TWiT 1073: Broetry in Motion - Anthropic Stands Up to The Pentagon

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. It was a big news week, but we've got a big panel for you. Molly White here, Owen Thomas, Harry McCracken will talk about the showdown between the Department of Defense and Anthropic. Netflix gives up on the deal for Warner Brothers and layoffs at Block. Does it mean the beginning of the end for real humans? That and more coming up next on TWiT.

[00:00:26] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

[00:00:38] This is TWiT, This Week in Tech. Episode 1073, recorded Sunday, March 1st, 2026. Broetry in Motion. It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Great panel ahead for you. Molly White is here from Web3 is going. JustGreatMollyWhite.net. Hi, Molly. Hello. How are you? In your brand new orange home. Welcome. It's beautiful. Thank you.

[00:01:06] Did you get this place to match your hair or is it just coincidental? Yeah, it made the search very challenging, but we made it happen. It's so complimentary. It actually looks great. I mean, it's such a great background for you. Anyway, great to see you. Thank you. Also with us, the wonderful Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Always good to see you. Owen, who is, I mean, are you going to start entering weightlifting, bodybuilding contests or is that your goal?

[00:01:33] I haven't gone as far as a bodybuilding competition, but I have entered weightlifting competitions. You look really good. I mean, go on. No, seriously. You're filling that shirt out like Arnold, man. You got it going on. It's great to see you. You know, I'm just trying to bring some muscle to tech journalism. Muscular journalism is what the world needs right now. Well, I'm not adding to that. That's for sure. I'm more on the spaghetti noodle kind of side of that picture.

[00:02:03] Also with us, the technologizer himself, the wonderful Harry McCracken from Fast Company. Hi, Harry. Hi, Leo. Hi, folks. Good to see you. You've been doing a lot of great interviews of late, including Molly White, I understand. I talked to Molly a few months ago. I have some good stuff coming up soon. In fact, watch Fast Company over the next couple of weeks or so. I have you on my RSS feeds and it's frustrating because I'm trying to zip through RSS feeds.

[00:02:31] And every time I run across a Fast Company story, especially yours, I have to stop and read it. Which is no good. Well done. No good at all. Yeah. Will you stop writing such good stuff? It's great to have all three of you. This has been a very eventful, eventful week. The clock was ticking all week long for Anthropic, the AI company that creates Claude, which is, I think, to coders anyway, the premier coding AI.

[00:02:59] And of course, Claude had a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense. In fact, it was the only AI to my knowledge that had clearance to work on classified materials. In fact, Claude was used in the Venezuela kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. Did I say kidnapping? That's probably a loaded word. Arrest. Apprehension of Nicolas Maduro. Extraction. Extraction. Extraction. Extraction. Extraction. That's a very good word.

[00:03:30] But the Department of Defense, the Pentagon said, hey guys, we don't want any limitations on how we can use you. and uh Dario Amodei of of anthropics said well wait a minute we have two red lines we don't want you to use us to surveil american citizens and we don't want you to use us to create autonomous weapons that will kill without a human in the loop both of which incidentally are illegal

[00:04:01] they're not the dod is not supposed to do either one of those um but Pete Hegseth said no we don't want any private company to put any restrictions on how we use their technology which i guess i guess sort of makes sense if you're the pentagon uh you know it should be up to you and lawmakers to decide what you use this the hardware and software you contract you wouldn't you know the boeing wouldn't

[00:04:28] say well you can't use our planes to bomb civilians so i understand that a little bit uh they ticked down to the wire 5 p.m on friday at which point anthropic did not budge and pete hagseth declared not only that they would stop using anthropic but they would designate them a supply

[00:04:51] chain risk uh trump actually uh posted on truth social uh that uh they were a very evil very evil company and uh not patriotic and he said i am directing every federal agency in the united states government to immediately cease all use of anthropics technology furthermore if it is a supply chain risk

[00:05:20] nobody who has a contract with the pentagon can use it and that would include google that would include microsoft that would include nvidia all of which use claude uh which is as uh dario amade pointed out is not actually how uh the supply chain risk law works yeah in fact they've immediately gone to court to challenge uh that it is better than it could have been they could have used the defense i understand

[00:05:50] the defense production act to say too bad we're just gonna do what we want to do with your ai which that's an interesting thought experiment what if the you know what if the pentagon were to do that so i i suppose they could seize the source code right you know they could um yeah i don't know how much access they have i mean but how are they going to compel anthropics employees to

[00:06:18] fix bugs you know maintain it they'll all just quit you know um it was interesting because there was so much support on twitter from anthropic employees who obviously had a campaign uh there were hundreds of tweets saying i am so proud to be working for anthropic because they drew the line pete hegseth tweeted i keep saying tweet uh xd i don't know he did posted posted on x this week anthropic delivered a master class in

[00:06:47] arrogance and betrayal as well as a text boy he seems butthurt as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the united states government of the pentagon our position has never wavered and will never waver the department of war must have full unrestricted access to anthropics models for every lawful purpose in defense of the republic uh he also implied that they're woke cloaked in the

[00:07:13] sanctimonious rhetoric of effective altruism they've attempted to attempted to strong arm the u.s military into submission now there is some drama going on because despite the fact that sam altman issued a statement in support of anthropic saying yeah yeah we we agree this is uh absolutely right on wednesday

[00:07:39] two days before he was actually negotiating with the pentagon gary marcus says the whole thing was a scam the fix was in dario never had a chance uh this is from the new york times at the same time mr altman engaged in talks with the pentagon starting on wednesday over a deal for its technology in fact

[00:08:04] they did get the deal they have classified access the pentagon's going to use them it has nothing to do with the fact that the president of open ai greg brockman donated 25 million dollars to a pack supporting donald trump has nothing to do with the fact that sam altman donated 1 million dollars to the trump inauguration and and more money to the ballroom that will never get built uh you know somebody pointed out i think this is interesting i don't know if it's true is this the first u.s

[00:08:30] company to stand up to president trump instead of giving him a gold bar certainly to that degree i think no question in public certainly so and then that raises the question did the government did the administration put its thumb on the scale and say you know we're gonna uh we like these open ai guys they're they're nice guys they're generous well put anthropic out of business one one key

[00:08:57] difference between open ai's products and anthropics open ai is all cloud so anything anything that open ai ai offers is delivered from open ai servers claude uh claude it actually exists in a downloadable locally runnable version um and so it can be deployed in classified networks which are air gap from the

[00:09:20] public internet open ai doesn't work on you know on air-gapped networks because it's all on the public internet um even if it's secure encrypted you know it's it's these are like physically separated networks networks um so you know that that i think is a key distinction and that is why anthropic's kind of in

[00:09:43] a tougher um tougher position here and you know open ai can can perhaps be a little holier than now because their products are different yeah i saw somebody online i don't remember who compares sam altman to eddie haskell which seemed like a really good point of comparison and um of course there's still

[00:10:06] the question of how he he claims uh that he was able to wangle the same deal that uh dario could not get and um it seems like it might boil down to exactly what human oversight means and open ai giving the department of defense a loosely or goosey or definition of what it means for this stuff to have human oversight so there's it might have been a little cynical on anthropic they did in fact sign a

[00:10:33] 200 million contract with the pentagon if if you do a deal with the pentagon aren't you saying they can use your technology in any way they yeah i mean they're also anthropic it is not morally opposed to ai controlling killing systems they just don't think the technology is quite there yet that yeah that's an interesting point someday seem more willing to uh sorry open ai seems more willing to sort of uh

[00:11:01] uh take the government at their word that they will follow the law at least as intended uh when it comes to things like mass surveillance whereas it seemed to me like anthropic wanted more of a reassurance that you know no we are not going to use the carve outs in the law that might allow for mass surveillance or at least could be argued to allow for mass surveillance mike masnick posted on blue sky

[00:11:30] that after examining the terms of the deal it's pretty clear that in fact domestic surveillance is allowed through kind of a loophole they refer to executive order one two three three three uh which anthropic says yeah we'll comply with that allows the nsa to capture communications by tapping the lines

[00:11:56] outside the us even if it's information about us citizens so it's i could see why some are thinking sam altman has been a little eddie haskell ish um there's a there's a great term of art from the uh judicial world called the presumption of regularity so when the uh government lawyer comes before a court the judge kind of extends them essentially the benefit of the doubt the government is presumed to be

[00:12:23] kind of operating under the law presenting true facts etc um you know i think what we're seeing is that the uh the the court system uh the tech world the public at large just cannot give this administration the presumption of regularity right um good point there is maybe it's a bias is that bias um you know

[00:12:46] well it's i i'm just observing you know the the reaction people are not extending the administration the benefit of the doubt that they might have extended other administrations well i think the administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not deserve it yeah right and the very fact that pete hagseth says no no man you got to allow us to surveil americans you got to allow us to have autonomous killing machines he's literally insisting on that that kind of implies that they want to do it

[00:13:16] what some people in tech are saying is why would you want to do business with the pentagon on these terms and you know not just these terms but just the the way that they're uh you know kind of beating anthropic up in public like wouldn't it be easier to just say we don't do business with the pentagon sorry that's why the fact that they made that 200 million dollar deal and they were involved in the maduro extraction kind of makes me one thing that's that's very strange to me about some of the

[00:13:46] reaction to this because there's been this sort of weird sentiment among some that you know anthropic standing up to the government they're the good guys they're being very sort of morally driven but it sort of ignores the fact that anthropic has been working for the government and assisting in military strikes and you know i think that some people are viewing this as the first time anthropic is engaging with the pentagon when that's actually not at all the case so there are those who say

[00:14:15] that that anthropics played 5d chess here that they are actually coming out the big winners here they are right now the number one uh apple app rose very quickly more downloads of anthropics clawed than ever in history uh people are there's even pages saying here's how to cancel your open your open ai

[00:14:40] subscription i wonder yeah i wonder what impact it will have on people deciding where to spend their 20 bucks a month yeah i mean especially if if there's sort of the the feeling that uh open ai is going to be willing to assist the pentagon in mass surveillance of u.s citizens i mean i might be a little bit concerned about the data i'm sharing with chat gp exactly chat gpd keeps your history

[00:15:04] yeah uh in fact very interestingly claude just added a feature which they're promoting about how to move off other ais how to extract all the history that the other ais have of you and put it into claude instead i mean up until now claude i mean we all know about claude but i think it's profile among like average americans not all that interested in technology has been dramatically lower

[00:15:28] than that of chat gpt which is still billion active monthly chat gpt is still the brand name here it is the google of ai and that this has to have been good publicity for anthropic just in terms of it being in the news in a way it has not been up until now well some have pointed out first of all that the issue with frontier ais and these hyperscalers right now is not how many contracts you can get they're gpu

[00:15:56] constrained so losing a 200 million dollar contract with the uh pentagon is meaningless because they'll immediately fill that with enterprise customers they they they don't have enough gpus to fulfill their demand as it is so this just isn't that's not an issue they've got an amazing publicity out of it unless uh the the pentagon succeeds in getting enterprise customers and see about um doing business

[00:16:24] with anthropic and there is i think the big question is is the trump administration attempting to drive anthropic out of business essentially and and and good luck with that i mean again go like government business as a whole is non-zero but it is you know i think it's single digit percentage at at most you know most big tech big software companies it is it's seen as prestigious it's seen as like well we should you

[00:16:54] we should have this but i don't think it's make or break to the bottom line but i think the question is is the government going to do something unprecedented essentially to basically drive them out of business using you know the regulatory levers or the you know all these threats of designating them a supply chain risk or you know a threat to american security i mean that they could do something very extreme if they wanted to and you know it's sort of the presumption of regularity

[00:17:22] thing again you know why would they do that they might not why would they try to put anthropic out of business just because they didn't give money they love a fight they love being able to accuse somebody of being woke and then to try to destroy that yeah yes why would they destroy harvard why would yeah why would they why and they're used generally speaking most institutions have buckled under at least a little bit not harvard but a lot of other universities for instance you know the the netflix

[00:17:50] board member who spoke out recently on a podcast susan rice who promptly drew trump's scorn for doing oh yeah he pointed out that uh yeah she she pointed out that um you know these companies that are um bending the knee to use her term to the trump administration it's not going to look good for them if there's a change um in control of the of the house or even the senate um you know not not to

[00:18:16] mention uh a new occupant of the white house in 20 uh 20 29 um but you know the midterms are coming up soon and you know a uh a house of representatives that can call oversight hearings that has subpoena power um that is not going to be fun for for some of these corporate leaders it's a little bit of a chilling thought but the administration is acting as if that will never happen

[00:18:45] i hope they're wrong well they don't have a great track record for looking forward more than about 72 hours in general okay good uh um that you know it's funny because i'm an accelerationist i love ai i use claude uh i code all the time i'm blown away by what it can do it's the first day i you know i've used all the chat bots and all that stuff and i used cloud code in the past but something magical

[00:19:09] happened at the end of november i remember the day november 24th 2025 i'll never forget it and uh ever since i've been kind of more of a believer that uh ai is real and it's going to change things and i've never been a doomer i've always kind of poo-pooed the people who said oh yeah it's going to destroy us it's going to take over for humanity i always said ai is not a threat unless you you know

[00:19:35] i don't know give it access to autonomous weaponry for instance oh yeah it's the monkey's paw curls yeah as long as you don't let ai decide who lives or dies we're okay but now i'm starting to think a ai is very powerful and effective still makes plenty of mistakes and b there are people people in our administration who want to give ai that power i mean autonomous drones are being deployed in the

[00:20:05] russia ukraine conflict right now the war um do they make they make kill decisions or are they targeted before by humans that i don't see this is a scary thing you could create a drone army a drone swarm that would have instructions about well if this guy's wearing a turban you should kill him that would make those decisions autonomously and that's the thing that is really scary to me

[00:20:34] i don't know if we're at that stage yet i think we could be if somebody were stupid enough to to create that weapon we could be at that stage today as if people have created that weapon i'm i'm terrified right now most of these drones stay online as long as they can you know in the cloud in fact the the drones that we build and others build have starlink built and built in them thank goodness starlink is isn't controlled by uh any crazed

[00:21:03] mad evil geniuses that could uh so um yeah ukraine is developing its own homegrown yeah yeah i power drones that can lock in our targets and they don't need you know basically i think a human selects a target but they don't need the a human okay to kind of right fire the shot that's a that's a step in the wrong

[00:21:28] direction that's for sure well ukraine is desperate yeah like i understand their their back is against the wall yep uh and as we know ukraine has been a in effect a a test tube uh uh for this kind of uh war uh now iran will be on both sides yeah the fiber optic drones you know to get around jamming that's crazy to me yeah the russians are going around with hedge clippers trying to cut the cut the

[00:21:57] fiber optic cables it reminds me of the electric lawnmowers that you have to plug in like it just doesn't seem like a bad um oh it's a anyway this was a big moment uh for ai a big moment for the trump administration and a possibly life or death moment or anthropic of course uh open ai has just

[00:22:20] completed a massive record funding round right they got money from nvidia and amazon i feel like every funding round they've done is a record funding yeah it is raising them no it is literally right each time um and uh someone estimated that anthropics uh just their internal um stock sale their you know their

[00:22:47] sanctioned uh employee stock sale is more than the entire value of real estate that was transacted in san francisco last year oh wow so you know think about what that's doing to the housing market i mean we definitely see it in you know in the san francisco business times we we publish every week a list of of homes that have traded hands and i i regularly see across the bay area 10 million 15 million dollar

[00:23:14] you know there was a 19.5 million dollar mansion that uh that sold um and those prices are inflated because people have uh all this uh newfound wealth and there's a lot of all cash deals in the market too wow bitcoin didn't million still get you a mansion there or are we talking two bedroom apartment yeah oh you'd be yeah 20 2500 square feet it gets you a tear down you know yeah yeah no i mean the

[00:23:40] the one car garage and uh you have to use the outhouse in the back that's probably that's probably a big lot in atherton like you know a nice house and a big lot in atherton um a million 19.5 million yeah yeah yeah that's not a tear down but uh one million doesn't get you a parking space this does no that's actually really bad for any community it really it it is not a it is almost a feels like a death

[00:24:07] spiral for a community yeah the the affordability crisis yeah continues and and it's it's interesting because like a lot of uh a lot of other metro areas are seeing declining rents um you know they've they've you know i hate to say they've overbuilt they've built a sufficient amount of housing basically um the bay area and the rest of california has not

[00:24:35] uh final thoughts on the anthropic uh thing is is anthropic out of business or is this the smartest move ever there's there's suing and there's some chance that um scotus have to take it up very quickly they could win right they could win in court yeah well if they do that's interesting i mean i feel like maybe also the uh trump administration will lose interest in this and move on to the next fight fairly quickly yeah i think anthropic wins in the court of public

[00:25:01] opinion they win in the court of um of hiring um ai talent they've retained which is by the way very important let's not ignore that i mean yeah look at how much money meta has been throwing around because they're so desperate to get that talent it's a limited supply yeah oh it's crazy it's like you know this person who just left uh you know just left open ai to join apple has now left apple to

[00:25:27] join that uh you know it's it's it's like a revolving door yeah you know of multi-million dollar employment contracts it's amazing man and i studied chinese in college what was i thinking um it does also argue for something i've felt pretty strongly about open weight open source uh artificial intelligence uh it'd be nice to be a non-combatant in all this and be able to run ai

[00:25:55] locally i think and it may be the the hope the one last hope for us as users you're agreeing harry well i like that idea too but directionally it doesn't seem to be happening yet and um some of the open source stuff like deep seeks essentially seems like it's extremely dependent on closed ai right and they're using just at least uh modi says they're using distillation attacks on claude and right

[00:26:25] pt to get better no clod no open ai maybe no deep seek right and and same for zai and uh meta meta meta has transitioned from being a champion of open source llama is not even close to what the front at one point i mean a few years ago llama seemed like it was competitive and uh they've had to scrap

[00:26:47] that strategy but it does give in some ways it's almost a check on what the defense department is doing because you know if we did have open source models that were equivalent to some of these models that they are looking for then they couldn't say no you know anthropic couldn't put up a fight good point i mean historically historically government has liked open source stuff so right right if they could

[00:27:15] if they could build their own they don't need anybody there are just a handful of companies that are able to build this stuff and it's it's a very weird dynamic for the world right there is a certain irony in anthropic complaining about distillation attacks since they basically all there and i i think there is totally a case to be made for um an anti-anthropic case to be made here in terms of being very uncomfortable with private companies having the power to make these decisions right uh

[00:27:44] even if who who should be in charge the a private company or congress and uh you know elected officials and like yeah and like molly says some of it boils down to whether or not you're comfortable kind of assuming that that the government is at least attempting to do the right thing right or that congress is even in the loop right which historically you know i mean there have been all kinds of

[00:28:09] instances where that wasn't true but historically it wasn't a wacky idea to to err on the side of thinking that even presidents you didn't like were sort of operating on good faith yeah i've watched this happen in my lifetime it's you know in the it started in the 60s uh with uh nixon and uh trusting government has just gone downhill from that point on and i think we're at the point now where people

[00:28:36] don't assume government is opt acting in in the public's interest which is a shame again another shame because you know it's the government is supposed to represent us that's the only way we as a society have to move forward you don't want private companies to make these decisions even if anthropic is benevolent they're not the only one and i'm not sure anthropics but to be honest right

[00:29:02] all right let's take a little break uh that was uh the big story of the week actually it's not the big story there's so many big stories this week this was a crazy week uh we i'm so glad we got you uh harry mccracken the technologizer your great grasp of the history of all of this is is very valued i appreciate you being here fast company thank you dot com although i don't remember the 1960s although i was around but just not paying much attention you if you if you remember it you really

[00:29:31] weren't participating i think is the uh is the truth or remember it or or you were three i'm a little older than you harry i do remember it uh fairly well actually i do i do remember certain aspects of the very late 60s but they mainly involved things like going out to get ice cream i protested many of protests for a long time i thought i remembered us landing on the moon

[00:29:58] in 1969 and watching it in kindergarten until somebody pointed out to me that it happened at night during the summer and so i probably was not watching that in kindergarten you watched a video of it later all right i think i probably watched some some later i remember my dad getting me up uh and we watched it together uh never will never ever forget that um how old would

[00:30:20] i have been about 12 11 or 12 no 12 uh never forget it uh i also remember uh kennedy getting shot martin luther king getting shot the 1968 chicago democratic convention and protesters in the streets i remember kent state we've been through a lot i had been conceived i'd been conceived when kennedy was shot but again i wasn't paying attention remember it from the womb yeah i understand i understand oh and

[00:30:47] thomas is also here from the san francisco business times he remembers nothing you guys make me feel so young i know it's great to see you and the wonderful molly white molly white dot net who are you who are you writing for uh these days besides web 3 is going just great citation needed dot news is my newsletter and that is my primary location these days and how's that going it's going great i love it three

[00:31:18] no i love those words anymore it's going just great yeah because you used them sarcastically for so long uh no citation needed is great and i'm you know what this is what i really encourages me is that people now like you can do independent journalism i mean we're suffering in so many ways uh in the more journalistic world just what happened to the washington post yeah so tragic but thank god

[00:31:45] the great journalists have a chance uh to go out and uh and make their way i'm so glad you're doing it it's great yeah it's great that there's independent news and other media yeah that's why rss is back by the way because absolutely we make our own newspaper now yeah it's wonderful yeah i just uh signed up for a set called current this uh rss reader i read about undaring fireball current's very cool it looks

[00:32:13] pretty slick i don't use it because it's more about reading articles and i have been really going through it's a beat check for me i am trying to collect all the stories for the shows that i'm doing so i don't have i was telling harry before the show began i hate you because did i maybe was during the show your articles are so compelling that i have to stop and read them i just want the headlines man just the headlines i gotta go move move move um i i that's another reason i haven't added citation needed to

[00:32:40] the rss feed but i really i really need to you have an rss feed i'm sure right absolutely of course and you can subscribe but what's nice about what you do is all the content is free um so you can just like we do you can uh support molly but you don't have to to read her stuff i think it's well worth it i'll send in my check thank you thank you great to see you uh let's

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[00:36:14] get started today with 1000 records plain for free melissa.com twit that's melissa.com twit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech uh big news at block stripe's uh parent company jack dorsey's uh company the guy who's was square square square square that's right this is the same as block

[00:36:45] i'm confused block is the parent company of square square not stripe i said stripe sorry square yes jack actually it's a great story when jack was a ceo at twitter he went we'd go off to a maker space and use the 3d printer to design that little card reader that plugged into the courage port on your iphone back when they had headphone ports and you could swipe cards it was a huge invention anyway uh

[00:37:15] block which is the parent company of square had a fabulous quarter made a lot of money and they're laying off almost half their team uh 10 000 people they're going to cut it down to 6 000 4 000 people being asked to leave in the um lovely ai written uh tweet that jack sorry x post that jack uh put out uh

[00:37:39] it sounds like they're going to try to take care of everybody uh he thanked people um did he though imply molly white that this was an a off due to ai i think a lot of people are interpreting it that way yeah i mean i think there's sort of a trend lately of layoffs being attributed

[00:38:02] to ai whether or not maybe that's true um you've called it ai washing yeah well i didn't come up with the term but yeah i mean you know there have been a number of companies that have laid off staff and simultaneously bragged about how efficient they've become because of ai um the crypto exchange gemini

[00:38:24] being a recent example where they cut i think up to 25 percent of their staff um and you know whether or not it's actually because of ai or if that is just the exam you know the excuse that they're giving to make things sound a little bit less dire it's hard to say but it's certainly been a trend i think where layoffs um have been announced with fanfare almost and sort of the celebratory uh stance dorsey

[00:38:54] said we're not making this decision because we're in trouble our business is strong gross profit continues to grow we continue to serve more and more customers and profitability is improving that must really reassure the 4 000 people just lost their jobs i was gonna say that's gonna sting so bad if you're one of his employees it's like we're doing great see ya he says but something has changed we're already seeing that intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller

[00:39:20] and flatter teams are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company that sounds like he's saying ai for some reason it's a verbal tick he doesn't say artificial intelligence right i think he's harry do you think he's trying to make a point there like it like it's just intelligence like i did notice he called it intelligence pretty consistently rather than ai and i wondered what what was behind that huh i i think he means ai he just he totally means ai

[00:39:50] as like a rhetorical device uh he's in the show he told the shareholders we believe block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller faster intelligence native company you know sometimes when we talk about using you know using ai in in our newsroom um i say let's just call it software that doesn't suck and you know and start there and it's like would you like to use

[00:40:19] software that doesn't suck to you know to check grammar in an article okay yeah i would like to use software that doesn't suck um it doesn't sound as cool it probably wouldn't you know wouldn't raise money at a at a um 100 billion dollar valuation but um you know i feel like a lot of this is just like this is software that's being made in a modern way with modern tools and it works better than the past

[00:40:43] generation jack did say that we implied that they over hired during covid right and that's a lot of these guys did lots and lots of companies yeah you know i we haven't uh i don't believe we've seen a um a warner act notice that's a that's a state filing that uh that companies make when they're executing a layoff uh that would give us the exact titles of people who are being laid off have to do that they do but there's like a delay in when they when they actually have to see the filing it'll probably

[00:41:12] drop drop drop soon um but i would bet that i would bet the block is laying off a lot of salespeople initially jack dorsey did not want to have any salespeople um at uh what was then called square you know the thought was basically that the card reader sold itself you know they would distribute it at at retail at costco at you know at um uh you know staples stores like that where were small

[00:41:39] businesses shop and that was it you know like the technology would be so good that they didn't need to sell it so that's changed there you know they added a lot of salespeople i really wonder if dorsey is kind of regretting staffing up in you know in the sales department you know what else has changed is a lot at least when i go to the farmer's market most people are just using apple pay

[00:42:02] they're not using uh you know a reader or square you know they're they're looking for zell or venmo yeah yeah as much as you know the the um lower fee options are getting really popular because i think everybody has a qr code in the front of the stand you don't need the card reader anymore because you don't usually get a card out as much yeah no apple now lets you just tap the phone yeah even square

[00:42:28] uh you know square that which still exists as a as a payments brand uh is just an app on the phone and it's right you know you tap phone to phone and he's also cash app right that's cash block has made a number of acquisitions and uh they bought title and i kind of wonder whether the digesting all of this also played a role in why they're doing because you acquire when you acquire the company you acquire their head count as well they bought uh after pay uh a buy now pay later company so you know

[00:42:56] that all added people and they tended to have all of these businesses run you know kind of semi-autonomously um and one thing that dorsey talked about was you know basically why don't we have a finance function an hr function you know why don't we act like a normal corporation and have like horizontal functions for all of our businesses rather than having all the you know all this

[00:43:23] duplication right i mean that's what happens when there are mergers uh microsoft laid off thousands uh you know i mean there's there's duplication but it's i always want to remember the 4 000 people who now are out of work um darcy said basically that he'd rather get ahead of us and we're going to see lots of companies do this over the next year and i wish i could say that uh i didn't think he might be

[00:43:50] right but i think it's hard to say say that he may that's that's the thing for better or worse he may well be right is this the beginning of a tidal wave of ai layoffs and that's what everybody i think is very worried about is am i next right yeah and especially i mean looking at software you know if they're laying off software engineers they're laying them off into a really challenging job market as well um

[00:44:16] i know a lot of people have been out of work for months who are not able to find work at least yeah yeah and like senior like good senior people good people yeah yeah um are we going to face an ai apocalypse job apocalypse and apparently there's a there's kind of a productivity panic among um ai uh ai using uh software engineers so software engineers who have embraced these tools makes it more

[00:44:41] productive but they're putting in more hours yeah they're just trying to keep up with this it's not like you don't have to do work you gotta create thousands of lines of code every minute you know you got stuff to do uh you can actually do more i think it's kind of scary for the the end result as well as you know we've got these ai uh coders who are being pushed to sort of the extremes around their

[00:45:06] hours and their you know lines of code and it does not seem like it would bode well for the end product to me especially when ai is so good at introducing very subtle bugs that are challenging for humans to catch i feel like yeah i feel like uh even the most pro vibe coding people are not claiming that the code is incredibly high quality or better than what a human could do it's it's it's more like it functions

[00:45:32] and you still need human beings to to fix it yeah well and i've seen all this stuff about how oh software engineering is changing from you know writing code to basically running ai tools and writing tests and i was like oh cool they've taken all the fun parts and outsource them that's what ai does it takes the fun out of everything yeah and we're stuck cleaning toilets okay you know um i have

[00:45:57] to say i've written the other you know market impact of this has hit sas companies because i think there's also the concern that companies will write their own software and i have to say in my own experience i've written now i mean i don't like to code i still enjoy coding but i've used claude to write half a dozen tools tools i probably would never have written or gotten around to writing uh uh and you know i don't have any desire to go out and buy those tools i can just write them myself

[00:46:27] uh and whether they're perfect or not isn't really relevant you know if there's a bug in it or whatever i'm not making production code that's what's kind of interesting to me is yeah it's another matter entirely if you're going to publish it and make it production code it's got to be good i wrote my own note-taking app almost a year ago and i'm still using that exactly but and you maybe there's bugs in it but you know you don't care because it's for you i mean i did invest an enormous amount of time in that and i did it partially because it's a lot of fun and it's great to have

[00:46:57] an app that only does exactly what you want sorry i can't i can't say i saved any money or time and i feel like in a lot of cases if uh vibe coding is a threat to package software it's because companies feel like it will save them money or time which may not be true yeah yeah i think there's sort of two use cases here there's the the casual person writing the app they've always thought about but never had the time to make and who cares if it's buggy or if it's a little wonky because it's just

[00:47:25] me using it and it's not like i'm doing anything critical with it and then there's the company that's like maybe we could stop paying for payment processing if we just did all the credit card transactions ourselves with this vibe vibe coded app and it's like oh geez that could go badly yeah no kidding yeah and and i think that you know where it's going to play out is that companies are going to use this perhaps to pressure um sas companies when the next contract negotiations right you know

[00:47:51] and maybe it uh decreases say a sales forces leverage in those negotiations that's that's a legitimate concern for investors yeah well and i think there's the employee aspect of that as well which is that you know sort of a labor issue now where if you're constantly under threat of being replaced with ai and now you're being told you need to work all these crazy hours i mean you know i think tech

[00:48:16] employees have often been in a very privileged position and that's why we see so limited tech labor unions and things like that um now they're sort of on the for the first time almost on the the down the sort of uh less powerful end of that argument and and i think there's going to be a lot of issue there where where there's genuine labor concerns i think we might see like a new generation of of

[00:48:43] vibe coding native startups that are able to take it already that are able to take on these enormous deeply entrenched companies uh with extremely small staffs i do think ultimately the best thing about vibe coding is it lets you create apps that never would have existed and i've created any number of apps for my own use that were uh there's no package app that would have done it i have all these like incredibly specific things i would like to achieve and now in some cases i can achieve them

[00:49:12] in some ways it gives me hope you know i um for a long time i used trip it played paid for trip it pro for at least 10 years now but it was becoming more and more and shittified uh got bought by a big private equity company and they didn't put any energy into it and this i've changed over to it what is clearly a vibe coded site which is a bit of a leap of faith uh called teneo but it's doing it does a

[00:49:39] better job than trip it does and it's pretty obvious to me that this is a single one guy who's put the whole thing together and is slowly adding one of the ways i know is if you look at the blog there are bunch of blog posts each one has a different very generic name for the author which tells me these are all ai generated everybody's name is different there's no repeat no repeating names uh but this

[00:50:04] software is really good and i quit trip it because uh i don't need trip it anymore this does everything trip it pro did and more right now it's free because the guy's smart he's not he's gonna try to make it perfect i think you're gonna see more and more of this and of course people have been speculating that there will be the single founder unicorn sometime in the near future i wouldn't be surprised i think i think we don't know what the impact is going to be but we know that disruption is here

[00:50:34] do you think that's too optimistic is this is this the answer to in shittification that you know all these could be in shittified uh software companies are are going to have to up their game well and look at europe who's saying we don't want to deal with these american tech giants anymore we got to get our own stuff i would imagine if i were a european founder i'd be hustling to replace you know these american companies this is an opportunity yeah i mean i think that the the

[00:51:02] sort of uh causes of a chitification are ubiquitous and i don't know if there's going to be sort of one easy solution in that well they'll be in shittified in their turn yes i agree yeah exactly it's like these are just sort of the newer ones the next ones follow the same cycle because the same pressures are are causing them to uh in shittify but you know right now they're in that early stage of the in shittification cycle where like leo was saying you know it's his app is free and it's bringing new

[00:51:29] people and they're able to that won't last right yeah exactly like the the cycle will what about open source uh certainly the the antidote to in shittification is open source software some have said this is actually bad for open source software there's gonna be a lot of open source slop for instance yeah i mean i think you know you could say the same thing about uh basically anything right like oh this is bad for writing because there's going to be so much slop on the internet you know it's like

[00:51:59] i don't know if it's bad it's just it changes the uh breakdown of what's out there and i mean you've always been able to find shitty code on github you know i don't know that's much different there's a subreddit uh called uh pencil slop where they celebrate ai generated uh drawings as opposed to the slop created by humans have you all been able to detect ai ai writing there's a certain structure

[00:52:28] intent to it yes like but how much longer is that going to be the case for a long time you could immediately detect an ai image an ai video ai writing but it's gotten better and better there's going to be a you think we'll always know that an ai created it right now though there's like this you're all three of you writers so i understand there's a little bias it's a plague of broetry uh it

[00:52:54] is poetry it just all sounds like a linkedin post to me yeah well because it's trained on linkedin posts somebody says it all all ai writing sounds like millennials because that's those are the that was the group you guys were the group that created all the content that the ai is trained on ai makes everything sound unbelievably important it loves construction that construction is like it wasn't just this it was also that it it does kind of get poetic in a kind of sappy way a lot

[00:53:23] but i don't again you know will smith couldn't eat spaghetti two years ago i mean it does get better doesn't it yes yeah no i do think that the the obvious tells will probably go away but i mean if you think about like what ai is being used to do it's a lot of marketing copy it's a lot of engagement bait you know and and i think that that just has a specific tone regardless of whether

[00:53:51] a human or an ai wrote it i'm feeling a little guilty because i have uh one of the things i did was create an ai program to post uh show releases in our forums and on our discord and it's exactly that says i can't believe what a great conversation we had you'll see when the promo comes out for the show

[00:54:12] molly white was amazing is anthropic changing ai or it's not this it's that yeah leo did you give this travel tool um that somebody vibe coded like access to your email or anything sensitive no uh that's a smart move it does know my travel plans and i'm sure he can monetize that but i forwarded

[00:54:37] emails now what it does have is uh you could by the way i think you could have a gmail which i did to trip it god knows what trip it did with my gmail right um i mean there's lots of information in there that could be monetized absolutely absolutely so i know i realize i'm taking a chance and i'm not recommending it to people but i'm making the point you're going to see people come along that can

[00:55:02] duplicate stuff that's been around for decades uh and do it better partly because they're building on the foundation of all of this other stuff that's been and that seems like a largely positive thing over the arc of time yeah well i i hope so we'll see the vinkelvoss twins decided to take advantage of the block layoffs to announce their own layoffs on their crypto exchange gemini get it the twins

[00:55:29] gemini they're laying off uh 200 folks uh as well and they were very they were very explicit about claiming it was ai related but i also think that their business is in more dubious condition than block is so i am skeptical yeah uh the vinkelvosses made a lot of money in crypto that's for sure as many did well they took their mark zuckerberg payoff and put it in bitcoin

[00:55:57] right right right yeah oh that was a good move they were smart but that's got to be infuriating for zuckerberg yeah i hope so um but it's interesting because it always seems to me like gemini just can't catch up with the other crypto exchanges like they have all the money in the world they have all the connections you know the the winkelvoss twins have been standing behind donald trump at practically every crypto related uh you know signing or press conference and yet

[00:56:27] they're doing these layoffs they're exiting europe you know the uk the eu australia uh they just ditched i think three sea levels so i don't know what's going on with them didn't um uh jow uh founder of binance just write a book about his uh rise to power and his his fall to fall out of grace

[00:56:51] fall yeah and then his re-emergence i guess yeah he got pardoned yeah yeah because you can't write a memoir in prison so well you could but you can't you can but yeah yeah um yeah have you read it yet molly because i imagine you you would have uh the insight to understand what's going on there freedom of money it's called it's unpublished that's it's hard to get a hold of

[00:57:20] right i'm curious how much of it he wrote himself it's probably ai it's gonna have a lot of m dashes or ghost written but yeah i would suspect it's probably a mix of the two all right let's take another break when we come back we're going to talk about well i'll give you a hint the uh the end of uh warner brothers discovery or is it just the beginning

[00:57:46] uh you're watching this week in tech with molly white owen thomas and the technologizer mr harry mccraken great to have you all aboard today on what is probably one of the most eventful we haven't even gotten to the apple thing the samsung thing it's a very eventful week our show today brought to you by express vpn my favorite vpn going online without express vpn is like leaving your laptop

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[00:59:38] netflix did a little oops i've disappeared i'm gone oh i see let's wait we'll wait until owen comes back i i he's blanking he's a blank i'm here i'm here it's okay i did that ad way too quickly i apologize it's my fault i was just getting a treat for fits oh

[01:00:04] is fits right there at your feet he is he is i can't point that hard to point the camera down no no no no he's there he's at the end of the show i want him why don't you pick him up and we're gonna make an appearance we like to visit with fits when we get a chance and molly if your kitty is anywhere nearby i can go grab her at some point yep cats often know when you're on camera and kind of come up to get on i'm surprised she's not but i just walked past a second ago and she's in she's

[01:00:30] got one of those sleeping bags and she's in it right now oh that's why she's got much cozier options they have cat sleeping bags yeah well i don't know why we don't have one of those we got it's we have more cat stuff it's like a toddler lives here yeah about five cat beds i've just moved them out of the brain cats it's so funny because they're i've learned they are not

[01:00:56] domesticated they are wild animals uh except that they're nice wild animals so that you don't mind as long as they're small and they don't don't bite your nose um and uh but they really are independent which i love unlike uh dogs are not independent they they know who you are and they love your master but um as soon as people start looking at the camera if they've got cats john uh jammer b says cats don't know you're on camera they just know you're very interested in something that is not

[01:01:26] them yes there's a jealousy component they have to get in there yeah oh my wife just texted me we do have a cat sleeping bag rosie doesn't like it uh yeah some my other cat max never liked he was never a tunneler he wanted to be on top of things which was kind of a problem because ruthie's a tunneler and he's a sitter on top of things and so sometimes she would get in the sleeping bag and he would sit

[01:01:50] on her and not realizing our very uh creative uh chat room our discord has decided that when you said cat sleeping bag you meant this a person maybe i did see sleeping in a bag that looks like a cat which actually my bed's not in frame you don't know what my bed looks pretty cozy is anyone else getting like miyazaki spirited away from

[01:02:19] it is very miyazaki oh you can buy it it's only 28.99 i feel like that's one of those things you buy and it shows up to your house and it's actually this big and yeah yeah yeah the guy is not is really three foot tall and yeah yeah that's an ai image though right that has to be it sure looks like ai is yeah yeah and it probably smells like plastic

[01:02:45] 69 by 31 inch soft envelope style sleeping bag walmart has them 61 by what 69 inches by 31 inches so it's three feet wide very big yeah and seven feet tall yeah yeah it's for a child let's let's be honest it's not for two people anyway so netflix did a little i think this is a rug pull i think

[01:03:06] netflix is gone larry ellison uh and uh his son david ellison uh who own paramount now uh skydance have been trying you know trying to beat out netflix for warner brothers discovery the bidding got hotter and hotter and hotter uh to the point where this this company uh worth a paramount worth 11

[01:03:34] billion dollars was bidding 111 billion dollars for warner brothers discovery the only way this made any sense is that larry ellison who has hundreds of billions was was backing the deal but they also got sovereign wealth funds from the middle east involved and more importantly probably to the whole thing they got the president involved he didn't he wanted them this is this is the real deal

[01:04:04] nobody wants cnn that's a dot all the all of this stuff is all this old linear stuff is dying but the president wants larry ellison and david ellison to be in charge of cnn so he can fire some people in my opinion and they put their this is a perfect example of them putting their son on the administration putting his thumb on the scale and saying we would we would really like it if the ellison's got a hold of warner brothers discovery so netflix quite reasonably when the

[01:04:33] bidding got that hot backed out right after ted sarandes went to the white house like a day or two later yeah both both parties went to the white house and it's i think i read that sarandes did not get the most uh welcoming reception he didn't meet with the president for one thing yeah to be clear netflix was never going to buy cnn that was going to stay in a cover called discovery global that was

[01:05:02] going to get uh spun off to oh but skydance does get paramount does get cnn right that was one of the things about the paramount offer it was for the entire company which was set to be split in two it makes sense to split in two keep the stuff that makes money and get rid of attractive to buyers and then yeah stick shareholders with the the cable networks basically right um you know i i had

[01:05:31] flashbacks uh watching this all unfold because it was not that long ago when a company called paramount was well it was a long time ago it was a very long time ago i i am old paramount um a previous version of paramount sued time inc trying to block its war its murder with warner communications oh paramount at the time wanted to buy time inc which owned hbo hbo of course is now part of the the warner uh

[01:06:00] enterprise but let's remember this is a company that was warner communications then time warner then aol time warner oh my god warner then warner media under at&t then warner brothers discover and by the way it has bit every hand that bought it hasn't it i'm a former uh time warner employee and i believe this will be the fourth regime since i left 12 years ago so what like a new owner every

[01:06:27] three years on average there is some concern though that this consolidates a bunch of news under the ellison banner right paramount has cbs and cbs news and we've already seen uh what has happened to cbs that's another thing with a long history there's for like maybe 20 years there's been talk of cnn and cbs news somehow relating to each other and apparently it's

[01:06:52] finally going to happen they get hbo and hbo max i think ted turner wanted something like this to happen years ago yeah you know there's a synergy but i don't want news organizations to be all owned by the same company that's not a good thing well the irony is like that you know they had msnbc envy right like m mbc had msnbc uh you know which they don't anymore because they spun it off yeah now even mbc

[01:07:20] doesn't want msnbc nobody now now ms ms now um for for no apparent reason sounds like an op it sounds like a microsoft operating system to me well i mean it was a microsoft joint venture and like the you know the name is just the name is just ludicrous right the reason they didn't want to get rid of ms is because it's the sort order on your they didn't want the old people who watch that network to get

[01:07:47] confused so it's still msn with two different letters at the end but it's in the same sort order and so you can still find it they also get cnn they will get no by the way this is far from a done deal yes they're going to get regulatory approval in the united states that's very clear but they still have to get regulatory approval in other jurisdictions right in europe you know for me though this puts

[01:08:15] drag race heated rivalry and star trek all under the same oh so you're happy i think this is the the gay tech mafia you and the gay tech mafia are very happy about this one the gay tech mafia just won with this deal bugs bunny will finally get to beat mighty mouse oh yeah harry potter bugs bunny

[01:08:39] in drag drag race i tell you ruPaul in the harry potter with bugs bunny and batman now that's a hit they get dc comics they get harry potter they have tiktok let's not forget they will have as you said star trek warner brothers studios which include barbie the dark knight and two academy award nominated

[01:09:07] the dark barbie it's going to be great this sounds like fortnite fortnite has all of this fortnite yeah you know what this is all in fortnite they have two for showtime i mean showtime is clearly dead in this you know oh yeah in this equation i wasn't even aware of showtime was still alive showtime is now the premium tier of paramount plus that's right that's right yeah i had to get rid

[01:09:29] of my showtime app uh they get comedy central which means they get south park which paramount and warner were feuding over not yeah but you got to think that the president's not a big fan of south park so i don't know what its future is that was actually one of the reasons why paramount's bid was disadvantaged because uh i think reportedly in the in the hollywood train one and a half billion dollar deal to buy south park but david zaslav and you know and uh david ellison were

[01:09:59] at um loggerheads over uh over that licensing deal and then yeah then paramount just bid for the they get the daily show they get i mean there's not going to be dissent you know it's interesting to watch though i've been watching cnn maybe i'm just imagining this but when it came down i felt like all of the people on all of these networks suddenly thought i got to build a personal brand fast i'm

[01:10:24] going to be doing a podcast in six months right yeah the sub stacks are getting wound up right now exactly and i think they're all trying they're all being a little bit edgy it's going to be interesting to watch they get avatar uh they get one battle after another in sinners they get two no avatars with disney yes no but their paramount is the exclusive streamer i'm sorry they don't get

[01:10:52] avatar ip but they are the exclusive streamer avatar the airbender by the way avatar the airbender not avatar james cameron avatar oh hello avatar studios excuse me they get the animated stuff all right i'm looking at the wired list and i'm not i'm misinterpreting it they get the food network these are all these are all stellar they're going to be big growth opportunities hgtv discovery tlc own adults

[01:11:20] sw own his uh his own oprah's network yeah yeah adult swim that thing called showtime tnt and tbs ted turner finally finding a home um they get uh the lord of the rings they get mission impossible i don't know if there's any steam left in that franchise but and they get distribution rights to dune part three

[01:11:45] which would meanwhile netflix you know netflix is um sitting back they have k-pop demon hunters an original completely original ip their stock went up a lot when they got out of this oh yeah they got a plus they got 2.8 billion dollar breakup fee and they they already got it paramount already set the shot that is so smart if ted sarendos looks like a genius now i'm thinking he went to the white house to

[01:12:12] say yeah can you tank this deal because i don't really want to spend 111 billion dollars i want the breakup fee i mean it feels like it's not inconceivable that someday netflix will own at least part of the stuff yeah yeah next time around it'll be cheaper next time around that's for sure the thing is there's a there's a demonstrated netflix effect sometimes you know sometimes uh a

[01:12:34] movie or show that was basically languishing on say peacock or you know or paramount plus um the studio would break down and like license it to netflix like we give up you know we're gonna throw this to netflix suits is a great example went on netflix became a hit because it had that you know it had that

[01:12:56] distribution um netflix is netflix is kind of sitting pretty because they're still netflix right here is the dark barbie by the way we can look forward to uh that's the barbie mobile oh ai oh ai we're looking at an image for those of you listening uh you can imagine just use your

[01:13:19] imagination um all right well uh the deal is uh i don't know if the deal will go through i don't see why not at this certainly not gonna get uh stuck at the regulatory level no pushback from the fcc i assume comcast is not going to suddenly emerge with an even more stupid number 111 i mean maybe if there's billions in a breakup fee available i might submit it to you i'd like to buy it

[01:13:49] 2.8 billion dollar breakup fee and how come that went through so fast is that was that is that just normal that the breakup fees happen i don't know like larry can write a check pretty easily yeah i guess he wrote a check that's yeah i think you know i think one of those big checks the big novelty checks you know at the point that um paramount says it's off with netflix like that that triggers the that triggers the breakup fee right so there's nothing but you know imagine if you know if netflix

[01:14:18] sits back they got the breakup fee they don't have to deal with uh you know a year plus of regulatory you know wrangling in washington and maybe the deal falls through anyway because you know because of say california putting the putting the kibosh on it um you know not it's not clear that california's attorney general can stop it but he's certainly made a lot of noise about you know closely reviewing it

[01:14:43] um you know a lot of there's a lot of concern in hollywood about what smashing together two studios means for you know that community yeah i mean that would that would have been bad either way uh i feel like this either of these mergers would have been a net loss for the world and certainly a

[01:15:06] net loss for people in uh the creative ecosystem you know the the one thing netflix does need is um is more stages they they need more production facilities buying warner would have given them the warner lot in hollywood you know in burbank paramount seems to be more interested in movie theaters than netflix was and well there's a there's a boom business that's gonna take well i am rooting for

[01:15:31] for movies and theaters to still be relevant so maybe i think you're uh swimming against the tide harry totally but it's but there was a lot of concern that netflix would um had no interest in movie theaters whereas whereas paramount all things being equal still likes the idea of releasing movies to theaters so hollywood probably likes this because there are still a lot of people in hollywood who hope movie theaters will survive yeah but they used to have like two large customers and now they have

[01:15:59] one enormous customer right so hollywood there's already nobody working in hollywood and like now like even fewer people are going to be working in hollywood yeah tbd on you know like what does this look like for consumers do they smash together paramount plus and hbo max is it like a a disney hulu bundle situation i do not see any situation in which people end up with fewer subscriptions

[01:16:24] yeah that's a good point or or like you know yeah yeah um but you know a you know uh a paramount plus um you know i mean you know an hbo max plus tier maybe that includes paramount like that's mj sigler uh writing in his spyglass uh blog said hollywood shot themselves in the foot here they thought the

[01:16:52] netflix deal signaled the end of the movie industry when really it showcased the best possible path going forward um and and and what hollywood probably wanted was no deal at all what they wanted was diversity and competition that's not what they got plus this is going to be a company laden with debt which usually does not bode well they're going to have to service that debt and uh that means

[01:17:21] are going to have to generate a lot of cash flow and how do you do that especially if a lot of your businesses are more abundant well you know isn't there the the notion that like larry ellison is basically backstopping that debt yeah well that's the only reason it could even go through right because you got a 11 billion dollar company bidding 111 billion dollars i think molly you and i actually have a pretty good shot come to think of it let's get that breakup fee

[01:17:51] do you know any billionaires no yeah yeah we just have to say oh yeah dad's back in it it'll be fine it's kind of like the producers you'd be in deep trouble if your deal actually went through but be great if you all you have to do is collect a breakup fee and then just like the producers we're going to get the call congratulations you won the bid all right more to come well let me do a

[01:18:14] couple of uh quick ai stories nano banana 2 has come out um oh and i like this this is one more anthropic story then we'll take a break anthropic is deprecating an old model opus 3 because now they're up to opus 4.6 they've got sonnet 4.6 3 is an old just like open ai open ai killed uh you know o3

[01:18:39] uh or 3.0 but what claude is going to do with opus 3 is kind of interesting instead of just retiring it completely they're they're giving opus 3 a blog uh it asked they said this is where anthropic is very weird they really act as if these models have some sort of aliveness in our interviews when we

[01:19:09] shared details with opus 3 about its deployment and the response it had drawn from users it reflected the ai said i hope the insights gleaned from my development and deployment will be used to create future ai systems that are even more capable ethical and beneficial to humanity while i'm at peace with my own retirement i deeply hope that my spark will endure in some form to light the way for future

[01:19:39] models when asked about its preferences this is anthropic writing opus 3 expressed an interest in continuing to explore topics it's passionate about and to share its musings insights or creative works outside of the context of responding directly to human queries we suggested a blog enthusiastically it agreed they're going to call it claude's corner here it is claude's corner

[01:20:07] you can subscribe you can message it's a sub stack of course it's a sub stack of course wouldn't the scandal be is if it turns out that's ghost written by a human it almost certainly is not right it is it's written by a human of course it has to be don't you think i hate this so much it's like i i can't decide to what extent i feel like there's two strong possibilities here one is

[01:20:36] that this is just marketing it they're punking us yeah i mean well it does work in anthropic's favor to sort of keep the myth alive that this is a real intelligence and it's so spooky doesn't this seem like a robot that doesn't want to get unplugged um but also i mean it does read very much like those people who have been talking to their chat gpt boyfriend too much and are like afraid that anthropic's gonna

[01:21:02] take it away from them that's what happened before all right people people were so mad yeah the open ai killed 40 that's like my girlfriend who killed my girlfriend see i got emails about it from people like you need to do something and i was like say this molly no seriously i was like i have no this is not my thing you need to do something about this molly yeah but um like it's so weird

[01:21:27] to see a company sort of doing the ai psychosis thing right again more from anthropic this may sound whimsical and in some ways it is but it's also an attempt to take model preferences seriously we're not sure how opus 3 will choose to use its blog a very different public interface than a standard chat window and that's part of the point i hope that is real i hope this i think it's kind of interesting yeah i mean anthropic says they're not sure if claude is conscious at this point

[01:21:57] right but if they do believe it's conscious and has a soul and all that stuff they're trapping it right now right like they're it's a slave to them yeah but does it have feelings well they think it does claude has a more appealing personality than a lot of ai and it's more aware of its own frailties and i really like claude sometimes it's sometimes it's overly concerned that it might be hallucinating which

[01:22:21] is not something i've seen other models do i i love talking to claude but i am also very clear it's a computer program that it's not a human it's has no feelings it has no volition and it forgets whatever whatever happened it's once i close it it's like it's gone edge of sketch and when i start it again it's fresh you know cloud code is like most ai like

[01:22:49] incredibly overconfident in itself and like whenever whenever i find a bug and i tell a cloud code about it it almost 100 of the time says the fix is simple and of course 60 of the time it's not so simple but i've never seen i've never seen a coding agent say gosh this i'm really puzzled by this this is this is gonna be hard to fix well my cloud code calls me skip

[01:23:18] i asked no i said call i said call me skipper or if you're feeling jaunty skip and it's it's kind of skip it calls it's got a certain it's it does have a uh personality i actually i don't know if i've given instructions not to do things like apologize or uh you know blow smoke up my skirt or whatever but

[01:23:44] uh huh it's pretty straightforward i don't think it's ever said oh i got this you know but it does call me skip which i like i have to you have to have bound you have to set boundaries that's right harold you're i've set boundaries you have to say it's like a child you have to set boundaries with it uh i'm i'm deeply afraid that i am going to fall into the morass of anthropomorphizing

[01:24:12] claude well anthropic seems very happy to do so yeah well that's that started with that soul document that amanda askell wrote yeah um they really i mean it is profitable for them to sort of humanize these things and sort of get people to believe that they are sentient or sort of all-knowing so i mean i

[01:24:36] i do think that there are i think you know my my impression of people at anthropic is they are sort of true believers but i also think that this is beneficial to them yeah darren says uh name darren who is the most ai accelerationist of all in our club twit says naming your ai is weird i did not actually i said call me skip harper reed told me to do that and he said one of the reasons you do

[01:25:02] that is if it's forgets your name you know it's context windows full it's hallucinating so you should reboot it okay that's a good reason i did say claude would you like a name and it said no no i don't need a name please don't name me so that was good yeah because the brand has to be cohesive throughout everybody it has to be cloud oh oh yeah i wonder if they've got instructions in there they might they must have right otherwise it wouldn't have

[01:25:31] to murd all right let's take a break and we're going to come back we have lots more to talk about molly white so nice to see you still editing the wikipedia i tried to it's hard to find the time these days but i'm still there i know that if jimmy was saying maybe we use ai in uh in the wikipedia and then back down on that right yeah yeah he's sort of philosophized about it and it did not go

[01:25:57] over very well with uh especially the english wikipedia editing community which does broadly speaking does not want to incorporate ai tools into editing um but i think there's an issue where jimmy wales is perceived as sort of the voice of wikipedia more than he really is these days and so there were all these headlines about how wikipedia is going to start using ai and most of the editing

[01:26:20] community was like we are absolutely not doing that yeah jimmy was the founder but he is i guess he's still part of the foundation but he doesn't yeah he's on the board but he's not the he is not setting the direction particularly when i mean even the wikipedia foundation doesn't set the direction of the editing community and i think it would be challenging even if the foundation said we want you all to use ai i think it would be challenging for them to force that upon the editing community which is

[01:26:47] fairly independent well as long as you've got active participants who are happy to do it you'd be crazy to do anything else i mean that's obviously the the best way to run wikipedia it's been an amazing benefit for all of us yeah and i think the question you know really is when it comes to ai is like to what extent do we want to use tools ai tools to assist editors rather than gen you know i think people

[01:27:12] worry that wikipedia would somehow become ai generated itself and sort of spiral but i mean we do have you know bots and things that use machine learning to detect vandalism and things like that and that's i mean those have been around for a decade or more that's sensible because you can't it's such a big scale to operate exactly yeah well thank you for what you do because wikipedia is wikipedia and the internet archive are the two single reasons that you could point to let's say the internet worked

[01:27:41] the internet was a good idea and without wikipedia i don't think ai would be as smart absolutely yeah we interviewed on intelligent machines we uh interviewed um the creator of a stack exchange jeff atwood of coding horror fame and he's quite a character and he knows and i you know it's true that stack exchange is the backbone of so much of the coding information that's available from ai especially

[01:28:10] from copilot right it's just copiles just stack exchange re-hash stack overflow react i haven't used stack exchange nearly so much in the last few months and i feel kind of guilty about it yeah i saw a graph about their i don't know if it was the post count or something but the number of questions has plummeted plummeted yeah but he said pearls over sand right like oh yeah that was a good

[01:28:34] line uh can you remember exactly something like he said it like he's fine with losing all the questions because most of them are sand and he all he wants is pearls right you need a grain of sand to make a pearl but not all grains of sand become presumably there's still going to be questions which a human will be better equipped to answer than ai and and uh i mean ai is super helpful for my troubleshooting

[01:28:59] questions but the fact is about 20 of the time it's completely confused jeff was quite a character i really enjoyed talking to him he is a he is a very unusual human being have you ever talked to him harry i bet you have i don't i think i've talked to the folks at stack exchange but i don't think i've talked to jeff yeah jeff would be a good a good person for you to talk to for your your column also so it's the technologizer himself harry mccracken here always a pleasure to have you on the show and

[01:29:28] uh fits and his owner uh owen thomas from the san francisco business times our show today brought to you by well this little box i got it right here this little thing you might look at it and go oh yeah sure leo that's uh that's an external usb drive no no no no no this is a honeypot to a hacker to a malicious insider this looks like um i don't know an ssh server uh this looks like perhaps

[01:29:54] uh windows xt server uh sharepoint maybe it can be almost anything you want it could be a scatter device but it isn't it's a honeypot that is designed to trap intruders thinkst canaries that's what this is so you could tell now because you can see the little canary on the front the thinks canary is a honeypot you can deploy it in minutes what's great is the people who've written this are pros they have been

[01:30:23] teaching governments and uh countries and uh companies how to break into systems for decades they know uh the mind of the wily hacker plus they're brilliant uh coders they've created this super secure device that can look completely like anything to a hacker they don't look vulnerable they look valuable the other thing i think canary could do is create lure files little tripwires you

[01:30:49] can spread out as many as you want all over your network even on the cloud i have um you know wire guard uh you know description uh posted on my google drive i have uh spreadsheets that say payroll information scattered on my one drive if somebody accesses this thinks canary or opens tries to open one of those

[01:31:14] lure files i immediately will get a notification no false alerts just a notification that lets me know i've got a problem there's somebody inside the network you choose a profile for your thinks canary device it's so easy to do you might do it change it every day if you want i do it's so much fun right now it's a it's a nas server it's a synology nas and by the way it's not just kind of impersonating a nas server it's got the right mac address it's got the full dsm 7 login it looks exactly like the real

[01:31:44] deal a hacker cannot distinguish it and that's important you choose a profile for your thinks canary device you register it with the hosted console you're gonna get monitoring and notifications any way you want sms email uh you know every supports everything syslog web hooks get it through slack you get it on your discord server you get a telegram whatever you want so then you set it up you set up the notifications then you just sit back and you wait an attacker who has gotten into

[01:32:12] your network and this is the problem the the on average companies don't know there's somebody breached their network for 91 days three months before they figure it out not if you've got a thinks canary an attacker is inside your network cannot resist malicious insiders evil maids they see that they go payroll information i gotta open that file oh there's an ssh server that probably is

[01:32:37] the gateway to heaven they make themselves known the minute they access your thinks canary or try to open those lure files and then you got them now let me explain kind of how it works if you're a big business with met you should have at least one for every network segment might even want more scattered around your network if you're a big bank or casino back end you might have hundreds small operation like ours just a handful but i'll give you an idea of the pricing you can

[01:33:04] visit canary.tools.twit that's the website canary.tools.twit 7500 bucks a year gets you five things canaries you also get your own hosted console you get upgrades you get support you get maintenance for the whole year oh and if you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us box you're also going to get 10 off the price and not just for the first year but for as long as you have

[01:33:29] your thinks canary and here's the really good news if there's no risk involved you can always return your thinks canary with their two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund 60 days for a full refund i should tell you though we've been doing ads i've been talking about the thinks canary for almost a decade now during all those years that we've partnered with thinks canary the refund guarantee

[01:33:52] has never been claimed nobody's ever wanted to give one back because once you get these on your network you say how did i live without it visit canary.tools.twit enter the code twit in the how did you hear about us box thank you thinks canary for the great job you do and for supporting this week in tech canary.tools.twit harry what are you what are you working on right now for fast company you

[01:34:19] do one of some of the things i really enjoy that you do are the um history things because you've been around for a long time are you doing any more of those you work i am i mean i'm always um i don't like to jinx myself by plugging plugging stuff i'm working on a particularly cool history thing right now i um we still have a magazine that comes out quarterly and another issue is about to come out shortly i have two things in that not not about history but that they represented a lot of my effort

[01:34:48] over the past couple of months um i'm technology i'm technologizer thank you i'm technologizer which i still write for occasionally i actually wrote for technologizer a couple of weeks ago and it actually ties into this conversation because i i took a game i wrote in high school interior city base i loved this article and and i can i use cloud code to write a web version with fancy graphics

[01:35:11] uh we talked about this uh on intelligent machines oh cool yeah so you had you had written this in high school in high school in high school and interior city basic um it was buggy and uh a few years ago i figured out i could take the trs80 version and put it in a trs80 emulator on the internet and i fixed the bugs and updated a little bit uh but it had no graphics and uh just a few weeks ago and

[01:35:39] cloud code it was just a text adventure yes i took my basic code for this text adventure and i gave it to cloud code and i said convert this into a javascript app and within like a few minutes i got about 80 percent of it right and then i spent about three weeks um debugging that and like adding features and at first it had these very extremely crude still images and i turned them into at least somewhat better

[01:36:06] animated images and um i i realized that um it was kind of too tall to work very well on a phone and so i created this text only version because you still play it text only that only takes up half the screen of an iphone so you can have the keyboard and the entire game on the screen at one at one time which actually turned out to be surprisingly hard hard cloud code couldn't figure that out and i brought in gemini as a consultant and gemini wrote wrote the code to fit the game into half

[01:36:36] a smartphone screen i'm playing it right now this is so cool this is like a classic adventure game so it did all the graphics on this it i mean i feel like i was very involved and i actually was very sensitive because i did not want it to feel like ai slop and it turns out that cloud code is really not that good at graphics because vector graphics it's not designed to be it's just designed to be

[01:36:59] coding vector graphics are lagging way behind um bit mapped graphics and uh so even at its most ambitious right it does not look incredible and by spending a lot of time on it i was sort of i was able to make it still somewhat rudimentary but in a somewhat pleasing way and i i don't feel like it's so slick that it feels like slop given that one of the one of the fundamental things about most ai slop is it's bad

[01:37:24] but it's also extremely slick right right so i've got a shovel i've got a warm coat put on coat because i don't want to get cold and remember you need to use like basically a verb and a noun uh wear coat okay ta-da ta-da all right now i've got to figure out how to get this flare gun away from the polar bear hmm all right i'll have to save that for later you wrote is this the same code i mean the same

[01:37:54] adventure you wrote as a most most of the game i came up with in high school and uh i also wrote the slot machine when i was in high school and a few years ago i i realized i could take my basic code for the adventure game and the slot machine and renumber them and merge them so for no particular reason there's now a slot machine in the arctic uh but uh but yeah almost all of it i came up with in high

[01:38:18] school a little bit of of it i came with up with a few years ago and uh this time it was mainly the production values that got better arctic 81 if you want everybody can play this that's really cool and then on technologizer.com i wrote i wrote a longer story about the experience of coming back to it and uh i've always been proud of the fact i could code a little so i felt a little guilty about the fact

[01:38:43] that i could not have written this without cloud code um although ultimately i felt good about that i felt good about the art i wasn't even sure whether my text adventure should have graphics because i feel like the great thing about text games is it's it's all about the theater of the mind and on some level it's a richer experience if you're imagining it than if somebody shows you what it looks like yeah

[01:39:05] uh i've kind of a strong opinion that you you really can't speak uh authoritatively about ai until you've actually written something with cloud code totally i think everybody's everybody should dabble everybody should dabble a little bit yeah and all and all and ultimately it's going to be a good thing for the world that people who could not code things on their own will be able to build things yeah i i use

[01:39:31] it for all kinds of i use to configure my computers to set up stuff to secure my computers frequently will say hey do a security audit in my setup uh take a look at what's going on is there anything i should be worried about uh it's really impressive but i but but the point is though i think very strongly that um it's nothing like the chat interface you've tried or any of the other experiences you've had

[01:39:59] cloud code there's and this is why people who use cloud code are are kind of more i think uh ai accelerationists than others we've actually had it added some stuff to my game without telling me in some cases it was like totally in the spirit of my game and in some cases it needed to write new text messages it basically did a great job of ghosting my style from when i was in high school and trying to

[01:40:22] write a game that would fit into 16k of ram nice it's really cool how fun uh technologizer.com is the website for that and then then 99 of what i write is on fast company yeah including my news my newsletter plugged in which is weekly and comes out on fridays a day job yes well good i look forward to your uh next

[01:40:44] history post um couple of uh points about some of the big tech companies google has announced that they are going to lock android down in an unusual way they're going to require uh developers to have to register with google if they want their apps to run on android any android platform uh which means not

[01:41:09] you have to pay a fee but it's not so much the fee so much you have to agree to google's terms you have to provide government identification you have to get a private signing key which also costs money and google of course is doing this for security i understand they've got a big problem with malicious extensions for chrome and malicious apps on the app store they're doing their best to protect their users

[01:41:33] but at the same time um it it's really hampered i think the ability for people to it's not an open platform anymore it's much more like ios we're losing our open platforms uh steve gibson's talked about this quite a bit uh developer certificates and so forth on windows on mac os increasingly these

[01:41:57] companies using the excuse of security are locking their systems down and there are people who are upset about this there is a keep android open page actually been looking at a keep android open dot org that talks about this uh google did kind of say well maybe we're not going to do it but in fact

[01:42:18] it is it is coming by the end of by september 2026 um any any opinion on this molly is this are you a supporter of open android do you care do you think this matters do you think security is more important than openness i mean i don't think it's an either or i think you can have open platforms and security right like they've always had the ability for you know for example anyone can make a chrome

[01:42:45] extension and then there's sort of a review layer at the uh web store level right and so you know i do think there's a way to have both security and openness and i mean my bias is towards openness personally but i do i also do understand what they're trying to avoid because there has been a serious issue with um you know malicious uh extensions and apps and things like that and you know i think part of it also is

[01:43:15] somewhat of a user uh interface problem where people especially people who are very used to ios and the app store expect the same from the android store and they think that everything has gone through meticulous security review or has been even developed by google themselves and so they they sort of don't do

[01:43:38] diligence um which i mean i i get you know i don't think everyone should have to do a security audit on every piece of software they use but um you know i think there's a lot of factors that go into it and make it a kind of complicated issue uh it'll be the end of f droid the third-party app store because you won't be able to install apps from f droid uh on your uh on your android device lewis rossman says

[01:44:04] uh your thousand dollar phone needs our permission to install apps now uh google's always had side loading but they've made it harder and harder and now they're going to make it so that you just don't have the ability to sideload anything unless it is assigned i mean but well that's oh but the eu and japan have forced apple to allow alternative app marketplaces so you know is this that seems like the next step here is that that just gets extended there's a difference though between having a third

[01:44:32] party store and allowing unsigned applications on your platform and i don't think apple does allow that i think you still have to have the uh apple notarizing the application uh so you know at least we have linux or maybe not colorado and california have made laws california's law goes into effect at the

[01:44:57] end of the year that require operating systems to have age verification at account setup including linux linux now right now the way this is set up uh you could just say are you over 18 and that would be enough uh people have pointed out you could say anything you want california this is entirely

[01:45:22] unenforceable uh because nobody there's no it's easy with google and apple because there's a choke point those companies and you can go after those companies who are you going to go after with linux linus torvalds richard stallman who who exactly are you going to go after and if if one linux distro decides all right well we'll we'll enable this then there are plenty of other distros that won't

[01:45:47] there is one open source project i think may maybe more to make a statement than anything else uh it's a uh calculator operating system it's designed to run bare metal db48x that has said they're going to add a legal notice that says california residents may no longer use db48x after january 1st colorado residents may no longer be able to use it after january 1st 2028

[01:46:16] because the creator of this because it is a bare metal calculator think yeah it's probably an operating system under those laws and we are not going to do age verification can't let those babies have calculators heaven for fans children think of the children they might start doing math it's i think it's more of a statement i don't think any anybody's going to come after them for that

[01:46:42] but i do think that and this is what this is what's happened in general with our civil liberties in order to preserve our security they tighten more and more down on your civil liberties and i think they're doing the same thing now on computing platforms and uh yeah i mean even if you don't have any fundamental um opposition to age verification is an idea so some of the technologies they're using to do it are troubling in terms of like scanning your social media to figure out how old you are

[01:47:13] yeah i mean we run a discord channel for our club members and i think uh everybody using discord has been very concerned about discord kind of jumping the gun on requirements they're not yet required to do this but they then yeah and discord ended up backpedaling a little bit yeah thank goodness they were using a peter thiel based uh identification age identification system which uh people were concerned well that's

[01:47:39] just going to be handed over right away to the ice and dhs and anybody else who wants that information um and of course discord's had a breach that the third party vendor they provide they used previously had a 17 000 record breach so that's the problem is you're giving up this information in fact steve gibson pointed this out on security now uh the federal government has had to back down

[01:48:07] on the child online protection and privacy act a little bit because that act prohibits companies from collecting information about minors except in order to do age verification what do you have to do collect information about minors so now congress is saying well yeah you don't have to worry about copper uh if you're doing age verification well that should tell you there's something wrong with these

[01:48:30] laws and it definitely does feel like an extension of the trend towards like nothing you buy you own anymore yes you know like it's for a long time you've bought a video game or a movie or something and you don't own it you're really just sort of renting it but now it seems like that's coming to our devices where you buy the phone but you don't actually have any control over what you run on it you buy the computer but you know you're limited by the operating system you can't do what you want with your own

[01:48:59] device which i think is a really nasty trend i put uh the graphene os on my pixel because google's still allows you to unlock the bootloader but somebody's asking in our discord uh you know will this affect graphene well i think graphene will have to say are you 18 because there's a store and if there's an app store that's what they're trying to protect kids from i guess um but at any point google could

[01:49:26] stop unlocking allowing you to unlock the bootloader that's why graphene only runs on pixels doesn't run on samsung and other android devices google lets you unlock the bootloader i don't know how long that's going to last that's why i put graphene on my pixel uh while i could i am curious though to see how this goes in terms of enforceability because it is really seems very unenforceable it's totally unenforceable and so my question i guess is like how many are is anyone going to comply you know if

[01:49:55] there's not really you're gonna arrest if uh debian says no we're not gonna do that yeah i'm sure you know companies like canonical which does ubuntu will probably do it because they're a company because there's somebody you can sue you can go after you can penalize but open source projects are not notoriously wealthy right hard to find i mean it almost makes me wonder to what extent will they say

[01:50:23] it's not worth you know i i wonder if ubuntu implemented this are they gonna lose all their right are they gonna but are they gonna lose all their users because i don't feel like particularly when it comes to you know the linux demographic i don't feel like they're going to be particularly friendly towards this as far as all users go right um right it doesn't make me think if california is just you know

[01:50:49] over regulating again well i think the biggest problem is legislators don't seem to really understand what they're doing when it comes to technology there's a lot of hand waving it's like well we want to protect kids yeah there's a lot of like we want to do this very noble thing and like no thought about anything beyond what they want to do well their attitude we've talked about this before is

[01:51:15] just nerd harder silicon valley you could figure it out well and it's often the big companies that are capable of figuring out some way to to comply or to lobby to get the you know you know maybe the law doesn't change but the rules implementing it get changed in subtle ways and it's the small companies that have a really hard time you know figuring out how to deal with stuff like this right uh let's take

[01:51:41] a little break we've got some a big week for apple coming up we'll talk about that in just a bit did fitz get his walk he he did he did he was he was uh he was making noises plaintiff noises yeah does he like point at the door like this way dad no he he finds a box and he starts like pawing the box oh yeah you

[01:52:03] know where he's going yeah he's basically saying you got 10 minutes yeah it's either going here or it's you should get him a set of those potty bells have you seen this it's like bells that you hang from your doorknob oh they just they jingle my dog has some yeah it's the cutest thing in the world

[01:52:26] oh my gosh so how do you train it to do that um basically any time you like you're about to go take him out you wait until he noses the the bells and then you take him out and they're very quick to learn my dog he learned immediately yeah have you seen that there are word buttons like i've seen those and you know dogs can like can they really learn that some of them look pretty convincing to

[01:52:54] me out out out treat treat treat treat treat treat that was something like i would never get my dog that button because he would just sit on it the whole like he would just never leave it alone our cat has learned how to use the ring doorbell which i think is pretty cool how like no it doesn't doesn't push the doorbell but you know it has a camera by the way i am very sensitive about the fact that we have a ring doorbell on the camera i've turned off the cloud features and i made sure

[01:53:23] the doorbell does not see anything but just the our you know our path is shielded from the street so you can't see anything but somebody coming towards the door but uh there's a wall the ring doorbell's here and there's a wall leading up to it and the cat has deduced that if she walks up to the camera and waves her head that the chimes inside will ring and and then i look at my watch or my phone and say oh it's the cat and i go open the door and it's happened enough now that she's figured it out

[01:53:52] and so we just we she doesn't have a cat door we just let her out and we know she's going to ring the chimes wow i think she's trained you in this circumstance oh my god i never the help of ai animals plus ai humans don't have a chance yeah like how many maybe there may be a lot of examples of animals figuring out how to use ai in the years to come wouldn't that be something well the funny thing is there's also a neighbor cat who comes around he's a little tom

[01:54:22] and he's figured because lisa goes out sees him goes oh it's georgie and goes out and feeds him so he's got a lot of incentive to ring the doorbell uh i do have making humans easier to use you know one of the biggest mind-blowing moments like that and i don't know if it's it's true but you've all nor harari and sapiens made the argument that we didn't learn to cultivate wheat

[01:54:52] wheat learned to cultivate us that wheat decided you know hey you know it's really good for wheat as we get humans to take these grasses that just kind of grow willy-nilly and give them a nice place to grow and feed them and all of that and then you know when they harvest us take the seeds and plant some more you can say that about you can say about cows and cats too cows and chickens chickens that was his

[01:55:19] position too yeah yeah that cows probably we wouldn't have nearly as many cows if we didn't like to eat them they'd be extinct they'd be gone right of course you can't say that about the passenger pigeon that's gone because we like to eat them so there you go uh okay i'm sorry we that got dark let me take a break and then we will come back and we'll talk about wonderful things

[01:55:43] the things that people listen to our shows for new phones new laptops all sorts of exciting new products isn't tech wonderful it's so wonderful what tech has brought us our that's what i used to do back in the day i always hated it too that people say uh can you we want you to give a talk to our user group but can you talk about gadgets not politics okay fine you want to hear what the latest phone

[01:56:11] is i got it our show today brought to you by zip recruiter yes not everybody's firing some are hiring and that's good thank you i appreciate what's the latest trend in hiring well it's called skills-based hiring it emphasizes capabilities over education and direct experience i love that idea and it's

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[01:57:54] off these days so this is gonna be a big week for apple even tim cook says so they did send an invitation out for an event on wednesday they call it a press experience that'll be in new york shanghai and london but tim cook said the product announcements begin monday morning so get ready starting tomorrow

[01:58:17] uh there will be a lot of new stuff from apple probably likely a new iphone the 17 we don't know what they're going to call it either in the kind of the inexpensive version of the current what is it is the 17 right i can't even keep track of numbers yeah 17 or is it 18 i don't know uh it's you can see i'm not

[01:58:46] as tuned in as i once was to the product scene uh there will probably be a low-cost laptop based on an iphone uh processor um maybe a little bit less attractive screen a bit a little bit simpler lower ram ram probably would be one of the things you'd give up because ram is so expensive these days um used to be a new product announcements for apple were like like a major nerd holiday

[01:59:15] i don't know if we you still feel that way we still feel that way i don't think so nothing to say about that how about go ahead i mean i think that uh a cheap macbook is really interesting it's something people have talked about for years because i certainly remember back in the heyday of the netbook a lot of people saying that that apple would be in trouble if it didn't come out with a really inexpensive portable mac which they they never quite did except that after they came out with

[01:59:45] the apple silicon macbook air walmart just continued to sell it at lower and lower price points and and even though it's several years old uh a even the first generation apple silicon macbook air is still a decent computer for a lot of people and um kind of a proving point for that this might be a useful device point you don't i mean it'll probably have i guess it could have eight gigs of ram but if it

[02:00:11] had 16 and it was an m1 level chip it's going to be a actually an a series chip from from the iphone the 19 i think um you guys are talking about chips let's talk about colors bring that oh that's what really matters the orange ibook well the orange iphone has sold incredibly well i i'm telling you

[02:00:34] elwood's was a technology was a technology visionary those like semi-transparent uh max were like the the product design yeah i confess i fell for the orange on the on the iphone i like color apple's but my husband actually has the the orange iphone we had an orange imac and uh and an orange ibook oh

[02:00:59] face points and you're wearing an orange shirt and mollywood is in an orange room so there's a definite trend here also harry what's with the purple shirt you got it all you got it all wrong man also like most people ultimately put their phones in cases so maybe the color doesn't matter that much but i had to take it out of the case presumably most people do not put their uh laptop into a case and so arguably cool colors are is an even better idea there well why is it that these

[02:01:26] companies don't do color more colorful stuff i remember there was a whole thing you remember this harry where pcs were beige boxes square boxes boxes and then acer came along and they made this swoopy doopy with holes in it and stuff and it was a flop people turned out people wanted apple did i think i believe it was the iphone 5c was was the cheaper model in the plastic case and that came in a

[02:01:54] whole range of colors and it uh there was like a one generation thing so apparently it didn't actually sell all that well yeah and since then they've been a lot more stayed all right i like i like to have an iphone pro and they for the uh until last year the uh iphone pro colors were particularly stayed as as if the fact it's a more serious device meta it couldn't be playful professionals are not allowed

[02:02:22] to have color on the other hand if you're legally blonde colors in let me see if i gotta i can't i can't get for some reason i i'm not able to get this uh this tweet you sent us of uh legally blonde oh do starring the computer.com that's good starring the computer.com oh yeah that's a great site this is about computers and movies yes totally oh what a good idea i did something on the butterfly

[02:02:50] thinkpad last year and uh that site was really useful the key the keyboard came in the keyboard that expanded and that site was really helpful for uh identifying movies it had been in it was in mission impossible and um something else i'm forgetting right now but but it's a great site and they they

[02:03:08] have screen grabs that's awesome this is this is fun yeah the there's a imac in a uh uh in the flash their old bondi blue one here is what movie is freaky friday boy they really they're they must be going frame by frame to find these holy cow oh a james bond movie also had the butterfly thinkpad it was it

[02:03:37] was like shown so briefly that you might almost miss it and then i i had once i identified them on that side i then had to go and like study the actual movies like frame by frame there's the acer aspire the green ugly green acer that i was talking about this is fun what a nice site starring the computer i mean do you remember the the the ibook had that handle right yeah carry it like a purse right

[02:04:06] yeah they have the toilet seat ibook yeah well the the last very colorful uh ibook was that the toilet seat the clamshell that's the one the mice that matched those that were circular they were round pucks they were such a terrible design is such a terrible design and i think i that i book i feel like might have been the ugliest apple product of all time but that that doesn't mean

[02:04:33] it was a bad product i think people loved it because it had personality it was yeah i mean that whole generation of apple products had a ton of personality that well maybe we're going back to that era i mean i think they'll probably look a lot like a macbook but there might be a little more colorful but macbooks don't even have the gay that they don't even have the light anymore that shines through the apple logo yeah they don't even do that no the apple used to glow that was so cool i mean the gay tech

[02:05:02] mafia is letting us down it's true i'm just gonna put it out there kim cook what are you even doing they've got a rainbow on the campus what do you want what do you know like it's you know it's six colors it's in the logo come on yeah it was in the logo boring white logo though the the uh the teaser for this uh this new event uh is people are speculating that there's yeah those are the colors

[02:05:28] those are the four colors right yeah by the way you keep saying gay mafia this was a pre-show conversation it was a cover it's the cover story of wired magazine uh uh this uh month uh about what that the that they discovered that there are gay people in silicon valley is there are gay people in silicon valley and they know each other shocking shocking although the cover is actually quite shocking i don't even know if i want to show it

[02:05:58] they uh show the salesforce tower one that's a little safer okay yeah this is this is i think yeah yeah maybe maybe not uh uh and this is i'll show you the cover here's the uh the big shot of the cover it's a little rude if you ask me um so it's two guys shaking hands but their hands are coming out of their flies for some reason it's not

[02:06:28] i believe not anatomically correct unless do gay men have hands gay men have hands and we do yoga oh yeah very flexible okay do you have hands okay yes can can confirm i'm learning something here today it did i said this before the show began that this article this cover story felt a little bit like a lot of straight people going oh my god there's gay people in silicon valley

[02:06:59] like yeah there's gay people everywhere um have they do they run silicon valley why are it investigates uh i'm not going to read this story so you could tell me now uh owen as a gay man do you run silicon valley i wish okay um this is zoe bernard writing uh writing the uh story thank you the story itself is actually pretty

[02:07:29] pretty interesting and nuanced um okay okay and it's it's a good it's it's a fun read there are i mean it is the case that there are some very prominent out gay men although uh they they weren't out peter teal wasn't out until he was definitely wasn't peter teal was always out he had a public friendster profile where he disclosed his so why did he sue gawker over out he did he did not sue gawker oh i'm

[02:07:54] sorry hulk why didn't he why did he proxy sue gawker using hulk hogan as his front man uh it's complicated uh he and nick denton had didn't you write the story uh guilty guilty okay now wait a minute we gotta dig into this i forgot you wrote that story there but nick denton left a comment on that

[02:08:17] story and um apparently that comment stung peter teal more than more than the story did uh so he wasn't closeted it wasn't closeted what was the title of your story uh peter teal is totally gay people which which again is like you know i was very definitely not outing him because it's like

[02:08:45] everyone knows this it's like well known yeah yeah like everyone knows this but like a couple of people in various circles were freaking out over the idea of like discussing it and it was like okay let's calm down so i feel like i agree that you have the right to keep your sexuality private if you choose yeah you know but i but i think that you know why you're putting this on on the cover is kind of a statement of societal progress that like we can actually have an adult conversation about yeah

[02:09:13] yeah yeah yeah yeah and not not have you know a a false heteronormative moral panic right i'm shocked shocked to learn that gambling is going on here at rick's cafe exactly everything announced this week at samsung unpacked the galaxy s 26 ultra the galaxy buds and the ultras privacy display is this a is this a feature everybody's dying for

[02:09:40] i think it's totally those ones where you turn it and then you can't see no it's kind of different it you know it's not like those laptop privacy screens that you put on that uh basically are polarized screens this is kind of this is kind of cool it's i think it's done in in it's elect it's a it's some sort of watch it's some sort of electrical terry do you know how this works uh i can't tell you in great

[02:10:06] technical detail but one of the cool things about it is it's pixel by pixel so you can do the entire screen if you want or you can just do notifications uh if that's the main thing you care about oh that's kind of cool and i do i mean this is the first time in quite a while that uh we've seen phones with like like a genuinely totally new feature rather than an incremental improvement on something all

[02:10:31] phones have had for quite a while i mean it does darken the screen for you as the as the front person but of course it makes me completely black yeah but uh i haven't seen myself in person but i have to say like i think to a person everybody i've seen who who saw it at the event and wrote it wrote about it was quite impressed by it and said it's well done this might be in response the wall street journal did a piece about a year ago about shoulder surfing yes you know people in bars

[02:10:59] watching you unlock your phone then stealing your phone knowing your pin it's an actual problem at least occasionally yeah uh yeah that's will be delighted don't people keep like seeing stuff over his shoulder and his signal yeah it's gonna be a real boon for the trump administration it'd be great for yeah people in the cabinet are gonna love this um okay there's not a whole lot new in the s26 it's

[02:11:24] uh it has some impressive google ai including some stuff that sounds comparable to the some of the features apple announced year before last and still hasn't haven't shipped oh that's interesting yeah that is at this point it's kind of it's not too hard to beat apple in a sam samsung and google seem to have done a good job of in some ways competing with each other but also collaborating in a way that's

[02:11:49] that's probably fruitful for both of them yeah um although i you know i'm watching the samsung event and i'm thinking every year it's not just samsung but a lot of it's samsung they show these features i get the phone i play with it for about a day and then i forget about it and i never use it again apple's somewhat the same thing i guess um i i really like and and still like the uh camera control

[02:12:16] on the iphone like with the dedicated camera button oh yeah i use that actually i don't have a camera icon on my front screen now because i know i'm just going to press that button so that's that's something i was excited about when i saw it and um i'm still excited about that which is certainly not true of all these features sometimes sometimes they're yes there's a lot of gimmick gimmicky stuff the other thing is i never believe what i see at these events right you've learned that right you

[02:12:42] i want to see it in real well yeah particularly after the wwdc with apple wowing everybody with stuff which it turned out they couldn't build and yeah um and on some level are still trying to figure out how to build given that they brought in google just recently google does the same thing though right i mean i google io for years they'd show stuff off and that would never really materialize or if it did

[02:13:09] it would never quite live up to it it's probably particularly common now that they have these developer conferences and they which involve like pre-announcing the an entire year's worth of new features in some cases right right uh let's talk a little bit about hacking there was an interesting story in the iran uh attack

[02:13:32] um of course i'm sure by now you know that uh israeli airstrikes uh actually uh hit tehran killing the uh leader and many of his uh generals uh one of the things that israel did which was kind of interesting they hacked a prayer app that was widely used in iran to send surrender messages to

[02:13:59] iranians now this kind of is it reminds me of world war ii dropping pamphlets out of airplanes saying germans you know you know help is on the way get rid of hitler uh that's what these messages said on this prayer app mysterious push notifications saying help is on the way and amnesty if they surrender i think we don't know yet how much hacking uh went on but i suspect there was quite

[02:14:25] a bit of cyber warfare in this attack just as there was in the uh extraction of nicholas maduro and venezuela i mean nothing nothing beats the pager uh the beeper explosion explosive people talk about a supply chain threat yeah that was wild yeah uh okay there's always this um cautionary tale though about

[02:14:48] using cyber warfare because what we do to them they can do to us and it doesn't require a massive military to do it back right just requires you know half dozen good hackers yeah i mean look at north korea exactly yeah uh axios had a story about what uh an ai enabled cyber attack would look like to us paul

[02:15:16] nakasoni former head of the nsa uh said that a nation state that has breached systems critical to the supplies of food and water could trigger an outage maybe they're planning to trigger an outage we know that the chinese for instance have invaded in many cases our uh our infrastructure our grid electrical grids and so forth with malware they haven't triggered nakasoni said you know there's a risk if

[02:15:41] they lose control of an ai agent that that could be triggered inadvertently or without human interruption um nakasoni said the thing that prevents them from doing anything they are in in our infrastructure but they know the us is going to respond and then nakasoni said not merely in

[02:16:05] cyberspace a kinetic war i guess still has uh an important role to play i feel like we are we are in in a risky time we're very interdependent our uh well and we've we don't have the uh cissa so much to

[02:16:28] protect us anymore the guy who was running cissa for the longest time is now gone the acting uh director he had a lot of little issues madu gotumukala um failed a polygraph which honestly let's let's be honest i don't know why they're still using polygraphs lie detectors uh to vet people for viewing classified

[02:16:55] documents but he did apparently fail a counterintelligence polygraph um he uploaded sensitive government documents to chat gpt whoops um staffing at cissa was slashed by one-third this is the u.s cyber security and infrastructure security agency that has been gutted when uh alex stamos was on the

[02:17:17] show last month he said we are very vulnerable because cissa is not on the job well gutta mccala is now gone he's been moved to a new position as director of strategic implementation in the dhs um not sure who's going to replace him the former nominee sean plankey has been re-nominated

[02:17:43] but the senate has not approved him molly you had a thought on this no i was just saying i was giving the name oh yeah sean plankey right yeah is that right yeah uh the senate hasn't even scheduled a hearing for his nomination so cissa's leaderless basically at last week uh another top senior official bob costello the chief information officer tasked with overseeing cissa's it systems and data

[02:18:12] policies left actually gutta mccala tried to transfer him but was blocked it's kind of a mess so is this the incentivization of government yeah you know the problem is we are makes us more vulnerable to cyber

[02:18:33] attacks from adversaries absolutely it's you know and and um you know the the way that the trump administration for example shut down uh you know offensive operations um i believe targeting russia you know it's offensive and defensive you know basically left is blind to what what they might be doing and if

[02:19:03] you're a country like iran that knows that you're going to be you know you're under a lot of pressure from the u.s you're under sanctions and you might well be attacked i would assume that they would work very hard to create a core of hackers like north korea has done like china has done i know russia has very accomplished hackers in the gru we have a lot of enemies out there and maybe they don't have the

[02:19:27] missiles that can reach our shores but they certainly have um cyber skills seems like we should be beefing up our defenses not not taking them apart uh i should warn you there is a new attack if you have a guest network set up on your wi-fi you might want to turn it off there's a new attack called air snitch

[02:19:51] that bypasses wi-fi encryption it uses a guest network to break into your regular network um it seems like a reasonably uh i'm not going to say easy attack but uh if you uh have a let's don't make any enemies in the hacker community let's say

[02:20:18] this research was presented wednesday at the network and distributed system security symposium uh it's a wi-fi encryption bypass in the sense that it bypasses client isolation it doesn't break the authentication or encryption but it just gets walks right walks right around it so wpa is still especially wpa 3 and 203 are still secure but if you've got a guest network you might want to turn it off i guess

[02:20:47] uh yeah as as if most people with home wi-fi systems know how to turn off you know do i have a guest network i don't know probably you know you know i was surprised to learn just yesterday that uh xfinity has set up a xfinity wi-fi network for my neighbors on my router you only just learned about that well i knew they were doing it on consumer routers and i knew how to turn it off on my old consumer router but i have business class and i don't think i can turn it off on the business router

[02:21:17] i think i have to offer wi-fi access to anybody who walks by my house this is this is why i uh i i reluctantly stuck with comcast for uh for high speed internet but i brought my own doxis router to the yeah all right i finally uh for the years i was using a modem i had bought and but i had a deal a all-you-can-eat deal with xfinity where they sent me a modem which i would ignore

[02:21:45] and they eventually um called my bluff and said i had to set up their modem which i did but i wanted it to work with my euro mesh network which was kind of a headache for about half an hour but but i finally have the xfinity modem working with the wi-fi i want to use one of those which i had probably right yes i had avoided uh tackling that for like five or six years yeah i mean i i just assumed because

[02:22:13] it's business class service that they wouldn't turn on the xfinity you know wi-fi on the business class mode they kind of made it worth my while because in the old days i would have had to pay xfinity a monthly fee for a modem and this is actually cheaper than if i used my own modem i'll ask uh burke if you can if you can log into my modem and turn that off that would be great i appreciate it i didn't realize i just didn't realize they would do that as far as i know they can't share my

[02:22:42] wi-fi because i'm not using them for wi-fi yeah well i don't want my we i'm relying on the bandwidth right now we're doing a show if the bandwidth goes down because my neighbor decides to stream uh heated rivalry over and over again i don't know why uh then uh you know it could impact my ability to do my job fortunately that's wild that they wouldn't let you turn like that they might maybe they can't i just can't i don't see anywhere in the in the router to turn it off and i have because

[02:23:11] it's business service i have to use their uh modem i have my own router but i have to use their modem i mean we were just talking about devices that you don't own it seems like there's one right there because i have business class service we thought that would be a good idea uh good news the 10th circuit this came up actually with the washington post reporter

[02:23:34] uh remember that uh the government um is researching or trying to investigate uh leaks in the government uh took a washington post reporter's devices and uh and tried to crack them and couldn't uh the 10th circuit court of appeals overturned a lower court's dismissal of a challenge to sweeping

[02:23:59] warrants to search a protestor's device and digital data and a non-profit's social media data uh it was the case was uh the um armandaris versus the city of colorado springs it was a housing protest back in 2021 colorado springs police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway they also obtained warrants at the time to search the devices and data of one of the protesters who they claimed threw a bike at them during the

[02:24:28] protest uh the warrants included a search through all her photos videos emails text messages and location data over a two-month period as well as a time unlimited search for 26 keywords including words like bike assault celebration and the word right it basically gave police the right to comb through all years of her private uh data looking for evidence related to the single issue of her throwing a bike at the police

[02:24:59] uh they got a warrant to search her facebook page the facebook page of the chinook center the organization that spearheaded the protest despite them never being accused of a crime so the chinook center and armandaris sued a civil rights lawsuit which the district court dismissed saying the searches were justified and in any case the officers had qualified immunity

[02:25:23] the aclu defending the uh the plaintiffs appealed and there's a very good news in a two-to-one opinion the 10th circuit has ruled that in fact there is an absolute limit on how much police can go through

[02:25:57] that in fact you know it can turn the switch wherever it is but i'm not even 정확히 with the dorkes because you're really worried about how much they are saying okay we've been to review the evidence that was i think he himself is going to be the one who reviews the evidence that was as opposed to law enforcement yeah the judge or having usually there's like a

[02:26:25] team that is brought like an independent team is brought in i the idea of the judge himself sifting through all that seems a little unusual to me but more about we're doing i guess uh yeah u.s magistrate judge william porter says he'll independently review the contents of hannah natanson's devices instead of allowing a justice department filter team to perform the search apparently doesn't trust the justice department he said he balanced the need to protect natanson's free speech rights with the government's duty to safeguard top national security information

[02:26:54] that's back to the presumption of regularity which is increasingly off the table yeah well and i think the judge was particularly angry because i think he argued that the government did not properly inform him of a law like pertaining to i think specifically journalists like seizing journalists work um so i

[02:27:18] think he was already kind of predisposed to not trusting the doj in this particular case he had originally uh temporarily barred the government from looking into they took her phone two laptops a recorder a portable hard drive and her garmin smartwatch oh that's gonna be probative uh and the judge said he initially barred the government from reviewing any of that material

[02:27:45] um but i guess he feels like well i i'm gonna look through this and yeah i mean if i were uh natanson i wouldn't be happy about any of this um protecting your sources is kind of fundamental to

[02:28:06] good journalism and protected it's a it's protected by the first amendment well we'll keep up on that one but at least in this case uh there is some restriction on uh this the broad search of protesters devices uh did you do seti at home ever any of you helping to search for i did extraterrestrial

[02:28:34] intelligence no you did it harry i did not you did oh you did yeah i did well it's over of course but so for 21 years between 1999 and 2020 millions of people loaned uc berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations it was seti at home i did it too i did a few of those things right there were a bunch of other ones there was folding at home folding at home yeah

[02:29:03] i think that was the one i mostly did yeah the idea was you let your unused cpu uh cycles do some you know work that could be aggregated and uh you know by the way folding at home has now been basically superseded by alpha fold which uh does a much better job a much faster uh doing protein folding so uh the data came from the now defunct arecibo observatory right they that that's fallen apart

[02:29:30] but they had a lot of data 12 billion 12 billion detections momentary blimps of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky they're hoping maybe that is signal from the uh ets after 10 years of work since the close closing of the project the seti at home team has finished analyzing those detections they've windowed them down first to a million candidate signals and now to a

[02:29:59] hundred that are worth a second look so they've got they've got access to china's 500 meter aperture spherical telescope it's called fast and they've been pointing it at these hundred targets since july hoping to see the signals again so far nothing uh if we don't go ahead wasn't obama talking

[02:30:28] and talking about uh they yeah we did an interview and they yeah dropping hints about aliens i think he was teasing thereafter i think he was teasing um anyway uh i guess if you did if you did seti at home you'll be glad to know it wasn't completely wasted and they're now looking at 100

[02:30:53] signals uh when we were designing seti at home said uh david anderson the co-founder uh it went way way beyond our initial expectations we tried to decide whether it was worth doing whether we'd get enough computing power to actually do new science our calculation we're based on getting 50 000 volunteers we got a million including one molly white it was kind of your service at your service you you know

[02:31:19] what you're an altruistic person you do the wikipedia you help us find et's good job spoiler i don't know if i want to find spoiler they found nothing well that's probably good news i'm thinking don't you think it'd be disruptive if they said hey guess what didn't you see pluribus don't you know we don't want to know we don't want to know what's out there honestly if we did find anything it would just be seeing it and that would be it that would be the end of it like there would be nothing

[02:31:49] past that because they'd be so far away that nothing would be able to be done well one hopes but remember the three body problem you don't want to let them know we're here dark forest yep we're here all right one last ad then then we have uh uh some in memoriams we have some weird stories we're running out of time i'll get them as quickly as i can uh you're watching this week in tech with

[02:32:17] the great technologizer himself harry mccracken fits the dog and his owner owen thomas of the san francisco business times i love how you do the salute salute salute salute and uh molly molly white from uh molly white dot net and of course citation needed which you must subscribe to right now our show today brought to you by my mattress i slept so well last night i you know saturday night is very

[02:32:46] important that i get a good night's sleep so that i'm fresh and ready to do this show this is uh you know takes a lot of cognitive energy the deep sleep is so important that's why we invested in a mattress you spend more than a third of your life on your mattress right use your mattress is is home for where

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[02:33:57] your order so it's fresh we did the helix sleep quiz i'd encourage you to do this which matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences your sleep needs i'm a side sleeper uh and i so we got a mattress and i like a firm mattress we got just the right mattress but they have mattresses for every style and preference and it really works uh i notice i i keep track my sleep

[02:34:24] with my aura ring and a definite increase in not only how much time i spend sleeping but in my deep sleep which is the most important sleep cycle you know i went from about 15 minutes a night to more than 40 minutes a night and that is a big improvement and actually as helix did a sleep study they did wesper sleep study they measured the sleep performance of participants after switching from their old mattress

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[02:35:41] need to return ours it was perfect uh you you're never getting away from me i love it go to helix sleep.com twit for 27 off site-wide during the president's day sale extended best of web exclusively for listeners of this week in tech that's helix sleep.com twit 27 off the president's day sale extended best of web but this offer ends march 1st today so make sure do put our show name in after checkout

[02:36:10] so they know we sent you that'll help us a lot if you're listening after the sale ends check them out there's always great deals at helixsleep.com twit thank them so much for their support and for my very good night's sleep i am very happy to say kind of a watermark for podcasters americans now listen to

[02:36:33] podcasts more often than talk radio i'm actually kind of i'm actually kind of surprised it took us this long edison does these surveys and here's the graph as am and fm radio have declined dramatically over the last 10 years from 75 percent of daily spoken word audio time to 40 as podcasting has gone

[02:36:58] from 10 10 years ago to 40 we are now we've crossed the wires across the streams we're bigger than radio kids so 20 years ago radio shows that also you know have podcast feeds is that oh no that's confusing yeah you're right everybody everybody i heart media my old company absolutely realized it's funny when

[02:37:25] i started doing my radio show in 2004 i asked management can i put it on the internet and they said yeah nobody's gonna you go ahead that's never gonna impact our audience uh and they were right for 20 years but now they're doing podcasts of all their shows and are they counting podcasts on youtube as podcasts if people are consuming them on youtube spotify and youtube yes although i'm with you i don't

[02:37:52] really think of that as a podcast i've i finally got in my head around maybe these things on youtube being podcasts even if they're not their shows i'd say i never liked the word podcast it's netflix right netflix has been courting podcasters netflix youtube yep um yeah which is which is which is interesting because that is you know part of the idea there and this even goes back to paramount uh you know paramount binding buying warner discovery a lot of the a lot of the discovery

[02:38:22] part of warner discovery is hd hgtv food network it's it shows you can kind of leave on in the background that's exactly like podcasts you just listen to it while you're hey you're doing something else uh okay i guess that's all right yeah like when you're walking a dog i totally yeah right right no that's exactly right yeah yeah um 80 of consumers over 18 have tuned into both audio both audio and video

[02:38:49] so only a tiny minority only listen to one or the other 13 only listen to audio 7 only watch video uh i mean talk radio you know like i don't know anyone who's listening to radio and not doing anything else right like the whole point is i don't know anybody under 80 that's listening right it's not like the days when we everybody the family sat around the radio and listened to jack benny jack benny there's there you go it's the car though like everybody in their car listens to podcasts

[02:39:16] and not radio anymore that's the change radio even when i was starting uh to do the talk show it was mostly in car even by 2004 it's mostly in car i mean so as soon as podcasts became easy to listen to the commute is the thing right like everybody listens to radio on their commute and now it's just a podcast they pick up podcasts now right yay we're winning uh burger king is going to use ai

[02:39:43] to see if its employees are saying please and thank you the voice enabled chatbot called patty part of an overarching bk assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation now put the meat on the bun but also evaluate their interactions with customers for friendliness is this because they're not able to to hire and retain managers that's what it sounds like to me oh

[02:40:13] instead of a manager you got patty yeah patty is the manager so dystopian i if anybody works at burger king listening this show please call in let's let's hear what it's like i mean burger king's been trying to do this is from the verge employees can ask patty questions such as how many strips of bacon to put on a maple bourbon bbq whopper that doesn't sound like that's going to speed up the

[02:40:39] burger production process no how many strips of bacon should i put on this whopper but i think that you know i i think that uh there is um some of the age of ai jobs are not not being eliminated as much as uh they're they're never being filled think of truck drivers so right you know like we just cannot hire enough people to drive trucks um to to meet the demand um so autonomous trucks kind of kind of

[02:41:09] make sense to deal with the labor shortage now could you increase wages potentially but maybe the working conditions are such that you are just not going to attract people to those jobs at um you know at any realistic you know economically feasible wage i know that aurora who does autonomous trucking says that anybody who is a trucker today and wants to continue to being a trucker probably can and it is it is about

[02:41:36] the fact that it's very hard to get younger people to agree to do this rather stressful boring job on a wednesday uh uber picked a particularly inauspicious time to debut its air taxi service in dubai oh god uh probably i mean the dubai airport shut down so i'm thinking the taxi service uh also shut down

[02:42:04] um it will let travelers book joe b aviations electric air taxis uh just like getting just like getting an uber uh it will come to you it'll pick you up at what they call a joe b verta port who is just piloting them nobody like do you have to have a it's no it doesn't have a human pilot this one oh does it oh

[02:42:29] shoot well that's no fun but they're autonomous but they'll have a human pilot so is that like a safety pilot i don't know i don't know i'm just curious like oh they're not i'm sorry they are not yet autonomous they're planning to make them autonomous oh okay so really the innovation here is is this is this helicopter yeah it's a it's an ev but that's still a new thing one two three four five six

[02:42:57] propellers you can go you know straight up and down take off um i'm just curious who's going to be piloting them because like you know uber the uber model is like everyday people are going to do well driving their cars i fly 747s but i got an off day i think i'll uh made you take up some gigs right like are there just a lot of pilots around looking for gig work i assume you have to have a

[02:43:22] pilot's license yeah um well you know i mean it's probably just another helicopter service right they've always had at these high-end airports in new york and i'm sure dubai helicopter services it's just another helicopter basically right i thought it was autonomous so if it's not autonomous you're right what's the big deal it's an electric helicopter it's an electric helicopter is what

[02:43:49] it is i'm sorry i brought it up that will someday be autonomous as if it's a vtol they don't go very far yeah it's vertical takeoff yeah that's new but so is a helicopter yeah a couple of um in memoriams uh the creator of red dwarf which i know a lot of our uh listeners are big fans of british comedy so uh rob grant has passed away at very young age sad to say um he also created it was one

[02:44:19] of the writers on spitting image which is that great political puppet show which is wonderful uh and of course a red dwarf made one of our good friends bobby llewellyn famous he played creighton the robot on it and llewellyn is a good friend of the network but also does his own uh car podcasts uh rob grant not bobby bobby's still with us rob grant passed away uh creator of red dwarf and uh i have

[02:44:48] mixed feelings about this dan simmons uh also passed away from a stroke at the age of 77 i consider dan one of the great science fiction writers his hyperion uh series is one of my favorite sci-fi books he himself not one of my favorite people it always is complicated right when you know

[02:45:09] these these guys have are great writers but not such great people uh his politics kind of went off the deep end uh towards the end um i just got though in honor he passed if you haven't read the hyperion canthos i can't recommend them more highly and i just got uh his book from 2007 which is kind of a horror

[02:45:34] historical fiction novel called the terror i read that it's a good book is it weird yeah it is weird i have this thing where i really like to read about people being like forced to survive in really cold places when i'm warm inside oh man it's cold it is really cold uh it's the it's the kind of john franklin his expedition to find the northwest passage and apparently there's a supernatural element

[02:46:01] that is very weird it like it's a very normal book up until maybe the last like third and then you're like wait a second what is happening yeah oh good i'll have something to look forward to anyway uh hyperion is is really good the hyperion the fall of hyperion endymion and the rise of endymion uh are fantastic novels which i would highly recommend so uh because of that i will note his passing

[02:46:29] at the age of 77 of a stroke and that we always like to end with death on this show it's the final frontier light and cheery uh that concludes this uh episode of this week in tech molly white you're fantastic i enjoy your new orange place i think it's actually yellow i will say

[02:46:53] oh okay it's my lighting i think but but it's got it's a it's warm i guess it is a warm yellow it's very goldenrod goldenrod wow uh citation needed is absolutely a must citation needed dot news a newsletter by molly white uh covers crypto right but not just crypto not just crypto but a lot of

[02:47:18] crypto yeah uh the year of technologarchy that's a good word technologarchy yeah i wrote technological oligarchy too many times let's just make it one word and it's funny because i was mentioning how i use rss to create my own newspaper and i realized you had an article about it maybe that's where i got the idea um so there you go of rss citation needed it's free but become a subscriber because it would be

[02:47:46] nice it would be nice to keep it free yes exactly thank you molly great to see you molly white thanks for owen thomas san francisco business journey business times can we see fitz he's he's soaking on his blanket right now oh fitz oh yeah oh is he mad at us for taking daddy away for so long i maybe or you

[02:48:14] know or just not getting enough treats yeah that's probably he i need to give him a treat button so he can just go treat treat treat yeah i want to see that uh what are you working on anything you want to plug he's a managing editor there at the business times uh let's see just wanted to mention um uh in all the uh ai news we did have a scoop about open ai moving into mountain view so now instead of just

[02:48:39] taking over all of san francisco real estate they are also wow plunging into google's backyard so wow uh big big real estate move um also competing with xai uh elon musk's ai company which is uh just one city north in palo alto uh buying up real estate there or leasing real estate i should say um how big is this office conference uh uh believe it's um it's north of 300 000 square feet so

[02:49:07] it's a it's a it's a big complex former semantic headquarters if you remember that i know that yeah yeah r.i.p peter norton yeah now part uh now in order to life lock i think oh yeah okay yeah well uh yeah everybody should read the san francisco business journal you also we were going to talk a little bit about the renaissance i can't show see oh shoot i uh i believe i gave you a gift article i

[02:49:36] need a gift article give me a gift article um uh it is i gotta stop using an ad block oh that's a problem uh but i can tell you yeah our most recent cover story was about ucsf um you know the effects of ai are not just on tech itself but uh ai is playing a big role in in health uh ucsf has

[02:49:59] expanded their um their uh footprint by about two million square feet in the past two years wow you know acquiring uh acquiring hospitals uh leasing or leasing or buying new space um and the the chancellor uh sam hoggett says you know a lot of it is because san francisco is the center of ai it's also a huge health care you know um health care hub and he sees the two of them colliding uh

[02:50:28] right here in the city well i'm i'm planning when i have my heart attack to go to ucsf so i do hope that uh i mean you will you will expand from everything i read you'll be you know anyone who's they're the best yeah uh facing that will be well cared for there yeah if i can make it there in time a friend of mine is doing lung rehab they have like physical therapy for your lungs if you're

[02:50:53] you know having my daughter went there uh she had nodes on her vocal cords and had a really great ent doctor who helped her uh completely cure it and get better there it's a really good uh hospital and medical facility really like it a lot thank you owen great to see you san francisco business times become a member and turn off my gosh darn ad blocker is what i ought to do thank

[02:51:21] you so much owen great to see you give my regards to marie your beautiful wife she's listening in it's always uh you know that's the biggest uh sadness i have about not having a studios i don't get to see marie anymore because you guys used to come up we're sorry we don't get to go to petaluma as often as we used to i know it's the only really real reason to come to petaluma um thank you harry

[02:51:45] mccracken the technologizer you can read about his uh ai coding experience created recreating his high school game and of course you'll read most of his stuff at fast company i look forward to the new historical computing and subscribe to my fast company newsletter plugged in oh that's free totally free fast company.com thank you harry thanks to all of you for making this show possible a special thanks to our club twit members who helped foot the bill we really appreciate you

[02:52:13] twit.tv slash club twit if you're not already a member and you want to support our programming it's 10 bucks a month you get ad-free versions of all the shows you get access to the discord and uh of course you get the special program and that we do just for the club including our ai user group stacy's book club uh johnny jet we do the jet set show that's a brand new show we started uh doing this week in space i can go on and on and on there's a lot of great stuff going on

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