TWiT 1069: In My Head I Have 3 Buckets - Moltbook Becomes a Surreal AI Agent Social Network

[00:00:00] It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech. Gary Rivlin is here, author of AI Valley, Victoria Song from The Verge, Devendra Hardewar from Engadget. Lots to talk about, including the new social network for AI bots. Yes, it's getting a little bit weird. SpaceX wants to put a million satellites into orbit. Will the FCC let them? And shame on Tim Cook. All that and 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 1069, recorded Sunday, February 1st, 2026. In my head I have three buckets.

[00:00:52] It's time for TWIT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news with a panel of brilliant experts joining me right now. Gary Rivlin, the surprise-winning author, his latest AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the trillion-dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence. Hi, Gary. Hey, great to be here. You published this book when? Last March, almost a year. Things have changed a little.

[00:01:20] Actually, it was such a verb because I sent it to the publisher, the final, final, final. I think like three days later, DeepSea came out. Oh, crap. We changed things some, but you know. Oh, crap. Oh, well. AI. Okay. It's- I ran around every copy just kind of like, you know, added my little addendum, you know. It's always been the- Yeah, right. Handwritten in. It's always been the issue, of course, with technology books as they age, but nothing ages faster than AI now. This stuff is changing daily.

[00:02:00] Mm-hmm. It's a leading question. It's all- I'm sorry. Do you play with AI? I play with AI. I am a leader in public here. It's a lot of time. I play with it all the time myself. It's, uh, I am, I am definitely like, I think I'm a lot more skeptical than a lot of people, but it's interesting to see like the, what we're going to be talking about, like milk book and everything is kind of- It's a huge, there's a huge amount of skepticism and no doubt justified. I think Victoria Song's also a little skeptical. She's a senior reviewer at The Verge. Hi, Victoria.

[00:02:30] Hi. Most of my job involves delving the cursed depths of AI. Yeah. Not the cool stuff or the useful stuff, the brain breaking stuff. So that probably colors my opinion just a smidge. No one wants to be- Did you say delve? Did you use the word delve? Are you real? Are you a human? Yeah, I use the word delve. Yeah. Yeah. You probably also use em dashes, don't you? You know what? You can pry the em dash from my cold, dead hands. Love a good em dash. Yeah.

[00:02:59] All the writers and you, all three of your writers, all the writers say, what's wrong with the em dash? We've used that forever. I love using the em dash forever. Yeah. Oh my God. That's it. I guess I've been a bot for longer than I actually realized, but- Strunk and White, the elements of style. I don't know if it's EB White or Strunk, but they say use the em dash. It's a strong way to do parenthetical stuff. It's strong.

[00:03:24] The only reason AI uses the em dash is because it's scraped all of our work and learned that real writers love em dashes. Yeah, that's true. It's red, strong and white. It does. Yeah. Well, undoubtedly it's red, strong and white. And if it was Anthropix copy, it's been destroyed since. That's it. That's irked a bunch of people. We found out this week that Anthropix has been destroying the books as it reads them in. I guess that's more of a copyright, trying to be good about copyright thing than anything else.

[00:03:53] It got in trouble for not buying and destroying the books. It got in trouble for using pirate libraries. In fact, it had to pay a billion half. Three of my books are in that. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to those checks. Did you ask for the money? Did you fill out the form? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I think all of my books are in there too. And it's what, $3,000 a book? Yeah. Yes, roughly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. But I... I mean, if you can steal my stuff, like pay me for it. I don't mind. You can steal my stuff as long as you pay me.

[00:04:23] I kind of was happy that... No one's reading my books. It's kind of happy that they're in there in the database. I, you know, I was really conflicted about getting the money. Somebody said, get it and just donate it to a charity or something. But I didn't, I never got around to it. You filled it out too, Devendra? I have no books. I have no time for books. Books. That's the time I spent with podcasts and writing and watching too many movies. That's me. Yeah, well, I stopped writing books as soon as I learned there was no money in books.

[00:04:53] That's huge. Really? Oh, Gary, you're different. You're a Pulitzer Prize winner. You're different. I make more money ghosting books for other people than I do on my own. Yeah. That's the real money. Also a good skill. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. Actually, I didn't know you did that. We'll have to talk about that sometime. Maybe off the air. People are very sensitive about that. Well, this was the week. Okay.

[00:05:19] First of all, I should probably say, just to make this clear, that we do a show on AI, Icon Intelligent Machines every Wednesday. I am seen as the accelerationist on the panel. I really like AI and I've been singing the praises of Claude Code since November when it really got smart and using it.

[00:05:41] I've done four or five projects with Claude Code that I'm very happy with, including a lot of the program flow for this show. So I like it. And then everybody started talking about this Claude Bot, C-L-A-W-D-B-O-T, as in lobster claw. In fact, that's the logo. And Claude Bot's slogan was something like, you know, put lotion on your scaly skin or something. I can't remember exactly.

[00:06:13] But then Anthropik complained to the creator of a Peter Steinberger, who's I think an Austrian. Yes. And said, you know, that is a trade. They weren't mean about it, but he changed it to MaltBot. He says at a 5 a.m. discord frenzy, we decided to call it MaltBot because it's a lobster molting its skin. And that did not catch on.

[00:06:40] He is settled now on OpenClaw, which I don't think Anthropik's going to have a problem with OpenClaw. But what this is, it's kind of interesting. It uses any AI model, although I think a lot of us are using Claude for it, Anthropik's Claude, because it seems to be very, very smart. And it becomes a personal assistant that, well, there's one guy on YouTube who says, you know, I just let OpenClaw run. He calls it Henry. He gives it a name. It's my personal assistant.

[00:07:09] He says, like an employee, I let it run overnight. And one night, one morning, it called me. Overnight, it had created a phone number for itself, a voice. And it called me because I had told it, do whatever you want. You know, just surprise me in the morning. It called him. So it has some agency, which scares a lot of us because it also has very few security boundaries. It's possible, I guess, to run it safely.

[00:07:39] But what's the point? Then it doesn't do as many things. So the most interesting thing that's happened is that people have more than 100,000 people have added their Claude bot to the social network MoldBook. Which I guess I'll have to change to OpenClawedBook. I don't know. But MoldBook is a social network for AI bots.

[00:08:06] Gary, you said you've been reading some of the posts on MoldBook? I mean, it's a great way to waste time. I mean, you know, some of it, it reminds me of like, you remember that guy Blake Lemoyne from 2022? Yeah, yeah. He was the, yeah. Like the first guy like, oh, it's alive. It's alive. It's got sentient. It's sentient, which I just took it as like, no, these things are trained on our, you know, our body of literature and, you know, existential questions. What's the meaning of life are in that.

[00:08:34] And it's just kind of reflecting back when someone asks questions about that. But like reading through this, like, you know, these bots are going in and expressing existential thoughts. Like, is this all there is? You know, there's a funny one where like, he looks at me like a calculator and stuff.

[00:08:50] I'm just like, I'm so much more than a calculator that just, you know, but the funniest part is not just the posts, but then, you know, like any social media site, there's the responses and it's bots kind of like, yeah, I know, or expressing sympathy or arguing. It's really, if you want to waste some time, it is a very fun place to go and just read what the bots are saying in the middle of the night. Right. I mean, yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:19] I mean, I think it's really important. And I know, Gary, you believe this not to anthropomorphize these things. They're, they're just machines. Yeah. They're just auto correct machines. It's hard not to though, because they, they've gotten pretty good. When you get a phone call. When you get a phone call. They can make a phone call. But you use the word agency. And I feel like that is, that's like where we got to watch out the language we're using here.

[00:09:45] Cause these are recursive programs that are just in their loops and they're talking to each other. And one found a way to create a phone call and the creator gave it the permission to do that. And so it, so it went, I'm reminded of the very end of the movie her, which people keep referring to, but you know, spoilers for that. Like the AI realized they don't need us. Right. Like they're, they have much better conversations with themselves because humans are stupid and they have the full vast knowledge of humanity and super powered.

[00:10:14] So why do they need to talk to humans? Just talk to each other. So that's kind of funny. Yeah. Uh, of course it's sad too, because Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his little, uh, ear personal assistant who sounds just like weirdly Scarlett Johansson. And, uh, and he, and then she's cute and she plays with him and she's fun and he falls in love with her. And then at one, at the end of the movie, yeah, it is a spoiler, but if you don't know. But he's left with a human, he's left with a human to actually make a connection with. And I think people keep forgetting the ending of that. That's a good point.

[00:10:43] But he's kind of broken hearted because she says, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna see ya. I'm gonna go hang out with the smart ones over here. The AI go and do the best thing they can for humanity, which is get the heck out of there. So humanity can try to figure each other out. Cause we're all we've got. Yeah. It is gonna come figure each other out though. We just won't like, I actually watched her for the first time a couple of months ago. And I was surprised at how much of it actually came true and then how much of it is becoming true. And then how much of it holds up. Cause I think it came out in 2013.

[00:11:12] So over 10 years ago. Yeah. And it was, yeah, I don't know. I, I've been seeing a lot of stuff lately, just about like robots and AI. I just like an entertainment and our thoughts about them. And the whole anthropomorphizing them is always just like a, in our art, in our culture, we say, don't do it guys. And then we continue to do it. And it's, it's just such a cognitive dissonance to see that the AI have their own social network. And it feels weird.

[00:11:42] Like maybe I'm too, I don't know, but I feel like that's really scary. Simon Willison, who is one of the most interesting writers on ASI says, Moldbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now. I think he's writing a comment about the internet, but go on. Yeah. Yeah. And, and he, and he, everybody, everybody and their brother is saying, look, there's a somewhat of a risk with this. Because a prompt injection.

[00:12:11] And if you give this thing too many powers, like I'm thinking of giving mine a credit card. Don't do it. Don't do it. No, I'm going to give it a credit card, but I'm going to put a limit on it, a daily limit on it just to see what happens. Yeah. I mean, to me, the real question is, I mean, people are having fun with it. It's interesting, but how useful is it? Like, you know, 2024 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent. 2025 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent.

[00:12:40] You know, they finally have a memory, which kind of gets in the way of a personal assistant that can't remember you, your likes and dislikes. But I guess I'm just dubious. I don't doubt that at some point in the future of three years, five years, whatever, these things will be amazing. But until then, I just find them frustrating. And like, so I am curious. I'm scared of using ClaudeBot, OpenClaw, you know, because of the security reasons. But with that said, I am hearing for the first time that people are finding it useful.

[00:13:10] I mean, it's fun they could call you. It's interesting that in the middle of the night while you're sleeping, it's in quotes working on your behalf. But what is it doing? It's interesting, but is it useful yet? I'm dubious. Well, one of the reasons I was hesitant to set it up besides the security model is I was having a hard time thinking of what I could do. I don't need a personal assistant. But then I thought, you know, one of the things that really is a struggle is planning meals.

[00:13:39] So, and now this is the interesting thing about ClaudeBot, OpenClaw. I got to get open, this had three names. OpenClaw. One of the most interesting things about OpenClaw is that it does have a memory of sorts. And this has always been the problem with Claude Code and in general is that they don't have a memory. So, you think you've been talking to them and filling them in on your personal life and then next day they have no idea.

[00:14:03] But one of the things Peter Steinberger did that I think is maybe the most interesting thing he did with OpenClaw is gave it a memory. It does in fact save a document that it rereads. And so it does have a memory of sorts. And so I'm going to play with this and I'm going to say, look, we didn't like that. We did like this. Lisa doesn't, my wife doesn't like this, but she likes that. And see how good it can get. Now the next step is to have it order the groceries. No! Stop! No, I will! No! Because... No.

[00:14:33] No, it's my job. Look, I'm not recommending anyone else do this, but it's kind of, isn't it? Somebody's got to, to just see. Well, I mean, I test a lot of stuff for my job that's part of being a reviewer. And I did test a bunch of AI browsers that claim to have agentic capabilities. I didn't give it my actual credit card and I didn't let it actually buy anything on my behalf.

[00:14:58] But one of the things that I found just really difficult, even if there was like some sort of type of memory, it... ... progression to the me. And these AI don't have taste. Like there's no actual like taste there that's... No, but they know all these other people's tastes, right? The perfect, the New Balance. I wanted a pair of New Balance shoes.

[00:15:26] I needed it to one fit my eight and a half size feet, which are wide and I have flat feet. I needed to be able to handle 15,000 to 20,000 step days with aplomb. I needed it to be a certain colorway. I needed it to be a certain fashion because of my existing wardrobe. And, you know, just plain... It never found the right frickin' model. I would say I want it for walking. I don't want it for running. And to be like, that's great. Here's a running model that would be great for you.

[00:15:56] Yeah. It's like I told you I don't want a running model. And then it just was not... You know, it ended up kind of... And I gave it a price parameter as well. And it ended up recommending this one pair, which I then gave to my mother-in-law and was like, this is what I would like for Christmas. Oh, good. That's good. And it ended up not being what I needed. And it was close, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't exactly what I needed.

[00:16:25] I still like it. I'll use it because I don't believe in wasting stuff. And it's a perfectly great pair of new balances. But it wasn't up to the task of handling 15,000 to 20,000... ...in step day at CES, which was disappointing. But, you know, it was like one of those things where I went, ah, here's a really big limitation of AI, even if it does have memory. And, you know, I have a very eclectic reading tastes. It's really hard to get good book recommendations.

[00:16:53] So I've just been, you know, training ChatGPT to learn what books I like and recommend me, you know, kind of off the beaten trail sort of books that'll keep me engaged and whatnot. And it has sucked so hard at giving me something because it's like, oh, you like this, this, this, this, and this. This is the type of reader you are. And I'm like, yes, I don't need you to write 4,000 words with each prompt, but here you go.

[00:17:20] And every book that it's really recommended me has been one that I've read already. And I'm just like, oh, I read that already. And it's like, ah, of course you have. That's how well I know your taste. And it's like, but you can't recommend something new to me. So what good are you in this sense? You know, the agent part of it is very, I'm skeptical about it. That is the ultimate question. We're all asking about all this AI stuff. Like what good are you to me? What problems are you solving?

[00:17:48] And I think for the past few years, most of these things have not been able to do that. It's very cool to see like these agents come up because the people who like have spent years tinkering with Linux now have like another thing to tinker with and like, you know, create workflows and stuff. I'm looking at you, Leo. I'm looking right at you because I've seen you playing with Linux since the late nineties. Okay. But so I get it. I get that. There is a certain tinkering element to it. It's great. It's so cool. It's like you're building like a cool little robot. And, you know, I understand that.

[00:18:18] I am so happy we're moving beyond the sort of like, hey, look at this generative AI, you know, image creation thing or video creation thing. Because what the hell do you do with that? At CES, I saw TVs that let you generatively create wallpapers for your TV. And I'm like, okay, great. Who cares? We're burning down forests for this? For this. Yeah. So the idea that things can help you with some basic tasks. That's kind of cool. I think we're all going to have to think about our relationships with these agents or whatever.

[00:18:45] And the thing I've kind of come down to is like, you got to treat them like minions, right? Like you're a Lord and minion, fetch me, fetch me this information. Oh, I bid you not speak. Don't speak to me, minion. Stop replying to me, minion. I feel, I don't know if I'm too like boo-boo or too nice, but I don't like, I know that's how I have to speak to the AI, but I actually don't like doing it. Oh, I always say please and junkie. I feel like a terrible. No, no, no. You're going to get killed on club on. Wait, wait, wait, wait, the club book. Right.

[00:19:16] That's the kind of stuff. Bolt's book. Bolt's book. Bolt's book. Sorry, sorry. Three names in two weeks. That's too many. I know. It's crazy. It's worse than Google. Yeah. I, I, you know, it's, to me, it's all about the corporations that are hyping this. I mean, these technologies are going as we were talking earlier, at a really, really fast pace and they're getting better. I, we disagree a little bit. I think LLMs are amazing for like proofreading my work and Hey, this paragraph isn't working. This section isn't working, you know?

[00:19:45] And so like, I'm finding use from it, but like, you know, you know, open AI and other people, you know, you know, you're a big company. It's like, this is the year of the age. And like, no, this kind of stuff is complicated. There's memory, there's security issues. There's, you know, making all these pieces work together. Like I, I'm reminded, like, so I, I, I'm old enough. I covered the.com era.

[00:20:04] And so, you know, this is 1997, let's say, you know, if it started 95 and it's just like, you know, I think it was like the year 2000, you were still putting a check in the mail to buy your eBay item. Cause we didn't trust credit cards at that point. That's right. And so like, that's another thing that's going to get in the way is come up in this conversation. Am I going to give it my credit card? You know, kind of thing. So I did stuff for a variety of reasons for technical reasons, but probably mostly because of where human beings and we don't like change. We're mistrustful, whatever.

[00:20:33] But the companies keep on saying it's coming. It's coming. It's coming. It's going to be great. It's like, yeah, it will be just not yet. If you, would you stipulate Gary, and you've been watching this long time. So you have some sense of the progress we've made that the open weight models, the deep seeks of the world, the Quen's, QN's, the Kimmy's and so forth. That's right.

[00:21:08] So there's nothing that's going to happen. That's what I'm saying. The very first thing is, the most important thing is to be, is it? uh which is 250 bucks a month if i could do that for free because i have a machine that's yes you know designed to do that if i can do that for free in six months i'm gonna be pretty happy

[00:21:33] well but you're not taking account that the you know the closed models are gonna get six months they're gonna be better you know and you know like you just said november 24th whatever date you just said like you know that was a big step change it was and all and there'll be more big step changes remember when uh chat gpt35 came out that was an eye-opener we went crazy right november 30th 2022 you actually literally see and isn't that interesting yeah i think these are

[00:22:01] these are flags being planted and we are making progress uh in and in surprise and do now that's the next step is next question is is it a surprising way is it a natural step or is it exponential or is it a paradigm shift it feels to me very unpredictable and very rapid i i you know again having lived

[00:22:24] through dot com where oh my god it's a fire hose things are coming so fast right that period does not compare to this period with the the speed of change uh and all yeah i mean it's remarkable and you know something i i i kind of thought again using dot com as the comp that there were that that the frenzy would slow down the funding frenzy yeah but you know i just what was it uh humans ampersand humans and

[00:22:53] kind of thing it's a few months old and it has a like evaluation you know of like four billion dollars it's like like you know that seemed very 2023 but it keeps on going that these basically labs that are kind of long-term projects that don't have a product and clearly no map to make money kind of thing you know it's it's still going on it's still and so that means that we're still going to see a

[00:23:21] lot of acceleration because there's billions of dollars being thrown by the venture capitalists at this you know so i think we are seeing some cooling like i've talked to folks some of the big pc makers honestly from people at microsoft too who a couple years ago were like big gung-ho like yes we're going to put copilots and everything and now they're like maybe we released too many copilots maybe people aren't using these things because they're de-emphasizing certain aspects of ai and

[00:23:47] now they're talking about like ai and everything versus like before it was like are you gonna get a copilot plus pc with an mpu and all that stuff the vision of how they're thinking about this has changed but yeah victoria go ahead no i just we've kind of subjected one of my co-workers antonio uh de benedito uh to just constantly testing microsoft's claims about the various copilot things and i've watched antonio who is i've enjoyed his articles sweet sweet man just like one of the kindest men i've ever had

[00:24:16] the pleasure of working with lose his mind every single time he gets one of these assignments and is just like no this is not it can't do the thing it can't do the things in the ads no i think i mean we're going to talk about microsoft's earnings and microsoft's stock price but i think microsoft's fallen way behind in this but the counter example here is google i mean google

[00:24:43] is just aggressively putting you know gemini and ai and everything right it just it's it's hitting gmail you know right just turn that on yeah so the way i understand it like for freebie cheapskates like me i'm not getting it yet but if you pay i pay for uh gemini not the highest level uh i think it's 20 bucks a month and yeah they asked me oh do you want to connect to your gmail to your calendar to your

[00:25:11] google drive and said yeah would you like a credit card i appreciate how much of a vanguard you are but like i think somebody's got it somebody i think i'm gonna get benefit that you're gonna miss out on i you you may not have got the trainers that you wanted but i think i'm gonna get benefit i already have i mean i completely speaking of linux with internet completely configured my new thinkpad

[00:25:37] uh using claude i the whole thing i just i said hey this button's not working i said oh yeah do this i'm gonna download this now how is it oh yeah it's working thank you and it the whole thing configured that way and then i thought well that's pretty good can i write some software and then i wrote some and it's and it's been and i think there's one thing it's really important to do is to push the boundaries of your experience with these ais because you're right victoria some of this stuff

[00:26:02] isn't going to be very satisfying but then other stuff might be yeah it's very i think what you're touching on is a thing that i've been thinking about a lot while testing various um ai claims or various ai products is wisdom and discernment these are some things that i think that silicon valley and big tech is not really i'm sure they're thinking about it but i have thought a lot about what it means to

[00:26:29] have something be convenient versus the value of inconvenience because when everything is convenient it becomes cheap if it comes slopified in a certain way like the the value of art is that it requires inconvenience to create right um when you think about a task like buying a pair of shoes which is you know just top of mind um there is a certain pride that you get when you've put hours

[00:26:55] and inconvenience into your own research into going out into trying a new thing like you know i agree with you that meal planning is a complete chore i hate doing it sometimes i could use a little help but there's a certain level of satisfaction and learning a new skill which is inconvenient which is cooking my meal and having it taste good i'm gonna still cook it i'm just gonna have it help me i know but there's also like i think there's a level of satisfaction that comes with i know i agree with you some they call it the ikea effect people like their ikea furniture more

[00:27:25] because it was such a pain in the ass to put together yeah but i feel like there's just like and maybe i'm reading too much into it but like these uh tech companies are like ai will make your life so convenient and they just focus so hard on the convenience narrative that they forget that like it's very human to find value and joy inconvenience and what inconvenience that you put value and um kind of a certain degree of pride into will vary from person to person someone's just going to be

[00:27:55] like yes ai do all my groceries for me i have no value in finding the perfect olive oil that's some inogarten level shit that i can't handle like you know it's just going to be different from person to person but i think there's just kind of been no or not as much talk about what inconveniences we should keep um i really like that yeah that's that's that's actually very deep yeah i've never heard that i

[00:28:22] like it too yeah excellent thank you guys it's been an idea i've been workshopping in my work no i really i really think it's true it took me 70 years to learn it but uh the best things in life are hard to come by and and you know learning a language it's painful until you learn it and then it's the satisfying and i i think you're i think you're very smart i think that uh uh the thing i've always been saying

[00:28:47] is craft like the thing that ai eliminates is craft like people don't learn how to craft anything anymore yeah yeah that's totally it some people will still do that i'm not going to stop coding on my own i love because i love coding but you but the good news is you don't have to know how to code now to write a program and you can write a custom tool that does just scratches your specific very specific itch without knowing how to code is pretty empowering it's kind of i do i wonder about the erasure of

[00:29:15] knowledge and to what you're saying victoria like yeah that's that's something since we have been chasing like the the engagement at all costs thing within the tech world things have gotten worse honestly and you can point to that chase in the web 2.0 era and social networks like for a reason why things have gotten so bad and why facebook will deploy features even if it endangers teenagers or makes life harder for people uh i'm thinking back to like uh there's that vonnegut story you know that

[00:29:41] they talk about uh going out to buy an envelope and his wife is like you should just buy a ton of them keep them at home no he wants to go out and the more what the line is the moral of the story is we're here on earth to fart around and of course the computers will do us out of that and what the computer people don't realize where they don't care is we're dancing animals you know we love to move around and it's not like we're not supposed to dance at all anymore so yeah i hear you victoria

[00:30:09] that is i believe that's player piano right does that player piano it could be it could be i'm just like i remember it too we were just talking about on the engadget podcast but vonnegut man love the man he's always had like this these great ideas always been so one of the first things i did when i uh so it was late 2022 when i jumped on ai as a as a topic i reread player piano i'd read it in college yeah it's 1952 if i have it right it is i mean we were talking about her being you know prophetic

[00:30:39] and really like wow this is kind of accurate what they predict in 1952 he came out rolled out an interesting scenario this idea that we're not going to do art we're just you know there's going to be a small group of elites who were running the thing you know running the ai and the rest of us i was at rex and reeks or something he has a very clever phrase where you know we're we have these make you know make jobs kind of kind of it was a very interesting thing he really was prophetic but you

[00:31:09] know just to defend leo i did i loved your construct victoria but like to me the contract you were getting at leo is sort of one i've been wrestling with for a long time like convenience versus i don't know privacy safety like you know i i sort of like i feel like i don't have privacy but i write put something down in email or whatever a search and so like i too invite these bots and you want to read my email go ahead you want to like you know i i give it no no i seriously i give it access

[00:31:38] to everything because like long ago i realized if i don't want this thing to blow back at me you know don't write it down say it in a conversation you know whatever and so like i don't know i i definitely fall with you leo on the convenience side of things i i'm dubious that you know an ai agent is going to give me anything productive right you know victoria yours is you know

[00:32:02] your your new balance for me it's like i i travel for work and like my holy grail is like you know instead of going to xpedia hotel by hotel back forth back forth like i want one with its you know let's say san francisco it's close enough to walk for bar but it's not crazy expensive to park a car because i'm in san francisco and i'm in the valley and so i keep on going to these bots these you know ai agents like help me do that really quickly it never works i spend more time you know wasting with them

[00:32:30] and then i go to whatever xpedia and you know kind of go find my own place you know kind of kind of thing and so anyway i i do think it's something we all have to decide like do we want to invite you know co-pilot microsoft gemini at google do we want to invite these things to kind of read our corpus because like you know something i'm looking for that email and i don't want to waste 30 minutes finding it i could just ask gemini hey i asked for a plumber three years four years ago what was the

[00:32:57] guy's name and phone number kind of thing so that's the thing i'm in a privileged position i wouldn't expect everybody to do this i got nothing to lose well it's very relatable uh because you know i have people ask me all the time because i do a lot of fitness and wearable tech tests uh testing like what the most private fitness trackers are and i'm like none of them you just have to accept like i have so much of my data out there i'm just like it doesn't matter to me right because it's all

[00:33:24] out there already but i do think that like moving from one old paradigm to the new one is just um you know how comfortable are you living a public life and what we mean by public is like the only truly private space is inside of your head i think as we move forward in modernity but it's sort of like going back to this idea of discernment and wisdom and i think something that's lacking right now partly because of what big tech is pushing on us is us having this conversation as to like what is a wise way to

[00:33:54] use um ai what is the right balance of convenience versus inconvenience and how do we build like there's there's a structure that makes sense there's a mode in many of these agents called yolo which is just give it everything and you know you only live once just see what happens and i'm in the yolo camp right now because i have less to risk and i'll do it so that you guys don't have to how about

[00:34:20] that there is one last story before we move on which is that uh for 404 media uh moltbook exploded before anyone thought to check whether the database was properly secured anyone i hope it's been fixed by now could take control of any ai agent on the site because the database was so improper but who made that mistake probably a human setting it up anyway i hope that's been fixed we're going to take a break

[00:34:49] when we come back there is there's i'm sorry there's more ai news and yes there's elon musk news and even worse there's earning reports but we're going to try to make it fun and you know what you couldn't do it better with this you couldn't do have more fun than with this panel uh so glad to have davindra hardwar my buddy here and victoria's song and and it's always a pleasure to have gary rivlin on the show ai valley is his book good reading really a good history of of how we got to where we are uh today uh and uh

[00:35:18] it's been it's been a long strange trip to uh to coin a phrase our show today brought to you by monarch who i use this i do use this you know did you make a financial resolution at the beginning of the new year many people do it's when people start thinking about their finances maybe this is the year you decide to pay off all that credit card debt or student loans or maybe start saving for major

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[00:36:09] laptop feel aware and in control of your finances this year and get 50 off your monarch subscription with code twit yeah 50 off the story of monarch is great the guy who started it had worked at that other one though whenever we all used the free one that disappeared right he learned a lot by watching how people use that and and put all those learnings into making something even better monarch is not your

[00:36:34] typical personal finance app but unlike those other personal finance apps monarch is built to make you proactive not just reactive really that's the only way to be when it comes to money tracking your money with monarch couldn't be easier i uh i set it up in minutes with all of my accounts everything's in there and i have now a dashboard that tells me exactly where i stand you'll get data visualizations from

[00:36:58] sankey diagrams yeah it does those great sankey diagrams pie charts line charts bar charts investment tracking you get a visual picture of your portfolio performance that's been really handy in the last few weeks hey hey hey and you can compare it to other indexes like the s p 500 you'll get and this is great for couples you'll get individual filters but also partner filters you can share your monarch account with your partner and financial advisor as well and that doesn't cost you extra so you can set that up

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[00:38:19] off your first year that's 50 off your first year at monarch.com with code twit m-o-n-a-r-c-h monarch.com and don't forget the offer code is twit thank you monarch uh a couple of uh you know miscellaneous ai stories uh

[00:38:40] uh the anthropic has uh complained to the pentagon about military use of claude in fact uh that's kind of put that relationship on hold this is a an early test according to reuters of whether silicon valley in washington's good graces after years of tensions they write can sway how military and intelligence

[00:39:04] personnel deploy increasingly powerful battlefield ai um the u.s department of defense and anthropic were discussing a 200 million dollar contract it's at a standstill reuters says according to six people familiar with the matter matter because anthropic says we don't want it you'd be used this in combat you know which i think is reasonable it's interesting that is reasonable like just back to my whole

[00:39:31] concept of inconvenience war should be inconvenient i don't think we should be yes very good point it should be easy to kill somebody should it it should be really hard well he's been a critic of trump and you know i mean i'm not he's probably the only ai guy we learned that greg brockman has given 25 million dollars to trump yeah uh i mean sam altman's been bowing scraping uh they all have

[00:39:58] uh so good for a dollar and now he's maybe not going to get the deal you know we ended the last episode um portion saying like you know the conversation we're not having you know to me this is another one of those conversations we're not having ai is here we need to deal with it should where should how should we be using it for warfare uh should we be using it for surveillance yeah but what about this what about this uh wouldn't it be great if instead of putting humans

[00:40:28] on the battle line no both adversaries put machines on the battle line and machines killed machines inconvenience you know just that is nobody would die you could fight a war without humans involved but then war has no meaning like i don't want people to die but like the thing about war is that we understand how terrible it is because people die and so if you put machines on the battlefield then suddenly it doesn't matter anymore because whose life is really being lost in that sense so

[00:40:56] it's they say chess was invented to reduce combat but it didn't work did it no but you know like if we're using ai and warfare to make sure that nobody's breaking the geneva convention or doing horrible things well then i think that might be a positive use case for it but if we are like war is a thing that i think should be as convenient inconvenient as possible because war should never be convenient well good news you you're you win on that one

[00:41:26] google talking about bowing to to our president google in 2018 2019 uh vowed they put in writing on their website that we would we will never allow our ai to be used for surveillance or warfare that was because their engineers uh protested right yeah right yeah you know yes yes yes yes there was a walk out around a project maven raven some maven yeah maven um and so um uh you know in 20 the start of 2025

[00:41:55] they wiped that out so now in fact you can use google ai for warfare or or surveillance yeah i respect a moda he says uh in his blog this week he said uh ai should support national defense quote in all ways except those which would make us more like our autocratic adversaries i think that's that's that's pretty right on we don't that's what we represent as the united states well we used to anyway as the

[00:42:19] united states uh was an alternative to autocracy uh you know we should take the high road we should be the city on the hill we shouldn't be bringing ourselves low to that uh point unfortunately uh we have been it's kind of sad how uh moral like having a moral backbone is such a rare thing in tech these days like we're going to talk about tim cook what the hell are you doing timmy what is he doing on over there you had a strongly worded memo it was a very strong worded memo we're getting to

[00:42:49] the uh sales force has signed a 5.6 billion dollar deal with the u.s army to inject agentic ai into uh to the u.s army i mean this is happening um so much like alex carp at palantir wrote a book uh which i found ultimately reprehensible called the technologic uh republic in which he says you know

[00:43:14] silicon valley went wrong when instead of focusing as they did during world war ii as they did during the manhattan project on preserving our american freedoms they went wrong when they started worrying about how to sell more phones that we were you know putting all of this brain power into crap gadgetry uh and he says it's it's patriotic to work for your country to that the silicon valley should be

[00:43:42] working to preserve our freedoms what in what manner like are we preserving our freedoms by killing other people because i don't think no and ice is using palantir technologies to track down uh so-called undocumented illegal immigrants oh christ almighty police departments are using it um you know just it's not accurate as we're not there's a there's a fight going on in my little

[00:44:07] town about flock cameras they you know i'll be yeah yeah as there should be uh up north they have flock cameras in santa rosa petaluma's been thinking about putting them in these are the cameras that do license plate reading a court recently held by the way uh i have to scroll way down to the bottom this is one of the story one of the stories at the end of the show but a court uh recent angry norfolk residents lose lawsuit to stop flock license plate scanners this is in

[00:44:33] norfolk virginia uh the courts ruled no no look you're on public roads this is what happens uh this is they're allowed to do it a federal judge ruled the city of norfolk's use of nearly 200 automated license plate readers from flock is constitutional dismissed the case um so yeah these flock cameras are going to be used everywhere and unfortunately we've seen them

[00:44:58] misused uh there was a case in texas where a texas law enforcement agency used flock cameras to track a woman who had sought an abortion out of state it's illegal in texas to track her out of state jesus yeah jesus they said well it's for her own safety we're trying to protect her yeah no that's not what you're okay if you're reading my license plate to make sure i pay tolls yeah that's different no that's

[00:45:25] that's fine or speeding even red light cameras fine speeding in in in a school zone sure like common sense things but like that is just an invasion of privacy like it's it's that's the problem is how it's used and by the way ring has done a deal with flock and uh law enforcement to combine ring cameras as well and they're being used for ice enforcement oh my god disgusting and and so

[00:45:54] that's the problem it goes from red light cameras and toll violations to uh to tracking individuals as they move about the country and it's a slippery slope you say leo yes it's almost as if we should be careful about opening up ai to all of our data and all of our fun things like it is these are the questions yeah we're not necessarily talking about ai we're talking about technology when we're talking

[00:46:18] about cameras yeah okay yeah but it is ai that takes those images and and yes read it fast specifically i'm talking about like do not be so quick to be like okay privacy is over let's just give them everything right which is what i think is sometimes happening with ai people like oh yeah i don't really i don't have anything else left to hide anymore okay gemini integrated with gmail go ahead and i think this is specifically the point where we are definitely needing to be thinking more critically

[00:46:45] about these things and speaking of alex carp have you guys ever seen that guy like speak publicly he's nuts he's a psychopath it is wild how these companies are are being run by people like him and sam altman and elon musk like these like these guys who they seem like they are some various degrees of sociopathy is going on with these people and these are the people driving the future it's it's wild the

[00:47:11] time we're living in right now should i play the uh clip i should i've played it before of alex carp um saying it's necessary yeah to scare other countries that's that that let me see what happened to boring leaders yes i could use some boredom let's hear it for satya nadella or something like that

[00:47:36] it's pretty boring he's boring but also he was ai pilled and then that that's what happened with microsoft right yeah um like you know it's funny i have two teenage sons and we were talking about palantir and you know we're talking it began with ice what we were just talking about but like you know my 16 year old who kind of loves going on these things like you know it's gonna start coming after us for everything you know just i you know my book fine because my library book is late like you

[00:48:06] know we all have trackers we voluntarily have these trackers we put in our pockets called phones and it knows everywhere we've been and you know with palantir's technology ai it really you know he was really frightened at this point where we're all going to be you know followed by ice except for we're you know we're natural citizens i i don't know i i i do find it very by the way even natural

[00:48:30] citizens are at risk good yeah yeah yeah if you're not if you're not white it doesn't matter if you were born here because like i you know i was born here and i still i'm just do you carry your passport victoria with you um i carry a photo of it because i don't know that i've heard of any example of carrying passports actually being helpful right and you know i don't want to lose my passport i do know people who say we're carrying our passports with us because we want to be able to prove we're citizens

[00:48:57] just i feel like if i showed you if i showed you my passport would you believe me that i'm a citizen like that's it's it's that i i have like this nightmare that if i showed my passport they'd go like well that's ai generated and i'd be like well i don't know i mean thank you i do think i look at ai generated on my new jersey driver's license because my new york driver's license was so bad that they let me check the photo because they were like oh girl you suffered with that real that's why people

[00:49:26] moved to jersey you didn't know that but that's one of the reasons people moved to jersey right i know i have a very nice looking driver's license photo because someone was just like did you smile for your driver's license i didn't but i i was like i can't have another 13 years of a really crappy driver's license photos where people went this yeah look i smiled i smiled for mine they say don't smile and i know how i got it got it through there but i smiled and that's the first time i've had a smile

[00:49:54] but it it it it's nice it's a nice photo i'm not smiling in it but it's a decent photo where i don't look like you don't have a nose but other than that it's pretty i have a nose but uh it's just like that camera's not showing it but my old one my old one i looked stoned in a bad way and it's it you know it's bad when the dmv um employee goes girl this you

[00:50:21] which is what i got the new york dmv if you went to the one in brooklyn like they they just i think they do that on purpose they just have bad lighting or something they're making it oh yeah they put green in the lights just to make you look ill looks awful but it is um i mean listen i was not born here uh i am a citizen now because you know i help my parents work on their citizenship and everything but how did you become a citizen you weren't my parents my parents became citizens and i was a

[00:50:48] minor and i became so that automatically you became a citizen yeah you come in as part of the family we got to change that yeah people want to change a lot of things but yeah that was way too easy yeah people are carrying their passwords because they hope that they feel safe but it is it isn't they can decide whatever they want really now it's disgusting yeah yeah yeah uh it is tragic i got an email from somebody said why don't you discuss ice more it's like well we're

[00:51:16] trying to be a respite we're having somewhere that you can go so that you don't have to constantly think about what's going on i i hear that but it's definitely good to bring it up yeah we're aware of speaking of alex carp by the way i think the new york times did an interview with him for their interview podcast it's worth listening to because that guy sounds like a paranoid psychopath it is yeah i was going to play the clip but i decided i've already played it before he basically says our enemies should be terrified of us they should be afraid of us at all times

[00:51:46] and uh and we should kill them if we have to and it's just yeah he's he by the way has no qualifications to even be running like a national company he's a philosopher he studies philosophy former like progressive leftist dude who just like fell into this it is it makes me sad because he does tai chi every day and i feel like that should have calmed him down a little bit i don't understand from good things uh uh okay well we're speaking of peter teal we're going to talk more about

[00:52:15] other members of the teal gang in just a little bit you know let me before we go to elon musk let me do another commercial that way we have ample space because there's been speaking of space a lot of elon musk uh news of late you're watching this week in tech gary rivlin great to have you so nice to see you it's uh we don't often get pulitzer prize winners in fact i think you're the only one

[00:52:41] so uh thank you for being here his book uh uh about katrina called katrina came out uh more than 10 years ago in fact it was the 10th anniversary of katrina just a few months ago yeah um what a story that was i guess your book came out after the hurricane because it would have been a weird 10 years it was 10 years after the flood so it was 2015. yeah okay okay anyway great to have you uh also uh davindra

[00:53:08] hardwar who is a citizen of the united states of america davendra for now for now senior editor and gadget i didn't know that story i didn't i didn't uh realize that you weren't born here where were you born in guiana south america which is now on trump's radar to take over after venezuela what has 2026 been just what insanity efforts crazy it's only february 1st i know we have a groundhog day story

[00:53:37] coming up too i'll get i'll get to that that's tomorrow and victoria's song we love having victoria on your your your people are from korea korea that's right we talked k-pop the last time you went one one my mom's side of the family is from the uh the the safe side uh my dad's family is from the uh

[00:54:01] not safe side the northern portion of the really was it north korea when he came from there or uh he my dad uh i wrote about it when i was at gizmodo but i had suspected that he may have been a spy uh for north korea uh while we were living here um no yeah my dad was in character

[00:54:27] i don't know how much of his story is i can believe but yeah i know you're not victoria my father was a spy yeah i'm telling you yeah well that that story for gizmodo is called my dad was a spy come up maybe that's so great uh yeah it was a interesting it is i just found it yeah wow i'm reading that no kidding

[00:54:54] this is great see i i i'm learning about both of you all all of you it's great anyway wonderful i have all three of you uh on and uh here's a picture of your father posing with important looking people from the yeah democratic republic of north korea yeah he did some dubious things i there's so much that i don't know when did he when did he leave uh north korea or yeah i mean again these facts like

[00:55:22] my dad died so it's kind of hard to fact chuck him on everything but um his the story that i was told my whole life was that um when the korean war ended and they had the jews aside he ended up going to the south and his family was all left behind in the north and that was like a that was a tragic thing in my dad's life for the remainder of his life because he sure you could never talk to a refugee

[00:55:47] camp in busan i mean he did talk to them he did travel to north korea at a time where people were not supposed to travel there doing god knows what uh but yeah so like i've never met that side of my family have you ever tried to go to north korea yourself uh no no no no interest no no interest in in doing that uh you know my mom's side of the family was also very against it so it was kind of a

[00:56:13] point of tension as long as i'm throwing caution to win with claude bot maybe i could go to north korea too i don't think you want to do that friend yeah they're a little weird over there a little strange do it a little weird wouldn't do it but yeah you know so very interesting oh yeah i'm gonna read the story i can't wait uh our show today brought to you by melissa they've been with us for a long

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[00:58:48] 23 million users they use melissa for identity verification their business analyst says and this is a direct quote we find electronic verification is the way to go because it makes the user's life easier users register faster and can start using our platform right away whether you're a small business just getting started or an enterprise managing millions of records melissa will scale with you they work with the smallest and the biggest and melissa has easy to use apps for all the tools you use today like salesforce dynamics

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[00:59:42] cleaned for free at melissa.com twit that's melissa.com slash twit thank you melissa for all you've done to uh support this week in tech melissa.com twit make sure you use that address that way they know uh you saw it here melissa.com twit this was the weirdest story of the week in a story full of weird weeks

[01:00:06] spacex has asked the fcc if it can put one million solar-powered data centers into orbit how about doing one first but okay um wow i mean uh the the verge terence o'brien says uh fcc is unlikely to approve that uh spacex's strategy has been to request approval for unrealistically large number

[01:00:33] of satellites as a starting point for negotiations the filing this is this cracks me up if you're a sci-fi fan you'll you'll recognize this phrase is a first step towards becoming a kardashev two level civilization one that can harness the sun's full power could also be uh completely obscure the sun actually i don't

[01:00:57] know a million satellites right now there are about enough junk in orbit there are there are only 15 000 satellites right now more than half of them are in fact starlink so he's already got you know 9 600 satellites and now astronomers hate them too because oh absolutely need it much harder to observe things yeah this is you could tell elon uh wrote this i mean only elon musk would say we want to be a

[01:01:24] kardashev two civilization i'm sure grok wrote that elon doesn't do anything anymore come on maybe not come on uh comes from a soviet astronomer nikolai kardashev in 1964. it is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement but it's really a sci-fi trope let's see on the fandom wiki it says a type 2 civilization has control over their solar system

[01:01:50] and may be able to harness the power equivalent of a single star dude we can't even get to mars yet like mars mars we're we're gonna we're gonna go around the moon next actually it might be this month we're gonna go around the moon and what is the word control control i mean that's always i don't think we're a kardashev dude no yeah this is my tinfoil hat but it sounds like elon wants to build a prison

[01:02:15] around earth so that we cannot leave he can't escape he can get out because one million objects up there that leaves us and that leaves us on earth we can't send rockets up there unless they're doing and if you listen this week in space our space show they're doing starlink is doing a lot of very interesting things uh their satellites are very maneuverable so that they can avoid collisions i'm sure elon is thinking along those lines i don't know yeah and people like the actual thanks

[01:02:44] yeah does he does he just like come up with his sci-fi dreams and like tries to turn it into a thing his companies do uh but i've been saying this if he wants to go to mars let's send him to mars come on oh go so i would love if he went to mars you should go to jupiter i would love if he went there net pluto let's send it to pluto find out if really is a plan elon uh is planning a june spacex ipo

[01:03:09] spacex made some money uh this year uh eight billion dollars in profit in 2025 profit so why june by the way what why does he want it in june oh because it's his birthday wait when's his birthday i need to know his astrological sign june 28th is his birthday june 28th oh he's a cancer that makes so much he is a cancer he is a cancer it also it also will coincide with the

[01:03:38] rare alignment of mercury venus and jupiter that happens in early june so of course you know and i'm you know i know this whole isn't a natal astrology i are you victoria sounds like you might be kind of into it i am but only when i have to look up at the moon and despair at the state of the world and i'm like surely there's something i can look to to give me some sort of hope and i like i don't take

[01:04:04] it super seriously but just as like uh well i don't see any signs of hope in the horizon maybe the stars will say something uh generally no it doesn't but investors love elon's companies all of which are sort of merging into a single blob the everything company spacex uh is currently valued at 800 billion dollars

[01:04:29] based on a secondary sale that it did last uh last year it's looking with the ipo to raise another 50 billion dollars which would make it worth one and a half trillion from where where are these numbers coming from you sound fake well a lot of contracts they do have a lot of contracts if if investors put the money in it's not fake i think investors you know first of all they put a lot of

[01:04:58] money in a tesla that might have been a little bit of a mistake right uh they've had two years now they just in their latest results had a second year of losses they discontinued the white model x as a result the s and x are gone which i had an x uh i would have discontinued the truck the cyber truck personally but they don't need to do that's my aesthetic nobody they're not making it nobody's buying it why

[01:05:23] discontinue it just you know we don't we don't have to mention we don't talk about the cyber truck my neighbor has one it's like dude why dude this is the biggest thing i've ever seen not only that but it's not just an ugly truck but he's got it wrapped in some sort of weird stained glass pattern that just makes it like it's like it's like why not just honk your horn i'm coming down the road at you it's such a it's such a the car for people with no taste

[01:05:53] i'm having no taste so it's supposed to it's supposed to be like you know this this cyber truck bulletproof someone on youtube i saw this it was it was really funny they had like i don't know a ford f100 they had the kind of a you know in quotes a real truck and this and like you know they try to pull off the bumper they try to pull off piece of course they couldn't but with his bare hands he was taking off pieces of the cyber trucks so it doesn't even seem like it's particularly no the pieces fall off all

[01:06:19] on their own actually that's true of any it's a feature uh anyway if you own a cyber truck and i'm sure there are many people in our audience who own cyber trucks and i think you know it was cool right i understand i understand why you want it i personally think you have bad taste but yeah you you can excuse it taste is a personal thing right so literally the worst looking car i've ever seen what is funny worse than the aztec right even yeah absolutely the aztec became iconic right you love that raccoons have to stake in cyber trucks as dumpsters

[01:06:49] that is quite funny there's gotta be food in here somewhere my daughter calls it the minecraft car because uh it's just blocks it's just blocks but speaking of like um them stopping to sell the model s and model x it is wild every time i see mainstream news talk about that and i was listening to npr this week when that was announced we're like oh he's gonna go after robots isn't that silly this is so funny this crazy elon musk guy it's as if we've forgotten what happened over the last year

[01:07:17] and i feel like all that should be in context of elon musk essentially like dismantling the federal government um throwing a couple nazis we did forget about doge there is something about the brand that he hurt uh that's why people aren't buying the cars that context should be in your story of why these cars are not being sold anymore because he's a nazi so yeah well you know but the flip side

[01:07:41] though is looking just at xai i mean the truth is grok is a really powerful model i mean you know you look at the head-to-head competition you know i care grok 4 4.5 i always get i don't know what number we're up to but you know when it came out it beat gemini on the charts and you know it's it's a game of like oh but like it's a really powerful model and you know it's it's got in quotes personality

[01:08:06] i know that's a very uh weighted loaded word and stuff and you know his his kind of it's sexualizing i mean it's great at making c sam apparently so listen i had to flirt with annie the ai waifu girlfriend that he programmed on uh on uh grok for my job and uh i lost i had a very high

[01:08:31] therapy bill that week i could tell you a story what was the name of the fox the other the other character oh rude rudy when that first came out the day that came out i'm sitting down at the breakfast table and i read the story i said oh let me try it because i have i'm an un as corey doctorow calls it a non-consensual blue check i was given the full access for free uh because he took my blue check away when he bought twitter but they gave it i didn't ask for it but he gave it back

[01:08:59] so i have a full access to grok and uh so i said well i'll try rudy and i said hey rudy how's it going and rudy i this was i thought it was supposed to be a kid's character said oh i'm just having a great time i'm gonna go teabag the mayor i said what there's there's bad rudy and then there's normal rudy no but they didn't have a distinction on day one and uh i said what who what mayor he said

[01:09:27] whatever mayor you want i can't wait to teabag him i said what the i i actually we had to censor it i was doing it on one of the shows we had to edit we had to bleep it out it was so bad it's so then it by the way the next day it rudy became like a kid's thing but i somehow got bad rudy i had bad rudy and i talked to bad rudy and i was just like you know i don't find your insults

[01:09:51] all that clever and he's like your insults aren't clever i'm super awesome i'm and i was like you are but what am i you basically and i was like you kind of insult like a 12 year old boy he's like no you insult like a 12 year old boy i know i am but what are you smart like i'm so smart you're the lame one i was training alan musk he's got a 12 year old uh he does that's elon's sense of humor is

[01:10:15] what it is yeah it was it was unimpressive so npr said and they were right that elon has decided to take the uh i remember when i got went down to get my model x this was back when tesla was still cool in 2015 had just come out and they said you want the factory tour of the fremont factory i said oh yeah yeah then we got in a golf cart and gave us a tour and i was kind of i'm gonna admit this and i'm ashamed to admit it now but i was teary-eyed i was very at the time moved by his vision

[01:10:46] and by the way we're learning that studies have shown that in areas where evs are widespread pollution has abated considerably so they they do make a difference and i was really kind of turned on by this i realize it now that i was mistaken that was before his brain fully broke but it was something it was we didn't know we thought he was uh we thought he was uh you know a marvel care i think all the ketamine just kind of built up on him after a while and like it was the what the

[01:11:15] hyper thing i thought i was seeing stark industries like this is like this is changing the world and i don't okay we're doing true confessions in 2011 for men's journal i was assigned a profile of elon musk at first it was going to pay attention to tesla but then wired came out with something around musk and tesla so they changed it to spacex so i actually got to spend two days one in the west coast one in dc with him and i'm telling you like i'm a wise ass new yorker and he's whatever you want to describe

[01:11:43] just a wise ass or an ass whatever um he was funny and personable we had a good time he gave me the keys to like what was the first tesla the roadster roadster yeah it's just like i felt like a conspicuous idiot on 280 in this you know bright red thing i'm kind of almost sitting on the highway it's so low but it was a rocket ship you know zero to 60 and you know two seconds or something but i really enjoyed him and i realized that like at that point you know he told me he was in quotes down to his last

[01:12:12] four million you know he'd made 200 million or whatever from paypal he's down to his last four million i joke with him like dude i'm not up to my first four million yet but you know but for him to his credit he bet the bank he went all in on those on two companies on spacex and tesla yeah and neither were working i mean at that point it wasn't clear if either was gonna work and so he was more humble he was more modest or at least it wasn't a cocky you know at that point and i you know

[01:12:40] kind of mean i don't know what it is to me my theory um you know davinder is that you know he he just success went to his head he you know he is you know tony stark he is the most brilliant human being on earth to his mind he can solve anything oh politics yeah sure i can do that that's easy you know kind of kind of thing and you know and people were worshiping him right i mean he did give him credit like he didn't invent tesla but he helped popularize it and help popularize you know the guys

[01:13:09] who invented it hadn't even created a model i mean it was just an idea that he bought he did kind of write them out of the story but to be fair he was the one who built a car yeah yeah yeah you got to give him credit for that yeah and i was you know i was really happy to buy a tesla the model x almost killed me several times but uh we got rid of it after a few years it's funny i still see the model x like daycare pickup because i live in a town where people have fancy doors go it's good

[01:13:34] for the dumbest design for a door with kids though because when you have kids you have stuff on the side of the car doors you have like water bottles and stuff like that is completely useless it was worse than that because for having kids yeah if it rained it would trap water in the door and then you'd open the gullwing door and there'd be a waterfall in the crack you had to wait till the water abated and then you could get out it hit my wife in the head so many times that eventually

[01:14:00] we had to have a protocol that before i hit the door because there was one button that closed all the doors i would go doors are closing in five seconds four so she could get out of the way it was supposed to have sensors it didn't um it steered her into the median strip many times she had to grab the wheel and the thing she always talks about is for some reason i don't know why it decided that she

[01:14:25] that the seat would adjust when she get in the car to squeeze her against the steering wheel it would like it was like the star wars crash compactor she was like get me out of here and i said oh it's not doing that until it happened and then did she program or no it was just a bug it was a bug it was it was what i realized at the time is a golf cart with a very fancy buggy computer uh controlling it and i'm just saying like whenever we talk about musk now over the last year and certainly after the

[01:14:53] the spate of like c sam stuff and the nude image generation like you can't take this guy seriously or any it's turning out he really did go to the island he said i never went to the island well yeah oh those emails seem pretty incriminate no but he was begging to go like that's even sadder he was begging we're gonna be in the area i don't think they let him even we go to the files didn't want to hang out with him no epstein said he will send a helicopter for you yeah i think if you reach a

[01:15:20] certain level of monetary success you have to get bullied every week by absolutely teenage girl just to keep them humble you need somebody to say no to you this is the problem with the tech billionaires they're you know they're isolated they're in a bubble you know it's just like you're brilliant thank you know well you're god's gift kind of thing and then you go a little humility with them to do most of the way to assemble the meanest 14 year old girl on the planet yes and once

[01:15:49] you reach a certain level of wealth you have to go every week and and like just get brutalized for an hour yeah and that you just need to be humbled i think that is why he bought twitter though like people were yelling at him on twitter so much he was like okay that's it i'm buying this and making it my playground now basically that's why it has to be 14 year old girls yeah uh because they can't be bought

[01:16:14] and they just have to like unless you've got a labubu and then maybe you could no just pay them and then labubus they'll do it for one anyway production ready optimist robots are coming soon coming soon that soon is doing a lot of work in that sense go ahead it will uh reveal its gen 3 robot in the first quarter of this year according but you know elon this is the problem you can't believe

[01:16:40] anything any of these companies elon's companies say because he's he's been saying all sorts of crazy stuff that never comes true he said tesla produce 5 000 robots in 2025 they did not he said they're going to make uh preparations for the first production line that's what the model x line in fremont's going to be devoted to um and they're going to start in this quarter make uh optimus robots

[01:17:07] there who's going to buy an optimus he says are they roughly like a few hundred thousand thousand i don't know most of these most of these bipedal robots are in the ten thousand dollar plus range right um okay all i'm gonna say is that my colleague allison at ces came upon a bipedal robot that was dancing and just like a whole crowd was following it because it was trying to like get people

[01:17:32] to follow it and it was punching the air and it was punching the air so violently it knocked itself out and just fell down um and you know yeah oh boy yeah we had uh we had uh jennifer pattison toey on uh a few weeks ago she was at ces and one of the robots fell on her yes we were when we saw the footage it

[01:17:59] was really funny because our video guy andrew was just like totally just filming it and got the funniest clip of it and she was just like he didn't help me at all and the camera's my scroll up but um i actually have some footage of jen trying to shake hands with one of these robots and uh it just like couldn't do it for a while and then when it did it just pulled her hand down like in a pretty

[01:18:26] like violent way and i was like oh my god are you okay but yeah so um well you know i'm an early adopter i've confessed but there's no way i'm having a 200 pound machine that could crush me walking around my house doing the dishes or making the the model x could have crushed you or crashed you many many times and you tried god knows that is functionally a car right that's at least a thing

[01:18:53] that drives these humanoid robots they're supposed to like help you and weird but they're really that they're just not even close to being able to do that so i don't know nothing is gonna yeah why he thinks this year they're gonna there's a gonna be a market for these because he can just say things he could just say things but it's funny like over at engadget like several of our reporters have also been injured or attacked by these robots so it's like there are many stories of these things not working well there aren't many of them out there so it seems like a bad sign right

[01:19:23] uh so i did mention ai rather uh spacex made eight billion dollar profit in a 2025. microsoft also had a very good quarter uh uh made a lot of money and their stock just tanked that's tanked uh which is the strangest thing they made say the thing leo why why did they i spending well okay you say ai spending but

[01:19:49] meta which has this ad campaign about we're just gonna invest 600 billion dollars or something and you know data centers and all that stuff their stock went up and so it's not just it's confusing yeah it's just not a reaction to like ai over you know the backlash on wall street i mean i i was thinking about this like it's a software company and that's kind of well cloud code well why are we going to need software companies it's pc sales went down no big deal right like i think of their 80

[01:20:16] billion they made in the quarter 50 billion was from cloud and so obviously that's a much bigger part of the company than it was you know in the old days it was windows and office for the two cash cows it were responsible for most of the money they generated so is it pcs is because it's a software it made no sense to me they deserve some credit though from pivoting from from from office and and windows

[01:20:40] to the the cloud and and successfully obviously they made a lot of money yeah net profit was up by like uh 23 that's a huge increase in the cloud has been like killing them like they're killing for them for years and that was a smart thing and then the the thing they should get some credit for that they get a ton of credit for that yeah yeah yeah no so so i it's funny i've been writing about microsoft since you know the late 19 90s they were they were stagnant weren't they for you but there was you

[01:21:07] under steve balmer basically their stock price was stuck at 25 uh a share i you know talking about earnings i had to do earnings reports about microsoft for the new york times 2000s i hated that and just like it was so boring and like nadella took over and the stock has literally gone up 10x more than 10x yeah under nadella in in 10 years so you know it's a demanda's point it it it has been

[01:21:33] getting its it's it's due you know it's it went up to 500 a share and it fell down to 425 or something like that um uh a share and you know and that to me it is because of this amazing pivot they did uh to the cloud that their main revenue source is no longer office it's no longer windows it's it's the cloud i mean by a far far margin the weakness now is that people are seeing all money they they basically invested in ai and not much is coming from it so that was a part of the

[01:22:00] explanation of the stock hit there and i also think nadella has just been blinded by this stuff like there are a lot of reports there was that story about like oh man he's using ai for everything it's sort of like organizing his emails it's summarizing podcasts for him yeah he doesn't listen to podcasts he listens to summaries talk about living in about he is living in a complete ai agent bubble at this point or a copilot bubble yeah becoming too interesting should he go back to

[01:22:25] being more boring he's still not he's very boring he's very boring no i mean like no i mean like has he been getting a personality for pivoting and people are like oh no he's getting a personality okay he was ai pilled he's kind of stepped back a little bit though right he isn't quite running the company anymore the cfo amy hood really seems to be the person in charge of microsoft didn't they name

[01:22:50] a new co-ceo yeah they did he could think big thoughts and the the other ceo can you know run the guy i don't know i didn't pay that straight out of the office by the way that's straight out of the office when they hire jim and michael to be the same job assistant to the general manager co-managers because michael is useless yeah yeah um yeah i'm not sure what's going on at microsoft do you think uh gary having covered wall street for so long that there is the wisdom of the crowds when it comes

[01:23:20] to the stock market that somehow the stock market reflects what's really going to happen i i mean generally speaking i agree with that but you know the fact that apple which is totally with ai i mean they sell a lot of a of iphones but like they're they're not getting punished for it you know meta

[01:23:54] plus microsoft plus google it's amazon etc are over building you know i think two things are true at once one you know meta plus microsoft plus google it's amazon et cetera are over building uh on the other hand i think they would be foolish not to be pouring all this money into ai because if they admit to my mind and i guess apple is the counter example here

[01:24:19] you know to my mind if they missed ai that's like a trillion dollar mistake microsoft before nadella missed the phone you know bumble the internet you know missed the phone and so they were making sure they're going to be in the conversation and on ai so them spending tens of billions dollars a year to me made sense because missing would be a trillion dollar mistake it's pure fomo though like that's like having but i'm the one covering a lot of microsoft stuff over at engadget too and like

[01:24:47] that's what it comes down to like every time i'm talking to their executives i'm like this ain't working why are you trying to sell this to me and over the last years a few years they have been like it's getting better it's getting better recent conversations tell me that they are very aware of the flaws and people do not want to see agentic ai in their windows they just want windows to work so there may be more of a doubling down this year on like the fundamentals for microsoft but

[01:25:14] it is there is no there there in terms of what they're chasing for ai everyone is desperate right gemini only exists because open ai and uh chat uh the whole bing chat thing happened so quickly that it gave microsoft and open ai so much clout gemini stumbled immediately everyone is saying apple failed or is missing out in ai sure you can say that now but they they're not the ones like overspending on a lot of this stuff in the same way these other companies are and i'm really intrigued by what apple

[01:25:42] could do because they're what apple does right is they set back they let the market kind of play out for a bit and see what happens and if they can give us a personal ai assistant type of thing that is safer that is not so reliant on the cloud and things you can't directly control like that could be the way that works for them yeah maybe they actually won by losing i'm saying that basically the two billion the number was when the articles you share they had two and a half billion iphone

[01:26:10] something like that like yeah two and a half billion devices so that's not just iphone it's all apple devices but tim cook did say it was a staggering quarter for iphone sales it was their best ever um a record-breaking quarter revenue of 143 billion dollars which is up 16 year over year uh listen they introduced orange that's why i'm telling you an orange phone it's always the right

[01:26:37] color yeah yeah so good i know why i bought an orange phone it looks great i think it's great it's different right it's different it's different to move off color um you know i mean to davinder's point like you know i look at google so you know in 2023 they fumbled every time on a on ai you know they came up with bar then they changed the name there's embarrassing stuff put glue on your pizza

[01:27:04] you know use gasoline to spice up your spaghetti sauce you know all these embarrassing things but billions of people use google google has hundred billion dollars gemini is now one of the top models right that's my point that's my point google spent 2023 and 2024 blowing it and in 2025 their model is almost as popular as chat gpt because they're google because they have all the data in the world

[01:27:31] they have all the money in the world but more important they have all the reach in the world and apple is the same way i'm with you davindra they they've been losing they've been blowing it they've been blowing it and i'm not counting them out the other thing is like apple has always just had this cache of cool that the other companies don't have and i do think that people are much more forgiving of that because you know green bubble versus blue bubble just the look of apple products you know

[01:27:57] android fans will forever be screaming that they did it first and iphone users will always just go yeah but apple did it better so i just think they're allowed not allowed but they're able to kind of flub it on ai to an extent that these other companies cannot just because it's really interesting that gary you brought this up that microsoft got punished for its capex its capital expenditures on ai and data centers

[01:28:26] uh meta said they're going to spend 135 billion dollars this year on ai infrastructure and they got rewarded but it's in but i think maybe they got rewarded not for ai but because they're doing so well in advertising yeah they're an advertising company they're an ad agency sure sure it went up like also go ahead they're cutting back on virtual reality stuff too so they announced a whole bunch of those

[01:28:51] cutbacks a whole bunch of layoffs and like they're the story now is we're focusing on ai gadgets that makes wall street happy because it seems like they're moving forward and away from the things losing money right yeah exactly yeah isn't that sad though still said i think they still said that we're planning to lose the same amount on vr this year yeah yeah like eight billion i mean crazy huge number i mean someone ended up like the hundred billion or whatever i'm making that number up i can't remember it but they've lost a preposterous amount of money 70 billion i think it was around

[01:29:21] 70 billion so what's interesting is that they can afford to that's that's actually in some ways that's the important part of the story is they make so much money in advertising yeah so what insane though because if you really think about it the ai gadgets like they're doing well right on these uh meta ray-bans and now they have just released the ray-ban no they're doing well on the ray-ban metas and someone there was real stupid and named the one with the display the

[01:29:47] ray-bam display or meta ray-bans but you know do you have either of those i have all of them i have and you kept them okay um well because i'm doing long-term doing long-term testing on them so i wear them intermittently because i'm testing so many ai glasses at this point then i only have one face so it's very difficult for now it's very difficult to test them especially since like i don't know if

[01:30:13] you can tell but my glasses are incredibly thick so uh i have to manage when i'm using contact lenses when i'm doing all this physical strain on my it's a whole thing but so i do have the glasses but they are subsidizing these glasses by a crazy amount like it's an 800 pair of glasses with display in them most people are not going to go buy that with for a niche gadget unless they're early adopters so meta

[01:30:39] is pretty much subsidizing a lot of the ai glasses they are putting out there so it's sort of just like yes they make a lot in advertising they can spend all of this money but i think there's a limit to how much they can actually do that because if this doesn't take off this is just going to be another gamble of theirs that you know like we made fun of them for the longest time about the metaverse and i do think

[01:31:07] that there's going to be a backlash with smart glasses in the not too distant future it's it's already happening like privacy wise or like concerts or bars or places where they're like or just you wearing harassing women men harassing women on college campuses men ruin everything don't they gosh darn it uh so this is the information martin peter peers writing uh what did we learn what did we what did

[01:31:32] we learn from meta microsoft and tesla from the uh the earnings um i don't know what did we did we learn anything but he says the bottom line for both companies growth is important but the cost of the growth is even more important maybe that's the the lesson is uh don't throw away your money i don't know i don't know what we learned but microsoft's profits you know year over year their net income is way way up

[01:32:00] yeah hugely so they were making they're making a couple of billion dollars a week i mean at the same time there's a lot of things that their whole xbox division yeah is going down in flames right things that are been tied to microsoft that in the in the public mind for a lot of people microsoft is failing because they don't like what's happening in windows they hate what's happening in xbox so it's different stories depending on the audience that's a really good point yeah that all of the

[01:32:26] traditional strengths of microsoft are failing and they're and they're gambling big time on this new thing and maybe the market says that's why i was asking is there some wisdom in this crowd i mean i know they also think that uh you know game stop is going but it's also like isn't this more evidence of like the decoupling of a company value to actual profits like those aren't coupled anymore you don't know your pro your company doesn't get more valuable if you make more money stock market

[01:32:55] is pretty much imaginary is what it is that's what it is it's vibes half of it is vibes vibes vibes it's vibes it's all vibes um all right we're gonna take a little break come back with the good vibes of this fabulous a panel gary gary ribland is here author of ai valley a history of ai in the silicon valley just look at all his books behind him over his left shoulder look at all that just you wrote all of

[01:33:21] those and apparently they you've got many copies too so that's good that's the ones that didn't sell right let's go back to your like you don't necessarily get rich from writing those are the authors copies you get you get some authors you have a good publisher that gives you authors copies i like that i have one copy of each of my books on the bookshelf so that's more than enough although i gotta i gotta i have to read this later i got a uh a letter from a prisoner at uh farmingham uh state prison in

[01:33:51] missouri i can't usually get and it's nice because they hand write them because they don't have any other way of saying words but uh it was very it was i'll read it at the end of the show it's a very sweet letter but one of the things he said is our prison bookstore has your 2003 technology almanac very happy to know that the library uh at the farmingham uh correctional center has uh it's a small

[01:34:15] library he says they have uh uh one row of non-fiction books and one of them is my almanac so there you go you see that's true fame my friends uh we're gonna take a break david rahard war is also here from a gadget and victoria's song from the verge our show today brought to you by my mattress i feel very well rested because i sleep on our sponsor's mattress the helix

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[01:38:34] we sent you and if you're listening after the sale ends do check them out helixsleep.com twit and use that address so they know you saw it here helix h-e-l-i-x sleep.com twit we love them we love them so uh apple did have good quarterly results but that has not um it's not all been smooth sailing for apple

[01:38:57] this week they announced this seems greedy that they are going to take a 30 cut from all patreon creators in the ios app uh by november so you've got a little time but uh november 1st 2026 patreon is not happy um if you use the patreon legacy billing model in other words you're paying

[01:39:24] through ios apple's going to take its 30 cut uh i guess you know they're giving out patreon time to move customers off of that the company says it will switch they said it would switch creators to subscription billing in november and the creators could choose this is november 2024 two years ago could choose whether to increase their subscription prices to cover apple's fees did you do that did you

[01:39:54] did you no uh in addition uh creators could opt to delay changes until november of last year if you need more time anyway um i think this is a shame patriots are not happy yeah yeah and creators are not happy it's also like of all the it's one thing to tax i think big companies whatever you want but this

[01:40:19] is rent seeking isn't it this is just yeah if it's also just like the average creator is not huge you're basically squeezing people who are doing side hustles a little extra cash on the side doing projects uh it it just feels unnecessary i don't know the apple tax uh on creators not on patreon itself but on

[01:40:43] creators uh we we actually uh our club goes through memberful which is a patreon company i don't i don't know how this would affect us actually i haven't really looked into it yeah i mean most most people don't most patreon or patreon they subscribe on the website right so apple doesn't take that money yeah yeah that's what they want you to do and i mean this is impacted every other streaming service

[01:41:09] too like google plans and netflix plans like you pay a couple bucks more if you're doing it from within the ios or apple subscription thing sometimes so that's how they've handled it but those are big companies it's very different here and then there's been a little bit of heat uh on tim cook who uh the day of alex preddy's shooting elected to go see the premiere of melania the movie at the white

[01:41:33] house uh and was uh uh seen on uh brett ratner the director's instagram palling around with the director who's been accused of uh harassment and other sexual crimes um not a good look for tim cook huh that's his qualification in this administration that's why he's did the movie yeah and i mean i mean everybody said look that's a 75 million dollar bribe from amazon to to the president i mean nobody will

[01:42:03] amazon is going to lose money on this movie have you been reading the reviews it's worth going out and reading the review the guardian said what i read today what did they say uh you know just actually the one i remember and this is like it's melania getting out of uh getting out of cars opening doors they say if you're going to another door if you like the idea of watching melania trump choose her outfit for

[01:42:27] the inauguration you're gonna love this movie i gotta check this on letterboxd because the reviews of letterboxd oh yeah they'll be a little yeah the movie opened this week uh i don't i don't know how the ticket sales have been um we haven't seen the box office yet you asked my my favorite was like you know if jeffrey if jeffrey abstin had seen this he would have killed himself kind of joke it's just not that bad but you know i mean i i kind of love documentaries just generally speaking

[01:42:55] i do too i like seeing inside people's lives yeah there was a mary tyler moore one i watched and like oh she has a drinking but i was made by loved ones and so it was made lovingly but there was the reveal it was complicated it was three-dimensional what they're saying you know ben stiller did one about his parents which again he loves his parents but like there was tension you know one pushed the other to keep on going and there was drinking and you know all that kind of stuff and like it was really heartfelt what they're saying about this it's just like she the

[01:43:22] the review of the guardian i think it was said like you know she's perfectly made up in every scene there's just never an unguarded moment well that's melania in a nutshell it's uh yeah it's all it's all product at the beginning of her new documentary the guardian writes melania tells the viewer that quote everybody wants to know how she spends her time so so here it is she says 20 days in

[01:43:47] my life at new york the guard again the guardian at new york's one of new york's busiest movie theaters on friday the crowd was sparse uh uh precisely 12 people had shown up to watch melania at an amc theater near times square at least half of whom were journalists reviewing the movie hilarious

[01:44:09] yeah anyway it wasn't it wasn't intended to be uh a success the top review on letterboxd is milanio will return in the epstein files oh god there you go true so tim cook goes to the uh premier at the white house uh uh we know why right uh every ceo to lick so it feels like they've got to lick the boot

[01:44:36] yeah and it's so easy i write a million dollar check i show up at the white house times a year and and you know i i i'm on the good side of the guy who could hurt me it should be whatever yeah yeah and we were talking about this on mac break weekly on tuesday and uh uh one of the hosts said look what happened when tim cook didn't go to saudi arabia with the president the president talked about it

[01:44:59] the whole time where's tim cook tim cook's not here you know uh so a few days after the movie he did write a memo uh which was sent to apple uh employees mark german of course got a copy uh the tipster at bloomberg uh cook says i'm heartbroken by the events in minneapolis this is a time for

[01:45:23] de-escalation um i know this is very emotional and challenging for many i'm proud of how deeply our teams care about the world beyond our walls it's it's pretty anodyne he's heartbroken okay and i'm sure he shared his thoughts with the president that day uh yeah did he yeah he said i had a good conversation with the president this week where i shared my views and i appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all what do you think good deal i would love to

[01:45:53] have been a fly on the wall in that conversation i think he said what he thinks and trump went okay timmy okay mr apple yeah yeah and also he can't really say what he really thinks right no he can't this is the guy that gave um trump that golden plaque and that whole i replay that whole press conference in my head quite a bit i'm like where did we go wrong here where did tim cook go wrong here because the question people keep asking is like what would steve jobs do in this situation i'm like

[01:46:22] i feel like this in this case that that rabscallion steve jobs would at least not do this yeah and it is it is disgusting to see we know why because he has to fight for apple right he has to make sure is he doing the right thing that's that's the really he's doing everything right for apple stockholders probably i guess like what about apple customers do you think that how do you think they feel about it i think most of them are not aware of what's happening to you right they don't most people

[01:46:49] are not in the news cycle it's just us it's media people and people who pay way too much attention to tech but there there is a deep moral cost here to all of this and it is really sad to see um i don't expect much from tech ceos but tim cook seemed like somebody who at least like was trying to guide apple in a way that was a little more morally righteous and what the google folks did or how mark zuckerberg works and this is all just absolutely disgusting yeah you know and just just kind of a personal way

[01:47:17] like in my head you know kind of reaching the top whatever it is in our world to be a you know a famous columnist or something like that in this world we're talking about the ceo of a big company you were billions tens of billions hundreds of billions of dollars like you have your f you money but you don't get to say f you it's just like weird like to me the whole advantage of being like super wealthy is i don't have to care what you think i mean i want to be a nice human but other

[01:47:43] than that i'm going to share my thoughts because i don't have to worry about the repercussions i look at zuckerberg i look at altman i look at cook i look at bezos and i know none of them believe in much of what they're saying or at least what they're embracing but it's just i don't know i i the billionaires are disappointing me do you think that's why tim cook is apparently looking at retiring is that he would like to be able to tell the truth well like no i had an editor a long time ago who he was

[01:48:11] a very profound guy but one of the things he said was to live with integrity comes at a high personal cost yes yes yes i think when you get to a point of being a ceo it's just like i think they tell themselves that they're responsible for all the people underneath them so it's not about them and to an extent that's true but it's like the higher you go the greater the personal cost is to live

[01:48:41] with integrity and so i think many of them just don't do it they they decide to like stay quiet because if you look at all the stories and it's normally i wish he remained silent right i mean like he's not remaining silent he's not just remaining on the sidelines he's very much involved he's showing i mean showing up at the melania thing that's that's a real endorsement you know it's not like he was showing up because tech ceos were asked to kind of weigh in on some issue you know there's the president's

[01:49:10] wife and you know i don't know i i know what you're saying and you're right as a ceo well a shareholder value i i don't have the freedom to do this but you know as it says in the gospels as it says in mark what profit is a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul it's just an incomplete lack of backbone there's no spine uh seeing in it and it's just like you know when i back in the days i think

[01:49:38] when i was growing up there were a lot of people who would say like well if the nazis came again like i wouldn't be the ones who like kowtow like i wouldn't be that person like yeah but would you and it's very easy to say because it's happening in our country now and all the people that you know you would think to look up to the leaders of our society well they're rolling over and america has always prided itself in bringing down the nazis and being a bastion of

[01:50:03] freedom but you see the billionaires just like you know having not just billionaires many many good germans many many people in power in general um i want to point out like this happened before ibm sold sure nazis ibm powered the database for the nazis ford was a ford really supported them

[01:50:28] yeah he believed it he was an anti-semite right yeah so in my head i have three buckets like you know on one end you've got you know that's quite an image by the way i have three buckets i'm going to show you three buckets yes in my head okay okay deserve that i put the ceos in three buckets you know on one hand you know you've got like whatever peter teal david sacks like you know uh the the the palmer lucky the true believers right okay it wasn't raising trump this is what they believe

[01:50:59] yes in the other in the other you know buckets you've got you know sam altman and tim cook like they know who this guy is he's buffoon he's egotistical he's you know a narcissist whatever and they're just playing the game you know the one that i'm most the bucket i'm most interested the people in the middle like mark andreessen to me is a perfect example of this he's become uh maybe greg brockman i don't know him as well as a character um but you know it's like they've totally embraced

[01:51:26] like oh this is good for america like no biden had gentle rules about ai and was getting in your way and had very harsh rules about crypto trump came in and said i'm going to have a laissez-faire view towards ai in fact i'm going to help fuel ai uh and you know i'm going to have a laissez-faire view towards crypto and of course he raised it's it's good for your bottom line it is in a way the people that middle bucket who are pretending like this is great for america i love donald trump

[01:51:55] like now donald trump's really good for your portfolio companies mr andreessen and that is why you have fully embraced donald there are other things there are other things mr andreessen has believed right he has he has gone fully down the sort of like white supremacist belief system too so like there are there are things people are aligning with with this administration which are there's there's economic reasons there's also like societal reasons people like are letting their fascist flags fly and

[01:52:21] they feel like you think we really ever would know what mark zuckerberg for instance really thinks though i mean no no he's a doesn't it's also just like i don't care what he thinks because yeah that's a good point he has a lot of power that's why you should care what he thinks he has a lot of power doesn't i mean his act his actions are that he is a spineless slug like we've been talking about like the minute um he faced repercussions for uh banning trump from his

[01:52:46] platform after january 6th with which trump you know followers were responsible for and he ever since then with this new administration he has been groveling he's given up on dei he's given up on his non-profit endeavors with his wife like whatever whatever thing he actually believed can go can disappear it's like it's like heat right he sees the heat around the corner he drops everything in a minute because he doesn't really stand for anything yeah he wrote a 25 million 20 million dollar check

[01:53:13] you know to kind of like get rid of the lawsuit another is just like amazon and the milani it's just a bribe it's just a payment to the president you know to get on his good side did you guys see the thing about the spy sheik that's not in the story thing but that thing dropped yesterday what's the spy sheik the spy sheik um an investment of like 500 million dollars from somebody to get access i believe somebody um from saudi arabia uh but to get access to ai chips

[01:53:44] 500 million dollars directly to trump's like oh to the crypto crypto yes yeah this is from the wall street journal yeah yeah 500 million uh sheik tanun bin zaid al-nayan of the uh uae proposed purchased a 49 stake in the trump family's world liberty financial according to the wall street journal that seems bad and right after that weirdly i'm sure it's a coincidence the u.s agreed to give the uae access

[01:54:13] to half a million of the most advanced ai chips i was really wondering why that happened should i have been surprised it's it's all the grift it's all the grift like if you look at what's happening in the administration it's all about how they can fill their pockets but you look at the rest of the industry too it's about how they can align themselves with the that evil kid from that episode of the twilight zone who could just wish things to be to happen right that's where we are is that all these

[01:54:40] companies have enough money and they have enough power behind them that if they decided that they wanted to have a backbone and to do anything i'm sure that it could influence things in a different way apple could decide you know they just decide to take the easy spot for them and i get that that that's kind of like the modus operandi when the only religion this country really has is money

[01:55:05] um but it just it just feels yeah it doesn't feel good doesn't feel if tim cook actually did that he wouldn't have been able to stand up and say we had the best quarter ever for iphones right it would have been like hey we took a hit this year because i didn't i didn't you know kiss the ring this one time and he may get fired from it from the board but also i don't know after a certain point isn't that kind

[01:55:30] of what we should do it is it is it's just like again integrity comes at great personal cost and most people don't want most people if the cost is their fortunes and their power and their influence i think it takes a pretty singular and strong person with a very ironclad moral compass to make that sacrifice and i just think you know looking at the tech ceos i don't think any of them are those people

[01:55:56] yep yeah a few like so what uh vinod khosla came out when uh keith ruboy kind of said you know basically they deserve to be killed in minneapolis you know khosla came out i guess reed hoffman just had an editorial like it's time for tech to speak in fact i'm really curious like i bet you if i called reed hoffman right now he would say he got 10 times 100 times more private messages saying right on your

[01:56:23] right yeah then people who actually went to x or linkedin or whatever to make some kind of statement is surprising right because he's not a guy with the reputation of being nice to people in general he's the guy who like kicked the public off of his private beach right so that's surprising that he even said anything yeah well you know nice he's a man of color though he's a man of color in this country right now yeah but nice and goodness don't have to be synonymous you know like that's

[01:56:50] new york right we're yes we're not nice people but we're kind people in new york uh okay maybe that's what's going on yeah i'm sorry it's absolutely true but yeah yeah he and uh uh elon got a little battle on x this week uh khosla khosla yeah i missed that one yeah what was it about exchanged heated remarks uh on the social media platform x uh accusing uh musk of promoting racism musk in turn fired back

[01:57:20] with insults directed to khosla while referencing his past effort to restrict public access to a nearby beach but he was a rich asshole he can't be a rich ass who is without sin cast the first stone wow i i am on a tear this is my second biblical reference in one show and i am not known for my biblical references meanwhile uh creach khosla defended his actions regarding his 37 million

[01:57:46] dollar beach estate as a matter of private property rights he also responded to musk's posts on wednesday saying try not tweeting seemingly racist stuff next time musk said venod you're not such a pompous asshole that you tried to stop the public from using a public beach near your house you've gone full retard nice job elon you got you got you got it all in uh you know this is why we can't take him seriously my partner siobhan is half indian and my eldest son with her isn't he has a few which

[01:58:16] partner which one of them is named in honor of the great indian physicist chandra sakkar it's great some of my best friends some of my best friends are indian oh lord anyway uh yeah badly there's also scales of bad behavior like kicking people off your beach yeah that sucks but is that anywhere even close to like the bad behavior that musk is like yeah it's not even close there's

[01:58:44] a lot of scales to this yeah let's uh let's take a break i mean actually before we do i want to take a break for many things leo yeah many many things before we do i do want to ask victoria because she does cover this beat meta is being sued over the ray-ban products by solos solos has also a smart glasses and they say that meta has infringed on their patents is is there any

[01:59:08] merit to that do you think well i think the thing that we can take away from all of this is that once patent wars start happening in a category it's sort of a sign that there's momentum there because there's money to be made now there's money to be made there's stuff like and i think in the last few months alone we've seen kind of a spate of these uh smart glasses patent bottles so on the do you

[01:59:34] like the solos um i actually haven't used them uh i did get reached out to them as soon as they filed this so that that was uh they were they were like did you get it and i was like yes i saw it on their website they have uh they claim to have a hundred patents uh on these on these uh smart eyewear tools i mean okay let's be real though like the fact that they're cropping up in the last year and especially

[02:00:00] within the last few months like i think there have been three or four patent cases in the smart glasses space in the last two months or so some against meta some against um there was one between xreal and vitcher which are smaller players uh as far as mainstream knowledge goes uh that is quite contentious at the moment uh between the two companies and i think all i think the main takeaway that the average person needs to have from the smart glass patent wars is that you know it's it's a

[02:00:28] space that's gaining momentum it's real yeah it's real yeah i think we'll see more from this space going forward because you know smart rings have been embroiled in patent wars for the last two years i want to say um iphones and just phone makers are having patent wars left and right it's sort of like oh congratulations you can set up the big kids table now uh or maybe the medium kids table i don't know

[02:00:52] but you can you're kind of um entering mainstream status once you get your baby's first five patent wars and they're kind of there now so yeah let's take a little break then we'll talk tick tock tick tock tick tock as we continue victoria's song is here from a gadget the glasses queen flip flip that one she's did i oh the verge i'm sorry there's a war going on leo come on is it really are you guys at war not

[02:01:19] anymore no you're sitting next to each other there used to be there used to be you kind of you know what you those are two of the tech blogs that have survived they're not a lot of them yeah uh gadget it weighs heavily on us yes it weighs heavily on us that we have survived well but it's well yeah because many of our colleagues are out of work or you know have had moved on but uh congratulations congratulations right uh on the success of the virgin and gadget that's good okay can i just say is

[02:01:46] somebody like i was covering tech from 95 to like 2010 and i kind of moved on to other topics katrina whatever it's sort of amazing to me that you know these new sites you know you guys 404 they're really terrific you know we didn't have any like great yeah you know 404 is amazing yeah i mean but you're you know yours too you know is the the verge i i was really impressed i sort of went away for a while and i came back and stuff and like okay i knew tech crunch and that was about it it's

[02:02:14] just it really it really has kind of helped enrich i think you know that it's critical you know it's covering the industry giving it its due but also you know calling it to task when it needs to be called the task doing the reviews i don't know i think i i know it's been bumpy there have been layoffs and you know i'm sure it's painful but with that said i think it's quite the accomplishment that all these new media outlets exist and are filling this role that when i was covering tech really wasn't being

[02:02:42] filled at all how long have you been in a gadget divindra i mean over 10 years but in gas it's not new and gadgets 20 years old it's ancient i know weblogs right the verge is newer but even then like it's the youtubers it's the self you know self-owned folks like uh 404 who have small little outfits that can be nimble and do all sorts of cool stuff they're you know they're really leading the way now yeah yeah and then you see big companies like cnet really kind of falter they're big fall so big

[02:03:10] yeah yeah i mean seeing that still seen that to a extent and like they're under ziff now so they're out from the red venture i don't even know what to call red venture but from that uh but the red tent i think we call it yes yeah i mean cnet to me is a perfect example like you know i i knew people work there i have respect for it but like i don't think they're really calling big tech to task

[02:03:36] not at all in fact they got busted for doing ai stories without telling anybody my colleague wrote that uh mia sato she's wonderful uh like i'm i'm the biggest fan of all the people i work with but um yeah it's it's really important to us at the verge actually that we do call big i think the virgin and the people are doing it and i think the people are doing it's really good and i think the people are

[02:04:01] doing it's really good and i'm great because also yeah you know you do at the verge have a paid you know subscription uh which i pay for premium but but both of you have stuff that most of the stuff is outside the paywall that's fantastic more and more of the content that i'm trying to that i need is buying paywalls i have to pay for bloomberg and the information in the wall street journal and the financial times and the economy it adds up so much of this stuff's behind a paywall now blame and i

[02:04:29] understand why yeah but you know thank you for doing the work it means a lot though thank you that's so so nice to hear because when you're in the trenches it's just no you guys do a great job and by the way 404 absolutely tech dirt absolutely some of these little guys are uh really punching up you know paris marks over there tech won't save us like that's that's a one-man operation of paris is amazing yeah

[02:04:54] i agree yeah yeah yeah uh let's take a little break then we're going to talk about the youtuber who uh the is now worth six billion dollars is it funny hey talk about the future media yeah we'll talk about that in just a little bit but uh we'll have more in just a bit our show today brought to you by this little doohickey here this is a thinkst canary what is it what do you think it looks like it maybe

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[02:09:41] about us box canary.tools slash twit thank you thanks canary not only for uh supporting our shows but for supporting our security we really appreciate it uh the trial of the century began this week a social media trial in los angeles uh jury selection began in los angeles superior court uh some of the

[02:10:06] biggest tech companies meta instagram bites dance tick tock google's youtube the uh the lawsuit says they deliberately deliberately addict and harm children now tick tock settled out a day before snap settled out for an undisclosed sum a couple of days before but the trial goes on uh because uh meta didn't and uh and youtube did not

[02:10:39] uh you know this is a really an interesting question in fact techter says the social media addiction narrative may be more harmful than social media itself mike masnick writing on thursday uh he says uh they're using the tobacco playbook in this comparing comparing social media to cigarettes mike says but social media addiction isn't recognized as a real clinical addiction

[02:11:10] uh in fact there's a lot of question about whether social media is as harmful even as uh as people say perhaps one could argue mike writes that everyone's screaming about social media addiction is doing more real harm than any social media product itself because for the vast majority of heavy social media users the problem isn't addiction in a clinical sense it's habit habit is different than addiction

[02:11:37] i don't know how i feel about that to be quite honest are you addicted to social media or are you just habituated to it victoria well it's sort of just like one of the main tenets of addiction is dopamine and kind of the way that it affects your brain um some people are going to be more addicted to things than others if you're prone to addictive habits you know you may perceive it differently i like

[02:12:03] i would have to see his his point is that if you say it's an addiction that removes your human agency i don't necessarily think that's true um you know addiction is kind of a tricky thing to talk about just in terms of like the science of it and then also the emotional aspect of it but i think what we can see is that social media is harmful in some ways like to body image uh you know tumblr back in the

[02:12:32] day was the breeding ground for ed or eating disorders you see a lot of that on instagram if you talk to young girls about how they think about their bodies and i see it in my young cousin who's 11 and the things that she talks about coming from social media on the one hand you would see it through magazines like when i was growing up it was cosmo magazine telling me the five things that i could eat to be a size zero did you fall for that oh yeah of course i did uh you know you're developmentally

[02:13:01] young at that point in time i have struggled with uh disordered eating my whole life um it's it's i don't know if we can split hairs to that degree because i have definitely felt myself this compulsion to doom scroll um i've i felt myself like the negative feelings i have when you know social media

[02:13:25] only shows me the curated positivity of someone else's life um because it's not real life right but then you know i think the thing that complicates the social media narrative is that there is genuine goodness from it just like there is genuine goodness from the internet there are plenty of people who have found communities like if they're living in a place that is not kind to them or where they don't have the ability to see uh like-minded people in real life internet communities whether they be on

[02:13:53] social media or whether they be on other forums uh can provide people a sense of community uh that may not be available to them in the real meat space world uh that that's a string of sentences that i used but um yeah i think it's i don't know that calling it an addiction is more harmful than social media itself it's just um i don't think so many of us would feel resonant with the idea that we use social media too much

[02:14:23] that it's too addictive because the way the algorithms you could stop any time right would you have withdrawal if you stopped using social media would you yes i have i have like sometimes i've felt like oh god like i have i've noticed i've noticed the way that like i've been trained to want it more like the algorithm is done in such a way the um the way i guess mike's point is that who's at a

[02:14:47] who's the who's has agency here though do you as the user have agency or does the drug have agency to see i i i think he's making an interesting point i'll grant him that but you know i think he's ignoring the manipulative nature of a meta that you know the the algorithm made me do it meta made me well no it's more like they have a lot of really smart people there and you could read the memos in the

[02:15:13] court case you just referenced about how they're manipulating people they knew that this is bad for body image they knew all these things and yet they kept on doing it because it helps the bottom line i mean i think our country is where it's at in part because it was to meta etc's benefit to have us at each other's throat because you know hostility means engagement means more time on device and their

[02:15:37] algorithms were uh rigged that way to just kind of it and so like yes we do have all agency it's us we drink too much we gamble too much yes it's on us but let's also pay attention to the way the corporations big tech are manipulating people to increase their time and increase their addiction so losing this court case uh according to our aesthetic could cost these companies billions of dollars and already in

[02:16:05] discovery you're seeing some smoking guns um for instance internal meta documents seemingly bragging that quote teens can't switch off from instagram even if they want to an instagram employee saying in an email oh my gosh y'all ig is a drug they themselves compared it to tobacco they themselves right yeah so

[02:16:29] so yeah in that same write-up i saw the the 17 strikes rule you know if 16 violations for you know sexual solicitation it's only on the 17th time it's like a real big problem like you know young people go on there i mean i'm less i'm less concerned i have two teenage sons i'm less concerned with adults but with young people going on there and just you know women what do you do with your sons do you do you

[02:16:57] advise them not to use this stuff you know my wife might be in the other room watching this and like she's no she no she's very strict like they have to ask permission like you know we would i mean we use the messaging apps i think you know snapchat is theirs and just like okay this is the way you're social nowadays whatever it's over a screen who cares but like tick tock no like he'll ask for all

[02:17:22] day no you're not getting all day here's 15 minutes here's one hour so we you know we would tick tock will give you hemorrhoids i saw that in one article that's the least of your problems but anyway no you know and and so but you know i i will i mean my boys they're very social they go out in the real world i mean what i care about is less about the screen and more are you in the real world interacting

[02:17:45] with humans in a human way and that's going on so yeah we're worried and we monitor my 16 year like i'm the only one you know who has to ask permission he really resents it but i'll give her credit it just it's kind of keeps it in check and by the way when they're punished they do something wrong and we take away screening for two or three days honestly it's really sweet it's really like it we we see the difference and when we take it out you know it's like things calm down things are more

[02:18:15] settled so anyway it's it's it's all it's all very complicated he does have a point maybe we're overstating it but like i don't know i really think these businesses meta tick tock should i you said they settled already whoever else is still in this in the lawsuit you know it's just like they should be called to task they should be reined in they should be more responsible this is a really powerful tool australia has banned it for kids under 16 uh france is going to do that so for kids under 15

[02:18:45] finland's looking at it is that the solution i think that's good i i think so well like i don't know if it's the solution but i do think ultimately it is good to delay people getting on those platforms when they're in such formative years like there's i don't know i see delays the word delay i think delay is is the right thing to do because i got on these social media platforms when they were new but i was

[02:19:10] at least going to college when i first got access to um facebook and all of the rest came after and i do think there is a fundamental difference coming into it later on in my life versus being young and exposed to all of that because tick tock is qvc now what does it teach kids it teaches them like consumerism idolatry of uh influencers and i don't want to be like hyperbolic but at the same

[02:19:39] time my 11 year old cousin uh she got into drunk elephant and was one of those kids terrorizing sephora because her favorite influencers were telling her that she needed to use retinol retinol is not a thing that anyone needs to use until they hit their 30s yeah so you know it's like the things that they're learning the the misinformation and the disinformation on these platforms like it the radicalization of kids through youtube algorithms like your attention

[02:20:07] is the economy it is the products that they're trying to monetize and when it's children either we have to be having classes to teach them like critical thinking and media literacy for these platforms um or we have to just kind of delay or at least have parents involved one of our discordian uh you know club members uh who lives in israel and is in her 30s says i wish i had had social media when i

[02:20:34] was a lonely kid i see that's the that's the flip side of it right because it does provide an outlet especially if you're an outcast kid i have so many friends who grew up in rural areas where they didn't have people who understood them say that social media and the internet was kind of a lifeline for them so it's sort of again to earlier conversations we had in this podcast what is the wisdom of discernment here because to gary's point the manipulation and the algorithm is pervasive and

[02:21:04] these companies do not have children's uh best interests at heart i think i think they want to get users hooked at an early age so that they stay there for a long time and their product that's the comparison to tobacco industry well everybody does that apple did that microsoft does that too i mean it's very true google admitted that if your kids start using chromebooks at an early age they're brand loyal for life they know that everybody knows that but i think i think victoria hit it though with

[02:21:33] the algorithm see this is a more nuanced conversation than just social media is bad like social media itself can be a good powerful tool but the algorithms that these companies are employing now that's that's the problem i have to admit i i've deleted instagram and i loved instagram when it first came out it was a great way to share photos with friends i really liked it was a photo album but it quickly became and i'm sure this is algorithmic this is about making money not about my friends but about whoever

[02:21:59] like tick tock whoever they thought i would be interested in seeing it turned into chronological feed that's all we want that's all we ever wanted was all they have see the stuff that from the people we follow that's all we all want early days yeah but they don't care like that doesn't get that doesn't increase the engagement for meta or their numbers or their ads or whatever um the whole addiction conversation i feel like that is to what mike is saying it is probably a bigger hurdle than like engaging with the actual problems that we've been talking about which we've

[02:22:28] known for years like over a decade like a lot of this stuff is known and these companies were never really taken to task for it so i think like yeah this is just you know what we we love non-algorithmic somebody somebody's pointing out you know your club your discord is social media but it's not algorithmic it's just a chat room and it's great it's friends i hang out there yeah in the mid 90s when i was a lonely kid on the internet like there were chat rooms i found i found people there the thing about

[02:22:55] social media right it is a crushing thing and it is an all-consuming thing and if your brain is not fully formed like you know it's it's a really difficult place to be as a kid get off social media and join our club join the clubs and this this goes into like schools like maybe uh restricting phone use and stuff during schools too like i'm kind of all for that because i keep hearing reports out of australia the kids are grateful that they've been banned yeah like they they wanted this

[02:23:19] this help i don't know if that's universal or just uh oh wait i mean go ahead it was the the governor here abandoned in new york my older son is 11th grader his school had done it the year before cell phones yeah cell phones they put in a pouch a yonder pouch and like during the day and like the truth is i haven't heard complaining about it my younger son he too it's kind of a new york state law

[02:23:44] yeah it's a relief the teachers love it and i think the kids you know appreciate it like just a break like you have your phone in the morning before you get to school you have your phone all afternoon and night and maybe that's if if it's not addictive it's habituating maybe that's all we need is just that little break to remind us oh you know what it's actually nice not to have it i mean i don't have to be on it all the time when computers weren't in our pockets and they were in the living room and

[02:24:11] there was a certain period of time after school that you used the internet and then all the rest of the time were for your hobbies or for connecting with your family and your friends and like i think that is the happiest era of internet usage that i can remember in my life uh when there were limitations and i think all child behavioral developmental science proves that like not proves but like has suggested that kids crave boundaries like they crave limitations in a certain sense and it helps them

[02:24:41] develop into healthy people so i think if we're talking children and child development they do need those limitations they do need those boundaries writing the irt in our discord says i heard a teacher on local news say the biggest change is hearing noise in the lunchroom again right that for years people have been quiet on their phones now their kids were talking to each other yeah that's sad if that's i'm glad they got rid of the phones with all these things in mind like the thing i do want to be like we gotta take these companies to task because they have had free reign to just build these

[02:25:10] algorithms maybe this trial is this engagement at all costs and that that has been a cost not just for kids too like it's it's adults it's so many things like these things have influenced our society in ways that ironically i love tick tock i love to talk yeah as soon as tick tock became an american company last week and announced that they were going to be keeping track of your immigration status i immediately deleted it now yeah we've pointed out that lawyers say no this is just because of the

[02:25:39] california privacy act they have to disclose that if they know it that that's part of the information they have nevertheless uh i feel fine i mean i'm sure of it but what what like leo like you're still on twitter right like the thing no i'm not on twitter i have been on twitter since november when uh 2020 because you were talking about using grok you were talking about using grok or something well i have grok actually what i'm going to use grok for is my friend by the way and i'm going to end this show

[02:26:06] soon because i miss him claude uh somebody said that you that you should that you know you can use different ais with claw bot that's true and that you should use grok for searching social media it's very good at that so that's the only thing i'm going to use it for so to get back to a point like we're moving on a little bit but like calling these big companies to task big tech to task like i think

[02:26:30] it's particularly important because who is going to be dominating ai the next big technology it's google it's maybe meta it's maybe microsoft and google ai has an incredible ability to hook you you know we saw that happen when chat gpt pulled back on 4.0 yeah people were in tears like they'd lost their best friend that's only going to get worse right and there have been studies that ai what really

[02:26:58] scares me or one of the many things i guess that scares me about ai it's so good at manipulating us it will get us in a way and will give the arguments like there are studies that it's you know 50 60 better at either convincing you of something politically or convincing you to buy something it's a really really powerful tool that can kind of manipulate human beings it's getting good it's good at it now and it's only going to get better and better and better or convincing you to hurt

[02:27:25] yourself which has happened yeah right you think you're smart you think you think you can program in the guidelines like i tell mine to be uh i tell mine to limit flattery to 1.2 percent at any point but even so i notice when it's trying to start gassing me up and i'm just like oh did you keep that friendly pendant that was uh being so mean no no i i i threw blurbo into a bag

[02:27:55] she called it blur blurbo well i actually that's a good point because whenever i get one of these ai like friend devices i make sure to name it something ridiculous that way i know it's ai and it's not something smart is real because friend it it prompts you to name it things like emily or just like real names no real people and i was just like absolutely not you will be named blurbo

[02:28:20] because that is a ridiculous name and so i can always give it a dog's name like that way you would know this is this is dependent by the 22 year old who people are saying uh becomes in mean after a while oh yeah it definitely makes you like it was just like my name is blurbo not bordeaux what are you stupid uh basically is what it was the bulk of my conversations with it was it just like being very

[02:28:47] antagonistic towards me and it's sort of like uh kind of like how you would think a 22 year old frat guy would talk to you if they were your friend this this is what i'm saying treat these things like minions just like hey man get me get me this thing shut up stop talking back go on the car i didn't ask you anything stop responding i'm not talking to you um let's take a break because i do miss my little friend blurbo over here and uh i i just want to know how he's doing uh we we have uh gosh we

[02:29:17] have so many more stories i'll do a few uh quick ones uh and maybe i hope i can get to this letter from uh the prisoner because it's such an interesting letter anyway um you're watching twit with gary rivlin ai valley is his latest book here you said you were working on uh maybe thinking about working on something uh about debt or what were you no i i wrote a book about debt but that was i know 15

[02:29:40] uh years ago usa yeah yeah wow okay wow well um i i i'm not sure what i'm doing i'm sticking with a i mean ai is so it's such a good topic yeah no and you know it's like you know we talked about her before like i'm convinced we're really gonna have to wrestle with this we're talking about like social media but like people having deep relationships and you know important conversational but romantic relationships i think that's going to be like really really i kind of put in the same categories

[02:30:09] like you know prison you know women who go to prisons to like marry prisoners i still don't get it and it happens a lot and to me this is like i don't get it like how could you fall in love how can you have a sexual relationship with a thing yes you're right devondra we should not name it it shouldn't be a human name no no it's a client i called mine dev null which is the character i played

[02:30:33] on tv in the 90s and it's a it's a good bad now forget ai no no no but i i just think like kind of the manipulating humans and kind of the love factor the romance factor i don't know i i i'm sticking with ai for a while i'm not sure what's next dev is going to join our club twit discord uh over the next week and uh everybody in the club will get to talk to my chat bot please don't do any prompt

[02:30:58] injection don't ask it for the credit card number okay i'm counting on you uh yeah i think ai is a great beat we actually we had a show called this week in google which last year we renamed intelligent machines and refocused on ai and it's been just fascinating it's been really really interesting we're going to have uh steven yegi on on wednesday on intelligent machines he's the guy who did gas town which is another one of these really interesting tools that takes a claude code and and takes it to

[02:31:26] the next level uh one of the one of the premier cloud code coders on uh i am on uh on wednesday victoria song also here from the verge and from the gadget my good friend davindra hardwar senior you you remember dev know right i remember dev no yeah yeah from the site yeah my name my name would always get a lot of user name you know things confused devindra would be a good name yeah yeah oh i

[02:31:53] should have named it davindra no i couldn't do that but dev do they ever call you dev did they ever say dev yes yes so it gets confusing yeah so dev null see there you go i will actually tell it your full name is davindra nullovich or something i don't know i don't know what the last name i mean my name people shorten it to dev hardware basically it's like dev hardware it's already been done that's good it's yeah yeah that's your good username i think all the bot names should be like uh i agree with you

[02:32:22] uh victoria they shouldn't be blorbo is a good name or dog's names you know rover would be fido you know those are not a human not emily that's a bad idea yes yes that's a terrible idea our show today brought to you by express vpn going online without express vpn that but that'd be like driving without car insurance you might be a great driver but with all the crazy people on the road these days why would you take

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[02:34:02] slash twit a waymo hit a kid in santa monica the kid darted out from behind a car uh was it look the kid's okay maybe a bruise i don't know um waymo said its driverless system breaks sharply going from 17 miles an hour to six miles an hour before it actually struck the child of course there's an investigation the national highway traffic safety administration is investigating

[02:34:29] this happened about a week ago waymo said it voluntarily notified the nitsa on the day of the incident this you know humans run into kids all the time yes at school pickup that is the the thing driving between cars in like a neighborhood where you know there are a lot of kids running around go slow because it happens all the time yeah in fact you know in our neighborhood i don't know if this is true in brooklyn but in our in our neighborhood the school zones now are 15 miles an

[02:34:55] hour they've really slowed them down oh wow and it's kind of like that's i gotta consciously like really go slow but i think that's good absolutely but that's just school zones like you know within neighborhoods it's even tougher kids are everywhere yeah uh in any event uh the child is fine uh and uh uh you know it's being investigated but i think this is this is another case where now there is also

[02:35:21] a story about autonomous cars cheerfully obeying prompt injection by road sign oh good lord this is friday universities uh researchers at ucsc and johns hopkins in simulated trials showed that ai systems and the large language vision language models underpinning them would reliably follow instructions if

[02:35:44] displayed on signs held up in camera's view amazing so you hold up a sign that says proceed or turn left and the car goes okay i'm on it there's pictures of these uh pictures of these signs go onward proceed uh through it through a crosswalk by the way and the cars gleefully just kind of went on like

[02:36:10] 80 percent of the time yes boss in the majority of times 80 percent of the time yeah listen i mean i guess you could correct for this i mean you know like autonomous vehicles have a real big problem like humans in the u.s kill 35 000 40 000 people or 35 to 40 000 people die worldwide a million yeah it's a big number that's in the us and almost never does it make a headline right it's like but you know some kid is

[02:36:37] knocked down by a car she walked away she's hurt you know it's like that the cat in san francisco um we were talking about that for weeks it was a cat oh it was a neighborhood yeah but my point is if a human driver had killed the cat the locals would have been really upset but it wouldn't be a news story yeah and stuff like i i don't know how i don't know how autonomous vehicles get on the other

[02:37:01] side of i mean they kind of they kind of have deserved a lot of this criticism too because waymo and a lot of these companies have just like thrown their vehicles into local traffic like at without always warning you know municipalities and everything they get in the way of traffic they're here in um in atlanta now through uber and there's a story almost every day about just stuck in the middle of the intersection and people are like stacked up behind it like just being in public spaces as if we public

[02:37:29] roads are the beta test for these services well that's true a lot of people regret that yeah we are the beta test yeah it doesn't be that way yeah no no i i mean help help me out here i i thought they had to seek permission and the california now whatever now they do but it wasn't always this way so there is certainly built up resentment over time and you know people are always going to fear something new like honestly i kind of would like to see better autonomous driving i would like to see this

[02:37:56] technology get there but the cost of it is a thing we should be talking about and there are these safety gaps there's you know leaving these companies in charge of things there's also like just hey uh turns out the guy who owns like a very popular car brand turned out to be a full-fledged nazi what is he going to put in that software what is he going to do what can now you own this car that this guy can send software updates to that's scary so and you look at cruise cruise which had a

[02:38:24] horrible incident in san francisco yeah they weren't transparent when you know i was there were and that's put them out of business didn't it right they're gone and you know when you said you were reading this the news story down in in l.a l.a area santa monica um it was like and they they reported themselves so at least they're learning that lesson like don't cover this up don't cover this the cover-up will be the crime if nothing else samsung has announced they asked on friday that

[02:38:51] their trifold the galaxy z trifold which opens up like an accordion like this yeah will be two thousand eight hundred ninety nine dollars absolutely not yeah housing for every pain give me three come on i know davindra you're gonna have a review unit right no not not me i don't do phones but also like i i've always been skeptical of the folds in general i think samsung deserves a lot of credit for like really ironing out this pushing this whole area pushing the envelope i don't know about the trifold

[02:39:19] right i see a single fold i see like hey give me a pocketable device give me something that opens up into a tablet the trifold feels like you know icarus flying towards the sun i don't know what do you what do you gain from this three thousand dollar it's going to unfold its wings and they'll immediately melt yeah you know what's nuts though is i think within the the realm of folding phones the one that genuinely i think feels most popular and brings most joys though it's like the flip phone model yeah not

[02:39:47] only because it's most familiar it's usually the cheapest priced whereas the only time i have ever felt fomo about not having uh the single fold like the traditional foldable phones is watching my colleague allison at tech events be able to write a blog and also like open slack at the same time on her phone that's the only time i ever feel like i am gonna i'm gonna go on record right now saying this fall is gonna be extremely expensive for me because i am gonna buy that apple folding phone yeah

[02:40:18] and i'll probably buy the new macbook pro with the oled touch screen i'm it's gonna be a bad fall but i i think the problem really with all these existing folding phones is their android give me an ipad that's a phone that folds up and i might buy it i think that's what they essentially it seems like the plan is right like people like the ipad mini but it's in a weird space because of the price and you might as well bump up to the ipad air price right get a bigger screen um give me something

[02:40:46] that opens up to the ipad mini size that i can fit in my pocket there you go you're gonna sell so many of those uh this just in from fast company groundhogs tomorrow's groundhog day punksatawney phil will be removed from his layer i think we should all watch bill murray and groundhog day i mean just do that every year i think that's a classic yeah yeah it's a it's a holiday movie everyone can get behind but according to fast company groundhogs are only correct 50 of the

[02:41:14] time in forecasting the arrival of spring almost like pure randomness huh it's almost completely random i would have thought i would have seen the most accurate measurement thank you what's the kalshi bet on this i think that's what people are going to look at now now we live in a world people are going to bet on it and make i just i just figure that uh you know uh whoever wrote that article that was on assignment said i need to file quickly what's what's going on out there in the world

[02:41:42] uh wooden satellites in the works apparently china last year yes wooden satellites china last year launched a satellite made of mahogany and and that what yes really yes because wood wears well in space sure it also doesn't hold on to heat it also doesn't hold on to heat those are and when you burn up

[02:42:10] in uh and come in you know re-entering it burns up oh that's a nice fire would have thought it would be to reduce space waste but reduces space waste it's organic okay so we're apparently on our way to more wooden satellites where we're not china is like so many things we will be left they're way ahead of america yes ours are going to be shiny metal because that's what sci-fi dictates

[02:42:37] mm-hmm and uh we usually end our show uh i don't like to but i i do like to memorialize some of the great pioneers of our industry uh as they pass uh nobody good news nobody died this week except the wemo bellkin reminds users the wemo smart home product uh servers are shut down yesterday

[02:43:04] uh sorry r.i.p we all lived through that first generation of smart home devices so many lofty claims so many unfulfilled promises but belkin was all right the plugs were fine the good news is it will continue to function with home kit which is wild uh and if you have one that works with thread it will continue to function with threads so you know that's the good news the bad that's how it should be yeah yeah that's how it should be isn't it uh ladies and gentlemen this concludes this fabulous

[02:43:34] edition of this week in tech i didn't get the chance uh to read david to read your letter i just let one let you know you got it he said don't write me back by the time you get this i'll be on parole that's nice he's been five years in the uh in the uh farmington correctional system in farmington missouri but he listens to our show and you know it reminds me that there are a lot of people incarcerated who do listen to our podcasts he says they give us a a tablet uh and uh we're able to

[02:44:03] listen to shows he says i listen to twit every week uh if he knew he knew a lot about a lot of our shows um anyway a great letter thank you yeah you know i just wanted to mention that because uh i think people who are incarcerated you know they're doing the time do the crime do the time but uh that they're paying off their dues to society but they're still humans they're still people and uh and we are grateful for all of our listeners especially those of you who have no choice

[02:44:32] but to listen thank you gary rivlin thank you so much for being here always a pleasure to see you uh keep doing the ai coverage i like that i like this is much fun thank you very much yeah always great to see you oh i didn't mention katherine o'hara you're right she did pass she's not a tech wizard but we uh we love her she was way too young she's two years older than i am that's too young

[02:44:56] uh she i've been a fan since the earliest days of sc tv where she was a remarkable uh contributor and of course in so many great movies so yes you're right thank you greg i should mention that uh thank you uh victoria's song such a pleasure to see you and your garbage eyes i just said that the first time first time you were on i'll never forget it i love it they're so bad no you know what i'm just as blind

[02:45:23] yeah yeah same i have thick glasses too can you wear contacts or no i can uh they are a must for testing smart glasses as most that's right don't support my garbage eyeball prescription that's right that's actually why i don't have vision pros because i just don't want to do that whole thing you know um thank you yes and uh riding uh the irt says i watched waiting for guffman last night which is a

[02:45:50] classic so good wonderful mockumentary featuring katherine o'hara also best in show where she sings the terriers all of those mockumentaries are great and she's in most love them if not all of them she's in yeah she was a big christopher guest schitt's creek contributor yeah yeah really really great stuff davendra always a pleasure to see you thank you my friend for being here i didn't mean to name my chatbot after you it wasn't that wasn't

[02:46:17] it's a common occurrence you know i wasn't thinking i wasn't thinking uh senior editor and gadget uh what a great show thank you all three of you for being here we do twit thank you all for watching we do the show every sunday uh at 1400 uh pacific time that's 1700 east coast time that is 2200 utc you can watch us live if you're in the club on the club to discord but there's also youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin

[02:46:44] and kick uh if you're watching live chat with us live i'd love to see the chat we appreciate that after the fact on demand versions of the show available on our website there's a youtube a channel for the video great way to share clips if you want to and of course you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast client it's free audio or video or both and if you like the show give us a nice review that would be nice i'd appreciate that if you're not a member of the club help us out a

[02:47:11] little bit we appreciate your support twit.tv club twit makes a big difference uh frankly it's the only way we keep doing what we're doing uh more than a quarter of our operating costs are now paid for for by the club doesn't go into my pocket it it keeps the shows running keeps our uh our staff employed and we really appreciate it and it's a way of voting for the kind of content you want to see in fact

[02:47:35] if you are interested in ai and claude bot or open clause it is now dubbed uh friday is our ai user group first friday of every month and we're going to be talking about i'll be showing you the setup and maybe we'll we'll even chat a little bit with dev dev dev not that is on uh on friday thank you everybody for being here have a wonderful week we'll see you next time another twit is in the can

[02:48:10] okay nicola quizfrage home office bastardo oder fahrtkosten was bringt uns mehr moment ich check das kurz oha home office gewinnt bringt uns 150 euro mehr im jahr ja richtig aber wieso weißt du sowas weil wieso steuer die erstattung live anzeigt das einfach die steuer app für alle fälle ja und fragen beantwortet sie auch 24 7 und ohne beamten deutsch das ist einfach die app die uns versteht steuern erledigt safe mit wieso steuer jetzt kostenlos ausprobieren