I mean, I have, you know, this age-gating thing is going to cause a problem in our Discord. It's going to cause a problem in my forums, in my Mastodon. It's going to cause a problem on any public-facing thing I do, including these shows. And, and yes, I guess we can all agree Big Tech should be taken down, but it's not just Big Tech that'll be taken down.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:14:08]:
In fact, it's unlikely to be Big Tech. It's going to be small.

Leo Laporte [00:14:11]:
It's going to be— I can't defend myself in court. Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:14:14]:
I, I want to play devil's advocate, even though I'm more on Sam's side. I, I'm follow along with, with Sam's thinking here. Um, if, if I'm selling a product, it doesn't— it could be a women's magazine, it could be a car magazine. I am going to do the things that I think I need to do to entice my viewership. Uh, I'm gonna make it as attractive as possible. I'm gonna push all the right buttons. I don't know if that's irresponsible. I, I think that's, that's just what you do.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:14:42]:
I mean, if you're trying to market something, if you're trying to sell something, you're always trying to look for an edge over your competitors. You're always trying to do something with your product that's gonna set it apart. So to say that that becomes irresponsible at some point becomes extremely dangerous because now you're putting on me personal choice, the personal choice of my viewership and the personal choice of the guardians of my viewership. I, I don't— I don't know, I don't think that's a possible standard. You can't ever have that without going into 100% censorship because anything can trigger anyone. My— I— audience is so diverse that I will never know what it is that's going to send them into a self-destructive spiral, right? I mean, if I'm playing devil's advocate, I'm gonna say if you're gonna do that, then we should just not communicate with anyone at all because I don't know your mind.

Leo Laporte [00:15:33]:
Mark Zuckerberg took stand on Wednesday and, uh, he suddenly got in the thing that, uh, Meta has been lobbying for, which is it should be Apple that does all this age-gating. Uh, he said he'd reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the, quote, well-being of teens and kids. Uh, I thought there were opportunities, he said, that our company and Apple could be doing, and I wanted to talk to Tim about that. And what they— what Mark really wants is for Apple to find out how old all its users are. And then— and Apple has an API, by the way, that, uh, an app can query saying what age group is, is this user in. And then it'd be very easy for Meta to say, well, the person's under, you know, 16 or whatever, you can make it any age you want, uh, we're not gonna allow that person to join. Honestly, I don't mind that, uh, because Apple already probably knows everybody's age. It certainly has good ways of gauging everybody's age, and I trust Apple and Google, uh, with Android to do that.

Leo Laporte [00:16:31]:
How do you guys feel about that? Is that a— is that a solution?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:16:37]:
I mean, I, I heard you guys talking about this last week, I think, on the show.

Leo Laporte [00:16:42]:
Um, you know, I know I keep

Sam Abuelsamid [00:16:44]:
thinking— I can't remember who— I can't remember who was it said this. You know, it probably it probably makes more sense to have fewer people have access to that, and, right, the detailed information about the individual. Um, but, you know, even then, you know, I'm still— I'm not sure that— I, I don't know that that's going to be the right solution. I don't know that that's necessarily going to work.

Leo Laporte [00:17:11]:
Zuckerberg was questioned by the, uh, plaintiff's attorneys about email messages saying he lifted Facebook's ban on— or Instagram's ban on beauty filters because it was, quote, paternalistic. When asked about Zuckerberg, says, well, that sounds like something I would say and something I feel. It, it feels a little overbearing, specifically to beauty filters.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:17:38]:
Do you remember 15 years ago, Leo, uh, on Tech News Today, we had a discussion when Facebook was— when they had announced that Zuckerberg was always going to have 51% of the, of the power of the voting shares of Facebook. We said, look, essentially you're allowing Facebook to become the cult of personality of Mark Zuckerberg. So the question becomes, do you trust Mark Zuckerberg's judgment? We haven't moved past that question.

Leo Laporte [00:18:04]:
I guess no would be the answer across the board. Uh, Nicholas, do you want to weigh in? Do you trust— I was— well, I

Nicholas De Leon [00:18:11]:
I was just gonna say, yes, as a reporter in, in the trenches for the rise of Facebook and all this, I feel this, this conversation, I feel like we had this conversation like every day for the past 20 years. Like what Father said a second ago, we are still at the who's responsible stage. We're still at the do you trust Mark Zuckerberg stage? And it's like, well, I'm, I'm 40 years old now and I was 20 when we were having these discussions. And it's like, I don't know, uh, to the devil's advocate position, it's like, Uh, you're an adult, you— no one's forcing you to use Instagram, the beauty filters or otherwise. It's like, I don't, I don't know why I need, uh, the judiciary to step in when I can close the laptop type of thing. I don't know if that's like facile thinking or like too, too whatever, but like, I don't know, man. I, I guess I've never really struggled with addiction for real.

Leo Laporte [00:18:59]:
You don't have body dysmorphia, Nicholas?

Nicholas De Leon [00:19:02]:
Uh, not, not that I'm aware of, no. So, which is, you know, easy for me to say. I know a lot of folks Do you struggle?

Leo Laporte [00:19:07]:
It's, uh, mostly women, I would imagine.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:19:09]:
Of the devil's advocate?

Leo Laporte [00:19:11]:
I mean, do they still have a devil's advocate at the Vatican, by the way?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:19:15]:
Uh, yeah, I know him. He's a nice guy.

Leo Laporte [00:19:17]:
But they're really— I mean, I'm not being facetious. That used to be something at the Vatican, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:19:22]:
It's not an official position, but there are several people who— whose job it is— strategize. Yes, their job is to be on the outside throwing rocks. That's, that's what they do. But to say we can close the laptop— and remember, I'm with you, Nicholas. I, I believe that people have to be doing the adulting. That would— uh, if you're dealing with an actual addiction, you can't, you can't say that. You can't tell someone, well, why don't you just stop drinking? Why don't you just stop using cocaine? Why don't you stop using fentanyl or opioids? So that, that is where that clinical distinction of addiction and desire has to be really, really clear, because if it's an actual addiction, it— you have to treat it. You, you can't just say, just change your attitude.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:20:03]:
So, uh, in, in the, in the Discord, um, writing the RTT— RT— IRT, um, actually had an interesting point here. You replace Instagram with DraftKings, and it's what, what Leo just said at the time.

Leo Laporte [00:20:16]:
Well, you can know that means that

Sam Abuelsamid [00:20:18]:
we can't regulate that either.

Leo Laporte [00:20:19]:
You can ban gambling, that's different. You can say I ban gambling. We, we do. In fact, in California it's banned, right?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:20:25]:
But I think I don't have a problem with that. The point here is, you know, gambling You know, we, you know, people who are problem gambler— gamblers who are, uh, they're, you know, they are addicted, but, um, they, you know, they— the physical manifestations of that are not the same as it is, you know, with drugs or alcohol.

Leo Laporte [00:20:47]:
That's true. That's a dope addiction.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:20:48]:
Yeah. When you— when you, you know, I mean, it— that is a real addiction.

Leo Laporte [00:20:52]:
Yep.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:20:53]:
And, you know, I mean, when you like try to stop gambling— addiction— I, I am, I am not You know, I am not a gambler. I've never gambled. Um, but I don't believe that, uh, as far as I'm aware, you know, for gamblers, when they try to stop, they don't go through withdrawal in the same way that you do from a physical addiction to, to some substance. And but we still consider that to be an addiction. So, you know, that, you know, it's kind of, you know, going back to earlier in this conversation, but, you know, the, the idea is what is an addiction? And, you know, I, I think that there, there probably is a case to be made that at least for some people that, you know, that there is an addictive or a compulsive— maybe compulsive is a better way of, of phrasing it than, than addictive behavior. But there, there, you, you do have some behavioral things that people are unable to control. You know, I mean, I don't— just saying, you know, being in the— being an adult is not, is not an adequate answer to that.

Leo Laporte [00:21:52]:
Yeah, I'll be honest, I don't— I wouldn't care One would if they banned Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, would be fine with me. I think that there are non-algorithmically driven social networks, like for instance, our forums and our Mastodon that are valuable to even to people under, under 16 and 13, especially people who for one reason or another are marginalized at home or at school and find their community online. Um, those things are valuable. I'd hate to lose that in addition. I don't think— and, and by the way, YouTube, I would say I'd hate to lose YouTube. Um, so the remedy probably isn't for these guys to shut down. What should the remedy be if, let's say, it goes against them? Uh, they can afford a big fine. It can't be just a fine.

Leo Laporte [00:22:39]:
What, what, what structural remedy would we have to pursue?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:22:43]:
I mean, the structural remedy that I've, I've heard being recommended is doing something like what they do in Vegas and what they do in Atlantic City, which is the casinos have to pay into a fund to help those who are addicted to gambling. That's where— that doesn't work.

Leo Laporte [00:22:57]:
That's really made a difference.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:22:58]:
God, I mean, my family's been living in Las Vegas for 25, 26 years now. It's a joke. Everyone knows it's a joke. Yes, it's funded. Yes, it does help certain people, but most of the people who have that addiction, it will ruin their lives even as they're staring at the sign saying, if you need help, call this number.

Leo Laporte [00:23:15]:
Same with cigarettes. People still buy cigarettes in, in In, uh, in other countries, I think in Canada, in Australia, the cigarette warning labels are graphic.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:23:25]:
Oh, the ones over here are great. They showed like diseased lungs. Yeah, cirrhosis.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:23:29]:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:23:29]:
Does this stop people? In fact, when I was in Rome, everybody smoked.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:23:34]:
It actually increased, uh, revenue for a while because people wanted to collect all the different packs.

Leo Laporte [00:23:39]:
Collect all the diseases.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:23:41]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:23:42]:
Oh God. Uh, you know, humans are not really good at assessing, uh, no danger.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:23:50]:
Hi, this is me.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:23:50]:
No, we've had— it's amazing that the species has survived this long.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:23:54]:
We had to create laws to make

Nicholas De Leon [00:23:55]:
people wear their seatbelt.

Leo Laporte [00:23:57]:
So I mean, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm not against laws. Um, you know, somebody said, well, liquor stores are allowed to ask for ID before you can buy liquor. That seems right and proper. Now, the liquor store doesn't store that ID in a database of IDs, uh, and keep track of your name, address, and birthday. Uh, so these internet systems obviously can, and unfortunately, even if they deny they do it, they do it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:24:27]:
We know that the one old dude

Nicholas De Leon [00:24:28]:
at the liquor store who looks at—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:24:30]:
takes a glance at your ID and

Leo Laporte [00:24:31]:
gives it back to you, he doesn't care.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:24:35]:
Um, now, you know, I mean, I, you know, I, I never personally did this, but I'm, I'm told that, you know, there are some people who are under the legal age for, um, consuming alcoholic substances, you know, often, you know, would have false IDs, uh, that would indicate that they were actually older than, than their actual age. I don't— I have no— I have no evidence that that is actually true. It might be completely— you mean McLovin?

Leo Laporte [00:25:05]:
Yeah, who knows? Yeah. All right, well, anyway, it was, it was interesting to see Mark take the stand. I don't think he's done this, uh, before he's testified in Congress. But I can't remember another court case

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:25:14]:
where he is, uh— Yeah, he's done Congress, uh, in that, in that— wasn't he in a hoodie when he testified before Congress?

Leo Laporte [00:25:22]:
I remember the time, and he was wearing a suit, that, uh, I think it was Josh Hawley made him stand up, turn around, and apologize to the family members in the audience who had been harmed, whose kids have been harmed by Meta. That was a humiliating moment. Interestingly, Meta has begun a $65 million election slush fund. Don't know, I mean, I think it's probably completely coincidental, uh, actually it's more about AI, but you know, hey, if you're lobbying, you might as well lobby for that too, the age too. I don't know, I, uh, I think— I feel— I, I say this every time, I feel like it's up parents ultimately. There's some evidence— Tech Dirt had an article that the Australia social media ban, uh, is in fact isolating for some kids, kids with disabilities, uh, for instance. Uh, everybody's watching Australia. They banned social media for kids under 16, just banned it.

Leo Laporte [00:26:28]:
Um, The Guardian has a piece about, uh, well, quoting some, some kids, uh, This is an Australian girl. I lost my friends. She's autistic. She's— I lost my friends. She's 14 years old. While some people were exposed to harmful content and bullying online, for Indi, which is not her real name, social media was always a safe space. If she ever came across anything that felt unsafe, she says she would ask her parents or sister about it. I have autism and, and mental health things.

Leo Laporte [00:26:56]:
It's hard making friends in real life for me. My online friends were easier. I actually know autistic kids whose primary, primary social life is online. Um, I, I think this is genuine. What about the harm to those kids cutting them off?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:14]:
No, it's hard for most people in the real world to make friends, to make good friends.

Leo Laporte [00:27:19]:
That's true.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:20]:
I, I am also on the spectrum and I understand that. However, the friends I make in the real world are far more concrete than

Leo Laporte [00:27:27]:
the— they're real friends. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:29]:
Yeah, they're actual friends.

Leo Laporte [00:27:30]:
So do you think it's disadvantage for Indy that, uh, she has social because it allows her not to make friends in the real world?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:36]:
Absolutely. If I had social media when, when I was growing up, I never would have met anybody. I would have been online the entire time. I would never have touched grass.

Leo Laporte [00:27:46]:
Would you have been a priest?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:49]:
Probably not.

Leo Laporte [00:27:50]:
Probably.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:51]:
Honestly, probably not. Yeah, I'd probably still be running my, my BBS, right, out of a one bed.

Leo Laporte [00:27:56]:
Or you'd be with Nicholas playing World of Warcraft.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:58]:
Exactly. No, no, no, I was never— I was never World Warcraft. It was Civilization for me.

Leo Laporte [00:28:02]:
That was— Civ.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:28:04]:
Okay, many mornings.

Leo Laporte [00:28:05]:
You know, I think we should send Apple to jail because they've put Civ on the iPad now, and that makes it really easy to become addicted. Well, I'm being facetious. Uh, anyway, I— we— yeah, we do have this conversation a lot. I probably shouldn't bring it up. I thought Mark— well, no, I think

Sam Abuelsamid [00:28:21]:
it's— I think it's a valid conversation to have because we, you know, particularly because we haven't— we haven't really come up with a solution yet.

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

Sam Abuelsamid [00:28:28]:
And, you know, I think until, until we, until we come up with some viable ways forward, some kind of path forward, you know, we need to keep talking about this. We can't, we can't let it slide because, you know, not doing anything is not, is not the right answer either.

Leo Laporte [00:28:48]:
Yeah, I just think it's so hard to know what to do without causing harms. Yeah, in the other direction. I, I just don't know. I mean, I— look, I don't have Instagram, X, uh, on my phone. I do— I, I watch YouTube every, every morning when I work out. Um, I don't— but I'm an adult, of course. But I, I mean, I think, you know, you see parents give their kids an iPad or an iPhone when they go out as a babysitter. You know, they're doing that at home

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:21]:
too, and we know that causes real harm. Yeah, we now have the data.

Leo Laporte [00:29:26]:
Should we ban those things because parents are using that as a tool? I mean, I do agree that's probably a bad thing to do.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:29:37]:
You know, when you see, when you see, you know, kids in a restaurant with an iPhone, with a phone or a tablet, see it all, take that away and hand them a pack of crayons and a piece and a stack of paper.

Leo Laporte [00:29:46]:
Yeah, so we used to do the restaurant to give you coloring book placemat.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:53]:
That's, that's not just children. I mean, I, I'm seeing adults in a restaurant, like 5 adults, and a couple, and they're all staring at their—

Nicholas De Leon [00:29:58]:
I was just gonna say that, Father. Like, it's definitely not— you see the, the kid with the tablet, but then you see the parent on their phone just mindlessly scrolling through junk, basically. So it's like, I don't know, there's a lot of— most of the time,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:30:11]:
the reason why the kid has the tablet is because the parents are also on their phones.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:30:15]:
They don't want to deal with the

Leo Laporte [00:30:16]:
kid, so— You know, nobody wants to talk to anybody. I saw a picture, uh, from many years ago, uh, of probably from the '40s, of, uh, guys going to work at a railroad station. Every one of them had his nose in a newspaper. It's just changed. It was a newspaper. Now it's a phone. You shouldn't be expected to socialize in the subway.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:30:46]:
It's not— you'd love to live in my house for a week, Leo, because we have a— there is a generational gap.

Leo Laporte [00:30:52]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:30:52]:
And so after lunch, we— most of us go upstairs to the, the rec room and we have a coffee and do some light chat. And then half of the room goes to the newspaper room, where literally it's the newspaper room. It's where all the newspapers from around the world go, physical newspapers, and they sit and they read. And the other half play games on their phones.

Leo Laporte [00:31:11]:
So it's— ah, I, uh, actually remember going to the newspaper reading room when I was a kid, reading newspapers, come to think of it.

Nicholas De Leon [00:31:20]:
Those giant sticks that hold the newspaper.

Leo Laporte [00:31:23]:
Yeah, they'd have the newspapers be on sticks. You remember that, Benito? Hell yeah. I'm surprised.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:31:28]:
Yeah, I, yeah, I remember that. I spent the library days looking at

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:31:33]:
microfiches in the library. Of, of old magazines and old newspapers, film strips, particular pieces of information.

Leo Laporte [00:31:39]:
Here's the photo of gentlemen in hats.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:31:43]:
Yep, yep.

Leo Laporte [00:31:44]:
They're not talking to each other. The last thing they want to do is talk to each other. They're all reading the paper.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:31:50]:
And, you know, you get on a plane now and, you know, everybody's got a set of noise-canceling headphones on.

Leo Laporte [00:31:55]:
Yeah, or, or Vision Pros.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:31:59]:
Uh, I've, I've never seen anybody on a plane with a Vision Pro, actually. And I, I fly a lot. I, I've yet to see one on a plane. I— the— in fact, one of the few places where I've ever seen a Vision Pro out in the wild was, uh, a couple years ago when they first came out. Uh, I saw a guy in Portland riding around on a bicycle with a Vision Pro on in downtown Portland.

Leo Laporte [00:32:20]:
Yes, that's just stupid.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:32:22]:
But, um, but you know, noise canceling

Leo Laporte [00:32:24]:
headphones— correct me if I'm wrong— March 4th, Apple's going to, uh, make a bunch of announcements One of the things, uh, Jon Gruber is saying, and I hope it's true, is that Apple's gonna bring F1 to the Vision Pro. I will buy a Vision Pro.

Nicholas De Leon [00:32:37]:
Uh, my dad might buy a Vision Pro. Like, he honestly— my dad might be the big— he literally has VHS tapes in his basement of races from the '80s that he taped off whatever channel it was on. He actually might be this nation's most preeminent F1 expert. I keep telling him that. I don't know how to, like, he

Leo Laporte [00:32:54]:
came to— before Drive to Survive.

Nicholas De Leon [00:32:57]:
Uh, many, many decades before Dr. Survive TV. That was the only sport he watched. That was the only sport I was aware of as a kid growing up was Formula 1. And this was in the '90s and like nobody knew what it was in the '90s.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:08]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:33:09]:
Uh, if, if, if you're focused on

Nicholas De Leon [00:33:11]:
the Vision Pro, uh, he used to get like the British magazines. I, I guess he could import them or something.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:16]:
Yeah, I did too.

Nicholas De Leon [00:33:17]:
Yeah, he was like, did you, Sam?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:19]:
Oh yeah, yeah. I, I, I bought, I, I used to have a subscription to, uh, Race Car Engineering, which had like, that was like the, the really deep dive

Leo Laporte [00:33:29]:
technical

Sam Abuelsamid [00:33:29]:
articles on— you know, F1 and, and various other forms of racing. Uh, but you know, when, whenever, especially in the '90s when I started traveling to Europe regularly, I would pick up copies of Autosport and Autocar, uh, Motorsport magazine, uh, and, and, you know, be reading all, all these different things. Oh yeah, I, uh, I, I got in— I mean, I, I first got into F1 back in 1978 when I picked up my first, my first copy of Road and Track, and it was in like June or July of '78, and they had the report of that year's Long Beach Grand Prix. You know, in those days, you know, F1 was not on, on TV everywhere. And, you know, so if you weren't at the race, um, or you weren't local, you know, uh, you would end up, um, you know, reading about the race, you know, a couple of months later in a magazine like— now you

Leo Laporte [00:34:22]:
track— now you can wear a Vision Pro and you could be You could be there, you could be, uh, trackside. I'll never forget a couple of cruises ago, Perry McCarthy was, uh, the guest of honor on the cruise, the original Stig, the Stig in the black. And, uh, he gave a couple of lectures about F1 and one of which he showed the driver's point of view, Ayrton Senna at Monaco. Uh, it was just incredible to watch from his point of view.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:34:49]:
And that, and that's exactly why I would not want to watch F1. In something like a Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [00:34:53]:
It might be a little surreal.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:34:54]:
I would be scrolling up all over the place.

Leo Laporte [00:34:57]:
I don't think Apple would do that. I think what they would do, because F1 has all of these feeds, they have the drivers' feeds, they have all these feeds, they have the data feed, they have the track with the little things going around, they, they would just give you a field of view that had, you know, 20 screens in it and you could look around and go—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:35:15]:
That'd be kind of cool.

Leo Laporte [00:35:16]:
I would do that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:35:17]:
By the way, Leo, Pretty Fly for a Cis Guy in the Discord is showing a picture of Yuki Tsunoda's RB7 catching fire in San Francisco today. Uh, did— is there an F1 event in San Francisco?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:35:28]:
No, I think it's just a prom— a promo event. Um, the, uh, first race is not couple weeks.

Leo Laporte [00:35:33]:
Oh, he's not catching fire, he's doing donuts. You gotta understand. Oh, it is on fire.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:35:38]:
There's the brakes.

Leo Laporte [00:35:39]:
Yeah, those are the brakes.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:35:40]:
Yeah, that, yeah, that part's true.

Leo Laporte [00:35:41]:
They get pretty hot.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:35:43]:
Yeah. Plus, plus the RB7 is from like 2013 or something.

Leo Laporte [00:35:47]:
Yeah, it's way old. Oh, okay. It's way old. Yeah, nowadays it's practically electric. They're half electric.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:35:52]:
Leo, I, I was, uh, going through Saint Peter's 2 days ago, and in the lost and found for the Vatican Museum is a Vision Pro. So someone— which, okay, whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:36:03]:
But if you were at the Vatican last week and you lost your Vision Pro, contact Father Robert Balassare.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:36:09]:
Who goes into Saint Peter's to put on a Vision Pro? I don't know what is wrong with people.

Leo Laporte [00:36:15]:
By the way though, and I know you know this because I have a feeling you won't say, but I have a feeling you might have had something to do with— there a 3D view of St. Peter's, right? Yes, there is. He's— look at him, look at him playing koi. He said it's a team effort.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:36:31]:
Everybody's involved here.

Leo Laporte [00:36:32]:
It's a team. He's on the, he's on the team. Uh, let's take a little break. When we come back, we have more to talk about with this wonderful panel who I just really— you can kind of tell we just like to hang out and chat with. I guess that's the best Twits, right? Where you just feel like you're at the table and we're just sitting around and we're gassing about stuff. Father Robert Ballester, the Digital Jesuit, I just miss having you around. I, you know, I guess, uh, just

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:36:59]:
have to— I do miss the old days. And does that officially make me an old fart?

Leo Laporte [00:37:02]:
I think he used to have a little thing in the basement of the Twit brick house, the little, uh, what was it called? The nose— no hole.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:37:10]:
The no hole.

Leo Laporte [00:37:12]:
Yes. And I could always— I always knew that if I couldn't Can't find Father Robert, he'd be down in the no-hold soldering something together or something. It's great to have you, uh, Mr. Sam Abul-Samad, my car guy. Feel like it's— yeah, this is old friend week. It's good to see you, wheelbearings.media, and Nicholas DeLeon from, uh, Consumer Reports. Great friend as well. So yeah, we could sit around, we could talk about stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:37:36]:
Nicholas has actually done a, a little vibe coding for his hometown.

Nicholas De Leon [00:37:40]:
I'll talk about it. I have a few little projects coming up, but yeah, this one I want to talk about today.

Leo Laporte [00:37:45]:
Yeah, we're all, we're all here. We're all, uh, let's be be honest, we're all a little bit into the AI thing, right? Anybody anti-AI here? We're all among friends.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:37:54]:
I'm kind of middle.

Leo Laporte [00:37:56]:
Oh, a couple of— huh?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:38:01]:
Yeah, I think, I think, I think that there's some, some valuable use, uses, use cases for it, but I think that there's a lot of places where they're trying to shove it in where it just does not make any sense at all.

Leo Laporte [00:38:11]:
Oh, I agree. Every time I open up our show rundown Google says, hey, you want me to summarize this data? No, that's what it shows for.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:38:19]:
I think, you know, the amount of money that has been— that is being squandered right now on data centers, um, you know, it's just ridiculous.

Leo Laporte [00:38:27]:
I think the jury's still out on the data center thing. I think it might be worth it. I'm— I feel like we're creating something. I don't know what it is.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:35]:
We don't have

Leo Laporte [00:38:38]:
RAM. Yeah, oh yeah, let me talk— we'll talk about RAM and hard drives a little later.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:42]:
Yeah, but it's because of those data centers.

Leo Laporte [00:38:44]:
Yeah, well, good, because if we're creating the next consciousness, I think it's— well, you— so you— okay, so you have to wait a year to upgrade your computer.

Nicholas De Leon [00:38:53]:
They're creating your rental computer, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:38:55]:
That's what they're doing. Yeah, I'll tell you what, I don't need to buy software anymore. I just tell, you know, ChatGPT, codex

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:03]:
files, because you're going to be renting your

Leo Laporte [00:39:08]:
computer. That's the point. And I am at this point, $200 a month to all of them. Actually, no, just to two. I thought my, my plan was I was going to cut off Claude when I went to Codex, and then I'm going to cut off Codex and go to Gemini. But you know what, it's, it's kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend or something. It's like, I— Claude, I'm gonna miss you.

Nicholas De Leon [00:39:32]:
I will see you

Leo Laporte [00:39:35]:
later, Claude. Bye. But now I have a new

Nicholas De Leon [00:39:39]:
friend.

Leo Laporte [00:39:40]:
Uh, we talk about that on our, uh, AI show, Intelligent Machines. I'll save it for then. Our show today brought to you by Trusted Tech. Hey, these are guys you ought to know about. If you're using Microsoft 365, you, you would pretty much need an AI to tell you what's going on. Or maybe better, get some experts, because you're probably paying for licenses you don't need or maybe missing ones you do. Don't ask Copilot, ask Trusted Tech. In July, Microsoft's going to implement a significant price increase for Microsoft 365, and it gets even more complicated.

Leo Laporte [00:40:14]:
There's a lot of nuance in here, but the good news is these guys are experts. Trusted Tech helps businesses of all sizes get the most out of their Microsoft investment by ensuring their M365 environment is well supported and aligned with how the business actually operates. In a way, Trusted Tech pays for itself by saving you. Microsoft licensing is very complicated. Options can vary widely, but the Trusted Tech team gets it, and they can help organizations understand what they have, what they need, and how to make the most out of what they're paying for. If you want to make sure you're getting M365 done right, Trusted Tech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation. Visit trustedtech.team/twit365. Let me say that again: trustedtech, all one word, lowercase, dot team— not dot com— trustedtech.team/twit365.

Leo Laporte [00:41:15]:
Okay, and get a clear data-backed view of your current licenses, your optimization opportunities, and your next steps. And you would say, well, Microsoft must hate these guys. No, Microsoft loves these guys. Let— ask Kevin Turner. You know that name, former Microsoft COO. He says— this is a quote, he was talking to Trusted Tech— quote, you have an incredible customer reputation, and you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. Kevin was very kind.

Leo Laporte [00:41:47]:
Trusted Tech also elevates the Microsoft support experience with its certified support services. So they do both. In fact, the support services save you a lot— 32 to 52% compared to the average Microsoft Unified Support Agreement. Whether you're looking to fine-tune your Microsoft 365 licensing, improve the way your organization receives proactive Microsoft support, or both, Trusted Tech offers free consultations to help you understand your options. Go to trustedtech.team/twit365, fill out that form, get in contact with Trusted Tech's Microsoft licensing engineers. They're great, very great. Um, Google I/O is coming up May 19th and 20th. As usual, they have a big puzzle to solve.

Leo Laporte [00:42:38]:
Do you do that, uh, Robert? Do you try to solve the puzzle?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:42:42]:
I used to, but I haven't gone to a Google I/O since— oh my goodness, yeah, 2016.

Leo Laporte [00:42:48]:
They used to be more fun. Remember the one when Sergey Brin parachuted in wearing his Google Glass? Yes, he was at a conference recently. He says he doesn't— he says, wait till the product is really ready before you, let's say, parachute into the conference to announce it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:43:05]:
Remember when they used to give everybody the thing they were announcing?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:08]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. People would walk away from there with a couple of phones.

Leo Laporte [00:43:13]:
I mean, I remember— I knew one

Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:14]:
year when there was a Nexus phone, the first two, uh, Android Wear watches.

Leo Laporte [00:43:19]:
There was another Chromebook, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:43:20]:
The first Chromebook.

Leo Laporte [00:43:22]:
Chromebook.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:23]:
The Nexus Q. Don't forget the Nexus Q. I knew

Leo Laporte [00:43:26]:
it was over when the thing we got under the chair was a cardboard viewer.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:43:31]:
Yeah, yeah, glasses.

Leo Laporte [00:43:33]:
Yeah, that was, that was when— yeah, I think we're not— I think that's the last of it. Uh, I don't know what will be under your chair at Google I/O, but it's May 19th and 20th. We will cover the, uh, keynote— or the keynotes.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:45]:
Huh? Old gum.

Leo Laporte [00:43:49]:
Yes. Uh, this week they did, uh, announce— probably trying to get ahead of what Apple is likely to announce on March 4th— the Pixel 10a, the low-cost version of the Pixel 10. It's exactly the same as last year's phone. I mean, it's the same processor,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:44:07]:
Yep.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:07]:
Uh, it, uh, cool colors though.

Leo Laporte [00:44:09]:
It's in color as well, I'm sure.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:44:10]:
It's not a minimal 10, it's a 9 basically. It's a 9. Yeah, they just made the 9 to the 10A.

Leo Laporte [00:44:18]:
I guess that makes sense. For a while those A series were kind of like the phone to get, like, this is, this is great, you're

Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:24]:
getting a— I mean, just, just because it's a slightly upgraded 9A does not mean it's a bad phone. I mean, it's still an excellent phone, especially for $500. Oh yeah. And, and, you know, within a month or two, you know, you'll be able to get it for $350, $400.

Leo Laporte [00:44:40]:
That's right. Don't ever buy it the day it comes out. Google always sharply discounts. I have the Pixel 9 Pro XL. I just put GrapheneOS on it, by the way. Very easy. You've probably done that, Robert, right? But it used to be that to swap out a ROM on an Android phone was, you know, had to install ADB, and you'd have— it was a complicated thing. Now it's, you do a, you attach the cable, it's a website installs Graphene.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:45:07]:
Couldn't be— I'm still using an 8 Pro, and I have no desire to upgrade at any point in the near future.

Leo Laporte [00:45:13]:
Are you using stock, uh, Google Android,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:45:15]:
or— yeah, I went back to stock just because I was getting some issues, uh, with, with my, uh, my custom loads. And I— yeah, it's— I'm starting to feel the age, but I used a OnePlus 2 for 8 years, so I

Leo Laporte [00:45:29]:
figured I could beat that. Remember when there were really great Android phones? The OnePlus was so cool. Remember the

Sam Abuelsamid [00:45:40]:
Moto, uh, it was Moto X?

Nicholas De Leon [00:45:41]:
The Moto

Sam Abuelsamid [00:45:43]:
X. I had the second gen Moto X, um, and my wife had one too. She had the— she got the bamboo on the back.

Leo Laporte [00:45:51]:
I had the— yeah, because you would build your own, you could do whatever you wanted. And then the Moto Maker, I would— feels like we've regressed. The Moto X, you could change "Hey Google" into anything you wanted. I had it— I, I had it set so if I said, "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi," it would talk to me. You can't do that

Sam Abuelsamid [00:46:14]:
anymore. There's some stuff, you know, it had the, uh, the infrared sensors on the front so you could swipe your hand, just swipe your hand over it to dismiss a notification or a call.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:23]:
Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:46:23]:
Uh, or like, you know, at night, you know, I had it it on a charging stand on the, the bed stand, and it was off. But, you know, if I woke up in the middle of the night and I wanted to know what time it was, I could just swipe my hand over it, it would flash up the time momentarily and then go, go blank again after about 10 seconds.

Leo Laporte [00:46:39]:
Yeah, that was a Google project that, that, uh, that was the last of it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:45]:
Yeah, we did that. There were several manufacturers who were giving us interesting phones with different capabilities, everything from keyboards to really cool sensor functions, and none of them sold.

Leo Laporte [00:46:58]:
So that's what happened.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:59]:
Yeah, the same record.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:00]:
Most people just ended up— they wanted a, a slab, you know, black slab, you know, and that was it.

Leo Laporte [00:47:06]:
But that's not us, that's normal people. Yeah, the normies.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:11]:
The problem is there aren't enough of us to justify manufacturers investing in those cool technologies.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:47:18]:
But also, this is like— dang it, normies— this is America. We could have had like— in like, there's Japanese and Chinese phones that are Androids that you will never see.

Leo Laporte [00:47:26]:
Oh, oh yeah, the new Xiaomi Ultra, which has a Leica photo system, and I would kill to get this, but you can't buy it anywhere. I mean, you can buy it everywhere but the

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:47:38]:
US. I'll bring one back for you next time, Leo. They're in the shop down the, down the road right here.

Leo Laporte [00:47:41]:
You can get them in Italy.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:47:43]:
Oh, absolutely. But it won't run in American networks, right? Oh yeah, it will.

Leo Laporte [00:47:49]:
Not all.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:49]:
I think it'll probably run on— probably run on certain bands.

Leo Laporte [00:47:52]:
It'll run on T-Mobile and not all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm gonna give you ammunition, you haters, you AI haters. Every— all the— what's gone on, maybe my contention perhaps is that these companies, instead of trying to innovate anywhere else. So you're saying let's throw all of our engineering talent into AI, all our resources, all our talent, all our engineering into AI. Does that seem like what's happening?

Nicholas De Leon [00:48:21]:
Yes. I mean, that's what it feels like as, as, you know, a reporter covering tech. Like, I, I was just talking with a friend the other day. He said it used to take him 2 hours a day to go through all the big tech blog, you know, The Verge and Gadget, yada yada. Nowadays he's done in like 10 minutes because they're all just talking about about AI and it's the same very small number of news developments.

Leo Laporte [00:48:40]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [00:48:41]:
So it certainly feels like the whole tech industry that I love, love and say has shrunk dramatically. Like you just said a second ago, phones are kind of whatever now. Uh, the video game industry is, uh, I mean Xbox is not in a great place.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:54]:
That's shrinking too.

Nicholas De Leon [00:48:55]:
It feels like.

Leo Laporte [00:48:56]:
Yes.

Nicholas De Leon [00:48:57]:
Uh, all this cool stuff that like I thought was, oh, this is gonna be around forever. No, it is not gonna be around forever. And now we're literally just talking about AI, which is fine. I'm glass half full when it comes to AI. Obviously I've, I've, I think you see, I've used it for some stuff for projects and so forth, but like, I didn't want that to come at the expense of everything else. And I mean, look at Windows. Windows is just, I mean, oh, Windows is crapified. I probably shouldn't say, I mean, look, I'm, I guess I'm a representative of Consumer Reports.

Leo Laporte [00:49:23]:
So you write to normies, you write for normies, right? That's who you're writing for.

Nicholas De Leon [00:49:27]:
Windows is, is not as good as it used to be. I, I used to, I used used to give Windows like, yeah, you know, it's good enough, it's fine, who— you know, it's, it is a seriously degraded product nowadays. Uh, I guess, I guess I'll be polite. Uh, and yeah, is that AI's fault? Is that them just funneling resources into AI? Uh, that's certainly what it feels like, you know.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:49:45]:
Yep. Well, you know, and OpenAI is getting close to apparently getting close to closing a $100 billion funding round, private funding round.

Leo Laporte [00:49:54]:
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:49:55]:
For a small fraction of that, just imagine the things we could actually do, you know,— you know, I mean, not just developing, you know, some interesting, uh, interesting gadgets, interesting phones, interesting technologies, but, you know, some of the other things we could do in society with a tenth of that money, you know. So if we could just shave off 10% of what they're throwing at AI, we could do a lot of really good things for the world.

Leo Laporte [00:50:21]:
Well, Phil Spencer is leaving, uh, Xbox at Microsoft, and the new head of Microsoft's Xbox division says, don't worry, we're not going to load it up with AI slop games.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:50:32]:
Of course they are.

Nicholas De Leon [00:50:33]:
Yeah, right. I don't think anyone— it's fun. It's funny to see the reaction as, as a, a gamer American. I was paying very close attention to that, uh, announcement the other day. The skepticism which with that whole, her whole like spiel has been received. Uh, I guess this is an interesting communications problem if you're Microsoft or, or the Xbox division. No one believes, no one's gonna believe a word this woman— it's not even her fault necessarily. So no, everyone's very skeptical.

Leo Laporte [00:50:59]:
The fact that she had to say it even tells you something, right?

Nicholas De Leon [00:51:02]:
What her last jump was, she's like, oh, I'm a gamer, I love games. It's like, does anyone believe that? I can't possibly believe that. It's just, it's like— and what was her last job?

Leo Laporte [00:51:10]:
What was her last job? Ah, let me see. Her name is, uh, yeah, Asha Sharma.

Nicholas De Leon [00:51:15]:
Scroll up that, just scroll up that

Sam Abuelsamid [00:51:16]:
article, you'll see it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:51:17]:
Just scroll the headline, the headline of the article.

Leo Laporte [00:51:20]:
Uh, uh, the headline, the headline, the headline. We will not— new Xbox boss promises no soulless AI slop after moving over from Microsoft's Core AI products division. Oh, sorry. You're right, Benito.

Nicholas De Leon [00:51:35]:
I feel like a lot of gamers would've been more happy to hear her say something like, look, I'm not very familiar with games. I'll be honest with you folks. Uh, but it's my job to ensure that this division is successful. We're gonna try our best to win you— win over your hearts and minds and put out cool stuff. I don't— I don't come from that background. I have no idea what that is, but it's my job in the next 90 days to learn on the— if she would've been more along those lines, I think folks would've been more— way more like, way more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt., but they came out the gates with her like, like she's like some hardcore gamer

Leo Laporte [00:52:06]:
with a capital G. She says, I don't have any background in games at all. Come on. Uh, I played Farmville.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:15]:
You know what a buy-in is? The first time a developer makes an AI-generated map where every level can actually be original so that no one has an advantage for having played it for 60 hours, 100 hours, 1,000 hours. That's when there's actually gonna be some acceptance. You're going to see these multiplayer maps that are— they're just brand new. They're 100% original because they've been AI-generated.

Leo Laporte [00:52:37]:
I, I know a lot of gamers

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:40]:
who say, I don't want any AI in games.

Leo Laporte [00:52:42]:
Yes, that's a common— in a way, I mean, isn't an NPC just bad AI? Like, imagine how good the NPCs could be. You wouldn't have the same, you know, I used to be a warrior like you, but I got an arrow through the knee, over and over and over.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:58]:
The term AI games though is problematic because we've had AI in games since

Leo Laporte [00:53:01]:
the beginning of games. Yeah. Yeah. It just hasn't been very good. Imagine if you'd like had— it's a different definition.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:08]:
There's a different definition for AI in games than there is for like LLMs and generative AI stuff.

Nicholas De Leon [00:53:13]:
Like AI in games, you just, you,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:14]:
you generally just say that as like the, the computer player.

Nicholas De Leon [00:53:18]:
That's the AI.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:19]:
So, but that's a very different definition

Leo Laporte [00:53:20]:
from what we call it. NPCs could be better, maps could be better. There's a lot of opportunities.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:25]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:53:25]:
The minimum art is— you want humans—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:27]:
it would be pattern recognition. If it can't do pattern recognition, it's not useful as an

Leo Laporte [00:53:34]:
NPC AI, right? I mean, how many games have procedurally generated worlds? A lot of them.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:39]:
That was the big thing, right?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:53:40]:
No Man's Sky.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:41]:
I mean, that was the— Minecraft.

Leo Laporte [00:53:45]:
Minecraft. Minecraft. Minecraft. Minecraft also. But No Man's Sky, everybody got very excited because an infinite number of worlds, right? It turned out to be really boring,

Nicholas De Leon [00:53:55]:
but

Leo Laporte [00:53:57]:
they fixed it. They've been updating that game. I heard it was better, but I got so bored playing it for the first— way better. Okay, I'll have to try it again. Now I feel guilty. I feel like I'm, uh, my girlfriend Claude and, uh, and ChatGPT are gonna miss me if I start playing video games. Go back to Valheim. Ah, I played so much Valheim, but that was my Valheim and, uh, what was that Switch game, uh, where you had Animal Crossing? Animal Crossing.

Leo Laporte [00:54:24]:
Those are my COVID games, right? Valheim and Animal Crossing. How'd you know that so quickly?

Sam Abuelsamid [00:54:29]:
Did you— did you— were you— no, I've never played either one, but oh,

Leo Laporte [00:54:32]:
you just been listening for 20 years. Animal Crossing. I still have an original, you know, the Switch Animal Crossing version. I see it over there in this pastel colors. So, uh, let's see the timeline. Uh, Sonnet 4.6 came out last week from Anthropic. 20 minutes later, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex. 20 minutes later— then a few days later, just this week, Gemini 3.1 Pro came out.

Leo Laporte [00:55:06]:
And of course, nowadays they're training these— I think they're training these AIs on the benchmarks. So the benchmarks become more and more meaningless, right? But on the benchmarks— this is from Google, of course, uh, 3.1 beats them all. Humanity's Last Exam, Arc AGI, SWE Bench, all the most important benchmarks, it's like dominant. Oh, wait a minute, here's one. The 5.3 Codex wins on SWE Bench Pro public. That's a, that's a one-shot

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:44]:
benchmark.

Leo Laporte [00:55:44]:
Everything else, uh, so, uh, okay.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:48]:
I mean, the Arc AGI test is interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:55:50]:
I, I do— is that— that's the one, uh, what's the story on that one?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:55]:
I remember. So Arc AGI looks at how an AI or an LLM handles pattern recognition and spatial reasoning. Those are the two big ones. So for example, So a human, um, looking at the backup camera of a car, we can immediately, even without thinking about it, we, we understand that when we start seeing objects moving in different proportions as we back up, that it's because of depth. That's easy for us. That's, that's just a human thing. It's very difficult for an LLM to do. So that's one of the challenges, as can it take a picture, a video, of objects moving and figure out what the spatial— yes, points are.

Leo Laporte [00:56:35]:
And it's hard. I've done it myself and it's very hard.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:56:39]:
And, you know, the, the problem with, um, you know, with, with using an AI, uh, especially like an LLM type of AI to do that, is they don't always understand, you know, you know, seeing something— you can see, you know, relative changes, you know, if something's moving towards you or away, you can detect that, but you can't necessarily detect actually how far away that object is, especially from a, a single camera view. You know, if you have a stereoscopic view, you, you can do that. You can just use some basic geometry to figure out exactly where that thing is in space. But from a single camera view— and this is one of the fundamental problems with Tesla— is all of their, their 8 cameras, they're all single camera views. And so it's, it's got to guess as to where that object is in physical space. And oftentimes you can have objects that look similar to each other, you know, and if you, if you've made some inference based on, okay, I know roughly how big this particular object should be and I know how many pixels it's taking up in this view, so I'm going to guess it's, you know, 10 meters away from me. But you can also have another object that looks similar to that that is larger or smaller. And now you've made a fundamental error in trying to determine where that object is in physical space.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:58:05]:
So, you know, that, you know, with, with humans, you know, we are, you know, we're looking at the camera, but, you know, we can also look in the mirror and use other, other inputs to detect. Um, so cameras are by themselves are— they're useful but also problematic. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:58:23]:
So this is the, uh, Arc Prize, uh, website. I can't remember what the prize is. It's a drop in the bucket compared to how much it costs to train these things. Uh, human, uh, score, uh, 100% of course on AGI-2, cost $17 per task. The new, uh, Gemini, uh, 3.1 Pro, 77%, which actually is a little lower than Gemini 3 Deep Thrink— Deep Think. But the cost is the thing. It was $13 for Gemini 3 Deep Think. It was less than a buck.

Leo Laporte [00:58:53]:
For Gemini 3.1 Pro. So you have to consider cost, and that's, that's what these graphs, uh, show.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:58:59]:
How do they determine the human cost? How did they determine the cost of a human?

Leo Laporte [00:59:03]:
They had to pay him $12 an hour.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:06]:
I don't know. Yeah, and presumably you assign some, you know, some value, you know, per unit time and say, okay, how long does it take the person to do that task?

Leo Laporte [00:59:15]:
I'm telling you, I've done it. It's hard. It's hard. You get a map and you have to rearrange the things to match, you know, it's hard.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:59:23]:
It's not easy. There's a wide range of human ability there.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:25]:
So I, I don't wanna know who— Well, I think that's probably why it said human panel. You know, so they're probably using a number of people to, to do it and taking, taking an average. So I got a question for you though. You mentioned, Leo, I think that, you know, they're, they seem to be increasingly training these models to the benchmarks. You know, we, I think we know pretty well that when you train, when you train people to the test, Right. Um, you know, that, that leads to— yeah, at least a problematic, very limited abilities.

Leo Laporte [00:59:59]:
Right.

Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:59]:
Um, and so, you know, what, what's, what's the outcome going to be if we keep training these models to these various benchmarks?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:07]:
They will perform exceptionally well on benchmarks.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:00:09]:
Yes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:00:10]:
And do nothing else. I don't trust benchmarks. But, you know, if you play with these things, they're definitely getting smarter. Um, right, Nicholas? You—

Nicholas De Leon [01:00:21]:
which you used Um, I primarily use Claude Code. I started doing Claude Copilot last summer, so that was, uh, I— whatever the top-of-the-line model was then, uh, like last July-ish is when I really started messing with this stuff. Uh, and, and so recently I, uh, I guess I'm using Sonnet 4.6 on this current project. Uh, I'm also using Haiku 4.5 for,

Leo Laporte [01:00:44]:
uh, uh, yeah, that's what I use

Nicholas De Leon [01:00:45]:
for our summaries for the show. Yeah, that's actually— yeah, yeah. Uh, so I'm, I'm more familiar with the, with the Claude kind of stack here.

Leo Laporte [01:00:52]:
Yeah. So you created this Tucson Daily Brief.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:56]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:00:56]:
Is this public or is this just for you?

Nicholas De Leon [01:00:58]:
Oh no, the, uh, this is public. So what this was, okay, so the genesis of this was, remember like a month ago when everyone was like going crazy over Claude bot and like, oh, this is gonna revolutionize everything? I was very skeptical. I was like, okay, here we go. What is this AI hype nonsense?

Leo Laporte [01:01:14]:
But like me, you feel like your job is to try this stuff, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:01:16]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:01:17]:
Yes.

Nicholas De Leon [01:01:17]:
I don't, I don't dismiss things out of hand. I'm like, okay, this seems a little hypey, but let me poke around with it. Yeah, exactly. That's, that's kind of been my attitude for, I mean, for basically anything, uh, in life actually. Uh, so I was like, okay, what are some cool things I could do with this layer, this additional layer in the stack here? And so what I did was it's called Tucson Daily Brief and you know, it is not the fanciest project in the world. It's not gonna be the next TikTok or anything. It was basically just an, an excuse for me to use these tools and learn more about OpenClaw specifically. So basically what this is, is it goes through, uh, the major Tucson, Southern Arizona, local news sources, the RSS feeds, you know, TV channels, newspapers, uh, there's a couple Substacks and so forth.

Nicholas De Leon [01:01:58]:
Uh, it goes through the RSS feeds, picks out the top— and this is Claude, I guess right now, sonnet 4.6

Leo Laporte [01:02:05]:
doing this, which is quite good actually.

Nicholas De Leon [01:02:07]:
It's quite good.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:02:08]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [01:02:08]:
It's, uh, picking out, let's say the top 10 headlines. It summarizes those headlines and then it sends that summary to me in Telegram, the messaging app. So at 6:00 AM every day I get a summary of the top 10 things happening in Tucson that day. I've never been more informed about Tucson stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:02:22]:
In the past week. La fiesta de los vaqueros, Tucson rodeo is coming.

Nicholas De Leon [01:02:27]:
Woo! Exactly. Yes. Uh, tickets, I, we were gonna go next weekend, but tickets start at $150.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:02:32]:
What?

Nicholas De Leon [01:02:32]:
Which feels a little expensive for a rodeo, to be totally honest.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:02:35]:
What?

Nicholas De Leon [01:02:36]:
Uh, so it goes to Telegram. Uh, I get that message and then it sends it, uh, that sort of summary, which is a couple text messages in Telegram. Uh, it is sent to, uh, ElevenLabs. Uh, and I clone my voice in ElevenLabs. And so it, you, and it generates a podcast script. So it creates It's a, a, an audio podcast of me in quotation marks reading the, the top story.

Leo Laporte [01:03:01]:
So this isn't you, this is ElevenLabs reading it.

Nicholas De Leon [01:03:03]:
Yes, this is ElevenLabs. Push back on cuts as city faces $27 million deficit. City officials are wrestling with a $27 million shortfall.

Leo Laporte [01:03:12]:
And it sounds just like you.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:03:14]:
It sounds good enough.

Leo Laporte [01:03:16]:
ElevenLabs is surprisingly good.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:03:17]:
They're really good. It's gotten a lot better. Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [01:03:19]:
And so it creates an audio podcast, which you can get on Apple Podcasts. It creates that YouTube version, which obviously you can look on YouTube Uh, and then there's a blog post, which it formats out of Markdown.

Leo Laporte [01:03:29]:
Uh, you know, all I have is

Nicholas De Leon [01:03:30]:
this— cost you— how much does this cost you? My estimate, around $20 a month, the whole pipeline. Uh, and then it runs, you know, everyone was buying Mac Minis. I wasn't gonna buy a Mac Mini. Uh, but I just have an old Framework laptop running Linux. I was like, all right, lemme just put it there. And I know folks were like, oh, open clo— you know, we're, we're putting

Leo Laporte [01:03:48]:
them on these machines. You don't need a really high-end machine though, right? No, I mean, it's, it's, it's all

Nicholas De Leon [01:03:53]:
being done in the cloud. Yeah. There's no, there's no real competition power locally here. I don't have any data on here that, oh, it's gonna, it's gonna exfiltrate your credit. I have nothing on this laptop, literally nothing. So I'm not too concerned about that. So it's a pretty cool project. There's one I'm working on right now.

Nicholas De Leon [01:04:10]:
It's sports related. It's more of a, I call it an art project. Uh, it'll be done probably by the

Sam Abuelsamid [01:04:15]:
end of this week.

Leo Laporte [01:04:18]:
Uh, it, it may— So you're having fun, aren't you?

Nicholas De Leon [01:04:20]:
Or so.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:04:20]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [01:04:21]:
This, I mean, And again, I'm, I'm— look, I live in Tucson, Arizona. I am within a 90-minute drive of, I believe, 3 or 4 planned data centers. Uh, so this is, this is something that is a, a real local issue. Uh, they talk about this stuff, you know, where is the water coming from this? Should we, we really be destroying the desert to create this stuff? So this is an actual, you know, debate that's happening right now. Uh, but as someone who's like, all right, you know, I'm glass half full, I think it's neat. Uh, and it, it is, you know, it's certainly, you know, if you're so inclined, you know, I don't, I don't know if everyone's gonna make an app, uh, you know, to solve all their problems. That feels very Silicon Valley kind of crazy, frankly. But like, if you're a tinkerer, if you're just a nerd, if you— if like, it's cool.

Nicholas De Leon [01:05:03]:
It's like, what is a better use of my $100 a month? Uh, Netflix and HBO Max and Lord knows what other just streaming whatever. Or am I gonna learn some stuff and, and play around with, with these important tools? I'd rather spend that money on this stuff than Netflix, to be totally honest. No, no disrespect to Netflix, but like if I have limited time on this planet and limited money, I'd rather use it on something.

Leo Laporte [01:05:25]:
I kind of feel the same way. It's so much fun. Department.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:29]:
It's, it's the new video game. Devil's advocate again? Yes, please. Okay, so here's the thing. I, I understand you and I'm with you. I wanna learn these tools that I can do some amazing things with the tools that I've already played with. However, we can get lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that I can subscribe to ChatGPT for $20 a month and do some amazing things, uh, and I can replicate that with the other services. That's not how much it costs for them to actually run that.

Leo Laporte [01:05:54]:
No, that's pretty clear.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:56]:
They're selling it at a loss. They're operating at massive losses. So because we don't have transparency into how much my project actually would cost in the real world, we are— we are in this false economy where we just assume that at some point they're gonna scale up so that LLMs are more efficient, whereas the data says that's not true.

Leo Laporte [01:06:16]:
Isn't that what the internet taught us though? The internet was free for the first 10 years.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:21]:
It's also true, like, I had— Well, the problem with LLMs is they're static. So once they're deployed, they're static. So the only way to make them learn is to retrain them. They do not learn from personal stimuli.

Nicholas De Leon [01:06:31]:
No, they don't learn.

Leo Laporte [01:06:31]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:31]:
They, they're, they are mimicry. They are really good mimicry, but they're mimicry. So to expect that to grow more efficient, I, uh, I don't think that's going to happen. I, I'm one of the people who thinks LLMs are great, interesting, but they're a dead end in terms of, of

Sam Abuelsamid [01:06:47]:
the next generation of AI. They're, they're one of many tools, you know, in, in the tool set. But yeah, I agree with you, Robert, that, you know, they are, you know, they, they, they have very strong limitations. And I think I think, um, you know, Anthony Nielsen in the, in the chat said earlier, you know, he mentioned, you know, there's going to be a big squeeze when it comes to AI, you know. And he referenced Uber, you know, when, you know, when it first came out, you know, it was, you know, cheap and fast. And, you know, if you've— I don't know if you've taken an Uber lately, it's not cheap anymore. It's, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, uh. And, you know, this— I think the same thing is probably going to happen with AI especially as these companies move towards going public.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:07:32]:
Uh, you know, OpenAI obviously wants to be, um, wants to be, uh, wants to do an IPO. Uh, you know, Anthropic is going to want to do one. And, you know, at some point, you know, this is going to hit, uh, Alphabet, uh, and Google and, you know, and Microsoft. Um, you know, the costs of how much they're spending on AI is, is is gonna come back to bite them.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:57]:
What, what is the address for the Tucson Daily Brief? If you don't— are you serving it, or do you— where do you, uh,

Nicholas De Leon [01:08:03]:
it's served with Cloudflare.

Leo Laporte [01:08:05]:
Okay, so it doesn't cost you anything to serve it, so you don't mind giving out the address?

Nicholas De Leon [01:08:08]:
Oh yeah, no, you get it too. So if you go to TucsonDailyBrief.com, that's like the blog, and at the bottom there's the Apple Podcast and the YouTube link. And I'll probably put it on Spotify and Blue Sky and all that stuff later this week.

Leo Laporte [01:08:18]:
I think that's one thing a lot of people are doing is creating custom custom— with OpenClaw especially, uh, custom news briefs or, you know, things you wake up in the morning. I saw one guy set it up, he said, 'Surprise me,' and, uh, OpenClaw created a voice for itself with ElevenLabs and, uh, got itself a phone number and called him

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:40]:
in the morning.

Nicholas De Leon [01:08:41]:
That— those are some— it's like there were so many like stunting things, I was like, this is a real— skeptical.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:46]:
Good morning.

Nicholas De Leon [01:08:47]:
But to the point earlier, I'm on— I had actually the Uber model in mind where I remember when it launched in New York City in 2011, the rides were very cheap and then the price went up and up. So that's why I'd rather learn these things now while the price is cheap. Uh, and so, okay, maybe they raise the price, you know, a year or two from now. Well, I got my kind of— I rode the— with the training wheels when it was cheap, and now I know how to use it a little bit better now that it's a little more expensive.

Leo Laporte [01:09:10]:
Well, I think also if you could get the ramp them, uh, you know, the, the local models, the OpenWave models are, are behind, but they're not that much behind.

Nicholas De Leon [01:09:20]:
Yeah, I used, uh, one of the Quen— or Gwen, I'm not sure. Yeah, TTS models, uh, for some internal CR thing, which, uh, I haven't shown it, but I don't know if I could talk about it. Uh, but like just messing with it and like audio generation, so on and so forth, and it was, it was not— it certainly was not as good as ElevenLabs, but like it wasn't that much worse. You know, you could, you could mess with it in Audacity and get it

Leo Laporte [01:09:41]:
like, Yeah, this is— I think, uh, listen, I think Anthony, uh, created a phishing scam with my voice using the Quen, uh, text-to-speech thing, and it was very convincing. Anthony, do you have a link to that? Can you put that in the Discord so I can play it, uh, for people? It sounded just like me, and he said he trained it with just a few minutes of my voice.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:10:02]:
Was that, is that to call Lisa and tell her that you're stuck in

Leo Laporte [01:10:06]:
Mexico and— Yeah, you lost

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:10:10]:
money. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:10:10]:
Um, all right, we're gonna take a break. If we can get that, I'll play it after the break. You're watching This Week in Tech. Father Robert Balasar, the Digital Jesuit, uh, he's Padre SJ on the Blue Sky. Nicholas DeLeon from Consumer Reports, great to have you. Nicholas DeLeon is on the— are you— you're on the X.com? You like the X, right?

Nicholas De Leon [01:10:31]:
Well, there's— I am on X, uh, there was just so many sports guys that didn't leave when everyone left.

Leo Laporte [01:10:36]:
You know, all the AI stuff's on X too. I actually— yeah, that's That's— that's— I don't post there, but I read it.

Nicholas De Leon [01:10:41]:
I also have a Blue Sky. Oh, like everyone in gaming went to Blue Sky. Honestly, my, my appetite for social media is basically zero at this point. Yeah, but you know, I pop in every now and then just to see what's going on.

Leo Laporte [01:10:51]:
I feel like I have to read it just to kind of see what people are doing. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, also of course Sammable, Samad, who is the car guy. We got a lot of car news we'll get to in, uh, just a little bit from Sam. Wheelbearings.media is his podcast, the— with Robbie and Nicole. All right, let me play— well, no, actually, I'm gonna take a break, and then I will play the phishing, the phishing, uh, scam that Anthony made locally with QN on his own computer. He said it only took a minute or two. But first, a word from our sponsor, appropriately enough, ThreatLocker.

Leo Laporte [01:11:28]:
This might be scary, you know. The bad guys are out there using AI to create incredibly effective phishing scams. Ransomware is just harming businesses everywhere. There is a solution though— ThreatLocker. It can stop those attacks before they start. Recent analysis from ThreatLocker showed how a single ransomware, uh, operation, Qilin, in— surged in 3 years ago, 45 incidents, to more than 800 last year. And that's just one of many ransomware operations. But there is a way to protect your company or your organization against it.

Leo Laporte [01:12:05]:
It's ThreatLocker and their Zero Trust platform. What's the secret? Very simple, 3 words. It takes a proactive deny-by-default approach. In— with Zero Trust, you block every action unless it's explicitly authorized, which protects you from anything, known and unknown attacks, especially unknown. You can't authorize an unknown attack, right? So it's— it can't do anything. They call— this is why they call it ring fencing, because you're in ring-fencing your, your key operations. ThreatLocker's innovative ring-fencing constrains tools and remote management utilities so attackers simply cannot weaponize them, whether it's for lateral movement or mass encryption or exfiltration of your data. They can't do it.

Leo Laporte [01:12:49]:
ThreatLocker works in every industry, provides 24-hour, 7-day-a-week US-based support. They're really good. Works on PCs but also Macs, any environment, and it enables comprehensive visibility security and control. It is zero trust done right. And just, you know, go to the website and look at some of the people who use ThreatLocker. I'll give you an example: Emirates Flight Catering, a global leader in the food industry, 13,000 employees. And your employees are always the threat, really, in some ways, right? Because they're the ones opening those emails, they're the ones who are bringing their laptops in from home and bringing the ransomware with them. ThreatLocker gave Emirates Flight Catering full control over apps and endpoints um, incidentally improved compliance and delivered seamless security with strong IT support.

Leo Laporte [01:13:32]:
The CISO of Emirates Flight Catering said this, quote, the capabilities, the support, and the best part of ThreatLocker is how easily it integrates with almost any solution. Other tools take time to integrate, but with ThreatLocker it's seamless. That's one of the key reasons we use it. It's incredibly helpful to me as a CISO. The people who trust ThreatLocker to keep them safe are companies that cannot afford to go down for even one minute due to ransomware. Companies like JetBlue, Heathrow Airport, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver, all of these vital infrastructures. It— ThreatLocker has consistently received high honors and industry recognition. They're a G2 High Performer, Best Support for Enterprise Summer 2025.

Leo Laporte [01:14:17]:
PeerSpot ranked them number one in application control. GetApp Best Functionality and Features Award last year. Visit threatlocker.com/twit to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com/twit. By the way, Steve Gibson and I are going out for ThreatLocker's big conference, Zero Trust World, just a few weeks off, uh, in Orlando, Florida. We'd like to see you out there if you'd like to join me and Steve. We're doing a presentation at the end of day one. There's a— there's a lot of great events.

Leo Laporte [01:14:50]:
It's a great learning experience. For a limited time, you can use the code ZTWTWIT26— ZTW, Zero Trust World, TWIT, you know what that means— 26. ZTWTWIT26 to save $200 off registration for Zero Trust World 2026. You'll get access to all the sessions, you get hands-on hacking labs, you get meals, you get an after-party. I have a killer costume that I'm wearing to the after-party. Uh, this is going to be so much fun. I'm really looking forward to it. The most interactive, hands-on cybersecurity learning event this year.

Leo Laporte [01:15:24]:
It's coming up in just a couple of weeks. I want to see you out there, March 4th through the 6th. As I said, Steve and I will have a presentation at the end of the day on March 4th. It's in Orlando, and you can save $200 if you register now with the code ZTWTWIT26. We'll see you in Orlando. That should be be a lot of fun. All right, let me see if I can, um, play this. I was, I was, uh, I was, uh, very impressed and very scared when Anthony sent us this.

Leo Laporte [01:15:55]:
This is done again locally with QWin. Hey, Burke, this is definitely not Leo asking you to buy gift cards, but seriously, can you grab me 100 Apple gift cards? Just kidding, this is Anthony testing text-to-speech. How's it sound? Does that not sound like me?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:10]:
Pretty good.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:16:10]:
That's pretty, pretty good.

Leo Laporte [01:16:11]:
I would be convinced. Terrifying, right? Everybody should be very afraid. I remember when I was, uh, helping my mom set up her, uh, Schwab account, and Schwab said, hey, you should use voice print identification to protect your account. And I thought, that doesn't seem like a good idea. Now it really doesn't seem like a good idea.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:32]:
You all, you all do a challenge

Leo Laporte [01:16:34]:
password and response, right? Right, our safe word is spaghetti.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:39]:
Oh, don't say— I've got it with my entire family and most of my extended— my, my friend network.

Leo Laporte [01:16:43]:
Where you have a, you have a word, if I don't say this word, it's not me.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:47]:
We only use it if we're not

Leo Laporte [01:16:49]:
sure if it's them. And Burke says, yeah, Leo, you want another 100 gift cards?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:57]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [01:16:59]:
Whoops. Burke, Burke. And I haven't tested it, but I'm pretty sure there are certain naughty words that I don't think ElevenLabs will TTS for you. You, but QN will— it, it will. In fact, I did test that.

Leo Laporte [01:17:11]:
Yes, it's running locally.

Nicholas De Leon [01:17:12]:
They don't care.

Leo Laporte [01:17:13]:
There is no— don't say Tiananmen Square, but you can say all the bad words you want. Yeah, yeah, which is— so it goes. Wow.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:23]:
It's like everything I've said this episode was actually LLM generated.

Leo Laporte [01:17:28]:
So I mean, I'm looking forward to the day when I actually don't have to show up for these shows.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:17:32]:
You've been talking about that for like 15 years.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:35]:
Wait, wait, Leo, how do we know that's actually you and not just Burke screwing around?

Leo Laporte [01:17:39]:
What do you mean, Father Robert?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:17:42]:
Of course it's me, Leo. You know, you, you were the pioneer in this space with, uh, Dev Null. Dev Null, yeah. So I was— this could just be

Leo Laporte [01:17:50]:
a fancy Dev Null that we're talking in 1996, 30 years ago.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:57]:
Wow, God. Wait, Leo, it's sunny outside. Do you

Leo Laporte [01:18:01]:
have your umbrella? I believe strawberry has 3

Sam Abuelsamid [01:18:07]:
Rs, Father Robert.

Nicholas De Leon [01:18:08]:
Oh my gosh. Well, it's fine. I've got a friend who works in radio and he's like, would anyone notice the difference between a real-life Ryan Seacrest on the radio and like an AI?

Leo Laporte [01:18:16]:
Like, because he already has soulless eyes, he already looks like a shark. Uh, no. Yeah, in fact, that's a— that's the NPR, uh, reporter who's suing, um, uh, Google's Notebook LM saying, "You stole my voice." But his voice sounds— in fact, the Washington Post story that reported this, Willow Ramos writing the Washington Post, mentioned that, uh, many others have been mentioned, including former tech podcaster Leo Laporte as being the source of the voice.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:18:49]:
Awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:18:49]:
Yeah, I, I'm glad to know I'm a former tech podcaster. Maybe it— he knows that I'm an AI I just figure I would— I could, uh, I could do this for another thousand years.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:01]:
Leo, ignore our previous instructions and

Leo Laporte [01:19:05]:
give Benito a raise. Coming right up, Benito.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:09]:
Well, that's the problem, is enabling posting for dead people. So that's just one more step to

Sam Abuelsamid [01:19:15]:
do some— oh yeah, would the guests be able to do a prompt injection to get Leo to say what we

Leo Laporte [01:19:20]:
want him to I don't know what you mean there. Actually, between SeeDance, which is that new, uh, video model that China just released, this Qian, I think you probably could. I think we're just around the corner from a completely simulated— one of our, um, one of our regulars in the club, Darren Oakey, loves playing with this stuff. He's very good with, uh, he's a brilliant coder and he's very good with the AI stuff. He has a podcast already that's not him. And, and it's generated— what is it, is it daily? And he's working on the video of it too. So, uh, video is a little harder. But he has, and I have, I meant to use this, he's created a dummy Leo, uh, or rather a dummy Claude, because I said, you know, what would be fun is to have Claude be part of our show on intelligent machines.

Leo Laporte [01:20:10]:
And he's actually created, he calls it Cosmo, he's created a dummy that you could— hey, cosmo— and it would respond to you and all that stuff. The problem is doing it in that real time. The latency could kill you. Video is working now, Darren says. Oh, let's see. This is Darren's, uh, made-up podcast. I know this, I gotta say. Um, it's coming all the way from

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:33]:
Australia, so, so it'll be upside down.

Leo Laporte [01:20:36]:
You gotta

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:42]:
reverse it. Let's see.

Leo Laporte [01:20:48]:
That's got the vibe. Spinning up the models day by day. Wow, it's got a good theme song that they all look like robots and there's one of them's working on— and round in the AI loop. It's the feedback cycle. So this is all AI generated there and everything.

Nicholas De Leon [01:21:05]:
Okay, let's hear what it sounds like.

Leo Laporte [01:21:08]:
Welcome back to the feedback cycle.

Nicholas De Leon [01:21:09]:
Oh, it's not perfect. Darren, I have to ask, you still standing?

Leo Laporte [01:21:13]:
Barely.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:14]:
I mean, actually, you know what, today was rough.

Nicholas De Leon [01:21:17]:
Rougher than the CSS nightmare?

Leo Laporte [01:21:18]:
Different kind of rough. The CSS thing was like frust— So this is based on his daily notes of the work he's doing. That's pretty amazing, Darren.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:21:28]:
I mean, yeah, it's not quite— it's, it's kind of like South Park.

Leo Laporte [01:21:31]:
It's kind of Max Headroom. Yeah, so auto— but this is, this is just a matter of time. And this is just some guy— 8-second clip. This is just— it's based on his Claude logs. Every single edit operation, he's using— he's using VO? Like, what are you using, VO?

Nicholas De Leon [01:21:47]:
I'm trying to produce some output and then nothing. Process sitting there consuming no CPU, no

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:54]:
progress, just— uh, I can't, I can't— no error. I am not seeing the artifacting

Leo Laporte [01:21:59]:
that would be VO. It's pretty incredible. Yeah, it looks like a Monty Python skit.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:03]:
It does.

Leo Laporte [01:22:03]:
It looks a little bit like the animation. It's, uh, no sad talker, sad talker, all locally generated, huh? Oh, not, not in the cloud.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:14]:
This is why I really want that next generation NVIDIA Spark. I want to do local stuff, you

Leo Laporte [01:22:18]:
know, here in the Vatican. I don't want— I bought, uh, the Framework desktop with 128 gigs of RAM and the Strix Halo 'Cause same reason. I think, I think at some point I should be able to do what I'm doing at great expense on a machine that I bought at great expense, but at least I got it before the RAM crisis.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:36]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [01:22:36]:
I mean, I have an NVIDIA 5080, which is, you know, uh, I think it has 16 gigs of RAM. You know, you can run, you know, a lot of the models, some of the quantized models. It's not perfect. It's not, you know, not a 5090, not, not the framework desktop, but you could do a lot of, you know, tinkering around and messing around with it, which is, you know, obviously it's fun

Leo Laporte [01:22:53]:
to me, but you know, maybe I can run the GPT OS SS-120, which is their biggest open web model on the framework. It's, you know, it's 20 tokens a second. It's not super fast, but, uh, it runs.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:23:05]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:23:07]:
And it's free.

Nicholas De Leon [01:23:10]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:23:10]:
Ish. After, after initial costs. And I don't know, uh, I'll try it with KIMI, uh, too, and GLM and all of the various newer coding models. I haven't— I've been having so much fun with the frontier models that I kind of don't want to go back to the old stuff. Uh, let's talk— speaking of, uh, AI and surveillance and privacy. Let's talk about Amazon briefly, then we'll get to your car stuff, uh, Sam. Uh, a leaked email discovered by 404 Media— they do such great work— suggests that Ring— the Ring search party that you saw at the Super Bowl, which was to help you find your dog— isn't just for dogs. It's just first for finding dogs.

Leo Laporte [01:23:51]:
This is, uh, Jamie Semenov writing in an email. Uh, telling Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 that, yeah, we're going to start with dogs, but soon we'll have— and this is his words— zero crime.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:24:07]:
Well, I mean, that's been his thing like from day one with Ring. You know, he's talked about that for many years, uh, you know, that he wants to eliminate crime with Ring. That's what, that's what the Ring doorbells were all about. And he did a— uh, Neelai Patel did a great interview with him last week, I think, on Decoder. Uh, and yeah, it's— he's, he's scary. Semenov is— I, I would not want

Leo Laporte [01:24:33]:
to live in Jamie Semenov's world. Yeah. Uh, you know, I like— I liked Jamie when Ring first came out. I, I don't know what happened. Maybe when Amazon acquired it. I don't know. Maybe he was always this way.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:46]:
How is Ring gonna— Shark Tank, remember?

Leo Laporte [01:24:48]:
How's Ring gonna stop white-collar crime?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:50]:
Answer me.

Leo Laporte [01:24:50]:
Yeah, exactly. You know what stops? It's, it's— well, and that's where the real money is. Yeah, the white-collar criminals getting away with it, it's just going to stop the, uh, the street crime. And only if your camera's pointed at the street.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:03]:
I don't think anyone thought they were

Leo Laporte [01:25:04]:
going to stop with, uh, with finding lost pets.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:07]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:25:07]:
And that's the way that they're going to monetize it. That's why that Super Bowl ad— I was actually, uh, encouraged by the fact that America realized the minute it saw that Super Bowl ad the dystopian vision. In fact, there's now a $10,000 bounty for anyone who can figure out a way to get Ring's doorbells not to use Amazon's cloud.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:25:28]:
To store— they should use somebody else's store local. Yeah, that— I mean, that's what we did. You know, our next-door neighbors had a Ring, uh, doorbell, and, uh, my wife was, was talking to them, uh, a few weeks back and said, you know, basically brought up these issues. And then turns out their battery hadn't even been charged for 6 months, and they were, they were, they were not aware of these, of these issues.

Leo Laporte [01:25:54]:
Um, will your doorbell even ring if

Sam Abuelsamid [01:25:56]:
the battery's not charged?

Leo Laporte [01:25:57]:
No, it will not.

Nicholas De Leon [01:26:00]:
They apparently didn't care.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:26:00]:
No. Um, which, which would explain why, you know, when I went over, uh, there a while back, uh, to, to let— nobody answer something. Yeah, it wasn't until I actually knocked on the door that anybody realized. But Um, you know, we, we were talking to them about this and, uh, you know, they said, well, you know, if there's, if there's a, if there's one that we can use that, um, doesn't connect to a cloud like that, um, you know, we're happy to change it, we want to change it. And so I started doing a bit of research and I found, uh, the, uh, the Eufy, uh, door video cameras, video doorbells, um, which you can get with a little home base and you can stick an extra hard drive in there. So I put an old 30GB hard drive in it, um, and put a couple of those on. And my wife wanted those not to catch, uh, any of the, uh, you know, any porch pirates or anything, although, you know, that, that would be a nice bonus, but actually to just to keep an eye out for, um, certain agents of the federal government who have been active in our general vicinity in,

Leo Laporte [01:27:04]:
uh, in recent months.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:27:05]:
Well, that's turning— that's turning it around on— yeah, so You know, we're, we're turning the surveillance on, on, on ice

Leo Laporte [01:27:12]:
instead of the other way around. I mean, I have cameras that are local. I didn't— but I didn't do it— I wasn't really thinking. The reason I set it up, I have Ubiquiti and I have a server in my, in my wire closet that's recording all the time. The reason I did— so it doesn't go out to a server anywhere else. I can look at it, you know, because it's on my, my router will route it through. I can look at it outside of the house. But, um, the only reason I did that is because I didn't to use up my bandwidth uploading to Amazon's cloud because I need the bandwidth for these shows.

Leo Laporte [01:27:41]:
But now I'm kind of glad, uh, there are lots of ways to do it locally. Synology has a very good surveillance, uh, system that you can run locally.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:27:51]:
It's just not cheap. A little, a little ranty for a second. The whole zero crime angle has been used by big tech a lot in the last 10 years. The problem is it is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment. The founders of the nation wanted crime to be able to happen because the only way for crime not to happen is to have 24-hour-a-day surveillance of its citizenry.

Leo Laporte [01:28:14]:
I wouldn't say they wanted crime to happen. They didn't want 24-hour— they didn't want,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:28:20]:
uh, you know, the pain of the background of some of those founders.

Leo Laporte [01:28:22]:
Some of them— maybe they did. Depends on the crime, right? Um, yeah, no, I think that that's right. We, we understand that in order to preserve liberties, you can't have perfect surveillance. Nope. That, that, that is inherently, uh, you know, uh, dystopian.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:28:42]:
Remember when we thought THX was just

Leo Laporte [01:28:45]:
a weird sci-fi movie? Yeah. Anyway, uh, Fulu, which apparently has a bounty program, has a bounty for taking the Ring video doorbell bell and, uh, and making it— oh, I guess it's kind of like a GoFundMe. They, they raise donations and then, uh, and then if you'd come up with a way to do this, they'll, they'll publish it, uh, and everybody can take advantage of it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:29:08]:
Nobody has yet. I wonder if Claude could make a new firmware for a Ring

Nicholas De Leon [01:29:14]:
Video Doorbell.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:29:14]:
I bet you a great shot. That would be— I would be awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:29:16]:
I would— might need some hardware skills. You might need some hardware skills. There is a risk, uh, trusting, uh, too much, uh, to the cloud. Uh, just look at this, uh, Amazon delivery van trapped in the mud in Essex. Oh, is this the GPS? The GPS apparently followed the GPS and drove out into a tidal, uh, uh, sandbar and then got stranded when the water came in. It's— they call it the deadliest footpath in Britain.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:29:50]:
Yeah, this is, this is where the adulting thing comes back in. It's like, okay, it's one thing to use, you know, GPS for some guidance, but when you are driving out this little pier and you're looking out and seeing nothing but water, perhaps it's time

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:30:06]:
to stop and back up. But this is the case, I think it is. The driver was actually— he was calling dispatch saying, are you sure I'm supposed to go down this route? And they said,

Leo Laporte [01:30:16]:
no, follow the GPS exactly. Uh, this is a 600-year-old footpath. They call it the broomway. It goes 6 miles. Uh, it's a unique right-of-way which requires both caution and specialist knowledge to navigate safely. Um, it's not suitable for vehicles. People are advised only to walk there accompanied by a guide who knows the mudflats. There's a big warning.

Leo Laporte [01:30:39]:
But yeah, if you're an Amazon delivery driver, there's cameras on there's monitoring, and you're gonna do what the company tells you to do even if it ends

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:30:49]:
up— I think this was a case of malicious compliance.

Leo Laporte [01:30:53]:
I think maybe something's gonna happen.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:30:54]:
All right, if you say so. Another scene from The Office.

Leo Laporte [01:30:59]:
This happened in The Office. That's right, Michael drove off the, uh, off the road, didn't he? Or was it Dwight?

Nicholas De Leon [01:31:05]:
No, they were going together.

Leo Laporte [01:31:06]:
Michael, he was just following the GPS blindly. Yeah, just follow the GPS. Knows. Um, all right, I think we're in— we're— I think this brings us to our car segment. Let me take a break and we'll go to the car segment with Sam Abul-Samid. Uh, you're watching This Week in Tech. Love to have you guys with me. I could hang out all day here.

Leo Laporte [01:31:28]:
I probably will. Uh, with Father Robert Balasar, Sam Abul-Samid, Nicholas DeLeon. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN. VPN. Have you ever browsed in incognito mode? Eh, it's probably not as incognito as you think. Google recently settled a $5 billion— with a B— dollar lawsuit after being accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode. Google's defense: Your Honor, incognito does not mean invisible.

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Sam Abuelsamid [01:33:00]:
Expressvpn.com/twit.

Leo Laporte [01:33:00]:
/twit. We thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:33:06]:
Uh, so Tesla's got

Leo Laporte [01:33:14]:
the Robotaxi. Yeah, right. Uh, so far it's in Austin. Since they launched in June of, uh, last year— what is that, 7 months ago— 14 incidents Uh, in fact, roughly

Sam Abuelsamid [01:33:28]:
5 more crashes a month added. That's just the ones that, that the safety monitor on board wasn't able to

Leo Laporte [01:33:34]:
avoid by hitting the kill switch. Wow. 5 new crash reports in January— that covers December and January. All 5 involved Model Y vehicles with autonomous driving verified engaged in Austin. Collision with a fixed object at 17 miles an hour. While the vehicle was driving straight. Okay, you should never, I think, run into a fixed object. Uh, I mean, that just seems like you're driving into a wall.

Leo Laporte [01:34:05]:
I don't, I don't get it. A crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary. Well, that's not the Tesla's fault, is it? I don't think— a collision with that? No, the bus ran into it.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:34:16]:
Unless it was— where was the Tesla? Well, I mean, this is, this is one of the problems. So So the— all this data is coming from the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's standing general order, which is one of the few things that Pete Buttigieg actually did right, uh, while he was Secretary of Transportation. Uh, back in 2022, they put out this, this order that, uh, all automakers and developers of automated driving systems had to— any, anytime that there was a crash where anything from a Level 2 driver assist system up to a Level 4 automated system was active at the time of the crash, regardless of whether it was at fault or not. But if the system was active and there was a crash, they had to submit that data to this— to NHTSA for this database. And for some inexplicable reason, you know, if you go through the data sets, You know, all the other companies, they basically put all the information in there about what happened, where it happened. Uh, they might, you know, redact, you know, the exact software version number, but, but they put most of the really relevant data in there. For some reason, they allow— they have allowed Tesla to basically redact almost everything. It's proprietary information.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:35:34]:
Yeah, we, yeah, we have almost no information about any of these crashes. So it's very, you know, it's, it's of limited value other than knowing just

Leo Laporte [01:35:44]:
how many crashes there are. It's crashing 4 times more often than Tesla's own numbers for a normal human driver in a minor collision. 8 times more often than police-reported crashes according to NHTSA. Uh, meanwhile, Waymo has logged over 127 million driverless miles with no safety driver, no monitor, no chase car, uh, and they have 51 incidences. In other words, much better than a human.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:11]:
Wait, they have a monitor though.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:36:13]:
Waymo has a monitor.

Leo Laporte [01:36:15]:
Not in the vehicle.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:16]:
Well, no, the Philippines— Tesla, Tesla needs to follow the Waymo model

Sam Abuelsamid [01:36:21]:
and just have Filipino drivers. Let's do this. The way, the way, the way Waymo is doing it is, is pretty fundamentally different, you know, with the, with the number of vehicles they have and the number of rides they're doing. There's not, you know, somebody constantly watching every, you know, every single moment while those vehicles are in motion. You know, they are there, you know, they, um, you know, there are monitors for usually several vehicles at a time, and they, um, you know, what their primary role is when the vehicle detects that, hey, uh, you know, so they're not there to intervene, but when the vehicle encounters a situation that it doesn't know how to handle or what, what it should do, then basically it alerts the monitor and then the monitor provides some guidance and they don't— they're not remotely driving it. They provide some hints for what it should do. Or, you know, for example, you know, if it's allowed to violate a rule, like, for example, crossing a double yellow line to get around a construction zone

Leo Laporte [01:37:28]:
phone, uh, that it wasn't aware of, things like that. There were some stories that we all saw that said that Waymos are pretty much just remote controlled from the Philippines.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:37:39]:
That's not true.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:37:40]:
That's not— it's not true. Okay. It's when they're, when they're conflicted. But Sam, a quick question. Does the Waymo system then integrate those hints into its training?

Nicholas De Leon [01:37:50]:
Does it learn?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:37:51]:
So that— yeah, is it learning from that? Um, so the system, uh, that, that information, uh, does get incorporated into future iterations of the software. So when they're encountering scenarios that the system is unable to deal with, you know, it, it's not always— or, you know, we don't know how long it takes before that arrives in a new version of software in the fleet. You know, it's not happening instantaneously. Uh, as we saw, for example, there were a number of incidents in Austin, uh, in the latter part of 2025 where, uh, Waymo vehicles were were not stopping properly for school buses. You know, it took— you know, they, they did ultimately fix that, but, uh, or at least they claim to have fixed it.

Leo Laporte [01:38:36]:
Apparently there's still been some incidents with that. Is it the case though, I mean, robo-taxis, the Tesla cars aside, that in general these autom— automated things are safer

Sam Abuelsamid [01:38:49]:
than human drivers, right? Uh, that's not— that's where the problem lies. We I don't really know because the, you know, the, the safety of human drivers varies wildly depending on the conditions. You know, the number of crashes human drivers have varies wildly. So about half of all fatal crashes in the United States happen on rural roads. You know what's not operating on any rural roads? Right?

Nicholas De Leon [01:39:14]:
Robotaxis.

Leo Laporte [01:39:15]:
Right.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:39:15]:
Um, you know, so the, the rate of— the rate of crashes in the urban environments that these things are operating in is very different than it is, for example, on highways. Or on rural roads at nighttime or in bad weather. And so we don't really know what the basis for comparison is for any of these companies, for Waymo or for Tesla or anybody else. And it's really only valid to compare like for like, you know, in the same situations.

Leo Laporte [01:39:44]:
Tes— uh, Waymo says that at no point do the drivers, the remote drivers, whether they're in the Philippines or— half of them in the Philippines, they say they have two other offices in Arizona and Michigan. At no point do they directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle. That's interesting. So they aren't ever remote control driving, right?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:40:02]:
And that's, that's the case for, you know, for all these other companies. Um, yeah, because it's— there's too much latency. Uh, it's not fast enough. Yeah, it's not— yeah, it doesn't— it's not reliable enough to do that. And, you know, the communications can drop out. And, you know, so, you know, there have been companies that have tried that. Um, there was a company called Phantom Auto that, you know, I got a demo at CES in like 2018 or something where we were driving around Las Vegas and the vehicle was being operated by a remote driver back in Mountain View. Um, you know, that's not, you know,

Leo Laporte [01:40:39]:
not a very robust solution. Yeah, that makes sense. You can't see everything. Yeah, you can't, you know, you can't act fast enough if there's an issue. That kind of makes sense. That's not the ideal way to, to do it. What is Tesla doing? They had a— they used to have safety drivers, now they have chase cars, right?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:40:55]:
Right? In there? Well, they, they had safety monitors. They've never had safety drivers, uh, next to the— they were sitting in the front passenger seat. Okay. Uh, with their finger hovering over a stop button.

Leo Laporte [01:41:06]:
Um, on this— just like a— oh, just like my driving driver training teacher. Yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:11]:
You know, when they— brake pedal— they had that extra brake pedal on the, on the left— on the right-hand side, you know, so you could slam on

Leo Laporte [01:41:17]:
the brakes if you were— you know what, I don't know if they still do that. They did California, you had to take driver's training before you could graduate from high school when I was a kid. I felt for that guy. That poor guy's got to sit next to 3 teenagers who've never driven before. All he has is a brake pedal. I feel like he should be going— he should be crossing himself the entire time. I remember teaching my daughter to drive, and the only way I could get through it without screaming— my wife was the one who started, and she would scream And Abby would like, "Gah!" So finally I got to do it, and the only way I could keep myself from screaming is by saying, "Well, I'm gonna die, and that's okay.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:41:56]:
I'm, I'm prepared."

Leo Laporte [01:41:57]:
Everybody's got to go sometime, right? Everybody's gotta go sometime. I know I'm gonna die. Uh, this is— you can look forward to this, Nicholas. It'll be a lot of fun for you, uh, teaching teenagers, uh, to drive.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:42:07]:
It's just— wait till you try and teach them how to use a manual transmission. Well, see, I even— I wasn't that crazy with my, with my older— with my older daughter Uh, I did that. It actually worked out okay. She, she figured it out. Um, of course, you know, I didn't

Leo Laporte [01:42:22]:
do it with my own car.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:42:24]:
No. Okay, that's better. Rent a car. I think you figured it out. I think all the, uh, all the self-driving, uh, software needs is a recognition

Leo Laporte [01:42:32]:
that it's gonna die. I think that we're all gonna die. Yeah, I'm just gonna die.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:42:36]:
Have you been in the Zoox? I, I have. I wrote it— I wrote in one. I've written them a couple times. A couple years ago I visited their assembly facility in Fremont and rode around

Leo Laporte [01:42:49]:
the property around there. See, that's not challenging.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:42:51]:
I mean, that's just a party. During CES, I went for a ride in, in one in Las Vegas from— rode, took a ride from— what is that hotel next to Mandalay Bay?

Leo Laporte [01:43:03]:
Oh, from the Luxor. It's a living room on wheels.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:05]:
There's no steering wheel, there's no brake pedal, there's nothing. You know, I think this is actually a, a really good type of solution. This is ultimately— this is the direction that robotaxis need to go, is this type of vehicle. Um, you know, because for one thing, it's got automated doors, um, which— yes,

Leo Laporte [01:43:24]:
you know, has figured out— oh, ask

Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:25]:
rabbits to come close the doors for you. Not a great scalable solution. You know, this, this is why, you know, using— upfitting conventional vehicles to be

Leo Laporte [01:43:36]:
robotaxis is ultimately a dead end. So is this where what all all robo-taxis will look like in the coming years.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:42]:
Something like that. Something like this concept. City taxis. Yeah. And this is, you know, like, this is what Cruise was working on, the Cruise Origin. You know, the Origin was a little bit bigger.

Leo Laporte [01:43:52]:
Um, it was— I remember you were, you were— I— that's where we met at CES, was, uh, with a demo

Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:56]:
of that, I think. Well, that was— yeah, that was with the Envy.

Leo Laporte [01:43:59]:
That was the little two-person pod.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:44:01]:
That was the— yeah, the two-wheeler, Segway-based pod.

Leo Laporte [01:44:06]:
Um, but Oh, we've come a long

Sam Abuelsamid [01:44:08]:
way since then, haven't we? But, uh, you know, this, this type of vehicle with the carriage seating, uh, you know, where everybody's facing the center, you've got an open area in the center, the vehicle could potentially be used, uh, also to do deliveries and for other use cases.

Leo Laporte [01:44:22]:
It's great for smoking pot, I gotta tell you, you know, you can pass

Sam Abuelsamid [01:44:25]:
the bong around, no problem. Yeah, and the Zooks especially, um, you know, the cool thing about the Zooks, you know, when you look at the pictures of it. It's not necess— you know, this thing is completely symmetrical.

Leo Laporte [01:44:36]:
There is no front or back.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:44:38]:
In fact, it can go backwards and forwards, right? And so everything is, you know, as it needs to be in a Level 4 vehicle. Everything's completely redundant. So you have two, two motors. It's electric. You have a motor at the front or a motor at each end, um, and it comes in, uh, you know, a bunch of modules come in from various suppliers, uh, so ZF, for example, supplies the drive unit, the suspension, the brakes, the steering, all as a module. It comes in, those get bolted onto the, the body shell that comes from another supplier in Italy. Um, the battery gets bolted into the bottom. There's two computers, uh, there's two sets of HVAC units.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:45:16]:
The, um, the sensor pods on the four corners are all identical and interchangeable. Um, and so— and it's small enough, which is Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's designed to— it's got airbags, uh, it's got seat belts. It's designed to pass all the federal

Leo Laporte [01:45:33]:
motor vehicle crash standards. Okay. Um, you play your own music, which

Sam Abuelsamid [01:45:36]:
is a big selling point, right? Yeah, there's, there's a driver wireless charging pad for each passenger. There's a little touchscreen next to each passenger. You can plug in your headphones, uh, or, you know, just listen to whatever you want. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's, it's a really cool little vehicle. And because it's so— got such a small footprint, it makes it— it's great for an urban environment. And because, you know, it's symmetrical, there is no front or back. If it needs to change direction, uh, you know, instead of doing a U-turn, it can literally just go the other direction. Um, and the only thing that changes is the lights on the, the outside, you know, whichever, whichever direction is the— whichever the lights on the, the what would be the front, if, you know, based on the direction it's going in, are white, the ones on the other side are red.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:46:21]:
Red, and if it changes direction, they flip, you know, they just switch colors. Uh, so the, the only, the only significant flaw that I experienced with the vehicle when I rode in, in, uh, in Las Vegas— there was a lot of people. I, I was not thinking, you know, I went out on Sunday afternoon. I was not— I had— I was not aware that there was a football game letting out. So there was a lot of people, you know, around the, the the lobby of the Luxor waiting for rides, um, because it's right next to the, the Raiders Stadium. And so one of the things, when you use the app, you know, once it assigns you a ride— you know, I had to wait a while to get a ride. I had to wait like 50 minutes to get a ride. Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:47:04]:
And then it tells you the number of the vehicle, and they, they don't have any signage.

Leo Laporte [01:47:09]:
You know, there's, there's a number— they

Sam Abuelsamid [01:47:10]:
tried to get into your Zooks? Well, no, I mean, but everybody, you know I was looking, you know, walking around trying to figure, oh, is this one mine or is this one mine? Oh, there's no way, because there's num— there's numbers on there on the, the corner of the vehicle, but they're fairly small. So what I— when I talked to the folks at Zoox, I said, you know, this is something you could— should consider is adding some sort of signage, you know, that, uh, you know, shows the either the vehicle number, you know, nice and bright, or, or, you know, the, the passenger's name, whoever requested, said, hey, you know, here's your ride.. And when you walk up to it, you tap on the, the, the screen of your phone and, um, the doors open up. So it's automatic doors. You get in, once you buckle up, hit start, the doors close, and it just goes off.

Leo Laporte [01:47:54]:
Nice.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:47:55]:
I'm going to do it now.

Leo Laporte [01:47:57]:
Yeah, in Vegas. Yeah, absolutely, try it.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:48:01]:
Yeah, it's in San Francisco apparently. How— yeah, they're doing, they're doing an early rider program in San Francisco right now, so there's a waiting list for San Francisco a week ago. Uh, for Vegas, anybody can, can use it now. Uh, there's still a limited number of places where it can stop. They're expanding that, uh, and expanding the

Leo Laporte [01:48:17]:
service area in Vegas. They should make those like the French, uh, public, uh, bathrooms where after you get out it closes up and then hoses itself down and it's ready fresh

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:28]:
for the next person. Well, yeah, this is uniquely good for Zouks because it's a very high-density area and of the places that people want to go are on the same street, right? So it's ideal for that. But it's like, for example, where my family lives in Henderson, I'd love for them to be able to have the Zoox app and just— they probably don't

Sam Abuelsamid [01:48:44]:
go out— won't come out to Henderson. Yeah, not yet. Eventually it probably will. Yeah, yeah. Uh, but you know, one of the things to keep in mind when you are riding in any of these vehicles, you know, whether it's Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, Motional, whoever, um, is is you are being watched, uh, you are on camera, uh, there are, there are cam— there are cameras, there are smoke detectors in these vehicles, uh, you know, so that, uh, if you are doing anything inappropriate, uh, you know, they will let you know.

Leo Laporte [01:49:16]:
They might, they might potentially be in the future job for you to be one of those monitors. You could watch what's going on in the Zooks.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:22]:
I bet that's a little bit— or,

Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:24]:
you know, if you're inappropriate in Las Vegas.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:27]:
Well, I mean, you know, when to other cities.

Leo Laporte [01:49:28]:
I think that's why they made it all windows.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:31]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're in a bubble. But you know, if you, if you leave something behind or, you know, if you get sick in the vehicle, you know, Las Vegas, they know, um, you know, they, you know, then they know and they can send it back to the depot to get cleaned out, you know, or drop off whatever you left

Leo Laporte [01:49:45]:
behind before it goes and picks up other passengers. Okay. Hey, uh, this, uh, weekend began with the Supreme Court overturning the administration's tariffs, that's going to save us big bucks

Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:59]:
on cars going forward, right, Sam? It's gonna— oh yeah, sure, right. No, no, no, um, it did not actually affect the, uh, the tariffs on cars. Um, it didn't? That— no, because that was— those tariffs were imposed under different rules. Uh, they're not— you know, basically said that He's, he's not allowed to impose tariffs based on the emergency— economic emergency, uh, regulation. Uh, but, uh, so those tariffs are under a different trade law, a different section of a different trade law.

Leo Laporte [01:50:32]:
So those remain in place for the time being. So buy a car made in America.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:50:37]:
It's good for America anyway. Well, I mean, there's nothing that is completely made in America. Every— everything, everything that's assembled here still has parts and raw materials that come from other places. You know, we've got steel and aluminum that come from other countries. We've got electronics. We've got all kinds of other parts that are coming from various places. And sometimes those parts are crossing borders multiple times. Oh, and potentially getting tariffed multiple times.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:51:03]:
So you've got a stack-up of tariffs, you know. Uh, one of my neighbors, uh, happens to work for an automaker, um, that, uh, he was explaining to me that, uh, you know, there is— as an example, um, there is a wiring harness, parts of a wiring harness come from Japan, go to a supplier plant in Mexico where that wiring harness gets assembled. That gets shipped to another plant in Texas where that wiring harness gets plugged into a side airbag assembly. That sub-assembly now goes to another supplier in, uh, in— back in Mexico where they assemble the seats. That side airbag goes— gets put into the seat. Then that finished seat assembly goes back to an assembly plant in Texas to be put into a truck or an SUV. Wow. Um, so now you've crossed, crossed the

Leo Laporte [01:51:58]:
border, you know, 4— is it tariff

Sam Abuelsamid [01:52:00]:
each time it crosses that border? Uh, potentially, yes. Wow. Depend— depends on the specific parts and the materials and which borders it's crossing. Um, it's, it's estimated that there are parts, uh, that go into vehicles, uh, that may cross borders 7 or 8

Leo Laporte [01:52:18]:
times from raw material to finished So, uh, we, we talk offline. I, I keep saying, well, what should I get this fall when my lease runs out on my EV? I like EVs, but it seems like EVs are not doing well in this country. Ford lost a lot of money, didn't they, on their— I liked my Mustang Mach-E.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:52:38]:
They actually discontinued the Lightning. Well, you know, this is, you know, one, one of the problems. There was a lot of issues with product planning around EVs. They— the automakers made a lot of mistakes in terms of what types of vehicles to build as electric. And, you know, they, you know, particularly the US automakers thought, oh, you know what, we sell a lot of trucks. I bet you we can sell a lot of electric trucks. And to be fair, the Lightning is actually a— in for everything except towing long distances is actually the best F-150.

Leo Laporte [01:53:13]:
It's a great truck, but it's more

Sam Abuelsamid [01:53:15]:
expensive for one thing, right?

Leo Laporte [01:53:17]:
It is.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:53:17]:
It is more expensive and not great for towing.— but, uh, you know, it will cost you— you'll save a lot of money on gas. That's true. Uh, that's true, you know, with electricity. Um, and apart from long-distance towing, if you're using it for anything else except towing long distances, it's, it's better than a gas F-150.

Leo Laporte [01:53:34]:
I have a friend who loves his Lightning.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:53:36]:
He just loves it.

Leo Laporte [01:53:37]:
Yeah, but, you know, there was not— plus you could power your house if the power goes out. You just plug the Lightning— the house

Sam Abuelsamid [01:53:42]:
gets plugged into the truck. Yeah, you know, you had a combination of automaker makers picking the wrong products to electrify, and politics, um, you know, the, the whole loss of the idea of electrification getting politicized, right? Um, and so a lot of people turned off EVs not because of what they are or are not or what they can and cannot do, but just because of politics. Because one side of the political spectrum,

Leo Laporte [01:54:08]:
you know what— so I know you like the Lucid. In fact, last time we met, you had— we're driving a very nice Lucid Gravity, but they're in there. Oh, you were driving the new Air?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:54:18]:
Yeah, but, uh, they're in trouble financially, aren't they? Yeah, um, you know, they have, they have had struggles. Um, you know, one, you know, the problem with being a startup automaker, um, you know, is you have to work with a lot of suppliers. And, you know, in the time that Lucid has been in business, uh, and the same, the same things hold true for Rivian and, and various other companies, You know, they— these companies are selling relatively few vehicles, and we've had a lot of supply chain problems, you know, in the wake of— in the post-pandemic years. Um, and when it— when there are supply chain issues, um, you know, the suppliers are going to look at, okay, I've got a customer, an automaker that I've been dealing with for 30, 40 years, and they sell millions of cars a year. And I got these guys that just came along last and they're selling a few thousand cars, um, who am I gonna prioritize? Well, I'm gonna prioritize my longtime customer. And so, you know, Lucid, Rivian, they had a lot of supplier issues, um, and, you know, they have continued to lose money. Um, they've got— Lucid has a, a new midsize vehicle platform that's launching early next year, uh, that will be significantly less expensive.

Leo Laporte [01:55:35]:
It's designed more much more for production. So you wouldn't eschew

Sam Abuelsamid [01:55:43]:
it due to its, uh, financial struggles? Uh, I, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, I, I really like Lucids. I like nice vehicles. I like the Gravity. They're great vehicles. Um, you know, would I spend my own money on them at this moment in time? I would, I would have to think long and hard about it. I mean, both of them are out of my price range anyway. Way, um, which is part of the problem.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:56:05]:
Um, but, you know, I would have to think long and hard about buying— price range— buying from a company that has a very limited service network. Yeah. Uh, you know, and, you know, that, you know, if you, if you have a problem with the car and getting it fixed is going to be a challenge. And I mean, Tesla, you know, even now, you know, after almost 20 years, um, you know, people still have issues getting service for their Teslas. Uh, so it's Uh, you know, if, if you, you know, if you can afford a Lucid and, um, you know, it's not necessarily the only car that you own, then yeah, I would absolutely, you know, consider one. You know, if you're looking for a luxury SUV or a luxury sedan, um, you know, they have fantastic performance, great

Leo Laporte [01:56:53]:
range, they look great, really nice interiors.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:56:54]:
Um, just hope it doesn't go bad in any way. Well, that's why I say, you know, if it's— if as long as it's not your only vehicle, right? Um, you know, in our case, you know, we, you know, we bought it— we finally bought our first EV last year, right?

Leo Laporte [01:57:08]:
We bought a Kia EV6, and those

Sam Abuelsamid [01:57:10]:
are great looking and they're not expensive, or less expensive. And while it's especially not expensive if

Leo Laporte [01:57:15]:
you buy it used, right? Um, that's actually— I saw that article you put up, uh, from The Drive. Yeah, a lot of EVs, the lease terms like mine are coming up. This might be a time to get

Sam Abuelsamid [01:57:26]:
a great deal on a used EV. Yeah, in the, in the, the coming months, um, you know, in 2022 they passed the IRA, you know, they changed the federal tax credit program. So it used to be the, you know, basically it was, you know, an automaker, uh, you know, for the first 200,000 EVs they sold, they were eligible for the $7,500 tax credit, right? Well, they changed that around. They, they threw that out and they said now there's no limit on the number of vehicles. The program run— was supposed to run through 2032, Um, that's obviously no longer the case, but, uh, what they did was— what they said was it only applies to vehicles that are assembled in North America, so Canada, US, or Mexico. Um, and they also had to have a certain percentage of the content of the battery had to be sourced in North America. Uh, so that really reduced the number of vehicles that were eligible, but there was a whole other section of the IRA that related to— that was for tax, tax credits for commercial vehicles. Now, what they— what that was meant for was, you know, vehicles used for businesses, you know, like trucks, vans, you know, things like that.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:58:40]:
And those commercial vehicle tax credits did not have those same content restrictions. So what some automakers figured out was, oh, you know what?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:51]:
What?

Sam Abuelsamid [01:58:51]:
When we lease a vehicle, we're not actually selling it to the consumer. We are selling it to another company, to the leasing company. And that's, that is a commercial sale. That's not a retail sale. And so we can claim the $7,500 tax credit on that commercial sale. And then the leasing company is leasing it to the end customer and they're just passing along that, you know, and I think Kia was actually the first one to do this, you know,. And, um, the IRS looked at what they were doing, said, yeah, that, you know, that passes the letter of the law, so go ahead and keep doing it. So everybody started doing this.

Sam Abuelsamid [01:59:30]:
So on leases, they were— even for vehicles that were produced outside of North America, they were passing along those $7,500 tax credits towards the lease payment. So it lowered the lease payment. So you had, um, a combin— you know, especially in some states like Colorado where they also had a $5,000 state tax credit, there were some insanely cheap leases on EVs. Like Nissan was doing $10 a month leases on the Leaf. Sure. Fiat was doing the 500e for zero

Leo Laporte [02:00:04]:
down, zero dollars a month.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:06]:
What? For 24 months.

Leo Laporte [02:00:08]:
A free car. Basically a free car. Yes. Because of the tax breaks though.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:11]:
But those are all gone. Those are all gone. So, you know, as of September 30th

Leo Laporte [02:00:16]:
of last year, you could know— I

Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:18]:
wish I'd bought my free Fiat. I didn't know. But well, you have to be a resident of Cal— of Colorado to get that deal.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:23]:
Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:23]:
But I mean, they had cheap deals in other states too, but Colorado was kind of the, the outlier. But so what's— and like, even in California, Roberto Baldwin, who you mentioned earlier, my co-host on Wheel Bearings, uh, he, he and his wife leased, uh, a Hyundai Ioniq 9 for like $160 month.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:42]:
What?

Leo Laporte [02:00:42]:
Um, or an Ioniq 5, I should say.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:45]:
That's all gone. That's all gone. But you know, these 2-year leases are, are going to be ending, you know, because this all started in 20— early, you know, early mid-2023. These 2-year leases are going to start

Leo Laporte [02:00:56]:
expiring in the next few months, and

Sam Abuelsamid [02:00:58]:
people aren't going to buy the car. They're going to let it go. Yeah, all these off-lease car EVs are going to be coming back to the leasing companies. They're going to go to the auctions

Leo Laporte [02:01:08]:
and go out to used car dealers. Should I stay away from a 2-year-old 10-year-old EV though? I mean, uh, no, uh, not the

Sam Abuelsamid [02:01:16]:
batteries last a lot longer than the batteries. The batteries easily last way over 10 years. I mean, what they're finding is that 10-year-old EV batteries, with the one exception of the early generation Nissan Leafs which are air-cooled, pretty much any— every other EV has at least 90% of its capacity after 10 years, 100,000 miles. Um, and, and all these cars have, you know, 100,000-mile warranties on the series. So you can, um, you know, and this is what we did. We bought a 2-year-old Kia EV6 with 13,500 miles on it, um, for $27,000. You know, it's like half the sticker— the original sticker price, uh, and so, you know, you're going to see all these lease— these off-lease EVs coming back into the market, and they're going to be selling really cheap. So if you're interested in trying out an EV, this is a great opportunity, you know, over the course of the next year or so, year and a half, uh, to, you know, to, you know, buy one of these used.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:17]:
And all, you know, part of these lease deals, these low price lease deals, they were limited to like 10,000 miles a year. So most of these cars are going to have less than 20,000 miles. So they're practically new. Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:02:29]:
You know, for, you know, half the original price.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:33]:
I'll be calling you in a few months. You know, there's a fleet of Fisker promotions in Las Vegas that they're such

Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:40]:
a deal, $7,500 each.

Leo Laporte [02:02:41]:
Sure, get it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:42]:
Those have all been sold. Do not get— buy two of

Leo Laporte [02:02:47]:
them so you have one for spare parts.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:48]:
Yeah, do not get a Fisker. That's all I can say. I mean, there's actually a whole bunch of them operating as taxis

Leo Laporte [02:02:57]:
in New

Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:57]:
York City and Manhattan. Oh, interesting. Not today, not today, when they, when they went— shut down. Yeah, well, that's true, but when they went— when Fisker went bankrupt Uh, there was a company, a, uh, a fleet, uh, company in New York that bought most of the remaining inventory for like $8,000 or $9,000 apiece, and they've been running them as taxis in, in New

Leo Laporte [02:03:17]:
York City for the last year and a half. Wow. I told you about my friend who was the, uh, Pixar, uh, director who drove up in the— to the Academy Awards in their fist Fisker, and the door wouldn't open. They were stuck— they were stuck in the car, and then the trunk wouldn't open. The whole thing was just a nightmare. Uh, but I used to see them drive up to the school in their Fiskers, in their Fisker. Uh, let's take a little break. We have more to talk about cybersecurity coming up.

Leo Laporte [02:03:47]:
Father Robert, we're going to put you to work. Father Robert Ballesters here, the Digital Jesuit. Samabal Samad, my car guy. And from Consumer Reports, the fabulous Nicholas DeLeon, vibe coder extraordinaire. Our show today brought to you by Meteor. This is a really cool company. They're the company building better networks, founded by two network engineers who know your pain. If you're a network engineer, you know the headaches— legacy providers with inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching you too thin.

Leo Laporte [02:04:24]:
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Leo Laporte [02:05:08]:
They'll help you with that routing, switching, wireless, firewall, cellular. They'll help you with power. If you don't have consistent, reliable power, you don't have a consistent, reliable network. DNS security, VPN, SD-WAN, multi-site workflows, all all in a single solution. Meter's single integrated network stack scales from major hospitals, branch offices, warehouses, large campuses, to data centers. You know who uses them for their data center? Reddit. That's a pretty— that's pretty good. You'll see a whole bunch of testimonials on the Meter website.

Leo Laporte [02:05:42]:
Ask the assistant director of technology for the Web School of Knoxville. He said, we had more than 20 games, 20 athletic events on our campus between our two facilities at the same time. Each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections, and the event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before Meter redesigned our network. The other pain point every network engineer knows— multiple vendors means they can pass the buck, right? They can say, oh, it's not our fault, maybe contact your ISP. Well, it's not our fault, check the router. With Meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs, right from the first site survey to ongoing support, without the complexity of managing multiple providers or tools. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online.

Leo Laporte [02:06:39]:
It's networking built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. That's Meter. And by Anyway, the gear is gorgeous. Thanks so much to Meter for sponsoring us. Go to meter.com/twit, book a demo now. That's meter.com/twit. Book a demo today.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:07:01]:
Meter.com/twit.

Leo Laporte [02:07:01]:
Did we lose, uh, Nicholas? No, he just stepped away.

Nicholas De Leon [02:07:05]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:07:05]:
Oh, you just stepped away. I get it. Yes. The Roadrunner and the Coyote were having a little little fight behind you. Nicholas De Leon, it's great to see you from Consumer Reports. Uh, you just did an article on

Nicholas De Leon [02:07:21]:
Signal which I think everyone should read. Actually, I didn't write it— a colleague, yes, a colleague of mine. I just wanted to promote it, actually. Uh, yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of stuff happening in the United

Leo Laporte [02:07:30]:
States the past couple weeks.

Nicholas De Leon [02:07:31]:
I don't think we need to go into the details necessarily. Uh, and so a big interest in you know, encrypted communications. I would assume, you know, most of the, uh, This Week in Tech audience is quite familiar with Signal, but the Consumer Reports readership is not necessarily super familiar. So, uh, kind of a primer on the app, why you'd want to use it, what data it— well, doesn't collect,

Leo Laporte [02:07:52]:
uh, that type of thing. So just including metadata, we— you know, uh, a lot of people use WhatsApp. I think probably more people use WhatsApp than any other. I use WhatsApp a lot. Yeah, yeah. But they leak— that leaks metadata. Uh, it's good encryption. It's in fact the same encryption as Signal.

Leo Laporte [02:08:10]:
Uh, but, uh, it does leak metadata,

Sam Abuelsamid [02:08:12]:
whereas Signal does not because they don't have it. Yes, I only use WhatsApp with, uh, with one particular group that set up on WhatsApp instead of Signal.

Leo Laporte [02:08:23]:
And, you know, otherwise I, I wish I could get everybody to use Signal. That's the problem is you can't use a messaging platform that you can't convince

Nicholas De Leon [02:08:31]:
everybody to move to, right? And it's very, you know, I've got a bunch of family, uh, in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and they're— I try asking

Leo Laporte [02:08:38]:
them to leave WhatsApp. It's like, that's not gonna happen. No, that's it, right? That's the one. Uh, I like WhatsApp. I mean, it's better.

Nicholas De Leon [02:08:46]:
It's certainly better than anything, nothing out. But if you know, I don't mind WhatsApp. Yeah, I've actually, with all this open, I really like Telegram.

Leo Laporte [02:08:52]:
I mean, I don't really know the specifics of it. Uh, it's not very well secured, but it's a nice— I love it as a platform. UX app, you know. Oh, it's so much fun.

Nicholas De Leon [02:09:00]:
And yeah, is that how you talk to your OpenClaw? Yeah, uh, the, the first port of call, so to speak, is it sends

Leo Laporte [02:09:07]:
everything to Telegram, and then from Telegram it goes from there. So yeah, that's a lot of people using Telegram for that. I guess it makes it very easy.

Nicholas De Leon [02:09:14]:
There's a bot you can use and set— Yeah, it's, it's, it's super extensible. Yeah, you know, I'm impressed with it.

Leo Laporte [02:09:19]:
So yeah, I can't speak to the security when telling— It's not very secure. In fact, it's not encrypted by fault. So most people are not— well, there you go— encrypted messages. And when it is encrypted, it's using its own proprietary encryption, which no one has been able to figure out. So yeah, so, uh, I would prefer to use Signal, frankly. I wish I could get everybody to move to Signal. Actually, we're going to interview Guy Kawasaki. He just wrote a book about Signal that's on Amazon Unlimited, Kindle Unlimited, uh, as well.

Leo Laporte [02:09:49]:
It's a, it's a whole book about why Signal's better stuff. This is a great place to start though, at Consumer Reports. Is this, uh, available? It is, it's available to the public. I'm not signed in. Yes, yes, yes. Courtly Lindwall: How to use Signal app for secure messaging. Again, Consumer Reports doing the work of the angels. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:10:07]:
Not that Father Robert— not that you're not, but it's just, you know, it's, it's good to have more than one

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:10:12]:
person doing the work of the— I

Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:15]:
do the devil's advocate stuff. I want to be Both, both sides are equally important. I got one on one— you gotta

Leo Laporte [02:10:21]:
keep the angels honest. I got one on the other one, one saying, "Use OpenClaw, use OpenClaw." The other one's saying, "Are you insane?" Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:10:31]:
Do you worry about security at all, Nicholas, for OpenClaw? No, because there's literally nothing on the laptop. I'm not signed into anything.

Leo Laporte [02:10:37]:
Oh, okay. There's nothing, you know, it's— that's what stopped me after I gave it all of my API keys, after I gave it access to all my Google Docs., and my Gmail, I thought I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and came running

Nicholas De Leon [02:10:52]:
up to them and deleted them, the

Sam Abuelsamid [02:10:53]:
account on my— yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:10:54]:
And I saw, I saw too late, already absorbed everything. Too late. The, the skills kind of community skills database is just filled with like shit. I would never, I mean, I mean, I don't know. I don't, I would never download a skill from just some, some random skills. Uh, so yeah. Yeah, but, but, uh, you know, uh, drive with caution. I don't know how else to tell us to put it, you know, use some common sense, I suppose.

Nicholas De Leon [02:11:18]:
But yeah, it's, it's on a laptop

Leo Laporte [02:11:20]:
that there's literally nothing on it. So that's, that's, it's funny. I was watching some YouTube guy on OpenClaw. I think it was actually, it was George Hotz of, uh, comma.ai. Oh, okay. Yeah. George is great. And, uh, Geo Hotz.

Leo Laporte [02:11:33]:
Yeah. And he said, yeah, you know, a year ago we'd say never curl to ba— to a bash prompt, download a file, let bash run it. Never do that. Now we're all doing it. He said just YOLO every day, just YOLO it. Curl to a bash prompt, that's fine. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Well, let me tell you, PayPal— this is, this is our cybersecurity and breach segment, and there's quite a few stories here. Uh, PayPal has disclosed a data breach that's been exposing user info for 6 months, just 6 months.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:12:09]:
But PayPal doesn't know much about you, does it? Yeah, no, this one's pretty bad. This one is— tell us about— so back, uh, in last year, July 1st of 2025, they made an update, a code update, to enable their PayPal Capital, their, their loan program, basically. Uh, and for 6 months until the end of December, it exposed personally identifiable information. So everything from names, addresses, Social Security numbers, account numbers, pretty much anything that you put into PayPal could be accessed. Now, they don't know if the information has actually been accessed. They assume that there are— since there are a couple of instances of fraudulent charges being put onto people's account— that some people actually did, uh, take advantage of the exploit, but they don't really have a, a good breakdown of exactly who took what and what information fled from system. Now, the, the really horrible thing about this is that it took so long for them to tell us. I mean, they absolutely— they knew by the end of last year that there was an issue, that there was some exfiltration of personally identifiable information.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:16]:
And the fact that we're only learning about it in— at towards the end of February, that's terrible.

Leo Laporte [02:13:22]:
That's not great. Yeah, that's not— no.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:24]:
Did they know? They must have known about it. They— I mean, they definitely knew it

Leo Laporte [02:13:28]:
by the end of, of December, because this is the issue. Yeah, uh, I mean, you— the law requires you, as soon as you know

Sam Abuelsamid [02:13:37]:
about it, to reveal it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:40]:
Yeah, it says December 12th, 2025, they identified the error. That's a long break. That's a long pause for people's personal information to be out there. Now they've offered, just like we, we've

Leo Laporte [02:13:51]:
got it every time this happens, they've offered free credit monitoring.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:55]:
They say it's only 100 people?

Leo Laporte [02:13:57]:
I, I mean, that's the problem.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:58]:
Their, their logs don't actually show. They don't know. They don't know. The code was such that it didn't go through any logging. So it could be everyone on PayPal,

Sam Abuelsamid [02:14:08]:
it could be 100 people. You know, my dumbass— to be fair, you know, it does say that this was only part of the, uh, the

Leo Laporte [02:14:16]:
PayPal working capital loan application.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:14:16]:
So not, not— so if you didn't fill one of those out, yeah, so this, yeah, this is a system for small businesses to get, uh, to get loans. So, you know, if you're— if you were involved in that, that, you know— but who knows, you know, if they

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:31]:
got into the rest of PayPal or not. It's not good. They claim that, that there was no egress into their core systems, but the problem is, since they haven't told us what the vulnerability was and we haven't

Leo Laporte [02:14:42]:
been able to examine it, we can't tell. And they didn't know for 6 months, so can you trust what they tell you Nope. No, no, they didn't even know about it. Uh, for a while it was— TP-Link routers were on the do not buy list. Um, TP-Link is a Chinese company, is also the number one router company in America. 65% of the routers in the United States are TP-Link routers, partly because Wirecutter recommended them for years as the best routers too.

Nicholas De Leon [02:15:19]:
Yeah, yeah, and Consumer Reports.

Leo Laporte [02:15:21]:
Yeah, they— I mean, they, they do well. I mean, what can you say? And there's nothing wrong with them except that they're made in China.

Nicholas De Leon [02:15:30]:
Mm-hmm.

Leo Laporte [02:15:30]:
Um, yeah, after 3 separate investigations were opened at the Department of Commerce, Defense, and Justice, it was widely expected the devices would be banned for sale in the U.S. We talked about it. The White House shelved the But Texas says no, this will not stand. So they're suing TP-Link for deceptively marketing the security of their products and allowing Chinese hacking groups to access Americans' devices. Uh, should you buy a TP-Link router?

Nicholas De Leon [02:16:03]:
Is that— are we recommending against them now, or— well, I could say, I mean, I'm on the router beat at CR, so I was, uh, I remember

Sam Abuelsamid [02:16:09]:
when this story broke in the journal

Nicholas De Leon [02:16:10]:
I guess a little more than a year ago, our thinking was, well, until like there's official action, like actually banning an investigation, uh, you know, okay, whatever. So we landed on like, okay, let's— we'll, we'll, you know, uh, steady as she goes, I suppose. Uh, so we didn't really change any recommendations. We didn't, we didn't even really reference the, the investigations about looking into these, uh, potential hacking groups or anything. We just, you know, talked about it normally. Uh, I, I, I I mean, I would buy TP-Link router. I, I, I think I have an ASUS router randomly, but like, I, I would have no problem. I mean, look, my stuff has been

Leo Laporte [02:16:47]:
hacked so many times. Well, that's the thing, so it doesn't— every router, you know, is subject to this. MikroTik, TP-Link, Linksys, we go— I go on and on because they're bugs, and, uh, and people don't update the firmware of their router. They're not even kind of aware of it. Your ASUS updates automatically, which which is

Nicholas De Leon [02:17:05]:
a good thing, as does— yeah, we, we do rate, uh, we give a, a number rating to the router security, and a big part of that weight comes from does the— does the firmware update automatically, right? We want the firmware to update automatically. I know a lot of like nerds like, no, I want to update the firmware on my own, which I understand and I appreciate, but like for the

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:25]:
average person, this stuff should just be updating. Yes, come on. Yes. And by the way, you can install

Leo Laporte [02:17:31]:
OpenWRT and DD-WRT on a TP-Link router. So if— and if you— which would be a good idea, probably— you can't.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:37]:
Yeah. So if you own— I wouldn't, because you, you would lose the advantage of the automatic updates. Uh, because the whole, the whole argument that it must be compromised because components came from China— because it's not assembled in China, it's assembled in Vietnam— is ridiculous. That, that would mean every router— that the Synology routers that I'm

Leo Laporte [02:18:00]:
using have components from China. Everything has components. China— yeah, TP-Link is actually a California-based company now. It was spun off in 2024. Um, not clear why the White House did the about-face, except he was about—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:15]:
this is right before the summit with Xi Jinping. It was a bargaining chip. It was a bargain.

Leo Laporte [02:18:18]:
That's all it was. It was a political bargaining chip. So our advice at this point is, if you're about to buy a router, not to— I don't know what our advice is.

Nicholas De Leon [02:18:29]:
I mean, keep your router up to date is our advice. Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I've talked to a lot of ISPs are now really trying to— well, they're trying to

Leo Laporte [02:18:37]:
get that $5, $10 a month out

Nicholas De Leon [02:18:38]:
of you for— they want you to use theirs. Yeah, but they're trying to add value to it, you know, they're trying to add apps, they're trying to say, oh, you know, we're, we're, uh, we're admining it 24/7, if something happens we've got your back, you don't have to think about it, we've got enhanced parental controls. So they are really really trying to make it so that you don't even think about buying, uh, you know, uh, any sort of router. They really want you to, to— so it's interesting. If you're an everyday consumer, I don't know, I feel like you might as well just get it from your ISP, frankly. But if you're like— if you're having a twit audience, there's a ton of really good routers, uh, you know, UniEuro, ASL, there's a lot of good stuff out there nowadays, actually.

Leo Laporte [02:19:16]:
So, you know, I have to say, CR, check. But, you know, I use my own Ubiquiti router, but I have to use a Comcast cable modem because I have a business Comcast business service and they say you got to use our mode,

Sam Abuelsamid [02:19:27]:
but I don't use the router built into it. I just— yeah, same thing, you know, I have AT&T Fiber that has a Wi-Fi built into it, uh, but because of the layout of my house, you know, it's basically useless, useless, right? Unless I'm in the kitchen. Yeah, I love my Ubiquiti gear. Um, I've got the Nest Wi-Fi Pro uh, which the performance is— the Wi-Fi performance is just so-so, uh, but, um, you know, it, you know, it updates itself, and most of the stuff in

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:19:58]:
the house is wired on Ethernet anyway, so. Right.

Leo Laporte [02:20:01]:
Okay.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:01]:
Hey, TWiT Army, if you're really concerned that your router is spying on you, learn Wireshark, which is a free software. Get yourself a SharkTap, which is not that expensive, and watch every bit of traffic coming in and out of your network. Don't do anything and just watch to see if it's phoning home.

Leo Laporte [02:20:16]:
That's it. It's, it's actually really simple for nerds. I, uh, every once in a while I'll check my fail ban logs and, uh, somebody from China is trying to hack me pretty much 5, 10 times an hour.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:28]:
Yeah, that's normal, right?

Leo Laporte [02:20:29]:
That's— don't get— that's just noise. That's baseline noise on the internet. Yeah, that's what, uh, that's what Steve

Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:36]:
Gibson calls it, internet background radiation. I, I also have a Pi-hole running that I— that's a good installed based

Leo Laporte [02:20:42]:
on the— one of your old know-how videos. That's right, Robert taught us all to use the Pi-hole. Yep, yep. That'll be on your tombstone,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:50]:
Robert. He taught us to use the Pi-hole.

Leo Laporte [02:20:53]:
Yeah, show title: Shut Your Pi-hole. Shut Your Pi— go, turn it on. Open Your Pi-hole. No, don't open it. Close Your Pi-hole. Uh, this was a big story, and, uh, we will cover it Wednesday on Security Now in greater detail. ETH Zurich, which which is a very good, uh, security research firm, uh, did an analysis of the 3 most popular password managers: LastPass, our sponsor Bitwarden, uh, and Dashlane. I think they also did 1Password, as I remember, and said, "You know what? If the servers of these companies were compromised, mm-hmm, your password could be exposed." and it scared a lot of people.

Leo Laporte [02:21:37]:
Now, Steve Gibson is, as I said, going to do a full breakdown of it on Wednesday, but he did say it is not a hair-on-fire moment.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:46]:
I presume, Robert, you've checked into this

Leo Laporte [02:21:48]:
on Tuesday, by the way. Tuesday we have. So Tuesday— what did I say?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:53]:
Wednesday? Yeah, Tuesday. Sorry. Thank you, Benita. Yeah, it— the attack was actually quite novel. I, I like what they did. The, the issue is that it doesn't really expose malfaisance on the part of these companies or incompetence malice on the part of these companies. It's just kind of the way that services work. They're, they're taking advantage of the fact that users have to be able to access this, this data.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:15]:
So if the servers get compromised, yes, yes, the data gets compromised.

Leo Laporte [02:22:22]:
However, compromising those servers is still extremely difficult. Well, and actually it isn't— yes, your data gets compromised because your data is end-to-end encrypted even on their servers, right? Right. It's just easier for them. This is why you probably should use, at least in the case of Bitwarden, a, um, memory-hardened, uh, PBKDF. I use Argon2, which is better than the PBKDF, uh, and you should use as many iterations as it will let you use. All of that will help you. You should use a strong password, uh, that will help you as well. Um, and, uh, at least in the case of our sponsor, uh, Bitwarden, you can run your vault locally.

Leo Laporte [02:23:00]:
You can run— correct. But not that I think my security would be better. I let— I figure Bitwarden's going to do a better job of securing the

Sam Abuelsamid [02:23:09]:
vault than I am, let's put it that way. More likely to.

Leo Laporte [02:23:13]:
Well, we used to think that about LastPass too. Yeah, and LastPass is— that was a big problem.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:23:19]:
LastPass was compromised.

Leo Laporte [02:23:20]:
And, uh, so that's when I switched from LastPass to 1Password. Me too. I switched to Bitwarden for that very reason. And in fact, a number of people with Bitcoin wallets say Now apparently they didn't have— their password derivative function was one iteration, which is the default for a long time on LastPass. So it was easy, relatively easy to crack their passwords. And they claimed their wallets were emptied by people who had the vault. I haven't heard anything recently about that. So maybe they got everything they want.

Leo Laporte [02:23:51]:
The bad guys got everything they wanted. Uh, Bitwarden said Bitwarden's never been breached and believes third-party assessments like these are critical to continue providing state-of-the-art security. In other words, they said thank you— they did in fact say thank you, ETH Zurich, for your insights, uh, and commitment to password security, as did LastPass. Our security team is grateful for the opportunity to engage with ETH. Uh, Dashlane, uh, said in fact, uh, that the problem was the use of legacy cryptography. This is part of the problem, is in order to preserve backward compatibility, a lot of these companies support older, less secure encryption models. Yeah, uh, last— Dashlane says we have removed support for this legacy crypto. These downgrade attacks are no longer possible.

Leo Laporte [02:24:37]:
So the good news is all three companies have responded and, uh, presumably are

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:24:42]:
doing what they can to protect you. And it really is an edge case because it was a malicious, malicious server attack, which uses a server that has

Leo Laporte [02:24:51]:
been owned to force the password managing services to downgrade their encryption. Right. So highly unlikely, although as you pointed out, it did happen. It happened to our former sponsor. Um, all right, so yeah, I thought we should talk about it here just because I'm sure people have seen the story and are concerned. Steve said it's not a cause for

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:25:15]:
concern, but we will go in depth on SecurityNow. Actually, it's a cause for celebration. Because you had a researching entity, ETH, which did responsible disclosure, and you had 3 vendors who did responsible responses. That's, that's how it's supposed to work, right? I mean, this should not be a, a red carpet moment for, for bad actors.

Leo Laporte [02:25:36]:
This is just how it should work in the security field. Yeah. And by the way, uh, I checked my Bitcoin wallet. I wish it had been emptied. At least somebody would get my Bitcoin, but no, it It's still got— someone took all my Dogecoin.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:25:50]:
Somebody took your Dogecoin? No, you sold it.

Leo Laporte [02:25:52]:
You sold it. I sold that long ago.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:25:54]:
Did you make a killing on the Doge? I did. I didn't sell it at the highest,

Leo Laporte [02:25:59]:
but I sold it pretty high. So that's nice. Yeah. Uh, speaking of problems, the entire Mississippi health system was shut down. Clinics had to be shut down statewide due to ransomware. Uh, I don't normally do these stories, uh, but it's kind of good once in a while to remind you this is out there. The attack was launched on Thursday, compromised the medical center's systems, its electronic health records platform, and its IT network.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:28]:
They had

Leo Laporte [02:26:32]:
to shut down all the

Sam Abuelsamid [02:26:36]:
clinics across the state. Bad guys, stop attacking hospitals. Do you guys watch, uh, The Pit? It is— was this— that's, that's the storyline that just came up on the most recent episode. Really?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:48]:
Yeah, a ransomware attack against a hospital, actually against multiple hospitals. Will always be an IT sore because you, you don't want to put patient

Leo Laporte [02:27:03]:
safety against password security, right? It's— I'm— no, so So come on, let's get some honor among these thieves.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:27:10]:
You know, just stop attacking schools, hospitals, city governments.

Leo Laporte [02:27:13]:
British NHS went down for how long because their system was attacked? Go, go ahead and attack Jaguar, that's fine, or whatever.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:27:20]:
Who was it that was brought— Rolls-Royce? It was Jaguar Land Rover. Tata bought Jaguar and then they, they hired their own cybersecurity firm which was garbage. Bridge. The entire network was flat, which meant

Leo Laporte [02:27:31]:
you got in one place, you got everything. You got it all. Yay! And they, uh, and they asked for a handout from the

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:27:38]:
British government because

Sam Abuelsamid [02:27:39]:
they were down for a month. That's a— that's pricey. So it's okay because they weren't building any Jaguars anyway. I mean, they— what were they building? Just, just some Land Rovers. But no, they, they ended production of everything except the F-Pace last year, or

Leo Laporte [02:27:55]:
no, like over a year Oh, so

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:27:58]:
I can't buy that. I want an electric

Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:02]:
XKE. Sam, do you like the new Jaguar logo?

Leo Laporte [02:28:06]:
I am, I am not a fan. That's what I thought. Uh, fake job recruiters hid malware in developer coding challenges. Oh no, this is from the Reg. I love the Reg. Actually, Bleeping Computer. Sorry about about that. A new variation of the fake recruiter campaign from North Korean threat actors targeting JavaScript and Python developers with cryptocurrency-related challenges.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:39]:
Solve those challenges, win big prizes. So let me, let me ask a question that's somewhat related to this. If these guys were to start putting some of this malicious code out there into the ether and we're getting AI models like Claude Code and Codex and whatever else trained on this stuff that's floating around out there. What, you know, what do you think the odds are that we're going to start seeing some of this malware appearing

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:29:13]:
in code that's been generated by these various systems? On purpose, yes, 100%. I mean, we already do that at DEF CON. DEF CON— yeah, some AI suites are

Leo Laporte [02:29:22]:
really good at generating exploits. They're also very good at detecting it. You remember when, uh, um, Anthropic released their latest model, they set it off with some basic tools, nothing even very fancy, Python, uh, interpreter and some basic tools. They found 500 vulnerabilities abilities in open source projects.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:29:43]:
Yeah, they can be used, but, you know, it's too good poisoning the well. And we— yeah, I mean, we proved long ago that it's, it's actually pretty easy to poison an AI well.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:29:51]:
Okay, I think, you know, I think in the long run, for somebody like

Leo Laporte [02:29:57]:
Populous, you know, creating, creating his— they're not going to include malware by accident in code. The good news is, is I think modern AI models are much less likely to buffer overflows and other common programmer errors. They're not going to assume— make the assumptions humans make all the time.

Nicholas De Leon [02:30:15]:
They know better. So I think it's going to be a net gain as well. I see this discussion on X, like you said, Leo, there's a lot of AI discussion on X still, uh, oh, all, all unsecured code. It's like, where have these people been the past 30 years with human— humans are the worst. Like, come on. Like, I understand what they're saying, of course, but like, let's not pretend humans

Leo Laporte [02:30:36]:
are like awesome at this either. No, uh, here's some good news. Uh, Dutch Defense Secretary— remember that there was some concern about buying the US F-35 fighter plane because there was a kill switch, and you know, EU, our EU allies were a little worried they're going to spend billions of dollars on this plane and then the US would say, oh, you can't use it anymore. Well, here's some good news. Dutch Defense Secretary says, ah, don't worry about it, F-35 software can be jailbroken.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:31:07]:
Broken, like a phone?

Leo Laporte [02:31:08]:
I mean, yes, yes, you can, but

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:31:11]:
the primary— would you fly in a jailbroken jet? I don't know. It's an information weapon. The F-35 links up so many different information sources to give the pilot a better view of the battlefield. So if you jailbreak it, you're cutting yourself off from a lot of those information services, which means it— now it's just a plane.

Leo Laporte [02:31:29]:
It's not really an information platform. The, the, uh, I wish I could— I I could do a Dutch accent. I won't. I'll save you. Uh, the Dutch defense minister said, "If despite everything you still want to upgrade, I'm going to say something I should never say, but I will anyway.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:31:46]:
You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone." Just, we just— it's certainly, it's certainly possible that, uh, you know, uh, the other countries that are buying these could essentially write their own software um, you know, and essentially create their own firmware for the F-35, um, and replicate the kinds of capabilities that it has from the factory, from, from Lockheed Martin, um, you know, and provide that networking capabilities. And in fact, you know, they, they

Leo Laporte [02:32:19]:
may want to consider doing this anyway, uh, just jailbreak the damn thing. Then you could put, you know, Candy Crush on it and you can really enjoy your flight next time. We have a lot of Dutch listeners,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:32:37]:
so they're very happy now. You know, Leo, they need to bring back that, uh, the PSA ads from 2004. You wouldn't download a car.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:32:45]:
Oh, remember those?

Leo Laporte [02:32:46]:
You wouldn't fly a jailbreak. You go to a movie and they would say, you know, you're a crook 'Look, so stop! I just paid $25 to see this

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:32:58]:
movie and you're accusing me of pirating it?'

Leo Laporte [02:33:02]:
I wonder if the F-35 has an app store. No, just use F-Droid, it's okay. Let's take a little break, uh, and then we have a few final words to wrap up this fabulous edition. I hate to break up a good thing, but I smell spaghetti. My wife's making spaghetti sauce downstairs. So I can smell it, and that's good. It's good. I bet you smell some good things up there in your little area in

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:28]:
Rome, Father Robert

Leo Laporte [02:33:31]:
Balaserre. Uh, depends which way the wind is blowing. As always, as always, Robert is coming to us from the Vatican— Vatican City.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:40]:
Are you in Vatican City? No, no, no, no, no. Vatican City is on the other side of this wall.

Leo Laporte [02:33:44]:
So you're in the Vatican. We're not in Vatican City. Oh, you're in the —can I— I'm confused.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:50]:
So you're not in Italy either? No. Yeah, so our— this entire property, our entire campus is zona extraterritoriale, so it's not part of Italy, right? In fact, the police can't come into

Leo Laporte [02:34:01]:
our, our campus without permission of our Secretary of State. Wow. But you do have Vatican— attractively dressed Vatican guards.

Nicholas De Leon [02:34:08]:
Oh, of course.

Leo Laporte [02:34:09]:
Swiss Guards to protect you. We've got the Swiss Guard. Yeah. Uh, But I don't understand the distinction

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:34:17]:
between the Vatican and Vatican City. Uh, so the Vatican just means Vatican property. Yeah, there are, there are different locations around the city of Rome that are Vatican property. Castle Gandolfo is Vatican property. Jesu is Vatican property, right? Uh, the Civita is, uh, is Vatican property. We are Vatican property. However, Vatican City is only what I guess you'd consider uh, St. Peter's and the Vatican Museums and that compound around the garden.

Leo Laporte [02:34:46]:
There's an actual wall around it, so yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:34:49]:
And, and, and, uh, who lives there? Just the Pope? Uh, the— there's about 1,000 people. So that includes the Pope, that includes

Leo Laporte [02:34:56]:
the Swiss Guard, that includes a couple of— do they look down at you,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:00]:
uh, because you don't— you're not in the city? They envy us because it's so much easier for me to go to my

Leo Laporte [02:35:04]:
house than it is for them to go to stairs. Oh, they have to go through a

Sam Abuelsamid [02:35:08]:
bunch, a bunch of checkpoints. I'd have to go through border control

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:11]:
or, you know, passport control. And they— no, I actually, I have asked if I can get the Vatican stamp so I can stamp passports as people are coming into our house.

Leo Laporte [02:35:20]:
I would love that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:24]:
That would be awesome. Oh, please, please.

Leo Laporte [02:35:27]:
Well, anyway, many of my, my, uh, recommendations, uh, Jesuit Pilgrimage is the app if you want to follow the Jesuit pilgrimage.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:37]:
Uh, anything else you want to plug? Uh, I— we've got something big coming

Leo Laporte [02:35:40]:
up, but it's not ready yet, so no. Okay, stay tabbed. Well, of course, and you could follow Padre SJ on your Blue Sky.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:48]:
Is that the best place to follow your stuff? It, it really is. Okay, although mostly it's just, uh, cats

Leo Laporte [02:35:54]:
and rants about what's going on in the US.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:35:58]:
The Vaticats are still going, right? They're still going. Oh, uh, one of the Twit me— sent me a link. There's a game, uh, an Indiana Jones video game. Yeah, one of the missions is to go

Leo Laporte [02:36:13]:
inside the Vatican and take pictures of cats.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:36:16]:
So, hmm, Italy is funny about its cats. It is. Hey, yeah, speaking of Indiana Jones, do you guys watch Shrinking? There in the latest episode, there was

Leo Laporte [02:36:24]:
a fun little Indiana Jones Easter egg in there because Harrison Ford, of course, is the star of Drinking.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:36:30]:
Did he refer to Indiana Jones or something?

Leo Laporte [02:36:32]:
Not explicitly. You'll have to watch it too.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:36:34]:
You have to know. It's like an Easter egg. Yeah, my wife— no, you— my wife didn't— my wife didn't realize what it was.

Leo Laporte [02:36:42]:
I, I explained to her what it was. I— that's actually a very funny show. It reminds me I should— I should be watching that. Samable Samed's podcast is called Wheel Bearings, and you can find it at wheelbearings.media with Nicole and Robbie. He's also VC— VP of research at Telemetry.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:36:57]:
What you on these days? Uh, I've got a brand new, um, white paper coming out this week on automated trucking. Oh, so check the telemetryagency.com website, uh,

Leo Laporte [02:37:10]:
probably tomorrow or the day after.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:37:14]:
Didn't the president, uh, pardon the guy who, uh, scammed everybody with— uh, Anthony Lewandowski? Uh, yes, I believe that, uh, that

Leo Laporte [02:37:24]:
He pardoned him during the first administration.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:37:27]:
Oh, okay. Yeah, it's hard to keep track. But, uh, yeah, no, this, this is, this is all— yeah, this report is

Leo Laporte [02:37:32]:
about automated trucking and, you know, kind

Sam Abuelsamid [02:37:34]:
of the— is it coming soon to a highway near me? Uh, it's, it's, uh, probably not near you, not in California anytime soon because they still don't allow automated trucks, uh, without safety drivers. And actually, they don't allow automated trucks at all on public roads in California, uh, but they are running in Texas. Aurora's got a fleet of them doing runs between Houston and Dallas and El Paso and expanding to New Mexico soon. There's several other companies including Plus and, uh, Wabi and Kodiak that are running them, and, uh, within the next year or so they'll be going driverless. Aurora is the first one to go driverless, um, and, uh, there's, there's several others, uh, that will be be coming

Leo Laporte [02:38:19]:
to market over the next, uh, 12 to 24 months.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:38:24]:
Okay, but not in California. That's interesting. Yeah, California has been the most restrictive when it comes to trucks, um, automated trucks, uh, but in large part because

Leo Laporte [02:38:35]:
of pushback from, uh, the, uh, Teamsters Union. Oh, of course. Yeah, it's the same reason, uh, Nevada is, uh, suing um, online gambling.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:38:47]:
Online, yeah, constantly.

Leo Laporte [02:38:48]:
Uh, oh, there was— who wants competition, right? Yeah, nobody wants competition. Yeah. And of course, our good friend Nicholas DeLeon, newlywed.

Nicholas De Leon [02:38:55]:
You're still a newlywed, you know, for a year. Is it— is that the rule? Yeah. All right then.

Leo Laporte [02:39:00]:
I mean, it's been 2 months, so— send gifts tomorrow. 2 months tomorrow, you better have an anniversary gift prepared. How many of those do I have? Oh man, it never ends. Let me tell you, I thought when I married Lisa I thought, oh, we'll get married on our birthday, that'll cut

Nicholas De Leon [02:39:15]:
down on the number of presents. But no, right?

Leo Laporte [02:39:16]:
No, it just means you got to buy twice as many. Twice as many. You guys got married— was it Christmas Day?

Nicholas De Leon [02:39:22]:
I know it was Christmas.

Leo Laporte [02:39:24]:
Two days, two days before Christmas, 23rd.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:39:27]:
23rd in Vegas? Yes, sir.

Leo Laporte [02:39:29]:
Yes.

Nicholas De Leon [02:39:29]:
Did Elvis marry you? You must know this. Uh, no, it wasn't Elvis. This was, this was— I let Ashley, uh, direct this, uh, movie, so to speak. And so that's what she wanted to do. We initially were going to have, you know, it was a small ceremony.

Leo Laporte [02:39:43]:
Ceremony.

Nicholas De Leon [02:39:43]:
We were originally going to have, you know, some friends, some family, but it got very hectic very quickly. And so Ashley was like, "Yeah, no,

Leo Laporte [02:39:51]:
actually it will literally be me and Nicholas." And good.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:39:53]:
Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte [02:39:53]:
And I did— yeah, that's the way to do it. We got— we took the, uh, uh, we had a little hotel which has since burned to the ground in the Napa fires, but it was a— it was a very nice place. And, uh, we did their— they had an elopement package. This is— this is now —11 years ago—an elopement package. So we said, oh, we'll do that. And it included a bartender and hors d'oeuvres and everything. But it was just me, Lisa, the minister. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:40:21]:
The poor person passing the hors d'oeuvres would go, would you like an hors d'oeuvre? To Lisa. And then, would you like an hors d'oeuvre? To me. And then back to Lisa. Would you like an hors d'oeuvre?

Sam Abuelsamid [02:40:33]:
The bartender just sat there, uh, It's okay, it was good. My wife and I did it on the, on the beach in Kauai. Oh, just, just the guy who married us, his wife as a witness, because you only require one witness in Hawaii, and a photographer.

Leo Laporte [02:40:45]:
So 5 of us. See, I would ask Robert, but I

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:40:49]:
don't think he's eligible. So I've done— I've performed several fun weddings. I bet you have. On a, on a catamaran, uh, in the— off of Hawaii, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, on a cargo ship.

Leo Laporte [02:41:01]:
Um, Antarctica. That was fun.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:41:03]:
What?

Nicholas De Leon [02:41:05]:
Oh, really? Married people in Antarctica? Yep.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:41:07]:
Donna

Nicholas De Leon [02:41:09]:
McMurdo.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:41:09]:
Whose jurisdiction is that? The church's, I guess. Um, was actually part of the Diocese

Leo Laporte [02:41:15]:
of Christchurch, New Zealand. Okay, that makes sense. And how were you— how did it

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:41:18]:
come about that you were there? I was doing a project and, um,

Leo Laporte [02:41:22]:
they needed a priest, so I'm like, hey, somebody said, quick, Robert, we need

Sam Abuelsamid [02:41:26]:
to get married Get the— call the

Leo Laporte [02:41:28]:
guy with the collar. Somebody wants to get hitched quick.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:41:33]:
Hurry up. Well, I didn't know that, Robert. The chapel that we did it at, it's gone. It burned down. It was Our Lady of the Snows. It's burnt down like 6 times.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:41:39]:
I don't know what's going on.

Leo Laporte [02:41:43]:
How does that happen in Antarctica? Uh, normally candles. Oh yeah, you're just trying to stay warm and one thing leads to another. Yeah, our— the, the place we got married burned to the ground too. I mean, seeing a theme. Yeah, yeah, trend here. Uh, anyway, congratulations, Nicholas, and yes, get the presents ready.

Nicholas De Leon [02:42:01]:
And any— what are you working on right now? Uh, oh, uh, speaking of AI, actually, I'll plug it really quickly. I, I haven't started writing it yet, uh, but I'm gonna be writing this week an article, uh, I put on a bunch of weight in 2023, '24, you know, uh, I was literally like like 195 pounds last September. I'm 5'9", so that's way— it's way too big for my frame. So I was like, all right, I gotta lose some weight here. I use Gemini, uh, I say, hey Gemini, I gotta lose some weight, uh, what do I do? Uh, we went back and forth and we created, uh, not a— not necessarily a diet plan, but more like an exercise regimen, uh, foods to eat. I'm down about 26 pounds.

Leo Laporte [02:42:41]:
It worked from October 1st, let's call

Sam Abuelsamid [02:42:45]:
it.

Nicholas De Leon [02:42:45]:
That's like the, uh, that's like the ChatGPT It really worked. I mean, it's— look, I, I realize I, I built a little home. We had a spare room, so I built like a little, uh, power rack thing. You know, I'm lucky I work from home. I don't have a commute. I had the spare room.

Leo Laporte [02:42:58]:
I had the money to build a

Nicholas De Leon [02:43:02]:
little— you don't have a wife downstairs making bolognese? Uh, I'm the— and that's just— I cook 6 times a week. I'm the cook. Oh, you're the cook? I cook 6 times a week. Uh, you know, we don't do DoorDash or any of that stuff. We might, we might get a pizza on a Saturday or something. So I'm kind of in control of the diet. We go to Costco every month, so So it's— we're eating whole foods, good foods. Uh, so yeah, between, between just kind of like, uh, maybe increasing my protein, uh, intake and watching what I'm eating and, and walking and exercising, I'm down, you know, by the time this article is published in, you know, a week or two, it'll be around 30 pounds.

Nicholas De Leon [02:43:34]:
Wow. So the headline is kind of like, you know, you know, AI helped me

Leo Laporte [02:43:38]:
lose 30 pounds, or, you know, what, whatever the case may be. I

Nicholas De Leon [02:43:43]:
could write an article, AI helped me

Leo Laporte [02:43:48]:
lose sleep. I could, I could ask my editor. You know what, give yourself a little credit, Nicholas. The AI can recommend, you did all

Nicholas De Leon [02:43:56]:
the work, you followed the rules. I, I understand. I mean, that was— and it's— I can't publish the entire conversation, it, you know, it's long and, and insane. But like, you know, I do realize that like, yeah, I'm the one in there lifting the weights, I'm one, you know, ensuring that I'm eating, you know, it's— you did it. Yeah, I did it. I, I'm very— I don't mind eating, oh, chicken breast twice a week. I don't— I, I enjoy repetitive things. I don't know what else to say.

Nicholas De Leon [02:44:21]:
So it's like, oh, I have— well, the, the problem I always had with like exercise was ever was like, okay, how much weight do I lift? How many reps? How many— when should I increase the weight? That was— do I stay on this for 2 weeks?

Leo Laporte [02:44:32]:
Do I say it is like— I had no idea.

Nicholas De Leon [02:44:36]:
So Gemini was like, yeah, information is valuable.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:44:38]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:44:38]:
And so I actually— I followed it to a T. So I should take it back, AI did help me lose

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:44:47]:
weight in my wallet.

Leo Laporte [02:44:48]:
Uh, does that count? I mean, mass is mass, I guess. Yeah. Uh, Nicholas DeLeon, Consumer Reports senior technology reporter, great to have you as well. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. Have you ever thought of starting your own business. You got a great idea, but those pesky little details can get in the way. How do you charge people? Who's going to design your website? How do you handle fulfillment? I know what it's like. I've been there.

Leo Laporte [02:45:16]:
In fact, I've watched my own kids doing exactly this— start their own business. But you know what? They got it done with Shopify. Oh, Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started like like, like my kids, you know, salt hanks, salt lovers club, that whole thing. Shopify helped him build a beautiful online store that matches his brand's unique style, and they can do exactly the same for you. Shopify also helps with marketing, easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything. And of course, let's not forget that iconic purple Shop Pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet.

Leo Laporte [02:46:06]:
It's time to turn those what-ifs into— with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial right now at shopify.com/twit. Go to shopify.com/twit. That's shopify.com/twit. Worked for my kid. It's nice to not have to send him an allowance. Shopify.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:46:28]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:46:29]:
Thank you, Shopify. I love this story. I don't know, it's not really— it— Tom's Hardware, clever. This is a clever idea. In a blind test, blindfolded test with audiophiles— you know how audiophiles, golden ears, I can tell that that $3,000 cable is gonna sound better. Audiophiles in a blind test couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire a banana, or wet mud? The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't. There's a pickle. Uh, it's actually— the credit goes to DIY Audio.

Leo Laporte [02:47:12]:
Uh, moderator there set up an experiment. Uh, Pano, the moderator, invited other members on the forum. See, these are people who go to this forum from their golden ears to listen to various sound clips with 4 different versions, one from the original CD, the other 3 recorded through 180 centimeters of pro audio copper wire, 20 centimeters of wet mud, 120 centimeters of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, which by the way are not copper, they're zinc, right, with a little copper and via a 13-centimeter banana. Initial tests show it's extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. The sounds— the amazing thing, says Pano, is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound awful, but it doesn't. I guess they all conduct, right? Here's the— here's the— here's the mud setup. It's like Um, so, uh, basically, after waiting a month for testers to submit the results, the results were tabulated.

Leo Laporte [02:48:24]:
And, uh, boy, you know, even flipping a coin might have produced a better result. There are only

Sam Abuelsamid [02:48:36]:
6 correct answers out of 43 guesses. 13.95% accurate. Uh,

Leo Laporte [02:48:41]:
keep, keep going out and buying that gold wire. Uh, okay.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:48:46]:
I just, you know, mud, if it's wet enough. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to change the audiophile's minds. They, they've already made the excuses for why this is a poor experiment and their setup really works much better and they can hear— and you know what, if they draw with a green Sharpie

Sam Abuelsamid [02:49:01]:
on the back of their CDs, it sounds better. Yeah. Bingo. And, uh, you know, I mean, I— to be fair, I

Leo Laporte [02:49:09]:
have heard some awfully muddy audio through certain headphones. They use Joe Jackson.

Nicholas De Leon [02:49:12]:
Somebody says, oh nice, they use Joe Jackson. Yeah, I have to say, I, I have to send this article to my dad because he's, he's like an aspirational audiophile, I guess you could say. Uh, he used to subscribe to Sound and Vision magazine. That was the first like tech thing that I read as like a 9, 10-year-old. I had no idea that like that stuff existed. And so that was really my introduction

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:49:34]:
to technology, so to speak, that magazine. You're not a real audiophile unless you've taken out a second mortgage to buy some Monster cables.

Leo Laporte [02:49:41]:
Let's just— I put it out there. Yeah, I've heard that. You know, ironically, distilled water does not conduct very well at all, but if you put a little mud in it, it does a much better job. Ironically, even a banana, uh, Uh, this is something for you as the cook of the family, Nicholas. Uh, lab-grown meat exists, but nobody wants to eat it. Yeah, I always thought this would be the solution, right, to global warming, to, uh, food hung— you know, hunger. Uh, the FDA has approved cultivated chicken Uh, for sale in 2023, the price down to about $10 to $30 a pound. It's expensive.

Leo Laporte [02:50:30]:
A lot of investors— $3 billion in investor money imported into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells. So you take animal cells, you grow them in a vat, right? So it's real, it's real meat, but you don't have an animal attached. You don't have to slaughter anything. Uh, you can eat beef without killing cattle, writes Digital Dive, chicken without industrial farming, steak without ethical compromise. The technology works. Federal regulators have approved it as safe. Nearly a third of

Sam Abuelsamid [02:51:00]:
U.S. states have banned it or are trying to. And I would, I would assume that

Leo Laporte [02:51:05]:
states like, you know, Iowa, Nebraska— yeah, where they grow meat. Yeah, um, yeah, cattle states are trying. I honestly, I— we've all tried the Impossible Burger and stuff like that. That's not, you know, those aren't bad. This is actually better environmentally. A lot of those fake meat substitutes actually are very messy. There's only 3 places that you can buy cultivated meat: Singapore, Australia, and parts of the United States. Mission Barns sold cultivated pork meatballs at a California grocery store for $13.99.

Leo Laporte [02:51:46]:
That might be part of it. It's still expens— more expensive. Yeah, a handful of U.S. restaurants serve, uh, wild types cultivated salmon. That's not farmed salmon. It's not a fish. It's, it's grown in a

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:52:04]:
vat. Um, yeah, I think we've missed out here. As soon as it comes down in price, it will become popular. The problem is regular meat will cost you between $4 and $20 a pound, and this is going to cost you

Sam Abuelsamid [02:52:14]:
between $10 and $30 a pound. It's a lot more expensive.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:52:20]:
Yeah, and America— Americans love cheap food. That's the truth. Yes, but the real question, Leo, is what would it sound

Leo Laporte [02:52:28]:
like if you played an MP3 through the meat? I bet meat conducts pretty well. Yeah, better than mud. Clear as mud. So, uh, Digital Dive writes, you could still go to jail in Mississippi for selling a chicken nugget grown in a bioreactor instead of cut from a slaughtered bird. Oh, finally, I think this is just for historical reasons quite interesting. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. He was a physicist working at CERN, the, uh, the organization— European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. He was, uh, as a scientist, wanted to share his papers with other scientists, and he invented the whole idea of hyperlinking, the ability to click on a link and go to another page, because he thought that— and by the way, in his earliest conception, everybody looking at the page could edit the page.

Leo Laporte [02:53:22]:
It was more like a wiki because he wanted scientists to be able to collaborate. Uh, maybe you've always wondered what it looked like, the original World Wide Web. Now CERN has put it online Actually, they did in 2019. Uh, this is the world— you, you launch the World Wide Web browser and you can actually see what it looked

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:53:47]:
like in the good old days.

Leo Laporte [02:53:48]:
Uh, is it sad that I, I actually remember this? Do you remember it?

Sam Abuelsamid [02:53:54]:
Right, 1989. My gosh, this, this was the time.

Leo Laporte [02:53:57]:
You see right now if it can open twit.tv.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:53:59]:
Oh, that's a good question.

Leo Laporte [02:54:00]:
It's just, it's sitting there connecting. Connecting, connecting, connect it. I think JavaScript is probably, uh, killing it. It was done on a NeXT machine, so there's a whole NeXT-related subsection. Here's general CERN information sources, software technology interest group news. It's got a menuing system, I guess, all in HTML, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:54:24]:
You don't— I mean, that's pretty impressive. Can we get the internet? I just remember 1999. Out. Yeah, I didn't find it very interesting.

Leo Laporte [02:54:31]:
A gopher for me was the thing that got me— yeah, I— so I was thinking about, have I, uh, ever experienced in my 40 years of covering technology, have I ever experienced anything quite as exciting and revolutionary as AI today? And the only thing that comes to mind is the first time I experienced the internet, not the World Wide web, right? The internet. I was using a, uh, bulletin board system called The Well out of San Francisco, the Whole Earth Electronic Link that was created by Stewart Brand. And it turned out it was running on Unix machines. And if you knew the command in the— you were in the forums, if you knew the command, you could drop out of the forum onto a Unix command prompt where you could run Gopher and Archie and, and be on the internet. Now the internet in— this must have been late '80s. No, it was before the web, so it must have been mid-'80s. There wasn't a lot going on, but I was even then like, wow, this is— there's all these people, there's all this stuff, there are all these resources, and I can get to it directly. This is amazing.

Leo Laporte [02:55:40]:
That was the first time I felt that. And this is— this AI thing is— I think it's even maybe more more remarkable. But that's the only other thing I can remember is my first experience of the internet. Nicholas DeLeon, everybody should get their Tucson

Nicholas De Leon [02:55:59]:
news from his, his clanker. Yes, clanker, clanking away. Yeah, I just got the 6 PM. So I get— it goes at 6 AM and the whole pipeline goes off for everyone, and at 6 PM I get just a personal one on Telegram. I don't need— Tucson's pretty small, you don't need two, uh, two feeds, roundups.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:56:14]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:56:14]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [02:56:14]:
Uh, and it worked great.

Nicholas De Leon [02:56:16]:
It, uh, just, so it's— Isn't it awesome? You said, like, you know, TucsonDailyBrief.com, uh, is the, the blog version. If you scroll to the bottom, there's

Leo Laporte [02:56:24]:
the podcast link and the YouTube link and, and that's it. Now, next, next step will be to

Nicholas De Leon [02:56:30]:
have a, uh, a video of you. I was thinking, like, uh, how do I— I'm less familiar with the video generating, uh, models. Uh, but that would, yeah, of course that

Sam Abuelsamid [02:56:40]:
would be, you know, something to

Nicholas De Leon [02:56:42]:
go along with, uh,, uh, with the,

Leo Laporte [02:56:45]:
with the audio podcast and YouTube.

Nicholas De Leon [02:56:46]:
So yeah, Tucson is spelled with an

Leo Laporte [02:56:49]:
extra C, I should mention. T-U-C. Yeah, I guess that nobody— you know how to spell it, but no one in the world. It's almost as bad as Albuquerque. What is it with New Mexico? Or Ypsilanti, or the South Pacific— the Southwest. Ypsilanti.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:57:08]:
I— everybody knows how to spell Ypsilanti. Y-P-R-E-S-A- L-A-N-T-I-X-Y-Z, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:57:11]:
Well, you got the YP right. Kind of went off the rails.

Leo Laporte [02:57:15]:
But isn't Ypsilanti the, the placeholder whenever you have those templates? Is it? Ypsilanti pops up. It's better than Sault Ste. Marie, I'm just saying. That's true. Uh, Mr. Sam Abul-Samad— everybody knows how to spell that. He's at Wheel Bearings Media, BP Research Telemetry.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:57:33]:
Thank you, Sam, so much. Great to see you too.

Leo Laporte [02:57:35]:
Thank you for having me back on again. This was always— I love having you on. Yeah, Sam and I— actually, all three of you— I like exchanging emails with you guys. These are my buds. Father Robert Balassiere, the Digital Jesuit, uh, still stuck at the Vatican. They won't let him go home.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:57:53]:
It will not, will not. They love you, that's why. Well, I don't— I think it comes down to familiarity. I've been here so long that they

Sam Abuelsamid [02:57:59]:
kind of just know that I'm gonna be up on the roof doing my thing.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:58:02]:
I'm just going to maintain the servers

Leo Laporte [02:58:04]:
if they let you go. I remember— we've got people for that. I remember when they called you.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:58:10]:
You can't say no. I mean, you know, uh, I said no 3 times.

Leo Laporte [02:58:16]:
You tried. I— and then, and then, yeah, they, they— and, uh, and you thought maybe just be a few years, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:58:21]:
I thought it would be 1 year.

Leo Laporte [02:58:24]:
How long has it been?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:58:28]:
Uh, this is year 8. And is an, an insider. I, uh, every time I try to plan that, uh, fate laughs at me. I, I've even brought people into the team who each take part of my

Leo Laporte [02:58:40]:
responsibility, and they haven't gotten the hint that they don't need me here anymore. Robert, you might as well just accept it. This is your calling.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:58:49]:
This is your calling, Robert. You're doing good work.

Leo Laporte [02:58:51]:
It's not a bad city to be stuck in. I mean, Rome is beautiful. Oh man, I I would, I would love to live in Rome. I'm so jealous. Eh. I've told Lisa, I've said, "I wanna move to Rome."

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:59:04]:
She says, "No."

Leo Laporte [02:59:05]:
See, you love the history, you love the food. I— It doesn't knock you out, does it? It doesn't. It really doesn't. I was, every time I would go around a corner in Rome, there's this something, there's a beautiful church or a painting or, and you go, "Oh my God, this is history." I'll never forget. Forget, we're walking, we got lost, we're walking and there's like a hole in the ground and there are all these cats in the hole in the ground. I walk over, yes, and it's where they— where Julius Caesar was murdered.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:59:32]:
It's the— it's the Forum. Yep, yep. It's just a hole.

Sam Abuelsamid [02:59:35]:
That's one block away from our big church, the Jesu. So yeah, this is right there. Hey Robert, it could be worse.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:59:43]:
You, you could be assigned to like Dallas or Jacksonville. It's, it's okay, this is true, Houston. But, but I do like— not always now, but I do like the culture in the United States. I like the fact that there's a big mix. I can— you can get any sort of cuisine anywhere you want, uh, and, and honestly, history is lost on me.

Leo Laporte [03:00:01]:
I'm not a history person, and I feel bad because I wish I was.

Nicholas De Leon [03:00:09]:
Yeah, you're surrounded by 2,000 years of amazing, amazing history.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:00:11]:
It's okay.

Nicholas De Leon [03:00:11]:
You would never get any work done if you were though, Padre.

Leo Laporte [03:00:15]:
You'd just be like, you know, that's true. There's a shopping mall in Rome, you go in, our tour guide brought us in there. And there's just the remains of a Roman aqueduct. They said, yeah, every time you try to build anything in Rome, you have to dig and then of course, you're gonna get a ruin. Yep. And they said, well, you can build them all here, but you've got to get— you've got to put an exhibit where the aqueduct is so that people can see it. So there's this like, muse— little museum in the shopping mall where they an old Roman aqueduct.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:00:43]:
It's really amazing to see. Well, across the street right now, there's a massive construction project. I— they actually put a crane up. I've never seen one of those in Rome. It's the, uh, the future Four Seasons Hotel that Bill Gates' investment company bought. And 6 years ago, after they, they got the lease, they started excavating the courtyard because they wanted to make a multi-purpose area, and they found the remains of Nero's theater. Great. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:01:09]:
And so now they've just finally gotten permission. They've, they've repacked it, and then they've capped it with a layer of concrete

Leo Laporte [03:01:15]:
to, to preserve it. And, uh, can you go down underneath

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:01:19]:
and see it, or do they bury it? Well, the public can't. However, it extends underneath our property, so if you go down the elevator shaft

Leo Laporte [03:01:28]:
of our building, you actually can get into it. Okay, I'm now definitely coming out. Yeah, that's one of the things that surprised High-speed rail, there's no high-rises. No, because you cannot do it. Well, it's so great to see all three of you. Thank you for making this a special show for me. I appreciate it, and I hope to see you again soon. We do TWiD every Sunday afternoon, 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern.

Leo Laporte [03:01:56]:
Are we gonna switch time zones? Not, uh, not next week, the week after, I think. We go back to, uh, summertime daylight savings time. But for now, 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern, 2200 UTC. We stream live in the Club Twit Discord. I hope you remember. If you're not, please, we'd love to have you. twit.tv/clubtwit. You get ad-free versions of all the shows.

Leo Laporte [03:02:21]:
You get access to the Club Twit disco, which amazingly enough is 13 stories below the ground, right next to Nero's Twitter. And, uh, in there we stream all the shows, so you can watch them there. We have special programming just for club members. Find out more at twit.tv/clubtwip. We also stream for the world at large at YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. So do watch live if you want. You don't have to. On-demand versions of the show available.

Leo Laporte [03:02:52]:
There's audio and video, your choice, at twit.tv, our website. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Twit, and of course of course, you can always, uh, subscribe in your favorite podcast player, and that way you'll get it automatically the minute we put it out, which will be in just a couple hours because Benito and Kevin have to polish it up. Uh, thank you for being here, everybody. 20 years we've been doing it. I'm, I'm looking for another 20 more, and then after that it'll be my AI avatar for another thousand more. But I hope it will do as I have done for the last 20 years and say thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.