This Week in Tech 981 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. Christina Warren's here, Alex Wilhelm Wes Faulkner. We have some great stuff to talk about. A lot of AI in the news. Scarlett Johansson, a little mad at OpenAI ICQ, says bye-bye. Microsoft announces AI PCs that can help you play Minecraft. Plus that Rabbit R1 turns out not so great. Great, it's all coming up next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit.

00:44
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 981, recorded Sunday, May 26th 2024. Grab your rabbit. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we get together with some of my favorite people to talk about tech. Honestly, that's the only criterion these days. It's got to be people I want to talk about tech with, like the wonderful Wesley Faulkner, who works for someone we can't talk about, but he is on the Mastodon at Wesley83 and is super smart, and now that you're going a little gray, we think you're even smarter. That's the key, Thank you. I used to work with a host at Tech TV who did not have gray hair, jet black hair. He dyed his temples gray so people would trust him more.

01:36 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
This just means I was made in a lab. Oh, that's good, I like it.

01:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does look like a lightning bolt. I love it. Anyway, great to have you on Wesley Also with us in her world of blur. Christina Warren from Microsoft, actually from GitHub.

01:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
From GitHub. There is a distinction. Is there? There is a distinction.

01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yes. I have different health insurance, Ah well, that's a big distinction, Is it good? I?

02:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
think so. I mean I prefer the GitHub health plan.

02:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if I'm being honest, you used to work for Microsoft at Channel 9, right.

02:12 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, that's right.

02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so good. You landed well in your little hop. You've also been very busy. I think this week We'll talk about that. Yes, lots of AI in the news, huge amount of AI in the news, huge amount of AI in the news. And, honestly, when I got in a big fight with Ed Zitron on Wednesday on this Week in Google a literal shouting match you never want to get in a shouting match with a Brit because they could tear you to shreds with their language ability, right, but he was saying, well, there's no good use for AI. And the first thing I pointed to was Copilot on GitHub, which is amazing and really useful. So one of the first very, really good uses of LLMs, I think, in the public GitHub Copilot. How old is that? It's a couple of years old now, right?

03:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, okay. So it officially became publicly available two years ago, but it was announced three years ago, so I've been using it for three years. So it's two years old, but it's three years old. It's been in various levels of People have had various levels of access to it for a little over three years.

03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very good and I like it. Sorry, ed, over three years. It's very good and I like it. Sorry, ed, also with us, my good friend. We had to dig him up because he's been ensconced in childlike things. He lives in my childhood home, mr alex wilhelm.

03:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Alex, alex, you're no longer at the tech crunch no, no, my second stint at uh, the home publication has come to an end and I'm trying some new stuff. So you know it's been a week, so not a lot to report yet this is exciting though you're doing the independent thing, that's yeah, yeah so I'm doing well.

03:59
Thank you, uh, golf clap for you. It's really different to say you're going to go off and write for yourself and then the first day you show up and there's no one else there, and then you have like no support and you're like, oh man turns out, working for a big corporation did have some advantages um, we're gonna.

04:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're gonna get a group of people to go right now to cautiousoptimismnews and subscribe. That's all there is to it. I mean, that would make my day, but I will say this by the way, notice that thing Subscribed because I am subscribing to it, so there.

04:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
If the website is ugly, it's because I'm not a designer, but I'll work on that, that's yeah, I'll get there.

04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How is it ugly? I mean it looks like every other sub stack that that's. Yeah. Well, I'll get that. How is?

04:46 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
it ugly. I mean, it looks like every other Substack. That's the problem. Oh, it looks like the generic WordPress template, it looks like I didn't try because I didn't, but everybody else's. Substack looks like this too. Yeah, that's interesting. Everyone's Cybertruck looks the same, so they all look good.

04:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they all look bad. They all look bad. That's Reporting and commentary. It says here on startups, technology and the stock market Modestly upbeat. I like that.

05:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, the whole shtick is I'm trying to find a little bit of space between very important and critical coverage of big tech companies and very overly optimistic early stage coverage of companies like Rabbit. And so it's cautiously optimistic, it's slightly upbeat, is the idea.

05:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cautiousoptimismnews. You're also working with our good friend Jason Calacanis on this Week in Startups.

05:31 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes, I am doing that part-time, a couple shows a week and that is paying my half of our nanny while I experiment with newsletters. And I am grateful to have kind of two things going on at once. And yeah, I'm just. You know, I needed to try something new. I've been at TechCrunch for another half decade and I love everyone there, but you know, sometimes you just got to shake it off and turn left.

05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the right thing to do. I think it's. You know so many people who worked for publications who, either because they decided to or because they had no choice, have decided to go solo, and I think it's the right thing to do. If you have a voice and you have, and you're smart and you can, and you can write, uh, I think it's a great idea. I think it's a very good well wish you the best.

06:17
If that's the case, I'm doomed so no, no, no, no, come on. No false humility, cautious optimismnews. Everybody go subscribe right now. Right now, uh, all, right now, let's talk. Ah, what, what a week we had. Last week was crazy, with open ai's. Uh, chat, gbd 4-0, which sounded remarkably like rashida jones. Uh, I don't know if you noticed, did you notice it sounds just like Rashida Jones. Did you notice that?

06:47 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it's funny, because I first thought Scar Jo and then one of my coworkers said Rashida Jones, and I was like I can hear that too. So yeah, Well.

06:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Scarlett Johansson thinks it's her.

07:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's who I thought it was at first. And then a coworker said Rashida Jones and I was like actually, they have the same voice is the problem.

07:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the problem. They have the same voice, they sound exactly the same. I started playing with chat GPT when it had a voice months ago and I said Scar Jo, right from the beginning. And that's why I liked it, because I want to talk to Scarlett Johansson. Of course it turns out. Sam Altman's a big fan of the. That's why I liked it, because I want to talk to Scarlett Johansson. Of course it turns out. Sam Altman's a big fan of the movie.

07:33
Her Scarlett Johansson was the voice of the AI in Her, the AI that Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with and gets his heart broken by. It's a prescient movie, you should all watch it. And it turns out that in fact, openai did approach Scarlett Johansson not once but twice, asking to use her voice, and she said no. But this is what's kind of interesting to me. Washington Post, I guess OpenAI talked to Washington Post and showed them the records and even introduced them to the actress who did the voice Sky, which is the default voice for GPT-4-0. And apparently, even before Altman talked to Johansson, they had this woman record. It showed the receipts to the Washington Post, who says the actress's natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice based on brief recordings of her initial voice test reviewed by the Post. The agent said the name Sky was chosen to signal a cool, airy, pleasant sound. Scarlett Johansson said no, you copied me and I know it because you came to me twice and I said no both times and you still went ahead with it. So here's the question Given that Sky sounds a lot like Rashida Jones as well, and apparently some third unnamed actress, she rightly so doesn't want her name revealed.

09:03
In a statement from the sky actress. This is again the washington post provided by her agent. She wrote that at times the backlash feels personal, being that it's just my natural voice and I've never been compared to her. Scarlett johansson by the people who know me closely, however, said she said she was well informed about what being a voice for chat gpt would entail, while that was unknown and constantly kind of scary territory for me. She said as a conventional voiceover actor, it is an inevitable step toward the wave of the future. So now what do you do? Open AI has paused the use of the sky voice, much to my sadness, because I liked it. Sadness because I liked it and I mean so. There is some case law in this. Bette Midler and Tom Waits both have sued because their voices were impersonated on advertisements. In both cases they were asked, said no, and then the companies hired voice actors to sound like them. So they're. You do have publicity rights on your voice and the courts have ruled but, I voices aren't that unique curious.

10:16 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Go ahead, alex. Sorry, no, I I broke my audio set up while I was trying to jump in there. My bad anyways. The thing that I'm curious about is when open ai was approaching this unnamed actress. What were they looking for?

10:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because it doesn't. She says they did not say scarlett johansson at any time that's because they're not stupid yeah, but they found that person's talent yeah, but if it's her real voice if she's not doing an impression, but that's her real voice. She owns that voice as much as Scarlett.

10:44 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Johansson, does Someone chose her? Someone chose her for a reason, and the reason is because it sounds close to what they wanted and what they wanted. I mean, maybe it's one of those things where, like, maybe they're not guilty in this case, but they're guilty of something.

11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, I don't think that they are a hundred percent clean on this we know who the someone is, because it turns out altman was on his world tour and not involved. Mira marati, the chief technology officer and the woman who was temporarily the uh open ai ceo when that, when altman was temporarily fired, was the sole decision maker. They used a director, joanne Jang, who leads open AI model behavior for open AI, she said the company selected actors who are eager to work on an AI product. She played actors a sample AI version of their voice to demonstrate how realistic the technology would sound. She also gave them an out if they're uncomfortable. She worked with a film director hired by OpenAI I'm sure not Spike Jonze to help develop the technology's personality. For instance, this is all from the Washington Post. If a user asked will you be my girlfriend? Jang wanted the AI tool to respond with clear boundaries, but also let them down easy. The director came up with a response. When it comes to, can I do this like Scarlett Johansson or will I get sued, do it?

12:10 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I think you're sued. No, no, no, yours was parody.

12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's right, because Rich Little never got sued by Richard Nixon or anybody. When it comes to matters of the heart, consider me a cheerleader, not a participant.

12:28 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So, christina, where do you come down on this? Okay, so, first of the disclosure that the company that I work for and its parent company both have relationships with OpenAI, all right, disclosed. The problem I have here is the optics. If you hired someone and it's great that you went through this process and you said we want people who are gung-ho about AI and it just happens that you know had a voice that could be confused with that of Scarlett Johansson or Rashida Jones or any other kind of pleasant voice that we might associate with things, fine, regardless of who was involved with approaching an actress, regardless of that timeline, the fact that you approached scarlett johansson twice and tried to get her on board, um, and also the the fact that you know tweets such as her were done, and and yeah, sam altman, the day after 4-0, tweeted one word her right, this, that's kind of an admission of guilt, isn't it?

13:23
well, I mean, look, it's a problem 4-0. Tweeted one word, her.

13:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, that's kind of an admission of guilt, isn't it?

13:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, I mean, look, it's a problem optically right, and so I don't know I'm not a lawyer, I don't know how this comes down legally I definitely think it looks bad optically right. Now. There's a part of me that says you know, what they should have done is just hire Samantha Morton.

13:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's a joke, because the original voice of Samantha and her.

13:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's the Siri voice right.

13:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, no, no, no, no, no. The actress Samantha Morton was originally the voice of Samantha and her, and it was recast after the film was shot with Scarlett Johansson because Spike Jonze liked Scarlett Johansson's voice better, and not at all because Scarlett Johansson was also the the sub tie-in for Sofia Coppola and Lost in Translation, her divorce film about Spike Jones and and her was Spike Jones whoa, whoa, whoa.

14:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a pop culture wizard here. Now I've got to get this straight what so wait a minute. Lost in Translation was Sofia Coppola's divorce film about Spike Jones, about breaking up with the director, spike Jonze, who then directed her, and of course, scarlett. Johansson's big break was in Lost in. Translation Correct, so was this a shot at Sofia Coppola.

14:36 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Honestly, sofia Coppola thinks of it that way. She's never watched her because she's like why do I want to watch Rooney Mara play me? I was there.

14:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow.

14:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So I don't know that that that's that's great info, by the way. Thank you very much this is why we have film girl on the show. I was gonna say it's not all for the tech. Um uh, pseudo-experts for the actual for the actual pop culture knowledge.

15:03 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'm glad your background is blurred. You probably have one of those words with the red string going around.

15:09 - Christina Warren (Guest)
The red string. Wow, no, but Scar Jo was the replacement voice, so it would have been funny in my mind.

15:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was the?

15:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
original actress Samantha Morton.

15:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to get some audio from Samantha Morton, just to see what she sounds like.

15:24 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Wouldn't it be funny. She's British, oh it would be a british voice she was the, she was a, the, the main um, um, what were they called? The precog in um uh?

15:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
minority report oh, yes, she was in the water, yeah, but she doesn't talk a lot in that movie.

15:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, no, let me just play a little Samantha Morton.

15:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to hear what her voice sounds like.

15:51 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Wow, thank you. Just looking at all your faces, wow. Thank you, BAFTA, I mean for me this is.

15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it would have really been great if they had used her for Sky, then everything would have come full circle. Your strings, honestly completely.

16:09 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's what I'm saying. It would have been very funny. The whole thing would have been great um to me if I were trying to do something, if, and if I were not willing to to pay scott loger hansen the amount of money that she would have required, because I have to think that's really what it came down to, right what?

16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if they went to her out of courtesy and they said look, we know this is gonna. It's not her voice, but it sounds like her, so let's just add a courtesy offer to pay her. And she said no, but they still say but it's not her voice, so we don't have to pay her, we're just doing this courtesy?

16:39 - Christina Warren (Guest)
yeah, but then why did you approach right like like this to be yeah, but then you know it sounds enough. I don't know. I feel like To be nice Leo.

16:49 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Honey, let's stop right there.

16:52 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No one involved in this is nice. Oh girl, baby girl.

16:56 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know I've met Sam Altman. I've been in and around the tech world for a long time. Not a nice man, you mean? No, actually Sam was lovely when I met him, but I don't think that people who end up running companies worth tens and hundreds of billions of dollars get there by having very rounded elbows that don't cause bruises or cuts.

17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. So really it's a PR. What you're saying, christina, is a PR issue, regardless of the legal issue. Yeah, scarlett Johansson. If it had been Roseanne Barr or Rosie O'Donnell, no one would have like sure it's her. We're pretending it's her, but Scarlett Johansson, everybody loves Scarlett.

17:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Johansson, you don't want to make enemies not just of her, but of her fan base. Well, totally, and I mean I think she also has to probably know her worth a little bit Right. I mean I think she also has to probably know her worth a little bit.

17:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what they offer her. She's also the woman who took on Disney.

17:47 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I was going to say this is someone who successfully took on Disney and, frankly, this is why I'm like, okay, well, how much do you offer to pay her? Because if you offered her between $250 and $500 million, which is what I think, that's what I think it would cost. No, if I'm being completely candid, yes, if your scholar johansson, if you were going to license your voice, if she were even willing to do it.

18:07
You're right, it would be a huge amount of money it would have to be, and I don't think they'd be willing to do that. Yes, because think about it if you're going to give your voice up in perpetuity to one of these things and and you and your voice is known because of the film you're in as being kind of this ai thing right, and you're going to be kind of the voice, the face, so to speak, of this company. Yeah, you're Scarlett Johansson.

18:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I will do it for one one-thousandth of the money Of course. I will do it for $250,000.

18:36 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And the thing is, alex, no one wants your voice. Oh, it hurts. That's the thing. That's the thing, right? So if you get a sound alike and then the case law is there, with Bette Midler and with other artists, it becomes complicated. I think that they could have a very good argument had they not approached her to say we just found this person, you know, we directed it. This is what it sounds like. If people want to, you know, and they could even use the fact that plenty of us could hear two different distinct actresses' voices, right Saying, used the fact that plenty of us could hear two different distinct actresses voices right saying no, no, it's just, you know, white women sound alike, which fair, um, I think that. But I think it looks bad when you, when you approach the actress and I think it's another example of open ai.

19:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Going through an unnecessarily negative press cycle like this feels like them tripping over their shoelaces again and again, and again and again, again and and again and again, because they just play slightly too fast and loose. And I pay for you know, chatgpt Pro. My dad loves it, I use it. I don't code much, so I don't use GitHub Copilot, but I think this stuff is awesome, and so it's a bummer that the company that's doing so much and breaking so much ground is making the entire world of AI appear to be slightly shadier than I think it needs to be. I think it's net negative for the industry and I can kind of see why Sam Allman, everywhere he goes, kind of gets in trouble with everyone he works with because he does things that get him in trouble. He plays fast and loose.

19:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's the move fast to break things, kind of guy.

20:01 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I want to say something. It's a little bit of a left turn, but one of the things that I'm concerned about and I think Christina alluded to this when she said Alex, no one wants your voice One thing out of all of this that no one's talking about is that the demo for 4.0 was primarily voice input. There was some camera action there, but it was mostly voice input.

20:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were trying to make her, weren't they?

20:29 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Not only that, no, no, no. What they want is the people to interact with their voice, and if you are familiar with their opt out models not their opt in for the data that you put in, they could be farming everyone's voice now.

20:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, this is why we want Scarlett to win. This isn't it.

20:50 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, no, there's not people talking about this, but like, if you're, if the primary input is voice input and they're capturing all this data. They're capturing all of the samples of everyone's voice in response to how they're interacting with OpenAI, their chatbot, and so of course, they can say, ok, sorry, let's take Sky out, but they could be replacing it with multiple different options of voices, maybe giving an option to use your own voice, and they could be not paying anything for that, and they could be not paying anything for that. So I don't think anyone's talking about why. Do you think the demo was mostly interacting using voice? It only makes sense if it's that way.

21:33
And also, why are companies using weird, messed up futuristic names Like Sky is obviously from Skynet, that's not a future we want. And all of these companies are using the types of like Palantir, come on. I mean, there are companies that are just basically saying the quiet part out loud, that we're evil.

21:52 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So the other incorporated is here to help.

21:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The other voices I can choose from are here's Ember.

22:00 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'm ready to hit the ground running. So if there's anything you'd like me to focus on first, just let me know.

22:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who do you kill first? Here's Cove. I just want to share how thrilled I am to work with you and I can't wait to get started.

22:13 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Here's Juniper hey there, I've got a really great feeling about us teaming up. How can I jump?

22:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in. And here's Breeze. It's great to meet you, how's?

22:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
your day going.

22:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm really looking forward to working on some cool stuff together I guess they don't want to give them human names, right? So they're all kind of nature names, um, but they are. But I mean what? This is a very personal thing. When you're talking to chat gbd 4-0 you're having it's a chat thing, you're talking to somebody. Often the answers are stupid and wrong, by the way. Um, but I wanted, frankly, I wanted sky yeah, no, it was the best voice.

22:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
This is, this is the problem I don't like these other voices.

22:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'd like you, christina, how much would you uh cost?

23:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
significantly less, significantly less than scott shahans.

23:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not a quarter of a billion?

23:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Absolutely not. But I'm not Scarlett Johansson, I'm not the highest grossing actress in box office history, so you know.

23:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Really.

23:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, she is yeah because of Marvel.

23:17 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Oh well, either way it still counts.

23:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It does still count. She's like yeah, I thinkbert downey jr is number one.

23:25 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
and she's like for actresses, yeah, wow wow, well, open ai can't keep its feet out of its mouth, and I think we'll be doing this segment again in six months, and we'll keep doing this until either skynet shows up to west's point or, uh, they managed to find a better way to handle crisis. Do?

23:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you think that their attitude is look, we have to move fast and break things if we're going to achieve AGI and we can't let ourselves be held back by petty concerns.

23:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
This is. This is such a sideshow, is an unnecessary PR mess. We are not talking about the technology itself. We're not talking about the improvements thereof If we're getting closer to AGI. We are talking about the person who scarger replaced in a prior movie made by spike jones who I don't really know who that is, but apparently film guy, and we're going back to 2013. No, leo, I don't. I don't think so.

24:17 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I it's an unforced error, it's not necessary exactly, but no news is bad news in this case, because we are inundated with AI news all the time, and this is the thing that hits mainstream, that expands beyond the tech press, that people are going to say what is this thing and what voice? Now you can do what with chat 4.0? And I think this is actually a net positive, because they didn't pay anything for this and they're getting a lot of press saying how awesome this is.

24:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and furthermore, one of the things before this 4.0 announcement, there were two speculative ideas about what they might announce. One is a search engine, which obviously Google was shaking in its boots, but the other was AGI, was ChatGPT 5.0. Was, uh, agi was chat gpd 5.0, and maybe they don't mind a little distraction, because I don't think agi is around the court. Elon musk thinks it's next year. Um, so who was it that said it's uh, 10 years off? Then there are people like ed zitrin who think it'll never happen. Maybe they don't want people to be talking about that. They'd prefer them talking about scarlett johansson, because it is good, you're right, alex, they're getting attention, not you know, or is it?

25:31 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
yeah, who's hearing this and saying like no, I, I, they make you want to try it. I am never going to use it.

25:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, it makes you want to try it this is only good for them okay, that's a more cynical take than I, than I had in my head, which is probably why it's more correct than the one that I had I'm even more cynical.

25:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they're intentionally distracting people because they don't have chat gbd5 and they've been promising it and that it's why not?

25:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
why don't they have that yet? I mean to me like it's not like it's hard or anything the first 98 percent are.

26:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just like self-driving cars. The first 98 no problem. The's just like self-driving cars. The first 98% no problem. The last 2%. The part that humans find easiest is the part machines find the hardest, and this maybe never.

26:16 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
But is GPT-5 going to be AGI? I thought GPT-5 was just going to be like GPT-4, but, as usual, bigger better.

26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
smarter with more data. Right, can they? They've kind. Smarter with more data?

26:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Can they? They've kind of run out of data. I would say that demo that they did actually shows me that they're actually moving in the wrong direction, I guess.

26:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What didn't you like about the demo?

26:37 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So there is the uptalk, the way that they kind of made the servant, it felt like it was only targeting a certain demographic of people, if you know what I mean. And also when turned the camera on, saying how am I dressed? The lack of objectivity in the way that they created 4.0 felt very kind of myopic. It didn't feel expansive, it felt like they're really dialing in deeper, into a personal companion rather than a personal assistant. And then, even when it says, do I feel excited or look excited? Studies have shown and I think they should know this as well you cannot tell anyone's emotions by looking at them and then perpetuating that they can, in that demo, also show that they either are ignoring research or are just really only training it on themselves or their own specific demographics.

27:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't read how people are feeling by looking at them.

27:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean it's pseudoscience. Yeah, Extremely cultural Like have you ever seen someone laugh?

27:51 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
when they're nervous, right right, or someone who smiles when they're like embarrassed, I mean, there's Nevertheless if you're going to be a good poker player, you have to have a.

28:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You have to hide your feelings well, yeah, you can hide your feelings, hide your tells and people. If you're around people long enough, you might be able to pick up on what some of their tics are, but it's not like a universal thing it's not universal that's the problem?

28:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because just because you, can't you can't make a lie detector really there. That that's well. No, you can't. I mean this is.

28:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
This is why this stuff is usually not admissible in courtrooms. Now, that doesn't mean that they're not used by law enforcement agencies. As you know, behavioral experts and like oh, I can pick up on people's body language and this and that and watch them like talk about you know people's um interrogations sometimes it's interesting yeah right so, and profiling is a little bit different, but what I mean is that these are people who like, are kind of like lip readers, who are like oh no, this is what this person means.

29:01
It's like clairvoyant, this is what they're saying and this is how it goes, and it's like no, you can't really tell that right.

29:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you make a good point about Wesley, about neurodivergence, I mean right there, you know, everybody doesn't act the same way.

29:16 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, and sometimes when, especially people who are in front of cops like you look nervous. Why do you look so nervous?

29:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, cops like you look nervous why? You look so nervous, right, because you have a, because you're a cop and you have a gun because I'm black why would I not be nervous?

29:29 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
right, exactly it's just before the court that's why you can't read someone's emotions and that's just it's. It's not predictable enough to say, like you can put it on a demo and like like, say that this thing is somewhat accurate in which they're doing I have to say.

29:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Say, though, I prefer Scarlett Johansson to the Chinese chat GPT, which is called chat she PT. There it's Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping, the president for life of China. Communist China has a large language model based on his political philosophy. It's known. This is a translation, as Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era. This I do not want to chat with.

30:17 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So I have an interest in the Chinese government as an intellectual interest, yes, and I am familiar with Xi Jinping thought, and I wanted to refresh myself because I knew we were going to talk about this. Yes, if you are curious what this corpus of thought is, it is the 10 affirmations, the 14 commitments and the 13 achievements, all of which are on Wikipedia, if you want to go look them up. Oh my God, it sounds awful. It is not much. Much is my impression of this. It is a collection of things that have been kind of scraped together to appear to be a larger pile of things, but I can't imagine how boring a chat bot predicated on those things would be, cause I think you'd ask it something and it would just tell you why you're wrong.

31:03 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You said 10. Was that a? There's many.

31:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's the 10 affirmations and the 14 commitments 10 men square.

31:12 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh, don't say that Can't say that I'm not nearly that.

31:16 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Woody, this was just my panic hands as I was trying to read on a different screen while trying to also have good eye engagement for the camera.

31:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We made Alex move to a different camera. You want to go back to the other camera? Go right ahead.

31:25 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I am not going to change cameras. Mid-shoot that is a recipe to have no camera at all in the middle of this.

31:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know where this comes from and you will know this as a student of Chinese communist government Mao Zedong's the Little Red Book, which was the aphorisms of Chairman Mao, which were everywhere in China in the 60s and 70s. And Xi Jinping just wants parity with that. He wants to have that. The thoughts of Xi Jinping, which include ensuring Communist Party of China leadership over all forms of work in China. The Chinese Communist Party should take a people-centric approach for the public interest. The continuation of comprehensive deepening of reforms. This is worse than McKinsey. This is Thank you for that flag. I do not want an AI with this yeah.

32:24
Although a McKinsey GPT might be worth some money Might be making some money.

32:31 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, it'll cost you money.

32:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, but whoever makes, it will make.

32:34 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Money is what I'm saying but no matter what question you ask the McKinsey. Gpt, it's going to bill you, it's going to bill you and then say you should find some people? Yeah, exactly.

32:45 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Layoffs. You should find some people Exactly layoffs. The key is layoffs. One thing about the good thing about I think it's going to be wildly successful. I know we're joking, because an AI that knows what the right answer is.

32:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, if there's only one right answer, it's very easy to be right. Yeah, all right, let's take a little break. We've got a good panel. We have more ai chat as well. Alex wilhelm is here on his first day of his new life. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Uh, cautious. Optimismnews is his new newsletter and everybody who loves alex and we all do should subscribe immediately so that he doesn't feel like he's typing into, uh, ether, I'm so proud of you. That's great, alex. It's the right thing to do.

33:28
Christina Warren's also here. She's senior developer advocate at the GitHub Love the GitHub. She's also an expert in all things mass media and culture, so from now on, we ask her the questions. When it comes down to Spike Jones and a guy who has no idea who's spike jones oh no, that was alex. I don't know wesley. Do you know who spike jones is? Yes, okay, wesley faulkner, hackydermio slash uh, well, you know what? If you're on a mastodon instance, search for wesley 83, w-e-s-l-e-y 83 and follow him. Uh, we will be back with more with this wonderful panel in just a little bit. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN.

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37:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I think that's right. I think that's right. I think that's right. I was not at that event. I was in rehearsals for Microsoft Build but I think that's right yeah.

37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the idea is, besides having a Copilot button, these are PCs that have NPUs, neural processing units Are all the Copilot Plus PCs running Snapdragon X?

37:29 - Christina Warren (Guest)
To my knowledge, yes. I think that it's possible that they might eventually have other designations that are broader than that, but right now they're all on the Snapdragon X Elite platform.

37:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was interesting. Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell were talking about this on Wednesday on Windows Weekly. They said that Intel was supposed to have a larger presence at this Surface event and was kind of shooed off at the last minute by Microsoft. In theory they are partners along with Qualcomm and AMD. In practice we'll see. The first ones, of course, are running the Snapdragon. That's the Microsoft Surfaces, acer, asus, dell, hp and Lenovo all will make co-pilot, plus PCs. I think they all ship June 18th. Certainly Microsoft's do.

38:20 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I know that's at least when the Surface ones do. I don't know about the others.

38:24 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, I think the Intel and AMD ones will come out later this year, so that's why they probably weren't highlighted. And I think the line I think they have to be 45 tops, 40 tops in order to qualify 40 trillion operations per second.

38:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that a good measurement for NPU? I mean, that's what everybody uses Apple as well, In fact. Their new iPads with the M4 are running 38 tops, so these are a little bit faster than those.

38:50 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's one dimension, because power draw is also very important, and so, even though you're thinking about efficiency, the other part that you need to consider is expandability. Like, of course, the xpcs aren't going to be as expandable as the amd and intel ones because they don't have a lot of that traditional architecture, but, uh, it does feel like you're all that stuff and, in terms of making your decision, it does feel like, though, microsoft is.

39:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some people even asked me are they making an apple, like switch from intel to qualcomm? I don't think they are. Or arm, I don't think they are. Or ARM I don't think they are, but they really are pushing these Qualcomm's Snapdragon X elites.

39:28 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, I don't think that they're doing it in the sense that they want. They're going to be completely-.

39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not abandoning X86, no.

39:37 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, and they never. I don't think, even if they wanted to, I don't think they could right Right, the you wanted to, I don't think they could right um, the, the, you know, oil refineries and and nuclear power plants and other things out there in the world would would not allow them to do that. Uh, but I think that they definitely one of the big things they're definitely pushing again. Um, this is, but but you know, we hear that it's actually good this time is they really want developers to actually optimize their applications for arm, which which has not happened so far, like right, that hasn't happened. And and qualcomm wants that, microsoft wants that. Um, I'm sure that the oems who are trying to sell these, these new, um, you know, generation of pcs, wants that.

40:16 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So so, but this is the marriage of windows 11, new ai models, especially smaller models at the edge.

40:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
SLMs right, instead of LLMs Small language models.

40:28 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, yes, Petite language models Miniature if you will. Petite, Petite. I think this is freaking awesome and I'm probably going to buy it. Agreed, I'm not going to lie. What I want is private AI for me at the device level in my OS, so that way it's not tacked on like what we have with like Slack, for example, which is like Slack with some AI on top right. I want to start at the OS and hardware level and build up from.

40:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There because, Okay, I got to say one of the features Microsoft announced at build was a modification to PowerShell. Powershell's always had two kinds of paste. You could paste as plain text or paste as formatted text. They've replaced paste as text with paste with AI. I don't know, have you tried this?

41:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, this is in PowerToys. Yeah, this is in PowerToys.

41:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
PowerToys or PowerShell.

41:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
PowerToys. Oh, I thought it was PowerShell, oh, okay. No, no, shell power twice. Oh, I thought it was power shell. Oh okay, no, no, no. If they did that power shell, I think that like the power shell enthusiast would freak out.

41:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I freaked out when I when I heard it okay, so I misunderstood it's power toys yeah, I don't know if you really want to paste with ai at any time, but okay, what?

41:40 - Christina Warren (Guest)
is what are you pasting? Shift v guy well no, I think what it's doing is it's determining whether it should be as plain text, text or rich text, based on context oh, it's not actually giving you a summary of what you're pasting oh, that's okay oh okay, the advanced paste feature can convert your clipboard content on the fly with the power of ai.

42:01
Oh, that's different, okay right, and this is the sort of thing because it's in Power Toys, which is a great project, by the way. Shout out to Clint and that whole team because they're awesome.

42:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I used to buy these. I used to get Power Toys with every new version of Windows.

42:15 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was so glad when they brought it back. I love it. You need to paste in your OpenAI API key. I was going to say that's what you need.

42:22 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's what I was going to say. Yeah, you need to bring your own OpenAI API key for that, and it's one of those things that if you don't want that feature, you can turn it off. But no, the idea is that and frankly, this is useful, I think, because I do run into this problem all the time where I'm like okay, what is the shortcut? Do I want it? Rich text or plain text? Or why it determine it based on where I'm at, and this is actually, I think, a good use of AI, even if it's only like 95% accurate, even if it's wrong sometimes. If it's if it's right more often than it's wrong, then that's one less thing that I have to think about.

42:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, okay, when you paste text with AI, the text is analyzed and formatted. I'm reading from Microsoft's own page based on the context of the text and the prompt provided to the open AI call so it does. You could have it summarize text. Take long text from the clipboard and ask the AI to summarize it or translate, or generate code or transform text or stylize text. Those last two is what we were talking about.

43:22 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Okay, last two is what I thought. Okay, but the other ones. That's not okay, I have to say the translate and even the code set. That's interesting, like if I have it on my clipboard paste this in german that would be wild, right?

43:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, that would be cool actually uh, all right, I take it back. Now that I know it's not power shell, it's power toys, I'm I misread that. Uh, all right, I take, take it back. That's actually kind of an interesting use of AI, isn't it?

43:47 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
But that quibble aside, I think the core idea of where Microsoft is taking their core PC unit, if you will, the direction of it, is what I was hoping for. Yes.

43:59
And that's very exciting to me because I really do think that when I go from my MacBook Pro to my iMac, to my gaming PC, all I do is just sit in Chrome and then maybe Steam on the PC, and it all feels very much the same. Here is a computing experience that does actually feel rebuilt or at least they're moving towards that to make it more intelligent and hopefully private for myself, and that's just that feels like the first step on a better journey for personal computing, if they get it right. It's early, but I'm optimistic and excited by it.

44:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I also want to highlight AMD's acquisition of Xilinx, which makes the ability to have custom accelerators, which makes the ability to have custom accelerators. So when you think about the M1, I think they had an accelerator for specific web code so that it could actually run faster than it couldn't even on natively previously. To understanding. With AI and all those accelerators, amd is actually really in a good place to kind of make the next generation faster and faster and faster, not necessarily from the tops number, from the AI piece, but all the accelerators that can stack on top of each other to make sure that whatever you're running and however you're running it, they can kind of have a lot of differentiation between all of these different systems on that domain Interesting.

45:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think this is. I mean Satya Nadella said particularly they are taking aim at Apple's MacBooks and their AI capabilities. Joanna Stern writes in the Wall Street Journal I tried Microsoft's new AI-focused PCs. Windows is exciting again.

45:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
All right, I'm not sure I'm going to go that far, I will say this the new laptop, the new 13-inch, the Surface laptop. It looks exactly like a slightly beefier MacBook Air. No, which is a great thing, right? So they've got this new blue color. Donna Starkar and I kept trying to steal one from the set at Microsoft Build and they were like you can't even pretend to steal one of these things at an event. We were like but we want them. They're like get it in June.

46:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll get yours. You'll get yours, young lady, don't worry. I'm sure young lady don't worry, but they look great.

46:23 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It has the ports that you want. It was slightly thicker than like a macbook air, but in a way I kind of preferred that.

46:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was like this is kind of like a wedge-shaped macbook pro, like it's exactly what I would want out of like a windows hardware device and port wise it's much more like a macbook pro it has, because the macbook airs have basically, you know, correct useless usbc ports when you'd have to do dongles. This has all of the other ports that you'd probably want, including a Type-A.

46:51 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Behold my dongle mess from my MacBook Pro. So here's the thing. We recently also saw the Apple event in which they showed off the brand new iPad Pro M4.

47:03
And that, to me, is the ultimate example of a race car engine attached to a moped, and it is not the direction that I want to see things going in, because it is brilliant engineering and then zero vision on the software side, which is more important, because the hardware should support the software and not the other way around. What microsoft is doing here to me puts it miles ahead of where the the mac and ios and ipad os ecosystem are, and that, to me, is kind of a gauntlet throwing moment, and so I'm hoping that this spurs the teams of cupertino to try some new stuff, because, my gosh, they have run their old formula to its conclusion, and it's been great, but now it feels dated.

47:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can make a strong case that the ipad that you really want is a surface pro tablet, right? I mean, it's a tablet that has, you know, all the things that the ipad doesn't. It has a real operating system to start with, I mean yeah, I think it depends on what you use it for.

48:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, because there are still things that an ipad is going to do as an iPad better than a Surface Pro is right, like what.

48:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What would it do better?

48:10 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Okay. So I will just say, when you put things in tablet mode on I don't know about the new ones, but on kind of the existing devices, you know there's a little bit more of a lag to kind of get there. And if I do just want to have pen input, for instance, I think the iPad is better for using things like Procreate and Art Tools. Right, like I do, I think it's better. There might be some exceptions, I don't know, but there is something to be said. If what you're using it for is primarily for a touch interface, I do think the iPad is great. But you're right. If you are somebody who is really wanting to live between those two worlds and if you're primarily using your iPad connected to a keyboard and using, you know, kind of the their version of a mouse to try to do that, yeah, I think you're better off with a surface device or another, like two in one.

48:59 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
frankly, Don't forget that they added the function row to the keyboard for the iPad, so I think they're trying to push people into a touch interface? Well, I think, maybe they might be merging the OSes. What's?

49:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
really clear with the iPad Pro and I have the new one is it's a laptop, it's a laptop price, it's got an aluminum keyboard. It's a laptop price with a nerfed functionality Running a nerfed operating system, running an operating system that's not intended to be for productivity.

49:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, no, it is one of those things where it's like it's very frustrating it is. I'm probably going to get one, and not because I need one. I have an M2 iPad.

49:36
Pro, because I'm going to give my M2 iPad Pro to my mom Because and hear me out on this I know it seems like an insane justification and it is, but only slightly. The amount of money they will give me for my M2 iPad Pro is less than it would cost for me to buy a 256 gigabyte iPad not iPad Air, ipad with LTE. That would cost more money than it would cost me to just give my mom. Like that costs more than what they would pay me for my 18-month-old iPad Pro. So I'm like, well, if you're going to give me so little on this trade-in, I might as well give this much better iPad to my mom and then find a way to self-justify me buying a new toy.

50:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think on this show you don't have to qualify buying a new toy, you can just do it.

50:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I know I can't, I'm just saying, in this case, that's the only reason I do the show. Are you kidding? So this is, I have to say, the OLED screen is really, really nice, but every time I try to use it as a, as a anything but a, you know kind of a content consumption device, it's frustrating.

50:41 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right yeah.

50:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because safe manager is an. Yeah, because it's good. I've done my domination. The main reason I got it is I thought, well, I, maybe I can do it, uh, use it as a photo editing tool. And I have to say, with touch and it has very good photo editing software available, like capture one and affinity stuff and, uh, darkroom is really excellent. I, I was able to do it that way. So if all you're going to do is something like this, or maybe Final Cut or Logic and touch is fine and it's fine, but there's so many things that I can't do with it. It seems a lot to pay for just a special purpose tour. Oh yeah.

51:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You know it's a whole lot. I like it A whole lot.

51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's. Yeah, this was like $3,000 all in.

51:25 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, that's what I'm saying, which is absurd, if you think about it, you're like, okay, like, and again to be one thing, like if I could run my regular Mac OS stuff and use it to use it for the power that this thing, but do I really want to run Mac OS on it?

51:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, I wouldn't mind having a terminal.

51:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't know, I would like the option. If I'm paying that much money for it, I would like the option.

51:44 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It would be cool if it was also a Mac mini and so you could just plug it into an external and have it run as a Mac.

51:50 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, that's what I'm saying. Right, Like, like, I like that option. If I plug it into a to a you know um studio display, then it's giving me that option. Okay, Now, now you're in this mode. This isn't the default mode. This isn't the thing we're forcing down anybody. You might even have to go through a Konami code thing to even enable it.

52:06 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Fine, you know like Just type in Samsung Dex.

52:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, exactly, yeah, I mean, you know there's no way to honestly justify it. It's an absolute luxury item and so it's hard to recommend it to anybody. I think, honestly, for a lot of people the Copilot Plus PC Surface is probably a good choice.

52:34 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, plus, they are bringing up the minimum system requirements. Everybody gets 16 gigs of RAM. Oh my God, what.

52:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, is that enough? I think the Snapdragon Elite sounds very interesting as a processor.

52:47 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's what I'm interested in seeing Like. Is the battery life actually going to be good? Is the performance actually going to be good? Because if it is, then it's been a really long time, but maybe we finally have like, because competition is good for everyone, right? I love my Macs so much and they're the best, but I would like to see them have competition on the chip side to actually have to push things forward. And on the software side too. To your point, alex.

53:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to correct myself. You were right, wesley. The 40 tops is the minimum, but the surface has 45 tops, so that's where your number was actually accurate. That's the Qualcomm hexagon NPU built into the Surface.

53:26 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
One more point about this before we move on. Leo, you said your Surface. Sorry, your iPad Pro was 3K, all in.

53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

53:33 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Okay, isn't that ridiculous.

53:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's insane, because you want a terabyte, so that you can get 16 gigs of RAM as opposed to 8 gigs. You want the unbinned processor with the four performance cores uh, and you want a terabyte of storage. That sets you back almost three grand by itself. And then you add a 350 keyboard and 129 pen and you're done.

53:57 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes, exactly because I'm sitting here looking at the Surface Laptop, co-pilot Plus PC 13.8-inch, with the NPU in the cool blue that Christina mentioned and it's 1K. Yeah, with the keyboard for free thrown in. Yeah, it's attached. Yeah, like I. Just I struggle to but who's doing so?

54:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
here's the real question. Maybe Christina's the best equipped to answer this. Does anybody now need that NPU or is that future-proofing? Is there anything you're doing locally that you need 45 tops?

54:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I think it'll depend, and this, I think, is what it ultimately comes down to in terms of what developers, how they can show up with what sort of applications you're going to do. These are the things that you know new features they're going to be building into Windows and things that will take advantage of that. That's coming Stuff that's coming yeah.

54:51
I mean, this is the stuff they're definitely going to be pushing for, right, but like I do feel like we've already seen just in you know you were mentioning Slack earlier, alex, and just you know kind of this bolt on and stuff.

55:01
We've seen all these companies really in a rush to just bolt on as much AI stuff as possible. I would like to see, especially with the rise of these small language models and the PHY series, which is so, the Copilot Plus PCs will come with this thing called the Windows Copilot Runtime and it's going to have like 40 plus models on it. I think more will come over time, including their PHY series of models, some that are optimized specifically for these devices and some that will come from other places, and I think what's interesting about that is that it's going to potentially allow developers to not have to think about OK, well, what small AI model do I want to use and how do I get this set up and how do I call this? It's just a thing that they can, while they're building their app, call and have it, you know, perform instructions using the NPU and using these on-device models, and that I don't know. I'm hopeful about that. I'm hopeful that six months from now we will see some really compelling, especially with image editing right and other tools.

56:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
see some really interesting use cases of this well, microsoft did announce a new app that will be part of windows 11 and your co-pilot plus pc. That caused quite a storm. Uh, we will talk a little bit. We'll talk about recall when we come back. Uh, you're watching this week in tech with a Wilhelm Great to have you, wesley Faulkner and Christina Warren Our show today brought to you by Thinkst Canary.

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Love these guys. We've had Thinkst Canaries running on our network. I can't talk too much about it because it's a security device. Here's why you need a Thinkst Canary. You've got great perimeter defenses, right, I'm sure you do. You've got your whatever, your firewalls, all that stuff is running. But what happens when somebody gets into the network, gets past your defenses or, worse, maybe there's a malicious insider and they're wandering around the network. Most companies don't have any way of knowing that. In fact, the average is bad guys wander the network for as much as six months before anybody notices or before they announce themselves. You don't want them to announce themselves, because usually that means, oh, we've just encrypted your entire network and destroyed all your backups and exfiltrated information about your customers. It's not a good thing. You need a way of knowing if there's a bad guy in your network, and that's what Thinks Canary does.

57:26
A Thinks Canary is an easy-to-deploy honeypot. You don't have to know anything about honeypots to deploy it. You could set it up as a Windows server. You could set it up as a Linux server. You can have a few select services running. You can have it lit up like a Christmas tree. Mine's running like a Synology NAS. It could be a SCADA device. Here's the key. You can even use it to create files, by the way, that you could spread around your network LUR files. But here's the key the minute somebody attacks those LUR files or that fake SSH server whatever it is that you've configured it as, your ThinkScanary will immediately tell you you've got a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter.

58:08
Choose a profile for your Thinks Canary. You can change it every day if you want. It's kind of fun to play with them. There's hundreds to choose from and it looks exactly like my Synology NAS. Has a Synology MAC address, has the DSM login. It in every way is indistinguishable from a Synology NAS, except that when somebody tries to log into it, I get a notification.

58:29
You register with your hosted console. You get monitoring. You get notifications. You can also use it with webhooks, syslog. You can have it email you. You can have it text you. Really, the sky's the limit. There's even an API so you can let the things canary let you know you're in trouble any way you want. But here's the thing You're not going to hear a thing unless there's an attacker. No-transcript. It's really a brilliant, brilliant idea. Not a surprise.

59:05
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59:35
Now, if you use the code TWIT in the how Did you Hear About Us box, you're going to get 10% off forever, for life. You can also return your Thinks Canaries. They have a very generous two-month, 60-day money-back guarantee for a full refund. But I got to tell you we've been talking about Thinks Canaries for almost a decade now and not once in all those years has anyone ever asked for the refund, because people love this thing. As soon as you get it, you'll realize how have we lived without it. Visit canarytoolscom. Enter. Enter the code twit in the how did you hear about us box. This is one layer of security. Everybody needs Canarytools slash twit. Don't forget the offer code twit to save 10% off for life. Thank you, thinkst, for the Thinkst Canaries and supporting all of our shows for all these years. Alex says I covet the new surface laptop. I want one. Are you a windows guy?

01:00:32 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
alex I I'm ambidextrous and I use both each and every day. I have my work machines a macbook pro, m3, pro, uh and then I have a personal imac m1 that I adore it's in pink. And then I have a gaming pc that is multi-color, rgb and chaotic, with a hot pink keyboard mechanical, of course. So my, my home office is a mishmash of everything is it pink because of your baby daughter? No, it's pink because I freaking love the color. Okay, just asking, yeah.

01:01:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My daughter's favorite colors are food Great color. I have to weep because I too bought the M3 Max MacBook Pro.

01:01:12 - Christina Warren (Guest)
As did I.

01:01:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got the black one, and then they come out with the M4 and then basically they said you know, I didn't say it, but it's obvious.

01:01:19 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Let's not talk about it. We're not going to make.

01:01:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
M3s. That was just an interim product.

01:01:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
The M4, those. That was just an interim product. The m4 is the future.

01:01:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're like thanks for your $5,500 purchase with us.

01:01:31 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Christina, thanks, okay. But here's the thing, though, and I and I love Apple and I love their silicon. It is literally fantastic. I went from an Intel based MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Pro, and it was night and day. Yes, I went from an M1 MacBook Pro pro to an m3 pro macbook pro, and it feels pretty much the same. Yeah it's great, but it's still just as it still is good. You know like it's. It doesn't feel that same jump no, I feel the same way.

01:01:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And the one area where and this is part of why and I think, leo, I think you did the same as me, I think we both like went full bore, like 128 gigabytes, maxed it out, yep yeah we future?

01:02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
proofed it?

01:02:04 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I thought no no, I, it's saying that's what I thought too. I was like, oh, this would be so great and then six months later like, oh, you thought um. But I will say for some of the local model stuff, ironically, it has been that's been. That's been where I've noticed the difference between my m1 max. My m3 max has been with the local model, of course which one are you playing with?

01:02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
which local models are you playing with?

01:02:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
well, a lot of them. I mean the pi3 stuff is actually really good, um, and and that's that's from microsoft um, mr obviously has some, uh, facebook's llama 3 really impressive. There are a lot of things that are more optimized. On hugging face hugging face is a lot of fun for all of that. Oh, that's actually another thing that the Microsoft announced.

01:02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stable diffusion running on locally. You're talking.

01:02:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, well, lots of things like a ton, tons of different models, tons of different people optimizing for things. But that's actually another thing that Microsoft announced, that build that got kind of lost a little bit. Is that how most of the models on hugging face, how you need to run them, as is using a tool called pie torch, but to do them on Windows you would have to use this thing called the Onyx Runtime to convert from the format that it was in to be able to run on Windows.

01:03:11
Well, they're bringing PyTorch to Windows natively so you can do it with one click run the models locally, which will be really, really good for dev types of all stripes, because, whether you're like me and you're just good at kind of following along with with tutorials and and doing demos, or you're actually really good at this stuff, it should mean like less setup and customization time I kind of think maybe I'll get the uh the dev unit, because then you get the snapdragon elite and you get uh all of that for under a thousand bucks and it's like a little nook.

01:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like a Mac Mini, yeah.

01:03:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It looks just like a Mac Mini. The Qualcomm guys were nice enough to show it to me when I was at Build and it's like $900. It'll be available on June 18th, but it comes with 32 gigs of RAM and the highest end thing, and so that's actually for people who, for developers out there. If you're like I don't know if I need to get a new laptop right now, look at this thing. I'm glad they brought this out. This is something that makes me hopeful. I'm still being cautiously optimistic to give Alex a shout out about what Windows on ARM will actually be like, but this, seeing dev kits like this, I'm like okay, they're actually here to play let's go.

01:04:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So before we, before we move from this section, yes, really quickly I I don't know why I do this, but usually when I'm on twit I kind of like talk about my thoughts about the future.

01:04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like this no, this is why I like having you on wesley. This is great.

01:04:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
There's been rumors about what Windows 12 will look like, and there's also been rumors that Microsoft is really wanting to have a subscription model of Windows, and so getting people hooked on AI local models and being able to have them have a subscription service when they need a little bit more oomph for their AI processing is a logical evolution. To get people to pay a subscription fee for Windows, and so this feels like that they're trying to make people get used to AI running locally, but also when they want to tackle something more, maybe not upgrade their PC every year. Instead keep their same PC, but then maybe borrow some cloud services as they need more power for their different models or whatever the new thing comes out. They can still maintain their hardware, but still just pay a little bit more to Microsoft to be able to leverage some of those cloud services.

01:05:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've kind of been expecting this for years, haven't? We Keep waiting for Microsoft to make that announcement, I mean I also thought.

01:05:53 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
AI pricing. Yeah, it's arguably a piece.

01:05:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I also thought they'd virtualize Windows, so I'm clearly a fool. But I thought maybe the way to do it was a subscription to Windows in the cloud that you could run on a thin client. But now that I see local AI models running, I realize that was a dead end.

01:06:13 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So it's a good thing nobody took my advice they need a minimum level of hardware, right, and so they can just say this is the minimum level for Windows 12 and then not have to worry about supporting those old models.

01:06:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, we don't know anything about Windows 12, even down to when it will be announced.

01:06:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, I'm guessing.

01:06:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I think one good guess is it will be AI forward right. Very clearly that's where Microsoft's headed.

01:06:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I would think so yeah.

01:06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

01:06:37 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I would think so. I mean, I genuinely have no idea, but yeah.

01:06:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, christina, we should be very clear is not saying this is a spokesperson for no microsoft in any way, shape or form. This is uh, christine is on a busman's holiday. She's uh talking about it on her own recognizance uh.

01:06:53 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
One reason why I think wesley is right, though, is that there has been a price shift in software as it comes to ai. Ai software costs a lot of money. If you want the, the ai addition to office 365, microsoft 365, it's like 30 bucks a month. You want open ai services, 20 bucks a month.

01:07:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People pay for this stuff and, by the way, that's still probably below cost, isn't it, alex?

01:07:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I mean, this stuff is hideously expensive for these models to generate not to put christina on the spot here, so I don't mean to make this about her company, but there was a a media report that came out that said that Copilot at GitHub was a money losing operation. Right.

01:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even at 30 a month.

01:07:34 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
And then I believe the CEO said no, that's not true, and that's where we left it. It's not clear to me exactly what the margins here are, but there are costs, You're right, and I think it's also just like there's a price threshold being set and so consumers will expect to pay for AI. So to Wesley's point if Windows 12 does have AI and upgrades and so forth, I can see that actually being reasonably well-received by power users, the prosumers out there, and not mocked mercilessly like I don't know Windows 8.

01:08:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Well, and when people use AI, it's funny. People are willing to pay for the Wall Street Journal. Generally, people are not willing to pay for a subscription to news, but if you're making money on this subscription, if the journal helps you make money, you're willing to pay 175 bucks a year for it.

01:08:18 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Or Bloomberg right or Bloomberg. Look how expensive a terminal, is it's crazy 26, 27,000 a year. Right, yeah, but it, it's crazy $26,000, $27,000 a year right.

01:08:26 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Alex. Yeah, but it makes you money. I've never had one Aw. The one thing I have not had in life is a Bloomberg terminal.

01:08:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It sounds like you want one. What would you do who doesn't want one?

01:08:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Really I would kill for one. Why? Oh, because it's got data. I went to Bloomberg in San Francisco and I sat down with the Bloomberg team and they gave me a tour. This was back when Bitcoin was brand new, so this must have been, like you know, 10, 10 years ago now and they were just like what do you want to know? I was just asking stuff. They were just pulling up the data, live ships around the world. It just if you it's better than the Internet. It's like the Internet. It's like okay, if the internet is heroin, bloomberg Terminal is fentanyl.

01:09:09 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Here's the thing.

01:09:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It puts you to sleep forever.

01:09:12 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, here's the thing. It's the internet, but it's like the internet for super rich people. It's like the private club internet, right. It's like the Delta Lounge. It's like the Centurion Lounge version of the internet. Like you get everything faster and better. But my point is you're willing to pay a lot of money, correct, because it makes you money, and I think that's the whole thing that that's why, yes, it's gonna be the same thing for ai.

01:09:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, you know, to talk to scarlett johansson, maybe not worth 20 bucks a month, although I must say I'm paying 20 bucks a month for open AI, for Gemini from Google and for perplexity AI each I didn't get an R1. I should have done that. I would have saved me money. It would have been half price.

01:09:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, absolutely $200. Like, hey, you get this dumb gadget, but you also get the perplexity. But you also get perplexity, but you get the perplexity pro yeah yeah, which is honestly I'm happy about it, only for the fact that it turned around a perplexity pro and I was like I really like perplexity, perplexity yeah, I have all three because I want to try all three.

01:10:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I also run local models as well, although I have to say maybe I need a surface because the local models do not run as quickly as chat gpt does. Chat gpt is very fast, it's kind of 4.0 is even faster, it's almost instant is perplexity better than google's search? Generative experience oh god can we hold off on that, because I do want to talk about that, but I, but I did say we would talk about recall, so let's, let's do recall. And then we've got to talk about putting Elmer's glue in your pizza toppings.

01:10:51 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's so good. It's so good, never change.

01:10:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So a couple of months ago a company came out called Rewind Rewindai that promised on a Mac to record everything you do over a period of time and then allow you to query it, which seemed like a great idea. Then they came out with a limitless pen that proposed to record everything in your world with a little wearable device and let you query it. Nobody got upset about this because I guess mainly because you had to, you know, subscribe and buy it. But microsoft obviously paid attention because they have basically built this capability into the new windows 11. Microsoft calls it recall and it wasn't long before everybody in the privacy and security community started screaming my hair's on fire. Here's one from Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer Microsoft new Windows 11 recall is a privacy nightmare. Except it's not really because it never leaves your device. It's encrypted using BitLocker. I mean, the only reason recall would be a problem is if somebody got access to your PC. Then maybe there'd be a problem.

01:12:09 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, in which case, if we're being completely candid like you're screwed anyway, You're in trouble, no matter what.

01:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:12:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, so the interesting thing is that Rewindai is rebranded as Limitlessai, right, and the founder of the company did a little video clip on Twitter responding to people asking him like, oh my gosh, microsoft, you know, made recall. It's like, well, you guys are building Sherlock. And he said Sherlock, yes. And he said well, kind of. But what we're doing now is a personal private cloud, so that way we can do a recall style thing across multiple devices. And here's I like the boldness of that. I like to try something bigger. Here's the thing uh, the cloud is not always as secure as I might personally wish it to be, whereas my device is probably a little bit safer, and so to me, microsoft is doing the smaller version of what now limitless is doing, but it seems like something I can trust, but it's, and it's also one device only, though, right, it doesn't, it's it, it's the particular device you're using it on.

01:13:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you have three PCs, each one is independent, right, that's my understanding, yeah, but this is all.

01:13:17 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I haven't gotten to play with it yet, you know. So testing to come, but actually that sounds kind of lame though, leo, because then if I have three PCs and I'm you know, I'm a dweeb, so I have several I almost wish we could tie it to, like my Microsoft account, to my local home.

01:13:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't this always the problem is, ai works better if you have no privacy. It always works so much better. All these things do, yeah.

01:13:40 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, all these things do. It's not even just AI, right. It's like, because, if you think about it, like, the AI component is is the natural language to service this, this data. But like, but not only, what these things are doing is they're just, you know, capturing a bunch of information, right, and we're like no, we love this and we love that it's all on our local device, because we don't want it in the cloud, where it's unsafe. But at the same time, you know, I do kind of want it everywhere because I want to be able to use it, because I'm also a dweeb, alex, because I want to be able to access it on all the things that I'm on. Yeah, team dweeb.

01:14:08 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know what, though, christina? This actually underscores, for me, the importance of encryption, and it underscores the importance of combating. I think currently, the EU is trying to once again weaken encryption, and it just goes to show that we cannot afford to lose that fight. As always, but now even more so, because if we are going to have more AI attached to our personal data, we need to ensure that we're safe.

01:14:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Fantastic point.

01:14:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, and that's why we've been really fighting over access to your smartphone, because, in effect, that's what this is is a device that's collecting every bit of your information. All your data smog is going into this device, and if law enforcement can just easily access it, you're an open book. And it'll be 10 times worse with the new AI technologies.

01:14:57 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, no, I mean and that's what I think Microsoft needs to do a better job being very crisp on who has access what-.

01:15:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they've done a good job. I don't think that that's satisfied. For some reason that's satisfied privacy advocates.

01:15:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They just don't trust my no, I mean I think I mean, which is fair, but I think you need to just come out and say this is exactly how it works, right? Because the thing is, is that forensic software already exists, meaning, um, you know, I don't know how well it works on the mac, although it does actually actually work pretty well, but I know, like on Windows, like if you know someone can get into your PC, that's the big thing. If they can get through your password to log into your PC, they can put forensic software on there and they can see basically anything you've done.

01:15:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really good. In many cases, your work is already doing that or your school is already doing that and they don't have to tell you ahead of time they don't have to tell you right.

01:15:47 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And so the difference here is there's no, actually you could surface some of that data yourself where it'd be useful, be like, oh, what was that thing? I looked up that had that thing with a thing, yeah, and and you could find it like, okay, that's actually useful. But the the broader concerns, which I completely understand, why they're there, um, I mean, you know, I don't know how different. I guess my big misunderstanding with some of the uproar is I don't know how this is that different than things that have already existed? Right, it's like, okay, if it's all held locally, it's just being surfaced in a different manner, but they could already get access to this data anyway.

01:16:21 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Christina. Go back to the top of the conversation. We're talking about Sam Altman, open AI and trust and essentially, the ability for people who are leaders and very visibly public leaders of AI to set the tone for trust between the public and technology. Here is where that rubber touches the road.

01:16:39 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right, and this is a fancy UI.

01:16:43 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, this is a fancy UI of the history of your PC. So, if they can get on it anyway, and it makes sense that it's not cloud-connected, because anything that touches the cloud can be subpoenaed Right, encrypted or not. I mean, I don't know if the encryption is what they call it like post-quantum encryption or not, which means it can be broken. So it's important that it's not cloud connected whatsoever. It needs to stay on device, okay.

01:17:08 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
But on the UI point, though, wesley. So what's really interesting is you just reminded me what it looks like the interface that shows the scroll bar and then the moving rectangles of screen images. It's CoverFlow, the old iTunes thing. Yes, oh my God. Yes, and I know this is evidence that I'm old.

01:17:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
but I mean we've seen this and it it was great when it came out originally as cover for it. I think it looks great now you're right, you're what is old is new again.

01:17:33 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Oh my god well technology is a flat circle as we all know, you're just going around and around. It's true, I I would use this, though I think, like recall if once I think I would too no same.

01:17:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I I think I would use this too. I think this is the sort of thing. I had a question in my mind. I was like would you enable this or would you be weirded out? I'm like, no, I think I would use this because I, okay, and I'm one of these weirdos I probably shouldn't admit this. I still have, even though I know it's a bad idea. I have, like my google search history turned on, and the reason is is because I've, on more than like a handle of occasions, gone through and like found, like search for certain queries and found things that I searched for like seven years ago. I was like, what was that thing with that thing? That was the thing you know and and I do that all the time something to my search history I also have the location history turned on just because I like seeing the map going.

01:18:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you've been here and here and here. I love that. And by the way, I bought the limitless pin. I can't wait, I don't care, I want to know. You know what Part of it is, because I'm getting old and I don't remember it anymore, and so now I'm going to have a device that I can say what did I have for dinner, and it'll know.

01:18:44 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
In a post-Twitter world where, like did I see it on X, Did I see?

01:18:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
it on Blue Sky? Did I see it on Mastodon? Was it?

01:18:51 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Slack. No, it was Discord, was it on? Icq no, ICQ doesn't exist anymore.

01:18:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, I know it's dying in a month. We're so old.

01:19:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are we sad? Do you remember your ICQ number? Are we sad. What was your, do you?

01:19:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
remember your ICQ number. I do what was it? 1-8, 1-8-5-6-4-5.

01:19:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, I do not remember mine. You guys remember your ICQ numbers? I?

01:19:14 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
don't think I ever had one. If I had that Microsoft thing, then maybe I would remember.

01:19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You need see. This is why I need recall. You need recall. You could find out icq, which is now owned by. What is it?

01:19:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
vk workspace uh, yeah, the russians bought it like a million years ago.

01:19:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We bought icq and now, in june 26, we're killing it. So it's goodbye, but it's mostly goodbye to a piece of internet history, right yeah, that's really what it was I was gonna be like.

01:19:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I haven't been able to log into that account and I don't know how long. Um, there used to be a way, because AWOL bought ICQ and you used to be able to log in via. Aim with your ICQ number with Messenger Right, but when AWOL Instant Messenger died and gosh, at this point I think it's probably been six or seven years and I hadn't been able to log into that account even longer before that. So it's been. I don't even know how long it's been, but it's been at least 15 years. It's really interesting.

01:20:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The internet has now been around long enough that it is littered, that its trail is littered with, you know, defunct tools, and this is just one more of them. I was going to save that story to my obituary section because there's a few, but we got a little preview of the obituaries still to come. Let's take a little break. More to talk about in just a bit. Wesley Faulkner, great to see you. Any lizards, snakes, anything going on back there?

01:20:43 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Just this morning we had to bury our bunny Aww, back there. Just this morning we had to bury our bunny oh um, but we do have four, four baby chicks that we transitioned out of the incubator outside um and so wait a minute, you have a baby incubator in your backyard well, no, there it was inside. And now they. Now they've grown old enough that they've gotten most of their adult belly, you have an incubator in your house.

01:21:11
Yes, and so we have eight, nine other chickens full grown, okay, and so now they're in a container, so you have a little chicken coop. You have a whole operation.

01:21:23 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
My sister in Sunnyvale does this. She has chickens now because she's becoming slowly a Neolithic farmer despite living in Silicon Valley, and it's like the new cool thing, apparently, at least amongst the California elites here in Petaluma.

01:21:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is ensconced into our city charter that everybody in Petaluma is allowed to have chickens. It's a law.

01:21:45 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They eat scraps. They're like little pigs. And's a law. They eat scraps. They're like and eggs pop out.

01:21:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:21:50 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, and then you get eggs every day.

01:21:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's amazing.

01:21:52 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Great yeah. And then one day they may not make eggs, and then you make dinner. Oh, geez.

01:21:59 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
And then what you do is, once they've outlived their usefulness, is you murder them and then cook them. I mean, I eat chicken, but it does feel a little barbaric. I had vegans over for dinner last night Eggs are their next generation of chicken.

01:22:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's a good point. You're eating their embryos.

01:22:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You either get them at the beginning or you get them at the end, either way it's a circle of dinner.

01:22:20 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Wow, didn't know we were going there today on the show, no idea.

01:22:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No idea, also, we were going there today. No idea, no idea. Uh, also alex wilhelm in his backyard. He's got him it's called an alex coop and that's where he is right now in the alex coop.

01:22:35 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I am in the alex uh cube. You might say. It's the uh. It's where my wife lets me put all my things.

01:22:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really so that way. I'm so jealous. It's so cute. I wish'd thought of it when I lived there in 1967. Yes, you all know that right that Alex lives in the house that I grew up in in Providence, rhode Island.

01:22:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It is one of the strangest coincidences of my life.

01:22:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so weird. It's so weird In fact. I was just, you know, on the echo I get, I have a slideshow and I just yesterday saw my dad sitting where you are right now on a lounge chair with his hat and contemplating. He was about 32 and I'm thinking, oh my god, anyway, yeah, yeah now.

01:23:20 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Now this house is is strictly owned by one 17 month old child who has more toys and goods and things and books and blocks. She has a sandbox that's on wheels so we can roll it around.

01:23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're actually supposed to do that with a chicken coop so that it doesn't ruin your yard. We are not getting chickens.

01:23:44 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's how you scramble eggs.

01:23:49 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I want fewer animals in my house.

01:23:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When I was looking into having chickens because, as you know, that is my right as a petaluma native. Uh, I did look into. They have chicken coops that roll, because you probably know this uh, wesley, wherever the chickens roost really becomes unpleasant, slime pit.

01:24:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They'll decimate grass as well, so it's like you can rotate them, but if you roll it around, then they can decimate your whole yard bit by bit.

01:24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an innovative approach. Anyway, I'm glad it's nice that Alex and his. You have a is his public. Did we say it? You have a young, another young one on the way.

01:24:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes, number two of two, the last one, if you will, the I'm not doing three arrives in early September and we're very excited for having another girl.

01:24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yay Two girls.

01:24:41 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's awesome oh yeah, it's going to be fantastic and I we already have a name kind of picked out, we're getting closer to that and we have a C section on the books man. So we are gearing up and I am terrified, Absolutely terrified sitting.

01:25:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This would be 1966, 67, something like that. Uh, come on, come on it's not that big a shot.

01:25:16 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Oh, it's not coming up right where you're working, which is so.

01:25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Leo has come over since liza I have owned this house, see if you recognize see if you recognize this plot of land. This is where that's my dad, where you're sitting right now.

01:25:28 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It looks so we've built like a whole back deck. I know it's very different. That really doesn't look that much like the house. Yeah, that's crazy.

01:25:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is. I will show you also there is, as you know well, this is so when we moved in, the backyard was filled with junk, so we had a rototillet. That's me with my dad behind me, rototilling exactly where that oak tree just outside your door is. Yeah, right over there, yeah, yep, and uh, we found bottle 100 year old list liquor bottles. We found handguns, we found all sorts of stuff.

01:26:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
We had to rototill it up to make it the nice verdant plot that it is right now yes, and the background here is the reason why there were bits of ancient tetradis is because the house was originally built in 1806 yes, which is very close to the founding of this nation you will recall 30 years after and here is it's.

01:26:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here is dad planting the tree. They called it a pin oak when he planted it. It's tiny. How big is that now?

01:26:35 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
um, it's so big now that whenever we have a rainstorm, like we did two days ago, I'm always worried it's going to fall onto my work shed and kill me. There's gotta be to be like a hundred. I brought a picture.

01:26:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know. I took a picture of it when I was visiting and I gave it to my dad and that's kind of a neat thing that you know what is it. 60 years later, the tree that he planted is now giant.

01:27:00 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's awesome and it's very expensive because the jerks behind us cut a bunch of the roots. Oh no. Several times a year the tree people have to come out and do special fertilizer, special watering and verify that it's healthy. So tell you that we are.

01:27:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's trees we'll care for. Thank you for keeping it alive, which?

01:27:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
is we love it.

01:27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's really awesome. It's such a nice story. And Christina Warren, who is in Seattle Washington. We can't tell because it's very blurry there. It must be the fog.

01:27:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's the fog. Honestly, the fog is real. It is the end of May and it is still a high of 60 degrees. We've never had a cold. At least as long as I've lived here, there's never been a cold snap like this. Apparently it was lovely, like the one week I was gone. I was in Atlanta and Atlanta was it was disaster. And then I was Portland and Portland was lovely and apparently it was very nice here and I came back and I'm like is it actually like?

01:28:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like the last week of May and it's still? This is good for me to hear, because we have thought for a long time about moving to Seattle. I thought it'd be kind of fun to retire up there and every time we go it's beautiful, sunny, it's warm. I said, right, they lie to you. They lie, they lie to you. It's a lot. Yeah, they do yeah.

01:28:14 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Everybody's like oh, it's like this all the time.

01:28:16 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, it's not For a few months, really lovely, and so that's how they trick you. And then october rolls around and you go oh, I grew up the pack northwest. I consider myself to be a pack northwest expert and let me tell you, leo, the weather is better in petaluma. Yeah, you shouldn't move, it's really nice, you can have chickens very nice, and I can have.

01:28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there, our show. It's great to have all of you here. You make it, you make, I tell you. I look forward to hanging out with each and every one of you You're really fantastic and, of course, our wonderful audience. We have a great community. That's one of the things I realized after 20 years we are in our 20th year now of doing Twit and you learn a thing or two in a couple of decades, one of which is it's all about the community. That's what podcasting is all about the community of people who are more than listeners, they're participants in it.

01:29:17
We have a new way that you can do it, which is to join our club. If you want to join a community of smart, interesting people who hang out in our Discord, who listen to our shows, who call into some of our shows, I invite you to join Club Twitter. It's seven bucks a month. It makes a big difference to us A lot less than the Wall Street Journal, and maybe it doesn't make you as much money as a Bloomberg terminal, but it is a lot of fun. You'll get all of our shows ad-free. You'll get video of shows that we only do in audio, in public, plus twit, plus bonus content, like that crazy watch party we did with Fritz Lang's Metropolis a couple of weeks ago. We've got a Stacy's Book Club, your friend Stacy Higginbotham Wesley coming up we're going to be doing on June 20th. We also have a lot of other benefits, but really the real benefit is knowing that you're helping us stay on the air. We unfortunately do need your support to continue doing what we do. We'd like to do it. So please go to twittv slash club, twit if you're not already a member, and sign up today. We thank you in advance. We'll have more in just a bit with this fabulous panel, but first a word from our sponsor for this segment of this Week in Tech NetSuite.

01:30:27
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01:31:27
By popular demand, netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for just a few more weeks. So don't delay. Head to netsuitecom slash twit. That's netsuitecom slash twit. N-e-t-s-u-i-t-e netsuitecom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Actually, in a couple of weeks we're going to stream the uh apple keynote. We talked about build on wednesday. We we talked about uh open ai's chat 4-0 on last Monday. Google had its IO, in which they said the words AI 120 times in two hours, and we only know that that's once a minute. Come to think of it. We only know that because Nadella admitted to it. He said we've had AI counting all this time. I don't think the Google IO keynote was much to write home about.

01:32:24 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
To be honest, I can't recall much of what they announced me either, that they really want developers to know that they're doing ai now.

01:32:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Please think about us for your cloud needs ironically with what I mean two hours keynote and all that. The real takeaway from google I o is what's happened to their AI answers in search. Google had a well, it's from the Google Labs, sgi or SGE I guess they call it search-generated experience or something like that that they finally they turned on for everybody. Almost immediately people start saying, oh, I am getting weird results. They call it the ai overview, which is a summary paragraph ahead of your search results. But some of the things it's telling people to do are a little outre. For instance, put glue on your pizza to keep the cheese from falling off.

01:33:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Can you pull up the headline from 404?

01:33:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes.

01:33:32 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Because, it's. I don't know if we can say it. I can't say it out loud, right?

01:33:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they figured out that the actual information that Google was serving up came from Reddit. Google, we know, gave Reddit $60 million. They found. This is the AI overview. Cheese can slide off pizza for a number of reasons, including too much sauce, too much cheese or thickened sauce. Here are some things you can try. You can also add about an eighth cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness. Now, it probably won't kill you, but it's probably not a good idea. 404 pointed out and I guess they got this from a, uh, from a tweet. 404 pointed out that this actually was google ai regurgitating something it had learned from Reddit. Wait a minute, let me see if I can find there. And, by the way, the Redditor who posted that I don't know if I can say it out loud F Smith was his handle, f Smith. So maybe this isn't worth 60 million dollars after all.

01:34:51 - Christina Warren (Guest)
maybe not, maybe not, I don't know. It seems one of those things I'm like hmm, um I I am a person who very frequently appends reddit to my various sources, because that's that that we've been trained the last few years.

01:35:06
that's one of the only ways you can get a good result, unless you do what I now do, which is to pay for a search engine, I've become one of those people. If you're not doing that, I'll append that. Having said that, I don't know if I would put in and I bet even if I did append Reddit to how to make cheese not fall off a pizza, I don't think that that's the first result that I would get.

01:35:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in fact, it's really weaponized the ability to pull crap out of Reddit. There are a few more Patrick Cosmo. These are all from Xcom, patrick Cosmo. And, by the way, google's response is well, no, these are unusual circumstances, or you were messing with us, you were doing it wrong, your fault. Has a dog ever played in the NBA? Yes, a dog has played in the NBA, according to AI Overview. Is Batman a cop? Yes, batman is a cop because he works with the law as an agent of Detective Jim Gordon who deputizes him, batman is called by the bat signal to solve, stop or catch a crime, which is something the government does. Really, the bat signal. Does government do that?

01:36:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, batman is kind of a cop. If you okay, that's the only one I kind of agree with.

01:36:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think batman is kind of a cop, batman's not not a cop, right, I don't think he's actually a cop, but he's. He's cop adjacent, if you're correct.

01:36:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He can never. He can never be arrested for doing something illegal. So thus he's a cop. Oh he's got. What do they call that?

01:36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
immunity yeah, yeah, qualified immunity. How many presidents graduated from the university of wisconsin according? This is the ai overview. According to the Wisconsin Alumni Association 13 presidents. By the way, john Adams graduated in 1934 35, 47, 51, 54, 57, 60, 61, 68, 69, 71. John Adams really 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 81, 87, 1990, 187, 1990, 2002, and 2003. I have to say, when AI fails, it fails spectacularly.

01:37:10 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It does, but also, how could this open AI feel about this?

01:37:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, andrew Jackson graduated, according to Google, in 2005. James Madison graduated in 1956. William Harrison graduated in 53 and 74.

01:37:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know what pisses me off about this. What makes me so infuriatingly mad is that Google search was good and simple.

01:37:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have screwed it up, they have consistently crapified it they have so screwed it up.

01:37:41 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Unnecessarily. For example, on YouTube, which we all use, when you search for something, it now gives you like what? Five links that are like what you search for, and then it says people also watched. Go away. Please stop trying to help me. You know I am able to think.

01:38:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google has paused this feature, but not before. We found many hilarities like this how many rocks shall I eat? According to geologists at UC Berkeley, you should eat at least one small rock a day. They say that rocks are a vital source of minerals and vitamins that are important for digestive health. This has to be a joke. Dr Joseph Granger suggests eating a server of gravel geodes or pebbles with each meal, or hiding rocks in foods like ice cream or peanut butter. No, don't do that. Rocky Road, Rocky Road. You know, I think this is actually chicken advice, right? Don't? Chickens have to eat rocks?

01:38:41 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, they have to eat some gravel. But there was another one that I saw. It was how many sisters do I have? And someone says well, you ask someone else how many brothers they have, then multiply times two by the way, I don't know who came up with uh.

01:38:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This one here is uh from, uh, from our own burke mcquinn the rock eating rocks. How do you think the rock got so big? Right, not gravel, but giant boulders.

01:39:09 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Ladies and gentlemen, proper nutrition and push-ups. Of course, there's nothing artificial whatsoever in his physique oh, good lord um, what were they thinking? Did they use this before they shipped it out to everybody in the world?

01:39:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is google search google spokesperson megan farnsworth, according to the verge, said the mistakes came from quote generally very uncommon queries. You're right, I'm think. Asking how many rocks you should use a little weird and aren't represented who would have a sample of queries?

01:39:40 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
who?

01:39:40 - Christina Warren (Guest)
would have that information. How could they?

01:39:42 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
get that.

01:39:44 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No one could have complete yes and also how many presidents have graduated from a university.

01:39:50 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's not a super common query.

01:39:52 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But that's a query that you're non-pre-doing the generative AI push. It's like a knowledge-based thing that Google used to get wrong, but at least they had some sort of overview of being able to report that it was wrong. Now can you even report that these things are incorrect when they even come in, like I think the mistake is not that Google's Gemini AI is somehow more prone to hallucination.

01:40:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think it is. The mistake is simply doing that AI overview in search results and I'm sure in that position, perplexity and Claude and everybody else at OpenAI would make similar mistakes or something, but maybe not so bad. Those are pretty awful, but this is what happens with AI. Ai has to be used responsibly and Google is so desperate to you know cash in on AI or not to be left behind. Maybe even more importantly.

01:40:49 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Maybe they shouldn't have laid off all those people.

01:40:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what went wrong At Google. Yeah, Ed Zittrain says Prabhakar Raghavan was what went wrong. The new guy in charge.

01:41:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
The.

01:41:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
McKinsey, guy in charge. Yeah, it's not one person.

01:41:09 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
The problem is they had one business line guys, and they had to choose it for more and more revenue, so they found people who could do that right here from LinkedIn is a uh message from Scott Jensen, who left.

01:41:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says I just left Google last month. The AI projects I were I was working on were poorly motivated and driven by this mindless panic that as long as it had AI in it, it would be great. This myopia is not something driven by a user need. It's a stone cold panic that they're getting left behind. The vision is that there will be a Tony Stark-like Jarvis assistant in your phone that locks you into their ecosystem so hard you'll never leave that vision pure catnip. The fear is they can't afford to let someone else get there first. Now, this is the telling point. Scott says the exact thing happened 13 years ago with Google+. I was there for that fiasco as well. That was a similar reaction, but to Facebook that rings true. Whether it is, I don reaction. But to facebook that's that rings true, whether it is I don't know it does.

01:42:14 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It rings true, it's panic, yeah, I mean, I think, I think that that definitely rings true. I think that's how you see, like, how much was this stuff tested? It definitely comes across as people who are like we're getting all kinds of pressure from all of our bosses and our bosses, bosses and their bosses, bosses, that we need to push this out as quickly as possible. And, hey, the testing seems fine to us. We don't have time to do maybe as in depth as we would like to because we are responding to everything and instead, yeah, you take this thing, which had been the best, the best in class for a long time, to the point that it literally obviated many, many, many, every other attempt at a search engine. Like the fact that, like I pay for a search engine now, if you would ask me that, even five years ago, I'd be like what are you talking about? Why would I ever pay for a search engine? Ever, right the fact that it's even a business.

01:43:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which one do you pay for?

01:43:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Keggy.

01:43:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Me too Love it. I used to use Neva, which, by the way, did AI overviews, although I never saw anything so egregious from Neva. They went out of business. They said we can't compete against Google. How much do you pay? I think I pay $25 a month for Keggy.

01:43:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I am part of a family plan or duo plan, so my friend Justin got it first and then I think it was. I think it's $75 a year. That's why I didn't know Justin, because I'm part of his duo plan, I think it's like $150 for two people.

01:43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty good For me it has been yeah.

01:43:36 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's gotten really good. I got to the point that I had become so frustrated with Google that I was like I'm actually going to be one of those people who pays for a search engine. We'll see how it goes, and it's been really good so far. I have to say I've been getting much better results. I've gone through the process of making it my default on all my devices. Apparently, google released this thing like a way where you can access the unadulterated search from Google.

01:44:09
And so I put a link to that in in the various chats. But um, but, but um.

01:44:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ernie from tdm has also created a great website, udm14.com, which basically just gives you, like the ai, free search directly, so that comes from the fact that somebody discovered if you add ampersand UDM equals 14 to any Google search and this is a Google search it will not give you any of the AI stuff, right?

01:44:34 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And and, and this didn't even come from like the. The way that was discovered was that this was, bizarrely, on May 14th. This was tweeted out by the Google search page on, who I think is at. Danny Sullivan says we've launched a new web filter that shows only text-based links, just like how you might filter other types of results, and so this is a thing they actually introduced officially, which is great, really fantastic. They did that, but of course, the way to natively kind of do that is a pain, and so a number of different websites have popped up so that people can configure it to be their default.

01:45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just append it right. Yeah, yeah, so that people can configure it to be their default. They just append it right.

01:45:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah.

01:45:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's funny. If you search Google now for should I eat rocks, what you'll get is all the news stories of Google saying you should eat rocks.

01:45:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
This is hysterical Because Google's like no, because they've had to go in manually. This is the awful thing with stuff like this. And look, it could happen to anyone. Any company who would do this would run into these sorts of problems and and we do and it would be a joke. We'd laugh at it. I think it is worse when it's google and you were so good for so long that no one could even begin to compete with you. I mean microsoft, I mean god. How much time I've had as microsoft. Microsoft spent trying to make being a thing right, like it, it, you know, and and now just the. The own goaling here of Google search is really spectacular. The main reason we pay for.

01:45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kagi is because there's no ads. And even Larry Page in the beginning, in the earliest days, in his first paper about PageRank, said a search engine can't sell ads because that compromises the results. A search engine can't sell ads because that compromises the results. For a long time there was a wall between revenue, ad sales and search, and that's what Ed Zittrain was writing about when he said as soon as Gomes left or was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, that wall disappeared and Google started tweaking its search results for more revenue. But I don't think that explains it all. It's clearly something's going on and this crown jewel has been destroyed. It's worth it for you and me to pay to use a different search engine. That's amazing. You're right. No one would have said that five years ago. It would have sounded nuts.

01:46:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah. So Kagi K-A-G-I, if you want to look up what they're talking about. I was just poking around while you guys were talking about it and I saw that it had raised one funding round and I was like, okay, that's kind of strange. It only has one round of $670,000. This was a bootstrap company until last year when it raised less than a million, which is an insane thing, because in the technology world today, anyone who's going to go out there and build something that's competitive tries to raise lots of money very quickly to go fast. But in this case, you guys are paying two and three figures per year for a product that was effectively bootstrapped by some dweebs. That is a cool story.

01:47:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stephen Wolfram's on steven wolfram's on their board too, which adds to some of the cachet right founded in 2018 by a guy named vladimir prelovak in palo alto. Uh, bootstrapped by the founder. He must have had a some other he sold.

01:47:42 - Christina Warren (Guest)
He sold something and made some money off of it, so he's been bootstrapping it um the. How I first became aware of it was that, um, he also makes this thing, the orion web browser, which is right, a web kit based browser for mac, but it uses chrome extensions, which is pretty which is pretty cool.

01:47:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, zero telemetry that's how I first came across it you know, our friend cory doctorow has said that, uh, the widespread use, I think it's. Now, according to pew, 52 of all americans use ad blockers. He says the widespread use of ad blockers is the largest consumer boycott in history and I think that's what we're seeing. I think we're seeing consumers finally say, hey, enough. Uh, even people who are not tech savvy or not really even paying attention are noticing it's not working right.

01:48:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, and the thing is is that you know, I I always, I'm always frustrated by the ad um tech situation, because I think that a lot of people there's always going to be a portion of people and and the audience for this show is certainly going to be largely have more people in in this segment than, um, maybe others.

01:48:46
But there's always going to be a portion of people and the audience for this show is certainly going to be largely have more people in this segment than maybe others. But there's always going to be a portion of people who will just reject any advertisement at all. But I think there are plenty of people who are like no, if the ad is tasteful and if it's not in my face, if you aren't giving pop-ups and if you're not slowing things down, if you're not making my overall experience worse, fine, I don't care. But when you know the ad tech has gone out of its way to be just such a completely terrible experience, you can't blame individuals from doing everything they can to know that the first thing you do when you get a new web browser is install uBlock version, right, like that's one of the first things you do.

01:49:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, we've been preaching that for years now, right Well?

01:49:23 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I just got a new computer for work so I'm now helping out the bit this week in startup. So they bought me a computer and I forgot to install you block, whatever the hell it is that we all use. And I was pulling up a youtube and, oh my god, it's amazing the ad was absolutely bonkers I I absolutely will never use that product, because no right, just just a hard pass.

01:49:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how they get me to pay a lot of money for youtube premium I was going to say I have.

01:49:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I have a grandfather dan youtube premium account, but I don't know, I don't even want to talk about it because I'm afraid that the grandfather pricing will somehow go away, so we won't talk about it. But yeah, I will never not pay for youtube premium, even if they make me pay the actual amount.

01:50:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I do, I do, I just it's worth it. I will pay.

01:50:08 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, no, no. Oh, that's what I'm saying. There's never a situation where I will not pay for it, I will always pay for it.

01:50:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:50:25 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's what I'm saying I say it's an old person thing.

01:50:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, You're not nearly old enough to say it, but go ahead.

01:50:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I remember the days of shareware, where you would get software and it itself would just have other software that I would advertise and stuff like that. That's what I feel like in terms of ads on the internet these days is that it's something that was pervasive everywhere but eventually will be transitioning to something else. I know we're all getting subscription out of our ears now, but moving into a model where there might be subscription umbrellas, where you get groups of subscriptions or something comes with your ISP.

01:51:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a good idea. But it really is true that we were sold a lie that the internet was based on, a lie that this stuff was all free. It was never free, it was always expensive and somebody had to pay somewhere. And so I think, making it explicit and saying you know, these podcasts aren't really free, we were subsidizing them by selling your eyeballs to an advertiser. But now that that economy is faltering and that's what's going on with Twit is that it's not just Twit, it's every podcast network, it's everywhere, it's also public broadcasting. Advertisers have stopped buying ads, or if they are buying ads, they're buying them where they know everything about you, like Spotify, and so we just don't have the revenue anymore and we have to go to the audience and say you know, this thing that was formerly free was never free. We were selling your eyeballs, but now we have to charge you if you want us to keep doing it. It's it's kind of the way of the world, I'm sorry to say we, we were lied to.

01:52:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
If you know the marketing funnel, the top of the funnel is exposure and awareness, and so the lie is also to advertisers saying, like, get exposure by putting your brand here, and then the issue, I would say the premium about being an advertiser on Twit, is that it's not at that level. It's lower, which means it's closer to the conversion at the end of the funnel, which means it's more valuable. Would you please go to work on our sales?

01:52:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
team. Here's the real problem. Agencies especially but advertisers to some degree also are impatient and not very subtle, and so you can explain that to them.

01:52:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They're less impatient and more motivated by clicks. Yeah, because that's the metric that they're tracking. That's right, and so if you abstract, like their own specific KPIs or whatever, of what they're getting paid for and move closer to what actually works, then it makes more sense to kind of move people down the funnel.

01:53:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Absolutely. I wish they'd pay attention to the ROI of our advertising, but they're not sophisticated enough. It's too much work, I don't know, and also the agency model doesn't incent them to do that. The agency model incents them to spend as much of your ad dollars as possible so they get the largest commission possible.

01:53:29 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, and the reason why Christina and I both are in developer relations is because that's why we do what we do, because we're embedded with the community. We talk to people. We gain their trust by being genuine, being authentic, being transparent. People know when they talk to us that we are not going to be just making stuff up.

01:53:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the only way you can? Yeah, it's the only way you can do it Correct. It's the only way we sell At this point. We don't have a sales team anymore. It's all Lisa, our CEO, but she will tell people no. She will say look, not, we're not going to work for you. Let's discuss your marketing strategy, let's talk about how this works. She is very big on that, but unfortunately, very few agencies have the time or inclination to sit and listen. They just go. You know what's your cpm and when can you start?

01:54:19 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
yeah, yeah, people are not going to be easy to get to. No, we're getting harder to find, we're getting harder to figure out who is the good alignment and so specialized industries like what Christina does and what I do, and in Alex, he's making his own brand and so he's building an audience. This is where we're moving to. This is going to be. I think you're ahead of the game, but I think the whole world is going to be catching up to that.

01:54:45 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
And I think it's going to be better, because I think that the incentives around advertising based businesses always end up eating themselves. And we were talking about the, the crappification of Google search, and a big component of that is the movement of ads from the right rail to the top and then to look more and more like search results and then more and more of them. And so now when you go to Google, you get like did you mean to ask this? A question you didn't want to ask? And then also here's 17 ads Congratulations, there's your search result. If you pay for something, it can be better. And so I think probably, if enough people are willing to step up for Twit and they have a subscription base, that'll make for a more stable in time and therefore better service.

01:55:28
And I think that you know the thing I was working on at TechWench for a long time TechWench Plus. That is no longer with us. Rip was the same goal, like get away from the incentives of farming attention and trying to drive the max audience possible. I mean, there's a reason why the new york times is what it is today and mashable is not the trick is to pay for things you do means you have money the trick is to survive that through that transition right, which is not easy, not easy, so many are not and uh, including Rocket right, which is greatly missed.

01:56:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, I mean totally, and you know we ended up for a number of reasons, but definitely the ad market slowdown was a real part of it. Right, it made us have to do more and more to make sure that we were going to be giving our listeners who did, you know, pay for a subscription what they were wanting. But yeah, you just sometimes just have to call it, and we did no, but you're exactly right, making it through that transition period is difficult. I mean one of the, in retrospect, very smart things the Wall Street Journal did. Now they've made their paywall more and less porous over the years. They never went free for all. It was always a paid product and they were online early. Like they were online early, early, early. Like I had an online subscription when I was in middle school, um, and so my, my aunt and uncle got me for my birthday or something because oh yeah, because I was that kind of child they wanted to be a stockbroker no, I asked for it.

01:56:57
Wow, so yeah I. I don't know what that. I know exactly what that says about me, but yeah.

01:57:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was reading, I was having issues of Punch Magazine shipped to me overseas. It would take like three months to get to me when, I was a kid. I don't know what that says about me either. That was the British satire magazine.

01:57:18 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
While we're doing this story, I had a bunch of annual reports delivered to my parents' house because in the Wall Street Journal there was a little thing like a little pamphlet and you could check the boxes for where the report's from. I just checked all the industry boxes and like several hundred pounds of annual reports came to my house.

01:57:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My mom was like what did you buy?

01:57:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
And I was like you know what I'm saying.

01:57:44 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'm going to read bank earnings. And they were like our son sucks. Wesley, what did you do as a kid? Played Nintendo, yeah there you go.

01:57:52 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You're the smart one out of all of us. You had friends. Exactly, I was going to say you had friends Me. It was like I had a subscription to Variety.

01:58:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We were poor and Variety, wow Variety and the Wall Street Journal, wow had friends me. It was like I had a subscription to variety and we were poor and it's part of it wow, variety in the wall street journal.

01:58:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Wow, I watch a lot of pbs. Oh yeah, there you go. All right, that's good.

01:58:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We only got four channels, man I watched gilligan's island, so that tells you something. Uh, let's take a little break. More to come, and we have to talk about the rabbit, because you actually own one, christina the r1 um, I will go grab it go grab your rabbit that sounds filthy.

01:58:26
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02:02:52 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Show us your rabbit christina all right, this is the rabbit r1. Um, it is currently. I don't know if it's either charging or it's doing something. So, because the battery on it was dead, because, shocker, I haven't used it in a long time but yeah, this is the device.

02:03:12
Also, there's no real way to turn it off, so it's kind of like AirPods Max, where they just it's like, oh, it'll go into low power mode. I'm like you liar. So now it's like a 7%. I don't know if it's doing an update or if it's doing a charge. I'm not sure what. What is?

02:03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it doing. But no, this is the device, so it's cute.

02:03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like a rabbit on a wheel. It's cute. It is cute Teenage engineering designed Emily Shepard. Decided to do a little search. Uh, ed zitron wrote it up in his uh on his uh blog where's your ed at? Rabbit hold is the name of his. H-o-l-e-d is the name of his piece. And then coffee zilla also made a youtube video his. The youtube video has the most, uh, of course, sensationalistic headline 30 million dollar. Ai is hiding a scam. I don't know if it's a scam, but the company that makes it, in November 2021, raised $6 million for a next generation NFT project called Gamma, a decentralized organization that is sending 10K crew members into space to complete energy harnessing missions across the universe. It's not sci-fi. They actually were trying to raise money by selling an NFT Holding. A Gamma NFT would grant you exclusive membership to the Gamma Space Station Wow, including other perks like staking opportunities, tickets to Gamma Studios, limited edition merch and live events. Well, obviously this was a scam Is scam too harsh.

02:04:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, no, no, no. Look, I'm not going to call the rabbit a scam, because I have one. I will call the NFT thing a scam. Yeah, that I think you'll hear.

02:05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The same person who did this. The CEO of Gamma was, and is a guy named Jesse Liu. He's the co-founder of Rabbit. He's also on the board, by the way, at Teenage Engineering I don't does this tarnish the Rabbit We've also learned that the rabbit really is just an Android device running an Android app, that the AI involved is ChatGPT 3.5. And that every time you try to use it to do anything, it seems to fail. Have you ever been able to get an Uber with your rabbit?

02:05:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh, I would never input my Uber credentials into the rabbit. Here's the thing.

02:05:42
That, honestly, is my bigger concern with Rabbit. So it's fine in terms of and I think it's updated the models because it uses Perplexity under the hood and Perplexity is an OpenAI partner, so it's using the OpenAI APIs so you can have access to whatever model it wants to give you access to. So, asking it general questions, that's okay. The thing is, with the Uber and the DoorDash and the Spotify stuff, how that works and this was not properly explained, or if it was, I didn't pay attention until I got it is that what they have you do is when you go to this like holerabbittech thing and rabbit hole is a cute thing they're like okay, log into these services to connect your accounts. Well, I go to log into the services and I notice I'm like, huh, I'm on my Retina MacBook Pro and this text doesn't look super Retina. This thing's off.

02:06:29
Also, why is my password manager not autofilling my Spotify credentials? Oh, well, it turns out I'm not actually logging into a Spotify login through an OAuth connector, as I would expect, but instead they've hidden a VM using a web VNC client. So I'm actually logging into some random computer in the cloud with my credentials and that's how it's giving it access to my things Right. And then security people were able to pop some of those containers not the ones where you log in, apparently, with your credentials, but they were able to log into some of the ones, I guess, where it's supposed to be doing the ordering of the Uber or the DoorDash or what have you. And that makes me pause. Very much cloud stuff is and and I am going to guess that you have not spent a lot of money on on security because you did this thing in six months, so of course you haven't uh, but I uh no, they're not getting my uber credentials.

02:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no way I would even attempt to order an uber with it they have made a raise, 30 million dollars to make the device $60 million. $60 million, sorry. They sold quite a few. What a million of them. They sold a lot of them, right.

02:07:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They sold a lot. They sold a lot because I was in the very first batch, so I got mine. I didn't get mine as quickly as the people who and I'm at 16%. I don't know if that means charging or if that's what they're downloading an update. I don't know. I didn't get mine as fast as the people who were at the launch event in New York, but I got it within a couple of days of that and I was in the first bash. But they have many, many more bashes of people.

02:08:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were up until last week. I tried to order it and I'm so glad that when I tried to order it it was in the first round and the site didn't work. Yeah, thank God, I never tried again, my god, yeah no, I, I was.

02:08:24 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I was able to get mine and, and, and I got a year per proxy pro for free out of it, which is so you can't really complain because that's normally 20 a month that's 240 bucks.

02:08:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I'm saying.

02:08:33 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's more than you pay right, correct, so I'm, so I'm, you got a deal I've justified it, my, I've justified myself. Plus I get like a toy from my like my my graveyard collection of tech right.

02:08:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly.

02:08:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
This takes me from having to buy it later, right, but for people who really thought that it was going to be exactly what it showed off or didn't understand, you know, like, the nature of these sorts of projects, I can understand how they feel misled. The nature of these sorts of projects I can understand how they feel misled. What's concerning to me and some of this is anecdotal, but some of this is actually based on real stuff is that I know, at least as of 10 days ago, if you canceled your order, they would refund people fairly quickly. But a friend of mine, she ordered one and she tried to cancel her order and there's been no response. And there've been anecdotal reports that I've seen on Reddit that they're not really being responsive to the order cancellations. Now I can't speak to any of that. I can't speak to my personal friend, who you know, when Ashley told me oh yeah, I emailed them to cancel, haven't heard anything. That makes me a little bit more concerned. Maybe they've had more cancellations than they expected, I don't know. But yeah, I mean it's not scam, but it's also not a not what it was sold as going back to our comments about ai and trust correct, it is here's

02:09:49 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
an example again something coming out that's not quite what it was.

02:09:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In a way, this is too bad and I think the google failings with the the ai overview is too bad. A lot of this because I think there is real promise. Maybe I'm wrong but I think there's real promise with ai.

02:10:04
I think we've already seen some amazing uses of it. I think that, potentially, ai could be amazing for human beings in so many ways. It's very easy We've seen it happen before to fall into an AI winter where people throw up their hands, give up and move on, and I would hate to see these scams and failures chase people away from AI because I think the potential is so great. So isn't there a risk with all of this that we are going to scare people away from something that is potentially very good?

02:10:38 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I don't think so. I think people will just come back when they feel like it works, when there's something. Oh, by the way, how do I sound? We've lost internet. There's a severe thunderstorms here on my phone.

02:10:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you're breaking up a little bit. I saw you dropped off, so your power's out right now.

02:10:57 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
We have power lost. Internet, just the internet.

02:11:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting, so I will talk slowly, just to make sure that I can be clear. So all the packets arrive, thank you.

02:11:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, so when people feel that it's cooked, then they can feel that they can come back to it. I think, no matter what, you can't avoid AI. It will be sprinkled in through all of whatever tech. The.

02:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Internet's made a choice. I think people will just wait. The tech sector's made a choice. Yeah, All right. Good, I hope that's true. Elon says AI is going to take all our jobs, though, so that's fine.

02:11:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I hope he's right. You know what I want to do. I want to wake up all day and do art.

02:11:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I want to do. I want to wake up all day and do art. That's what I want to do. He was speaking at a tech conference in Paris, viva Tech 2024. He says probably none of us will have a job. He didn't give us a time frame. If you want to do a job that's kind of like a hobby, says Elon you can do a job, but otherwise AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want. Now, okay, so I don't work, so I have no money. He says oh well, there needs to be a universal high income, not to be confused with universal basic income. I don't know where this money comes from.

02:12:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right. Where does this money come from? Is it all just self-perpetuating?

02:12:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's not alone. I just saw somebody else say that in the next year, 50% of all jobs will disappear In the next year. Well, let me see if I can find that story. I think it was.

02:12:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That seems awfully optimistic.

02:12:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in 2025, that's almost next year, I think that's next year. Yeah, in 2025, that's almost next year, I think that's next year 50% of all jobs will disappear. Let me see who said this Elon Musk, probably right. It was somebody I thought was fairly intelligent.

02:13:00 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That'll make him happy, because then he won't have to hire people just to lay them off.

02:13:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's really what Elon wants. He doesn't. Elon doesn't want people. Some say 10 years.

02:13:10 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'm sure the Google search would give a good answer.

02:13:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the problem. I can't seem to find this article that I just read. I should have, I should have booked it, so you need recall yeah, gold, maybe it's Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs predicts 300 million jobs will be lost or degraded by artificial intelligence. This was last year, so it hasn't happened in a year.

02:13:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I don't know that's how many people they want to lay off.

02:13:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah 300 million they wish they could, they wish, they could Look, they could look at.

02:13:42 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Look at how much money we'll save if we can just lay off all these people. They'll never forget. No, never mind about the fact that that means no one will be able to buy your goods or services that you're selling. But but just think of the pure profit potential if we just get rid of all these pesky employees so I want to.

02:13:56 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I want to go back to the the elon quote and the idea about jobs as hobbies. There's an author named Ada Palmer, which is actually one of the reasons why the name Ada came back into my life, and it's one of the reasons why my daughter's named Ada. She wrote a book series called Terra Ignata I-G-N-O-T-A, and in this series, if I'm remembering correctly, there are people called vocers who are big on having a vocation. This is a post-scarcity society in some ways, and so these are people that like to do a lot more work than they're required to by society, because they find it to be personally fulfilling, and so there's a lot of science fiction out there that already digs into this question, yeah, but in the case of of ada palmer, it's 24, 54, it's not next year.

02:14:41
I'm leo, I'm not gonna lie. I have never looked at goldman sachs as the next oracle of delphi, okay you're right you're right. If it happens, you figure out where interest rates are going but you actually.

02:14:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It isn't unreasonable to wonder what's gonna happen um over the next 10 let's say 10 years, not one year, but over the next 10 years, with AI and jobs? Isn't it the case that AI could do a lot of these jobs right?

02:15:09 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes, yes, even our jobs. Go back to my dad's time.

02:15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to say no. No At a company called.

02:15:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
CH2M at a company called I think it was ch2m hill. When he worked there, they had like a typing pool and they had people that were paid to like help with the production of documents. All of those jobs were absorbed into word processors, computers and so forth, and so I think we're going to see not the elimination of jobs but instead people's productivity in certain areas be greatly increased, limiting the need for human inputs for those jobs and thereby reducing the total number of slots needed to get the same amount of work done. So AI is going to enhance humans and replace some jobs, but not replace humans, I think entirely. So that's the way I see things going, but it's probably not the pace people are hoping if they're accounting eps more than the quality of human life well, here's the good news if ai takes our jobs, at least we'll have more time to game.

02:16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I think I'm going to change the subject now from a you're all the way I'm back online oh good I'm back on like yes the internet's supposed to survive thunderstorms, I thought, but maybe I'm wrong. Especially fiber. It's underground. Yeah, what the heck? Are you a gamer, wesley? I know that these two are.

02:16:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'm a cell phone gamer. I'm a casual gamer. That doesn't count. Yeah, and Alex is not going to be a gamer anymore. He and Alex is not going to be a gamer anymore. He's going to have two kids.

02:16:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's got two kids. How does he find time? You'll see. He's talking about buying another second game.

02:16:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And he's running his own business. I mean, come on, you will not have time.

02:16:51 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I have solved the problem that you are describing, which is entitled not getting enough sleep. That's my solution. The children go to bed Well, the baby one right now goes to bed, the spouse goes to bed, I put the dogs to bed and then, from that moment on until midnight, is alex time.

02:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and what are you playing these days?

02:17:10 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
oh, leo, what a lovely question. Thank you for asking me. There's an amazing game called dyson sphere program made by a group of folks over in china called, I think, like youth cat studio or something. It is a factory automation game in which you build these awesome multi like um solar system factories, and it is insanely good. I have a hook line.

02:17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it like factorio or one of those kind of it's?

02:17:38 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
factorio with better graphics, yeah, I would say much better quality of life and also much more like going around the universe and doing stuff. It's, it's. I guys this game is amazing.

02:17:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's cheap, play it all right, it's on steam, uh, and, and the reviews are overwhelming, go ahead I was gonna say can I play this on my Steam Deck?

02:18:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I wouldn't.

02:18:04 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Because you build eventually. You build like multiple Dyson Spheres and you're flying around. It does get eventually CPU heavy. You need a big screen.

02:18:12 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah but I can use that on another thing too? Okay, no, I'll play it on my gaming PC. That's fine. I was just asking because I do like to. When I can play on my Steam Deck, I prefer to do that.

02:18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought, Christina, you might be an Animal Well fan. Have you played that yet? This is often claimed by many to be the game of the year. It's got very difficult puzzles, you know.

02:18:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, I'm into the aesthetic already though.

02:18:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's an 8-bit side scroller but it's got interesting puzzles, difficult puzzles. Anyway, I was just wondering. I've been reading a lot about that. I always look for recommendations for things to do from you. Christina Shows to watch I've been watching. I have to say I just watched two episodes of ripley last night on netflix. That is the most beautiful black and white it's beautiful, it's gorgeous very pretty. Um reminds me of a hitchcock in the sense that there's a lot of it does ominous feeling, but so far nothing ominous has happened well, I'm.

02:19:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm a massive fan of the uh, oh yeah, talented mr yeah that's what that's so. So for me, like I have mixed feelings about the netflix adaptation, but I for me it got better as it got along good, I actually kind of going back to, sort of going back to gaming best tv show I've seen this year, genuinely is fallout, fallout, yeah yeah, pretty amazing yeah yeah, uh, a jury has handed bungie as a landmark victory.

02:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, cheating software, the jury decided, violates copyrights. Now, it's not a massive sum. They, they awarded bungie 63 000. They, they found that Phoenix Digital, which owns the cheat mod site Aim Junkies, is guilty of violating copyrights by creating cheats for Destiny 2 and awarded them $63,000. Not enough, probably, to stop other companies from doing this, but this is the first time dmca has been used to protect a video game from cheats I'm torn about this one same.

02:20:34 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, I don't uh because you like cheating? No, I like destiny too. I've played a lot of that. I used to have a whole crew that I played with. We would get stomped by people who were actually good right or by people who are using cheats well, now I'm. Now I'm kind of thinking about why we were getting owned so hard, but I'll just say that it doesn't feel like an a proper application of copyright law yes, yeah, it's the dmca which is the problem exactly yeah, right, yeah, because my thought on this is like on the one hand, I'm actually like I think that cheats and things like this, when they're used in online play, actually really detract from the experience for everyone.

02:21:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
If you want to do it on your own and if it's like your own local thing, I don't care. Right, like mod, mod to your heart's content. I'm actually very pro game modding. Uh, again, going back to fallout, right, like that's a. I think I love. I love game mods, but I think when it starts to interfere, like with online play, especially something like destiny, not not a fan. Having said that, like like you, I don't know, like the dmca seems like a weird use case for this and I'm not super comfortable with having this being like oh well, this is a copyright thing, like it.

02:21:39 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Just I don't like Right because it sounds like it would actually make modding illegal and possibly legally dangerous and financially dangerous, which is dumb, because game mods, as you said, are fantastic and anyone who's played a game and modded it knows why.

02:21:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, like Carrie's mod.

02:21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or even Counter-Strike Without, you know, half-life. There is no Counter-Strike without mods.

02:22:02 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Or strike without you know half-life. There is no counter-strike without mods or like mods for baldur's gate 3 or crusader kings or whatever you know.

02:22:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean. In many cases those mods like give the game's life and give them our broader communities and bring people into them and and can sell more copies, frankly, than what you would have otherwise, because a lot of times the modders fix stuff that the developers who don't have time because they've moved on to another project or because you know it's difficult for them to do it. The modders fix stuff that the developers who don't have time because they've moved on to another project or because it's difficult for them to do it. They can fix stuff that other people can't.

02:22:28 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
They can also get around IP. So, for example, in Crusader Kings 3, there is a Game of Thrones mod that Paradox. Games could never make, because they would never be able to afford it.

02:22:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The people who are making that as a fan-based like literally full rebuild of the game, have made something that is that is ludicrously fantastic. Anthony nielsen asks in our discord if this could be used against emulators as well. I guess it could? We are in a golden age of emulators, now that apple's allowing emulators on ios finally.

02:22:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, this is huge well, the emulator case law is pretty settled. Um, uh, there's bleem, yeah, yeah, there were two lawsuits. There was bleem and there was virtual disc station. They were both playstation mods, one was for uh, pc, one was for mac, and in both cases sony lost pretty resolutely. Um, now the lawsuit still bankrupted most of those companies, but the case law for emulation is pretty solid. Now where people get into problems is how you distribute ROMs and other things, but the emulation itself is, I think, a pretty settled issue.

02:23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you see the co-pilot Minecraft, a Minecraft demo at Surface? Or you were probably busy preparing for a build. I was busy.

02:23:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So I know I saw, I saw like I guess in the highlight, like that certainly is like a.

02:23:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What an interesting use of AI. I mean talk about getting the young people comfortable with AI. You can use AI to help you in Minecraft, to show you a digital assistant that could show you, give you tips, show you how to build stuff Great use case, honestly yeah.

02:24:08 - Christina Warren (Guest)
If it works, if it works, that that actually could be. I mean, because how oftentimes many of us, when we're playing any of our games, you know we have like a browser next to us and we're typing things in and we're going through YouTube videos. And maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just bad at games Fair, but, like you know, we're like walking through the walkthroughs and we're like trying to figure things out. If I could get that while I'm doing the game, yeah, you know how?

02:24:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it's not just you. There was a huge market for those game walkthrough when they were books. Remember, you would buy the game and the book.

02:24:36 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah.

02:24:38 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
This is why I have my iMac next to my gaming PC. Yes, so that way I have a separate machine. So when I get to a puzzle in a game and I because I have- children. I don't have a lot of time.

02:24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
An excellent use for your $5,000 iPad. Pro. We've solved it, you're absolutely not even wrong. This is what it is.

02:24:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Spend $3,000 on your iPad Pro so you can walk through.

02:25:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I keep the Valheim Wiki open at all times as I'm playing, absolutely Because you couldn't use a Fire tablet that costs $4 to do the same thing?

02:25:08 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Absolutely not. No, you need the M4 chip.

02:25:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we are going to take a break, and then it's time for our IPs. Actually, one more gaming story that I think is kind of interesting nostalgically. Atari is buying Intellivision, ending the longest running gaming platform feud of all time. You had an Atari or you had an Intellivision. Now Atari which is, by the way, done very well with nostalgia, keeping nostalgia alive Uniting Atari and Intellivision after 45 years ends the longest running console war in history.

02:25:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I guess because it probably had to be the original one, right Like yeah, you had a 2600, you had an Intellivision, yeah, in 1979, mattel released the Intellivision, which competed directly against Atari's 2600.

02:26:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Intellivision sold an estimated 5 million units all told, I think it's probably safe to say that Atari won that one.

02:26:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Atari won. Yeah, yeah, my dad had well, I think we had both, but we had an Intellivision. I remember it came out before I was born and so my first console I remember is is the original Nintendo. But when I was in third grade I, in some closet buried someplace, I found the Intellivision box. I was like what is this thing? And then I, then I I couldn't get it connected because it didn't have like an RF cable or anything. I think I did eventually find a way to get it connected to a TV and my dad used to rave about how great the football game on it was, and I was like I don't know what you're talking about, because I have a super Nintendo now and and I I don't know why, why you were so obsessed with this thing, but he loved his television.

02:26:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's so funny. All right, let's take a little break and then we're going to talk about the well, I guess this would have fit into the end of the line for some history in technology in just a little bit. But first a word from our sponsor, the beginning of the line for a great customer experience. I'm talking about InTouch CX. Customer experience has changed dramatically thanks to modern tools and InTouch CX. Customer experience has changed dramatically thanks to modern tools, and InTouch CX can do it. They know that a major goal of your company is to give your customers an excellent customer experience, right? Intouch CX works with some of the biggest brands around the world to apply AI and smart automation to optimize the customer experience, to make it better for your customers and better for you for every touchpoint across the entire customer journey.

02:27:48
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02:29:42
We mentioned the end of the line for ICQ that's coming up end of next month. Congress just made the end of the line for the Elon Musk jet tracker. You may remember Jack Sweeney, the college student at University of Florida who created the Elon jet Twitter account in 2020. Elon always hated it. He called it assassination coordinates. Right Shadow banned Sweeney, then fully banned him. By the way, he's back on X for some reason. Taylor Swift, constantly dogged by complaints about her incessant air travel. Watch this video, which is hysterical. This is taylor has two private jets. This is the year 2023. They're making some stops. It looks like kansas city uh, there in the middle, I don't know. Uh, all over the, the jets are going on like crazy, and the reason that we could do this is because the tail numbers are public are public knowledge, right?

02:30:49
Uh, a lawyer for Swift served Jack Sweeney with a cease and desist order earlier this year. Elon, as you know, has been, you know, tried to buy it. Try to do anything you could to stop it. Uh well, Congress has intervened and now it's all over. By the way, a rare bipartisan vote, the first the amendment in the federal aviation administration reauthorization bill passed last week allows private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information. The tail number will no longer be associated with your name. The bill was signed into law on May 16th. Get this pass the Senate. Nothing passes the Senate 88 to 4, this one did Pass the House 387 to 26. There was unanimity, practically.

02:31:41 - Christina Warren (Guest)
God bless America, no more jet, like, absolutely, they're like nobody can do this anymore, even though and it's so funny like, obviously this, this kid popularized this, but at least for taylor swift I don't know about anyone else this practice had been very common in in the fandom for quite a long time. Sure, like they're like, no, no, no, no. Like there were tumblers dedicated to this like for a decade, um, and it was gross and it was creepy, and I always found it gross and creepy. That said, I was also like but it's legal and you know why, why should your tail number be allowed to be private? Um, I, I. There's a. There's a part of me, a cynical part, that wonders oh, do the politicians just not want to have their jets tracked?

02:32:22 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
yes, partially that. The supreme court, for example, and some billionaire friends.

02:32:26
But here's the thing if you don't want to be tracked, don't fly private if you want to right, or or fly through net jets like like right or if you're a tailor and you have two jets, um, and you fly around with them, people might notice because we have an open database of this sort of thing. Right, there was no problem here. There were people making decisions inside of a market and I find it gross that the billionaires have complained and congress has snapped to attention like five at the end of boot camp and gone okay, cool absolutely right, but if a cop kicks down my door and shoots me, it's right correct, correct, yeah the problem is, my bank account lacks some zeros right, right, we're not part of this.

02:33:10 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And, to be clear, like I, you know, I've thought, like the twitter account existing, I I never had a problem with him kicking the kid off of twitter. I never had a problem with that. Right, like, I think that if you're saying I don't want people who share this sort of information, that's my terms of service, fine, is it hypocritical if you talk about how much you care about free speech? Sure, but like, the whole thing with Elon Musk is hypocrisy. But, yeah, I mean to me, even though I personally find some of these services and people who do some of this tracking stuff, yeah, it can get kind of gross. I'm like, yeah, but that's how the law works, but not anymore. Not anymore, because people got embarrassed privacy is a luxury item.

02:33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really basically the bottom line of all of this. If you got the, got the scratch, you can be private privacy.

02:33:55 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Privacy for those who can afford it exactly congress for those who can afford it.

02:34:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the best congress money can buy. Don't you knock it. Yes, spotify is going to break every car thing it ever sold. I have one, I'm so mad oh, so the idea was tell us how this worked. It was for your car. There it is. Is that it was?

02:34:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
for it's for your car. Yeah, this is it. It's not plugged in right now because? Because it's not, but because I don't have enough USB-C things to power it, so it was for your car. I never used mine with my car. I got it for $30 or $20 when they were on like, I guess, closeout.

02:34:33
The idea would be you would plug it into your car. It basically would just be a remote control that connects to your iPhone or your Android and then have a great touchscreen on it that had a really nice little wheel that you could turn to control things and a really nice way of interfacing with Spotify. Now, what I did with mine is I just connected it to my computer and used it in a great way.

02:34:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was like a little Spotify radio for your computer, correct, oh, that's cool.

02:34:55 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It was just a great like always-on thing, and what was great about it is the yes, it might be paired to my phone, but it could control wherever spotify was playing. So spotify is playing out of my computer speakers fantastic, I can see what's playing. I can scroll to the next thing. I don't have to bother with spotify on my computer. I've just got this great little toy, but they're gonna kill it and I'm so mad at them. I'm so mad at them. I know I only paid 30 for it, but at least let us hack it like. If you're gonna do this, then I don't know, maybe this is what the eu should care about okay, most people who bought it spent 90 on it.

02:35:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how much the list was. They only made it for a year. They stopped producing it a year at less than a year after it went on sale. Uh, now, two years later, they're going to turn off the servers december 9th and that's it on your car thing. And no refund.

02:35:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And it's so dumb yeah no, refund, no. And then what bothers me is it's like okay, you, I get it, you don't want to continue supporting this? Fine, can you at least? I mean, maybe, maybe this should be a thing the EU should focus on, right? We're like oh, we, you know, want to make sure that, um, there's no unfair business practices. Well, what about the unfair business practice of selling a device and then bricking it and then like just refusing to say, oh well, we're not going to give you any way of hacking?

02:36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it. Did you ever own a Chumby? Yes of course I did, of course you did. Same thing happened to the Chumby, which was like a little hacky sack with a screen on it.

02:36:20 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It was so dumb. But, you know what it?

02:36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was so dumb Because they open sourced it. Somebody picked it up. The community came in. The community came in.

02:36:28 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They're like we will have your stupid little widgets available forever, and that would be great.

02:36:34 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Why is Spotify bricking it?

02:36:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's the thing I'm not clear on, oh well, they're saying that they just don't want to maintain the stuff anymore and it's all about solidifying their brand. Here's what I really think it is they just introduced a new font because they don't want to pay for the font licensing for the old font, and I bet that they can't remotely update the hardware.

02:36:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my god, that is the lamest thing I've ever heard.

02:36:55 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And I used to work for.

02:36:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Prime and Epony.

02:36:57 - Christina Warren (Guest)
This is just my theory. I have no idea if it's really about the font.

02:36:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That makes perfect sense.

02:37:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But the font timing is the same thing. So this is just my completely could be completely conspiratorial, like I could be sharing bad information, but this is my pet theory, which is they were like yeah, we don't have any way of, we don't want to, we don't want to update this to use the font that we don't pay for licensing for anymore anymore.

02:37:18 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So infinite money for joe rogan, right, right, but not enough money to keep the hardware they sold you alive right that.

02:37:25 - Christina Warren (Guest)
To me it was 90. I mean I didn't pay that, but a lot of people did so this is lame.

02:37:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This new font is called spotify mix. I never I didn't understand now you've explained it why they? Why they had to have a font. Nobody else has their own personal font.

02:37:40 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They were paying license fees yeah, they're paying a license fee, yeah, so now, what you could do in that case is you could just, you know, buy like perpetual rights yeah, that's what we do on the twit website and we pay like 60 bucks a year or whatever to to use a special font.

02:37:56
Yeah, and and I don't know what the terms were on their particular font, but I think that it was one of those where, like, because they have web apps and whatnot, they were being charged for Anyway, so they created their own, and I mean, you know, github, we have our own font. What we did, though, which was great- oh, I use the GitHub font.

02:38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the.

02:38:14 - Christina Warren (Guest)
GitHub font.

02:38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you open sourced it. Anybody can use it.

02:38:18 - Christina Warren (Guest)
anytime, anybody can use it yeah, and are you talking about monospace? Because I use this in my uh, I love monospace. It's a gorgeous font yeah yeah, monospace, and then we also have mona sands and um. We also have like there. There are a bunch of um options we have now. But yeah, the the github fonts are open source, but it originally started it was a font that we'd paid for and then we worked with that foundry to open source it because we made some modifications and we were like, okay, it's a great coding font.

02:38:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's monospaced, it's got ligatures. I use it in Emacs and in my terminal as well. I really like monospaced, love it, yeah, and it's got like many, many, many families. It's a very flexible font.

02:39:04 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, many families it's a very, uh uh, flexible font. Yeah well, maybe spotify will release mix. No, they won't never.

02:39:08 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
No of course they won't, but sorry to talk over. I I'm gonna call this out because I see this all the time. They had layoffs and I can't help to say that this is probably tied to this as well. They don't have the people to maintain the servers. They don't have focus to be able to push things that are considered experimental or considered taking a chance. They are just, if it's not AI, that's the only thing that they're willing to try to put any specific focus on, but I think that they don't have the people that made this.

02:39:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Last month Daniel Ek admitted that the 1,200 people they lay off impacted the company quote more than anticipated. Uh really.

02:39:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They lay off 17% of the staff. This is the kind of thing that happens.

02:39:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's sad. By the way, a lot of those people got laid off because podcasts weren't making it, which is weird, because they pay Joe Rogan hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Call Her Daddy got, I think, 20 million a year for three years. I think actually those shows probably do make money, just not enough money to support the entire, but they're not exclusive now. Right.

02:40:23 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So now they're trying to audio books, which they're also trying to not fully pay, what I think is a reasonable market grade for Correct. I love Spotify. I have been a Spotify user for so long, but the company kind of just always sucks slightly more than I think it should. I sound like a downer. It's a great service.

02:40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, here's a bigger downer. The doge has passed. Kibosu, the side-eyeing shiba inu, who inspired the doge being passed away this week at the age of 18. Oh, there she is, she inspired. Yeah, she was a very good girl. Her story's interesting. She was turned into a pound, along with dozens of her pound mates from a puppy mill which went out of business 19. She was sent to a Japanese dog shelter after the shutdown of a puppy mill. She was adopted by a kindergarten teacher, atsuko Sato. To save her, she took her home. Sato created a blog. I get the distinct feeling Sato. Basically, this is her whole family and the rest is history. You can actually still see the blog right here with pictures of a Cabosa, oh Cabosu. What a good doggy 18 years old.

02:41:54
She'd been sick for some time 18 is a good long life For a dog.

02:42:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's like very high end and how loved was this dog right, so loved.

02:42:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it makes me want to get one Also. This inspiration for Dogecoin. In fact, I think Dogecoin had her picture on the Dogecoin and there are a few people who made some money on the Doge.

02:42:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm not one of them. I, for I didn't sell mine in time I was. I was preoccupied, well, no, cause, it happened right when the peak happened, right when my nephew was born, and I was preoccupied with that um which, uh, that I, that I didn't sell, and um, yeah, anyway, how much do you have still? Oh, I don't know. I think I have like $500 or $600 worth.

02:42:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But at one time was it worth thousands.

02:42:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh yeah, at one time it was worth thousands. I mean, look, I still, for the most part I made some money off of it, but I would have made more. I've lost like $300.

02:42:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Didn't Father Robert make quite a bit of money? He sold, I think, at the right time, early, oh, he's so too early. Ah, it's too bad. He found more. I think he made some money, but the problem is he's not allowed to make money. He's a jesuit priest working at the vatican. Whatever he makes has to go to the church, so it doesn't really matter. Well, how much? How much do you have, john? How 20 000 doge coins?

02:43:20 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
is that like a lot of money? Or is that like four cents, john? I'm not sure what.

02:43:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The conversion is right now not bad, but probably worth tens of thousands at one time at the peak. That was the. That was the meme that elon tanked right yeah does twit?

02:43:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
does the twit club take doge? Do you guys take crypto for? Uh, your?

02:43:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
thing. Okay. So there's a sad, sad story there, which was before the club. We had a tip jar, like everybody did back in the day, and at one point about 15 years ago, I said, hey, we should take Bitcoin. So I started taking Bitcoin and have accumulated now 7.85 Bitcoin in the tip jar, but at some point I forgot the password, leo. So I have roughly what is that? $400,000 worth of Bitcoin that I can't access. So we stopped with the. We stopped with the crypto. We only take American dollars.

02:44:18 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's amazing and it's also why I don't feel bad about having started to cover that coin back when it was like 50, because one of two things would have happened if I had purchased some I would have sold it for 75 or I would have lost it and had zero. But there's no way I would have managed to. I would. It was like no box days you know.

02:44:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, it was well, it was so. So what would have happened to you would have been what happened to me, which which was I first wrote about it when it was like $10 a coin or something, and then I was first told that I had to, if I ever for the you know your appearance of impropriety you have to get rid of it.

02:44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You found it. Is there a password on there anywhere, wesley, or is that just a lid? That's the actual plastic tip jar that we had in the studio fantastic there wasn't. There wasn't any bitcoin in that.

02:45:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So no, but don't feel bad, because yeah, don't feel bad.

02:45:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Six days ago and alex may 22nd is bitcoin pizza day. Oh yeah, this is the anniversary of the day. A florida man paid 10 000 bitcoin for two pizzas. It was the first bitcoin transaction. Uh, in 2010, it wasn't that long ago. 14 years ago, he arranged to get two papa john's pizzas. For what would today be worth? What is it? 680 million dollars, something like that that hurts my soul it does.

02:45:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's like that hurts even more than like the fact that if you really want to be awesome, to be doubly depressed, just think about how much inflation has has increased the the price of like papa john's pizza well, honestly, even even two dollars is too much to pay for papa's you're, you're not even wrong, but now two of them it's it's 45 minimum, it's 45 dollars and uh, yeah, so, yeah all right.

02:46:14 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
The problem with with everything that I deliver now to my house is that I always somehow spend like a hundred dollars to delivery. I don't know how everything became so expensive everything's a hundred dollars now.

02:46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just everything, just, yeah. Everything it's a hundred dollars at least. Yes, here is the uh, the posting from 2010 this guy was celebrating. I just want to report I successfully traded 10 000 bitcoins for a pizza. Thanks, jerkoes. Congratulations, laszlo. A great milestone reached, boy that aged like milk. Oh boy.

02:46:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, I mean, look, we all thought that it was going to be worth like a fraction of a cent, right? That was the whole thing. So in his mind he's like, hey, who cares? It took me 20 minutes to mine this. I might as well use this for something.

02:47:04 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No one's going to be dumb enough to actually use this as currency people still don't, because it has like I mean three transactions per month.

02:47:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, correct, because of it, because of how expensive it is to do the, the transactions and whatnot, yeah yes, if you want to use bitcoin, it's like mailing gold.

02:47:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's kind of inefficient and silly one, uh.

02:47:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Final note uh, what. One of the creators of the personal computer, a man who made many computers, many computers for digital equipment, gordon Bell, passed away this week at the age of 89. Founded the Computer Museum, a beautiful computer history museum down the peninsula some years ago.

02:47:39 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh, I've been there.

02:47:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's beautiful. I interviewed him some years ago. Oh, I've been there. Yeah, it's beautiful. I interviewed him many years ago. He because his wife, gwen, who co-founded the museum with him, had Alzheimer's. He realized the importance of you know, kind of remembering anything. And I don't know if you met him in the day when he would wear a camera around his neck that was recording every few seconds everything he did, with the idea this is way ahead of his time the idea of having some sort of repository of everything that happened. He didn't have the AI at the time to analyze it?

02:48:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, he had the limitless pen.

02:48:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He had the limitless before it was around, recall, don't recall. Yeah right, limitless pen, like he was doing the limitless before it was around for total recall. Yeah, he called. Oh, yeah, right, he called it. Uh, the meme. I can't remember what he had a name for it. When I interviewed him he was wearing it. Um, anyway, the the late gordon bell was a great engineer, uh research, uh, researcher. He worked at digital equipmentipment, opened Microsoft's first research lab, joined the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab full time in 1995. Oh, it was called my Life Bits, a database designed to capture all of his life's information in a cloud-based digital database in 1995.

02:49:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Damn, look at you, gordon, ahead of the curve Yep in a cloud-based digital database in 1995. Damn, look at you, gordon, ahead of the curve Yep. I mean digital equipment is one of those companies like most people don't know because you know Compaq bought them and then whatnot, but like they were really, from what I have heard, only after the fact, but from what I understand you would correct me if I'm wrong on this, leo but like they really were on the forefront of a lot of early.

02:49:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, absolutely, they were the first. They were the VAXs, the first mini computers. They were. It was huge. They call a data nation, called him the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers. He was a computer architect at the very beginning of the of the computer era. Gordon Bell, great man, and I very much enjoyed interviewing him many years ago. I think it's on our triangulation somewhere. Oh, cool, that brings us to the close of a fascinating fun and I'm not surprised, thanks to the great Christina Warren Love talking to you. Every time we can get you on, we will. Christina is a senior developer advocate at GitHub, filmgirl at film underscore, girl on all social networks. And I was going to talk to you about Shein and Timu, but we'll have to save that for another day.

02:50:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Save it for the next one.

02:50:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, louise Misaka's had a great piece on a big technology, about how they snuck up on amazon mostly, interestingly, uh timu by buying ads in middle-sized markets, not major markets huh yeah kind of an interesting strategy, clever strategy. Thank you, christine. Anything you want to, anything you're up to these days.

02:50:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, I mean, you know the GitHub YouTube channel. I do content there just about every week, so youtubecom slash GitHub. Check that out, but yeah.

02:50:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, we love Christina. It's always great to have you on. Thank you, christina. Thank you for having me. Youtubecom, slash, github Mr Wesley Faulkner always a pleasure. Can't tell you who he works for, but I can tell you he's at Wesley83 on the Mastodon, so so nice to have you on Anything you want to plug your chickens, anything.

02:51:20 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I have a shout out that I would like to say. So I'm on another podcast. One of the others is it's called Community Pulse. We talk about community and developer relations and I was one of my co-hosts we had he worked for another company, I won't say, but his name is Jason Hand and he's a great guy, and we were.

02:51:44
He was asking me, like, what am I doing this week?

02:51:47
And I was told I was going to be on Twit and he said, if you get on Twit, please make sure you say Leo Laporte, you had a marketed effect on my journey through tech.

02:51:59
You helped change my you, you helped change my life. You helped like you were there since you know, back in the day when you're on cable, and he, he felt like he had a kinship with you and, um, I wanted to, he, he, he asked me if I would be willing to share that with you and I said, of course he's like and I I also want to like double down on that and saying like being on the show is, you know, is a huge bucket list check item for me, but also for those who I think Jason represents, is that you touch a lot of lives, not just now, but way back then and all the years between, way back then and all the, the, the years um between and um wanted to make sure that you understand how much you mean, not only to mean, but so to so many people out there that's so sweet Well thank you, I'm going to break down into tears.

02:52:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You must work with him, Christina, cause he's a I used to. I used to work with him actually. Yeah, I used to work with Jason Hand.

02:53:00 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I worked with him for a number of years. He's fantastic guy. So shout out to jason hand and also plus one to everything he said oh golly, makes me feel old jason.

02:53:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi, jason, and thank you for the very kind words.

02:53:13 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's really you're welcome really, by the way, what you're talking about, um, uh, the person that died, um gordon bell, and I want to get to gordon bell. I want to get to the age when I die. No one asks what I died of, so that's oh, yeah, we didn't ask.

02:53:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was 89. 89. It's pretty much obvious.

02:53:31 - Christina Warren (Guest)
He died. We were like congratulations.

02:53:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good run. Like the Shina Ibu, he had a good run, you know.

02:53:40 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
There he is. Is that a triang?

02:53:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
good run. Yeah, you don't say, oh, bungee jumping, is that a triangulation episode? Yeah, it is Great. Gordon Bell, what a character. And you can't see it. But around his neck he's wearing that camera that records everything that happens in his life. Well, thank you, that was very nice of you. I appreciate it. Wesley, it's really. Honestly, I feel very privileged to get to be hanging with people like you and Christina and Alex. I am the lucky one I have a very blessed life to get to know people like you. In fact, I thank Stacey every time I see her for introducing us. I appreciate it. Mr Alex Wilhelm, who is caretaking my home, my family home, home for me. He's living out in the back. It's very nice that you're doing that. He has launched a brand new enterprise and everybody I hope everybody listening to the show, is now subscribed to cautiousoptimismnews. I know I have.

02:54:38 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I was going to take Wesley's very kind words and turn them around and say rude things about you. Yeah, I wish you would, but since you started off with something lovely, I feel like now it would just be unthankful.

02:54:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We go back a long way, long enough for you to have absolute scorn and disdain for me.

02:54:57 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, what's interesting about just thinking about Twit over the years is just how long I've been coming by and how consistent you've been, leo, because I've done podcasting for a while. You've done podcasting for a while 20 years, baby and it's hard to stay as on point as time goes on and somehow every time I come on Twit, you have good energy, and that's not easy. So 10 points to you. Thank you, againit. You have good energy and that's not easy, so 10 points to you, thank you again, and you have more hair than me, so minus 10 points.

02:55:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The key is surrounding yourself with great people, not only the people on camera, but the people behind the scenes. Kevin king filling in for benito gonzalez this week. Thank you, kevin. Our studio manager, jammer b, and honestly, the best thing about twit is the full community, not just the people who are on our panels, but all the people who watch and listen, who participate with the show on our Discord or members of Club Twit. We really the community is what it's all about, and I feel totally blessed. From the days we did the screensavers, we've been able to have a great community of geeks and nerds and I've been able to participate in it, and that is a blessing, absolute blessing.

02:56:09 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I know it's Alex's time. I don't want to just but Alex's my first twit. Alex and I drove to Petaluma together. Really. Yes, and then we connected that way, oh my gosh. And then Christina and I, we still hang out every once in a while. I was Christina Milanese at South by Southwest as well, carolina.

02:56:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:56:32 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Carolina Milanese and then, like Amy Webb, I mean it just feels like it's your community that you built here.

02:56:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a great community. It's amazing. It is Super smart people who are really genuinely interesting and interested, and what a blessing you all are, thank you. So I'm right back at you, okay, except for you, alex, that's totally reasonable.

02:56:54 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I wouldn't hang out with me either.

02:56:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I love you, Alex. In fact, the next time I'm on Rhode Island, I'm coming up, knock on your door and taking you out.

02:57:02 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Just give me like a two-hour warning and I will take you out to any restaurant in town and buy you lunch.

02:57:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to see the babies and Liza, your beautiful wife. You have a good life, alex, in a very nice house. Yes, we've been working on it. Thank you all for being here. We love doing Twit. I am very lucky to be able to spend this time with you and thank you. If you like the show, please join the club. That's what's going to keep this show on the air. It's the only thing at this point that can keep this show going. I know I'm ready. Are you Twittv slash club Twit?

02:57:34
We do the show every Sunday afternoon 2 to 5 pm Pacific time, that's 5 to 8 pm Eastern time, that is 2100 UTC. You can watch us do it live on YouTube, youtubecom slash twit, slash live for all of our shows. That's where the live streams live. Of course, club Twit members get to watch not just during the show, but before and after as well. There's often some fun stuff before and after. There was today. You can also get the show on the website. At twittv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech. Look at all that. Look at all the ways you can get it. You can get it on Spotify, you can get it on iTunes, basically any podcast player you can find, subscribe and that way you'll get it automatically of a Sunday evening, just in time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you so much for letting me be part of your life for the last 20 years. Here's to 20 more. Another twit is in the can Bye-bye this is amazing.