TWiT 1048: Tiny Steering Wheel - Unpacking Google's Antitrust Ruling & AI's Impact

[00:00:00] It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech. Alex Wilhelm is here, Harry McCracken. We have a lot to talk about from the big decision in the anthropic lawsuit by the book authors. The Google penalties are here. Was it a slap on the wrist? Will Google appeal? And some iPhone 17 speculation. Actually, in this case, it might actually be real. All that more coming up next on TWIT.

[00:00:29] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1048. Recorded Sunday, September 7th, 2025. Tiny Steering Wheel.

[00:00:52] It's time for TWIT. This Week in Tech. The show we get together with my favorite tech journalists to talk about the latest tech news. Joining me now, two of my great friends, Harry McCracken, the technologizer from FastCompany.com. Longtime observer of the tech scene. It's great to see you, Harry. Welcome. Hey, Leo. Good to be here. And I thought, since I got Harry, let's get one other and we can have a little threesome. That didn't come out right.

[00:01:20] Alex Wilhelm is here. He is, of course, also a long time buddy from TechCrunch days. Then he went to this week in startups and started his own newsletter, Cautious Optimism at cautiousoptimism.news. And still covering the stuff. You've always had a little bit of a financial bent to your coverage though, right? Oh, absolutely. I'm just really touched, Leo, that when you think of the word threesome, I'm the first name that comes to mind.

[00:01:48] Trio. Should I say trio? That's maybe a better... Maybe a menage a trio, perhaps. A menage a trio. Okay, good. Triumvirate. Triumvirate. Perhaps even a trivium. Oh, wow. Go team. We're getting Latin now. It's going to be a long show, everybody. It's going to be a long show, everybody. Step in. I actually was torn over the top story.

[00:02:08] There's some big ones, but I think we've got to say that Judge Ahmet Mehta's decision, which finally came down a year after he ruled that Google was in a monopoly, the penalty phase finally completed a little late. He said he'll finish by August. I think he came out September 2nd with his decision, and I'm really fascinated by what you all think about it. I could tell you the stock market loved it. Google went up.

[00:02:36] This is from CNBC, 8%. I think it ended up being up 9% by the end of the day. Apple also went up because Judge Mehta said Google can continue to pay Apple and Mozilla and Samsung the billions of dollars they pay them to be the default search engine. Google does not have to sell Chrome. Google does not have to divest Android. In fact, Google pretty much doesn't have to do anything.

[00:03:02] The only thing he said is, well, those exclusive deals you make with handset makers. You know, handset makers can use the open source version of Android for free, but if they want the Play Store, and of course they all do, Google had required them to also use Chrome as the default browser to ship with Chrome and to have Google be their default search engine. And those exclusivity requirements apparently are not to be continued.

[00:03:31] Of course, I'm just imagining this, but I can imagine the boardroom with the Google lawyers all sitting around hearing this judgment and giggling wildly and then composing themselves and saying, should we appeal? As far as I know, they have not yet decided to appeal. Is that correct? That's to my knowledge correct. The statement they put out after this was pretty anodyne.

[00:03:59] And I think it's because you're right, Leo, they pretty much got the best possible result. Now they didn't win every single thing. There were a couple of wrist slaps in there, but to me, it was pretty much a nothing burger, a disappointment for folks who were concerned about Google search monopoly, especially companies like DuckDuckGo were pretty annoyed. But I'm really curious, Harry, what you think about the data sharing elements of this, because that's slightly more technical than I tend to get.

[00:04:21] And so I'm not sure if the requirements for Google to share a little bit of search data are impactful or if that's more of a thing that looks good but doesn't actually carry a lot of substance. I thought it was pretty intriguing, but I don't pretend to fully understand its impact. I'm not sure if the judge fully understood it. So I'm sitting around being curious about it.

[00:04:43] And once again, being, I guess, not disappointed isn't the right word, but I feel like I've spent my entire career waiting for some big antitrust decision that actually does have seismic impact on the industry. And it seems like they all fizzle out eventually, like even the Department of Justice versus Microsoft 25 years ago. At first, they were talking about about splitting up Microsoft and that that ended up being more of a wrist slap like this as well.

[00:05:13] And Harry, you're a historian. And this is what I love. One of the reasons I love having you on, as I remember, but correct me if I'm wrong. The judge on the Microsoft case was forced to recuse himself. And at that point, Microsoft got together with the DOJ and they worked out a consent decree, avoiding most of the serious penalties. They worked out a deal, which I guess did have some impact on Microsoft's interactions with the companies that was selling Windows, too.

[00:05:40] And, I mean, ultimately, the world changed a lot shortly thereafter. But it wasn't so much because of this agreement. It was because the web and then smartphones came along and controlling Windows and controlling the PC platform turned out not to be a great way to control the world. And, in fact, if Microsoft had moved past Windows even a little bit more quickly, it might have been in better shape.

[00:06:06] And you might even argue that the stuff they agreed to do helped nudge them in the right decision direction, rather. Judge Mehta did say that there will be a five-person committee overseeing Google for the next six years, which is kind of like the ombudsman that Microsoft was forced to accept in its consent decree. But it's unclear, A, what power that committee will have and what they'll be watching for.

[00:06:33] We should make clear when we say sharing data, it's not sharing our data. It's sharing search data, the spidered stuff. And it is with, according to Judge Mehta, quote, qualified companies. Qualified competitors. I think I heard from a number of competitors who say, well, that's going to help us a little bit. People like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and others. Yeah, and in all the instances where Google likes to talk about how open it is, the search stuff has kept very close to the vest forever.

[00:07:02] So, sharing any data, I don't think it's something it would choose to do on its own. No, it's their secret recipe. It's their Coca-Cola. You know, it's in the vault. The seven herbs and spices. Yes, it's their seven herbs and spices. Should we explain to people why that matters, Leo? Just so people understand why people can't. Well, if you like Kentucky Fried Chicken, it really comes down to, it's just flour, but it's the seven secret herbs and spices that make the difference. They actually have special plants at the KSC factory that no one else has.

[00:07:31] That's why they're secret herbs. No, but in the case of search data, why this matters is if you have a lot of usage, which you purchase via exclusive deals, then you get a lot more information about what people are searching for, allowing you to make a better search product. That's really a good point. It's not just the page rank anymore. It's also the feedback loop that users create. And the argument was you can't break in because if they're going to buy all the search traffic from Apple, then DuckDuckGo can never get the same sort of information advantage.

[00:07:58] And therefore, their flywheel fails, whereas Google gets more and more powerful and strong. So the idea is, at least in theory, by sharing some of this data, then other search engines will have a chance to compete more effectively with Google. So I think it's going to be a small point. But the thing is, do you guys use Google that much anymore? I feel like I'm slowly transitioning. I think that's if you're going to give Judge Mehta a pass, and some people are not willing to give him a pass.

[00:08:21] He even spanked the Department of Justice saying they overreached and asking me to order them to divest Chrome, which is true. It's very hard to imagine. We've talked about this, how you would divest Chrome, what that would even mean. So he was pretty critical to the Department of Justice. They basically got nothing that they asked for. But what Judge Mehta did say is, hey, I did rule him a monopoly in August of 2024.

[00:08:49] But he said, the emergence of AI has, quote, changed the course of this case. And I think he kind of, in his mind, realized that just like with the Microsoft case, times had moved on. And maybe he didn't need to spank Google because, in fact, Google was going to be in a fight for its life. Remember Eddie Q from Apple coming up on the stand and testifying, A, if Apple lost its 20 billion, that would be a big problem.

[00:09:17] But that Apple had considered creating its own search and nothing was as good as Google. They wouldn't be able to compete with Google. Google's dominance is pretty clear. But Q also said that that is not going to hold forever, that AI, generative AI is changing the landscape. In fact, you see Google adding AI. They just added something, a new thing beyond the AI assistant. Ah, yes. Yes.

[00:09:47] The Google AI chat thing, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to log in for some reason with my Workspace account to see it. But it's google.com slash AI, I think. And, oops, let's see. Yeah. I played with it. And I was very impressed with it. It's different. The AI assistant is awful. In fact, I've heard some people say, you don't, you don't, oh, no, I guess it is now my regular account.

[00:10:11] They said, you don't really want to, Google's harming the world with this AI assistant because most people think that's what AI is like. And it's so terrible, so bad that they're assuming AI is worthless. On the other hand, this AI mode, which is basically Google's top models in a deep search mode, is actually very good. I thought very good. Competitive with things like perplexity and others. So they can't send people to it, though, en masse, because that would undercut their profit source.

[00:10:41] So right now, they're stuck giving you a really crappy patina of AI on top of your standard search. And then over there, if you open door number two, you have an entirely different and better product. But they just don't want to flip everyone over. And this is the innovator's dilemma, I think, has spelled out in real time for Google forced to defend a legacy revenue stream in the face of a new technology. But maybe the judge was right. I mean, maybe the judge, you know, he's certainly getting a lot of heat from some quarters saying, you, this is a slap on the wrist. You didn't do anything.

[00:11:12] What do you guys think? Was this, is it, let me ask you first, Harry, appropriate decision? Well, yeah, I don't see, like, how forcing them to sell Chrome would solve much. And also, who would be all that interested in paying enormous amounts to Chrome? Chrome is mainly of value if it's operated by a search company that has a large advertising business. And splitting it up certainly would have been harmful to Google.

[00:11:42] But whether it would have clearly made the world a better place for consumers, I think, is very unclear. And I wrote about that when that first came up as a possibility. I do think that, like, over time, the market changing so rapidly tends to do a decent job of policing things. Because even the largest, most powerful companies, if they do rest on their laurels, they get into trouble. And we've seen that over and over again.

[00:12:11] And there's at least some possibility that not only Google, but kind of all of the incumbents may run into trouble with AI now. Because in almost every aspect of computing, AI could change things pretty quickly. Okay. I do have to point out, though, that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, all have other revenue streams. So they can spend vast amounts of money training AI models in a way that companies like OpenAI can't.

[00:12:40] I mean, they are spending it, but they have to do that on the pleasure of venture capitalists. The models matter, but so do the products built on top of them. And some weird ways it's harder to build a good product than to spend billions on training models. Right. Which is using others' models, but has really become a premier example of what you can do with orchestration. There's also the emerging issue, and we talk a lot about it on our AI show and Intelligent Machines,

[00:13:08] that maybe the large LLMs are not the only way forward. That these, you know, the Chinese have smaller models. There's interesting models out there, interesting ways of doing it besides transformers that are also proving to be very powerful. So maybe these giant incumbents don't have a huge advantage. What do you think, Alex? Is the judge, was the judge lenient? So I think the judge was probably correct in the state of the market today. But what I hate is the fact that everyone says, and I'm sympathetic to this argument a little bit,

[00:13:36] because I do talk to a lot of people who are pretty deep in the tank on the financial side of tech, that technology fixes things. You know, if you have a product that takes over the market, eventually it'll get beaten by something else. So therefore, why do we need antitrust protection? Well, because we need a trust for monopolies. That's the point is that monopolies get so big, so dominant, that the market no longer has any impact on them. They own the market in effect. Right. But in Google had that for a long time in search. And then in the end, they were slowly taken over by something else, you know, 15 years down the road.

[00:14:06] And some people want to say, great, everything worked out really well. But they have monopoly for a long time and they illegally held it. And it turns out the punishment is if you can keep the case far enough away long enough, eventually you'll get saved by someone trying to take your lunch money. But the market was still impacted for all those years by an effective monopoly player. And that, to me, should come with stiffer punishments. So it's fine to say that today we don't need to take a stick to Google's overall corporate structure because they're being challenged by open AI and anthropic and perplexity.

[00:14:34] And over in China, moonshot AI, Z.AI, DeepSeek, et cetera, et cetera. It's amazing, yeah. But what about 20 minutes ago? It pisses me off about this. I feel like people are saying that because ShoutGPT is challenging them now, nothing else matters. And to me, that's freaking bull crap, I think, is the appropriate twit way of saying that. It's also, I mean, in a lot of ways, I've been more bothered by Google's position in advertising than its position in web browsers or search or mobile operating systems.

[00:15:03] It does have a big competitor in meta, but Google has been extraordinarily powerful when it comes to determining. How advertising gets bought and placed and how much it costs. And forcing them to sell Chrome might have had an indirect impact on that because they have that power in part because they're able to direct eyeballs to that advertising.

[00:15:28] But I don't know how and when that changes, particularly given that the chat GPTs and perplexities are a very, very far way away from monetizing through advertising in the way that Google has monetized through advertising for like 25 years now. So to be specific, because there's some question in our Discord, our club members about what's going on with the data sharing. The DOJ asked for one thing. The judge decided something a little bit different.

[00:15:56] He rejected the DOJ's proposed data sharing remedies. Google will be required to share something called DocID, unique identifiers for each document in the search index, which can be used to retrieve the documents from the index without performing an actual search. The DOJ, the DOJ, the DOJ, the DOJ, the DOJ data, and that user side data should include, but not be limited to the time when the URL was seen, last crawled, the spam score.

[00:16:24] Basically, these are valuable little signals about the search index. uh it is not one time there there will be periodic releases of this information i believe eddie q and duck duck goes gabriel weinberg uh and chat gpd's nick turley all testified uh citing them the court said receipt of this narrowed data set will still enable rivals to

[00:16:51] overcome the scale gap by allowing them to build a competitive search index more quickly when it is robust in volume freshness and utility um so basically the judge said well if you still want to do a search engine in this era of ai search uh we're going to make google give you some stuff but i think the judge kind of felt like it's not going to matter that much because uh ai is happening of

[00:17:18] course it is open ai it was one of the companies that was celebrating uh this information uh to answer the question about how often does google have to share the data periodically in short no the doj wanted google to share its data periodically the court rejected that saying that the qualified competitors will receive only a one-time snapshot of the relevant data uh so that's interesting it's just enough to kick start their own efforts

[00:17:47] that doesn't sound about that valuable no what a disappointment i feel like this this i keep trying to find some way to not get mad about this because i'm trying to be less mad about everything all the time it's good for you yeah yeah that's well i feel like my cortisol levels were just too high and uh this tech will do that to you not helping not helping at all it is kind of incredible that a year ago we were looking at one particular set of of remedies and now we're here it's like being invited to a lunch and then arriving and being handed one crouton and a small cup of water and being

[00:18:16] told that you should be very very happy no rubber chicken for you something yeah now remember google has been found to be a monopoly not once but twice another court the earlier this year found uh google uh guilty of a monopoly in online advertising yeah judge leonie brinkham of the u.s district court for eastern district of virginia now judge judge brinkham is going to uh now enter the penalty phase

[00:18:41] so uh in fact i think really this is where google is clearly predatory in the market because they are both buyer and seller they they own both ends of it and everything in the middle as well and uh i i can see them being ordered to split off some advertising capabilities that kind of thing does this play does this play in the eu problem so uh i think it was yesterday the eu announced

[00:19:08] they're going to find google three and a half billion over i think playing both sides of the ad market and trump's very mad about this because i don't know doesn't like rules uh i think i think the president's point of view is if we're gonna spank big tech it's our job not your job right and that's the thing because if the if the deal if we're going to be having this case right discussing at the national level is google being unfair in the advertising market and the eu says they are and then we're like no they're not it feels a little bit contradictory to me in a way

[00:19:37] that makes my head spin and going back to my cortisol levels very mad uh google was fined uh this week three and a half billion dollars by the eu over their ad tech uh but here's the problem of course they're still in trade negotiations with the eu and trump is waving tariffs over their heads saying no no maybe not uh so it'll be interesting to see he's gotten the eu to back down

[00:20:01] in other areas i apparently got the uk to back down on asking for data from apple so although we don't know that for sure because all we have is a tweet okay but like are you surprised that the uk government was trying to get an american tech company to backdoor its operations and not just not just for uk citizens but for americans as well you know i mean i think that was a little that was a bridge too far well everyone knows that if you open a secure back door for one

[00:20:28] government no one else can ever go in it's closed for everyone else 100 safe um trump called the move discriminatory and threatened to open a section 301 trade investigation to nullify the unfair uh penalties so that one's up in the air the block uh gave google 60 days to propose how to resolve the inherent conflicts of interest so google is not out of the out of the woods by any means but i think

[00:20:54] they they can i'd be surprised should they appeal this i mean if they appeal it then it goes on for years and they don't have to do anything is there a risk though if they appeal it that the the appellate court might say no in fact we're gonna make you sell chrome after all it must be a huge relief to them i think they're celebrating they uncorked some champagne and apple is probably celebrating as

[00:21:19] well yeah 20 billion a year for they're not going to be forced to give up that relationship that's right i mean there there is this thing that google can't buy exclusive placements um but you know at least for now i think apple would prefer to have google as the default search engine regardless of of how much money is involved just because it is the world's default search engine and that that might change at some point but it's not well let me show you how to the next year or two how dominant

[00:21:49] google is uh neo win uh just published an article from stat counter showing how overwhelming chrome's market share is it is climbing it is now 70 percent of the desktop browser market we say desktop because obviously iphone is a safari browser and so forth but on the desktop safari is third with 6.4

[00:22:12] percent microsoft edge is second 11.8 percent wow google has 70 percent of the market then there's firefox opera and the rest are you know de minimis tiny i'm glad that firefox um has not been forced to give up its relationship with google because that that would put them out of business i think yeah and the world is a better place because firefox exists for sure i imagine

[00:22:38] uh the judge considered that as well you know you would be putting one pretty much the only other competitor to a chromium-based browsers out of business the it's estimated 700 million dollars google pays every year to mozilla for being this default search thing is it's only a setting in all cases you can change it right yeah i mean i use coggy as my default search engine uh although i i do find myself going to google for some stuff and um actually like on apple devices

[00:23:07] i'm mainly in safari using coggy but i'll flip over to chrome partially partially because google is is uh there's default there on apple devices you have to actually install the coggy plug-in right which is a little bit of a clue choice yeah they have a very limited set you were you're raising your hand you don't have to raise your hand alex you could just i'm learning how to not interrupt people leo this is oh my i'm learning

[00:23:34] patience and and calm but harry i'm very curious what what are the searches that you currently go off of kagi is it kagi or kaki k-a-g-i you pronounce it any way you want kagi okay um the well there are there are certain things like google books where there's not a kagi equivalent but i also find that um uh in cases where you actually want an enormous number of results because you're

[00:23:59] looking for something incredibly obscure um with kagi you'll get fewer results which are often enough but in cases where i really want to see everything google will give me more results and in some cases that is valuable it's interesting because i start with google i used to start with google and then i would switch to uh gpt like it's now five but now i'm kind of like a gpt5 first person it's pretty good it's search because they've added all of these ais now have added the the component to add search

[00:24:28] to the llm and i do use i do use gpt and clod but i don't really trust them so like i i use them as step one but then i still have to verify anything they tell me with with an actual search engine which is usually either kagi or google but when it doesn't matter you don't have to check them so last night i was playing hear me out last night i was playing satisfactory which is a factory building game lovely game yes i'm uh i'm breaking my factorio addiction at last thank

[00:24:55] you it's basically factorio in 3d so it's it's fun right but it's a you have to like actually like hunt things it's it's a whole i know leo you're a big crafter um enshrouded guy but for me it's kind of new um but you can get these recipes these alternatives and i was trying to figure out what to do and i literally just hopped on to chat gpt i'm like all right all right you know uh cast screws or quick wire and it broke down for me like you know units per minute and the community

[00:25:22] expectations and i was like all right all right cool cool i'm not gonna check any of this i'm just it's useful it's okay for that it's it's like when i'm looking for actual facts that need to be correct i'm still still friendly when you're gaming yeah but by the way microsoft is building copilot into xbox so you will have that availability in your does anyone like copilot no

[00:25:46] there's a story that just came out the uk used office 365 copilot m365 copilot and found no noticeable productivity gains and i for one am shocked that if you take a tech stack and just slather some ai over the top of it nothing changes doesn't improve anything shock uh i'm going to show you a little trick uh henry uh henry uh harry if you go my son's name is henry if you go to kagi.com and you click the drop down you'll see they have a thing called the assistant

[00:26:10] which is their version it's like perplexity of orchestrated ai and they have every model a really broad broad number of models that you can use uh and so what they're doing is taking kagi search results and then using these llms uh as the back end for it and i find it's very it's very useful i really like it you could see i was trying to see there's a big uh trend right now to ask chat gpt what

[00:26:38] the emoji is for seahorse and it goes crazy i don't have you seen this no show me all right let me go to chat gpt what i was doing with kagi is trying everybody to see uh you know who had so this is what you get if you uh is there a seahorse emoji yes there's a seahorse emoji and then it shows a horse and a wave technically it's this one right here horse wave but wait that's a horse and a wave not a

[00:27:03] true seahorse this is the thinking going a little overboard but there's no official dedicated seahorse emoji in the unicorn standard yet if you're trying to capture that adorable twisted tail sea dwelling little wonder you've got three playful workarounds now that's 4-0 if you actually ask five it's even crazier yes there is indeed a seahorse emoji kidding the real one looks like this and then he gives you a fish no that's a fish the actual seahorse emoji is nope that's a dragon here it is at

[00:27:29] last a true hippocamp of unicode no wait it's that fish again found it fish okay okay i'll stop trolling you the actual seahorse emoji is and then it's a wave still wrong straight answer and it goes on and on and on again finally says leo i've completely tied myself in knots want me to show you the actual unicode code point for the seahorse emoji i didn't dare ask it for more because there is none

[00:27:55] i just got a similar response and i just said yes and now it's going oh man poor thing it keeps going crazy yeah the nice things about kagi is that um it's so customizable that it has all that stuff when you want it but you never feel like it's forcing you down a particular road and you know kagi is interestingly at the point you remember this harry dvorak used to come on and say back when alta vista and excite were the big search engines he said here's how i find out if

[00:28:25] you're really a geek what's your favorite search engine if they say google i know they're a geek well we're now at that inflection point i think with kagi because more and more the the really smart people i talk to because for i started using kagi two years ago you pay for it and i thought i'm a little outlier and over the last two years more and more people like you harry saying yeah i use kagi so that's so maybe we're going to get alex in the fold soon too yeah no i'm actually i'm on the side right now looking at the pricing page as you say this and it's relatively affordable i mean

[00:28:54] i pay 25 bucks a month for the full 25 well i'm just doing the 10 plan yeah well you can start at five bucks i think yeah but there's no ads so you got to pay them and this is the thing people have kind of started to grok on the internet is you either pay for it or you're going to be your data is going to be mined or in google's case uh you know you can't really avoid it if you

[00:29:18] use crumb but i will say leo you're very good at at using your money to vote and i think that yeah i try to do that uh and i think everybody all of us if we can afford it should do that because you need to send a signal that this is the right way we don't want the and some and i think it's a good time to start worrying about surveillance capitalism in an era of ai because it just puts it puts surveillance and steroids right it makes it even you guys know flock security

[00:29:46] right yeah the the company so i had i had their ceo on the on twist and this is before the latest reporting about the company came out and how they're a bit entwined with the security state and i was really trying to push him on you know cameras in public and cameras on roads and such and he had an argument that i couldn't fight back against he was like well the state owns the road so they can take pictures with malix and i was like yeah fair enough but i do think that we need to have something

[00:30:13] at the national level to set guardrails to protect our privacy because as it is right now and where it is going we're not going to be able to be private citizens for very much longer and i don't mean to be alarmist but the pace at which we're adding cameras and intelligence to those cameras does actually make me worried and i try to not panic about things but i think it's a legitimate concern for the next five or ten years we need to fight this probably now or we probably won't be able to and but i don't have a whole lot of faith that anybody in the federal government is going to solve any of that

[00:30:43] because they a they have a long history of talking about solving privacy problems and not doing much yep and b just just with the current administration and the house and the senate um their instinct is not is not to regulate their instinct is not to regulate no and they want to have an imperial presidency so i think it's probably both things they don't want to regulate and they want to arrogate to themselves and let's your authority at the executive branch it's about the unitary

[00:31:07] uh presidency is what it really is uh by the way i hope you asked flock because you know it is a combination of cameras and and uh license plate readers so absolutely he's right purely in the academic sense it's completely legal these are not public these aren't private roads these are public roads that you're using that's why you need a driver's license regardless of what the sovereign citizens movement says uh but they were giving that information to not only to law

[00:31:36] enforcement but and ice but it was also being used by law enforcement in for instance in texas to track a woman down who left texas where it's illegal to have an abortion to get an abortion in another state and they you they were using flock data to track her down in this other state and that's where yeah it may be technically legal but is it right or is it a huge invasion of privacy

[00:32:00] and then it's the state not the federal government but a state using flock data to enforce their laws in another state um i'm like a political transformation leo um so i went through my teenage libertarian phase as i think a lot of young men do it's either that or nihilism so you know okay good then i i pivoted to that later on oh and then i kind of came around to being an obama liberal for lack of a better phrase

[00:32:26] kind of like free marketing but let's try to help people that's what your friend jason uh calacanis says uh they're all obama democrats now in the white house i'm not sure i agree with that's that's i hard disagree with that but jason and i are on here's the way i put it i'm the token liberal on twist and he is the token liberal on all in yes that's a good point that's where we sit um but what i've learned

[00:32:52] through the trump administrations one and now two is that if you have levers of power in a government that can be used for good then when you lose and the person you don't agree with comes into power they turn those levers into wrenches to hit you with and so ironically or maybe not ironically but maybe positively i think trump is actually making me more of a libertarian because what i don't want is for the executive branch to have so much power because i would like to not worry about flock safety i would like to not worry about encryption being undermined i would like to not worry about being

[00:33:22] surveilled all the time and well we've given we now have such tools for surveillance that we've never had before you know giant databases ai to search those databases and an infinite amount of compute the the world has changed dramatically in 50 years and all that power is very scary uh and and probably shouldn't be in the hands of somebody who wants to uh abuse it we have to take a

[00:33:46] break but we will come back uh you've got alex wilhelm on the left okay my crossfire i'm such a capitalist but i'm still a lefty yeah i'm not gonna put harry in the right on the right but he is on the on my on my right uh you're right actually my he's on my left so that's what's really confusing and i'm in the middle that's for sure on either side uh actually i'm not i'm probably more liberal and leftist than

[00:34:12] you are alex but uh let's have a left off it'll be fun i'm covert uh not so good word let's take a break we're gonna talk more uh actually an apple event is coming up tuesday it's awe-dropping which i contend is the worst name for an event ever apple you could do better you really could uh but we'll we'll get to that in just a little bit our show today brought to you by zscaler

[00:34:35] the leader in cloud security ai is fascinating in business because it is both a huge threat ai is being used by hackers to breach your organization faster than ever right it's also a boon an incredible boon ai powers innovation in so many companies and drives efficiency so on the one hand it helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective

[00:34:59] attacks you know phishing attacks over the over encrypted channels increased by increased by 34.1 last year and i think this year it's going to be double that and it's it's fueled by the growing use of generative ai tools they're now these phishing attacks are so you know used to be able to say well is it grammatical because and because they weren't they were terribly written now they're flawless

[00:35:24] indistinguishable from the real thing thank you ai but yes thank you ai organizations in all industries from small to large are leveraging ai to increase employee productivity they're using public ai for engineers with coding assistants right the marketers are using ai for writing finance is creating spreadsheet formulas automating workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams

[00:35:49] they're embedding ai into applications and services that are customer and partner facing ultimately ai is helping companies move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage but companies really have to think about how they protect their private and public use of ai right you don't want to accidentally exfiltrate proprietary information just because the ai is helpful you also have to start thinking about

[00:36:13] how you defend against ai powered attacks well there is a tool that does both zscaler zero trust plus ai ask stephen harrison he's got a tough job he's cso of mgm resorts international i mean imagine he says with zscaler quote we hit zero trust segmentation across our workforce in record time and the day-to-day maintenance of the solution with data loss protection with insights into our applications these

[00:36:41] were really quick and easy wins from our perspective traditional firewalls traditional defenses perimeter defenses and then the vpns you need to get through them and the public facing ips that creates exposing your attack surface none of this is is protecting us in the ai era it's time for a modern approach with zscaler's comprehensive zero trust architecture and ai that ensures safe public ai productivity protects the

[00:37:09] integrity of private ai and stops ai powered attacks thrive in the ai era with zscaler zero trust plus ai to stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve learn more at zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security thank you so much for their support of this week in tech

[00:37:36] so i actually read the zscaler earnings call uh when it dropped just because i'm an enormous dweeb and i really do think that cyber security is going to become one of the biggest winners of the ai boom because no one knows how to keep it secure like prompt injections and yeah data leaks that's right it's actually a really big and interesting problem so while we talk about ai often the kind of enterprise productivity or consumer search context i think companies like zscaler and i would even throw in like your octas and a lot of other firms in there crowd strike they're going to be feasting for years

[00:38:05] if i was a an active investor leo i think that's actually a place i would be exploring just because i think it's interesting i know i completely agree with you especially as we start to use agentic browsers we've already seen this happen you know with comet which is from perplexity where people can hide a prompt in invisible text that that that suborns the ai you don't see it but the ai sees it

[00:38:28] reads it and starts acting evilly or even fooling the ai agent into buying stuff with your credit card number and then sending it to a bad guy that's even more complex than stuff that i've seen which is that these uh agentic browsers don't have a good gut check for what's a fake site and they're going to write you know buy a leo lepart software.tumblr.gif and then you you know get exactly stolen hey i got

[00:38:52] you a free copy of windows how'd you like it i would thank you so much is it windows vista ultimate i don't know but it's good install it right now uh iphone uh 17. we think we don't know but the rumor mill by this time two days before the apple event usually is pretty well stocked with good rumors four models a slim iphone we don't know the name iphone slim iphone air we don't know an iphone 17

[00:39:22] an iphone 17 pro and iphone 17 pro max uh a korean carrier may have leaked the specifications ahead of the event this happens pretty regularly so if you care you can see how much memory will be available you can see the the cost in korean one i don't know what that translates to i haven't spent the time you can see the screen sizes the processor speeds and the battery sizes according to this anyway it's a

[00:39:51] rumor 8k video support for the pro models uh specs for the 17 air which has of course as one would expect a much smaller uh battery size 2800 milliamp hour battery uh size compared that's to 3600 for the 17 nothing incidentally if this is a true uh spec sheet it is going to be the name the air

[00:40:16] that will that confirms uh that name big screen 6.6 inch screen bigger than the 17 pro just a little bit smaller 17 pro max so uh it'll be interesting we'll see we'll find out more we also expect we're seeing rumors ming chi quo who seems to be a pretty good supply chain rumor guy says apple will do air pods 3 at this event on tuesday not clear what features there are some health features we think

[00:40:46] in the new air prods include air pods including perhaps a heart rate uh monitoring sensor power beats already have those so i think that's not too far uh a reach there's also a new chip which they say will improve sound quality connectivity and yes noise cancellation uh ink looks to me like an incremental improvement rumor is there will be a new apple watch ultra as well the ultra 3 are you excited about

[00:41:16] that alex that was my sarcastic about all this slightly bigger screen it's much bigger great uh pretty much the same processor all right yeah it's i guess it's hard to get too excited about this i mean look at harry's face is that a man bursting with excitement and ripping his credit card out and racing to the apple store to camp out because he has to get the iphone 3gs harry didn't you used to

[00:41:39] go to these apple events on a regular i used to see you there right i think you're muted harry did we mute him i hear nothing the show is now much worse yeah i got muted and i have no idea how we did it apparently sorry i've been to a zillion apple events that's true and there are years where i am kind of ready to whip out my credit card like last year when i saw the camera control the i like that button

[00:42:07] i agree that that when i saw that that that was a strong incentive for me to actually buy one i haven't seen anything this year that gets me that excited partially because um it's the camera stuff and long battery life that does um speak to me and the air it'll be intrigued to see what they do with the air but it sounds like it's not going to have great battery life and then it's probably not going to have their top of the line cameras um i did this week last week rather in my plugged in newsletter

[00:42:37] for fast company i wrote about foldables which i am excited about and uh that sounds like we may see a foldable iphone next year um and even in fact the the thinking is that that new air i'm going to call it the air now since that leak seems credible uh is thinner as part of the process of designing a foldable that isn't you know they tend to be very thick this is the latest samsung galaxy fold and it's so thin

[00:43:05] because the two to two halves are much much thinner and so apple obviously apple's going to take advantage of everything samsung has learned they're going to use a samsung screen in the foldable i wrote about the uh honor magic v5 which um in one certain color and if you're not counting the camera bump it's the world's thinnest foldable by 0.1 millimeter um which is not not a huge achievement except it does

[00:43:35] feel really great in the hand and uh yes designing a good foldable is is almost like designing two extremely thin smartphones and then putting a hinge in between them and so anything apple has learned from the air would be totally applicable to a folding iphone um yeah this is my question it it feels like apple's rushing to do a folding phone of course we don't know apple doesn't say anything this is all

[00:44:01] rumors because these folding phones sell so well they don't sell all that well uh that's what i thought it's like 1.5 percent of the market and unless they get radically cheaper they're not going to be they're two thousand dollars roughly yeah and i can't i can't imagine that apple is planning to sell one for way less than anybody else right um i'm still excited though i'm just just in terms of it

[00:44:26] being a genuinely new experience and some of the challenges folding phones had six years ago when they first came out have been resolved and uh and apple would not be rushing in because these things have been around for years and yeah they've been able to learn from from the mistakes uh samsung and others have made and i think apple does have the opportunity to um do some deep thinking about the software side in ways that might see and that's the thing that's what excites me because unlike android

[00:44:53] yes i have a little campfire burning in my it's cute i like it yeah unlike android uh android apps really don't arts don't scale well to the that's why android tablets don't really take off to the bigger screen but apple's got the ipad apple has a beautifully scalable operating system and so i think that they could potentially really take advantage of that screen real estate in a way that android does not yeah the one thing that disappointed me a little bit about the honor phone is that

[00:45:23] very few of the third-party apps i tried seemed to be aware they were running on this form factor that there's kind of got larger um but like you say anybody who's designing apps for apple devices so has a long history of of different screen sizes i put pokemon go on the samsung galaxy fold as you can see it doesn't understand oh now i'm getting a message it doesn't understand that it's on a bigger

[00:45:49] screen so it actually it zooms it out and it's the edges are getting cut off it's not it's not taking advantage of the size oh that's terrible yeah so it's basically just a zoomed in version of the game and most apps either do that or they have borders around them they just whereas i don't think you'd have that problem on an apple uh designed os i don't think google i mean google has done some good work with with folding interfaces honor the honor phone comes with a ton of honor apps which do take

[00:46:17] advantage of that screen and apple would have the opportunity to take all of these iphone apps and rethink them to provide value by by doing things like having sidebars um and other elements you can't really do on a conventional iphone because by definition a conventional iphone you're talking about a single stack of elements right and on a folding phone you can start to think about columns

[00:46:41] well actually uh speaking of which meta weirdly has released an instagram ipad app for the first time in years no they've they've they refused for the longest time you had to look at it as a as an iphone app a little tiny part of the screen ironically at the same time as apple is going to release ipad os 26 which actually allows you to actually use that little screen as a window um but they are using the

[00:47:09] the kind of the additional uh real estate to do kind of like that columnar thing so you have your menu bar here you have the the same vertical reels or pictures there but you also now have comments on the right side and it fills the screen nicely and i wonder how much of that is meta saying well i think for the folding phone we better get ready to have instagram ready uh to use all of that real estate that might be them actually saying that i like that i like that theory leo but i want to loop

[00:47:38] back to the price point about these folding phones because i feel like somehow we blew past the moment in which phones cost more than laptops and i don't think we talked about that enough and now you can get a brand new macbook air for 999 yeah and i definitely have bought phones that cost more than that and it just explodes my head because the phone is such a worse computing experience all it has is the ability to make phone calls which my laptop can almost do so it feels a little strange to me but i think the point

[00:48:06] about the folding phones be more expensive is more about raising the ceiling for what a smartphone can cost versus apple trying to actually sell a lot of phones at that particular asp uh price i think they want to raise the their overall asp mix and make it seem like a 1400 iphone is cheap because compared to the 2000 iphone it's it's a gosh darn bargain so to me it's more of a signaling point about pricing than an attempt to actually i think get all of us to buy these folding phones yeah i couldn't be too

[00:48:35] cynical i mean i think in a way that the price that matters is the price of the foldable minus the price of the most expensive iphone up until now and and the delta and a certain number of people who are willing to spend 1400 on an iphone will be willing to spend that much for you know they'll pay 2000 or 2200 or whatever it is but also the fact point i never thought i would say this alex but you're getting old uh when you started you were in your 20s

[00:49:04] when you started on our show i was that was like 24. you were just a kid but you're now officially old because what you don't recognize is that for a lot of people in the younger generation the phone is their computer i don't believe that they're not buying it can't be true they're not buying a laptop and a phone they're buying a phone and so that's i think the market and doing what because all of their computing is done on this so they need the bigger screen and they're willing to

[00:49:30] spend laptop prices for the bigger screen look at the ipad i spent three thousand dollars for the ipad pro and keyboard it was let me stop you right there leo oh i'm sorry pokemon go has started again you spent three thousand dollars on your ipad and i think i think that makes you the unique apple customer in the world because someone has that's what they cost no they do not cost if you buy an ipad pro

[00:49:53] and you buy the keyboard for 250 dollars well i love it it because and here's why this is my point for many people including me and i know for harry it's their computer so they're willing to spend the money because that's your prime right perry that's your primary computing device i remember spending a lot but i don't think i spent three thousand do you do you have two terabytes or one terabyte yeah i got

[00:50:17] i maxed it out of course i scrapped i just had one terabyte when i was a child which i never have filled even one terabyte so i but i thought oh this is going to become my primary computer yeah you know when you buy a desktop you put you put two terabytes of storage on it routinely right computer yes because i'm going to put i'm going to do all my photography on it i'm going to put all do video editing i need that i never used it but i need all that room what's the rationale so leo how

[00:50:46] much value do you think you've gotten out of that per dollar spent compared to if you had bought a map no no no no no no you should never ask that question and by the way i also bought a map pro i get a lot of value out of my ipad you use it as your primary computer right if you do yes i mean if you divide the price i paid by the number of hours yes i spent with that mostly doing work um it was a lot of money but it was not uh an extravagance and i do feel like i should

[00:51:12] speak up for phones they're they're not worse devices than pcs um they have all these sensors that that laptops don't have uh they have way better cameras they can go anywhere with us gps gps they're always connected i feel like if you give them a folding screen you get back some of that real estate that that's nice about laptops while keeping all the things that are that a phone can do that a

[00:51:38] laptop cannot do and that's that might be end up being worth a fair amount of money and i i'm after having used this honor and uh thought about the galaxy fold and the new google folding phone i am you know i'm at least intrigued and i'm at least tiptoeing up to that moment where i whip out my credit card even if i'm not quite there yet if i end up being wrong about this and and the big phone lobby ends up being correct because that's all a tablet is just a phone that didn't have a

[00:52:03] zentic you know like i mean so wrong you're so wrong all right all right i take it back i only spent two thousand four hundred ninety nine dollars on my ipad pro at two terabytes and all that so 20 but still more than a macbook right i spent that minus the two terabyte upgrade right okay and by the way i now and harry you were the first person i ever saw to sit at the twit round table with an ipad as

[00:52:31] your primary computer and i admit perhaps of being a little i've been i've been doing this since 2011 yeah 11 11 that's a long time so but lately with the ipad pro and the improvements they've made to the operating system and the improvements in software uh like the rss reader i use uh i use the ipad pro probably more than my much more than my macbook pro it's become my primary pc

[00:53:01] so you were right harry you're just ahead of your time i was right all along yeah as usual and i think the phone for a lot of people is takes has that role as well the phone becomes everything it's your camera this is how you lose digital literacy people think like oh the kids these days are good at computers they're not because apparently they're all on their tablets and how are you kids gonna use emacs without an escape key i don't understand it i'm a parent now i get

[00:53:27] to say kids these days because i'm literally raising them sir i've earned this right i am blood sweat tears and crap and diaper pails so i get to talk about the kids and i'll just say this harry does tend to be right about things yes and harry does tend to be a tablet guy yes um but i do think that this is one place where he is incorrect and i i will die on this hill if i'm the last person on the tablet suck hill with my ipad pro out of batteries in my backpack right in touch it in six freaking

[00:53:54] bajillion months yeah well by the way 13 hours just sitting at that ipad pro just keeps on going apparently we have to charge it if i if you know what i can do with an etch-a-sketch leo i can look at an etch-a-sketch for 20 000 hours without a battery recharge and it still gets as much done as i would on an ipad pro i've actually been a bit disappointed with the battery life of my newest ipad pro which is you're using it more um no i'm using the same it's the 13 inch and i had the 11 inch before and i kind of by the way wonder what the best screen that apple makes right it's a very

[00:54:22] nice screen it kills the battery but it is i'm also spoils you i see me one of the few people who is skeptical about the ipad os well that i was asking multitasking interface which um i am slowly getting used to but i didn't really ask for it and i would have been i think just as happy if it didn't exist or or if at least if they hadn't gotten rid of the split view and the slide over and in their rush to make an ipad more like a mac which i acknowledge is going to please a lot of people and

[00:54:50] probably help with ipad sales yeah i'm kind of with you it gets in the way uh you know how often does a window open not full screen yeah i don't yeah i don't i don't like overlapping windows i don't want to manage windows because we're used to using full screen ipad apps really every moment every moment i spend screwing around with windows is a moment i've lost to actual productivity well we'll see it's coming out uh probably uh at the same time as the new iphones come out and uh

[00:55:18] i think we are at the last public beta version which i think was beta 6. so uh if you're using the beta you probably are using the final version both on the iphone it's probably not going to change a whole lot more mac apple tv apple watch everything yeah vision pro can i ask one more question about this before we move on because i i haven't actually honestly my ipad has been in my backpack and just sitting there for a long time it has the the the fragmentation of apple's operating systems into mac

[00:55:45] os ipad os and and uh what we have on iphone is that leading towards a point of harmonization or are we going to end up still running down multiple tracks for a very long time i'm very curious about that question i wrote about that recently and plugged in as well uh because most of the news in ipad os 26 is about adding stuff that people are familiar with in the mac and not just multitasking

[00:56:11] but also things like the uh the files app looks a lot more like the finder and there's better support for for background tasks and so forth and i'm not sure whether that means the trajectory of the ipad henceforth is all about getting more mac like or whether there's still an opportunity for apple to do things with the ipad that are really quite different from what it's going to do with the mac particularly if at some point the mac also gets more ipad like and if they that's the problem if

[00:56:41] they do finally come up with a touch screen for the mac no one's never really figured out how to do you know mouse keyboard input and touch at the same time efficient effectively i mean we all recall the windows 8 debacle right i love i love the fact that they that the ipad threw away so much that we've dealt with on computers for the last 40 years and started fresh and and i hope that we don't lose that all together i mean i'm sitting here right now in front of a macbook pro and a curved 34 inch

[00:57:08] monitor and then on my other desk on the other side i have another 34 inch with the pc and an imac and i just can't imagine taking all of my beautiful digital real estate my computing power the the heft and the amazing ability of these bad boys to be just amazing everywhere and going to a crappy little diddly screen i maybe i'm maybe i am out of date frankly a 13-inch ipad is really the same as a laptop screen

[00:57:32] basically uh and i'm out and about a lot so uh well i do i do use external screens sometimes um they don't matter that much to me although i am amazed anytime i use one just because 13 13 inches to me seems large because i used to be on an 11 inch ipad i i have a second screen for my ipad a little bit of a disappointment that apple has not enabled to touch on those second screens even if they are touch screens the ipad doesn't support it and i think if they did that maybe you'd really have a perfect system

[00:58:02] we're going to take a break but we will be covering the apple event you must be a club twit member to watch our simulcast uh because apple keeps trying to take us down when we do it in public so uh we will we will do it in the club only tuesday micah sargent and i 10 a.m pacific 1 p.m eastern time 1700 utc we will stream the apple event and we will comment on it and because we'll be in the club twit

[00:58:28] uh we'll also let you comment on it in the chat and maybe even bring you up on stage if you have something to say uh if you're not yet a club member please join the club twitter tv slash club twitter it's one of many benefits you get including ad free versions of all the shows and it really supports the work we do here it's 25 of our operating costs now are paid by the club thank you thank you i know there's a lot of people looking for money and i know money's tight these days but uh if you like what you hear on our shows and if you

[00:58:55] want to support we do that's the way to do it twitter tv slash club twit uh this episode we'll have more in just a bit with harry mccracken from fast company and uh this week in startups uh wonderful alex wilhelm he's also of course got a newsletter which everybody should subscribe to do you have a free tier right cautious optimism uh yeah absolutely uh i read it it's part of my regular rss uh beat check

[00:59:22] that's actually like the biggest compliment you could give leo so thank you no it's your insights are fantastic everybody should uh subscribe immediately waste no time the next issue will be about why tablets are bad and what cautious optimism dot news i love it our show today brought to you by miro we speaking of things we love it's fun i i first started using miro wound uh micah sergeant and i

[00:59:49] were doing uh ask the tech guys and it was the reason we used is because we had two people in different spots collaborating on a show we would get together on a sunday to do the show but all week long we are working in miro to plan to collaborate to work and now miro is even better everyday new headlines speculate about how ai we just were talking about is coming for your jobs fostering anxiety and fear

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[01:01:32] data tables and prototypes in minutes it's more than just making it look nice it's organizing it's making it clearer it's making connections between the different pieces of data you're not just putting a bunch of ideas on a board you're rapidly iterating with your teammates to bring those ideas to life fast you can quickly build on your ideas without needing the perfect question or prompt you don't have to be an ai master or toggle yet another tool the work you're already doing on

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[01:02:29] make it even better with miro everything more court news i know court news isn't the most interesting but this one was a bit of a shocker uh you may remember that uh seven the authors of seven million books there was a class action lawsuit against anthropic for using those books in the training of their llms

[01:02:52] uh the judge did an interesting kind of uh two-part ruling uh part one the judge said okay in the case of the books that anthropic bought used but bottom authors got no money for the used books but bought them legitimately scan them cut them up just discarded them that was fair use that's a very important

[01:03:18] judgment for anthropic and all ai companies that there is a way to scan books and use them in your llms and that's fair use but the judge said we do have a problem because there's also these millions of books you used from a pirated source they were pirated and that's probably piracy uh the lawyers for the authors settled with anthropic we knew their settlement was coming we talked about last week

[01:03:45] it was the lawyers for the authors were crowing about the settlement so we thought this is going to be big but nobody thought it would be this big anthropic has agreed to pay 1.5 billion dollars plus interest to settle with these authors that's three thousand dollars each for half a million books in the class they also agreed to destroy the data it was accused of illegally downloading unclear whether

[01:04:12] their current models use that data uh they certainly didn't say we're going to destroy our current models so um the authors said yeah because most of these authors were making nothing books anyway you know if you've ever written a book uh it's not a profit making enterprise if you paul thorat always said if we're getting paid by the uh hour it'd probably be a buck fifty an hour to write these books it's not

[01:04:40] a big money maker um so the authors are saying this is great um anthropic probably felt like they got a deal they could have been on the hook for as much as a trillion dollars in damages uh and i think anthropic also was very happy to have that first part of the judgment because it

[01:05:04] showed a way forward for ai companies including them to ingest copyright material as fair use yeah you agree alex you're not i want to i want to add a detail here so anthropic said in the settlement that the books that are covered by the agreement were not used in the training of its commercially released ai models that's per the washington post so they don't have to discard that well my thought

[01:05:29] is that they've now found the dollar amount to put their copyright concerns behind them and it is exactly about 11 or 12 of their recent series f which was 13 billion dollars so to me this is a you take your lumps once and you move on you have a path forward with the destruction of books physical books to um transform them so accounts is fair use you stop using the pirated stuff you resolve your you know risk of being sued again you make your investors happy because you fixed a problem that could have been in the

[01:05:59] trillions it could have sunk your business so to me this is a very expensive win for anthropic but i agree oh you've simon's blog up i agree with simon that this is a pretty good result for anthropic and even for their investors think about it this way you're talking about simon willison who says it is a victory for anthropic yeah yeah but the company's not valued at 183 billion dollars so over 0.8 effectively if it's worth today they've closed a chapter on quite a lot of risk and so well

[01:06:26] you know and open ai and everybody else can say thank you because we now at least if i mean it's a precedent it's not a uh you know i'm not a lawyer but i have a feeling that other courts could rule otherwise but at least this one judge was a judge ossop i think it was said um hey there is a way to

[01:06:51] use this as fair use which is huge the downside to that just to play it fair on both sides is that i think anthropic bought used copies of books leo right then they did stripped and scanned and then turned up which means that no one got the last you know a little bit of commission income there but if they're gonna buy one copy of each book but that's that's not the issue because the real the fundamental issue and we've talked about this a lot so i know a little bit about it thanks to

[01:07:16] kathy gellis who's an attorney and an expert in ip law the first amendment embodies something called the right to read and undermining the right to read would undermine our everybody's ability to to ingest content it would undermine our ability on twit to take these stories which we're doing right now and interpret them and use them so knowing and and a lot of people said well an ai is not a human

[01:07:42] they don't have the right to read these are big companies ingesting little authors stuff or the new york times or the washington post or walt disney's stuff to their benefit i think it's really important and i i do agree with the judge in this respect to say it's transformative it fits the four tests for fair use they're not taking away the author's ability to make money on these books

[01:08:09] it's not like you can read the book through the ai you can't read the new york times by prompting open ai to give you the content of the article despite what the new york times asserts uh so it's not taking away their right to make money uh it is transformative it's changing it because it's it's it's not turning into text it's tokenizing it the text does not survive the process uh i think it is fair use and i think the judge made the judge also made the right decision in this case uh harry do

[01:08:38] agree well there do seem to be some cases of people being able to get uh llms to spit out parts of harry potter and so forth uh the new york times in their pleading had a very elaborate prompt in which they basically gave the uh chat gpt the first three paragraphs of the article and said what's next uh and that now that is not the way you could read the new york times in chat gpt let's face it

[01:09:05] you're not going to read harry potter in chat gpt i mean i think it's really complicated because copyright law was not created to deal with this stuff um i also think that um along with anthropic being relieved because um it turns out they can scan chopped up books um they're also in a place to spend 1.5 billion to settle this and there are a few other companies like open ai and meta and google

[01:09:34] and microsoft who can spend billions of dollars without giving it that much thought but smaller startups uh might be intimidated by this it may be harder to get into the llm business of um if you're to deal with this i don't think you're going to see these kinds of fines because i think basically what the judge gave these guys is a way forward to legally train their stuff and i do think it's unfortunate

[01:09:59] that it seems like a large number of these companies did pirate books and well in order to feed their models that's the new question because we know meta used the same pirate database that meta employees have said that uh two authors have accused apple of doing the same thing so at least apple and meta and i would be willing to bet every other ai company in the world has trained on these pirate

[01:10:24] database uh book databases right better not have that in your current models right because then i think it's slightly different conversation that's why i said anthropic saying this was you know in the past is what they're paying for a past transgression they're not currently re-breaking um but i think i'm i do have a lot of sympathy for what harry is saying in that this is not super clear cut and i am worried about who gets the benefits of this but i think i don't think we're going to have a way with the current legal system and i don't expect change to properly defend ip

[01:10:53] rights of authors writers scribblers of all sorts and that's pretty much why i'm a fan of cloud flair's model i'm sure you've talked about on the show of uh paper crawl essentially just setting a price for this sort of thing and letting commercial terms stand in where we might have hoped for a more strict but that does what you just described which is it pulls up the ladder for smaller companies bigger companies can afford to pay for this content yep smaller companies cannot now there's common crawl

[01:11:23] which uh we've had richard scranta on intelligent machines talking about this they have a trillion page uh database of stuff crawled from the internet that many ais used for training it's good it's good material for training it's it's granular though because i think the way it's set up instead of cloudflare and this is currently in beta and uh the ceo i don't like it i'll tell you why i don't like

[01:11:49] it because cloudflare becomes a toll booth on the information superhighway and this is where cloudflare has now i think taken a wrong turn i really supported cloudflare i like cloudflare i think they have many great services but they have started to act as if they are the keeper of the internet and they are not true and they sure not fair enough but there are a number of companies that are doing competing things so it's not just cloudflare on this on this bent there's also um tollbit created by humans and human

[01:12:18] native which are each taking those are startups they're each taking a different tack on trying to solve the the licensing agreement world between ip holders and ai companies but i don't think there's really much of another option leo other than arming people with the right to protect what they have online and the reason why i'm not a hundred percent concerned about the latter being pulled up and only open ai anthropic and you know meta google are being able to pay for this is i think you're going

[01:12:43] to be able to set per uh ai crawling terms and so i could say from my side alex.tumblr.whatever that you know the the smaller ai companies could crawl but the bigger ones have to pay and i think that's going to be kind of where this goes but i do agree it's a real point but also i don't think you can throw your hands up and say we're just going to give up for example i had the um the ceo of tollbit on uh on the bob and he was like look here's an example of this there was a a sports website

[01:13:09] in the uk unsurprisingly quite a lot of soccer content football if you're international and um they got something like 13 million crawls from ai companies and that generated for them 650 clicks so they had to pay to serve that many queries from the the ai companies but got no effectively resulting traffic so either we allow for the the the immiseration of people who publish online or we have to have some guardrails and tollbooths built in and sure there will be companies behind those but

[01:13:39] i don't see another path it's been interesting playing around with the chat gpt agent and discovering that a lot of cases it's not all that useful because it's trying to go to websites that are blocking it um just just seems like a substantial percentage of the media companies in the world that's cloud flare yes have pulled up their gates and they seem to be fairly effective like i i tried to get it to

[01:14:05] summarize some fast company stuff and because because we're blocking ai it had a lot of trouble it eventually found an article of ours that had been translated into spanish and published on that's amazing on yahoo mexico and it translated that article back into english and that that was like one of the few cases of it being able to uh to find a fast company story because we have been pretty

[01:14:29] aggressive you wanted to be able to read your stuff uh fast company stuff i mean a fast company as a business does not want ai companies making a fortune off of our stuff and not giving us any money so we've carefully blocked stuff in a lot of cases and we certainly are interested in these business models where we can make money i mean so here's the here's the risk that's a little bit about my pay grade yeah yeah this is the risk of it and i would tell your boss this um as more and more search

[01:14:58] moves to ai search if you're not in the index you suddenly just like not being in the google index you suddenly don't exist that's true and i and i certainly do recall that in the early days of google um there were media companies who yeah they didn't want to be in the index that's there's something attempted to block google that was not a good move but the difference is google actually sends traffic to your site whereas these ai companies do not we are the freaks we click on the source links we are the weirdos other people don't and at some point at some point um

[01:15:29] the bots may do a better job of sending traffic to media companies but that has not happened yet that's better some traffic than not existing at all and if you are if you are an e-commerce site and you're optimizing you know you're doing seo search engine optimization uh this is what rich grant has said you better start doing ai optimization because if you're selling sneakers and somebody searches for the best you know the best sneaker for somebody whose foot pronates

[01:15:56] and you don't show up in that ai search you don't show up so okay it's a very similar issue but i think it's the same for fast company but if you get three three clicks whereas with in the golden age of google you might have gotten ten thousand uh three three that golden age is gone anyway true well no it's it's merely in terminal decline leo we have a couple more thousand feet we're close to google zero though are we not close to google zero we're not we're not that close to google zero it still sends

[01:16:24] millions of people to to websites around the internet today it it is sick and dying but it is also still i think a material engine in the content game and i was at tech crunch last year and it was still incredibly important so important you should ask him now though i bet it's declined well you know they don't they answer my calls because now they're in my different private equity shop um i i want to say though that nope i've lost my thought harry back to you sorry yeah i mean well i mean there's there's this other

[01:16:48] thing happening in parallel at a pretty high percentage of media companies which is um becoming a lot more serious about about getting readers to pay for our stuff and ideally rather than finding readers only through google or uh an ai chat bot getting readers to come directly to the sites and and subscribe uh and that is um trying to undo these decisions that media companies made 30 years ago when um they

[01:17:17] launched websites and didn't charge for stuff so um um i feel like that is kind of directly connected to the concern over over um what's happening with ai and ideally we become a little less dependent on anybody sending us traffic because we get back to what magazines were like back in the old days where um you did have an advertising business but you also had people happily paying you to get your content

[01:17:43] and coming directly to you and subscribing and um we're seeing a little bit of success there well in certain cases like with new york times we're seeing a lot of success um but that's that's kind of this thing happening in parallel with what the impact ai could have on these businesses i think it's very important also i'll just say this fastcompany.com slash section slash plugged dash in is where you can find that newsletter you can join his audience and not do you have google's

[01:18:10] intermediaries and you can you can subscribe and get it get it in your inbox for free too i think that's why people are doing uh newsletters right that's one way to get that traffic right and you're saying you're seeing some newsletters that people have to pay for and others that are advertising supported it's tough it's a grind i mean this is literally what i'm doing with my my mornings but i'll say this you know my open rate is pretty much static as my audience grows which means that i'm i'm able to actually reach out and communicate to people without any intermediary apart from their inbox provider marking me a spam or not so that's that's

[01:18:40] that's yeah it is a great feeling looking at my numbers and seeing that yes uh people are not only have decided to get this newsletter but they're opening it yeah it's a huge compliment but going back to what leo said about the e-commerce site it's actually a very important example and there are companies right now working on this leo it's called geo generative engine optimization i don't know why we have to call it that can't we just get off the seo train but apparently not um but i think the the point about e-commerce companies being desperate to be included in these

[01:19:08] queries is just an entirely separate lane from what media companies are dealing with and so i just don't think that that example really holds water when we consider the goals of nike versus the goals of say fast company to me they're sufficiently distinct that the value difference is so large that i don't actually think right now fast companies losing a lot by having relatively strict walls up to keep other side other ai engines from crawling their stuff using it in their corpus of information

[01:19:35] generating results from it and not sending people back why should i subsidize your for-profit enterprise yeah um yeah it's i look clearly the model is collapsing i don't think it's entirely the fault of ai no i also don't think there's an unlimited fund of money coming from ai despite the appearances

[01:19:58] so i don't know if the only if the solution is to charge ai i mean we're in a problem this is problematic we've also we've also seen media companies be burned by things like um getting excited by facebook yeah remember that paying them everybody said oh you should do facebook video live video on facebook is the next big thing generally speaking to being dependent on any third party yeah to make your business model work is not a great place to be so perplexity is trying to

[01:20:27] square the circle here they i forgot i can't find the actual name of it now but they launched a five dollar a month subscription service for their browser comment yeah for comet thank you yeah and what they're going to do is pulling from memory here folks fact check me uh i think they're going to give like 70 or 80 percent of the revenue generated from that five i'll be honest uh well i'll believe it when i see it not only that we've seen these micro payment things i mean brave does the same thing with his bat tokens right i don't know basic attention token also i started a company called

[01:20:55] contenture back in when i was a real child that was trying to do the same thing but at least perplexity is making a token gesture and i do take that to be at least indication that publishers have raised enough of a stink about their model that they're trying to do something as a sop and going from a middle finger to a sop is still progress even if it's not all the way to where i want it to be true i mean i hate that i'm arguing for table scraps here but a starving man eats from the floor

[01:21:21] right that that's not actually a proverb is that i was gonna say is that in the bible because that's good i like that was just me rambling uh sorry and probably media companies have uh understandably become cynical enough that even if they're intrigued by what perplexity is doing they're not like aha perplexity is going to solve all of our business model problems first no no not at all but but i

[01:21:47] do think though that it's it's so strange to be a journalist today having lived through multiple uh technology booms and bust cycles because right now i really do think i've reached the point in my career and the moment in technology when there's not really a journalistic home that i that i want to go to next and so i i do think that i'm going to end up being increasingly indie as time goes on and so this all feels very personal to me it's like do i get to keep doing this or do i have to go get a real

[01:22:13] job at last well imagine if you were working for a daily well one of the six people who still do yeah sure okay i mean imagine uh it would if many of my friends who worked in radio have called me saying okay tell me about this podcasting thing how does that how does that work oh no i said if you started 20 years ago you might have a shot yeah it's a tough time for um content creators of a certain ilk and i said it's a tough time for you to be able to do it but i think it's a tough time for you to be

[01:22:42] a good cookbook on the other hand my son henry who makes sandwiches on tick tock is doing very well i bought his cookbook yeah did you yeah it's great yeah uh his his uh his uh we talked to him on uh friday on the club twit event his sandwich shop in new york is a big hit so you can you can use these uh platforms to

[01:23:06] launch and oh by the way thank you president trump apparently cash tips are now deductible for digital content creators up to 25 000 i just have to figure out how to get cash tips have you heard of only fans because i hear it's a thing that's not a cash i think you have to put it in an envelope and mail it to me i think don't by the way when i say that there were there are people who will do that and we have received via snail mail five dollar bills in envelopes don't i don't

[01:23:36] yeah leo will spend it on ipads and i don't approve yeah don't do that but i i did not see the trump administration coming to the the rescue of the adult entertainment industry as they apparently have so shout out to you so you think only fans tips are now uh text not taxed i i just want to say that it is a testament to my personal growth that of all the jokes i can make about tips and just that i'm not making them in this moment and i want to give myself five points five points thank

[01:24:03] you for keeping the tip out uh ladies and gentlemen we're going to take a little i almost got you to spit that i was really trying to time it and i almost got the spit take i wanted to come out the nose it didn't go over all of my awesome computers and i respect them because they're useful devices see if you had an ipad you wouldn't have to worry exactly because it's not a computer right harry mccracken is here the e-technologizer from fast company and his unplugged newsletter is at

[01:24:31] fast plugged in plugged in not unplugged you are in fact plugged in actually that that's that's a common thing to accidentally call it so you're because of mtv yes you know unplugged harry mccracken unplugged no mccracken is plugged i should at least start a section within that called unplugged i think you should i think that's going to be the trend man if i didn't if i didn't have to cover technology day in

[01:24:56] day out i wouldn't have the internet i wouldn't have a phone i'd be living in a log cabin growing my own tomatoes it would be a whole different world leo five minutes i would take five minutes five minutes like where's where's blue sky i got what's going on like i i talk a lot of smack about that myself i'm like why is it we're gonna move to the woods i'm gonna get it like the exact same fantasy and don't you want to do that it's a fantasy though yeah but then she's like you get bored so

[01:25:25] fast yeah yeah yeah that's alex wilhelm he's easily bored but thank goodness you hear him on this week in startups of course with jason calacanis my man he's got you you kind of so it's kind of the joe rogan model right he's joe rogan and you're the guy who he goes look that up right that's your job now look that up i i am the show notes preparer i am the the director in some ways of what we talk about

[01:25:51] and i you do that oh that's good all right so i write the docket and you know jason weighs and other people weigh into but i'm the main docket person and my main job is to like set things up and then he swings at him and then i kind of nibble at the end but it's i think it's a good it's a good partnership yeah we've reached a good a good middle ground i think it's going pretty well and there has been so much to talk about it's actually been a relatively rich when we're going to take a break

[01:26:15] when we come back uh we'll talk about the big table in the white house i didn't see jason at that table but i did see a couple of people from the all-in podcast at that table sitting pretty close to the president i might add closer than tim cook was uh that's coming up as we continue on this week in tech our show today brought to you by smarty oh i love smarty if you are a coder if you've got a

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[01:30:27] slash twitter we thank them so much for the support of this week in tech did you get invited to the big party at the rose garden alex uh what is the furthest person away from possibly getting invited to the event at the david sacks was there yes my my political equal uh a chamath palipataya was there i'm gonna i'm gonna actually correct you that chamath palipataya that's what i said no

[01:30:56] no i said then i screwed up chamath palipataya did i say it right it's hard it's got a lot yeah i think it's easy to say it's got a lot of syllables there's david sacks sitting next to mark zuckerberg who's sitting next to the president of the united states of america this was the dinner party on thursday night two dozen high profile tech and business leaders i'll tell you what if uh bomb had gone off in the white house you would have lost the entire leadership of silicon valley

[01:31:25] zuck was there tim cook bill gates was there sam altman was there sundar pachai was there sergey brin was there safra cats the ceo of oracle david limp ceo of blue origin sanjay mahotra mahotra mahotra mahotra yeah ceo of micro mirotra marotra uh greg brockman president of open ai was there

[01:31:52] satya nadella was i mean everybody was there the owner of the sacramento kings with yeah he was there he's also the founder of tipco maybe that's why he was there uh the chief technology officer from palantir uh the fat alexander wang who is the the hot commodity in silicon valley 28 years old

[01:32:16] the billion dollar uh head of meta's new ai division which has no name so they just call it tbd uh leader of super intelligence david sachs who is of course the ai and crypto czar at the white house jared isaacman interesting it must have been interesting conversation poor guy poor guy he was going to be the minister at nasa uh then because he was a friend of elon musk who by the way was not

[01:32:44] invited uh got got booted from nasa but he's still a big shot elon was not there jensen wasn't there that was jensen wong wasn't there that's a surprise i don't think jensen was there but i think jensen's already paid his uh pound of flesh in the form of the 15 of uh h20 sales to china then they had the dinner and then they went out to the rose garden the newly paved mar-a-lago style uh rose garden i they didn't say what the playlist was but you may remember a couple of weeks ago trump

[01:33:14] had control of the playlist as he tested out the sound system there you got to see the the dance the trump dance yeah the only i think the only thing i found a little offensive some people were offended when tim cook gave the president the gold bar with the glass thing on it the effusively sycophantic speeches one after another coming from these tech leaders i guess when you have an

[01:33:42] authoritarian leader you've got to do this it did it was a little bit sick yeah it did feel a little bit like whenever trump's cabinet meetings which are in the same format same thing oh you should have the nobel prize mr president have we gotten to the point where it's so important to appease the

[01:34:04] authoritarian that you basically become a lick spittle yes yes sycophant and i can tell you how you have to do this for business well okay in in silicon valley uh the phrase that i keep being told by people who are investors and founders and people who run the companies is that you have to play the game on the field and this is that kind of undersells how how abasing it is you're not really

[01:34:31] playing the game on the field you're lying down on the field and eating the dirt well maybe that is the game that you're you're being told to play so this manifested itself for example back in the 2020 2021 zurp era technology investing boom as well i guess we have to pay high prices because we have to play the game on the field we've been paid to allocate capital we're going to allocate we're going to overpay don't look at us we're just you know playing the game on the field and that's what i think is happening here but i think also there's a little bit of um frog boiling going on uh leo you're

[01:35:00] familiar with the phrase um salami slicing uh referring to how how china how the sausage is made oh no no the approach by the chinese communist party to not go after an objective in one big leap but to go after in 10 000 small little chunks so you don't actually at any point fight back too much i i think the the rise of authoritarianism in the us has been growing since trump won and i think this is a continuation of it but i think now it just looks more gross but i don't think this wasn't going

[01:35:28] on before behind closed doors i think now these people just feel like they have no authority and have to abase themselves at the risk of losing some shareholder value i think the disappointment to me is that it turns out that all these incredibly powerful people are not powerful enough to possibly weather a couple quarters of lower earnings because of the president's ire and so they have to fall and collapse in front of themselves uh at his feet and kiss the shoes and so forth and i i foolishly expected

[01:35:55] better uh the the telling a moment was when mark zuckerberg ceo of meta said yeah we're gonna invest 600 billion dollars in the in in uh the united states and then we leaned over to the president and whispered is that the number uh i wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with what number did you so so if you're clear about how a free market's supposed to work it's not that the president doesn't

[01:36:24] get to tell the companies what to do that is a form of state capitalism which is often aligned with a fascist approach to government and it is just nasty and i keep trying to beat this drum and and i'm not getting the reception from people in tech that i that i expected uh i'm like hey isn't it bad that the government's calling the shots they're like well and then the conversation stops and i i'm blown away by it i really have learned that in a lot of in a lot of cases people in business

[01:36:53] do not actually have principles so much as they have short-term approaches to the market that they think are the most accretive financially and as a person who has i i hope principles the contrast consistently jars me yeah uh but they but the i guess the principles are a luxury if you are

[01:37:18] operating in china or russia or the united states and you want to keep operating in those jurisdictions and you have strongman leaders who insist on fealty it is tim cook's obligation to his stakeholders to tell the president to go to hell is it though is that not a long term you cannot win under state capitalism and strongman leadership the way to build long-term shareholder value is to stand up to this

[01:37:48] and say no the way to build short-term value is to do what they're doing which is to roll over like a kicked dog yeah it's disappointing these are supposed to be these people get paid bajillions of dollars and i don't even mind that because i'm a capitalist but i did expect them to have a spine required cause in their contracts and apparently everyone's got freaking jello going up their back yeah sorry i didn't

[01:38:12] get all shouty i mean i'm sure that um there were a jillion people in that room who are not trump fans and found one way or another to rationalize this as um not being an awful thing they're doing and um yeah i mean look i i think it's an admirable laudable goal to bring manufacturing and business to the united states um i it feels like these companies the commitment these companies have to that is similar

[01:38:41] to their commitment to dei as soon as it becomes became unfashionable to be committed to uh diversity equity inclusion they said oh yeah yeah we never we never thought that was a good idea and uh it's i mean i mean left left their own devices they took all manufacturing out of the us right um they became they became intrigued when the government talked about giving them some money to bring some of it back this is uh this is them playing the game i understand it's not even all that clear they care

[01:39:10] all that much about the the geo care geopolitical danger of um not no longer being a manufacturing powerhouse right they don't they don't care about any of this they care about the bottom line and i think it's probably a useful lesson i'll quote mike masnick in the tech dirt he says real innovation happens when companies have to compete on merit not on who can kiss the leader's ass most effectively yes in a functioning democracy with actual rule of law the best products have the opportunity to win

[01:39:40] in an authoritarian system the company makes the dictator happy wins and that's it it's not good for innovation so i guess you that's what you're saying alex is short term maybe this is what you have to do but long term yeah go back to the the romney obama debate and romney said that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers but you mr president only picked losers and it was a it was he never had the good line to put no not not when romney did it somehow that man had the charisma of

[01:40:10] his family dog um after it died uh by the way isn't romney looking a lot better now though i i would i i'd sell harry to russia to get that i take mint romney barry goldwater i don't care i yeah yeah barry but i mean romney for sure but yeah the the way to have a competitive economy long term is to allow market forces to shape where investment goes so that way things end up being efficient

[01:40:38] a good example of this and i just read a really great article from um a chinese economist about high-speed rail in china we talk a lot about the power and prowess of the chinese country to build lots of high-speed rail and frankly they built a lot of it and it goes pretty well shout out some of the lines make a lot of sense like beijing to shanghai great place to have high-speed rail but because the government decided they were going to do a lot of this they built tons of high-speed rail lines that are incredibly economically useless and they have to maintain them and they built these enormous

[01:41:07] stations down the middle of nowhere and that is how state capitalism can have the occasional patina of looking good but really it does not allocate resources effectively and it leads to corny capitalism and corruption it's bad all the way through it is a rotten core and i know i sound like a neoleb here because probably because i am but i just don't i do people just think that that once you go down this road it's all going to get rolled back i'm sure a lot of them are saying to themselves they just need

[01:41:36] to get through this for now and long term they'll come out in a better place although that's it's hardly clear that's going to be true i honestly think this is one of the the problems in america besides the financialization of uh of every business in america is that the short-term uh look at short-term quarterly profits you know driven by the market but driven by other forces as well

[01:42:02] without long-term planning you don't have much there's another example this is from the atlantic when the populist strongman juan peron ran argentina's economy from his presidential palace in the mid 20th century personally deciding which companies received favors which industries got nationalized or protected and which businessmen profited from state largesse economists warned the experiment would end badly they were right over decades of rule by peron and his successors and peron by the way was

[01:42:30] electorally very popular yep he won three elections a country that had once been among the world's wealthiest nations devolved into a global laughing stock with uncontrollable inflation routine financial crises rampant corruption and crippling poverty haven't we learned anything centralized economies don't do well they do not do well well what we did was we learned that but whenever republican wins the the apparatus of the media goes and says well now we should finally do it

[01:42:58] america should have a king and i it just it blows my mind and i'm very annoyed by this moment in time as as a as a technology and business journalist it's just right it feels like i'm shouting into the wind and then everyone keeps telling me well we have to play the game on the field yeah what's the point of all your power yeah what's the point uh give it to someone with with with ethics please uh technology though how about that iphone yeah i'll give you well here's another one that has some

[01:43:28] technology uh impact postal traffic international traffic to the u.s via the postal service is down 80 percent according to the un postal flows the united states have come nearly to a halt with 88 operators 88 nations worldwide fully or partially suspending services why is that

[01:43:52] the the the minimus uh being taken away so even for these small orders tariffs are screwing things up and it's also uncertainty right because it comes and goes and this might mean um this has got to be devastating to a lot of small businesses that are very dependent on these supply chains so um ever since 1950 uh not sorry 1938 um there's been an exemption on items below a certain amount currently because of

[01:44:22] inflation 800 dollars uh they're shipped to the u.s without duties uh the number of de minimis packages entering the u.s in 2024 was 1.36 billion wow timu think timu she and alibaba a lot of the stuff you buy on amazon um so the new rules mean that all parcels regardless of value are subject to tariffs and the other

[01:44:50] problem is that these tariffs uh themselves are going or go to change right now we have i don't think there is a tariff to china that was put off but and uh and depending on right depending on court decisions they may either be going away or with us forever oh that's right and now we're waiting until the supreme court decides uh because a lower court has decided the tariffs are illegal if the supreme court agrees

[01:45:16] we will have to repay billions of dollars to companies by the way you will not get that money if you paid a lot more for something that was shipped over from overseas uh because of tariffs hey here's the good news you're not getting a refund and then even then uh congress may um pass tariffs that's right they might have to because of the economic hardship imposed by refunding those illegal tariffs that's

[01:45:44] right the irony of uh of the white house twitter account posting the like the tariff revenue chart which is just a tax chart and then bragging about how much tax it's a tax bringing in i'm like you guys just sound like democrats but with a worse tax mechanism this is dumber than hell what what are you doing and then and then because they there still persists this notion that well we don't pay tariffs countries pay tariffs you're not you're not allowed to say that americans are paying for tariffs right

[01:46:12] yeah yeah remember when amazon proposed that president went ballistic um so uh you know most retailers aren't mentioning why the costs are going on yeah but we're going to get new inflation data this week i think it's wednesday and thursday so we're gonna we're gonna see more more of what's going on i think we've all seen the jobs data but it's also hard to keep track of does that is apple apple's not paying tariffs right now on iphones right because of the gold bar i think they have the promise to

[01:46:38] build factory near-term favoritism from the president to get an exemption yeah which is this is it's like changes every day you don't know what it's going to be and it must be driving these guys crazy another reason why they showed up for that dinner businesses love uncertainty what they love is that playing field underneath them is constantly changing and it's full of invisible pockets makes it so hard i mean for the other guys that's just uh crazy so people probably didn't notice it but in the middle

[01:47:07] of the show uh my uh internet went out i'm on comcast or got spotty so i unplugged something and uh now i'm operating on starlink which makes me happy because it's making astronomers crazy satellite companies like spacex are ignoring astronomers calls to save the night sky most

[01:47:33] satellite constellations exceed recommended brightness levels some are even visible to the naked eye and it's not just a starlink by the way there are 12 000 active satellites circling the earth ast mobile and all these guys everybody's got one up there and uh you mentioned amazon's launching project kuiper satellite have they actually started launching those they have they put up a couple and then also china's making its own satellite internet cluster and the eu has allocated a lot of money for it as well so

[01:48:03] much like there's multiple gps systems in the world there's going to be a gps equivalent systems in the world there's going to be equivalent um competing satellite uh connectivity clusters and this will become an important point in future wars and so forth but i just want to say that far be it for me to be elon musk's defender because i'm not but i do think that he's getting hit with a lot of complaints about starlink impacting uh land-based telescope work it's going to be a lot of people

[01:48:29] really soon and i don't think there's any way to stop it even if we want to i i i don't know if we need land-based we have the the jwst now right so i think it's better to be doing that from space have you seen some of the recent images from the web oh my god of course i have i'm a dork oh they're gorgeous yeah dude so who cares if there's a little light pollution we've got the web well there's a lot

[01:48:55] of land-based satellites that are expensive and useful and universities run them and so forth but telescopes yeah sorry telescopes but we're moving we're moving towards an era of humanity in which we're having a more active space economy and i don't think there's any way to slow that down and so to me this is one of those like oh we're gonna do that okay like i mean harry do you see any mechanism by which we could slow global satellite growth i can't imagine i mean i do know that um

[01:49:21] different satellites have different impact maybe there's some way to use technology to well for a while elon said that they were darkening their uh the starlink uh satellites so that they wouldn't be uh so visible but i don't i don't see the astronomers winning this one yeah no because they have no power right or money or influence actually they're out of favor with the president right now so actually i think that probably anyone in academia is gonna get kicked in the shin

[01:49:46] astronomers are scientists so uh oops there you said the s word uh oh they do not have a lot of friends in the uh trump administration yeah i i do feel bad though for the people who will be impacted by this in the near term as they deal with increased light pollution impacting their ability to take you know good pictures of the sky but i don't want to live in a world in which we don't have improving satellite-based connectivity and eventually space-based computing so it's mind-boggling i

[01:50:14] don't know if you watched the uh uh starship launch a couple of weeks ago and they had beautiful pictures of the inside of the of the uh launch vehicle of the beautiful view of the earth and on the top of all of them it said powered by starlink they were using the internet of the starlake satellites as a relay to send those pictures back to earth gorgeous 4k pictures if they had been if pictures have been this good as we landed on the moon people would have

[01:50:41] been shaved for sure that's fake that is that is for sure fake saved by the grainy footage yeah this looks so good it's really mind-boggling it's really i think the fact that starlink is your backup for broadcasting this to the internet leo is a legitimate win for humanity and we joked earlier about going to the woods you know growing tomatoes out in the sticks now that i can play video games

[01:51:06] in the woods like i mean just bring your satellite all the poor yacht owners out there who've been struggling with low bandwidth over the years you know sitting on your third deck with your fifth wife in your seventh helicopter and you couldn't download your email now you can watch youtube there are a lot of humanitarian applications for this stuff too so that's true i would not argue that satellites make the world a better place i was a big sorry i'll make the world a worse place right yeah i was a big proponent of uh starlink initially because i thought it was going to bring

[01:51:35] internet connectivity to every corner of the globe and really democratize it and then i found out how much i was going to have to pay for the dish and then the monthly uh fees and it's definitely not democratizing it is the high priced uh spread but if you can't get anywhere else we have a regular uh nicholas de leon who lives out in the albuquerque uh new mexico desert and loves living out there and he's able to use starlink that's awesome yeah it really it's a it is amazing there's also an element of starting

[01:52:03] that i really appreciate which is it's um not tied i as far as i understand it correct me if i'm wrong everybody but it's not tied to the same networks that governments often control so if you're in a nation where there is censored internet access if you can get your hands on one right still tricky in certain areas but you do have a way out of a digital jail that your government wants to keep you in yeah instead of your government you now have elon right yeah i mean elon may decide whether you get

[01:52:30] access or not guys guys let let's not let our our our views of one man color the fact that the chinese communist party is worse than elon musk that's probably true right no you're right is worse than musk and so like i i do think and like there's other authoritarian regimes that block internet access is it possible to get starlink service in china not officially but my point is it does open a small

[01:52:56] door for democracy activists journalists and dissidents and so forth to have a shot at less sensor connectivity and that is a good now when it comes from a different company i'm sure we'll all give that an extra clap but for now i'll take this yeah let's take a break we're talking tech with alex uh wilhelm from the wonderful uh this week in startups podcast of course his cautious optimism.news

[01:53:20] newsletters go it's good to see you is it a secret what you told us before the show can i mention uh oh that we're having a third kit yeah that no no no that's uh that that's we've known for a little bit now and congratulations we're in uh dcan we fit three car seats in our car mode and yeah so that's i'm so happy for you you sent us uh you sent me pictures of the little ones they are so sweet so cute you are at a

[01:53:46] great great time and so if you know i really appreciate you uh being on the show because i know this is family this could be family time so thank you leo you are family so i'm happy to be here thank you for having me very nice yes such beautiful beautiful kids uh and of course harry mccracken the technologizer at fastcompany.com this episode of this week in tech brought to you by zip recruiter actually in many ways we've used zip recruiter to hire many of our team members hiring can be

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[01:55:36] ziprecruiter.com twit right now you can try it for free again that's ziprecruiter.com slash to it zip recruiter the smartest way to hire you might actually uh welcome our satellite internet overlords when you hear stories like this microsoft says its azure service is affected by damaged red sea

[01:56:01] cables they've they've actually fixed that but the cut cables show you kind of in some ways how fragile the internet is um the red sea cables where they cut it's unclear did they just break it's unclear but um there's some suspicion that maybe the houthis the yemeni houthis who are active in that area i remember us

[01:56:32] sailing through the suez canal a couple years ago and the captain said uh due to pirate activity in the area uh we are taking on some security personnel and we'd like to ask you to stay off the decks as we transit this area and if you see anything approaching the boat you might want to go to your room and get under the bed because that'll save you and then these these basically navy

[01:57:00] seal types are get on board and kind of line the deck i you know it's kind of amazing uh you know not that cruise ships are probably the first thing pirates would attack but that sounds terrifying leo yeah well it wasn't it was kind of fascinating we're all going what i was just glad to be able to go through the suez canal that is an experience that's on my list of things to do yeah i think we take for

[01:57:26] granted how how much our internet cables work i read a really fascinating story about the ships that actually go out and fix these cables and how that how difficult that work is to bring them up from the sea floor if they're damaged and then work on them because there's a lot of tension right because they're long heavy cables and so you have to specialize boats and such that story was sadly framed about the um the last major tsunami in japan uh that led to the nuclear disaster and so forth and and the damage that the cables under underwent and that because if they get shifted around underground

[01:57:54] they can get caught on things and rip i just the internet's much more tenuous than i think we realize at times and it's kind of miraculous yeah more real to me now they said microsoft said due to undersea fiber cuts in the red sea but that doesn't necessarily mean somebody cut them could have been a ship accidentally dragging an anchor could have been they broke uh because of their own weight could have been an undersea volcanic activity we don't know aliens could have been aliens i have a

[01:58:24] couple of guesses that are a bit more likely uh when it comes to disruptions of of major especially in that area right yeah if it's up in the if it's up by sweden i have another guess and it's not accident you know uh last year uh the government of yemen claimed that the hoodies did in fact cut cables in the red sea last year uh microsoft managed to restore service by rerouting it they did the same thing but those those the problem is you can reroute until other cables are cut and other cables and other

[01:58:53] cables and it takes a while to fix them so one thing we've seen is uh increasing investment from the major tech companies um to build their own if memory serves and so we're actually seeing a little bit of kind of private internet development but there's so much expense in putting these cables down it's also a good thing that major tech companies are putting the money into it but i mean we could see geopolitics impact information sharing which i think is something we don't talk

[01:59:21] about enough in terms of the internet being available to everybody right and therefore commerce therefore ai therefore data centers and so forth but people are trying to really expand uh mina region uh data center footprints right now um especially in the uae and saudi arabia but if the cables are getting cut in and around the area i mean that's bad that's going to make it less likely less attractive of a place to invest so it's amazing it's amazing to think that microsoft has to have the expertise

[01:59:47] in-house to deal with some of this stuff and like i wonder what kind of a team you have yeah so meta has helped develop over 20 uh subsidy cables in the last decade um and their partners in 16. i mean that's that's a lot of capital to an amazon does it right amazon has subsea cables right who i don't have all my fingers google has some yeah you're not a real internet company until you have to kiss the president's ass and you have to spend billions of dollars on spaghetti noodles for

[02:00:15] the ocean i you know i it's amazing what these companies uh deal with i i don't know the size scaling uh you know think about what it took to scale facebook uh and and the infrastructure that they've had to invent in many cases and then there's the facebook poke

[02:00:37] all that beautiful infrastructure to support the poke it's back baby uh 21 years meta still hasn't given up on the facebook poke this is carissa bell from engadget uh meta apparently uh posted on instagram that uh it is now easier to find by adding pokes back to user profiles

[02:01:05] sending pokes here it is here's the instagram post just got easier yes finally at last our long national nightmare is over instagram on the ipad and facebook pokes are back baby it's 2009 uh uh can i tell you a story about facebook though leo i had to rejoin recently oh aren't you that's because you have kids and you probably have older relatives who said where are the pictures no

[02:01:34] no no that's all the group text i had to make a facebook account so i could make a business page for my blog and uh did you know that that's worse than going to dinner at the white house that is cow telling to the meta i i literally had to call up mark and be like please let me in because i'm kidding but no one joins facebook anymore so it did not treat me like a human for a very long time oh yeah they assume probably you're a bot that's a good point yeah but it was interesting like

[02:02:02] i've gone i went through the facebook process to sign up when i was in middle school or high school or something you know a thousand million years ago and it was easy and now it kept blocking me it kept being like no no you're back in the penalty box we don't think you're real and i'm like it's literally me i think this is a measure of how much how much bot activity there's it's the same thing on x right joining x if you've lost your account or don't have an account is murder because there's so

[02:02:29] many bots and of course the irony of it is it's probably a lot harder for you as a human to get on facebook than it is for a bot yeah probably the front bots probably got that all wired you know that's instant just in case carissa writes you weren't on facebook two decades ago poking was something of a novelty in the early days of social network how many show of hands how many of you remember getting in just like little poke battles with your friends where you'd poke them and they

[02:02:55] poke you back and now you got to poke them again and it just goes on and on let me if you're in gen z let me explain this to you uh poke used to be your equivalent to a snap streak right you would poke back i don't know what that is what's a snap streak isn't uh oh crap um isn't snap streak when you if you like text someone back every day it adds to your streak oh you have a streak of how many times yeah and it's part of like a friendship mechanism so it was like top five on myspace facebook

[02:03:24] but that's not that functional poke doesn't record anything it's just you get a message that says poke yeah but it was the predecessor you know it was the the preamble it was they did and at one point facebook brought back they like created a poke app which if memory serves was kind of competing with snapchat at the time so this may shock you but the poke never went away it just was just been sitting there sitting there and de-emphasized but the company carissa writes has for some reason been

[02:03:54] trying to get poking to make a comeback for a while now meta said last year the feature was quote having a moment and there there had been a 13x spike in pokes after the company began surfacing the feature in the facebook search bar of course as soon as you put the button there they're gonna poke people will poke i mean anytime anybody pokes me i assume that um it was an accident and so i ignore it like you accidentally clicked the poke button and it like only happens once every six years so it's not a major

[02:04:24] problem wow i have i been poked lately i don't know what's the name of your facebook page how do you know if you've been poked i don't know uh does it come through messenger oh maybe it's messenger see that's part of the problem is i i never open messenger yeah we sound right now like my parents and i'm trying to get to log into netflix how do you how does this work this inch facebook thing what's that you know

[02:04:54] the old grandmother meme when she's like picking her glasses up like this i think that's all of us right now all right so what's your page i'm gonna poke you i don't know like i have to pull up one password and i don't log into it oh it's just automatically hold on bob do talk amongst yourselves alex wilhelm i'm looking for you you're not the ceo and founder at loan bridge you're not this guy with a beard you're not the uh the eyeball the residence eyeball mid-roof roof you don't work at midwest

[02:05:21] roofing you're not any of those alex maybe i do work at midwest roofing you guys don't know in costa rica maybe i fly a lot block block never save hold on i'm almost there i thought i had a page where's my page somebody poke me so i know what happened what it looks like when you oh here it is okay facebook.com slash c-a-o-p-t news ca opt news because i couldn't fit my whole name in there leo

[02:05:49] you can poke my page can you poke pages we're about to find out do you need a license all right i'm gonna stop here there's no point in this uh zuck said last year he wants to bring back more og because he's with the kids og facebook features like being able to find content posted by your actual friends

[02:06:14] uh is the ai slop on facebook as bad as i'm told oh my god well it's awful you saw the trouble they got in lately with these uh fake celebrity chat bots oh god um that were sending risque messages oh this is character those ones are character ai but yeah but facebook was doing it too there were had a similar issue but that was like yesterday's news about chat bots sending fake risque messages

[02:06:44] yeah that was a character ai which has of course been in trouble in the past uh being sued by parents uh over the day um i mean my facebook feed is currently dominated by ai images of celebrities holding birthday cakes with their names on them and also heart touch very long heart touching anecdotes about celebrities being nice can you can you screen share that oh can i see it i'm just just share it with

[02:07:13] them on facebook i i don't i don't want to use facebook all right let me see what's let me see what's on my i don't can't believe we're spending all this time on facebook it's so i mean it's so you can just cut it out later it's so yesterday isn't it isn't it maybe i mean apparently it's not leo because i think they still have hundreds of millions of monthly active users on on the big blue yeah is it only old people i mean based on this conversation apparently not because of because we're

[02:07:40] all okay here's a birthday party here's i always get uh for some reason i don't know why ladies in skimpy bikinis uh my wheels are like that too that the algorithm it's just reels it's just the way reels is the reels algorithm seems to be ladies and skimpy bikinis yeah well humans um there's bill gates within 10 years ai will replace many doctors and teachers humans won't be needed for most things bill

[02:08:07] don't bring your personal life into it okay just you know yeah be quiet also you know you know trump's old and out of touch because he made bill gates come to the white house and put satya further away like come on dude uh i i have no ai content in mind all right there you go so it's not it's not the ai pocket it's you told it's you well you need to read some of the texts though because some of it is ai

[02:08:30] generated text uh huh i never i never go here so yes i think that that that summarizes it like it's a good it's a good ploy to get a little attention to facebook again and it's perfectly fine that they brought back pokes and it may even drive some authentic human interactions on the site but a bit like a cup of water to to um smiegel as he fades into the lava i don't think you're gonna change the

[02:08:56] trend my precious and he's gone uh eureka alert first brain wide map made of decision making charted in mice yeah princeton neuroscientists have led an international collaboration of 22 labs

[02:09:18] they have now mapped the 620 000 neurons in a mouse and discovered how they make decisions this is awesome it turns out uh many more parts of the brain are involved in the decision making than they thought now i don't know if mouse decisions are anything like human decisions

[02:09:45] why not the task was deceptively simple mice sat in front of screens that intermittently displayed a black and white striped circle for a brief amount of time either on the left or the right the mouse could get a reward a sip of sugar if they quickly moved the circle toward the center of the screen by operating a tiny steering wheel in the same direction

[02:10:11] so if this if the if the pictures on the left they get to turn the steering wheel to the right move it to the middle and they get a sip of sugar water yeah you're see i'm showing a giant i'm assuming i'm tiny but really the mice is tiny yeah but i mean that's what i do at work i do stuff and then i get rewarded with caffeine water i mean like it's also while the mice performed this task by the way they also threw him some curves the circle was faint sometimes requiring them to guess relying on past

[02:10:40] experience while the mice performed the task researchers recorded brain activity using high density electrodes that allowed them to monitor hundreds of neurons across many regions simultaneously and because there are so many neurons the work was divided among all the labs pooling a data set covering 620 000 neurons recorded from 139 mice in 12 labs encompassing in

[02:11:06] the nearly the entire brain the results revealed decision making is distributed across the brain including areas traditionally associated with movement rather than cognition decision making is broadly distributed i i don't know can you extrapolate this to humans i don't know uh yeah well no maybe not

[02:11:30] directly in the way that you're thinking but mice are mammals so start there like we have if i fed you whiskey instead of sugar syrup that probably worked better yes i would get that wheel totally off and i um so no no whiskey for me sugar water no whiskey sugar water is fine but the thing is there's a company called cortical labs and i talked to them because i think they're awesome over on twist and what they

[02:11:56] do is they take um chips and then they layer actual neurons on top of them and they found a way to to make them do electric pulses together to do cool computing projects and so what i'm excited about is once we understand how perhaps even small mammalian brains work we can then build those somehow and then we already are learning how to connect them to computers and then we can have synthetic or hybrid physical and uh digital or biological and um silicon-based computing systems and that's going to be wicked

[02:12:26] because that solves the ai problem of like oh god lms aren't actually intelligent you can jack into your game in the log cabin and be there virtually there there would probably be some jack into the log cabin just thinking out loud stop it stop you you can't put it all you you can't slow pitch all right all right sorry if your children are listening you're a father now alex yeah my oldest kid's two and a half there hey explain this to me

[02:12:53] because i is this feels like a little bit feels like a little weird okay nvidia's chip round trip deals nvidia would sell chips to a company lambda a cloud startup then rent them back from lambda so nvidia this is from the information nvidia is paying lambda 1.5 billion dollars over time uh it's also done this

[02:13:22] with core weave another nvidia-backed cloud startup uh they invest in startups which then buy the nvidia chips then nvidia rents those chips back spending several hundred million dollars a year in the process by the way a tiny amount for nvidia what's the reason for this the startups get to increase the chip rental

[02:13:45] revenue they report which buttresses their ability to go public and of course because nvidia is an investor in these companies they benefit in the increase in the startup's value plus they also show revenue from the chips that the startups are buying so it's a shell game is this even legal i've been talking a lot harry why don't you crack at this no this is your you got it this is yours alex yeah i

[02:14:13] mean it's a little bit of bailey wick it's a little bit outside the area of my expertise it's so bizarre certainly i mean um it basically presumably this can end up offering something that the world wants because you know companies want to buy these cloud services so just i think it artificially inflates this the the nvidia stock price to some degree and the value of

[02:14:41] these companies to some degree so it must be worth more than the hundreds of millions that nvidia is paying for the radio you got to play the game on the field i'm sorry just tell you otherwise you're eating dirt off the table or something something yeah well we can run that back so i do think that if this was happening at scale it would be a cause for a concern 1.5 billion dollars for nvidia that's chump change yeah why don't you that's the thing it's why do you have two zeros and

[02:15:10] then we'll be talking about real scale is relative but well i don't want to not this is not as nefarious as it sounds on on the okay on the surface so first of all lambda and i actually but i just talked to its former ceo a few days ago i figured you'd do something about this lovely guy and what i see here as the advantage for nvidia is they get to financially support through investment these neo cloud companies your core weaves your lambdas your end scales etc which is good because they want to have a broader

[02:15:40] array of cloud providers that are not just the hyperscalers because amazon google and other companies are building their own chips to try to reduce their ah good point dependence on nvidia open ai is also working with broadcom that came out this week and sent that stock up quite a lot uh two when nvidia sells a chip to a company and then rents it back it's not the exact same transaction in reverse because the company has to rack that chip cool that chip put power through that chip and then

[02:16:07] nvidia is just renting time on it for its own needs nvidia isn't really in the business of being a cloud provider and so i don't think it's actually a net negative for the company to let an expert third party do that is it a little bit in ronnie it definitely smells like it but the scale is small and i can see the strategic elements to this and i don't think there's enough uh round tripping here to actually cause a concern uh about invidious financials there is a there is somebody a chatter in our

[02:16:36] youtube whose handle is breton woods which tells me must be an economist right who says it's called sales and leased back which takes capex and switches it to opex in your sheets capital expenditure to operational expenditure and that's probably good so port furniture right uh is a berkshire halfway company and they do furniture rentals because some people don't want to do capex

[02:17:03] they'd rather have it be manifested in opics and that's totally fine oh okay see it's it's a it's a it's a little bit freaky i i think what people do with stories like this is that people like uh my my friend ed zitron whom i adore um who are currently beating the ai is um a fraud drum if you will take things like this and then to put them in the worst possible context because that's the perspective they

[02:17:26] view the world through it's just financial it's normal it's not really and i i think if it goes up by 10x then i wanted to ask you this is why i want to ask you yeah okay be cautious but don't freak out let's take a break then we have they have the uh i like to call it the seeds and the stems the stuff the news in this show that just fell through the the sieve the little bits and pieces left over you

[02:17:53] can make cannabis jokes but i can't make cannabis is legal in the state of california always doing things in a cabin it depends what state the cabin's in alex wilhelm is here he's doing things in a cabin harry mccracken is the technologizer he's not and our show will continue in a moment but first a word from this little doohickey let me show you this thing is this thing is so cool this is my thinkst canary i'm

[02:18:20] going to show you that it looks like a little um i don't know external usb drive maybe but it's it's got an ethernet connection on it and it's got a hard wire on it but let me tell you something this thing is the best security device ever our sponsor today thinkst canary i'll go to canary.tools and show you what i can do with my thinkst canary i'm going to log in here it is a honeypot just so

[02:18:46] you understand what we're talking about here this this is a device that looks benign looks simple but it composes almost anything now right now uh i it's set up for me to uh to look like a windows server but you know i was just thinking the other day they're probably better for a sharepoint an old sharepoint server uh this is the interface at canary.tools you see it's right now windows server 2019

[02:19:16] but oh this is so cool watch i can configure this to be almost anything i want and when i say configure it it looks exactly like it it could be iis it could be a microsoft ad domain controller oh you know you want vulnerable nothing better than sharepoint 2010 baby the point is it isn't really obviously

[02:19:39] a cent os server or oracle enterprise server or a jupiter photogate security device or a microtik router it's a honeypot look it can even be a skater device i'm going to make it a herschman rs20 industrial switch now the thing about this is it it isn't you know it it personates it perfectly it's got the mac address of herschman automation it's it's got a fingerprint in the ip stack everything looks exactly right

[02:20:09] so a bad guy doesn't see a honeypot bad guy doesn't see the thinks canary the bad guy sees something vulnerable and valuable thinks canaries are honeypots that can be deployed in minutes and why would you do this well if somebody is inside your network brute forcing your fake internal skata device or your ssh server or your web server uh your thinks canary will

[02:20:37] immediately tell you you have a problem no false alerts just the alerts that matter thinks canaries can also create canary tokens an unlimited number of fake phony files it could be anything from an aws login to a credit card to an excel spreadsheet i've got excel spreadsheet you can put them anywhere including on your cloud so i've got on my google drive an excel spreadsheet that says employee payroll

[02:20:59] information now i know it's phony it's bogus but bad guys if they open it up bang i get an alert and i get the alert in a way that makes sense to me whether it's email text uh syslog they have they support web hooks they have an api any way you want you're going to get the notification that matters that tells you somebody is inside your network whether it's a bad guy hacker who's in there or a

[02:21:25] uh malicious insider just choose a profile and you'll see it's so easy to do you could change your profile every day if you want choose a profile for thinks canary device you register it with a hosted console it does the rest it monitors it gives you the notifications and then you just sit back you're done attackers who breached your network cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your thinks canary visit canary.tools slash twit for just seventy five hundred dollars per year you're going

[02:21:54] to get five thinks canaries your own hosted console you get the upgrades to support the maintenance if you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us box you're going to get 10 off the price for life other good news you can always return your thinks canaries with their two months money back guarantee for a full refund so there's no risk but i got to tell you during all the years we partnered with thinks canary their refund guarantee has never been claimed visit canary.tools twit don't forget

[02:22:23] enter the code twit in the how did you hear about us box this is a device once you get one you will see how did i live without it it is a big part of your layered security strategy how do you know ask yourself if somebody were inside my network today how would i know i know i've got to think canary i may have more than one i'm not telling i'm not telling canary.tools twit don't forget the offer

[02:22:48] code twit so breton woods is back he's big on monetary policy he says a slightly corrected version of my former comment sale and leaseback deals switches capex to opex thus lowering investment assets subject to taxation lowering investment assets subject to taxation so it's a it's a tax deal

[02:23:13] as well there's some benefit tax wise you're watching twit harry mccracken yeah alex you knew you knew that all along all right well it's just a different way of thinking about where the costs end up but no i don't disagree with mr breton woods which is a sentence that i never thought i'd utter out loud i never thought i'd see a handle on youtube breton woods wow uh but monetary policy is very popular

[02:23:37] these days so let's see there's so many other stories here um did you see this that uh elon musk and tesla have decided hey first tesla has decided to give elon a trillion dollars pending certain this is normal you do this with a quarterback or a home run hitter certain measurable performance

[02:23:59] things like he's got to sell what was it 18 million full self-driving subscriptions um maybe uh this is tied to the fact that they've changed the wording of full self-driving on the tesla sales page now they describe it not as autonomous uh they describe it as advanced driver assist yeah adas like every other

[02:24:26] car manufacturer has maybe this is because of that lawsuit i don't know that when would they spend a couple hundred million dollars in the settlement i'm just kind of blown away that they kept calling it full self-driving for so long so long it just it just it never it never made sense to me it's like calling full sugar coke zero calorie coke it wasn't the same thing and it always made me kind of mad but it seemed like whenever i would complain about it i would get the wave of elon fans and i i got tired

[02:24:52] of that so you eventually stopped stopped beating the drum yeah the uh the tesla board years ago offered him a deal that sounded implausible and he did achieve that one and that's how he made a lot of money so that's why they're paying 56 billion a year well and that's when the delaware chancery court came into play and so forth this is one of those times in which we have the right mechanism and the wrong reward so i think people are kind of conflating the two i i think actually tying ceo

[02:25:21] performance to pick a metric you know market cap if you want or revenue or profitability or 10 million active fsd subscription sure is is a great way to actually track performance puts a little accountability into the c-suite great love that um a trillion dollars stock and that's that's when i begin to get a little bit later because how much does one person need that's them saying though and i think by the way the shareholders will have to approve this uh that's a way of saying hey we think elon is

[02:25:47] vital to the success of tesla and we want to keep him focused on tesla right well ask yourself this question if elon musk quit tesla tomorrow what would happen to its share price it would tumble right crater because the company is not valued like a car company is valued like elon musk's vehicle to pursue his visions so in a sense i can kind of squint and see it the the reward in this case i think is excessive

[02:26:16] for any corporation um when satya became ceo of microsoft they eventually dropped a um an sec filing i forget it may have been an 8k or something and i talked to microsoft's comp people at the time it's probably been gone long enough i can say this and they're like just so you know this is the way we think about it we're framing it in context of other ceos but this is going to eventually make satya a billionaire and you know what running microsoft for as long as they expected him to stay in the seat and how well he's done sure i can see that in our current system immensely to their value yeah

[02:26:45] but a trillion to me is a thousand times as much as a billion it's a lot more than a billion are there any trillionaires no no at this time a trillion dollar company it sounds like this would involve tesla becoming unbelievably more successful than any other company in the history of the world which elon has said is in the future for for tesla because of the optimus robots right right but not

[02:27:11] not because i'm selling evs but because of robotics uh this is what they advertise now if you uh go to the tesla website by the way i paid on my model x five thousand dollars for full self-driving which i know which you never he's been promising it for years i never i never did get it now they're saying full self-driving supervised it's supervised uh your car will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with

[02:27:39] minimal driver intervention that's a more accurate description to be honest that's that's a that's it still says full self-driving on the 10 right there supervised supervised okay we'll find that i i think leo laporte is death incarnate parentheses maybe not maybe not i mean come on the fine print says this is from electric it doesn't make the vehicle autonomous it doesn't even promise it as a feature

[02:28:04] you know i paid five thousand dollars for the right to get it if it ever came out it didn't during the three-year term oh it's an options contract i see yeah you know at the time and maybe i was naive i i also bought the bio weapon defense filtration system which is just a filter uh but it had the bio

[02:28:27] weapon you know had the bio hazard thing on it was great and i knew i was it was not real i knew that i wasn't going to probably ever pay more for the self-driving or any of that i wanted to support elon because at the time naive as i was this is 2015 something like that i thought he was changing the world i thought he's really doing a good thing and i wanted to support it i remember going to the factory in fremont to pick it up and get the factory tour and like tears were coming to my eyes i was so

[02:28:57] inspired boy do i feel like a fool now but i was so at the time i was inspired i thought this guy is really trying to make the world a better place and i think maybe he was i still think in some ways many of his projects are i just hate that he's taking the wealth from those projects and using it in ways that i think are reprehensible but like i struggle with this a lot because i'm an enormous science fiction

[02:29:20] guy and i want to go to space before i die and i want to go to mars trust me leo i'll go to venus mars freaking mercury i don't care put me some quote the to quote the poet ain't the kind of place to raise a kid i hear it's cold as hell cool let's go i i don't i mean i'm not going to space because i think it's gonna be luxurious i could just go to the four seasons if i want that i called the cost

[02:29:47] harry did you ever use the uh arc browser do you know about the arc i used arc for a while i said nice things about it i loved it uh i saw the news about the browser company yeah so it was created by the browser company of new york and i saw some wag create a uh a little uh meme template that says the something company of some place and you just fill in the blank to make up your company name i like it

[02:30:11] the uh podcast company of petaluma that's me anyway uh the browser company created arc then decided you know not enough people are using it so they killed arc oh you can still get it but they said you know we're deprecating our that's on maintenance yeah we're gonna make a new browser that's ai focused called dia well the other shoe dropped they have just been acquired by atlassian for 610 million

[02:30:36] dollars is that a good exit i think it's probably a pretty good exit for a company that really sold nothing had no profits no revenue at all it's a good deal for them i mean i i'm i'm personally very interested to see how ai impacts browsing and um with all due respect to atlassian it sounds like this is going to become an enterprise product and uh this is probably the last we'll hear about it

[02:31:05] being something wildly inventive and experimental and so uh on that level i regret it although i certainly if i had been offered 600 million dollars for for this product i probably would have been excited as well i i loved arc i was very disappointed it was cool um yeah it was my you know one of the but i have some unusual requirements i want to use a browser that i can show on the screen that doesn't have any browser user interface or anything it's just a full screen of the web page and arc did that i

[02:31:33] like the heart the the tabs in this i'd like to think we won't all be stuck with with chrome and safari and uh just forever and that there's a chance some some very small company will shake up that market but um according to the information uh uh perplexity had also talked uh with the browser company about an acquisition back in december open ai held talks with them as well i mean it must be a pretty good team because they've built some nice software well and and also uh the latest thing

[02:32:03] is these agentic browsers and uh open ai uh is building one um perplexity has built one comet we talked about that dia was by the browser company same idea as this idea of a an ai browser which can do things for you agentically the browser company was uh valued at 550 million last year investors included atlassian salesforce figma co-founder dylan field and linkedin co-founder reid hoffman who has

[02:32:30] his fingers you might as well just say in everything right he's just in everything i love it that's that's where you went with that i was going to say you know dylan that that's a guy who's really suffering from poverty right now he really needed a good outcome it went well for him didn't it not not being able to sell figma as planned then they went public and they made more money right all right so i made that argument and uh the silicon valley logic i can just report to you is that if you look at the

[02:32:57] effective irr or internal rate of return of the two deals at different points in time 20 billion adobe versus the eventual ipo at a higher price uh it present it puts out a smaller uh rate of return for the capital invested in the company precedingly so no it actually wasn't a better outcome which i think is a little bit silly given the importance of liquidity and dpi and venture today you know that's you may remember when uh when it was announced that figma had gone public for all those billions of dollars

[02:33:26] lena khan the former chairman of the fcc tweeted see we did a good thing preventing the merger the acquisition i i wrote a very similar piece and then uh i i i took it to work at twist and i'm like and then it turns out that people didn't agree with me shot you down did they yeah shot you down i floated it we started the show talking about a big victory for publishers against um anthropic warner

[02:33:52] brothers discovery has joined in other suits against ai giant mid journey uh you may remember that the mid journey is being sued by disney over darth vader uh warner brothers discovery owns the dc comics uh ip and so they're pissed off about batman so uh we'll see both those both those cases are uh

[02:34:16] wending their way through the courts now probably be years before there's a decision um i don't know what we're gonna do about this because you can go to hugging face which is an online repository of open source ai models and you can download chinese image generation models that don't have to comply with western copyright protections right and so sure copyright infringement is bad i think we all agree here uh but i don't think there's going to be a way for brands to actually prevent people from doing

[02:34:45] this and there's probably not a way for the ai companies to say you may know what rick and morty look like but you cannot generate an image with rick and morty i mean they seem very erratic there there have been times when chat gpt has refused to generate batman for me but if i say um if i ask for an image of a guy dressed as a bat from a 1960s tv show it'll give me a perfect adam west and then

[02:35:11] after i read the stuff about mid journey i asked chat gpt to do an image of batman grocery shopping and i called him batman and it gave me a really good batman grocery shopping so okay but on the other hand though harry remember when uh open ai dropped their image generator and we all did the studio ghibli um yeah and nobody minded that in fact i still have mine as my twitter icon studio ghibli didn't like

[02:35:35] it no but uh the attorneys that i heard from said yeah they can't really you can't copyright a style which is interesting no but but you can copyright images a crime-fighting superhero who dresses up like a bat and calls himself batman i think any ai mid-journey would just generate something that looked virtually identical to an actual batman poster yeah i think any ai that could generate

[02:36:03] a perfect adam west deserves our praise it's all worth it it's all worth it were you a batman fan as a kid i was i was too when the show came out so you can do the math and how old i am now and um my according to my mother i loved it and i took it very seriously and did not realize it was not a very serious because you were younger than me i was in i think fifth grade and all the kids were so excited

[02:36:30] batman's gonna be on tonight batman's gonna be on tonight i got home i'm so excited to watch batman my parents said we're going out to dinner and i said oh no no well serious serious batman fans are still a little um crusty about adam west just because the show made made fun of batman i thought it was great it was hysterical it was very funny this is the show that that looked a little bit more

[02:36:54] whimsical it was campy it was very campy and then later we got holy cracker jacks box batman that kind of thing we got late eventually we got all these extremely serious dystopian batman movies so uh i love those two i love all batman my dad had the you know a replica of the original dc one batman superman comics and i loved those i loved them all and i loved the tongue-in-cheek batman that was hysterical

[02:37:19] that's nice but see for me the formative batman experience that i had was the no man's land arc uh which i just looked up it's from 1999 because i used to draw a lot and i wanted to do comics and so i bought those and i tried to recreate the images but that particular arc of batman is to me like what batman is and it's frank miller really reinvented batman and made it uh i mean basically the best batman as the batman from whenever you started reading comics or watching tv or going to

[02:37:46] the movies are you saying that childhood has an impact on our nostalgia functions in our we're like baby ducks we get imprinted with uh whatever you know which which batman was it that you was the frank miller batman the dark the dark night stuff or what did you call it uh no man's land no man's land which was uh the 1999 apparently according to this it's um were they written by

[02:38:11] uh jordan b that was later that was after frank miller but it was it was after we'd already gone dark with batman yeah but i can still like remember like individual panels from those compendiums that i had because i i read it so many times and and yeah sure it's it's nostalgia but i also grew up with harry potter and that's still infringed on my on my dna as well because i was around for every release of the books can i say something i know this will be not welcome but

[02:38:38] and i read those books to my kids and until they got old enough where they said dad you're reading too slowly don't don't give me all the character voices and they she dabby just took the book from me it was like volume four and said i'm going to read this this is taking all the fire bear yeah but i would do harry porter you're a wizard harry and she after a while she she didn't want to hear that but i was

[02:39:02] very serious about i took her to see jr uh jk rolling jk rolling i knew there was something wrong jk rolling uh when she toured she stopped it after the first book but she with the with the with the first book she toured and did readings and i took abby which little girl and i said remember this you're meeting like it's like me meeting jr tolkien this was before she became a

[02:39:27] controversial figure uh but i'm gonna be honest here this is a little controversial they are not well written books that's the thing they are controversial down the road and then just they are terribly written books there's some i mean you can't really can't compare to to tolkien or even

[02:39:51] like even patrick rothfuss or or george rr martin the second patrick roth books rothfuss book in the name of the wind series was just okay i can't use the words here on the show it started so well and then went off the rails and then harry harry back me up here no one ever compared the literary quality of the harry potter they were terrible to the literary quality and those spell names i mean some people certainly did and they certainly speak to a lot of people yeah no i and they spoke to

[02:40:20] me they spoke they spoke i listened and my kids loved them and all that i think right right on entertainment value absolutely they are up there she as she tapped an herb she's the richest woman in england but entertainment and literary value are very distinct things there are people they're not fun at all i mean there are lots of people who also say that tolkien does not have all that much literary value so it doesn't it's well or idiots but they're wrong how about that i declare

[02:40:48] uh tenaciously liking tolkien back in the 1960s was also something that people would turn their nose up that oh absolutely it was considered my uh my uh my father was like a tolkien nut back in the early days and he tried to convince his father my grandfather to um read the lord of the rings which i can't imagine my grandfather actually taking the lord of the rings seriously great books man that's an interesting comment on time there's an example though of of uh world creation

[02:41:18] done right compared to harry potter where it's very haphazard and there's you know it's just kind of slapped together and if you look at the economy underneath for any moment in time it falls apart immediately there's a there's a with the goblins run a bank and then there's this mystery vault in the bank and anyway no no it's way more pedestrian than that there's a scene at the the weasley's house when suddenly the mom can generate a sauce out of her wand randomly yeah it's been discussed earlier

[02:41:45] that you can only expand and contract but it's just didn't even try it's not it's not no world building it's made up it's not good anyway i i thought i'd just throw that in because people don't hate me enough ladies and gentlemen uh i have ended the show on a sour note and i'm sorry to ruin your childhood but that's how it goes sometimes harry mccracken he's at fast company he is plugged in and so is his

[02:42:10] newsletter you can subscribe to it and you should uh at fastcompany.com slash etc i don't know just search for plugged in right that that probably search search for fast company and plugged in and then you will immediately find it and you should be reading it every every go to fastcompany.com yes i actually uh again another one of the sites that i read every single day though lots of great content on fast company i think they do a good job and now that i know it's not owned by private equity i like

[02:42:39] it even better i really like that it's great to see you harry tell one one one one uh patient person who likes what we do is that amazing used to be like that back in the day uh say hello to marie all right well and uh i miss her that was always fun when we had a studio harry and marie would come up to petaluma and we'd get to see them both we miss those days i miss those days too yeah thanks harry

[02:43:07] great to see you all right same to you alex alex wilhelm uh if you hadn't come to the studio with your at the time a fiancee liza i would never have known that you live in my childhood home yeah yeah which we're gonna have to expand maybe yeah uh we had a family of four in there and it was pretty tight quarters i don't know how you're gonna do it with five and three dogs yeah i don't know it's uh it's adorable it's life as it should be you are living the living the dream alex

[02:43:37] i appreciate that thanks for having me back yeah always a pleasure this week in startups of course twist and uh you should subscribe to his newsletter cautious optimism.news it's really interesting how we've been doing to it for 20 years uh it started it was mostly people writing in magazines and now it is almost entirely people writing newsletters it's because you get the uh the slightly and i say this with love to harry and myself the slightly weird people to come on i think

[02:44:05] it's the way the world has changed but no it's the people who can't stop talking that come on well it's very important to have that person yes it's the worst when somebody won't talk but i mean i mean we need multiple outlets for for for stuff so i'm not shocked that you know we both have newsletters i don't have the discipline i wish i did because it probably an easier way to uh i don't know it's not easy is it no no no what am i saying there's nothing easier than sitting and talking yes i've

[02:44:33] had an absolute blast for three hours reverses sometimes i sit down and write for three hours and i take what i have and i crumple into a little ball and i throw it up you can't crumple this up it's done it's over it's finished no editing it's out there thank you everybody for joining us we do twit every sunday 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 eastern 2100 utc we stream it live in eight different places of course club members get to see us in the club twit discord i like to think of that as the behind

[02:45:00] the velvet rope access but there's also youtube twitch tick tock facebook linkedin x.com and kick seven public places you can watch you don't need to watch live though uh that's only if you want to chat and and so forth but it but uh if you if you're content to download a copy we've got plenty of places to go our website twit.tv there's a youtube channel with the video uh that's a great way to clip pieces of the show and share it with people which if you do that we love it because it

[02:45:29] spreads the word about this uh podcast we've been doing for 20 years now you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player do also if you do that leave us a great review because that's another way to help us spread the word if you've been around for 20 years it's hard to be the flavor of the month you could i guess we could be the flavor of two decades but that sounds kind of stale so tell people let them know twits here because we still are still doing the good work that we do thanks to our

[02:45:57] producers uh benito will be back next week or the week after anthony i i'm not sure benito gonzalez on the next episode yeah next episode he's back yep anthony nielsen has been filling in doing a great job thank you anthony for your hard work he is a he is a vital element to our production team thank you yeah absolutely the great ai user group by the way if you're in the club you can

[02:46:21] watch it on the twit plus feed talking about n8n and using nodal compositors to combine ais to do interesting things it was really a very interesting uh subject uh we did reschedule chris marquardt's photo uh segment uh because uh chris had a family emergency it was nice because that gave me the opportunity to interview salt hank that's also on the twit plus feed if you want to see that it's also on most of

[02:46:46] our socials uh because we're trying to you know i don't ride the back of his success uh there's yeah we'll probably do the photo thing next week so you have one more week to take your uh delightful pictures thank you everybody for joining us as we have said for the last 20 years um we appreciate your being here thanks a lot and we'll see you next time another twit is in the key