This Week in Tech Episode 926, 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 TWiT, This Week in Tech. Great panel for you. The return of Allyn Malventano, our former SSD guy from This Week in Computer Hardware. He's still working on SSDs at Solidigm. We also have Louise Matsakis of Semafor.com. Always great to have Louise on. And somebody I've been following for years, first at GigaOM then at he was at Variety, then at Protocol. Now he's got his own newsletter, Lowpass.cc. Janko Roettgers joins us. We'll be talking about AI, of course, in that big White House meeting of all of the leaders in AI, a judge protects a data broker. Oh, no. And what's Google gonna announce at Google IO this week than a whole lot more. Coming up next on TWiT.

TWIT Intro (00:00:48):  
Podcasts you love from people you trust.  This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:01:01):  
This is TWiT, This Week in Tech episode 926 recorded Sunday, May 7th, 2023. Bias Hallucinations, jail breaks. This Week in Tech is brought to you by Ag One, by Athletic Greens. If you're looking for a simpler, cost effective supplement routine, AG one is giving you a free one year supply of vitamin D and five pre travel packs with your first purchase of a subscription. Go to athletic greens.com/twis and buy ZipRecruiter whether you're starting a new business or growing one. If you wanna be successful, you need the most talented people on your team. That's where ZipRecruiter comes in right now. You could try it free at ziprecruiter.com/twiz and buy express vpn. Stop letting big tech Leach on your data freely. Use this link right now and you get three extra months free with your one year plan. Express vpn.com/TWiT to get protected with the VPN rated number one by CNET, Tech Radar, and me. It's time for TWiT. This Week in Tech. The show will we cover the latest tech news. I've put together. Assembled a really good panel for you this week. I had to, cuz last week was so stellar, I have to keep up the standards. It's great to have Alan Malventano back in the house. Longtime host at This Week in Computer Hardware, our, our TWiCH show. He was at Intel. He's an SSD guru. Intel spun off his current company, Solidigm, which now makes the Intel SSDs, except they're Solidigm. Hi, Alan.

Allyn Malventano (00:02:46):  
I liked it so much that I was not part of the spinoff and joined them

Leo Laporte (00:02:50):  
Anyway. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah. Also submariner Naval Intelligence Officer, NSA Analyst. Did I get that? All right. <Laugh>. Just get all, just get all over the lifetimes. Get all former. I'm putting it all out because that n that NSA analyst is helpful these days. It's good to have somebody who's had experience on the inside. Yep. Welcome Alan. It's great to see you also from Semafor.com. Good friend Louise Miki is here. She writes about tech at Semafor. Hi, it's good to see you.

Louise Matsakis (00:03:25):  
Hey, Leo. How's it going?

Leo Laporte (00:03:26):  
Welcome. Did you ever, thanks. Are you now or have you ever been an NSA analyst <laugh>?

Louise Matsakis (00:03:32):  
No, and I have never leaked anything private in a Discord server.

Leo Laporte (00:03:35):  
Is your first name Reality? No. Okay. <Laugh>. Yeah, that that story is a fascinating story in getting weirder and weirder as as time goes by. We'll talk about that in a little bit. Also here not his first time, but the first time in a long time. Janko Roettgers, who is you, you may remember him from Giga, om, and then Variety and then protocol <laugh>. And he's out now. That's pretty much it. Did I get 'em all there? It's crazy. I think so. Yeah. Go. He has a great new newsletter called Lowpass, which has a, that's a clever name, filtering the future. But you've always focused on streaming and media and as you said, the, the confluence between technology and media and always great topics and great content. So thank you for being here. It's great to see you.

(00:04:22):  
I've been, you know, that's alright. I, you're, you're here in spirit. Many shows we often quote you <laugh>. So appreciate that. Yeah, yeah. Always. well, you know, when Variety was smart for a variety to hire somebody new about technology, cuz it, you know, it really is an entertainment magazine. But, but the world has changed. I guess we should talk about the writers strike cuz that's on in Full Force started this week already, you know, there's a big back and forth between the writers and the TV and motion picture producers. The, the big changes that they're, they're striking over are revenues from streaming, which don't trickle down to the writers particularly. And ai the writers are very concerned, probably reasonably so. I don't know that AI will either take their jobs or supplement their jobs. And one of the clauses they were hoping for in a new contract was one that prevented AI from going through their old script and creating new scripts, <laugh> from them.

(00:05:24):  
Last week, somebody pointed out that how many, how many years of the Simpsons are there? There's hundreds of Simpson scripts. Would it be possible for something like chat G p t to write a new one based on all the old ones? Anyway, the motion picture and television producers seem very reluctant to negotiate on ai. In fact, all they, their counter proposal was, we'll have a yearly meeting. <Laugh>, let's, let's talk about it once in a while. We'll get together. I, I presume you kind of talked to people in the WGA about this. How serious is that concern for about ai?

Janko Roettgers (00:06:00):  
I think it is serious. And I think they also, sometimes it gets played off as, oh, it's just these people who are afraid that robots are taking their jobs or something like that, right? But they are having very valid concerns. I think one, one of them is what happens when like, AI goes through old scripts and maybe even rejected scripts. Maybe a studio's gonna tell you, oh, we like what you did, but we are gonna go with something else. And that something else happens to be an AI version of a script that's trained on your script. So that would kind of suck for writers, obviously. But I think the bigger point here is that writers get paid less for marking up or sort of reworking existing scripts than they get for original works. And I think writers are rightly worried that studios might just have AI churn out these really

Leo Laporte (00:06:46):  
Bad scripts. Oh.

Janko Roettgers (00:06:47):  
And then say, you know, this is not perfect. Why don't you like work on it? And then you get paid half of what you would get paid for if we, if we took your script. So that's, I think, a really valid concern, and I could see that actually happen.

Leo Laporte (00:07:00):  
I think there's a serious concern. Last week we had Alex Stamos security Guru on, and his concern is that AI is, is so facile at generating content and necessarily accurate content, but, but, you know, kind of convincingly well-written content that it's gonna be a, an information overload that we're gonna have. And, and the Washington Post had an art article this week kind of confirming that, saying AI is already writing books, how to books. They're writing recipes. It's already cranking stuff out like crazy. So I think this, the Writer's Guild is rightly concerned. One of the stories that the Washington Post, it's Willow Remus writing this, he does a great job talks about a software developer Nest named Chris Cow, who wrote a very technical book for a very small audience called Automating DevOps with GitLab, C I C D pipelines.

(00:07:56):  
Now, you probably understand, if you understand what any of those words mean, that is a narrow slice. But three weeks before it came out, a book with exactly the same title came out. And as far as he could tell, the, the author Marie Carpo had never written anything before, had no presence on the web as he figured it out, it was written. There's a book publisher in the India, an education technology firm called Ink Stahl that has dozens of books on Amazon, each with a different author, each with five star Amazon reviews from the same handful of India-based reviewers all apparently AI generated. And that, you know, you spent a year writing a book about DevOps and c I c d <laugh> with a narrow audience, and somebody beats you to the punch at three weeks with an AI generator book. That's not good. Yeah, no, it's, it's really bad. I think what you're seeing

Louise Matsakis (00:08:54):  
Is sort of ai filling up the lowest common denominator information on, on the internet, right? Like it's all the s e o blogs these books you're seeing on Amazon, that's their Kindle self-publishing program, right? Which we've seen a lot of sort of abuse and, you know, spammy books fill that section previously. I saw a great tweet earlier this week that was like, wouldn't it be so wonderful instead if Google was trying to figure out new ways to filter this stuff out? Right? It's already been a big problem in their search results for a long time. I would just love if there was a company that was taking the stance, Hey, instead of giving you a chat g p t powered bot, we're going to, you know, emphasize human results, right? And we're gonna make sure that you see, you know, the best quality human generated content as possible. I would, I would switch to a new search engine that was putting an emphasis on that. But instead you're seeing it's

Leo Laporte (00:09:47):  
Going the other way, <laugh>.

Louise Matsakis (00:09:48):  
Exactly. Right. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:09:50):  
Yeah. It,

Janko Roettgers (00:09:51):  
It's getting harder and harder to tell too, whether something's coming from like a bad content farm or from a bad ai, right? I think, Luis, you probably have the same issue when whenever you write something, there's people, or you break some news or something, people are picking it up. There's reputable outlets rewriting it, picking up doing some own reporting, and then there's always these really weird websites that sort of get it right. And then at the end of the article totally goes off the rails and becomes like a weird conspiracy theory. And up until recently I thought it's all just content farms as people in India getting paid like 10 cents to rewrite the story. But I'm starting to suspect that a lot of that stuff has been AI all along and that like half of the Google search results for many topics are just AI garbage at this point.

Louise Matsakis (00:10:33):  
Yeah. And I think the reason that it's hard to tell between those two things is because these bots were trained on so much of that stuff, right? So like they're, they're able to really easily generate that type of content because so much of it was already polluting the web. And I think it's, it's just really nefarious and unfortunate that this is already starting to happen on a pretty wide scale. I wrote a few weeks ago about how this was starting to happen with online reviews. I encourage everyone to do a Google search for site yelp.com and search as an AI model that response that you get back from Chad g p t, and you'll find Google has cache all these really funny reviews on Yelp for bakeries. You know, for, I think it was like a sewage service somewhere in California. And it's just full of AI generator reviews that, you know, someone didn't even bother to take the part out where it says, as an AI model, I don't have personal opinions or whatever <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:11:27):  
This is this is a really fascinating Google search that you can use on Twitter in a lot of places. And what it is, is frequently chat g p t will start an answer with as an AI language model. So if you search for that, you'll find it everywhere. Vice pointed this out and, and they're not even bothering, you know, to cut it out. It's just everywhere. A user review for a waste trimmer posted on April 13th contains the entire response to the initial prompt unedited <laugh> on Amazon as an AI language model. I mean, it's, it's terrifying, but is it, but as you point out, it's low quality content. So low quality content's always been a problem with the content farms and stuff. Maybe we don't have to worry about it cuz it's just low quality content.

Allyn Malventano (00:12:27):  
You know, a few months back when AI to start to pick up steam, I I, and I said this to multiple of my friends at the time, I went, I really feel like we're at the beginning of some form of a renaissance here. Like, this might really be an interesting thing that we get to watch unfold. And that has slowly been shipped away <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:12:50):  
By,

Allyn Malventano (00:12:50):  
By what, you know, the types of things that we've just covered here, right? Like, look at how quickly society has proven to us that they're just gonna use this new thing in ways that are just, you know, nefarious or any other, you know, opportunistic. And I

Leo Laporte (00:13:06):  
Have to point out that while you can now look for as an AI language model and, and, and immediately eliminate those responses, it's not gonna take long before, in fact, probably people have already figured it out. Right?

Allyn Malventano (00:13:20):  
And, and then someone's gonna need to make an AI model in order to catch the

Leo Laporte (00:13:24):  
All the yeah.

Allyn Malventano (00:13:25):  
AI outputs and then now it's gonna be this war of AI is just happening behind the scenes, right? <Laugh>,

Louise Matsakis (00:13:31):  
I think, I think that's especially true because right now the vast majority of what you're seeing is people using the chat G P T interface, right? But since the AI opened, since the p I opened up for the ai, you're starting to see now like all of these sorts of third party apps that are using the same technology. So, you know, I'm sure somebody's gonna come out with a fake review generator, right? Where it automatically strips out that language or, you know, a fake book generator, whatever it is that's optimized for that purpose. I think one really interesting story that I'm gonna be following for sure is how well does Open AI and the other companies creating these large models, do they police their a p I access, right? Are they gonna be cutting off hundreds of apps a day? Or are these apps gonna last a long time before the access is cut off? And I think, you know, content moderation stories can be tiresome, but in this case, you know, they're paying for that API access, right? So I think there's sort of a really direct line to revenue. So there's an incentive not to clamp down on the majority of these apps. And I think that's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out. How,

Janko Roettgers (00:14:39):  
And I think on the other, go ahead, on the other side, when you, when you talk about these reviews, maybe it doesn't even matter that that's in there because when you go to Amazon, you don't read 5,000 reviews. You look at this and you say, oh, it's 5,000 reviews and it's four a half stars average. It must be good. But he, then you missed the part that 4,900 of those reviews contain that language that says as an AI model, I don't really know what I'm talking about, or something like that.

Leo Laporte (00:15:02):  
Alex runs Stanford's internet Observatory, which is basically looking for disinformation. He's concerned about the next year's presidential election. He says bought farms and disinformation are gonna go crazy thanks to these new tools. What do we, how as users should we deal with this? What <laugh>, you know, as consumers of information, you guys all create information, but as consumers of information is there, is, is there a trick? Is there a tool or should we just forget everything we read? Yako, what do you think? I think, oh, go ahead. You could start, Luis, go ahead.

Louise Matsakis (00:15:43):  
Well, I think you're gonna see you already, before we had this influx of all this AI content, you already saw a movement towards closed spaces, right? Like closed discords, people using signal Ah, yeah. Or these curated communities. And I think you're gonna see more and more of that the same way that now there's a premium on like handmade ceramics, right? Like handmade jewelry after we saw sort of like the explosion of machines, you know, turning out all sorts of like, you know, low-cost junk, right? Like, I think you're gonna see that with the internet right now. You're seeing like some publications say like, oh, we're like open to experimenting with ai, or we're gonna generate, you know, AI quizzes like Buzzfeed. But I think you're gonna see like subscription publications and subscription you know, services online emphasizing we guarantee this is a hundred percent human, there's gonna be no bots like, you know, in this Discord server or whatever.

Janko Roettgers (00:16:34):  
I think the next problem then is that that might lead to a rift, right? Or digital digital divide where some people can afford to pay for all the subscriptions on New York Times and whatnot to get verified information that has been written by humans that has been going through an editorial process. And then you have the, the one level lower all those people are rewriting those news and AI has a much easier like avenue get in there on and Rick havoc. And then if people can't afford all the subscription fees, that's really troublesome.

Allyn Malventano (00:17:05):  
Yeah. It, it's a, just think about the average person probably isn't the, you know, very deliberate subscriber and going out to make sure that they're getting the correct sources, right? So this type of thing going on is gonna catch up. You know, the broad net is gonna catch the majority of folks that they're just like, oh, I heard about this thing. Let me just Google it. And then whatever results they see, that's what they look for, right? They're not, they're not being careful to be in any sort of any sort of a walled garden or anything like that, you know? So

Leo Laporte (00:17:37):  
Do we have to teach? Is it now time to teach people I guess it has been for a while to be a little bit more d discriminate in their con media consumption. You know, I look, I look at cnet, none of you have worked for cnet, right? <Laugh>, we had, when this story broke that CNET was using AI to write its personal finance articles. We had the EIC of CNET on Connie Gomo. And she had just you know, published a statement saying, well, we have humans check it. We're very careful. It's just doing the stuff that, this was one, one of her big points. These are, it is just writing articles. No, nobody wants to write, Louise and Yako don't wanna write those articles. So we have a machine write 'em and then an editor review 'em. Actually, as it turned out, there were still many, many mistakes in these personal finance articles. Cnet was rumored to, and their, you know, personal private equity owners. Red Ventures were rumored to be really doubling down on this. And and it looks like Red Ventures has been planning to use AI written content in all of its other sites. Site, site bank, bank rate.com really are content farms to some degree. Be sad to see CNET turn into that, but and, and

Janko Roettgers (00:18:49):  
Right after that came out, they laid off a bunch of riders. So

Leo Laporte (00:18:51):  
Yeah. Sort of riding on the wall, right? Yeah. We don't need writers. We've got ai should we be, I mean, you know, it's funny cuz there was just a meeting at the White House on the Thursday. All the, all the big CEOs came in to, to meet with the vice president. President Biden came in and tipped his ha hat and said, we need you guys to help <laugh>. Sendar Pacha was there. Satya Nadela was there. Sam Altman from Open ai, anthro CEO e o was there. But I mean, what are these guys doing? They're not saying what, I mean, this is their business,

Louise Matsakis (00:19:40):  
Isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I have to say, what was sort of funny about that meeting to me was that first of all, it was interesting that Apple and Meta were not included. So what that sort of left was open ai, the big company partnering with Open ai, the people who left Open AI to start competitor <laugh> and Google <laugh>, right? Like, I, it it it is sort of a narrow group of people that have a lot of power right now. And, and I think it's important to push back against that. Like, one of the great framings that I loved of the writers that went on strike was why can't the AI replace studio executives? Right? Like, there you go. Framing is, there you go.

Leo Laporte (00:20:15):  
Yeah. It's

Louise Matsakis (00:20:16):  
Like so great <laugh>. Like, why does it have to be, why us the most creative job Yeah. That, that people really like to do and that we sort of value that that's coming from a human and, and has a human perspective and, and does not sort of pollute the internet with spam or, or, you know, create really reductive, you know, narratives. I think when you ask it to generate stories and stuff, it's not only inaccurate, but it's often just like really mid right? It's kind of boring. It, it's sort of bad because it's just sort of taking an average of everything on the internet. So it's not surprising. But why do we have replace these things that are so valuable within our culture? Like, why can't it be, you know, why can't we use AI to analyze, you know, budgets for, for, for studios, right?

(00:20:56):  
Like, why does it have to be these really creative jobs that end up being things that get replaced? Cause I think this technology is really powerful, can do a lot, but why, you know, I just don't get it. But on the other hand, I do think that the, that the editor-in-chief of CNET has a point that these, you know, this aggregation, these, these sort of like, you know, low value articles that are just trying to catch, you know, a random Google search or whatever the, that's not what a lot of people envision themselves doing when they wanna have a career in journalism, right? So I think there's some point there, but just automating that process, I'm not sure really, that's just sort of a really sad and narrow use of this technology, which could be used to do a lot of really cool things, but instead it's being used to write, you know, SEO articles and spammy books. And,

Janko Roettgers (00:21:43):  
And the question is like, articles that nobody wants to write, are those really articles that anybody wants to read, right? Or are they just like clogging up the pipeline and clogging up the Google news results with SEO garbage?

Leo Laporte (00:21:54):  
Well, maybe nobody wants to read, but people are searching for, right? That's why it exists. You're gonna search for bank, you know, what's the best savings account rate, and you're gonna get to bank rate.com and be served a bunch of ads. And even if the content sucks, they got you with the ads, they're there and you saw 'em, and they get to charge the companies for that. So do I guess they, I mean, I think honestly, they don't care if the content sucks.

Allyn Malventano (00:22:21):  
No, it's all about the, the ROI for that effort, right? It's super low effort to just make an AI do a thing and then just throw it up there. Low

Leo Laporte (00:22:28):  
Effort versus That's exactly it. Yeah. Low effort. I love the picket signs. Writer's Guild, of course is gonna have the best written picket signs. <Laugh> right. Writer's Guild of America AI wrote the sign and then it's crossed out and says, this sign live from New York on strike. My favorite succession without writers is just the Apprentice <laugh>.

Allyn Malventano (00:22:53):  
That one's great. <Laugh>, that one's really great.

Leo Laporte (00:22:57):  
I told Chap Beat G P T to make a sign and it sucked. <Laugh>, the force is with us. That was probably on May 4th. We have some notes, a little shot at producers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, no ai. The AI obviously a real concern. Would love a two-day delivery on this Amazon <laugh> <laugh>. Nice. I want to get a baseball hat that says writer, even though I'm not, my brother's career is more stable and he's a magician. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Louise Matsakis (00:23:29):  
That's really good

Leo Laporte (00:23:30):  
Writers. We need him. <Affirmative> <laugh> <laugh>, by the way, this

Allyn Malventano (00:23:37):  
Yeah. Let's not forget that. I mean, this, this extends to tech journalism too, right? Which used to be my beat, you know, and, and, and the, the written technical detail type info, which is a thing that AI tends to do reasonably surprisingly well, even if it gets some stuff wrong, it sure sounds like it's right. You know, none of this was around and I was already kind of seeing some writing on the wall, doing my job back at PC perspective where it was, okay, there's an awful lot of this stuff is moving to really short form video content. Yeah. People don't seem to have the patience to, to read a written technical article anymore. They just wanted in a five, 10 minute, how quick can you get me the, you know, the information side of it.

Leo Laporte (00:24:18):  
We've been heading this way for a long time, haven't we? Yeah,

Allyn Malventano (00:24:21):  
Yeah. Well, I mean, that was, so it was already heading that way for a long time, but now we have this piled on top of it, right? It adds even more pressure. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is unfortunate, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> because that, you know, that's, it is, admittedly it's a niche, but there's, there are people and that would like to be more educated about a given technical topic. And it's handy to be able to Google something and get, you know, an actual good long form article on that technical thing, especially in tech in general, right? Especially like computers and whatnot.

Janko Roettgers (00:24:52):  
I mean, in a way, going back to that White House meeting, it actually makes sense to invite the folks running Google search engine and being in all those things. Because if anybody can help filter out a lot of the garbage and steer people towards high quality content, whether that is AI generated, AI assisted or entirely human made, it is search engines, right? And a lot of them have been trying to use AI and being chat chatbots and whatnot for kind of an interface type of question. But the, the next step is really like, how do you revamp that whole thing to make sure that a lot of the garbage doesn't clock up everybody's results?

Leo Laporte (00:25:31):  
So you, Louise had one suggestion for people, which is create your own private spaces that can't be infiltrated by ai, but then that just creates, puts you in a filter bubble, right? You don't get to see stuff outside of your immediate circle.

Louise Matsakis (00:25:47):  
Yeah. It's definitely not the only solution, but I think it's something that people are gonna increasingly crave depending on how much AI generated content ends up on social media or ends up in some of these places. I think people are gonna wanna know that they're like talking to a human. And I think you see that a lot already, where like other parts of the economy that are automated, right? Like people, oh yeah. Wanna talk to a human, they don't wanna talk to a customer service bot. They, they value companies that where you can call someone nice who will help you. Or you want things that are handmade, hand designed that aren't just, you know, coming out of some big factory somewhere.

Leo Laporte (00:26:19):  
Artisinal writing <laugh>, it's time for autism. Yeah.

Louise Matsakis (00:26:23):  
Artisinal writing <laugh>. I think that's the way things are going. It's like, you know, how many times do we think that like, you know, ai like, you know, AI generated music for example, is not going to eliminate musicians. It might eliminate some types of music,

Leo Laporte (00:26:35):  
But I think, I think the labels are worried about that a little bit. They shut that Drake song down real quick.

Louise Matsakis (00:26:40):  
Oh yeah. I mean I think the IP thing is a huge un you know, unanswered question and it'll be fascinating to see how the Supreme Court and some of the lower courts decide on that because that's, I think that's one of the big concerns that's keeping a lot of some companies at least with maybe like more conservative legal teams from immediately jumping into this stuff, right? Cuz they're really worried about copyright complaints.

Leo Laporte (00:27:05):  
Yeah. And I don't know, of course we have no idea these days how the courts will rule, but in the case of the Drake song, it was completely original. And so it wasn't like it was samples, which, you know, we know that case law supports writers you know, the creator's rights in that case. But it wasn't samples, it was generated. It sounded like Drake can he, is he copyrighted his voice? I don't think you can your sound. It's gonna be very interesting. I think the, the legal experts I've seen have all kind of said there isn't really a case for preventing this kind of AI mashup,

Janko Roettgers (00:27:48):  
I mean, sort of impersonation and using his likeness, right? It's not copyright anymore. It goes into like different areas of law

Leo Laporte (00:27:54):  
Maybe, but it's

Janko Roettgers (00:27:55):  
True protection. A lot of the companies have been using a copyright takedown notices, which are really not meant for something like

Leo Laporte (00:28:02):  
This, right? Well, it's, we, we live in interesting times. And I guess I, the best you could say is just tell your friends and neighbors and people who aren't maybe paying attention that watch out. Cuz there's a lot of gonna be, a lot of, there's gonna be a flood of fake content

Janko Roettgers (00:28:21):  
And real content that people say is fake. Like, you know, Musk like to do.

Leo Laporte (00:28:24):  
Right? Well, and that's part of the problem too, isn't that, that that's the old Soviet flood the zone techno technique, which is, it doesn't matter if all these bot farms say anything believable or credible, it's just you're flooding the zone with crap so that nobody believes anything. Even the real stuff. We may already be there, frankly. So Google has been slow to jump on this bandwagon. It's interesting. Sendar Pacha was there. They have barred, which is kind of unimpressive, wall Street Journal yesterday said Google plans to make search more personal with AI chat and video clips. And there's a word they use that I'm just loathing, but I'm seeing it more and more snackable.

Louise Matsakis (00:29:07):  
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:29:08):  
Snackable is the big not a great choice. Google, Google plans to make its visual engine, its search engine more visual, snackable, personal and human yako. You've gotta run into snackable before. It sounds like qui sounds like Quibi to me.

Janko Roettgers (00:29:24):  
Yes, it takes exactly. Sounds like Quibi. I mean Google has started with some of that stuff already, right? For a lot of popular topics when you search, you get the blue links on top and then you scroll further down and you get sort of cart type of interfaces and a lot of colorful, snackable things. What I thought was interesting about that story was that it said it's going to allow you to ask more follow up questions, which helps people to maybe be a little bit more precise or figure out what they're actually looking for. I actually kind of want sometimes the opposite. I would like Google to ask me what I'm looking for because maybe I'm searching too broadly. And if Google got back to me and said, do you wanna bake this cake for yourself or for your dog? That might actually be really helpful

Leo Laporte (00:30:08):  
As a

Janko Roettgers (00:30:08):  
Results, right?

Leo Laporte (00:30:09):  
Very important. Get that one right? Yeah. <laugh>, do you, have you ever baked a cake for your dog?

Janko Roettgers (00:30:17):  
My daughter has. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:30:18):  
<Laugh>,

Janko Roettgers (00:30:19):  
We, we all tried it. It was not very good,

Leo Laporte (00:30:22):  
But yeah, <laugh>, that's quite cute. <Laugh>, I didn't know, I didn't know there were dog cake recipes, but if there aren't ai, we'll be writing them soon. Google's search visitors, as you say this is from the journal article, might be more frequently prompted to ask follow up questions or swipe through visuals like TikTok videos in response to their queries. This is, by the way, the thing that I hate about big tech or just I guess the world we live in. You know what, you could blame Hollywood. They keep making sequels. Nobody's trying to make something the next big thing. They're Google's rushing now. They're scared to death. They're rushing now because Microsoft came out with chat G p T and they're worried they're gonna lose their advantage in search. So they're gonna make search more like that. And oh, by the way, as long as we're doing this, let's make it more like TikTok cuz that's, the kids love that. And it's, it's, it's chasing your tail,

Allyn Malventano (00:31:16):  
The race to the bottom.

Leo Laporte (00:31:17):  
It ends up being a race to the bottom. I think. And I, I understand Google's nerves on this, but copying the other news, they gotta

Allyn Malventano (00:31:26):  
Do it because yeah, they gotta do it because other people are doing it and then everybody rushes to do it and then you don't get a good product out of any of them because they're all just trying to get it out the door.

Louise Matsakis (00:31:34):  
I think the TikTok bit is actually really interesting because one of the things I was contemplating when, you know, this huge search bot wave happened is that we're seeing an increasing number of younger people who are actually using TikTok as a search platform. And the platform is much better for search than say Instagram or other visual based platforms. Which is not surprising cuz this, you know, this transition already happened in China, which is where TikTok is from. So I think that's interesting cuz you're seeing these companies scrambling to make an AI bot when younger users are signaling no, what we want is maybe something integrated into a social platform or we want that visual content. We don't want to talk to a chatbot. We wanna see normal people who are posting videos. Cause you know, when you talk to those users, why are you using TikTok? It's not just, oh, they only have the attention span for a video. They wanna see normal people who are reviewing something or showing them, you know, advice on where to go on vacation or, you know, immediately showing them a video of that recipe. Right? You don't have to scroll past all the SEO garbage, you know, 1000 word introduction to get to the guacamole recipe or whatever. It's just right in front of you and it's a normal person making it and you could decide whether you trust them.

Leo Laporte (00:32:46):  
Jammer B just gave me a really interesting story. This is back from 1988. Do you have my audio? Let's see if we've got it. Tom, wait, sued Doritos

Speaker 6 (00:33:03):  
Tortilla called Salsa Burrito Doritos. It's Buffalo Bravo gung Mellow.

Leo Laporte (00:33:10):  
That is not Tom. Wait, sounds exactly like him, doesn't it? It's a Doritos ad where they copied his voice and he had a, has a very distinctive voice. He sued and in 1990 won 2.475 million in damages from Frito Lay. So I guess he probably

Allyn Malventano (00:33:31):  
Did not sue for copyright infringement.

Leo Laporte (00:33:33):  
Yeah, well, yeah, that's a voice theft <laugh>. Yeah. The voice thief is coming.

Allyn Malventano (00:33:42):  
I mean, I mean, you know, because they're taking advantage of the thing that is unique to that other persona, right? You're basically stealing and it's not just, I mean it was voice back then. Sure. But potentially, you know, with all these AI things and just where computing is going in general, what's to stop some, you know, you could make, I just saw this short video, short movie that was made where they basically inserted Spock into a Star Trek themed thing, right? And it was extremely convincing. Like, how many steps away are you from being able to just take an old actor, you know, even if they're with us no longer with us, doesn't matter. Right? And just insert them into a thing. And now you just have that person and that thing. And if you try to, we

Leo Laporte (00:34:24):  
Know they're limits. Yeah. So I guess Drake could have sued, but who do you sue if an AI <laugh> generates a song with your voice? Who do you go after

Allyn Malventano (00:34:34):  
Right. Turns into a finger pointing game.

Leo Laporte (00:34:37):  
The person who commissioned the AI to do it, I don't know the, the person who publishes it maybe. Yeah. You have to go after the publishing. Right. Which is by the way, what they successfully did. And I think that's why they used D M C A cuz they were able to get it taken down everywhere.

Louise Matsakis (00:34:51):  
Yeah. Platforms don't respond to anything with the same level of speed that they do D M C A takedowns,

Leo Laporte (00:34:58):  
Right? <Laugh>. They just, they, well, in fact, I think most of the time it's just automatic. Right? We get hit by that all the time. And even though, for instance, <laugh>, I, I'm taking my, my life into my hands by playing that Doritos ad I could get taken down by everybody. <Laugh> Tom Waits, right. Doritos. Doritos. But it was, it's in a commentary and in a news story about this topic. So it's very, it's for sure fair use, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna go to court to defend it. Right. You gotta file a counterclaim. Well, and this is the problem with YouTube, as you know, that takes months and by then nobody's gonna listen to this show cuz it's, it's old. So generally, I mean it's a chilling effect. We, we, we go through this all the time and I often just don't play stuff. That was, that was I think very germane to the topic. Right. But absolutely Tom Waits who let us down the street, my willow disagree. Yeah. That

Allyn Malventano (00:35:54):  
Doesn't stop people from, you know, exploiting the system. Right.

Janko Roettgers (00:35:57):  
I mean flip their own

Allyn Malventano (00:35:58):  
Failures.

Janko Roettgers (00:35:59):  
The flip side then is that we are gonna see, or we already have started to see artists license their voice models, right? So Grimes

Leo Laporte (00:36:06):  
Did, she said for 50 50 Grim a 50 50 sprint. Right? Right, right.

Janko Roettgers (00:36:10):  
Yeah. I mean that was more of a late night tweet. How much is gonna come out of that is a question. But I think John Legend did Google speakers for a while where he would tell Yeah, I

Leo Laporte (00:36:19):  
Paid for

Janko Roettgers (00:36:20):  
That. The Google speaker would tell you the weather in his voice.

Leo Laporte (00:36:23):  
Yeah. And I know it was a deal cuz it expired. So I paid for it and then, but they only had it for a year or whatever. I have Melissa McCarthy in my Amazon Echo <laugh>.

Janko Roettgers (00:36:34):  
There you go. But they're all, all time limit because I think the artists or their managers are smart and all. Yeah. You wanna keep that sort of limited in, in the bottle. You don't wanna give them the right and perpetuity to do whatever you they want with your voice. Obviously

Leo Laporte (00:36:47):  
This is, of course, this always happens when there's a new technology, you know, going back to Ned Lu and the looms when there's a new technology, there's displacement, there's disruption. That's what Silicon Valley Herald, you know, hails is the disruptive force of innovation and there's always winners and losers there. And obviously AI is about to disrupt. Well I always ask this question, I'll ask it from you cuz I, you all, cause I haven't asked it of you le yet, but is AI gonna disrupt? Or is it, I often think maybe this is just a, a trick and it will just, it'll wear off and then we'll do the next big thing. Or is this gonna be totally disruptive? Maybe it's already is is it already disruptive?

Allyn Malventano (00:37:33):  
Alan, I think, I think it's already dis it's disrupting on multiple levels, multiple angles all simultaneously. Right? It's not just the topics we've been talking about today. There were for, you know, what month or two ago just the photo, photo-based AI generated imagery and all the copyright, you know, questions there.

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):  
The playing with the new first tool came from 5.1 mid journey and you, you can go on Twitter and see a bunch of, it's gotten more and more photo realistic to the point where it's almost, I mean, you can easily generate an image that looks like a real photo. Right.

Allyn Malventano (00:38:05):  
Question. And not only that, you know, earlier earlier it was mentioned about oh yeah, well we're not sure if the API's open or if the companies are gonna lock down certain things or try to limit it that way. This is computing, this is a compute related thing, right? How many compute related things start in the cloud, but then computing, compute in general advances to the point where you can just have this running on a, on a system in your basement or a few years later on your regular desktop system if you can do

Leo Laporte (00:38:33):  
It on your phone years later

Allyn Malventano (00:38:34):  
Yeah. On your phone. Yeah. I mean, what, I mean, I think you

Louise Matsakis (00:38:36):  
Already got Midge running on a phone, right? Someone already was I think Yeah. Stable

Allyn Malventano (00:38:39):  
Diffusion you can run on your phone as well. Yeah, yeah. Right. Well you can run it, but I, albeit with a very limited data set. Right. But as things expand, you know, the data sets that they just trickle down, right? All that, all that expansion just trickles down over time. It always has. So whether, you know, I don't, I don't see this, I don't see this just going away because it would be too easy to do it willy-nilly not too long from now on any devices. Right? Right.

Janko Roettgers (00:39:07):  
People always overestimate the short term impacts and underestimate the long term impacts. Right, right. And I think, so the Drake example, I think that will be sorted out in a way where people follow artists and, and you know, on Spotify they will verify those types of things that it's only from the real artists. But then there's a whole other area of the music business. Like when it comes to licensing music for films, oftentimes it's already where, you know, people, music supervisors are looking for something that vaguely sounds like the Beatles, but right now they're still license some British band for that. In the future, they might just say, oh, you know, let's just generate something that sounds like a Beatles. Here we go.

Allyn Malventano (00:39:44):  
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Maybe it turns into not making the ai, not so much model exactly Drake, but just to be close, just close enough, but not close enough.

Janko Roettgers (00:39:55):  
Just Drake ish enough. Yep. Just

Allyn Malventano (00:39:56):  
Drake. Drake ishish enough, right? Yeah. Yeah. Drake ish. I

Louise Matsakis (00:40:01):  
I think though also a lot of the applications are not gonna be the really sexy things that people are talking about right now. And those are not gonna be the first things, like a lot of the applications for this stuff is gonna be like really boring administrative work, or it's gonna be in really high tech sectors like biotech where you're gonna be seeing this technology used pretty quickly. And I totally agree that, you know, the short term impacts are probably being overestimated. The long term impacts are being underestimated, but I think you're gonna see it kind of come into these you know, just like more boring, like, you know, like rote data entry type things before you're gonna see people flocking to an AI Drake concert or whatever. I, I think a lot of that stuff, people are still gonna value a human.

(00:40:42):  
And I also think, I'm trying to remember when, you know, these things feel scary that it's not predetermined. You know, like we as a culture and as a society get to decide how we're gonna use this tech. And I think it's important not to accept whatever the narrative is from open AI or Google that you know, this is gonna transform everything and everyone's gonna lose their job. Right? Like that's still to some degree up to us how we wanna use this. And I also think the consumer response is gonna be really interesting. Like, I dunno if you guys saw, but Amnesty International tried using AI generated images in a human rights campaign. And the backlash to that was really intense. But how did

Allyn Malventano (00:41:18):  
People find out? Did they say they were doing

Louise Matsakis (00:41:20):  
It? They, yeah, they disclosed it and it was like really, really bad. I mean, it was about you know, Columbian, it was about Columbia civil rights movements there. And they had this woman who was, you know, being away by, by police or whatever, and she had a Columbian flag and it wasn't the Columbian flag, like the AI got it wrong. Of course it did. And that was the first image. And it's just like, my God.

Leo Laporte (00:41:41):  
So they didn't have to disclose it because it was kind of obvious.

Allyn Malventano (00:41:45):  
Oh, the refugees have six

Leo Laporte (00:41:46):  
Fingers. Yeah. <laugh>. Well, they've fixed, by the way, they've pretty much fixed the six finger problem. Here's somebody's using the latest mid journey to generate pictures of presidents as football coaches <laugh>. And and the hands are, the hands are pretty good. It's, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't know. Would you be fooled? Maybe you would. Some of them were pretty obvious. I might believe that one in Bill Clinton. Reagans aren't very good. Carters aren't Reagan good? See, you

Louise Matsakis (00:42:16):  
All have that weird quality. There's

Leo Laporte (00:42:17):  
A certain quality isn't there? Yeah. Yeah. LBJ is a, I don't know, I believe L G B J is a football coach. <Laugh>, you're right, there's an uncanny valley, I guess still, huh?

Louise Matsakis (00:42:29):  
For now at least.

Leo Laporte (00:42:30):  
Yeah. Yeah. We're getting, we're getting better and better and better though. I mean, so it's obvious to get

Allyn Malventano (00:42:34):  
It's getting better very rapidly Yeah. Is the thing. Yeah. Right. This isn't like, think about how video game Uncanny Valley has progressed. It's taken years to get the really super realistic video game engine and graphics. Right. But this, the AI stuff, it's this, this is not that many generations to get to. Yeah, I know. That's pretty funny. The, her,

Leo Laporte (00:42:53):  
The, the Herbert Hoover is college football coaches. Actually, the only thing is it's too good quality and like it would, it should be older. Yeah. This one's believable. So you could see that it's only a, that's Woodrow Wilson Warren g Harding as a college football coach, I don't even, did they even have college football? Howard, William, Howard Taft, <laugh>. Some of these are quite believable. I don't know. I think we're gonna live in a, we're living in a time now where you can no longer. Yeah. I mean it's trust what you see.

Allyn Malventano (00:43:26):  
Well, and it is being used behind the scenes a lot. Just not this,

Leo Laporte (00:43:30):  
We don't know it, but the things

Allyn Malventano (00:43:31):  
That we're noticing here. Well, no, there's, I mean, programmers, programmers I've adopted. Yeah, yeah. Extremely quickly. Is it

Leo Laporte (00:43:37):  
Pretty, so Alan, you're code, you're still a coder. Yeah,

Allyn Malventano (00:43:40):  
I, I dabble, but here's the thing. I've, I've always coded out of necessity. Right. I need to do a thing. Okay, let me learn what I need to learn. You know, I have the, I have, I know where to look to find the answer. Right? And, you know, someone who's much more skilled than me at programming, those folks are still using Sure. The chat GBTs to take care of the more mundane things and they're the experts and they can Yeah. They act as a co-pilot, right? And it just, I just need this thing that does this thing. I can sit here and take 10 minutes to do it, or I can take, you know, five seconds to just get that spit out for me. And I know enough about it where I can very quickly review it and, and know if it's gonna work or not, and tweak it as necessary.

(00:44:20):  
Right. It, it fills in those gaps. But for someone that's at my skill level, obviously lower than those experts, but still I know what, what I want it to do. I know what the system can do. I can at least get 90% of the way there very quickly. And if anything, learn something along the way, right? Like, I didn't know how to do that function, right. But I knew what I wanted done and it's teaching me, and at the same time I'm able to fill in whatever couple of holes that there may be, you know, to make it work, to make it run in

Leo Laporte (00:44:46):  
The long run. Isn't that what's gonna be the, the most useful way to use AI is as a collaborator to work in hand in hand with a human? Yeah. Not by itself, but hand in hand. Is that right?

Allyn Malventano (00:45:00):  
Yeah. And what I've noticed is what we've just discussed about the fingers and how okay, that was wrong. So obviously some, obviously humans intervened and got Yeah. They trained

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):  
It like crazy on hands. Yeah. And they fixed it. They

Allyn Malventano (00:45:12):  
Trained it like crazy on Yeah. Made some choices there, right. The same kind of thing can, can be applied totally different AI type thing now. Like Teslas autopilot for example. Right. the recent versions of autopilot I've noticed tend to kind of stay on the opposite end the lane as semi trucks.

Leo Laporte (00:45:31):  
Oh, interesting.

Allyn Malventano (00:45:33):  
Don't, I don't think it's doing it because it did it on its own. Somebody thinks doing

Leo Laporte (00:45:37):  
It, avoid those guys because

Allyn Malventano (00:45:39):  
Yeah. It's, it's, it's a very dis if if you're, if you own a Tesla on any other recent firmware, you'll notice it is extremely distinct. It is very purposeful. You're like one car length away from the semi, it moves over a little and as soon as you pass its front bumper, it's right back in the middle of the lane. Right. And that's, that was very purp, you know, you can tell human had to intervene. It didn't figure that out all by itself. I'm sorry. Right. It was a very specific programmatic sort of intervention by human. So you're not just being able to let this thing go. You have to like, you know, intervene a little and teach. You

Leo Laporte (00:46:08):  
Saw Waz say he doesn't like Tesla's self-driving. It's tried to kill him on several occasions.

Allyn Malventano (00:46:13):  
<Laugh> it, it has, it has tried to kill me as well, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:46:18):  
I haven't had the recent one, I had it on my Model X and it, there was a cur, there was a curve on the highway. It always tried to drive into the divider every single time. You just

Allyn Malventano (00:46:27):  
Learn. I

Leo Laporte (00:46:28):  
You don't let it do that <laugh>.

Allyn Malventano (00:46:30):  
Well, true. I mean, you and I and many other tech folks like to be on the bleeding edge and some of us like to sort of lean into testing something. Yeah, yeah. See, when it turns into your actual safety though, it's a little, yeah. It gets a little dicey. Yeah. But yeah, I I I've been surprised by how, you know, before when I used to try it, every once in a while it would scare the heck outta me. And now it's like, oh, this is, it might be getting close, it's doing things that I would've done normally. And that's kind of surprising me.

Leo Laporte (00:47:01):  
But I remember interviewing Ashley Vance, this is back before Elon was an evil genius and was still a genius, genius about his book about Elon Musk. And one of the things he said, which I think was very true, is that the difference between Tesla, say and Ford was that Tesla's being run like a Silicon Valley company where you iterate, you try, you fail and try again. You iterate. And Ford is much and the, all the, you know, traditional car companies were much more judicious and cautious. But maybe we, maybe with, when it comes to ai, we need to be a little bit loose with the, I mean, certainly it looks like Microsoft, traditionally a very cautious company, has thrown caution to the wind and said, let's put this out and see what, let's just see what happens with chat G P T or you know Bing chat.

Allyn Malventano (00:47:50):  
That was the, that was the loosest. I think I've ever seen Microsoft go on a thing ever. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:54):  
But maybe that's what, is that what we need for AI to succeed? I mean, I don't know. Waz by the way, signed that letter. There were a number of people who sign a letter saying we should including Musk, I believe we should pause six months. Which I always interpreted as like, wait six months so we can catch up. And then you can continue <laugh>, just give it, we just need a heads, just a little bit head headstart. I mean,

Louise Matsakis (00:48:20):  
Right. Elon is what recruiting people from deep mind and opening eyes. He doesn't want us pause.

Leo Laporte (00:48:25):  
He wants to, he's not gonna pause, let's put it that way.

Allyn Malventano (00:48:28):  
Right. A AI as a fundamental concept is in startup mode, right? Yes. They're in go fast brake things mode. Yes, yes.

Leo Laporte (00:48:36):  
Everywhere. Is that risky? Yeah. Yes.

Allyn Malventano (00:48:39):  
I mean, as long as it's not steering my car, I, I guess

Leo Laporte (00:48:43):  
What if it's steering an election? <Laugh>?

Allyn Malventano (00:48:46):  
Yes. That's, that's the worry, right? What if

Leo Laporte (00:48:49):  
That's the, you know, what if hit

Allyn Malventano (00:48:50):  
It on the head.

Leo Laporte (00:48:52):  
You know, what if the results in 2024? I don't mean like AI will vote, but AI disinformation might prove

Allyn Malventano (00:49:02):  
It shorthand influence.

Leo Laporte (00:49:05):  
Yeah. It has power

Louise Matsakis (00:49:06):  
Influence. Did you guys see the Joanna Star video in the Wall Street Journal where she, she cloned herself, cloned her voice? Yeah. She fooled her bank. Right? I, I think, I think Joseph Cox at Motherboard did that as well and they were able to fool banks. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that I worry about in the short term is like just, you know, a serious increase. I told my mom that like, we have to have a safe word cuz if you think I'm calling you like, you know, ask the safe word because I, she, she, I feel like

Leo Laporte (00:49:30):  
She fooled the bank and her family.

Louise Matsakis (00:49:32):  
Yeah, exactly. And I think that that kind of stuff, that's what I'm really terrified about. Like, I feel like disinformation sometimes can be sort of a nebulous concept. And like, what do we mean? What does it look like? Right? Like, I'm not saying that it's not a danger, but when you see that kind of thing, it's like, okay, if they can get into your bank account, it's sort of game over <laugh>.

Janko Roettgers (00:49:49):  
I mean Yeah. But social engineering has existed for a long time. People have been playing tricks on banks on other institute for a long time. So I think what all of this leads to is just we need better security across the board against malicious actors, whether they're humans or AI or a combination of those things. Stuff just needs to be more secure. And maybe AI will bring us there. Maybe that will be a good, good thing, good outcome.

Allyn Malventano (00:50:14):  
When you, when you combine the potential, you know that what we mentioned at the beginning of this, where we were talking about the reviews and all those review spam and everything, you know, take the malicious intent of those folks with the power of AI and someone who knows social engineering, who would typically be a human who is trying to social engineer their way into your bank account. Now, back that up with ai. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Right? Like, that's extremely powerful. That's, it's, it's learning, it's doing a, it's taking a brief few minutes to Google everything it could possibly about you and come up with much more solid guesses about any possible security question, answer. Right. Just in an instant, you know, potentially on the fly as the call is happening. Right. That's, you know, that's dangerous, right? We need much better. I mean, everything should be two factor even when they're talking to you on the phone.

(00:51:11):  
And I don't mean like some, some companies try to do a second factor to add security, but I've lost count how many times I didn't have my second factor, for example, to make changes to like an at and t account or something like that. And you add the pin code, but then if you don't know the pin code, they can just turn it off right there on the call for you. Right. Maybe they ask your birthday or something so that it doesn't, you know, it didn't do any good. Right. It's, and and it's certainly not gonna get the better of an AI trying to get in

Leo Laporte (00:51:45):  
<Laugh>. We're in trouble. Yeah. I know we're in deep. It's

Allyn Malventano (00:51:48):  
Real depressing

Janko Roettgers (00:51:49):  
This Cut the pressing fast. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (00:51:50):  
Yeah. Well, it, it means, but it means that all of the people on the other end of those, those transactions need to be on the bus. Right? They need to have the well,

Leo Laporte (00:51:59):  
Which they're not. I mean, I remember when Charles Schwab said, oh yeah, you can use your voice to log in. And I thought, this doesn't seem like a good idea. Well, now we know it's not right. Terrible idea. Do you have safe words, Yako for your family? <Laugh>?

Janko Roettgers (00:52:16):  
I don't know if you want to go there.

Leo Laporte (00:52:18):  
I actually talked to my daughter. You might all have them. No, I talked to my daughter about this. I said, you know, if you hear from me and so we worked out a scheme. I don't want to say too much about that, but

Allyn Malventano (00:52:31):  
<Laugh>, don't give up the password to your, I'll get gile

Leo Laporte (00:52:33):  
<Laugh>. I,

Janko Roettgers (00:52:35):  
I, I do have to tell a story. A couple years ago, something happened to me and that no AI was involved in this at all. But I got a call, I had an LA number at that time, and it was a scam call, but somebody pretended to be somebody pretended that they had abducted a family member. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:51):  
Oh my God.

Janko Roettgers (00:52:51):  
They are basically, somebody was screaming in the background, calling my name, and I could figure out really quickly that was not real because I wasn't living in LA anymore. They didn't know the name of the family member, which was sort of a important detail in a hostage negotiation situation, <laugh>. But I, I just imagine at the time, for people who may be coming, for countries where abducts are more common or are just in different situations where that could be a real situation. So that could be really crazy. And now you add AI to it. Obviously, it gets even scarier when the voice now sounds like it as well. And I think there was stories about that recently too, where people have been using the very same scam, but with simulated

Leo Laporte (00:53:32):  
Voices. It happened to one of our regulars on our shows. Larry Mago last week published this article on the San Jose Mercury News, how I nearly fell for a frightening virtual kidnapping scheme. My God, 20 minutes of terror. Now, this is a guy, by the way, who's as technical as we are. He actually is the founder of an online safety organization, connect safely.org. He said the call felt real to me and threatened to separate me, not from, not from money, but from someone. It was his wife. They used a simulated voice. He says, it began Tuesday morning when my wife drove to San Francisco to visit a friend. Most days, she and I are together at Homer. She's somewhere nearby. He says, I was already a little nervous because, you know, last time she drove to San Francisco, she was sideswiped by another car.

(00:54:25):  
1237, my cell phone rang with a caller ID that at first glance looked like it was my wife. I now know it wasn't exactly her number. Same area code, same prefix, same last number. So it was all but three at the time. You know? Oh, that's, that's her. Cause he was worried. Right? When I heard, what I heard was a crying, upset woman, I assumed it was my wife. Cause it came from her phone. This happened to him last week. By the way. I repeatedly asked what the matter was, but I couldn't understand her answer. All I could imagine was something horrible must have happened. Then a man came on the phone, identified himself as a police officer. I'm, I'm telling this is worth reading. And knowing about and telling family members about to understand this scam goes on. He said, he said, I'm a cop.

(00:55:07):  
I need to, to verify who I'm talking with. He said, well, normally I'm gonna refuse a request. But I felt desperate. I gave him my name, my wife's name. He then admitted he wasn't a police officer, but a member of a drug cartel. My God, <laugh>. Now, this is a nightmare. This is a nightmare. And I know Larry, he's sharp. He's like us. He's not gonna fall for this stuff. And said that he had my wife with him in San Francisco. I don't know how he says sh he knew she was in San Francisco. Maybe I, I don't know. Maybe he said something about her location. Maybe not. I wasn't thinking clearly. A security expert I spoke with later explained the technique. Start with fear.

(00:55:50):  
Follow with an authority figure to gain your trust, the cop, and then pivot to the threat. I mean, this is like a pattern. He says, it worked with me. Even though I pride myself on critical thinking skills, there was enough information to cause me to worry. It could be the real thing. Either way, I knew I was dealing with a criminal. So while I had him on my cell phone, he at least did this. I put him on speaker and dialed nine one one for my desk phone. I didn't say anything to the 9 1 1 operator, but knew they would hang on and listen to the call. At one point the caller told me she'll be okay, just bring $5,000 to a Walmart parking lot in San Jose. I found out later, the 9 1 1 operator put my local police on the line. So they heard nearly the entire call, including the ransom demand and the threat.

(00:56:37):  
He told me not to contact anyone. Asked me if I was alone. I said I was at one point, the 9 1 1 operator asked me for my wife's phone number, which I whispered into the desk phone. The scammer heard me asked who I was talking to. I denied I was speaking to anyone just as I was talking to myself, cuz I was nervous. He then asked me to get in my car. <Laugh>, I didn't, but kept him on the phone as long as I could. The car request was to initiate the next step in this, the compliance process. Once you follow one instruction, you're more likely to complete the process and pay the ransom. Right. So do they actually

Louise Matsakis (00:57:08):  
Want them to go to the Walmart

Leo Laporte (00:57:10):  
Parking lot? Yeah. Yeah. He says, we spoke for over 11 minutes. He finally hung up on me probably cuz he realized I wasn't gonna comply. So anyway, even though he

Allyn Malventano (00:57:20):  
Initially fell for it, that is extremely quick thinking to call 9 1 1 on another

Leo Laporte (00:57:24):  
Line. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, again, I would say Larry is no more vulnerable than any of us here. You know, he's, he's savvy, right? Right. so the police came to his house. The O officer said, it's likely a scam. He did say, call your wife. There was no answer. <Laugh> he called again and she answered, she's fine. Never in danger. The police had texted my wife and they contacted S F P D to dispatch an officer to look for her. So they, they took this very seriously.

Allyn Malventano (00:57:56):  
Wow. So

Louise Matsakis (00:57:58):  
I wish she just blissfully unaware driving

Leo Laporte (00:58:00):  
<Laugh>. Yeah. She had no idea. Right. So it, this

Allyn Malventano (00:58:03):  
This article, it's scary. Used to be like a public service announcement.

Leo Laporte (00:58:06):  
Yeah. Well, he didn't put in the San Jose Mercury News. I encourage people read it. I, I guess they didn't, it wasn't really an impersonation of his wife's voice. It was just a scared female voice. But it was enough for, and it was close. They must, they knew something about him. And this is, by the way, one of the things that's really scary these days is there's enough information out there with data brokers and elsewhere. Bad guys are able to learn enough about you to s to really kind of fool you. They almost knew his wife's phone number somehow. They knew she was in San Francisco, or guess she was in San Francisco. We had a, a scam happen at work where somebody impersonated our c e o and sent him messages to everybody, not to me, but to all the employees, all her direct reports. And fortunately our staff was smart enough, they didn't do anything about it. But I can imagine what the next steps would've been. And, and this is because, because somehow our company structure a corporate structure, the names were employees, their emails or phone numbers, and at least his email and phone number were available to a bad guy who then was able to implement that attack. This is how spearfishing happens. Now. This is very scary stuff and it's how spearfishing

Allyn Malventano (00:59:17):  
Is a tale as old as time.

Leo Laporte (00:59:19):  
Well, and it, you know, for a long time I kind of, and I still kind of feel this way, like I don't have any privacy fines. So what, what's the worst they can do? Well, now we're starting to see that mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, maybe privacy is important for security, if nothing else.

Allyn Malventano (00:59:36):  
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:59:38):  
Good news. The bad guys, I mean, the good guys, the good guy, bad guys. The hackers are gonna, are gonna take this on Defcon which is coming up this summer in Las Vegas, is gonna have an AI village where they've invited hackers to show up, dive in, find bugs and biases in large language models from open OpenAI, Google Philanthropic, and others. They expect thousands to kind of red team these AI large language models. So, you know, this has worked very well in the past. Defcon had that, remember they had the election Machine Village where people were presented with electronic voting machines and were able to show how they were hackable and, and where the Vulner was. And

Louise Matsakis (01:00:23):  
Then didn't they try ensue, like the election company trying try ensue <laugh>. I

Leo Laporte (01:00:27):  
Think Dominion, dominion wasn't too happy, as I remember <laugh>. Anyway, this is good, right? They're they're not just looking. They're gonna look for bias, hallucinations and jail breaks.

Louise Matsakis (01:00:41):  
I, I think that's awesome. I mean, I don't know if you guys saw, but the other day, OpenAI launched a Bug Bounty and I kind of put it you know, put the link somewhere to write about it in my newsletter the next day. And by the time I went back to look at it, they had already paid out like dozens of bugs. Oh geez. <Laugh> within like, you know, 24 hours. So it showed you that like, you know, I think this kind of red teaming is really important. If you go down to like, on the Bug Crowd website, it will show you how many bugs they've already paid out. I think it should be there. Yeah. If that's the bug crowd link. Yeah. So you can see on the right, they've already rewarded 30 vulnerabilities.

Leo Laporte (01:01:16):  
Vulnerabilities.

Louise Matsakis (01:01:19):  
Yeah. And you know, that's pretty, that's pretty strict. And they're also not considering bias or hallucinations or anything. So that's just literally like security problems with the platform.

Leo Laporte (01:01:29):  
Well, that's the first thing we remember started doing with Chad GPTs is hacking on it. Yeah. Alex,

Allyn Malventano (01:01:35):  
Remember, none of the good work that those folks are doing are gonna stop people from using the AI for nefarious purposes. Right. Just pointing that out. It'll do it more securely. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:01:45):  
<Laugh>. But it'll,

Louise Matsakis (01:01:45):  
Well, at least, yeah. I'm hoping at least people's chat histories are not leaked. You know, we saw that there was already that one big bug that they found where people could access other people's chat histories and, you know, there's already been stories coming out showing that people are using this chat bot as a therapist. Right. You know, it's, it's really worrisome. What, what, you know, the, that chat has history could particularly look like. I'm also, that reminds me, I am super interested to see will those conversations be used for targeted advertising and how soon, you know, we already saw Snapchat said that they were gonna use the outputs from their bot or the inputs and the outputs from their, their AI bot for advertising. And that's gonna be really weird if you have a therapy session with a chat bot and then you see ads based on your Yeah. Therapy session.

Leo Laporte (01:02:29):  
Yeah. Well, this is why PR Microsoft is now offering, according to the information professional chat, g p T for companies cost 10 times more, but

Louise Matsakis (01:02:40):  
It would be, oh my God, 10 times,

Leo Laporte (01:02:41):  
10 times more. But which, and you know, at least that your inform, your, your corporate information won't leak out. Samsung's already told its employees Do not, you may not use an AI to help you with code or anything else. They're worried about leaks.

Louise Matsakis (01:02:58):  
Amazon as well. Yeah. Amazon said only use our tool.

Leo Laporte (01:03:00):  
Yeah, you can leak to us. It's okay. Just don't leak to anybody else. All right, let's take a little break. What's your, what's your newsletter? Louise? I didn't know you had a newsletter. Is it through SE for

Louise Matsakis (01:03:13):  
Yeah, so it comes out twice a week. I write it with my colleague Reid Alberg. Gotti. It's just called S four Tech.

Leo Laporte (01:03:19):  
Oh, good.

Louise Matsakis (01:03:19):  
Yeah. Reads Green.

Leo Laporte (01:03:20):  
Yeah, they've been, he's been on the show as well. S four Sfor is great. And what is the cost of this newsletter? This fine

Louise Matsakis (01:03:28):  
News? It is absolutely free.

Leo Laporte (01:03:29):  
Well, I can't believe that <laugh>, I don't understand the, the by the way, I also said this to the folks at Protocol. I don't understand the financial model. Sorry, Yaka.

Louise Matsakis (01:03:43):  
Well, we have a great we have a great sales team and there are ads in the newsletter, I will say. Good. So

Leo Laporte (01:03:48):  
Because there aren't ads on the front page as far as I can tell.

Louise Matsakis (01:03:52):  
Yeah, they're in the newsletters though, for

Leo Laporte (01:03:53):  
Sure. Okay, good. There you go. So you're supporting the fines four by subscribing. I just subscribed to Yao's new newsletter Lopez filtering the future lopez.cc. So thank you Yako. $80 a year, eight bucks a month. And I've been a fan of your writing and your byline every step of the way, so I'm glad to get your stuff still.

Allyn Malventano (01:04:20):  
Thank, thank you. One more subscriber.

Leo Laporte (01:04:22):  
Right there. Right there. And Alan, what's your newsletter? <Laugh>?

Allyn Malventano (01:04:27):  
I got out of that beat like four years ago. No more. Don't do that anymore. Congrats

Louise Matsakis (01:04:32):  
For you, <laugh>.

Allyn Malventano (01:04:33):  
Listen, I, I missed the heck out of it though. It's just that I do all of my storage testing internally now. And, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:04:40):  
That's too bad cuz you really were the best resource for ssd information and knowledge at PC perspective, and we missed on that. But

Allyn Malventano (01:04:49):  
I really, you have no idea how much I missed doing that. Yeah, yeah. It's just first,

Leo Laporte (01:04:52):  
First, first. Keep,

Allyn Malventano (01:04:53):  
Keep the lights on, buddy. <Laugh>, you

Leo Laporte (01:04:55):  
Built a a mass array disarray of SSDs Brandon, in the beginning. Sds, right? How many, how many, how big was it? How many sds? Oh, early

Allyn Malventano (01:05:05):  
On. Oh man. I did like four of those X 25 msms back in the day back when it was like,

Leo Laporte (01:05:10):  
I thought you had like hundreds of drives on that thing.

Allyn Malventano (01:05:13):  
Well, I'd have hundreds of drives in my basement. Yeah. <laugh>. But they're not all Sfts.

Leo Laporte (01:05:17):  
Okay.

Allyn Malventano (01:05:18):  
That's just because I'm a crazy person and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Leo Laporte (01:05:21):  
So company is Sodi, S O L I D I G M. And yes, Alan is always a welcome on this show. I want to tell you a little bit about my new health regimen. You know, we went, went to on our vacation. I just said, this is it. I am not, I started, you know, you get the pill miners and the vitamins and you ch and it, you know, we're, we're gonna be gone for like 24 days and that, that's a lot of pill miners. That's when I found this a G one. And it has really simplified my life. Like many, of course I I want to supplement with with, you know, the appropriate dietary supplements, but I don't wanna more pills to swallow and I don't wanna sacrifice my taste buds. When I found AG one, I found something delicious that gives my body what it craves all in one daily nutritional drink. Now, I started this this morning, so I just saved a little bit. Just to prove to you this tastes delicious.

(01:06:18):  
It's really good. In fact, I've started to crave the taste of it. I really love it. But look what's in here. I mean, everything you need, it's the best all in one solution for daily nutrition. And by the way, this is no flash in the Pan Ag one was founded in 2010 millions of people. As I've been talking about this, I've heard, you know, I, aunt Peru said, oh yeah, I've been doing that for years. AG One is the best all in one solution for daily nutrition. It saves you time, confusion, saves you money each serving less than three bucks a day. Individual supplements can cost a heck of a lot more. You don't have to tell me that. Plus Ag One's daily habit gives you long-term powerful results. It's not just vitamins and minerals, it's prebiotics, it's probiotics. 75 high quality minerals, vitamins, pre and probiotics.

(01:07:05):  
One scoop of ag one in the morning covers your entire daily nutritional basis. Eat this, fill this bottle up. By the way, when you get the the starter kit, you get the the bottle, you get the you know, the package of Ag one that's a month supply plus a canister to put it in a great scoop. And right now, in addition to this is by the way, metal, this is the nicest scoop ever. I'm gonna end up stealing this, I'm sure for my my, my kitchen. But when you sign up now, you'll also get with your first subscription, a year's supply of Vitamin D, little dropper you put right in there and five free travel packs. I'm a big fan. This is what, this is what got me started. Instead of packing you know, three weeks worth of Vitamin mi pill minders, this is just everything I need for one day Pack's very light.

(01:07:53):  
It's easy to use. You put it in the shaker, tastes great. It's a great way to start your day. AG one Athletic Greens is a climate neutral certified company. They make these in New Zealand in the purest best processing facilities ever. Very, very high standards. So, you know, you're getting the best quality nutrition and of course for every purchase they donate to organizations helping to get nutritious food to kids in need because they believe good nutrition should be available to all. So if you are looking for simpler cost effective supplement routine that tastes great, is a great way to start your day. Once scoop once a day every day, AG one from Athletic Greens. And if you go right now@athleticgreens.com slash twit, you'll get a year's supply free of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase of a subscription. I think you're gonna really like the travel packs if you ever, if you ever travel and it is delicious, you shake it up. You don't have to put it in warm water. You put it in cold water, it dissolves very easily and it tastes phenomenal. Mm. AG one from Athletic Greens, go to athletic greens.com/twit athletic greens.com/twit. We thank 'em so much for their support and you support us back. By the way, when you go to that address, athletic greens.com/tweet All right. Like put away my AG one. All

Allyn Malventano (01:09:25):  
I can think of during the whole ad was Steve Gibson spent an awful lot of time talking about

Leo Laporte (01:09:30):  
Vitamin D. I know, I know. Let me think here. You can. This dropper is a thousand IU of one drop is a thousand IU of vitamin D, but if you put in two drops or five drops or 10 drops, you can increase it. I think a thousand's enough. But you definitely want to add that vitamin D that is a, and it's an easy way to do, it's just a little dropper goes right in there. How predictions, we'd start with the Writer's Guild, but I didn't really finish it. Yako predictions, is this gonna go on? The last one went on what, a hundred days back in 2007.

Janko Roettgers (01:10:00):  
I mean, the longer it goes on, the more power the writers have, right? Because right now Hollywood still are streaming services, still have a bunch of stuff that they banked and they can use for a while. They're coasting.

Leo Laporte (01:10:10):  
But once that,

Janko Roettgers (01:10:10):  
Yeah, once that drags on, they're really going to have to wonder like, how are we gonna fill this void and what are gonna do about it? It, I think I might predict sure that's gonna impact different companies differently. And that might also like influence, who wants to settle this how fast like Netflix seems to be in a better position because they have so much international content these days and people really dig Korean TV shows and, and stuff. It's really successful on there. If you're Disney, if you're H b O or Max now, I guess that might be a little harder because you don't have that much of a catalog and you maybe you don't have that many shows queued up. So the logo drags on the hard it's gonna be for Hollywood to, to get all of that. I

Leo Laporte (01:10:54):  
Think I reme I seem to remember last time that that happened, that for instance, Letterman did a side deal and got the writers back earlier. Right, right, right. I can imagine we were talking about this on Wednesday on Mac Break Weekly, that Apple especially might be incentive to say, okay, okay, Kay, here, here have some apples throwing money at people anyway, have some more money because we really need this content. On the other hand, the longer it goes on, doesn't that when, when our favorite shows start going off the air or, or not finishing their seasons, doesn't that start to put pressure on the writers from, from fans? Like, are we gonna start saying, Hey, I, you know, what happened? You know, my show's gone.

Janko Roettgers (01:11:38):  
For sure. And there's also this point where especially Warner Media Warner Discovery they, they already started to cancel a bunch of shows or not put shows on like already.

Leo Laporte (01:11:49):  
Yes. They don't seem to mind doing that, do they? Yeah. And

Janko Roettgers (01:11:51):  
They can use this now as, as sort of an excuse if something didn't perform completely well. They were like, oh, well we didn't get to make that outta season. So just, let's just, can that project and you know, we take a tax write off. Good for us, bad for you. But

Leo Laporte (01:12:04):  
Yeah, the evil David Zaslav, who's running this <laugh> says the writer's strike will be ended by a love for working <laugh>

Allyn Malventano (01:12:13):  
<Laugh>. All right? Right.

Leo Laporte (01:12:16):  
He is really nasty. What a nasty piece of work. I am not at all happy with what's happening at H B O. Honestly.

Allyn Malventano (01:12:26):  
The whole, the whole landscape has shifted dynamically. If you think about between what it looks like now and the last time there was a rider strike, right? Like you have, there's a totally different set of players, at least big players now,

Louise Matsakis (01:12:38):  
Right? Silicon Valley took over Hollywood basically since then.

Allyn Malventano (01:12:40):  
Yeah. Yeah. So now there's like this different layer of like, probably less likely to see all of the execs on the one side try to get in the room together and sort of like, figure out, okay, what's the game plan here? Like now it's their, all those guys are competing against each other to try to, you know, that wasn't, you know, you just said about Apple, right? Maybe Apple will just kick 'em some money earlier. What David Letterman did. Like, like now you have that many more big players that are potentially gonna try to, you know, solve this and, and be the leader of solving it. So maybe that actually makes the strike be shorter. You know?

Leo Laporte (01:13:14):  
I mean, ZLA got paid 39 million last year. He's not hurting. But these companies do say, oh, you know, all of this competition you know, we're not making the kind of money we used to be. Netflix seem to be struggling for a while. Isn't that the counter-argument that well, you guys want more money and and times are tougher than ever for the streamers. Is that true Yako? Well, they,

Louise Matsakis (01:13:39):  
They just had record profits. Yeah. They just had record profits. Like, I, I'm just not sure that I believe that like the streaming platforms are doing better than ever. I mean, it's certainly a different business model and I think, you know, the glory days of TV are maybe over to some extent. But no, I I I don't think that that's reasonable. And if it was, you know, you'd see the people making 39 million a year being fired, right? Like, if you can still make 39 million a year, it's probably okay. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:04):  
<Laugh>, two years ago he made a quarter of a billion dollars. So, you know, he's hurting now. He's <laugh>.

Louise Matsakis (01:14:10):  
I very sorry for him.

Janko Roettgers (01:14:12):  
He's just, he's just really doing it for the love of work. That's, it's the

Leo Laporte (01:14:15):  
Love of work for us. He, he just shows up. It doesn't really matter what you pay me, I'm just gonna do it. Cause I love, I love work. We love, I have to say, we love though this modern content world for a while. A couple of years ago we were saying we were in the golden age of television, the golden age of content. We watched a lot of it during the pandemic. They're making more money than ever before. Is it, is it still the golden age of content?

Allyn Malventano (01:14:43):  
Now we're in the golden age of a TV series that you might get really like, and really enjoy and might be produced really well. And then it's just gone the next, the next glad

Leo Laporte (01:14:50):  
Year. I'm glad succession has been complete. Is is done <laugh>, it's in the can <laugh>. And they can't, they can't stop my succession cuz that then I would really be really unhappy about that. Yeah, there's actually more, there's more to watch now than ever before. I can't even you know, we're, it's, I I can't even figure out what I wanna watch next. I don't even know. There's so much stuff. And

Allyn Malventano (01:15:12):  
Well, and the shame is that for a lot of the older content, your retro, you know, you won't go watch some TV show you used to watch in the eighties, right? All these same services, they're all still there. Their licensing money. Yeah. Well no, they're not. Oh, they're not pieces. There's a lot of 'em. Yeah. There's a certain television series that it happens to be on Netflix right now and no, it's gonna be gone next month. And there's whole articles that are come out occasionally on here are the next series that are gonna be missing from, from Netflix or who or whoever, you know, next month. And then it turns out they were the only service that had that particular series. So the only way for you to watch it was there and it's just gonna be gone until somebody else decides to license it and add it to their library.

Louise Matsakis (01:15:50):  
Yeah. It's not this like growing infinite library,

Leo Laporte (01:15:53):  
Right? Yeah. Actually Yako, we,

Allyn Malventano (01:15:55):  
We all assumed it would be, but it's not.

Leo Laporte (01:15:57):  
You had a really good piece in your Lopez newsletter about free tv. That's now the hot thing, right?

Janko Roettgers (01:16:04):  
Yeah. I mean, so that was sort of interesting I think to to, to the point here with, with all the titles, a lot that is coming back or getting revived on these free streaming services or free linear streaming service. There's Pluto out there, there is a lot of these services that are feel a little bit like basic cable but stream stuff in a, in a linear way and you can switch channels and all those things. But my article focused on sort of the next thing behind that cuz one of the people who founded Pluto, one of those early pioneers and free streaming is now building free televisions. So instead of just giving away the content, they actually want to give away the TV sets themselves, which

Leo Laporte (01:16:41):  
Wow.

Louise Matsakis (01:16:41):  
Where is the demographic for that? That's fascinating.

Janko Roettgers (01:16:43):  
Well, you know, people like free stuff and I think the bet here is, oh, the free content worked so well, what if we like take it to the next level? And in a way, if you look at the TV market in general, TVs have been getting cheaper for like a decade or so. Tvs used to be really expensive. And now you can go to Best Buy or Walmart and buy a really good, really nice sized TV for $300. Sometimes $250 is crazy. That's like five, six years ago. Those prices. And now this, this guy Poon, who was a co-founder of Pluto, has a new company called tv. And they want to build this free TV set that's going to be like a regular tv and then it's going to have a speaker build in sort of like a sound power. And then underneath of that it has a second screen built into the main tv. And that second screen is all about showing you advertising nonstop. And maybe every now and then there's gonna be a, a widget to show you some sports scores or some news headlines when news breaks. But otherwise you watch something, maybe you watch Netflix on the first screen without ads, and then on the second screen relevant to that, you're going to have some ads pop up. And in exchange for enduring that, you get the entire TV set for free.

Leo Laporte (01:17:56):  
That is a wild idea. Do you think people are good for that? And people hate ads, but a free tv that sounds pretty good. <Laugh>.

Janko Roettgers (01:18:03):  
I mean, that, that's the thing. Everybody says they hate ads, but advertising still is billions of dollars. Right? And people are going back to the point I think where, you know, we have all these streaming services, when you bundle them all together, it's getting pretty expensive. And especially with recession and maybe people, you know, not having as much money as they used to before trying to save a little bit more, they're going back to some of these free streaming services. So why not give them a free TV as well?

Leo Laporte (01:18:32):  
So it, it is a ticker just like on cnn. That's where the ads will live. But there'll also be information there and, and other stuff.

Janko Roettgers (01:18:41):  
Right. And it's interesting, when I, when I published this story, one of the first responders on Master On was actually somebody saying time for an ad blocker. And then the photo to it was a roll of duct tape

Leo Laporte (01:18:51):  
<Laugh>. Yeah, yeah. You

Janko Roettgers (01:18:53):  
Know, that could happen. It, it's going to be interesting. I asked myself the question like, how a, are they going to pretend prevent people from getting these TVs for free and then just doing,

Leo Laporte (01:19:03):  
Doing that stuff with blocking it, putting a soundbar in front of it. Yeah.

Janko Roettgers (01:19:06):  
Maybe putting a soundbar in front of it. Yeah. Or maybe just smashing the entire TV for a stupid TikTok challenge or something like that. Right. Putting it

Leo Laporte (01:19:12):  
On Craigslist or whatever. Oh Lord. Craigslist, <laugh>, they'll be a contract in there that you have to, they'll,

Janko Roettgers (01:19:18):  
I suspect actually that they might, it might be a free TV on paper, but maybe they're gonna put it in stores. Yeah. Sell it for $300 and then if you have it active and if you use it, you get some, some money back, a

Leo Laporte (01:19:31):  
Rebate or something. Yeah. You point out, and this kind of blew me away, that Vizio only makes about $3 per tv.

Janko Roettgers (01:19:40):  
It's, it's crazier. That's

Leo Laporte (01:19:41):  
The profit $3. That

Janko Roettgers (01:19:44):  
And, and TVs have been a really thin margin. I mean there's the Samsungs and the lgs, they make really expensive high-end TV sets. They're making money with that, right? Yeah. But sort of the mid level or the lower level, the TCLs vio, those, those TVs that you pick up for three, $400 on at, on Wal, at Walmart or whatever those margins has always been razor thin and they're getting thinner. Right. supply chain shortages, shipping getting more expensive during the pandemic. Roku has been pretty transparent about, they don't make any money with their streaming device. They actually lose money with every drone that they sell. And they're trying to make that back with advertising. VI is the same thing. They're doing a running ad supported video services. If other companies have their ads on their devices, they're getting some kickback from that as well. So that's where, how they make money. So in a

Leo Laporte (01:20:32):  
Way, you're already getting the subsidized tv cuz when you buy that VIO tv, they make the money not on the $3 but on the ads that they, they, there's, you say that they generate $28 and 30 cents per user per quota with ads and, and other fees and per quarter more than more than a hundred bucks a month a year per user. Wow. So you are already doing that. In fact, that, you know, I have often thought that they put cameras in TVs not so you could do Zoom <laugh>, but so they can see if there's somebody in the room when they sell the ads. I know that information goes back to advertisers. Yeah. There were four people in the room watching.

Janko Roettgers (01:21:16):  
I mean, I don't know if they need cameras for all those things. I think

Leo Laporte (01:21:20):  
To think, I know we all,

Janko Roettgers (01:21:21):  
We all tend to overthink these things a little bit. Yeah, yeah. In the end, it doesn't matter quite as much if they say, oh, on average three people watch everything that's on our tv, that that's good enough for the advertiser. But yeah, advertising on TV has long been a big business and traditionally there has been sort of the business of the networks and so forth and the cable operators, now it's the business of the companies making those TVs.

Leo Laporte (01:21:42):  
So this is gonna be called telly sometime later this year. The biggest thing to happen to TV since color. But we don't know the actual details as you say. It might, you might be, they'll sell it in a store and it's just gonna be more subsidized or

Janko Roettgers (01:21:57):  
Yeah, they didn't talk to me and it's been completely stealth. Yeah, I sort of found out about it through people who knew some things and then I dug up additional details. It's

Leo Laporte (01:22:06):  
A great scoop. <Laugh> Wild, just a wild story. It ties into this story about ad blockers. I mean, we're all more concerned than ever, and I think more aware than ever, certainly our audience, more aware than ever of ad brokers or information brokers and ad tracking and things like that. The FTC was suing a company called Kak Chava. They were a location data broker. They sold information about where you are, information they get from your phone, presumably to advertisers. Ka Chava, according to the New York Times, collects more than 90 location data points a day from about 35 million active mobile device users. So you may not realize it, but when you have an app and you give it location permissions, it's not just for the apps developer, but it may also be sold onto a broker. The location coordinates can reveal where each mobile device has been approximately every 15 minutes. Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint last August saying it, it's problematic because not only does it track your visit to a store, it could track your visits to private locations like churches, mosques, synagogues, abortion clinic clinics, domestic violence shelters, medical centers, and homeless shelters. The location data could be used to track not just the dates and times patients visit, abortion clinics, for instance, but also track the locations of healthcare professionals who provided medical treatments like abortions. And there are many states where that would be against the law.

(01:23:54):  
So the FTC sued and lost on Thursday. A federal judge in Idaho di dismissed the lawsuit against c Chava. The judge wrote, regulators had not provided sufficient evidence to back up their claims that the company was unfairly selling information on the precise locations of millions of people's mobile phones. They said, well, you haven't proven any harm.

Louise Matsakis (01:24:23):  
Now. I mean, I Go ahead. I, I, I think, yeah, I mean, I think what's so unfortunate about this is that le a Khan who, you know, I admire a line is trying to do a lot on tech at the ftc. This is just such a good example of how you can't really do this without legislation. Right? Like if we had a national, you know, privacy law that Lena would be entrusted with enforcing, I don't think that you would've had that outcome in this case. But the problem is that she's trying to shove you know, antiquated laws Yeah. Into a more progressive model of data privacy. And we just don't have the legislation to back that up.

Leo Laporte (01:25:01):  
The founder in Chief Executive Kochava, Charles Manning celebrated saying the company has complied with all rules and laws, including privacy laws. Now the FTC said it's not a qual it's qualified victory because the judge did agree that location data could enable third parties to track and harm smartphone view users. He, the judge merely said regulators hadn't given him adequate evidence that consumers were actually suffering or were likely to suffer substantial harm. See, FTC said, okay, well, <laugh>, at least he stipulated that it could be harmful. Now we just have to prove the harm. Presumably that means they're gonna go back to court and, and fight this one. But that's discouraging because it's such an obvi to me, it seems like such an obvious invasion of privacy. And that's the harm by itself. Judge disagreed. So maybe what the issues here

Janko Roettgers (01:26:02):  
Too is that a lot of the states now, especially when it comes to these abortion laws, restrictive abortion laws, there's some states that now, and basically deputize citizens. So if you are a citizen and you suspect a doctor provides abortions Exactly. You can sue them for damages. Yeah. And you know, it's not too far-fetched to think somebody could buy this location data and then just monetize it by suing a bunch of doctors or a bunch of people who go to abortion

Leo Laporte (01:26:28):  
Clinics. New kind of ambulance chaser. Yeah. Yeah. That's terrifying. We'll watch obviously we'll watch that with interest. Cause I know our audience is very concerned about privacy of, of all kinds. And that's why I mentioned this in the context of that ad supported tv. I mean, clearly what you're selling is information about you in order to get a free tv. So very, very interesting. Let's see. Google has turned on PA keys for passwordless future. I'm, I immediately turned it on. But there's some concerns about, well, maybe <laugh>, maybe this is risky. It replaces not only your password, but your two factor. So when I turned it on, I went to a page at Google and made my phone essentially be like a YubiKey. The idea is that by unlocking my phone with face ID or touch id or a pin, and by the way, I probably would not recommend you use this with a pin. But it couldn't be used that way. You can unlock your Google account. And of course the risk is if somebody gets your phone and your pin <laugh>

Allyn Malventano (01:27:46):  
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:27:47):  
<Laugh>, suddenly they've got your Google account along with everything else. Alan, you, you think this is a good idea, would you do this?

Allyn Malventano (01:27:54):  
It doesn't feel that great to me. Yeah. Hot take <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:27:58):  
From Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (01:27:59):  
From the former security person. Okay.

Louise Matsakis (01:28:01):  
I, I'm also worried about, like, I, I just think this overreliance, I I know that, you know, security experts will tell you to move away from s m s, but this is still, you know, an overreliance on your device and your phone and your phone account. Right. And, and I I, I just worry about that. Like, you know, every time one of these things comes out, I'm like, how many iPhones are stolen a year? Right? Like, I, I just feel really bad for people who you know, get separated from their device for whatever reason. Because, you know, all your backup codes, whatever it is, you know, you might have stored there, it can be really, really difficult to get into your accounts. I mean, the only way you can safeguard against that is to ensure that you have, you know, an iCloud backup right. Of your phone. Cause I think if you are able to restore from an iCloud backup, you'll have a lot of that stuff. But I

Leo Laporte (01:28:45):  
Don't, okay. So this is and this is still unclear, but the Fido Alliance, which created this paske protocol, has never been clear about the idea of moving these keys. In fact, they don't really, they really have never provided a way of moving these keys. And I think that they see it as a security problem. Like, well, if you can move the keys now you got a problem. Apple does not allow you to import or export the keys. What Apple's doing with the iCloud key, as far as I can understand, and I keep trying to read these documents and understanding them, is when you get a new iPhone, the keys will be moved through your iCloud to that phone. But the key is stored in a secure enclave on the hardware. This iCloud, the name iCloud, is merely that when you get a new device from Apple, you can move the keys over. As far as I know, there is no, and 5 0 2 doesn't allow for any export or import of keys. They see that as a, a hazard. Well,

Allyn Malventano (01:29:42):  
That's a great way to ensure you never switched to Android, isn't it? Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:29:46):  
<Laugh>. Oh, I never thought of that. Oh, yeah, exactly. I, and so, yeah, and, and Apple's been queried about this. I remember when they announced support, but Google and Apple, Microsoft all support PAs keys. But in every case, I think the companies are seeing this as a <laugh> way to keep you from moving off of their platform.

Janko Roettgers (01:30:05):  
I, I wonder how it works for sort of unusual devices like even Smart TVs. I've then been in a situation where I have a, I have a Google TV and I have two factor authentication. I have a UBI key or like one of those keys. And so it suddenly asked me to put my key into the USB part of my television and press the button and I had to climb behind my tv basically <laugh> to lock into my Google account. That

Leo Laporte (01:30:27):  
Is not a good solution. Quickly,

Janko Roettgers (01:30:29):  
<Laugh>. Yeah. So, so how is that going to work with sort of Well,

Leo Laporte (01:30:33):  
I don't think we're ever replacing passwords, to be honest with you. And, and that's the problem. I think this is sort of a, a solution for some in some cases, but I don't think it's gonna replace passwords. You still need a fallback anyway, because if you lose your phone, you gotta have a fallback. So all of your previous methods of logging in still work. You can't turn them off.

Allyn Malventano (01:30:56):  
That's another trend I'm not thrilled about now, is that there's a lot of companies out there that seem to be trying to move away towards or push their users into, oh, the next time you sign up you could do password list. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, this is so amazing, and all they're doing is really just sending you a confirmation email. So they've reduced it down to a single factor mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for you. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's not even what you know anymore. It's just what you have. Yeah. Which is your

Leo Laporte (01:31:20):  
Email. And that's not very secure at all, frankly. Well,

Allyn Malventano (01:31:23):  
Hopefully it is as secure as you can make it, but the average person isn't doing even that. Yeah. Right. For

Leo Laporte (01:31:28):  
Some,

Janko Roettgers (01:31:29):  
For some services, it's fine. Right. So, I mean, I know Slack does it and one could argue that maybe for some Slack

Leo Laporte (01:31:35):  
Beehive you're

Janko Roettgers (01:31:36):  
Would be that

Leo Laporte (01:31:37):  
Good beehive does it? You're you,

Janko Roettgers (01:31:39):  
You're, yeah. But, but for that, if you subscribe to my newsletter, and I highly agree at do <laugh> <laugh>, but if you log in there and somebody else was going to ac hack your email to then read my newsletter. Yeah. It's an unlikely scenario.

Allyn Malventano (01:31:52):  
Right. one I've seen do it lately is Microsoft. Yeah. It's very, and I don't know if that also, I don't know if that also carries over to your OneDrive account,

Janko Roettgers (01:32:01):  
Right? That's a different stake for sure.

Leo Laporte (01:32:03):  
Yeah. So here's my Google PAs keys page. I don't think there's any harm in showing you this for a long time. Maybe even without your knowledge. Android devices have become PAs keys. You could see my Google Pixel seven was a pasky, which I've never used as is my S 23 Ultra. Those are automatically created when you sign into your Google account. Here's the Pasky I've created, and the PAs key with the iCloud key chain is in the same blob as my Yuba keys. So they're treating this as similar to Yuki. And it's true. If you, if you got my Yuba key, you wouldn't need anything else. Like, well, you would, you'd need my password plus a Yuba key. Right? And I, I guess that's the biggest difference. A pasky, there is no password, it's just the PAs key.

Janko Roettgers (01:32:50):  
But in those cases where somebody gets a device of yours and you already have the browser has already saved your password, and now I'd ask you for the second

Leo Laporte (01:32:58):  
Right thing. Well, it doesn't ask you though anymore. Right. password managers Dash lane and one password say we're going to support this. But again, this is this issue that the Fido Alliance doesn't talk about export import of passwords. So I, I guess what you would be doing is replacing your iCloud key chain or your Android device with one password, which I'm not sure is a good idea either. So this, I, Google's jumped on this and a lot of people jumped on it cuz no one likes passwords. But I think there's a lot of questions. Google thinks it's strong enough that even users who are using its advanced protection program, that's the program it created for members of Congress and famous people extra secure, they can use it too. Instead of the physical security keys, Google used to require, you have two physical security keys with the Advanced Protection program. Now you can use pass keys. I I really want to hear from some security gurus on this one. I'm not convinced.

Allyn Malventano (01:34:02):  
I mean, my, my personal, you know, best known method that I've been using that now that I've settled on is just everything's passwords. It's all made with a password manager. Right. I'm using bit Warden for that piece. But then everything that's important has a second factor. And the second factor is in no way, shape, or form tied Yes. To, to the email or the anything else. Exactly. It is a completely separate thing. Yep. You know, which is which bit Whan, even bit warden even tried to make it a little, you know, easier for some folks. You can add a two-factor no to what's safe at Bit Warden. That's a

Leo Laporte (01:34:37):  
Bad idea. I

Allyn Malventano (01:34:38):  
Think I don't do that. Right. And maybe I would do that for, for, again, something that offered a two-factor. If it was just like a blog or something simple right. Then it's convenient. I can maybe cross that bridge. But I've just sort of personally made a firewall where thou shalt be no two factor Yeah. On the thing that has the passwords. Right. It's just its own animal.

Leo Laporte (01:34:56):  
I'm w I'm with you as well. Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of banks require that you use s m s for your second factor. I guess that's better than nothing. That's not much <laugh>. We're kind of in a mess. All right. I wanna take Yeah, go ahead, Louise. No, I was just gonna say, yeah, I agree. Yeah. I'm wanna take a little break, come back with more of our esteemed panel. Great. To have Yako records lopez.cc for his newsletter. Louise Zaki, SEMA four s e m a f o r.com. Did you all get free copies of Traffic <laugh>? No, we did not. Ben did not give you free copies of his book. He allowed us to have a PDF of, of the Oh, okay. There you go. So that's good. Yeah. I hear it's very good. Jeff Jarvis has read it and said it's, it's really interesting.

(01:35:51):  
It's, we're gonna get to actually kind of the fallout of all of that in a second. And of course, our dear friend Ellen Melvin, formerly of this week weekend, computer Hardware, formerly of a submarine, formerly of <laugh>, the nsa. Now it's done too many things. My he's done many, many things now. The king of solid state drives at Soine, our <laugh> our show today. Hey, you're my expert. I, you know, that's good enough for me anyway. Aha. Today brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Boy, when you are and a business and somebody leaves, it's like, yikes. And if you're starting a new business or you're growing your business, and by the way, if that's the case, Bravo. But you gotta understand, and I, I certainly know this, having run my own business now for 18 years, the business is just the people who work there.

(01:36:46):  
If you wanna be successful, you gotta get the right people on your team, people that fit people with the talents you need people with, the skills you need, people with the drive you need. And that's where ZipRecruiter comes in. And I love ZipRecruiter. We use it here for our hiring. And right now, you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/twit. Have you thought about starting your own business, whether it's a taco truck or a, or a charity? You need to hire people. And this is why you should use ZipRecruiter first of all. Because when you post a ZipRecruiter, it goes to a hundred plus job sites. All the social networks, you're reaching out, casting the biggest net possible cuz you know the right person's out there. But you gotta make sure you, you reach 'em where they are. But then you might say, well, gosh, that's great.

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Now I'm gonna get a million phone calls and my inbox is gonna be jam full. No, it all flows into your ZipRecruiter interface. In fact, they even reformat all the resumes so you can scan them quickly. They give you screening questions, true, false, multiple choice, even essay questions. So you can eliminate people who just don't fit. And then ZipRecruiter does something really remarkable. They have already a million plus current resumes on file. People come to ZipRecruiter looking for work. They use their powerful matching technology to go through those resumes and find people qualified for your role, the job you're trying to fill. And then they let you send them a personal invite. And by the way, that really works. If you look at some of the, the re the prospects that ZipRecruiter finds for you, and you say, oh, that person would be great. That person would be great.

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And you send 'em an invite, man, they are they happy? They're flattered. They're more likely to apply follow through, take the job. Ziprecruiter does more too. They give you labels you can put on your listing to help you tell the message in a quick way. Cuz you know what those, those, those prospective employees, they're also scanning the openings. They're gonna see these attention grabbing labels. You can say remote work, for instance, allowed or training provided. That's a big one. People love that. Or urgent, we need to fill this one fast. They'll really help your job stand out. That invite to apply the attention grabbing labels. The just the process alone makes ZipRecruiter amazing. Let ZipRecruiter fill all your rules with the right candidates. We do. And I have to tell you, we get results fast. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

(01:39:12):  
That's such a relief when somebody leaves and you gotta fill that position. It's stressful just knowing, Hey, I got some great candidates. We, you know, Lisa will post at breakfast by lunch. She'll be going, oh, we got another one. We got another one. It, it just, it takes some of that stress outta your life. See for yourself, go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free. Ziprecruiter.Com/Twit ziprecruiter.com/t W I t I can tell you from, from our personal experience, it is the smartest way to hire ziprecruiter.com/twi. We thank you ZipRecruiter for all that great support we get from you each and every time we need to hire. We were talking about Ben Smith's new book Traffic and what was at the time when, when he was at buzzfeed and and later at other sites. The way to, you know, make it in news was to generate traffic with attention grabbing headlines and social media. It seems to be <laugh> a little more problematic than it used to be. We Protocol. Right. I guess Gigaom in a way, in its way. And now Vice apparently said it to be head for bankruptcy according to the New York Times. Buzzfeed just shut down their news division, froze it all. Vice was valued at 5.7 billion. They've been looking hard for a buyer. Can't find one. Is the online news business in trouble? Louise?

Louise Matsakis (01:40:54):  
That's good question. Well, I live really close to that Vice office and I used to work at Vice. And I can say that I think there were a lot of mistakes that were made at these companies just about the business model and how they structured the business. You know, I just watched, even in my short time at Bias, you know, over and over again, sort of pivoting away from things that made money, you know, starting a cable news channel when their core demographic was cord cutting more than ever. I don't think it's just about this spiral news model being you know, not as good as it seemed potentially. But that was definitely such a specific era. You know, I think of like the personal essays, the catchy headlines mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but also a lot of like, you know, really hard you know, admirable reporting for sure.

(01:41:41):  
And I, I think we all have, you know, seared into our brains. Anyone who worked in that era these tools. One of 'em was called Chart Beat. And you could see in real time how many people were clicking on your article. And it would sort of move to the top of the list of the website. And, and yeah, there was nothing that sort of hit the little serotonin receptors in your brain like that. And, and Gawker and some other workplaces actually had them on screens that would project into the, into the office. So you could see, you know, how you were stacking up against your competitors. And, and I, I, I definitely think that those sorts of incentives are not always most positive <laugh>. Yeah. I don't miss those days.

Leo Laporte (01:42:17):  
Yeah. Buzzfeed it said was to Reliant on Facebook too, and then when Facebook stopped sending links their way, it was all over.

Louise Matsakis (01:42:27):  
Yeah, definitely. I think that's one reason that S four is honestly like doubling down on newsletters. Cause we wanna own the audience. We wanna know who's reading us, how we can contact them in the future. We wanna be right in your inbox instead of, you know, sort of a drive by on Facebook. Right. Yeah. I think that that's totally you, you don't want you know, one day the platforms change the algorithm and, and you've totally lost your audience.

Leo Laporte (01:42:51):  
Yako, you've been through these wars too.

Janko Roettgers (01:42:55):  
Yep. and part of two companies that folded. So yeah, I think part of that issue is what Luis described the traffic chasing. But I think part of it was also that some of these bets that they made were just really, really expensive with the idea that they would pay off in the future. And so they erased a ton of money on those ideas, like making bespoke branded content and doing crazy video things. And so, and if you raise hundreds of millions of dollars or even even more in the case of vice, I guess at some point you have to be able to pay that back. And that sort of forces you even more to chase those, those audiences and those ad dollars and everything. And that, that's, I think, even the bigger problem. It's not that news itself isn't, can't be run profitably. And, and they're saying huffing post is actually profitable, right? So <inaudible> saying huffing both gonna stay around as a news organization because they're profitable. So you can run profitable news organizations, but if you raise so much money that you have to make this crazy profitable and you take these crazy bets, it's easy for those things to go wrong.

Leo Laporte (01:44:08):  
I guess, you know, even today with what you're doing, Yako with the newsletter, what Sfor is doing with this newsletter, we're still trying to find a model for online news. It's not that, I mean, it's just, and so I understand the desire to experiment and Vice did, I mean, motherboard was a really great source of security news for years. We, we, we quoted it all the time. But part of the problem is just that the, is it just that it's hard to make money in news?

Louise Matsakis (01:44:41):  
I I think it's hard to make the kind of money that justifies you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in you know, venture capital funding. And I think that's true for a lot of businesses, right? Like, it's not just news. It's true for ride hailing, right? It's true for food delivery. Yeah. All these things where it's been really hard to turn a profit. And I, I think that's the problem. I think you can run a profitable news business absolutely. But it's about the scale of that and understanding that, you know, you're not gonna be read by everyone in the country every day. Right. Like, but you know, the messenger's trying it, right? There's another one of these big, big operations that has, you know, incredible aspirations that's about to launch. And they said, I think they're gonna hire 500 journalists. So, you know, I'll be praying for them. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:45:24):  
Yeah. No kidding.

Louise Matsakis (01:45:24):  
Trying this again, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:45:26):  
Is some of the problem.

Janko Roettgers (01:45:27):  
I I like how you said that you're not rooting for them, but you're praying

Leo Laporte (01:45:31):  
For them. <Laugh> kinda tells you something. Some of the problem is and Alex Kantrowitz has talked about this in his big tech newsletter and podcast, the over financialization of these, of these models that, that, you know, you have to get VC funding and then the VCs are really pushing you to go to show profit to have an exit. And it's just not a very, it's not a very tenable way to create value. I don't know what the other, I don't know what the opposite solution is. You can't bootstrap a Jonah Pertti at Buzzfeed famously said, I know news is never gonna make any money, but it's important, so I'm gonna pay for it outta my own pocket. And he retired of that, obviously <laugh>, because it just never made any money. W w I don't know what the alternative is, but it sounds like, well, I think it

Louise Matsakis (01:46:18):  
Made a lot of money. Yeah. It made a lot of money. It just didn't make enough money to justify hundreds of millions of dollars budget news. News did. Yeah. News didn't, yeah. I think, I think that's the, that's the problem. I mean, I think Bused news did make some money, but Yeah, I don't think it made enough to sustain the scale of the operation that they had. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:46:36):  
He just, like, that was, he said, I just like news. And I, and I'm, I'm actually in his, I'm with him. I like it too. In fact, we, you know, we're kind of a parasite on the, on the online news industry. I mean, all we do is talk about your stories. <Laugh> <laugh> analysis is important. Commentary, it's important. That's okay with you. But I'm smart enough not to try to spend money on enterprise reporting cuz it's expensive. So I let, I let you know, Ben do it and and just piggyback off SEMA for and, and, and so forth. But we need news. And I think that one of the bad things that this finance financialization and finance pressure and, and traffic pressure is caused is that a lot of news is just so Link Beatty now. I think it's turning off users. I think we're users are, are not gonna want to read it anymore. If I see another Listic, I don't go to listicles anymore. Right. And that was the famous Buzzfeed model. If I look at Microsoft's news service, it's almost entirely link bait articles.

(01:47:43):  
You'll never believe what happened next. You know and I guess that's what drives traffic.

Allyn Malventano (01:47:53):  
Yeah. But it just dilutes the, the experience.

Leo Laporte (01:47:56):  
Yeah. Greatly. Yeah. Actually, this, today is a bad day to look at this cuz we have two very, very big news stories that are dominating the, dominating the news and they're real news. So they're not doing listicles on those. But yeah, normally it's a lot of just kind of crappy stuff.

Janko Roettgers (01:48:13):  
I think we've seen models that work though emerge of a, of a the last couple of years. And I wouldn't sure there's these big companies going under, but I think in a local news space, if you look at local nonprofit news sites, they're really sort of providing resurgence of, of some of the stuff that newspapers used to cover. I

Leo Laporte (01:48:32):  
Hope you're right. We have

Janko Roettgers (01:48:33):  
A great one. We have a great one here in Oakland. And, and Berkeley is a, is a familiar one too. And you know, smaller publishers, a newsletter based publishers and some of the big ones are doing well. Right? The New York Times is doing well. So there's examples for things that work. Just these big massive bets and glitzy things. And raising, I think Vice raised 400 million from Disney alone. Yeah. They were never gonna be able to pay that back in a, in a reasonable way.

Leo Laporte (01:49:00):  
Funny thing is Chart beats still around <laugh> and Parsley is the other one. Yeah. Parsley, huh? <Laugh>. yeah, I just, I, boy, I think news is so important and I think an informed electorate is so important. And I just hope that there is a way forward and I would hate for it just to be the New York Times and the Washington Post and, and, and nothing else. So we gotta find a way to make this possible. What is your local Oakland and Berkeley? Is it a newspaper? Is it, what is it? It's,

Janko Roettgers (01:49:34):  
Here's a Oakland site, which is a nonprofit news organization doing really good work and covering local stuff really well. In Berkeley. It's Berkeley side. I know that Don in LA you have LA s which is Yeah. Is awesome. Connect Public Radio Station down there, kpcc. So they're doing good work. And a lot of that is some of it is advertising based. Some of it is in case of I think l a s that's primarily just Grider supported. And so finding the right mixture there and keeping those newsrooms manageable in size and not promising the world, I think is a, is a good recipe for, for

Leo Laporte (01:50:11):  
Success. Local news is so important and that, Chris, that's one of the first things that goes away when you have NA only can support a national enterprise. And of course, Berkeley and Oakland in LA are big metros here. We are in little 50,000 person Petaluma. But, you know, there's a Petaluma Patch, there's a local newspaper. I guess there's ways to get this information. You read aist Louise, is that,

Louise Matsakis (01:50:33):  
Yeah, I think it's really important. I mean, I, I only moved to LA a few years ago, but I think local news you know, helped me learn about and integrate into a new community. I, I

Leo Laporte (01:50:41):  
Think it's point crucial. Yeah.

Louise Matsakis (01:50:43):  
And even just like, you know, I think too the, of course, like, you know, the really hard news is super important, but I think one thing the New York Times, the La s some of these other publications understand is that people wanna know like, what are the latest restaurants they wanna, they want recipes, they want crossword puzzles. Like, they want sort of like lifestyle, fun, community parts, traditional

Leo Laporte (01:50:59):  
Lifestyle

Louise Matsakis (01:51:01):  
Coverage. I think that stuff's important. And I think it's, it's, it's good when news organizations realize it's not just like winning the Pulitzers or like, yeah, I agree. Wish Disney Princess. Are you, it

Leo Laporte (01:51:08):  
Drives traffic <laugh> the best la restaurants to eat brunch with your dog. To me, that's a good thing. You need to have articles like that.

Louise Matsakis (01:51:16):  
Yeah. Crucial information. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:51:18):  
No, this is great. How to live with our coyote neighbors. <Laugh> <laugh>. No, this is important stuff. Do these writers at, at publications like this, are they able to make a living? Are they doing this for the love of it? Do they have to have a job delivering food with Uber Eats?

Janko Roettgers (01:51:37):  
I, I think I mean, I don't know every example, but I think at least in these examples, those are our real journalists that I've been working for, for

Leo Laporte (01:51:44):  
Real Jobs

Janko Roettgers (01:51:45):  
Island news organizations in the past. And Good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:51:48):  
Good. That's very encouraging. Makes me happy. Google I owe this week. Let me take a break and we'll talk about Google io cause we're, we're kind of running down the clock here and I want to give you guys a chance to tell me what you think. We're pretty sure. In fact, I think Google has now admitted Yes. A folding phone. So we'll talk about that and more in just a bit with our wonderful panel, our show today brought to you by Express vpn. We talk about privacy a lot, but you need tools to help protect your privacy tools like our sponsor Express, p n everybody's talking about, you know, like chat, G P T, Microsoft, Google investing heavily in AI for search. It's not a surprise. These are the same companies that use the information you give them to monetize. They, they get a cut from the information you see.

(01:52:48):  
And you might notice that one of the things they're doing is <laugh> is creating their own search results with their little robots so that you don't ever leave the site. I think more and more it's important that you kind of defend yourself against data brokers. We just talked about c Chava about against Big tech that wants to mine your information for their ads. A good VPN is worth its weight in gold. That's why I use and recommend Express VPN to put a layer of protection between you and Big Tech and Little Tech. The outside world. With Express vpn, you hide your IP address on all your devices. It's very easy. There's an app for Mac, windows, Linux, iOS, Android. You open the app, you press the big button, and now you are hidden. Big Tech doesn't know it's me, it's sees an express VPN N IP address instead.

(01:53:45):  
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(01:54:43):  
Do what I do. Use Express vpn. Go to express vpn.com/TWiT right now. You can get three extra months free with a one year plan. That's the best deal. It's not free. It shouldn't be free. You wanna pay for your vpn cuz you don't want to give them any incentive to sell your information. Express VPN bends over backwards to make sure you're private. No logging. They run a specially designed d Debbie and Distro that wipes the entire drive every single day. So even if it could write to the hard drive, they can't store that data. They run their custom trusted server software, which runs out of Rand. It's Sandboxed, it can't write to the drive. By the way, this has all been validated by independent third parties. It was great article. If you're interested on bleeping computer about how Express VPN n does what they do, it really works. X P R E s ess vpn express vpn.com/twi. Number one, rated by CNET Tech Radar and me express vpn.com/twit. Get that extra three months with your one year package. And a fun week this week on Twit, we've even made a little movie for your entertainment.

Speaker 7 (01:55:53):  
Do you, do you, Jason, when, do you remember back in the day when notification and ringtone volumes were separate on Android?

Speaker 8 (01:55:58):  
Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Do you remember that? Yeah. Because

Speaker 7 (01:56:01):  
It looks like it is back and in testing it's

Speaker 8 (01:56:03):  
Happening. <Laugh>

Speaker 7 (01:56:05):  
And I, my guess is whoever the person on the product team at Android that hated this around the time of Lollipop has left and moved

Speaker 8 (01:56:11):  
On. They're like, Bobby can we finally split these apart? No, I'm still here. I hate that. No. Set yourself a reminder. We'll check back with Bobby next year.

Leo Laporte (01:56:21):  
Previously on Twitter, iOS today

Speaker 9 (01:56:25):  
I'm joined by Matthew Castelli and we are gonna talk pro tips, tricks, apps, and more to bring you up to the best skill level for you and all of your devices.

Leo Laporte (01:56:35):  
Tech News Weekly,

Speaker 8 (01:56:36):  
We start with Mia Sato from The Verge. She joins us to talk about generative AI on the voice front ai, Drake, AI weakened, and the legal implications. You

Speaker 10 (01:56:47):  
Can't copyright your voice. You can't copyright your style or your flow or the way Drake says something like, that's not a copyright problem. Right? And that's why the song is so deeply weird. It's like, well, there's no work that it was copying

Leo Laporte (01:57:01):  
This week in Google this morning. I got up early and signed up for Pass Keys. So now my iPhone is my Google login, and all I have to do when I wanna log into Google is do the biometrics on the iPhone in this case face id. May I

Speaker 8 (01:57:16):  
Add something here?

Leo Laporte (01:57:17):  
Yes.

Speaker 8 (01:57:19):  
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:57:20):  
Because you have a workplace account. Oh, right. And does it not work with that? No. <laugh> and they keep using Ai Leo as the announcer on this show. So I'm gonna sue a <laugh>, I'll sue you. D it sounds a little bit like me. Anyway it was a great week this week on Twitter, and I hope you'll join us all week long. And of course, if you're a Club Twit member extra stuff from hands-on Windows, hands on Macintosh, the Untitled Lennox Show, the giz Fizz Stacy's book club, and more. If you're not yet a member, seven bucks a month, free versions of all our shows. You wouldn't even be hearing this if you're a member plus access to the Discord Plus all those free shows. Well, they're not free, are they? They're seven bucks a month, but that's nothing for all the goodness that you get.

(01:58:07):  
Go to twit tv slash club twit and you can join. We will be doing a live stream from Google io. I think we decide it's 10:00 AM right? 10:00 AM on Wednesday, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern, Jeff Jarvis. And I will watch the keynote along with you and then we'll discuss it all later on. Windows Weekly and this weekend, Google apparently Google has finally acknowledged. Yeah, there's gonna be a folding phone and I guess well, we'll see if they, if they, what they say about it at Google io. But they have with video teasers on YouTube and Twitter teased, this is, it looks like it's a two screen phone extra wide screen that unfolds, and then one on the front. So you get, you get both. It unfolds into a 7.6 inch display. That's pretty big. Then the exterior screen is 5.8 inches. Here's the scary thing. The rumors are, it's gonna be as much as $2,000. Any, do any of you use folding phones?

Allyn Malventano (01:59:12):  
No. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:59:13):  
Trying to figure out who this is for People with a lot of money. Yeah. Well that for sure, you know, somebody wants the coolest looking thing. I guess Samsung's been selling these SF have other companies for some time. I don't know, maybe it's just, I don't know. <Laugh>, I think the, they keep the sweet spot and Android is the cheap phone, not the expensive phone.

Allyn Malventano (01:59:37):  
I think they keep trying to encroach in the space of

Leo Laporte (01:59:39):  
Premium.

Allyn Malventano (01:59:40):  
You know, how there's, well, maybe some of that, but maybe also some of, oh, look at how much more you can do with this, because it has the bigger screen. Like assuming that you're gonna bust out a keyboard or something and use this thing as, as if it, you know, was like a larger, really, I think that's where they try to start going with these things, because what, I mean, why else would you need the screen to be really that big? Right. Other than either to show off or to try to be more productive somehow, but to, to be more productive. Okay, well now you need to do some other UI or interface things like to be able to effectively leverage that. Right. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:00:14):  
We'll see how Google makes the case, I guess, on Wednesday. I wonder if Google will address Jeffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI who quit Google so that he could warn of the danger ahead. He does not, by the way. Think that what we're currently seeing with chat G P T and Bard and so forth is dangerous. He's more worried. I don't know about the sci-fi future when it's Robocop or something.

Allyn Malventano (02:00:42):  
Is it bad that I was so worried that his photo in that article was AI generation? It doesn't look

Leo Laporte (02:00:46):  
Real, does it? <Laugh>? Do you think it's fake?

Allyn Malventano (02:00:50):  
It's a really nice picture, but it's, it's, we'll never

Leo Laporte (02:00:51):  
Know anymore, will we?

Allyn Malventano (02:00:53):  
Right. See, maybe he's making the point right now.

Leo Laporte (02:00:56):  
<Laugh>, it's scary. Cade Metz had an article, but he also did interviews with I think the m i t technology review and so forth. It is a little concerning that people who should, I mean, he basically created large language models who should, you know, understand the deep implications of this are worried about the future. He actually he as a graduate student in 1972 was the first to create something called neural networks. Then a professor of computer science at C M U left because he didn't wanna take Pentagon funding, went to Canada. He is opposed to artificial intelligence on the battlefield in Canada. He built a neural network that could teach itself to identify flowers, dogs and cars. I remember that actually. In fact, I think we had one of his students on our show up in Canada, as I remember, chief Scientist let's see. Google spent 44 million to hire him and his students and acquire their company. He got the touring award for their work on no neural networks. But he's a little worried. He says, as companies improve their AI systems, they become increasingly dangerous. Look how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference in propagate it forwards. That's scary.

Janko Roettgers (02:02:30):  
He's also, I mean, really respect what, what he did there, but he's also aesthetic state 75. Yeah. Which is still younger than, you know, a lot of the politicians we have, but <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:02:43):  
I think everybody's younger than a lot of the politicians we have.

Janko Roettgers (02:02:46):  
Yes. Yeah. But at this point, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:02:49):  
Maybe he's just too old,

Janko Roettgers (02:02:51):  
But I don't know if he's too old, but sort of, but it's time to

Allyn Malventano (02:02:53):  
Retire.

Leo Laporte (02:02:54):  
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Janko Roettgers (02:02:55):  
It it's an interesting good way to retire to say I can't. Yeah. I, I resigned the protest.

Leo Laporte (02:03:03):  
He had his, I mean, he's having his Oppenheimer moment. You remember when Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who helped perfect. The Adam Bomb first saw it. He says, now I, now I'm become death destroyer of worlds. He was very adamantly afraid of what the Adam Bomb would bring. And I, I understand that was not unreasonable.

Allyn Malventano (02:03:25):  
Yeah. I mean, I, I don't think his standpoint is, I don't think he's not being genuine. Right. Just for, I don't think he's really just embellishing or anything, but I don't

Leo Laporte (02:03:32):  
See any concrete thing to worry about that he's talking about, honestly.

Allyn Malventano (02:03:37):  
Well, right. But none of us have the perspective that true. He might have. So,

Leo Laporte (02:03:43):  
So there you go. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (02:03:45):  
You know, it's maybe just food for thought. Right? It's something that

Leo Laporte (02:03:51):  
His one, one good

Allyn Malventano (02:03:52):  
Point.

Leo Laporte (02:03:52):  
One good point is it's hard to see. He says, it's hard to see how you can prevent bad actors from using AI for bad things. But that's true of all technical advances. Right? You said the same thing about crypto cryptography, not cryptocurrency,

Allyn Malventano (02:04:10):  
But look at all the ways that we went down the potentials even earlier in this show Yeah. Where things could go true down very bad roads, right. If, if unchecked. Right. So, right. Maybe the warning is, you know, maybe he's just trying to get the warning out there just to make people

Leo Laporte (02:04:26):  
Think, we'll send our chei on Wednesday to take any time to reassure people. He's gotta explain why Google is so far behind.

Janko Roettgers (02:04:35):  
I was just thinking about that because Sun used to go out on, on stage at AO every year and talk about ai. Right. People were just like, oh, that's his thing right now. It's everybody's thing. And he's kind of behind, actually. So it sort of turns a conversation on his head. It's gonna be interesting. For sure.

Leo Laporte (02:04:51):  
We will be watching Jeff Jarvis and I 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday, right before Windows Weekly and this week in Google, Google io May 10th to be something I look forward to. So with great, you know, excitement and of late the last three Google iOS have been, you know, I guess it was Covid, but they've been very disappointing. So Go ahead, Alan. Yeah. Have a,

Allyn Malventano (02:05:14):  
Sorry. Yeah, I have an inkling. He may temper it maybe with, you know, if they're a little bit behind a, as we all can observe maybe he strategically tempers the, the, or, you know, sort of makes it a little bit washing over them being behind by saying, oh, we're being extremely cautious.

Leo Laporte (02:05:31):  
Well, that's kind of what Tim Cook's position was when they Apple quarterly results came out on Thursday. His three word response, I don't know, it was more than three words, but Jason Aton writing for Ink says, I liked his three word response, which is we're gonna be deliberate and thoughtful in how we approach ai. Apple way behind <laugh>. I mean, the problem is we don't know if they're behind or not. We, because they're very secretive. We know series way behind. But who knows? Apple could have killer AI just waiting in the wings. I think AI is gonna be the very most interesting topic at Google io and we look forward to talking about that. Let's see, what else before we, the Halo Amazon Halo. Bye-Bye. Bye-bye. Good article on the Verge about all of the plans. Amazon had Chris Welch trading to celebrity fitness classes and AI powered personal trainer Apple Watch support. That was all supposed to come out this fall. Amazon killed it before they got there. Hmm. I had a halo. It was dopey <laugh> and, well, the problem is you had Fitbit, you had Apple Watch, you had all these devices with screens, and none of which required you to get naked and take pictures of yourself before you used them, nor did they have monthly subscription fees. Well, Fitbit did, but you didn't have to. I, I think it was just not a well thought out plan. Any of you use the halo? Nope. I use it for five years. Even when they

Louise Matsakis (02:07:17):  
Break these devices though, it's always really unfortunate when they just, you know, oh yeah. Stop supporting the platforms.

Leo Laporte (02:07:22):  
Yeah. People probably put a lot of money in there. Yeah,

Allyn Malventano (02:07:26):  
I do. I do use your last sponsor.

Leo Laporte (02:07:29):  
You use what was Oh, express V p n Gotta use a v VPN N Right. For years. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. I guess that's pretty much it. I don't what, tell us the latest, greatest technology advances in S SD L in Melvin.

Allyn Malventano (02:07:49):  
Oh boy.

Leo Laporte (02:07:50):  
Anything <laugh>.

Allyn Malventano (02:07:51):  
You're just lining me up to really seem biased for my own though.

Leo Laporte (02:07:55):  
Oh, go ahead. My own. Is it Sol? Let me guess. Is it coming to us from Soine Synergy 2.0?

Allyn Malventano (02:08:02):  
Listen, if I was still running the beat, doing the SSD reviews, I would've been, I would've loved to be able to be the person to write the article that John Coulter here was able to write

Leo Laporte (02:08:14):  
In Tweak Town. So what is the, what is, why is software matter with an sst? Well,

Allyn Malventano (02:08:21):  
As it turns out, if you start really digging into performance of SSDs for various tasks, and you start doing really detailed analysis and tracing and seeing, okay, is there any low hanging fruit lift that we can squeeze out of the system and make this thing quicker, that is not necessarily all about, oh, we have to do Gen five P C I, we have to do this, we have to do, we have to throw all of this hardware at it? Is it possible to squeeze some extra performance out from some optimizations elsewhere in the stack? And as we have discovered, the answer to that is yes. Oh. And that is in the form of a driver, which we now make, and as a part of the Synergy 2.0 software that we just happened to launch last Wednesday.

Leo Laporte (02:09:06):  
So when you get Windows, you get a standard Microsoft N V M E driver. Can you replace this with a solo driver?

Allyn Malventano (02:09:14):  
You, not only can you, but our software does it for you and it's free. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:09:17):  
Okay. And does it make a difference? I mean, will it work with other SSDs?

Allyn Malventano (02:09:23):  
So there's a couple of points to the software. There's the driver piece, and the driver piece has some benefits for, there's one of our SSD models called a P 41 plus, which is a qlc S S D, which has a cash as, as most SDS do, especially qlc sds. And our driver in that case helps that product be smarter about how it uses it, the cash. So it's able to do things that a normal SSD can't do, because normal SSDs have no idea what's running around, what's running on Windows. Right. So the driver is a thing that can sort of link those two Hals together a little bit more better. So

Leo Laporte (02:09:58):  
You get, so you get more benefit in Windows than you would say in Linux or Mac Os, or Yeah,

Allyn Malventano (02:10:02):  
Absolutely. More benefit in, in Windows. We have to focus on Windows. That's where the, I mean, everybody knows Sure. That's where the bulk of everybody is. Yeah. And we're, you know, our driver guys are working as hard as they can just to get to, to accomplish what they've accomplished so far. So unfortunately we can't make it, you know, work everywhere. We had to focus on the biggest fish right now, and that is Windows. There's also some other pieces in the driver that are things that you wouldn't actually get a benefit from so much on the Linux side, because they're things that the Windows driver, just Microsoft isn't gonna sit there and endlessly optimize their driver. They're just gonna do what they need to do to make it work. We had the extra cycles to burn on making it better and more optimized. So we did a bunch of optimization on, you know, on and along those avenues and found some low-hanging fruit and we're able to get some extra gains there as well.

Leo Laporte (02:10:52):  
So gamers and pc, other PC Master Race people have probably long been aware that you can tweak your SSDs to get better performance. Samsung offered software to do that for a while. A magician. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Tweak Town's conclusion is this is the successor synergy 2.0. It makes, they said as much as an 8% difference in performance enough so that an inexpensive Sodi SSD can outperform the higher end Samsung E V O extreme models. That's pretty darn good.

Allyn Malventano (02:11:26):  
Yeah. It's actually, I was pleasantly surprised. Remember, I usually tend to look at these things objectively, even if I happen to work at the company, right? And part of my job at the company is just to make sure that, yeah. Make sure that we're testing the things correctly, things like that, right? And I was, when I came on board and started testing, testing this new, these new drivers even, I was kinda like, wow, okay. How, how much I'm, I'm excited.

Leo Laporte (02:11:49):  
How much does it cost?

Allyn Malventano (02:11:51):  
How much does the driver cost? Nothing <laugh>, oh,

Leo Laporte (02:11:55):  
Now how much would you pay?

Allyn Malventano (02:11:57):  
The driver is one piece. It's also, there's also a synergy U UI that's also a part of the package, and that gives you your typical toolbox type functionality that you would've seen and with, you know, other competing things over the years. Right? Every V SSD maker tends to have their own little software package you can install to do various things like Secure Erase and other, you know, your other utility type functions of the, of, of, for storage in general. Right. we are doing our best to be more open about that as well. So while the driver is the thing that's really just attached to, to benefit our hardware the, the UI and then the toolkit type software that we, that we are providing, we try to make it as open as we can. So, for example, to Secure Race and s s ssd we are opening up Secure Array.

(02:12:46):  
Most companies only make it work with their own product. We're making it follow the standard, you know, N V M E secure erase type operations. So as long as, even if it's our competitor's s sd, we don't care as long as it conforms to the standard way to secure a race and s d our software will let the user do it, right? We're not, we're not trying to lock everybody into a, to a walled garden. You know, we really want our, our software to be like a Swiss Army knife for doing SSD type things

Leo Laporte (02:13:12):  
For a long time. You know, I always recommend Intel SSDs probably cuz you told me they were the, the best. This is before you even worked for Intel and the, and the software and the firmware was the best. Yep. this is essentially Intel's former SSD division, which they spun off.

Allyn Malventano (02:13:30):  
Yes. These are not SSDs, right? These are, this is essentially a cute and, and, and a continuation of all of the work that had been done. All of the pedigree from all of the work done back at Intel, right. This, it's the same team. It's all the same folks. Yeah. Yeah. They just spun off and they, you know, began this new company, this new initiative, Solidigm, and the work continues and, you know, the, the engineers, I don't know what it was, but something about that spinoff and that move and everything, the, the engineering guys and the driver guys, like, they really just something lit and they just started really, you know, putting out some, some amazing work.

Leo Laporte (02:14:06):  
So you get this driver's software just by when you buy a Sodi ssd,

Allyn Malventano (02:14:12):  
I mean, it's not in the box, it's just there's a link. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:14:14):  
You download the website.

Allyn Malventano (02:14:15):  
Okay. Go to the website, download it.

Leo Laporte (02:14:16):  
Yeah. So if you're using a solid I SSD on Windows, you should probably get this software cuz it'll make a difference.

Allyn Malventano (02:14:21):  
You're just leaving performance on the table if you don't. Right. Right. It's, it's just, just silly.

Leo Laporte (02:14:25):  
You know, the other thing that blows me away is, you know, when SSDs first came out, and one of the things we always talked to you about on this week in computer hardware was, well, are they gonna be reliable? Are they gonna be robust? Are they gonna last as long as spinning drives? They, it seems to be, are more robust and reliable than spinning drives. Yes.

Allyn Malventano (02:14:44):  
I mean, it depends, but they're pretty is down to,

Leo Laporte (02:14:47):  
There's no, there's no disadvantage. Is there? There's and they're a lot faster.

Allyn Malventano (02:14:53):  
I mean, okay. There used to be a disadvantage in the fact of hard drives. You could just keep writing and they would never wear out. But modern hard drives actually start to come with an endurance rating of their own Right. As far as how many petabytes you can pass through the, the heads in the disc. So that thing that used to be a, a differentiating factor is kind of no more at this point. So there, it's, they're even more on, on a level playing field.

Leo Laporte (02:15:19):  
Well, and the price per gigabyte used to be ridiculous for SSDs. I'm seeing this is a Solidigm <laugh> two terabyte drive for under a hundred bucks.

Allyn Malventano (02:15:29):  
Yep. Remember for, well, I don't know if you, I don't know if you remember, because you, you might have not caught the PC perspective podcast, but like for years, Ryan Schau went on and on chanting 10 cents a gig. Right. As a price point that he was hoping that we would get to. And the thing you just showed,

Leo Laporte (02:15:45):  
Is it a nickel

Allyn Malventano (02:15:45):  
Is 5 cents a gig? It's a nickel

Leo Laporte (02:15:46):  
A gig.

Allyn Malventano (02:15:47):  
<Laugh>. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:15:49):  
Unbelievable. We live in amazing times. That's all I can say. And thank you for the work you do. You saw me. So from now on, no more Samsung nine 80 pros who get the same boy performance for less <laugh>. Oh, I I'm saying it not you. Hey,

Allyn Malventano (02:16:06):  
Trust, trust the independent reviewers. Not me. I work for the company. So don't, don't take my word as gospel. Take the press guys

Leo Laporte (02:16:13):  
Words. Yeah, well that's what the tweet guy said. So I believe him.

Allyn Malventano (02:16:17):  
Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm happy to. Like I like that I'm working here. Yes, it's, yeah. It sucks that I no longer work in the press and no longer get to play in the, in that, in that battlefield. But this makes up for it being, knowing that I'm working on stuff that really, you know, is, is doing good. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:16:34):  
Nice. New Riverview. John Coulter just, just came out a couple of days ago@tweaktown.com. Get the, get the new Sodi Synergy 2.0 SSD software when you get your s s D from Soda Diamond. Thank you, Alan. It's great to see you someday. I just want you to do a tour of all the stuff on your bookshelves behind you. Oh,

Allyn Malventano (02:16:56):  
We don't have that kind of time. It's

Leo Laporte (02:16:57):  
Crazy What's going on back there?

Allyn Malventano (02:16:59):  
There's a lot there.

Leo Laporte (02:17:00):  
Yeah. Well, may this I need,

Allyn Malventano (02:17:02):  
If I need to prune it keeps growing.

Leo Laporte (02:17:03):  
<Laugh>. Hey, the fourth be with you <laugh>. And, and may the STH be with you as well. Those

Allyn Malventano (02:17:10):  
Are, those are mostly the influence of my lovely wife who likes the Star Wars, all

Leo Laporte (02:17:13):  
That stuff. Oh, okay. She's the geek, huh? Yep. Great to see you. Thank you so much for being here from joining us from the wonderful SE four. And I am not blowing smoke when I say how much I love SEMA for. I think you guys are, I think this has turned out to be a wonderful publication, especially because of the international coverage and of course the stellar technology coverage from Louise Moaks, Reid, Albert Gotti, and the team. You're doing a great, I love it. I love it. Thanks Leo.

Louise Matsakis (02:17:42):  
I really appreciate

Leo Laporte (02:17:42):  
Your support. Yeah. Anything you wanna plug? You've got the newsletter. Subscribe to the, the seven four Tech newsletter for sure.

Louise Matsakis (02:17:51):  
Just the newsletter. Yeah, please sign up. That's the best way to get our coverage. We try and have you know, a scoop in e tradition and that's the first place you'd be able to read

Leo Laporte (02:17:59):  
It. When are you gonna start doing YouTube videos? I know they got, they've got some YouTube video. You gonna do the seven four YouTube videos?

Louise Matsakis (02:18:07):  
Yeah for sure. Yeah. Our video team is amazing. We're on all the platforms. We're on TikTok. We're on YouTube. Good. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:18:14):  
Good. Cool.

Louise Matsakis (02:18:15):  
Yeah, it's going

Leo Laporte (02:18:16):  
Well. Nice. So great to see you. Thank you, Louise. Appreciate it. At Mats El Mokis on Twitter. Okay, fine. You notice we didn't mention Elon, our Twitter once on this show. I, I'm listening to you folks <laugh>. I can hate it when we do that. Thank you Louise. And thank you so much. It's great to have you back on Yako. I hope you won't be a stranger. I, I, like I said, we, we quote you all the time. We might, as we should get you on the show too. Sure. Anytime. Y Yank o's new newsletter, which I just subscribe to is Lopez pass@lopez.cc and you cover the confluence of technology and media. Is that a good way to put it?

Janko Roettgers (02:19:03):  
Technology, media, entertainment and smart speakers, smart TVs, A r vr, all the fun

Leo Laporte (02:19:08):  
Stuff. Oh, I should have asked you about smart speakers. Are they gonna, are are we gonna get chat G p T built into smart speakers soon?

Allyn Malventano (02:19:17):  
Oh boy.

Leo Laporte (02:19:18):  
<Laugh>, that is

Allyn Malventano (02:19:19):  
A good question.

Leo Laporte (02:19:21):  
Hey, lemme tell you what I know about that. Have you <laugh> Just what you need A smart speaker mansplaining stuff to you. That's great. That's great. This,

Allyn Malventano (02:19:31):  
This, this, this this AI model has been trained on the microphone that nobody knew was on. At

Leo Laporte (02:19:37):  
Least he can do it in Tom Wade's voice. I am a subscriber. Thank you Yako. Appreciate your being here Lopez. Thank you. Cici. There is a free tier by the way. You can, you can, you can get the, their that newsletter every single day if you want. Or every Thursday I should say. If you want. Every Thursday. Yep. Yeah. Thank you all for joining us. We do this week in tech every Sunday, right after Ask the tech guys, we start around 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 utc. There's a live, you don't have to watch it live, by the way. I think people think I'm saying you gotta watch it live. You don't. In fact, you know, most people don't. But if you wanted to watch it live of a Sunday afternoon, you're not busy doing anything else, go to live dot twit tv.

(02:20:19):  
You could chat with us live as you're watching. We have at irc open to all IRC TWiT tv. You don't even need an IRC client. It your web browser. IRC TWIT tv. Of course. Our Club TWIT members get their very own cool kids channel in our discord which is a lot of fun. They're already voting on the show title. We didn't mention Elon once. You know, there's a, a ai leo in our our Discord. You can, you can talk to. Oh dear. Yeah, I know, I know. And he's smarter than I am. He's <laugh> or did they take, did you take AI Leo out? I don't. Where'd he go? He's gone. No, no. I don't know. No, he's in there somewhere. Cause I know he is. He's working, man. How many channels are in that? There's a lot of channels. <Laugh>.

(02:21:09):  
It's a, it's a whole community. It's just what you were talking about, Louise. It's kind of a closed community where you can trust what you read there because it's good people in there after the fact. We do have on-demand versions of the show ad supported at twit tv. When you're at the twit this week in tech page, you'll see a link to the YouTube channel that's also available to all. You could see the various podcast clients. You can subscribe just by a single click or get the RSS feed or just search for this week in tech in your favorite podcast client. You can get it automatically the minute it's available. We do audio and video. You you choose. Pick the one you like best. Thanks everybody for being here. I hope you have a wonderful week. I'll be back on Tuesday with Mac Break. Weekly security now, and then a fa of course Wednesday. Don't forget our live coverage of Google io starting at 10:00 AM Pacific. Along with this week weekend, Google will be talking all about what Google announces this week. Have a great week. We'll see you next time. Another twit in the can.