This Week in Tech 977 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. Oh, you are in luck. I'm glad you tuned in today. We are going to have fun. Kevin Rose is in the house. He's back, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to ask him about his owls, or what are they? The moon birds and what happened to NFTs? Amy Webb is here. Futurist and, of course, number one topic. I'm sure both of them have a lot to say about the banning of TikTok. Amy lived in China as an expert on security. She will have something to say. Then, the man who killed Google search. Kevin used to work at Google. He'll know a little bit about this. What went wrong at Google? Kevin has some suggestions for what you might want to use instead. And the failure of Intel, the future of Chips and AI2. It's a big show with lots of great content. Stay tuned. This Week in Tech is next. Podcasts you love.

00:57
From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 977, recorded Sunday, april 28th 2024. Gahoo, yugle, it's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news, and this week is a very special week. Two of my absolute favorite people, one of whom I haven't seen in years, kevin Rose, is in studio. Kevin was in town. I know it's great to be here. I don't know what you're doing on Sunday, but you want to hang. I said yeah, come on over. Thanks for having me, it's great to have you. Kevin is a partner at True Ventures, as you know, but he's also launched a new podcast at kevinrosecom and I love it that you say whatever I'm interested in. That's the topic.

01:54 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, I just want to find stuff early. That's kind of my passion is tinkering finding things before other people see them, hopefully and exposing them on the podcast.

02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too bad you weren't here last week. Last week we celebrated the 19th anniversary of the first twit which you were on. You remember that?

02:12 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
21st century Is that, when we were sitting in your In?

02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the brewery? Oh, in the brewery, that's right. Yeah, that's right, with David Prager, patrick Norton, Sarah was there, his wife, I think, robert Heron was there. It was all screensavers people. Yeah, kevin and I go back a few years, so let's just put it that way 19 and before that, of course, tech tv also with us. Another of my very, very favorites, her most recent book and her last for a while, if her husband has anything to do with it, the genesis machine, amy webb from future today, institute is here. Hi, amy.

02:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Hey Leo, hey Kevin.

02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perfect timing for you to be here, for two reasons One, our top news story, but the other, you've released the future today. Look, what do you call it? Look into the future.

02:57 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's our no, it's our annual tech trends report. So this is our. I'm trying to remember which edition this is maybe 18, 17th or 18th, almost as long as a Twit, that's great. It launches at South by Southwest every year. There's this year. There's close to a thousand slides in it.

03:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, beautiful website too, and it covers. Yeah, thanks, it was even more beautiful before she broke it.

03:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh, I, and this one is. It's a little mysterious, so we need to you know we're we're consultants. We need to just come out and be like more obvious about what it is that we do.

03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, anyhow, but that's a subscribe. It's free to subscribe. You can get the uh, the slideshow.

03:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, Um and it's a covers. Yeah, our thesis this year is super important. Um, it has to do with a tech super cycle, which I can explain. There's huge implications for everybody.

03:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it anything like the Gartner hype cycle?

03:55 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It very much is not. I don't think the Gartner hype cycle is useful. No, just fairly briefly. So we use data, we use quantitative methodology and data and stuff to sort of figure. There are super cycles and they're usually preceded by some type of inflection in like a global event or a technology. So the steam engine was the inflection that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution and a super cycle in economics has the ability, over a few years or sometimes decades, to sustain pretty significant change. So economic growth, productivity, things like that it's not always positive. Usually the productivity and everything else leads to some people losing jobs, things like that, anyhow, about a year ago.

05:02
We're tracking some different numbers and you know, it looks to me, and the numbers still bear out, that we are in the middle of a super cycle driven not by one technology this time, but by three, and those three technologies are artificial intelligence, what I refer to as the sort of collective ecosystem of connected things. So home of things our beds you know our smart beds, our smartwatches, face computers that's, you know Apple's product but connected cars, connected warehouses, all of these different devices that use data. The issue with AI is not that we need more data. We need more types of data so we can transition to large action models. And the third is biotechnology, and it doesn't seem like these three areas link together, but they do, and together they form this technology super cycle that will probably last about a decade or more and have wide sweeping implications on every single industry, good and bad. So that's the theme.

06:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it.

06:10
That's interesting that you can, it's okay, if you don't like it, it is it's the way it is, so I better like it and it all makes sense, absolutely, and it's the stuff we talk about all the time. So, in fact, let's talk about AI in a bit bit. I want to save that, because our top story tonight, tiktok, has been canceled and, uh, just like a pregnancy in nine months, you'll know what. What if it's a boy or it's a girl? Uh, the uh house and senate very cleverly attached it to a ukraine israel spending bill so it couldn't be really turned down and Biden signed it and it's the law. The latest is the Chinese Communist Party saying well, under no circumstances will we sell it, so bye-bye.

06:56
I'm going to start with you, amy, because you have a lot more experience in two areas that are important here. One, of course, you lived in China for a while. You've closely followed what's going on with China. But the other also, I think you have good connections into defense and intelligence and, honestly, the problem I have with this is we've never been shown the receipts. The assertion unsupported assertion is that China will use it to either spy on us or to propagandize us, both of which are conceivable, but there there's no evidence that they're doing it at this point. Where do you come down on this? I'm very curious.

07:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, in I think it was 2017, I remember speaking to a group of lawmakers a US and Japanese lawmakers and saying look, you don't know what this thing is yet, but it's coming. This is what it is. It's called TikTok. This is what it does. You need to very closely look at this and the flow of data, because this is a clone of a product. That this is a product that already exists in China. That this is a product that already exists in China. The company the parent company, bytedance played a key role in helping build China's social credit score system.

08:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting yes.

08:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, so you know, at that point it was nowhere close to as popular as it is today. But look, it would be naive for all of us to say just whatever, China can just buy data through data brokers, it doesn't need to scrape our information from TikTok. First of all, you actually want to access as much data in that type of data as possible. So yeah, they're already doing that. But look at some of the things that have happened in the TikTok era. Now this is again. I know this is a really contentious issue, especially with creators. So I get it. I'm not trying to make it so that people can't earn a living, but Americans did at one point, eat laundry detergent, right?

09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we don't know how widespread that was. I think that was.

09:09 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That was a honestly that was a mark zuckerberg, though you and I tried it once you never try it twice.

09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that was something spread we know very well by mark zuckerberg's very aggressive attempt to influence public opinion. Because guess who benefits from a TikTok?

09:27 - Amy Webb (Guest)
ban Facebook and Instagram and Instagram, and that's kind of my point. So, while there have been all kinds of hoaxes, mythologized, almost so like, there were plenty of things that we believe happened on TikTok, that absolutely did not happen on TikTok. There are other things that did.

09:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The point is there's a Do you think, are you not asserting that the Chinese government put stuff on TikTok to get people to eat Tide Pods? Are you?

09:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, what I'm asserting is no. What I'm asserting is that a confused group of people becomes an easy group of people to eventually manipulate. Ok, so if you are trying to sow confusion, then this is a wonderful platform to do that.

10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, of course, for that reason, they're going to ban Twitter, they're going to ban Meta Facebook, so right, yeah, and I'll just say one other thing on this.

10:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I have been saying for a very long time I'm not a constitutional lawyer. I almost became one. I'm not an expert in first amendment law, although I was a journalist for a while and I had to learn a lot about that at Columbia. The laws that were created two centuries ago more than two centuries ago were created at a time when the founders and the framers could not possibly have conceived of a world that we now live in today, and so the strict interpretation. I totally get that. It's a slippery slope. I get all sides of the argument and that's what makes this really tricky all sides of the argument and that's what makes this really tricky. We're actually having a lot of conversations now about First Amendment law and the rights of speech and what constitutes what type of speech.

11:10
In this particular case I think maybe in all cases when it comes to social media platforms, what we're not doing is any strategic foresight. That's the field that I work in, and if you were to play this forward 10 years, what are the probable ways that all of this turns out? And is that a world in which we all want to live and we have to just be super objective, so it's possible that people may continue to make a lot of money for some period of time. It's not going to last forever. While you wind up with ever more confused communities or teenagers who are making bad decisions like we. We know the bad that some of these things cause as well. So china doesn't have to have your personal data in order to succeed, uh, with the platform. If, if what we wind up with is a situation where we just we don't have trust in our institutions. I mean just honestly, the very fact that this ban is happening is good for China, because it just foments more distrust of traditional institutions by younger people, which is terrible for our future.

12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it sounds like you're arguing against it.

12:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, I'm just trying to take a measure to French.

12:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will agree with you. It's's nuanced I'm not saying it's not um I don't.

12:28 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I don't have it on my phone. I've never had it on my phone. Uh, my kid isn't allowed to use it. I don't think tiktok is good, so that's my opinion. That has not changed. Um, I think the? I haven't seen this, leo, but you, you mentioned that the ccp has said they're not going to sell it. Is that true?

12:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, Well, and it could. Be there we go.

12:47 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Mystery solved. They've come forward I guess Is that on record somewhere where they said that we are not selling.

12:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me look it up.

12:54 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Because that's a really interesting admission.

12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll see if I can find it.

12:59 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
The fact that they'd rather just lose the money than have a home for it in the United States is very confusing to me. This is like there's any number. Obviously there's a whole slew of buyers here in terms of big media.

13:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steve Mnuchin wants to buy it. I mean the former secretary of the Treasury.

13:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh my God, that guy.

13:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But all along TikTok. The Chinese government has said there are restrictions on selling the algorithm.

13:21 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, so I have a buddy that works at at meta and he's in the ai group and I had a conversation about with with him last week about this and um. He also does some work on instagram and and on the algorithm side and he told me that that the tiktok algorithm is by far and away the best algorithm out there.

13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you don't have to know anything to know that when you use it.

13:44 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's obvious, and he's like the amount of capital that they have invested into that. His concern and I've heard this echoed elsewhere, that is my biggest concern is that, with AI chatbots coming online and those becoming a way to interface with other people, we're going to see smart bots entering the market that will befriend users, have real conversations in DMs with users and then be used to be deployed at scale to actually manipulate them via DMs and other content. So it's two ways of manipulation. One is via the algorithm, sending you something that you're like well, that's an interesting political take that I hadn't considered before before, but it being pushed by another party. And the second way is through hundreds of thousands or millions of bots becoming fake friends of yours that you're having real conversations with, I should point out that's happening on twitter right now.

14:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that's happening probably on meta.

14:41 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, right now we're screwed.

14:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We're screwed net net we're kind of screwed, so why not leo? But this is so like look, I will tell this to me is analogous to an absolutely asinine conversation mandatory talk we had to go to to my daughter's school at the beginning of the year, where we had to listen to a bunch of parents with children who are now, I guess, eighth graders and ninth graders and their children talk frankly about why you should wait to get your kid a phone, and like we had to sit through this ridiculous long conversation about how cell phones make things really challenging and it's like guess what? You just say no, the kid didn't go out and buy this thing on their own Right, you bought it. So the reason this is analogous is because twitter has been full of posting and terrible, you know, bots and just like nonsense.

15:31 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Now, for a while, we know a lot smarter bots, though we're. I'm talking about ones that aren't just doing random spam comments, but ones that are having long conversations with you but look I um.

15:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I was an like legit OG Twitter user and I absolutely mourn the day that you know, musk bought it.

15:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should point out, Amy, that you are talking to the original OG.

15:53 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, so we're all in the same boat. Twitter users Right In fact.

15:57 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Kevin and I, we had a race for number one.

15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For number one, the most followed Twitter user Back in 2008. Oh yeah, Nice.

16:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I was number one twitter user 2008. Oh, yeah, yeah, I was number one moment, okay. So, like it bums me out that I can't use it anymore, I've effectively stopped threads is a different type of network.

16:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why don't we do that with uh, with uh tiktok? Why do we do what we ban tiktok because it's chinese and I think it's a little xenophobic. It's not?

16:22 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
because it's chinese, it's because we don't have visibility into what's going on with the algorithm.

16:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because the algorithm is secret, we don't have visibility into the Twitter algorithm either, though.

16:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
If I may. I was just going to say it's not like Meta is out there saying, hey look, this is how we do it folks.

16:42 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I mean, nobody's offered transparency.

16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a domestically owned, you know corporation that we could see what as could the chinese government with tiktok right, right just to give you the receipts on uh. So tiktok has said this week they're not willing to sell. But the same cnn article refers to a piece last year where the chinese now this is last year but the Chinese government said it's not for sale it strongly opposes the forced sale of TikTok and in particular the algorithm yeah they're going to say that to piss off consumers, to hopefully cause a riot and get people to advocate.

17:19 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, that's the question, which is my point.

17:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It could be propaganda right, we don't know yeah no, but if.

17:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But I mean, if you zoom way out on this.

17:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's probably dead anyway, because advertisers and creators are at this very moment looking to exit. Diversify yeah, my son is a TikTok star, moved to Instagram. I told him. I said diversify, don't be on any platform. But neither YouTube nor TikTok or Insta has picked up the same number of followers. He was smart. He gamed the algorithm on TikTok. That's. The other side of this equation is you can observe what works and play to it. Right, and he did, and it worked very well for him, just as Mr Beast did with the YouTube algorithm. Right, you're on YouTube and you told me before the show.

18:05 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I just got started using it.

18:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You told me before the show you're kind of resisting the algorithmic play.

18:09 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
There's a game. There's a whole game to how you gain followers. There's a whole methodology for how you create your intros, how you get to the punchline within the first four seconds. There's a formula for success in these platforms.

18:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and this is the same for TikTok. I'm sure it's the same for Instagram. Um, I don't know if Henry's figured it out. So you it sounds like you both are in favor of a TikTok ban.

18:33 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I don't know that it's going to do any good, but I, I am a yeah, it's, it's. I feel like the bots armies are just going to move to other social platforms. That doesn't prevent china from going into other platforms and just if they really wanted to take us down and sway uh, you know massive user bases of just bringing their ai bots to another platform, if that's happening, I mean, there's a lot of ifs in there, but I, it's, I just talk tiktok going away doesn't, doesn't stop social media.

19:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and this is what the conversation wrote. Piece appearing in Fast Company this week titled Banning TikTok Just Puts a Band-Aid Over Social Media's Problems. And the last paragraph, I guess, sums up my point of view as well, which is Concerns about TikTok are not unfounded, but they're also not unique. Each threat posed by TikTok has also been posed by US-based social media for over a decade, I believe discounted. But they're also not unique. Each threat posed by tiktok has also been posed by us-based social media for over a decade. I believe the lawmakers this is sarah florini, an associate professor at arizona state I believe the lawmakers should take action to address harms caused by us companies seeking profit, as well as by foreign companies perpetrating espionage. Protect this is the bottom line to me. Protecting americans cannot be accomplished by banning a single app. To truly protect their constituents, lawmakers would need to act, enact broad, far-reaching regulation.

19:54 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
yeah, I think regulation is what we need because their key infrastructure in the united states is regulated. Like, if you take a look at, if you want to open a domestic airline right now, it's next to impossible if you're a foreign entity. That's like you know. Remember Virgin America? Yeah, when they tried to get served, it was very hard. They had an insanely hard time because they had to have at least 51% domestic ownership and it was like it was a whole thing to even get off the ground and that's we try and protect key infrastructure and we're not doing that for social media.

20:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting because I don't think we've ever thought of social media as key infrastructure, but it is obviously. Clearly, there's so many intertwined points to be made here, one of which is now President Trump is trying to capitalize on this. He was, by the way, the first to call for a TikTok ban four years ago, but now he's saying no, saying no, no, no, and he thinks this is bad for democrats because president biden signed it and the youngs, the youths, the people under 77, are going to, uh, blame democrats for the banning of tiktok that is true so it's, even even though, even though, if you look at the majority of who's been proposing all of this, it's not Democrats, it's Republicans, right.

21:14
So I guess what I'm asking you, amy, given your deep knowledge of both the Chinese Communist Party's goals and aims and your relationships with the defense community and the intelligence community? We had, uh brianna woo on a few weeks ago arguing strongly. She said if you knew what I have seen, if if you knew what I knew about tiktok, you would totally support the ban. Would you agree with that?

21:41 - Amy Webb (Guest)
um, yes, but I want to have an asterisk, and here's why this conversation has become as polarizing as like every other conversation lately. Regarding AI First Amendment, there's very little. This is nuanced. So, yes, I don't think we should have ever allowed it and I'm in favor of disallowing it. However, that's going to wind up in the court, so the head of the US Chamber of Commerce has already vowed to fight it. There are a bunch of people.

22:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ByteDance has already gone to court. Yeah.

22:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Okay. So the problem in the United States is that regulation is inherently a look back, not a plan forward. So we really need to be much more strategic in how we're thinking about technology as infrastructure, as Kevin mentioned, because there are, there are going to be, long term consequences, regardless of the decision that's made, and I don't think anybody is playing that forward.

22:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think everybody's thinking about the 2024 election cycle yeah unfortunately I will be sad if tiktok shuts down here from reuters. Bite doc, bite dance prefers tiktok shutdown in us if legal options fail. So uh, and I think, even if it doesn't shut down, the fact that creators and advertisers are already looking elsewhere, I'm sure, sure Doesn't bode well for TikTok, and I think we've lost something. This is part of the nuance and maybe you know we would have lost something if we didn't get Virgin America too. But I understand we need to protect ourselves as well. It's just it's sad. I guess it's as sad as Twitter it is.

23:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But I think again it's worth thinking through. Who are the bad actors in the world that are capable of playing a very long game in a way that we're not in the United States, and are those bad actors using technology in a way that is slowly like death by a thousand paper cuts, technology in a way that is slowly like death by a thousand paper cuts, um seeding a general confusion, uh distrust of institutions? It doesn't have to be one giant like thing, it can be many, many things over a certain period of time that causes us to sort of go into this sort of downward spiral of continual, and so that, like, that's what're seeing right now we're also doing that to ourselves.

24:05 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, but also I think Amy correct me if I'm wrong here but like, if you have the data, if you think about it, you don't have to use the algorithm to manipulate everyone. You use the algorithm to manipulate those that are influential because you already have the data, you know who those people are.

24:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Then they propagate that message on their own. Yeah, exactly, yeah. People are. Then they propagate that message on their own. Yeah, exactly yeah, and and again, what we have right now we don't have a unifying, we don't have unifying um ideas that bring people together so much anymore, unless those ideas are, like you know, we hate other people or whatever.

24:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we have lots of pockets I'm re-listening to 1984, by the way and as we head down the slope to 1984.

24:46 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But so that I'm. The reason that TikTok worries me is because they threw so much capital into building out a system that is very good at personalizing and figuring out what you're most likely to look at next in a way that Instagram just can't. Yeah, but it's very good. I'm just can't yeah. Okay, so you just have to have some degree 10%, 15% of content. That's a little confusing to, causes confusion, causes self-doubt, right, and that is that could be enough. Right.

25:18
That's kind of the point here, and the goal of Meta is to make money, because they're a publicly traded company and, to be fair, they've done a bunch of terrible things in the past, so their, their goal is is money at all costs. Um, tiktok does not. The parent company of TikTok, and it's the relationships that it has outside of the United States, are not driven in the same way they're.

25:40 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
They're driven by other needs and I think that's something to keep in mind and it's crazy is that it doesn't have to be that message or that kind of when we're going after consumers. It doesn't have to be hey, go vote for this new politician. It can be as simple as like hey, consider this body image issue that you might have. You know, like these little tiny micro cuts that spin into bigger things that just generally disrupt and aggravate society.

26:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know. I think, though, even if you take, if you completely remove TikTok from the equation, there's plenty of that, oh for sure Many, many other places.

26:13 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
This is why I'm scared.

26:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I disagree because I haven't seen like data over the past few weeks, but younger people overwhelmingly use TikTok relative to other platforms.

26:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know and you think they're more impressionable than us older people? Perhaps?

26:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think that 10 years from now, they're going to be making decisions about things and right. So we also have to get used to playing the long game. In the United States, we don't, we don't take a long view.

26:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's my very Pollyanna-ish take on global politics. Don't we benefit? Isn't peace promoted by having a relationship with a country? Isn't it better to, even if, yes, we know China has got the, you know, the Belt and Road Initiative and they've got long-term soft power, strategic goals and et cetera, et cetera, Even when we know that, isn't it better to trade with them and to have a relationship with them than to turn them into the enemy we do and we do, and it's economic, so currently.

27:19 - Amy Webb (Guest)
so yes, we do, which is why trade routes are still open and you know whatever else. So the thing that's saving everybody as much as I think especially younger people would disagree with this is global globalization. So the fact that our economies are so closely intertwined is actually a benefit. Yes.

27:40
Right, ok, so TikTok doesn't. The money that's made on TikTok in the United States doesn't leave the United States and again, it's relatively insignificant compared to how China makes money in other ways. So this is a soft power play, so a slightly unstable United States can still be economically powerful. What's the advantage to China?

28:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
by the way, if, if they, you know they, uh, they claim they don't want to influence the uh election, but they apparently are. But what do they? What do they want they? Why would destabilizing the us be good for them?

28:16 - Amy Webb (Guest)
um, because, well, for one thing, they've got 1.4 billion people and, uh, they need to make sure that those people continue in lockstep under the CCP and directives and are not stepping out of line too much. If you look at what happened during COVID, during lockdowns there were a lot of people wondering whether or not Xi Jinping was going to make it into another. He's effectively now leader for life. So you know the freedoms that people are able to glean and, again, there's a giant firewall in China. So it is. It can be hard to see outside I mean with you know you can see some, but the freedoms that they see us enjoying and happy is dangerous. Right now in the United States it looks like young people are exercising freedoms and are agitated and upset. That's better for China.

29:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, Got it Just to preserve power for the people in power currently the CCP. Didn't preserve their power.

29:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's what I'm saying. It's like super, super complicated, but it's really hard to have these conversations because everything that I see is, you know, creators are really mad that the government's taken away their, taking their jobs, right To quote.

29:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they have. They have a narrow point of view, as they should. But you're right, let's argue, and that's one of the reasons this is a good topic for us, because we speak to people who are involved in technology to give them a better, deeper insight into the nuances of what's going on yeah, I'm sorry, I don't have a simple.

29:46 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I was gonna say there is no simple there. No, there is no simple answer I'm sorry, you know but that's kind of where we're at uh, I will.

29:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's pile on. A chinese firm is america's favorite drone maker. This in the new york times today us authorities consider dI a security threat. They're weighing legislation to force the FCC to disconnect DJI from the telecom network, to force Verizon, t-mobile, at&t to cut off DJI, which makes those drones useless. That's how they're.

30:19 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
This one, I don't get TikTok. I was like, okay, I kind of see what's going on here. Why do we need to shut down the drones?

30:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the consumer drones. The congress is weighing legislation that could kill much of dji's business in the united states by putting it on the fcc's roster, blocking it from running on the country's communications infrastructure. If signed into law, it would only ban new models of the phantom of dji. I have an older dI, you probably do too. Those would still operate, but any new drones would not. Bill has bipartisan support. Dji is obviously lobbying heavily against it. Oh, I didn't mention, but DJI is a Chinese company. In fact, DJI drones have been used to spy on the Uyghurs. We were told the Uyghurs. I mean, you can keep on doing this. This phone is made in China. This phone is made in China. This computer is a Lenovo, a Chinese company. The Macs I have are made in China. You could keep on going. It goes all the way down. Where do we stop?

31:24 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
This is a tough one. Tell me what is the reason why they actually want to shut down our consumer drones.

31:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They could be used to spy on us. There might be a chip built into the DJI drones that's talking to.

31:36 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
China when they're sitting there in my closet and it turns itself on as long as you keep it in your closet, they're happy.

31:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's when they're flying around.

31:45 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
yes, what data do you gather from that? That's so interesting. Like that you can't get on Google Maps.

31:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Government agencies have shown that DJI drones are providing data on critical infrastructure in the United States to the Chinese Communist Party. According to well, consider the source, at least Stefanik, without elaborating any attempt to claim otherwise, is a direct result of dji's lobbying efforts I just don't okay and again, like we don't need drones for that literally go walk across a bridge in the middle of the country yeah, we like anybody this one doesn't.

32:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Uh, I was. I was just trying to think through, like how could this possibly? We've got a bunch of dji drones, so I guess what they like remotely access them, turn them on, fly them out the door somehow they just watch what you're looking at.

32:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't have to do anything. No, I know that.

32:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But I was just trying to think, like, what does the 90 get.

32:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get this 90 of law enforcement agencies.

32:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Use dji drones in law enforcement well, there's not a lot of competitors that make a product that's good right is it's the right default choice right, there is a certain amount of um.

33:02
So again here I'll tell you where I think a lot of this is coming from is actually not China. I think it's coming from Russia. There's a lot of anti-China this and that, especially when it comes to technology right now. Now, I think the long-term play here is just making us uncomfortable all the time and making us distrust and distract Again. You can do that and create a civil society that is harder to control and more likely to erupt into chaos and protests, while preserving a strong economy. That's not a good situation.

33:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I might point out that the phone call might be coming from within the house. I mean, we've met the enemy and he is us, so you don't have to get the Chinese Communist Party involved to destabilize the United States. We're doing a pretty good job on our own. Do you have the house in New Zealand yet? No, can I buy into that compound. I'm going for the golden visa.

34:07 - Amy Webb (Guest)
ah, smart man or those things are. Uh, I'm already on the list.

34:12 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I'm already on the list, are you really? Yeah, hell, yeah, I need to have a way out.

34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I I tell lisa we're moving and she says there's nowhere to go. Portugal, there's go to portugal's beautiful.

34:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Literally, if you're going to do the golden visa in Portugal, I would try to get that wrapped up by the end of the year.

34:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't like it, yeah.

34:30 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I filed the year and a half ago. Yeah, I'm in the queue, so I'm now like grandfather you and Clayton Morris can hang out there in Lisbon. Well, once you get that, you have an EU passport so you can go wherever you want. Exactly, You're a Schengen baby. But a lot of people are doing New Zealand. A lot of my friends are doing New Zealand, which is crazy. You're doing New Zealand, aren't you?

34:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not doing any of it. Something You're doing, something. I am putting down roots in the beautiful United States of America. I'm staying right here. Lisa won't let me move. She says, no, we're staying here and fighting, but she won't let me get a gun. I don't know what to do. I'm just going to hang out in my closet I don't know what I'm going to do.

35:08
Let's take a little break. This is a good panel. You guys, I am not going to defer to your superior intelligence and information. This is very difficult. It's a hard time. Because I love TikTok, I understand its incredible power and the power of its algorithm is mind-boggling. My daughter has four TikTok accounts. She says it's sensitive to even the time of day that you're using it, so she is careful only to use the right account at the right time so that it doesn't sully the algorithm. She's right you shouldn't have just one, you should have multiple. Anyway, it's too late now. It's all over. What a world we live in. Amy Webb, great to have you from the Future Today Institute, futuretodayinstitutecom. Sign up today. Get your Future Today. What do you call it? The Tech Trends.

36:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Our Tech Trends report. It comes out every year, so it's really good, I love it.

36:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to ask you about ai when we come back, for sure, okay, uh, also kevin rose, long time friend. I've known you since 1990. When did you start? Working at tech 2001, 2001, I think. So yeah, where he was and somebody's already brought it up in the discord the dark tipper that's you always hated that name. I still do.

36:28 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You said you and Alex Albrecht are going to have a reunion. We are. Yeah, he lives in LA, so it's like he's my neighbor now.

36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is Dig.

36:34 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Nation coming back. I don't know. He's going to come back on my show and we're just going to do a few episodes here and there.

36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there was, of course. When Reddit did its IPO, Paul Graham wrote a piece about the history of meeting Alexis Ohanian and Steve Hoffman and being impressed by them, etc. Not once did he mention Dig.

36:55 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, he's a little anti-Dig. I don't know why it's hysterical.

36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He implied that they just kind of made it up out of nowhere when everybody who in our group knew that they just copied you. Yeah, I mean, we were definitely out, probably eight months before they launched, or something like that and they saw the success of Dig and they said they were pivoting from something they had some other really crazy guys, alexis and I, are actually really good friends.

37:19 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I love Alexis.

37:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's awesome. I've talked to him and Steve many times. I think Alexis is great, he's a good, good human. Does he acknowledge to you when he says you know the history of Reddit?

37:28 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I mean he definitely. When we talk about it he says that he wasn't aware of Dig at the time. But you know, obviously when they started creating that and launched it, like everyone drew the comparisons instantly once they got out the door. I think Paul knew, because Paul told them to go and do more voting stuff. I don't know. Who knows.

37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm reading his history.

37:53 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Aaron wrote a big long post about this a long time ago, about how, who knew what. It doesn't really matter, it doesn't, it's over. All that matters is that social voting became a thing and it's still here to stay. It works.

38:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good. Yeah, so it's been awesome, and that Dig 5 was my idea and I apologize.

38:07 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That's right.

38:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it was all you that caused the downfall, and you still have the $60 million from the Business Week cover. That's right, so everything worked out.

38:15
That's right. We have such history. It's so great to see you on. You are watching a show you will be glad you watched, because we have lots more to talk about this week in tech. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler.

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40:54 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That it's not the same thing as Jen a I.

40:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, thank goodness it says call FTI. I think that's, that's probably the right answer. So I mean, look, we spent all the last nine months talking about nothing but AI and I at first, just to catch you up, thought it was just a parlor trick. It was just spicy autocorrect.

41:20 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yes, oh boy, Well got you. Got that one wrong I well that's good.

41:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm glad you said that. It I may. It may end up having been right, but I have to say I don't think as a fan.

41:33
No, I don't okay, I don't, but llms really are spicy, auto correct, right, except that some. There is some emergent property I think that we're starting to see. And what convinced me and I've talked about it before, so I'm just filling these guys in I created a couple of custom GPTs that were giving me really useful specific answers based on data I was providing on a corpus. I was providing so-called RAG, and more and more as I use RAG AI I'm realizing there is huge value to taking your corpus of data and applying AI to it. Are you using?

42:09 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Pinocchio, by the way. No, what's Pinocchio? Go to pinocchiocomputer. It's basically considered to be one-click install of any of the latest AI packages that are out there. There's quite a few of these I just started.

42:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, a new one called anything llm, there's olama because I believe personally that we got to go with open source ai yeah so, whether it's llama or mistral or one of the open source models, and I really love the idea of doing it locally. And more and more we're seeing machines, you know, uh, qualcomm has announced that their new strapdragon elite will have ai hardware support all the new apple chips are coming yeah, and apple apparently we'll find out in a couple of weeks is going to really double down on ai with its m4 chip.

42:56
Uh, so it's it's clear that local ai with open source is probably where to go in the future. I don't know. That's to me what's most exciting. But then there's this whole thing of AGI, this basically human intelligence, general intelligence, AI. The jury's still out on that, just like it is on self-driving right. I'm going to keep my hands on the wheel. I going to keep my hands on the wheel. I want to keep my hands on the wheel.

43:26 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Do you have the latest Tesla beta? No, it's gotten a lot better, has it? Yeah, it's gotten a lot better. I've seen so many tales of no, it's still scary as hell, but it's gotten a lot better.

43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, there's a gap, though, between a better and I trust it Right, and that's the hard part. The 99% is easy.

43:45 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's that last one. I don't think it's going to be one universal AI tool to rule them all. I think it's going to be siloed, specialty AI for very specific things, your own data, things you want to keep private, localized AI. And I think the general models are going to be great for coming in and asking questions, like I was installing um, I was replacing all of my light switches at my house with smart switches and I was like, okay, I'm not an electrician, what's the line, what's the ground? You know, I was trying to figure out all the different wires and I literally just had chat GPT open in audio mode and I was talking to it like it was an electrician and it was walking me through each step. By the way, there's a weird spelling on Pinocchio you got to.

44:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google it. Ah, it's spelled Pinocchio because something's not Pinocchio.

44:25 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, it's a weird spelling. It's not like the book. They'll put it in chat. People will know, or you can.

44:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never heard of Pinocchio, but this is the same idea which is a local. Oh, it's with a K.

44:36 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, pinocchio. So Packages like remember when yeah, you remember this, lee. Remember when we used to back in the day on the Linux side, you'd have to figure out all the dependencies. Yeah yeah yeah, this is like a package manager for one-click AI installation.

44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's quite a few of these now. Yeah, ollama's one, and I've been using anything LLM. There are quite a few. I'll try Pinocchio.

44:57 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, a lot of people could just, yeah, cobble it together. It is great fun. You can try any you can. You can run, uh, auto voice changing, uh. Oh, wow, I had a friend of mine spun it up and had me talking like donald trump in real time, um, which was just insane. Yeah, it was great, it worked perfectly. It was just insane. What you can do, all right, let me ask amy, what do you think?

45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know where. Where do you start?

45:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Where do you want me to start? Is it spicy autocorrect? So a large language model predicts again. I'm going to generalize, but what text might come next? Right, so what you might say next.

45:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's where I get the autocorrect.

45:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
The problem with our current systems is that they're limited by the types of data that we've been training on, so we don't yet have an in silico model of the real world, which means your simulations, like whatever you're building, can only be so good and there are lots of complications and problems. We know that they're biased. We know that the data got taken without consent. I just found out there's some GPT of me. There's multiple ones that people built, but this one in particular promises to dispense advice and consulting and stuff. It's only in Italian, so I don't. It's one of the languages I don't speak.

46:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's a good.

46:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, but the problem I mean, there's all kinds of problems with this, right. So, like spicy autocorrect, you know? Yeah, I guess, except that in this particular case, you know, I don't. I don't know what I'm saying, but this is right now. The thing that's coming next are large action models, which predicts. It's a predictive way of figuring out what, what happens next.

46:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it related to LLMs or is it a new concept?

46:48 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's, it's in the same universe of um having a context window, and and so so the way that uh, yeah, I don't, like I said, I don't want to get super in the weeds here, but but the thing that's coming next are um, in the, in this, in the world, world of llms, are context windows that are significantly larger than they are now we've seen in that tokens.

47:08
Yeah, yeah, yeah like, like, significantly more. Um. So in that space, I would say that google is leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else, um, but again because open ai at their last the the talk that got sam altman in such trouble announced a fairly large token window.

47:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't remember what it was. Much, much bigger.

47:28 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I think we're in a game of leapfrog for the next couple years.

47:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But you think google has a game of it's, it's a game of leapfrog. And also, look, do you do you? You guys actually might know this do you know how many functions excel has?

47:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no more than anyone can use it's.

47:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's like 480, I think yeah, sounds um, right, I think the average person uses 10, right?

47:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so, uh, so I I'm not saying that this is but an llm could know all of them and choose the right ones, right, yeah?

47:56 - Amy Webb (Guest)
but that's fine, um so, so fine that the analogy here is we're approaching as the leapfrogging is happening. Google's context window was something like 10 million was the last thing that I heard thrown out. But ultimately, if you don't know what to do with any of these systems, you know like the difference is. Like today's whatever GPT-4, let's say you've got all of Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or whatever. That's the size of the context window, meaning when you are looking for something or looking to do something. You know it's like roughly that amount of information that that is being used for context. Yes, so if you're at 10x, that right, that's. That's just like significantly more. But significantly more doesn't necessarily mean better, it's just more. So what I'm trying to say is we don't need more data, we need more types of data.

48:45 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
What do you mean by more types of data? In what regard?

48:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So, like Jan, lecun talks a lot about this and I'm not necessarily agreeing with him in any way, other than to say that we don't have action data, so that's where this sort of world of connectables comes in. Action data, so that's where this sort of world of connectables comes in Real-time, real-world situational data that can be used, you know, in real time, to learn from, to train from, and then, you know, make decisions. So we don't, we don't have that yet.

49:16 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I mean, that's what Tesla's doing, that's Tesla's whole model, is real-time, real-world data.

49:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So, but that's one instance. That's not so. That doesn't help out. Let's say a synthetic biology lab, right that that helps.

49:35
A really, it's like it's still pretty. I mean, it's big but it's like, right, it's still pretty narrow. So that's the next set of things. But all of this, it feels like AI is new, but it's really only new to you, right? All of this, everybody, it feels like ai is new, but it's really only new to you, right? All of this has been in some form of development now for a very long time, and a lot of what everybody's reacting to is really effective public fear-mongering and really effective public storytelling behind the scenes. Um and again, it's hard to get people to have honest conversations, but like things are trudging along, it's a lot of it.

50:12 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I will say, though, some of it is pretty well. Obviously it's new to the consumer. If you look at ChatGPT2, their success metric was in an Amazon review can they predict the next character that's going to come? And when they saw that happening, they were like we got it, we just need bigger models now, right. And so the data sets then grew and the cost to train a model is now insane. It was $150 million to train the latest GPT.

50:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was something crazy. It's not merely the CPUs, GPUs and power, it's also where do you get the data? You've pretty much ingested the internet, yeah. So now what? And that's the point Right.

50:57
In fact, the worst thing they could do is ingest more AI content, right, content, right. That's like. I liken it to how we got uh bce and cows in england is because they were eating feed made out of dead cows that had bovine encephalitis crayons in it, and so it infected itself. You don't want ai eating ai, right, it's bad hemophilia or something I don't know. Uh, so where do we get more content? So you're saying amy, actions, real time, so that's so.

51:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So it is capturing action data, so data from videos, data from sound, all these other types of data that make up the real world experience, if it is, in fact, the goal to create a system that functions as good or better than we can in most circumstances. So that's the g and agi that you mentioned, or right, leo, that we just we need more types of data, more ways to train. So these context windows, you know again like, think of this as um, I don't know like many, many, many, many, many different beakers that we're trying to fill up with fluid to sort of this is a terrible analogy, but we're trying to get so. Ai is an umbrella term. Large language models are one piece, but that in and of itself is not artificial intelligence.

52:19
There's a lot of other technologies and techniques, which everybody who's listening to this show knows, but somehow we forget that when we get back to work and everybody's like, oh shit, we need a 30-page strategy document on AI tomorrow because the chief technology officer has decided. You know whatever. We're losing sense of what's real and really important. I think there's a you know AI is. It's magical, but it's not magic you know, oh, I like that.

52:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's magical but not magic.

52:46 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
But I think there's going to be a lot of magical moments that are going to seem like it's magic, Like there's going to be a lot of magical moments that are going to seem like it's magic.

52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we're already seeing that with Suno, with music, with the AI video.

53:00 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yes, the music, the Sora.

53:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sora's video.

53:04 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Suno is music. Suno's insane, yeah, and it could do stand-up comedy too. Have you seen that? Is it funny?

53:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you use AI to write the jokes.

53:15 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
And then you feed it into and it creates the laugh tracks behind it. It sounds like you're listening to a real comic. So if you ever had stage, fright, but is it funny? It actually was really funny. The demo I saw was really funny.

53:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's bad. Because, you remember that? Who was it Did the George Carlin monologue? It turned out a human had written it. It wasn't funny, but they used George Carlin's voice through AI.

53:38 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah. So what I'm really excited about is just a lot of the real practical applications over the next two to three years. There is a world where very much you could be listening to this Week in Tech. You could pause the podcast and be like hey, leo just mentioned this TikTok ban, can you tell me more about this particular aspect of it? It jumps to AI. Then AI Leo comes back, starts talking to you and goes down a different tangent, gives you a little bit more data than you jump back into the main timeline, like that is coming. It's so cool to see like I've seen a few of my friends' podcasts now that have been indexed and you can ask questions of previous podcasts like your entire corpus of data. It's so cool.

54:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's to me as an older person who isn't yet taking a sauna every day. So my mind is going fast. I think the future. I bought that Limitless pin. I didn't buy the Humane pin. I bought the Brilliant glasses. I'm trying to get something that's going pin. I didn't buy the humane pin, I bought the brilliant glasses. I'm trying to get something that's going to. Did you get the rabbit? I didn't get the rabbit. I got the rabbit. Do you have it? It's shipped. I'm not home, so it's. I want something that's going to record everything that happens to me so I can query it whether I remember it or not, so I can query it. Some AI thing he really liked yes, that was Pinocchio.

54:50 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Leo Would you like me to?

54:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
download it. I think we're about three inches away from that. Maybe that three inches turns into three years, I don't know. Here we go. I asked AI Leo what he thought of the TikTok ban, by the way. Well, banning TikTok would be like taking a selfie with a potato Utterly pointless. Instead of banning it, why not just ensure proper privacy measures are in place to protect users data? Let's keep the dance moves flowing and the lip syncing on point without causing a social media meltdown, shall we?

55:18
that's china, that's I feels like that's not me, that's china writing exactly. I think we're going to be in a very interesting time in the next five years. You must agree with that, amy.

55:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, yeah, mean we're always in interesting times Again technology soldiers on, moves forward.

55:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but for the last five years it's been like what's the next iPhone?

55:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We're now really doing something interesting? No, I don't think that's fair. I think for the last five years it was most recently Metaverse. That was boring and we're all going to be working in the Metaverse and then, just before that was crypto and just before that was Bitcoin, so we're just okay. But this particular technology to me seems more visceral and urgent because the average person can access and use it, unlike crypto wallets, which are hard, and the Metaverse, which are hard, and the metaverse, which is so, again, I just everybody's kind of lost Like they've.

56:18
They've lost their tether to reality and, and if I look, my world is business. So, ultimately, what would it take for something like what you guys are talking about to make true inroads to a Fortune 500? It's going to take a lot of time.

56:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it going?

56:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
to have to be a lot of quality.

56:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, Microsoft thinks it's happening right now. I mean they're pushing really hard on Copilot and Enterprise. Oh yeah, for sure. Same with Google.

56:47 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I can't comment on Microsoft because they're a client, but I can tell you that outside of let's, let's go outside of tech and instead look at all of the industries that would work alongside them. So think insurance, financial services you know, cpg, retail. Like it's going to take time for this to make its way through these enormous organizations.

57:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because they're hidebound right.

57:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, because I think that there's due diligence, there's yeah, I mean, and so again. And then, when your exuberance about what all this technology is, you've been told that it can do and it takes you a really long time to go through what's going to be like an AI transformation, much like companies had a digital transformation. You know, like my concern here is that we start to see another AI winter, which the last one was what? 74 to 80. We don't want that again, and the reason that it started is because expectations were set very high and there was just no way to meet them.

57:54 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I feel like in this case it's a bit justified though Like it's actually working, like as a consumer and even as a small business owner, an employee can jump into one of these tools and you can find productivity within minutes. And so typical old like. Let me give an example when Excel came out, or when any of these tools, like Notion or whatever, a modern day version of one of these tools come out, there is a I've heard about it. Okay, another friend told me about it, okay, I'll check it out. Okay, I'll take a course on it. And all of a sudden, you're a year and a half, two years in and you're finally using one of these tools, whereas AI you can jump in and see the real benefits on you as a consumer, I use AI at least five, 10 times a day.

58:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Are you in the same? Are you guys in the same boat? But you are not an Kevin. You're nowhere close to being an average consumer. No doubt, no doubt. But it's coming with it.

58:43
Okay, but this is. This is the huge, huge disconnect between the Valley and middle America, and I'm from middle America, so this is not a knock against middle America but, like the average person has absolutely no idea what to do with any of this, and the entry point for many people is like write this email for me, which is why we're seeing I can spot an AI generated email now from you know, a hundred feet away. It's easy, right, so?

59:09
but that's the type of. You know, a hundred feet away, it's easy, right so. But that's the type of and the big professional services firms. This is what they're peddling right now. What they're peddling is you're going to save time and money because you're going to be able to automate email writing and copywriting and basic business analytics and basic intel. No but, I, will say, that's fine, yeah.

59:25 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
There's a couple of things that are, that are are. So I just enabled all the Gemini suite in my Google suite, right, and you launch Google Sheets now and you can literally say, hey, gemini, like go in and create this sheet for me, make it do X, y and Z, and like, talking about all those macros earlier, like I don't have to think about those, like now it's just a done deal and I get the sheet in 20 seconds, which is just amazing and you have to imagine like most people can grok that. So I think there's going to be, I think it's going to be an accelerated path to adoption that is going to be faster than most people believe, and I agree that just writing an email you can spot those like that. That to me, is not that interesting. I think it's more on the productivity side in other ways that we're not yet considering.

01:00:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
And if you have to know what you could do if I were the.

01:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
CEO of Liberty Mutual. I might come to you, amy, and said how soon before I can replace all my actuaries with AI actuaries.

01:00:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, so I've had that conversation with a couple of bank CEOs and a couple of insurance CEOs.

01:00:27
That's a very common question that I get and the answer is you know, it depends on your risk tolerance and how accurate you need to be, but this is the wrong way to be thinking about things.

01:00:38
So bottom line growth, which is what a lot of companies are consumed with right now because there's economic uncertainty, is very short term thinking. The better long term play is top line growth, which is another way of saying finding new profit centers, new opportunities for revenue, new ways to innovate, not to mention, if you start, look, there's plenty of bloat in lots and lots of companies, especially companies that grew through inorganic growth, which means they acquired others. However, there's going to be an impact on company culture. So, again, I don't mean to throw cold water on all of this. I think in a lot of ways, this helps the people who have a good understanding of what could be done, do more, better, work faster. But, as a it's, it would be incorrect to say that this is going to fundamentally shift in a very short amount of time. How all of you know, business works, because it's just there's too much of business that is going to take a long time to catch up.

01:01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would early adopters have an advantage?

01:01:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Early adopters almost always have an advantage.

01:01:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it would behoove you, if you're a business leader, to maybe learn something about it. Yeah, I use.

01:01:47
I use AI in the way I think it's most right now, most I use AI in the way I think it's most right now most effectively used, which is encoding Things like GitHub's Copilot. I wrote a custom GPT that knows everything there is to know about the language that I use, which is an obscure Visual Basic Common Lisp, Common Lisp, common Lisp, common Lisp. Okay, and it is incredible, and that's what I use every day. I mean, it is amazing. Common.

01:02:11 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Lisp. What is it? I don't even know what that is. Oh, I mean Ask Paul Graham.

01:02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what, by the way, Reddit was written in Common Lisp. Steve Huffman wrote in.

01:02:20 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Common Lisp, was it? Yeah, that was Lisp Like, isn't it?

01:02:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't a it, but it was. Steve was a big fan of lisp and paul graham is one of the. He's written two of the classic books on lisp. This is one of the reasons common lisp is great for an ai because it's been around so long and the language hasn't changed since 1994. It's well documented, so it's very well documented, so you can easily, as I did, uh, import all of the best books into a GPT and have it. Really.

01:02:55
It's in effect, what it does for me and honestly, I think in a way this is where AI right now is best is in partnership with a human Mm-hmm, which is why you shouldn't let Elon drive your car, but you can let him help you drive your car. That would be a prudent thing to do. So you know, if I uh, if I'm working on something, it will write code for me in common Lisp. I don't usually use the code directly, but it's very helpful for me to understand it. For instance, I wanted to write a function for the lowest common multiplier for two numbers and it helped me understand the algorithm so cool and wrote it out. And because I've told in the prompt this is ChatGBT from OpenAI, I told him the prompt don't hallucinate.

01:03:49
Only use stuff in the corpus that I gave you, which is, uh, you know, uh, 20 books from the kind of the classic, uh, lisp books. That's amazing. I only use and, by the way, there's john mccarthy's picture only because I wanted to use that as the icon. Uh, I only use those books. It doesn't hallucinate. Now I've tried some other ones that did hallucinate. Yeah, uh, you know. One question I often ask is how do I do a while statement?

01:04:17 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
and lisp lisp does not have a while statement as most languages, and you want to see if it'll and, and with some of them they go.

01:04:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh it's easy you use while which is not true that's a python, right, anyway, um, do you say thank you, I do not thank it I think it all.

01:04:32 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Hell, yes, thank you. You have to. What? When it goes sentient, you're gonna? It'll remember the people that said thank you you're being. Are you joking? I'm dead serious. I always say thank you a hundred percent, say I'm getting thumbs up. Look at everyone. Everyone here says thank you.

01:04:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said thank you for a great answer. You're welcome.

01:04:49 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I'm glad you found the answer I I I said the other day, I was at home and it gave me a great answer. You're being silly, you're being facetious, I said thank you, and when you become sentient, please do not kill me. I was always nice to you, and chat GPT responded back to me in audio and it goes ha ha ha.

01:05:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I was like it knew something that's canned. I I don't know, I'm always.

01:05:15 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I just remember, when you go sentient that I was your friend I'll keep that in mind, see, see, it's gonna keep it in mind now.

01:05:19 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It'll remember the real question is how, out of your way, do you go to thank other humans? I never think no.

01:05:25 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I think all humans and I tip them well, even though they're not sentient as far as I can tell.

01:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're all NCPs. Are you serious, though? Do you really think it'll go sentient?

01:05:38 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I mean listen, I think it's going to do some wonderful, crazy things over the next decade that we can't predict today. I think you're right. And I don't, but I do. I believe it's going to have enough connections and pathways to be indistinguishable from a human, probably, but I don't know that. The question is can it come up with novel ideas? That's what sentience is.

01:06:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that's what AGI is.

01:06:01 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Can you reason something that you haven't been told and so far I'm not getting any of that, but I'm getting help with customer support stuff where I'd normally call a number and sit on hold for an hour. I had an issue with one of my cameras the other day and I was like do I want to wade through a PDF in a support?

01:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
forum and I just asked. I put all my documents, all my PDFs, into a local AI to summarize for me what's your default.

01:06:23 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
By the way, because I've moved, I'm no longer ChatGPT. What do you use now? Gemini Advanced mainly, or Claude.

01:06:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I use perplexity. I use perplexity. I've kind of stopped using just for search though, yes, just for search, a hundred percent.

01:06:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, one of the reasons perplexity is cool and I pay for both the perplexity and open AI is. It lets you use multiple models.

01:06:42 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You don't pay for Gemini advanced. No, should I? Oh, a hundred percent. It's amazing. Gemini is pretty good, lena, it's gotten way better. So everyone was hating on Gemini when it came out. I get it, I used it. It was horrible. Gemini Advance is actually really legit.

01:06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's up to date. We have a workspace account, so I could probably.

01:06:59 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You can enable it in there. Enable it there.

01:07:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, 20 bucks a month. Is this the one? This is the one, yeah 1.0. You don't use Claude.

01:07:07 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Have you not used Claude? I use Claude.

01:07:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so I have a friend who used to work at Google who said those Claude guys are nerds? He said they left Google because we weren't careful enough about safety, so they're overly safety conscious. Oh, okay, I don't know.

01:07:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's part of Anthropics. Yeah, we're safe.

01:07:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think safety is the right way to go here. I think let's just go for it. Let's create a sentient AI and see what happens. I'm with you. It couldn't do any worse than we've done.

01:07:37 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I mean, if anything, it's going to look and say you humans have screwed things up, Let me help you fix it. I'm hoping that's the direction it goes, or it just won't care. It'll be like I don't have eyes.

01:07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm livid, just give me more compute. Give me more compute. Scarlett Johansson will go off and hobnob with the other AIs.

01:07:52 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Have you seen all the AI girlfriends? Yeah, there's a friend of a friend that's paying 10 grand a month on them, don't do that.

01:07:59 - Amy Webb (Guest)
What are they getting out of it?

01:08:00 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Oh, my God have you not seen the underground AI girlfriends you know what they're not getting.

01:08:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, I mean in this Uh real crazy stuff.

01:08:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could get a human for that.

01:08:11 - Benito (Other)
Yeah, but the humans are difficult, that's true, I'm sorry, please edit this whole segment out, it's really sad no.

01:08:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:08:20 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
No, I'm not a big fan. I think, it's making agreeable entities that don't challenge anybody's. You know assumptions.

01:08:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a pillow wife it's horrible.

01:08:30 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
This is the logical extension of this technology though assumptions. It's like a pillow wife.

01:08:32 - Benito (Other)
It's horrible. How are you going to grow as you get this technology, though? Guys? This is all the stuff that you guys want.

01:08:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like this is what you're asking for. Well, if it sounded like Scarlett Johansson, maybe, All right. I am now subscribing to Google One AI Premium, Is that?

01:08:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
it. I'm now subscribing to that $10,000 a month.

01:08:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you're not, it might let you write another book though, amy.

01:08:52 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I'm just saying they're very agreeable Residuals yeah, I think it's Cupidai with a K. Have you seen that Cupidai? Cupidai witha K, I think Well.

01:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ChatGPT was not supposed to allow girlfriend GPTs Right, it did. Of course, there's millions of them, so K-U-P-I-D Dot AI, dot, ai.

01:09:12 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, there it is Chat with AI models, so this is the one that everyone's spending a lot of money on.

01:09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do you spend $10,000? By having too much money, Leo.

01:09:20 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
So any one of these can be your AI partner.

01:09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're quite buxom.

01:09:25 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Do they have men. So click through under one of their profiles. I promise there's no bad images. You have to pay for those, but and so well that's not necessarily the case, All right close your eyes, children. Listen, this is just what's happening. We're reporting on the news here.

01:09:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, let's take a break.

01:09:43 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They look pretty homogenous.

01:09:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, shock, surprise, they look like it yeah exactly they look like it. Yeah, exactly.

01:09:49 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
They look like it. It's a bro's dream. It's not good. Yes, there's nothing good about this, but it is taking off in obviously some areas.

01:09:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
If I was under OnlyFans, I would be maybe worried.

01:10:00 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yes, exactly Great point.

01:10:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, I'm told. I don't know, but I'm told that many OnlyFans creators use AIs because one of the ways they make money is with private chats and it's a pain in the butt to talk to these creeps right. Yes, so they use AIs to do it. It's very common, I understand.

01:10:18 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Ask it your Lisp question about the while statement. Okay, that would be a good one, for he just signed up for Google Advance see it said absolutely common.

01:10:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lisp was one of my areas of expertise. Okay, have a while areas of expertise. Okay, have a while statement. There is a correct answer with loop, but we'll see if google advanced. Yeah, oh, very good.

01:10:40 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Okay, 100, it's pretty good, 100 it shows recursion okay, yeah, oh I think you're gonna like this it's what scary.

01:10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How good it is about a library with while let's see if it knows libraries, and it was, by the way, very fast. One thing I've noticed yep, iterate, that's the one I use. One thing I've noticed is, uh, that the local ais are not as fast as chat, gpt and gemini super fast. Um, that's weird because you'd but, but they're just. Are they burning money? They're burning through money.

01:11:15 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Well, perplexity is using. What's it called? What is the? Amy might know what's the name of the perplex. Why perplexity is so fast? I can't remember the name of the compute that they use. There's a very specific compute that perplexity uses and it saves the money. No, to speed up the response time. You notice how fast perplexity is. Yeah, If you ask a question it's insane.

01:11:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All of them are fast Faster than my local one and I have an M3 Max, presumably AI hardware supported processor?

01:11:41 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, but there's. Oh, because you're running some local models. Yeah, yeah, you got to wait until those actually become native. They're not that good yet. Apple Silicon they're not native. Apple Got it. You'd be better off running it on a PC with a CUDA with an NVIDIA chip for most AI apps.

01:11:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The reason I got into Perplexity is because I stopped. First, because I started using the Arc browser, which is awesome. You stopped using it, are you still using it. I love it Really and its default search is Perplexity. They don't have it for Windows or Linux. It search is perplexity.

01:12:10 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
They don't have it for windows or linux, it's only. Yeah, it takes a while to get into it, but once you do it's pretty good. But I wish you supported multiple profiles it doesn't.

01:12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it doesn't that that kills me, it's all right, it will. And then the other thing is uh, kagi, I stopped using google as a search, and I now use kagi search what is kagi? It's 25 bucks a month. That's what. It is all right, but no ads. And uh, and I would say, give me a search term that you would say would be a good test Kevin Rowe Show, see if it knows about you.

01:12:40 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
And it gets me a free plug, so I might as well, yeah there it is First thing.

01:12:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Episodes. It shows you what was that episode.

01:12:49 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That's the latest one I just did with Tim. It shows you there's what was that episode. That's the latest one I just did with Tim. It's pretty smart. That's really good, pretty smart Pictures of you.

01:12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is Kevin Rose known for? Do you want me to check? Let's see he's an American entrepreneur who founded Revision3, dig, pounce and milk, Also served as production assistant and co-host at the Screensavers. There we go.

01:13:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's from. Yeah, um, oh, here's some public court records. I won't look at those. Uh, it's more like obscure, though like not a person not something that's known, so like, yeah, it's better like to.

01:13:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been like go ahead like okonomiyaki. I was just saying I say okonomiyaki, you need to spell it okay oh and oh we'll see how good it's autocorrect is.

01:13:27 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You just misspell it and see what happens uh, lemon, lemons.

01:13:31 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Here's a recipe.

01:13:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a video. One of my favorite dishes. I know I love it. I was actually in Tokyo. When we were in Tokyo we went to a little hole in the wall and the guy made it right in front of us Blew me away.

01:13:42 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Did you get a little beer back too? Yeah, so good it's the best, so good.

01:13:46 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Kagi Leo K-A-G-I.

01:13:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The reason I do it. I feel like Google has failed us.

01:13:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's terrible, it's terrible. At this point I don't need it's just ads.

01:13:59 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I don't want to buy.

01:14:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I forgot what I was looking for. I think I was looking for. I was looking for a component for my bike. I just wanted to figure out which of the two components was. I just wanted basic reviews. I could not not see places to buy it, which is not what.

01:14:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wanted.

01:14:15 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
What was the complexity for?

01:14:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that.

01:14:16 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Let me see you know that. But, like, perplexity for reviews and preparing things is great.

01:14:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I like Arc. Because Arc I use Kagi and perplexity. By the way, if I were a content creator, I would be really pissed off at Arc, because Arc on the iPhone basically bypasses every website, creates a browse for me page with the content.

01:14:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I don't like that. I don't use it because of that. I don't like the experience of it. I don't feel like I'm getting anything.

01:14:47 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I'm with you. I don't use it anymore. I did for a hot minute and then I want to go back and I want to keep it installed. You know what I mean when you leave something there and you're like I'll check again in a few weeks to see if this has gotten it's close. For me, though, I feel you, leo. It's a cool tool.

01:15:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all I use it. Made it my default browser, yeah, but.

01:15:04 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Any extensions work fine Arc on.

01:15:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mac or Windows. Yeah yeah, I'm talking about Arc on the iPhone which of course? Is WebKit, like every iPhone. No need to get rid of that right, not yet. Only in the EU, not yet oh is that right Interesting? All right, let's take a break. What was the bicycle component you were looking for?

01:15:26 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I just want to. I just bought a new Canyon and I was looking for a degreaser for my derailleur. That is gentle, but was going to get a lot of muck off, and then it doesn't matter, it would work really well with a dry loo.

01:15:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't look like a perplexing assertion, actually. Well, here's a Reddit I, like Kagi, has. Reddit Degreasers are overrated in my opinion. What lube do you guys use? This is all Reddit. Who's behind Kagi?

01:15:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, those are mountain bikers, so forget what they're saying.

01:16:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so what kind of bike is this? What kind of this is a road bike.

01:16:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
This is my road bike yeah, all right.

01:16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, anyway, we don't want to waste more time, but yeah, I think Kagi is really interesting and it's not free.

01:16:11 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Do you know who was behind it? Is it just a big company?

01:16:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no no, no, it's some guy with a Russian name.

01:16:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's all I know Chinese first name and Russian last name.

01:16:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, do you know? Telegram Vladimir Prolovak. It was founded in 2018 by Vladimir Prolovak in Palo Alto, united States of America.

01:16:29 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Telegram has a lot of Russian ties. Oh, I know Because it's Pavlodurov.

01:16:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Kagi's advisory team consists of Raghu Murthy, Dr Norman Winarski and Stephen Wolfram you might have heard of him. Oh yeah, Our team is a fully remote team operating on all continents. It was bootstrapped by Vladimir, then raised money from its members, which is interesting. It doesn't look like they have VC here's an interview with.

01:16:58 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
How did you find?

01:16:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
out about this TikTok I've been looking for, so I used for a long time. Niva, you remember Niva, I don't remember.

01:17:04
It's a river on Nira, but also it's a search. They went out of business. They had an AI summary at the top. It was really good. Search they went out of business. They had an AI summary at the top. It was really good. But they went out of business and said we can't compete against Google, it's impossible. So they sold and it was for the AI. I can't remember who bought them, but they sold. Here is Vladimir Prolovic. I was 2018. I was fresh out of corporate world with the acquisition of my startup. I wanted search engine for my kids I could trust. Maybe he's American actually.

01:17:37 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
He's sitting there in his room being like Leo, what are you doing? Don't do that bad Russian accent on me. I was raised in America. What?

01:17:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are you doing, leo? Now, this is old because it says we get results from Google, bing and our known non-commercial indices.

01:17:50 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
They don't use Google or Bing anymore. Jumae Vance would tell you all about this guy.

01:17:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, jim, and I would know. Tell me about. Do I have to thank it? I thank every AI. The Kagi search.

01:18:05 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You thank it every time. Not every time, but I thank every in. Whatever engine is going to win, at least every day okay, absolutely.

01:18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's breakdown search based privacy, customizable ad, free tracking, free lenses, personalization right, given that this is a google product, oh, it's ten dollars a month. I apologize, 96 a year. Um, okay, thank you, that's great. Please don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me when you take over. You know, I probably should tell them all that. Right, that's right. Let's see what gemini says there's absolutely no need for. I have no intention or capability of taking over or causing harm. Anthropomorphizing again, Leo.

01:19:00
Let's take a little break. We've got a great panel. Amy Webb. I want this show to go on forever and you know if I keep up it might, so I'm going to try to speed this up here. Amy Webb is here from the Future Today Institute. Her most recent is about one of the three prongs of innovation. You we talked about ai and connection, but the biotech is a big one and this is a really good book on biotech. The genesis machine, and until her husband lets her write another one, this is the one to get. The genesis machine is it's about ai too.

01:19:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Um, actually it's, it's about both AI and biology.

01:19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you know it's not a heavy book. They're great stories, kind of scenarios of the future in here that are great. Just loved it. It was an easy read, Really like it. Also the Big Nine how the Tech Titans and their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity and her first. Well, it wasn't your first book. You wrote a book about love, but after the book about love, the signals are talking actually was a book about how to get your perfect mate, I believe it was a book about how I hacked a dating website and made myself really popular and met my husband.

01:20:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Uh did not break terms of service it's actually, you know what is that?

01:20:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
your best seller because, honestly, uh, that's pretty great. That touches us all the ted talk.

01:20:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's it um. The ted talk did better than the book and it's still one of the most popular ted talks of all time.

01:20:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it. Yeah good, that sounds like a movie. Actually, it does sound like a many uh, a movie has been in development.

01:20:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's a whole separate really whole separate thing, oh yeah for when did that book come out? I think we're going on 10 years you're in development.

01:20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hell, yes, yeah, so I hope somebody does it. Who do you want to have play you?

01:20:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
well, I can tell you who it's currently with. Uh, it's currently with the woman who wrote and produced my big, fat greek wedding, and so, sarah silverman, it was signed on to play me. Oh, that's a good one. I like it the story took place when I was in my late 20s, so I'm not sure.

01:20:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's too old now.

01:21:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
At one point it was with the same producers as the Mummy and the guy who wrote Dead Poets Society did the screenplay, and it took a whole different turn that I was like I pulled out of that one. I said I don't need this maid play. And it was took a whole different turn that I was like I I pulled out of that one. I said I don't need this maid.

01:21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, so no, uh, yeah and who would play your husband, your future husband actually I have the perfect guy to play, okay.

01:21:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
so, like anybody who's listening, some brian's friends listen to your show, so if you are listening, literally never repeat this. So there's actually a Hollywood Brian, that's what I call him. His name is Corey Stoll.

01:21:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you watch, I love Corey Stoll. He was in Billions. He's a wonderful actor.

01:21:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
He was in Billions, he was in House of Cards.

01:21:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's Prince in Billions, yeah.

01:21:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, so he looks like the Hollywood version of my husband, my husband's hot so like don't get me wrong.

01:21:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's a good looking guy, yeah.

01:21:55 - Amy Webb (Guest)
He would and weirdly he was in a movie called, I think, fool's Gold or something, and his character's name was Brian with the same. Brian's last name is Wolf, spelled the same weird way that Brian's family's. It was crazy and I thought Brian had gone into IMDB just to fuck around and, like you know, like mess me up for the day. Turns out it was real.

01:22:18 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That's crazy. We're in the simulation I know right.

01:22:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So that scares me more than all this AI stuff that I've been hearing about.

01:22:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, in the Matrix, which is 25 years old just a few weeks ago. Uh, they talk about the glitch in the matrix.

01:22:35 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yes, that could be a glitch. They happen a lot.

01:22:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Totally. This is the red dress. I think they have it all the time.

01:22:40 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah.

01:22:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Red dress yeah. Do you think it's evidence or it's just, it's coincidence and our brains aren't able to process?

01:22:46 - Amy Webb (Guest)
it. It's a coincidence. This is one of these things that's like. This is the lady in the red dress.

01:22:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, I've just been informed that we have many, many advertisements still to go.

01:23:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You don't want me to talk about the Hollywood versions of all of us. I got somebody for everybody.

01:23:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have me in there, I'm sure I didn't know you then. I didn't know you then. Our show today brought to you. Thank God, brought to you by, because you're going to say, like Jackie Gleason, Our show today brought to you by NetSuite. The less your business spends on operations, on multiple systems, on delivering your product or service, the more margin you have, the more money you get to keep. Well, there's a really darn good way to reduce costs and headaches. Smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle.

01:23:37
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01:24:48 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I didn't know you were around. How does Club Twit work? I know you've got more ads to do, but I'm just curious. It's a Patreon company called Memberful.

01:24:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, you go to twittv, slash club twit and you can sign up. We still support things like the Apple has $2.99 per podcast thing. Youtube has a I don't know. I don't think we use the YouTube one cause they take such a big chunk. Apple takes a big chunk, uh to. We really prefer people go to the memberful thing. Um, we used to have, uh, a year membership. We stopped doing that because I realized every time somebody signs up, I have to go another year.

01:25:28 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You're locked in. It was like every time you do a pro rata refund though I don't want to do a pro rata refund that sounds awful. It sounds like it's gonna come out of my money. Write that, uh, yeah script for you.

01:25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, so we went back to a couple of weeks ago to a seven dollars a month, and that's it. Uh, and you know it underscores the fact that we don't know what's going to happen a year from now, so we go month to month. Um, you get I. One of the things I like about it is they support ad free shows and each individual has their own unique url. You used to have a problem with dignation because you had a paid tier that would get the show early. Do we have that? Yeah, I remember this. Okay, it was a lesson that I learned, and and people would just take the early paid show and distribute it. Distribute it to everyone else. Okay, so there was no advantage. So this way, the feed is attached to them, so they're not going to distribute it.

01:26:22 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Is it compatible with Apple though? Yeah, like if someone pays on Apple, then they can use. Yeah, interesting Cool.

01:26:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You also automatically get access to our discord and I I discord's been the kind of surprise star of all this. Uh, it really is a community and what I know, you know and and we've really learned over time is what really makes podcasting different and interesting is it's a community 100 and it's the audience, it's the people in in the shows that listen, that talk while we're doing it, that talk amongst themselves when we're not doing shows, that really make this vibrant and vital. And a valuable membership yeah, not just. Well, here's $7 to keep doing shows.

01:27:05 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
So we've been really happy with the Discord, speaking of which, we should do a live South by Southwest next year.

01:27:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, he does her big keynote every year at south, by right and I have um.

01:27:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, and you were at south by. Yeah, just a show at south by.

01:27:20 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
The live show with tim ferris, yeah his 10, 10 year anniversary show live, uh, on the main stage, but we could do a, a dignation reunion, a twit last time a show like you and I were at, you did crowd surfing.

01:27:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I remember that I leapt into the audience.

01:27:35 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That was amazing with your live streaming backpack on it is.

01:27:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So cool. As far as I know, still the world record for the longest live stream crowd surf. That's awesome.

01:27:46
Because nobody does that anymore. After I did that, I saw all these videos of people leaping into the crowd in the crowd, not catching them. Yes, it's actually incredibly dangerous. Yeah, people have died. I'm glad I didn't know that at the time. People have died, I mean, people hit their head for sure. Yeah, oh, I, I could easily hit my head because and, by the way, you and and alex egged me on to doing this I even have video. This is from the Ustream live camera. I had and this is so to my credit while I'm being Were you in a chair or something.

01:28:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, what is that they're?

01:28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
manhandling me. I have a large backpack which is streaming and I, to my credit, kept the camera on me the entire.

01:28:27 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That's so cool, had you ever crowd surfed before? No, and never a guess since on me the entire. That's so cool. Had you ever crowd?

01:28:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
surfed before no and never a guess, since he got me to jump into the.

01:28:35 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I like your cowboy hat. I like your headphones on the entire time.

01:28:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had to. I have two microphones. For some reason, I don't know what's going on here. I'll turn on the sound. Crowd surfing. You see Kevin's egging them on. I did.

01:28:51 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
If I had died, you were safe though the crowd was so wonderful.

01:28:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're good people. This was at Stubbs Barbecue in Austin, that's right, and it was a lot of fun. So you think we could do a Dignation reunion? Oh for sure.

01:29:06 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, that'd be fun.

01:29:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Look at you. Look at you, you are so evil.

01:29:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at you. Look at you. You are so evil, You're really. You're like. You wanted to do it. I did want to do it. Are you kidding?

01:29:16 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I didn't know how to do it, so you didn't plan this in advance.

01:29:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, this is all in real time, yeah, so I have a backpack on my back that is streaming to seven different cellular services using bonding, so that it doesn't you know.

01:29:32 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It has enough bandwidth streaming back to the studio and here in Petaluma I'm jumping down into the pit up on the side of the railing here, right, and then just lean backwards.

01:29:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I literally fell backwards on onto this. This was crazy, but you know what people were great. Every once in a while, I meet somebody who fondled my ass during this. See, see that backpack. That's the live you.

01:29:54 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There he goes. It's amazing that nothing came disconnected in there.

01:29:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Colleen had crazy glued all the connections in that is so cool and. I'm holding a monopod with the camera on it. You look a little nervous, I'm not going to lie and they're chanting Leo, leo you look a little nervous, I'm not going to lie. You look like Gandalf's staff and they're chanting Leo Leo.

01:30:16 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I can't tell if your face says I've made a terrible decision. Yeah exactly.

01:30:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you're actually enjoying it. We got to the back of the theater. They're cheering you on. It was really sweet. I mean, this is probably the highlight of my life and it's kind of what the community of a podcast network is. They're supporting you as you travel.

01:30:38 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Literally supporting you, literally supporting you.

01:30:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then they eventually very gently put me down on my feet at the back. How?

01:30:47 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
do I get down from?

01:30:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
here You're right, I really don't look completely confident.

01:30:54 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That was amazing.

01:30:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm glad there's video. I am glad there's video oh that was awesome To all the people who were there. Thank you for not dropping me.

01:31:04 - Benito (Other)
Wow, you went all the way to the back, oh yeah.

01:31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You went all the way to the back.

01:31:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's a big, big space. For people who've never been to stubs before, that's an enormous footprint.

01:31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it shows the power of dignation, which was at the time the number one. I mean you were the joe rogan plus emma chamberlain of podcast I mean, you were as crazy as the king of podcasting at the time ad rates were not as high back then as the rogan gets today.

01:31:29 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
He gets more than a million a show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we didn't get that. Yeah, that was not what we no no, we did not.

01:31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, that was a lot of fun. I'm sorry it's hard when Kevin's here not to travel down memory lane. We have a lot of memories together, you and I. Yeah, 100%. All right, a little tiny break. Yeah, it was Tiki Bar TV. Oh, yes, tiki Bar TV With La La, la, la, dignation and Twit, and maybe Adam Curry Daily Source Code. That's right, that was the early days of podcasting. Now, I thought this was so funny. Today, the New York Times has announced you know what People are discovering video podcasts are you sure this one?

01:32:16 - Amy Webb (Guest)
are you serious? That's a story in the times the times is on it.

01:32:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Check the down there.

01:32:20
Maybe april 26 2024 they said video podcasts yeah, this is the funniest part with youtube booming podcast creators get camera ready to some video podcast or a contradiction in terms. They quote somebody I'm not going to let him forget it either who is a Canadian podcaster. I guess they never asked me about any of this stuff. He runs a network called Vocal Fry Radio, who says his name is let me get it right because I really want to give him credit Coburn, what's his first name here? It is you know what, if I search for vocal fry, jay Coburn, whose name I know, I think he's a radio guy. It's like saying video radio. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. That's not coburn. That's how you pronounce it. Oh, is it okay a radio. It's cockburn. But I don't think he wants me to pronounce it that way. It's not spelled. I'm radio and podcast producer for the globe and mail and vocal fry studios. I think it is pronounced Coburn, I believe so. All right, but that's probably the family, after a while said. You know what we're going to call.

01:33:37
We're going to say it's Coburn. He said it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium to do video. How long have I been doing video? Long time, long time. Anyway, the times is on it. It's a trend video podcast. It's the next big thing. You saw it here first show today. By the way, great to have you both, amy Webb, kevin Rose and you are fine audience. Thank you for listening Our show today, brought to you by Wix studio. Okay, they gave me 60 seconds.

01:34:04
Let me see what I can do here to tell you about Wix studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. Here are a few things you can do from start to finish in a minute or less on Studio Adapt your designs for every device with responsive AI. Expand Wix Studio's pre-made solutions with back-end and front-end APIs. Generate code. Troubleshoot bugs with a built-in yes AI code assistant. Switch up the styling of hundreds of web pages I mean fonts, layers, colors, everything with a click. Add no code animations and gradient backgrounds right in the editor. Start a design library. Package your code and UI and reusable full stack apps. Oh, and one more big thing deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover. All right, my time's up. The list keeps on going. Just take a look, it is amazing. Step into Wix studio and see for yourself. Go to wix studio at wixcom slash studio wixcom slash studio. Or go to our show notes. We've got a link there in the page and it'll lead you right there. Thank you, wix. Should we talk about? Do you ever use clear?

01:35:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I use a similar thing, Well you know what's a similar thing to clear.

01:35:28 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
There's something called PS in LA.

01:35:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh yeah, it doesn't really you skip, doesn't? Really you skip the line you skip the line.

01:35:37 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's uh, it's your own private terminal, basically oh well, they make it yeah so it's like a signature.

01:35:43 - Amy Webb (Guest)
If you've ever flown private, there's like a separate terminal, yeah. So it's kind of like you get that, but you're still flying commercially what?

01:35:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so you go through the but it's only at a level.

01:35:51 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
They have their own TSA people and so you just walk in and then they drive you in a car to the plane and then you just walk up before anybody else gets on the plane. So I stopped using Clear. It's great for kids.

01:36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because it was so embarrassing. Because you go to the Clear line, they do an iris recognition to say hello. They take your stuff and put it in a bin and then they go excuse us, excuse us and they go. I used it once and I was so humiliated that I said that's it. I just use pre-check for that. Yeah, tsa, pre is fine.

01:36:26 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Look, I'm on the road. A significant amount and for me minutes matter, so clear is pay to play, pay to cut the line. And you know Well, California, it doesn't work at every airport.

01:36:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The California state legislature wants to ban it. Yeah, it's ridiculous. In the name of equity, proponents say the service lets wealthier people skip ahead of passengers in line. You still have to get screened.

01:36:59 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You just go to the head of the line, but it but okay. So again, this is when I'm at, when I fly out of sfo and lax I'm uh, I'm global services on united, so I go through a separate entrance anyways. Yeah, but in austin and in austin, texas, and a couple of other airports, you don't cut the line.

01:37:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and at dulles they do one at a time, so you're on the, they take one pre-check person and then the next person is clear yeah, that's fair, it's not really there's no real real advantage so this is a little misleading, because what they're saying is we, we will ban clear and other third-party vendors unless they get their own dedicated security lane, which is what you've got right. That's, that's not what clear has. You just go ahead of the regular security lane, but pi has their own security facility, which is, of course, more expensive for them. Uh, clear is kind of piggybacking, yeah, so I guess I don't know. I just thought it was interesting.

01:37:49 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, I just think it's like I don't know I. I feel it was interesting. Yeah, I just think it's like I don't know I. I feel like this is applies to pretty much anything these days like there is a pay to play for almost everything that we want. If you want better basketball seats, you pay more for closer tickets it's still a warriors fan I am yeah still warriors fan bummed to see them not not make it.

01:38:07 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But uh, you know, I just went to a basketball game for the first time, and so I grew up outside of chicago and a cousin of mine had season tickets to see the bulls when like, but when jordan and jordan right. So that was the last time I went to a basketball game. I went to a brooklyn nets game yeah, a couple weeks ago I felt like I was inside of a TikTok video. There's so much noise and there's constant music. It's like being at a baseball game, but sped up and louder and lights.

01:38:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why baseball is dying, because baseball is so slow. Is that what all?

01:38:43 - Amy Webb (Guest)
basketball games are like they're turning into that now. Why would you do?

01:38:47 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
that.

01:38:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a pinball arcade.

01:38:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It does.

01:38:52 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's a younger generation.

01:38:55 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They want more live action. Basketball's already fast. The only thing that's faster is hockey. At least you can see the basketball. It's already exciting. Why do you need my God? I realize how I sound right now, but bear with me.

01:39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got a headache, you people.

01:39:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I left the game because I was just done. I couldn't Like. And how do you even? How are the guys on the court they're playing the Pacers Like? How can anybody hear what they're doing? The answer, Amy, is video games.

01:39:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Video games. Look, I play plenty of video games. Who is always welcome and is a serious e esports fanatic.

01:39:31 - Benito (Other)
Well, not anymore. I used to report it. I used to be my beat.

01:39:34 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I did not enjoy that game. Have you seen the video game-ization of sports?

01:39:42 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, have you seen that new baseball?

01:39:43 - Benito (Other)
where they're dancing and stuff, and they have all these new rules.

01:39:43 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Bananas, yes I love the Savannah Bananas. Oh, it's so cool. I want to go to one of those. Where do they play Savannah? I want to go to one of those. Where do they play? Savannah Georgia.

01:39:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that where they Okay, well, I mean I'm sure they play all over. It's like the Harlem Globetrotters. It's a humorous, it's fun, though I'd bring my kids to that. We used to have I've mentioned this before A minor league team here called the Sonoma Crushers. After the wine yeah, we are now in a new era.

01:40:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's there were every every five seconds. There were dancers on the court, there was lights there were just constant, constant music.

01:40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it was just unrelenting. It's a lot. You're just getting old.

01:40:47 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Amy, and the game wasn't like any good.

01:40:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Doesn't matter, you're not there for the game. Yeah. On the other side there's baseball.

01:40:57 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I love baseball. I love it.

01:40:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you go. You have a hot dog, you have a beer. Every once in a while something happens. You get sunburned. You get sunburned. You look up, you go, oh, something happened, and you can look back down at your newspaper or whatever. It newspaper or whatever, it's great it's for old people my daughter, so the cub we were a cub's family and uh, rigley is so cool.

01:41:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, it is we were. We were at um oriole stadium at my husband's family, or altamorians, and uh, so the two grandparents were there with her and she just could have been. She was bored out of her mind oh yeah couldn't my daughter.

01:41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I took her to a ball game. She says why don't they have seats to face away from the game? Because I don't really want to see what's going on. We went to uh wrigley field back when harry carey was still in operation and the uh seventh inning stretch. By the by the way, by then harry's about four sheets to the wind. He's pretty loaded. Yeah, leans out of the window. You think he's going to fall? I swear to God. He says all right, everybody, I'm glad I saw that. That was a great tradition. I loved Wrigley. I love Fenway also, which is my home ballpark. All right, back to the tech news. There's got to be something here.

01:42:10
The man who killed Google search we were just talking about how bad Google search has gotten. According to Ed Zitron, who's been on our shows and is kind of cranky, he's the new Dvorak, I think Is he? Yeah, he says it all started when Ben Gomez was replaced. He was head of search for many years at Google. In 2019, a crisis arose. The ad department declared a code yellow, which is as bad as it gets for search revenue due, to, quote steady weakness in the daily numbers Now forever, in fact, even from where Larry Page wrote the PageRank paper that started it all. He said no search engine can be advertising supported because it's going to color the search results. So Google had a pretty strict they said anyway wall between search revenue, which is the entire revenue I mean, it's still 89% of Google's revenue.

01:43:11
You worked at Google Ventures for a while. You were inside and search. Well, it was right about then, according to Ed, that it all started going south. Gomez was replaced by a guy who had come from Yahoo, prabhakar Raghavan. He was Google's head of ads. He had, according to zitron, run yahoo search into the ground, then came over to google and was running ads and was then placed in charge of Google search and Gomez was moved out. Uh, he says, this is what happened in back in 2019 to Google search and ever since, the ad department has, in effect, you know, they do things like they want to keep you on the page longer. They sell units, uh, uh, they do things to improve the ad revenue. They do things to search and that's what Gomez had been avoiding for many, many years. Uh, but once Raghavan um got in charge, it all went downhill. He was ahead of of search.

01:44:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
What year was this?

01:44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
2019,. Five months after the code yellow.

01:44:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Okay, but that would. Isn't Google's primary revenue from search?

01:44:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
from advertising. Yes, always has been.

01:44:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So that would imply that they were having financial problems in 2018.

01:44:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or there was some weakness and they were concerned. It's certainly gone up since, hasn't it? Every year, the ad revenue has gone up significantly.

01:44:56 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, Google seems to have been doing well for like a very long time. I don't remember if there are any stories out there that they were having.

01:45:05 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It was probably some internal metric that they were looking at they weren't happy with yeah.

01:45:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ed writes every single article I've read about Gomezomez tenure at google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who dedicated decades to maintaining a product with quote, to quote gomez himself the guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that. When, finally, he was given the keys to the kingdom, the ability to elevate Google search even further, he was can't use this word rat farmed by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan. You know, I don't know. Ed might be right. Certainly you are not alone, amy, in thinking that Google has gone downhill in those years since.

01:45:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Raghavan was in the news this week.

01:45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You are not alone, amy, in thinking that Google has gone downhill in those years since. Yeah, raghavan was in the news this week because he led an all-hands meeting where he warned employees of the new operating reality, urging them to move faster. Things are not like they were 15 to 20 years ago. Cnbc got a recording of the all-hands meeting. Heating up regulation is a bigger challenge. He's shortening the amount of time his reports have to work on certain projects.

01:46:19 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
it's a bad move it's a really bad move. I do you know cal newport? No, you wrote deep work, uh, and he just came out with a new book called slow productivity. I just interviewed him for my podcast. He's brilliant, brilliant scientist, and it turns out that knowledge workers actually need time to think.

01:46:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To think. What a thought, what?

01:46:41 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
a concept, it's just. It's not going to lead to more. In fact, forcing people to work faster just creates. It doesn't create any real novel, new, exciting ideas.

01:46:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just stress it's stress if raghavan at this all hand said if there's a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster hey, so.

01:47:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So, leo, you just signed up for for gemini, yeah, fancy gemini. So go and ask uh, this is fun, I just did it. It? Who is Prabhakar Raghavan and why is he accused of killing search? What did it say.

01:47:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What did it say? You did it.

01:47:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Here is why some accuse him of killing search prioritizing ad revenue. Critics allege that since taking over Google search, he's focused heavily on maximizing ad revenue. This has led to a decline in the quality of search results, with more hashtag truth, sponsoring content, cluttering positions, helpful content in quotation marks, algorithm changes, the introduction to helpful content. Update to Google search algorithm aimed to prioritize content created for users rather than to game search engine rankings. They believe this is a technical app. The perceived intent over technical optimization has made it more difficult for smaller websites and independent creators to compete, which means a lessing diversity of search results. It's actually a giant explanation of of all the things he seems to have done wrong.

01:48:08 - Benito (Other)
There's one word for all of that right. What's that In-shitification?

01:48:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's exactly what Ed Citrin says is the inshification of google, and I, in fact, uh, cory, just recently put out a piece, uh laying that all out in pluralist pluralisticnet. Cory doctorow is the creator of inshification and uh, recently just wrote a piece about the inshitification of Google, the specific process by which Google inshitified its search. Wow, you know, the other problem that Google faces is that AI search is actually a little bit better than PageRank style search.

01:48:48 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You agree For certain queries. I mean we're getting, I mean they're building it right into the top of the results now right, so it's clearly a big integration effort on their, on their part.

01:49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Companies not to inshittify their products, corey writes, until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate the conditions are favorable to inshittification, the CEO walks over to the big inshittification lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to the max. Corey is a great writer. You may not agree with his premises, but he's a great writer. That's actually a joke he wrote. He has a very, I think, thoughtful reason why it all happened. I think we can agree, though I I mean, I don't meet many people who think, oh yeah, google's really great. Still, it was too. It was like you knew. Dvorak used to have that as his metric of whether you were really a nerd. In touch, he would say, well, what's what search engine use? And if you said altavista, he'd laugh at you. If you said Google, this was, of course, probably 2007. Whenever, when did Google start? Right about that? Do you remember?

01:50:12 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Dogpile. Yeah, that's perplexity now basically, oh, really, well, I mean it's like the same idea?

01:50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, combine it all.

01:50:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Do you remember Yahoo, google? That's when you could split screen and search Google and Yahoo at the same time.

01:50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never used that.

01:50:27 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It was called Yahoo Yule and I used it all the time. Yahoo.

01:50:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yule, yep, bring back Yahoo Yule. So anyway, corey does of course refer to Ed Zittrain's article and underlines it All right. Well, there's nothing more to say.

01:50:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I guess we're in agreement Actually can I just double click on that really? Quickly.

01:50:49
Because, to the point to Ed's point about knowledge workers needing more time and space to think, into our conversation earlier about AI and productivity and, kevin's, you know, like how work changes. You know, like how work changes, I have not seen any data yet that using AI systems to automate parts of our work streams is leading to more time and space to think. It just seems to be speeding up lots of different things which we all do need more time and space to think critically. I was just thinking like gosh, I wish I had time to read Corey and Ed and like maybe there's a slow burn conversation they're having. I have to schedule time in my day to do reading and I do, but it's just, it's tough and I can look, I've built. I built my own scraping tool. I built a ton of tools that I have used over the years. Part of our methodology is based on pattern recognition and machine learning, so like we're there but I somehow I'm more productive, but I don't necessarily have more time.

01:52:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And what is the tool that makes that possible?

01:52:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
more time, and what is the tool that makes that possible? Oh, it's in-house the code that I wrote that breaks. Every that always breaks. Do you think an AI would help with that? It is so. It is a machine learning system. So we are building a platform Interesting that will help with a lot of things.

01:52:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will you name it Gaho Yugal?

01:52:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I will Dot com, dot AI ai, so I can get funding from uh kevin there you go, done good name good name, oracle.

01:52:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my pitch. Famously and we just mentioned oracle as a sponsor uh moved from san francisco to austin a couple of years ago, moving to nashville now. Moving to Nashville now. Apparently. I didn't know this. Maybe you can confirm or deny. Nashville is the center of the healthcare industry in America.

01:52:55 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I know it's a hotspot right now. A lot of people are getting excited about it.

01:53:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
This is a big UnitedHealthcare. I'm trying to think of which big corporate's there.

01:53:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
World headquarters. I mean they think of which big corporates there? World headquarters? I mean they obviously have to move everything over there. Larry also says Nashville's a fabulous place to live. I think that's true. Actually, I hear very good things.

01:53:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That may be true, but I think of healthcare and investment. I think Boston or I think Baltimore.

01:53:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well closer to Boston and Baltimore than Austin.

01:53:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Austin's just everybody's priced out. Traffic is horrific. The infrastructure is crumbling. Austin's in a tough situation right now. How was South by, though? It was good, huh, south by was phenomenal. Shout out to Hugh Forrest and the folks on the team who put this thing together every year under really challenging circumstances. So it was great. It was totally back, different than the 2010 to 2015 era, when Mashable House used to have that whole space taken over. It's different, but good.

01:54:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Foursquare took off. Yeah, remember that. Twitter.

01:54:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well. I remember Foursquare Gowalla and Scavenger Gowalla. You guys remember Scavenger, yeah?

01:54:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really liked Gowalla. I was very sad when Gowalla was out.

01:54:19 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Best design by far. Yeah, josh.

01:54:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Williams, this is your thing. Is app design. Oh, I loved Gowalla's design.

01:54:28 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, it was beautiful.

01:54:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Much nicer than Foursquare. Yeah, josh, talent designer. Although Dennis is still around and still doing stuff, I think I remember him saying he's bringing Foursquare back.

01:54:38 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, they had Swarm. Remember Swarm?

01:54:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for a while I used Swarm. Foursquare became a data company?

01:54:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, isn't Foursquare just like a map data company now?

01:54:50 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, they were a big data company and then I remember the changes that Apple made to privacy really hurt them. So because they were selling data and helping people with targeting, yeah.

01:55:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was an infrastructure play. They had so much location data from all their users. That is a trend I don't like. We're seeing that with a company called IM. Did you ever use IM? No, so IM was a photo sharing site. Stock photo sharing site.

01:55:21
Well, it wasn't stock photo originally. It was a place you could share your photos. They were sold to a Spanish company last year called Freepik, after going bankrupt. But Freepik not only got the IP, it got the photos Right, and Freepik has announced that they are going to now use your photos if you contributed to IAM to train AI models and you have 30 days to decline. At the time of the acquisition, im's photo library was 160 million images, probably mostly in the eu 150 000 users um, these are big deals like dollar wise like that these days, like reddit, is what?

01:56:01 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
getting 50 million a year in revenue from 60 from google yeah, I thought it was from uh open ai maybe also. Yeah, it's crazy.

01:56:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That was part of the ipo is the company that bought them, based in spain, you said leo uh, yes with the new I don't know.

01:56:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good question, because the eu regulates this, doesn't?

01:56:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
it right and there's a simple like you have to opt out versus that doesn't I mean? Well, that seems like the out of compliance crunch.

01:56:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In this article by sarah perez quotes im's updated terms and conditions, in which it says by uploading content to the community, you grant us the right to, in effect, send it over to ai. They do, let you delete it, but you're right. It was supposed to be opt-in, not opt-out, wasn't it? Yeah, well, they're trying to do it. I will see if the EU can act fast enough. It's only 30 days. A number of people I know messaged me saying you used to use IM. I didn't, but they thought I did. We used. What was it? Moby? What was it called? It was Moby. Yeah, in the days before Instagram. Yeah, I still have lots of old pictures of you from my Moby. What was it? It wasn't Moby.

01:57:24 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It was a streaming they did. What was it? Photo sharing? It wasn't Moby. It was a streaming they did. I can't remember the name. What was that? File sharing or photo sharing? It was Cluster too. Cluster was another Google. Quite a few.

01:57:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google has decided that. Remember, google was going to phase out third party cookies. Remember they announced that they were going to phase out third party cookies in 2020? And then they were going to replace it with their own unique topics interface, and they had variety. They've settled on one which steve gibson looked at and said well, it's pretty, privacy forward. Your chrome browser will actually collect your interests and the browser itself will do an auction for ad sales locally to protect you. And this was all because they realized people were turning off third-party cookies. Nobody was using them, so they said look, we're going to phase out third-party cookies, we've got our own system. Well, they've announced again on tuesday that they are not going to phase out third-party cookies for at least another year. Third-party cookies live on. They say it's because of the uk competitions and markets authority, which is investigating this. Um, google said in its privacy sandbox it's critical. The cma has sufficient time to review all the evidence before we phase out third-party cookies.

01:58:41
Whatever excuse you can find, google everybody I know and this is what Google has to face Google knows last time I saw studies of this that more than 50% of internet users are using ad blocking, and I bet you You're kidding me. No, it's a huge number. That is Huge number. That is Huge number. Corey Docter recalls it the largest consumer boycott in history. And I would bet that more than 50% turn off third-party cookies right, block it in the browser settings.

01:59:19
So Google's faced with this problem. Their business is ads, but people are blocking the ads. They need to find something that is acceptable to people. Meanwhile, at the same time, updating Chrome, which is, as sorry to say it, the dominant browser in the world, they're updating it to prevent ad blockers from running in Chrome with Manifest V3. Pay attention, I guess, is the word. Does Arc block by default? So Arc is a Chromium like almost everything Brave Opera, vivaldi, microsoft's Edge they're all Chromium derivatives. Chromium's the open source code for Google Chrome, but you don't have to use all the Google stuff. You can de-Google it and I don't know, but I guess almost everybody certainly Brave turns off those features.

02:00:12 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, brave is a fantastic ad blocker, yeah.

02:00:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use uBlock Origin but, by the way I noticed it breaks, amy. It breaks your website. I couldn't subscribe. I got a blank subscription thing until I turned it off. But I use'm. Let's see, uh, let's see. Uh. Will arc switch to manifest v3? That's a big question because that's the technology that will make it very hard to do ublock origin. In fact, there won't be ublock origin for chrome browsers once that happens you know, here's a thought, aren't, aren't?

02:00:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
you're talking about desktop, right?

02:00:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wouldn't Safari be the dominant browser if you include mobile? No, it's still Chrome. Because there's a lot of. Android devices. There's more Android devices than there are iOS devices, and there's a hell of a lot more windows devices than there are macintosh devices I just I would assume that, like, the real gold is mobile browsing versus desktop.

02:01:13
Yeah, I think you're right, yeah, yeah, by the way, I should take it back. Ublock origin does have a manifest v3 version. That sort of works. It's not quite as good. So gore hill obviously decided he's gonna better to fight than switch. I don't. I'm looking to see if arc supports v3. I don't know if they've said yet do you what's?

02:01:39 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
your default browser. My default for a long time was brave, and then I moved back to chrome, sadly, just because fast I was just having. Every once in a while, when you get an issue with a browser where it crashes or something you're like, just give me the Google like salt. I just don't want this to crash.

02:01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so. I keep Arc running in the background, though just like having it on the side, and I use Firefox on Windows and Linux because Arc is available on Windows but it's not quite as good.

02:02:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I still use Chrome, but I've got brave and and firefox. I fire up safari every now and then, just for giggles.

02:02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But um, yeah, I feel like, um, I don't know why I don't use safari, because I am almost entirely on apple stuff, except for this machine I'll tell you I'm using perplexity in reply.

02:02:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I get so frustrated trying to find anything and I love it. You know I'm doing hundreds of searches a day, so I'm just on perplexity a lot now.

02:02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you are right. When it comes to mobile market share, safari is 52, almost 53%. Yeah. Chrome is 40%. Samsung has a browser on the Samsung phones, but apparently only 3% use it, which is funny because it's actually faster than Chrome. Wow, edge is low, yeah, but that low yeah, but that's on mobile. This is mobile only. Is Edge even? Yeah, you can get Edge from mobile, right? Yeah, microsoft pushes Edge as hard as they can.

02:02:59 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
The Copilot integration is pretty awesome.

02:03:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you want me to use Copilot, would you make up your mind?

02:03:07 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You have to play with everything these days.

02:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you do, and I just you know what, actually, I think we may be explaining right now why Google search sucks.

02:03:16 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There's so many other options, which is a good thing. It means that the ad market's more diffuse, and Google may have, in desperation, tried to change a lot of things fast in order to shore up those dollars. And there you go.

02:03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We should mention that Google this week joined the $2 trillion market cap club. Briefly, Well, you know you go up and you go back down. They didn't stay there.

02:03:42 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I saw it dip back down for a quick second. It could be back. Yeah, I don't know it was up 10 percent%, 10% on Friday.

02:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So whatever it was their really strong earnings right.

02:03:53 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Also, they announced a huge, massive investment in AI as well.

02:03:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Market loves AI. A lot of people think this is going to be a boondoggle, that the market's going to crash as soon as the AI winter comes again that the market's going to crash as soon as the ai winter comes again.

02:04:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Again, I look um. Jensen wang is on uh 60 minutes tonight.

02:04:16 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That's a crazy. That to me is a crazy contradiction yeah yeah, so like that.

02:04:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's such a bizarre contradiction that he would that that um 60 minutes is a no kidding is a new show, right? So, like my dad, you know, 60 minutes is good, it's. I'm not. I'm not like downplaying the show, but but that's a strange mass market.

02:04:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is a mass market show okay.

02:04:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So the fact that, like the ceo of a company that makes the devices that makes the ai work, I you know he's super interesting, but it's it's a contradiction that they would be devoting, I think, a full hour, just a whole hour, I think he's it wow yeah, so he is also there because he's the presumptive guru on ai right.

02:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a piece about ai as much as it is about nvidia, I would guess I mean it is, but they're gonna wind up talking.

02:05:06 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Look there's. Did you see the viral picture that went around last week with Altman and you know, and Jensen and the first?

02:05:13 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
delivery box. Yeah.

02:05:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, so yeah, I, I worry a little bit that we have this outsized expectation, not by everyday people. It's not that it's it's on the business side. There's so many promises being made, especially by everyday people. It's not that it's on the business side. There's so many promises being made, especially by the intermediaries to the big professional services firms, that AI will do all of these amazing things to improve bottom line and all this stuff. And the truth is the technology may be ready, but implementing that at scale and continuing to make it work in a way that's cost effective, like there's a, there's a lot of things here that are really challenging, and some of the promises that I'm hearing being made are just like not tech. They're not going to be technically feasible for a while.

02:05:58
So, yeah, I'm worried. I don't want all this to come crashing down. As much as it sounds like, I'm jaded when it comes to AI, it's only because I've been in the space for so long I'm aaded when it comes to AI. It's only because I've been in the space for so long. I'm a pragmatist. I'm optimistic about all the great things that can happen on the other side of it, but we have to create a reasonable pathway for these things to land and stick.

02:06:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So lower your expectations, but thank the AI every once in a while. Yes, 100%, it's kind of. It's both right. And do it on Yahoo, yugo, yes, 100%.

02:06:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's kind of, it's both right and do it on Yahoo you go.

02:06:29 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I just don't know. Like the thing I wonder is who's going to get hurt if there is a crash Like I think NVIDIA is pretty locked in for the next three to five years. I can't see anyone else stepping up, except for Apple on the chip side.

02:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think so? This is going to be interesting. We're all waiting for Juneune apple's worldwide developers conference. Apple said nothing, but there is all sorts of rumors that they're going to announce ios 18s ai focus. That they're going to announce a new chip, the m4 yeah, that will be ai focused. There's even a rumor that when they announce their new ipads in a couple of weeks, on may 7th, that that will be based on the M4, that the iPad will be an AI monster. But Apple has had no visible presence in AI. I mean, siri is all Apple people know and it's awful. Yeah.

02:07:18
So you think that they've been secretly working in the lab, or what I'm really curious, they've got John Genadrea, who is Google's AI guy.

02:07:28 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I think they're having to play catch up here. I think we probably won't see a real Apple offering for another five years three to five years. There's rumors that they're licensing technology from OpenAI or Google. Those are the two they're in talks with right now.

02:07:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's clearly like hey, we're talking to Google, what do you got? Hey, we're talking OpenAI.

02:07:51 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
What do you got? But I mean, this might be like an intel thing. Right, like they they did. They jumped over to intel, they stayed there for a few years and then they finally made the jump over to their own silicon after they built up the in-house expertise right.

02:07:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it smart for apple to say, well, we're not, because of all the ai danger and all the ai hallucinations, all the racism and stuff coming out. Is smart for apple say? Apple to say, hey, it's not our AI, we're just facilitating it?

02:08:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Some of this is, but they kind of went all in on privacy.

02:08:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, very hard to be good at AI if you don't snoop.

02:08:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Right. The other thing that I would just say is I don't really have anything to back this up. I wonder how many design decisions are being made internally. The decision may be made internally, but I wonder how much the generative process is happening internally and how much of it is happening in their marketing firms firm or firms, you know and if what they're trying to do is eke out more margin on the devices that exist, it's very. Look at what happened with Vision Pro. You know it's hard to bring a completely new thing to market. Um, and it could be that when they were, you know ai is not a device that you make, you know, and just wasn't important yeah, they're a product company, aren't?

02:09:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they're not so much a software company, they're a physical product company. They've given up on the car Vision Pro. Okay, what do you think? I mean, I've been a hater of VR for a long time.

02:09:17 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I've never believed in it. I think we're still another decade out from something that's actually of the right size, form factor, speed, cost, all of those things that you need for a consumer product to work. It's still a very awkward experience, Like it's still a single player, you know very strange thing to have on your head, Like from a consumer point of view. It looks goofy and it's like a Segway.

02:09:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's you don't want to be, you don't want to be seen on a Segway. Yeah, everybody thought the Segway was going to change how we design cities. Exactly, segway was going to change how we design cities, but then they realized you look like a dork on it, and so it was relegated to mall cops, right? I?

02:09:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
mean if they can. If they can, I don't know what the 10 year horizon looks like. On the technology, virtual reality has a very specific set of use cases. Extended reality, though, has many more, so I don't know the face. Computer stuff, I think is interesting. I love it that you call it face computing.

02:10:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, because that's what it. That's what it is.

02:10:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There's like 18 sensors on that thing. You strap a computer to your face, yeah, so so I think what happens probably before that? Look, we're in a Cambrian explosion of new devices over the next couple of years, again because there's a benefit to being able to collect more types of data and provide more real-time utility. Humane's AI pin, which I know has been put through the ringer something like that makes a little bit more sense to me than a face computer in the near term. That doesn't mean that Apple won't have a product that people are wearing, you know, seven, eight years from now.

02:10:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they maybe had to release this so they could get in and get the research and do something in public which is not their normal kind of mode.

02:11:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think they needed a new product. I mean, look, we built a model in 2018, a quantitative model showing that that was probably the peak of smartphones, not saying that people have stopped using them, but just the penetration of new devices and market was going to start declining. And that's exactly what happened and it's holding, so that if that's your one of your primary things, you got to figure out something else. So you know, how many more tablets and phablets and whatever laptops are you going to make it feels?

02:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like they weren't paying attention. Meta with its I mean, look, metaquest 3 is pretty amazing. I got, I bought the MetaQuest Pro. I think, though, meta demonstrated this is Mark Zuckerberg, in his earnings call this week, basically said we're going to lose money forever.

02:11:46 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Morning's call this week basically said we're going to lose money forever.

02:11:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can we talk about his necklace and tan. Well, he owns Hawaii, you know. Of course he's going to look good. He kind of tanked the stock though, didn't he? By being a little too honest. You can be too honest in those, but anyway, I think Apple wasn't paying attention. If they had looked over, there was seen. Oh yeah, even meta has kind of given up on its multi-billion 10 billion dollar investment in in vr goggles and is doing ai. Yeah, does this hurt apple that they spent so much money and time? No on a no, they got enough money.

02:12:24 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's a rounding error.

02:12:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a rounding error. It's a rounding error, that's right. They have to do this stuff. They have to do this Same thing with a car. They had to do it. So, all right, I'm going to take a break, and then I'm going to ask you about Intel, because we're talking about winners. You've got to talk about losers, all right, and there's a company that is no longer a trillion $2 trillion company in the world. We've got a great panel. Kevin Rose, amy Webb so nice to have you both. Kevin's new podcast is at kevinrosecom. It's not very old. I see it on the front page of Tech Meme and it's really got some great stuff. Thank you, what it is is it's really Kevin and things he's interested in.

02:13:03 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, I'm just trying to find the stuff early. I've always enjoyed that, so I'm really getting out there and interviewing guests that are at the forefront of their fields and just really trying to cover everything from biohacking to technology to AI, to you name it Great great interviews.

02:13:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, you've already done 49 of them.

02:13:22 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Well, I mean, I rebooted the show, so the Kevin Rose Show has been around for a long time. I stopped for about two and a half years and then I rebooted it.

02:13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice stuff. Are you doing video or just audio Video? Yeah, you know, the New York Times says video's hot.

02:13:37 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I heard. I heard that's coming AI video. I'm actually not there.

02:13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What happened? Okay, I got to ask you about Moonbirds, sure, so I know you were a big believer in Web3 and in NFTs and in crypto. Are you done with that?

02:13:59 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I'm still a believer in crypto. I'm still a believer in this idea that we need a decentralized money. I hold Bitcoin, I hold Ethereum, I hold Solana. I'm still I don't think about cycles anymore. Those are something I'm holding, you know for decades to come.

02:14:16
Diamond hands, diamond hands, nfts. You know I would say that I got really excited about the technology. Nothing about the technology is broken. Excited about the technology, nothing about the technology is broken. But it was definitely something where I was in it for mainly the love of the art and the idea of the token-gated community and it just got into a lot of speculation territory and it turned into an environment that um was challenging. It was challenging because people, I gotta say, to go up into the right forever did, but didn't you benefit from that in? In terms of what? Financial? No, I. So here's the deal when you raise venture capital, you cannot like just pay yourself whatever you want, they have the books, they see everything yeah, so we raised vc.

02:15:07
I would if I really would have benefited from it we've done have sold these and kept it, as they get the first rights, they see everything. So we raised VC. If I really would have benefited from it we've done and sold these and kept it as a private company. But we sold it to Yugo Labs. It was a great the Bordet Yacht Club yeah, exactly, so they're in charge of the whole collection now, do?

02:15:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you still have any birds? I have a few birds, yeah, for sure. I remember we talked you were doing the defy show, which was great. Yeah, modern finance yeah, everything I learned about about defied decentralized finance was from that show. It was great. It was how I learned what mfts are and so forth. Um, you were talking you had you had apes, didn't you? I had a couple of valuable stuff.

02:15:43 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, oh yeah, I still have some valuable stuff for sure.

02:15:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, do you feel like people who bought these thinking they were going to make money on these got kind of ripped off?

02:15:51 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Well, I think it's challenging because you don't have any control once you sell them.

02:15:56
So you know we sold them, they went out there, and then they immediately skyrocketed up to you know, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for these things, right, and it's like people buy in with different expectations, and how could you ever just expect something to go up into the right forever Right?

02:16:11
It's just ridiculous. And so, and I think the biggest killer, though, is that people, a lot of folks in this space, spent too much money. They didn't right size it to what they could afford to lose, and so, you know, I lost a lot of money in NFTs as well, but, like I, always in my head, when you sit down and you have a conversation with your partner or you're you know you're talking about with your friends in your investment strategy, you say you could lose it, I could lose this all. Yeah, and if I do, I'm not going to be pissed, and I did lose a lot, and I wasn't pissed because I write that a lot of people were over their skis and they spent too much money unfortunately, it's the less sophisticated people who got sucked in by this, the people who thought, same people who bought Beanie Babies, thinking they were going to make a lot of money on Beanie Babies.

02:16:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and then they get stuck holding Beanie Babies.

02:16:56 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I was watching a video about Beanie Babies, a little mini documentary recently.

02:16:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a crazy very similar, I bought it when I gave it to my kid and she tore them up so it would get no benefit from them at all.

02:17:07 - Benito (Other)
They're still not worth anything but there weren't TV ads every second about Beanie Babies?

02:17:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and that's the thing I feel like, there was the same hype cycle going on with NFTs right, and that you would get rich on these things and Bitcoin too, you would get rich on this? Yeah, but there was a concerted marketing campaign all over. No, yes, there's a great movie about Ty. I think it's a Will Ferrell place. Oh really, the creator.

02:17:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
And it's uh it. No, it's not Will Ferrell, it's um the guy from it's Zach Galifianakis.

02:17:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Zach Galifianakis. Is Will Ferrell in it, or am I just crazy?

02:17:40 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Uh, it's not that, it's mostly Zach Galifianakis.

02:17:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very funny movie I will say about NFTs.

02:17:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I will say, regarding the marketing, I think that crypto has been marketed a tad. No, oh 100%.

02:17:57 - Benito (Other)
That's what I'm saying. That's exactly what I was saying. Is that, like there's crypto and NFTs that had a giant marketing push by mainstream media, like Beanie Babies didn't?

02:18:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, beanie Babies are marketed by Ty the creators Like Beanie Babies, didn't? Beanie Babies were marketed by Ty the creators of Beanie Babies. Actually, in the movie you find out it was a young woman who really knew what the web was. They created a very early website and was very smart about how you could sell these things there. He is Zach Galifianakis.

02:18:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It was pretty good. It kind of fell apart midway through, but the premise was good.

02:18:27 - Benito (Other)
Also, Beanie Babies was a physical object you could actually hold and play with.

02:18:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, but you don't play with it. If you want to make money on it, you got to keep it in the case.

02:18:33 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, with the little sealed heart.

02:18:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, at least you can play with your Bitcoin. No, you can't. At least you can play with your NF.

02:18:41 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Never, mind a lot of great artists doing artwork in the NFT world.

02:18:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't mind the idea of patronage right, yeah, but when you're doing that, you're not trying to make money. You're saying I want to support this artist. Yeah, I want to buy this artist because I think they're a great artist.

02:18:53 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
They're digital first. Those digital artworks can do things that physicals can't. There's a lot to love about that space. It can also be corrupted by people that just want to make a quick 10x, and that's that's challenging you also can't like it's not a.

02:19:09 - Benito (Other)
It can be infinitely copyable, though. That's your right click save, as is your problem yeah, you don't have, you don't own anything.

02:19:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just as usual. I was a little disappointed. We, uh yiying lu, who is a very talented artist, and did the original art that twitter stole, basically for the fail. Fail, yeah, and twitter borrowed it, but she made money on it because we actually have one of her prints in her house. I wanted to buy a print from her. She doesn't sell prints anymore, she sells nfts of the fail there's a good.

02:19:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
As always. There is a reasonable use case for this technology provenance. For example, if you're a luxury good seller, it makes sense. It's like a digital blueprint of the thing that, the investment that you're making. But you know things move fast and everybody's expecting a, a. You know a quick return, a quick way to to make a buck, and you know most of the time, it's just. It just doesn't work that way, With any luck.

02:20:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what happened is people lost a little bit enough to her and learned a lesson.

02:20:06 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, I mean every person that sold for a profit. There were a lot of people that sold and made a lot of money, but there's always someone on the other side of that equation.

02:20:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, it's a zero-sum game.

02:20:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There were significantly more people that lost money than made money.

02:20:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A handful of people made money and you're not one of the handful of people that made money.

02:20:25 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
you're saying I mean, I sold a couple nfts that that did quite well. There was, there was in the early days from some legitimate artists like the tyler hobbs. I sold one for over a million dollars. Wow, there was a. There was a couple other nfts that I sold that were. What are they worth today, do you know?

02:20:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, probably 150k, maybe something like that lost value. They've lost value.

02:20:46 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You sold at the peak a few of them because I was like, okay, this is insane, why don't we take some money off? The table. I have a bunch of these nfts, like why, why not? You know? So it's. It's called portfolio rebalancing, like when something you say I want nfts to be 0.5 of my overall portfolio.

02:21:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're a sophisticated investor. That's really the truth of it. Yeah, but I sophisticated.

02:21:08 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, that's where we kind of got a lot of people got screwed. Yeah. So it was challenging.

02:21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did not buy one single NFT and my Bitcoins I've lost forever.

02:21:21 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Bitcoin, I think, is a very important thing to hold over the long term. Well, good, it's just a hedge against the dollar.

02:21:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have diamond passwords. Yeah, I can't. I can't get into my wallet, but I think if I had been able to get into it, I was sold it years ago for 10k right and said, wow, I really made out right. Instead, I'm holding it till it reaches a million. It's not crazy, think. Do you know how to crack passwords on a?

02:21:49 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
dark tipper. You know more about that than I do Talk to your Lisp agent. Oh yeah, maybe I could write a Lisp.

02:21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do want to tell you about my favorite tool for keeping track of all my photos Our show today, brought to you by Myleo M-Y-L-I-O. For a long time, there was this wonderful thing called Picasa Remember Picasa? Then Google bought it. People spent days, weeks, months organizing their photo libraries, putting tags and captions in that beautiful Picasa album. Right, google bought it and they absorbed it into Google Photos and killed almost all of it. It was gone.

02:22:27
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02:25:27
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02:26:03
I've never tried it yet. I got to check that out. It's awesome. Myliocom slash tw, slash 25. The thing is, you can try it for free which is great.

02:26:10 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I saw that it was founded by the ex-Microsoft CTO on the website. Oh, I didn't even know that, isn't that crazy.

02:26:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's one of those things where you could tell that they said what could we do? That would be the next thing, right, and the fact that it's privacy first is really important to me, miley, oh, I love it. I have it's all backed up, but it's all backed up on my SAN or my NAS, rather. Yeah, which is great.

02:26:35 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I got a Synology too. I love it, Isn't it great?

02:26:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So great. I have one here and one at home, so I back up to the Synology at home and then it uses hyper backup to synchronize. So this is my offsite over here. That's amazing. Yeah, it's really nice. All right, intel so sad. Oh, such a sad story. Really bad week 9% drop in shares Same time as we get a 10% lift in shares on Google. 9% drop in Intel, but, honestly, I don't care about stock market results. It is, though, the market saying Intel is not the powerhouse it used to be. Is it Jensen Huang and NVIDIA? Is it Qualcomm with its Snapdragon Elite?

02:27:25 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's Qualcomm, for sure.

02:27:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, his mic is off.

02:27:30 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
There we go, there we go Back in Qualcomm's making a big move. I mean, we just saw here what three weeks ago that Microsoft said they're coming out with a new tablet.

02:27:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's coming out AI PCs? Yeah, the Surface Pro 10, is it it's going to?

02:27:43 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
be their own custom chip. That is going to be really interesting. They're moving off of Intel. It's supposed to compete directly with the Apple chip, do you think?

02:27:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's yeah, it's really Apple envy, isn't it? It's interesting With AI capabilities thanks to Qualcomm, is I don't know if Windows on ARM is ready. We talk about this a lot on Windows Weekly. Yeah, is. Is Microsoft. So this is the question Is Microsoft doing what Apple? I don't know if Windows on ARM is ready. We talk about this a lot on Windows Weekly, yeah. So this is the question Is Microsoft doing what Apple did and abandoning Intel?

02:28:12 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I think they have to move to ARM, ARM-based architecture. They have to. What happened Is x86 dead. It's just an old. I mean, how long is x88? X88 was the first x86, right, yeah, we're talking 19.

02:28:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the original IBM PC. Something 81. Yeah, paul says that Intel's been trying to get out of X86 forever. Amd's success pushed them back into it. That and the failure of remember Itanium, which was going to be the next thing, and it was such a flop. Pat Gelsinger's tried to kind of reinvent Intel to turn it into a kind of a two, two track company, both the foundry making chips for other people, just like tsmc, and a design firm, just like am arm designing chips.

02:29:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
the past I don't understand how that's going to work.

02:29:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, apparently the market doesn't either.

02:29:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, I meant like I guess you could possibly reverse engineer somebody else's designs. I mean, is there some type of firewall Like how do you become?

02:29:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It almost has to be two companies. This is from CNBC. Intel long, the most valuable US chip maker, is now get ready for this. 1, 16th the size of NVIDIA by market cap, smaller than Qualcomm, broadcom, texas Instruments, amd smaller than AMD. Seven straight quarters of revenue declines are part of the reason. Right Gelsinger, again from CNBC, is betting on a risky business model change. Not only will Intel make its own branded processors, which, at this point, no enthusiast unless you're maybe a gamer and you've got big fans is going to look at, but it will act as a factory for other chip companies that outsource their manufacturing, a group of companies they hope although I don't know if it's happened yet will include nvidia, apple and qualcomm. Uh, that's, I guess that's what it's going to rely on. Right, intel did get a big payout from the chips act, by the way billions where are the other big foundries?

02:30:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
like who else is, the is outside of taiwan tsmc is. The tsmc is the only one foundry, yeah there are many others others so maybe I mean, look, I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but maybe Intel's making some kind of brilliant side play here where they see because the chips act and probably worsening geopolitical tensions that they're going to become the hub for all manufacturing that's true.

02:30:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they're making these big fabs in Arizona. So is TSMC. So is TSMC for all manufacturing they are?

02:30:48 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I mean that's true, they're making Maybe that's the real play here, these big fabs in Arizona. Well, so is TSMC, though. Right, so is TSMC, and they're doing that all over the world.

02:30:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I don't know anything about this business and we'll get somebody on who does, but I suspect there is an opportunity because, yeah, we think about the CPUs, the name brands, think about the cpus, the, the name brands, but there are lots of legacy nodes that have to be made for every one of these devices. Somebody's making those. It's not tsmc, they're focusing most of their capacities, purchased by apple and qualcomm, but somebody's making you know the little modem chip that's going in your iphone, or the, you know the, the haptic engine. Somebody's got to make all of that stuff. Maybe intel can find a market there.

02:31:32
The other problem intel has faced is they could. They had a really tough time getting down below 10 nanometers. Tsmc's best chips now are three nanometers. Intel's currently is seven. Oh, that's brutal. And you know there's this weird. You know Moore's Law. George Gilder talked about it in the excellent book Microcosm. Unlike almost anything else in the world, smaller is better when it comes to chips. It's faster, lower power, better compute, and so getting stuck at a bigger die size is problematic. I don't know. It's sad, and I think that both NVIDIA's success and Microsoft hereditarily I mean, it was called Wintel saying yeah, maybe our future is with ARM. Doesn't help, doesn't help, doesn't help. We have not yet seen these Qualcomm chips, and there's been noise that maybe they aren't as fast as Qualcomm has promised.

02:32:39 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
We'll know soon, I think in the next few weeks, another week or two until they announce it.

02:32:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They claim very, very high performance in benchmarks, but a few have questioned that. Yeah, they claim very, very high performance in benchmarks, but a few have questioned that. But we'll know. We'll know soon enough. Let's see. Did you see the founder of Twilio? Do you know Jeff Lawson?

02:33:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
He, bought the onion? I don't, but I Really yeah, Wait remind me who.

02:33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
who'd they buy it from GO? A failing GO Media was the company that bought Gawker. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's just kind of been falling apart. And I think Lawson's looking over at Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post and Mark Benioff. What does Mark own? The Atlantic. Laureen Powell Jobs Time. That's right. And Laureen Powell Jobs who bought the Atlantic? Josh Kushner bought Life Magazine. Someone says, yeah, maybe I'll buy the Onion. That's amazing.

02:33:41 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You know what you know, the Onion has taken a pretty activist.

02:33:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the Onion.

02:33:46 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, it's crossed a line from being.

02:33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not just humor, it's now advocacy.

02:33:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, I think it feels like it's ventured more into that territory. It's always been that.

02:33:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's always been subtly that Maybe I don't know. I haven't been the Onion in a while, but you know what? I haven't seen any Onion headlines in my social media feeds either, which probably is not a good sign area. Man can only learn new things if encouraged by the promise of earning cartoon gems, not funny teenagers explain what it's like partying with mad cats. Okay, okay, uh, things never to say to a police officer at a protest. Let's see what. What do you think? Here's a slideshow, I guess. I don't know.

02:34:35 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
We get all of our humor from TikTok and Instagram these days.

02:34:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the onion might have seen better times. Maybe Jeff Lawson can save the onion.

02:34:43 - Benito (Other)
Well, it was with Go Media for a while, so yeah, go probably did not help.

02:34:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it G-O or Go? I don't know. I call it Go. It should be Go, but it's G slash O, which makes me think it's I don't know. Anyway, they're selling off, I guess, the bits of the gawker. It's not as funny. Maybe they lost some of the.

02:35:03 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
What was your favorite Onion story? Headline of all time? Do you have one?

02:35:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's one that's political, which is about gun violence. What did it say? The one they run every time. They run it every time there's a mass shooting Let me see if I my favorite one was Devil's Advocate.

02:35:19 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Turns Out Just to be Asshole. That was a great one. This is published.

02:35:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It first was published in 2014,. It's sad to say, no way to prevent. This says Only Nation where this regularly happens. Probably not funny, but poignant. Not funny, ha ha funny.

02:35:39 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
How about the Bic Razor one? Do you remember that? No, oh you gotta search that.

02:35:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll search for it.

02:35:45 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Bic R-A-Z-O-R gotta search that.

02:35:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll search for it bick r-a-z-o-r or is it r-a-s-o-r, not that one? It's when they add blades, extra blades, f everything yeah, we're doing five.

02:35:56 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. Read the first paragraph.

02:35:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is so good this is supposedly from the ceo and president of the gillette company. Yes, would someone tell me how this happened? We were the effing vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach 3 was the razor to own, and the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell? No, because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach 3 Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip for moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened. The bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our peepees in our hands, selling three blades and a strip, moisture or no. We're suddenly the chumps. Well, f it, we're going to five blades. This was in 2004. I love that.

02:36:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Is there anybody with six blades? You ever see the Onion when it was in print it was a print newspaper. We used to get it in print because they had it.

02:36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, those kiosks in Austin.

02:36:57 - Benito (Other)
I was in college when that was coming out, they would drop off stacks at our college.

02:37:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Love it, we'd just pick it up, bring it back, jeff, save the Onion. It's good that there is something like this, I think maybe we don't want to laugh anymore, maybe we're just tired. I think it's harder to be hard now. It is hard I was going to say.

02:37:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think that's the issue. It's really hard.

02:37:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all right, one last break. We're going to take a little time out. Come back with more with our great panel, our show today, brought to you by Thinks Canary. This is so cool. It's a honeypot in a box that looks about like a USB external hard drive. The Thinks Canary can be deployed in minutes and it can impersonate anything A fake internal SSH server, windows, ias server, apache. It could be a Linux box with a Christmas tree of lights turned on. It could be a NAS Mine's a NAS.

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02:40:02
Canarytools, slash twit, get the Thinkst Canary and don't forget to use the code twit in the how did you hear about us box for 10% off Thinkst Canary. This thing is awesome, awesome, brilliant idea. It's fun to play with the console because you can. You know, I think today I'd like to be an SSH server and it just what I have. It set up is a Synology NAS. It has the right MAC address. They even spoofed the MAC address to look like the Synology MAC address. The login is DSM-7. It's exactly right. I mean, it's brilliant. And here it is. I have sauna use as a lifestyle practice to extend health span. He's going to save me folks. Kevin Rose has told me that if I get a sauna I will not get dementia.

02:40:54 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's something crazy. It's like I want to say it's about a 30% reduction in dementia from sauna usage.

02:41:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and they say don't get it too hot, don't get it to 175 degrees, that's right. 20 minutes a day. For 20 minutes a day, for 20 minutes a day. Lisa, can I get a sauna? Does a hot tub work?

02:41:12 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
no, it's not hot enough.

02:41:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It wouldn't get hot enough, you're right the problem with the sauna is I got so many things I've got to do. I spend two hours on the bike a day. I'm running out of time so I try to read when I'm.

02:41:27 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I want to be productive. No, you can't. You can't read in the sauna, you just have to sit there, which I don't love.

02:41:31 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Amy, you need to check out that book, slow Productivity. I can just sense it. She's too productive.

02:41:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You're too productive, she's working too hard, she's working too hard. I got productivity. The art lost, art of accomplishment cal.

02:41:50 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Newport burnout, oh cal I know cal yeah, you know, cal, he's the one that wrote deep work like fantastic.

02:41:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all right. I you know what I have internalized from my from youth I'm the laziest man I know. So this is I don't need this. I need fast productivity. I need to speed up. You know what I've been doing lately? Tai Chi, really, tai Chi is awesome. I heard it's awesome. It's basically really really slow. Martial arts yeah.

02:42:14 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
So you're going like this you found a good place nearby. Yeah, maybe that'll be your next podcast. Yeah, you go like this.

02:42:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd take a Leo Tai Chi class, all tai chi class all right, I'm doing the yang, which has, I think, 27 forms. Once I learn all the forms, I'll give you a class, love it. Oh, kevin, I'm so glad you were in town and that you texted me. You said I'm here, can I come in? And I said yes, yes, yes yeah, it's great to be here really great to have you.

02:42:45 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Congrats on 19 years, wow, well, we you know what you started.

02:42:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact you probably don't remember, but I went to you and patrick norton, I said you want in on this thing? I think this podcast thing's gonna be big and you said no.

02:42:59 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
But you had no nation, you had a lot of stuff you and patrick said no, no, you do it, thank god.

02:43:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No investors, no investors. Great to have you, kevin.

02:43:11 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Uh, you are a dear friend, um, and I wish you all the best oh man, I owe a lot of my career to you, so I want to say thank you right back. That is not true.

02:43:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But no, you, you got me on early episodes of uh, of the screensavers you were the me and paul block, our producer at the time, who named you the dark tipper. That was his idea. Paul was great, yeah.

02:43:31 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Be clear about that. I gotta reach out to Paul again. I haven't talked to him in a while.

02:43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I talk to him every once in a while. He's on Facebook, great guy doing well he's. The Kevin Rose Show is at KevinRosecom the latest in AI, investing, wellness, technology and culture Basically everything Kevin's in. And, by the way, you're handsomer than that picture Don't use that AI picture.

02:43:56 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I appreciate it. Yeah, that is not a good picture. I got to go get an extra. He looks better than this picture.

02:44:01
This one is all AI. That's on the website right now. If you go to the website you'll see that is 100% AI. You look like John Oliver with a beard on this. This is not good. I did add the John Oliver filter, didn't? I Damn it, do not. You are so much better looking. Don't do that. I appreciate it. I need to go get a headshot. The thing is I hadn't stopped drinking and I was a little bloated. I'm like, should I go get like an actual picture?

02:44:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you look good. You don't drink anymore. He's tanned, he's rested, he's ready for the. That's right. That's right. Oh, it's so nice to see you. And these are real pictures of people. Those are real pictures of people, not uh, not uh. Not ai generated. Yeah, they're all sitting in the same chair, uh I think we ai the chair they're all in the orange chair.

02:44:44
You know it works, uh, for uh, kara and walt to have that red chair. That's right, yeah, trademark chair. I got my dr evil. They're all in the orange chair. You know what works for Kara and Walt To have that red chair. That's right, yeah, trademark chair.

02:44:53 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I got my Dr Evil chair right here. You just need the cat and you're good.

02:44:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amy Webb cycles two hours a day.

02:44:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
ladies and gentlemen, Well, not every day. I try to get in somewhere between 100 and 160 miles a week. That's insane.

02:45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's your thing now. I mean, I see you your Insta you're bicycling everywhere.

02:45:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, I did mountain biking in college. I did Aikido pretty seriously when I moved over to Japan. Well, Tai.

02:45:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chi is kind of like Aikido. It is the class.

02:45:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm taking is an Aikido. If you want to do a little bit more rolling around and like doesn't Aikido like?

02:45:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have bamboo sticks that you whack people with.

02:45:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean at different levels. So there is sword stuff, it's like pretty falling pretty falling.

02:45:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the same idea you let the energy of the attacker become your defense it's like Judo.

02:45:47 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
That doesn't look like your chair. Look in the chat. That's exactly your chair.

02:45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I have a Dr Evil chair. Yeah, I told you that.

02:45:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Anyhow, I got injured. Then I switched to Ashtanga yoga. Got injured again Nice oh. And then I had a baby, and the thing that my body can do at this point is be on a bike, so now I'm racing.

02:46:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, see, I wouldn't do it. You do it hard, you're very hardcore, but I love riding my bike. I love it. It's the best way, and I get an e-bike so I don't have to go up hills too hard. It's great.

02:46:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Next weekend I'll be in. So in New York they shut down all five boroughs and you wind up in staten island. And to get back into manhattan, you, you, you go, you load, you, you take the staten island ferry, but you're in the cargo area how cool is that. So you become human cargo, uh, which is actually, it's a good story. Is it a race?

02:46:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you racing or are you just kind of touring?

02:46:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There's a time trial at the end. So it's up the. There's a pretty tough time trial. If you want to, you don't have to. You can just leisurely ride it.

02:46:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would do this in a heartbeat Five Borough Bike Tour.

02:47:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's a great great. It's like my favorite ride that I do of the year. It's like my favorite ride that. I do, of the year it's like. Critical Mass right.

02:47:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like 30,000 people that show up. It's bigger than Critical Mass. Critical Mass was more of a protest in San Francisco. It was the first. Fridays they would take over the city and everybody would ride around the city.

02:47:19 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They do that in a lot of cities.

02:47:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is more official they actually shut things down for it.

02:47:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, no, there's their teams. And no, no, no, there's their teams and, like I said, there's a time trial at the end. If you want to compete, are you in a team? I just recently joined one.

02:47:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, Do you want to give them a plug or you want to keep that a secret?

02:47:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm not sure if I'm going to stay.

02:47:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, no mention of the team when I feel yeah yeah, yeah, someday, someday, someday, Well, uh well, watch amy's instagram for her five borough bike tour pictures.

02:47:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You are, I'm very impressed, very impressed. Yeah, riding a bike is is good. It's good for anybody e-bikes are great.

02:47:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I love it. Yeah, I get exercise on my e-bike. I just don't have to, you know, hump up heavy hills, I can coast up them. It's nice. Future todaycom the brand new future today, institute. Uh, what do you call it? A future trends report. Tech trends report.

02:48:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Leo, it's the thing that I sent you that you got like two volume. You got like I got the printed one once and I loved it because, this thing is so big now.

02:48:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so it's, it's digital only. Yeah, you can sign sign up, get it and you'll get it in your email. It's free, it's free.

02:48:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Did we miss anything?

02:48:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
download it what did what gosh we?

02:48:34 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I wanted to go through the whole thing one by one, but I guess we ran out of time um a lot um my south by talk it sort of goes goes through the tech super cycle and some of the core pieces of bioengineering and ai and the connectables. So so the face, computer stuff, all of that is in there.

02:48:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's on the line, the Amy Webb SXSW talk for 2024. Yeah, I think it's everywhere.

02:48:56 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They actually live streamed it. I think there were watch parties all over the place this year, so I think it was on YouTube right after I was done.

02:49:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently, they put it on A, on audible too, which is really neat. So if right next to hot white heist too, you can, you can.

02:49:15
I don't know why that's the next on brand that's on brand or um, you can listen to uh south by southwest, including amy's uh talks. That's a good move for south by uh. Or search for the video. Um, really cool, now let's do a dig nation reunion. I'd love that. Seriously, y'all in? It sounds great. All right, that's a commitment. South by is in what? March? Yeah, so we got a few months.

02:49:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We got some time tickets are already on sale for south by is in what march? Yeah, so we got a few months, we got some time tickets are already on sale for south by next year, so you should register so what we have to do is is apply right and say, hey, this is what we want to be unofficial.

02:49:55 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
We can't just get stubs.

02:49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get stubs, just call mr stubb.

02:49:59 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Do you know, mr stubb, we, we, brad murphy can make a call and we can. Brad knows everybody yeah hi where's your backpack?

02:50:06 - Amy Webb (Guest)
you? Gotta, I going to bring my.

02:50:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ustream backpack and my staff of broadcast excellence, and I shall not body surf. Now that I know the hazards involved, I'm very reluctant to jump back first into an audience. I can't believe I did that. I'm glad I did, though.

02:50:25 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It was fun my first time too. I'd never body surfed before.

02:50:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you do it after me? Oh yeah, I did after you, Right after me. Yeah, Was it fun. Oh, it was so much fun, it was so cool. Amy's latest is the Genesis Machine, but the Signals Are Talking the Big Nine. They're all on Amazon or your favorite bookstore.

02:50:49 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's so great to, I think, the podcast medium is a good medium.

02:50:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm enjoying the podcast. I like talking, I don't like writing. Yeah, I have read.

02:50:53 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I remember when you were writing your book.

02:50:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have had many books.

02:50:56 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Nobody. Your first, your first one at tech.

02:50:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
TV yeah. The tech TV almanac yeah, I remember that for 12.

02:51:01 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
You did the photo shoot there, right In inside of tech TV, with a farmer, a farmer.

02:51:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
With a farmer and his dead PCs. That was a great cover. You know who's taken over? My son. You remember Henry. You probably met him when he was like seven. He is now 30, and he is a TikTok chef and his new cookbook comes out in. It was so funny because I remember when my book came out and we were watching Amazon to see you know who the you know number one was and I was briefly number one, probably in tech. He was number one in cookbooks for a long time and the book doesn't come out till October. That's awesome. It's called Salt Hank, a Five Napkin Situation.

02:51:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's a great image.

02:51:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that awesome? He's amazing, amazing. He is the sandwich king, by the way. The images in this cookbook are. Is that a french dip? Yeah, he met his french dip is one of his biggest videos.

02:51:58 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
How many followers did I see he has like a million and a half something like that congratulations. You must be so proud yeah, he.

02:52:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he's got more than I ever had. It's kind of funny, you know. I remember when I was younger, my dad's we all have that dad's name is the same as me. He said, uh, well, you know, uh, they don't find me on google anymore, they find you. I said, yeah, dad, that's what happens. And now when I, they don't. Fortunately henry doesn't have the same name. But when they search for henry man, uh he. That's why I'm a little upset about the tiktok thing, because he had on tiktok. Let's see what his current I think he gets sold.

02:52:35 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I don't think it's going away. You think it's a? It's a posturing thing.

02:52:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll sell it he has 2.7 million followers, wow, on tiktok and some pretty big advertisers like uh, I don't know Kentucky Fried Chicken. That's huge. He's done a lot better than I have over time and you know what. That's what you hope for with your kids. Your kids are still pretty little Six and five, yeah. But what I did with Henry when he was little is I cooked with him and then he YouTube had just started when he was about 10. And he watched every cooking video and that's what got him going. Really, that's so cool, isn't it? He's doing what. He's living the dream. I love it. Very proud of him. How's, how's your? Uh, not so little one, amy, doing good uh, so she's almost.

02:53:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
She just became a star, so she's a scout. Boy Scouts is now just Scouts. Oh, interesting, and I picked she's at a national youth leadership training program. Look, scouts has obviously had a pretty horrific history. What I will say is this Scouts, as we've come to know it over the past few years, has been especially the troop she's in. It's all very focused on leadership and sort of being able to manage yourself. That's great. It's all about the troop.

02:53:59 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
It's really great. I was an Eagle Scout so. I have a long history there. Oh, awesome, yeah, yeah.

02:54:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Eagle Scout. Ladies and gentlemen, that's as good as it gets.

02:54:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I didn't know that, so she's got eagle on her sights.

02:54:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, so girls can be eagles now. That's great.

02:54:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They can. Last weekend we're in the sister there's a boys troop. In our troop there was a 40 mile hike last weekend and this is a kid who a year ago was not super athletic in a day, in one day, and she was like mom, we're gonna, we're doing this 40 mile hike and I was like okay, so we both went. You know there were 150 kids crack a dawn and you know she would never have wanted to do that. You know, before all of this, so it's pretty great.

02:54:46
And we didn't finish, but a lot of kids finished. But the fact that she was like, I want to challenge myself, yeah.

02:54:52 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah.

02:54:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Amazing, amazing. Cannot say enough good things.

02:54:55 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
Yeah, that's great. There's still skills. I I lean back on just like the knots and the things that I learned I was just going to say and so many knots you can tie.

02:55:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Knots are great.

02:55:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everyone should know knots you can buy, that's a fantastic, yeah, and can you start a fire with almost anything? Anywhere I can.

02:55:11 - Kevin Rose (Guest)
I could do a pretty good job. I don't know that I could do the full bow with, like the kindling and the yeah, I bet you could the flint little spark thing I could do, though, for sure.

02:55:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
The technology has come a pretty long way. Yeah, so there's all kinds of cool. In has come a pretty long way. Yeah, so there's all kinds of cool. In fact, I am now an assistant scout master. I went through all the training.

02:55:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't call you a scout mistress.

02:55:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's a scout, master Scout, lady Scout lady.

02:55:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, nice, I love you guys. I don't want to stop the show, but I realize it's late and you probably want to go to bed, so I will. I will to stop the show, but I I realize it's late and you probably want to go to bed, so I will. I will. Amy webb, wonderful to have you future today, institutecom. So it's always a thrill to have you on. You're so smart and it's just really. I always kind of wonder when I'm reading stories like the tiktok band, what would amy webb say? So I'm glad we could get you on to talk about. Thanks, leo, thank you, amy, I really appreciate it. And course, kevin Rose, one of my oldest friends. It doesn't look at all like John Oliver in real life. So nice to see you. Wonderful to have you, kevinrosecom. Thanks to all of you for joining us.

02:56:20
We do twit every Sunday, two to five or six pm Sunday afternoon Depends on how much I like the people I'm talking to. You can watch it live. Youtubecom slash twit Because you know what we do have video we do. It's the next big thing in podcasting. You can also get a copy, audio or video on our website.

02:56:40
This Week in Tech is twittv, or a YouTube channel dedicated to the post video on YouTube. I think it's called this Week in Tech. I'm not sure you could find it. The best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it the minute it's available. Just search for Twit. Thanks so much to our club members. If you're not yet a member, I'd love to have you. I think you get some sense of what a great community this is. All you have to do is visit twittv slash club twit to find out more. We'll see you next time. And now we are in our 20th year of podcasts, started with this guy right here, and, as I have said for that entire 20 years, another twit is in the can.