This Week in Tech Episode 951 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for 20 this week in tech. Oh, we have a good panel for you. Alex Wilhelm is here from tech crunch, larry maggot from connect safelyorg, and it's the return of a guy who hosted a show for us for years. We lost him to the dark side. He's back. From Intel. Ryan shroud is here. We're going to talk about, of course, the qualcom event and what's going on with CPUs, what Intel's plans are, what qualcom's trying to do. We'll also talk about cruise GM's self driving vehicles, which are now banned in California. Cruise says you know what. We're just going to quit the whole thing. And the new UK law that means you will have to identify yourself and your age before you use a website. The online safety bill is now law. All that more coming up. Very fun to stay here.

0:00:56 - Ryan Shrout
Yes, you love from people you trust.

0:01:00 - Alex Wilhelm
This is twit.

0:01:08 - Leo Laporte
This is twit this week in tech, episode 951, recorded Sunday, october 29 2023. Callie sober, this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. There's zero trust for OT. Security solution can help your business achieve 351% ROI over five years. To learn more, find the link in the show description or visit Palo Alto Networkscom and by our friends at it pro TV now. Aci learning ACI's new solution insights assists in identifying and fixing skill gaps in your IT teams. Visit go dot ACI learning dot com. Slash twit Put listeners. You'll receive up to 65% off an IT pro enterprise solution plan. Just complete the form and then, based on your team size, you'll get the proper quote, a discount tailored to your needs.

It's time for twit this week in tech, the show we cover the weeks tech news. It's kind of old timers week. This week is great. I don't mean old and age, just long time. Colleagues. It's great to see Alex Wilhelm here from tech crunch. Hi, alex, it's good to be back. Your startup battlefield hat there. That's great. The tech crunch startup battlefield legendary.

0:02:33 - Alex Wilhelm
I get $5 if I wear tech crunch to tire on the show. So everything counts Absolutely.

0:02:38 - Leo Laporte
Yes, you could take that $5, go down and get half a hamburger at the East end. It'll be great.

0:02:43 - Alex Wilhelm
One third of a hamburger.

0:02:47 - Leo Laporte
I went with my. I was in town, as you know, visiting my mom, and I went with my sister to have a hamburger. She said they're really expensive. I said, honey, I live in Northern California. Nothing's expensive here. There's quite a difference. Great to see you, alex. Thank you. How's the baby? How's Liza?

0:03:06 - Alex Wilhelm
Liza's lovely. The baby is 10 months old and cruising around on every surface you could find If it's sharp, hot on fire or potentially dangerous. She just crawls right towards it and tries to stick all of her fingers into it.

0:03:19 - Leo Laporte
Perfect, you want a child like that, that's good.

0:03:23 - Alex Wilhelm
Okay, but no one told me that parenting is just walking slowly behind a child, that she crawls around your house and don't touch that. That's a little hard, don't touch that?

0:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but you do want to. I think it's important to have a kid who's exploratory and an interest in the world. I think that's a much better thing than somebody just lies there and says can you turn on the TV, dad?

0:03:42 - Alex Wilhelm
Okay, yes, but sometimes I would like to have a weekend to rest. No.

0:03:47 - Leo Laporte
And did I not tell you? If you have kids, that's it. I didn't tell you that part.

0:03:54 - Alex Wilhelm
No one can get you sorted out to understand that your life is over.

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
We all lie. We say, oh, it's going to be so amazing. We lie, we lie. Hey, let's say hi to Larry Maggett. He is the CEO and president of connect safelyorg. He'll soon be signing their internet contract, alex. Hi, larry, good to see you.

0:04:12 - Larry Magid
Good to see you, leo. I guess we are old friends, so to speak. Yeah, you and I are older, we're raising one older and older, but still having fun.

0:04:21 - Leo Laporte
People may note that you have a yellow western electric telephone. I do, I do.

0:04:28 - Larry Magid
No, they came out. They came out with new models about every 15 years. They were really exciting when AT&T would come out with it. Remember the touch tone phone, Leo.

0:04:37 - Leo Laporte
That was a thrill. I always wanted a princess phone but I didn't get one of those. Maybe someday you could get one. Yeah, they actually sell them. You can. Yeah, sure, and I'm really pleased to welcome back to our microphones. Long time host on this weekend computer hardware, he was the founder and editor in chief at PC perspective, pc percom, and for the last five years has been working at Intel. Now free at last. Free at last. Ladies and gentlemen, ryan Shrout, good to see you.

0:05:07 - Ryan Shrout
You too, Thanks for having me on it's. You know I did. I did PC perspective and or some online, you know, review format for like 18 years. I did have a Shrout research, did consulting for like the last two or three years before I joined Intel. But then, yeah, I kind of fell to the void for almost five years and, you know, popping my head up and seeing what's going on in the world, I guess.

0:05:30 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad to see you back in the real world. So many people that we work with end up going to work for Intel or Microsoft or Apple and and you know I'm just thinking of a few people that we work with that who went to Apple that we just you, never hear from again.

It's never just disappear and you and Ellen Malventano, who was also on this weekend, computer hardware both kind of emerged out of the Intel, the mall of Intel. Allen's working for a solid line which is a spin. Intel spun off a solid line to SK high necks. But so he's still in the biz. But it was great to talk to him every once in a while and I'm thrilled to get you back on our panel.

0:06:09 - Ryan Shrout
Well, I appreciate it. You know it's it was. It was an interesting five years. Definitely learned a ton, a lot of smart people over there, but you know it must be amazing to work there, yeah. I mean, I went. I went from a company of seven to 107,000 in one day and you learn a lot. You don't have a choice and I was. I was fortunate enough to get to work on some cool stuff. You know competitive analysis and you know helping launch the art graphics brand and products was really cool so yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:06:39 - Leo Laporte
Does it does it feel, though, now, like you're a little more free to speak? Or did they make you sign a paper that says I, I am never going to talk honestly about anything again?

0:06:48 - Ryan Shrout
I mean, but no, no, I mean, you know any, any knowledge I have on roadmaps and the products and all that stuff.

0:06:54 - Leo Laporte
obviously I can't say no, I wouldn't expect that. But, for instance, I get your thoughts on the Qualcomm event which you were at this week.

0:07:01 - Ryan Shrout
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I you know free to talk about my opinions on anything Good.

0:07:06 - Leo Laporte
No longer. No longer constrained by a corporate parents. Yeah, you can put your fingers in any plug socket you want to. It's all on it's all on.

0:07:15 - Ryan Shrout
Yeah, yeah, much like Alex's daughter, I just walk around putting my fingers and whatever's hot or, you know, electrified, and see what happens.

0:07:22 - Leo Laporte
Here's a story that kind of was a surprise, almost immediate, you turn, if you will, for GM's cruise self-driving vehicles, literally a month or two after they got permission from the California public utilities commission to run unhindered in San Francisco and all of California, day and night, without a driver. They have. They have basically thrown in the towel now because it all started with an accident. They, a vehicle driven by a human, hit a pedestrian in San Francisco. The pedestrian was knocked into the road and run over by a robot taxi which then drew, drove another, I think 60 feet, with the human underneath the car trapped, I'm sorry, 20 feet, at speeds of up to seven miles an hour. When the California department of motor vehicles began to investigate, they asked. It turned out the cruise vehicle of course had video of the incident, but they claimed that the video ends prematurely, when in fact it didn't. They withheld evidence from the DMV during the meeting the department was shown this is from the DMV.

Department was shown video footage of the accident captured by the AVs on board cameras. The video footage presented to the department ended with the AVs initial stop following the hard braking maneuver. You see, your honor, we stopped, we stopped footage of the subsequent movement of the AV to perform a pullover maneuver was not shown to the department and cruise did not disclose that any additional movement of the vehicle had occurred after the initial stop. The department only learned of the of the AVs subsequent movement via discussion with another government agency, which we believe was the NHTSA, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. The department requested crews provide a copy of the video with additional footage, which was received October 13th. This is a tech crunch story so we can trust it. Alex Wilhelm Kirsten, a Corsac, writing.

0:09:30 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, kirsten's amazing, but you know what's really amazing about the story? There's lots to talk about here, but there's a phrase in politics that it's not the crime, it's the cover up, and I mean, just talk about a self inflicted wound here, like things happened. Own up to it. We can talk about the tech behind the decision of the car to try to pull over after it had stopped in the whole situation. But I mean, by omitting that footage, they, I think, made themselves an enemy of a local regulator. That's an incredibly important part of their business in the state. So just do they think they was going to get away with it? I mean, I just don't understand the logic behind the decision there.

0:10:04 - Larry Magid
You know, I've actually never hit a pedestrian when driving a car manually, back in the old days before I had a Tesla, when I actually used to drive my car. But it seems to me that if I did, I would just stop. I wouldn't, you know, drag them 20 feet.

0:10:17 - Leo Laporte
What I heard algorithm we haven't heard from. There's no cameras pointing down like that.

0:10:24 - Larry Magid
They didn't know. Would there be an algorithm that said, if I am dragging a pedestrian, what should I do? I mean, that's an algorithm they probably didn't think of putting in there.

0:10:33 - Alex Wilhelm
Right, a valid point, but I don't think the algorithm was if you hit a person, don't worry, keep going. I think it was. They stopped and then they didn't have the next piece of code or something along those lines to make it function properly, and that's why it was a learning opportunity for the AV industry, because, keeping in mind they didn't start this accident, a human driver did, yeah, and so I want to make sure that we don't cast too many aspersions on the technology, even though there wasn't fault that should be blamed for that, but not the whole thing. Anyways, it's just the fact that they tried to cover it up.

0:11:02 - Larry Magid
Well, it seems to me, since it was a human driver also involved, that we should ban all human driven cars as well, because clearly we've proven how dangerous they really and in fact, as everyone knows, thousands of people do die every year. There's also human error. So the question really becomes you know, what can we do to not only make these better, but, in some ways, what should our standards be when it comes to robo cars hurting people? I mean, should they be the same as humans, in which case we're nowhere near there.

0:11:31 - Alex Wilhelm
Well I want to say you joked that we should ban all human drivers. But actually I think unironically yes, because does anyone recall being 16 and driving? Were you making great choices in a multi thousand pound vehicle, going at speeds on highways? I wasn't, and I'm just in awe of the amount of deaths that we a lot of happen at the hands of human drivers and we just go well, what can you do? And then this happens and we all kind of have this moment. But to me the accident isn't the main issue, it's the way the business operated. But I agree with Larry let's just ban all human drivers as fast as we can.

0:12:04 - Leo Laporte
I should mention that Kristen Kristen writes in her story that GM says that it shared the entire video with the DMV. The DMV, when asked about that, says we stand by our assessment. So there is some dispute over whether Cruz gave that entire video or they only gave them a shortened version. But let's, let's, so you're, let's stand aside from the cover up. If there was a cover up, I think you raise an interesting point, larry, because humans run over people every single day, right?

0:12:38 - Larry Magid
Doesn't make a new thing, yeah.

0:12:40 - Leo Laporte
By the way, gm's taking this so seriously. They've now paused, as of day before yesterday, all driverless operations across the US. So they were, they're paused in California by the DMV, but they're. They're stopping everywhere, probably for public relations reasons. Right, ryan, you're, you weren't PR. You know how do you make a bad thing worse, sometimes you have to.

0:13:05 - Ryan Shrout
you have to over over, swing your movement right To make sure that you get the point across. But I think you know this is, I think when self driving vehicles began, we had to assume that something like this was going to happen. And you know, if we again, if we move the cover up off to the side, then you say how do you learn from it and improve and make it better? Right, is there need to be cameras under the car that maybe never existed before? Right? And is there part of the, the logic of what happens if you hit a thing versus a person? Do you? Do you react differently?

Because you know we can say we want to ban all human drivers, but I tell you out, here in the Midwest that's not going to work very well because we don't have self driving cars on any of our roads. So if I want to go to the grocery store, so off the drive. But like this is, this is just one of those steps, unfortunate things that's going to have to happen and we hope we learn from it. Everything gets better and continue to have this path. I would really really hate for development on this to stop right or slow down significantly because of because of the accident.

0:14:08 - Leo Laporte
Cruz operates, or did operate, driverless fleets. It besides San Francisco, phoenix, houston, austin, dallas and Miami, and it was hoping to go nationwide. You're right, maybe not in Hebron or Hebron, but but but but was going nationwide, probably in metros.

0:14:26 - Larry Magid
Yeah, and I feel the same. You know I've got the self full self driving on my Model 3. And I kind of feel the same, you know. I yeah routine.

0:14:34 - Leo Laporte
Here's the thing. You use it on surface streets.

0:14:39 - Larry Magid
Yes, you do, but I've got my but, I've got my eyes open, I've got my foot hovering over the brake just in case something goes wrong. Reliable on surface streets.

0:14:48 - Leo Laporte
Because this is where, by the way, tesla differs from General Motors, ford and their self driving vehicles. Those companies, mercedes, all work on mapped freeways alone. Only Tesla works on city streets.

0:15:02 - Larry Magid
It's never failed to stop at a red light or a stop sign. It has.

0:15:07 - Leo Laporte
Although you remember that it didn't stop at a red light for Elon, he had his. I'm talking about mine.

0:15:12 - Larry Magid
Well, you probably had an advanced version of it.

0:15:16 - Leo Laporte
He doesn't. Yeah, that's right, he had the new, but you know it's still.

0:15:19 - Larry Magid
It's still buggy, but I have to say it's far less buggy now than it was when I got it. Whenever how many months ago used to make right turns from the left lane. It would accelerate into a turn and they fixed a lot of the things Well, and that's the argument, by the way, for letting these cars get out there is that's how you learn.

Right, right. I mean, I still think the drivers have to be responsible and watch the way I look at it is to on the downside, you know, every driver has to worry about making a mistake and they have to worry about other drivers, and now I have to worry about my car making a mistake. So there's three points of failure me, the car and the other driver, but on the other hand, it's also an assistant. It's also something you know. It's got 12 eyes. I only have two eyes.

So there are, there are advantages, but I really agree with Alex. I think that long term, we are going to look back at human beings driving cars, that we're going to say what were they thinking? Why were they letting those you know, irrational, emotional, immature people and, by the way, I include my age as part of the immaturity, not just a 16 year old wire or or senile people, as I may be on the verge of becoming you know, why did they let them pilot a 3000 pound weapon through the streets of America? I mean, I think that will be what we'll talk about at some point in the future.

0:16:39 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, hard to agree with that. Also, like there's people like myself who are not very young or very old but are also just very distracted all the time, and I'm just not a great driver, which is why my spouse, who is a great driver, does all of our driving. But on the safety thing, it's amazing how incremental some of this can feel because we went from a very the five speed manual Volvo S40 with no features to a relatively modern Subaru and now we do have lane assist and rear view cameras and all this stuff and our car like beeps at us, like, hey, you need to stay in your lane, and all this and it's, it's. It's like night and day and it's only about a 10 year timeframe.

0:17:13 - Leo Laporte
So when you think, about it and do you feel like it's better that that's safer for you?

0:17:16 - Alex Wilhelm
I mean Well, you should hear my wife shout at it when it, but you've got a baby in the back.

0:17:21 - Leo Laporte
I mean you really have a higher level of need to be safe and and you prefer the. You prefer the driver assist features.

0:17:30 - Alex Wilhelm
Well, I mean, leo, I've driven the car once across the parking lot, so you're the wrong.

0:17:35 - Larry Magid
No one.

0:17:35 - Leo Laporte
You really are a bad driver.

0:17:37 - Alex Wilhelm
But well, I, I. I grew up in a town where you had to drive, move to Chicago.

0:17:41 - Larry Magid
Why are you such a bad?

0:17:42 - Alex Wilhelm
driver, Because I just I I don't know about you, but I live inside my head and I'm thinking about, like you know, a book I want to write, and then I'm like, oh, stop sign, you know, like like I'm not going to be drafted into F one. That's what I'm saying.

0:17:56 - Leo Laporte
I look forward to the days when I don't have to drive. Cruise says that their vehicle did what it's supposed to do the cruise autonomous vehicles. Well, without a minus. The person trapped underneath cruise and, by the way, this is horrific the woman was severely injured by the initial accident and ultimately even more injured by being dragged under the cruise, which led to her death. We don't know why she died. Cruises autonomous vehicles are designed to perform such a maneuver after collision to minimize safety risks. Hard breaking, slowly pull over that's what you're taught to do, of course, but they say they're doing an analysis to identify potential enhancements to the AV's response to this kind of extremely rare event.

0:18:45 - Larry Magid
But Leo, I'm programmed to pull over in, yeah that's what you're supposed to do, but I also have common sense. If I hit a pedestrian, I think I would stop.

0:18:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but you don't see. Here's the thing.

0:18:55 - Larry Magid
Artificial intelligence is, in some ways, is not as good as you. I don't think it's the programming.

0:18:59 - Leo Laporte
I think it's the sensors. The car only knows what it's told. I'm sure if it knew, if it had a camera and they knew there was something under the wheels, it would not, or it could be programmed not to.

0:19:11 - Alex Wilhelm
But it could be programmed.

0:19:12 - Leo Laporte
That's the problem. I think it's just you know we have. But I think do we all agree that to some extent this is moral panic, because it's a new technology. We're holding it to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. Yeah, yes, actually. And does it mean? We should that the DMV is acting incorrectly here, or no?

0:19:36 - Ryan Shrout
No, I don't think it's acting incorrectly to put a pause on it. If they decide that they're never going to do it again because of this one incident, then probably yes.

0:19:44 - Leo Laporte
We should be clear that the DMV didn't say that's it, you're done. They said that you're done until further notice. Right, so sure.

0:19:53 - Alex Wilhelm
And Waymo is still on the road right. I believe Waymo still driving cars.

0:19:55 - Larry Magid
They did not shut down Waymo, yeah.

0:19:58 - Alex Wilhelm
So this is a targeted action in one place against one A V company. But on the stopping the progress, we're not probably going to see that, given the scale of the investment that GM has put into the cruise program. Kirsten, who wrote that article that we had on the screen a little bit ago, sent me GM's recent earnings report and I was going through it and we found out that they're spending about $250 million a month on this project. It's about 750 a quarter in contra profits. It's a lot of money. So they're really betting on this being the future of GM. Even as some American manufacturers get a little skeevy with their EV plans, this is going ahead. So I mean, bring on the future. I just hope that we can do it with the very bare minimum of stories like this, because it slows down progress and, as Leo points out, it can kill people.

0:20:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, and, but so can humans. And if in the best of all worlds, no humans would be driving, you know they would be all autonomous vehicles, right, and that would be much safer.

0:20:59 - Larry Magid
I'm sure it would be if you had all autonomous vehicles. Yeah, yeah.

0:21:02 - Ryan Shrout
I think once you get to that in state, this is something that before, even before I joined Intel was something that we talked about a lot was you know, you have all the same cameras and sensors and everything and you're doing all that processing locally right, and then they can communicate with other autonomous vehicles on the road. You can plan ahead Like they could depend on other vehicle sensors, Like there's all kinds of ways that this becomes better than having any human touch us during really good I mean, look at aviation planes don't crash into each other and they used to occasionally.

0:21:32 - Larry Magid
I mean, they do on the ground sometimes, but once they're in the air they pretty much don't crash into each other because the technology is such that they can communicate with each other, be both the humans who are driving them and the planes themselves, and that's made them very close to 100% safe once in the air.

0:21:48 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, but one thing I'm curious about the Ryan so you were at Intel for a long time until just spun out mobile I mobilized working on all this AV stuff. Why, why would Intel seemingly slowly move away from the AV tech center things?

0:22:01 - Ryan Shrout
I mean, if you look, if you look at what they said when they were spinning off mobile, it was, it was not about the technology. Mobile has been very successful and a profitable you know part of what Intel's portfolio was. It was more, it's more of a financial decision.

0:22:14 - Leo Laporte
It strikes me, actually, that what's going on in Intel is they're focusing. They also, as we mentioned, spun off solid iron, which is a great company with a great product, not because it was a bad company. Look, division, yeah, they're trying to focus and they probably need to Wow. So this is the problem and in fact, this is really a technology issue in all areas which is there? There's the end state, which is going to be a better world. There's the. There's the state we came from, which was you know fifth. What is it? There's more than a million auto fatalities globally every year, a million every year in the U S alone, 50 to 60,000 every year. So we'd love to get to this end state where there are none and the vehicles are driving themselves, and, and it's much safer. But to get there, you go through this disruption that is always problematic and always, you know, difficult for society to go through. That's kind of where we are right now and it's not, by the way, this is in every area of technology, you see this.

0:23:27 - Larry Magid
I'm glad you said that because obviously AI is another area where we're we've got a lot of moral panics going on, and you know the question is can you? We can envision the utopia, we can division and dystopia. But in the meantime we're going to go through a lot of tribulation as it mature. And you're right, leo, I mean going back to the camera when, when, when Kodak and introduced the first handheld camera, people were afraid of what implications it would have on society. There's a lot of fear around it and and I think that's you know, those moral panics happen with every technical social media. I mean my God, when, when, when my space was out there in 2004,. That's why I started Connect safely, because there was literally predator panic. I mean it was to catch a predator on television every Thursday night, scaring the bejesus out of every parent in America.

Stranger danger, and what's ironic about it is, by being paranoid about something that happened very rarely, they failed to focus on things that actually happen all the time, like wellness and bullying and you know all sorts of bad things.

0:24:28 - Leo Laporte
And the fact that most predators are family members or people whose child knows very well, not strangers. Right, so if you turn your eye, away from that, you're missing the most important thing.

0:24:38 - Larry Magid
Right, and I raise that not so much to derail the conversation in that direction, but just to point out that there are almost every technology that evolves. At some point we get scared about it. Maybe we should in some ways. I mean, I often wonder what would have happened if Henry Ford had, you know, a safety council back in whatever year he started automating the production of automobiles, whether they might have anticipated some of the bad things that have happened as a result of the car, and maybe the cars would be safer and cities would be cleaner and we'd have less congestion if they had put some more thought into it back then. I don't know.

0:25:14 - Leo Laporte
It's an interesting conundrum because we want the end state, we want to get to that safer place. But how much are we willing to sacrifice to get there? It's really interesting. It feels like it usually works out. I mean that it's that during the disruption it's difficult and there are problems, but in the end it's, it's going to work out. You think it's the same for AI?

0:25:35 - Larry Magid
Yeah, and, by the way, pharmacies. How many people die or get sick as a result of taking drugs? I mean drug prescription drugs that are designed to cure you. I mean almost every drug comes with a with a warning right. My favorite ones are the ones that allow you to grow hair, because what they and then they tell you it might affect your. You know, you might give you ED. So what they're saying is that you're going to be better looking and attracting people. But you right, you won't be able to do anything with it. But no, seriously, I mean, should we stop all pharmaceuticals Research?

0:26:08 - Leo Laporte
because, alex, what's under that hat? Just show me real quickly.

0:26:14 - Alex Wilhelm
No, I mean. I mean there's no, I'm wearing this hat. Is that my hair grows out sideways now I look like a cheese wedge.

0:26:22 - Larry Magid
So I'm wearing it.

0:26:23 - Alex Wilhelm
Based on the research, shooting for for none Hopefully.

0:26:26 - Leo Laporte
I did not know that was a side effect. That's not good, can?

0:26:30 - Larry Magid
I go back though.

0:26:31 - Alex Wilhelm
Leo, can I go back to something you said, because I want to quibble very gently with your your logic. There you were talking about how much will be pay as a cost to get from today to the end state we want, when we do have all self-driving cars and everyone's safe. I wonder if the technology today is actually less safe per mile driven by AVs than humans. So I wonder if there's actually going to be a consistent cost to this technology's improvement. Then I don't think there is.

0:26:57 - Leo Laporte
I know, you know it's funny, because we went through this on this week in Google. We looked up the stats and the problem is it's apples and oranges, because we know how many incidents are caused by self-driving vehicles but and we know how many deaths are caused by human driven vehicles, and I guess you can do it per mile, but it's difficult to compare the two because incidents does not equal deaths. So all I know is we we we came up with the idea on this week in Google that perhaps humans were safer than self-driving vehicles, and then I got a lot of emails saying well, you misunderstand or misinterpret or it's not exactly as it seems, so I don't know what the answer is on that, and maybe that's part of the problem is that we don't have very good metrics to figure this stuff out.

0:27:47 - Larry Magid
But it is, it claims to have them, but they've been. They've been to see him, elon, so we've claimed.

0:27:52 - Leo Laporte
I don't believe anything Elon says about anything he says, right yeah.

And some of this comes down to. It brings us to the, the techno-optimist manifesto. Mark Andreessen wrote this horrific, you know, 50, 200 word high school essay encouraging us to stop worrying about trust and safety and think, think of the children, think of the future, not the fat, not the past. He is arguing of course he's a venture capitalist and he's arguing that we shouldn't you know, we shouldn't regulate this stuff. Growth is progress, he says, leading to vitality, expansion of life, increased knowledge, higher well-being, Everything good is downstream of growth. So his argument is stop trying to regulate, because you're just, you're just hurting us in the end. But I don't think it's as clean cut as that, Is it no?

0:28:56 - Larry Magid
No, that was, that was a kind of a prevailing attitude in Silicon Valley for many, many years, and actually companies are beginning to push back on that. Even Mark Zuckerberg has said that he thinks regulation of social media is necessary.

0:29:11 - Leo Laporte
But I mean, but on the other hand, I wonder if he says that because he has to at this point, right, or he says that because he's got the resources.

0:29:19 - Larry Magid
It's regulatory capture, yeah, so he can. It's better for him than it is for the startups to compete with him. But you know, I think that there's also the risk of bad regulation, and we've seen plenty of it. I mean, it goes back, leo, you were involved when the Communications Decency Act was passed to protect children and it was a horrendous law which the even the Supreme Court, you know, agreed with with those of us who were opposed to it. So there's been a lot of really bad legislation. But some sensible regulations might make sense I mean, do make sense in my opinion but often they get them wrong and they take away rights, sometimes in the name of protection, take away children's rights in the name of protection. So there has to be a sensible approach to this.

0:30:02 - Alex Wilhelm
Yes, yes, I agree with that entirely there. But we were just talking about a story in which there was a technology company working on a new tech that interacts with humans in the world and then, when it came to reporting what they had done there is controversy about this, but it appears that some people think they weren't being entirely truthful and there we have a frontier technology that was for a long time the target of billions of dollars of venture capital money and has made lots of progress and, I think, a poster child of where regulation does intersect with progress and can be this beautiful union. And the problem with this manifesto is that I agree with like 85% of it. It's just the 15% that I don't agree with. Is that crap crazy? And I think it gives pro-progress, pro-tech people a bad name because they get lumped in with the end recent crowd who think that the existence of government is somehow like a bad idea when it comes to anything involving the marketplace.

0:30:52 - Larry Magid
It's just the other question is whenever you're looking at something that's an analog to something that already exists. So, for example, self-driving cars are an automated aspect of driving. We've regulated driving for decades. We've already established that it's okay to regulate the highways, so why wouldn't we regulate automated driving just like we regulate human driving? I don't even, I don't even see the issue there, unless you think we should abolish all traffic laws.

0:31:15 - Alex Wilhelm
So we're going to delay it. Then take that one step forward. Apply that logic to AI. I'm curious where you end up, because AI is more de novo than driving on a highway. So when you think about AI regulation, where do you have to drive? It gets more complicated.

0:31:25 - Larry Magid
It gets more complicated because AI involves speech, for example, something we generally don't regulate very much, and that's where it becomes very complicated, you know, in certain areas yeah this stuff is a computer's personhood.

0:31:37 - Leo Laporte
This stuff isn't easy. I mean, I think that's really. Maybe we all want a simple, easy answer like you should regulate or you shouldn't regulate. It's not that easy. And clearly, if you're lying to DMV and again we, that's in dispute at this point but if you lied to a DMV, they have every right to suspend your license. And they went to a human, yeah, and they probably should.

0:31:59 - Larry Magid
You lied for your drive.

0:32:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's not necessarily an indictment of all self-driving vehicles. As you point out, they let Waymo continue, but so I think you need some regulation. It's just it's hard to know what's the right regulation. It's also hard to trust, as Mark Andreessen calls it, our gerontocracy in Congress and to know whether they are able to do this appropriately or not.

0:32:31 - Larry Magid
It's an imperfect system in both ways. It isn't it? There are a lot of congressional idiots that are young too, so let's not only blame you.

0:32:38 - Leo Laporte
It's a good point.

0:32:39 - Larry Magid
Good point the cross-generational stupidity.

0:32:42 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, I can think of a couple of names that fit that rubric actually rather easily, but when we're thinking about the comment in the manifesto about the gerontocracy in Congress later on, they also talk about how liberal democracy is the best way to form a government, and so the way that I think about that is yes, democracy is the best thing we have. It's flawed. But that applies to regulation as well, and so I feel like there's a little bit of talking about both sides of the mouth here to appeal to one crowd while also appealing to the other, and so that just makes the whole thing a little bit mealy-mouthed to me.

0:33:16 - Leo Laporte
What is it? Who is it? Was it? Churchill said democracy is the worst of all forms of government, except for every other?

0:33:25 - Alex Wilhelm
I mean, it's us right. Humans are messy, society is messy, progress is messy, change is messy and it's always going to be a mess, and we just try to do the best to keep it from hurting as many people as possible. To me, I can't imagine a better project as humans than leveraging our ability to invent new things while caring for one another. What's better than that?

0:33:43 - Leo Laporte
And I think this is why we have this discussion a lot. These are important discussions, and Twit is bi-technologists for technologists, and so we like and celebrate technology, but we also want to do it as best we can with as little harm as possible, and I think it's important to have these discussions, and it's important to point out there isn't any clear-cut answer to this. We've got to do the best we can, though.

0:34:10 - Larry Magid
And let me ask you, the fellow veteran of the tech journalism world I don't recall having these conversations back in the 80s no, we were techno-optimists back then and actually I'm a little mad at myself because I bought into the whole thing.

0:34:27 - Leo Laporte
I mean we thought the internet would be nothing but beneficial, that giving everybody a voice would democratize everything, and in the long run we might be right. But we did not anticipate the nightmare that social media has become.

0:34:40 - Larry Magid
I wrote my first book on online communications in 1983. And darn it. I failed to anticipate state-sponsored interference with technology.

0:34:49 - Ryan Shrout
I don't know how.

0:34:49 - Larry Magid
I missed it. Disinformation, not mention a million other things.

0:34:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, because we were very excited by what was happening. This is the new thing. It was very exciting and we had high hopes for it. Humans are, I think, at root, an optimistic species and we had high hopes for it. And it hasn't quite worked out as we thought, but I still have high hopes. We do Right. Yeah, we're still better off than we were, aren't we.

0:35:20 - Alex Wilhelm
That's the thing with that manifesto. It fuses optimism and grievance in a way. That's just a little bit gross. It's good to be an optimist. You can't be a venture capitalist who's a pessimist?

0:35:30 - Leo Laporte
I don't think billionaires should have a grievance of any kind whatsoever.

0:35:34 - Larry Magid
Oh, but they pay so much in taxes. No, they don't, they don't. I always look at taxes. What's left over after you pay your taxes, and, in their case, a lot.

0:35:46 - Alex Wilhelm
All of it If I ever have a billion dollars. You will never see me again, Like you will never see me on Twitter. You will never see me on Twitter.

0:35:54 - Leo Laporte
I will just shut up and evaporate. Yeah, well, why they get on Twitter is beyond me, because you had 42 million.

0:35:59 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, no, I could buy Twitter 44 times for one billion.

0:36:04 - Leo Laporte
I was just looking at the Google's corporate results and their tax rate was stunningly low. I was thinking can I get that there? Can I find that somewhere?

0:36:13 - Alex Wilhelm
Did you hear about the Microsoft possible tax bill from the IRS? That was like dozens of billions of dollars 29 billion dollars they owe the IRS.

0:36:21 - Larry Magid
They just spent that Well the IRS claims.

0:36:23 - Alex Wilhelm
Yes, yes.

0:36:25 - Leo Laporte
But can you imagine that letter, as you should, coming through the mail slot? Satya Nadella gets up in the morning, gets his cup of coffee, goes open the mail 29 billion dollars.

0:36:34 - Larry Magid
Leo, how much would that be compared to what you and I would have to pay? Oh yeah, what's the percentage? The percentage of assets.

0:36:40 - Leo Laporte
And it was over like a long period of time.

0:36:43 - Alex Wilhelm
I mean, it's not even their entire cash reserve. So it's like if I ask for a third of your check, you'd be like all right, satya could get the checkbook out, write the check, say just go away, I don't.

0:36:53 - Larry Magid
It's like when you know when Google gets these fines. I sometimes will calculate them based on the net assets of the average American and a major FTC fine is kind of like a parking ticket, absolutely, yeah.

0:37:06 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. I think we've got some AI to talk about. We've got a great panel to talk about anything going on with technology. Larry Maggett and I have been here for a hundred years, and so we'll give you the old school point of view. Ryan Schraut, formerly of Intel young man, knows all about hardware, and he's he's. He grew up, you grew up with tech, right.

0:37:29 - Ryan Shrout
I did, yeah, I mean I started, started the first website on 17. So wow.

0:37:35 - Leo Laporte
This morning Mike, a sergeant, said, yeah, when I was in college, my first wifi router in college and I said wait a minute, you had wifi college. What the hell? I was lucky to have two rocks to bang together.

0:37:46 - Larry Magid
I don't my big and caught I got. I had a Smith Corona. I think it started out with a manual typewriter manual typewriter.

0:37:53 - Leo Laporte
I was so excited when I got an electric typewriter Me too. I still had to type everything, though and of course, alex Wilhelm from tech crunch, who is right in the middle. He's a young man in an old man's body. You know, I'm sorry, an old man in a young man's body. There it is.

0:38:09 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, I just. I'm very glad that here on this panel today I still count as old, because sometimes I come on Twitter now and there's people that are younger than me.

0:38:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm like that's not allowed. I was the young person I know Go away. We're trying to get you. You started with. You were in your twenties when you started doing shows with us.

0:38:22 - Alex Wilhelm
Yes, oh, I was like 23, 24. Yeah, I was like you were the kid, that's exactly right, yeah. And now, now they're these younger than you, interesting young people. I mean, it just drives me bonkers. How, how, how dare they?

0:38:36 - Leo Laporte
It's my view Right? Do you think that our point of view as oldie oldies is because we didn't grow up with tech of this kind? Anyway, we didn't. We didn't have the internet in school, even we didn't have internet is different than I didn't have a calculator till graduate school.

0:38:52 - Larry Magid
I know slide rules. Slide rule, yes, I have, I still have mine.

0:38:57 - Leo Laporte
I have a giant one in my office that was the teacher would use to demonstrate how to use a slide rule. Uh, yeah, so we have a different. I think we might have. Do we have a different perspective, larry? Do you think?

0:39:08 - Larry Magid
Well, I have an historical perspective and you know what you. You're talking about optimism. I still I still have this wonder. I remember when you would pick up a rotary phone like the one off the right of my hand and pay several dollars a minute to make a long distance call Europe. That's changed.

0:39:24 - Leo Laporte
I think the LA to New York was like oh, you'd be on the phone with somebody and you'd shout hey, I'm on long distance here, Make this fast.

0:39:32 - Larry Magid
Exactly. And so when I, when I look back to what I, to what I've been through, you know, since the days of literally the manual type I think you can see that over my shoulder to that literally was my typewriter in elementary school, my mom's typewriter when she she was a legal secretary, and when I look back from where I started in technology, which was pretty much that phone and that typewriter, to where we are today and you can see my brownie camera behind, you.

0:39:56 - Leo Laporte
I know you got a lot of stuff behind you. I'm noticing.

0:39:58 - Larry Magid
And I keep that here to remind me of. Like everything that's on my shelf is basically been replaced by this guy and it's a thousand times better. You're talking about your smartphone. So when I look back and I people hear people complaining oh my God, I've only got an iPhone 14. Oh no, it's so slow. I think back to you know where you and I came from in tech and how incredibly far we've moved and how much further we're going to move.

0:40:27 - Leo Laporte
I think, though, we do have an advantage that young people don't have. I remember talking to my friend who used to host the CNET. He used to host a couple of shows, but he hosted one for a Westinghouse about the future of the internet, and then he worked for CNET for a while, and I he's he's now teaching. You know, I'm talking about trying to remember his name. He was on TV.

0:40:52 - Larry Magid
He even broadcast TV, yeah.

0:40:54 - Leo Laporte
It was a broadcaster and and he's now Richard Hart. Richard Hart, he's now teaching kids in school about technology. I said, oh, it must be nice to work with young people, or internet natives have grown up with it. He said, Leo, they don't know anything about technology. We had to know in order to navigate it. Young people grew up with it. They never had to learn anything.

0:41:17 - Larry Magid
They know how to use it, but they don't know how to fix it. They don't know how to build it. I mean some do. I don't mean to generate the entire generation, but but you know it's sort of like my father-in-law. He knew not only knew how to drive a car, he knew how to fix a car because he had to when he was a kid. If the car broke, he had to fix it. And so you know.

0:41:35 - Leo Laporte
I, that's true. Don't ask me to fix my car. There's nothing in it I could fix.

0:41:39 - Larry Magid
I wouldn't even know how to open the hood. In fact, there is no hood in my car.

0:41:44 - Leo Laporte
All right, us old folks, I'll tell you I'm sorry. Yeah, he hosted the next step on the Westinghouse. Yeah, the next step, remember that, and it was all about.

0:41:52 - Larry Magid
Westinghouse.

0:41:53 - Leo Laporte
That's the company Ever hear, westinghouse, I think the brand still exists, the brand Group W.

0:41:58 - Larry Magid
It was Group W. It was Group W television stations. Yeah, come to think of it.

0:42:07 - Leo Laporte
There's one area that's changed dramatically is the media landscape, completely different. Let's take a little break. I'll come back with more with this great panel, but our show today brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. There's a name you ought to know Palo Alto Networks offers ZT for OT without the trauma Zero trust for operational technologies.

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To learn more, find the link in the show description or visit paloaltonetworkscom. That's paloaltonetworkscom. Thank you so much for their support of this Week in Tech. That's. One area that's moving faster than the speed of sound is internet security and these acronyms. You probably have to learn a lot of this, alex, especially back when you were with Crunch News and you were covering startups. I mean, it's a new acronym every minute.

0:44:15 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, I just pretend to know what they are. When I talk to CEOs, I'm like sure, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you guys go back. What was that last one? No, I actually just pulled up Palo Alto Networks' latest financial performance and the company is doing this is my non-ad opinion, just to be clear really well, which doesn't shock me because you're right, cybersecurity is a massive growth part of technology right now and, apart from AI, probably the fastest growing out there.

0:44:40 - Leo Laporte
So it's one of those. I have no idea what it is. It's one of those things. It doesn't get headlines as much as AI does, but it's probably much more important, frankly, to AI, to our security and our existential threats to living. I'm not so worried about AI taking over the world, but I am worried about bad guys taking over the world.

0:45:03 - Larry Magid
I was at the Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto a couple weeks ago and there was a session on the vast shortage of security professionals globally.

0:45:12 - Leo Laporte
I mean, there's just a huge demand, I think the last stat I saw was 1.4 million open jobs in the United States alone. Amazing, Open. They can't fill them. You know where a good area to go would be? Maybe bug bounties.

Hacker One says they've paid ethical hackers over $300 million over the last 10 years in bug bounties. Hacker One is one of the good guys in this. The companies go to them and say, hey, we've got new software, we want to make sure it's safe and we want to make sure that when bad guys find a flaw, they come to us, not to a nation state, not to a bad guy, another bad guy but they come to us to fix it. So they create these bug bounty programs. Hacker One is 10 years old. 30 hackers have made more than $1 million and one hacker has received $4 million for his bug reports. But that's people who are selling them to the good guys so that the software can be fixed, as opposed to and it's got to be tempting when Pegasus comes along or a nation state fancy bear comes along and says we will give you $8 billion rubles for this security flaw, it's nice that you can say well, actually I just got $1 million from Apple for it. So thank you very much.

0:46:37 - Ryan Shrout
On average. I think these programs are really interesting ways to capture those in the middle, people who don't have any allegiances to one side of this debate or the other. I know Intel had some very public bug bounties as well looking for. Remember, back in the days of Spectre and Meltdown and all that it fired off this whole new world of hardware security things to find and they had a paid bounty program for that as well, I think they use Hacker One as well.

0:47:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, ok, yeah, intel has. This is actually a perfect example of how a well-run company and what they're doing to find the bugs and fix them before the bad guys get the bugs, and Intel's really on the front line for all of this. So now they're doing integrity, I guess their bug bounty program Eligible for money swag. Don't give me a t-shirt, I want the money.

0:47:39 - Alex Wilhelm
I have Intel and all I got is this.

0:47:41 - Leo Laporte
This is a lousy t-shirt.

0:47:44 - Alex Wilhelm
I think, though, this is a good example of incentives being flipped to fit what the market wants versus what the market wants to avoid. I mean, if you want to make hacking less attractive to devious types, make it very profitable to do it in an ethical sense. Much like how do we end, essentially, music piracy? It wasn't by shooting everybody. It was essentially by saying, hey, let's make a model where you can pay and consume, and make it easier to pay and consume than it was to steal. Yeah, and so to me, this is brilliant. Also, one thing I just learned Hacker One is a startup that's raised like $150 million in venture capital.

0:48:16 - Leo Laporte
I had no idea. It's kind of cool. It's a great idea. Intel since 2017, they announced this earlier this year $4.1 million in bug bounties. Last year almost $1 million.

0:48:30 - Larry Magid
I wonder how much that $4 million saved them. I think that's one of the best investments they could have made.

0:48:36 - Leo Laporte
Exactly and if you don't give it. So I'm Joe Hacker, I'm really good at finding flaws, and if a nation's, if Israel's offering me a million dollars and Intel's offering me a T-shirt, I may really, really, really want Intel to fix this, but it's money talks and so you've got to. Apple. For years really did not want to do bug bounties and finally they had to.

0:49:03 - Larry Magid
Did Apple have bugs? I thought they had a bug freeze.

0:49:05 - Leo Laporte
I think that might be why they didn't want to do bug bounties. They didn't want anybody to know they had bugs. We know now that they do. They call it a security bounty, but they have them and I think it's important that you do this. In fact, apple, for a long time, security researchers thought the iPhone was so locked down that it was problematic. There was no easy way to take somebody's phone and determine if it had been compromised because it was so locked down. So just recently, I remember Apple started a program where researchers could get iPhones and get access into the inner work that was very strictly controlled, of course the inner workings of an iPhone so that they could do that kind of thing. Anyway, if you want a job and you're good at this stuff, you might want to look. Let's see. This is from Hacker One. The average bounty for all industries is $3.7, $3,700, but cryptocurrency and blockchain there's big, big money in finding those flaws. What a surprise. Not so much in government.

0:50:16 - Alex Wilhelm
I'm shocked the government's behind on paying up.

0:50:19 - Leo Laporte
Not so much.

0:50:21 - Alex Wilhelm
To Larry's comment, though, about this being very high ROI stuff, I mean I'm curious if that 3.7K bounty shouldn't be 37K. Tech companies, especially right now, are mercilessly wealthy, and so to me, I would just add a zero to that and just spin up the amount of inbound. We were getting to make things more secure. It feels cheap from companies that are sitting on off and $100 billion in cash.

0:50:44 - Leo Laporte
Larry, I'm glad you're on today because this one really bugs me and I want you to tell me if I'm wrong on this. Meta has just been sued by 42 states, by the attorney's general in 42 states, alleging that it's designed, facebook and Instagram, to be addictive and target kids. Yeah, and it seems to me this is insane, but you correct me.

0:51:14 - Larry Magid
What's insane about it? Meta's position or the FTC?

0:51:18 - Leo Laporte
The FTC has been in on this as well. That's right. New York.

0:51:23 - Larry Magid
California.

0:51:23 - Leo Laporte
Colorado, louisiana, nebraska, south Carolina, washington and Wisconsin. You'll note both red and blue states. Yeah, because with different motivations but same result I don't understand. Of course, all internet activities are designed to be sticky Right. That's in the nature of them that they're a business. You wouldn't expect McDonald's to make terrible food.

0:51:53 - Alex Wilhelm
They want you to come back.

0:51:56 - Leo Laporte
But, you sue McDonald's because kids love happy meals.

0:52:03 - Larry Magid
The analogy that I use. People say that social media is like tobacco. I actually think it's more like chocolate. Chocolate is delicious and Hershey's I don't remember Hershey's ever going out of their way to put ingredients in chocolate that make it less appealing. Now, some people can't eat any chocolate and they'll get very sick. Some people eat far too much chocolate and that's bad for them. But most people, I think you know, moderate At least a lot of people moderate and it's fine.

And we don't ban chocolate. We don't ban chocolate. We don't ban chocolate from kids. We don't prevent. We don't tell parents that they have to sign a form for their children not to eat chocolate until they're 18, or they have to be regulated. So I'm glad you said it was insane, because I mean, the popular belief among most people I talk to outside of the tech world is that, yeah, we need to regulate and we probably do need to do some regulation, but this notion of it being addictive, yeah, it's appealing. Of course, if you're in the business of getting people to go online, you want them to enjoy your product as much as possible. Now, does that mean that there aren't some abuses like some of these things? That what if that Snapchat had some feature which is literally designed to get you sucked in and some of the feedback loops that are built into social media.

0:53:22 - Leo Laporte
Well, they got in trouble. For instance, they had a feature, which I used, that said how fast you were going and so you could do a selfie with your speed. And I used it in Japan on the bullet train, but apparently some silly people were speeding down the highway going see how fast I'm going. That's not a good idea, but is Snapchat to blame? They did, by the way, pull the feature down.

0:53:47 - Larry Magid
Well, I think Meta has cut back on or tried to discourage teens from using likes. I can't remember. I should know this because we work with Meta. Here's what the complaint says.

0:53:55 - Leo Laporte
Meta and I. I should shut up, but I'm very curious what all of you think. Meta designed its Facebook and Instagram products to keep young users on it for longer and repeatedly coming back. According to the federal complaint, they did this via the design of their algorithms Copious alerts, notifications on your screen. Hey, your friends just posted something So-called infinite scroll on the news feed, right? The company also includes features the attorney's general alleged negatively impact teens' mental health through social comparison or promoting body dysmorphia. We know that happens with likes and photo filters. It's very common, especially for young girls, to develop eating disorders because they're trying to be like the person the influencer on the Instagram. One federal suit accuses Meta of violating COPPA you were just talking about the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting personal data on users under 13 without parental consent. Now that is legit the violation.

0:55:01 - Larry Magid
They shouldn't be doing that. They shouldn't be doing that.

0:55:03 - Leo Laporte
There's already a law against that. That's fine.

0:55:06 - Larry Magid
But can you blame?

0:55:07 - Leo Laporte
Meta for making its algorithm sticky.

0:55:11 - Larry Magid
If they're doing that for Facebook, they're doing a pretty bad job of it, because I don't know anybody under 18.

0:55:15 - Leo Laporte
No kid wants to use Facebook. I'll tell you right now they do use Instagram Big time.

0:55:20 - Larry Magid
Look, Meta, I work with these guys a lot. As you know, Meta's one of the supporters of ConnectSafely. I'm not sure I'm disclosing that or bragging about it or what, but I need to say that. But bottom line is that they do put a lot of thought into this and there is a big trust and safety group that I work with that tries to educate parents. They've got parental control, control tools now that they can put in there. They've got all sorts of ways to alert kids. So there are things that they're doing to try to mitigate the problem. But, yes, they're going to make their product as appealing as possible and I don't know of a single consumer company out there that doesn't do that. I mean cars, you name it.

0:55:55 - Leo Laporte
McDonald's puts sugar in their hamburgers because it makes you want more.

0:56:00 - Larry Magid
Exactly I know I'm an addict.

0:56:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't understand, but I take responsibility for the number of Big Macs I eat.

0:56:07 - Ryan Shrout
The parts you read there where it says that those features and capabilities or algorithms and things were targeting young users. Were they not also targeting you and me?

Like I assume that they are right, Of course. So the delineation there seems unnecessary. Right, If it's going to target kids, then it's targeting everybody. But I think I'm on the side of this, of it is on parental supervision, is on parental education, to really understand these things. I have an eight-year-old, a three-year-old. They have tablets, they're watching YouTube videos, so they're exposed to some of these types of things. But you're basically saying the business model should be changed and relegated on these things. It just doesn't make sense. And maybe the closest I don't know this might go down a rat hole on this one, but is the closest analogy to this cigarettes and how they had to self-regulate and they had to pull themselves out of advertising but cigarettes actually kill you.

0:57:08 - Larry Magid
They're dangerous. They're scientifically proven to be dangerous Cigarettes are amazing you guys are all crazy.

0:57:13 - Ryan Shrout
I bet there are people that would argue that this kind of body dysphoria and all that stuff is doing something like that.

0:57:20 - Larry Magid
See, that's why I make a chocolate analogy. Could you imagine giving your kid a debit card and saying, hey, go buy as much chocolate as you want, eat as much junkie you want. You're a parent, you're taking responsibility and your kids are probably going to come out. They're probably going to do pretty well. What about the happy meal?

0:57:34 - Leo Laporte
I think the happy meal is my favorite analogy. Mcdonald's clearly targets those as children. They put a toy in there and I don't think McDonald's would agree that their food is bad for you, but I think anybody paying attention would say don't live on happy meal. Or, yeah, don't live on Captain Crunch Cocoa pops. I mean, come on, those are aimed at kids. And, by the way, I would also point out that Congress has done absolutely nothing to prevent mass shootings in school rooms, which I think is a lot more hazardous for kids than this is, than Facebook is. Is this an easy? It's an easy target is what it is.

0:58:12 - Larry Magid
Yeah, we should ban bowling alleys, because something horrendous happened in a bowling alley last night, you know it feels to me like Congress doesn't care about some real dangers to children and they're worried about.

0:58:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they're spending a lot of time on Instagram. Go ahead, Alex, yeah.

0:58:28 - Alex Wilhelm
So the chocolate thing, it's come up twice. I want to push on this because chocolate can be purchased.

0:58:32 - Ryan Shrout
Chocolate.

0:58:35 - Alex Wilhelm
No, chocolate's fine whatever, but I mean in the analogy of chocolate, as some people regulate it, some people can't eat it, et cetera, et cetera that Larry is making. I'm curious Larry is taking the chocolate analogy, which is accessible to anybody at any age, as long as they have a dollar. Do you think social media should similarly not have an age restriction on it?

0:58:54 - Larry Magid
Well, there is an age restriction right now with COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection, and that is a problem.

0:59:00 - Leo Laporte
You should not be advertising to the kids and you definitely shouldn't be collecting data on children Personally. But the problem is.

0:59:09 - Larry Magid
Let me quickly say the problem with age restrictions is we don't yet have good age assurance. I think we're gonna talk later about the UK bill.

0:59:16 - Leo Laporte
We can talk about the UK. Yes, that's right.

0:59:19 - Larry Magid
And the problem? One of the problems is that in order for me to know that you're 12, you have to know that I'm over 18. And so it brings up a lot of privacy issues that are problematic in the United States. They're less problematic in other countries, but they're problematic in the United States. And I also believe the last time I looked at the First Amendment it didn't say anything about an age test. It doesn't say you have to be 18 years old to enjoy the right for free speech, and social media is speech, and so we need to be really careful.

0:59:47 - Leo Laporte
I might argue with Leeds on that, because I think that it's the courts have held again and again that kids in school, for instance, don't have free speech in the same way that adults do. So while the First Amendment doesn't mention age, courts have subsequently ruled that minors do not have the same free speech rights as adults.

1:00:05 - Larry Magid
There is the Tinker decision, which gave kids the right to protest the war in Vietnam despite their.

1:00:10 - Leo Laporte
you know, I took advantage of that.

1:00:12 - Larry Magid
It's nuanced. Look even at work, leo. I mean you Right, we don't have free speech here either. As a boss, you could tell your employees that there's certain things they can't say in the office.

1:00:22 - Leo Laporte
That's not what the First Amendment's about.

1:00:23 - Larry Magid
The First Amendment is about government restriction of speech, not private, but that's what we're talking about. If we're talking about regulation, that is, government restriction of speech and I'm not saying it shouldn't happen, I'm not saying that five-year-olds should get to look at porn I'm saying that it has to be done in ways that are sensible, constitutional and also don't punish adults by creating a situation like the Communications Decency Act would have done, a situation where they're banning content to everyone in the name of protecting children. So it has to be done sensibly. Yeah, and I I don't see what.

1:00:51 - Alex Wilhelm
I get a lot to say, no, I just I'm bursting with agreement with that, but the chocolate analogy is just too polite to, I think, the situation. I think you're. You've picked something that everyone likes chocolate, and so it sounds great. But if we're all going to sit here and agree that we think there should be some regulations and restrictions on the age minimum to access social media, then I don't think the chocolate analogy holds up and it's too generous to these companies, because you can eat chocolate when you're two.

1:01:20 - Larry Magid
Should you you can but Should there be a warning With the red optimization in both cases.

1:01:23 - Leo Laporte
Should there be a warning on Cocoa Puffs that only should be eaten with parental consent if you're under 18?

1:01:33 - Alex Wilhelm
I'm not arguing in favor of age restrictions or not. I'm just saying that letteries analogy I felt was too generous to it's too Chocolate's okay. You're not feeding your so I'm You're not feeding your baby chocolate, I'm sure. I don't think we're allowed to. Yet there's something you can't eat before you're one Right Like honey for example no, you're a parent, you're allowed to.

1:01:51 - Larry Magid
I mean, you kill your kid, but you're allowed to I'm pretty sure that I'm not allowed to kill my kid actually.

1:01:55 - Leo Laporte
I think that goes against the rules of men. It's that I believe. Okay, you're the rule again. That is a rule my wife's-.

1:02:00 - Alex Wilhelm
Thank God my wife does not watch Twitter, because that would not have been a great 30 seconds for her to tune into. My point is we seem to agree that this is not as bad as tobacco or alcohol, but certainly is not the same thing as Greek yogurt that you can eat when you're a very simple person.

1:02:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, okay, that's good. So we do restrict alcohol consumption. Should we restrict Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram in the same way? I personally do not think so.

1:02:27 - Ryan Shrout
Yeah, I don't think so. Well, and unless you consider again Kappa to be that restriction right that we already have in place, whether or not it's adhered to, right is and it's about PII right.

1:02:39 - Leo Laporte
It's about collecting PII Right. Collecting PII.

1:02:42 - Larry Magid
And we all.

1:02:42 - Leo Laporte
I think everybody agrees that that is a reprehensible practice, no matter what age you are, but certainly if you're under 13,. You should not be allowed to do that You're protecting us from PII.

1:02:52 - Larry Magid
Yeah, right.

1:02:54 - Alex Wilhelm
No one, but that's been bought and sold. I mean, try to get that through Congress. I think everyone can agree, can? We can all rally around, protect the kids, but when it comes to adults in America it's very hard to get regulation around things that corporations want to keep. The suit I read in its entirety and the only thing that hit me as a seemingly reasonable argument was the possible Kappa violations. The rest of it was just a lot of whinging by people who have a it's stunning though, this is 42 out of 50 states.

1:03:19 - Leo Laporte
I know, yeah, this is virtually everybody.

1:03:24 - Larry Magid
And this has been going on, the reason we started ConnectSafely in 2004,. I mentioned earlier the predator panic. This has been going on. I remember the Attorney's General 49 attorneys general complained about my space and all the horrible things that would happen and again they were worried about predators. So this has been going on since the dawn of you know well, since certainly since the dawn of social media, if not the dawn of the internet, and I think it's popular for Congress.

I think it makes congressional people look really good because they're protecting the children, and I don't think you. I think you get elected when you say you're and AGs.

1:04:01 - Ryan Shrout
And AGs? Well, they're politicians.

1:04:03 - Larry Magid
They're elected in most cases. Yeah, absolutely. Brian, are you gonna let your eight year old get on Snapchat in five years.

1:04:13 - Ryan Shrout
You know the one. She wants to get on TikTok and I've denied that. Okay.

1:04:18 - Leo Laporte
Good, I see, you know I was at the airport the other day.

I was at the airport the other day, next to a family with a 10 year old Dad was scrolling TikTok with his speaker on, by the way, very annoying and for some reason he kept looking at the same video over and over and over and over. That should be frustrating, but then, to keep the kid quiet, she was scrolling through TikTok and both of them bottomless scrolling For the entire time we were waiting for the airplane. I understand, as a parent, that's a difficult challenge, but Stressful time it's a stressful time. But I see a lot of kids on tablets and phones. They're babysitting. Yeah, I think that's more common than not these days.

1:05:07 - Larry Magid
On the other hand, my parents let me watch television when I was a kid and there was some real crap. I mean, some of the commercials were horrible.

1:05:12 - Leo Laporte
My parents had a half hour limit. Pissed for them, Pissed me. The. The man from Uncle is an hour. There is no way. Half an hour is enough. I was so mad but I survived.

1:05:26 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, one thing I've learned is how addictive screens are, because I'm watching this through my, my first child, and if there is a phone out she will crawl towards it. She loves to play with my Apple. Watch, totally addictive she has turned on every single setting Totally On my Apple Watch by just whacking it repeatedly Because she thinks it's the best thing in the world. I have to not wear my watch around my and I think it's taught me what my brain is doing. Yes, To the lens of a little person.

1:05:53 - Ryan Shrout
It's a little scary, is the? Is the term addictive overly negative, right? Like, if you say screens are addictive, I'm trying to you know, maybe devil's advocate a little bit here but like, don't you want young people to interact with technology in a way that is is preparing them for the future and and everything like? Well, I don't I don't.

1:06:12 - Leo Laporte
Sugar is addictive. We, we, we feed everybody constantly. We feed them sugar.

1:06:18 - Larry Magid
It's killing us. It's going well. It's killing us.

1:06:20 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, sure I'm. I'm worried that people who grow up with technology at that age won't have enough experiences in the sitting quietly waiting in a novel side of things, because that does take more work than scrolling TikTok to develop some of the things they're going to need down the road. And so to me, can I make a?

1:06:41 - Leo Laporte
a draw. But wait, Alex, how do we know what they're going to need down the road? Maybe what they're going to be able to need down the road is the ability to scroll fluently.

1:06:50 - Alex Wilhelm
Probably not, leo, but can I make a drug based analogy? Yes, sure, why not? Okay, so there's a saying that let me try this one out, we can cut it out later if it doesn't work. People say that that cannabis weed is a is a drug for people who have found their way already, and then you're going to be okay. I feel like technology in a lot of cases is for children who have already had their brain gel, a little bit Like they've already kind of gone out into the woods a lot and read books.

1:07:15 - Leo Laporte
So then play outside and then you can have your Snapchat.

1:07:18 - Larry Magid
So are you saying it's not like chocolate, is more like marijuana? Is that? Is that your analogy?

1:07:24 - Alex Wilhelm
Well, if you're offering if you're offering both and I have to pick one, I'm going with cannabis.

1:07:27 - Larry Magid
I should quite have. The thing is, cannabis will make you want to have more chocolate.

1:07:30 - Leo Laporte
So they were sober for years now, right so?

1:07:34 - Alex Wilhelm
but I'm.

1:07:34 - Leo Laporte
I'm I'm Cali sober. So your Cali sober, is that what it's called California?

1:07:40 - Larry Magid
sober, california sober. I didn't know there was a California stop.

1:07:44 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to inquire further.

1:07:47 - Alex Wilhelm
I think my brother-in-law is going to see this. Hi, brett, anyways, okay. So the lesson here is drug based analogies on Twitter. Don't go well, don't make them. Okay, let's learn.

1:07:59 - Leo Laporte
And I think we have a show title. I'm not going to go to Urban Dictionary. However, let's take a little break and we will have more in just a bit. Ryan Stratus here. Great to have you, Ryan. Should I say you're looking for work or no? I think you're enjoying life.

1:08:15 - Ryan Shrout
Yeah, I'm good, we're just just just running around Like I'm. You know, I don't know if you can retire at 41. You probably can't. You should, so yeah, you should I did. I did nothing for a couple of weeks and got pretty bored, so then I started.

1:08:31 - Leo Laporte
All right, he's going to be consulting soon near you, but follow you know what. We will keep you up to date on what's going on in the Shroutville up there in Hebron, just across the river. Hebron, hebron, hebron, hebron, hebron. Yeah, okay, yeah, just across the river from Cincinnati. Do you get, do you get, a skyline chili down that far south?

1:08:55 - Ryan Shrout
All the time. Oh, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a staple, it's a staple.

1:09:01 - Leo Laporte
Also with a slurry maggot connect safelyorg. You care a lot about kids. That's your. That's like what you do now.

1:09:10 - Larry Magid
Thank you. They're kind of the future of the world, you know. I mean I started out with when I was a parent. In fact, we can talk later about I actually started out being a tragedy that happened in your town of Petaluma.

1:09:21 - Leo Laporte
I know polyclass. It is actually the 30th anniversary.

1:09:25 - Larry Magid
It is Of polyclasses abduction and murder.

And, as you know, I got very involved in that case because I put her image online first time with a child's missing child posting that were put online and that's what led me to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And then they asked me to write Child Safety and the Information Highway and that's what led me to the career that I'm in. But, yeah, of course I care about children, both as a parent and as a human being that knows that there are future, and they need to be protected in many ways, including protected from being kept off of technology, as well as protected from the dangers of technology.

1:10:04 - Leo Laporte
That case rocked this town. When it happened, we had just moved here and I remember the signs going up she's missing. They didn't know initially where she was.

1:10:16 - Larry Magid
And I was in my car when I heard about it on KGO and I wanted to turn around and drive to Petaluma, but instead I kept going south and I was headed over to Netcom and it occurred to me that we could look for her online and unfortunately she was not to be found. She was already dead. But that really shook me to my core when I heard that story.

1:10:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know what's sad is? There was a black girl abducted and murdered roughly the same time, yep, and it didn't get coverage at all.

1:10:49 - Larry Magid
It didn't get coverage. White missing girl syndrome it's an issue and National Center for missing and spoiled children is really on that. They're really trying very hard to make sure that we don't forget any missing child, regardless of their age, their gender, their race, whatever. I mean. It's so important yeah.

1:11:11 - Leo Laporte
Every child's precious Georgia Moses, also abducted roughly the same time Found. Her body was found off the freeway just here in Petaluma and there's a memorial there for her, but I don't think people really remember her in the way they remember.

1:11:24 - Larry Magid
Polyclass. A book just came out about the Polyclass incident by a woman named Kim Cross and I knew she had an event in Petaluma a couple weeks ago. I was out of the country but there'd been a lot of attention looking back at that 30 years.

1:11:41 - Leo Laporte
Also with us, are good friend, and I mean it when I say Alex Wilhelm, since he was 23 years old.

1:11:50 - Alex Wilhelm
You should go back and find that episode. But just adding to the cultural conversation we're having today, I just learned all about Cincinnati, chili, in the time since you talked to Ryan about it. Did you know there's? You can order it five different ways.

1:12:01 - Ryan Shrout
Oh, yes, this is fantastic.

1:12:02 - Alex Wilhelm
Oh yes, I'm imagining that you saw a lot of anti-harper and stuff down there in Cincinnati, because this sounds amazing.

1:12:11 - Ryan Shrout
It's very good, Although I will say there's a pretty strong. You either hate it or you love it.

1:12:16 - Leo Laporte
It's got cocoa in it and cinnamon and there's two dominant brands.

1:12:22 - Ryan Shrout
One of them has cinnamon in it, One of them has chocolate in it as kind of like the little yeah.

1:12:28 - Leo Laporte
And it's on spaghetti. It always is on spaghetti. We're hot dogs, yeah.

1:12:33 - Larry Magid
Well, Uber eats delivered to California Sounds great.

1:12:36 - Ryan Shrout
I'll Google and find out. It is not great. Let me see.

1:12:40 - Alex Wilhelm
This is just working class. Bollin' Yeas sauce.

1:12:42 - Leo Laporte
It is exactly what it is. It's funny because we were talking about this a week ago and I even asked chat GPT for a Skyline recipe and it was quite good. It was quite good, so I don't know how Skyline Chili has now come up twice on our podcasts and furthermore, have no idea how you missed out Alex Wilhelm.

1:13:07 - Alex Wilhelm
Apparently. I'm not cultured in the Midwest. My parents are from Missouri, so I know all about sweet barbecue.

1:13:12 - Leo Laporte
They know, skyline, they just have been holding out on you.

1:13:14 - Ryan Shrout
Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Florida only. Huh, yeah.

1:13:19 - Leo Laporte
There's a picture, by the way. Oh God, get ready. This is your on tech news today, alex Wilhelm.

1:13:31 - Alex Wilhelm
All right. So what you see? There is the effect of drinking lots of vodka and not sleeping for a long period of time. You end up looking like that. You know what? Behind me is a billboard Sorry, a whiteboard in the old tech crunch office.

1:13:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's your tech crunch whiteboard. Yeah, alex, I loved you so much even then. Even then, and I was really happy for you to watch your progress as you got sober, met the woman of your dreams, have had a family and have moved into my childhood home. I've been watching the progress all along and I feel like you're just many me and you complete me With less hair.

1:14:14 - Larry Magid
The hair shmare. You can order a Skyline chili on Amazon for $37 for four small packs, but Walgreen seems to have a better deal on Skyline chili.

1:14:25 - Leo Laporte
Is it from Skyline or is it from Skyline I?

1:14:28 - Alex Wilhelm
don't know. It's the actual Skyline chili.

1:14:30 - Larry Magid
I don't know, wow they have big cans.

1:14:31 - Alex Wilhelm
They have these ones with a show now they have cans or in packets.

1:14:38 - Leo Laporte
Wow.

1:14:38 - Alex Wilhelm
Wow, wow.

1:14:38 - Ryan Shrout
And they are ready. I'm ready to see those food items spike up the Amazon charts I'm ordering.

1:14:43 - Larry Magid
I think I'm going to get the Walmart version and the hot sauce.

1:14:46 - Ryan Shrout
the hot sauce is interesting. There's always this interesting trick you get oyster crackers. You can see the pack. Yes, they sell oyster crackers as well. Yeah, if you put a drop of hot sauce on one of the oyster crackers and eat it, it tastes like a grape. What? I'm not making this up, I'm just telling you.

1:15:04 - Alex Wilhelm
I got to go. Can we do a big group field trip? Can we do a show in Sency? Can we just go there and do one in a Skyline chili's booth? That'll be a blast.

1:15:13 - Ryan Shrout
This is the value I bring to the show.

1:15:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh my, God, I never knew this. All right, let's take a break. You go, have some skyline hot sauce and oyster crackers and report back, if you would. Our show brought to you by Wix web agencies, this is for you. You're going to like this one.

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1:16:54 - Ryan Shrout
There's a skyline chili out on my football game television presently.

1:16:58 - Alex Wilhelm
So the local ads. How are the?

1:17:01 - Ryan Shrout
bangles doing. We're up 17 to 10. Zip Doing great.

1:17:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's all, Because you know who the bangles are playing Alex Wilhelm.

1:17:09 - Alex Wilhelm
They're playing the Santa.

1:17:12 - Ryan Shrout
Clara 49ers, the Santa Clara 49ers oh you stole my joke.

1:17:16 - Alex Wilhelm
That's it. No longer friends with Brian.

1:17:20 - Leo Laporte
We're too slow.

1:17:23 - Alex Wilhelm
I'm really tired. The baby woke up at five today. Oh, that's bad.

1:17:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. That's not good. So let's talk about this online safety bill. It is now the law in the United Kingdom. People were complaining. A lot of companies, whatsapp signal both said we're leaving the UK If this passes. They decided to stay after the regulators said well, don't worry about encryption, we're not going to, you don't have to worry about that. But they didn't actually write that into the law, so that remains still a question mark. They're billing it as they want to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online, which is a terrible slogan I'd strongly recommend you do not make bumper stickers. It became law. The Royal, the Royal Ascent, king Charles Chaz, said it's okay with me, and so October 26th, it became law. It's. This has been. They've been pushing this forever. Yeah, it addresses underage access to online pornography. Did they get the age requirements in, because that was very controversial for a while. Yeah, there was the thought that you'd have to go down to a pub and say here's my driver's license, governor, I want to see some Polno. Is that fixed?

1:18:47 - Larry Magid
Well, there is a technology that the company in the UK called Yoti. It's been around for a while and they use I guess you call it biometrics to determine an age. Now that brings up other privacy issues as well. They, of course, swear that they don't keep the data, they don't identify who you are, they only estimate your age, but that is something that the UK government is pushing the use of the age assurance technology. But you bring up a really good point, leo, because one of the biggest concerns about all of these bills that require age limits is what impact do they have on adults who want to privately, anonymously access legal content that may be inappropriate for children? And it goes back to Well.

1:19:27 - Leo Laporte
I can't speak for the UK, but I know that many states in the United States where these laws are now in effect, they don't care. They want pornography to end period. They want it to be illegal. Yeah, so that you they want. Yeah, it's just a wedge, basically. Yeah.

1:19:42 - Larry Magid
I mean, and in the US I mean, there is a bit of a red-blue divide in the sense that the two states that have passed somewhat similar legislation are Arkansas and Utah, which are Republican states. That doesn't mean that Democrats want to feed pornography to children by any stretch of the imagination, but Republicans are slightly more. But in the UK it's really such there's been a lot of pressure there. First of all, you've got the tabloids that really push any issues and any bad things that come up become major tabloid stories. But this one of the things it does that I like is really puts pressure on companies to remove CSAM child sexual abuse material, otherwise known as child pornography. That isn't the name we use anymore, but it's what how people understand it Really promoting that, making them responsible for doing that, enforcing age limits and age verification measures not necessarily the going to the pub for the ID, but some way of doing that Providing parents and children.

1:20:41 - Leo Laporte
I'm reading now from the UK by the way, that's part of the problem is this hand waving providing some way to do that, In other words, avoiding the problem of how do you do age ID effectively without invading people's privacy. It's really hard. I was on a commission 20 years ago looking into it.

1:20:57 - Larry Magid
At the time we couldn't come up with anything. But there are some technologies and just also making reporting easier and clearer. And one of the things that I really feel very strongly about is when you report, whether you're a child or an adult, when you report, there needs to be some follow-up. You can't just report it to the void. You have to get they have to actually do something with that report and that's one of the things that the UK is going to be insisting on. Otherwise, some very hefty fines and, believe me, the social media companies will continue to do business in the UK and it wouldn't surprise me if certain aspects of this law wind up jumping over the pond and coming to a country near us.

1:21:40 - Leo Laporte
So it sounds like you're on the balance in favor of these components.

1:21:45 - Larry Magid
You know I understand why it's being pushed.

1:21:48 - Leo Laporte
Nobody is we should say nobody nobody in their right mind is in favor of CSAM Right. And if you oppose these laws, sometimes you're painted as somebody who's advocating child pornography, and that's not the case, Exactly no.

1:22:03 - Larry Magid
No, you can be opposed to these laws for a lot of reasons and still love children and want to protect children. So I don't think that I think it's unfair to paint anybody who's opposed to these laws as being soft on protecting children and they are problematic and look, it's hard. I mean, there's no question about the fact that even think of bars. You go into a bar today. Why should you have to show your ID? Maybe you want to have a drink and not identify yourself? So there are that's a good point Even in traditional methods that we've had in place for decades.

1:22:36 - Leo Laporte
No, I still have to show an ID often, even though I'm obviously over 21. Yeah, some place is required. Actually, the California DMV and some other states now has an app that I can do age verification without revealing anything else on my driver's license. Like say, my home address and. I think that's a good thing right, I can there's actually on the DMV-.

1:23:01 - Larry Magid
It just shows you're over 21, or what is it?

1:23:03 - Leo Laporte
says well, here it says share my age. So this is the California. California, unlike some other states, is not allowing Apple to do it in the wallet. They have their own not such a great app. Okay, and I can verify using true age. I guess I can show a QR code. So if the bouncer has the right thing, I can show the QR code, but if he doesn't, I've got this little ID that actually shows my birthday, without my driver's license or anything else. That's good right.

1:23:35 - Larry Magid
Yeah, because a lot of this has to do with privacy. I mean, the privacy folks are the ones that make the strongest objections to these kinds of laws, including, as you pointed out, the encryption the whole encryption issue, and I'm glad they're pushing back. I'm glad they've been pushed back. They seem to be backing away-.

1:23:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's part of the problem with CSIM identification is, if you're using an encrypted platform like Apple's Messages or Signal or WhatsApp, you can send CSIM material without being detected because it's encrypted. And that's what's unclear about this is initially, this bill said no. Well, these companies have to, upon request, provide clear text versions of what's going on which breaks encryption.

1:24:19 - Larry Magid
Which breaks encryption. And, by the way, encryption protects children as well as adults. I'm actually on a Internet Society task force where we're looking into the whole issue of encryption, and part of the issue is children have a right to be protected, not only in terms of protecting their privacy, but also their security. What if there's a database that contains information about a child to see medical records that must be encrypted to protect a child. So it's a two-way street, even on the aspect of safety.

1:24:46 - Alex Wilhelm
How are we still doing this? I feel like I'm here with my slightly elders in the technology world. Even I've gone through so many cycles of encryption's bad. We need to get around it. Technologists need to make better technology to make it work. And every time they go we can't do that. It's math. And then it comes up again nine months later, because they're never going to give up.

1:25:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the answer On it's just that law enforcement in every country of the world, and perhaps I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They're doing this with the best intentions of stopping terrorism and child exploitation and trafficking and a variety of ills. They believe that they should have the right to see every form of electronic communication and that that will enable them to do this. Now, this is Alex. This goes back to the Constitution of the Bill of Rights in the United States, where the founding, the founders, said okay, yes, with perfect information you can have perfect law enforcement, but we believe that the cost of perfect information is too high, that people should have a right to be secure from, for instance, illegal search and seizure, and I think that we answered that question. We answered that question in the 18th century, but it still comes up. And it's not that they don't understand the math. I'm going to describe good motivations that they really, truly want to end crime, but so did Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It's not. You can't have perfect information, sorry.

1:26:22 - Alex Wilhelm
I would even go one step further and say, even if you had perfect information, you couldn't have no crime, because any government that had that much information would become inherently corrupt. Yes, but that's just. They would become the criminals. Political acts they would be the criminals. Yeah, I mean, I was on the phone with a friend of mine.

1:26:38 - Larry Magid
I was on the national center for missing exploited children for 20 years and this debate would come up constantly and I was in a minority among my colleagues on the board and they all met well. They were all great people. You all know about John Wall she was one of my fellow board members. I mean you know upstanding folks and they. But you're right. I mean the law enforcement temptation is to want to get as much information as possible and there needs to be pushback. That doesn't mean that they don't have a right to push in their direction. But we need an ACLU, we need an EFF, we need people saying wait a minute. What about protecting our civil liberties? And that's really important. And again, I you know I run an internet safety organization, but I still feel very strongly that we have to. We can protect children for the most part and still have our liberties. We're not going to get it right 100% of the time, but we never have.

1:27:26 - Leo Laporte
I guess what you're asking, alex, is why don't they understand this? That math is math and you can't have any break encryption without breaking it for all of us. Yeah, I don't know why they don't understand that, because that gets tedious.

1:27:38 - Alex Wilhelm
I understand the desire to protect children. Everyone's in favor of it. I also get the desire for privacy. Most people are in favor of that but there's Encryption is not. You can't have 80% of it if that makes sense, Right by my understanding, and this is what I hear from every single person in the cybersecurity and just security world. And here we are again, you know, with WhatsApp threatening to pull out of the UK because they're being told that they can't encrypt. Now, clearly, there's some work to make this function, but, like it's 2023, we're still doing this. Maybe this is just, you know, heat, death of the universe, taxes and encryption debates. I mean honestly.

1:28:13 - Leo Laporte
I really wonder why WhatsApp and Signal dropped their objection to this Because the bill doesn't actually protect encryption, it doesn't. They did not remove that clause that says you'd have to provide clear text. They just they kind of said, well, we Don't worry, we're not going to be able to do that, we're not going to make you do that, and I think Signal and WhatsApp and the others just didn't want to, didn't want to, they couldn't face it and they said, okay, fine.

1:28:44 - Larry Magid
Remember WhatsApp's owned by Meta? I mean that would have been disastrous for them to continue Exactly.

1:28:50 - Leo Laporte
They don't want to leave the market. This is the timeline. Get ready for this, Because OFCOM, the British regulator, now has to come up with rules and get this timeline. Yeah, it stretches into 2026, I might add. That's a good Gantt chart. Yeah, so the act passes that's up at the top here. Then in a few months they're going to do a consultation on guidance and then it won't be until the end of next year that they'll finalize the codes and then Parliament has to approve it. Blah, blah this is, but I think what they've done here very cleverly is they got it passed and then they convinced people. Yeah, it's going to take a long time before we implement this, but it will happen, I think. And I think that's problematic. I really do Pull them playing for solicitors though.

1:29:39 - Larry Magid
Oh God, You're going to get a lot of legal battles going on and notice there are.

1:29:45 - Leo Laporte
In each of these phases, parliamentary approval is required, so there is an opportunity to fight it in Parliament. I think the same thing is going to happen in the US. I mean the fact that these AGs 42 AGs are so these are suing meta because it's addictive to kids just shows us that there's a political will to come down on big tech regardless of the sense.

1:30:11 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, but there's not a political will to be non-hippocrates about this. If you want to dig into a little bit more of the UK scene here, just Google Torrey's WhatsApp message deletion.

1:30:20 - Leo Laporte
Right, oh, believe me. So these members of Congress want to use encryption? Oh yeah, parliamentarians, they're not talking about for them, it's for you, right.

1:30:31 - Alex Wilhelm
And so that's why I just. Going back to the good intent portion of this, I think it's very generous of us and full of the spirit to ascribe good intent to all law enforcement demands for more information and so forth, but I don't trust them.

1:30:45 - Larry Magid
I think law enforcement.

1:30:46 - Alex Wilhelm
So I'll take the more negative side of that.

1:30:47 - Leo Laporte
I will give law enforcement the benefit that they have good intent because they're trying to do their job, which is protect us. But I don't trust politicians. Politicians always have mal-intent. Their only intent is to get elected, so they'll say whatever they have to say.

1:31:02 - Alex Wilhelm
Did you hear about the recent case when the police pulled over the wrong person and then, as they were arrested and realized he wasn't the right person and then made up crimes to name?

1:31:10 - Leo Laporte
him. Yeah, you're right, I know, yeah, yeah.

1:31:12 - Alex Wilhelm
And we only found out because of body cameras. My point is these people.

1:31:16 - Leo Laporte
That's a good point.

1:31:17 - Alex Wilhelm
These are the people who are going to want to snoop through your messages. These people, yep.

1:31:23 - Larry Magid
But you make a good point about politicians. They want their privacy. Businesses want their privacy and security. Sure, so that and I think that's actually where the real power of the pro-encryption movement is is with the businesses that basically require it. They have to have it. Yeah, you can have online banking without encryption.

1:31:41 - Alex Wilhelm
That's right. Yeah, so it's. I mean like if we lost encryption, the internet stops working and we can't do anything, and that's the same thing. That's the scale of what we're talking about here. So it has to be in bad faith that they keep trying this, because they must have read at least one thing once about how this debate's gone.

1:31:58 - Leo Laporte
They don't believe it.

1:31:59 - Alex Wilhelm
I know I just Unless they're just massively stupid. Well, well, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

1:32:06 - Larry Magid
I'm going to put on my happy face again.

1:32:08 - Alex Wilhelm
Well, there you go.

1:32:09 - Leo Laporte
I love it. Great stuff. Good work everybody. By the way, I should mention Larry, you noted this Apple now has advice from Connect Safely in iOS 17. I think that's really great. Yeah, so Apple backed down on their CSAM detection and took it out. They decided not to do that. That was where it was going to scan your phone for fingerprints of known CSAM material and then it would notify the Nick Center for National National Center, nick Mac, that they found something. And there was this whole process where, eventually, law enforcement would get involved after Nick Mac looked at it and said, yeah, that's child porn, etc.

1:32:48 - Larry Magid
Well. So what they're doing now and it's certainly less controversial, although some people could argue it somewhat is on your device, not on the cloud. They're not doing anything in the cloud. But if a child gets, let's say, a naked picture or tries to send a naked picture on device technology will say we'll blur it, basically say are you sure? They won't say you can't do it. It'll say you're sure. By the way, an adult can sign up for this as well. You can choose to have it scan your device, but it happens only on the device. And if a child does get it, then they get access to our content. They actually get.

We wrote content for adults, for parents, for teens and for pre-teens. So, depending on who you are, you get access to our content. Adults can also go in at any time. If you have iOS 17,. You can go into screen time and click around into the I think it's called sensitive content I can't remember the exact screen there and that will take you to content written by Connect Safely. So we were very pleased to have that opportunity to ultimately present our material to about 1.5 billion people around the world. Once this rolls out, once iOS 17 rolls out globally and it's in most markets are going to be using this. I don't know if you found it yet.

1:34:04 - Leo Laporte
I have to I actually did and it's in communication safety Right In your screen time. And it actually looks great. You could turn it on. It could detect nude photos of it. You know, one of our quippy in our Discord said that his wife was running a speed test and there were pornographic ads in it. Would it protect you against that? Because I think that would be a good thing to protect you against Well.

1:34:33 - Larry Magid
I don't know if it would or not. I think it's mostly on messaging different.

1:34:36 - Leo Laporte
Apple messaging apps. That's too bad, because I would go for that it's really challenging to write.

1:34:41 - Larry Magid
It's hard enough to write at all. It's hard enough to write for a phone, but we actually had to make this that it would work on a watch as well. So it was a really challenging editorial project for us.

1:34:50 - Leo Laporte
So you can turn on communication safety, and then that will go to other devices using iCloud for screen time. So your desktop as well, if you want Right, absolutely.

1:35:02 - Larry Magid
I think they all the Apple platforms.

1:35:03 - Leo Laporte
And then this has View Child Safety Resources. That was the stuff that was written by you. That's our material, Great. And then improve communication safety. Help Apple improve communication safety by sharing analytics and usage data. I think as a parent, I love the idea that the phone will it's just say hey, this picture of you that you're sending somebody Right, Do you really want to do that? That's a really important. I know a number of teenagers who've gotten basically tricked into doing this and a little nudge like maybe you want to think about that is a great thing. I have no problem.

1:35:40 - Larry Magid
Yeah, I mean a revenge point, not revenge. Extortion is actually a byproduct.

1:35:44 - Leo Laporte
That's what happened.

1:35:45 - Larry Magid
Extortion a byproduct of this happening. So it's really a way to. And again, it's not censoring, it's not even telling even miners. It's not saying you can't do it. It's saying put some thought into it. And, by the way, here are some consequences, here are some resources, and we go into a lot of stuff. We have stuff on cyber bullying, we have stuff on time management. It's not just protecting you from inappropriate images.

1:36:08 - Leo Laporte
That's great. Good job, thanks. I think that's a really good thing to do. Ryan, you're quiet, you've been sitting in corporate meetings for too long and you're.

1:36:23 - Ryan Shrout
You're too well-behaved for this show Topics shift. Yeah, maybe that is a corporate practice. I have nothing to add here, boss. The interesting what I was thinking about as you were going through that is it's a great use case of on-device AI and the ability to utilize some of these more advanced detection algorithms locally on your smartphone or on your PC or Mac, whatever it is to be able to do all that stuff in real time. It's happening locally, so that it's safe and secure and private that this is happening right, and those kind of match up well with the tenets of what on-device AI versus cloud AI would bring to consumers.

1:37:05 - Leo Laporte
So it's an added measure. It also comes from the point of view of do the least harm, because we know that it's easy to mistakenly think there's nudity in a picture, for instance, and instead of saying sending it off to Nick, they could say there's a naked picture of a child here. It's just nudging. And so I think that that's good, because, I mean, this AI isn't perfect, right, and things happen, mistakes happen. I'm sure there's some false negatives, but I'm sure they're also probably false positives. So you know, it's good to accommodate that in some way that it's least damaging. So yeah, kudos.

1:37:45 - Larry Magid
And not only is it good for you know what you pointed out you don't want to turn someone in for not committing a crime, it's also good from an education standpoint. Look, you can't arrest your way out of all social ills. You've got to educate them.

1:37:58 - Leo Laporte
There you go, Protect the set.

1:37:59 - Larry Magid
That's really profound yes, and I think that's fundamentally the most important thing. Yes, and that's it. Does that, I think.

1:38:06 - Leo Laporte
I like that. That's a very good way of putting it All right. We're going to talk about something Ryan has something to say about, and that is Qualcomm. They had a big Snapdragon event. We had rushed through all the shows just so we could get to this special event in Maui. Did let me ask you, ryan, did they fly you out for this and put you up and all that?

1:38:23 - Ryan Shrout
Yeah, they did. So this was. I talked to them maybe the week ahead of time and I said you know, I left Intel and it was jumping out what's going next? They said, well, we could use some advice and input on how to launch this. Yeah, so the reason I asked it was good.

1:38:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think almost everybody there was in effect paid to attend you. That's fine, no problem with that.

But at the end of the PC world article they have a little disclaimer that says to gain access to Qualcomm's new Orion and Snapdragon Elite platform, Qualcomm offered to pay for PC world for room board and airfare at its Snapdragon technology summit. Pc world accepted but maintained editorial control of its content. I'm not a fan, honestly, of I've never gone on any paid junket for, you know, any of these companies. I think Intel's probably offered, Certainly have been invited to, to a type A for Computex and I don't know For sure, you know, and I never say yes, but it's interesting to see the number of influencers at Apple's events posing with Tim Cook, my buddy Tim.

1:39:36 - Alex Wilhelm
That's just branding right. On the journalistic side, I'm also opposed to junkets because hashtag ethics, but I do have a small modicum of allowance that I'll give because media is so broke. Yeah, and the news the news event was holding Maui, which, you'll note, is not that close to anybody, if they held it in Santa Clarita and offered people airfare there, I wouldn't have as much problem.

1:40:01 - Leo Laporte
Where is Santa Clarita? Is that a real place? Yes, somewhere you don't really want to go, frankly, yeah, okay.

1:40:07 - Alex Wilhelm
No, why not? Why not Palo Alto? We all know where that is.

1:40:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm just saying if it were less attractive of a destination actually Qualcomm's in San Diego, that's a little too attractive. Let's stick with Santa Clarita. And, by the way, if you live in Santa Clarita, nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it. I'm just saying if somebody gave a journalist flight to Santa Clarita and put him up at the Motel 6, I wouldn't have as much problem. All right so, santa Clarita, if people-.

1:40:37 - Alex Wilhelm
Go ahead. There's only 228,000 people there as of 2020 and it is 30 miles northwest of LA. So there you go. Now you know where it is on the map.

1:40:47 - Leo Laporte
I didn't. There is a six flags there. I'm just saying.

1:40:50 - Ryan Shrout
Alex is very good at quickly Googling to stay relevant in what's happening.

1:40:54 - Larry Magid
I love that.

1:40:57 - Ryan Shrout
Well, no, it's the fact that I'm this is a flaw of mine.

1:40:59 - Alex Wilhelm
I'm very curious about everything, and so I'm like that can't be a real place.

1:41:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's just a quarter million people there.

1:41:04 - Alex Wilhelm
Okay, I'm starting to have a little bit of a problem.

1:41:07 - Leo Laporte
Do you think the public knows the difference, though, between I mean, do you think about any more the public cares anymore? The PC world got their ticket punched for this or that? I just Dean and their sister were there and you know. I mean, I guess nobody cares anymore, it's just me, I can imagine.

1:41:26 - Larry Magid
And I was saying I don't think when Harry McCracken was out of their, you know, multi years ago, they would have allowed for that. I also want to point out that. I want to point out that the United States journalists are just about the only ones in the world that don't generally as a rule take junkets.

I've been to many a conference where all of my European colleagues had their way paid and the Americans all paid, paid their own way. So but I think, if someone just pointed out this, may be the way it is now because you know I think, alex, you made the point companies are broke and if they can't afford to send their journalists to cover things, I can understand why they would allow them to take these junkets.

1:42:00 - Leo Laporte
But it's an issue I just hope consumers of tech news pay attention and I mean nothing wrong with that, Justine, I love her, Good friend but you just have to consider the reviews from sources that are paid to go to Maui with that in mind and you know, unfortunately, a lot of YouTubers. I mean YouTube influencers, basically.

1:42:29 - Ryan Shrout
What I think is super interesting about the conversation. I don't think the medium matters anymore, Whether it's written or video or YouTube or.

TikTok or what have you right? And this is the value and the importance of multiple points of view and not just depending on one person or one outlet to get your insights from right, because any given person on any given day can be influenced for any given reason on their opinion. Right, as a when I was independent media like 2004, I wasn't going anywhere if I was gonna pay for it, right. And I do think that there's value to fostering some of these smaller, independent outlets and people to do some of these, you know, to be able to cover these products in a way that's interesting and compelling, and sometimes that means, you know, taking a flight on somebody else's dime to go do it right.

1:43:20 - Leo Laporte
I'll give you a current example. So tomorrow Apple's having a big event. Actually, it's not an event at all, it's small.

1:43:27 - Larry Magid
They're releasing a video.

1:43:30 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, key notes now are just YouTube's.

1:43:32 - Leo Laporte
How might be the following and some people got invitations to watch the video. I am so persona non grata at Apple that they didn't even ask me to watch their video. Then there's others who not only got invitations to see the video but got sent AirPod Max's and Gift Box's. Here's Lamar Wilson, good friend, who is a YouTube influencer two and a half million followers on YouTube. Looks like they sent him chips and I don't know what number seven is, but it's something to drink and he sent AirPod and $550 headphones to watch the video. Here's Lamar Got to have the headphones to watch the video. Yo, yeah, you can. Here's the Gift Box that Apple sent influencers to announce this event. I didn't even get an email, but I'm not but hurt. I'm proud of it because I honestly folks consider when you read reviews of stuff from people who are sent expensive gifts to watch a video, maybe you should consider that and I think and I love Lamar.

He used to do a show on our network and I don't blame him. I don't blame Justine, I don't blame a single person, even PC world for going to Maui on Qualcomm's ticket. But I do think you have to consider are they not influenced by that? Maybe they're not.

1:44:58 - Larry Magid
If I were Lamar and I took all that.

1:45:00 - Leo Laporte
I would have a very hard time saying you know this M3 is crap.

1:45:07 - Ryan Shrout
In my view, this is the benefit of the old guard right the people have been around wrong enough, and by the way we're getting older, I know, yeah, yeah, the old guard keeps getting older and some of us are dying off. It's like you know, you're not impressed by a ticket to an exotic location, or maybe you're like actually I'd really rather have not gone, I'd rather have stayed home with my family. But you know.

I'd rather give information and be responsible for, you know, covering all the products that I need to cover. You know I need to go do some of these things. Maui's an exception to that right, because it is Maui and it's not going to Santa Clara or Kansas City or Cincinnati right, so it definitely stands out for sure.

1:45:48 - Leo Laporte
And it's really sending an influencer a box with goodies in it.

1:45:54 - Ryan Shrout
But that happens. I mean, Did you?

1:45:56 - Leo Laporte
do that in Intel? Did Intel do that Intel?

1:45:58 - Ryan Shrout
does this yeah yeah, of course, of course, of course, when we would send out 300 CPUs for review, they weren't quite as exotic as what Apple had demonstrated there, right, but there'd be, you know, some trinkets, some t-shirts, a stuffed pillow, a one of the chips and a piece of lusite that you can use on your shelf behind you when you record your videos, all that stuff. I mean, when we were launching ARC, they made ARC branded neon lights, right that you could use.

1:46:29 - Leo Laporte
Where's mine? I know you never sent me any of those.

1:46:32 - Ryan Shrout
You wouldn't take it. I'm sure you wouldn't take it even if I offered it to you. Right, you've clearly sent it.

1:46:36 - Leo Laporte
Obviously I have a stabbler's reputation, because nobody offers me bribes of any kind anymore.

1:46:44 - Larry Magid
I actually find it annoying when they send me these Chachkis.

1:46:46 - Ryan Shrout
I've got to do something with it. Yes, you have to do something with it.

1:46:49 - Larry Magid
The product you need to review and it's up to the whole team.

1:46:52 - Leo Laporte
From time to time we have review units. I think Jason Howell got a review unit of the Pixel 8. And I always, we always say we will accept a review unit, we'll hold it for a number of weeks. Please include the return shipping envelope and the return shipping, because we aren't gonna keep it and I think that that's a you know. There's like I'm not me. I don't take nothing from anybody and nobody offers it to me. They don't even send me invitations to watch a TV show. Then there's people who do review units. I used to do that for a lot. When you can't afford to get every phone that comes out, that's not unreasonable. Then there's people who get gift boxes with $550 headphones in it and snacks and I just look. I don't blame Apple or Intel or any other company for doing that. They should do that. I blame the. I blame people who claim to be journalists for taking it.

1:47:44 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, I also think it just goes to show how much power now has been distributed away from traditional media I wanna think of that in a very broad sense towards individuals with large followings and influencer marketing. It's such a big industry. For that reason, the only thing I would kick back on is Ryan said the media doesn't matter at all. I would say we matter very little, but we're trying very hard.

1:48:04 - Ryan Shrout
We work hard. I wouldn't say media didn't matter at all. I hope I didn't say that.

1:48:08 - Leo Laporte
You said something like it doesn't matter, the old timers don't matter, oh oh sure, yeah, Well, yes, anyway.

1:48:15 - Alex Wilhelm
I mean, here we are doing this show right, kicking and screaming, trying to be ethical and trying to have our impact, but I guarantee you that one of those big YouTubers is gonna get more views than we are, maybe by a large number, because, let's be honest, they have slicker, shorter production and we're here on hour two of Twitch still chewing on the important stuff. But I mean that doesn't mean we I am jealous.

1:48:36 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm not jealous of the gifts, I'm jealous of the access that's provided to now YouTubers as opposed to more traditional, and access is a very important part of doing the job.

1:48:48 - Larry Magid
And access has always been something that companies and governments and politicians would dole out. I mean, that's nothing new and there's nothing unethical, as far as I know, about having a politician or a company who wanna talk to you from the standpoint of a journalist. But there are certain people who get one-on-one who's Tim Cook, and there are certain people who don't, and there are very few people who wouldn't want it. So that's much more valuable to me than a $500 headset Absolutely.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
I bought my AirPods Max.

1:49:20 - Larry Magid
In fact, if you get paid by the hit and you get a one-on-one with some senior guy, you could make a fortune on your blog post that you wouldn't make if they didn't give you that access. So it's worth a lot more than $550.

1:49:32 - Leo Laporte
We're gonna take a little break. Let Ryan Schratt do a little celebratory dance you, son of a gun and we'll be back with more. Just a little bit. We won't go into it. We won't go into it. Our show today brought to you by you've seen the signage around our studio. Our great friends at IT Pro TV are now ACI Learning ACI Learning our studio sponsor this year. We thank him greatly and we tell a lot of people we have been telling people since IT Pro started that that is the place to get IT training as an individual or if you've got an IT team.

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Love these guys. They do a great job and that was a paid endorsement. I've been compensated. But if they wanna fly me to Maui, I'm not saying no, I'm just saying that no, we love our sponsors. We're very grateful to them. In fact, this is an opportunity for me to ask you to help us out. You could be a sponsor too by joining Club Twit Now. It's a lot less expensive than you might imagine. $7 a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows. It gets you access to the Club Twit Discord, where there's so much great discussion about everything not just stuff we're talking about in the shows, but any topic nerds and geeks are interested in. It's really my social network. I love hanging out in the Discord.

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Alex Wilhelm is here. No, not yet. Got one more break, right? Yeah, okay, alex Wil. Sorry, they were just asked me to do something, alex. I was gonna put on my squirrel costume for you, alex, but I guess I won't.

Alex Wilhelm from TechCrunch, larry Magged, connect safelyorg and formerly of Intel, now on his own, ryan Schraut. Ryan, I'm so glad to see you again. It's good to see everybody. It's fantastic. You have a unique perspective because Intel has been really, I think, struggling to get their process down smaller and smaller. They've been kind of stuck at 10 nanometers, 11 nanometers. It must have been, despite all of their protestations to the contrary, a bit of a shock when Apple Silicon comes along and gives all this performance at a much lower power. Really great for mobile, something that Intel has struggled with. Intel still powers most PCs by far, like 90% of all PCs in the world. Microsoft clearly would like to have an ARM platform to compete with Apple Silicon. Both in Vidya and AMD have said we're gonna do that. Intel says we're looking at that.

But it was Qualcomm that bought a company called Nuvia, run by former Apple chip designers. In fact, people were so in tune with what Apple was up to that Apple sued them at first. They've dropped the lawsuit, but Apple initially sued them. Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and this was the debut, for I guess this was the debut for what Nuvia was gonna bring to the table. Qualcomm wants to make an Apple Silicon competitor. They wanna make Windows and ARM processors. They make a lot of other things.

Qualcomm has kind of shifted. They were known for so long they had the patents on CDMA. They were known for so long for mobile chips. They started to get into network chips, ai, vision, xr and desktop in the last few years, thanks to their new CEO. They promised I mean I'm watching this presentation some 30% better. They promised better performance than the M2, a four nanometer system on a chip. Lower power, use 30% less power. What do you think? You were there? You were sitting in the audience. Now, I know you got a free ticket to Maui, but I know you're also gonna be honest, You're gonna be honest and I know that it's really interesting because this isn't Qualcomm's first attempt to do Windows on ARM.

1:58:02 - Ryan Shrout
They've actually been trying to do this since 2016, 2017 maybe, and in fact they worked with.

1:58:06 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft on the surfaces the nine and the X with ARM chips and the promised desktop performance and did not deliver.

1:58:16 - Ryan Shrout
They did not. Yeah, and you look back at those older platforms, because this was before I was at Intel. They had very clear advantages in battery life and connectivity. Every device came with LTE as an option and the battery life was amazing. You could finally close the laptop and come back to it three days later and it would still turn on.

But the performance was poor and they found ways to kind of say, oh, we're as fast as a Core i5 in this little environment here and there, but the truth was that the software wasn't ready. You're doing a lot of software emulation at the OS level for different applications and the performance of these, which were essentially trumped up cell phone chips, just didn't have what they needed. So I think they recognized that. They bought Nuvia, like you described, and this is where that reveal finally happened. And the performance claims I told this when I was talking to them. I said I think this is gonna surprise a lot of people. They're not really expecting this.

Christiano at the beginning who's? The CEO of Qualcomm at the beginning talked about single threaded performance, faster than the fastest Intel mobile processor today and faster than the M2 Max. Now devil's in the details a little bit, because those were single threaded results and when they went to go compare to multi-threaded results they kind of changed what the comparisons were. So that's why you said they're 30% faster than an M2 in that multi-threaded test, but not faster than an M2 Max. That would have that would have beat it out. But their justification for that right is that they were comparing kind of like for like system configurations and pricing and everything that goes along with that.

1:59:57 - Leo Laporte
So but if you know You're a master of benchmarking. I mean, that was a lot of what you did at PC perspective. Yeah, they used. It was hard to tell because it was such fine print, but I learned later geek bench right. Yes, Was that an appropriate use for the single core?

2:00:12 - Ryan Shrout
anyway, I think if you're trying to pick one test, geek bench is probably as good as you can get, because it encompasses lots and lots of subtests that kind of all add up into one score. Now they didn't show me all the subtest scores and I kind of poked on that a little bit because you know you could have one or two sub scores that are really, really high and maybe that offsets the average score or kind of the calculated total score. But we'll get that soon enough.

2:00:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, but, by the way, that's what was my first thought too, when they say things like and this is one of their slides best in class CPU performance, 50% faster, peak multi-threaded performance versus M2, or yeah, we don't have any efficiency cores, they're all performance cores, and we speed step them up to 4.3 gigahertz. So when I see peak, I'm thinking, yeah, that is not sustained speed, this is-.

2:01:09 - Ryan Shrout
They did let people see the hardware tested in real time. I was gonna say they let people test it, but they didn't actually let people test it. They brought you into a room and they had a person there with, like here's the two laptop form factors they had. And you know, look, we're using the real software, we're just gonna hit start and it would generate the result. So I have reasonable confidence in the performance numbers that they showed and that they talked about, but I'm you know, I think there's still a lot more testing to be done, a lot more applications to look at and things.

2:01:40 - Leo Laporte
And we know they made these claims a year ago and didn't deliver. So I'm a little skeptical, let's say skeptical.

2:01:49 - Ryan Shrout
I think skepticism is fine, right, I'm like I want them.

2:01:52 - Leo Laporte
I would love it if they came up with an ARM based processor, I would as well. Windows on ARM ran as well. For instance, as Windows on ARM runs on the Macintosh running parallels that would be great.

2:02:03 - Ryan Shrout
Yeah, I think they would be hard pressed to walk back this performance that they have now and all indications that I see from talking to other press and analysts that were at that event that you know have. I just came back into the non-working at Intel game a couple of weeks ago, right, and so they've been talking to more people in OEMs and everything else seems like it's going to live up to that, and so now the question becomes like what do they do with it? Right? Are they going to get the right systems built with the right partners to really have an impact?

2:02:35 - Leo Laporte
They had Microsoft there, they had Lenovo there, they had HP there. Of course, all of them make Windows on ARM machines. Now that are kind of suboptimal.

2:02:45 - Ryan Shrout
Yes, yeah, it won't be, we won't know, until the summer of next year.

Right, this is going to be a while yeah, I mean before we have systems in like reviewers and consumers hands. That's going to be my June May, june. Timeframe. Copy text is a good indicator of it. They'll probably start marching out more performance data and more design win information and really talking about what the devices are going to look like. And it's not a coincidence, right that you know they wanted to get this information out before Intel 14th gen processors launched, before Intel Meteor launches before the M3 comes out, before the M3, which is tomorrow, almost felt like quick get this out.

2:03:29 - Leo Laporte
I mean they can't possibly have worked that way. I mean no, I mean they've planned.

2:03:33 - Ryan Shrout
I mean you have to plan that event.

2:03:35 - Leo Laporte
And nobody knew about Apple's event till two weeks ago.

2:03:37 - Ryan Shrout
So yeah, correct, if anything. It felt to me like the Apple event was just like oh, we have to go respond to something on this.

2:03:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So they showed slides, almost Apple-like slides, without much access, information or zero points, comparing both to Intel's i7, i9 and Apple's M2. Yep, I have. The numbers look good, the memory bandwidth looks good, the power usage looks good. They're going to have Wi-Fi 7. Of course, they're going to have great radios. That's what Qualcomm does.

2:04:10 - Ryan Shrout
There's an interesting part about that, though, is these Snapdragon X Elite parts do not have the Wi-Fi 7 or the 5G modules integrated on them. They are separate modules, so that is a shift from what they've done previously. Like, before they called it, they always connected PC right, because they really leaned into that cellular connectivity, I noticed as I was listening to the presentations. It's like it didn't really see much about it, and when I finally asked, it's their separate modules right, so we will have to choose to include them.

2:04:43 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting because I've seen OEMs kind of stop putting cellular radios in their laptops as if people didn't want them, and I guess maybe if you're already paying for connectivity in a phone, you could hotspot, I don't know. I guess the market told them.

2:04:58 - Ryan Shrout
If you've ever had a cell phone or a laptop with cell coverage, with cellular data, you don't go back Like it feels bad to go back.

2:05:06 - Leo Laporte
You're always connected it just simplifies everything. Yeah.

2:05:10 - Ryan Shrout
But I think the hurdle is really the carriers, and what are they charging and how do you have to sign up and is it more complicated and those types of things? But then it also Qualcomm can probably charge. They can cut down on price quite a bit to these OEMs and say, hey, if you want to offer a 5G model to this, you could do so and charge whatever extra you want.

2:05:30 - Leo Laporte
But I've often wondered why PC manufacturers backed off on that, even Microsoft, and I just assumed to all they figured there's no market for it, but it's the cost.

2:05:40 - Ryan Shrout
Well, if you look at how they did it originally, like it was well, think back to the iPad right, the iPad LTE. You were paying what $150 more for the device.

2:05:51 - Leo Laporte
And $10 more a month Cellular connectivity.

2:05:53 - Ryan Shrout
Yeah, well, $10 more. Yeah, I mean, your watch cost $10 a month.

2:05:59 - Leo Laporte
How did you know? Pull up Twitter.

2:06:03 - Ryan Shrout
The idea that you would have to pay $150 to get this extra kind of connectivity Extra kind of connectivity you may or may not be using all the time. I think it put a sour taste in people's mouths, and that same thing happened in the PC side.

2:06:15 - Leo Laporte
Alex Wilhelm, if you want to call Uber Eats, you go right ahead. I see my club I see you complaining and discord that you're hungry. Do you want a power?

2:06:25 - Alex Wilhelm
bar. No, I am very hungry but I can't eat. People, I'm recording because then I will spit food, and also I can't eat before I record because then I sound all raspy. Oh, leo, but we'll wrap this up.

2:06:35 - Leo Laporte
This is my exercise in me. We'll wrap this up. I know you're bored by all the CPU stuff. I know.

2:06:41 - Alex Wilhelm
Absolutely not, absolutely not. What I am is jealous because I just checked in, my MacBook Pro that I'm on has an M1 Pro and now M3.

2:06:49 - Leo Laporte
Now I'm out of date.

2:06:50 - Alex Wilhelm
It's too better, too better and that's much better, so I want it. But on the always on connectivity thing, I was a big fan of the direction we were going for a while and having laptops and everything just be connected to cellular networks. I haven't really thought about it much lately because Wi-Fi is so ubiquitous now and I wonder if that's the thing that really precluded.

2:07:14 - Ryan Shrout
I still think it sucks, as somebody who just has been traveling recently, like every airport makes me. You know I got to watch some 60 second ads before I can get there.

2:07:21 - Leo Laporte
Oh, plus security issue of getting on these open access points and yeah, you guys leave the house, you see.

2:07:30 - Alex Wilhelm
Oh, I now see you're a problem. Yes, I've got gigabit Wi-Fi here.

2:07:34 - Larry Magid
I don't find tethering to my smartphone to be that much of a pain point.

2:07:37 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I don't know what you're doing, you don't do it enough. Yeah, I find the network.

2:07:42 - Ryan Shrout
Sometimes it doesn't. It's yeah, it's odd.

2:07:46 - Leo Laporte
What about every day? What about NVIDIA and AMD? Because the clock is ticking. Qualcomm got an extra year. They didn't do it last year. They're going to get an extra year, but NVIDIA and AMD both say they're going to do these kinds of, you know, high speed, low power chips.

2:08:06 - Ryan Shrout
So I read the Reuters news and kind of some of the coverage afterwards. This still kind of surprises me a little because If you're in video it makes great.

2:08:18 - Leo Laporte
Like the Tegra was a really the X one was sure they stop. Yeah.

2:08:23 - Ryan Shrout
Right, yeah, and like the PC business. So if you're in video, you're a trillion, one point, trillion, what one point? Whatever trillion dollar company, are you really eager to get into a market that is, by all accounts, shrinking and low margin? And you know you are already filling up your orders at TSMC for fab space with GPUs you can sell for $10,000 a piece. If you really want to sell $180, you know, processor, I am quite sure that they're experimenting with it all the time, right, that there's a design team building something that's got, you know, their own integrated GPU in it.

That would be fantastic. And you know, maybe they put it in laptops, maybe they're putting it in handhelds, like the Steam Deck or you know something like that. Maybe it's for the next Nintendo, maybe it's for the next PlayStation handheld. You know, I don't know. And I'm sure AMD is doing the same. Even at Intel, they have teams that are looking at arm based designs, risk five based designs all the time. So I wonder how much of this is maybe over. Reading more into that than that is necessary. I would be fairly surprised if these actually came to market, because, to your point also this this isn't until 2025 that this would happen, right?

2:09:37 - Leo Laporte
Because of that's such a great insight. This is why I'm so glad to have you on this week, Because I don't. I didn't really think about it, but you're absolutely right that the real market is in automotive AI, perhaps XR, and mobile, not desk, not desktop computing.

2:09:57 - Ryan Shrout
Yeah, or even like laptop computing. Right Did Cristiano did?

2:10:02 - Leo Laporte
did Amon, their new CEO, who really, it is said, took Qualcomm from being a mobile radio company to being this, like Nvidia, this powerhouse in all these areas. Did he maybe make a strategic mistake focusing so much on desktop?

2:10:21 - Ryan Shrout
I don't think so because of their partnership with Microsoft, right, if you. If they didn't have that support, I think this would be a non-starter, right. But their, their move of they want to go from what he says is a communications company to a compute company. That means, you know, I don't want to just make modems that eventually Apple's going to displace me from. I want to be in as many different things as possible, right, and the XR headsets and the partnership with Meta is critical to that. These laptop chips and the partnership with Microsoft is critical to that.

And they don't. You know, the edge compute kind of having a lot of AI acceleration at the edge, I think is going to be really important from them. What they don't play in right now is a server, the data center space. That was one of the things they talked about when they bought Nuvia, but you know, clearly not going to happen so, or at least not happen anytime soon. But I, you know, I don't. I don't think it was a mistake. I think this is they've got 0% market share, much like AMD, right. Every point of market share they take from Intel is a net positive for them. It's billions and they're smaller companies Like Intel is worth 10 times as much as Qualcomm, probably, and they don't need that frustration maybe.

2:11:28 - Leo Laporte
What is Intel focusing on? I mean they. It's interesting. We've talked quite a bit about this idea that they've gone from being an integrated processor company, where they both design and build, to two different companies a design company and a build company. In fact, at one point they said we someday we'll make Apple's chips too, which everybody thought, wow, okay.

2:11:56 - Ryan Shrout
And that's, that's Pat's vision, right, pat?

2:11:58 - Leo Laporte
Gelsinger came in as CEO.

2:11:59 - Ryan Shrout
He came in with the idea of creating a US based foundry company that all the top, you know that with leading foundry technology that Nvidia and Apple and Qualcomm and everybody else uses. I think that's still their, their vision for what? What Intel is?

2:12:15 - Leo Laporte
The geopolitical timing was good because we we want to reduce our dependence on China and there's a lot of concern about Taiwan. Of course, Apple's chips are all made by TSMC. Who makes Qualcomm's chips? Is it TSMC? For the most part, Yep. So, they're all made in Taiwan and everybody's looking at diversifying out of China, so maybe this is a real opportunity for Intel.

2:12:36 - Ryan Shrout
It is. If they get the technology, if they get the process nodes right. There's no reason why Nvidia and Qualcomm wouldn't want to go do that right. They love everybody, no matter if you're a consumer or if you're a company who's buying something. Competition is good. It's going to drive better, better technology. It's going to drive better pricing and that's what they. They want to see competition for TSMC there. So there will always be this kind of being a proponent and supporting Intel in this endeavor, but they're not going to, you know, sacrifice their profitability for the benefit of Intel, or even, you know, patriotism, really.

2:13:10 - Leo Laporte
I want to take a quick break because Alex is starting to faint and I don't want to lose him at this point. No, I'm just teasing you. But we will come back. And, Alex, I have an assignment for you. We got quarterly results from pretty much everybody in the tech industry and I know you follow this closely. I do not. I want you to summarize all of the Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Google. Tell me what it meant. But first, hey, you know we have a great promo to watch. Let's watch it together.

2:13:48 - Larry Magid
Welcome one, Welcome all to our attempt not to break out of an escape room but to break into a box.

2:13:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh, something happened, isn't it? It's a magnet. Oh, this is so good. Oh, I am so impressed. Does he usually take this long? No, yes, yes, now reveal the key. Yeah. Previously on twit twit news, you've been watching our live coverage of the Snapdragon Summit keynote, in which Qualcomm announced in a very big announcement, the new Snapdragon X elite processor and its Orion CPU, claiming a performance better than Apple's M2 processor. Tech news weekly.

2:14:44 - Alex Wilhelm
Talking with Stu Tartarone, who is the principal member of technical staff at AT&T. Why are we talking to him? Because he was there when the first cell phone network was brought online 40 years ago. We went out and we did a very professional market survey.

2:14:59 - Larry Magid
The conclusion was that there was no market for this type of technology Back in 1973.

2:15:05 - Leo Laporte
This week in Google, do you know?

2:15:08 - Larry Magid
that I was once named one of San Francisco's 100 most eligible bachelors by San Francisco oh my hold on.

2:15:15 - Leo Laporte
How is that not on you sing, okay. How is that not on here? Oh, no, it is on the card. Oh, I'm sorry, I brighten about formerly one of San Francisco's 100 most eligible bachelors. Wait, do we have this article somewhere?

2:15:29 - Alex Wilhelm
Does it have like a?

2:15:30 - Ryan Shrout
fun photo of you, I twit.

2:15:33 - Larry Magid
Does it have like a?

2:15:33 - Ryan Shrout
list of the things you like to do Talk about moral panics.

2:15:38 - Leo Laporte
He likes long watches, walks on the beach. I hope you watched our shows this week and I hope you will watch the shows next week. By the way, if you don't subscribe to the newsletter, it's free and it's a great way to keep up on what's going on on the network Twitter TV slash newsletter. If you would like to subscribe, all right, just a few stories, but since you're so hungry, alex, I loved this story. Apparently, there are restaurants all over the country named near me, like. Here's an example Thai food near me. And you immediately got what they're trying to do. They're trying to fake Google, because how many people do searches for, oh, I don't know, thai food near me, or Dennis near me, notary near me, plumber near me, businesses across the country. This is me, asado, writing at the verge pick names meant to outsmart Google search. Okay, did it work.

2:16:36 - Alex Wilhelm
No, I mean, this is kind of brilliant, but I didn't think I was going to see the day when SEO went IRL.

2:16:43 - Leo Laporte
Yes, SEO IRL. That's exactly right. Danny Sullivan, who runs a you know search communications for Google, said no, don't get your hopes up, it's not going to make that much difference. But hey, at least they got their picture in the verge and that's. That's better than better than nothing. They say they did get a initial bump. The problem is, of course, people search for Thai food near me in many places and the way the near me algorithm works. That isn't just the name of the place. Danny Sullivan, when asked, does it help? I doubt it, said I doubt it. Owners doing this might find success, but Google pulls in other data to serve results to users, like location reviews or ratings. A quote hodgepodge of different things that are out there, and just the name by itself is probably not enough. Nevertheless, I am going to change the name of Twitter to a podcast near you.

2:17:46 - Alex Wilhelm
What I loved about that verse story was when they were doing some tests they were like Googling for this like Wisconsin and couldn't find it, but when they're in New York they could, or something like that.

2:17:54 - Leo Laporte
There's a funny geographical element to it, yeah it's Google's got is they have ways, they have ways. So Google had a good quarter. 71% of their revenue comes from advertising. That's actually down A little bit.

2:18:10 - Alex Wilhelm
So the Google or alphabet, earnings run down in a nutshell is they were ahead on both revenue and profitability compared to street expectations. But Google cloud, its cloud platform, didn't grow as fast as expected and that's in the stock price down.

2:18:26 - Leo Laporte
So the market punished them, they punished them. I love.

2:18:30 - Alex Wilhelm
I mean the market also has awarded them a more than one trillion dollar valuation, so they're hardly in the stocks.

2:18:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, microsoft also did not do well in cloud. I thought they did well in cloud.

2:18:42 - Alex Wilhelm
No, they did. They did do well on cloud. They also beat on revenue and earnings per share and their cloud results came in a little bit better than expected.

2:18:48 - Ryan Shrout
faster growth rate that I think was 29% for the Azure and other bucket they're like I was gonna say, their surface group was down 22% or something like that, I think their product. Yeah, but all PCs.

2:19:01 - Leo Laporte
as you pointed out earlier, ryan, all PCs are down.

2:19:06 - Ryan Shrout
After the boom of COVID, where PC market took off, everybody got a computer, I guess, but it was interesting right, because the OS group said that they were back to pre-pandemic levels of PC sales, the software division where they were going to spend Windows. Is that a leading indicator, maybe?

2:19:24 - Leo Laporte
people are. Oems are buying Windows licenses because they're going to put them in machines that they're going to sell. Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah. So maybe that's an indicator that the PC market will pick up as soon as those Qualcomm chips come out. How about Amazon? They had a pretty good cloud quarter. I imagine they're the winners in cloud, aren't they?

2:19:44 - Alex Wilhelm
They're the market share leaders, but the growth rate of AWS is in the kind of low teens now, if I recall correctly, and that's quite a lot lower than we're seeing from the smaller players. So I would say Microsoft continues to consume share. I would say Amazon's basically defending share and then Google Cloud to distant third and everyone else is dying. We're going to wind up in kind of like not a duopoly but kind of an oligopoly of hyperscale cloud providers and I think it's pretty clear that's going to be Microsoft to Amazon at the top and then Google kind of running third.

2:20:13 - Leo Laporte
How about Meta? Did Meta have a good quarter?

2:20:17 - Alex Wilhelm
If my memory serves, they did. I think advertising results were a little bit better than expected and in fact advertising results across kind of all the major tech companies were pretty strong. One thing I didn't see coming five years ago was that Amazon would become a leading provider of just advertising and Microsoft has its own ad products, and pretty much everyone but Apple is the way it kind of feels right now, but I'm sure they'll get into the game. But I just I think it's weird that I'm talking about tech earnings and ads are as big a component as we thought, because I mean, frankly, does anyone like them?

2:20:49 - Leo Laporte
No, and what's interesting is podcast advertising is tanking across the board. Gimlet's gone, WNYC's pulling back so many podcast networks and Spotify, which made a huge investment in podcasts, is now saying no, no, no, forget podcasts, it's audio books. Yeah, that's it Audio books of the future.

2:21:07 - Larry Magid
So yeah, good luck competing with Amazon on that, yeah.

2:21:11 - Leo Laporte
I think Amazon pretty much owns that. You know the thing about Meta.

2:21:15 - Larry Magid
Meta is actually rehiring. I know somebody who got laid off from Meta back in the big layoffs and then just got their job back. I don't know how common that's going to be, but Meta had 23% growth.

2:21:27 - Leo Laporte
And again, as you said, alex, in ads, profit doubled Boy, you wouldn't expect that from Meta. Well, you know they made the big bet $10 billion a year bet on mixed reality, on Quest. But all of this money is coming from Facebook, instagram, whatsapp, yep.

2:21:47 - Alex Wilhelm
Turns out, the core business at Meta is fantastic. They have a great model. It has grown forever. They are massively profitable and they can afford to have the world's most expensive hobby, which is there. You go Pissing away 10 billion on VR. Shout out to them, though, for keeping it up. I mean, if it wasn't for Meta just hosing money into that area, what would we have?

2:22:09 - Leo Laporte
Not much. Well, we might have Apple. Apple seems to be spending some money. Of course, we're going to be covering the Apple event tomorrow, 5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern. That will be midnight UTC, and it's some speculation. This is Apple's first prime time event Now. Admittedly, it's just a TV show. They're inviting a very small number of people to an event in New York. I think the same people got that box.

2:22:40 - Ryan Shrout
But most it still feels weird. Yeah, and this is during Monday night football, on Monday night football against prime time.

2:22:47 - Leo Laporte
Why would Apple do this? And I think it was. Maybe it was Neil Appetel or John Gruber. Somebody speculated this is a test, because the next big event, the one that Apple really cares about, is just a few months off. It's the Vision Pro headset, and they're trying to figure out should we do that in the daytime or should we make a big prime time splash out of this? And so that actually makes sense to me. Will you watch an Apple video in the prime time when football is on?

2:23:21 - Ryan Shrout
The question is who is who going to watch it? Are they trying to get mass audience, like general consumers, to watch?

2:23:27 - Leo Laporte
these videos. We know they're going to have the press, no matter what right. Yeah, they're going to get Lamar Wilson, no matter what.

2:23:35 - Ryan Shrout
I would say going to telling the mass audience, the mass market, that you want to sell them. I don't know, forget how much it was $3,500 headset is maybe not ideal you want. Maybe you want to filter that through somebody, maybe you don't want to filter that through press and maybe that's why they would want to go do it directly.

2:23:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly this is the. It was Alex Krantz at the Verge. Apple's getting ready for prime time. She's managing editor of the Vergecast. It does kind of make sense, if you. If I mean these events are now for consumers, right, if Apple can get consumers excited about a product in the reality distortion field and these are beautifully produced, really nice events maybe they should do it in prime time.

2:24:24 - Larry Magid
Their announcements are basically television shows. Yes, federal, yes, certainly since the beginning of the pandemic, and you know I would sometimes go to Apple Park. I haven't lately and I feel, except for that two minutes of hands-on you get after afterward, or the remote chance of running into Tim Cook, I just assume. Watch it on my screen.

2:24:44 - Leo Laporte
I think what it'll be interesting to watch for and I encourage we'll be. We'll be doing it, michael, michael Sargent and I and Alex Lindsey, and I think he's going to bring some office hours people with him as well. We'll be watching it tomorrow on the stream, but I bet you there'll be some production value to this. This will be more like a TV show there. You know it's. They're tying it into Halloween, you know, celine.

2:25:09 - Larry Magid
Dion as a pumpkin.

2:25:10 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, something's going to happen, huh.

2:25:13 - Larry Magid
Maybe you can watch it. Maybe you can watch an Apple TV plus yeah, one with you can you already?

2:25:18 - Leo Laporte
can we know that? That, by the way, they'll stream it? They do always stream it on Apple TV plus, so I think it's kind of interesting. I don't know, maybe I'll watch it in my living room. Yeah, on your big screen. The magic.

2:25:30 - Alex Wilhelm
The magic is gone. Like these videos are well produced, they do have high production values, but I just can't tell you how much I don't care. Yeah, like I used to never miss a minute of an Apple keynote because it felt very important, and now it's just a collection of of bright, happy, shiny people just telling me stuff that's been well-versed. It just it just feels much more like an infomercial than a technology keynote and I know that sounds like a fine line and I'm kind of being old, funny, dirty about this, but I just I just don't care as much and I wonder if, going back to the earlier point about media versus influencers, if they're just not targeting us anymore.

2:26:06 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm just not there. I think it's clear and I and I also don't think they care that much about influencers. I think they care about real people and they want to create. They want to see if they can create buzz.

2:26:16 - Ryan Shrout
It was. It was it was clearly a direction in my time in Intel that our goal was to talk directly to the consumer.

It's a little bit more difficult for Intel because, other than box CPUs that you build a desktop out of, we don't actually they didn't actually sell things to a consumer, right, they sell to OEMs and then OEMs have to build a machine to do all that stuff. But there there's definitely the idea for marketing departments that owning the relationship to the end consumer is incredibly valuable and a lot of times if you've got snide comments coming from reporters and media and even influencers right, maybe that's that's, that's not important anymore. I think that's exactly right.

2:26:53 - Larry Magid
At the risk of being a snide a reporter, a snide reporter. I'll go up Alex one, I don't care largely to give you the exception of once in a while, like Vision Pro. The announcements are boring. Do I really want to look at the latest and greatest iPhone, which is only slightly later and greater than last year's latest and greatest iPhone, in most of these announcements these days? Because these industries are so mature, these product categories are so mature that the improvements are so incremental that they're not that exciting to write about or to cover.

2:27:24 - Leo Laporte
You, you just prove. Ryan, right, they don't. They don't want to go after you because that's all you're going to say. Is you're going to snark and groan and moan and say it's just like another iPhone. What's the big deal?

2:27:35 - Larry Magid
They never seen an iPhone before. Sure yeah.

2:27:38 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, that's right, that's right. See, you say, oh, they don't, they don't want to start, but the snark's valid, it's because, like well, of course it's true. Of course it's true. Sorry for advocating for the truth.

2:27:49 - Leo Laporte
Leo, I'm over here. I'm over here caring, but I think I think Ryan's right that the companies want to disintermediate. They want to go direct to consumers is, and if you get a chance to have an hour ad in prime time, that how many people watch? These 10 million, 20 million people watch. That's valuable.

2:28:07 - Larry Magid
You're not even paying for ad time for this, so what you're really saying is that Tim Cook doesn't do as good a job on us with the reality distortion field that Steve Jobs did, so he's got to do it on the public. I think that's true.

2:28:18 - Leo Laporte
I'll be into it, I think. I think, um, I think Tim Cook, I think Steve appealed to us. Yeah, absolutely, and he was a master of it and we loved him. We ate it up and we, we got sucked in by the. I personally got sucked in by the reality distortion field. Every damn time, every time I know Tim is not. And, by the way, remember last time Apple's event, they had a skit with Octavia Spencer. See, I think you're going to see more of that, I don't. It's not going to be Tim Cook on the stage, it's going to be entertainment. I think you might see celebrities, you might see skits. I think Apple's trying to make a prime time TV show. I agree with Alex.

2:28:58 - Alex Wilhelm
We'll see Do you know that? Wait, wait. So you're telling me, leo, this is going to be a worse version of SNL.

2:29:03 - Leo Laporte
Yes, oh yeah, cause the Octavia Spencer skit was ledden. It was terrible Like.

2:29:10 - Alex Wilhelm
SNL is funny Only half the time. Apple's going to be funny 0% of the time, especially when, when they try to produce shows, you're not allowed to criticize China or AI, as John Stuart learned the other week.

2:29:21 - Leo Laporte
Do you want to guess how many people watched Apple's events? An Apple event last year on YouTube? 30 million people watched Apple's event on a phone event last year. Brands numbers, that is friends.

2:29:33 - Alex Wilhelm
Numbers, that is friends the only the only brand that can compete with that is Elon Musk's brand and his Legion of Fins who do turn up for things. I mean we, we, we stark again. But Elon does have a massive following and when he, when he does like Tesla owner's day and people show up in their Teslas to like beep, that's true speech.

2:29:52 - Ryan Shrout
He's got stands.

2:29:55 - Alex Wilhelm
Absolutely. I mean that's, that's rare, like name another brand that actually meets, meets that level of of consumer love. I mean Disney maybe.

2:30:06 - Leo Laporte
That's guideline, chili. Don't make him hungrier than he already is. He might eat the microphone. Is it the bingles or the bangles? The bangles.

2:30:13 - Alex Wilhelm
Bangles Like dangly ears Is that? Is that what it is? Okay?

2:30:18 - Larry Magid
I want to create a bumper sticker for Tesla owners which says I bought it before I know what a jerky I've seen that bumper stick.

2:30:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh, how many have done it. They've done it. Yes, oh my.

2:30:27 - Larry Magid
God Shoot, there goes my fortune.

2:30:30 - Leo Laporte
That's Larry maggot Connect safelyorg. He's president and CEO there at Larry maggot and all the platforms. Always a pleasure. Larry's been a good friend for years, In fact you and. I standing in front of down there at Erba Buena center when Apple announced the iPad in 2011. I remember that Yep, you and I sitting on lawn chairs.

2:30:53 - Larry Magid
I think. I think when they announced the advocacy, we were, we were covered. That was the last event.

2:30:57 - Leo Laporte
I was invited to. By the way, ryan shroud, so good to see you. I welcome you back from the dark side. You are now once again in the light and if you want to come back and do this week in computer hardware, you let me know. Cause, all right.

2:31:12 - Ryan Shrout
I appreciate it. You're the best. Glad to be back. Yeah, glad to be back.

2:31:16 - Leo Laporte
It'll be fun, but yeah, yeah go have a nice heap and bowl of five way skyline chili.

2:31:23 - Ryan Shrout
I got to drive across the street to it, I guess now, yeah, oh man.

2:31:28 - Leo Laporte
And you know you didn't say walk and yeah right, you, alex Wilhelm, you, you go down to the East and walk down to the East end and have a giant hamburger. I'll be thinking of you. Alex Wilhelm writes a tech crunch. You do the podcast too.

2:31:42 - Alex Wilhelm
We should give you credit for that, oh yes, if you want to hear all the adventure, capital tune into equity, available on all fine podcast platforms everywhere. Now I appreciate you will give me a pat on the head equity a fine podcast featuring Alex Wilhelm.

2:31:56 - Larry Magid
Leo, can I do a? Can I do a quick picture of my new podcast? Oh, you have one too. It's called are we doing tech right? Oh, wow, and we are interviewing all sorts of people, including people like Vint Cerf, and we're going to be having more cute Al Gore trying to look at all the pioneers and tech to figure out what they all did right or wrong, and then another folks as well. So we'd love to have folks tune into that.

2:32:20 - Leo Laporte
You already had Vint Cerf on. We already have.

2:32:23 - Larry Magid
Vint on. He's great. We already interviewed Leonard Kleinrock, another one of the. You know we're talking to a lot of people talking to Al Gore in a couple of months about.

2:32:35 - Leo Laporte
You know how he invented the internet and this is through connect safely, but I'm sure you can get it wherever you. You get your podcasts. Are we doing tech right? So there's equity. Are we doing tech right? And, Ryan, what's the name of your new podcast?

2:32:52 - Ryan Shrout
Uh, uh uh, TB TBD. No, nothing, yeah you son of a? Yeah, of course, Of course, yeah. The the Cincinnati Bengals football podcast.

2:33:03 - Leo Laporte
Yes, hey, it's great to see all three of you. Thank you so much for a great episode with lots of insight. It's nice to have smart people on the show. Have a great, great evening, alex. Enjoy your your time with your beautiful baby.

2:33:19 - Alex Wilhelm
Oh, no, I missed that she's asleep.

2:33:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh, all right, Well, get out of here.

2:33:23 - Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, I got out of here.

2:33:24 - Leo Laporte
No, get out of here, go have a hamburger or something, go live it up. We do twin every Sunday two to five PM Eastern time. That, no, I'm sorry, western time. Pacific time, that'd be five to eight in the evening. On the East coast it's 2100 UTC, but I shouldn't say that because we are currently on summertime. Starting next week we're back on standard time, so we will be at 2200 UTC. 2200 UTC you could figure out what that means in your neck of the woods. I know UTC doesn't change, but we do so.

If that's and I only say that if you want to watch it live, which really a small number of people do the live stream is at livetwittv. You can listen or watch. There's live audio and video, and the reason I say that is sometimes people like to interact with us either in the chat room on our club, twitter, discord and I'm paying attention to both, and that's nice and that's a good way to kind of give us some feedback. So if you want to do that, do otherwise. It's a podcast. You can listen or watch whatever you want audio and video available at the website, twittv, or on the YouTube channel dedicated to this weekend tech that's video, obviously or subscribe in your favorite podcast catcher and then you'll get it automatically as soon as it's done, just in time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you for joining everybody. We will see you next time. Another twit is in the can!