This Week in Tech 974 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT. This Week in Tech, a live studio audience for the first time in four years. Great to have them. Plus, hey, plus Harry McCracken, lisa Schmeiser and Micah Sargent we're going to talk about the House and Senate nearing a deal on a landmark online privacy bill. What are the odds? I think pretty low. What happened to Marissa Meyer's new app? And the price of zero-day exploits north of $20 million. All that and more coming up on TWIT Podcasts you love.

00:38 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT.

00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 974, recorded Sunday, april 7th 2024. Get at the young, youngs. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the, the show. We cover the week's tech news and this is a very special twit, not only because I'm wearing a velvet smoking jacket, although it is kind of speffy, uh, but because we have an all-in-studio panel and we have for the first time since the covid, since 2020, so february 2020 we have an in-studio audience. But start, let me. I'll introduce the audience later. Let me introduce the panel. Harry mccracken is here, the technologizer from fast company. Hi, leo, hi, harry, always good to have you, nice to be here and uh maria's home.

01:39 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
she's, she's at home, but she says hello. Hi, marie, she always enjoys being mentioned by you.

01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also here Lisa Schmeiser, who is editor-in-chief at NoJitter NoJittercom.

01:52 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yes, NoJittercom Yep.

01:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is NoJitter?

01:55 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's NoJitter I ask you this every single time you do and I don't mind answering every single time. Nojitter is the. It's an ancient, as in 1990s, telecommunication term for being able to successfully move voice data without dropping any of the data as it moves from point A to point B, creating a jitter in the sound. And no jitter covers communications and collaborations technology from copper wiring all the way up to unified communications.

02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will vouch for that, because one of the things we ask people when they're on Zoom is what's your jitter? Yeah, because it's the worst thing for phone conversation, for video conversations, and I'm really happy to have Mike Asarjan. He's stuck around from Ask the Tech Guys Hello, hello, he's in studio. His sweater is not made of seaweed, however.

02:37 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
No, mine is not seaweed, mine is something else, something else, mine is seaweed, if anybody wants to touch me later on.

02:46 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
This is why we don't have live studio times. Yeah, because we will.

02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And we do. We welcome a wonderful studio audience of Club Twit members. Thank you all for coming and being here. We really appreciate it. It's so nice to see you all. Lisa's very kindly decided to come in on her day off to shepherd people here. Among the celebrities in the studio audience, our famous Joe from the Club Twit Discord. He's the guy who makes those crazy stickers. In this week in Google He'll be doing live stickeropathy, whatever you call it. Also, thank you to Greg, who's a potter, earth and Fire Pottery in california, earth and fire pottery dot net, who brought us some beautiful, beautiful mugs of his own crafting. Thank you, it's nice to have you and all the rest of you welcome.

03:36
Good to have people who's here from the farthest away. Anybody here from england? Okay, never mind, they're all from roughly Northern California, right, yeah, all right, story time. I don't know where to begin. I always have some fun and, micah, you can help me on this. I don't know if this is going to be real or not, but I was grabbed by the headline from the Washington Post House Senate leaders nearing deal on landmark online privacy bill. I never thought I'd live to see it. Is there any chance I will live to see it, I guess would be the next question.

04:15 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I still don't feel like we're going to live to see it until it actually happens.

04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The leaders of it's bipartisan right, leaders of two key congressional committees. According to the Post, post or nearing an agreement on a national framework aimed at protecting americans personal data online. Now, if you keep reading, you might see the reason for this. It would supersede all the state data protection laws. We have one in california, that's quite good the ccpa.

04:42 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It would supersede that yeah, that's, that's the biggest source of the conflict. Isn't it that the republicans are saying supersession is a condition and the democrats are saying no, no, states should be allowed to go above and beyond on privacy?

04:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the same way, you might argue that states are allowed to decide whether or not marijuana is legal, or it feels to me like lobbyists for Meta and Google and all the many hundreds of data brokers, went up to the Hill and said you know, would it be great, we'll work on something. Meta's been saying this for a long time. You know we need to be regulated. It'd be good to regulate us. Jeff Jarvis calls that regulatory capture.

05:21
When an incumbent supports regulation that they can survive because they're already big and strong and powerful, but any, any competitor would would be dead, you know, at birth. So, uh, meta has been saying you've probably seen the ads oh, regulate us, we need to have privacy laws. Um, and I wouldn't be surprised if all of these people are saying to the Hill make a law. And, by the way, you should supersede those terrible state laws with something that we can live with. The other thing I don't like about it although I'm thrilled that they're doing it and I hope they continue to, I hope they continue is that it would that the enforcement and this, this has happened with some laws in texas, I think in florida would be by us individuals who then could sue for bad actors violating their privacy rights, and that, to me, is a is a problem is, am I wrong?

06:20 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
you think having individuals sue to enforce a law instead of having regulators regulate or you don't want them to think of it as a cost of business that they they violate your privacy and try to get away with that and deal with well that's how companies have been dealing with security threats for years and years it's a cost of doing business it is they're like.

06:41 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
we would rather pay out tiny settlements to people when their data has been breached than have to put in the money for an infrastructure that actually keeps data secure. They ran the numbers and figured it was cheaper. And this type of thing where oh, you will have to sue to prove that we misused your data, Good luck with that. We're a massive company. You are not.

07:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's it's not great news for the consumer the feds have tried and failed to do this for 20 years. Uh, and as a result of their continual inability to do this, a dozen states have their own strong, in some cases privacy laws. Illinois has very strong privacy laws, california does I thought utah had really good ones too.

07:24
Maybe, yeah, maybe. I've always said we'll never see a national federal Eddie Snooper law, because I think that the defense and the law enforcement agencies in the United States go to Congress and say, please keep those data brokers going. We're using them. Nsa has admitted it. We use them for information. That's where we get a lot of our information. It saves us the trouble of going to Apple and Google and saying, hey, hand over the data, we just buy it from the data brokers who have it anyway. So I'm sure there's intense lobbying from law enforcement not to pass this.

08:01 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
What do you think's changed? That there's suddenly more of a? Is it that there's more of a public understanding of just how valuable this information is? Where? Where's this coming from? That we are more heavily focused on this, which?

08:16 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
company is trying to get ahead of this, I guess, is my question because you're looking at regulations that, or rather you're looking at regulations that, or rather you're looking at proposed legislation that was probably written with some very considered contributions from big companies and if they put to the regulation now, this protects them later, when a story comes out that says, oh and, by the way, they've been packaging and selling your data in tranches to bad actors A through D they've been packaging and selling your data in tranches to bad actors a through d, or it's a lot easier to say let's go after china and tiktok than actually have comprehensive privacy passed.

08:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But maybe this is the, maybe this is the time.

08:55 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I hope so I do think also if it's notable to take a look at the states that have enacted privacy laws, and a lot of them do business internationally Interesting.

09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And.

09:04 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Marguerite Vestager in the EU doesn't play, and the EU has had comprehensive data privacy laws, including the right to be forgotten, for six years.

09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
GDPR yeah.

09:14 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So all of the states that did pass these privacy laws like CCPA. It's good for citizens but, more importantly, it was very good for business and I think that's going to be something. It's good for citizens but, more importantly, it was very good for business and I think that's going to be something good for business.

09:29
I think that's something you're going. It's easier to do business in the EU If you're like, look, we have the same standards, we don't have to maintain parallel, parallel systems for the wild west of the US, and that's what Apple wants to do, isn't it?

09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And?

09:43 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
having 50 states and potentially 50 different laws does sound like kind of a nightmare it is.

09:48 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It is a nightmare, um. So on that level you can make an argument that, yes, you should have a federal regulation that supersedes.

09:55 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That said, I don't think it should be devolved down to the lowest common exactly that's the thing I understand the the overall idea of saying across these 50 states, you know we're going to put in place this policy, but that yeah, it shouldn't negate the stronger protections that we have here in California, for example.

10:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here from IAPPorg, which follows this is a map of US state privacy legislation. The green states have already passed comprehensive privacy bills, but you can see there are a lot of light blue states where the bills are in committee, dark blue where they're in cross-committee.

10:36 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Virginia's ground zero for military data Like this is where the data centers are.

10:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, interesting.

10:42 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
This is where Amazon builds out their stuff that they're doing for the military. There's a. There's another uh data farm that's about to go in in western prince william county. Texas has the same thing with nasa, with military and with all of the companies that start in california and then open up things like that.

10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, we can talk about california it's interesting, washington state does not have any plans marion catwell man.

11:05
She's the senator going for the. She's the sponsor of the national uh bill. So maybe, yeah, maybe, uh, you know I'm sure microsoft has some impact up there. Um, maybe we is it. Is it better? Is it better to have a federal law? I guess it is you're saying it's better because you know what the rules of the road are, even if it's, from the point of view of Meta or Google, draconian. It would be better to have a federal law.

11:30 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Rather than piecemeal trying to decide how we play in this state, how we play in that state.

11:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think we should be passing legislation based on how Meta's feelings you know in this country it might be important how Mark feels about it.

11:44 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I mean, they're as much a citizen, as I am, but that doesn't mean that they're rich.

11:48 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I certainly worry about legislation that's trying to be helpful screwing things up worse, but on the other hand, the California law has not had any negative impact on my life. I mean, the European laws have probably had slightly more negative impact in terms of stuff like cookie winnings coming around and irritating me it also makes me nervous.

12:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm somebody who runs a website and we have a club that people sign into. I'm always thinking about am I going to get dinged by?

12:13 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
gdpr right this. I have teeny tiny sites and I get messages saying you've got to get these privacy things there is or if you send out an email.

12:21 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
This is another thing to consider too is there are countries that still go above and beyond EU. For example, germany has more stringent privacy regulations above and beyond the EU. For some understandable reasons, australia has really great privacy regulations. So if you're somebody who runs an international mailing list, you're already worried about this, and it's just a thing where, like you said, it's like a low-grade level of friction where you have to be aware. A thing where, like you say, it's like a low-grid level of friction where you have to be aware. Okay, if I have Germans on my sub stack, then I need to make sure I'm not violating their rights.

12:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there's an ecosystem of bottom feeders who are sending emails to you and me, harry, and probably to you, lisa, saying you know you really need to adjust your cookie warning. Or you're need to adjust your cookie warning or you're going to be in trouble. I don't even know how enforceable or real these are. There was a really interesting piece a couple of weeks ago by a guy who said you know all those cookie warnings, you don't have to do that.

13:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I was just sort of ding ding Good because I haven't in most cases. Yeah, do you just like? X them out? It just seemed like it was the thing to do that I was just sort of Good because I haven't in most cases.

13:26 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
We did it it just seemed like it was the thing to do. There was one site I can't remember what it is now, but I could not access the site at all and I even went into the HTML and was trying to set hidden to some of the properties to get it gone, and there was layer upon layer upon layer of these windows that they put in front of it, and there was layer upon layer upon layer of these windows that they'd put in front of it, and this was some. It was like a health site, so there was no way to. I think it was like an insurance thing or whatever, and so they were very serious about making sure. You said I am okay with these cookies, but not these cookies. It was very frustrating.

13:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here is the and I don't know who this is, if this guy's an attorney or not. It's the Bytecode blog at bytecodedev. There is no, he says, eu cookie banner law. You know those modal screens that interrupt your groove when you're surfing. There are no laws forcing websites to use them. They do it because they choose to. He says American companies don't have to comply with EU law and, in fact, even if you think people from the EU are going to visit your website, you don't have to show it, which explains why amazon does not have a cookie banner does it.

14:30 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I have a site with some google ads on it and google is very interested in me complying with all this stuff and, uh, reminds me to do it and in some cases, lets me have google put the warnings on my site he says that really, what's really going on is that nobody.

14:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is a do not track setting in your browser and all your browsers, which we've said many times. Steve gibson's always saying it does nothing right, because sites ignore it so much so that it's deprecated now, but really that would be the thing to do according to bike code. He says if you, if you would just honor the do not track, you wouldn't have to do that in fact. Furthermore, he says he believes cookie banners are illegal okay, who is this person?

15:17 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
again, by the way that's a good question.

15:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, but but he makes a pretty strong case, so you're right. You're right.

15:23 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I read a blog once and he said I didn't have to do this. Good question, I don't know, but he makes a pretty strong case, your honor, he makes a pretty strong case.

15:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I read a blog once and he said I didn't have to do this. This is why you end up doing it.

15:30 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I kind of want this to be a show on NBC now.

15:34 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I read a blog once.

15:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I read a blog that said by the way, I don't have to pay taxes either. Did.

15:39 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I mention that I heard that.

15:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I figured that out, You're a sovereign citizen. Yeah, I'm a sovereign citizen, you're a sovereign of Leoville. Well, anyway, consult your local authorities. But I think he makes a strong case that the cookie banner thing, it's just easier to do it than not to do it.

15:55 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I think that's what it is.

15:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But really, if we cared about privacy, there are better things to do, like or do not track.

16:01 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And there's so many. What are those sort of software as a service platforms out there whose specific purpose is to you? Just put this line of JavaScript and then suddenly you're cookie protected. Your cookie problems are gone. Yeah, exactly, they're all there to make sure that all of it is covered.

16:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We get those emails right, lisa, and we've gone and we've gone through and you need a comprehensive privacy policy. Okay, through, and you need a comprehensive privacy policy. Okay, even though on our main website, twittv, there's no login right. Nobody, there's. No, it's very frustrating. It's hard to know as a small business owner and I am pretty small, some shrinks down in the seat that what to do about that stuff.

16:39 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Um, but I just put one on and that's why, right, because it's so hard to know what you have to do, right, you just do as much as you can to cover yourself, cover all your bases.

16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a passive-aggressive cookie banner on my personal blog that says I can't show it because I've already agreed to it. But if you go to leofm you see it says at the bottom something like yeah, this site has cookies. What about it? This site uses a cookie to remember your light dark mode. That's what I'm getting. That's the only cookie. I said learn more for light dark mode. And then I do have to learn more because I think that's kind of people want that. What are cookies? Blah, blah, blah.

17:16
Cookies are not inherently problematic, period, but google is so aware of it that they've created a new technology that's uh, you know we'll talk about that sometime. Steve's talked about it a lot that eliminates third-party cookies in favor of your own browser spying on you, which is a better thing to do. It's the malicious compliance cookie banner. Joe, if you want to make me a sticker, cookie banner, joe. If you want to make me a sticker. By the way, joe Esposito, who is in our studio audience today, has already made his first sticker of the day. Right after you had to explain what jitter is to me. Lisa Schmeiser, smiling through the tenth time explaining jitter.

17:54 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I love that. That is delightful.

18:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The sticker man is in the house. Ladies and gentlemen, more coming up in just a bit, but first a word from our sponsor, kolide K-O-L-I-D-E. You've heard us talk about KOLIDE before, but have you heard? This is good news. Kolide was just acquired by 1Password. Now that's a big deal. Both companies lead the industry in creating security solutions that put users first solutions that put users first.

18:27
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19:07
Collide K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash twit to learn more. Watch the demo today K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash twit, and we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Lisa Schmeiser is here from NoJittercom, harry McCracken, the technologizer from Fast Company, and it's nice to have you in studio, mike. I think I've heard of you from time to time.

19:34 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, I've heard of you too. I've heard of you.

19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mike and I do a really good show on the Twit Network called Ask the Tech Guys. We had some fun this morning we did Talking about the eclipse. I guess you're all here. You're not going to see the eclipse?

19:45 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
No, no, my sister is in Texas and I assume has plans it's going to be a very Anybody here planning to fly out tonight.

19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason Snell is flying to. Where's he going? I'm not sure where. Mexico, somewhere, I think, distant, at least Texas.

20:02 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
David Pogue says he's going to Vermont.

20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That I think distant, at least Texas. David Pogue says he's going to Vermont, that's easy for David.

20:07 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I think he lives near there. This is probably explaining. I got crazy great last minute tickets to Hawaii for tomorrow and I'm pretty sure, are you going to Hawaii? I'm going to the big island tomorrow and I'm pretty sure the reason everything was so cheap is because Hawaii is like on the exact opposite side of where the eclipse is.

20:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it is cheap right now, isn't it?

20:25 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I'm going to Hawaii tomorrow. Let me just yeah, let's all go to Hawaii. Let's all go to Hawaii.

20:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to scare you, Lisa. We were talking earlier to Johnny Jet, who is the travel guru on our Ask the Tech Guys show he's going to scare you. And I'm going to scare you just in case. And he was on. He just flew to Oahu. He was on an American Airlines plane to Hawaii. He's sitting in the back there and the pilot comes on and says this there was a.

20:53 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
The aircraft is being observed, so to speak, because oil pressure on the number two engine is trending upwards and the aircraft is going to require actually it's the fuel pressure fuel system filter replacement when the aircraft gets back from Hawaii. They told us that the plane's good to go, but I'm not really feeling it. The plane's good to go, but I'm not really feeling it. I'm not going to leave the ground if I'm not completely certain that we have an airworthy aircraft. So I'm going to probably err on the side of caution and I'm refusing the aircraft. They had to get off and get another flight.

21:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But listen to the reaction from the audience, the passengers, when the pilot says I don't think we're flying this plane. And remember, these guys have to get off, find another plane.

21:54 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
Oh, don't take it away because they applaud.

22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They actually applaud his choice. And you know what, if I were a passenger, I would too you don't think it's safe Because you have a pilot Bear in mind.

22:10 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
he's put all this stuff on the news about how Boeing is like oh things fall off planes, who cares?

22:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's nice to have a pilot who's like, yeah, no, he's the first one who's going to hit the ground.

22:18 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I think if he says let's not, let's not, because it's somebody in the whole aviation system that's advocating for the safety of the passengers, and we have had nothing but news stories lately about how Boeing is blithely like meh doors they fall off cares.

22:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you. So to have somebody who's saying otherwise is great. Now Micah said something interesting when we talked about it this morning.

22:38 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Mm-hmm, you said Are we talking about the hope thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do we have other than the hope that we will get a pilot who makes that choice? Because how many times have we been on a flight and we don't know. We don't know if the pilot, the pilot's been told that, yeah, and the pilot decides you know what? We're still flying because the company's telling me to fly. I want to fly.

22:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's kind of scary. Yeah, last line of defense, but it's a thin gray line.

23:03 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You just have to hope you get a pilot who says you know what?

23:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, have a nice trip.

23:10 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Like I said, great tickets because I feel like it's you know again on the opposite side of the world.

23:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lisa, can we go to Hawaii tomorrow? Let's go, let's go, let's get out of here.

23:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Big island man.

23:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe there'll be some sunshine there. Not for Marissa Meyer.

23:24 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Very clever, that was good.

23:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Marissa Meyer, the former VP at Google. We all knew and loved her right. She was the product manager.

23:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I wrote a cover story about her. Did you yeah for?

23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fast Company. She was the person famous for the Google search page, for keeping it simple. Who, obsessed about, you know, the perfect design for it, left Google to become CEO at Yahoo when Yahoo was in desperate straits and I think she thought and a lot of people thought, white knight riding in, she's going to save Yahoo. She was not able to do that, so she left Yahoo and founded a startup studio, which at the time was called I think Lumi is now called uh, is it sunshine? Um, and just released an app uh, march 27th and was immediately mocked somebody. She released it. Uh, I don't know if she publicized any other way besides on twitter.

24:24 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That might have been the first mistake. She sent out an email. Yeah, because I got it twice for some reason.

24:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, wow, uh, somebody said this looks like it was designed in 1996, you know, by a latvian. Uh, you know, uh, postcard company. It's not the most attractive thing in the world and even though, uh, there were high hopes for this, in fact, in the office, this is from platformer. Uh, oh, wow, zoe schiffer and casey newton writing this in the office. They, you know, they have great inside sources. So in the office, employees placed bets on how many downloads the app would get. Oh, on its first day, myers set hers high at 12,000, because 12 is her lucky number. Platformer has learned the actual number of downloads. Day one 1,000. 1,000. Shortly after it was released, meyers' co-founder at Sunshine, former Google and Yahoo executive Enrique Munoz Torres, resigned. He quit and, as usual with Platformer, they've got kind of some insight as to what went on there. Apparently, meyer was very hands-on, very hands-on, very hands-on.

25:41 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
This is the same woman who agonized over the specific color of purple and the specific cast of the Y when they were redesigning the Yahoo logo. Do you remember that? Yeah, I would be at that.

25:53 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, and she had the whole blog post explaining the exclamation point had to be at exactly the right angle.

25:58 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, they spent a weekend.

26:01 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
What I loved about it is apparently, reportedly, reportedly. She went on a vacation with friends and, of course, her friends. Who are they actually her friends, or are they just hanging out with a rich lady? Sorry, that's maybe too much editorializing. Maybe, they're colleagues, could be colleagues.

26:19 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Exactly.

26:19 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So they were all hanging out. The friend was using Shine because of course you've got to use your friend's app and it ended up posting some images that were selfies that the person had taken, and so that person did not like that it had posted in the group conversation and was embarrassed that had showed up. So Marissa Meyer came back after their vacation and was immediately like, by the way, if a photo is taken with the front-facing camera and there's only one person inside of it, that should not show up in the app. So it just became these are the experiences that I am having and that's how we should make this app that's available to all of these people.

26:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and you remember, I'm sure I know Harry, you would color. I remember color. Same idea, right, it would know where you are. Shine's plan was it would know where you are and then would share, create a photo, joint photo album. Everybody else was around you.

27:14 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's so great that, like no one has privacy, it's basically an app where it's like everyone will know what you're doing and where you are and who you're with at all times, and I'm sure that is totally fine with you.

27:27 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It's like contact tracing turned into a photo app.

27:31 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So the thing I struggled I think I was talking about this with Lisa before the show too is what problem did this solve? Like what pent up demand or irritation about taking photos and sharing them with people? Like what unmet need did this address Right?

27:47 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
because all of the photo sharing apps that I know and use Google Photos, apple Photos, even Amazon, I'm sure have this built-in opportunity to create a shared library with other people. It's already done so to make it and then, as you said, make it look like it was made in years ago, ago. It was a little bit odd, but I mean, I don't know.

28:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had high hopes for the other sunshine apps the contacts they had a context app, which is also struggled, even though I thought it was pretty good. Yeah, um, there were problems early on of it duplicating your. It was supposed to dedupe your context but in fact, duplicating your context uh, some of the some. I guess you'd expect this on Twitter. Some of the tweets in response to her announcement were pretty nasty. One tweeter said Marissa, you've hurt the reputation of Stanford more than SBF's parents. I have to say I'm a little more sympathetic.

28:37 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Wait, there's Elizabeth Holmes. Don't put Elizabeth Holmes off on this one.

28:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this a parody? Why is the UX from 2002?

28:47 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Retro off on this one.

28:48 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Is this a parody? Why is the ux from?

28:49 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
2002 retro.

28:49 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That's her other favorite number. Go ahead, I have to say. This is, first of all, this this is an idea that keeps coming back. Even before there was color, there was something called cool iris, which also did similar stuff. I mean, the notion of like zero friction photo sharing has always been out there and has never caught on, probably partially because it has some basic challenges as an idea, and I believe that the idea here is that these photos are not going out to random strangers. They're at least going out to people who were also at your party or whatever. I do personally find that when trying to share photos with friends or family members, I sometimes just forget to do it, and so I'm at least vaguely intrigued by the idea of something that would intentionally do it.

29:33
I think there's also this other basic problem that is very hard to be a photo app, given that all devices have built-in photo apps and stuff like instagram already exists. So, even if it's wonderful, the bar is very high, but it is something that is fundamentally super challenging.

29:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just in case you're confused, that is not Yahoo Purple. That is four digits off Yahoo Purple on the Hex color scheme.

29:56 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, thank goodness, I did try this app. I did.

30:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I downloaded it immediately.

30:01 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
I was one of 1,000.

30:02 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I think I was too. I plugged it immediately. I was one of the 1,000.

30:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I even I think I was too. I plugged it on MacBreak.

30:05 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Weekly. I plugged it in my phone and I left the app open, purposely so it could do all of its processing, because I thought, oh, surely it's going to get better. And I came back hours later and it still looked the same and I thought I don't want to share any of the things that it's because it was supposed to use AI, right, the whole right, the whole thing about sunshine. The company we made clever uses of ai and also their company culture is be nice or leave.

30:27
um, really, yeah, that's the slogan yeah be nice or leave um oh my god, it's like the weaponized be kind yeah, and so don't be evil, but um, I was waiting for the clever ai to kick in and it was just locations, it's all in almost every single one of my photos. There was no one in any of the photos, so who was I supposed to be? Oh yes, that little tiny gecko. I should probably share with that gecko that's in this photo.

30:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It did make an album of all the pictures I took of you when we unboxed the Vision.

30:55 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Pro, but those were all taken right at the same time.

30:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were all taken at the same time.

31:06 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I had the address. So one of the innate challenges in photo sharing apps, or photo sharing in a social setting period, is different people are going to have different tolerances for privacy. Yes, I'm just going to throw this use case out there. Say, you're throwing a children's birthday party and you've got 10 little girls and it's a really cute photo album you do. It's on you as a, as the person who's in the party, that you have to reach out to all those families and go hey, if I put up a photo album on facebook, is that cool? Or if I put this up on google photos with a password, are you okay with me sharing pictures of your kids? And that's the kind of problem you could, in theory, use technology to solve. I don't see how this app could do something like that, though, where it could reach out to the people in the albums and go hey, your kid's in an album, is that cool?

31:45 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
and wait for the check box to come in, essentially that the consent is there, right? Yeah, that would be neat, yeah, but I don't.

31:51 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I have to say or maybe there's people who just don't like having their social life like. I'm sure I'm not the only person this has happened to. Where I've gone over to a friend's house for a get together, the friend has put up group photos on facebook, which has let other people know they weren't invited to the to the shindig, like. That's the kind of problem that technology can simultaneously create and or solve, and something like shine. I can see where they're like. Look, it's just a very small group of people. You're bypassing some of the awkwardness, but you're also introducing new levels of awkwardness around consent, yep.

32:24 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, well, not ever. That's the thing. I wish that more people thought like that, because I can tell you there are going to be lots of people who would not consider reaching out to all 10 of those people and asking if their kids can be posted. And this is, in theory, running things through some AI system. Are you okay with your kid?

32:42 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
being part of the data set.

32:45 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's something to consider.

32:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Is the AI actually capable of identifying adults versus children in photos? Yeah, I mean, it's not entirely clear whether AI solves some of these issues or creates new issues. There's a good app called Tiny Beans which is basically designed for incredibly private sharing of photos involving kids and, as far as I know, there's no ai involved. It's it's you deciding what's appropriate and it's all private, and so it removes a lot of the challenges.

33:10 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, if you spend any time on any of the subreddits where people are like, am I the the jerkwad in this situation, like, at least once a month somebody is posting something because some relative of theirs is splashing their kid across social media. They ask them them to stop and World War III erupted. And it's kind of baffling to me that in the year 2024, when we all have access to these lurid Reddit soap operas and or we all have access to phones with cameras, you don't have product managers and developers who are like okay, we know that there's a potential for conflict around sharing photos here. What governors are we putting into our product to make sure that we're not inflaming the situation or we're allowing an elegant solution to the situation?

33:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So at least they have a sense of humor. This was March 26th. After the brutal comments by quote design Twitter Sunshine posted on Aprilil 1st, we all heard you loud and clear and showed an even more brutal design of shine obviously an april fool's joke. I want it to succeed. I like the idea.

34:17 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I I feel bad for marissa meyer second acts are always nice to see so hard though isn't it to have a second, maybe a third act in this case?

34:25 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But is she actually embarking on an act that speaks to her strengths?

34:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they got the purple right.

34:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Well, she certainly, I think, did have a sizable impact on Google in the early days, which worked out well for everybody involved in terms of what it was, although Google is now what? 25 years old, and it's interesting to wonder like would it work as well if that homepage was launched today and the homepage doesn't look all that much like it did originally, because they're way more willing to clutter it up than they were back in those days?

34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A little bit in the story and, of course, casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer have been writing about Elon Musk. In fact she's got a book about the Twitter revolution. It does feel a little bit like another CEO who kind of runs a company by fiat like Elon does. Didn't it feel like an Elon?

35:16 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Well, this is a very small team too, it's only 15 people, right?

35:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They noted that while Marissa uses former sponsor, former sponsor mondaycom to keep track of everything, no one else does, so they have a whiteboard. They call Analog Monday in the office, so that people can see Analog Monday.

35:34 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Analog, that's a great band name.

35:36 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's actually a really interesting. That's a good name. It's a really interesting insight, though, because you've already got, you're duplicating a process, either because the ceo is unwilling to say this is the tool that we're all using, let's get our information and our processes in one place, or the the people like no, this mondaycom is terrible. I'm not saying it is because I'm sure mondaycom works wonderfully.

35:58
no, it's great but the fact that you don't have a formalized process structure in place and what you've done instead is is duplicate the CEO's idiosyncratic process. For people who haven't bought into that, that's a problem.

36:11 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
But that's I mean. Okay, I feel like that's very common. People are always going to manage up with the person who's in charge and will bend to the will of who's in charge.

36:26 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Especially if it's somebody, the getonmondaycom, I mean, that's I see what you're saying.

36:29 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You're saying instead of holding out on joining Monday, why not just join Monday, or why?

36:33 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
not have her say this is what we're using. I like it, we're using it. Yeah, that's a good point, like why isn't she doing?

36:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that Like she's got a fairly recalcitrant team working for her.

36:46 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There are tons of studies that talk about how much time workers waste in information capture and information retrieval. Like close to 20% of your work week is spent just trying to find the information you need to do your job.

36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I spend 20% of my time just trying to choose what to wear for the show.

37:02 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Leo, you just need five of those jackets.

37:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Make it a uniform. It is the right purple. I might add it is a perfect purple.

37:07 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But what I'm saying is, if you've got somebody who's running a company where she has made it acceptable to introduce a whole new level of information, capture issues like why that's not good. That's entirely preventable, it's the wrong direction.

37:21 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
Good point You're the CEO. That's entirely preventable. That's the wrong direction.

37:23 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Good point, you're the CEO. Just say no, this is how we're doing it. This is what we're using to capture information, to track our projects and to make sure everybody knows everything at the same time. This Analog Monday thing isn't cute. It's a failure of leadership. Oh, wow.

37:36 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Incidentally, if anybody would like to read more about Marissa Meyer and the Color Purple, I wrote what I consider to be the definitive article on that topic some years ago for Fast Company, and if you google for that, you'll probably find it. I spoke to her at surprisingly length long.

37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tell me about the color, tell me about her. What do you? What?

37:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
did you like her? Uh, that's, that's what I wrote on.

37:58 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I do think she's a really smart person.

37:59 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Um, I do think she is a little bit under the spotlight, and maybe not by anybody on this panel, but maybe occasionally is somewhat fairly drubbed for things that if she were Matthew Meyer she might get away with a little more easily.

38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's sad if that's true, but I believe it. You actually wrote about Sunshine when it first came out.

38:21 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And before that I wrote about her when she was at Yahoo and she spent so much time talking. Before that I wrote about her when she was at Yahoo and she spent so much time talking about purple. I wrote a separate story about it. She wanted to make clear that purple is not her favorite color.

38:34 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Her favorite color is yellow, but purple is her mother's favorite color and so it also matters to her, Aww Well it kind of reminds me of Kim Palazzi which was a story Kim Palese she was a product manager for Java and then she launched Marimba she was like super hyped, and when that didn't work out there was a whole lot of because she was a woman well, she was hyped for being a woman, and then she was. Of course she can't make it work, so I agree with you that's a very good point.

39:05
It's him very well, it's the same thing with cheryl sandberg too. You always get these women who were held up as as lean in, so we could punch you yeah, yeah, but you know that's a good show.

39:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Title that is, that is actually the story of pop culture in america, which is we love to build up people so we can shoot them down, men or women. I mean behind the music. Baby, Did you grow up watching behind the music on MTV?

39:31 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
No, it was VH1. Vh1.

39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, you did. You're the one who did.

39:36 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, oh my gosh, because it was always the same story arc right. Yeah.

39:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Band gets huge, gang gets big band collapses and drugs overdose and then comes back.

39:44 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They did like a five-part series on Fleetwood Mac. Oh wow, you kind of had to, though, because it was Fleetwood Mac.

39:49 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, I just was reading about all the drama there. Yeah, and anyway, yeah, yeah.

39:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't believe, Harry, that you wrote an entire article on Marissa Myers. She gave me so much good material.

39:58 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Love affair with a color purple used to kind of torment her that people assumed she loved purple and so they would give her purple stuff and uh oh, that's so awkward and then also, uh, people mistakenly believed that she loved cupcakes, which was an urban legend, and so they, they would give her purple cupcakes the nightmare but you know, the beatles did the same thing remember they did an interview where they said they love jelly beans, or whatever they call them in england, and they would get pelted from the state on the stage with jelly beans okay.

40:26 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So wait, hold on. If I say I love basketballs, they're gonna throw basketball that's right, don't, whatever you do or if you love money, yeah, there we go, but not quarters oh yeah, I love money, soft money, paper money I love it, just throw it at me.

40:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's folded up like a paper.

40:40 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Play the yadda yadda was originally rad, which I forgot about until I wrote this story. Oh yeah, look at that.

40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, oh, it was yeah, but you know what, to her credit, purple really did become its color. I mean, I told this story on MacBreak Weekly. Lisa had season tickets to the 49ers in the Yahoo section and we had to go up to go see the game at Levi's Stadium A purple escalator was lit like a nightclub purple and every 10 feet it would go. Yahoo, it was so annoying. You remember that, lisa? Am I making that up? No, it would do that.

41:15 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It was so annoying. Purple was Yahoo's color when she got there, but she did change it to a different purple. And she made it more consistent. And also there's this long story about why they chose purple and there's more than one version of it, but all the versions involve them buying some cheap purple paint in the early days of the company.

41:33 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And painting the walls purple just because the paint was cheap. Oh my God, I love it when that's the reason.

41:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh I just remember that. Do you guys remember the Yahoo sign that used?

41:42 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
to be in South of.

41:42 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Market the pretty neon sign.

41:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that was the best billboard ever.

41:48 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh, it was fantastic.

41:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was right off Highway 101 as you're driving through the city of San Francisco.

41:52 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
And it's South of Market, yeah.

41:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it was not just neon, it was like three-dimensional. It was very elaborate.

41:58 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It was like an old hotel sign.

41:59 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, it's a nice place to stay on the internet. They called it. Oh my gosh.

42:04 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Let me see, if I can. I wonder if that sign still exists somewhere.

42:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somewhere. Yeah, it was a sad day and I remember it vividly when they took it down yeah, oh. Yeah, it is like a motel sign.

42:13 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It was so cute.

42:16 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Kind of like a Holiday Inn sign. It's kind of sad what happened to Yahoo.

42:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They're still around, they're actually a this sounds terrible, but my mom uses them. My mom uses them as a news aggregator and when I was working actually at a business newspaper, financeyahoocom was kind of our in-house tool. I still use it. It was a great way to look up stock news. It was a great way to keep track of different ticker symbols.

42:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When I show ticker symbols on this show, I almost always use Yahoo Finance, for some reason there probably aren't all that many companies that employ more journalists on the Internet than Yahoo still does to this day.

42:48 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I don't know the exact number, but I do know it's still a large operation with a lot of eyeballs, and some of the people there are really good.

42:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is my Yahoo.

42:56 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Nobody ever talks about it, but they do go there.

42:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's just that sexy. Where are you?

43:00 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
right now.

43:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The my Yahoo page is still there.

43:11 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It was my home page for a long time. It knows where I live. Apparently, yahoo mail still has lots of people using it. Oh, my mom uses it. Yeah, that's the one thing where I, anytime somebody's got yahoo mail, let's get you somewhere safer this isn't a good neighborhood, yeah, exactly all, right break.

43:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to talk about Elon Musk's Tesla stock tanking. But Musk found a way to boost it. He found a way to boost it. We'll talk about that in just a minute. Harry McCracken is here for the Technologizer. I still call you that. I hope you don't mind.

43:38 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Thank you, I appreciate it. Do you still have the Technologizer blog? I blog there occasionally. Keep it alive. You know, not every week or maybe not even every month, but sometimes, yeah, and I recently.

43:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nice to have a hobby.

43:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I took it off of WordPress and I kind of freeze-dried it so it can stay up essentially forever. It was still based on a template from 2008, which was not compatible with modern versions of PHP, and so I managed to figure out how to crunch it all down.

44:06 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
Can you help me freeze dry my blog I can show you how I did it I want to freeze dry mine.

44:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then do you add water and it leaps.

44:13 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, exactly, it's like I could even put it on a thumb drive and it would operate from a thumb drive.

44:16 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, that's cool.

44:20 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Which is not true of a WordPress blog. Yeah, no, be up forever, yay.

44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lisa Schmeiser is here. No, jittercom. What is that thing? Again Jitter? No, no, no, don't tell me. Don't tell me. I don't want to know and we're so glad that, micah Sargent, you've been on Twit before.

44:35 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah.

44:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've hosted it before.

44:39 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's right, but I think you should be on every show. Personally, I've been saying that, for a while now, the kindest thing you say to me regularly. I just don't want to, I want you to host it Keep coming and maybe you will someday.

44:57 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Micah does all about nothing.

44:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He does iOS Today and Hands on Macintosh which is now in public, by the way, thanks to our esteemed CEO, who's decided that all of the shows that used to be behind the Club Tweet paywall are now available audio only to the public. That includes iOS Today, home Theater, geeks, hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows, the Untitled Linux Show. They're all available as audio shows to the public. So subscribe if you haven't, and, of course, if you join the club, you get the video versions of it, which I think is a we want to give you something when you join the club. Club Tweet is $7 a month, which I think is about as inexpensive as it could be given the number of shows. You get Ad-free versions of all the shows, not just the ones I mentioned, but Tweet MacBreak Weekly this Week in Space, and you know I can go on and on. Get all of those shows ad-free. Windows Weekly this Week in Google. You also get TwitPlus stuff that we don't put out anywhere else, like our book club with Stacey that's coming up in just a little bit, the inside TwitLace and I just did and access to the Club Twit Discord, where Joe Esposito will post stickers and other things. He's working on them right now. He's in the back of the studio working on some more stickers for the Discord. Look the real reason you join. It makes a big difference into what we can do going forward.

46:13
Ad support for so many podcasts has disappeared. We don't want to be one of those podcasts that falls off the face of the earth With your help. We don't have to be. I like your new sticker. Joe Twittv slash club twit, and thank you for your support. Why can't I? This sticker is from the server. You can use it everywhere. Oh, you made this a sticker we can all use. Thank you, leo Laporte. Blue Sky hype influencer. That's me.

46:45 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Those aren't your legs, though, right, that's just you slouching, and then the rest has been added by Joe.

46:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Joe, are those somebody else's?

46:54 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
thighs you put on me. They're AI generated. They're rather large.

46:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They look like small hams attached to my pelvis. Jamon, jamon. Somebody's saying it's like succession.

47:08 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I'm just gonna keep leading you on my I've never watched succession, so I thought it was a positive thing.

47:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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49:45
Elon is a master. There are a few people in our world today Donald Trump's one of them, elon Musk's another who are masterful at grabbing the headline right At changing the conversation. Tesla stock's starting to go down severely, so he announces oh, we're going to have tesla robo taxi august 8th. And what happens to stock price boom? Will they have a robo taxi product on august 8th? Who knows?

50:16 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
that's not the important thing this is the man who's been saying since 2015 that that self-driving cars are any day now and he said in, I think, five years ago yeah, every tesla owner would be able to turn on this feature.

50:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would let other people rent your car when you're not using it and it would just drive them around.

50:38 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That never happened I mean, the thing you should take away from the story is not that, oh, rotaxes are coming, but rather that the street is desperate to believe that Elon Musk and Tesla are still a good bet. I mean, this is the thing is. I'd be looking askance at the street rather than taking this story as factual period.

50:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In 2016, Elon said, you'll be able to send one of our cars on a cross-country drive all by itself.

51:07 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Why would you want to? I don't know, but you're good.

51:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've been talking about this autonomous robo-taxi that will turn its cars into level three automated vehicles, but it hasn't happened. They've been talking. They've been talking. He's good at that. We're going to talk about it. I feel like this is going to be the theme. I happened, so you know, they've been talking, they've been talking.

51:24 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
He's good at that.

51:25 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, we're gonna talk I feel like this is going to be the theme I keep hammering home during this episode. But when you talk about automatic taxis, what problem are you solving for here, is it? Oh, I don't want to talk to a cabbie.

51:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I don't want to talk to my no, the problem you're solving certainly when it was uber's idea is the cost of a driver, a human driver, that's. That's, that's not a problem for the user.

51:48 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The thing is is you have to persuade consumers that you want, that they want robo taxis like. What problem are you solving for consumers where they're going?

51:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to pick this ridden in one of those waymos or or lifts, or cruises, or whatever they were no like harry, you have. I remember we talked about been in a cruise. Uh, when there were cruises or whatever they were.

52:05 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Harry, you have. I remember we talked about it. I've been on a cruise. When there were cruises in San Francisco, I saw somebody this week last week say they prefer Waymos to Ubers or lifts in San Francisco Because they don't have to talk to a driver. Well yeah, if you don't love talking to drivers, you might find the privacy of a self-driving car to be appealing. He also claimed that the Waymos are better drivers than human drivers.

52:30 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
They drive like grandmas, though right they're very. I want my grandma driving me places. That's what I want. That's because your grandma's 52. Well, and also I don't. That might be true, but I also don't have To be perfectly, but I also don't have to be perfectly blunt, if your grandma were my age, you might not want her to be driving.

52:49
I don't have to worry about my grandma being a like to believe that aliens have probed her that, that anti you know, like that vaccinations, like I have been in so many different I'm a sovereign citizen. Stop signs don't apply to me yeah, I've been in so many different ubers where the person just starts telling me all these scary things that I'm like you live on a different planet, which is cool. But now I'm in this vehicle with you.

53:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The thing is, though, you have like a number you can call, or, or you have a thing that the concern I have about I pop into this pod that takes me from point A to point B is if something goes wrong, who am I talking to?

53:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you push a button and then you're talking to the guy who's actually driving?

53:33 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
your car Right now there's a level and this is something where we saw it with self-checkout at stores where the minute it screws up you've got to wait for somebody to come and fix it for you. When you remove people from the equation, you're kind of removing an incentive for consumers to get your product because they don't trust you to do right by them.

53:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the difference between you and me, and I think, micah and you, you like people yeah.

54:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I find people really interesting. I'm not sure that's the same as love. That's the difference.

54:07 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I do like people, but my problem is I have trouble setting boundaries and so the moment I get in that vehicle, I don't care how I feel, I'm going to talk to you if you want to talk to me and I don't want to talk to you, but because you want to talk, I'm going to talk to you.

54:21 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I'm not good at being like no, so you've never hopped in and said, hey, I'm, I'd rather work right now.

54:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't do that uber has a button on the app, though.

54:28 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's why, yeah, I know, and I won't use that button either, because it seems mean I mean I.

54:33 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I once had a cab ride from the savannah at georgia airport at midnight, where the cabbie drove me through the pine barrens and talked about how easy it was to hide the body.

54:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See that that's what I'm like Obviously a Sopranos fan.

54:44 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Actually, that's where they and I remember like writing down like his number and putting it on a piece of paper and be like maybe they'll find the number when they find my body.

54:52 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, it's terrifying. But my point is you know, if I wanted to hide a body Practicing your tuck and roll? Oh my God.

55:06 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
No, no, I went for, like we all actually know. The ride back to the airport was more terrifying because the dude, like turned down a second fare and then talked about the shotgun he had under his seat and I was like I was not aware there were fireworks.

55:13 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You know the robots won't talk about the shotgun under their seat, so they'll just have the button that you can press to shoot things.

55:21 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
No, but my point is they're, with all of these, like closed loop, little automated systems. You do kind of need some sort of in case of emergency to talk to human, press this button. Or if you are not happy with this product, here's how you can get it redressed. And it's not a customer service bot. And I think with a lot of these products, when you make the effort to cut human beings out of a workforce, you're also significantly degrading the quality of the product for the people using it it's also interesting to see how quickly crews just kind of completely collapsed, no kidding what happened there starting with the fact that they're.

55:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
They had a ugly incident, or two of the they dragged a pedestrian under their car doing things like that, and then the entire company. I mean it's not completely gone, but it's out of commission and they don't want to start up again the executives all left and it's not entirely clear what's going to happen to this enormous investment on gm's part don't you think?

56:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the real truth is that self-driving vehicles aren't really. We haven't figured level four or five.

56:17 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, it seems. It seems like um largely self-driving vehicles can be a thing and entirely self-driving vehicles is a hundred times harder.

56:27 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, samuel Bull Sam, you know says that that he doesn't see it at any time soon. He said on this show.

56:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There will never be a level five vehicle, at least not in the next hundred years. And the other thing and we were talking about this earlier on, ask the Tech Guys we're learning more and more about AI is there is human involvement. There was a lot of human involvement in Cruise, amazon, go and Go.

56:49 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh, I just had a great interview about that that I did with Cisco's Javed Khan at Enterprise Connect, which we'll be going up on no Jitter shortly. We talked about how Cisco believes that the foundation of great generative AI comes with great transcripts, and I said so how'd you get that going? How'd that technology happen?

57:08
And he's like well, we had an army of human beings transcribing everything until we could get to the point where we could train the AI to do it Like they relied on human beings, because the technology is just not there yet to be able to train an AI to quickly transcribe something without people doing the first steps.

57:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We learned from documents submitted to NHTSA and the Department of Motor Vehicles that a lot of crews in Waymo vehicles had takeovers, frequent takeovers. The human drivers back at the office, would you know? The car would say what do I do here? I have no idea what to do, and the human would take over. The car would say what do I do here? I have no idea what to do, and the human would take over. Now we're learning that Amazon's just walk out tech was very much human driven. That's why Amazon is dropping it out of go ahead.

57:56 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
They claim they have something that's better, which I think involves shopping carts where you can scan the stuff as you go. Is that better? Why do we? Yeah, why does this?

58:03 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
why that?

58:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
makes me do the work. Who wants this? But better for them, maybe but it might also.

58:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, until I read that stuff I was not aware of how many human beings there were watching the cameras and the amazon go stores and watching what I plucked off the shelf they said that a great percentage, I think it was like up to 90% of all of the walkout customers.

58:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The video had to be examined by a human they had more than 1,000 employees to verify that what we're charging them for is actually what they just walked out with. And you can see that that's not very tenable and Amazon has decided to can that they're no longer going to build stores with just walk out. They're going to have the, the carts where you scan it. At the same time, stores like target and Walmart are phasing out their self checkout. Because it's it I know. Every time I use a self checkout, somebody has to come over and help me, and if you're trying to steal stuff, you just alluded to a bigger thing in AI in general, which is it's still not artificial intelligence, it's human intelligence.

59:08 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yes, and it's human intelligence, where we're offshoring a lot of data, categorization and sorting to these big labor centers and acting like it's an algorithm that's magically sorting everything, when the truth of the matter is, the data is still being very intensely processed by humans at almost every step.

59:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Part of me when there were Amazon.

59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go stores in San Francisco did love them.

59:35 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I never used one. I see what Lisa is saying about these experiences benefiting from humanity, because the Amazon Go stores had zero humanity to them and they were kind of completely lacking and so at the end there was just like a security guy up front. I don't think retail environments benefit from not having any human aspect whatsoever.

59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When all is said and done, Theo Waitwriting in the information, said Amazon relies on a significant amount of human staffers to power Just Walk Out. Behind the scenes, amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walkout as of mid-2022, whose jobs include manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos. But to your point, to train Just Walkout's machine learning model, you do have to train it with humans. They explain that's why, if you've used it, it might take hours for you to get the receipt.

01:00:26 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
They to oh review it and there is a difference between there's something on your receipt that you didn't pay for. Normally, you can go back in and talk to a human being. In this case, like you're saying, yeah, you go to talk to support and it's an ai chat it's a bot, do you think?

01:00:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
have I? Have I solved your query? No, are we?

01:00:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
gonna get used to that or are going to rebel against that. I mean, I know people with gmail, for instance. There's something goes wrong with gmail. There's no one right?

01:00:48 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
do you just accept that there's a?

01:00:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
woman called the radio show, said I. I went to the google office in irvine and pounded on the door to see if I could get them to help me with my gmail, but no one ever answered.

01:01:00 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I use hey email and I have to say maybe the best thing about it in some ways is the fact that when I have a question or a problem I pay for it and if I have an issue I ping them and a human being writes back quite quickly and even if they tell me they have no intention of adding the feature, I suggest that it's nice knowing there are actual people there reading my stuff.

01:01:22 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Slate used to and a google search just failed to turn it up. But I remember very distinctly slight used to run an article once a year which was here is amazon's live customer service number. Here is who you call if you want to talk to an actual live human being related to amazoncom amazon actually does have decent human support.

01:01:39 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It's just that they make it almost impossible to find.

01:01:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you do find that they quite often are pretty helpful, pretty quickly yeah at least I heard you the other day in the other room shouting representative, representative, representative. Did you eventually get a human on the other end.

01:01:57 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, she said yeah well, there's that website, gethumancom, which, uh tells you how to get a rep on the phone. You type in the company name and it tells you how to get to the people.

01:02:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like which the button tree that you push yeah. And so that's my question is are we going to get used to the idea that there are no human support, or are we always going to want humans? And that's really a big cost center. That's the biggest cost center of all.

01:02:24 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So I just spent a week on this at Enterprise Connect.

01:02:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perfect.

01:02:30 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There's a couple of things going on. One, call centers are very hard to staff. You have a high rate of turnover, you have a high and they're expensive to staff, in that you have to bring agents on board. They have to then know about the service or the product and they have to be trained in how to deescalate situations. It's costly, as it should be, because you're taking time and effort to train people, but you have a turnover problem because these guys get really burnt out. No one ever calls into a contact center because they're super thrilled with a product and they just want to share how happy they are. Hey, this was great. They're super thrilled with a product and they just want to share how happy they are.

01:03:05
Hey, this was great, like literally everybody who's calling in is already in like a low key state of agitation. They want their problem solved and they want it solved in a specific way, and your job as a contact center agent is to deescalate, to try to make the person happy, but also to follow whatever the service restrictions of your company are going to be. Ai is seen as a way to head off more of these calls early on, the idea being, if somebody calls in and they're like I just don't know my account number, you can have a bot do that in theory. However, what this means is the people who do make it through the bot to a live person are only going to be more agitated, which means that it's only going to be more unpleasant to deal with them, which means you're only going to turn out faster.

01:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's got to be the worst job ever, right.

01:04:02 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I mean you're only talking to guess the organization of the information and figure out how to ask the question that they want you to ask as opposed to the question you want to ask.

01:04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well-trained humans, which are even more expensive. Well-trained humans who have the power to do something, who aren't just looking through a notebook.

01:04:18 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They're faster, though, well-trained humans are so much faster and AI, when it's done right, can pull up product spec information or it can pull up similar cases where you're like oh, I see that three months ago we had a customer with a similar problem. Here's how we solved it. Would that work for you People?

01:04:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are still faster than customer service bots, but I suspect that, as with many AI things, a pairing of a human and an AI might be the best of both worlds.

01:04:45 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's how the vendors are currently selling it. I lost track of the number of times I got a vendor who got up and said AI is going to be your colleague, it's not going to replace you.

01:04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think that's the way to think of it and that's the way it works. Igor in our Club Twit Discord, says that whenever he uses Just Walk Out, he gets his receipt within seconds. He loves walk out. He gets his receipt within seconds, he loves it. He's never had an inaccurate receipt. But he also says I never want human support, if possible in any way. Anthony ilson our own anthony ilson says and I think he makes a good point I just make it easy to manage your stuff online. Yeah, but the companies don't want to do that because you know what happens it gets too easy to cancel let me reset my own if I need to.

01:05:24 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The other challenge you have this. This was actually a great metric I heard in the 90s when I was working in a web design shop, as you could always tell companies that were customer focused as opposed to ones that weren't, because the ones that were customer focused organized their website along the lines of what customers wanted to look for. Otherwise, you'd look at the web, the the site train be like okay, you've just replicated your internal corporate structure and I think that's still a problem that you have with a lot of online account management. Is the website that's been rolled out makes sense to the people inside because it ties into whatever workflow they have, or however the data and the money is moved through different departments. That's not going to be the same experience the customer has.

01:06:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you not a believer in the good book from the St Cory Doctorow, who says that all companies start that way and then in shitification means that eventually they go from being customer centric to bring every penny of profit out of the customer? That seems to be the common path.

01:06:22 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I hate that he coined that because it's so apt and it's so depressing it's so true, and once you see it, you can't unsee it, it's everywhere you cannot unsee it.

01:06:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got a blue check this week for free. Sorry, honey, you didn't pay for it.

01:06:41 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I didn't pay for it.

01:06:43 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I didn't ask for it.

01:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon is? I guess I don't. Is this backing down on his original plan to make the money that he needs on Twitter to make people pay for this thing Is?

01:06:54 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
he back? I don't think he knows what that means. I lost my blue check Backing down. I don't think he does.

01:07:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he doesn't know that.

01:07:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That by bringing back the idea that, oh, legit people have blue checks, it's not just lunatics paying eight bucks a month More people will come back to Twitter and be like oh so it's not all porn bots and Nazis.

01:07:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It tempted me. I thought well, I got a blue check, I should use it. If you have at least 2,500 paying followers, that's important you can get your blue check. If you have 5,000 paying followers, you can get a premium plus membership. And I'm happy to say I do believe, even though I will never use it I have a premium plus membership. Thank you, elon, for nothing.

01:07:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh my gosh, so you can use Grok even.

01:07:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can use Grok. You want to try it?

01:07:43 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yes, I finally tried Grok after this happened to me too.

01:07:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you got it too. Yeah, what do you think about it? I mean, do you use Twitter? I stopped using Twitter. I just say go to my master.

01:07:54 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I read about this in my newsletter last week. I mean, I have not quit Twitter but my usage is way, way down. Like, like, I tweeted last month in total about as much as I used to tweet in two days back three or four years ago, and some of that has gone to Mastodon and Blue Sky and Threads and I'm reading more newsletters. I'm trying to spend more time on Discord and Reddit and I actually have found it's been kind of liberating to take all this time which I used to reflexively spend on Twitter, and sometimes I just do yard work. I have way more time than I thought I did because I'm using Twitter less.

01:08:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You said that You're such a good writer. You said that exactly right the time reflexively spent. You don't think about it, it just happens you go. I got a minute, let's go to Twitter, and then, five hours later, you're still looking at it.

01:08:52 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It's. It's kind of unconscious, totally. Yeah, maybe I should have been telling it up and I would have been concerned about my online habits a lot more quickly if I had.

01:08:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you agree with the members of Congress who believe that social media is a blight on our young people and like people like Jonathan Haidt who say it's it's rewiring our children?

01:09:12 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
didn't they say the same thing about comic books?

01:09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they did, and books and tv and music and rock and roll cut your hair, you hippie.

01:09:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Uh, oh, no, that was my dad, I mean there are things about social media that are different, in the sense that with television you were a consumer and with social media, especially if you've got very young people who haven't developed impulse control or an appreciation of consequences, things like bullying can follow you from platform to platform.

01:09:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's a consequence, I think. As an old white man, I don't experience so much, but people do and it's problematic for sure.

01:09:52 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
My daughter, who is a seventh grader, has reported, so I should caveat this. She doesn't have a phone. She'll be getting one. When will she get one?

01:10:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ninth, grade Tenth grade, eleventh grade.

01:10:04 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Never no. Ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade never, no, she's actually well, she's going to Europe in a few months and we're getting her a phone before she goes, sure, so that she can keep in touch with her tour groups. What, what whatsapp group?

01:10:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
absolutely photos and they can if call for help, if needed exactly, so she'll get one.

01:10:18 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Then she's going to fill it. We have a contract for usage that we're putting together where we talk about her, our expectations and her expectations of us and consequences, etc. Etc. Um, so we talk about it's a tool. We expect you to use it responsibly and we will model responsible use ourselves, like that's what we're doing there. Um, to get back to the story, she doesn't have make me feel like a terrible parent, by the way.

01:10:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to say I didn't do any of that. Maybe I didn't need to because it was 20 years ago. Yeah, no, yeah nowadays you gotta do it right. Yeah, it's, it's just, you can talk, it's okay. Yeah, do you agree? It's very different it's different now, yeah, yeah, how old are your kids?

01:11:01 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
40, but I didn't care yeah oh, you teach.

01:11:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What grades do you teach in middle school? Oh, my god. Well, you have more experience, yeah, than any of us. Yeah, our middle schoolers glued to their phones. You have to take them away. You have to say put your phones down. Now we're going to do something. When I was a middle school teacher, they didn't have phones. Yeah, yeah, oh, so you're not doing it now, yeah, can you imagine?

01:11:25 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
what my daughter self reports is that the kids who are on tiktok and social media tend to beef with each other a lot more and have more fraught social relationships than her little, than her little crew than her little. You know, when somebody just cut, off twitter.

01:11:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're all spun up. Yeah, so angry about something. That's what happens from this stuff. It's okay, she can speak up. You don't have to. It's okay, I like it.

01:11:49 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, but it seems like it's another source of stress for them if they're conducting their social lives, both online and offline. And she has a watch. She has group texts. We've made it clear that we expect to be able to see her texts at any time able to see her texts at any time.

01:12:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, as a parent taking away the phone, because they did. We did have some cell phones, they weren't smartphones. Yeah, was kind of a double-edged punishment because, yeah, the kid didn't have the phone, but then I didn't know where the hell a kid was, yeah, or, and I was worried that I could, they couldn't reach me.

01:12:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
You know, they needed the phone, was a safety thing but that was what it wasn't a smartphone I do actually have to kind of check myself that way, because I remember that, you know, when I was in middle school, my parents let me run errands. I run around with friends, oh you remember that we could go out well, I always had to say I'll be back by this time. This is who I'm with, this is where we're going, and so every once in a while, if she's out without her watch, I have to remind myself that you know what parents live through this with their kids.

01:12:40
It's gonna be, okay if I don't know where she is at all times. Part of my job is to learn how to be okay with her being an independent person in the world, and part of her job is to prove she can be.

01:12:49 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Can I follow up? You mentioned about an expectation of being able to see messages at all times. Did I unplug something? Oh, there we go. Where do you draw the line on expectation of privacy for the youth, for the child? Do they have it? Do they get to have an expectation of any privacy with it, or does that come at a certain age? I'm curious about this as it is now, because I think even Lisa was talking about it before. Externally, we all don't have a huge expectation for privacy because there's so much tracking. That goes on. But I've heard a lot of parents who talk about for their kids giving some level of privacy. So I'm just curious where how that is for you so it's.

01:13:31 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's stepped up as she's gotten older. For example, when she was in elementary school, we made it clear we get to look at your google search whenever we want. Um, and I'm glad that we did, because there were a couple times when she was querying things. I'm like, okay, I see that you're curious, let's talk about it.

01:13:44 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And she I'm dying of embarrassment but we've got to talk about it, yeah um, with the text now it's basically we've always talked with her.

01:13:55 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Don't ever put anything in writing that you wouldn't want read back to you. That's fair in a court of law or on the front page or grandma to see. Yeah, yeah, um, yeah. But since this is a really emotional and fraught time, if there's drama on a group text and she spun up about it, yeah to be able to help you, yeah well, it's not just people to help, it's it's okay, let's get some context here, so it's something like that.

01:14:18
Where we need to see is this is are you being bullied, right, um? Are you saying things to someone that I'm going to hear about later? I haven't had to actually step in and look at stuff like that. Just letting her know, I reserve the right to.

01:14:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you would force kids to use Mastodon, everything would be okay.

01:14:41 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So boring and quiet there would be no problems whatsoever.

01:14:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Potus is now on Mastodon the president, but not by joining Mastodon, but by his Threads account. In fact, I just recently turned this on too.

01:14:54 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
Oh, that's right, If you're a.

01:14:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Threads user. You can go into your settings on your Threads account. I don't know why anybody would do this, but you can I. I don't know why anybody would do this, but you can. I need to turn it on and you can turn on what's called Fediverse sharing and they'll give you a whole explanation. I've turned mine on so I don't see the explanation, but then somebody on Mastodon can follow your threads account.

01:15:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh, very nice.

01:15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, I'm still kind of a Mastodon, prefer Mastodon kind of guy, but that's kind of a mastodon, prefer mastodon kind of guy, but uh, but that's kind of nice.

01:15:26
It means that you can at least follow some uh critical, important accounts, and more and more, I think, over time I think that's the best way to solve this by the way and I don't think this will ever happen with twitter but the idea of multiple small instances all over the place that are run by whoever you trust but who then give you access to accounts on other social networks, that's pretty good. That's a good way of doing it.

01:15:49 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I think I just, I just I've just been hurt Like the loss of what was once Twitter.

01:15:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it is a big loss. I agree.

01:16:00 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So I don't. I have no desire you don't want it To post anywhere at any time about anything, anything, to be perfectly honest with you. So I pretty much only occasionally share stuff that I'm doing here because for the most part, I just feel so it's draining for me to these different social media sites anymore. I think I maybe post on Instagram once a year at this point and all the rest of it again. It's usually just oh, check out the thing I did on Hands on Mac. I don't feel like I have a personality on the Internet anymore and it's just because, yeah, I did that and I enjoyed it and then it went away For one brief shining moment.

01:16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But here's the question did that and I enjoyed it, and then it went away For one brief shining moment. But here's the question. And the reason it's interesting that the president is on Macedon is how important it certainly wasn't important until roughly the time of Obama that our government had a presence on these social networks. How important is that? Is it just a way of raising money? Is it just a way of advertising, or is it legitimately a way for government to communicate with?

01:17:07 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
the government, because that's where the journalists were, I think.

01:17:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:17:10 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That was the big way to make sure that the news got to the people who were going to be sharing the news with everyone else as quickly as possible. I think if they weren't there then maybe it would not be as important.

01:17:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, that was the whole point of Twitter.

01:17:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Twitter was kind of the town square for people who would have been obsessing over Conde Nast in the 90s Kanye West, conde Nast, oh okay.

01:17:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I'm obsessing over Kanye West in the 20s, but that's a different. I do feel like Twitter may have had a negative impact on politics and governance overall, because all of these politicians and people in government wanted to be celebrities and people in both parties were trolling other people in a way that's not to help they construct you could say 24-hour news didn't help that.

01:17:52
Even right, that's made them celebrities probably some examples of people in government have used it in a constructive and positive way, but I think they're probably outnumbered by people for whom, if they didn't have that presence, we'd all be better off yeah.

01:18:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Entire problem with social, though, is it's all performance, whether you're a government official or just some lowly person like micah every. No, I don't.

01:18:14
I don't mean to say that just uh, like me, uh, that it's really a performance in every case, that you're creating a persona. That's part of the problem, right? Is that on, uh, on savvy young people might think that instagram account is real like that person, right? Is really that thin and beautiful and having that greater life and anybody more sophisticated would go. Well, that's all phony and staged, uh, but isn't that what everybody's doing? And in you know, this used to be the, the province of only people like me who got a chance to be on TV. I don't want you people having a performance. No, I'm just saying it's bad for people, I think to be performative instead of genuine.

01:18:57 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, it was actually Harry's employer in the 1990s who ran the cover story of Brand Called you Indeed, oh God.

01:19:04 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
People are still reading that story to this day. Was it the time person of the year? Was you the time person of the year? Was you? Eventually.

01:19:11 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But we do have. It is considered good job advice now even.

01:19:18 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Branding always be branding.

01:19:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Think of yourself as a brand and to present yourself as a brand.

01:19:24 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
God, how depressing.

01:19:27 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Well it is because it used to be that one brand, and to present yourself as a brand. Um god, how depressing this was. What year was that here? That one was what?

01:19:30 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
2004 matters versus family matters, like people always had a public facing persona and a private one, but now we're commodifying that public facing persona in a way that is in shitification well, and also, how important are those?

01:19:43 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
um, oh goodness, help me with the term. It's a relationship that parasocial yeah, parasocial relationships are becoming a, an expenditure. It's becoming a product that people can buy. Uh, when you think about the subscription, a lot of subscription services, a lot of memberships and all that kind of thing yeah, that is all about, uh, leveraging the parasocial relationship that forms and, oh oh, you will get more access to me. I'm going to do videos where I dance like a chicken and they're only for you if you pay $50 a month. Now, if any of you would do that, let me know, because we'd love to have more. Michael loves chicken dancing. Yeah, I love chicken dancing and $50 a month would be great.

01:20:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is prescient though Time. Person of the year you, yes, you. You control the information age that dates it right there, that phrase.

01:20:28 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, the information.

01:20:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Welcome to your world. But it was kind of prescient, I don't think. I think in this case, time was saying this is a good thing, but it really turned out to be, while it's true, maybe not such a good thing.

01:20:45 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
People made fun of it at a while, but it probably reads okay, and the fast company story which lisa mentioned was like 10 years before that, um, because I remember, so you thought this up, it's your fault.

01:20:51 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, uh, retroactively, yes, so it was like oh it was like what I think a brand called you came out in fast company in 96.

01:20:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to say 96 and uh, that, and this is 2006, probably our most famous cover and and our website.

01:21:04 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That story still gets read regularly.

01:21:06 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I remember that cover. It was a really well-designed cover, just beautifully graphic.

01:21:12 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And that was kind of before they were. I don't think we were really talking about you being you on the Internet so much. No, it was just. It was branding yourself as a business person.

01:21:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's what it takes to be the CEO of Me Incorporated. This is Tom Peters.

01:21:29 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Tom Peters.

01:21:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The management expert right yeah.

01:21:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I believe you'll have to pay us to read the entire story, Leo.

01:21:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh man, it's a brand new world. Get it yes. Tom Peters writes in 1996, the cross trainer you're wearing. We don't call them cross trainers anymore. Yeah, One look at the distinctive swoosh on the side tells everyone who's got you branded that coffee travel mug you're carrying. Ah, you're a Starbucks woman your t-shirt with a distinctive champion C on the sleeve. This seems so naive and innocent. This is like a long time ago. Little did they know. Yeah, exactly.

01:22:06 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Where we were headed. It was really it. It I'm again. I was working for hotwired and sitting next to the folks from suck at the time and this hit like a neutron bomb. It was something where it was combining with um commodify your descent from the baffler, and the whole idea that you could commodify people or your public facing presentation was just it was. It was probably one of the more influential ideas of the 1990s.

01:22:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm not going to sign up for Fast Company now, but I will sign up for the premium. I'm very curious.

01:22:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It would be well worth it just for that story alone.

01:22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, a personal branding expert shares what it takes. Wow, and in fact Tom Peters on his own website had a piece on the 25th anniversary of that piece.

01:22:50
It's changed a lot, but it was also kind of a glimpse into what the future was holding. And I have a little bit of a bias about this because, well A, I kind of built a career to some degree doing that, but my son has done that using tiktok and instagram quite successfully. I mean, that's how he makes his living and I feel bad for a whole generation, his whole generation, that all thinks they should be influencers and all thinks that there's their future.

01:23:18 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But in his case it worked out don't they say when they ask kids what they want to be when they grow up? Online influencer as well? It used to be NBA star or NFL star.

01:23:29 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Isn't your son in cuisine Like that's his thing?

01:23:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's funny, he's not a trained chef or anything.

01:23:36 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But he's like amassed, a form of expertise that's recognized.

01:23:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He grew up. What happened was he grew up watching YouTube videos of all of these cooks and decided, oh, you know in his head, at some point I would like to do that, but I don't. I don't know how he suddenly said oh, this is now. He's got a cook. Simon Schuster is publishing his cookbook in the fall. That's so cool. He's been on Gordon Ramsay's show. He's hanging out with you know big stars, and some of his, some of his TikToks get 5, 10, 20 million. This grilled cheese sandwich has 20 million views. Oh my God, that looks so good. Yeah, really, that's all it is. By the way, that's his mother's house.

01:24:19 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
He's doing it from mom's house, but that doesn't seem to hurt his dating life at all, I think there is a lot of good that's come out of the fact that anybody can get a platform, so it's not all bad by any means.

01:24:28 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, leo, anyone can get a platform. This is why I'm biased this is why I'm biased.

01:24:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can we also talk about?

01:24:33 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
how he's like. Let's pour it out there for BuzzFeed's food videos though, because your son's videos remind me a whole lot of. One of the appeals of BuzzFeed's cooking channel videos was it did the step-by-step and it sped up, so it looked fun as opposed to tedious, which so much cooking is so tedious, but when it's like sped up and montage-y, it's like cute and fun.

01:24:55 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I can do that in 15 minutes.

01:24:57 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
No, no, you will be making that stock for two hours, friend.

01:25:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I think, who is responsible for those buzzfeed videos and that style? Yeah, is zay frank. Do you remember zay frank? Yes, he was real early to that.

01:25:12 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
He was, uh, he had that whole creative thing where he was like producing a new thing a day too.

01:25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and he would never blink yeah right, he was the guy. He would, he would. He was afraid he would do fast cuts. Yeah, he would never blink. This is in the very early days of the internet and I think, I believe, he joined BuzzFeed and actually designed their recipe. Yeah, style Like they had a video.

01:25:34 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, it was just. It was a really distinctive style and you see it all over TikTok now or all over YouTube shorts or whatever you want to call it, but over YouTube shorts or whatever you want to call it, but anytime you see someone cooking, it's always sped up and it's it's and often it's about, it's always about the, not so much as the person up you're looking at hands and you're that's safe.

01:25:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Frank, that was his, that was totally his style.

01:25:55 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There's a new um I don't know the name of the creator, but basically what. They also reading aloud Reddit stories oh wow, and that fascinates me because there's no instructional value whatsoever. You're just watching them pipe frosting while they're also reading about this crazy relationship drama and I thought this is like next level. This is the inception of the internet.

01:26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't this a great opportunity for creativity? Yeah, so again, what we're doing here is we're talking about both the pros and the cons. There's negatives, there's downsides At the same time. As you know, I'm glad my kid got into doing all of that and watched a lot of youtube videos, and because it's, it's turned out to be what he does for a living. Not that that will happen for a large number of people but still.

01:26:36 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The point I was originally getting at, though, was he created an area of specialty. He's like I'm an authority, he did it right, and and. When people are like, oh, children want to be influencers, that's not necessarily bad. What you should point out, though, is, if you're going to do that, you have to be good at something.

01:26:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every single barber in the barbershop.

01:26:53 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I've talked to kids like that. I'm like, okay, but how?

01:26:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every single barber in the barbershop I go to has a plaque above their name with their Instagram handle. Oh wow, and you're supposed to. I follow mine and she's posting. She says, follow me on my Thursday and there's a picture of me and my haircut. It's like that's what every but the thing is, if everybody's an influencer.

01:27:15 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Then nobody's an influencer who's?

01:27:17 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
watching the videos. I don't know. Everybody's influencing someone, right?

01:27:20 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
Yeah.

01:27:22 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Can everybody be an influencer If they're influencing other influencers.

01:27:24 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Everybody can have a sphere of influence.

01:27:26 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yes, there we go.

01:27:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We all get to be in our own little sphere.

01:27:30 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And let's be reasonable, not everybody will be an influencer.

01:27:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and there's some people who are very happy to consume. Yeah Uh, and somebody's got to do it. So please, if you will be a consumer, because there's not enough room for all this.

01:27:41 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Consume my influence please.

01:27:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I swear, one of the problems. I mean there are a number of problems with podcasting, which is struggling right now, but one of the biggest problems is every freaking body has a podcast. So if you are a podcast listener it might be a little overwhelming, but your attention you only have 24 hours in a day. It's going to be diluted a little bit. Here is your new sticker, Thanks to Joe Esposito in our studio today. Joe Esposito, this is the man responsible for all internet narcissism and there's a lovely picture of I will take the bullet on behalf of Fast Company you.

01:28:18
It's you, it's your fault. You're watching kind of a special edition of this Week in Tech, not only because it is an in-studio for the first time in four years we love it that, first of all, all of our panels are in-studio panelists but also our great studio audience Nice to have you here. Please don't hesitate to shout out, yell, scream. It's good for us to understand that there are people listening to what we're saying and responding, just as you would at home. It's quite a. It's really I don't mind at all, I like it. It's also a special occasion because this is close to our 19th birthday.

01:28:56
So the very first this Week in Tech was April. Let me see, I have to find it. Every time I can't remember the date, twittv slash one, I think, is all I need to do it. Every time I can't remember the date, twittv slash one, I think, is all I need to do. Maybe it's twit one and uh, the first episode will pop up was April 17th 2005, so 10 days away from our 19th uh anniversary of this show. It's kind of amazing. Yeah, that's a long time and I haven't aged a bit, which which is really remarkable. I think I owe it all to my velvet jacket. So nice to have you in studio, harry. You've been on this show how many times.

01:29:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Many, many times you looked it up. The last time I was here it was 19 years.

01:29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was like forever, More often than I remembered. Yeah Well, I forgot most of mine too. I think it's a protective mechanism. Lisa Schmeiser, you've been on for many years as well. It's great to have you from no Jitter.

01:29:49 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's one of my favorite things to do Well.

01:29:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you for bringing Girl Scout cookies. Did you see there are Samoas, but I'm going to buy those. I don't want no freebies, no freebies, we're going to buy those Girl scout cookies.

01:30:04
It was a gift, I promise I know it was, yeah, uh, and also, of course, uh, the kind of the newest member, but a but a very important member of our twit family. Uh, it's great to have micah sergeant. Good to be here in studio with us. Our show today brought to you by those good folks at robin hood, this episode brought to you by Robinhood. Did you know that even if you have a 401k for retirement, you can still have an IRA? Robinhood is the only IRA that gives you a 3% boost on every dollar you contribute when you subscribe to Robinhood Gold. But get this now. Through April 30th, robinhood is even boosting every single dollar you transfer in from other retirement accounts with a 3% match. That's right. No cap on the 3% match. Robinhood Gold gets you the most for your retirement thanks to their IRA with a 3% match. This offer is good through April 30th. Get started at robinhoodcom. Slash boost Subscription fees apply. And now for some legal info Claim as of Q1 2024, validated by Radius Global Market Research. Investing involves risk, including loss. Limitations apply to IRAs and 401ks. 3% match requires Robinhood Gold for one year from the date of first 3% match. Must keep Robinhood IRA for five years. The 3% matching on transfers is subject to specific terms and conditions. Robinhood IRA available to US customers in good standing. Robinhood Financial LLC member SIPC is a registered broker-dealer.

01:31:38
Welcome back this week in tech. Continuing on with the week's tech news, let's see here. Should we talk about Yahoo? Yahoo's in the news. So there was a wonderful news app I don't know if you ever used it AI-driven news app created by Kevin Systrom, the man who founded Instagram, started Instagram then was, of course, instagram was bought by Meta and he went to Meta and stayed there for many years. Left is no longer running Instagram and has now started a new startup called Artifact, which, one year in, he decided, eh, never mind, and canceled it. Then, a week later this was last month put out a blog post saying, oh, never mind. On the never mind, we think we have a way going forward.

01:32:25
Now the other shoe has dropped. This week we learned that Yahoo, yahoo, yahoo is buying Artifact, the AI news app, but they're not going to keep the app running. I still have Artifact on my phone and, of course, I immediately went to Artifact, hoping that it would in fact be doing something, and then no, it's just saying no, it's over. So Yahoo, I guess, wanted the technology but didn't want Artifact. Every time, every tab I go to, it says that's all we have for you at the moment. Wow, they moved quick. They didn't take any time.

01:33:01 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Merciless. Shut the whole damn thing down, thing ghosted by your app, oh it does feel like that is one of the companies where things go to die. Yahoo, yeah, tumblr flicker, flicker yeah, they're just not what they used to be now.

01:33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tumblr is now owned by automatic by that's true.

01:33:21 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's true, but but it isn. Tumblr is now owned by Automatic. That's true, that's true but it is not.

01:33:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Flickr is owned by SmugMug, so a lot of this stuff got dispersed eventually, but it's like they got some sort of horrible parasite.

01:33:32 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
They ingested some sort of horrible parasite that they've never recovered from or something, because to this day, I remember Tumblr being a cool place to be and actually liking that platform and it is not anything like it was.

01:33:45 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I would argue there's kind of a built-in expiration date on a lot of these intensely um cultured that's communities, because you had the same thing with live journal, which got bought by a russian company at one point and is still kicking around. I remember a lot of online bulletin boards from the turn of the century getting bought up and killed. Tumblr is kind of the same way. Myspace was again an intensely cultured place that was great for discovering music and building out connections and then just was murdered.

01:34:20 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So maybe Yahoo's not a discerning buyer?

01:34:22 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, I think the problem is Yahoo wants to be cool in Google, but they're not, and that's not a bad thing.

01:34:29
Not every product has to be cool, not every product has to be cutting edge. It's a decent internet aggregator for people who don't want to spend a lot of time surfing but still want to feel informed, the same way that you used to have news magazines that just aggregated news for you so that once a week you sat down and read them. Um, the problem is is that yahoo was trying it was beholden to its investors to prove they were growing, and it was trying to find new audiences and new niches, and I think that's where a lot of their disastrous buys came from. Is they're like this will get us in with the young, youngs, or?

01:35:03 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And that was their first problem. Yes, looking for getting in with the young youngs yeah.

01:35:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there's that in certification the China lent to the Washington. Am I wrong on that? I believe so.

01:35:13 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But you were saying, I mean, yahoo does have a ton of content, yeah, and if all they want is some AI, that might be helpful figuring out which content to serve to which people there might be some value there.

01:35:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would love it if Yahoo rose like a phoenix from its ashes.

01:35:28 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
If it becomes the USA Today of the 2020s is that so bad?

01:35:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wouldn't that be great. Would anybody be against that? I think that would be wonderful.

01:35:34 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Now the money quote in the Verge story, which I think explains everything, is coming from the co-founder's system, where he says a lot of organizations care deeply about news and personalized content and I think they're looking around and saying, wow, there's this new wave of AI. Maybe we should figure out what's going on, and so-.

01:35:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says also maybe that's what I discounted originally.

01:35:57 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, but what he's basically?

01:35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
saying Always catching up yeah.

01:36:00 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, what he's basically saying is look, organizations have decided there's value in offering highly curated or customized news feeds to people. I loved Artifact.

01:36:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember Nuzzle.

01:36:14 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yes, oh my gosh. I really liked Nuzzle Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter bought it and basically let it.

01:36:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess it's part of Twitter Blue, but it's not the same, Not at all.

01:36:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Years ago, Yahoo bought a company called Sumly which was using AI to figure out which stories to show to which people, and that became Yahoo News Digest in the Marissa Meyer era and then went away. So they're definitely coming back at an old idea, but maybe the AI is ready for prime time now.

01:36:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Maybe the AI is ready for prime time now. Yeah well, this is one of the biggest challenges in news and information period is readers or surfers will always oh, there's a flood of news, I don't know where to start, and so giving people the bespoke experience is always gonna be the end goal. It's good for advertisers or it's good for subscriptions or whatever, but when you have people do it, it's tremendously, tremendously labor intensive. So being able to have technology do it would be great going full circle back to our self-driving car thing yeah um, where you said I want people yeah, well maybe there's places we don't need people.

01:37:18
I feel like news ought to have people so again, having spent a week having people say oh you, you know, ai is coming for your job, it's not coming for your job.

01:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's not In fact every time some publication, whether it's CNET or Sports Illustrated, starts proffering AI-written articles. It's a huge problem.

01:37:38 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
With the caveat that I'm not sure the current sub-stack boom is sustainable because we only have so many subscriptions we're willing to pay 50 a year for that's true. Every time I want to read something, I go another yeah, like I know I I do think there is a real hunger in audiences for content that is written by people who know what they're talking about, or is curated by or edited by people who know what they're talking about.

01:38:04
Um, and if something like artifact can be used as an assistive device to help editors better serve their public, that's great you know, though I would love it if I had a tool where, if I'm editing a story, a tool pops up and says hey, you've also edited four other stories on a four-day work week in the past year. Yeah, that's useful. Why don't you roll this in and let's see if we can put together a digest based on these insights from those stories? Like that would be amazing, because it's something I could offer readers to say hey, this is the year-long story we're evolving. This is the most recent installation of it.

01:38:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd love something like that, as a consumer, though, what worked for me, for Nuzzle and somewhat Artifact, was not an auto-generated one, but this is what people you're following are reading, this is what people you're following are interested in. That is essentially harnessing the real power, human power, of the people I follow, and that's really useful. That's really good, better than some AI saying, well, based on what, that never works out. Based on what you've been reading those never work out.

01:39:06 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I would be more likely to read something if I knew one of the three of you recommended it. Because I trust you guys and your judgment and I think if AI can help with that, or if AI can help pull things together to give people a more complete view, like as a consumer, I think that would be great.

01:39:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's reasonable for companies like Yahoo to look at at least. Yeah, because, as you say, it's very expensive to do this human stuff. That's why Nuzzle and, to some extent, artifact was genius, was well, they're not doing any extra work, they're just aggregating, they're linking into and this is Twitter. Really blew this, because Twitter could have done it very well. They're aggregating links from your friends and the people you follow.

01:39:45 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
There wasn't even any real AI involved with Nuzzle. No work. It just turns out that if you have interesting friends and they're sharing stuff, it's a pretty good sign you might also be interested.

01:39:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mr Beast says slow down.

01:40:01 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, we're going away from the Zay Frank.

01:40:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Talk about influencers. Mr Beast, who is, I believe, now number one on YouTube by a long shot, made his name. He's very clear about it. He studied the algorithm. He had a team of people going back to his high school years studying the algorithm and and feeding the algorithm basically what it would, what it would uh promote to his viewers, and it's worked quite well. In fact, he's worked so well that, uh, it's sometimes called the beastification of youtube. Jimmy donaldson, who's uh that's the real name of mr beast.

01:40:39
Beast Built his reputation by and this is from the Washington Post creating hyper-engaging, fast-paced videos with frequent action on screen. I will add loud noises, flashing lights and no pauses. That was the style he's now saying stop. Pretty much everybody's copying Mr Beast. Earlier earlier this month, he tweeted a plea to his fellow youtubers to stop doing it. Get rid of, he said here I'm pulling up the tweet right now get rid of the ultra fast-paced, over stim area era of content. It doesn't even work, which is kind of rich coming from a guy who's been using this to make his name.

01:41:24 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The Washington Post story has a bunch of experts saying actually it works quite well.

01:41:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe Mr Beast doesn't like the competition, mr Beast huh, he says this in his tweet. The last year, I've slowed down our videos focused on storytelling. Let scenes breathe, yell less, more personality longer videos. Basically, he's turning his style into mine. Basically, we just start doing three-hour shows. He got old, leo. He got old, he got old. That's what happened, benito, our producer.

01:41:55 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh, my goodness.

01:41:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what to make of this right.

01:42:00 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I mean, like you said, said he made his money by studying the algorithm. He claims in the part right before he says slow down and do everything, is that the algorithm seems to have changed because he said, by changing to this more storytelling style, by slowing down, he says quote, my views skyrocketed. So he's claiming that that shift is actually better for the numbers. But, as you said, then there were the Washington Post folks who said no, that's not better for the numbers. Does anyone really?

01:42:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know, look at my son's videos. Would you say fast-paced editing? I'm so hungry. Actually, he slowed down towards the end. I think he speeds it up when he's making it. Oh, this is an ad for King's Hawaiian bread. He speeds it up when he's making it and then slows down to eat it. I think this is all very conscious, I'm sure Very, very calculated. I think he did what Mr Beast did to kind of figure out what the style is that would generate. Now this is early days of tiktok. That would generate the most? Uh, because tiktok, the whole kia, tiktok is getting the algorithm to to boost you. It isn't really getting people to like you or follow you or or anything, right, it's getting whatever magic algorithm tiktok has to promote you and almost instantly you get millions that algorithm is going to be influenced by people, though, um I don't know, I don't know, we don't know.

01:43:25 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There was a story early in the pandemic talking about how um and it's one of the few that came out of like the whole black box of how tiktok works, but, um, for a while, uh, the people who were responsible for tweaking the TikTok algorithm were deliberately waiting or pushing out videos where people had really nice houses, like you had a bunch of kids making. I'm bored. It's the pandemic, I'm at home videos. The ones who are making them in 4,000 square foot houses with marble countertops in their kitchens were getting boosted into people's feeds a lot more than the ones where the kids were living in just, you know, modest ranch.

01:44:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's probably why he was using his mom's kitchen.

01:44:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Modest ranch houses. So there are people putting thumbs on the scale with the algorithm.

01:44:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
at different points the Post quotes a one influencer, 17-year-old, who works as a freelance video editor for social media content creators. She's 17. Good for her, dara Pesheva. She says every 1.3 to 1.5 seconds you have to have a new graphic or something moving. You have to use a lot of effects. For every image, in every transition, you have to add a sound effect. Henry, by the way, does all of that. You need flashing graphics and you have to have subtitles in every video. That's kind of true. But she then says people around my age can't focus. I wonder why they have very short attention spans. They're used to tiktok. Oh, she says.

01:44:47 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's why she's adjusted to this short form, because that's the audience editors have to adjust for gen z, so this raises an interesting thing is could you have there been any studies taking a look at people's attention spans relative to social media use? Like aside from the alarmist, it's killing our children's brains. Like, has any researcher actually tried to set up any study that takes a look at what happens to people's ability to concentrate or complete tasks?

01:45:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
depending on social media use, and we talked about this last week. But there's a great debate going on right now and it's always prompted by jonathan heights. Yeah, a new book called the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness like why wouldn't they be anxious about?

01:45:35
I think they're anxious about a lot of things like climate change, uh, but candace augers, who's the author of many of these studies, wrote in nature that he's confusing uh uh correlation with causation, which is a common problem. Yes, there's a correlation there, but she says there is, there is no. There are no studies that that support this idea that our children's brains are getting rewired or that there is an epidemic of short attention span. She does say, though, that there is a rise in mental issues, mental health issues in young people, but why? It might be you're right, it might be because of the world around them, but it also might be they're reporting it more, and it's okay to report it more. She also says focusing on social media detracts from some of the real solutions that we need to look at. She points out that, of every 1,119 students in the United States, there's only one school psychologist, so there aren't a lot of places kids can go to get solutions.

01:46:33 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Our former educator. What are your thoughts on this?

01:46:35 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
It's a mess.

01:46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a mess.

01:46:39 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
Yeah, it's a mess, because the technology that kids are exposed to is, for the most part, inappropriate for their age.

01:46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's a whole different issue, isn't it? They're exposed to stuff that you and I were not exposed to when we were their age. It's really inappropriate. Yeah, but maybe that's us judging it as inappropriate. Maybe, I mean, when we were young, we were exposed to rock and roll and our parents didn't think that was so appropriate either.

01:47:07 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
When you say it's inappropriate, how? Because I just want to make sure I understand how you're using the word.

01:47:16 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
Visually, you know, it's like boom, boom, boom. So there's no attention.

01:47:22 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
You talked about attention span?

01:47:24 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
There's no attention span at all. There's just like you know.

01:47:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That started with MTV.

01:47:29 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
Yeah, Actually you don't read a book Right, you don't read a book. Right, you just don't sit down and read a book.

01:47:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but people when books came out, when novels were widely read jeff jarvis has brought this up many times there was a. There were a lot of scary articles about people's imaginations withering because they were told what to imagine instead of thinking it up on their own.

01:47:50 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I mean, there's always been louisa may alcott actually wrote a polemic against novels in one of her books really yes, the author of many a novel yes, yeah well that that she was, the little house on the prairie.

01:48:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, she did.

01:48:02 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Little women, little men, little women, that's right, she basically wrote for money because her dad, the fruitarian, didn't provide.

01:48:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So oh, she just did it because she had to yeah, she, she basically did it because she had to.

01:48:12 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think it goes way back, uh, before mr beast or even mtv, like sesame street was way faster than captain kangaroo. And yeah, I'm pretty confident that Sesame Street was kind of controversial early on because the cuts were so fast and it was something new every 10 seconds.

01:48:30 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But you watch it now and it's so slow-paced compared to. Well, the shows from the 70s are so slow-paced compared to what they are now we should watch some Captain Kangaroo together.

01:48:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was my show.

01:48:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's really, and the Children's salvation workshop was using research at the time saying you know, we're dealing with kids and the attention spans they have as small children, but it those attention spans have changed humans though, yeah are marvelously adaptive.

01:48:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I think it's easy to overestimate the damage.

01:48:59 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's being done right, I mean I think we will also survive Well, I think you do raise a good point about reading, though, which is the ability to engage in a text in a protracted way and be able to sink into a book Like do you guys all remember reading with complete absorption when you were younger Like just being able to get lost in a book for hours? I loved that. You know just things like that absorption when you were younger like just being able to get lost in a book for for hours loved that. You know just just like that it's. I've watched kids who do that today, and then that still happens, but it is a skill that you have to encourage them to practice and cultivate I actually put some captain kangaroo on youtube and it's gotten a ton of views oh, that's so sweet.

01:49:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you old enough to have watched captain kangaroo as?

01:49:41 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
a kid I loved Captain Kangaroo. Yeah, me too, and there's not a whole lot of the early stuff online and I put up two episodes from the 1960s. Who owns that? He was on CBS. I'm not sure if they own it.

01:49:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know who owns it is the answer You're posting. Where are you finding it?

01:50:00 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
These were VHS tapes I bought years ago. Oh my gosh, there is more of the more recent stuff where he's in color.

01:50:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you are posting the black and white stuff.

01:50:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I put up two 1960s ones.

01:50:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This one's from the year of my birth, 1956.

01:50:16 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
You just don't understand.

01:50:18 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Grandfather, I have got to have the keys to open the door to the treasure house.

01:50:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think, though, mr Rogers was a very calming soothing.

01:50:28 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I really loved Mr.

01:50:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Rogers' point of view. But again it's us parents kind of deciding what would be right faith that young people will survive this, as they survive the onslaught of Captain Kangaroo and movies and radio and books and locomotives and cars and all the other things that have been menaces to children.

01:51:00 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
We'll survive. I survived. Rock and roll Didn't poison my mind. I don't know. These kids these days have an innate understanding because they don't know anything else. I understand it way better than we do.

01:51:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe, and maybe we're preparing them for the world that they're going to be living in, whether we like it or not. I mean, there's the other risk of if you have a kid and you say, well, no screen time for you when he gets to college, what's life going to be like for him? Is he going to college? What's life going to be like for him? You know?

01:51:28 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
is he going to be able to talk to his peers? Is he going to be ready for the world he's going to inhabit? Oh my god, can you match my son's grad student at oregon state and I asked him how the freshmen and juniors, freshmen and sophomores are doing in this way and he said okay yeah, they're surviving.

01:51:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think I have faith. I think the human brain is marvelously adaptable and we've survived a lot worse than this.

01:51:53 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I'm just eager to see, frankly, the heart of it. I'm eager to see more research being done specifically about all of this, about all of this, and that, I think, is kind of an argument there that if we focus too much on one specific thing, we miss out on research opportunities for however else things might be impacted. And you just brought up that really good question that I would love to know have we, over time, done research on attention spans to see if attention spans truly have changed or if maybe we are just more aware of how one's attention span shifts over the course of their life? And is that what's different? Or, genuinely, are the attention span shorter or are their attention spans being used in such a way that they're? You know, it's just focused on something else. There's a lot of questions that I, as a person who's not a child psychologist, I'm not going to try and say is this or is that, and I I'm curious, I just want to see something else.

01:52:47 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There's a lot of questions that I, as a person, who's not a child psychologist am not going to try and say is this or is that? And I'm curious. I just want to see more research. I mean, adolescents are always novelty seeking and stimulation seeking. It's part and parcel of your brain growing from childhood to adulthood. That's why they engage in risky behaviors and act out socially. It's their brains desperate for stimulus. The thing I'd like to see studied is so that's what's going on with Leo.

01:53:10
The thing I want to see studied is does having easy availability to countless types of stimulus, with gaming systems and YouTube and TikTok and all that, is that affecting how that brain matures? I would, I would point, or is this just? Is this like? Well, it was hot rod racing in the 1950s and now it's watching.

01:53:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. It's notoriously difficult to do in vivo human studies Really hard to do. It's why we have such bad information about diet everything right. Because humans you can't really study them. There's so many variables and the real problem with studies like that is they bear the imprimatur of science and so people decide this is true, this is the way it is, and then you get people acting on that and I think the last thing we want is a Congress marching in and saying okay, I think the last thing we want is a Congress marching in and saying, ok, we're going to ban social media or we're going to ban TikTok.

01:54:08
Louise Mitsakis had a great article in Wired this week the guy who most of DC is listening to about the dangers of TikTok. Turns out he only worked there for six months. He made it seems to be made up a lot of stuff, but it spoke to what Congress, certain members of Congress, wanted to believe. Tick tock said you know he's. Here's what the what Louise wrote. He worked at Tick Tock as a risk manager. In a wrongful termination lawsuit filed against Tick Tock, he alleges he was fired for refusing to sign off on Project Texas. That was the move to get all our US data stored by Oracle in Texas. But Louise says he worked at TikTok for six months. He did not have a senior position. His lawsuit and a second one he filed against several US government agencies makes a number of improbable claims. He says he was put under 24-hour surveillance by TikTok and the FBI while working remotely in Mexico. In other words, there's a lot of evidence this guy might be a nut job.

01:55:11 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
He says, merrick Garland wickedly instigated his firing.

01:55:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, nevertheless, because he's saying something members of Congress want to believe, want to think is true. They feel it in their gut. They feel it in their gut. They feel it in their gut. This is true. Uh, the senate passed a law banning tick. I mean, the house passed a law banning tiktok. Fortunately, I think, cooler heads have prevailed, uh, in the senate, uh, so it may not, but biden said I'll sign it if the senate passes it. So, uh, I think there's a lot. I think, yes, it's good to have the research, it's good to get the information. It's bad to act on it. That's what I'm saying and it's certainly bad for government to act on it. I don't think that's the right way to solve this. I've argued against any ban on TikTok and again, I have a little bit of a dog in this, I admit it.

01:56:03 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I don't, and I still feel that You're young, I feel that I've talked before plenty, because we've, especially on Tech News Weekly, have an opportunity to talk regularly about where things stand, and I've been uncomfortable with the whole thing from the get-go because of what I still feel is a heaping helping of xenophobia Partnered with, or paired with, my overall concern about how a ban like this would be enacted and what it would do in terms of the privacy and security of the millions of people probably, who are still going to use TikTok, even if it's banned, but are just going to get it through an illicit means. And then they've got some app that isn't signed and they're all jailbreaking their phones because they got to get their TikTok, and that is terrifying to me. Uh. So I have concerns on that front as well, and again, there are so many more aspects of this that we, you know, are like missing because we're paying such heavy attention to this specific situation. It feels odd to me.

01:57:10 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There's that LBJ quote better to have them inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, so LBJ. And I keep thinking if you're banning TikTok, all you're doing is kicking them outside the tent too.

01:57:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and let's face it, there are Russian and Chinese influence campaigns on Twitter right now, on Meta right now.

01:57:28 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
On Instagram. They're everywhere that is proven.

01:57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is actually proven that it's there, so that there's, yeah, we know they the Chinese government as well as our own government buy information, as we were talking about earlier, from data brokers Banning TikTok.

01:57:43 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
buy information, as we were talking about earlier, from data brokers. Banning tiktok will do absolutely nothing. It's not going to make our country or privacy, it's not going to make our people safer. It's not going to stop our children's brains from leaking out their ears, as people are presuming the guy who got this all started maybe.

01:57:54 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Uh, bad information, yeah it does seem somewhat performative, and it's not something where I trust congress to get it right, even if there is an argument in favor of doing that, and there certainly are smart people who do think that there's a problem here yeah, brianna woo argued quite eloquently for it a couple of weeks ago on this show.

01:58:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little break. Harry mccracken, the technologizer, is here. Lisha schmeiser from no jitter. Our good friend micah sergeant.

01:58:20
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02:00:28
Uh, let's see. Oh, I had a good story here. It's talking about zero day exploits. There are companies that buy these, you know. Uh, presumably to sell them on to bad guys or governments. There is a startup now offering a pretty high price for tools to hack iPhones, android devices, whatsapp and iMessage. A startup named CrowdFence F-E-N-S-E published its updated price list for zero days. If you have a zero day to break into iPhones, $5 to $7 million. Wow, zero days to break into Android phones are not so good $5 million. Chrome and Safari zero days $3 to $3.5 million. $3 to $5 million for WhatsApp and iMessage zero days. This is a big jump, in some cases 50% higher than the last price list published a few years ago. It is clearly. I mean, if you want to make money, yeah, seriously.

02:01:37 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
But I wonder, then, about the aspects of that in terms of how you, as an individual, find a zero day, for example.

02:01:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, no, no, these are people who do this for a living.

02:01:50 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that would mean you'd have to have like a company on your side with lawyers and stuff, because whenever you decide you try to sell it. Why would they actually give you the money that you're selling it to? Oh?

02:02:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
believe me.

02:02:03
So there are two companies We've talked about this on Security Now Zerodium, we've talked about a lot. Crowd Fence is like Zerodium. These are companies that buy zero days not to tell the company responsible Apple or Microsoft or Google how to fix it, but to sell it to people like Pegasus or North Korean hackers, and that's why there's so much money in this. It's why it's hard to compete with these bug bounties that these companies create, because they're not going to offer Apple's not going to offer you $7 million, I guess that's what I'm saying, though.

02:02:35
So if you're a bad guy that's come up with this and you don't have a conscience. You go to Zerodium or you go to Crowdfence.

02:02:43 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
But a bad guy working with a bad guy isn't that second bad guy? Why would they actually?

02:02:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
pay.

02:02:48
There's trust among thieves, I guess, which I think is wild, but there is, that's all I'm saying Google said in a report last month that saw hackers use 97 zero-day vulnerabilities in the wild in 2023. 97. Spyware vendors, who often buy these zero-days from brokers, are responsible for 75% of zero-days targeting Google products and Android, according to Google Jeez Louise. This is an article from TechCrunch, lorenzo Franceschi Bichirai, lorenzo's good yes, and this is a very interesting story and also perhaps a little bit scary. Crowdfence currently offers the highest, according to Lorenzo, publicly known prices outside of Russia. There is a company in Russia called Operation Zero. They announced last year they were willing to pay up to $20 million for tools that hack iPhones and Android devices.

02:03:47 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, I don't think you're getting your money from Russia is all I'm saying. I just don't believe that.

02:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you could figure it out. You could give them everything but the last bit of the code and then say, give me the money and you get the last line and then say look well, we can figure out the last bit of code.

02:04:00 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
There must be an escrow.

02:04:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There must be some sort of hacker escrow service.

02:04:04 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There must be a way to do this right, Like some sort of bank that all the bad guys use. Oh, the Cayman Islands.

02:04:12 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
The Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Bahamas Other places.

02:04:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually a guy who works at Linchpin says the price Crowdfence is offering is below market. Oh, at lynchpin. Says the price crowd fence is offering is below market. Oh, oh, my god, below black.

02:04:30 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And you can see how uh, let's say I'm a, a person, uh, with some skills with the z, exactly sunglasses, and I know how to do this.

02:04:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a pretty big payday to turn down. And if you could go to google and say I found a hole in android and they say, well, here's a couple hundred thousand. Right, that's a 20 million dollars. What's the legal stuff here? Oh, it's completely illegal. You might have to move to russia to spend that money, but yeah, see, that's mostly just a uh, a relocation fee by the way the fbi uses them in 2016,. Lorenzo writes the FBI used a zero-day from a company called Azimuth to break into the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter.

02:05:08
Oh, that's, I guess, how we found out that was a zero-day. They went to Apple. Apple said no, so they said, never mind, we found somebody. Motherboard revealed in 2020, the FBI, with the help of Facebook and an unnamed third party, used a zero day to track down a trafficker, a human trafficker. There have been several cases where zero days and spyware have been used to target human rights dissidents and journalists in Ethiopia, morocco, saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. So I don't know what to say about this. I'm sure Steve will talk about it on security now, but it's hard. You could see why there is. Yeah, why would you? Why would you? You just say, well, look, 20 million, I'm sorry.

02:05:57 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So I know if Putin's going to use it against Ukraine, change my face and move away. So I know if Poop is going to use it against Ukraine, change my face and move away.

02:06:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why we live in a kind of scary world Precarious, precarious world.

02:06:11 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Apple has changed I want the movie adaptation.

02:06:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, you know, we were talking last week about XZ, this really interesting hack. That was probably a nation state hacker who two years ago sort of started to gradually infiltrate his way into an open source project so that he could introduce malware into it, which with oh, that great new york times.

02:06:35 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's a great piece.

02:06:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just the luck of the luck of the draw, that a microsoft, not a security researcher, but just a guy who was responsible for their Linux distribution, said. You know, it's taken me half a second too long half a second 500 milliseconds too long to log into my SSH. There's something wrong here and he found it. If it weren't for that, it could have been bad. Who knows, and this was somebody with a lot of patience, gradually wormed their way in. It was a very it is.

02:07:04 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's a movie you know what it reminds me of is there was a great book that came out in the 90s the Cuckoo's Egg oh yeah, cliff Stoll, cliff Stoll where? The reason he was able to break out the Russian hackers was he was responsible for the code that maintained the machine. He wanted to see where the discrepancy was coming from.

02:07:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you know Cliff Stollin, I think you do you totally believe that he is the craziest guy ever? We used to have him on Tech TV as the anti-editor and he would rail against him. Technology.

02:07:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Did he write Silicon Snake Oil, yes, which that was his number two At the time. People made fun of Utman. Maybe in retrospect.

02:07:41 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
He might have been right. He might have been right. No, he was like who's ever going to pay attention to URLs? And I remember at the time being, like he has a point.

02:07:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He currently. Here's a picture of him in his attic. Yeah, he sells bottle bottles. Yeah, you know what a Klein bottle is. It's an infinite loop. Yeah, and I guess I don't know if he's a glassblower, but he sells them.

02:08:09 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
He is now, yeah, yeah, there's a wild video of him sending his robot into the attic to pick out a Klein bottle. What are you even saying, do?

02:08:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
those words all go together. Yes, All right. So here he is. He's got a forklift robot this is from Wired that he sends out into his attic space where he has a bunch of Klein bottles. So these are Actually. I should get one of these.

02:08:27 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Cliff came on.

02:08:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tech TV and made a Macintosh goldfish tank once for us. He's a very strange fellow.

02:08:34 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The Cook is just a classic in the genre. I really encourage anybody who hasn't read it to read it, because it's just such a great snapshot of a really specific time in computer history as well, and like a love letter to the Bay Area in the 80s, and I love that book.

02:08:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
His little robot forklift is found, the Klein bottle he's looking for. It's a second quality big Klein bottle and he's now going to retrieve it and bring it back.

02:09:04 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And he doesn't just go and get it himself. Why, yeah, as a small hole.

02:09:07 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Because, he can. I guess this is just Cliff.

02:09:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's, that's just Cliff. I love Cliff. We should. I'll call him up see if we can get him on the on the show, and I definitely want one of his Klein bottles.

02:09:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, I read that New York Times story and was instantly reminded of Cuckoo's Egg. Where all it takes is one person is like this doesn't make sense.

02:09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the next thing you know but that's exactly what you said Half-set discrepancy, something's wrong and people like Cliff, that was it. That's all it took to get him to go out and find the Klein bottle or no. Find the Klein bottle or no. Find the Klein bottle. Who was the hacker? It was a German kid, right? Who did it? I think?

02:09:46 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, it was part of the Cold War. That's what I remember, yeah.

02:09:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, apple is now allowing game emulators.

02:09:54
They're slowly opening up the App Store, in fact because the Under penalty of Well, yeah, uh, in fact, because the penalty of well, yeah, in the eu, now music apps can send can say if you want to buy the song set, give us your email address. We'll send you an email that tells you how you can use our external website to buy the song, which, for apple, is a big concession. I don't know if the eu is going to accept it, but music streaming apps can now take users to a website and now everywhere, game emulators. This is the first time they've allowed that.

02:10:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I hope that my beloved iDOS, which I talked about here after it was banned, might come back, the DOS emulator for an iPad which lets you play old DOS games and even old TRS-80 games.

02:10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I just got my little. I should show you my little Atari 400. I saw that in the corner. It's so cute, it is adorable. Can you reach it? Is it over there?

02:10:58 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I can get it.

02:10:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's over there on the table. Sorry to make you do that, Micah, but you are my personal secret.

02:11:04 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
How's the keyboard? Does the keyboard even?

02:11:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
work. It doesn't do anything.

02:11:07 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Did you have an Atari 400? I still have my Atari 400.

02:11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm jealous. That was my first real big boy computer Mine too. And this is the cutest little mini version of it. Look at that, isn't that cute, adorable, but it's just a game machine. It does come with a full-size, thank goodness I don't think I could use a little mini Atari joystick, but it's pretty much like the old Atari joystick. It plugs into the back of this and there's 25 games. Star Raiders is on here, battle Zone, asteroid Centipede we played minor 2049er on the uh, on the ask the tech guys show seems worth having just to put on your desk.

02:11:49
Yeah, I know I, that was 119 dollars. How could I not get that? The original 400 was 400 and that was back when a dollar was worth something. Look at that thing. Now I was hoping I. I knew it was a faint hope, but I was hoping that those little keys would well, they were terrible in the first place, so I'm not working at all.

02:12:07 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Isn't that much different?

02:12:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he was gonna hire a mouse to type for him I typed in many a computer program from I don't remember what that was. A compute in here atari basic computer program does it have?

02:12:19 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
can you open up it up where their cartridge slots were originally, or is that sealed?

02:12:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's sealed. But you know what? We had Jerry Ellsworth on the show many years ago. She made a joystick I have it in my museum that had a Commodore 64 game emulator and she said I didn't tell the company, but I put a backdoor that let you drop into a Commodore Basics so that you can't actually do everything that you would have done on a Commodore 64. And I wouldn't be surprised if whoever wrote the little Atari emulator on there put a little backdoor in there. We'll have to find out if it was you. Reach out, reach out, tell us.

02:12:58
Anyway, I think Apple is kind of starting to maybe Is it too early to say bend just the tiniest, tiny way to sway. They do say you're responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these guidelines and all applicable laws. In other words, no pirated roms here. Roms. This is Jerry Ellsworth's C64. It was just a little joystick that hooks up to your TV. This is how old it is. The Atari has an HDMI adapter. This thing has composite adapters. But she told me there's a little back door, probably up down, left right, left right, up down, that will get you into the C64, commodore 64 basic. So that's cool. Anyway, actually, do you want to give away your Jerry Ellsworth augmented reality game?

02:13:55
At some point, anthony Nielsen bought Jerry's game, which was you have a tabletop and you put on some glasses and it's augmented reality and he hasn't played it once. I think he's going to give it away to some lucky audience member. After the show he said can I give this away, because I'm sure somebody would appreciate it. Oh, this was a huge story in the New York Times this weekend and I think it's hysterical. Apparently, openai decided that they needed more training information. This is going to be the gold rush going forward with AIs. They already ate the entire Internet. We need more. Ate the entire internet. We need more. So open ai in 2021 said you know what? There's all this great stuff on youtube. They created a tool which I use to this day called whisper. It's a great transcription tool. They created it specifically to transcribe audio from YouTube videos so that they can use it to train their AI. The New York Times.

02:15:05 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Let's hope they didn't use it on any Disney properties.

02:15:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, let me read on Cade Metz, cecilia Kang, shira Frankel, stuart A Thompson and Nico Grant writing for the New York Times.

02:15:16 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's a murderous row of great journalists I know Holy cats.

02:15:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against youtube's rules. Three people with knowledge of the conversation said youtube, which is owned by google, prohibits use of its videos for applications that are independent of the video platform. Ultimately, they said I'll screw it, and they went ahead and did it, transcribing more than a million hours of youtube videos get, Get him Disney.

02:15:43
The team included Greg Brockman, openai's president, who personally helped collect the videos. The texts were then fed into GPT-4, which is the current state-of-the-art OpenAI and probably really the benchmark for everybody making an LLM.

02:15:59 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I did not have Justine Bateman speaking out on the ethics of open AI on my bingo card, but if you did, congratulations You've just filled in your square, Did she say? Justine Bateman, filmmaker, former actress and author of two books, told the Copyright Office that AI models were taking content, including her writing, in films without permission or payment. This is the largest theft in the United States period, she said.

02:16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the largest theft in the United.

02:16:23 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
States period. She said in an interview.

02:16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the debate. Of course, love that she's bringing this up. In fact, kathy Gellis has been on our shows many times as an attorney. An expert in intellectual property says that is part of the free speech is not just the right to speak, but the right to read. Now the question is humans have the right to read. You have a right to read Justine Bateman's book. You even have the right to read justine bateman's book. You even have the right to memorize it and repeat it back to me. Uh, is an ai different? Is open ai different? And right now it's unclear. The courts have generally supported ai's right to do this. Now that is violating google's policy. So last year, meta uh apparently discussed buying simon and schuster just to get their library of books you read.

02:17:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Kara Swisher's latest book, right? No, of course not. Oh okay.

02:17:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not a fan? Tell me about it.

02:17:14 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So I did not know that you read it. You legally read a copy.

02:17:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can now tell me about it without in any way violating her intellectual property rights.

02:17:23 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, I didn't realize that.

02:17:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you know, that's a long story.

02:17:27 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So the myth that she builds of herself over the course of the book, that's my problem. The myth that she builds is that she was the visionary who saw that everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and this is a theme that she brings up repeatedly in her book. But I'll say that, looking to buy a publisher, just so you have access, to its corpus certainly doesn't do much to disprove.

02:17:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I should mention that Google broadened its terms of service so that it could tap publicly available Google Docs, restaurant reviews and Google Maps. I think Google may also be doing. Oh yes, google transcribed youtube videos to harvest text for its ai models.

02:18:10 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
According to five people with knowledge of the company's wait what I love is the thought that the reason why we actually have transcriptions built into youtube is not because it was a good no great thing to train the ais baby, at least to the public, but it was because it was a good and great thing to release to the public, but it was because it was so it could train its AIs.

02:18:27 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Accessibility, schmexcessibility.

02:18:28 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, exactly.

02:18:29 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's all about our dumb robot overlords.

02:18:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am though I think I'm maybe that is wild contrarian in all this, but I really think AIs should be allowed to read everything. The last thing you want is an AI that's trained only on public domain information. If you can read Kara's book, the AI should be allowed to read Kara's book.

02:18:47 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The biggest problem you have with AI is data quality period.

02:18:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this is something that we're not.

02:18:54 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I think you have a lot of AI startups that are somehow assuming the data will create itself, in a time when we're gutting the content industry. In a time when we're gutting the content industry in a time when we're gutting basic research.

02:19:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's a race. It's a race between the collapse of the content industry and the AIs. And if the AIs could just read everything before all of us writers and creators get driven out of business by the bots that are now writing the SEO glurge yeah, well, and this is one of the problems with AI right now is that there is such a dearth of information. They're proposing that they train on other AI's creations, which is definitely a bad idea.

02:19:31 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
No, because you still don't have a really good model for that You've got a problem. I believe somebody called it the Habsburg data model where eventually it just gets so iteratively bad that a couple iterations into training it bears no resemblance to the original data set.

02:19:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They all get the bleeders disease.

02:19:47 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, the idea that these great publishers with long histories could end up being most valuable essentially by providing chum to large tech companies is incredibly depressing. Yeah, yeah.

02:20:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, remember, the Times does have a dog in this fight. They sued OpenAI because they felt that OpenAI was using copyrighted news articles. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what the courts say, because you can make a fair use argument and that these AIs are doing nothing different than a human would do to read this content. And, as Kathy's pointed out, there is a risk, if courts rule against this, of infringing, in fact, the right to read for humans as well, because wouldn't copyright holders like that? They'd love to shut down libraries because you didn't pay for that book. More than 10,000 trade groups, authors groups, authors companies.

02:20:42 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
justine bateman I just want to know if someone in disney's legal office, if there's like some poor intern who's who's been assigned to like chat somebody up at open ai to see any of the videos trained on are marvel trailers maybe.

02:20:59 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Chat somebody up implies it's sort of like this undercover thing where they're getting to know them. They start a relationship. Okay, that's what you mean by chat somebody up.

02:21:08 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Hey, you wouldn't happen to have used any Disney movie trailers when training your AI, did you?

02:21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If AI were to, I mean, it may be the AI is worthless. It may be AI is the new, you right. It's going to be on the cover of every magazine and then it turns out to be another AI winner. But if it is going to be what it could be, it's going to only be that if it can ingest as much information as possible. And I think there is a chance maybe not a lot, but there is a chance that AI could create the next cure for cancer, that AI could solve hereditary childhood diseases, that AI could solve a lot of problems if it's given enough information.

02:21:49 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I'd like to push back on the phrasing that you have. Ai could solve this, because what AI is? It's neither artificial nor intelligence. It's just a way to do large-scale pattern matching and large-scale pattern extrapolation based on previous data. But what AI could do is working in conjunction with researchers who know how to identify and frame a problem. It could help by saying we will crunch all this data that we have and see if we can find something that comes out of it, the same way that AI is actually generating new, and this is what's really interesting to me.

02:22:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is something that is a new era in AI, which is it's generative. It isn't just regurgitating existing stuff. One of the things AI is doing, for instance, is protein folding. Remember folding at home, where we're all supposed to devote our computers spare cycles to protein folding? Ai has done more in just a few months with protein folding than we did in many years of ai uh at home or folding at home.

02:22:56 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
it is literally generating new, useful information based on a corpus of existing information and well like my point exactly you got to train it yeah right, but it can become generative if it's properly trained and most of the ai breakthroughs of the last few years have come from the unbelievable, unbelievably vast amounts of data that have been force-fed to them right and so there are more breakthroughs.

02:23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They may come from even more data I think there is um a societal benefit. Isn't that the whole point of fair use and and in fact, the whole point of patent and copyright law from to begin with? Was you have to at some point give up your patent or give up your copyright for the great or good of society?

02:23:40 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
wasn't that a big argument when they were sequencing the human genome? Like I remember Craig Venter being like, I'm going to copyright the human genome.

02:23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He tried to copyright it.

02:23:47 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
No, I actually interviewed him at the time and he's like I found it, it's mine.

02:23:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's ours. I hate to tell you.

02:23:54 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Craig so.

02:23:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Copyright is not in our interest is what I'm saying. Yeah, in our interest is what I'm saying yeah. And copyright, if it prevents an ai from becoming all it can be, probably is not in our interest, and so I think that maybe this I mean I'm I know I'm a contrarian here, but I think we should. I think too bad google, uh, let the ai read all your videos and and not just open ai.

02:24:17 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
But every day. That's the thing, right? Is it just one company that's becoming incredibly powerful that's doing it, versus if we're allowing every?

02:24:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI system. Well, I'm a big believer in open source AI. I completely agree with you.

02:24:29 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Whenever we put that note in there, then I'm 100% on board.

02:24:32 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So when you say big believer in open source AI, does that also extend to the data sets that would go into training it?

02:24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think they should steal everything they possibly can get Okay. Training it no, I think they should steal everything they possibly can get okay. And then, yeah, the train sets should be given to us. Yeah, to do whatever we want to do with it there's a call stealing it's.

02:24:50 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Is it theft? That's the argument.

02:24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Reading it's reading you read kara switch's book? You just told me about it. Yep, I didn't have to read it. Yeah, this whole show is all from reading articles, that's all we do. I try to them, but I don't pay them.

02:25:04 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I would also dispute the notion of the term regurgitate, because we're adding extra context. We are assessing and synthesizing different pieces of information to come to a new insight.

02:25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the whole key. It's generative. There is, you know, I think there's no doubt that their AI is useful in synopsizing existing information. I use it all the time to do that. It's really, really, really useful. Yeah, so even if it just does that, that's great. But I think if we can get to generative maybe not AGI, but generative AI and I think we're getting there where it comes up with new stuff that it has come up with, that's incredibly valuable and a societal benefit. So, uh, you know, these companies spend a lot of money on electricity and processors to train yeah, that's an environmental thing well, if we're gonna have a solution to climate change, it might have to come from an ai.

02:25:58
Bad news for you paradox.

02:26:00 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Paradox it might happen. Yeah, which will happen first?

02:26:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little break. I want to come back and wrap it up and thank our team, and I have a few more stories we could talk about, but first a word from our sponsor you and I were talking about this earlier Micah Mylio M-Y-L-I-O. I want to suggest this to everybody who's listening, because you can use it for free on one device right now. Myleo is all about taking all of that stuff on your hard drive photos, videos, documents too and organizing them automatically, in many cases using AI, without putting it in the cloud. We're not talking about giving Google all this stuff, no, storing it locally, working on it locally. It's Mileyo, and I have to say it's transformed my photography, if nothing else. For a long time, I've been looking for a solution that lets me store all my photos, and Mileyo absolutely. I have more than 200,000 photos in Mileyo. It's a private cloud, independent. You can use the cloud if you want to. You don't have to platform. That helps organize, curate and preserve a lifetime of memories. All of my photos, all of my videos are connected in a single library. Now I pay for the pro version of it. It's fairly inexpensive and that means I can put it on all my devices, but it's free for one device, so it's certainly something you should try. It works with Android, iphone, windows, mac.

02:27:25
Get started for free, sign up for their paid plan to get automatic backups, syncing between devices. It's got duplicate file cleanups and more. They just added a family tree feature. That I think is mind-blowing, and this is free. You know it's very expensive to use some of these, but they are actually tying into the LDS database and you can actually upload data from your photo library and download data. You can connect, you can create your family tree. You can have others in your family annotate. All of this free or sign up for their paid plan for more $9.99 a month or $99 a year. You can organize, manage and protect an unlimited number of photos and videos across all your devices. And the thing that blows me away about Miley is they are doing so much work. Every time we talk to them, they've got another batch of things you and I just talked to them recently, Micah A new batch of features. It's incredible.

02:28:22
You've got to at least try the free version, but if you want to take a full advantage of the platform, you got to get Miley O'Photos Plus. We have a special offer 25% off your annual or monthly subscription right now, get 25% off your first year of Miley O'Photos. Plus 25% off, you go to myliocom slash twit25. I kind of want to go up to people and shake them and say you got to try this thing. You remember Picasa? It was like this was something Google bought and basically destroyed. This is that times 10.

02:28:55
This is the photo With AI. It's so much automatic face recognition categorization. It's private and it's on device Mileyocom slash twit25. I've got all my photos in Mileyo now and it is mind-boggling. It's fantastic. Highly recommend it. Thank you, mileyo, for your support of this week in tech. Google has pledged. Remember, google got sued because incognito mode was not private. Incognito, it was not private, they said. But we told you it wasn't private. Yeah, but you called it incognito mode private browsing. Well, they got sued, they lost and now the latest is Google has agreed, as part of its settlement, to delete everything that it got it collected in incognito mode Before or after using it to train its AI.

02:29:49 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh well, that's a good question Before or after selling it to advertisers?

02:29:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The lawsuit said that Google's marketing and privacy disclosures didn't properly inform users about the fact that, when you're in incognito mode, google still collects all the information about which websites you visit, and so forth. The settlement, which was filed Monday in San Francisco federal court, set out the actions the company will take to change its practices. They've agreed to destroy, they say, billions of data points that the lawsuit says it improperly collected. They're also going to update disclosures about what it collects in private browsing and give you the option to disable third-party cookies. In that setting no damages, but individuals can continue to file claims, and apparently 50 have already been filed. So this isn't over for Google, but they're going to delete all of that data.

02:30:39 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
All of those private browsing features are woefully misnamed. Because, yeah, they're all the same, because none of them are terribly private and there are all kinds of ways in which they're not private at all.

02:30:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're basically don't let my spouse know what I've been doing. Yeah, that's Is what they basically.

02:30:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But your ISP still sees everything your ISP knows.

02:30:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google still knows, or Safari, it's the same as Safari. It's the same in Firefox. It's the same in all of them. They're just turning off saving the history, but all of that stuff you know you can't In fact it'd be difficult without a VPN to keep your ISP from seeing all that stuff.

02:31:14 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
So anyway, and even there, sometimes VPN providers sometimes don't do a great job of making sure they don't know what you're looking at.

02:31:23 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's right, that's right. I found the part about this that's interesting to me, I guess, is usually these lawsuits end up being the settlement where people aren't able to individually go after them after that.

02:31:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's unusual, isn't it? Yeah, this settlement. You didn't let them off the hook.

02:31:39 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, this settlement where it was like okay, we're not going to talk about money, you just have to delete the data. I kind of now this is another movie here comes everybody else. How that played out in the in the courts that it's like oh, it almost feels like it was just done for good because it's not a money thing involved. It's just like okay, y'all have to just delete all the data.

02:31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of cool we talked about amazon abandoning just walk out. The giants. The san francisco giants have abandoned, have adopted just walk in. The san francisco chronicle calls it a new unnerving way to skip the line unnerving is the best part unnerving you.

02:32:15
So this is one of four teams in major league baseball that, uh, offer you a way to walk in. Obviously, you have to buy a ticket, but you have to sign up for the MLB's new Go Ahead Entry Program. You take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app. Your tickets are on the app, upload the selfie. Once you're approved, you just walk in to the ballpark. You'll have to barely slow down at the entrance gate on the way to your seats. I think this is great. I don't care, is there?

02:32:48 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
anything in that story about how long your data is? Retained yes where is the data retained.

02:32:52 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Are they going to be?

02:32:53 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
selling that data to anybody. Are they attaching things like time and location.

02:33:00 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Am I smiling? Am I frowning? Do I have a hot dog in my hand already?

02:33:05 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Does that bag look like it has cats you take?

02:33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
all the fun out of everything I do.

02:33:09 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's true, that's my job.

02:33:10 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Does my bag look like it has candy I'm bringing into?

02:33:13 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
the stadium so.

02:33:14 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I'm not buying stuff there.

02:33:18 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Did I sue this ball stadium?

02:33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, I don't think it's still gonna have to go through the security line. I'm sure right that's.

02:33:24 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
The other thing is that half the time, the people who are actually running the stuff at the gate don't even know about this then it's this awkward thing you're walking in. I thought I was supposed to walk. No, oh, look at this so here's the little kiosk.

02:33:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It spots you coming, whoops, let me go back. It spots you coming and then pops up a green thing. It says go ahead you've got three tickets.

02:33:42 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Enjoy the game it shows a horrible photo of your face and movement I think you still would have to go through all of that I can't imagine they're abandoning that you have to go to the local usps and have a little meeting beforehand. How old are you?

02:33:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you have any intention to look at porn? Well, anyway, apple is thinking about home robots. Most important story of the week, and I buried the lead I don't think they're going to. This is Mark Gurman. He knows the next big thing. The car thing failed. What about robots?

02:34:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, we just saw how they're very, very good at getting client bottles out of attics.

02:34:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true. This is from Mark Gurman. He says engineers at Apple have been exploring a mobile robot that can follow. This is just what I'm looking for follow users around their home and do what. I have a dog for that They've also developed an advanced tabletop home device that uses robotics to move a display around. Again, why?

02:34:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It sounds vaguely like Amazon's Astro, which is a robot that has a screen.

02:34:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It had a periscope. It can follow you around, and it does not transform the world, at least. Yet I think this is If I were an Apple shareholder, I'd be nervous. To be honest with you, can?

02:35:06 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
you train the robot to put things away.

02:35:08 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
If it could fold my laundry. I'm buying it Absolutely like hands down.

02:35:12 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I've seen attempted laundry folding robots at CES and they just never, and they always fail. Oh, it's so disappointing.

02:35:18 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And it makes my heart sad every time because if I had something that folded my laundry for me, that well, okay, see, I could hire someone. So here I go, trying to eliminate humans from.

02:35:27 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I'm just as bad as these companies, great yeah, but I'm not sure how many people in the 21st century are like my brain is so fried from tiktok. All I'm good for is doing laundry.

02:35:36 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That's true, that's true it seems like stairs are a fundamental problem with the idea of a robot that follows you around.

02:35:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Well, I think we should just stop buying two-story homes.

02:35:45 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, maybe flying robots. They fly up the stairs while you walk.

02:35:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Amazon also had that security drone that was going to fly around your house.

02:35:53 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, that's Security drone. I think it cut off too many pet tails. Oh my gosh, no, no, that was a joke, I'm sorry. Oh my gosh, no. No, that was a joke, I'm sorry.

02:36:00 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh my, I thought for real.

02:36:02 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I was like I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sometimes I say things sarcastically, but no one understands. It's sarcastic and that's a problem.

02:36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's my fault really. Am I fantasizing? Is it my imagination that those laundry folding robots had humans controlling them? Probably, Probably.

02:36:17 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
A thousand ones from India. Maybe there was an ongoing joke that that was the case.

02:36:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe that was it.

02:36:20 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
There was somebody inside. They never did that well, right.

02:36:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you see something?

02:36:25 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
No, they never actually, and sometimes they'd have one, but it'd just be sitting there and there'd be video of it actually working.

02:36:30 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But the product itself was never turned on. Oh, that's so sad.

02:36:33 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And you're like, okay, this doesn't work, does it?

02:36:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am glad we had a lovely studio audience here today. I'm sorry that we couldn't entertain you more, but I do appreciate your being here and we have lovely gifts for you. I also want to thank our wonderful hosts for coming in studio. All in studio, harry mccracken, fastcompanycom. What are you working on?

02:36:54 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I can't tell you what I'm working on, but I have a story in our new print issue, which is also online, which is a look get why nvidia was our number one most innovative company of the year.

02:37:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And pretty amazing, isn't it the success of NVIDIA.

02:37:07 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
They're doing some great stuff and I got to go talk to Jensen Wong about it.

02:37:10 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh nice, oh, I'm reading that.

02:37:12 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Harry's got all the scoops and I have my newsletter plugged in, which you can also find how to sign up for at our site.

02:37:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh site, oh nice. And you a most recent article how you're filling the twitter-sized hole in your life with yard work apparently with yard work. I'm sure marie's really thrilled about that. Uh, harry, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming in. I appreciate always fun.

02:37:35 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Thank you leo editor-in-chief.

02:37:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No jittercom, lisa schmeiser. Thank you for the girl scout cookies. Thank you for coming in and being with us today. Thank you for having me.

02:37:43 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Scout cookies. Thank you for coming in and being with us today. Thank you for having me.

02:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is delightful, always wonderful, to have you on Anything you want to share, anything you're working on. Let's see your new podcast.

02:37:52 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh, I would love to get back to podcasting. I have a Q&A with Cisco's Javid Khan coming up in the next two weeks. I just have to finish polishing it, and no Jitter should be continuing to run its coverage on what the big cloud-based companies that are doing generative AI are doing in terms of data protection policies, data privacy and training data.

02:38:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're covering a lot of AI now.

02:38:16 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, because it's powering so much everything from automating communications and workflow processes to customer service. So we really have to take a look under the hood and see how it's working.

02:38:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice. Yeah, nojittercom. Yeah, thank you, lisa. You will be back. Mr Micah Sargent, on Tuesday for iOS Today with Rosemary Orchard, wonderful show Now again available publicly audio only for video. Join the club. Twittv slash club, twit Thursdays for Tech News Weekly and, of course, every Sunday morning you do Ask the Tech. Guys with me and it's so much fun doing that with you.

02:38:50 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You can head to chihuahuacoffee C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee. That's where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. When I get up the energy to post on those different places, well, you need more.

02:39:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chihuahua coffee? I do, you're right. Yes, chihuahua energy, that would be a good name for an energy drink.

02:39:08 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Exactly.

02:39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do you like to?

02:39:10 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
vibrate all day, the opposite of no jitter.

02:39:13 - Leo's Computer Audio (Other)
It's all jitter, all jitter, all day long.

02:39:15 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Passing through walls? Yeah, exactly.

02:39:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do Twitter every Sunday from 2 to 5 pm Pacific, that's 5 to 8 pm Eastern. You can watch us on YouTube at youtubecom slash twit. When we go live, it is 2100. Am I right on that UTC? I think so. You're the only one here who can do the UTC math.

02:39:38
I'm the only one who does the UTC conversion in my head After the fact? On-demand versions on the website twittv. You can also watch a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech and also subscribe in your favorite podcast player, You'd think, after 19 years I'd be able to say that.

02:39:56
Podcast player, audio or video, and, of course, if you're a member of Club Twit, we've got special URLs for you twittv slash, club twit. Enjoy the eclipse tomorrow for those of you who observe, and we will see you next week. As I have said now for 19, almost 19 years, another twit is in the can. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye, you can applaud, please, everybody. Bye-bye, you can applaud. Please clap. They've forgotten. They've forgotten. It's amazing. Doing the twit, doing the twit, all right, doing the twit. Baby. Doing the twit, all right, doing the twit.