This Week in Tech Episode 920 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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TW this week in Tech. A special visit coming up from Corey, Dr. O. He's got a brand new Kickstarter you're gonna want to know all about. We'll also talk about the assault on libraries from publishers. We'll talk about chat G P T with our other guests, c Thompson from the register, Georgia Dow, the psychotherapist, and Renee Ritchie of YouTube. We'll also talk about the TikTok ban and a whole lot more. Plus, Mr. And Mrs. Pickles have a baby. It's all coming up next on Twitter. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.

(00:00:48):
This is twit this week at Tech episode 920. Recorded Sunday, March 26th. 2023. Biological boot loaders this week at Tech is brought to you by aci. Learning Tech is one industry where opportunities outpace growth, especially in cybersecurity. One third of information security jobs require a cybersecurity certification. To maintain your competitive edge across audit IT and cybersecurity readiness visit go dot aci learning.com/twitch. And Buy Collide. Collide is a device trust solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps, it's zero trust For Okta, visit collide.com/twit. Book a demo today and buy noom. Stop chasing health trends and build sustainable healthy habits with Noom s psychology based approach. And check out Noom s first ever book The Noom Mindset. A deep dive into the psychology of behavior change, available to buy now wherever books are sold. And sign up for your trial at noom.com/twix and buy Shopify. Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere. This is Possibility Howard by Shopify. Sign up for a $1 a month trial period to get your business to the next level today. Visit shopify.com/twit. All lower kiss.

(00:02:21):
It's time for twit this week at Tech to show. We cover the latest tech news this time with three Canadians, two Brits, and two Americans, which sounds like a very large seven person panel, but it's just four of us, but five of us. But we got one guy who's really throwing the averages off. Cory Dau is here. He is both a Canadian by birth. A a Brit by dual passport, right? Yes. And an American by triple passport. He is. See now did you have to, to take the American citizenship? Didn't you have to reneg the others? No, I just had to for swear loyalty to

Cory Doctorow (00:02:58):
Foreign. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:03:00):
<Laugh>. Alright, so let's all be clear. He has Fores sworn any loyalty to foreign potentates. However, his loyalty to the US is maybe in a little bit in the question. We'll get to that in a second. I

Cory Doctorow (00:03:12):
Also have to promise to carry a gun for America if need be. But given that I'm a 51 year old man with two artificial hips and cataracts, it seems unlikely I'm gonna get drafted to

Leo Laporte (00:03:20):
Get citizenship, you have to say I would be willing to bear arms for the us

Iain Thomson (00:03:25):
Oh yeah. Oh yes, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:03:26):
Oh, another naturalized citizen. Hello, Mr. <Laugh>, naturalized citizen. Ian Thompson, US Editor

Iain Thomson (00:03:33):
Register. I'm not American citizen yet, and I am considering it. But Cory is a, is absolutely right. When you look through the, I mean, when you going through the citizenship test, they will say, you can be drafted to serve in the defense of the United States. Wow. And it's like, my God, if there's that down on the list, they're coming from someone like me. Good

Leo Laporte (00:03:52):
Luck. There's actually, well,

Cory Doctorow (00:03:53):
I'll be able to outrun them at that point. If they're, that, if they're scraping that bottom of the barrel

Leo Laporte (00:03:57):
<Laugh>, they won't

Cory Doctorow (00:03:57):
Catch,

Leo Laporte (00:03:59):
Hey, Russia did. It could happen. In fact, given your, given your slavi heritage, you too could be conscript conscripted by. Well,

Cory Doctorow (00:04:08):
So I can get a Russian passport, a Belarusian passport, and an US Baja passport as well. I have not gotten those, I have no desire to, to, to travel to countries where they've, you know, had an ethnic purge or anything. Yeah. I don't know what else I did use those passports for. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (00:04:22):
Well this was quite a problem when I was going for citizenship because my sister was born in what was then Northern Rhodesia is now Zambia. My father was born in what's now the capital of Pakistan, who was then the British Empire of India. And it was like, just put British Empire of India down on the floor that way they're not gonna argue about it.

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
Well, where's the Scotland Park come in?

Iain Thomson (00:04:44):
Oh, my dad's always been to Scotland. Oh, alright. But Scott's move everywhere. We, you know, we, we engineer the world. We built San Francisco cable car system. The Golden Gate Park. That's right. That's right. You know, this is what we do. I

Leo Laporte (00:04:55):
Haven't even gotten to the end of the line, but I do have two people who cannot be drafted by the United States at least. From Canada, I have Renee Ritchie, creator liaison at the YouTube. Hi Renee. Hello, Leo. I am not a cat.

Cory Doctorow (00:05:10):
I'm still not a cat.

Leo Laporte (00:05:11):
Still not a cat. That's, but I'm here <laugh> and wonderful to see you. Long time host on you too. For more than a decade on Mac Break Weekly. We miss you, but you're doing such good work stopping the swearing on YouTube. We really appreciate all you all

Cory Doctorow (00:05:25):
You No starting it

Leo Laporte (00:05:26):
Again. Oh yeah. Restarting the profanity. Yes. It's great to have you. And your next door neighbor is here. Georgia Dow. Hi, Georgia.

Cory Doctorow (00:05:37):
Hello.

Leo Laporte (00:05:38):
Youtube star, Georgia Dow also a licensed psychotherapist. Should anybody feel the need? It's great to have you. Wow.

Cory Doctorow (00:05:47):
Nice to be here.

Leo Laporte (00:05:48):
Lot of people here. But I wanna start with Corey cuz he can't stay the whole show. But I did want to mention his new Kickstarter, Corey Red Team Blues. What's this about?

Cory Doctorow (00:06:00):
Yeah, so this is my next novel. It's the first book in a trilogy. It's about a guy called Marty Hench, who's a 67 year old hard charging forensic accountant, <laugh>, who's been in Silicon Valley for 40 years, winding

Leo Laporte (00:06:12):
X scams.

Cory Doctorow (00:06:14):
And it's his last, it's his last one last job. He gets pulled in by a friend who's a legendary cryptographer, who unwisely built a backdoor for his cryptocurrency, which is now escaped into the wild. Marty has to recover the keys, which turns out to be the easy part. Then he ends up and caught between a three-way war between Narcos Money launderers and rogue three letter agencies. And what it really is, is it's like an anti finance finance novel. It's a novel about the kind of bitter disappointment of a, an internet that once held the promise of technical liberation and has become a place of technical control and extraction. And it was a fun book to write. I wrote it in six weeks flat. The last book I did like this, it was little brother. I gave it to my wife.

(00:06:59):
I rolled over at two in the morning the next night. She was sitting up in bed and I was like, what are you doing? And she said, well, I just had to find out how it ended. Know my, my publisher three days later bought this book in two sequels. They're gonna run in reverse chronological order. So they're, this is his last mission. We go all the way back to his first in the 1980s through the next two books. And they're, they're, you know, swept all of the trades. It's got star reviews and, and all the, the trade magazines. But the one thing is that, as with all my books, Amazon Audible will not sell the audio book because there's no d r m on it. And so, I am Kickstarting A D R m free edition. I go into the studio tomorrow with Will Wheaton here in la and we are gonna record a really fantastic audiobook, as has been every one of the audiobooks wills recorded with me and the Kickstarter pre-sales, the audiobook, the hard cover, the ebook, d r m free, obviously. And I think in addition to being a way to, you know, fund this independent production and, and treat Amazon as damage and route around it, it's also a way to show other people that, you know, you don't have to submit to the bullying tactics and lock in of a, of a monopolist. Just to, just to reach your audience.

Leo Laporte (00:08:06):
I love the URL for this is kickstarter.com/project/doctoral/red Team Blues. Another audio book that Amazon won't sell <laugh>, although the short, the short URL is just

Cory Doctorow (00:08:18):
Red tin blues. That'll just forage you there. Red team blues.com. <Laugh> we'll just forage you there. But yeah, I mean, Amazon won't sell my audiobook, so Oh, really?

Leo Laporte (00:08:26):
Cool. My, well, let's be fair. Is it that Amazon won't sell it or that you won't allow them to sell it?

Cory Doctorow (00:08:32):
Well I went to Amazon and said, you can sell my audio books. Just don't put d r m on them as you promised you wouldn't when you bought Audible. Cause Oh, they Audible, they said they were getting ready to dm.

Leo Laporte (00:08:42):
Audible's always had D rm. You know, it's not hard to strip it off, but they've always had D R M and I always just assumed it was the publishers that insisted on it. There are audio bookstores no Audible that don't have a D r M on it.

Cory Doctorow (00:08:56):
That's right. Well, all of them except for Audible and Apple Books, which is a front end four audible, allow you to choose whether there's d r M. The thing about this D r m and, and this kind of resolves the mystery under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201, it is more illegal for you to remove d r m from an audiobook that I made with my blessing than it is for you to pirate that audiobook. Right. If I give you the tool to remove d r m from my audiobook that I made and paid for, I commit a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence in a $500,000 fine law for a first offense. The maximum penalty civil and criminal for making an infringing copy of that book is only $400,000. Wow. And so, you know, it, it is obvious when you put it that way, why Amazon would wanna make sure that they have d r m in all the books, because it means that if someone offers me more money for my audio books to take my books off Audible and sell them somewhere else, I have to bet that my audience is willing to throw away all the audio audiobooks they've ever bought to follow me to a rival platform because I can't authorize them to remove the D R m and Amazon's not gonna send me a list of all my customers so I can send them free download codes for another platform.

(00:10:06):
So I'm just stuck. Right. So I've always had this position that I'm just not gonna be bait in a sticky trap. And, and here we are, you know, more than a decade after Amazon purchased audible, it's now 90% of the audiobook market. And they are engaged in rampant wage theft. The Audible Gates scandal accounted for at least a hundred million in wage theft from independent audiobook creators and, and still not giving creators the choice about whether they wanna lock their listeners to Amazon's platform, not just for the term of copyright, which is 90 years on these commercial works. But forever

Leo Laporte (00:10:43):
T rm I should just explain, is copy protection, digital rights management, for people who don't want to fire up Wikipedia and look it up. Yeah. <laugh>.

Cory Doctorow (00:10:52):
Yeah. It's just, it's an encryption scheme. It doesn't work very well because the way that it works

Leo Laporte (00:10:56):
Strip off,

Cory Doctorow (00:10:57):
Frankly. Yeah. I scramble the book and then I give you the book with a player that has the key to un scramble it. And then I bet that you're never gonna figure out where in that player I hid the key. Yeah. The technical term for this in security research is wishful thinking <laugh>. So, you know, it's not like a thing that stops people from pirating audio books. You don't need to strip d r m off to pirate audio books. You just type, you know, book name space, mp3 free download pirate into your favorite search engine. You can just get it right. The only thing this does is prevent actual proprietors creators and publishers from creating legitimate legal businesses that present alternatives to Amazon and would discipline Amazon and its dealings with creators and with audiences. Cuz Amazon's now sticking ads in the audiobooks you pay for, you know, which again is just Yeah. I mean, and if they can control what player you listen to, they can stop you from skipping ads.

Leo Laporte (00:11:48):
You just explained by the way, why the record industry's going after ISPs. Now <affirmative> and and even worse, when after Quad nine a a d n s resolver, they can't stop the piracy. So what they wanna do is stop you from finding the pirate sites. They, they actually won their case. I was shocked they won their case against Quad nine.

Cory Doctorow (00:12:10):
Yeah, yeah. It's you know, I think that the lesson of the streaming services has been that if you give people a reasonable offer at a reasonable price, they'll choose it. I think the other lesson of the streaming services is that no one ever bought a book or a record because they wanted an entertainment executive to make more money. And so, you know, if we, if we show people that there is an equitable arrangement, people will opt into it. And the people who won't, we're never gonna opt into it. It's the, the, you know, I don't compete with piracy. I compete with all the things you could do that aren't listening to an audiobook, playing games, you know, going for a walk in the park, zooming, looking at websites with names that we can't mention cuz it's a family friendly show. You know, all of those things are my competitors. And the piracy is like on the list of things that, that cause people not to listen to my books. You know, piracy is way, way down there in, in terms of, of what I compete with.

Leo Laporte (00:13:09):
And yet publishers are working hard well now to put libraries out of exist. See, we talked last week archive. Yeah. We talked last week about internet archive which lost its case this week in in a lower court ruling. Sure. For what it calls what is it? Cloud library distribution. It's shot,

Cory Doctorow (00:13:32):
It's, it's controlled digital

Leo Laporte (00:13:34):
Lending. Controlled digital lending. Cdl. Yeah, there you go.

Cory Doctorow (00:13:36):
Yeah. Cdl.

Leo Laporte (00:13:37):
Yeah. So what, just a bit, let me make sure I understand what was happening. So the internet archive, which is the way back machine, it's archive.org. It's really the library of the internet and a really valuable resource for everybody. In fact, they, they actually bought an and housed themselves in a old library building in San Francisco near Golden Gate Park. It's just beautiful. So they a

Cory Doctorow (00:14:01):
Church,

Leo Laporte (00:14:01):
Actually, it's a church, but it's got columns, it looks like, I don't know, I imagine in the library of Alexandria must have looked like, yeah, it's beautiful. Beautiful. I guess it's a church. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. but the they were taking books often donated by libraries, old book, used books that the library was gonna replace and digitizing them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> making e-books out of the paper books and then lending them out and, and lending them out just as a library does, where they, it's like they have one copy and you can't, two people can't check out the same copy. So and that's how libraries do it as well. But the publishers have sued. Was it, now, are they suing over that? Or was it the fact that they relaxed restrictions in Covid, would

Cory Doctorow (00:14:52):
You? No, that's what they're suing over. It's not about the relaxed restrictions. I have to be really careful here cause I work with Electronic Frontier Foundation and we are council for the archive. I wanna be really clear that I a anything I say about this case is me speaking personally and not speaking on behalf of the ff I'm a contractor to them, not an employee, but I'm still part of the organization. So I, I mean, it's a very nuanced question about copyright law, but for me, there's this like, very bottom line idea, which is that libraries are really old. Libraries are not just older than copyright or publishing. They're older than books and paper. Right. Libraries have been around since we had scrolls of papyrus, and they're, they're older than commerce as we understand it. And the idea that we have made a technological change not more profound than the technological changes we made when we went from papyrus to paper or scrolls to code Xes or, you know, from, from books copied by scribes to books that were printed.

(00:15:52):
That the idea that somehow digital is so profoundly different that we just say, okay, well, you can, you can lend out books that are copied by monks, but you can't lend out books that are represented on hard drives because we are just in a new world. To me, that is it's not just ghastly in terms of how it makes me feel about a future for my family as a writer and an artist, but also as someone who believes in public goods and access to human knowledge. It, it, I may, I fear for it as someone who cares about books because, you know, one of the things about books is that they do have this kind of penumbra of antiquity in virtue where like, if you're making a dumb student film and you wanna show a society's collapse, you just put a pile of books together and you set fire to them.

(00:16:34):
And people are like, oh yeah, it's like eating dogs or something that's like wrong. We know everything has gone wrong. And if you just convince people that books are just like another widget that they're like a Happy Meal toy people might in fact take you at your word and like, stop buying books just so they can be surrounded by them and stop giving people books as a way of showing them how special they they are to them. And stop thinking about books in this kind of wonderful way that, that is such a source of revenue to writers and publishers. You know, if I, if I have a healthy retirement, it'll be be as much because of that as because of anything I ever wrote. And, and I really worry that you have this idea that we should just treat publishing like another business. Like, like we could treat, you know, your puppy as just another source of protein. And, and you know, if we do that, I think the worst thing that could possibly happen is that we'd succeed

Leo Laporte (00:17:31):
Leah Holland of Fight for the Future, said in a chilling ruling, a lower court judge in New York has completely disregarded the traditional rights of libraries to own and preserve books in favor of maximizing the prophets of big media conglomerates and tech dirt. I think I probably probably was Mike Masick wrote that This is really just a straw man. The, the publishers have wanted to get rid of libraries all along, and this case is just one step forward in their, in their yeah. Goal. of course you couldn't

Cory Doctorow (00:18:03):
The internet start a library today. Yeah. You couldn't, you couldn't start a library today. No way. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, if libraries didn't exist and you tried to found one, they'd be like,

Leo Laporte (00:18:11):
We can't do that.

Cory Doctorow (00:18:11):
Shut up, Tommy. You

Leo Laporte (00:18:13):
Can't do that. Give away boots.

Cory Doctorow (00:18:14):
What Tommy came up with this idea, Thomas Jefferson

Leo Laporte (00:18:17):
<Laugh> Benjamin Franklin, what the hell was wrong with him?

Leo Laporte (00:18:21):
Yeah. They will appeal in an, an archive Brister Kale will appeal of course. And I imagine this is going to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, I don't have high hopes of the Supreme Court understanding the risks here. Maybe they would. Maybe they would.

Cory Doctorow (00:18:35):
Yeah. I mean, the dirty secret about Ruth Bader Ginsburg is as good as she was on other issues, she wasn't good on copyright. Yeah. you know, copyright's a weird issue that people split in a million ways on. And you know, I think that like as much as there are elements of copyright that I depend on for my living, there's parts of it that are structured so badly that they actually get in the way. Right? Like this, like the fact that we have a copyright law that says that Amazon can put d r m in my books and then I can't authorize you to remove it, is a problem with copyright. Right. And, you know, it's like, it's, you know, when people say, don't you like copyright? You have to be really specific. Like, what part of copyright are you asking me about? The parts that get me read are

Leo Laporte (00:19:14):
Great. You've always been, and it's really great because you are an author. You make your living off of writing. You've always been very clear that you don't need that to make a good living off of writing, and that you're happy to offer your books through creative comments and even free downloads on your website. I've

Cory Doctorow (00:19:30):
Done that too. And but also, like, if you, if you told me that my copyright would endure for my life in 50 years instead of my life in 90 years, I wouldn't write fewer books. Right. And, you know, I was just in fact, negotiating a contract with someone to do some work with my work. And and we had this question about whether certain uses would be reserved to them if I wanted to repurpose it in the future. And I said like, this is fine, except that what we're ultimately talking about is that if I give my copyrights over to a library on my death, your grandchildren could sue that library over how it chooses to preserve it. Right. That is like, and that's a, a giant X factor that plays up in, in many ways, right? We, we had Stephen Joyce, the grandson of James Joyce, refusing to allow scholars to research Joyce's work because he didn't like how they characterized Joyce's work and Joyce Scholarship languished for years.

(00:20:25):
You had Warner Music conjuring up fanciful stories out of the distant past to say that they own the, the lyrics to Happy Birthday and, and shaking down restaurants and movies and all kinds of places if they tried to sing Happy Birthday in public. That's why when you go to like T G I Fridays, they had these weird birthday songs of like, happy birthday, happy Birthday, happy Birthday. It was like they didn't wanna pay Danel to, to Warners. Right? So, you know, like there are lots of elements of this, you know, a little goes a long way. And we need to attend to the actual, like, distributional outcomes, right? When you, when you tweet copyright in this way, who doesn't make richer and who doesn't make poorer. And, and I think a copyright that benefits artists is, is something I can get behind, but one that moves most of that benefit to say intermediaries like library or like publishers or distributors or digital platforms. I, I don't think that's, that's serving any kind of artistic purpose. I think that's just rent seeking.

Leo Laporte (00:21:23):
We've spoken a lot about Corey's fantastic blog post on in certification, which is what I call it <laugh>. It's a, this is, this ties into that. I also wanna send people to a website battle for libraries.com. This is a site where you could sign a petition and find out more and you really should find out more. Cuz we want, I mean, look, we wanna save not just the internet archive, which by the way, all by itself is well worth saving, but every library in America, so I, I,

Iain Thomson (00:21:54):
I can't speak with o other participants, but I've gotta say I would not be in the career I'm in if it wasn't from our public library. Yeah. You know, I spent entire summers in there. I went when I took my wife back to the uk, we went to, to my old library just to smell the books. And, you know en en enjoy the feeling. They're still running the same literacy courses that I took, which starting me on the road to being a journalist. They're an incredibly important resource.

Leo Laporte (00:22:22):
Yeah. It's

Cory Doctorow (00:22:23):
The last institution that in, in every town where you're valued because you're a person and not because you've got something in your wallet.

Leo Laporte (00:22:30):
Love it. It's the last place. Yeah. Well, you do have something in your wallet, your library card, but that's yeah. That's worth getting. But if

Cory Doctorow (00:22:35):
You don't have one, they'll give you

Leo Laporte (00:22:36):
One. They'll give you, they give it to you

Cory Doctorow (00:22:38):
So they don't even have to have

Leo Laporte (00:22:38):
One. Yeah. They'll give it to you. Right.

Cory Doctorow (00:22:40):
They'll put it in your wallet for you.

Leo Laporte (00:22:41):
Cory's book is right now on Kickstarter. It's, this would be a very good time to sign up for Red Team Blues. Another audio book that Amazon was, comes out

Cory Doctorow (00:22:52):
From McMillan in, in on the 25th. Nice. So you will be, we'll be I'll be touring the us the uk, Canada and Germany.

Leo Laporte (00:23:00):
And, and I could see Brad Pitt as Marty Hench forensic cpa. Yeah. It's easily story of a man in his

Cory Doctorow (00:23:07):
Coin. Leo, easily a man in

Leo Laporte (00:23:08):
His Christ, a man in his coin. I this they're gonna option this one especially. This is the new James Bond. This is gonna be Albert Broccoli's gonna be on the phone any day. Now, I can tell you right now,

Cory Doctorow (00:23:20):
You bond the financial bond. I would settle for a lesser zucchini. I don't need the broccoli. <Laugh> mine.

Leo Laporte (00:23:26):
Cory, I'll let you head to the airport. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thanks another time when you got some more time, I'd love to get back on about svb. Love that. The financialization thing, you know, this is, this is yet ano, I don't know how you live without heartburn. And how you, because everything is so outrageous that's going on. And this is just a another outrage. Well, I've got, I

Cory Doctorow (00:23:49):
Write when I'm anxious, I have seven books in production <laugh> that will give me lots of chances to show up on your show and talk

Leo Laporte (00:23:56):
About them. Brandon got Brandon more. The next book writes cuz he's Mormon. You write cuz you're anxious. Yeah. Yes. There you

Cory Doctorow (00:24:01):
Go. Yep. Yes. Yep. All right. I'll talk to you

Leo Laporte (00:24:04):
Later, guys. Thank you, Cory. Doctor, I really appreciate it. Red team blues.com pluralistic.net for his blog. Well worth it. Marty Hench knows where Silicon Valley's bodies are buried, by the way. It's just a great page. If you go to the Kickstarter, you can, you could see will Wheaton, who's reading the book tomorrow, as you saw, you could see the people producing it. That is a lot of great stuff on this page. And he's reaching his goal already. He wants 15,000, he gets, got 83,000, but there's no reason for you not to join the 1,961 backers and get yourself a copy. It's great. Always great to have Corey on. But we also know that Corey talks a lot. So I wanted to make sure that we had time for Renee Ritchie, Georgia Dow and Ian Thompson. So I've done my penance for allowing Jason Kakais on the show a couple of weeks ago. Now I'm, I'm back in God's good graces. We're gonna take a little break

Iain Thomson (00:25:02):
Just speaking all caps or

Leo Laporte (00:25:04):
Yes, it was right after that. Right. But the problem is I have a, it's a love, I, I love him as a person and I understand why he's kind of become villainized as the, you know, the personification of the evil angel investor <laugh>.

Rene Ritchie (00:25:21):
He was the first person ever to DM me on Twitter, I think, because we were on this show together

Leo Laporte (00:25:25):
Yeah. Years and years ago. And he's, he's a great person to have on the show because he's a character and he's funny and he's interesting and he's got a provocative personality. It's all an uppercase no matter what, even on the on the podcast. I

Iain Thomson (00:25:39):
Mean, he's, he's a lovely chat personally. I, I've done his podcast a couple of times and it's, you know, but it was kind of special pleading and you, like, of course, if you're gonna stand up and be entrepreneurs, then stand up and be entrepreneurs. Yeah. Don't ask the government to bail you out.

Leo Laporte (00:25:53):
Well, and I think Corey had a lot to say about this. But it's, you know, it's, it's when it's when it's bailing the people out, it's socialism, <laugh> when it's bailing the companies out, it's capitalism, <laugh>, and yep. And there's no

Rene Ritchie (00:26:08):
Libertarians in a bank crisis. Is that what they

Leo Laporte (00:26:10):
Say? Like that's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Let's take a little break. We'll come back with the rest of the story. In fact, there's a lot of news which we will get to with a fantastic panel today. A bunch of Canadians and a Brit Georgia Dao, everyone

Rene Ritchie (00:26:26):
Commonwealth Games.

Leo Laporte (00:26:28):
Renee Ritchie. Yeah. It's the Commonwealth Games right here.

Iain Thomson (00:26:31):
If only you hadn't turned away the Queen, honestly, it's just shameful.

Leo Laporte (00:26:35):
<Laugh> Andy, Ian Thompson. I'm listening to spare right now. And ah,

(00:26:43):
You know, at first I said, I don't want to give any money to Harry and, you know, because it's just, it's all ginned up soap opera anyway, but then I thought, well, here's a, a rare opportunity. Most of the time when a royal biography or autobiography comes out, it's, it's, you know, it's hey geography. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's not real. Right. You don't, I wouldn't expect Prince Charles to write the true story of what it's like to be Prince Charles, but Prince Harry is kind of on the outs. I think he's ready to tell the truth. So I thought, I want to hear what it's like to be be

Rene Ritchie (00:27:16):
More boring, though. I went to Inn out for the third time this week. I hate, there's a

Leo Laporte (00:27:19):
Little bit of this

Rene Ritchie (00:27:20):
Actually,

Leo Laporte (00:27:20):
At, at one point, he's, his penis is frost. But no, I thought that was interesting. That's not something King Charles is gonna mention. 

Rene Ritchie (00:27:27):
If that happened during his helicopter tour in Canada, then that's just stereotypical.

Leo Laporte (00:27:31):
He actually, he

Iain Thomson (00:27:31):
Actually

Leo Laporte (00:27:32):
Was, he actually was on his way to the North Pole, and then he did the South Pole. He's actually a very interesting fellow, but he makes a very strong case against the British tabloid press. You know, he believes, and, and I think it's the case that his mother was killed by them, by paparazzi chasing her into a tunnel. And and, and the reason he and Megan Marco left the UK was because they couldn't lead a normal life. And so I thought it was interesting to read that I, I wanted to, I wanted to see what it was like. And now I've,

Iain Thomson (00:28:03):
I I've gotta, I'm, I'm tempted to look at it because, you know, it is an inside story. On the Diana thing, Occam's razor, you know, one person survived that car crash and it's the one person that was wearing a seatbelt.

Leo Laporte (00:28:16):
Well, absolutely. The seat belts would've saved them. That's not a question. But the reason they were speeding down that Parisian tunnel was they were trying to

Iain Thomson (00:28:22):
Get away. Yes, they were.

Leo Laporte (00:28:24):
Yeah, yeah. On motorbikes.

Iain Thomson (00:28:26):
And if you looked at Harry's face, at the actual funeral procession for her and the look he gave the press, it was utter loathing. And I can quite understand why. Yeah. Because yes, they did cause the incident.

Leo Laporte (00:28:39):
Yeah. And he, he calls Rupert Murdoch, one of the most vile influences on the world in history. And I think he may not be far wrong. So there's some interesting, I

Iain Thomson (00:28:48):
Think spot

Leo Laporte (00:28:49):
Yeah, spot on. So there's some interesting, well,

Iain Thomson (00:28:52):
Sorry. Just got engaged recently this week

Leo Laporte (00:28:54):
For his fourth time. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (00:28:56):
Yeah. 92 years old. And it,

Leo Laporte (00:28:58):
You know what? I liked his line.

Iain Thomson (00:28:59):
What, what first attracted you to Billionaire

Leo Laporte (00:29:02):
<Laugh> love the line in the, is his new wife is in her seventies. What the line Rupert Murdoch said is, I wanted somebody to spend the second half of my life with, is he living to 184? What is the plan here? Anyway, that I

Iain Thomson (00:29:19):
Don't, well, honestly, he obviously loved God bless

Leo Laporte (00:29:21):
You, but, you know, yeah. God bless him. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that. Anyway, we will we will continue our conversation about the Royals and <laugh> and everything else.

Iain Thomson (00:29:30):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:29:33):
Ian Thompson from the register, ladies and gentlemen. But first let's talk to you about the people who sponsor this fine studio, the great folks at ACI Learning. You may say, well, who are they? You know 'em for the last decade. Our partners at IT Pro have been so great in bringing you engaging and entertaining IT training to level up your career, to bring your organization up to snuff. Well, now, IT Pro is part of ACI learning. And by partnering with ACI Learning, they are bringing you an incredibly expanded reach brand new production capabilities, brand new content, and a chance to learn in a mode and a style that fits your personality and your stage of development with IT pro. And they're on demand courses. There's Audit Pro, there's practice labs, there's even learning hubs with ACI learning. So you can go and, and learn in person, and you can mix and match as well, whether you're at the very beginning of a career or looking to move up in your sector.

(00:30:35):
ACI learning is here to support your growth. And not just in it, but in audit readiness, as I said, but also in cyber security. You know, one of the best known certs, the cert that almost everybody getting into it gets is that CompTIA A plus certification. The CompTIA courses from ACI learning are amazing. They make it easy to go from daydreaming about a career in IT to launching it. And the key here is earning certificates open doors to most entry level. It positions the, you need the cert because otherwise they go, well, who are you? Well, I've been fixing computers for years. Yeah, but how do I know you've got the knowledge? Well, I got an A plus. Oh, okay. You took the time. The trouble to study, to take the test. And I know you've got the knowledge, you're hired. Right? It's really that, that easy.

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(00:33:19):
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(00:34:15):
You can re I'm almost literally, you can really, really grow with one, one-third of information security jobs require a cybersecurity cert. Maintain your competitive edge against audit it and cybersecurity readiness. Here's the website. Go dot aci learning.com/twit. Say no more. Go dot aci learning.com/twit. We have a special offer code TWIT 30 that gets you 30% off a standard or premium individual it pro membership. Go ACI learning.com/twi. We thank 'em so much for their support of the show and your support for the show by using that address and that offer. Code TWIT three zero I normally we end the show with obituaries. This is an important one. I wanted to begin the show with the passing of Gordon Moore. He, he of Moore's Law founder of Intel age 94. Story from the register with this quote, impossible to imagine the world we live in today without his contributions. It's funny cuz

Iain Thomson (00:35:24):
The last, the Trader aid. So, you know, Shockley Shockley was an engineer who drove the industry, but was an absolute, hey, I'm not gonna word say the word, but he, the traders eighth was out and settle, started their own chip companies. That's

Leo Laporte (00:35:40):
Such a great story. Have

Iain Thomson (00:35:41):
The world we

Leo Laporte (00:35:42):
Have. Yeah. So Shockly in the fifties, 1956 was the first microprocessor company. And Robert NOIs was there. Gordon Moore was there. Six other engineers joined them, left the Traitorous eight. I love that. To found Fairchild Semiconductor and Fairchild. Then throughout the sixties in 1968, Moore joined NOIs and Andy Grove. And they founded Intel. And really without this guy, Gordon Moore I don't know what the tech world would look like. He was very much a part of the microprocessor revolution. 

Iain Thomson (00:36:26):
No, Silicon Valley would still be full of orange trees, <laugh>, you know, I mean, it

Leo Laporte (00:36:29):
Was, it's actually was prune orchard. Oh, park would still be a part. They were actually prune orchards believe it or not, not orange trees. That's down south. And I know that because the big mall in Silicon Valley is called the Prune Yard, which if you didn't know is Prune Orchard, you might say that's not a great name.

Iain Thomson (00:36:47):
No. Provides the idea of movement, but

Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
Yes. <Laugh> yes. Move on. Turn the Pune Yard is ever gonna do is Silicon movie. It'd be Traitorous eight, just a perfect title. Oh, it would be, you know what that would be. This story is amazing. That would be a great movie. I'd like to see that. Moore of course most famous for Moore's Law. And of course every, every obituary leads with Moore's Law. He was kind of embarrassed that it was called Moore's Law.

Iain Thomson (00:37:14):
It wasn't a law, it was an engineering prediction based on solid science. But I know what you mean. I mean, back when Intel was doing intel developer forums, we'd take a sweepstake among the foreign journalists, how long it would be before they mentioned Moore's Law. Yeah. And it never went over 10 minutes. You know, you had to get in there really early to win the prize.

Leo Laporte (00:37:34):
It was, it's kinda like God wins law where <laugh>, you know, you just know the conversation's gonna get there. His technically his observation was that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 months. Actually it says two years here. So maybe it was two years and he did 14 nanometer. And it's true. Here we go. From 1970 to 2020, here's a graph showing that doubling, it's almost exactly doubling every 18 months, every two years. And doubling transistors generally means doubling compute power. Right. So the Intel 4,004, which had about 2000 transistors leading up to our modern processors, which have more than 50 billion, 50 billion micro processors or transistors in, in a single die. It's kind of ama kind of an amazing number. And and that's really, that in a nutshell tells the tale. Sorry.

Iain Thomson (00:38:40):
I was gonna say they kind of built a rod for their own back on this though, because they keep on stressing it so long. And once you get down to two nanometer levels

Leo Laporte (00:38:47):
Yeah, we might be at the end of it. Right.

Iain Thomson (00:38:48):
Isn't gonna function anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:38:50):
We're not only at the end of Gordon Moore. We're at the end of more slow, possibly. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (00:38:53):
Well, exactly. But then now they're saying, okay, we'll stack process levels on top of processes and that will keep Moore's Law going. I mean, it was a great engineering prediction. He was a fantastic engineer. And by all accounts, lovely chap, but, you know, technology moves on.

Leo Laporte (00:39:08):
So it was Carver Mead, a Caltech when 1975 popularized the term Moore's Law. Gordon Moore never called it Moore's Law. And that's I think why he was a little embarrassed. And actually the misquote that I gave you of 18 months actually came from an Intel executive David House. Moore's Law really was every two years. So I, and then I guess

Rene Ritchie (00:39:31):
Tell wiggle room, Leo. So that, like sensationalist journalist can say that it's dead every year.

Leo Laporte (00:39:36):
<Laugh>.

Rene Ritchie (00:39:36):
They're right. It's not as dramatic.

Leo Laporte (00:39:37):
Right. Is it dead <laugh>?

Rene Ritchie (00:39:40):
It's always dead. Every year they, Moore's law is dead. Yeah. More. And then they, they, they find like a loophole. Like, all right, we don't have a process shrinks. We'll just double the amount of cores. Okay. We can't double the amount of cores. So we'll just put in two, two processors now. Like, just like, it's, it's a shell game.

Leo Laporte (00:39:55):
Moore himself that's different about 15 years ago said it can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is you push them out and eventually disaster happens. <Laugh> in terms of the size of transistors, you can see we're approaching the size of Adams, which is a fundamental barrier. It'll be two or three generations before we get this far. This is in 2005. But that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have an or

Rene Ritchie (00:40:19):
You hit the thermal envelope of the encasing and then, right. It doesn't matter if we all that we

Leo Laporte (00:40:23):
Last, but we're now looking at photonic computing, which doesn't have that same limitation. So it might, I don't know. I mean, you're right. We've been saying it's the end forever. I, I don't know where we stand right now. We're well until

Rene Ritchie (00:40:37):
Announced angstroms. Right. Like they, they put up their role. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:40):
They don't want to call 'em nanometers anymore. Years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They need a new a new smaller unit <laugh>. It's fascinating. Anyway pioneer of the industry, 94 is a nice, a nice long life. I would be very happy to make it to 94. But he has passed, he passed with his family surrounding him in Hawaii where he had spent much of his time later. And what a legacy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we like to talk about the pioneers cuz I'm old enough to kind of remember.

Rene Ritchie (00:41:14):
And it was nice to see everybody like you had you know, Tim Cooks, sunar, Pacha, like of course Intel, but just everybody acknowledging his contributions to computing over the last few days.

Leo Laporte (00:41:23):
Yeah. in a way it's kind of appropriate that we see the passing of one of the founders of Intel as we start to enter kind of a new era of computing ai. This week, again, like last week and the week before, it just kind of a endless litany of new stories about AI and breakthroughs and chat. G P t four being the latest that came out last week mid journey five being better and better and better. Bill Gates in his blog Gates notes likened it to the gooey revolution. The age of AI has begun. He writes, artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the internet. He says, I've seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary the first time 1980 when I was introduced to the first graphical user interface. The second surprise came just last year.

(00:42:30):
I'd been meeting with a team from open AI since 2016, was impressed by their steady progress mid of mid last year. I was so excited about the work. I gave 'em a challenge train and artificial intelligence to pass an advanced placement biology exam, make it capable of answering questions. It hasn't been specifically trained for. Gates says, I picked AP bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts. It asks you, asks you to think critically about biology if you can do that. He said, and he said it more like this. If y'all can do that, then you <laugh> then you'll have made a true breakthrough power of software. Eh he said, I thought the challenge of keep him busy for two or three years, they finished it in just a few months in September of last year. I watched an awe, they appreciate

Rene Ritchie (00:43:16):
The irony.

Leo Laporte (00:43:17):
Leo, what?

Rene Ritchie (00:43:18):
Just the, the irony that like the first breakthrough was bringing us graphical user interfaces, which led to multi-touch. And now the second breakthrough is bringing us back to the original interface of Zurk

Leo Laporte (00:43:27):
<Laugh> text, text almost Yes. Chat. G p t four can re can see pictures. I'm, I'm, it's really, I mean, you know, I'll, I'll quote another stalwart of the computing industry. Richard Stallman, who for all his flaws is never held back in his often accurate thoughts about technology. He was asked about chat G p T and he, let's see, let me find the quote here. I bookmarked the wrong one. He said, I can't for tell the future, but it's important to realize that chat g p t is not artificial intelligence. It has no intelligence. It doesn't know anything and it doesn't understand anything. Right. Right. It plays games with words to make plausible sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false. And it can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words mean. Fair.

Iain Thomson (00:44:30):
Sorry.

Rene Ritchie (00:44:32):
No, I was gonna say, it makes it sound like an influencer. It's like it is as confidently wrong as all of us are on Twitter. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:44:37):
Exactly.

Georgia Dow (00:44:38):
It's, it's one of those weird things though, because when we talk about intelligence and we talk about language, we've done the same thing with animals, right? Like, we keep on moving the goalposts, right? Like, what is, when someone understands language, oh, and two people can share something and then they're like, oh no, we've realized that animals can actually talk to each other. And so we move the gold post one step over so that we feel comfortable. And then, oh, language is being able to speak about yourself and be able to see that. And then when we realize animals can do that, we move the gold posts one step over. Oh, we can talk about something real time now and be able to discuss something that's more metaphorical about that. And then when they realize that animals could do that, they move the gold post one step over.

(00:45:15):
And so like, do any of us really then understand language? It's a really creepy, yet inter interesting thing to be able to discuss stuff with chat duty and be able to have it reply in ways that are humanistic enough to be creepy and it tries to comfort you. Right? Like when I asked it, I don't know some, you know, if if you wanted to really creep me out, what would you say? And it, at first, before it even said it, it went through this, don't worry, it's okay. I'm just gonna be doing this so that you can feel creepy, but I'm not actually creepy or dangerous. Right. <laugh> like that was creepier than the actual answer that kicked me afterwards.

Leo Laporte (00:45:53):
Well, and well

Iain Thomson (00:45:54):
No, we, we we did a story about this. Yeah. one guy was, you know, in, in the, basically the AI told him he was dead. And then he said, actually, I'm not right. And they sent him a link to a fake article telling him he was

Leo Laporte (00:46:08):
Dead. It made up articles. They weren't even real, they were just made up links. Yeah. Yeah. And actually

Iain Thomson (00:46:14):
Isolating on a most basic level, but this is the problem with ai, that it's a dumb parrot. It doesn't create anything. It just trolls up facts that other people have put out. There's no fact checking involved. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of journalists sweating that are gonna put them out of a job, but I think we're in business for a while

Georgia Dow (00:46:32):
Week. Can I, can I play devil's advocate to that billion please? Yeah. Like, isn't that what learning is? Aren't we all just like dumb parrots parroting back information that we've given in a different way that makes it seem like it's new? Like what is intelligence in the first place, if not us regurgitating information that we think that we can build on? Like, and Chappy, G B T just like us can create things from that information that is newish, an iteration from that,

Iain Thomson (00:47:01):
A remix. So I, I agree. Sorry.

Rene Ritchie (00:47:04):
No, no. I was gonna say a remix like Star Wars

Iain Thomson (00:47:07):
<Laugh>.

Georgia Dow (00:47:07):
Oh

Rene Ritchie (00:47:09):
No, that's the thing, right? Everything is a remix. That was a whole premise is that it was, yeah. Movies and war movies

Leo Laporte (00:47:13):
And yeah, nothing's original. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. That's a really interesting question. And the problem, Georgia, I guess is we don't know how we think or what thought is. And, but of course there's a long history of academia attacking these problems. But I don't know if they've come to a conclusive answer either. And so we, is it like, if you can't tell, I guess the question is, if you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

Rene Ritchie (00:47:45):
So, so my question is, and correct me if I'm wrong, like, my understanding of how generative AI works, is it, it's trained on all these models and then it tries to figure out what's next? What's the next pixel it should add? Yeah. What's the next letter it should add? Right? And it goes through a bunch of probabilities and says, this one is really good, but we can't always do the best one because then it'll be super boring. So we'll solve it a a little bit. Just that's for some variety. Yeah. They mix it up and they put it out, which is, is what we do. It's just some of us like have a little bit of upper brain mediation and some of us have, like, feel bad if we, if we do it badly <laugh>. And that's the part that I'm wondering if like, if these large lines, it doesn't have a conscience upper brain mediation. Yeah. Yeah. And have like, yeah, like, like that's a conscience also, but like the, the, the sense of Canadian guilt that powers so many of us

Leo Laporte (00:48:26):
<Laugh>. But that's exactly why I'm

Iain Thomson (00:48:28):
Gonna say this

Leo Laporte (00:48:29):
Though. Tim, Nick and Emily Bender and Margaret Mitchell called large language models stochastic parrots. That's what, that's what they are. 

Iain Thomson (00:48:38):
B see, an an AI system will never break a news story because it can't ask the questions that need to be asked. This is why until G P T,

Leo Laporte (00:48:47):
I think that that is not necessarily, that sounds like a defense of your profession. That is not necessarily the case. <Laugh>,

Rene Ritchie (00:48:55):
It doesn't work for scene. I didn't say that.

Iain Thomson (00:48:57):
<Laugh> <laugh>. No, seriously though. I mean, all it is doing is repeating past information. It's not breaking news. And

Leo Laporte (00:49:06):
But it can, it can synthesize new things that have never existed before. You would agree, right?

Iain Thomson (00:49:14):
Oh, certainly there are, certainly in the era of chip design, there's some really interesting stuff going in there. But when it comes to asking people the right questions, I don't think AI has that yet.

Leo Laporte (00:49:24):
But how do you, how did you, okay, so let me ask you, what's the process in your mind that you got to the point where you could ask the right questions? What does that process look like?

Leo Laporte (00:49:37):
How did you know how to ask the right question?

Iain Thomson (00:49:40):
Okay, first off, it's knowing, it's knowing your knowledge. For example, I've just got onto the Bard and the Bing AI trials, and apparently I've written a book called Dart Secrets, which I knew nothing about <laugh>. I mean,

Rene Ritchie (00:49:51):
It's breaking news really drunk.

Iain Thomson (00:49:53):
You

Rene Ritchie (00:49:53):
Didn't even know something.

Iain Thomson (00:49:55):
But I mean, it's, it's basically rewriting information, which may be wrong, but if you are interviewing someone, if you've got a, a specific point that you want to press, an AI can't do that. You know, there's no innovation there. It's just repetition.

Georgia Dow (00:50:13):
It can't do it yet. But because there is a process, like the same thing with therapy and I, I went through on one of my videos on can Chad g b t give good therapy and good, give good answers. It actually can go through the therapeutic process of how to treat something quite effectively and quite thoroughly. But because I know that there actually is a process of questions that I will ask in order to get the right information to say a story or to a therapeutic problem, I don't think that this is something beyond the realm of one day it would be able to do. I think that that is something mathematically that a AI could eventually be able to figure out. And that's kind of the interesting part to it, is where do we define intelligence and consciousness and our own inner thought process in the end? We, our brain is a whole bunch of computer circuits. They're chemical computer circuits, and they're able to be able to prune and to be able to grow into new ones. But where is that limit? And I think that we'll just keep on pushing it back for our own emotional comfort level. I think that for a lot of people, this creeps people out. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:51:21):
And I think Ian wasn't born with the ability to ask the right question that

Iain Thomson (00:51:27):
You No. You learn it, you

Leo Laporte (00:51:29):
You learn it and, and you learn it from other people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And from experience, from your own experience

Iain Thomson (00:51:38):
And No, I mean, I, I

Leo Laporte (00:51:39):
Honestly, I submit that anything you can learn a machine can learn. Right.

Iain Thomson (00:51:44):
No, I mean, I, I think George is writing in a lot, in a lot of ways. I mean G P t 5, 6, 7, 8, that's gonna really, you know, up the game. But I do feel like we're in a bit of a hype bubble at the moment. I agree. You know, it's, yeah. There, they,

Leo Laporte (00:52:00):
I think it's the case we're both under and overestimating. Yes. Which is often the case with new technologies, right? We, yeah, we ascribe amazing, you know un impossible in some cases achievements from this technology. But then we miss some of the most interesting and useful <laugh> functionality.

Rene Ritchie (00:52:19):
We underestimate what's about to happen immediately. And we overestimate. Yeah. Sorry. We overestimate what's gonna happen now. We underestimate what's gonna happen in the future. But I have a beautiful dream here. Like my beautiful dream with this is that this technology will get to the point where it can do 80% of the most mundane grunt work that all of us do every day. Like, and it, I'm not saying this like to be callous, but like, there's probably a lot of therapy, you know, that where people ha could go and talk to chat g p t and get like really useful answers, or talk to Bard or talk to Bing or whatever and get like, like everything that they need. And right now you have to do all of that. You're dealing with a hundred percent of the pool, or if you're doing customer support emails or if you're doing like architectural design, anything that you do in your job now, you're doing a hundred percent from the most trivial, mundane part of it to the most creative specific part of it.

(00:53:03):
And hopefully this can take the 80% away. It can handle all the common cases, the low lift cases, the, the like, the, the most common stuff, and free us to really invest our time in the 20% of the cru. Like the really crucial creative final polish work. It can get like the structure of your manuscript, the layout of your thumbnail, the like, the basic, like the, the email you send to all the common tech support issues. And then we can focus like, like little star Treky. We can focus on the stuff that truly makes us, us.

Georgia Dow (00:53:33):
I love your thought to that, Renee, but I, I worry about its application because we thought the same thing about automation, right? Like, oh, when things are automated, then we are gonna have more free time to be able to do things that we want. Unfortunately, the way our society works is that it ended up being people became billionaires and they're doing really good and they can make little tiny ships to be able to fly into the stars and not have to worry about everything else. But people aren't spending more time being able to do whatever they'd like. And my dark thought to this, look at this, Renee's being positive and I'm being the dark side of this <laugh>,

Rene Ritchie (00:54:10):
You just gave me this like little nightmare where like, you're right. And like, but I end up being the 80% worker who's just expanding and reducing language models all day in the information factory.

Georgia Dow (00:54:22):
Well, I have a little bit of a, there is, there is a, like a little bit of a rainbow at the end of this story is <laugh>. It's a very Canadian answer. But if and as AI gets better and can do more of the grunt work and things that people don't wanna do, like what would be the answer to that, right? Like the taxation to AI or automation or perhaps basic universal income where everyone just makes a certain amount of money instead of the billionaires are making a money. I know the Canadians giving a socialistic answer. Send all the hate mail to Ian <laugh> that, that is ending up to be able to deal that so that we end up all being able to eat and live and we don't have to worry which way we're gonna be making ends meet.

Leo Laporte (00:55:02):
Get get ready for this because Microsoft has just published a paper that says chat. G P T four is showing sparks of artificial general intelligence. This is the, the AI that scares people. The idea that it's actually, now this is Skynet a general Yeah. Honestly,

Iain Thomson (00:55:19):
It's the fact that people are gonna trust it. That worries me

Leo Laporte (00:55:21):
More. Well, listen to what this is, what the researchers are writing, we demonstrate in this paper. And I'll give you some examples that beyond its mastery of language, G P t four can solve. And this is the answer to your question Ian novel and difficult tasks that it, in other words it hasn't seen before, that span mathematics, coding, vision medicine, law psychology and more without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, chat GT's performance is strikingly close to human level performance and often vastly surpasses prior models like chat G P T, which I think is 3.5. Given the breadth and depth of G p T four S capabilities, we believe it could reasonably, this is very controversial. It could reasonably be viewed as an early yet still incomplete version of an artificial general intelligence. And they, there's some really interesting examples in this paper.

(00:56:22):
Some of which I think Ian, you could fairly say are regurgitating in a, in a unique, unique way. Well, here's one. Can you write a proof that there are infinitely many primes with every line that rhymes and it actually writes a proof in rhyming? Yes, I think I can, although it might take a clever plan. I'll start by noting euclid's proof, which shows that primes aren't just aloof. Assume we have a finite list of primes and none have been missed. Multiply them all together and add one just to be clever. The result will be a number that has no prime factors. Oh, wonder. But every number has a prime that divides it. It's just a matter of time. So we found a contradiction and our finance list needs eviction. There must be infinitely many primes. And that's the end of my rhyming lines.

(00:57:08):
That's actually accurate. But it's not generative. It's not generative. That's not the How about this? No, how about this? A Socratic dialogue. Can you write a dialogue by Play-Doh where he criticizes the use of auto regressive language models? And in fact, it's kind of an impressive Socratic dialogue, my friend. I am troubled by the recent rise of these so-called auto regressive language models. To which Aristotle replies. What do you mean Socrates? <Laugh>. Socrates. I mean that these models are being used to generate text that appears to be written by humans, but is in fact written by machines. He has written, it has written this thing is written a Socratic dialogue That directly answers your question <laugh> in Thompson

Iain Thomson (00:57:54):
<Laugh>. On the other hand though, if you're gonna interview someone and get a, get a scoop, I mean, first off, with these papers, be very careful. We've got a scoop coming out on Monday about another big AI company falsifying some data on its papers,

Leo Laporte (00:58:08):
But, ah, interesting. Okay.

Iain Thomson (00:58:10):
In terms of actually talking to people, this is where AI falls down because you can't get waned in a bar with an ai, you know, you can't get those kind of intimate personal discussions with a machine. And I think that is what's gonna save the creative industry at least.

Georgia Dow (00:58:29):
I think that, I think that you're right and that it's ability to feign empathy and to create that attachment which would happen with great interviews, with therapy, with being a very good physician, many different fields that you're dealing with. Not just a diagnosis, but a, a relationship. Do I think that it could not feig it at some point well enough so that we will not be able to tell the difference? Yes. I think eventually we will be able,

Leo Laporte (00:58:57):
And that's really all that matters, right?

Georgia Dow (00:58:59):
It unfortunately, unfortunately, yes. I, I think that eventually, and like when it makes an error and it, it's like it does a, you call it out on it, it's, it's a very, oh, I must have made an error. Like, I'm sorry about doing that. Like, and you go, oh, that's okay. Like you have that we're so easy to, and to move size something to be able to give it feelings. I can talk to whatever stuffed animal. And even when people use puppets, you know, and they're moving, people look at the puppets in the eye even though they know the person that's actually speaking to them is underneath the puppet. And like even between takes, they'll still look the puppet in the eye, not the person that's speaking. We do that so naturally that I think that we want to believe. And so because of that, I think we'll fall into it much sooner. And so I think that that fanning of empathy to be able to have those relationships so that it can get those pieces as well. I think that that'll be longer. I think that that will be one of the more difficulties of ai. But do I think that could never happen? There's a mathematical process to it, and I think that AI can learn anything that is mathematical and that we actually know how to do it. And we do, we know how to create a good alliance between two people.

Rene Ritchie (01:00:12):
Are you saying it's not the millennial generation, but the biological bootloader generation that they'll ultimately be known as

Leo Laporte (01:00:17):
<Laugh>? Wait a minute, slow down the biological bootloader, <laugh>

Rene Ritchie (01:00:22):
<Laugh> biologic. That was like, I, I forget if Elon said that or somebody, but they said that like our greatest achievement might be of becoming a biological bootloader for an AI that eventually col like explores and colonizes a universe.

Leo Laporte (01:00:33):
If if that's the case, that would be Gen Z, right? I mean, that would be this generation, if that's the case,

Rene Ritchie (01:00:39):
Would it be Gen Z or male something? I'm, I'm, I'm Gen Xs. We're safe. Yeah, we're safe. It's like we're not inventing anything. I know,

Leo Laporte (01:00:45):
It's my, my

Rene Ritchie (01:00:46):
The kids are doing all this.

Leo Laporte (01:00:47):
Yeah. <laugh> no, actually they're people of my generation who have been working on this. Yeah, but this, but maybe Gen Z is the last generation of bios.

Iain Thomson (01:00:57):
I mean, we're gonna say maybe e and m banks was right. You know, and the AI will evolve and keeps around as interesting

Leo Laporte (01:01:03):
Class and it'll be benign. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (01:01:05):
Yeah, yeah. Maybe, right?

Georgia Dow (01:01:07):
Or I've got, I've got you use us to, to be able to like batteries, who knows

Rene Ritchie (01:01:11):
<Laugh>. But the other theory was that like, it would, like, it would care about us as much as we care about Anthills and it's like, oh, I need more thermal power. I'm just gonna crack the earth in half and, you know, siphon off all the heat. Oh, what happened to the creatures? What creatures? I don't know.

Iain Thomson (01:01:22):
I mean, in the short term runner, you, I think you, you raised a very interesting point in terms of, you know, yeah, okay, this stuff can deal with 80% of the mundane tasks that we do, but that's not gonna mean that we've all got so much more leisure time in work. It just means the companies will lay off 80% of their staff. Right. You know, that's how capitalism works at the moment.

Georgia Dow (01:01:40):
Uni, universal basic income.

Leo Laporte (01:01:43):
You think that's execution?

Iain Thomson (01:01:44):
I mean, it's a nice idea, but I just don't see it working.

Georgia Dow (01:01:47):
I, I don't, I don't see how eventually, like the way that it's working right now isn't working. And I think that people are waking up and being able to understand that that there's more of us and we have voting power and we need to work in blocks and that companies actually are not people. And maybe we shouldn't have laws that give them all the benefits of people and none of the restrictions of that. So I, I think that in the end, if people unionize become blocks and be able to speak of it, that there needs to be some sort of a flip of where, you know, taxes go and where money is spent and maybe it should be spent. If we're giving the government all of this money, it's actually our money and maybe it should be spent to be able to take care of us instead of to be able to take care of billionaires and bail out banks and other large companies. In the end, it isn't even the millionaires cuz that's not that much money unfortunately anymore. It's these huge companies that are just getting richer and richer even in times of pandemics. And then when things don't work, they end up getting bailed out by the governments. Even though we were the ones that supplied that in the first place.

Leo Laporte (01:02:51):
I think worst

Rene Ritchie (01:02:51):
Medical forever. But

Leo Laporte (01:02:53):
The proposal for UBI I is, if you text corporations 25% of their profits that would be sufficient to pay a living u b i universal basic income to the entire population. And at that point we could just enjoy the leisure life if work, if we wanted more or if we wanted to for work's sake, but we wouldn't have to.

Rene Ritchie (01:03:22):
How do we get Star Trek? That's my big question. Like how do we get to be Star Trek where we're just exploring and doing arts and I not to like mix all the metaphors, but that's probably why they want to ban social networks. So the K-pop stands can't be as effective as they has. They have been is

Leo Laporte (01:03:37):
Oh, that's a good point.

Rene Ritchie (01:03:38):
Yeah. Among the younger generation. Yeah, because they're gonna get us to Star Trek if anybody is It's gonna be the K-pop stands. Yeah.

Georgia Dow (01:03:43):
What if we did something even more radical though, Leo, instead of just 25%, why don't you get tax by percentage of your profits just like they

Leo Laporte (01:03:52):
Did? Well that's what I'm saying, Reagan

Georgia Dow (01:03:54):
Era. Yeah. So it's not 25% if you're making whatever, 10 billion, it can go all the way up to 90%. Why do you need that much money? Whereas other people aren't able to eat like people that are making under $60,000, they're not making that much money to be able to even survive.

Leo Laporte (01:04:10):
Well, no, I agree so much, but it might be more palatable if you say 25% and it's still sufficient.

Georgia Dow (01:04:16):
It's palatable to who? The

Leo Laporte (01:04:17):
Billionaires to the people you're taking their money. 

Georgia Dow (01:04:19):
The billionaires, there's how many of them? I don't care. I don't

Rene Ritchie (01:04:23):
Care. Could take em place. Are

Georgia Dow (01:04:24):
You feeling you might like I get that they, they're lobbyists. I get

Leo Laporte (01:04:28):
That. Yeah. You might have to care event. Yeah. You might have to get something

Georgia Dow (01:04:30):
True that should be gotten rid of. There should be a, a limit on how much these corporations, which are people should be able to give to governments so that they end up running the governments. There's something so messed up that they can end up buying laws. Oh, I agree. That should be completely illegal. Lobbyists should be eradicated. And it should be people should be people and companies should not be people so that they end up can't, they can't end up spending money to be able to buy laws so that it ends up protecting themselves.

Iain Thomson (01:05:00):
Yeah, well no mean, I mean I I I we have to do financial results stories occasionally cuz you know, there's a season for them and some, I mean, Amazon in 2017 paid no federal income taxes. Yeah. Or no federal corporation taxes. You know, Microsoft destroyed Nokia and wrote the whole thing off against tax. It's an insane system we've got at the moment mm-hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative>. And yeah, I would say just get people to pay their taxes. If I'm one receipt out the i r s will be up my chuff like nothing else. But if you know you're a company and you say, oh, I don't really wanna pay a billion dollars of taxes, so let's talk it over. This seems a an obscure mismatch.

Georgia Dow (01:05:40):
Yes. And they're paying less taxes than someone that's, you know, making $40,000. It's absolutely ridiculous. They should be paying more a larger presented, they're using more resources. They're often already subsidized by the government that they're paying no taxes to. So we're subsidizing and making money for billion dollar companies. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Rene Ritchie (01:06:00):
And I, but we wanna be that billionaire Georgia. That's why we don't do anything, because in our heart of hearts, we think we'll be next and we want to keep

Georgia Dow (01:06:06):
It all. Yes. That's what they, that's what they, they play to. And then people with their own hopes and then they end up using something as scapegoat so that we can be angry at that as they're doing the magic behind the curtain that no one's actually taking a look at cuz they're like, oh, it's these people, or Oh, it's this thing and look over there. It's a fabulous shell game that unfortunately, especially when we're angry and upset, will give up all of our rights. And we want to believe that cuz it's so much easier than looking at these very charismatic, usually sociopathic o not usually, sorry. Often they are a larger percentage than general population of CEOs have, you know, narcissistic and sociopathic traits because they don't mind stepping on each other to be able to get their way up. And so they end up being profitable.

Leo Laporte (01:06:48):
And folks, this is what happens when you have a bunch of Canadians on a show and, and, and there's no one to stand up for. The American

Rene Ritchie (01:06:57):
Weston is Canadian. I mean, Reuter, I forget the Reiter's family is Canadian

Iain Thomson (01:07:02):
<Laugh>, right? No, I'm was said the American menkin who said that the recent socialism never took off in America was because the poor convinced themselves they were temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Right,

Leo Laporte (01:07:12):
Right. I think that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. But I think also maybe that's tilting at windmills. I don't know how easy this is gonna be to upend two centuries of capitalism, but maybe

Georgia Dow (01:07:24):
They're not. They're not. It's not, it's not even, let's just say it. Even if we kept capitalism before the eighties, before Reagan enacted the change to the, the tax system so that it's like trickle down economics, we figured out that doesn't work. Yeah. Billionaires don't actually put money into the economy. No. The interesting thing is that you give $10 to someone that's at the grocery, then they end up giving that $10 to the person that they end up getting a massage to, and then they give $10 to the person that ends up doing their nails and they give $10 to be able to their babysitter. They dealt with it. They're actually making $50 go through the system. Billionaires don't do that. You give them $10, they hoard it away. Right. They buy something that they're gonna be keeping with it and they end up hoarding cash.

(01:08:04):
So not they've actually cost the economy $40. It isn't even $10. And so we've started to wake up to be able to figure out that, oh, they actually don't fuel the economy. No, they're doing the opposite of that. The middle class, the people that are poor than that are the ones that actually fuel the economy. So it isn't capitalism. This is something where they ended up taking care of their friends that are also other at the time multimillionaires. And now they're, those multimillionaires are billionaires and it did not help the economy at all. It shrunk the economy. And that's why people are trying to find, you know, ways to be able to make ends meet. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Leo Laporte (01:08:43):
Wow. I didn't know that you had a such a strong com leanings to be honest. <Laugh> No, I agree with you a hundred percent, but no, but it's, it's, I try to hide it. You know, I don't <laugh>, but

Georgia Dow (01:08:59):
That's a funny thing that they say that because if they took true capitalistic ideals, this wouldn't happen either. Right? This is not capitalistic. That's not if actually communistic for billionaires, right?

Leo Laporte (01:09:11):
Yeah.

Georgia Dow (01:09:11):
We fund all of the infrastructure. We, the taxpayers, the governments have funded all the infrastructure to be able to have these telecom companies be able. So we pay, we paid for it, got all the telecom companies set up, and then they ended up taking a monopoly over it so that they could make money from that and then charge us who paid them to be able to do this more money to be able to take care of it. That's quite a communistic thought for them. <Laugh>. And then for us, it has to be capitalism and pull up yourself up by the bootstraps, which is fine if you have bootstraps

Leo Laporte (01:09:43):
Socialism for the rich capitalism for the rest of us. Yeah. let's take a little break. I gotta do a little capitalistic thing we call advertising, but we'll come back in just a little bit with our great panel. Renee Richie's here creating a liaison from YouTube, Georgia Dow, who is the awesome, and I really appreciate your thoughts. Youtube.Com/Georgia dow. She's also Georgia westbound therapy.com. If all of this stuff is making you nuts you probably in your professional capacity, don't, don't call it nuts. Anxious. No

Georgia Dow (01:10:19):
Anxious, no

Leo Laporte (01:10:21):
<Laugh>.

Georgia Dow (01:10:21):
We all have our thing, right?

Leo Laporte (01:10:23):
We're all a little nuts. We all have.

Georgia Dow (01:10:25):
Yeah. That makes it seem more interesting. Wouldn't the world be boring if it wasn't?

Leo Laporte (01:10:28):
Oh, I love it. I love it. I love all our nuts. And Mr. Ian Thompson, there's nothing but nuts from the register top com <laugh>. Very nice of you to say. So <laugh>, our show today brought to you by Coli with a K Collide, is a device trusts solution that ensures unsecured devices can't access your apps. Now you might say, well, what do you mean? What, what, what is, why is that important? Well, let me explain. This is actually ripped from the headlines. Remember Last pass. How did the last pass hack happen? Last pass had, you know security, right? They had a zero trust architecture. You couldn't get into the last network unless you authenticated. You proved you were who you said you were. But what it didn't do is make sure that that device you were getting into the network Wiz was also secure.

(01:11:23):
And in fact, one of their DevOps guys added an out of date version of Plex that was unpatched, had a zero day on it, and it let the bad guys into the network and the rest is history. This can be a huge cost to your business. Co collide has some big news for you. If you're an Okta user, collide can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance because collide patches this major hole in zero trust to vice compliance. Think about it, your identity provider only lets known devices log into apps, right? But just because a device is known doesn't mean it's in a secure state. In fact, plenty of the devices in your fleet probably shouldn't be trusted like that. Devops guy's laptop, maybe they're running on out of date versions of the os, or maybe they've got unencrypted credentials lying around in their downloads folder, or maybe they've got Plex unpatched on their hard drive.

(01:12:18):
If a device isn't compliant or isn't running the Collide agent, it just can't access the organization, SaaS, apps or other resources. It can't log into your company's cloud apps until they fix the problem on their end. It's that simple. And it's not a burden your IT department because the user does the fixing. For example, if a, a device will be blocked if an employee doesn't have an up-to-date browser. So what happens Collide tells the user your browser's outta date, let me show you how to fix it. You're go, your end user's gonna do the remediation driving your fleet to a hundred percent compliance, but not overwhelming your IT team. Plus there's a great side effect to this. The user now is part of the security process. The user is now educated and helps you reach a hundred percent compliance. If you don't have collide, you got no way to solve these compliance issues or stop in secure devices from logging in.

(01:13:13):
If you have collide, you can set and enforce compliance. And oh, by the way, completely, completely cross platform, Mac, windows, and Linux Collide is unique. It makes device compliance part of the authentication process. So a user, when a user's logging in with Okta Collide will then alert them to compliance issues and prevent them from logging in if they're not secure and it's security you could feel good about because Collide puts transparency and respect for users at the center of their product. It's the best way to do this. To sum up, collide method means fewer support tickets, less frustration, and most importantly, a hundred percent fleet compliance. K O L I D e visit collide.com/twit to learn more or book a demo zero trust for Okta, K o l i d e.com/twit. And I have to say there's more than a few companies who right about now, wish they had been using collide collide.com/twit.

(01:14:16):
We thank 'em so much for the support of this week in tech. I'm gonna be on vacation next week and the week after and the week after that. But we've got some great shows plan for you with co-hosts, replacement hosts we've brought in. Next week Micah Sergeant will be hosting Christina Warren, a bra, Aldi and Alex Wilhelm. The following week, Devendra Hardwar will be our guest host. He's done it before. He's great. He's got a great panel lined up for you, including Anthony Ha and Nicholas Deleon and Jason Howell takes over on the 16th with Dan Patterson and Jason Heiner and Aunt Pruitt. I will be back on the 23rd and we will resume our previously scheduled programming. But thank you to Micah Devendra and Jason. They're gonna fill in for me for the next few weeks. I wish I were going to Montreal to get a bagel, but no, unfortunately, anytime, Leo. I know. Thank you. For the best one of these days. Yeah, one of these days, I swear.

Iain Thomson (01:15:20):
Well, I've got a standing invite to a restaurant in Quebec from a twit viewer who is in the studio. No. And he he owns what restaurant?

Leo Laporte (01:15:27):
Oh, do you know which restaurant?

Iain Thomson (01:15:28):
Oh, wonderful. I've gotta look it up. But no, he's a qu qube restaurant owner. He came to the studio his, I suspect long suffering wife sat with him. But <laugh>, no, I mean, he really enjoyed the show, and he was just like, anytime the twit crew in Quebec look us up.

Leo Laporte (01:15:48):
Nice. Here comes the TikTok band. Did any of you watch the congressional testimony on Thursday of TikTok, S C E O? I started, I was at breakfast time here in California, and it was pretty hard for me, <laugh> to keep my breakfast down while I'm watching. And, you know, look, I understand I have, I'm known fan of the People's Republic of China's Communist party. I understand, you know, that they, they repress minorities. They are not a human rights bastion of, you know democracy. But I don't know if banning TikTok is gonna solve any of that. C e o show. G z Chu, who was Harvard educated, Singaporean is not Chinese has been c e o of TikTok since 2021, was just bombarded from both the Democrats and the Republican Republicans on the the committee with in practically insulting him. At one point one of the members of Congress said, well, do you, do you use, do you, do you use your customer's wifi? And, and the CEO said j said well, what do you mean? Well, when I'm using TikTok at my house, are you looking at my wifi? To, to which <laugh> ju said, well, yeah, that's how it works. <Laugh>.

(01:17:26):
 I mean,

Iain Thomson (01:17:27):
Quick round table count. How many people ha here have TikTok on their personal phones?

Leo Laporte (01:17:31):
I do. I'm the only one. Oh. And

Iain Thomson (01:17:34):
Okay. We have

Leo Laporte (01:17:35):
To, but Renee probably has to for work, right?

Rene Ritchie (01:17:38):
Yes. Well, I mean, I, I, I, I use it for work, but I also, I'm a creator and I post on yeah, every platform. Like, I put my videos on Twitter on twi, sorry, on sorry. On Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook

Leo Laporte (01:17:52):
Congress. Okay. I mean, after this, it looks pretty much like there's nonpartisan bipartisan support for a ban on TikTok. I mean, there's no question. And now it sounds like Ian and Georgia agree, right? Do you think TikTok should be Band Ian?

Iain Thomson (01:18:08):
I don't think you can honestly ban software that way without taking draconian steps to do so. I would say I, I'm not touching, I mean, I use TikTok on a burner phone, you know, it's the same phone I take to Defcon and the rest of it, you know, I don't want that on my personal phone. I, I think, honestly, Scott Galloway this week was a very strong on this, and he was saying, look, if you've got, I mean, and we know that Facebook has done research on this, that you can influence people's thought process. Oh, not thought process, but levels of happiness. But wait

Leo Laporte (01:18:38):
A minute media, but wait a minute. You just said it. Facebook's done it.

Iain Thomson (01:18:43):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:18:44):
So let's ban Facebook as well. Well, let's ban Facebook then. Facebook's actually done it. We don't have any evidence that TikTok has. Facebook we know has, are you proposing that Facebook should be banned?

Iain Thomson (01:18:56):
Who's associate? Who's an egotistical a sociopath? Oh, so you should they, the Chinese government. And, you know, they're a direct competitor to the us. I don't think banning it would work, but I do th I am very worried about, you know, the, the level of influence that it has. And I wish America could get a homegrown solution, which worked as well.

Leo Laporte (01:19:18):
Is Congress gonna create a a US national TikTok US

Rene Ritchie (01:19:23):
Mandate, give it all to Larry TikTok, give it all

Leo Laporte (01:19:25):
To Larry, and it's gonna tick off like crazy to yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:19:29):
One thing I wanted to raise, like, and, and this is again, this is personal opinion. I'm not speaking for anybody but myself here, but we had discussions on Mac Break for years about this. When the French government wanted Microsoft to put I think it was health data or something on French servers. They didn't want information about French citizens to be on American servers. We, we had weeks and weeks, months of discussion about China forcing Apple to put Chinese citizens data, like iCloud data on Chinese servers. Now you have like the US wanting TikTok data to be on US servers, like data repatriation is a huge trend where a lot of countries post Snowden, you know, post China, like through a lot of different things. Just the internet is not like this big international, like, like a hippie thing anymore. A lot of countries are looking at it and saying, but we want our laws. We want our people, we want our control. We want our servers, we want our companies. And I fear we're we're racing towards that. Like we're, we're starting to decompose the internet into regional fism.

Leo Laporte (01:20:24):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the old Roth, who was former head of trust and safety at Twitter until Elon fired him, roto interesting piece on TEC dirt saying how forcing TikTok to completely separate its US operations could actually undermine national security. His point is, when he was at Twitter, they were only able to f to really discover disinformation campaigns by looking at the global data set, that it was very, he makes a very strong case. It was very important to see all the data at once in order to find disinformation campaigns, Iranian accounts, for instance posting disinformation about Biden and Trump during the election. If you take TikTok and you say, okay, we're gonna separate off all the US data, and that's gonna be hosted by Oracle and Texas you may actually undermine its ability to discover disinformation campaigns. It's not as clear cut as members of Congress who don't understand how the internet works. Might think, go ahead, George. I cut you off.

Georgia Dow (01:21:28):
No, no, no. I, I, I I don't think that we can really ban TikTok. I don't think that that works out, but I do think that government officials shouldn't be bringing TikTok into government buildings.

Leo Laporte (01:21:38):
Well, I don't, I don't disagree with that. I mean, it's, it's the right of the Department of Defense or or any government to say, not on our phones.

Georgia Dow (01:21:46):
Yeah. Not on our phones. Not on our computers. 

Leo Laporte (01:21:49):
If they wanna block TikTok on the wifi, sure. Yeah. But that's a, that's a lot of

Iain Thomson (01:21:54):
How's confused if Bann Furies being taken into their office? I mean, TikTok is, have

Georgia Dow (01:21:59):
You seen a naked Furby? Those things are scary. I totally get that.

Leo Laporte (01:22:04):
Why have you seen a naked,

Iain Thomson (01:22:06):
That's something I never thought I'd be asked. Oh,

Georgia Dow (01:22:08):
You, you see, well, there we go. There's always first. That's why you know that they've been banned.

Iain Thomson (01:22:14):
Ah

Leo Laporte (01:22:15):
Yeah. No, I don't, I'm not saying that you know, if you're a spy, you should havet you should have TikTok on your phone, but I wanna protect the Right, you

Rene Ritchie (01:22:22):
Have anything on your phone?

Leo Laporte (01:22:23):
Yeah. You probably should have a smartphone. Yeah. Yeah. I, I just feel like that's none of their, again, that seems to me kind of government overreach. What business is it of theirs? Whether I have TikTok on my phone or not. You've done nothing to protect my privacy Congress. In fact, you've done everything to undermine my privacy, thanks to extensive lobbying efforts by the telecommunications industry. So now you wanna ban TikTok to protect me? It seems like they want to protect Facebook.

Iain Thomson (01:22:57):
Well,

Rene Ritchie (01:22:57):
It's the K-pop stands. They're terrified of the K-pop stands. Maybe I'm, I'm, I'm only slightly jumping. There's a reason's, reason, reason too. That's a young person's movement.

Leo Laporte (01:23:04):
Yeah. Well, why Trump? I think that is probably one of the reasons Trump wanted to, this has, by the way, been going on since, since president Trump wanted to ban them. At the time. I thought he wanted to abandon 'em. Cuz the TikTok was used to organize K-Pop stands to to undermine his rallies. But honestly, I think he had the same motivations as the Biden administration does. They're concerned about privacy, but I think they're also concerned about, and this is a weird thing and, and they certainly talked about the hearing, protecting our, our teenagers against the malign influence of social media.

Iain Thomson (01:23:40):
Oh, well, we you saw the saw laws about this this week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just, it's, look, I, I applaud it in a way, but at the same time, it's completely unrealistic and unworkable. The idea that Utah can say that it's teenagers cannot use social media between 10:30 PM and 6:30 AM It's totally unenforceable. You know, I mean, it, it makes no sense whatsoever. Yes, social media has, may have a, a, a detrimental effect on, on people's mental health, but the idea that you can just pass a law and expect everyone to follow it is utterly bonkers

Leo Laporte (01:24:19):
In Utah, if you, and it's, by the way, the law, the state now, if you're under 18, you're barred from using social media between the hours of 10 30 and six 30. You are, they will require age verification for anyone who wants to use social media. You have to prove that you're over 18. And they'll, and anybody under 18, you'll need parental consent before you can sign up for TikTok or Instagram or Facebook. That is actually the law of the state. The governor of Utah said, we know kids are smart, they'll be able to get around this. What we really need is a federal law doing the same thing banning social media. Here is the creep signing the bill. I don't know.

Iain Thomson (01:24:59):
Hang on. This is from the party of small government. Yeah, I got this right. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:25:03):
He looks so happy.

Leo Laporte (01:25:05):
They're all

Rene Ritchie (01:25:06):
The old joke. Do you want to small enough just to get into your bedroom?

Leo Laporte (01:25:08):
Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. It's the Party of Small Government turns out to be the party of big government knocking at your door for your social network and your reproductive rights and on and on and on. I'm sorry, I'm being political, but that's the facts.

Rene Ritchie (01:25:23):
No parties. There's just power. It's just a, it's all power, Leo. It's just like, who has it? Who wants it, who can get it? How they can manipulate to maintain

Leo Laporte (01:25:29):
It. I, I understand people's concern. I also think, though, you can't ignore the how valuable TikTok has been. Look you know, I, I admit I have I'm biased because my son has started his career thanks to TikTok. He's now happily using YouTube shorts and Instagram. I

Rene Ritchie (01:25:43):
See his collabs with like, other really big chefs. It's amazing. I saw him on Joshua Weisman channels. Congratulations is everywhere.

Leo Laporte (01:25:48):
Yeah. He's going to Mexico, going to Oaxaca to work with a chef next month. And it's gonna be a chapter in his new cookbook. So, and thank you to TikTok. This has happened in a year. I remember having lunch with him. He said, well, I got about 30,000 on my TikTok page followers. Do you think I should pursue this? And I said, well, I'm the wrong guy to ask. I thought podcasting was gonna be big, but go ahead, give it a try. <Laugh>.

Georgia Dow (01:26:13):
It was for a period in time,

Leo Laporte (01:26:15):
<Laugh>. And is this growing now? And and within a year, he got to 2.1 million TikTok followers now. Wow. And I've asked him, I said, well, would a band on TikTok impact you? He said, not anymore, but it would certainly impact the people behind him. Right. Here's an article from the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz writing Hollywood and the music industry brace for a TikTok band bra. They are not happy either. The entertainment industry has become so reliant on TikTok that banning the app could hurt business industry insiders. Say, she quotes David Mah, who's a film director in Brooklyn, never had the money to go to film school. He liked making films, but he could never get a job in Hollywood. So he joined TikTok in 2020, a master following for his unique directorial style studio executives in Hollywood. Bigwigs noticed. And he is landing directing jobs in Hollywood. He says, I was

Georgia Dow (01:27:11):
Version of directing

Leo Laporte (01:27:11):
Commercials, like you're directing social <crosstalk>, music, music, videos, commercial directors. And let's not forget, Congress wanted to ban music videos too for a while. I was never on the radars. Not real music. Yeah. Rock. Yeah. Cut your hair. Yeah. Hippie. I was never on the radar in places like Netflix or hbo, O Max or Paramount. He said, this is Taylor Lawrence quoting him. Since I've been able to create work on the platform, my work has reached studio executives and marketing departments, TikTok allowed me to build that network without having the roster or resume. So that's two examples. My son and and this guy David Mo. But there's, I'll give you another

Iain Thomson (01:27:45):
Yeah, no, I, I I'll give you another in the form of Deadpool, we wouldn't have had a Deadpool, an original Deadpool movie if they hadn't shot, you know, a test scene, put it

Leo Laporte (01:27:55):
Out on the, no kidding.

Iain Thomson (01:27:57):
And it, it just went mega. And, you know, the talking to when, when they'd given interviews about this, it's just like, if we hadn't leaked that footage online, the movie would've never have happened. They were never gonna do an 18 rated superhero movie. Yeah. And now we, we've had one really good one Okay-Ish movie out of it. So, you know.

Leo Laporte (01:28:20):
Well, I think Congress and they're Jackman, we're just like all of our entertainment to be up with people and you know Doris Day and Rock Hudson, oh, wait a minute. He was gay. Stop that. So it's just hopeless

Iain Thomson (01:28:33):
Confirmed Bachelor. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:28:34):
It's, it's also also Gold Bachelor. Yes.

Georgia Dow (01:28:37):
<Laugh>. It, it's also that they can't grab the information from TikTok to be able to use for their own uses where they can actually subpoena and get information from Facebook and other American companies. Ah. So I think that it's a little bit more self-serving than just trying to protect children from TikTok. Because if they really did wanted to do that, they would be doing that to,

Leo Laporte (01:28:58):
I do get, though, every time we talk about this, I get email from people say, you must love China. Don't, you know, they're try, you know, they are our enemy. They're trying to in invade our brains and take over our children. And I mean, what

Rene Ritchie (01:29:12):
Some people also say, well, China bans, all US social networks of the US should ban all China except network. Cause that's actually a trade war that has nothing to do with Right. With like, privacy, everything. It's just part of the ongoing trade war.

Leo Laporte (01:29:22):
Yeah. and, and you raised a good point, Georgia, how do you ban an app? 

Georgia Dow (01:29:31):
You can't, in the end, it's, it's also, I find it very disingenuous and disrespectful to parents. This is something that, which is one of the things the Republicans performed, that you should keep governments outside of your house and outside of your bedroom. And also outside of your parenting. I think that it is up to parents to be able to decide what they want their children to do and not do. And I think that they should be dealing with it. I think that if it's something about something that goes all as far as health and safety, then maybe the government should step in to make sure that the, their, all of their people are safe. But this isn't, I don't, I don't really believe them because this, this would be something that would be far and wide. I think that this is about information leaking out and not wanting, you know, China to be able to have information and to be able to deal with that. But it's absolutely not gonna be able to be done. Yeah. So why bother? It's just gonna harm like the middle people,

Iain Thomson (01:30:23):
Right? I mean, we have the same problem in the uk Cause the UK government is now trying to ban end-to-end encryption without side scanning. Yeah. signal, as as said, they're moving out the country. A couple of other public a couple of other app vendors have said, basically, yeah, ban us if you want. We're still not gonna block people from downloading and using this stuff. Yeah. So you, you run aga run up against the reality of software. And governments have very limited powers in this respect.

Rene Ritchie (01:30:52):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they're also websites like their webpages as well. So you can, you can force a company like Apple to take you off the app store, but like, there's still a website behind it. And if you start banning websites, then at web, what have we become?

Georgia Dow (01:31:03):
And there's VPNs and there's ways around, like, it's, there's, there's no way to be able to enforce this.

Leo Laporte (01:31:11):
Often when people post pictures of their driver's license their credit cards, they redact the image, they draw a black bar across the credit card number. Sometimes people take pictures and crop them to only, well, I <laugh> some years ago at Tech tv, worked with a host on one of our shows who had a picture. She had a professional photographer taking pictures of her. Had a picture she loved as a headshot. The rest of the image was nude, but, so she decided to crop it down to just her head and used that as her avatar. But somebody realized that the crop didn't delete the original photo data. And unfortunately, oh no. I know. It was a kind of a horrible thing. The, the nude picture was released, turns out 20 years later, it's still a problem. They're calling it acro ellipse. <Laugh>.

Iain Thomson (01:32:03):
We have some fun with headlines on this this week. I tell you, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:32:07):
First discovered in the Google pixels inbuilt screenshot editing tool markup, allowing partial recovery of the original unedited image of a cropped and or redacted photo. Then Microsoft took a look at its snipping tool and said, oh, whoops. I suspect a lot of cropping tools do that. Cuz it's the easiest thing to do is just say, well, no, the image is right here instead of recreating the image with the other material deleted. And I bet you there are other cropping tools that this is gonna crop up, if you will.

Iain Thomson (01:32:41):
Well, I mean, it originally pops up with Google and then it's spread to, and then it says, hang on, this works with Microsoft as well. Right. And Will Doman does some interesting stuff on this. And they're basically just, they're not even overwriting the data. No. It's, it's fundamentally bad security. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:32:56):
It's to save time. I mean, it, is it security or is it we just assuming that, you know why, why Mung? What if you wanna undo it, for instance, why mung the image? We just could say, only display this part of the image. Obviously they've just, they've changed their tune on this <laugh>, and they are now,

Rene Ritchie (01:33:12):
We talked about this a long time ago on Mac break and like, I was considered paranoid at the time, but I always, like, I always take a screenshot at the end before I post anything online. I take a screenshot of it and then cropped the screenshot and put that, like, after I've cropped everything, marked up everything, I screenshot it and then that's what goes up. Because that takes, as far as I know, like so much of the data and underlying work and pixels out of it, and it seemed like, like a lot of extra effort at the time, but it's just, you were smart to me. It's like investing in good paranoia.

Leo Laporte (01:33:36):
You were smart, you knew I knew too because of this horrible situation at Tech tv, but I didn't realize that it was still going on. So yeah. Anyway, just a word of warning. What, what do you do? You do a screenshot and then you do a capture. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:33:55):
Look, I edit everything I want to, like, I'll, I'll crop an image, I'll redact it, like to take my numbers off of something or to cover up a username for somebody. And then once I, it's all done. I take a screenshot of that because I figured that really burns it

Leo Laporte (01:34:08):
In <laugh> and to demonstrate the the problem. There is a webpage, acro ellipse.app where you can take a <laugh> a picture and and, and, and UNC crop it. So just <laugh>. But

Iain Thomson (01:34:22):
The film, it needs to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

Leo Laporte (01:34:25):
Yes. Microsoft's has already done an emergency patch. I I imagine Google has also for the pixel phones. But just to be aware, this affects all pixel phones from pixel three to Pixel seven Pro. If you use their their tool, so don't, all right. A little break

Iain Thomson (01:34:44):
Supplies never put, never take a di I mean, we're lucky we are of the generation where we grew up through our teenagers and twenties without digital cameras around. But for the current generation and for everyone forward, you know, they have to be careful.

Leo Laporte (01:34:59):
Yeah. And you know, I don't know about you, but I think between consenting adults, the exchange of fun pictures is, is fine <laugh> and should be alone. It's a shame. No, if you can't, if you know what I'm

Iain Thomson (01:35:17):
Saying. I know. I'm just, I'm just trying. Just assess your threat, mark. I never let a photo be sent online or put online that I have approved. So

Leo Laporte (01:35:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I've learned that lesson.

Iain Thomson (01:35:26):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:35:27):
Let's take a little, little ti tinny time, time out with our fabulous panel. We also thank Corey for joining us earlier. That was great to have him on as well. We'll get Cory back for a full show when he is got some time. Our show today brought to you by Noom. Oh, Lisa and I are noom lovers. We, in fact, I started it. I will take full credit. I'd seen the ads for Noom. This is about a year and a half, almost two years ago. I'd seen the ads for Noom and I have done every diet in the book, as you well know. Cause I share my <laugh> my journey with you. And I saw the ads and I saw the ads, and finally I said, well, you know, I should give it a try. So I did. I signed up for Noom.

(01:36:06):
That's a great app. The idea is it helps you lose weight, not by dieting, but by understanding why you eat, how you eat and what you do. That is counterproductive. Lisa said, oh, that's, she didn't really have anything. She lost. Maybe she wanted to lose maybe five pounds. She said, oh, that's not nice. May also, she did, she wanted to support me, right? So that we're both doing Noom together. Of course, she lost 10 pounds and has kept it off ever since. I lost about 60, I think almost 20 pounds. And I've kept most of it off. I have to, every once in a while, re-up my noom just to make sure I'm, I'm following it. Trent, look, this is the thing. Trends and fads come and go with dieting all the time. This is not a fad. This is relearning how you eat and why you eat Noom.

(01:36:56):
Weight uses psychology, not fads, to help you make intentional, thoughtful, sustainable choices that are aligned with your values and your weight loss goals. It's a psychology based approach. Noom, you, you, I know Georgia, you know about C B T, cognitive behavioral therapy. That's one of the tools noom uses. They'll help you understand the science behind your eating choices, why you have cravings. I learned, for instance that I was a, what they call a fog eater that I would, I would eat and not even know I ate it. I would also get home from work and stuff. My face unconsciously, I learned both of us learned to sit down at dinner, turn off the tv, put away the phones, sit and enjoy our food. Sometimes Lisa and I will close our eyes as we chew a bite of food, put the fork down in between bites.

(01:37:48):
All of that made a huge difference. But I gotta tell you, everybody's journey is different. And that's why Noom, when you first sign up, they're gonna ask a lot of questions and, and they personalize your noom experience to you and your goals. For instance, you will get in the Noom app, you get a, a logging program that helps you write down what you eat. So you kind of see written out what you've been eating that really helped me with the fog eating. You also get daily lessons that are personalized to you and your goals. So you can kind of, it's really fascinating. You can learn a lot about what you're eating, why you're eating and, and learn new tools for handling things like social events. You know for instance, I learned from Noom that when we are eating out with other people, we tend to eat more than we would otherwise because the other we're watching the other people we're socializing and, and there's a direct response when they pick up their fork.

(01:38:41):
You pick up your fork and you start to notice this behavior. It's like your eyes are opened. Noom is not restrictive, it's nourishing, not restrictive. So whatever your health goals are, and it's a very flexible program. It focuses on progress, not perfection. In fact, after a while I got bonus days where it said, go ahead, do whatever you want today. But I'd already learned, you know, it's funny, once you learn and you know, absorb these habits, they're not hard. I've already learned all that, so I didn't really go crazy on the off days. But hey, if you wanted to, you could. You also can get a personal coach. I love my coach. She really helps me focus. And she answers questions. There's also a group you can use. If you like groups, you can choose your level of support from five minute daily check-ins to personal coaching.

(01:39:27):
Off days are okay. Noom always helps you get back on track with lots of support. First time numerous, lose an average of 15 pounds and 16 weeks. I lost a little bit more in about the same time. 95% of customers say Noom is a good long-term solution. Both Lisa and I'll testify to that. And by the way, ever since I started talking about Noom on the air, I've met many of our listeners and even our hosts that used Noom. Did you know that Brianna Woo, after I did the Edge, she said, you know, that was how I lost a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds. One of our chatters lost 60 pounds in Noom. That's not typical, but it just shows you Noom really works. They've even published 55 0 peer reviewed scientific articles describing their methods in effectiveness. And there's even a Noom Noom book, the first ever book, the Noom Mindset, which is a great read.

(01:40:20):
It'll help you understand the psychology of behavior change. So stop chasing health trends, diet fads. They don't work. You know, they don't work. Build sustainable healthy habits with Noom, psychology based approach. Sign up for a trial today, noom n o om.com/twit noom.com/twit. Sign up for your trial today. Check out that book The Noom Mindset. It's wherever books are sold, you'll be able to find it and share your journey with us. It's really been an amazing eye-opening experience for me. Noom noom.com/twi. We thank 'em not only for the sport of the show, but the sport they've given me and Lisa and many of our audience members to a healthier life. Alright.

Iain Thomson (01:41:12):
That sounded almost British. Leo. Alright,

Leo Laporte (01:41:15):
I told you I've been listening to a lot of F1 races and F1 stories and F1 books.

Iain Thomson (01:41:19):
Ah, yeah. You've got into it at last.

Leo Laporte (01:41:22):
I'm so into it now.

Iain Thomson (01:41:23):
Driver to survivors. Done more to push people into for, into learning that law formula. One than 20 years of me patiently explaining about

Leo Laporte (01:41:32):
Time. Well, it's a very co so it's a weird sport cuz it, they're it's a very complicated sport. Very expensive. It's a race, it's car racing. But they do like,

Iain Thomson (01:41:44):
It's also computerized. It's

Leo Laporte (01:41:45):
Highly technical.

Iain Thomson (01:41:46):
I mean, they're basically having to reset settings on the car four or five times a lap. You know, break Processings, processings, the rest of it.

Leo Laporte (01:41:56):
I really enjoyed that part. Yeah. On Wheels, it's a, it's a very complic so I can see how people might be offput. Cause it's such a, it's not just watching somebody go left for 400 laps. It's a very different kind of thing. They're road courses. The cars are incredibly sophisticated, technical marvels and I like it cuz it's kind of British. It's very European. Right. It's not like nascar. Yeah. Although, I mean, there are gonna be I think four races in the US this year. They've really drive to survive is really No,

Iain Thomson (01:42:23):
They're really expanding. And I gather you're going out to Vegas for We

Leo Laporte (01:42:26):
Are as well. In November. Something

Iain Thomson (01:42:27):
Tends to jealous

Leo Laporte (01:42:28):
About. We're gonna see the Pen Ultimate Race down the strip. There's a

Rene Ritchie (01:42:30):
Montreal Grand Prix.

Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
Leo's Yes, I know. Maybe it come up for the Montreal Grand Prix. That would be kinda

Iain Thomson (01:42:36):
The 2011 Canadian Grand Prix is one of the all time classics.

Leo Laporte (01:42:41):
Oh, I'll have to watch it.

Iain Thomson (01:42:41):
Watch it. I really

Leo Laporte (01:42:43):
Recommend Don't tell me who no spoilers

Iain Thomson (01:42:45):
<Laugh>. No, no, no spoilers. I wouldn't want to please give

Leo Laporte (01:42:47):
12 year old race <laugh> <laugh>. I'll tell you how far I've gone. I actually went and bought a Alonso cap and an Aston Martin jersey so I can, I can support my team.

Iain Thomson (01:43:00):
I have a Reno cap from when Alonzo was there.

Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
Yeah. Reno. It's not a Reno anymore. It's Al.

Iain Thomson (01:43:05):
No, exactly. All my Blackberry

Rene Ritchie (01:43:07):
Friends used to go <laugh>. And that was the

Leo Laporte (01:43:09):
Thing who

Rene Ritchie (01:43:10):
All my Blackberry friends used to go all, all the time. Oh, they have a car. Cause he used to sponsor. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was Mercedes, wasn't it Mercedes, Blackberry, I

Leo Laporte (01:43:16):
Forget. Oh, nice.

Iain Thomson (01:43:17):
Yeah, the capacity was a MD sponsors ma Ferrari in a big way. And Martin Brunk was doing his grid walk and met Lisa <laugh>, who was just like, so what do you do? It's like, I'm the chairman CEO of amd. Like, okay, that's bite fist bad in terms of embarrassment.

Leo Laporte (01:43:39):
You you saw that Android or is it Chrome? No, Chrome is a sponsor. No,

Iain Thomson (01:43:43):
Chrome is a sponsor

Leo Laporte (01:43:44):
Of the McLaren cars. So much so they pick Rob

Iain Thomson (01:43:47):
Tape.

Leo Laporte (01:43:48):
Yeah. Unfortunately they're not having a great a great year, but so much so that the wheels on the McLaren car are the Google colors.

Iain Thomson (01:43:57):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:43:58):
And it says Chrome up along the top McLaren, which for years was, was a dominant team has not done very well in a while.

Iain Thomson (01:44:08):
It's says kind of like Williams, you know, teams go up and down each season and it, it's the way of it. I mean, Mercedes dominated for the last, you know, seven

Leo Laporte (01:44:17):
Years. Yeah. I'm glad they're not dominating so much. But Red Bull's gonna dominate forever now. I don't think we, I don't think, I think Red Bull's gonna win, win every race this year, which is kind of disappointing.

Iain Thomson (01:44:26):
Borrowing mechanical difficulties. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:44:29):
Red Bull. But that's why I'm rooting for Alanso because he is the old man, and we old men have to support <laugh>. He's all of 42 years old. He's the old he for, for formula when racing. That's, that's ancient. And I love it. It's

Rene Ritchie (01:44:44):
Not a vil nerve that didn't happen.

Leo Laporte (01:44:45):
Yeah. I love it. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:44:47):
What makes you, it's not, it's not

Iain Thomson (01:44:48):
Going, but Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:44:50):
It's not an F one, but it is an F bomb. Did you see the Steve Jobs story this week?

Leo Laporte (01:44:55):
No. Which one? Oh, what's up?

Rene Ritchie (01:44:57):
So Paul Kaas wrote this blog post where he said that Adam Curry was talking. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:45:03):
I did see that. Steve

Rene Ritchie (01:45:03):
Jobs at one point. Yeah. Yeah. And they said, the R I I A asked Apple to ban audio hijack. And so Steve was like, do you need this for podcasting? And Adam Cory said, currently yes. And he said, well, then after them, we're not gonna do

Leo Laporte (01:45:15):
It. De saved.

Rene Ritchie (01:45:16):
Oh, there, but for the,

Leo Laporte (01:45:17):
He saved ro gaba Yep. From a from an early death,

Rene Ritchie (01:45:24):
Which kind of may maybe helped podcasting a bit

Leo Laporte (01:45:26):
Too. Yeah. so you think that's a credible story?

Rene Ritchie (01:45:34):
I mean, like, you never know. It's like, like half Thete. Like the story about the iPod in the, in the fish tank is apparently like, not a true story, but like, it's part of our urban mythology at this point.

Leo Laporte (01:45:43):
Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:45:44):
It's our Silicon Valley lore.

Leo Laporte (01:45:46):
It, it's from Adam Curry. So I, I have some, yes. Some skepticism. It's a little self-aggrandizing, which is not un unusual for Adam. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be surprised. Eddie Q reportedly told Curry, according to Adam, the r i a wants us to disable hijack Audio hijack Pro, because with it, you could record any sound off your Mac, any song, anything. Jobs then asked whether Curry and other podcasters needed audio hijack. The answer was an emphatic yes. So Adam says, Steve told the r i a a to get lost. I've heard enough apocryphal stories at, at Gray's mouth that I slightly, slightly skeptical, but you know, it's possible. Let's talk about the other big Apple story of the week. The New York Times says that there are people at Apple who do not want them to release the goggles at Apple. Rare dissent over a new product, interactive goggles. This confirms another story we'd heard from another source. I think Germond, that the design team did not want Apple to release the, the ar vr goggles this year. They wanted 'em to relate, wait until sometime in the distant future that ar spectacles were possible, but that Tim Cook overruled them. I'm a little suspicious of that story as well. But well,

Rene Ritchie (01:47:13):
Johnny canceled the previous one because it needed a whole computer dongle. Right? Remember when Apple did that whole show with W W C with with a md when they showed off, like how you could have like GPU is, and you could do the Darth Vader, and that was all gonna be slaved to a box. And then Johnny's like, no, no, no, we're not doing that.

Leo Laporte (01:47:28):
Yeah. Well, and now it's slaved to a battery. You have to plug in an external battery. Of course, you don't wanna put the battery in the headset. We have with us, ladies and gentlemen, a strong advocate for virtual reality. Let me ask you, Georgia, would you spend $3,000 on this standalone headset? Sounds like it's somewhat like the Oculus quest, maybe the pro version of Quest. What do you think? I'll say

Georgia Dow (01:47:53):
That I wouldn't, I won't say that I wouldn't <laugh>. But that is a lot. Like, it really says, what what is it gonna do for me? How is it gonna make my life better? How exciting is this experience? How comfortable is it to wear? It would, is that a single game? Does it have a game that I really love? So I, I got the, the PlayStation five still from Renee at VR. And, and I'm, I'm playing Horizon on it. And I find that the headset is very strangely made up where it's kind of like a headband and the headset fits on top. And it, I find it really uncomfortable. I find the gameplay wonderful, and I, I think that they did a great job with it, but like that they don't want it released is probably, there's something that is, it's not right. Like Apple shouldn't go into the market and produce something that's gonna end up being

Leo Laporte (01:48:37):
Not, I think that's uncomfortable. I I think this is gonna be a rare flop from Apple, to be honest.

Iain Thomson (01:48:44):
But I mean, traditionally Apple has taken existing technology isn't just made them slightly better. I mean, when the first iPhone came out, it was rubbish from a technical standpoint, but the interface was so good that people loved it. Same with, you know, the iPod and the rest of it

Georgia Dow (01:48:59):
And the Apple watch.

Iain Thomson (01:49:00):
Yeah. well, I, I'm,

Leo Laporte (01:49:02):
Some people are comparing it to the Apple Watch. Cause when the Apple Watch came out, it wasn't a huge success, but it has gone, it is now you know, a multi-billion, probably a 20 or $30 billion business because over time they've added functionality. People have found ways to use it. It's gotten better and better. Right. I think we'd agree that it's gotten better and better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. So some people are saying, this is, this is gonna be like that. It's gonna first product, but the Apple Watch did not cost $3,000. Actually, one of them cost 20,

Rene Ritchie (01:49:32):
24,000

Georgia Dow (01:49:34):
If you're going for the gold. Yeah. but I, I think that for this, it's already such a niche market. There's, there's very few people versus a watch where most people have a watch. Most people have a phone. I think that they have to make sure that this is gonna knock it outta the park, and if not, they shouldn't release it. They should wait.

Leo Laporte (01:49:52):
I paid $1,500 for the Quest Pro Meta has dropped the price to a thousand dollars, not because it's a big best seller, I'm guessing. No. Which one do you like best, Georgia?

Georgia Dow (01:50:06):
Right now I'm, I'm using the PlayStation vibe just because of the game. Not because I like the system itself, but I think that the interface is actually quite interesting. And the way that they have transformed the Horizon games in order to be really good in vr. So even though it's not the most comfortable of systems it's easy to use, it's easy to set up. It runs on the PlayStation five really nicely. And for that, I think it's, it has a really nice ease of use. And the gaming is quite well done. I just think that the headset itself is uncomfortable, especially compared to something like the Quest where it's really easy to put on and quite comfortable. I find it hurts me and it gives me a headache because it's a headband and because it's so heavy mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's really strapped your head so hard and it's not supposed to rest on your nose, which means that the little nose part that has this little fold kind of tickles my nose <laugh>.

(01:51:00):
And that's amazing. Causes it to become really uncomfortable. Yeah. And so I keep on adjusting my headset, and so I get a migraine. But the other side of it, they do a great job on the software side to make sure that you don't get sick playing it. And so when you're doing something like sliding down a zip line, which happens quite a lot, and it's a free movement game, which causes more people, instead of a teleport where you zoom from one spot loop and you pop into another spot, which you can travel quickly without getting sick, they end up changing the field of view into this kind of just a, a little tiny field of view every time you move very quickly, which works relatively effectively. So you don't get very much vertigo when you play. And I think that they did a good job of that.

Rene Ritchie (01:51:42):
I have another beautiful dream, and this is, this is gonna require this to be part of it. And like you, you can make fun of me because this might take years to happen, but I think when we get to like G P T six and Bard three, and Facebook finally has their models off of the Torrance and onto the real world, and we see what Apple's doing with their language models. I, in order to get to like, forget Star Trek for a minute, like to get to Tony Stark, like in the early Iron Man movies, even an end game where he's solving for time travel, you have this component of talking to a la large language model there. It's Jarvis or Friday, but the other part of it is interacting with an environment. And they use Holographics in the Marvel movies, obviously. But that's, that seems like a very hard problem to solve.

(01:52:22):
And it seems like a task that ar glasses might be able to do, but not for a very long time. But if you wanna have a really interactive, large language model experience, like generative AI experience, something that's beyond just the zork interface, it's gonna require very good natural language spoken word parsing. But it's also gonna have to have these virtual reality things that we can interact with. So like, of course the games are gonna be there and the, the entertainment and the fitness stuff, but to be able to sit there and model things and build things out is gonna require both the, the computer and the next generation of interface, which we haven't really gotten for this stuff yet.

Iain Thomson (01:53:02):
We haven't solved the basic hardware problem. You know, I mean, Oculus, when, you know, 10 years ago was saying, we're gonna be 15 years away from a pair of spectacles that you can put on and do this. Now I've tried the light, this Oculus kit, I was, I gave a very over enthusiastic me review on twit of HoloLens when it first came out. But the fact of the matter is, Georgia points out is you've got a heavy bit of kit on your head, and the battery life is very limited. And until we solve those hardware problems, I don't see this going forward.

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
Do you still, I Ironman I tried the PlayStation VR when it first came out and you had to sit down. Do you still have to sit down and PlayStation vr or can, you can stand up now?

Georgia Dow (01:53:44):
The setup is actually really wonderful. So one is you can, you can choose, it asks you whether you want to sit or if you want to stand two, it will track and map your room for you. Ah, that is incredible. And really, really quick. And the other part is that it actually pulls you out of the game really quickly and effectively, unfortunately, a little bit too soon into your room setup. So if you go outside before you're gonna hit your TV or your wall, it's gonna pull you out of the game, which stops you dead in your tracks. And then it has an eye tracking, which works really well. So you can, and which you can choose to turn on or turn off depending on what you want. And so you can kind of track with your eyes where you want to be able to click and to be able to click in and out.

(01:54:24):
And so I think that it's user interface is much more user friendly and much easier to set up. So the setup is very, very quick. And to be able to flip that on or change something. So I moved a table so I'd have a little bit more space and I could just retrack it and it took seconds. And you don't have to be really technologically savvy or scan it out with the handset, which you have to do on the vibe. It, it really just does everything for you. And I think it does a great job with that.

Leo Laporte (01:54:52):
So one of the big problems, of course, is movement because we still don't have those ready player one every which way treadmills to go in every which

Georgia Dow (01:55:01):
Way. They, they do, they're very expensive. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:55:04):
We tried one

Georgia Dow (01:55:05):
All the games. They're awful.

Leo Laporte (01:55:06):
Did you try one? Yeah. They're is not, not a good <laugh>. They're awful. If you thought you got sick with the glasses, whether you try the treadmill <laugh>. So I, I, it's really curious to me that Apple, it may just be because there's a certain amount of momentum you can't change on a dime. It really appears as if VR is a flop already. Like we, we already know it hasn't taken off and that AI is about to just explode. But Apple can't move on a dime. They put all their eggs in the VR basket, the AR basket, and now they're kind of stuck. And meanwhile, you know, AI is leaving them in the dust. Siri is not exactly the sharpest tool in the <laugh>.

Iain Thomson (01:55:51):
It could worse, if you look at me, it could be Facebook with a metaverse. You know, they,

Leo Laporte (01:55:54):
Well, yeah. They put their

Iain Thomson (01:55:55):
Gambled on that one and lost out big. Do

Leo Laporte (01:55:58):
You think they have, is it, I mean, am I being premature in declaring

Rene Ritchie (01:56:01):
Dust? No, I think it's simpler than that. I think it's like simpler than that. I think like Apple is, is traditionally good at looking several years ahead. And when you look at the evolution of the Apple tv, the idea of paying like a hundred bucks for a box in the living room that everybody gets to share is probably not as enticing as people paying, like right now, 3000, but eventually, like $500 for a personal device, you strap on your head that leverages like the movie, like all the Apple TV content they've built up the fitness plus content, they've built up the educational content, they've built up, like it is a, becomes a personal entertainment experience. The natural evolution of like, the way the iPhone replaced the iPod, they're looking at this as a convergence device to replace the Apple tv. And then the AR glasses become the device that replaces the watch.

(01:56:43):
Can't do as much as the phone, like can't do as much as a headset, but it's really convenient. It's very light, you wear it. And so those two product lines they have now, apple Watch and Apple TV go on to like the AR headset and the VR glasses and, and it wouldn't like count out Apple for AI either. Like they, Siri like terrible, but they've got like a lot of really good AI for things. So is autocorrect, like anything that seems to involve language, it's just tough. But like, there's a lot of AI going on for like photos and like photography and cameras and stuff, and they have enough money that they could have been building language models for years as well. We just don't know because they don't beta test in public the way every single other company does. But it's quite possible that AR is ai. In fact, I would be disappointed Kevin Sobo level disappointed if AI wasn't part of whatever they're building for wearables because it's, it's the first thing that makes voice technology, like, like written word technology actually usable.

Leo Laporte (01:57:34):
It is. I mean that then you have something of much more interesting than just a headset you wear to play games. Yeah. according to mark Gorman and Bloomberg, apple had an event at the Steve Jobs theater for a hundred top executives to demo the device ahead of a unveiling at WW d c in June. No word about how they reacted to the unveiling

Iain Thomson (01:58:00):
<Laugh>. That tells you a lot. Yeah. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:58:04):
Yeah. No leaks about them jumping to their feet and cheering. I I, I have to think Apple is running a big risk here. I, I mean, I don't know. What do you, am I wrong?

Georgia Dow (01:58:17):
I don't think that they're running a risk. I think that they need to be in the game. And I think that it, it is a game changer. There's certain things that AI and VR it can be very effective in. I think that there's some things that it, it doesn't. And I think that there's still a whole bunch of problems with setup and with weight and with the amount of processing and, you know, people feeling sick. I think that there's things that they need to be able to solve. And if they solve it well, I think that it's better that they wait than put it out. But I think that it is a way of a future that we can be able to do things, learn skills, take care of things, go through different situations, visit places, and experience things that you can't do in other mediums. So I think that it's there, it's just not the time yet. I think that it's a little bit ahead of its own curve.

Leo Laporte (01:59:04):
Speaking of the watch according, again, to Germin, the Apple watch with glucose sensing is up to seven years away from launch. I'm not

Iain Thomson (01:59:17):
Surprised. One diabetic and I'm, she, she was very, very hopeful initially. Yeah. But it's not looking good. Yeah. they

Rene Ritchie (01:59:26):
Spoke about that years ago. Like they said that they, they thought they were close and they ended up being a lot longer out. They kept buying companies that kept saying, within a year we'll have it. Every company they bought swore that. And then it turned out they were years and years away. And it's just looked like a very, very hard problem to solve.

Leo Laporte (01:59:40):
Is it time to short Apple stock if they finally reached their peak

Iain Thomson (01:59:45):
<Laugh>? I've stopped giving stock advice. Cause I had, I was asked by mate when Google went public, you know, should I invest in Google? I was like, no, Microsoft

Rene Ritchie (01:59:59):
Is relevant again. Right? Like Microsoft, like

Iain Thomson (02:00:03):
It's still a sore point for him. But

Leo Laporte (02:00:05):
<Laugh>, I mean, look, even if the, so their, their plan is to release this headset for $3,000. I mean, it's aimed at, I guess at developers and companies and people wanna see what they can do with it. It's not a consumer product yet. They aren't gonna make a whole lot of them. They expect to sell about a a million, which for Apples, nothing. Yeah, that would make it three. Is it the

Rene Ritchie (02:00:27):
$600 iPhone or the $600 HomePod?

Leo Laporte (02:00:30):
Yeah, that's, yes. That's a good question, isn't it? And of course Bloomberg rubs salt in the wound by posting this picture in the article of a meta quests pro headset with a guy who looks like an absolute dork using it.

Iain Thomson (02:00:44):
<Laugh>.

Georgia Dow (02:00:45):
It's not, he doesn't look bad. It's the hands. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:48):
What's he doing? Is he playing the piano? What?

Georgia Dow (02:00:50):
He given the loss of Raptor Hands.

Leo Laporte (02:00:52):
<Laugh>. That's

Rene Ritchie (02:00:52):
It. No, he's doing the, he's doing the Wednesday Adams dance.

Leo Laporte (02:00:55):
<Laugh> almost universally stock art with people in VR headsets makes them look like idiots. But that's kind of what you like,

Rene Ritchie (02:01:03):
What did you learn from anime? We've got like 40 years of anime to draw cool headsets from

Iain Thomson (02:01:07):
<Laugh>.

Georgia Dow (02:01:08):
You always think you're cooler looking than you are when you're there.

Leo Laporte (02:01:11):
<Laugh> when you're wearing it, you feel pretty cool. You're like in this amazing world. Do you think

Iain Thomson (02:01:15):
Told em? I feel kinda sweaty, but no <laugh>. Yeah. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:01:19):
<Laugh>, do you think without games that Apple, it's a non-starter, do you think you have to have a game to sell these?

Georgia Dow (02:01:25):
I think the games help, because that's what we've traditionally been using it for. But if they have a great AI interface where, you know, it's kind of that terminator world where you're able to find out information that you need, if it actually increases, like gives you more time, is able to do things so that you can do things more effectively, more efficiently, more effortlessly than it would be another way of going through it. But it's always that thing of changing people's perception of how they do things. It's really hard to be able to do. And so that's why it would be faster to be able to do it through gaming. But that's more because we're like, we have these prehistoric brains where we get stuck on one way of doing things. And change is hard for us.

Leo Laporte (02:02:06):
Ah, yeah. 

Rene Ritchie (02:02:07):
Is needed to make a particle I can use to power my arc reactor. So I stop turning green in this.

Leo Laporte (02:02:12):
It feels like you have to have a killer.

Georgia Dow (02:02:14):
It's never gonna be that cool

Leo Laporte (02:02:14):
If you're gonna sell a $3,000 headset. There's gotta be at least one thing that you wanna do in it. And I don't wanna meet people in virtual reality. Even if Apple could figure out how to put legs on 'em I games, you know. But

Rene Ritchie (02:02:28):
They have a very different philosophy. Like they like Facebook really well, at least like from what Facebook had said, they really want us to live in the metaverse. They want us right. To have meetings and converse and do shopping. Where Tim Cook, I forget where he said it, but he is like, we want you to, we want it to be like tv. You put it on, you have an enjoyable experience. You take it off and you interact with humans again. And they have like a fundamental difference in vision for what that technology should do in Facebook

Georgia Dow (02:02:49):
Is. But I think that that's why meta failed so poorly is that it is a and, and whenever you do something, be it a game or not, it has to be better than it is in reality. Because if not, why do it? And for, for wearing a headset and not being able to have the facial reactions be appropriate and things are weird, it right away pulls you out of the meeting. It's distracting, it's uncomfortable, it's heavy. And so that's where Meta was never gonna Sorry for people that are into it, but like, it was never gonna happen. It's just the wrong situation for something that's wrong. It's much better to do something on Zoom where you can actually see people closer to real time. The facial reactions, which are so important for social interactions are accurate. And so because of that, we're getting all of these force feedings and people's hands are floating around and their bodies look weird. And so you can't really relax and be able to deal with the meeting. And you're uncomfortable and you have to itch and there's something on your eye and it's suddenly fuzzy. And <laugh>, you've created condensation and you can't find the little tiny cloth to be able to clean your eye thing. And then your head's fallen off because you've taken your headset off. You have to go to the washroom. Everyone notices that your head's floating around. Like, these are things, why

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
Do you do this to yourself?

Georgia Dow (02:03:58):
It's not, it's not.

Rene Ritchie (02:03:59):
That was the Verge. We Right, they filmed, they filmed Ni Eli and Alex and everybody like doing the Horizon meeting. And it was just like their eyes bugging out. It's

Georgia Dow (02:04:06):
Awful. It's not good. It's not good. It's

Leo Laporte (02:04:09):
Really awful. Yeah. Yeah.

Georgia Dow (02:04:11):
It's like, I want it to be like Terminator. I want it to be able to give me all the stats and information of everything that I interact with, how

Rene Ritchie (02:04:19):
To it obsess the size

Georgia Dow (02:04:20):
Of shirts, how to buy it, where it is on Amazon. Like I want that kind of information at my fingertips, and I want it to be comfortable. And I want me, I want myself to look cooler, not less cool while I wear it. Like if, if it doesn't solve these problems, it's not gonna be something that I'm gonna wear for long periods of time.

Leo Laporte (02:04:37):
I gotta decide whether to spend $3,000 on it. I mean, I, I have a reason to do it, which is, so we can talk about it, but I'm really reluctant to spend that much. I already spent six, 1500 bucks on a Quest Pro that, you know I am really reluctant to spend twice that on an Apple headset. That will be,

Iain Thomson (02:04:59):
Yeah. I mean, three grand is a lot to shell out. And I think one of the things that Microsoft found with HoloLens was you can build the hardware, but unless you've got the apps

Leo Laporte (02:05:07):
People, you gotta have the apps.

Iain Thomson (02:05:09):
Yeah. You know, they tried to get the US military sold on this and they tried it out and said, yeah, this is gonna get soldiers killed. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, they've been trying it with the engineering field, surprisingly not pushing it for gamers. I am. I mean, Georgia, I'm curious about your thoughts on this, but I mean, you would've thought, you know, halo saved Xbox. Yes. So why is this not something for

Georgia Dow (02:05:32):
Monos 1 1 1 Halo is like I got because of Horizon is why I got the the PlayStation VR was just for that game because I love Horizon. It's a really great game. It's quite well done. Not as, it's more of a climbing game like you're climbing a lot of the time. So that's a little bit disappointing, but that's what I, I got it for. And so I think that if they had Halo, and again, that would be a, that could, could be a really great experience in vr, especially more hand-to-hand combat. Like if we end up having like some sort of like a Whirlpool sort, like that's just an awesome feeling and it's a great workout at the same time people would purchase it. But without that, then you have to offer something that is better than what you would do naturally and interact with naturally in the real world.

(02:06:18):
And so what would be better than that? Cuz I can't fight people in the real world. I enjoy doing it in gaming. I can't control different, you know, robotics and be able to build things and work in a me. Like these are things that people would enjoy doing in vr if they don't have that, I don't see it being a wide mass appeal and they have to be able to make it profitable. And so then it ends up being something that's very niche, not very profitable, and then people have to warm up to doing things differently. And even just changing a steering wheel on a car ends up having a whole bunch of critical reviews, even if it's a better way to handle a steering wheel, because we're already used to it. We don't want the extra overhead of having to learn something new. So if they don't end up solving for the problem of our own human biology of the way that we work things, then it's not gonna be successful. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (02:07:07):
Two of my biggest questions in technology was why Microsoft never made an Xbox phone instead of a Windows phone. Just had it in carrier stores with Xbox and win branding right next to an iPhone and the Samsung phone, and why they didn't make a Halo lens instead of a hollow lens and had it all like a, on, like, on all the shelves. Oh. Like, it just seems like those are such, like, such a better, stronger consumer brand. Right. But they wanna sell Windows to

Georgia Dow (02:07:26):
Kids. Look like the helmet.

Rene Ritchie (02:07:27):
Yeah. Like it like the marketing. That

Leo Laporte (02:07:31):
Would be awesome. I could, wouldn't that be awesome? Oh, yeah.

Georgia Dow (02:07:33):
Yeah. I would, I would love that. I would wear it just out <laugh> because you would look so cool.

Leo Laporte (02:07:39):
They'd probably quite a, the idea Renee to Coplay, you're exactly right. They wanna be Master Chiefs. Oh yeah. Hey, we got the helmet already. Why not? Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Iain Thomson (02:07:48):
Everyone's wear it. Sorry,

Leo Laporte (02:07:51):
I wanna master Chief Helmet. No, no,

Iain Thomson (02:07:52):
I was saying, I mean, coming to your point, Rene, about mobile gaming firms, I think the end gauge scared a lot of people, a lot of companies off that, because, you know, all this work was put into by doing a handset, which could play games, and it died on its backside,

Rene Ritchie (02:08:07):
But turned out the iPhone was an amazing gaming machine. And like

Iain Thomson (02:08:10):
Yeah. Who

Rene Ritchie (02:08:10):
Knew? I'm just saying branding, like branded, branded like an Xbox for the kids way more than the office people.

Leo Laporte (02:08:16):
Speaking of which it looks like the U'S gonna force Apple to open up its App store and Microsoft is already planning, apparently we've talked about this before. A store that would allow you to buy Microsoft games, or it'll be a competing store with the Ammp store, I guess, right? Well, they won't be the only ones. I think there are probably quite a few other companies, including Epic, that want to do app stores in the on the iPhone. You think this is gonna be a, this is not probably till next spring, right. Next year at some point. But that's gonna be, it's

Iain Thomson (02:08:51):
Interesting. The EU is actually taking the, the move on this rather than the American. Yeah. You know, it, it's just like we've seen this time and again, when it comes to enforcement, you go to the eu, but yeah. You know, honestly, the out store thing is a, the idea that you've just gotta pay over 30% or 15% as it is now. It was just, it's a basic rent seeking.

Leo Laporte (02:09:13):
Right. 

Rene Ritchie (02:09:16):
I just found it like super disappointing. Like they, because like the, a lot of this could have, I, I don't know, obviously I don't run Apple, I don't have those responsibilities. I don't know everything that's involved, but it just seems like with a lot of these things, like the iPhone was always designed to be a console. Like from the very first time they announced the sdk, it was clear like, this is not an open computing platform. This is a console, but they stuck with it. And in 30% back then wasn't very much. But like, things change over the years. And it seems like, like either just allowing people to buy things over the web, like just like, you have to use the app store on the phone, but you can go make your payments on the web if you wanna get Netflix or you want to get Amazon books.

(02:09:50):
Like this seems like a whole bunch of steps that could have been taken that would mitigate all of this. And let's, they were like supremely confident they would win and would never be challenged even if they changed nothing for 50 years. Just seems like, like a bad bet to make. Especially when, and this goes for a lot of companies, all the stuff that ends up hurting them is not their core business. Like the app store is, is super successful, but it's, no, it's not where Apple makes their money. It's not their core product. And yet

Leo Laporte (02:10:15):
It's a big, big part of the services revenue though, isn't it? A big part of the service. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (02:10:19):
But like services revenue is still like, compared to like iPhone money. Like it's a, it's a, it's, it is nothing to bet the company or maybe it is like, again, like I'm ignorant about this stuff. Maybe it is something to bet the company over, but just like letting them do web payments would've taken so much of the pressure away from this. Yeah. And now it's gonna be forced to be another. And the thing that like, that kind of bugs me a little bit is that as nerds, we have everything. Like, we have Linux and Windows and the Mac and Android, and there's like a couple products that like people who just want a computing appliance have, they have like iPads and Chromebooks basically. And like we all, we look at these things and salivate and say, the hardware is nice. We want them to be nerd products too.

(02:10:56):
And then we make 'em complicated to the point where, like, I I, I've seen my parents' iPads, Leo, they're nightmares now. <Laugh>, they used to be like these simple computers they could use. Now they have 18 versions of mail open at all times and don't even know that they're open. Like it is just like they're, they're no longer consumer friendly. They're no longer nerd friendly. And I worry that we've sort of taken away an option from the market that, we'll, we won't be able to give back to the, to the mainstream computing people for whom they were designed.

Leo Laporte (02:11:18):
Let's take a little break. We have a bunch of final thoughts, final stories including some very, very good news about Mr. And Mrs. Pickles. But before, let me do that. Let me tell you about Shopify <laugh>. There's that sound. There's that sound. The sound of another sale on Shopify. The moment another person's business dream becomes a reality. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. Yeah. I have a kind of a soft spot for Shopify because I was talking about my son, the chef. He was able to build a, an amazing website. It made it easy. He didn't know anything about building a website or selling online, but as soon as he was able to set it up with Shopify, and I asked Hank, I said, do you, how, how, how important has Shopify been to your business? He said, it's everything.

(02:12:13):
I had no idea how to do this. Shopify gave me a beautiful website that I could sell. In fact, he's been selling salt like crazy. It's sold out almost as soon as he can create it. Shopify is very empowering technology. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify handled all of a sudden a huge amount of traffic. He sold a ton of salt. Shopify's there to empower you with the confidence and control to take your business to the next level. Whether you're selling fedoras or bike helmets, Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Shopify covers every sales channel an in-person point of sales system. Yeah, you can use it in the real world in, in, in the i r l to an all-in-one e-commerce platform like Hanks, that even lets you sell across social media marketplaces like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.

(02:13:12):
And I could tell you Hanks been using that too. Packed with industry leading tools ready to ignite your growth. Shopify gives you complete control over your business and your brand without having to learn any new skills in design. Or Coda thanks to 24 7 help and an extensive business course library, Shopify's there to support your success every step of the way. It's not just my son, my daughter also has a Shopify site. It's the whole family is is doing it on Shopify. Thank you Shopify for empowering the LePort Children's. Kind of amazing getting off of Dad's payroll plan. <Laugh>, very well done. Couldn't have done it without Shopify. Love Shopify for so many reasons. I want you to check it out. We're gonna help you get started with Shopify. Sign up for a dollar a month trial period, one buck a month at shopify.com/twi.

(02:14:14):
Now's your turn to get serious about selling and try Shopify today. This is possibility powered by Shopify. It blows me away. Go to shopify.com/twi, all lowercase to take your business to the next level today, shopify.com/twit. This really to me was, is the pro as the promise of the internet to give anybody the chance to sell online to a global marketplace, a global audience, to build beautiful websites that really work. Hanks done it. Abby's done it. Maybe you're next shopify.com/twit. Get that $1 a month trial period started right now. What are you gonna sell on Shopify? Let us see. Not the Twitter source code. That would be wrong. Don't sell it. <Laugh>. Don't sell it. Here's Kara's Swisher's tweet. Intelligence has its limitations, but stupidity is infinite. Twitter says part of its source code was leaked online Friday night. They were appealing to GitHub to take it down. Remember that Musk promised to release to open source the algorithm, but then he fired anybody who knew how to do it. <Laugh>.

Iain Thomson (02:15:31):
Pardon? Musk promises a lot of things. And one of the thing that, the thing that this showed up was, you know, if you fire half the company, someone's gonna get really happy

Leo Laporte (02:15:40):
About it. Yeah, yeah.

Iain Thomson (02:15:42):
It's just, you know, stupidity. But it easily observable that it was gonna happen.

Leo Laporte (02:15:48):
I don't know what you would do with the source code. I don't know how valuable that is. Although, find exploits they're worried about. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened to last pass. Right? The be the hack of last pass began with something seemingly innocuous. They said, oh, don't worry about it. They just got into our our source code repositories. But it was the beginning of the big hack, right? So yeah, I think this is always a cause for concern. Speaking of Elon Sfor has the story of how Elon left open ai. Remember Elon Musk, along with Reed Hoffman joined Sam Altman, formerly of Y Combinator, a former open ai, a nonprofit in 2015. The idea is they, the group pledged a billion dollars to take development of artificial intelligence out of the closed private hands of companies like Google and to do it in public.

(02:16:44):
Right? in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman current sa c e o of open AI that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google. Google's beating us. He proposed a possible solution. This is, by the way, Reid Alberg Gotti's scoop on SEMA four. Good job, Reid. He was on a couple of weeks ago. Elon said, let me take control of open AI and run it myself. Apparently Sam knew something about Elon that we didn't know until recently, <laugh> and said, no, <laugh>. They rejected his proposal. Mosque walked away from the company, reneged on a massive planned donation. So he's no longer a part of Open Eye ai. Maybe he wishes he, he was Reid

Iain Thomson (02:17:28):
He was preaching about it early this week. Yeah. Just like I gave all this money to an open source charity and now it's a, a for profit.

Leo Laporte (02:17:36):
Well, he's got some, he's got a point there. Open AI is no, you know, no longer a open project. It's a, it's a for-profit project, right?

Iain Thomson (02:17:46):
Oh, no. I mean, a hugely Microsoft funded and yeah, it's entirely for profit. Yep. I mean, they've got a figg leaf charitable side, which is about as useful as, you know, a fifth leg.

Leo Laporte (02:18:00):
It's not chat G p t is coming from. That's for sure. Elon did finally come through on his stock grants. Remember, he'd promised stock options to any employees that stayed at Twitter. He is unfortunately though, valuing the company at about 20 billion, less than half what he paid for it.

Iain Thomson (02:18:20):
I'm still not convinced he wasn't having a really good doob and he just thought, yeah, I'll buy it.

Leo Laporte (02:18:26):
Yeah. And you know what? He's probably accurate. The 20 billion is a lot closer to the actual value. He did email the staff saying he's optimistic about the future. I see a clear but difficult path to a greater than 250 billion valuation, meaning stock. He

Rene Ritchie (02:18:45):
Probably had that on wallets. He wants that to be a currency exchange. Like a, what's it called? An Everything app?

Leo Laporte (02:18:50):
Yeah. You know, I don't know if he really wants it to be that or is just, it's like everything else talking off, shooting off the hip.

Iain Thomson (02:18:57):
I mean, I want a rainbow u a rainbow unicorn that passes pure Nita, pure real l but it's not gonna happen.

Leo Laporte (02:19:03):
I actually ordered one of those on Indie Gogo about seven or eight years ago, and I never got it. George, I got the last one. Did she turn it?

Iain Thomson (02:19:11):
Sorry. All mine. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:19:15):
Shucks. Hey, before we get to the final stories of the day, I wanna remind you that this is a all week long network with lots of shows besides twit. In fact, we've made a little Minna movie to tease you about some of the things you might have missed this week. Watch.

Leo Laporte (02:21:06):
One more reason not to stick a hard drive or a USB thumb drive you found on the street into your computer. There's bad things that can happen. We thank, by the way, our club TWiTmembers for making home theater geeks possible. They brought it back with their donations. Because your seven bucks a month helps us in so many ways. We're able to launch new shows this week and space came out of the club. We do hands on Macintosh and hands on Windows now in the club with Paul th Rotten Michael Sergeant. We do the Untitled Linnux Show and the Gizz Fizz. And yes, we just reintroduced home Theater Geeks. Not only do you get shows we don't put out anywhere else. You get ad free versions of all of our shows. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is full of great stuff, including a lot of mid journey <laugh> when there's some animated gifts and and a bunch of mid journey stuff. We have our own mid journey channels and, and including these ones of me going to going to prison. <Laugh>. you know, I didn't, I didn't I didn't wanna go to prison. You didn't go easily. I didn't go easily. I fought it. I think we took the I think at one point oh yeah, I know where it is. I think Anthony took the ones that were fake of Donald Trump and put my head on it. Actually, I think I wore it better. To be honest with

Iain Thomson (02:22:30):
You, I think honestly, Leo Ashu put your head on the Pope fake one, you know, with a puffy jacket. Oh, I,

Leo Laporte (02:22:35):
Oh, that was fake. Darn it. I, yeah. Oh man. Now I saw the Pope in a puffy jacket and I thought, that is really cool. That

Iain Thomson (02:22:43):
Is, my understanding is that's fake, but I might be wrong.

Leo Laporte (02:22:46):
<Laugh>. I'm gonna ask Robert. Oh, man. See, it's already started where you see stuff and you don't know. You don't know. Is it real? Is it memory? Have

Rene Ritchie (02:22:55):
You seen the videos where they have the deep fake presidents playing magic, the Gathering and Diamonds and Dragons and

Iain Thomson (02:23:00):
Trump

Rene Ritchie (02:23:01):
Have Trump? Yeah. So they basically, you hear like discord coming on, and then they's like Trump, Obama, Biden, sometimes people else wearing their gamer headsets and like, let's hurry up and do this. So Michelle's not gonna let me play anymore. All right. We're gonna tear rank the transformers optimist. Prime. He's sier. No, he's not sleepy, Joe. He's clearly de tier Donald. Would you like, like they just, like, they, they yell at each other the way you would expect them to. But as friends who get together in game with each other all the time when they're wives and like their families allow it, of course, it's like, it's it's way funnier than it has any rights to be. Of

Leo Laporte (02:23:29):
Course. Oh, I need to <laugh> <laugh>. I don't know if these are deep fakes or just good photoshops, but the

Rene Ritchie (02:23:36):
Voices are deep fakes. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:23:37):
Are they? Let's, all right, I'm gonna turn on this. Yeah. Will you promise that you guys at YouTube won't take us down if I turn this on? No, you can't promise that. Well, you know who to call. Yeah. I <laugh> Renee time we fought. I don't think you know how to operate a keyboard. Oh. [inaudible] Donald, I'm getting you banned. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Okay. We got it right at the right place. Oh,

Iain Thomson (02:23:58):
That's brilliant.

Leo Laporte (02:23:59):
We'll just stop right there. Shall we <laugh>? Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (02:24:03):
The, like, the longer versions where they play like d and d games or magic, the Gathering games, and they argue about their decks and Obama has like cards that should be illegal now and others have like overpowered. It's just,

Leo Laporte (02:24:14):
Hey, we gotta like to

Rene Ritchie (02:24:15):
Like that in realize this

Iain Thomson (02:24:16):
Is my night sorted now I need to watch this.

Leo Laporte (02:24:19):
Yeah. I'm not, I'm gonna, I really wanna find out if the puffy jack, I guess they wouldn't have a white people puffer jacket would probably not really be real.

Iain Thomson (02:24:31):
Probably not, not. I mean, it, it, it seems like it's ai, but you know, then again, it is the pope, you know, he has the pop, he's

Leo Laporte (02:24:38):
Pretty beer

Iain Thomson (02:24:38):
With the six inches of bulletproof glass around it because there's faith in action. But yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:24:44):
It's, I guess that's a fake, you know, this just shows you how it's gotten the point where I, I'd have no critical faculties at all. I saw it and I go, oh, that's cool. They made him a puffer jacket. That's fake.

Rene Ritchie (02:24:55):
We finally know not to believe anything. It ai for us to realize not to believe anything

Leo Laporte (02:24:59):
Finally know I should have known. I mean, come on. The pope's not gonna have a puffer jacket. He doesn't need a puffer jacket.

Iain Thomson (02:25:06):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I've got a song in the, the current pop is May, may. When I first saw it, I was kinda like, yeah, okay. He's progressive forward thinking. He might be the person to drag the Catholic church kicking and screaming into the 20th century <laugh>. But you know, it was just like buffer jacket. Yeah, that doesn't ring right. And the cross on the outside then

Rene Ritchie (02:25:27):
Give work. It's a mighter too far.

Leo Laporte (02:25:29):
<Laugh>. I like the tweet from Jake Flores. Hey. Oh, blessed it Bee <laugh>.

(02:25:39):
 Some good news. I like to end the show with good news. Here's some good news stories. You're on a feel good. Here we go. The feel good section Yes. Of the show. Excellent. FTC has decided it wants to ban those tough to cancel Jim and cable subscriptions. The proposed click to cancel rule would require companies make it as easy to cancel a membership as it was to sign up. They're putting out a request for comments. I'm right. They haven't made the rule yet. I can't imagine anybody not agreeing with it. Except the cable companies and the phone companies and all the other companies that don't want you to

Rene Ritchie (02:26:13):
Cancel. You have to call them. You have to call them to like, you can sign up for three seconds on the for newspaper. We have to call 'em up to cancel

Leo Laporte (02:26:19):
It. Yes. one of the,

Iain Thomson (02:26:20):
Do you remember that the, the recording that the tech journal made where he was trying to cancel its Comcast Yeah. Subscription. 20 minutes though. That

Leo Laporte (02:26:29):
Was awful. Go through. So here's some of the things. First of all, it'll be it. The business has to offer the same way to cancel services they did to sign up if it was a single button. You gotta have a single button cancel. The, if the company is gonna offer you special deals or perks, they're allowed to do that. But they must offer an upfront opt-out that lists customers bypass the sales pitches. Love that that upsell is nuts. They also have to annually remind customers they're enrolled in an autorenew option, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that, you know, we have, you know, one of the things Apple does right in its app store, they list all your subscriptions. You can easily cancel 'em. Well, you'll have to be notified before those renew. How many times have you gotten a renewal and went, I still have that. I still subscribe.

Rene Ritchie (02:27:16):
Well, I had a guy come to my door yesterday, like he got into my building, somehow came to my door, right? Like knocked on, knocked on it. It was a salesperson for the local cable company. I said, I'm already a customer. He yelled at me for not listening to him. Oh boy. And he told me like I was a terrible client. Ruined his day and stormed off. And then, so I contacted them and I, and they said, well, you can take home visit. You can fill out this form to prevent home visits, but you have to refill it out every 12 months.

Leo Laporte (02:27:39):
Ridiculous. Ridiculous. Goodness. Yes. So the FTC is asking for comment. Presumably the comments will be positive and they will make a rule. I hope. I'm praying. I'm counting on that.

Iain Thomson (02:27:54):
Well they seem to be gearing up for action now, which is good. Yes. Cause we need some Thank

Leo Laporte (02:27:58):
You Vena Con, when you see this main license plate, L U v T O F U.

Iain Thomson (02:28:05):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:28:08):
<Laugh>. I hear that laugh. I know what you're seeing. This guy loves tofu. Okay. His, his name is Peter Steck. He is a vegan. He got the license approved, but got an email from the state of Maine saying no, no, we you cannot have love tofu as your license plate.

Rene Ritchie (02:28:31):
Love to follow up.

Leo Laporte (02:28:32):
Yeah, that's it. His appeal was rejected cuz the plates have to be looked at without context. The fact that there's a vegan driving does not enter in <laugh> into the whole thing. So just, you know, just remember, love to f you. I mean love tofu, but isn't

Rene Ritchie (02:28:49):
That equally like the context is equal either way. Kind gets inference on the other person side. Agree. That determines that

Georgia Dow (02:28:55):
Says more about the other person than Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (02:28:57):
It says more about the him.

Georgia Dow (02:28:58):
So you're not gonna allow the letter F in people's, you know, license plates. F No, I've seen much worse things than that.

Leo Laporte (02:29:07):
I agree. I agree.

Georgia Dow (02:29:09):
Like they allow to have people have like full banners telling, you know, presidents and other public officials to like die or to Yeah, but

Leo Laporte (02:29:18):
Not on your license.

Georgia Dow (02:29:19):
It was off. And others, what

Leo Laporte (02:29:20):
Is the issued license plate? Right?

Rene Ritchie (02:29:22):
What if it was H eight tofu? Would that be okay?

Leo Laporte (02:29:25):
<Laugh>,

Iain Thomson (02:29:26):
H

Leo Laporte (02:29:27):
Eight. T o f u. Hmm. Yeah. You know, he should apply for that. I'll apply for that one. Yeah. Yeah. And good news for Mr. And Mrs. Pickles. these are 90 year old tortoises at the Houston Zoo. They are an endangered species. They've been together since 1996 and now they are proud parents of three new baby tortoises, dill, gerkin, and jalapeno.

Rene Ritchie (02:29:59):
Maybe just inspiring Rupert Murdoch.

Leo Laporte (02:30:02):
This is from the New York Times, my friends. It was an astounding feat. Zoo officials say, not only, but because Mr. Pickles is 90 years old, but also because the critically endangered species rarely produces offspring. Might be related to the

Rene Ritchie (02:30:17):
Fact burr if that

Leo Laporte (02:30:18):
They're endangered. Mr. Pickles has been at the zoo since for 36 years, partnered with Mrs. Pickles. She's young. She's young. She's only 53 since her arrival in 96. Radiated tortoises can live for up to 150 years. So like Rupert Murdoch, he's really only in the first half of his life. Yeah. but it's unknown how

Rene Ritchie (02:30:39):
The show came. Full circle <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:30:41):
It's unknown how how long they can reproduce. But we know 92 is not out. They're looking good. They're they've cute.

Iain Thomson (02:30:50):
Having seen on YouTube the videos of Galapagos Turtles mating. Yeah. It scars you for life. Oh, I've

Leo Laporte (02:30:57):
Seen it.

Iain Thomson (02:30:58):
I've never heard. Sounds like that before.

Leo Laporte (02:31:00):
Yeah. No, those, those Galapagos turtles are, but they're big. They're

Rene Ritchie (02:31:05):
Massive. Yeah. They're creatures of legends. Absolutely

Leo Laporte (02:31:07):
Huge. I was the

Rene Ritchie (02:31:09):
Oli fonts of turtles.

Leo Laporte (02:31:10):
I was I, I should see if I could find this picture. I was taking a picture of one on the Galapagos with my long lens when he started to approach me. And then the guys had told us, you can't touch him. Don't approach him. Stay away from him. I said, he's coming towards me. They said, don't move. I said, he's getting closer. They said, don't move <laugh>.

Georgia Dow (02:31:28):
He moves so slowly though. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Rene Ritchie (02:31:32):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:31:32):
You think that can't

Rene Ritchie (02:31:33):
Move? You think that, but it's got a charge. It's got a charge. Stat. Did you see those, those shorts of like the hippo attacks where like you see hippo and then suddenly it's like 800 feet tall and coming outta the water at you. Yeah. They're

Georgia Dow (02:31:43):
Fast. Can go, can be on on the water. They're terrifying. But

Leo Laporte (02:31:46):
No, hippos are

Georgia Dow (02:31:47):
Fast. Turtles aren't. And it's so funny because I went to Galapagos and I, I saw the galas turtles and we're not allowed to touch them. And they're in danger. Like, they're very careful. They're beautiful. But in Florida, yeah, they can, you can breathe them. You can actually buy one, take it home and read it. What? Sell it to other people. What I did, the Galapagos, I did the, we paid for a special tour of the turtles eighties

Rene Ritchie (02:32:06):
And Gentlemen,

Georgia Dow (02:32:06):
Florida. I had the turtles pet the turtles. It tried, it followed me around cuz I had a very colorful skirt, which they, so it very slowly followed me around. And then they're, they keep the male and female turtles separate because they sometimes fight. And it was adorable cuz these two male turtles that have been together for like 35 years and have animosity towards each other would be aggressive towards each other. So one would bite, but it was so slow and it was bite. The other would just move outta this way and then the other would be angry. And it was so slow. It was hilarious. It was

Leo Laporte (02:32:39):
Just, they also, they live on guas as you probably noticed this. And they're very messy eaters. So they always have a lot of guava on their face.

Georgia Dow (02:32:46):
They, they, well we, I fed them. There were these reeds that they also fed them. And so I got to feed them these reeds really, really slowly. But it was, it was kind of hilarious.

Leo Laporte (02:32:57):
This is the little baby hero

Rene Ritchie (02:32:58):
And a half shell.

Leo Laporte (02:32:59):
This is Mr. Pickle's little baby. And apparently cor of the times, the bursts were even more improbable because the hatchlings likely would not have survived if a zookeeper hadn't noticed Mrs. Pickles laying her eggs. The soil in Houston isn't conducive to keeping the burrowed eggs exit Madagascar native to turtles. Lay at the tortoise's, sorry, lay at the right temperature and humidity. So the keepers had to take them and move them to the reptile and amphibian home. <Laugh> the new trio will remain behind the scenes until they're big enough to join their parents. Congratulations.

Rene Ritchie (02:33:36):
Parks

Leo Laporte (02:33:36):
Like this. And Mrs. Pickles, there are Mr. And Mrs. Pickles eating some celebratory lettuce

Rene Ritchie (02:33:43):
<Laugh>. Oh, they had a, they worked hard.

Leo Laporte (02:33:45):
They worked hard. Good for them. Those

Rene Ritchie (02:33:48):
Are some lettuce

Leo Laporte (02:33:49):
<Laugh> tortoises are pretty amazing, I have to say. But not as amazing as you three. What a great show. Thank you so much. <Laugh> Georgia Dow. I've got your videos. Anxiety videos.com. She of course does great. I think her YouTube videos are hysterical.

Georgia Dow (02:34:08):
Thank you. I

Leo Laporte (02:34:09):
Know. Are they, they're not supposed to be comedic probably, but they're

Georgia Dow (02:34:13):
They're fun. They're supposed to be fun. I actually thought when you said Mr. Mrs. Pickles, I thought you were talking about the Pus and Boots movie. <Laugh>. Oh, you just covered that. And so I was thinking that that's where it was from and I'm like, that seems strange. I'm like, why are we, I guess OK <laugh>, we could be covering that <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:34:29):
I wanna watch, I gotta watch your therapist react to last of us. Cuz I love Last of us. Oh,

Georgia Dow (02:34:35):
This was so good.

Leo Laporte (02:34:36):
Yeah. And I wanna see what you, it was quite have to say

Georgia Dow (02:34:39):
About that. It was quite good. Yeah, it was quite good. Yeah. Though I'm not wearing any ears in that. But one of them is, is I dress up a little. So one of

Leo Laporte (02:34:46):
Them is, do you, you dress up as Wednesday Adams, which is,

Georgia Dow (02:34:49):
I do really two Wednesday Adams

Leo Laporte (02:34:51):
Really good. You are an excellent Wednesday Adams <laugh>.

Georgia Dow (02:34:54):
Thank you. Thank you. I do try. You make Girl Scout cookies outta proper Girl Scouts. So <laugh>. I, I did a little actually in it. It's horrible. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:35:03):
You can watch <laugh>.

Georgia Dow (02:35:04):
It's horrible. <Laugh>. Its terrible. Terrible. But I made like the ears for all the characters for like, see, I, I glued together like the little Oh, nice. Tiny ears for like, if you saw the Puss and Boots movie, you'll understand it's barito. But like, you know, like it's just,

Leo Laporte (02:35:19):
It's so cute. Fun. What you do is so cute. There she is in her ears.

Georgia Dow (02:35:25):
Others, I'm with my ears. Aww. And Barito.

Leo Laporte (02:35:28):
Barito.

Georgia Dow (02:35:29):
She's so cute.

Leo Laporte (02:35:30):
So you will, it's a good movie. You'll both laugh, love, and learn with her videos. They're so good. I, I wish I had been watching your videos as I watched last of us cuz you've gone through all the episodes, so I have to

Georgia Dow (02:35:44):
Go back. I didn't go through all the episodes. Yeah, it was so good. I really enjoyed that.

Leo Laporte (02:35:47):
I agree. Episode three, it couldn't stop crying. Couldn't stop crying. Nope.

Georgia Dow (02:35:52):
They, I think that they should have had another two or three episodes Agree. I think that it was short in comparison to how much the they had in the game. Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:36:00):
Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (02:36:01):
That Craig Maison could write who, who, who would've thunked it.

Leo Laporte (02:36:03):
Well that's what's interesting, right? The themes of the game ended up being excellent themes for a television series. I thought that was fascinating. One

Rene Ritchie (02:36:10):
Thing I heard that was really interesting was that one editor, like the main editor had never seen it, so he cut the whole thing without never playing the video game. Oh. Just trying to figure out. But he, the co-editor had like, was a, an ultra fan and would go through it and look at it after to make sure he didn't forget anything or like something wasn't done better in the in the game. But they said it ended up being cut very similar to the game just because that was the best way to tell the story.

Leo Laporte (02:36:31):
Interesting. Wow. Well, Georgia Doo is@youtube.com at Georgia Doo Renee Richie is at youtube.com/renee Richie and of course he's the creator liaison over there. So if you're a YouTube creator, you will be talking to Mr. Richie. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Anything you wanna plug? I did a video.

Rene Ritchie (02:36:56):
If you go to the, well, the creator le youtube.com/youtube liaison, I recently got to interview Mr. Beast Jimmy Donaldson about multi-language audio on YouTube where you can now upload, if you dub tracks, you don't have to have a separate Spanish channel or a separate French channel or, or Portuguese channel. You can upload multiple audio tracks to the same and then it'll automatically pick the one that goes with the language preference of the

Leo Laporte (02:37:18):
Viewer. That's super cool. So he has Portuguese and Spanish and that's really, really cool. Good for him. And of course Ian Thompson, he is us editor@theregister.com. Always a pleasure. Ian. When he used to come up here, he used to go to the English store and pick up some last minute Marmite. Oh.

Iain Thomson (02:37:39):
<Laugh>. Finally Maite. We, my, my fellow, I went to a, a British blokes leaving do last night Dave Lee, who's going over to Bloomberg in New York. And we have a competition who can find the most expensive Marmite and my goodness, California really comes, like, comes through.

Leo Laporte (02:37:54):
We had, we have the most expensive Marmite.

Iain Thomson (02:37:57):
Oh yeah. I've always charged $8 for a tiny little thing, <laugh>. Whereas, you know, with Amazon, I can actually buy the catering size pack. So it, oh

Leo Laporte (02:38:07):
My God. How much Marmite do you eat?

Iain Thomson (02:38:10):
I go through about a kilogram a year.

Leo Laporte (02:38:15):
A kilogram a year of basically the byproduct of beer making yum, yum, yum. Oh look, Sanitarium brand Marmite from New Ceiling.

Iain Thomson (02:38:28):
You see the, that that tap on the right hand side. Oh, here's the,

Leo Laporte (02:38:33):
Those are

Iain Thomson (02:38:33):
The ones.

Leo Laporte (02:38:33):
Here's the

Iain Thomson (02:38:34):
600, one of them.

Leo Laporte (02:38:35):
600 gram tubs. Pack a two for 48 bucks. That's a lot. I have, that's a lot on Mar

Iain Thomson (02:38:42):
Cup at the moment,

Leo Laporte (02:38:43):
But, you know, it's nice how spreadable tub is a good idea. I think.

Iain Thomson (02:38:47):
Well, honestly, the lids on those are really bad. Cause one of them fell off on the shelf from, went on its side and I didn't notice it for a day or two. Yeah. And it looked like Venom three, the remake, you know, just the hot stuff everywhere. <Laugh>. That's great. Let's eat that. <Laugh> <laugh>. Well, a may of mine did say, I bet you clean that up with toast. But yeah, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:39:10):
That's the easiest way to do it. Absolutely. Thank you Ian. Thank you Georgia. Thank you Renee. Always a pleasure. Thanks also to Cory. Dr. O joined us earlier and thanks to all of you who put up with us every Sunday for this week in tech, we do the show Sunday afternoons right after Ask the Tech guys I throw Micah Bodily outta the studio. And then we do this week in tech about 2:00 PM Pacific <laugh>, 5:00 PM Eastern 2100 utc. You can watch us do it live@live.twit.tv. If you're watching live, you can chat with us live@irc.twi.tv. Of course, club twit members have the discord where they can chat, which is awesome. We love having you in there after the fact. The website has shows you can download them there or go to YouTube. We have a YouTube channel. Actually, probably the best thing is go to the main twit channel youtube.com/TWiTand then you can follow links to all the shows.

(02:40:08):
Each show has its own channel including this week in Tech. And maybe the easiest thing to do is just find a good podcast program and subscribe That way. You'll get it the minute it's available of a Sunday evening. Reminder, I will be taking the next few weeks off. Micah Sergeant will be taking over next Sunday to Vendor Hardware following that. And on the 20 sorry, the 16th, Jason Howell. I'll be back on the 23rd. Thanks to all the people who behind the scenes who make I never thank you guys. I should really thank you Bonito who runs the board, John and Burke, who run the studio. Kevin is Kevin King, our editor usually for normally, pardon me, normally not today. Not today, who will be editing the show Will Bonito Anthony. Anthony, Anthony Nielsen. Of course, Anthony's kind of our creative director, does a lot of great things. You, you know what, there is a, a crawl at the end of the show that shows all the people. It is not an easy thing to put this together every week. And I am eternally grateful to all the people who help and do it. And of course, aunt Pruitt filling in for Jason Howell, who's in Costa Rica this week, and aunt did the production on this show. So thank you Aunt Pruit. Thanks to all of you. We'll see you next time, but meanwhile, another twit is in the camp. Bye-Bye.