This Week in Tech Episode 935 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 threat. This week in tech. We got a great panel for you with some big stories. Ben Parr is here. Seth Troub from nine to five in electric. And Reid Alberta from SEMA four. Of course, we're gonna talk about threads. The hottest, I think the hottest app launch in history was this week. We'll also talk about AI used for everything from writing articles to zapping pests and is at the end of the line forever. Evernote, it's all coming up next on twit

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Leo Laporte (00:00:43):
This is twit this week at Tech episode 935 recorded Sunday, July 9th, 2023. Gotta sleep 'em all. This week at Tech is brought to you by mid mobile. Inflation is everywhere. Whether it's gas, utilities, or your favorite streaming services, thankfully Mint Mobile can give you a much needed break. Get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free. Go to mint mobile.com/twit and buy HelloFresh America's number one meal kit. Get farm fresh pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Skip the grocery store and count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun and affordable. Go to hellofresh.com/twitch 50 and use the code TWIT 50 for 50% off, plus free shipping and by ACI learning IT skills are outdated in about 18 months. So stay ahead of the curve and strengthen your IT expertise with affordable certification based learning that will advance your career visit. Go dot ACI learning.com/twit and use the code TWIT three zero for 30% off a standard or premium individual IT pro membership. It's time for TWIT this week in tech, although we might be calling it this week in threads this week. Anyway, I'm Leo LaPorte. This is the show where we cover the latest, the elitist tech news. And no one more lead than Ben Parr joining us. AI guru, author of the AI Analyst, an AI columnist for the Infra. Is that a new job, Ben?

Ben Parr (00:02:32):
It is a new column, yes. I write a monthly column where I get to say brain, many brain thoughts on ai. That will be what I spend my time after this, trying to get the thoughts outta my head onto a piece of paper. Nice. No AI being used for that yet.

Leo Laporte (00:02:47):
Yeah, I stopped doing that because it's painful. Those thoughts. Really? Oh, so painful. They don't wanna leave my head. So I found it easier to talk Anyway. Great to have you, especially this week cuz you were instantly on threads and very active there and so I'm looking forward to talking to you about it. The technology editor from Semaphore is also here. The great read. Al Albert Gotti. Hi Reid.

Reed Albergotti (00:03:09):
Hi. How's it going?

Leo Laporte (00:03:10):
Good. Are you on Threads?

Reed Albergotti (00:03:12):
Yes, I am on Threads.

Leo Laporte (00:03:14):
What's your thread count? <Laugh>. I, that that's gonna be a thing. It has no name. I don't know.

Reed Albergotti (00:03:22):
I am not the, I have reached Egyptian cotton

Leo Laporte (00:03:25):
Level of print

Reed Albergotti (00:03:26):
And

Leo Laporte (00:03:27):
I hope it's long staple. That's all I can say.

Reed Albergotti (00:03:28):
I have, I have no idea. I I am not like, I'm not as good as Ben. I I I'm sure I get notifications that someone's following me every once in a while. Yeah. Those off. And I'm not, I'm not really right away. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:03:41):
Right away.

Reed Albergotti (00:03:42):
I

Leo Laporte (00:03:43):
<Laugh>, it's great to see you though, and I love your, I love SEMA for and I love your newsletter. You guys are doing a great job. Thank you. Yeah. I was really pleased to see you move over there. Also a guy who was founded more than a few publications, the great Seth Weintraub is here, you know him from, initially it was nine to five Mac. Right? Right. And then nine to five, Google nine to five. What else? You got a nine to five AI yet?

Seth Weintraub (00:04:06):
Not yet.

Leo Laporte (00:04:07):
But you do have electric, which is Electric is my favorite publication cuz I'm an EV fan and he's on the threads with the same handle. He was on everything else with L L S L, lss <laugh>, I can't ll Seth j <laugh>.

Seth Weintraub (00:04:23):
Yes. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:04:24):
Oh, get it. Get it. I

Seth Weintraub (00:04:26):
Love it. It's an old a o l name. That's Oh, nice. Somehow stuck with me forever. Nice. I just haven't been able to shake it.

Leo Laporte (00:04:34):
Do you get on Threads and go ASL and and ask people for their age, sex and location or? No. You probably,

Seth Weintraub (00:04:41):
I don't do that.

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
No. Stop doing that. Good. Okay. Actually, Seth is legendary. I I was very pleased. I was you Electric sponsors a grand Prix race of, of solar powered vehicles, which is really cool.

Seth Weintraub (00:04:57):
Yes. It's, it's called the Formula Sun, not to be confused with the Formula One. And it's a bunch of colleges every year get together and race their cars. And it's, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of nerdery. And

Leo Laporte (00:05:11):
Look at these, these, these are so cool looking. Yeah.

Seth Weintraub (00:05:14):
Yeah. And they're fast. I mean, relatively fast. They're not

Leo Laporte (00:05:18):
Well, you were telling me before Fast, but you were telling me before the show they were too fast initially they had to cut down the size of the panels.

Seth Weintraub (00:05:24):
Yeah, they went from six square meters to four square meters because they were going, you know, 60, 70 miles per hour <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:05:30):
And, and what is essentially a bike? Pretty much, yeah. A bike with a fairing, big old fairing and solar panels on it. Yeah. Very cool. Very, very cool. Who, what team won this year?

Seth Weintraub (00:05:42):
So Florida State won the single occupant vehicle race, and then a team from Montreal won the multi user or multi-person

Leo Laporte (00:05:52):
Vehicle. How many people in a multi-person?

Seth Weintraub (00:05:55):
Well, there's just two. Oh, I they could call it,

Leo Laporte (00:05:57):
It's not a family car or something. Yeah, okay.

Seth Weintraub (00:05:59):
No. But in the World Solar Challenge, the team from the Netherlands actually turned their multi-car or multi-person car into what became Lightyear, the company Lightyear, which recently went outta business. But it was, it was going good for a while, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:06:19):
It's always going good for a while until you're out of business. Right? That's, that's the startup, the multi, multi-time startup founder. That's a great idea. Gosh, I would buy a solar powered ev I'd be very happy. The problem is, you can't get enough panels on there to charge a 80 or 90 kilowatt hour battery. It's just, they're too

Seth Weintraub (00:06:38):
Big. There's a company outta San Diego called Aptera that's making some headway. It's, it's not entirely solar powered, but it's such a aerodynamic car that the solar that you get from it will add about 40 miles a day.

Leo Laporte (00:06:51):
Oh, that's great.

Seth Weintraub (00:06:52):
If you're lucky.

Leo Laporte (00:06:53):
Yep. Well, you know, 90% of trips are under 30 miles, so that's good that that'd do it. That'd doer. So we were joking around at the beginning of the show about threads. I think that's really clearly the top story of the week. And I, I mean, okay, I have mixed feelings about it, but let me tell you what happened. And we've been teasing this. So has meta for some time that they were gonna add a Twitter like platform to Instagram. The name is Threads. They did it this week. They said they were gonna do it on Thursday. They jumped the gun and launched it Wednesday night. And even though I got on as quickly as possible, I was the f in the five millions of new people. Mark Zuckerberg posted this, I think was Saturday or Friday that they have 70 million.

(00:07:44):
I'm sure it's higher. I'm sure it's over a hundred million by now. So it's probably the fastest growing app of all time. It is very, and I'll show you, it's very much like Twitter. And it has a couple of advantages. Well, one advantage is Twitter is rapidly swirling the, the drain, but the other, oh, aw. But the other advantage is it, it's just like Twitter and you join it by going to Instagram and it imports your Instagram follows and followers and your handle and you're pretty much on and going. The other thing they did that was brilliant was instead of doing the Twitter style following feed, where you have to follow people before you see their posts, it did a TikTok style algorithmic feed, which when you first join it is brilliant because you are instantly, you're seeing a ton of content and if the algorithm works content you're interested in, and so you could quickly add people, it immediately caught on with not just regular users, but brands and celebrities.

(00:08:49):
Everybody. There's a o c, there's Howie Mandel, there's Ben Parr, there's everybody is on here. And I think this is a very interesting play. Now. It's missing a lot of features. It doesn't in fact have a following feed. You know, you're stuck with the algorithmic feed. It does not have direct messaging. It does have tweet quotes, quote, tweet, tweet, quote, tweet, tweet quotes, read threads. You know, where you quote. You can say, look, I like this. I'm going to retweet, repost it, and I'm gonna put a quote in above it. You know, the traditional quote tweet that Ma Iton refuses to do because they don't like it. It but it is missing some other features that Twitter users might like. It certainly doesn't show you how many people have looked at your post, which was a late ad from Elon Musk.

(00:09:42):
It shows you though how many replies you've gotten, how many likes. And you can see on a lot of these, there are, there's a lot of engagement, a lot of engagement. Ben, you were very good picture of a picture that I think Mark Zuckerberg would prefer not to see. Oh, that's a link to something of himself as I don't know what looks like a Juggalo there has a Juggalo. I think you're right there. I'll show you. I will go to the the app store to show you the thing that most people, you know, before it launched com complained about, which was the privacy settings. It, it, it has the same privacy settings as as Instagram and I, I presume as the Facebook app. In other words, it sucks it all down, baby, including health and fitness. In theory, we don't know in practice what they're gonna do, but in theory, they could know, for instance, if you were, if you were pregnant if you didn't like to exercise, if you like to eat donuts, it knows your purchases, your locations, your financial info, your sensitive info, basically they get, they get everything.

(00:10:56):
I thought maybe that would slow down adoption. Clearly it has not, nor has the relationship to Meta. I think there's a lot of people, I don't, I'm not on Facebook. I don't wanna have anything to do with Facebook, but for some reason Instagram never bothered me. And I don't, I don't use Instagram anymore cuz it's turned into some sort of weird shopping mall. But I, but Threads was easy to join and I love the engagement. So, Ben, what's happening? Why is Threads, people are just over overruling their own better interests in joining?

Ben Parr (00:11:31):
I mean, there's one main reason that Threads has taken off. And it's Elon and Elon ever since he took over has alienated a large section of Twitter. And I think, you know, now we know how clearly that happened. And it was a lot of people, more than let's say the Elon stands would be willing to admit. And the result is that people were flocking and looking for a place where they didn't feel like they would be trolled all the time or have those issues. And look, I love Twitter and I like still love the community there. And there's a difference between the two. And I think what will end up happening is that threads will become the more mainstream app with a little bit of the more mainstream conversation, just purely from the fact it's connected to Instagram. And Twitter will have a little bit more of a business bend and maybe a little bit of a right wing bend. But reality is like El Elon made missteps and it turned people off and they're looking for an alternative. And Macedon wasn't really it. And Blue Sky wasn't really it. But Meta just knows Mark Zuckerberg knows social, you could paid on him as much as you want. He knows how to build social media companies doesn't quite know how to do Metaverse, but he knows social media and he has nailed it

Leo Laporte (00:12:47):
For this. And by the way, as proof that Elon is feeling the pain, he immediately, July 5th sent out a cease and desist email from his attorneys saying that A threads is a copy of Twitter and B, that they hired a bunch of former Twitter employees, people Elon fired, I should point out. And is using them to copy threads. Adam Ser, who's the head of Instagram and the head of Threads said no. In fact, we are not using any Twitter employees on threads. And who knows if this cease, cease and desist will actually carry a lawsuit behind it. But it sure is a direct sign of Elon's serious pain. <Laugh>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, he's not happy. And of course he probably sees what's happening, right? I mean, we don't know the numbers. We know how many people have joined threads. What we don't know is how many people have abandoned Twitter in favor of threads. We may never know that.

Ben Parr (00:13:45):
Well, there's always these little signs happening right now of people banding in like Elon at least resetting, or you could say panicking. One example was, I think today they brought back Tweet deck, which was a favorite of power users of Twitter, including myself. I was so upset when they removed Tweet deck, which was before Elon's time, bringing it back. That's the kind of thing that could bring people back. My general thought, hopefully is that this spurs real competition, which means better things for users. Cuz competition is always good for the end user. That's my hope. At least.

Leo Laporte (00:14:20):
This is how fast the story is breaking. We would've reported the story that tweet deck no longer worked <laugh> because of the rate limiting paywall. And then this morning, all of a sudden it starts working again. And a according to one developer Twitter switched to the old version one API to get it working again. Dunno how long it will work. The

Seth Weintraub (00:14:48):
Old tweet deck is actually kind of more important because can, you can act as different sites. So, you know, me as a publisher, we have a bunch of different writers that have a bunch of different accounts. And the old tweet deck was the only thing that we could get to, you know, multiple user using multiple accounts.

Leo Laporte (00:15:08):
Plus you could schedule posts too, right? Which I'm sure was useful for you.

Seth Weintraub (00:15:13):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:15:16):
Yeah, I agree. I, that was the only way I used Twitter. I loved the old tweet deck. So Twitter clearly is reeling a little bit, but Threads is missing a lot of features. There's no web interface. I, I have to show you on my phone cuz I, I can't put it up on a Well, you've got a hack, I guess Ben, but normal people can't,

Ben Parr (00:15:37):
I I I mean, look, the they like, the story is that they rushed to get this out early. It was gonna launch probably a full month from now with more of those features. But when the rate limiting thing happened, which was just like the cherry on top, mark told Adam Aria and the team launch now. Yeah. and I think his instincts were right. Most people were just looking for an outlet and look now every day they're gonna launch something that is just a basic functionality. You now have the ability to have multiple feeds. You now have lists and people will be excited over it. Just as a like side note, we are like, just, it's the great Elon is the greatest PR person Mark Zuckerberg has ever had <laugh>. Like, think about how we talked about Zuck a year ago.

Leo Laporte (00:16:25):
Yeah. No, two years ago. No, yesterday. You know. Yeah.

Ben Parr (00:16:30):
Oh, what, what? It's, it is such a power move cuz I don't know if we like the fir he tweeted for the first time in 10 years when he launched Threads and it was just that Spider-Man meme of like pointing at each other. He's having a blast. He's having the best weekend ever. It's good. He popping champagne, whatever. He's having the great time.

Leo Laporte (00:16:52):
How quickly we forget though, that meta's long-term strategy was to find something that was succeeding on the web. And if they couldn't buy it like Instagram, they would copy it like Snapchat and how many dozens of, of clones has meta made over the years. But this one took, unlike all the others, this one took, although I guess you could argue Instagram's reels probably did hurt TikTok a little bit. Reed, are you on Threads?

Reed Albergotti (00:17:22):
Yes. As I said before, I am on Threads. I've played around with it. Do you care? I do think that there's, I do, I mean, yes, I obviously, I I agree with you. It's the top story. I think there's this like question though I have in the back of my head. Like, has anybody ever been able to launch a successful social media app? Like with this kind of fanfare based on just sort of people wanting to leave another platform? No. Well, and Ready.

Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
I don't wrote MySpace, Reddit dig.

Reed Albergotti (00:17:51):
Yeah. That was not, I mean, MySpace was sort of like, it wasn't like people said, oh, I don't like the people running MySpace and I'm gonna go to fa I mean Facebook is just, it's, it had a better kind of rollout on college campus. I mean, it, there's always these things always kind of happen like organically. And not to say that this, this won't have staying power, but I do kind of wonder whether we're, whether this may be kind of a flash in the pan. It's hard to get,

Leo Laporte (00:18:19):
I'm not sure if you get 70 million or a hundred million users. That's critical mass, isn't it? I mean, isn't that

Reed Albergotti (00:18:27):
Point, it's a lot of that is like, a lot of that is just their, their ability to leverage that Instagram. Right. You know graph, I guess, if you will. So I don't know if it's like a pure 70 million, like, and it's, and it's like what does it actually mean for Facebook and what does it actually mean for, for Twitter? Like, I don't know if this will meaningfully change Facebook's or Meta's, you know, underlying business. And I don't know, like, we'll see what

Leo Laporte (00:18:55):
Is Meta's underlying business, by the way? Do you, is it,

Reed Albergotti (00:18:58):
I mean it's still, you know, it's still just selling ads on Facebook. Right. Okay. And I, they want it to be good. They want it to be, you know, a different sort of, you know, they're, they're looking to the future. That's the other part of it that I wonder is like, is this really the future? Like is the future of of tech and, and media, like just another, just more and more copycat apps of, sorry, I'm like shaking my camera. Are there there like more and more copycat apps that just do the same thing? Like I, I sort of, I'm kind of wondering whether Gen Z is going to like, start using something completely different and like, what is that? Like how is, how is Gen Z to communicate? It

Ben Parr (00:19:38):
Was TikTok and they, that could create a new paradigm. But unfortunately some of the other new social networks they've tried to do like the Twitter copies be real, for example. Oh be real. Real was like a new idea. And like that completely Flaws has lost all momentum. Yeah. And I agree with you that, you know, like you, so the only reason Threads works is because of what Elon has done with Twitter and like the like response to that. He, if Mark had launched Threads a year ago, it would've failed two years ago. It would've failed. Yeah. It would only work right now. And he knows. And like, I think the reality is there will still be two and he can convince these specific celebrities who are not tweeting anymore to post on Threads. Cuz it's part of Instagram. So there will be an audience.

(00:20:18):
Both are gonna still be there and survive. I actually think that it will make Twitter better and like Threaders will make Twitter better and Threads will have an audience. And it's not like, my guess, and I can be wrong, is that it's not like Clubhouse and it's more, has more real staying power, but is purely by circumstance in a lot of ways. And look, you know, if it works, don't, so I sometimes if it works, don't try to like reinvent the wheel just because you can. It'll be interesting to see if there's like another generational shift in the way social media works or something else that is like the hardest thing to predict. All I can say right now, yeah, Elon, if Elon messed up <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:21:00):
We should,

Reed Albergotti (00:21:01):
I think there mean, and when I say Gen Z, it's like TikTok is like the older Gen Z Yeah. Slash millennial audience. I feel like the younger Gen Z

Leo Laporte (00:21:09):
What a, what a 20 year

Reed Albergotti (00:21:10):
Old say. I don't think if we know yet. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think there's going be something else and it's, and it's not gonna be threads. So

Leo Laporte (00:21:16):
One thing, one thing that this has done, a couple of things come to mind. One is we were last week all proclaiming the end of social media. Those articles and hours look have aged like Milk. Two, it's still the same. People use Twitter. It is not the general, or maybe it is, I don't know, but I don't think it's the normal group of people. It's journalists, it's influencers, it's brands, it's celebrities. The, the same group they use Twitter. Were looking for a Twitter replacement. But that is still a fraction of the total world. And then the third question I have actually, Seth, this might apply to you cuz Seth, you have a bunch of brands, I presume. Cuz you, you know, you're doing brand marketing, you're gonna immediately join whatever network is people are on, right? You have for

Seth Weintraub (00:22:06):
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And we joined Threads right away and we immediately saw like some big engagement. And also like, you know, as Ben said, like Twitter had been really rough on us recently. You know, we can't auto tweet anymore. They pulled our tweet deck like, and we're, and we're verified. So like, I don't, I don't know how people are being treated that aren't, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:22:29):
Well they, they only can look at 600 tweets and that's that and you're done and goodbye.

Seth Weintraub (00:22:33):
Yeah. So we get, we, we are treated pretty poorly by Twitter and, you know, every, every author there has to like, you know, go through these extra hoops to, to tweet or reply or whatever. So when Threads came up, everybody was like, let's just do this. You know, let's, let's be there. Let's see if this is the next thing. And, and the engagement has been great. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:55):
What does this mean from your point of view to, for Blue Sky T2 spill? I mean, I can go on and on and on. I'm gonna leave Mastodon out for the moment cuz there is a further story with the Fed Deverse. But what is it, what the, all the other Twitter clones are they, I mean, they were in the same position. They didn't, they didn't have the Instagram social graph to, to glom onto. But I think, is it done for Blue Sky for instance?

Seth Weintraub (00:23:26):
It feels kind of done to me. I, yeah, like I have, I don't think I've checked Blue Sky since

Leo Laporte (00:23:30):
I haven't. Nope.

Ben Parr (00:23:32):
It's, it's hard for me. And Post News and like, look, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:23:35):
Well Post had already killed itself. I'm sorry. Post was already done.

Ben Parr (00:23:40):
Blue Guy did just announce a new funding round. They have, they think they have a very

Leo Laporte (00:23:44):
Small, loyal audience. But I mean, look, those people went to Blue Sky cuz it wasn't Twitter and now there's something better and they're gonna go to Threads. There's no reason there's no stickiness to, to Blue Sky or G two or any of the other. Agreed. Yeah. You, you just go wherever the people are and it's, the people have voted it seems like.

Seth Weintraub (00:24:02):
Yeah. I mean, threads suck the air out of the room for all the, you know, Elon hating Twitter people, like, they're just all over it threads now doing their thing. <Laugh>.

Reed Albergotti (00:24:13):
Well, Elon hating is interesting. Cause like there was, we had what, like six years of Zuckerberg hating right now, which is crazy. Like, like, like you were saying, everybody, everybody loves the guy now. So you

Leo Laporte (00:24:25):
Think that Zuck hate was Unmerited Seth?

Seth Weintraub (00:24:29):
No. No. I, I can't believe that I'm like sort of rooting for Brett's to work. Cause

Reed Albergotti (00:24:35):
Like, I hate the pr I hated, it's crazy Facebook

Seth Weintraub (00:24:38):
Like I, me too Instagram. Me too. Nobody treated publishers worse than that. Like there's no, like,

Leo Laporte (00:24:43):
Well, how do you feel when Adam Oeri says, yeah, news and politics we're, we're not gonna favor that.

Seth Weintraub (00:24:50):
I, so I mean, I don't,

Leo Laporte (00:24:51):
I don't trust, I don't even know what that means. I don't know what that means coming

Seth Weintraub (00:24:53):
Out, coming out of there. So yeah, we'll keep an eye on it, I guess. Like Ben said, I I think competition between the two hopefully keeps them honest. Hopefully keeps them, you know, you know, fighting each other and, and making the user experience better. But I mean, you know, Facebook and Instagram have not been great to use. Or, you know, when they're in the position of power, they're not great to users or publishers or anybody.

Leo Laporte (00:25:21):
Yeah. So I left out Mastodon because there is one, I think fascinating element to this that still remains unknown. W before they launched Feds threads, they promised that they would federate, that they would support Activity pub, which if they do, it means that you know, we run our own Mastodon instance at Twit Social. I could follow anybody on Threads safely without joining Threads on Mastodon. Which means all the brands and celebrities that refused to join Mastodon and the subgroups like black Twitter that wasn't, didn't feel safe on Mastodon. They joined th they've all joined threads. They could all be followed from Mastodon. Now there a lot of mast for some reason, I'm not sure I understand why a lot of Mastodon admins say, we'll, never federate with meta. We're gonna, in fact, there's one guy who said, I just blocked it already. It doesn't even exist.

(00:26:22):
I already blocked it. But as a Mastodon admin, I, I think it's great. Eugene, Eugene Roko, who wrote Mastodon, wrote a blog post this week What To Know about Threads in which he said exactly what I've felt, which is it's not, there's no risk to mastodon from threads. There's nothing but benefit threads. Meta doesn't get any of your data. You won't see ads. There's no embrace and extinguish going on. The activity pub is open and, and is out there and is not gonna disappear. So this is very good for Mastodon, which makes me think that meta will absolutely back down. It's promised and we'll, never, never federate. They have, there's no reason for them to, they've been successful, so successful they don't need to. Right?

Reed Albergotti (00:27:10):
I if they do, I think they will. That will be the real impact of threats is to, is to make the Fed the fedi verse happen. Which is really interesting. Isn't

Leo Laporte (00:27:19):
That? Yes. Yeah, that's my thought. Exactly.

Ben Parr (00:27:24):
Complete side note, when I hear the phrase Fed averse, I always first always think like the Feds are gonna come knocking down my door. It's, it is the universe, the federal agents, it is like the Marvel Cinematic universe. But you got the CIA and you got the FBI agent, and they're gonna all combine forces.

Leo Laporte (00:27:42):
I wanna be very clear that Ben is, it's

Reed Albergotti (00:27:45):
A terrible name. Cookie

Leo Laporte (00:27:47):
<Laugh>. Maybe it's a terrible name, but the point of it is that, but it

Reed Albergotti (00:27:49):
Is a really interesting concept. Yeah. I I think it makes a lot of sense.

Leo Laporte (00:27:53):
Yeah. I mean it's a, it's federated social network. So you know, it doesn't, it's not all Macon by the way. That's just a small fraction of it. You can follow people from any part of the Fed averse to any other part. If Threads joins it, yes, they'll be by far the largest social network in the Federation. But that doesn't mean they take it over. It merely means we have access. To me, the best way to use threads, the privacy forward way to use threads would be to join a Mastodon instance and follow Ben Parr and, you know, and Kim Kardashian and, and you know, Cheetos and just follow them on, on Mastodon. Then you get exactly what you want. And no more, no less. There are there, I think there are some other issues. And I really do wonder if Mark will just say, yeah, that was a good thing to say when we weren't sure if, if it was gonna take off. But we don't need, we don't need them now. It,

Ben Parr (00:28:45):
It, it feels like a two-thirds chance now. It backs out. Yeah. And a one-third chance he just says, but I said I might as dwell do it anyway. Cuz it doesn't really

Leo Laporte (00:28:54):
Hurt. It doesn't hurt this meta.

Ben Parr (00:28:55):
No, no. The only way it hurts 'em is they, they, if a large percentage of their users are looking at threads from another Macedon instance and they can't serve ads, that's how it could hurt. And that would be the reason they wouldn't do it. But who knows? I I would love to see it. It should happen. Will it happen now? He's not thinking about that at all.

Leo Laporte (00:29:17):
The fedi verse would be a symbiote. It would be, I don't know, what is the, what is the bird that sits on the hippopotamus back and picks its teeth or crocodiles back? It picks his teeth. It would be the smallest little thing on the back of the giant behemoth that is threads. And I don't think it would harm it or help it, it's just there. And it, it would help in the sense that it would make it look like it's not a centralized network.

Seth Weintraub (00:29:41):
Yeah. But, but Facebook not being able to monetize a group of users, I, I

Leo Laporte (00:29:47):
Just don't see that happen happening. Yeah. That's the third party problem, isn't it? Yeah.

Seth Weintraub (00:29:51):
Right. I

Reed Albergotti (00:29:51):
I think somebody needs to, needs to come in and make the Fed verse sort of accessible to everyone. Right. And Mastodon is just not that. It's, it's never gonna be that. But yeah. Something needs to happen to kind of get that idea off the ground. Cuz it's, it's so ridiculous that if people, people have this network that they've built up for years on Twitter and you know, they all of a sudden they don't like Twitter anymore. They can't just take that network and go somewhere else and still be able to access it. Right? I mean, that's like, you really don't own your contacts. I think there's something just inherently backwards about that.

Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
I mean, here is a picture of a water buffalo with a symbiote, oxpecker, <laugh> Mastin on in this, in this metaphor would be the Oxpecker and Threads would be your, wasn't that

Seth Weintraub (00:30:43):
Your college?

Ben Parr (00:30:43):
I'm starting to get do

Leo Laporte (00:30:44):
Yeah, oxpecker, that's what <laugh>

Ben Parr (00:30:48):
Oxpecker.Com.

Leo Laporte (00:30:49):
Oxpecker.Com.

Ben Parr (00:30:51):
What?

Leo Laporte (00:30:51):
I'm gonna quickly reserve that name. <Laugh>. Okay. Well, I guess we've said everything amazing in less than half an hour. Everything there is to be said about Threads. Yes. What, what would you, what will we look for over the next couple of weeks to, to what, what would, what wins should we look for? Where should we, where should we stick our finger? No, that just, that's not right. It's, I meant, you know, in the air like that

Ben Parr (00:31:27):
I, I mean the next co I, I like close like the closing thought, which is just kind of like, we're still like a weekend. This is like 4th of July weekend. It feels like 4th of July. It was a long time ago. Yeah, right. Weekend. It's a holiday weekend. Just have no news. Yeah. But it's just through Giant News. Look, we have to wait a couple months to see if it did stick. It's could be a while if it is sticky. Okay. Right. And what's your prediction? This, my prediction is that Threads and Twitter coexist threads is slight, is bigger. How much bigger? I don't know. Threads is just a different kind of conversation. A little bit more TikTok like a little bit more unhinged, less business and Twitter becomes a little bit more business. And Twitter's a little bit more like politics and Twitter gets better because of this. Those are my safe predictions. Does to, does Threads get to a billion users by the end of the year? I don't think so, but we'll see.

Leo Laporte (00:32:32):
Reid, do you wanna make a prediction scattered? Oh, go ahead Seth. You go ahead. Well, I

Reed Albergotti (00:32:35):
Mean, I,

Leo Laporte (00:32:36):
Oh no, I just read

Reed Albergotti (00:32:36):
Him. I don't necessarily disagree. I mean, I think what you're kind of saying is it's like, you know, the the, the future of social networking is just scattered, right? Like people are just, you know Yeah. Cuz

Leo Laporte (00:32:47):
There's discord and you know, people are using, I know families that use Slack you know, they're messages telegram, there are all these places that are more private, no advertising.

Reed Albergotti (00:33:03):
This is where the Fedi verse is kind of interesting too. It's like if the world is really scattered and there's like 18 different social networks that you're using at any given time, it just becomes really unwieldy and like, then you sort of need something to kind of like unify it. I've been, I've been using this app called Beeper which is kind of interesting that like takes all your messages. I'm just playing with it. But like, you know, you have Slack and iMessage and you know, every, you know, LinkedIn, whatever, it's all like in one place. And it's, it's really useful. <Laugh>. I mean, it's just, it's so hard to keep track of like, everything that you've, you know, that you're, you're posting and messaging these days I think.

Leo Laporte (00:33:45):
So that is one complaint people had. I imagine you have two, Seth, which is there, does Hoots Suite work with threads? I mean, what <laugh> how do

Seth Weintraub (00:33:53):
I I was just gonna comment on that. Yeah, it doesn't yet. And yeah, you know, like, it, it's just gonna become more complicated. Like we're going in that direction. It would be nice if there was like a Hootsuite type top level thing that would shoot out to all the, you know, other stuff. And maybe Meta will make something like that that does its programs and then you know, Twitter and, and some other groups will do something else. You know, it's hard to say. Like right now I know that threads is here to stay. I think it, it, it'll be around for a while. I don't think it's gonna be like Google Plus. And I think and Meta, I know, I don't think, I don't think Meta's gonna give up on, give up on anything that quickly. I,

Ben Parr (00:34:34):
I, I'm unashamed that I loved Google Plus. I did too, too. And look, look, and I, look, I look, they gave, I got half a million followers on Google Plus of course I loved it. Please Meta meta. I, I am not above be beyond a suggested user list. I am not above begging <laugh>. But Google, if Google had just not turned that off and had just kept going with it, it could have taken advantage. Like for sure. Like it Google could have absolutely done it too. This is just timing. But the reality is, Mar like Google is not an expert at social networks. Meta is, that is their core competency.

Leo Laporte (00:35:10):
Yeah. But ironically, the one thing that made threads take off is something they stole from TikTok, which is a pure algorithmic feed as the default feed. And goo you know what had had people known about that in Google's time? <Laugh>, Google plus Time, maybe they could have saved Google Plus with that. That's how YouTube works. When you go to YouTube, you don't have to follow a channel before you can see the videos. It recommends immediately. And so maybe YouTube gets credit for inventing that. Certainly TikTok perfected it and Threads is doing exactly what TikTok does, which is you, you don't have to have any friends on threads. You just go and there's stuff already happening. You can see people, you can add them easily. They have a, everybody's head has a plus sign in it, which means you just tap their head and now you follow them. They, if, if anything meta has learned the lesson from TikTok and Google and what Twitter did right. And what Twitter did wrong. And this is the ne to me, this is next generation social using everything we've learned over the last 10 years. Google Plus didn't have the advantage of that. They were at the other end of those 10 years.

(00:36:19):
I think, in my opinion, threads by cl cleverly using, they can go wrong and they still have a long way to go. But I think if they make the right steps, this is the next big thing. I don't, I don't have any doubt about that. Seth, you to have a made a prediction yet. What's your prediction?

Seth Weintraub (00:36:39):
Yeah, I think, I think this is gonna be a thing. I don't know if it's gonna be the next big thing, but it's gonna be a thing

Leo Laporte (00:36:45):
We post next are we post the big thing in on the internet now. It's just too fragmented. A big to have somebody. There's a lot of things. They're all, you can't win internet anymore.

Ben Parr (00:36:54):
Un until the super intelligent AI is invented and integrates all of us into one super being one

Leo Laporte (00:37:01):
Giant paper clip. Are you kidding me? That's the problem. <Laugh>.

(00:37:06):
We'll be paperclips. All right. Yeah. I I I I have to say, having seen quite a bit of this in my 30 or 40 years covering technology, this is, I've never seen anything quite like threads. And I've never seen anything be quite so appealing so quickly. I joined Instagram on day one and it was very appealing very quickly, but it didn't have the same kind of resonance. And I think partly it's because we already know about, we know Twitter, we understand that. And it's like a Twitter done, right. I, I do disagree with you, Ben. I don't think Twitter has a history. I, a future. I think it's over. I think. I think,

Ben Parr (00:37:46):
Ooh, that's like nice. And that's a nice spicy take. I I I I mean look, I I did the same post.

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
Twitter is the next gab. How about that? I

Ben Parr (00:37:56):
<Laugh>, I I do disagree, but it, it's, it depends the way that El Elon responds. And I think Ellan is competitive. Yeah. What's

Leo Laporte (00:38:05):
His history though? Is his petulant and foolish? It's not brilliant. You think he's

Ben Parr (00:38:11):
Brilliant? No, there's, look, look, look. I'm gonna try to give some credit even though like, overall, like I like embrace threads because I was unhappy with the way Ellan ran things. Like there are things he did like being able to see the number of impressions on a tweet that were good moves that did help engagement. And I'd posted the exact same thing on both threads and on Twitter. Of course, this is a week in, and my Twitter went super viral. My threads was like minorly viral. And so there's a bunch of people who aren't gonna change behavior and it's really hard for them to change behavior and they're not gonna go and do it or they don't trust meta. And so I think there is a world for both. Now. Does do I think Met Threads will be bigger than Twitter? Yeah, I do. I think that's what will happen. But I do think that there is a war like Elon's too proud to give up like that. He's not gonna go and shut it down. Like I just can't imagine Twitter going away. At least in the next 10 years. I'd have to take I, I don't know. You'd have to burn all the servers, which I guess is not out of the question.

Leo Laporte (00:39:15):
<Laugh>, is this your, well,

Reed Albergotti (00:39:16):
Twitter's always been tiny compared to Facebook, right? I mean, so how do you define bigger, right? It's influe more Influe. That's a influe point's. Influential.

Leo Laporte (00:39:23):
Yeah, influential, right. Compared to its number. Cause Twitter's never is like 300 million daily active users compared to several billion.

Reed Albergotti (00:39:30):
Yeah. I mean, Facebook eclipsed that like a decade, right? More than a decade ago. Right? Right. I mean, it's not,

Leo Laporte (00:39:36):
It's not she numbers. I think it's the,

Reed Albergotti (00:39:37):
I'm sure

Leo Laporte (00:39:38):
Thread. I think it's Mindshare, right? I'll give it, let's say minds share.

Reed Albergotti (00:39:41):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:39:43):
Right. Am I, I guess I'm, I

Reed Albergotti (00:39:45):
Don't know what, what the numbers will be.

Leo Laporte (00:39:46):
I guess I'm on grandpa's, Meta's got the Mindshare. Facebook has a mind share. And I say this as, as somebody old enough to be a grandpa, but Twitter's minds share was all with the kind of digger you, you

Ben Parr (00:40:00):
And your politicians too.

Leo Laporte (00:40:02):
Yeah, no, that's true. But I, I no politician wants no, no non right wing politician wants to be on Twitter anymore. Right. It's become a Right, it's true. A haven for the right which isn't gonna bode well and you don't get those people back. AOC is not gonna come. Oh yeah. I should be back on Twitter. That isn't gonna happen. Biden's still posts there, but that's cuz you know, he's the president of all the people.

Reed Albergotti (00:40:26):
Well, I mean, if voters are on Twitter, they'll go on Twitter, won't they? Yeah, I

Leo Laporte (00:40:29):
Guess so. Yeah.

Reed Albergotti (00:40:30):
They're not gonna be too proud to just ignore

Ben Parr (00:40:34):
One thing here that we are also still forgetting, which is Threads is still mostly us. It's not even available in the eu. And when that happens, it, it may

Leo Laporte (00:40:43):
Never ion be a available in the EU because of privacy concerns.

Ben Parr (00:40:47):
And, and if it is not available in the EU for some reason, then Twitter still does absolutely have a future. Oh, that's a good point. Look, they're gonna figure it out. Threads will be there at some point. They will figure it out. It's just gonna happen. But in the interim, you know, Twitter, like there, there's reasons why Twitter will still be around. And even if it's just internationally in certain countries, Twitter is just immensely popular in places like Japan. And who knows, like if Threads will become popular in a place like Japan. I don't know enough of the numbers. It's a really interesting complex topic all around

Reed Albergotti (00:41:23):
Big in Japan.

Leo Laporte (00:41:25):
Yeah, I'm big in Japan. Big in Japan. Yep. I I guess because you publish and are editor in Chief Electric says you might have a higher regard for Elon than I do.

Seth Weintraub (00:41:39):
That's not correct.

Leo Laporte (00:41:41):
<Laugh>. Okay. Just giving you the option. <Laugh>

Seth Weintraub (00:41:45):
We, we used to have a pretty good relationship with Tesla and, and Elon as well. And we wrote something about when they put out the hardware 2.5, so Tesla just going in the weeds a little bit. Tesla's had when, when the model three came out, the hardware for like self-driving was 2.5. Right. And when the model three was launched Elon and Tesla even wrote a blog post about it, said every car we build from now on is gonna be capable of full self-driving. Well you know, obviously that didn't come true, but in the, in the interim Tesla released a 3.0 version of the hardware that everybody was getting and, and actually did it full self-driving a little bit like the, you know, the beta stuff that, you know, you only crashed every 30 minutes or whatever, <laugh>. So we wrote a story saying, Hey, y you know, Tesla promised this at, in 2018, said every car being built from now on is gonna have full self, you know, the cap hardware capable of doing full self-driving. What are you gonna do about it? Because that was, you know, that was what you said. And that, that day Elon blocked electric blocked the wrong rider. But one of the writers of Electra and never like we were like person on grata at that

Leo Laporte (00:43:10):
Point. How dare you call him out? Yeah. Well, somebody paid $5,000 for, for the potential right. To buy full self-driving on my Model X and that was $5,000 fully wasted fully wasted. Yeah. I'm, I'm a little sympathetic <laugh>, let's put

Seth Weintraub (00:43:26):
It, how would you keep the details of your purchase and and sell of the car? I think at some point in the future there'll be a settlement

Leo Laporte (00:43:33):
Or you think Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, maybe. For sure. Yeah,

Ben Parr (00:43:36):
There has, well, look, this is actually one of the things that like, also like why Threads is working. Cuz if you like publicly criticize Elon on Twitter you actually have to worry about the risk of, he just, oh yeah, secret presses a button and you're not seen anymore. And look for all the things about like Zuck. Like, I'm not worried about that. If I were to criticize Zuck on Threads, I don't have the worry that they're going to throttle me for some Right. Like, reason. And that that is a big thing. Despite the fact that like, they want Twitter to feel like free speech it's like, that's like part of the pitch. It doesn't feel that way for, for

Leo Laporte (00:44:16):
It's, I'm time for a lot of people back in 20, back in 2014 when I put in an order for my Model X, there was a real chilling effect because Elon had canceled a journalist's order because he was critical of Elon. And it was like, oh man, I could lose my order <laugh>, I could lose my place in line if I'm critical of Elon. I mean, this is, there's a long, that was eight years ago. There's a long history of this with

Reed Albergotti (00:44:44):
Elon Musk. Oh. When he started pulling journalists off Twitter for the the private jet location thing. Oh, I, I think that was a turning point where it's just that, that Twitter was not gonna be the same. I don't, I don't agree that it's gonna go away completely. But I do think it, it sort of changed. Its its whole meaning.

Leo Laporte (00:45:03):
And incidentally just kind of related, Elon Musk's jet is now on on, on on Threads. So if you on Threads, if you wanna know where Elon is, it's, it's on threads. He moved to Maston briefly. I don't know if he's still there, but clearly he knows this is the place to be. This is where the people are. One other que one other follow up re read your mentioning beeper. Do you like beeper?

Reed Albergotti (00:45:28):
I, yeah. I was on the wait list for like, like two

Leo Laporte (00:45:31):
Years. I have been too, but I think it's, yeah,

Reed Albergotti (00:45:34):
I, I was really excited when I like suddenly randomly got a, you know, a message that it was off the wait list and it's, I think it's works great. My only problem is now I get, I'm not ready yet to turn off like notifications for the other apps. Right. So now we get two notifications for

Leo Laporte (00:45:49):
Everything. Oh, that's, which yeah.

Reed Albergotti (00:45:50):
Is sort of annoying, but that's like, I just haven't been

Leo Laporte (00:45:53):
Willing to this like pigeon or there were a bunch of, back in the days of early days of messaging apps like I C Q and Aim, there were a number of apps that would get all, all of them. That's,

Reed Albergotti (00:46:08):
But the thing that's interesting about this is they've got iMessage so you can like iMessage from the

Leo Laporte (00:46:14):
Pc they're doing that. There's, I mean, I don't know how they're doing it. They say they have Twitter too, which there's no api, so I don't know. Yeah,

Reed Albergotti (00:46:19):
They do. It works. Yeah. I mean it's, they must be,

Leo Laporte (00:46:22):
It's crazy. It must be scraping or something. How could they, I dunno how they can't scrape by messages.

Reed Albergotti (00:46:27):
Like how does Apple, like, they've somehow

Leo Laporte (00:46:29):
Gotten, oh, I remember with Beeper, didn't they give you an iPhone? Didn't they? Didn't you have to get

Reed Albergotti (00:46:34):
That was originally how they did it. Yeah. But they somehow, somehow figured out a way to do it without that It works. Yeah. It works across platforms. So you can iMessage there. I tried some other solutions too. I was just interested in there. There are some other ways to do it, but this is definitely the easiest.

Leo Laporte (00:46:51):
All right, well, I'm glad to get the update. Yeah, I I asked for an invite a long time ago. I should check my email. Yeah, I I stopped looking. <Laugh> <laugh>. All right. We'll have more. Great,

Reed Albergotti (00:47:02):
I think on the Elon thing, I just want to Yes. Make one point on the Elon thing. Please. I, I mean, I agree. Like he's, you know, he's childish and, and you know, sort of, I think petty at times and reminds me of, I, you know, wrote a book about the Lance Armstrong, and a lot of that reminds me of Armstrong too the way he treats his critics. But but I mean, you know, the, the guy's like, you have to have some respect for what he's accomplished, right. And I, I think, yeah, I mean, Ben was kind of making this point too, but I mean, the guy is like, I would not count him out on, on Twitter if that means No, you're right. Him stepping back or whatever, whatever he has to do. It's, I I I'm not ready to write it off.

Leo Laporte (00:47:45):
Oh my God, I got a beeper invite last month. I <laugh> I was just signing up myself. I just checked. I'm Go Spa right now. <Laugh>. I just checked my spam. Thank you, Reid. Thank you. <Laugh> downloading it right now. There's a

Reed Albergotti (00:47:59):
Reason you invited me.

Leo Laporte (00:48:02):
Well, I just gave up and you know, stopped looking for the invite and I just checked. It was in my spam folder, but it's there. Oh, wow. So I'm downloading it, right? It's on Lenox too. I'm downloading it right now. That would be huge. If I could get Android and messages and iMessage and Slack and everything, all in one app on Lenox, that'd be amazing.

Reed Albergotti (00:48:22):
Yeah. Let me know how. How's

Leo Laporte (00:48:23):
That? I will, our show today brought to you by Mint Mobile. Love these guys from the gas pump to the grocery store. Your utility bills your favorite streaming services. Everything costs more these days, right? Make it stop. Well, I'm gonna give you one thing that's going the opposite direction. A much needed break. It's Mint Mobile Mint Mobile's the first company to sell premium wireless service online only they pass the savings along to you. No retail stores. They let you order from home, you save a ton. Their phone plans started just $15 a month. I've been a Mint mobile user for two years now. Saved a huge amount of money compared, you know, I have, I have to for work, have accounts with Verizon, at and t and t-Mobile, and I have to say if I add up how much I'm spending for those guys and how much for Mint Mobile, I've saved thousands of dollars with Mint Mobile.

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You get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Bring your own phone. You can port your phone number up, keep your contacts. It's just a great deal. In fact, honestly, you'd be crazy to do this. Get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. That's all in. How much are you spending right now? Get the plan shipped to your door for free. Go to mint mobile.com/twit mint, m i n t, like that minty fresh flavor mint mobile.com/twit. I even wear mint green mint mobile socks to celebrate. And I'm wearing a mint green shirt today. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month. Mint mobile.com/twit. We thank of so much for their support. Reid Al Albert Gotti's here from Semaphore. Ben Parr. Ben, you got a new column. I'm so happy for you on the information all about ai. Tell me about the book though. What is this book?

Ben Parr (00:51:10):
The book? Which one?

Leo Laporte (00:51:12):
Theology book. Which one? The AI Analyst.

Ben Parr (00:51:15):
Oh, that is, that is my co that's my newsletter.

Leo Laporte (00:51:17):
That's the column. Oh,

Ben Parr (00:51:19):
I, I I have two. I have the, my column on the information so you can go the information and just like find my name. I have my first two columns up there. It's a new thing.

Leo Laporte (00:51:29):
Oh, and then you have a kind of, or is it a sub? What is it?

Ben Parr (00:51:32):
It's a beehive. Beehive. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:51:34):
Using beehive. Hey, how do you like beehive compared Tock?

Ben Parr (00:51:38):
So far more it's, for me who wants a tinker? It's much better cuz you can tinker and you can change

Leo Laporte (00:51:43):
Things. I'm, I'm hearing a lot beehive's new, but I'm hearing a lot of good things about it compared to the other newsletter platforms. Huh. Oh, look at all the stuff you've written here and, and you pretty much by the way, there's your appearance on episode nine 15. You pretty much focus on AI nowadays.

Ben Parr (00:52:01):
Focus mostly. Although my most recent one about threads did upset some people

Leo Laporte (00:52:09):
Elon should be worried.

Ben Parr (00:52:11):
Yes, that one upset some people. That's fine. So look, I'm gonna still gally drop in on other topics, but AI's the thing that I've been talking writing about, and for those who don't know, I started an AI company seven years ago. Right. So it's fascinating how, you know you sadly become part of a hot trend and I am not complaining, but also I've been doing it for a very long time and thinking about these topics for a very long

Leo Laporte (00:52:36):
Time. Yeah. More than so it's nice

Ben Parr (00:52:37):
To actually be able to write

Leo Laporte (00:52:38):
About it. Yeah. You really have been. And congratulations to you and Deborah. We had dinner with you guys when you were in town a while ago. She's a playwright and fabulous. And you're very lucky, man. That's great. Congratulations. That's really great. Thank you. Ben par.com for your beehive. Oh, beehive baby. So, I'm sorry, I said that

Ben Parr (00:53:05):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:53:06):
Wired Magazine says today why we don't recommend ring cameras kind of a big deal. Wired does testing kind of like the wire cutter and everybody else. They say, well, yeah, ring cameras from Amazon are affordable and ubiquitous, but we don't think homeowners should be able to act as vigilantes. Yikes. When you set up a ring camera, it says Wired, you automatically are enrolled in your, in their neighbor's service. You can't turn it off. But of course it's the default. So nobody does Neighbors, which is a standalone app shows you activity from all nearby ring camera owners. And a safety report that shows how many calls for safety services were made in the past week in your neighborhood. It also allows you as a ring owner to send videos you've captured with your doorbell to law enforcement. And they say Hold, hold on there. That's turning everybody into vigilantes. We believe this feature should not exist because of course the biggest problem is it increases the possibility of, of racial profiling, makes it easier for both private citizens and law enforcement to target certain groups for suspicion of crime based on skin color, ethnicity, religion, or country of origin. You thoughts Ring says we do it cuz our customers love it and they're probably right. They're probably right. You know, I'm sure customers

Reed Albergotti (00:54:49):
Do it. I have a ring camera. I love it. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:51):
See? There you go.

Reed Albergotti (00:54:52):
Cause you turn it off. I opted out of the neighbors thing, but you know, it's just, and it's like, as far as crime prevention, I think it's completely useless. Like, I, I mean, what are they gonna do with the footage? Like of whatever people stealing packages or breaking in. I mean, come on. But I think it's, it's really useful, like when you're not home and somebody, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:55:13):
I have a Google hello camera and it's just as intrusive, right? <Laugh>, it captures everything going by on the street in front of my house, including neighbors and people walking their dogs and stuff. It doesn't offer to send it back to law enforcement. I used to be I used to use n was it next door? I used to use Next Door, and that ended up really scaring people. What was the other one that was really terrifying? That would tell you all the law enforcement

Reed Albergotti (00:55:41):
Citizen.

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
Citizen Oy, all that does is scare you Yeah. And turn you into kind of a racist agoraphobe.

Reed Albergotti (00:55:54):
I agree with you. But like, isn't that just, isn't that more a problem with people rather than technology? Yeah, I mean, like, I, I don't, I mean, I use this stuff and I'm not like a racist and I'm not checking crime stats and being scared all the time. Like, I shouldn't say this, but half the time my doors aren't even locked. But like, I don't know. I mean, it just seems like it's a problem. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:56:16):
It is a people problem. People are terrible. Yeah. But it's, it's

Reed Albergotti (00:56:19):
Like people just, people are people, right? Like they're, you know, whether they have the ring camera or not, they're gonna, do you anybody

Leo Laporte (00:56:26):
Gonna watch they're doing magic on your ring camera? See, I think that's cool. I would go around the neighborhood doing magic. Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah.

Ben Parr (00:56:36):
I, I have to agree with Reid on that one. Just for most people I could, like, that's a useful feature I have, I have one for my home when I'm like away to just like, check on stuff. Like, it's useful and like the Wired article doesn't have like, here's the alternative, right? So like, yeah. I, I need something. I want something. And the, like, I still have fall under the thesis that just the vast majority of people do not care about some of these like larger societal issues or privacy issues or things like that. They're like, what can solve my problem of who's at my door and who's trying to steal my packages? And Ring does a very good job of it.

Leo Laporte (00:57:17):
All right. I had a ring camera for a long time. Yeah. And they were an advertiser for a long time before Amazon bought them. I do like a doorbell camera. Do you have, what do you have, Seth?

Seth Weintraub (00:57:27):
So I have a Google one. Yeah. just because we have, you know, a bunch of Google stuff. I, so I think the problem here is that it defaults to sending video to the cops. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:57:40):
Like,

Seth Weintraub (00:57:41):
Because we know, like for instance, I was told that if the default on your license was organ donor and not, not organ donor, that we wouldn't have any organ donor problems because everybody would just be like whatever.

Leo Laporte (00:57:53):
Right. They do the default. Yeah.

Seth Weintraub (00:57:55):
Right. So the default is a big deal. Like, you know, the default web browser on a phone or a default search engine mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that's, that is mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, the, the search engine. So I think Ring could probably say, Hey look, let's just not make the default or during this setup, you can choose one or the other. But, you know, I think the default people know that everybody's gonna be sending their video to the cops. Maybe cops in some certain areas aren't, you know, the, the, the best civil rights people. So, you know, I understand like Wired's concerned that a lot of cops are gonna probably get a lot of footage that maybe they shouldn't have the right to have by default. So the easy fix is Ring could just say, you know, during a setup, just say, send it to the cops. Don't send it to the cops. And,

Reed Albergotti (00:58:46):
And I'm just happy cops are trying to solve crimes at all. Like, I, I didn't,

Ben Parr (00:58:52):
No, in some areas a whole different,

Leo Laporte (00:58:54):
You must live in San Francisco, Reid in some areas. I mean,

Reed Albergotti (00:58:58):
I don't live in San Francisco, but I mean, yeah. Like San Francisco's going through, you know, hell right now mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Nobody wants to stop crime. It's like yeah. I mean, I don't know. What are they exactly doing with the footage? Like, there's so much, I mean, I don't know, like we villainize these cops, you know, and, and there are some bad ones. Obviously some bad apples. But I mean, it's like they're probably trying to get footage to solve some crime. Like, that's <laugh>. What else?

Leo Laporte (00:59:25):
Yeah, I don't mind it so much. It's just, I, I noticed that it turns people, it turns people into kind of paranoid. You know what I, I stopped looking at next door for that reason because it just was like, there's a strange person, you know, a strange black man walking around in the neighborhood. What is he doing? What is going on? And it makes you kind of crazy and, and concerned. And I think citizen, even worse, you start, you start turning into, you know, one of those people cowering in their homes with shotguns. Somebody knocks at your door, you blow their heads off. It's not a good thing.

Ben Parr (01:00:03):
I turned that notifications off. I couldn't, I didn't want to have all that negativity all the time.

Leo Laporte (01:00:08):
It's negativity. Yeah. And it gets, eventually it kind of gets into your head. I think you start, I mean, that's why you should probably turn off network news and, and 24 hour news channels cuz it just gets in your head after a while. That's

Reed Albergotti (01:00:20):
What I was gonna say. People used to say the same thing about the news. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:00:23):
You start to think the world is a horrible place.

Reed Albergotti (01:00:26):
You watch the news and you think there's way more crime than there actually is. Right? And then you watch, you know, the cop shows and you think that way more crimes get solved than actually do. Right. You know, your whole view of the world is

Leo Laporte (01:00:37):
Completely wrong, easily skewed. And I guess the problem is people, again, the problem is people not, not those things, but still

Reed Albergotti (01:00:43):
We blame technology now for like, every problem with society and humanity. Good point. And it's like, I don't know. I mean, we should be asking these questions and I think it's important to, it's an important discussion to have for sure. I don't mean to minimize it, but I mean, right. At some point we're flawed.

Leo Laporte (01:01:00):
Well that's why I for one, welcome our AI overlords <laugh> <laugh>. You're well. They say

Reed Albergotti (01:01:08):
That AI should have human values, but that scares the hell.

Leo Laporte (01:01:10):
There's a terrible idea. <Laugh>. Let's hope it does better than we do. Your this from the Wall Street Journal. Your school's next security guard may be an AI enabled robot. Talk about a story, a headline designed to scare you. Right. One school in Santa Fe, Santa Fe High School, using these 360 degree camera enabled patrol robots. Look, it's got a big loud speaker on it. Hey, you kids get away from there. It's <laugh> a among other things it does face recognition. It it starts to notice when kids gather and when certain kids gather. Maybe that's a, I think some of this is a response to all the school shootings. Right. in Andy Sanchez, who does sales for the Robots distributor in North America, team First Technologies says, in the case of an active shooter, the robot could alert the security team.

(01:02:14):
It could move toward the intruder. And it transmit video footage that informs the officer's of action. It's not armed, but it can confront intruders and humored security team members would be able to speak to the intruder through the robot's communication system. They did have, they turned them off. Weapon detection features does not have face recognition. I should clarify that. And the high school maintains control of the footage. It doesn't go back to the home office. The robot, according to the journal, has not yet detected intruders on campus. But it has alerted the security team to new workers entering the school's construction site, individuals attempting to open locked doors in harmless attempts to enter buildings. I might add it's good, it's not armed <laugh>, its cameras have also caught faculty members waving and students making peace signs in passing. One student said I don't think the robot will change our behavior. It'll just be funnier. Just different <laugh>. And a drama teacher says, I already feel safer. Oh no, I'm sorry. I already feel safe at school without the new surveillance measures. What do you think? Security robots, I don't know if I wanna see this in our anywhere. Security robots on patrol in this area.

Ben Parr (01:03:45):
The but the, there's more and more of it happening. Yeah. It is cheaper than a human or multiple humans. But I'm shocked that thing hasn't been vandalized yet. I know. That's like a $60,000 robot. Yeah. Like, so teenagers gonna just like straight paint, like Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:04:05):
Yeah, yeah.

Ben Parr (01:04:06):
It

Leo Laporte (01:04:06):
Should be full of TB by the end of the week. I'm sure. <Laugh>.

Ben Parr (01:04:10):
I I mean, interestingly, I think a lot of it is just based off of like the design. And so it actually reminds me like of a story I saw recently where people judge different pieces of art ah, and they changed their rating based off of if they were told it was made by AI or not rather not actually AI made it and they wouldn't tell 'em either way. Like the reality, right. This thing, like, it, it co evokes, you know, some of those like feelings of Terminator style, that sort of thing versus like, you know, you don't think about just like cameras in like the quarters or like, you know, even that's true.

Leo Laporte (01:04:49):
Like true. They're already there, aren't they? Yeah.

Ben Parr (01:04:51):
Right. So it's, it's, it's the form factor that like gets people and that like, maybe you could turn it into a puppy, I don't know. But it's gonna, it'll be tested more and more. And it'll get more and more sophisticated. It'll get cheaper and cheaper. But to me, widespread adoption feels decades away if ever. Cuz like the other piece is like a robot can't solve of the human problems that people have. So, interesting supplement, interesting experiment. Biggest one is it's a sad indictment of the state of American safety in American schools. That is my political perch.

Leo Laporte (01:05:31):
Fair enough. We were talking about speaking of ai, we were talking about today on the ask the tech guy, Sam Bull, Samar car guy was on talking about San Francisco, which is inundated with these self-driving Waymo and cruise robo taxis. San Franciscans have discovered that the way to disable them is to put an orange cone on its hood because the vehicle thinks, you know, oh, that's a traffic safety area, but it can't drive around it. So it just stops. Let me, this is a TikTok video that describes this technique. And I don't know, I, I don't, we're we're kind of distant from San Francisco. I did see, I was in the city yesterday. I did see quite a few Waymo's and and cruises. And they, and they do see, but see if you just put a cone <laugh>, it's hood

Reed Albergotti (01:06:33):
So funny. Just

Leo Laporte (01:06:34):
Find a traffic cone. They're all all over the place. Of course. But don't take it from anywhere important. Then gently they say, place it on the hood. And you know, as long as there's nobody in the car, obviously if there's a safety driver, he'll come and take it off the hood. But if, if it's just driving by itself, it <laugh>. That's terrible. It

Reed Albergotti (01:06:55):
Just, A friend of mine said he almost did that the other day, but then he felt bad cause it would've caused a traffic jam. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:07:03):
Oh, M g Yeah, that's the problem cuz that, that disabled cruise is just sitting there in traffic and that we see enough of that. Anyway.

Seth Weintraub (01:07:12):
I'm, I'm sure Google and or Waymo and Cruz will send a software update that, you know, tells it to back up really quickly and it'll fall off or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:07:24):
Wiggle, wiggle the hood. Yeah.

Ben Parr (01:07:27):
Had a robotic arm to take it off. Mm.

Reed Albergotti (01:07:30):
Right. It's to Ben's point though, some people feel really like, I don't know, like violated somehow because there are these like robo taxis just driving around their city and you know, like who's responsible, who's accountable. And you know, so far there haven't been any like, you know, major safety. Like no one's been, there've

Leo Laporte (01:07:47):
Been small ones though. There haven't heard there, there were emergency vehicles were blocked by a cruise in San Francisco some weeks ago. I was talking to a friend who lives on the hilly area of San Francisco. He said, yeah, for like several weeks. A lot of, lot of self-driving vehicles. I guess they were training on the hills would, we just, were all over the place. Then. There are people who live on, in San Francisco on cul-de-sacs. And because the cruise vehicles follow traffic laws, you know, any, any, any human will just go, okay, I am turning left here cause I'm not going down that cul-de-sac, but these vehicles go down the cul-de-sac, make a U-turn and then come back out so they don't make a left turn. They only make right turns. And it, and they've been lined up in the cul-de-sac, like dozens of them <laugh> making this this crazy turn. I think they must have fixed that. Cause I haven't heard about that in a while. But

Reed Albergotti (01:08:39):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:08:39):
They're not, it's not merely that, oh, the, it creeps me out. They can cause problems,

Reed Albergotti (01:08:47):
But it's kind of amazing they've gotten them to work so well.

Leo Laporte (01:08:50):
I guess so,

Reed Albergotti (01:08:50):
Yeah. In San Francisco. Yeah. I think that the thing that I keep wondering every time, and I see them every time I go in the city for a dinner or whatever, they're just, they're, there's more of them at night. I just see them all the time. And Yeah, the thing I keep thinking is like, when are they gonna have these in other cities? Right? Like how, how hard is it to bring this now to like every major metropolitan area? And I think that's the fact that it hasn't happened yet is like, it's either because they're worried, you know, that there's gonna be some safety issue, you know, and something bad's gonna happen and it's just gonna shut the whole thing down. Or you know, they've, like those little edge cases in San Francisco are in every single city and they're different. And so it's just gonna be so difficult to, to scale this, you know, to, to other places.

Leo Laporte (01:09:40):
They,

Seth Weintraub (01:09:40):
They are in some other places. I think they're both in Arizona, Phoenix

Leo Laporte (01:09:46):
Starting in Phoenix. Austin has some now in fact Austin.

Reed Albergotti (01:09:49):
Yeah. Most in

Leo Laporte (01:09:50):
LA Yeah.

Ben Parr (01:09:51):
A lot of local laws and those pieces, they're being cautious, right? You don't want to just like, you don't wanna do what Bird did and just drop a whole bunch of self-driving cars, happy driving.

Leo Laporte (01:10:01):
Oh, those scooters you mean? Oh, those Oh

Ben Parr (01:10:03):
Yeah. Which, which are now worth Oh yeah. Went from what, a billion valuation to 25 billion now. Yeah. Just a whole nother story. Yeah. but you don't wanna just drop a thing like that. You gotta work with the local government like Google and the other companies of this space and crews are much more cautious as they should be.

Reed Albergotti (01:10:20):
And you, so you think they could, you think it's not, there's no tech, there's no hurdle to scaling these other than laws and, and regulations.

Ben Parr (01:10:29):
Oh, I, I'm sure in some cities there are some, because of very unique circumstances like Snow is probably a very unique circumstance. None, no. To all the cities we talked about Austin, others are not usually snow cities. They are warm cities that don't have a lot of snow. Snow is your biggest problem where it like cuts off all the lines and things

Leo Laporte (01:10:51):
And rain. How about rain? I mean, they all rain in these cities.

Ben Parr (01:10:54):
Rain is easier. Yeah. You can still see the lines like it can detect right? Like in three to 60 degrees, right? It's when snow completely covers like the middle lines and the sidelines. And like humans can kind of understand where like the edge of the road is by feel, right? The machines, you know, that's just a much harder problem. So when you start seeing self-driving cars in the middle of the winter in the Twin Cities, that's when you know the technology has done it.

Leo Laporte (01:11:20):
Right. And as

Reed Albergotti (01:11:21):
I talked to someone at Cruz, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:11:23):
Go ahead. Go ahead. No, no,

Reed Albergotti (01:11:25):
I I I was just gonna say, I talked to someone at Cruz about it the other day and it was like, I, I think the message was, you know, don't underestimate how difficult it was to, to make it work in, in San Francisco. Oh. And you know, how long that took and sort of how bespoke it is, I guess. And I, I think, I think that's an inter, it'll be interesting to see cuz nobody wants to, like, none of these companies want to just invest all that manpower in every single city. Like they want to, they want to figure out how to make it turnkey.

Leo Laporte (01:12:01):
Well, and that's important because we, we forget they need to make money in the long run. They can't, they're not just doing this just cuz they can, they wanna make it a profitable business. And if it's prohibitively expected,

Seth Weintraub (01:12:14):
I think each new city is, I think each new city is gonna be a little bit easier that like, they're gonna learn some stuff from every new city and, and theoretically the fifth or the eighth or the 10th city is gonna be a little bit EAs you know, by the time they get to smaller cities in South Dakota, it's gonna be turnkey.

Leo Laporte (01:12:32):
So this is one use of AI that I think probably is okay. Right. It's not, this doesn't pose an existential threat to mankind.

Seth Weintraub (01:12:42):
As long as you're not a cab driver. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:12:44):
Yeah, true. It's probably bad for, although I, I think about, we were talking about this earlier, I think about what happened in New York City when Uber took over. It didn't get rid of cab drivers, it just meant there were far more cars in the street and, and it was worse for everybody except I guess it was probably was good for Subway use. It got really gridlocked for a while because of all the Ubers on the city streets. Gizmoto another publication. Are you, do you do any of your publications, Seth, use AI to write articles?

Seth Weintraub (01:13:23):
So we use Grammarly. Sometimes

Leo Laporte (01:13:25):
That's fine. We use Grammarly too. That's good.

Seth Weintraub (01:13:28):
Yeah. So I kind of view AI as like the next step in that regard. So we don't use AI to write articles. We have no plans to do anything like that. We know that some of our competitors are doing it. You know, red Ventures and C Net have obviously

Leo Laporte (01:13:45):
They love it. Oh, <laugh>.

Ben Parr (01:13:49):
It's painful for me since I, I wrote a column for cnet. It's so painful for me because I if it were, cuz the initial stuff was just, it's was just not good. It's not, it wasn't,

Seth Weintraub (01:14:02):
I mean, it's horrible branding move. Like, why are you, like, why are you announcing that you're gonna use like a not mature technology to, to write, you know, basically garbage. Like

Leo Laporte (01:14:17):
We had Connie Good on right after that came out and she said, well, these are articles no human wants to write. They were in the personal finance section, basic stuff that no person wants to write. So we have the AI write it, and then we have an editor check it. But what did come out later was there were some real concerns about accuracy.

Seth Weintraub (01:14:37):
Yeah, there were big, big mistakes.

Leo Laporte (01:14:38):
Yeah. So here's the story from the Washington Post about an AI written Star Wars story at Gizmoto. Now, one group you don't mess with is Star Wars nerds. Right? a few hours, the story goes after James Whit book clocked into work at Gizmoto on Wednesday, he got a note from his editor in chief. Within 12 hours, the company would roll out articles written by artificial intelligence. 10 minutes later a story by Gizmoto bought post on the site about a chronological order of Star Wars movies and TV shows. Whit Whit Brook, who is a Star Wars fan and writes about sci-fi among other things at Gizmoto, said he cataloged 18 concerns, corrections and comments about the story in, in an email to the editor-in-chief, noting for instance, that the bot put the Star Wars TV series, the Clone Wars in the wrong Order, admitted any mention of and or in fact completely in the 2008 film entitled Star Wars, the Clone Wars Inaccurately Formatted movie titles. And the story's headline had repetitive descriptions and contained no explicit cons. This is the biggest problem in my opinion, explicit disclaimer that was written by ai. The story was error riddled and more importantly, to the staffers actively hurt our reputation and credibility.

(01:16:14):
They used Google Bard and chat g p t to write it. Red Ventures has its own wordsmith AI to write its articles. Whit Brook said, I had never had to deal with this basic level of incompetence with any of the colleagues that I've ever worked with. If these chatbots can't even do something as basic as put a Star Wars movie in order one after the other <laugh>, I don't think you can report it, use it to report on anything else. I think he's got a point. I mean, that's a factual matter. You cover ai def can you defend Gizmoto Ben or was this just an inappropriate use of it?

Ben Parr (01:16:56):
It's a bad use of it. Yeah. Because there are much better uses and like look like I thought a lot about AI and journalism kind of over the shortened long term. There's this great report from before Chachi PT came out by the AP showing where AI is already being used for certain things. So and so I'll give you my general stance, which is like we are already seeing AI being used for the really, like, straightforward stuff. Like if you're reporting on a local sports game, like the format is straightforward, put in the numbers, you know, there's names of players, those things are already automated lot by ai. And it's in part because there are no local reporters to report on those things anymore. Right. Which is unfortunate, but the reality. And so there's a whole world of that. But we're definitely gonna see more of it.

(01:17:44):
Like it's in its infancy, but it is also the worst it will ever be. And so we're gonna see more experiments like this. This is a not a good experiment because they didn't have the support of the staff. They didn't do any fact checking out, which you must do with ai. It the AI of today don't fact check. They're not that smart. But there's definitely like, but this is why the writers, for example, are striking in Hollywood right now. Right, right. Because the future could very well be that more newsrooms do use more ai. My I'm gonna plug my fiance Deborah, because she wrote a play was why was an Sonoma last year, her play last year called Atlas the Lonely. The Gibbon was about two journalists, one of whom lost their job to ai and the other was desperately trying to keep his job.

(01:18:29):
He was a cybersecurity reporter in this play. And it like that is kind of what the real, like, it's, that's kind of what the reality's gonna be. I think down the line for certain types of reporters. The types that are gonna have jobs long term are the ones who are doing investigative journalism because the AI cannot do that, cannot make the phone calls. And those who are like on the fourth, again, in terms of columns and opinion, because AI don't have strong or good opinions. And it's not gonna be some immediate change where like half the jobs are gonna be gone, but more of this experimentation's gonna come just because the economic incentives are unfortunately, there,

Leo Laporte (01:19:08):
Here is a good

Reed Albergotti (01:19:09):
Use. I think all that's true. Yeah. But I think I just wanted to say the CNET thing, and I think this, I think this gives Moto thing as well. I mean, they're, they're having it write articles that basically they used to pay people like $30 to, to write something, right? That's essentially just to try to game the Google algorithms. And that's like, I mean, that's not journalism. Like I just wouldn't put it in the same ca in same category as reporting, as you basically said, Ben, I mean like, like what we do is make phone calls. The writing part of it is almost like, and my boss Ben Smith, like made this point at one of his book parties that I was at. It was like, you know, the, the writing part of this stuff is kind of an afterthought. Like there are a lot of great journalists who really can't write <laugh> Wow. Editors have to do it. That's true. Wow. Like that's not, writing

Ben Parr (01:19:58):
Is not the strong. Yeah.

Reed Albergotti (01:19:59):
I mean that's interesting. I never thought of that. Add,

Ben Parr (01:20:02):
How can you

Reed Albergotti (01:20:02):
Build yourself

Leo Laporte (01:20:03):
A writer? You're not a writer, you're a investigator, you're a fact officer.

Reed Albergotti (01:20:07):
I mean, every, any, any real reporting is kind of, I mean, I guess like as investigative, right? Right. You're trying to get information that that hasn't been out there before. Right. And the only way to do that is to, you know, make human relationships with people. I would love for AI to be able to help me with the writing process. We do, we do use it for you know, fact grammar checks and things like that. But like, you know, writing

Leo Laporte (01:20:31):
As as, as it gets better, it could help write, you could give, you could provide it with the facts and say, here, put this into a coherent article. I I would, I've

Reed Albergotti (01:20:40):
Tried. Yeah. I've tried to do it. I've tried to do it with q and as where like, okay, I've got a transcript of a conversation. Can you edit this down? And you give it a whole big string of instructions with a prompt and it just isn't there yet. It doesn't, it can't, it can't do what a human can do yet there. And it can't take a a you can't take your notebook and turn it into an article. Right. Like you'll you'll end up spending more time. Right. Than you would have if you just, if you just wrote the thing from scratch. So, you know,

Ben Parr (01:21:09):
It, it, it, yeah. It's just good at certain things. And the, you, you can get it to a point where it'll do that noting Chachi peti. You're gonna have to like build your own side thing. Like my co-founder Matt and I built our own like side stuff just to like do very specific AI things for our company and for ourselves. That's the only way we could get it to do those things. It's just a lot of tweaking to make it work for very specific use cases. But AI's not yet at the point where you could just be like, fix this and it fixes it like a human would. That's what it has to get to. Right. it, but it will at some point, I do believe, I just don't know the timeframe, but some point, but it will not be making the phone calls, building human relationships sourcing reporting out of Google or Tesla or Meta or the US government. And that's where we need more reporters focusing more of their time anyway,

Reed Albergotti (01:22:04):
Actually. And we need those local reporters.

Leo Laporte (01:22:06):
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. We need those. Yeah. And there's no money for those. I strikes me actually, the, the AI might be a good reporter. We, I was playing with a friend yesterday who was a former Facebook engineer. We were, we were having a conversation, the three of us, and he put our little recorder on the table and he said, watch this. And he had it set up so that the recording would automatically go to Dropbox, where whisper AI would turn it into a transcription and then chat. G P T would take the transcription and return notes on the conversation and action items on the conversation. Exactly. The notes would be the kind of thing a reporter would do on a, you know, listening and the action items, the kind of thing you might do in a business meeting. And it was really, it was quite good. It was almost instantaneous. We'd finished the conversation and he said, okay, now here's the notes. And it was actually really good at picking up you know, tidbits. I guess there's a lot of judgment for a reporter on what to keep track of. So maybe it would lack that, but it might save some time on that end. Maybe it's better on that end than on the writing end.

Reed Albergotti (01:23:16):
Well, any profession you should be, you should be trying to figure out how to use these tools, right? Yes,

Leo Laporte (01:23:20):
That's

Reed Albergotti (01:23:21):
Right. Cause you don't, I mean, that's right. You're gonna fall behind. And we've, we've been using, like you said, Ben, like we've been using AI for a long time, if you define it that way. Right. It's really machine learning. But like, I remember, I mean, when I was at the Washington Post, like I trained an algorithm to scan apps in the, you know, tapped into the api. You, you could scan app store reviews. And we were trying to find like certain

Leo Laporte (01:23:44):
That's

Reed Albergotti (01:23:44):
Interesting. Certain types of content, huh. And it works, you know, it works incredibly well. It's a powerful tool. And all of these large language models will be very powerful. As, as well I, when you're talking about it being a good reporter, it kind of makes me think how like a lot of, there's like the LinkedIn era sort of journalist and there's this strategy of just basically LinkedIn messaging. Like every single person who could possibly give you information like that. Actually

Leo Laporte (01:24:12):
You're very good at that.

Reed Albergotti (01:24:14):
Yeah. I mean, and then the people who respond, the one out of whatever, 20 people who respond like you just, you know, you then you start talking with them. Do you

Leo Laporte (01:24:22):
Identify yourself as an ai that's contacting people, or do you pretend you're human?

Reed Albergotti (01:24:28):
I mean, I think you'd have to pretend you're human, which would be unethical. So you can't really do it. But like, but like, I mean, you're not far from an AI if that's how you're doing your reporting. Right. So <laugh> Yeah. I

Leo Laporte (01:24:39):
Guess

Ben Parr (01:24:40):
There's already companies automating, using AI to automate like all their outbound email. I know it's happening Yeah. To success for some, there's all sorts of crazy stuff happening. Like, you know, superhuman, the a email app now has like AI feature, I have it. You click a button and it like will write your rate, turn your random thoughts free. Free

Leo Laporte (01:24:59):
Into a pretty Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Ben Parr (01:25:00):
Yeah. Into a decent email. Yeah. So it's like, ha like you have to just expect that what a quarter of the emails you write are at least 50%, quarter percent some percentage written by ai. A whole different topic of once, like most everything is just written by AI, is talking to other ais, whole different

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
World. I'm sure it's happening. Yeah. I was, you know, when I got this demonstration of, you know, our conversation being transcribed and then noted, I thought this would be a great thing to do with all our podcasts. We don't have the manpower to do, nobody would lose a job cuz we don't have the manpower to have somebody take really thorough show notes and publish 'em. But if an, an AI could do that quickly and easily and basically for free, that would be a huge benefit to listeners. It made me think,

Seth Weintraub (01:25:47):
But do you publish transcripts of the whole

Leo Laporte (01:25:49):
Thing? We do. We do.

Seth Weintraub (01:25:51):
Yeah. I mean you could

Leo Laporte (01:25:52):
Just scan those just, just then, then Yeah, you scan those and then, and then summarize or, or you know, make action items or whatever. Here's a but I think Go ahead.

Seth Weintraub (01:26:00):
I think, I think one thing that like it's, it's kind of scary is like what does an a world look like, you know, publishing world look like when every single publisher has access to a, a, you know, fairly good ai. So we could publish 750 articles on, you know, the new iPhone in a second. And, you know, all of our competitors could do that. And 500 blogs and publications that we don't even know about could do the same thing. So then all of a sudden you have a glut of content that all kind of looks and acts, you know, very generic and very similar. Theoretically that's not gonna be good for anyone. Like who, who's gonna want that. Like Google certainly doesn't want that. Like Google would become useless at that point cuz anybody who's doing original reporting is gonna be buried under 700 different AI doing, you know, like large language model reporting. So I think the human piece is gonna be more and more important as, you know, that's the sea nets of the world go in and just, you know, lay off their writers and, and build up in ai. Mm.

Reed Albergotti (01:27:15):
I think, I think that you're, what you're saying is true. It's true, but I think to me, the natural conclusion there is like, people are just gonna crave places like the information, right, that have, you know, it's a paywall, but it's differentiated content that you know, is gonna be high quality. You know, I I worked at the information for four years, so full disclosure, but and I think it's great, but I, you know, isn't that what's gonna happen? Like, like I think you're right, Google's, you know, if, if the Internet's just flooded with this stuff, like Google's gonna be in trouble, but it kind of, it's kind of been moving in that direction anyway and like for sure AI is just gonna like, finish the job. <Laugh>,

Seth Weintraub (01:27:53):
I guess. Yeah. I mean, in this scenario the Google results have been bad and getting worse and, you know, there's a a hundred very low quality, you know, sites on top of some better ones. So, you know, guess that's the direction it's going. But I don't think that's, I don't think that's a good ending. Like, well, I don't, I don't like that world. We're,

Ben Parr (01:28:14):
I mean, look, we're ending at a world of lots of behavior change right now. There's a lot of articles about how Gen Z their first instinct is not to go and search on Google. It's to go on TikTok and search and like, you know, that's gonna be made by a person for the most part, although that might not be true in a couple years. But you can go and like find travel tips on all sorts of things, and that's like how they find their information. Now you have a chat g PT and all sorts of things. And then you now have a generation where, and I wrote about this on ben par.com, how the new generation is solving their education problems. Like try to solve a complex, like how do I solve this math problem? Instead of going and asking a student or Googling, they just ask chat cpt.

(01:28:56):
And it's really good at that sort of thing, giving you an explanation of the step-by-step of what you should be. And so just dramatic behavior change happens. And I think the reality is that long term we are probably entering an era where the Google search will be on a very, very slow decline. And this is an existential crisis for Google. That's why they rallied so much. That's why they're investing in Bard. And it's not gonna happen overnight, but it's, yeah, the behavior change. I'm already changing my behavior. I just, Google results are less useful for me than they used to be. And results from ais and results from TikTok and other places are much more useful to me. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:37):
I wanna take a little break. When we come back, Reid has a story about something, not generative ai, but causal ai. We'll find out what the heck that is in just a little bit as we continue what a great panel, especially for, for ai. Ben Parr is here. His his column@benpar.com is the AI analyst and he's writing now for the information and also a founder and been in the AI space for some time. Reid Alti is here. He is now with SEMA four.com technology editor there. Great newsletter. Must subscribe. And it's free, right, Reid? They did. They charge for new, it's free. It's free. Yeah.

Reed Albergotti (01:30:14):
Thank you for mentioning that. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:30:15):
It's free.

Reed Albergotti (01:30:17):
Yeah, we should, can I plug seven for, we broke that story about Elon threatening to sue.

Leo Laporte (01:30:22):
Yes. You get credit for that. That's right. So I had the PDF, but I shouldn't over there. Yeah,

Reed Albergotti (01:30:27):
Yeah. Max Danny. He did. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Great scoop.

Leo Laporte (01:30:31):
Huge. Yeah. And how did he do that? Was that shoe leather? Did he go down to the courthouse and, and talk to chat up the clerk or what?

Reed Albergotti (01:30:39):
No, he asked Chachi pt and it told him that Elon, his planning to,

Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
Well, you know, shoe leather salesman are gonna be the letter and everything. Trouble if this keeps up, I gotta tell you right now. Does it at least he, mark

Ben Parr (01:30:52):
Zuckerberg made fun of me. What should I do? Chad, g p t

Leo Laporte (01:30:56):
<Laugh>. I, I hope at least he wears a fedora hat with press in the in the side there.

Reed Albergotti (01:31:01):
Yeah, exactly. I can't reveal Max Tanny's sources secret,

Leo Laporte (01:31:04):
Secret and good old fashioned journalism and nothing but nine to five, Google, nine to five Mac, and of course electric. Seth Wine Tribe is founder. He's the guy who discovered Mark Urman. Put that on your business card. He was like 12 probably when you discovered it. Something like that. Yeah. High school kid. Our show today brought to you by Hello Fresh. Ooh, I love it when my hello Fresh box comes take a bite outta summer with Hello Fresh from chef crafted seasonal recipes to this brand new and I love it. Fresh and fit Summer menu. Hello Fresh brings flavor right to your door. Pre-Portioned ingredients that cuts down on food waste. You always have exactly what you need to make the recipes. Beautiful recipe cards to with step-by-step instructions. So cooking is a breeze, not a chore. Look at that creamy lemon herb pork chops.

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Reed Albergotti (01:34:49):
Yeah, I mean it was really interesting. I was in, I was in London and meeting with a bunch of AI companies there, which is, you know, if you don't know, London's like a big, a big hotspot for ai. It's where DeepMind now Google DeepMind started and I met with this sort of interesting company that I, you know, I think few people have heard of called Al Lens. Maybe you've heard of it then. But it was a really interesting conversation about what they're doing, which is like very different from these large language models. They're, they're trying to tell, you know, companies you know, predict like predictive analytics, but then like give them suggestions with these sort of frontier kind of cutting edge AI algorithms that determine cause and effect relationships. And that's something that large language models cannot do right now.

(01:35:43):
Right. And that's, you know, the stuff we were talking about earlier. You know, it gets all these things wrong and that's because really what it's doing is just sort of trying to predict what the next word should be, right? Based on billions of other words that it's scraped from the internet, right? It's, it's kind of a, you know, in that sense it's not very intelligent. And, and if you this idea, and it's sort of a science fiction kind of idea at this point, but like, if you could somehow combine causal AI where like, you know, algorithms understand, can sort of, you know, grasp and grasp is the wrong term, right? Cuz these are not brains. These are just math problems, but, you know, math problems that can determine cause and effect relationships. You combine that with large language models, you get something that is, is much more powerful than, than anything we have today. So give

Leo Laporte (01:36:38):
Me an example of, of how that would be used.

Reed Albergotti (01:36:42):
Well, I mean, right, like basically, I mean, what they're doing right now is actually the founder of Colan had this great, this great example, it was like an analogy, but her made up example. But like, you know, if you go to like you know, Bondi Beach in Sydney and you look at ice cream sales and shark attacks, those two statistics are correlated, right? Like when ice cream sales go up, shark attacks go up. Obviously they have nothing to do with one another, but, you know, there are more people in the water in the summer when it's hot and they're buying ice cream. So they get, you know, but if you run sort of traditional predictive analytics, it might not figure out that, that that correlation is completely unrelated with, you know, causal ai. You can sort of say, okay, you know, when should I increase, you know, you know, buy more ice cream for the ice cream truck and it will, it will understand you know, that it has nothing to do with shark attacks, right? And it will, and that, and that therefore will apply like anywhere not just in Sydney, right? We, we often mean where they're even,

Leo Laporte (01:37:52):
We often make that mistake. Yeah, I mean I, we often have to say, you know, correlation does not equal causation, right? But when it comes to, I mean, people make that mistake all the time when it comes to diet and all sorts of things. They, they go, oh, there's a correlation there. It must be the cause. So you're saying this AI is smart enough to know the difference,

Reed Albergotti (01:38:11):
Right? So they had a customer, I thought this was an interesting anecdote. They, they had one customer where they, they were trying to figure out why they, there was all this churn, like why customers were, were leaving right after they, their usage went up. It was a SaaS company. So, so they, they'd start using the product more and then they would leave, Ooh,

Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
That's

Reed Albergotti (01:38:33):
Not good. And they were like, well, how do we, like, how do we sort of solve this problem? Like we, we can predict when people are leaving, but we don't really understand why. We don't really know what to do about it. And it turned out that they were they ran these numbers and it turned out that they were giving people like free their, their own algorithms, the company's existing algorithms were predicting people would churn and then they would automatically get these like free credit offers. Oh, they

Leo Laporte (01:39:00):
Were causing the churn.

Reed Albergotti (01:39:02):
So they were sort of, yeah. Or they were predicting the churn, but then they, they had this number, it turned out to be completely unrelated. Like it had nothing to do with Oh, interesting. What they were, you know, trying to solve. And the, and the, the, the solution which, you know, came out in these algorithms was that actually, you know, maybe they should offer some other, you know, some other solution that the free credits were not working. Like Yeah. You know, give them a phone call. And there was another one with a bank where they were trying to figure out, it was kind of the same thing, like, how do we not lose customers? And it turned out that some of the customers that they were call, they would like call these people and try to like, touch base with customers. And turned out that that actually was causing people to leave

Leo Laporte (01:39:46):
<Laugh>. I was chasing them. There's

Reed Albergotti (01:39:47):
Like this, there's like certain, there's a certain customer that, like if you call them, they will actually, like, they'll think about it and they'll, they'll leave. But if you just do nothing, yeah. And they'll just, they won't, yeah. They'll forget it. Or they, I don't know, for whatever reason,

Leo Laporte (01:40:01):
Don't remind them they're paying for the service by calling them, right?

Reed Albergotti (01:40:05):
So they saved this bank like 250. So the, I mean, those are some examples, but I think that that, what's fascinating about it is that's this idea that like, I mean, understanding cause and effect is like a, it's a, an essential part of intelligence, right? And if we do wanna get, I don't think that we're gonna get to AGI as we sort of been joking about on this show. Like, I don't think, I don't think we're getting there, but if we do wanna make these tools much more powerful and, and much more, you know, I guess trustworthy, useful there are gonna have to be breakthroughs. And I don't think it's just gonna be, you know, large language models getting bigger and bigger. I think it's gonna be other areas of, you know, artificial intelligence where there are breakthroughs and those things sort

Ben Parr (01:40:52):
Of combining.

Leo Laporte (01:40:54):
I, I agree. I think that's the risk of the success of chat G p t in large language models is that people will then focus on these instead of trying to be think of more appropriate and better use or more useful ways to use AI than than the ones that everybody's all excited about. You know? There is a big risk I think in that or worrying so much about, you know, ex existential hazards to humans that you miss the fact that they, I love this. They, they called, you have this in your interview, they called the the customers who were just kind of happily paying for something, sleeping dogs. And you don't wanna wake the sleeping dogs up with a call saying, how do you like our service? Cuz well, better to let sleeping dogs lie. Right?

(01:41:42):
You know, <laugh>, I think that's actually very clever, but it's that, that's, that's something, I mean, I really believe in the use of AI for analysis of existing data sets. You don't get the hallucinations, Ben, you must, I presume you're gonna be looking at this and I, I hope we look at it. We're, we're gonna do an AI show in the club with Jason and Jeff Jarvis. I hope you'll be looking at this too though. These other kind of non l l m uses of ai. I think some of them are even more interesting, but they're more narrow so they don't have the broad general appeal.

Ben Parr (01:42:13):
Generative AI is just one subset, right? Like one approach. And large language models are just one approach of using deep learning and machine learning, which is like, like I I, I'd have to like put up like the graph cuz you have like, AI is this weird umbrella term for all these different terms for machine learning, neural networks, all sorts of things. And then you have like, you know, machine learning neural networks within it, deep learning within it. And one piece of that is the generative ai slash lar and large language models is a subset of that. And they're very good at a very specific thing. And like I could go into the explanation of embeddings cuz I just find it fascinating. But at the end of the day, it's just a predictive technology to predict the next most likely word. It does it really well.

(01:42:58):
But that is not enough of an approach to approximate a human. For example, the h e i discussion, you have to have other types of learning. Causal AI is one example of that. And as you know, generative AI has lots of weaknesses. It's not very good at doing math. It was not made for that, for example. And so it can guess a number, but it's not doing actual computation. But there's other AI systems that actually can and causal ai can actually like find cause relationship in a way that generative AI can't. So at some point, like if you think of a human as just a bunch of ai, AI is like a bunch of the eyes and ais put together, you know, there's like 170 of them or some ridiculous number inside of our brains. And generative, like the ability to predict the next most likely word is probably one 170th of Cuban cap capacity and potential. So we need more of those. It's that cause was very interesting in particular. But I think we'll see more fields of AI start to pop up as we hit the limits of what you can do with the large language model.

Leo Laporte (01:44:08):
I put this in the show notes and it's really too much to ask anybody to read. And oh, it's certainly far too much for me to comment on on the show, but I encourage our listeners to read it. It's from an engineer at DeepMind in in London, Jen Dong Wang. He posted last month why transformative AI is really, really hard to achieve. And he also, he's saying the same thing in a way. He's saying people are very optimistic that that AI is a kind of a, a different category of innovation. That it, that it's it's, it's gonna transform things in a way that other great inventions didn't. And he cautions people that probably AI will be transformative in the same way say the internet was, or the industrial revolution. But he said transforming transformative AI is very difficult and he brings up three arguments why one is that the transformational potential of AI is constrained by its hardest problems.

(01:45:11):
He quotes a well known aphorism from it's called AVX Paradox. Stephen Pinker wrote about it in 1994. The main lessons of 35 years of AI research is the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. And I think we've, we are already seeing that with, with self-driving vehicles and handwriting recognition, face recognition. He also says, despite rapid progress in some AI subfields, major technical hurdles remain. And finally, and this is I thought the most interesting, even if technical AI progress continues social and economic hurdles, not technical hurdles, but social and economic hurdles may limit its impact. And he uses as an example how the industrial revolution has, you know, technology has reduced the price of a huge number of goods and services, new cars, household furnishings, clothing, cell phones, computer software, toys and TVs. But ha hasn't had an overall impact on inflation because non non-technology supported products like hospital services, college tuition, medical care, food and beverages housing have gone up commensurately.

(01:46:32):
So there's this kind of per perverse cycle that happens that yeah, your, your AI's bringing down the cost of these things, but it's bringing up because it's not solving har other problems, it's bringing up the costs of those things. So really good article, I don't, we don't to debate it, but I thought I'd put it in people's tray intre inbox to look at. I thought it was quite good. And given its author as a deep mind engineer is obviously deeply involved in this very provocative, he has a good picture too of King Charles operating the London tube and he points out that train drivers are paid close to twice the national median in, in London, even though the technology to replace them wholly has existed for decades. <Laugh>, even King Charles can drive one of these <laugh>. But you know, it could easily be automated, but it has it for a variety of social reasons and other reasons. So yeah, you know, very,

Reed Albergotti (01:47:34):
It's, automation is the right word, right? Yeah. I mean AI is a, about, to your, to Ben's point earlier, I think AI is a really bad <laugh>. It's terrible term.

Leo Laporte (01:47:42):
It's

Reed Albergotti (01:47:43):
Terrible.

Leo Laporte (01:47:43):
Yes.

Reed Albergotti (01:47:43):
Even though I use it every day in my newsletter, it's just, it's just like, it's not intelligence, it's automation and Right. Like I think Ben, the one thing I disagreed with, with what you said was like that the brain is like, you know, all these different algorithms put together. Cuz I just, I don't think we have any idea how the human brain works and I th and, and yet all these AI technologies so called or automation technologies are like named after the human brain, like neural nets. And you read it all the time that like neural nets are like, it's, it's a architecture based on how the human brain works. And it's like, it's really not. I mean, it has nothing to do with that.

Leo Laporte (01:48:23):
We don't really know how the human brain works that's part of

Reed Albergotti (01:48:25):
The problem. Right. And I just, I just think it's actually kind of, it would be helpful if we could use different vocabulary for this, because I think people would like a, like they would freak out less, and they would, it would be like, I agree. Look at this in a much more sort of practical way, which is like, here are these new tools that people are creating just like they have forever. We, we

Leo Laporte (01:48:47):
Anthropomorphize it and by calling it intelligence or saying it's thinking or saying it's a he or it's hallucinating, all implies some sort of hu human mechanism that isn't really present. I've been

Reed Albergotti (01:49:00):
Saying that for a long and we all do it. I do it. Yeah. I mean, I do it all every day, but it's just,

Leo Laporte (01:49:05):
Kevin Roos did it when he said,

Reed Albergotti (01:49:06):
Che's, like, we need language. He

Leo Laporte (01:49:07):
Said chat GT had fallen in love with him in the New York Times. <Laugh>.

Reed Albergotti (01:49:11):
Right? I mean, how ridiculous is that? I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:49:15):
There's,

Ben Parr (01:49:16):
Look, there's, there's an entire community and like you can, I can tell you the subreddits that are just hoping and praying that OpenAI secretly has like the super intelligence agi. Oh. And they're going back and forth with it, and they're just so scared to release it to the public. And they're just trying to prepare us for it.

Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
And also, I don't think that there's UFO bodies in Roswell. We know that for a fact. So, you know, it's the same. Perfect. That's a subreddit right next door. I think that that subreddit,

Reed Albergotti (01:49:46):
I mean, it's just, again, back to being human, right? Like we're just, you know, humans are, you know, we go a little crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:49:53):
I've had this conversation, I've tried to talk to all the smart people I know, and I'll know a lot of smart people, and that's one of the questions that I have. And there were, there really are two answers to this. I mean, you know, people like Ray Kurzweil who say the singularity is near, who really does believe that an artificial general intelligence will be, he defines a singularity as indistinguishable from humans, so that we won't really know if it's a human. It's not merely the touring test, but they will literally be, you know, human, so human-like that. We won't know the difference. I said, but they're not human. Right? He said, but it doesn't matter if you can't tell the difference. And of course the real threat there is once they become that adept, then they can design themselves and their acceleration and advancement of a and I think this is what this whole, you know, threat to humanity is, becomes so fast that we don't, you know, just they exceed us by, by such a great margin so quickly that we're just little worms to them.

(01:50:56):
I think there's a, and, and this is really where it comes down to. I'm curious what you all think. I think there is a gap, and I'm, I'm not a religious person and I'm not talking about the soul, but I think there's a gap between the most that you can do with a kind of a Von Neuman machine with a, a, a mechanized intelligence. There's a gap between that and what we do as humans. Now, some, some of my friends, Steve Gibson, our security guy, says, no, no, no. Consciousness is an emergent property. You just have to get the intelligent machines fast enough, give 'em enough ram, and they will be conscious, they'll be indistinguishable. We are just machines. In other words, I am not religious, but I don't, I don't feel like that's true. Where do you, what, what do you think of that? I mean let me ask you, Seth. I

Reed Albergotti (01:51:46):
Don't think it's

Leo Laporte (01:51:47):
True. You don't think it's true? Reid says No.

Seth Weintraub (01:51:51):
I mean, I think that's the big question, right? We don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:51:53):
We don't, we don't know.

Seth Weintraub (01:51:54):
Like what's going on in her head is just

Leo Laporte (01:51:56):
Like a are we machines or is there something special that we do?

Ben Parr (01:52:00):
This is just down to semantics and definitions because there is some machinery, like things that's making me move my arms back and forth.

Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
That's a chemical reaction. Yeah, yeah.

Ben Parr (01:52:10):
Right. but like, what point is like which, and like how,

Leo Laporte (01:52:14):
Where's the crossover? Validating it? Yeah.

Ben Parr (01:52:16):
What, yeah, what are you defining?

Leo Laporte (01:52:17):
Consciousness. It's now, it's, yes. Now I will point out that, and this is from Scientific America. A 25 year old bet about consciousness has finally been settled. A brain scientist and a philosopher 25 years ago made a bet. The the, the brain sci, this was at an event called Toward a Scientific Basis for Consciousness. Christophe KK was the neuroscientist. David Chalmers was the philosopher. The neuroscientist believed you know, that it's, that consciousness was an emergent property, and that we would cra he said, we scientists would crack consciousness by discovering its neural underpinnings or correlates by now. The philosopher said neither 40 hertz oscillations or any other strictly physical process could account for conscious sensations. And that consciousness was, was not something we would solve. He won. Obviously, we don't know what, here we are 25 years later, we are no closer to understanding consciousness than we were 25 years ago in 1994. So, so actually caulk paid, paid that wager <laugh>,

Reed Albergotti (01:53:37):
I don't know what to Mor X You mentioned Mor X paradox. Yeah. In the article. I mean, I think Ovex Paradox is really, I've long thought that it everyth, it always turns out to kind of like fit that. And maybe, maybe, maybe we overthink what he really meant by it, but but he was also like, I mean, he was a brilliant thinker and, but he also sort of believed that we were gonna have consciousness like pretty soon, like computer computers have become conscious like fairly, fairly soon, I think. And, and obviously was totally wrong. And I, which I think is like a reminder that, I mean, there are people who are absolutely brilliant, who are, who are pioneers in this technology, who can also believe in an almost like supernatural sort of belief, supernatural philosophy, I guess. That like this will eventually become human. And, and, well,

Leo Laporte (01:54:29):
That's gives me pause.

Reed Albergotti (01:54:30):
Like,

Leo Laporte (01:54:31):
Because the people who signed that letter saying AI was an existential threat to humanity were some of the top, I mean, it wasn't just Sam Alman, it was Jeffrey Hinton. It was some of the top people in the field. People I respect Yeah. Who presumably know a lot more about AI than I ever will. And they're worried, but I, I don't understand

Reed Albergotti (01:54:51):
Why, why they've been worried for a long time. Like Yeah. Like even previous generations, right? It's something that happens.

Leo Laporte (01:54:56):
I think they read too much sci-fi personally. I think it's science fiction, probably not.

Reed Albergotti (01:55:02):
I think it's also, it's like the language we use to describe it, right? If you, if the language you're using to describe your field is like neural nets and Right. You know, all this brain related,

Leo Laporte (01:55:12):
They painted themselves that corner. Yeah.

Reed Albergotti (01:55:14):
Yeah. I think you start to, you start to believe that you're creating consciousness, and that's like a, it's a very powerful thing and it's very emotional. And I think, but like, if you look at the way this technology actually works, it's like, it's so clearly not it's

Leo Laporte (01:55:30):
Mechanistic,

Reed Albergotti (01:55:31):
You know, headed in that. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:55:33):
It's not consciousness. You wouldn't, you know, you look at a self, you look at a cruise, it's not confused by the cone on, its on its hood. Like ex it's not an existential crisis. Why am I here? What am I doing? I can't drive. It's just the, why

Reed Albergotti (01:55:51):
Can't I fly the no, if you put, if you put Chachi PT in charge of like, really important stuff, like, you know, right.

Leo Laporte (01:56:00):
Don't

Reed Albergotti (01:56:00):
National

Leo Laporte (01:56:00):
Infrastructure. Well, don't give it lasers and don't give it nuclear weapons. Not because it's gonna decide, oh, we don't need these worms anymore, but because mistakes happen

Reed Albergotti (01:56:10):
<Laugh>. Right? Like, really bad stuff would happen if you did that. But I don't think anybody is saying that you should. Right. You know, I think it's kind of a, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:56:19):
Nobody's proposing that kinda a meet up problem. And if they are, well, don't, they're in, there's a there. Yeah. Right. Don't there in Jen Dong Wang's article, he, he, he has a picture of a very famous, well, it was an art project in 19, I think 71, where he took an autonomous vehicle and put it in a, in a circle with dotted lines. In other words, a, you know, a do not pass zone all the way around it <laugh>. And the, this is equivalent to putting an orange cone on the on the hood of a cruise. And the, you know, the autonomous vehicle said, I can't cross those lines. The easy stuff is hard, but the hard stuff is easy. The easy stuff. Hard stuff is easy, but the easy stuff is hard. A I mean, a three year old can recognize it's mom, right?

Reed Albergotti (01:57:10):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:10):
All right, let's take a little break. That was very heavy and philosophical. We're gonna stop that. Stop that right now when we come back. Actual tech news. But first, a word from our sponsor. They sponsor the studio. You've seen the signage, ACI learning IT PRO is now a part of ACI learning, and you know, IT pro they provided our listeners with engaging and entertaining IT training for more than 10 years. We've been with them since every step of the way. Now they're part of ACI learning, which means they have really elevated their capabilities, bringing you better and more highly entertaining bingeable short form content, more than 7,000 hours to help you become better at it. Whether you are an individual looking to get into the business or a business with an IT department, you want to get better. Maybe you're an s p and you have a bunch of engineers who need to learn this stuff.

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(02:00:45):
Phil Libin, who's been on our show many times, was the c e O. He told me at one point that more than half of their signups came from me. People I recommended use Evernote, loved Evernote. They've gone through a lot of troubles and eventually were bought by an Italian company called Bending Spoons. They have fired 129 employees now, and it looks like, I don't know if it's the end of the line, but the, the Milan based bending spoons has shut down their us operations. Kind of sad, kind of the end of the line, I think. I mean, I've said this before forever. No, but maybe this is the real, the real deal. End of the line. Did you use Evernet, Ben? Hey,

Ben Parr (02:01:34):
All the time. Yeah. I'm like, look, Phil's, Phil's a friend too. Phil was one of the very first investors in Octane back of the way in the day. This is of course, after he left Evernote, but I switched over. I put my stuff into Apple Notes, and I put my stuff over into Notion a little while, notion ago, because notion's fantastic. The, the, the reg's been on the wall for Evernote for a while, unfortunately. And like it is sad because is, well, that's a great product and it could have very well like, come out with notion like features and other things. But you know, once you didn't have someone like Philip the helm, you didn't have founders, you had like, all those kinds of things. Like, it just felt like nothing ever changed and no one really wanted to change things. And eventually you can't win if you do that.

Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
Ironically, one of the nails in the coffin was they moved to subscription some years ago. Nowadays, I mean, notions a subscription product. Everything's a subscription, including Microsoft Office. Had they done it, you know, recently, it might have not been in such a negative, but I think it really hurt them back when they did it. They were the, you know, early on the subscription train. And I think it's true that there are so many other choices. I like notion, I like Rome, I like obsidian. I've been using a free open source product called Logs Seek now for a while. L O G S E Q. It's fantastic and it's free. There's so many good choices out there, and it's come along with this idea of the, of the personal knowledge management system, P K M S and a lot of people's students.

(02:03:15):
It started with, you know, college kids, but a lot of people now are starting to adopt these systems like Zeel Castin, which ties your thoughts together in such a way that you can have, you know, you can have, take notes on what you're learning and then create new ideas based on the synergy of all these notes. It's a really interesting model these days. And I think Evernote, which really was the first, I mean, OneNote preceded it, but Evernote was so much better. It's kind of sad, I hope. I don't know if it's the end of the line, but it doesn't feel good. When you lay off 129 people, that's usually not a good sign.

Ben Parr (02:03:52):
I hope they all land on their feet. That's, that's what I hope.

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
Techcrunch says they're getting good severance, you know, they're, they're not, they're not being dumped out. And actually, it's not TechCrunch, it's the San Francisco Chronicle, I guess they're all in San Francisco. The company will provide 16 weeks of salary, prorated performance benefit, up to a year of health insurance and visa support to affected employees. That sounds like

Ben Parr (02:04:20):
An Italian company.

Leo Laporte (02:04:21):
It does. They're probably required to, aren't they by law, right? Yeah. they say our plans forever, not are as ambitious as ever. Going forward. A growing dedicated team based in Europe will continue with some ownership of the Evernote product. Now he's turning into a vampire, I'm sorry, <laugh>. That wasn't my intent. You transported me to Lake, to Lake Como, you know? Yeah. Lago de Gomo. See, banding spoons had a hundred million dollars. And now I'm Anne Roanna Danana. I don't know. It's all over the place. They also got, they had a hundred, you say pivot to AI in Italian. That's p that's to ai. A here in the annals of court judgements. Last week was all about the Supreme Court. This is about a somewhat smaller court King's Bench for Saskatchewan, Canada. A Canadian farmer was sued for a breach of contract.

(02:05:25):
So the story is, it's all about flax. Flax, you know, flax, F L A X. It's like a, it's like a wheat thing. <Laugh> grain purchasers from a company called Southwest Terminal, we'll call 'em. S w t wanted to buy flax for $17, a bushel for delivery in October and November or December. There's a, a futures contract, right? After phone calls with Bob and Chris, actor, s w t drafted a contract for Chris to sell 86 metric tons of flax for $17 a bushel and deliver the flax. In November they had a real printed contract, signed an ink. This is where they might have gone wrong. They sent, they took a picture of it with their camera phone and took a picture of the contract, sent him the photo with a message, please confirm flax contract, to which the farmer responded with the thumbs up emoji.

(02:06:38):
However, by November of 2021, the price of flax went from $17 to $41. A bushel farmer decided, no thumbs down, and he, he did not deliver. So, s w t went to court and said, well, wait a minute. He sent us the thumbs up, and the de dispute was, does the thumbs up emoji bind you to a contract? The farmer said, no, no, no. It just means I got it. I got the contract and I'll let you know, I'll follow up. No. The court said, no, no, no, <laugh>. That is a, that is a verbal contract. It's not. It's a thumbs up emoji contract. It's binding. The judge wrote, I'm satisfied on the balance of probabilities that Kris okayed or approved the contract just as he had done before, except this time. He used a, and this is in the actual judgment, the thumbs up emoji <laugh>, in my opinion, when considering all the circumstances that meant approval of the flax contract, not simply that he received it and was gonna think about it, a reasonable bystander, knowing all of the backward come to the objective, understanding that they had received, reached consensus, a meaning of the minds, the judge ruled in favor of S w T.

(02:08:00):
Yes, you owe him $82,000 for that flax contract you didn't deliver on. So just be aware when you use the thumbs up, that is legally binding,

Ben Parr (02:08:10):
Emojis are language. Everyone, they are just the same as any other word. They

Leo Laporte (02:08:14):
Are.

Ben Parr (02:08:15):
The judge got this one, right?

Leo Laporte (02:08:17):
You think so? I think so.

Ben Parr (02:08:19):
Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:22):
<Laugh>,

Reed Albergotti (02:08:24):
I agree.

Leo Laporte (02:08:25):
Okay, so we all agree we're the court of appeals here, and it is now I guess Reid, you agree?

Reed Albergotti (02:08:34):
Yeah, totally

Leo Laporte (02:08:35):
Agree, Seth. You agree?

Seth Weintraub (02:08:37):
All right, I have a little bit of a problem.

Leo Laporte (02:08:39):
<Laugh>. Oh, no, A

Seth Weintraub (02:08:41):
Dis What if somebody, like, there's a lot of stuff, like what if you know you're inebriated? Or what if your kid's got your phone? You know?

Leo Laporte (02:08:49):
Oh yeah. Okay. Well, he didn't, he didn't assert that the kids got the phone.

Ben Parr (02:08:54):
Because you can, if you can send afterwards, like, Hey, kid took the phone or something, right? That does change a thing, but under, like, it's the same, it's like under reasonable circumstances agree with past

Seth Weintraub (02:09:05):
History. Yeah, I agree. I agree. But like, I don't want this to be a precedent because I've sent things that I don't want, like necessarily want to be. I mean, I guess if it's an 80 million contract, I'm probably not gonna be dealing with emojis. So maybe I don't have to.

Leo Laporte (02:09:23):
And frankly,

Seth Weintraub (02:09:24):
Think about that.

Leo Laporte (02:09:24):
I feel for the farmer, cuz he sold it at 17 a bushel and it went to 41, I might be saying. Yeah, it's not a contract. That's just a thumbs up emoji too.

Reed Albergotti (02:09:34):
It was worth a shot. It

Leo Laporte (02:09:35):
Was worth a shot. Yes. Worth

Seth Weintraub (02:09:37):
A shot.

Ben Parr (02:09:38):
If anyone out there has approved a contract using an emoji, please tell us on threads, because why not <laugh>?

Reed Albergotti (02:09:46):
I mean, the question is, what does this mean for DocuSign?

Leo Laporte (02:09:49):
Oh, <laugh>. You know, that's a good point. That's a good point. I mean, actually,

Seth Weintraub (02:09:54):
I, I think Elon accepted the Twitter offer with a thumbs up. Right? And that's why Yeah, right? Yeah. That's why it went through. Is that

Leo Laporte (02:10:01):
True? Or you make, you're joking.

Seth Weintraub (02:10:04):
I'm Polish. I could

Leo Laporte (02:10:05):
See, I could see him doing that. No.

Ben Parr (02:10:06):
Elon only sends rocket emojis.

Seth Weintraub (02:10:09):
<Laugh> and poop

Leo Laporte (02:10:10):
Emojis and poop emojis if poop emoji for the press department

Reed Albergotti (02:10:15):
And had it been a thumbs up, he still would've had to buy Twitter <laugh>.

Seth Weintraub (02:10:19):
Yep.

Reed Albergotti (02:10:19):
We now know

Leo Laporte (02:10:23):
Let that sink in. You wrote a li or no, you actually put this in the show notes. Ben, the Vegas sphere. Are you all excited about the msg, the world's largest freestanding sphere structure in Las Vegas?

Ben Parr (02:10:40):
Yeah. The, for those who haven't seen it go just like Google Vegas sphere. The thing is nuts. I saw it. I was in Vegas two weeks ago before they turned it on, just before that. Already that thing looked impressive, but

Leo Laporte (02:10:52):
Oh, I've been driving by it in Vegas for with four years now. Right? They've been building it forever. Was stalled a little bit in Covid, ended up costing more than the Raiders stadium <laugh>, $2 billion. James Dolan and the MSG group paying for it. It's gonna be an 18,000 seat concert venue with tens of thousands of speakers. It's really interesting. And on the outside a 508,000 square foot l e d screen, which can turn into the moon, the sun, the planet earth. There was, its hello world message, which was posted last week, and then on the 4th of July they had fireworks on it. And real fireworks behind it, which is kind of, kind of cool. I think this will be worth seeing. I, I tried to buy tickets. U2 is the first concert there, there's gonna be an event there before then, but U2 will be the first concert in October. And un I maybe, fortunately or unfortunately my credit card wouldn't let me. So <laugh>, I won't do. They were a little bit pricey, shall I say?

Ben Parr (02:11:55):
You, you, you could sell your left arm and you might be able to get one ticket that

Leo Laporte (02:12:01):
Way. It's a little bit expensive, but

Ben Parr (02:12:04):
The one, the one that

Reed Albergotti (02:12:05):
Got me it be, oh, go ahead.

Ben Parr (02:12:07):
No, you go.

Reed Albergotti (02:12:08):
I was just the one, I was gonna say, the one that got me the the picture was the basketball. Yes. And it was like, you could see the cars and then it looked like a gigantic basketball sort of hovering over Las Vegas.

Leo Laporte (02:12:20):
Amazing. You know, there are a lot of high rises around this sphere that will have this as their view. I don't know how happy they are about that. I

Ben Parr (02:12:28):
Guess people love seeing it. I've seen from TikTok, like, I don't know if you'd wanna see it every day from your apartment, but if you're on the strip, like that's a thing you'd want to see. Like, it just, they makes me think like how Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Saudi Arabia, right? Like right. Putting up the crazy stuff. And then America was just like, oh, you have a tower.

Leo Laporte (02:12:47):
Hold my beer. We have

Ben Parr (02:12:49):
A giant sphere. <Laugh>. So, I mean, look, Vegas, it's gonna drive people, it's gonna drive that tourism thing. Now you're gonna have all these sports teams there. Like, there's something crazy happening over in Vegas for sure. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:13:04):
Yeah. How long until it gets hacked? Oh, here's a, by the way, here is the here's the basketball I think on the horizon. Yeah. There you are. Driving down the strip, the giant giants. The scale is just crazy. It looks like a giant. I mean, it really looks real.

Ben Parr (02:13:22):
It's insane.

Leo Laporte (02:13:23):
<Laugh>.

Ben Parr (02:13:25):
But the technological work to make that work is just mind boggling too.

Leo Laporte (02:13:29):
It is, yeah. It's kind of amazing. It's

Reed Albergotti (02:13:32):
Leds, right? Is

Leo Laporte (02:13:32):
That the, it's LEDs made outta a hundred square, 160,000 square feet inside. That's about the size of three football fields. I mean, on the outside. So it's three football fields worth of programmable LEDs.

Reed Albergotti (02:13:47):
Yeah. How many iPhone screens is that? That's,

Leo Laporte (02:13:49):
Yeah, I dunno. Somebody do some math. Somebody do some math. Someone let

Reed Albergotti (02:13:52):
Us know. Please. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:13:54):
Look at this. How about this? A giant eyeball on the Vegas strip. I mean, it looks very real, doesn't it? It's, it's terrifying. <Laugh>, the Eye of Soran. They've been building it for years. Madison Square Garden. I don't know how they, how they make money on this, but they're planning to do another one in London. That's the real London eye. So we will, we will see now, if you plan to sue MSG anytime soon, you might wanna think twice. Cuz you wouldn't want the Dolans to stop you from, from getting into the, the Las Vegas sphere. Maybe that's my, my credit card wouldn't let me buy a ticket. Maybe it knew <laugh>. I don't know. I don't know. You play Pokemon, go get ready for Pokemon sleep.

(02:14:49):
The, the Niantic companies laid off a good number of employees. They've been struggling a little bit Pokemon Gold, though. Still a big success came out in 2016. I mean, it wasn't as big as threads, but it was pretty big a launch. It was a pretty big launch. And the whole idea of Pokemon Go was you had to walk around. Like, for reals, my wife has accumulated more than 11,000 kilometers searching for Pokemon walking around. And so their claim is this has been really good for people's health. And I think that's probably true. I've, I've walked, I don't know how much, but I've walked quite a bit, you know, more than I would normally looking for Pokemon. So now they've launched Pokemon Sleep or will launch this summer. Here's a video from Niantic. How do you play? Well, you go to Sleep <laugh>, you catch Pokemon by sleeping and having a quality night's sleep. I guess the same idea. They wanna do good things for their their, their users. There are some sleepy style Pokemons. There's a sleeping poke, Pikachu <laugh>. You have a sleep type decks like poke decks. Once players collect a certain Pokemon, they can feed it pokey biscuits to make it friendlier. There are three types of sleeping, Pokemons, dozing, snoozing, and slumbering.

(02:16:17):
You know, my wife. But it's

Reed Albergotti (02:16:18):
A competition, right?

Leo Laporte (02:16:20):
Yeah, of course it is. So who can sleep better?

Reed Albergotti (02:16:22):
Better? So do they, do they give you like a handicap? Like if you're a teenager, you shouldn't get the same number of

Leo Laporte (02:16:27):
Pokemons. Oh, they should. That's a good point. As

Reed Albergotti (02:16:29):
A,

Ben Parr (02:16:29):
A

Leo Laporte (02:16:30):
Parent or something. That's right. You mean? It's a simple sleep tracker. Users can monitor their sleep patterns and even listen to recordings of their sleep.

Ben Parr (02:16:42):
It's, it's a good way to do a sleep tracker, I guess, for kids because for yeah. I mean, look, the Aura Ring, which I have one is like a, like fantastic swim tracker went viral among a lot of adults. I

Leo Laporte (02:16:56):
See everybody wearing them now. Yeah, they were an early advertiser. We were, we interviewed them when they first came out and they advertised for many months. I still have mine. I have the Do you have the version three?

Ben Parr (02:17:09):
I, yeah, I have the latest version. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
It doesn't seem to be super accurate, is my only, I have so many sleep trackers. <Laugh>, my mattress tracks me my watch

Ben Parr (02:17:20):
Tracks more. Me see what Sleep track my Google hub. You

Leo Laporte (02:17:21):
Are, they're all different. They all have different results. I have that Google hub that tracks your sleep records, your snoring. I, you know, but

Ben Parr (02:17:30):
This is the only one where you can sleep 'em all. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:17:32):
Gotta sleep, 'em all. <Laugh>.

Ben Parr (02:17:35):
That sounds wrong Outta contact.

Leo Laporte (02:17:37):
Gotta sleep 'em all.

Ben Parr (02:17:39):
Oh God. There's a show title for you.

Leo Laporte (02:17:41):
I think so. I think you gave us the show title. We'll wrap things up in just a bit, but <laugh> in just a moment. Stay right here before we finish things up, just to look at some of the things that happened this week on Twit.  We had a good week, if you like, this week in Space, A good reason to join Club Twit. We launched this week in space, if you will forgive the phrase in our club because the club, you know, members supported it and it, it garnered an audience. We were able to put it out in the public. That's kind of our model going forward is ad sales kind of dwindle.

(02:19:58):
We really rely on you, our audience to support our growth. And we need it because this month we we just broke even. We didn't make any money. And that's, that's a tough position to be in for any company. We could keep this up, but I don't wanna lose money. The Club Twit makes all the difference and it's just $7 a month, hardly anything. You get access to all the shows we do, including this one Ad Free Tracker free, right? So completely private. You also get access to the Wonderful Club Twit Discord, which is a place to hang with other club Twit members. It's a great, it's a great place to be. Lots of animated gifts conversations about all the topics, geeks like, and special events that our community manager Aunt Pruitt puts together. We just had Stacy's book club.

(02:20:47):
He just interviewed Hugh Howie, the author of Wool, the inspiration for the Apple TV Plus Silo series. We've got other events coming up in the, in the works. <Laugh>, the animated gifts are part of the fun. You also get shows that we don't put out in public shows. We're launching or trying like Hands on Macintosh with Micah Sergeant Hands on Windows. And coming soon our new AI show with Jeff Jarvis. Jeff Jason Howell. We're in development right now. That's because the club members support it. That, that, that seven bucks a month makes a huge difference to us. If you're not yet a member of Club Twit, I implore you. You know, if you can't afford it, don't worry. There's plenty of free stuff ad supported still. But the future I think is gonna be with The Club. So get on in there.

(02:21:36):
Go to twit tv slash club twit. We have monthly plans, annual plans, family plans, and corporate memberships as well. You can even give a gift of Club Twit, which is an awfully nice gift for the geek in your life. Twit tv slash club tot. And we thank you so much for your support to all the Club TWIT members. You're, you're keeping us on the air and we really appreciate it, Seth. It's so great to have you. Seth Weintraub is the founder, publisher, editorial director of the nine to five sites. And of course, electric, which I think is the best. It's, I it's my go-to. I'm a big EV fan. I just love reading about it. And congratulations thank you on the sponsorship of the of the formula son. I think that's a great thing that you did and I look forward to next year too. The Grand Prix you can read all about it in electric.com. Anything else you wanna plug, Seth, this is your chance. Well,

Seth Weintraub (02:22:33):
Electric.Co. Somebody else got the.com

Leo Laporte (02:22:35):
Oh damn that. Yeah. Co electric.co. Yes. That's okay. It reminds me of the electric company. Right, exactly. Yeah. anything else you wanna plug?

Seth Weintraub (02:22:45):
We, yeah, just all the, the whole network

Leo Laporte (02:22:47):
Is it's great stuff. Turning out. Good stuff. Yeah. You've done a great job. We're very grateful. Thank you. I know how I, as, as somebody in the contact business myself, I kind of know how hard it is now. And, and it really takes dedication and inspiration. I thank you for what you've done all these years. Thanks too. Tore Alani, it's great to see you again. And Semaphore is going so well subscribed to Reid's free technology newsletter. S e m A f o r.com. Did I mention it's free <laugh>? SEMA for is really good for, for now. Wait a minute.

Reed Albergotti (02:23:24):
Get on the ground floor.

Leo Laporte (02:23:25):
Is that the plan? Is it some point start to charge for these things or

Reed Albergotti (02:23:30):
No, I mean, I can't give away our long-term plans, but I was just trying to create urgency.

Leo Laporte (02:23:34):
Okay. That's it. That's the way to do it. So it's about semaphores great cuz it's, it's global, which is really important. I don't think we get enough international coverage in our our national news media covers politics, business technology, net zero Africa Security Media. I really like what the Bens are doing and I'm so glad they they snagged you cuz I think you're fantastic. Thank you for being here, Reid.

Reed Albergotti (02:23:59):
Me too. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thanks for

Leo Laporte (02:24:01):
Having me. Yeah, we love having you on. And Ben, old friend, great to see you. Congratulations on your engagement. When's the wedding?

Ben Parr (02:24:08):
The wedding is April next year.

Leo Laporte (02:24:11):
Okay. Okay. You and Deborah have to come by sometime. Say hello.

Ben Parr (02:24:17):
We, we might be up in your neck of the woods in a month or so. Oh good.

Leo Laporte (02:24:20):
Well, you know where to, you know where to call. You know who to call <laugh>. Go to ben par.com. Ghostbusters Ghostbusters to read his fabulous AI analyst newsletter. Do you charge for this? Yeah, you subscribe, right? No,

Ben Parr (02:24:37):
No. Also free. Thank you. Yes. Free as well. Come and then follow me on threads afterwards cuz that's apparently the thing this week.

Leo Laporte (02:24:46):
I really appreciate. I'll be honest, I really appreciate free newsletters because more and more as I go around, you know, part of my job is to go all over the net and look for news stories for our shows. And increasingly I am, I am, you know, pay walled out of a lot of great stuff and yeah, you're, you're good. You deserve my money, but I can't, what am I gonna, I eventually, I'm gonna have to put a like, make a budget like a hundred bucks a month. Subscribe to 20 newsletters or something. Cuz you know, I it's everybody's charging now. I'm not sure. That's a great thing. I like what we do. Have a have a patronage site, have a club, but then have free stuff too. Anyway, I'm glad you're doing it for free. I, you know, I the AI analyst@benpar.com. Anything else you want to promote?

Ben Parr (02:25:36):
I said threads already. That was probably say thread

Leo Laporte (02:25:40):
Threads, threads,

Ben Parr (02:25:41):
Threads, threads. Add Ben par on the threads. Let's go. And I, I need to like, be able to like, get some shiny threads. I'm trying to get to 10,000 followers, you know, I gotta do the whole game. It was funny when I first joined, I was just posting nonstop. And my, if you had told her friend that I were, I was Ben Paring was what she described it as. It was too

Leo Laporte (02:25:59):
Much Ben. It was too much <laugh>. No, now it's just, now it's just Right. Yeah. Can you, am I still on the yeah, you should be able to see my, can you see? Can you see there? Nope, nope, nope, nope. My phone. Can you show? There

Ben Parr (02:26:14):
It is. Here. There it is.

Leo Laporte (02:26:16):
There it is. There's Benny Little Benji, little Benji Par I post threads about AI, startups, tech media, and hot sauce. I, I missed that. It's great. I, I have to say because everybody I know is on threads now it's become this, it's become my what, like Twitter used to be for me. All my old Twitter buddies are on there, but I only have like a thousand followers. I really gotta work on it. I'm Twilio. I'm Twilio on the let me show you mine. That's me podcast You broadcast, you tick pundit. Oh, I'm up to 1650. Look at that. And there is Ben Parr you mentioned. Oh no, I reposted you. That's it. Let me know if there's a topic we should cover. Here's some pictures from the Computer History Museum. This is the book I wish I'd bought. How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.

(02:27:13):
Dang nabbit, I missed that one. It's, it's in the museum now. We thank all of you for joining us. We do this week in Tech every Sunday afternoon right after I ask the tech guys with Micah Sar and me 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 U T C. I mentioned that cuz you can watch us do it live. All of our shows, not all, but most of our shows, you know, we, we, we stream the production so you can watch it like it's a live TV show. We like it cuz we like the interactivity and the chat rooms and so forth. Live dot twit tv for live audio or video. If you are watching live IRC dot twit tv is open to all. That's our internet relay chat. And you can do that with a browser. Just put your point, your browser to irc dot twit tv.

(02:27:59):
Of course, club Twit members can be in the Discord at the same time after the fact on-demand versions of this show. And all the shows we do are available at twit tv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to it as well. And of course the best way to get it is to subscribe on your favorite podcast application. Just search for twit. You should find this, this, and all the other shows we do is subscribe to 'em and all that way you'll have it on your phone and you have something to listen to next time you're stuck on a long commute. Thanks for listening everybody. Thanks to our great guests, Ben Parr, Reid Al Albert Gotti Seth I almost called you Seth McFarlane. It's great to <laugh> Seth Weinraub. Great. The only other Seth I know. Great to have you. Thanks for joining us, everybody. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.