TWiT 1081: That's Miasma - John Ternus Replacing Tim Cook as Apple CEO

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Great panel this week! We've got Victoria Song from The Verge, our dear friend Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports, and car guy Sam Abul-Samad. We'll talk about Tim Cook leaving Apple, a lot more leaving Meta, involuntarily, and why Australia's teen media band just ain't working. That's coming up next on TWiT.

[00:00:26] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT. This Week in Tech, Episode 1081, recorded Sunday, April 26th, 2026. That's Miasma.

[00:00:49] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Hello everybody! Good to see you, and good to see our panel today. Hi, Stacey Higginbotham is back in the house. Hello, Stacy. Hi, everybody! Policy Fellow for Consumer Reports. Looks like a beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest. It is. It hurts my soul to be inside. I'm sorry. We'll get this over with real quick so you can get out for the sunset. How about that?

[00:01:19] Do you get really nice sunsets on your island? Because I came from Texas? No. Oh, you're spoiled. They're fine. We don't have enough pollution up here. Yeah, I was gonna say the thin layer of hydrocarbons in the air really give it a rosy glow. Yeah. I mean, there's still like, you see the water and it's the mountains. Yeah, it's beautiful. That's very nice. Yeah. I'm jealous. Also with us, Victoria Song, senior reviewer for The Verge. Hello, Victoria.

[00:01:49] Hello. Sorry I was late. No, no, no. You weren't late. You were just on time. Exactly. Like a wizard. Exactly when you meant to be. Wonderful to see you. Everything going well in the Song household? Yeah, pretty much. Just same old, same old, cats being mischievous, husband stomping around somewhere. Nice.

[00:02:15] Yeah. Turn yourself up just a little bit because we want to hear all the goodness of Victoria Song. Okay. And by the way, you and I are the cat owners here. Stacy has a brand new dog. And Sam Abul Samet is here with his pup. Hello, Sam from Wheel of Games Media. Hello. My car guy. Hey, good to be here again. And you drove something. What is the Toyota Woven City? What is that? So, Woven City is this... Is it made of fabric?

[00:02:44] No, it's not. It's this test area that Toyota has built near Mount Fuji. Oh, this is why you were in Japan. This is why I was in Japan. I was visiting Woven City. The story I've written has not been published yet. It'll probably come up in the next couple of days. Wait a minute. This is all built just like a test track? For a test track? Nobody's... It's not real? No, it's real. There's people living there. It opened... The first phase opened in October.

[00:03:12] And there's about 100 people living there now. They want to... They plan to grow that to about 2,000 people. So, the facility is... There's three main areas to it. There's what they call the inventor's garage, which is part of the old factory that was on that site. Oh, it was an old Toyota factory. Yeah. And then there's the buildings, the residences.

[00:03:37] And then there's the experimental... The experiment field, which is... That's kind of the test track. And so, they're working on all kinds of different mobility technologies, some of which I'm less enamored with. I see a little scooter there. Yeah. The scooters are pretty cool. They call it the Swake. And... Does it have three wheels? Yes. It's three wheels. It leans. You know, so when you're going around turns, it leans.

[00:04:04] Got a little backrest to give you a little more support, make it easier to stand on it. I like that. That's nice. Yeah, it's pretty slick. And then these Zouk-style driverless vehicles. Yeah, those are called the e-palette. They got to work on the naming, but it probably makes more sense in Japan than Japanese. Yeah. So, it's an electric pallet. It's designed to be used for a variety of uses, like moving up to 17 passengers. Wow. Or they had a couple of them that were set up... One was set up as a mobile coffee shop.

[00:04:34] The other one... Another one was set up as like a little convenience store on wheels. And there was another one that was... The streets are very clean. ...a mobile office. Yeah. Look how clean the streets are because there's only 200 people there. What's that? That is a robot that they use for delivering packages and stuff. So, that's like a mailbox thing.

[00:04:59] So, they're experimenting with various types of robotics and a bunch of different things. For people who are only listening, it looks like a trash can on a pedestal with a stool next to it. And it rolls, I guess, around. Yeah. Yeah. And stuff's in the can. Yep. Like Twit. Oh, there's another version of the robot. So, this is called the Guide Mobi. And again, this little vehicle in the front. It's three wheels and it's autonomous.

[00:05:28] It's got radar, LIDAR and cameras. And you can use it for a bunch of different things. They can hook up a little trailer to it. So, like utility workers, you know, landscapers can have one of those that follows them around. This is all conceptual, right? This is Toyota's. No, this. Well, it's experimental. I would put it that way. Because they're real. This stuff all exists. Yeah, we saw all this stuff. Wow. So, if you go back to the previous image, what it's doing there is it's actually towing a car.

[00:05:58] So, it's towing a Toyota BZ virtually. So, it's wireless towing. So, what they have is, you know, so for this community. Follow me. What they call Woven City. They have shared vehicles that they provide to the people living and working there. So, they've got a fleet of these vehicles and there's a parking garage that has solar panels. And it's set up as a virtual power plant. So, all the charging happens in there is bi-directional charging.

[00:06:27] So, when the, if there's extra power or if they need some power from the batteries in the vehicles, they can pull that out. When somebody needs a vehicle to go somewhere, then they just pull up their Woven City app, they summon. And what happens is the little guide Moby will come up by one of the vehicles, connect to it wirelessly, and then guide it to where the person is. What a call does it use? Mm-hmm.

[00:06:58] What is that call? What wireless protocol does it use? It's basically Wi-Fi, but it's customized. It's not LoRa or something. It's proprietary. Stacy's a big LoRa fan. Sorry, I'm a big wireless person. Yeah. They didn't get into too much detail about the specifics of the wireless protocol they're using yet. Okay. And then when you come back, because everybody's living in these apartment-style buildings, there's nowhere to park your cars there.

[00:07:23] So when you come back, you just pull up by your building, summon the guide Moby, and it will come and take your car away, take it back to the garage. It'll get plugged in, charged, and then it becomes part of the virtual power plant again. So if the local utility is running under high load, they need some extra power, they can pull it out of the batteries in some of these cars as needed. So it becomes stationary storage when needed.

[00:07:49] Do you think this is just a showcase, or do you think that this is kind of a real, something that will really happen? Whether something, I think some of these things, I think things like the VPP, the virtual power plant, the shared mobility. Come true. Those things, I think, will absolutely happen. I mean, there's a lot of experiments going on globally with VPPs. You know, shared mobility is obviously a thing.

[00:08:19] But, you know, one of the other aspects of this whole community is they've, Toyota, through their ARINE division, which is their software division, has developed the Vision AI model, which is, it's their own in-house developed foundation model and a vision language model. So rather than processing text, it's processing visual inputs from the cameras.

[00:08:47] And it can be used for a variety of stuff. So when you walk around the city, there's cameras everywhere. Like, I mean, everywhere. And it's watching everything. Oh, that sounds so good. And the idea is to, you know, see what people need, when they need it. Yeah. And the Japanese don't mind that so much. Not as much as Americans do. Yeah.

[00:09:15] But, you know, and one of the cool things they're doing with it is collaborative perception messaging. So as vehicles are moving around the city, you know, obviously the cameras on the vehicles or human drivers eyes are limited to line of sight. You know, and an urban environment, you know, when you've got a lot of buildings close by, it's easy for stuff to be hidden. And so the cameras can detect, you know, if someone is approaching the street that might not be visible to a vehicle coming down the street.

[00:09:42] And it can send a message to it and provide you some extra situational awareness. Or if it's an autonomous vehicle, you know, to let it know, hey, there's there's somebody coming, you know, should slow down. That's all well and good. I totally on board with that. Where things get a little shaky is one of the things that they have in here in Volvin City is a coffee shop owned by UCC. UCC is the company that invented canned coffee back in the 1960s. I know.

[00:10:11] And so they've got this coffee shop. You go in there. It's actually not bad coffee. Amazingly. Yeah. Given that it's in a vending machine. Yeah. Okay. But the problem and they have a chain of regular coffee shops, too. So it's not all in cans, but you walk into this coffee shop and if you look up at the ceiling, you'll notice there's cameras everywhere in the ceiling. And what they're doing is they're using the same vision, AI model to track what people are doing in the coffee shop.

[00:10:37] They're using it for market research to see how people respond to different coffees. You know, are people more alert? Are they getting are they getting more stuff done? You know, what what are they doing when they're drinking their coffee? This is where things start to get kind of creepy. Remember Amazon's ghost stores? They closed those down. And I think some of it was people that was the same idea. The camera you didn't have to check out because the cameras would just watch you and know what you picked up and left with. And I think the reason they closed those is people were creeped out by it.

[00:11:07] Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think I'm willing to give Toyota some credit that they're they're not going to do anything nefarious with with all this data. The problem is we live in a world that also includes Palantir and Meta and ICE and the Chinese Communist Party. And when when you start thinking about it from that perspective, I don't want all the surveillance. It's very dystopian. Yes.

[00:11:33] So it can very easily run off into the weeds and be very bad. You know, it's funny because one of the things I wanted to ask you about. And I'm sorry, guys. Jump in, Victoria and Stacy, if you're bored, I'm sorry. I just whenever I get Sam on. We have to. I'm not a car guy, but I have all these questions. Elon has been taking a little bit of a victory lap. See, saying, see, we didn't really need LiDAR. He's always said, well, just use cameras. That'll be plenty.

[00:12:00] And I guess full self-driving has gotten mature enough now that maybe he was right. You don't have those spinning things on the roof. No, no, no, no. A lot of head shaking. So they think, you know, they don't operate in the rain. They don't operate in most bad weather. There's actually not very many of them out there. They're currently all being monitored about the robo taxis. Yeah, the Tesla robo taxis. Yeah, they're they're all being monitored 100 percent of the time by remote operators.

[00:12:30] Right. That can take over and at any time. Most of them still have, you know, safety monitors sitting in the front passenger seat. Those that don't are usually being followed by another Tesla. They have a with somebody behind. Yeah. You know, I and if you actually, you know, if you look at the data from the,

[00:12:52] the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, their standing general order, manufacturers are required to submit data on any crashes involving vehicles that have level two or above assist or automation. And there's been quite a few crashes involving the the the Tesla robo taxis in Austin where they, you know, where they've been operating up to this point. Oh, all right. So forget it. Yeah. All right. Well, we will do more car stuff later.

[00:13:23] I don't want to. I don't want to. Like, I have so many questions about this city. However, Woven City is really. Yeah. Well, weird. I mean, interesting. I mean, I would like to live in a very, very planned community. Wouldn't you? Stacy, isn't that kind of neat? No, I grew up in a planned community. It's the worst. Well, Victoria, would you like to live in a really, really planned city?

[00:13:45] Like it's, it's one of those things that sounds good in theory, but then in practice, like, could you imagine it just taking way too long for the little bot to get your car to you? Yeah. And just like getting really, we'll be here. Yeah. In 12 minutes. So just, just to explain the name, Woven City. Uh, I don't know how familiar you are with the history of Toyota, but before Toyota was a car manufacturer, it started off as Toyota automatic loom works. No. Yeah. They started off building looms.

[00:14:16] Wow. That's cooler than Nokia's history. Yeah. Or Nintendo's history. They were a card company, a playing card company. Yeah. That's related. Nokia was tires, right? No, Nokia was rubber boots. Well, before they started doing tires. Then they did tires. Then they did tires. Yeah. But yeah. And the, and the idea of the name Woven City is there, uh, you know, they've got these two groups that they call the inventors. They're the ones working out of the inventor garage, creating new stuff. And the, the weavers are the people living there.

[00:14:46] And so. I'd be a weaver. Yeah. I kind of like the idea of kind of like something really modern and. Yeah. You know, and they're, they're trying to live. Every box. Weave together an ecosystem of new technologies. Yeah. And you'd be with other interesting people. Yes. Stacy's blurry. Victoria's microphone is a hundred feet away. I don't, I don't know what camera setting I have on, but it keeps trying to like. It's focusing on the out. Like you, it wants to go outside.

[00:15:16] Yeah. Sorry. Focusing on the tree. It's okay. It's just, it's when I say I want to live in this technological city. And then as if to remind me how flaky technology is. Stacy goes out of focus and Victoria. It's just, it's great. It's my Barbara Walters filter. It's so beautiful. You, you, you look like a beautiful thumb. So that's not a wrinkle. That's actually probably the best version of me. Not a wrinkle in sight. All right.

[00:15:43] We should talk about the big story of the week, which is, it's funny because there was a little, you know, kind of kerfuffle among the Apple rumor mill. Uh, for most of last year, Mark Gurman, who's the king of Apple rumor guys said, yeah, Tim Cook's going to retire sometime. And John Ternus is the likely replacement.

[00:16:07] Then the financial times at the end of last year said, not only is that true, it's going to happen before WWDC and sometime in the spring, which was a surprisingly specific rumor. Although well sourced because they had four different reporters on it. And to which Mark Gurman said, no, I checked with my friends at Apple. They said, couldn't possibly happen.

[00:16:35] Tim Cook actually went out and said, no, I'm very happy. I'm not going anywhere. And then boy, lo and behold on Monday, Tim Cook says, yeah, I'm retiring. And September 1st, John Ternus is going to be the new CEO of Apple just in time to release the new iPhones. And Mark Gurman kind of a little guy, a little cranky. He said basically that the financial times was wrong. It was false.

[00:16:59] And it's become pretty apparent that somebody at Apple called the financial times and said, we'd like to plant this story just to prepare the market. We'll deny it, but it's true. And it all came true. Victoria, is this a good thing, a bad thing for Apple, a new CEO? I think everyone has been talking about it for a while. So I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it'll be an interesting thing. And one thing is that Ternus is a product guy.

[00:17:28] So I'm kind of curious to see if there's any shift coming from that, because, you know, Cook, you know, he wasn't like a Steve Jobs-esque figure. I think he might be most famous for his supply chain prowess, which I don't know about you, but supply chains are not the most exciting thing, except to people who are excited by supply chains. So my God, right now it's so important, though. It's like it's a hugely important thing.

[00:17:57] It has like a it has such huge impact in like why Apple has as much money as it does now today and like the efficiency there. But it's not a flashy thing. It's not the one more thing. It's not the thing that people or like the fans necessarily salivate over. Yeah, but the flashy stuff doesn't happen unless the supply chain actually works. No, like don't get me wrong. I think Tim Cook is like a steady hand, really smart in that sense.

[00:18:25] But I do think that there are people who are just like kind of longing for the old days of the twinkle in the eye. One more thing. Here's the flashy new product thing. And I think they're wondering if Ternus is going to give that to them. I don't know if he will. I think you got to be realistic. There's only one Steve Jobs in the generation. And even people who are really good at keynotes like maybe Jensen Wong from Nvidia, there's still no Steve Jobs.

[00:18:53] You're not going to get another Steve Jobs in our lifetime, probably. Oh, who knows if we're going to get another Steve Jobs in like the gadget space. We might get them in a different space. Right. Maybe there is an AI. I don't know who it would be, though. There's nobody I can think of right now that's got that laser-like focus, that vision, that taste. Well, Jensen's probably the one guy who's close to that. He really has managed.

[00:19:20] By the way, this week, Nvidia, $5 trillion company. Who? What the? Money isn't real. Oh, yeah, that's right. Oh, never mind. Let's start there. At that point, it is. It's pretty imaginary. Jensen has benefited probably in some ways like Steve Jobs from a laser-like focus. Yes.

[00:19:48] Jensen's core belief was, I will do massively parallel compute. Right? I will design special chips. And I started covering Nvidia in 2008 when they had just launched their first chip that was designed to go into cell phones. And they were pitching parallel compute for graphics on like enterprise computer, like for PowerPoint and stuff like that. And it was, everyone was like, that's ridiculous.

[00:20:16] But he's basically, he's got, is it everything's, when you have a hammer, everything's a nail. He has got a really great either nail or hammer and it's found its moment and he's ridden with it. Now, I don't know if that really compares to Jobs or not, but. Yeah. I mean, turn this to his credit, his first job out of college. And he was only there a couple of years, went almost immediately to Apple. Been there for 20 some years, 25 years. Was at a VR headset company.

[00:20:46] So if you're a Vision Pro fan, you might say, oh, that's good news. He's certainly been hands on with Apple Silicon, which is Apple's, I think, greatest success of the last five years. Tim Cook said that he thought the Apple Watch was his, you know, big success. And I think you probably could say that's true, but Ternus is there for that as well.

[00:21:09] One of the things though, as a hardware guy that, you know, I have no doubt he'll do well with hardware, but Apple's and Apple's always done good hardware. Apple's real problem these days. I don't know if you'll back me up on this, Victoria, is software. They need a good software person. Hmm. Do you agree? I think right now people are mostly criticizing them for their lack of AI software.

[00:21:37] Well, yeah, he's going to be the guy who launches, you know, whatever Apple AI is. Yeah. So I think that's what, you know, it's an odd time because Apple was getting so much criticism for not being fast to the AI market. And now I think some people are like, well, maybe that was a good thing just because how things are panning out. So I don't know. I don't know that Apple has a software problem.

[00:22:04] I just think they have a kind of like, it used to be that there was one iPad. There was one Apple watch. There was one Mac book. And I was actually in the Apple store the other day, just because I wanted to check out the Neo in person and be like, do I need this? Do I not need this? And then I was just struck by how many of each product that there has been under the cook era where it's like, there's 40,000 iPads. There's three Apple watches. Yeah.

[00:22:33] There's such like a diversity of product where I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. But at the same time, it feels like diluted in a sense where I don't really know where the company is gonna go. I still think like whatever it's done well, it continues to do well. And the main question is like, what are they gonna do with AI?

[00:22:57] Because it feels like they've been on the back foot a little bit and trying to catch up to things like meta is leading and the smart glasses space. Google is ahead of them there as well. Google is well ahead of them in the AI space. So it feels like I don't, it feels like they've just been saying Apple gonna Apple and other people going like, I don't know if that's gonna work for you anymore. So what's the next step? And I think Ternus has to answer that. Yeah. Well, we will certainly see it.

[00:23:27] WWDC is in June. I imagine Ternus will get a little bit of a round of applause and then Apple is gonna announce, I think in June, a month away, roughly, their series. And then, uh, Siri with Gemini AI built in. This is gonna be the debut. And then September, new phones, including we think a folding phone. So Apple's got a lot of stuff in the pipeline.

[00:23:51] And, uh, I think starting now, John Ternus is gonna get either credit or blame, especially for what happens with AI. Well, he's certainly gotten a lot of credit to date over the last, let's say five, six years, five, you know, maybe a little bit longer in terms of turning around the hardware design. Yeah. Huge success. And yeah, getting rid of the butterfly keyboard and stupid touch bar and all that silliness that Johnny Ive imposed on us.

[00:24:18] That was also, Ternus was behind the touch bar as well. He was? I believe so. Oh, oh. And I think- Well, he was there for sure. The touch bar has its defenders. I'm not one of them. Yeah, but, but what, I mean, was he responsible for- You're not a, wait a minute, now you're not a John, wait a minute, I gotta hear this. I think, uh, Victoria revealed that you're not a fan of Mr. Ternus? I'm not a fan of the touch bar. Like- Oh, I'm not a fan of the touch bar. I have, I have, I know people who will defend the touch bar to their dying breath, but that's never been me. No.

[00:24:45] But, but, you know, the question there is, you know, was he responsible for engineering the touch bar to make it actually function or, you know, who, who, who, who created it? Was it the industrial design group or the engineering group? I think it's more likely- When he first joined Apple, he was a designer. In fact, his first product was the, uh, the pro display, the, um- Yeah, but he's also a mechanical engineer by training. Right.

[00:25:10] You know, and, and to follow up on what Victoria was saying earlier, you know, on the software side, you know, it seems to me, um, that the, the, the problem on software is not necessarily the, the quality of the software, but rather the interface design, you know, which goes back to the, the whole Alan Dye problem. And, you know, I think not, not really thinking through the design enough, you know, so the, the engineering team is responsible for implementing it, but who's really, who was really responsible for creating it?

[00:25:39] I mean, I don't know that we can necessarily answer that question from outside of Apple. Well, it's a new era. I guess we can say that. And, uh, congratulations to Tim Cook, cause I think he's going to go out on a high note. Apple's done very well. Did get to 4 trillion at one point, uh, back down slightly under 4 trillion. Uh, kind of, it's, um, it's just weird to think of a company being worth five. Stacy, you can do, you, I think you'd be good at this.

[00:26:09] I've heard it said that the East India company was like the equivalent of a $5 trillion company back in the 17th century. That was such a big dominant, uh, Koretsu, you know, conglomerate that it was worth that much, but I get it's kind of apples and oranges, so to speak. I don't know if we can. It was like, or tea and computers. Tea and computers. Um, yeah.

[00:26:36] I mean, in terms of economic impact and like the amount of like GDP of a nation, I don't know. But do you really want me to look this up? This feels like, this feels like you sending me on a side. I felt like you would know just off the top of your head. I don't know why. I just feel like you're so smart. You would just go. Oh yeah. Well, as many people don't know actually. Okay. Get ready. The, the Mississippi company, a French trading venture.

[00:27:06] Which triggered by the way, one of history's first financial bubbles would have been in today's dollars worth 8.4 trillion. Then the Dutch East India company 10 point. Oh no, sorry. 10.2 trillion. South sea company 5.5 trillion. So these, if you, just for inflation, obviously there weren't companies this big way back in the day in the 17th and 18th century. But I mean, come on, the Dutch East India company had a monopoly.

[00:27:35] The Dutch East India company though was. It had a monopoly on Dutch trade with Asia. It dealt with spices, silk, porcelain. I think slaves, as I remember. They colonized, you know, the new world and put tobacco and sugar plants. Yeah, those were basically pirates. That's what, that's what the East company was. Yeah. Yeah. Not the nicest people. Uh, but how do you get to be a $5 trillion company? Look, I think Jensen's a nice guy, right?

[00:28:03] Um, I don't necessarily know if a lot of the tech execs right now are, you know, Most of them are not nice. Nice people. They're, they're trying to build as much of a monopoly as they can, which kudos to them. That's what business school teaches you. Yeah. Yeah. Jensen's a very smart guy. I will give them that much. Clearly and did and ran the company. It runs the company very, very well and effectively. In other words, it's not a fluke that they're worth $5 trillion. I mean, it certainly helped that AI, but they were smart because it was video games, right?

[00:28:33] First it was, it was GPUs for video games. Yeah. And then they found a lot of other applications. Cars. For the same core technology. We talked about that. We talked about cars a lot. They're very big in that. Uh, you know, vision and things like that. Crypto. And they pushed into servers, like starting in like 2010, believe it or not. It was crypto though. So they were ready. Crypto blew them up and then they leapt like a frog from that lily pad to the AI lily pad.

[00:29:00] Well, actually there was a, there was a, there was a fall off in between like crypto blew them up. And then all of a sudden there was way too many underutilized GPUs out there, unsold GPUs. And, you know, their, their market value collapsed. Is that going to happen? Are we going to, we're going to see a bunch of black wells on the black market in a couple of months? I mean, if a lot of these data centers that are supposed to be built, don't get built. And a lot of them have not even started. They haven't even figured out financing yet.

[00:29:29] Um, you know, there is a, certainly a possibility that that could happen. Yeah. Well, let's take a little break. Uh, and then when we come back, we can talk a little more about other things like Meta's big layoffs that are coming. Big money in data centers and investments. A couple of huge new AI models came out this week. And the NSA says, Hey, Anthropic, uh, you may be a supply chain risk, but we like what you're doing, buddy.

[00:30:00] All of that coming up as we continue, uh, this week in tech with Stacy Higginbotham policy fellow at consumer reports. She's you're still writing for magazines and publications too. Very occasionally. I've seen your byline. I know you have, but you're doing great work at, at a CR. I mean, really appreciate what you're doing there. Even though Microsoft did not listen to you. And they did not, but you know what? The cyber label may still come out. Good.

[00:30:29] Crossing your fingers. That was a big one. Sam will salmon. My car guy is also here. His company's telemetry where he does research on vehicles. And he, of course he does that great wheel bearings podcast and Victoria's song from the wonderful, the verge, the from the wonderful, the verge. And you're still wearing the Oro ring. I see. I actually know this is the even reality is a G two R R one. Oh, do you like it better than the Oro ring? Currently charging.

[00:30:59] So this is like a smart ring that fitness tracks, but also controls a pair of smart glasses, which I'm not wearing because they're charging. When you say controls, like how does it control it? You tap it. It taps. You tap it and it can like scroll through a display. No, you tap it with your finger, not onto your head. You just tap it like on the side. But you have to be wearing the ring for it to work.

[00:31:27] Um, it has its own like touch controls as well. It's just sort of like things are charging at the moment. Okay. It's a Sunday. I'm curious. I did actually my old, uh, series four or a died and I actually splurged on the ceramic and I'm really quite liking it. It's very good. I like the ceramic. It's a lot more durable. Yeah. It's really nice. Yeah. Hey, Victoria, I just want to say your, your story on the, uh, your experience with the glucose monitors. Oh yeah. And what you talked about on the verge cast.

[00:31:57] It's great stuff. Oh, thank you. Well, hold, hold that thought. Cause I'm going to do the ad and then when you come back, uh, let's, let's talk about it. Cause I, I wear the, uh, Dexcom Stella Stella. Um, and, uh, it's great. I did try a new service that does the Dexcom called Cygnos that software that I kind of like, it kind of tells you a little bit more about what's going on and so forth. Anyway, let's, let's take a timeout and we'll come back too much to talk about. That's what happens when you get a great panel.

[00:32:26] Our show today brought to you by box, you know, box, the leading intelligent. I like that word, intelligent content management platform for enterprises. The key to unlocking the power of AI. I'm going to tell you something that's kind of controversial. It's, it's not in the LLM. It's not in the agent. Nope. Not the model it's in your content. Oh yeah. That makes sense, right?

[00:32:52] Your business isn't the sum of internet knowledge. Those other guys knowledge, your business lives in your content. Now, the good news is AI is not some far off idea anymore. It's tangible. It's dynamic innovation. That's here to stay. It's already having a profound impact on the world. And box is here to help. Their mission is to power how the world works together. Collaboration is so important, making it easy to access information from anywhere to collaborate with anyone.

[00:33:22] Box serves more than 97,000 companies. 68% of the fortune 50. Many companies are underestimating. I hope you're not, but many are. Maybe you are. AI's transformative potential. Rather than re-imagining their operations. They're just, you know, bolting AI onto their existing processes. Capturing, you know, maybe some modest productivity gains, but missing the opportunity for fundamental business transformation. Becoming an AI first company.

[00:33:52] It's not, it's not just about automating what you already do. It's about re-imagining what's possible. With box AI businesses can truly leverage the latest breakthroughs in AI to automate document processing and workflows to extract insights from content to build custom agents to work on assignments and more. Most importantly, and this, boy, this makes me really happy. Box AI works with all the major leading AI model providers. You're not stuck with one model.

[00:34:21] You, you got open AI, you've got Anthropic, you've got Google, you've got XAI and more. So you can always be sure you're able to use the latest AI models with your content. And here's some of just as an example, some of the things businesses are doing with box AI. They're using box AI to extract key metadata fields from contracts, from invoices, from financial documents, from resumes and more. To query and automate workflows.

[00:34:48] You're using box AI to ask questions of any type of content like sales presentations, long research reports and more. You can do that for one file. You can do it with box AI for thousands of files at once. You can even leverage box AI's APIs to integrate into your application stack for any document processing and data extraction. Box AI handles the vector embeddings, the retrieval augmented generation, the rag and the agent customization. And they do it all inside the platform.

[00:35:18] And you can do this all. And this is really important while maintaining the highest levels of security, compliance and data governance that over 115,000 enterprises trust. Look, you need a content layer that gives AI the context it needs while giving your teams the flexibility they need to test and leverage various models for different use cases. You're never locked in. Box is great with box. You got it all. Visit box.com slash AI to learn more.

[00:35:47] That's box.com slash AI. We thank them so much for supporting to it. Box.com slash AI. Thank you, box. All right. Now, what do we say? You liked Victoria's piece on continuous glucose monitors. Do you wear one, Sam? I do not. No. I do. And it's been, I'm type two diabetic and it's been very, very helpful on watching, not just what diet does to my blood sugar, but even what exercise does.

[00:36:17] Even more importantly, it's taught me to take a walk after dinner every night because I can really see the difference that makes. So what did you, what did you learn? Well, you can tell us what you learned, Sam, and then Victoria can tell us. Yeah. I mean, I was fascinated by Stacy's crying. I don't know why. I was just fascinated by, you know, what, what Victoria talked about, you know, around metabolism, trying to control your metabolism and the challenges that she had with it. I'll let her.

[00:36:46] So you, you do wear one then Victoria, not just for. Um, I had actually started testing these, um, over the counter continuous glucose monitors are, they call them glucose biosensors now just to like differentiate them from the CGMs that diabetics use. Um, and you know, so I had started like testing these in 2024.

[00:37:10] And then over the course of the next, Oh God, now it's like, I think 19, 20 months. I had a very up and down journey with them because, uh, I'm non-diabetic and the evidence for non-diabetics wearing this technology is, uh, shall we say non-existent kind of, um. Um, in terms of, of what its value, not its accuracy. Not, not, not, not in terms of value per se.

[00:37:36] Like if you wear it, you can see how food impacts your, uh, blood sugar. You could see how exercise impacts it, but we actually don't have enough data among endocrinologists and medical experts to say what is good or bad data for a non-diabetic. So, um. Like what your blood sugar should be sort of. We know we have an idea of a range. It should be between like 70 and 140, uh, uh, energy per deciliter.

[00:38:05] But, you know, um, so there was this study and I talked to the, um, researcher who conducted it where they gave, I think about 18 endocrinologists, expert endocrinologists who use CGMs every day with their patients. They gave them about 20 sets of data from, uh, non-diabetics and they couldn't come to a consensus about whether, what, um, whether these people should be recommended for further screening or whether they are totally fine.

[00:38:33] So it's sort of, um, this situation where all the experts are like, well, we don't know what to do with non-diabetic data, but you have wellness influencers out here who are saying that you need to, you have to optimize your metabolism. Like you should never have a spike. That's over 30 milligrams per deciliter. You should never get above 115, uh, milligrams per deciliter, depending on what you're eating. And it creates this, um. Anxiety. Just like a sleep tracker. Yeah.

[00:39:03] Just like a lot of anxiety, uh, which I personally experienced and it led to a bunch of disordered eating habits for me where I couldn't, like I couldn't enjoy myself at parties because I would be like, oh my God, my, my glucose monitor is going to spike. And then also I was getting readings that didn't match up with a previous two week stint that I had done under Nutrisense the year prior when I had done that. Oh, I did Nutrisense too. That was, that was a CGM as well. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:30] Like when I had done that testing in 2023, I was eating like crap. And at the same time, my data was just like, you're perfect. Your glucose doesn't matter what you do. You can't seem to get a spike over 120 milligrams per deciliter. And then a year later it was like, ha ha. Your, um, like your, your baseline glucose went up 40 points, uh, for no reason. And so I was like, is there something wrong with me? I have a family history of diabetes.

[00:39:59] Um, and liver cancer and a bunch of metabolic dysfunction within my family. Cuckoo. So I would go to the doctors with my continuous glucose monitor data. And they would be like, I don't know why you're wearing that. Your A1C is fine. Your blood, your fasting blood glucose is fine. You have nothing wrong with you. And I was like, I don't know. I feel like something's not fully right. I have a polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis, which also impacts your likelihood for insulin resistance.

[00:40:28] And it can like lead to diabetes later on in life. So I was like aware of these things. And after a long period of time of advocating for myself and having like these feelings about food and exercise, I got, um, I found out that I do have, uh, something called, uh, it's a long metabolic dysfunction associated statatic liver. It's fatty liver due to, um, uh, metabolic, um, just my metabolism.

[00:40:56] You're my kind of person because, you know, I'm an old man and we could sit around on the front porch and talk about all of our little ailments and problems. And you just have a lot of, you have a rich, rich collection of things, but, but you seem so happy. Do you feel better? I mean, do you feel that the diagnosis of your fatty med, I don't, that's good to know, right?

[00:41:21] Does it change the way you do anything or does it provide some level of peace for you, Victoria? Um, it was like a thing on the one hand, it was like, no, I kind of had a sense that I had it for a long time. Cause I'd had elevated liver enzymes for years and doctors were just like, it's probably not, not that bad. Cause it's not that elevated above normal. And then through the course of one year, a bunch of my metrics just went crazy and I was feeling exhausted and tired and I had no idea why.

[00:41:48] And then they took my liver enzymes again and they were like, oh, they, they sextupled, uh, for one of them and they tripled for another. That's not good. You've gone from mild to moderate and are in danger of liver scarring at this point. And we need to reverse that. Uh, so I got on a bunch of medications. Uh, I don't enjoy being on these medications. They have come with like some pretty severe side effects for me, uh, for the last couple of months.

[00:42:15] And so it's like a, it's a weird thing because these wellness influencers are, and you know, not just wellness influencers, but also like RFK Jr. and his whole ilk are very on top of the metabolic optimizing trend. And all of that. Victoria is more peptides. We'll get into those. Don't. I'm doing a lot of peptide research these days. And oh, that stuff is. You just need some peptides and a little brain worm and you'll be good.

[00:42:45] Well, no, I was just. Yeah. Like that sounds validating. And you got some diagnosis. She got a diagnosis. Yeah. It also. Yeah. It reminds me of those scans, the full body scans that people do. And we don't know what a healthy body has in it. Right. I've done that. I did the prenu. Yeah. You, I mean, you did it and sure it may catch something, but it's also going to catch a lot of nothing. And I appreciate it. What I learned and why my doctor told me is everybody's got something wrong with them. Yeah.

[00:43:14] Well, we generally like to wait till you have some symptoms. Because then, you know, we're not treating something that's just, you're, you're a different animal. And I would say, I really appreciate it, Victoria, in that story, how you talked about how it led to some of your disordered eating, because way back in the beginning of like smart home coverage, I had like a smart scale in again, not a glucose monitor, but I saw this coming and was trying it out. And I hated, I hated it.

[00:43:44] It brought back so many like bad behaviors and thoughts. And I just appreciated that your story talked about that in a way that a lot of them don't. People focus a lot on the data and less on the like, how does this change the way I feel about my like day-to-day life in my body? So. Yeah. Like this obsession with using technology to optimize yourself. I think it can have a very dark side to it.

[00:44:11] Um, especially since we don't know how accurate the data is. So you're basically. We don't even know what it is to be optimized. That's what drives me absolutely bonkers. Yeah. I do all of those. I have that smart scale. I know how much muscle mass. I know I have the aura ring. I have the Apple watch. I have every possible quantified self BS device there is. And I think the number one conclusion I came up with is the numbers. Aren't that meaningful?

[00:44:42] They, they really aren't like it can be useful to have a baseline and know when you deviate from the baseline that is sort of what led me to finding a diagnosis and then taking steps to reverse it because like I got the diagnosis and I found out that my liver enzymes went haywire at the same time that my uncle was going undergoing surgery to remove part of his liver. So it was, it was kind of like a very emotional time for me to be like, oh, you know, uh, at least I'm catching it early enough where it can be reversed.

[00:45:10] At least I can take steps towards that. And to be fair, you might've found that out with a blood test anyway, right? I probably would have actually like at my next physical, I probably would have figured that out. So it was sort of like, I figured it out a couple of months early. Was it worth having all of those like thoughts in my head? And it was like, well, you know, my blood tests now in a certain, like if I was optimizing for metabolism, my blood tests now look a lot better, but my cardiovascular metrics

[00:45:38] from my other wearables are much worse because I have these side effects and it has been very hard for me to do the level of cardio exercise that I had been doing previously for that. So it's like, am I healthier than I was before? In some ways, yes. And in other ways, no. And I think it speaks to how wearable technology often treats mental health as an afterthought. And it doesn't speak to the way that the, the, these tools can be used to perpetuate some

[00:46:06] harmful, like disordered eating habits. And one thing that really stuck with me was the type one diabetics reaching out to me to be like, oh yeah, we have those anxieties around food, but we don't have a choice about that. We have to live with that every single day. I don't understand why non-diabetics are being pushed to live the way that we do, to constantly be weighing our food, to constantly be just like panicked about everything that gets put in our mouth.

[00:46:35] And I was like, yeah, no, that's not really a great way to live. And it was funny because some diabetics would look at my, my data and they'd be like, girl, you're fine. Why are you freaking out? And it's like, well, I'm not optimized. Whoa. What does that mean? Right. So I kind of wanted to tell the story. It's like, it's not black and white. There is a lot of value to be had for people who are pre-diabetic, people like you, Leo, who are type two diabetic to have that insight and to make those lifestyle changes.

[00:47:02] But it's not just people who have a legitimate reason. Now they want everyone to, to be using these devices. And is that something we should be doing? I, I, I'm inclined to think no. So, yeah. That's why I prefer to stay fully unquantified. It's just different types of people. I'm not a natural hypochondriac, so I can get that data and not get all worried about it. Um, but I could see that it's like, you know, it's like the ubiquity of gambling.

[00:47:30] Now there are some people who that's dynamite, you know, they're playing with dynamite. And I, and I think that that's the problem is, um, you know, in this modern capitalist society, as long as somebody is making money at it, it's okay. And they don't think about the, uh, the consequences of all this qualified self for some people, not for everybody. I'll give you an example really fast. I've had a Fitbit since it came out. So I had the little flower Fitbit from, I think it was 2011.

[00:47:57] And I, I looked back over the 16, is that 16 years of data? 17 years of data almost. Um, and there, everyone's like, oh, it's great for seeing trends over time. And you're right. You can see like the 30 year old version of me starting out here. It's a slow decline. You can track your decline as you get all right. I am, I am tracking like, oh, look, I used to walk seven miles a day.

[00:48:27] That's crazy. Now I only walk like five and a half. And so, and actually my heart rate and stuff has gone down, but the point here is I, it partly it's because I'm like, do I want to buy another tracker? If so, which one do I get value out of it? And after like this many years of tracking and doing like athletic ish pursuits, I'll say athletic ish. Cause I'm not like hardcore anything. Pickleball. I think the answer is no.

[00:48:55] It just, you're not going to do it anymore. It doesn't really give me a lot of value. It's like the dopamine hit when you wake up and you're like, oh my God, I got a 90 sleep score. That never happens. If only. Oh man. Yeah. It really never happens. I'm settling for 70. It's good. It's good. I'm happy. All right. Well, that was a good conversation, not on our playlist, but I'm glad we did. I'm glad we did. It's we're going to take another break.

[00:49:25] Then we will talk about all of those other things that I mentioned that are, I don't mind, you know, honestly, this show should go wherever the people who are on it want to take it. Layoffs. Who wants to hear about that? I know. I'm not anxious. I'm not anxious to talk about that. That does make me anxious. So Sam got cars. Victoria got CGMs. Stacy, if you want to talk about LoRa or something, we can do that next. Whatever. Good.

[00:49:52] Or nutrition labels, whatever, you know, whatever you want to. I miss the Twig LoRa discussions. Yeah. Those were fun. Should go back to that. Do you still have that router in your window that ships can use as they pass by? I no longer have the helium router that was part of like basically a Ponzi scheme that I was unawarely. Yeah. Did you ever make a lot of money? It wasn't money. That was it got paid in helium, right? Well, yeah, but I turned it into like whatever the helium coin was.

[00:50:22] And then I turned it into cash because I am old and I like my money under the mattress. Smart. Smart. By the way. Not in weird meme coins. These days, that's probably not a bad strategy. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. And I neglected to mention this, but I will mention this. Victoria's article on The Verge. You can search for it is, and I love the title, A Year of Continuous Glucose Monitoring Pushed Me to the Edge. Thank you, Victoria.

[00:50:51] We are going to take a break. We'll come back with more in just a little bit. The show this week brought to you by Doppel. D-O-P-P-E-L. Maybe, you know, that text message, maybe that is an urgent message from your CEO. Maybe it is. Or maybe it's a deep fake trying to target your business, trying to rip you off. AI can impersonate trusted individuals. It happens all the time.

[00:51:20] Remember that wild story last year of the CFO who was convinced he was in a Zoom call with his CEO and the board, and they told him, write a big check, and he did. And they were all fakes, deep fakes that fooled him. Remember that story? It can happen to you. AI can impersonate trusted individuals. But Doppel's platform illustrates how frequently users fall for phishing attempts.

[00:51:46] In voice call simulation deployments, all right, voice call, target users spent, this is scary, six minutes conversing with a deep fake. I mean, it's not just one line. They talked to it for six minutes. 100% of them believed the AI was human. You need Doppel. Doppel is the AI native social engineering defense platform.

[00:52:13] Doppel strengthens human risk management by training employees to recognize deception, while their digital risk protection detects and disrupts attacks across every channel. As attackers turn to AI to power increasingly sophisticated strikes, Doppel uses it to fight back. With automated takedowns, multi-channel coverage, and AI defenses that build intelligence with every fight, Doppel works relentlessly to protect people, brands, and trust.

[00:52:42] Doppel offers best-in-class integration and partnerships to seamlessly integrate into your existing security stack. Doppel's industry awards and testimonials speak for themselves. Doppel recognized as a winner 2026 G2 leader of users most likely to recommend, momentum leader, best support. That's three. Join hundreds of companies already using Doppel to protect their brand and people from social engineering attacks.

[00:53:09] Doppel, outpacing what's next in social engineering. Learn more at doppel.com. That's D-O-P-P-E-L dot com. And boy, do we need that right now. On we go with the show. Yeah, I don't want to talk about layoffs, but man, it's bad out there. And it's been bad and it's getting bad. Meta has now said they're going to lay off 10% of their workforce. They told their staff that today.

[00:53:38] Not the only thing they told staff. They also announced they're going to record your keystrokes and use it to train their AI models. Okay. Microsoft did an interesting thing. They said, okay, if the amount of time that you, I had to do the math. The amount of time you've been with Microsoft plus your age is greater than 70, we'll buy you out. And I had to think about that.

[00:54:05] Now, if you're 40 years old, you couldn't have been at Microsoft 30 years. So you're out because you wouldn't have started when you're 10. If you're 50 though, you could have started when you were 20. That would give you 70. You could retire. So what they're basically saying is if you're over 50 and you've been with us for a while, here's the door. And we got a package for you. That is a little bit more humane, I guess. I don't know what Meta is going to offer its employees.

[00:54:34] And of course, in both these cases, they intend to replace these employees with AI. Here's the question. Is that AI washing? Are they really just trying to get rid of people and blaming AI? Or is it really because AI has gotten so good now they don't need those people? What do you think? I can't possibly believe that AI is good enough for them to get rid of people. Yeah.

[00:54:58] Just based on my own personal testing of it, where it's still, even at the things that it's good at, it still needs a human oftentimes to just shape it into a thing that's actually usable. So I really, I think there's a degree of AI washing in there, but also it's sort of just like, okay, I mean, you're going to do this.

[00:55:24] And then a little bit further down the line, I imagine they'll rehire some of these people. And then once they need earnings to go up and investors to be happy, they'll do the layoffs again. That's what this really is, isn't it? Yeah. I feel like this is just like... They're getting expensive people. Yeah. That's what I was just going to say. The people who've got the most experience, they've been there the longest, they're getting paid the most. Those are the people that are being let go. And I mean, it happens in every industry.

[00:55:53] A lot of it has happened in the auto industry in recent years, but it happens everywhere. When they need to tighten up, the most expensive people are the ones that get shown the door. What I will say is it's a little scary. And this is because my kid is in college right now looking in the job market eventually. It is really unclear to me because you can take away your expensive people and replace

[00:56:21] them with AI by hiring a cheaper person who can act as your human in the loop, right? But they're not hiring young people either. They're really junior people. So I'm really... I feel like we're not going to hit... I feel like... I wonder if we're going where we were with the trades, where everybody went out of the trades because it was not... You know, seen as a great job.

[00:56:49] That's too bad because we need more trades, people. And we need them now, but no one built in... We didn't build in training programs. We didn't build economic incentives. And even when they saw this coming, you still didn't see a lot of economic incentives from a company's investing in training. They would invest in college programs. So I'm very curious if we're going to see something like that happen with more of the white collar work, where we denigrate it, we kill kind of most of the pipeline.

[00:57:19] And then suddenly we're going to look up and be like, oh, wait, who do we have now to do this work that we absolutely still need a human to do? And it's short-sighted, but we've been living on that short-sighted edge for quite some time. It does feel like everything's about the quarterly results and nobody's looking five years down the road at all. We're just like thinking about what we're supposed to do with our time. Like everyone keeps saying AI is going to make things more convenient.

[00:57:49] And so we'll lay everybody off. Okay. So what happens when we're all laid off? Are we just all going to launch our own podcast to fill up the unemployment time? I got three of them. Glucose monitoring. We're kind of really rigorously plan our meals. One word, Victoria, macrame. Okay. I'm just saying. It's the future. We'll all be doing macrame. My favorite, by the way, my favorite cover band touring in Petaluma these days is Fleetwood Macrame.

[00:58:18] Anyway, I'm just that apropos of nothing. Do they all wear macrame outfits? No, I don't know. It's just a good name. One of the things Meta might be spending this money on, you may remember they admitted that they were going to make $16 billion in 2024 because of scam advertising, 10% of their total advertising. Once they admitted that, the lawsuits have started to pile up in the UK, the US, and Australia

[00:58:49] because basically Meta's internal documents admitted it. They didn't do much to stop it. And now the lawsuit saying Meta knowingly profited from fraudulent ads. They didn't just not stop it. They profited on it. Let's do more. Let's do more. To an incredibly, like the cynicism there. Yeah. Consumer Federation, not Consumer Reports. We actually did a letter on this and have been following it pretty closely because it's a huge scam issue. And that's one of the things we work hard on.

[00:59:18] You know, that story broke a couple of years ago and it just kind of went away. And it's like, it's okay. Last October. So eight months ago, but it's, it's like a huge story and it just kind of, yeah, well, I think it was almost built in. Like everybody figured, oh yeah, that we, we thought they were doing that. Well, there's lawmakers are actually taking some action on it now. Good. I think that, I think they won like a, a couple of journal, Reuters run a few journalism awards. Yay. Yay. Journalism. Yay.

[00:59:48] Well, they deserve it because that's just appalling. And then there's also the fact that meta is now going to Amazon and is going to buy millions of Amazon AI CPUs. So they are taking that money and spending it on AI. They're going to buy the Graviton, which is Amazon's arm-based, by the way, CPU, not GPU. So. Are they using it for inference?

[01:00:17] Well, that's a good question. That would be my guess. Agents create compute intensive workloads. Oh, agents create compute intensive workloads like real-time reasoning, writing code, searching. So you do need CPU to coordinate the GPU. And in fact, that's exactly what Graviton is designed to do. Handle AI related compute needs. So I guess that's why, because they're spending money, I mean, I'm sure it's spending money with NVIDIA as well. Yeah.

[01:00:46] Well, the NVIDIA chips already have CPU cores built into them. Oh, okay. They have ARM CPU cores. You know, a Blackwell hat, you know, is mostly GPU, but it has some ARM cores. It's got some tensor cores and a bunch of other bits and pieces. Part of it was they couldn't buy it because Amazon does have a GPU, the Tranium, which is literally the worst name ever. The Tranium. They couldn't get those because Anthropic basically bought them all for years to come.

[01:01:15] So I guess they're also just getting what they can get. Anthropic agreed to spend $100 billion over 10 years to run its workloads on Amazon Web Services. That's not real money. That's more of that funny money? We should stop. Like, this drives me absolutely insane. So wait a minute. There's one more story that you can then complain about too. Google investing $40 billion in Anthropic.

[01:01:45] Is that not real money either? Okay. We should stop reporting these. We should get the details of like when the tranches for these payout and we should report them that way because it is spread out, right? It is absolutely spread out. It doesn't exist yet. Right. We're talking about they're going to spend, you know, billions of dollars on something. The chips don't exist. But it's also data center in the compute where that compute happens. It doesn't exist.

[01:02:15] It's also it's zeros out because Amazon announced it was going to invest $5 billion into Anthropic. So then Anthropic said, we're going to invest $10 billion in Amazon, which could go up to $40 billion if Anthropic or no, then Google. It's like it's all going. This looks like racketeering. I'm so sorry.

[01:02:39] If you follow like old school, like cartel crime finance, you're paying. I'm sure they're core. I mean, they have gap accounting in like cartels too. These people deal with money and make it. They probably don't call it gap accounting. Do they do 10 Qs? They do not have audits, nor do they report to the SEC. But, you know, it's important to know how much money you're making. Is it real money?

[01:03:08] And can I actually how liquid am I in what the press what has happened? And I think here's what I think. The tech press for decades, we've been like, yeah, tech. And we've been focused there. And now suddenly all these people in the tech press who historically have been pretty nice to the people I cover, we're being asked to be financial press. Right. We are not financial press.

[01:03:33] And the financial press is now so totally beholden to Wall Street. And I don't even know what else. There's very few people who are doing the actual math who even have the capability to do that math. Sorry. I this is like as I started out business reporting and doing stupid accounting stuff, went into tech. And now I'm like, oh, I should get back into like the business. Yeah, we need you.

[01:03:56] Well, and to build on what you said, Stacey, you know, even to even do any of that kind of analysis of it as a financial reporter, you know, so many of these companies are still private. The ones that are public, they, you know, they obfuscate so much of this in their books anyway, that it's hard to really extract any real fundamental understanding of what's going on.

[01:04:24] Well, give me some advice then, all of you, because, I mean, these are stories across the wire and I want to report on them. Um, should I just not even mention them or should I mention them and do what we're doing right now, which is point out that it's, it's circular. I don't. You have to ask the question. So you don't like, remember how I used to yell at you for not asking questions and researching things. You've got to call their financial BS. I have a little bit of a. I'm sorry. The trauma.

[01:04:53] Post-traumatic. So yeah, we should be pulling up their 10 Ks and analyzing everything and seeing what we can find. Can I, can I get my AI to do that? I mean, you can. I wonder if. I mean, there is like, I, I, I've used like, I have used lovable to write like spreadsheet, like pull data from financial reports into spreadsheets. And that's totally useful. So what would, what would you be looking for? Well, I don't know.

[01:05:22] Cause I haven't, one, I haven't spent the time on this, but like every industry has code, like fraud, fraud, places where fraud likes to hide. So like, you know, in retail, you can look at inventory and how they're like in here, actually inventory would be another good place to look for it. Um, I I'm trying to think of, it's been so long, um, since I've had to think about any of this. I could do really well being a, uh, we need a forensic accountant. Yeah. Accountant.

[01:05:51] Actually, my wife is a really good forensic accountant. I should get, I should get, I should get Lisa into this. She's really good at this stuff. She could do this in her handshake. Follow the money. That's what they tell you. Follow the money. Um, all right. So we're not saying it's fraudulent. We're saying though, it's manipulative. The math ain't math. It's, it's, it's misleading.

[01:06:17] It's to fool the investors, to fool the tech press, to convince everybody, everything's sunny. And they're not even working that hard. That's what's, that's what drives me nuts. I mean, I, I should probably do this. I don't have this much spare time, but I know. And I don't, even if you go back to the original Microsoft investment in open AI, you know, it was what, $10 billion that they gave to open AI, which was basically for open AI to buy Azure time.

[01:06:47] Right. It was, you know, so it was, and it's just, it's just exploded from there. Right. That's maybe when they figured it all out. Well, speaking of AI, uh, spud is out, uh, open AI's new, uh, GPT 5.5. Uh, it thinks it's really good. AI, open AI does. And so does spud. It's got a terrible name. Uh, I played with a little bit. I like potatoes. Yeah. Well, you don't think of potatoes as being like great computational devices.

[01:07:17] I mean, it's just an odd name. I think mythos that was, now that was a good name from, uh, anthropic, but spud. What's funny is as soon as these companies release a new model, as soon as Anthropic releases Opus 4.7 and mythos, open AI says, well, we got 5.5. Then deep seek, which we haven't heard from in a while. They were the ones that shook everything up in January of last year when they showed that in fact, maybe China has some pretty good models.

[01:07:45] They have a new model before, which they're saying is as good as the best frontier models from Anthropic, open AI and Google. And I think from what I've seen, that's close to true. Um, I don't know what it means. Uh, they're not, I guess what it means. Jensen Wong said this in a, um, kind of provocative interview he did with Dwarkesh, who is becoming the AI guy, right? For podcasting.

[01:08:11] Uh, he said, you know, you don't want to keep China from getting our best chips because all China's going to do is build up its own chips and its own proprietary stuff using the Huawei chips, for instance, which I think deep seek was trained on. And that's going to make them better instead of having kind of a universal. Now it's a little self-serving because Jensen really does want them to buy his chips, but he has a good point.

[01:08:38] If they, everybody uses CUDA, then nobody has this advantage, but there's a real risk. If, if you force China to get good at this, that it'll be, I don't know, it'll be too diverse. It won't be a, we won't, we won't all be on the same page that we could lose our competitive edge is what he said. Does that make sense? Or is it just self-serving? Like in some backwards way, like you can kind of see what he's saying, right?

[01:09:08] It like, it makes sense to me, but I mean, it's like from a different point of view, it's like, well, isn't that what you want? Don't you want there to be more competition? Don't you want there to be a lot of like, um, competing different versions of it? Do, is it, is it good to have everything be on one universal thing in some ways in terms of convenience? Yes. But in terms of competition, no, you do want, you do want these companies to be afraid and looking over their shoulder because that's how you get innovation.

[01:09:38] So like, I think it's a bit self-serving of him to say that. Like, and when you have a $5 trillion company, do you really want competition? No, you don't. You just want to, you want 6 trillion. If you have 5 trillion, you're thinking about how you're going to get the 6 trillion. You want to sell all the chips you can make to China. Until the EU comes knocking. And then you're like, oh. Well, yeah. I mean, Intel used to keep AMD like just surviving. Right. Microsoft did that with Apple, right?

[01:10:07] Just so that they didn't have a monopoly, right? See, there's, there's competition. We got competition. They're not very good, but we got them. I have competition apparently from Ashley Vance. This is a, this is a weird side story, but I thought it was very weird. He did an interview behind a paywall, uh, with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. And somebody on Twitter said, well, you got to release this to the public. They, they said, this isn't free. Vance, I think joking.

[01:10:37] And I, I've interviewed him. He wrote a book about Elon some time ago. Said, well, I'll make it public if, if you give me a hundred thousand dollars. So, a guy did. Jim Belichick, the CEO of a Nevada based laser manufacturing company, send, cut, send. Give him a hundred thousand dollars to unlock the podcast. Now everybody can hear it. By the way, everybody says it's a very good episode. Um, man, what was I thinking?

[01:11:09] Access journalism pays off for Ashley Vance. It feels a little, it just feels a little odd, a little weird. He said the funding wasn't prearranged. Uh, I, it wasn't intentional. He has a podcast called core memory and a YouTube channel of which by the way, send, cut, send is now a sponsor. I guess, I guess he got something for the hundred thou. Anyway, I, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that because on the one hand, dirty.

[01:11:38] Cause on the one hand, like I understand, you know, the verge has a paywall. Lots of publications have paywalls because, you know, Google and the death of SEO and all of that. You gotta make money. Yeah. We gotta keep the lights on in some, in some respect, especially since journalism isn't, like quality journalism isn't cheap to produce. It takes a lot of time, uh, effort and, and whatnot. And resources.

[01:12:01] But at the same time, just like, you know, I think there's discussions to be had about if something is in the public interest and in the public good, making it accessible in some way. Maybe you don't put all of it out there, but whatever is relevant and that people should know, like the whole point of journalism is to inform people. But to sell it, to be like, kind of like, well, you know, there's a lot of good info in here, but I need someone to pay me a hundred thousand dollars before I make it public.

[01:12:28] Like, I feel like I'm not, not, you know, get your bag. Journalism is suffering. So I'm not going to begrudge any journalists for making money. But at the same time, like journalism at its core is about providing people with information.

[01:12:43] And so if you had something really valuable that was of public interest, I think there should be a conversation about making the most, um, important parts of that free for, for the greater public good versus just going like, cha-ching.

[01:13:01] I think that's what like rubs me as like, this is kind of not feeling great looking at it because I think if we had some like, you know, conversationally inside baseball at the verge, if we have a story that's like really, really, really relevant, we have a couple of stories that go up every day that are free, uh, that do get outside of the paywall.

[01:13:20] Even though all of our content is like in under a dynamic paywall, because it's sort of like news, you know, like the New York times has a subscription, but if there's breaking news, everybody can see what the breaking news is. Right. So it's sort of, there's something. We do the same thing. I mean, we don't hide anything behind a paywall, but, uh, sometimes we'll do stuff in the club that we like, like your book club, Stacy, that we let people listen to when we're doing it live.

[01:13:48] And then we put it behind the paywall for a month and then we make it public. Um, not that we ever do anything that is particularly newsworthy, but most of everything, including this is public. This show is public. Um, so should I be asking for more money for the, I think we need to get a hundred thousand dollars from you, Stacy, actually is what I think. Oh, me, me. That's like, right now I even buy my own books. I would feel really weird doing that. I have to say, I would feel a little bit odd.

[01:14:15] Um, it also feels, it feels like cherry picking in some sense, right? Like, and this is what the journalistic, like a lot of publications did. They, you have a few stories that are really, you kind of cherry pick your beat, right? So you only focused on stories that it used to be page views. Now it maybe is things that are going to be worth the money from an analyst.

[01:14:42] And GigaOm way back in the day had our research business. And that theoretically was that. I mean, Wall Street Journal makes money because people make money by paying for it. Right. Well, and yeah, you could argue Bloomberg has. Same thing. The terminals are hugely expensive. Yeah. But you also did other journalism that was not as well remunerated, right? That people wouldn't necessarily pay for. And that journalism was, you used to think it was kind of a public good. I don't know. It was pro bono. Yeah.

[01:15:12] No. Yeah. Every, every, you know, news is essentially pro bono, but you got to pay for it in some way. So yeah. Like news that gets clicks versus news that doesn't get clicks. Right. As someone who wrote deeply about wireless protocols, not all of my stories got clicks. Not link bait. Exactly. You won't believe what Laura is going to do next. 10 ways wifi could change your life. It's all in the headline writing.

[01:15:41] Is Fox, Fox is for selling the verge or no. What did I read about that? What are they talking about that? And I would love to know too, Leo. It's one of those things where like, there's been a couple of media rumors about Jim Bancroft's shopping around the sites. As far as I know, we're not going anywhere.

[01:16:02] The verge is what I think almost certainly the premier tech blog in a tech site right now in the, in the world. I mean, you know, I haven't heard anything about like us getting sold. So far it's just like stuff from puck. And I think ad week saying that there. That's the problem. I read puck. There's my problem. And I pay a lot of money to read puck, by the way. It's not. I mean, there's been rumors.

[01:16:32] What you should be doing is paying your money to read the verge. I do. I am a paid member, premium subscriber, of course, to the verge. See. Yeah. No, the verge is worth it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you guys. Yeah. It helps keep the lights on. Speaking of which, I'm going to take a break for an ad. How about that? You're watching this week in tech with, from the verge, the wonderful Victoria Song, senior reviewer. Always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you, Victoria.

[01:17:00] Sam Abulsamed, my personal car guy, wheelbearings.media. And I apologize. Sam sent me an email saying, it's not the Department of War. It's the Department of Defense, Leo. And I sometimes slip into the colloquialisms, the Gulf of America, the Department of War. But I understand the legal name is the Department of Defense. I appreciate the correction, Sam. I forgot to respond to that. So I thought I'd respond. No worries. Anyway, great to have you, Sam.

[01:17:30] And of course, Stacey Higginbotham from the wonderful Consumer Reports. Our show today brought to you by Meter. Talking about Wi-Fi. Let's talk about Meter, the company building better networks. You would love this company, Stacey. Founded by two network engineers who feel your pain. If you are a network engineer, they know what it's like. And you know what it's like. Legacy providers, inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching you thin.

[01:17:59] But of course, you're expected to work miracles for nothing. Complex deployments across fragmented tools. Let's face it, network engineers, you're mission critical to the business. But you are forced to work with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands. And it's not, you know, it's not your fault. And it's not completely the boss's fault because this stuff moves fast. But there is a solution. Businesses are switching to Meter. Meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure.

[01:18:30] And I'm talking wireless, yes. Cellular-less. Wired, of course. Meter's built for performance and scalability. But they did something remarkable. They said, in order to do this right, we need to do the whole stack. So Meter designs and builds the hardware. They write the firmware. They build the software. They manage deployments. And they provide support. One number does it all. They will do everything.

[01:18:58] Going down to getting the ISP procurement. They will do security for you. Routing, switching, wireless, firewall, cellular. Power is really important, right? They'll do the power. They do DNS security. They do VPNs, SD-WANs. They specialize in the challenging situations that you will run across in business. Multi-site workflows. You acquire a company.

[01:19:24] They've got a 200,000 square foot warehouse in Muncie. And you're over there in Chicago. And you've got to get them on your network. And their Wi-Fi never worked well to begin with. But Meter comes in. They fix it all with a single solution. Meter's single integrated networking stack works in the most challenging environments. Major hospitals. They're in branch offices and warehouses. They're in large campuses. They're in data centers. Reddit uses Meter, okay?

[01:19:53] Here's a quote from the assistant director of technology for Webb School of Knoxville. Quote, we had more than 20 games on our campus between our two facilities. Each game, every one of those 20 games streamed via wireless and wired connections. And the event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before Meter redesigned our network. End quote. With Meter, you get a single partner for the whole kit and caboodle.

[01:20:20] All your connectivity needs from first site survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers or multiple tools. They're on your side. They're the people you bring in to solve the thorniest problems. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. Meter, built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow.

[01:20:49] We thank them so much for sponsoring. Go to meter.com slash twit to book a demo. You should do that right now. M-E-T-E-R dot com slash twit to book a demo. And we thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech. Talked to these guys a couple of, like last month. I was so impressed with what they're doing. We mentioned Mythos, this spooky anthropic model that they say it's too good to release to the public.

[01:21:17] Instead, they gave it to 50 companies saying, fix your software before we give it to the bad guys. But what's funny, remember, Anthropic is the one that the president said nobody in the government should be using. The Defense Department said that they are a supply chain risk, which is usually reserved for foreign government software. But then Mythos came out and apparently the NSA said, you know, we could really use this.

[01:21:43] So according to Axios, NSA is using Mythos despite the blacklist. And many other government agencies looking to do it. Last week, we talked about this last week. Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic, went to the White House. And apparently President Trump now thinks they're pretty good. Mythos, some questions about whether it was just a marketing ploy.

[01:22:10] But Mozilla said they've used it to find and fix 271 bugs in the current version of Firefox, the one that just came out. And Anthropic has surged to a trillion dollar valuation because of this, but also because Enterprises seem to have been very enamored of Anthropic's opus as well.

[01:22:38] And bad guys got Mythos. Apparently, according to a number of sources, a group of unauthorized users has gained access to Mythos in their Discord. The unauthorized group tried a number of different strategies to gain access, including using access enjoyed by the person who was interviewed by Bloomberg, which broke this story.

[01:23:04] The person currently employed at a third-party contractor that does work for Anthropic. They're on a Discord channel. They've been using it, they said, regularly since gaining access to it. And they showed Bloomberg screenshots and a live demonstration. Cool. Cool. What could go wrong? Paris asked a great question. You were telling me that this cybersecurity tool that's the best thing ever couldn't protect itself?

[01:23:35] I guess not. Not when there are humans. That's the problem, isn't it? We are the weak bugs in the code. We are so terrible. Just eliminate the humans and it'll all be good. Yeah. I mean, we just want things to be so easy and frictionless. And that is our problem. Bloomberg said the group made, quote, an educated guess about the model's online location. And that worked? And it worked. Didn't they pull a URL out of the leaked?

[01:24:05] Maybe. I think I heard that one somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. The leaked source code from a couple of weeks ago. The good news is these aren't hackers. They're not bad guys. They just like playing around with the latest models. And so they haven't used it to create zero days or anything, at least as far as we know. Well. So far. We don't know that. We don't know that. Everything's fine. They didn't. So, I mean. I believe it.

[01:24:33] I will say, like, everybody's freaked out about, like, AI and cybersecurity. And they should be. But I will say the biggest thing that I think people should be worried about is that everything that was secure by obscurity is now open. Yeah. It's. There's no more obscurity. Yeah. I mean, now you've got the sheer brute force of these AI systems that can go and find everything that was hidden. It wasn't even hidden.

[01:25:02] A lot of it's like, well, it's too. Like, there's things that are hidden. And that's one thing. But then there's a lot of stuff that is floating around that people are like, why would you ever want to hack a, you know, I don't know, this weird esoteric industrial robot that cleans floors? And someone's like, yeah, actually, I would love to do that. Or you're like, oh, there's only, you know, 100,000 of this car out there. It's not useful to really invest the time to do a stupid hack on it.

[01:25:31] But now you can do it in a night just for lulls, you know? SpaceX XAI Grok. The blob. Has said that they are going to, well, either buy Cursor, the AI code generating tool, coding tool for 60 billion or just give them 10 billion one way or the other.

[01:26:01] This is another one of those funny money. Because money's not real. This is another, this money's not real. Well, they said they, and they, and they, you know what? They posted it on X this week that they're working with Cursor to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. Combining Cursor's AI powered coding model with SpaceX's Colossus training. I need an echo. I wonder if they're poisoning the training data to get like better valuations. Are people doing that yet?

[01:26:32] They have to be, right? Well, they could do it, right? Colossus. Sorry. It sounds better that way though. All these names are just breaking my brain. Colossus training supercomputer. That's just, can we just like, can everyone just have a mandatory touch grass session every day? This is what we all need. Five hours of touch grass time every single day because the headlines just get more ridiculous.

[01:27:02] I would, but I'm right in the middle of a coding session with Claude and I just can't leave. So if you don't mind, I'd like to stay here. It wants me to review the spec. So grass can wait. Grass will always be here. Will it? I'm the grass this afternoon. Did you? With your doggy? Yeah. With your doge? Toss the ball around. There's a problem with kitties, right, Victoria? They don't really go for walks. No.

[01:27:31] Not with you anyway. No. Like I do everything to keep my cats inside because my cat ran out the other day and I got him to come back in by yelling, Peter, you are not for the streets. And he ran back inside. And he listened. And he listened. Yeah, he listened. Because I never yell at him. That's what happens when you give a cat a human name. You call your cat Peter? His name is Petey. And when he's being bad, it gets elevated to Peter. In which case, he's like, oh, mommy's mad.

[01:28:00] And he ran back inside immediately. Oh, there's a sweet little corgi, I think. Yeah. Oh, goodness. Corgis are funny dogs because God made their legs too short. But it makes them cute that way. And Stacey just got a brand new Australian Shepherd. I'm not going to pick her up. Oh, she just popped up. And yeah, she's real cute. She's like a sweetie. Yeah. She's super sweet. Love her. They're very smart though, right?

[01:28:27] Aren't those the ones that'll nip at your heels if you don't? Corgi will nip at your ears. Yeah. They're both good. Any herding dog. Yeah. Yeah. Any herding dogs like, you go here. Yes. Very, very smart. Very athletic. We've already been on a five mile hike this morning. I guarantee when I'm done with this show, we're going to be back out there. I've told this story before, Victoria, but I haven't told you our cat rings the doorbell.

[01:28:53] We have a ring doorbell and she's learned to walk up to it and stare at it. And then it rings in the house. The chimes ring because there's movement in the house. And then we go and we let her in. That's a smart cat. She's learned it. But then the neighborhood cat has cats have also learned it too. Now, Lisa, when the chime rings, she says, okay, who is it? Is it Rosie or is it Georgie? Or, you know, we have all these cats.

[01:29:21] We'll come to the, I guess they learn from each other. They come to the doorbell. And then depending on how much we like the cat, we'll feed it. Oh, I was going to say, if you feed it, they'll definitely. They learn. They're so smart. So ring should have started with cats for you and not their like surveillance dog network. And I will absolutely say our ring does not point at anything but our front walkway. You can't see the street. You can't see the neighbors. You can't see anything but our front walkway from the ring. So don't worry.

[01:29:51] But what about people who deliver to your house? We see that, but that's what we want to see. That's the whole idea. So we know there's a box there, right? You're inviting them into the surveillance state against their like consent. But they took the job with Amazon. Didn't they know there's a camera in the van? There's a camera in the house. In this economy, can you afford not to take the job? Right. I'm just, I'm sorry. I'm asking the questions to make you think a little harder about it. Just because I-

[01:30:19] Okay, but to make up for that, we offer them snacks and beverages. We have a little refrigerator out there and we have a bowl full of chips and healthy snacks as well. So that if they are hungry and we have a port-a-potty outside because we've been, the house has been under construction for the last 23 years. So, you know, basically they use our facilities. So I figure we should, and the, no, the port-a-potty is not on the camera. Okay. It's in a separate, well, it is on this.

[01:30:49] Nevermind. Nevermind. This is why my husband hates me. You need your little punching rig still for real. I know. These are just verbal punches now. I'm just like, let me ask you a question. Go ahead. I would, you know, I'm already bruised. I have Eufy cams, Eufy doorbell cams that just record on a local home station. Most, almost everything's ubiquity of my house, which is all local. Doesn't go to the police, doesn't go to anywhere.

[01:31:18] But the ring, the house came with a ring and I can't really replace it because it's like built in there. And it, and because the cat needs to ring the doorbell. Okay. I have replaced dozens, literally dozens of video doorbells in my life. They are not. It's, it's, it's that fancy one. That's ethernet. It's powered by ethernet. And if I remove it, there's a big hole in the wall where it goes. You know, you know what you can do with holes? You can fill them in. Catch them. Yeah.

[01:31:47] I'm just saying that the technology, it's not even hard. I don't pay for a ring subscription. Does that help? I mean, I don't, I don't like they, they don't, if you, if you at least doesn't go to their servers, does it? Yeah, it probably does. Everything will hit their servers unless it's recording locally to an SD thing. Should I put a sign up at the beginning of the path saying you're a smile, you're on candid camera?

[01:32:17] I mean, I do believe if you have any outward facing cameras, you should notify people that you have outward facing cameras with some sort of sticker. It used to be like some places that used to be. Is there a law that you have to do that? Like, I think in some places that is the law. I don't know in where Petaluma or California. Yeah. Speaking of laws, you may remember that in December, Australia banned social media and YouTube for people under 16.

[01:32:47] Fortune magazine says more than half of the Australian teens get around it with VPNs, face masks, their parents' IDs. It's not working, I guess. It's been a teen. Yeah, what did you think was going to happen?

[01:33:09] A survey conducted by a UK suicide prevention organization, the Molly Rose Foundation, surveyed 1,050 Australians aged 12 to 15. More than 60% of teens who had social media accounts before the ban still had access to at least one of them. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram have retained more than half their users under 16 in Australia. I mean, it's probably making them more tech savvy. That's great.

[01:33:37] Well, that's what one of our panelists at the time said. Good. You're breeding a bunch of hackers. I think it was Corey Doctorow. So this is great. Australia, in 10 years, is going to be the place where the best computer programmers come from Australia. Because as teenagers, they had to get around the... We do know that VPN sales have gone through the roof there. I get the thought process because I think there's a lot of data that shows that social media use too young is not good for the brains.

[01:34:05] But it's also like you have to understand teenagers and remember what you were like as a teenager. If you tell me no, I'm going to do it. You're especially going to do it if you don't know. Right. So you have to find some other way to make them not want to do it. Oh, it was Harper Reid. Thank you, Galia. Galia says it wasn't Corey. It was Harper Reid who said, yes, that's right. You're very good memory. That's right. Give them credit for that. Also, I'm sorry, Stacey.

[01:34:36] Oh, no. Now I can't remember. I was like, I lost it. Oh, it was also you're hiding like the best stuff. I mean... It makes them want it more. It's not like you're doing age verification for like, I don't know, Excel or something excruciating. You must be 16 or older to use this accounting software. They wouldn't care. But Instagram. No, they would become great accountants.

[01:35:03] The internet when I was a teenager, which was like in 1994, I'd be like... I mean, plenty of my friends were like, why would you even want a computer? And I'm like, why would you not want to spend all of your time online? But I was weird. And now that's like where everything is. So it makes sense.

[01:35:29] By the way, Harper, Reid, and Amy Webb will reunite on a show in the next couple of weeks. Harper is in the pan right now when he comes back. Apple kind of got a little trouble when the FBI said, yeah, you know those signal chats? They're supposed to be encrypted. We were able to get them by looking at the notifications. We just... And you know what?

[01:35:54] Even though the person we were investigating had deleted signal, the notifications were still there. To which Apple said, oh, whoops. And they pushed out a fix for that this week. If you care about that. Our fix was don't turn on notifications if you're using signal because the notifications are in plain text.

[01:36:16] The FBI had been able, according to 404 Media, to extract deleted signal messages from someone's iPhone using forensic tools due to the fact that the content of the messages was displayed in a notification then stored inside the phone's database even after the messages were deleted. Yeah, because you still have that notification history. Yeah.

[01:36:39] By the way, this is also the first time in this case that somebody was charged for being an Antifa. So there. Like money. Antifa isn't real. I know. The case involved a group of people setting up fireworks at the ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas in July. It was the 4th of July. Come on. They're patriots. Not Antifa.

[01:37:08] Anyway, Apple fixed it. After the news that Apple fixed it, Signal president Meredith Whitaker said, we never asked Apple to address the issue, but we don't think notifications for deleted messages should ever remain in any OS notification database. But let's face it, Signal allowed clear text notifications, which they probably shouldn't have. So there's a lot of blame to go around, but now it's been fixed, says Apple.

[01:37:39] I will say, if you're security conscious, are you having your texts or your signal messages come up as notifications? They should. You should. Exactly. You should turn that off anyway. Right? Anyone can see your phone when they come in. Sorry. The whole story. I was like, I'm glad they fixed it. But I'm also like, why are you using this highly encrypted message from Messenger and still putting the notifications on your screen? Some people don't think that far. Right. That's an extra step.

[01:38:09] Like, I know Antifa doesn't. No, they don't apparently. But I like started doing that just because I have very bad eyesight, as you can see from my extremely thick glasses, which means my text size is the size of the moon. And anyone could read my phone if they can see my screen. So I've started. Because I'm old, too. And I zoom in the phone. I make the text big because I'm old. And I think, you know, at first it was like, oh, no, no, no, you shouldn't do that. But then I thought, why? I should be able to read it.

[01:38:38] Nothing wrong with it. Yeah. But then there's a lot of programs where if you do that, you can't use them because the buttons hide stuff and the buttons are hidden. They don't scale well. They don't. They need a responsive design for. Yes. Fix your software, dude. Yeah. I used to have it like zoomed in really, really crazy zoom in. And then I was having those issues with the apps as well. So now it's just slightly bigger.

[01:39:06] But I still get made fun of by my friends who don't have crappy eyes because they're like, oh, my God. Why is your text so large? And I have an Apple Watch Ultra as well. And the text on there is also you can read everything. You could do that on this? One character at a time. Yeah. You can just read everything. And it's like, I got nothing to hide. So that's just. Good. If you live in Nevada, the Nevada police could be tracking your phone's location. And in Nevada, they don't need a warrant anymore. Woohoo.

[01:39:36] Let's go. Nevada signed an agreement earlier this year with a company that collects location data from cell phones, which means police can track a device in real time all without a warrant. The software comes from a company called, appropriately, Fog. Fog Data Science did a contract with the Nevada Department of Public Safety. The state has allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool.

[01:40:06] They don't have to get permission from a court. They don't have to do anything. Fog calls it patterns of life. You could see people's patterns of life. It can help the police deduce when people are at work, where they live, with whom they associate. Fog says, oh, the data is anonymous. It's linked to devices, not people. Oh, well, that's a relief.

[01:40:35] Location data is usually on the device. We just, we have no laws for this. It is so aggravating. Well, the Supreme Court actually is hearing in a very important case about this. And I'm not sure when this is going to come up, but this is going to be a big case.

[01:40:56] The FBI has been doing basically fishing expeditions with geolocation, saying, sending a, they get a warrant for this, but it's still a question, saying, we want from the phone company, everybody who is within a mile of this convenience store robbery, for instance. So, it doesn't matter if you're innocent or guilty. Everybody is in this.

[01:41:27] Well, time to build my bunker and move underground and see no one ever again. Nah. Yeah. It's really just your cell phone you have to get rid of. I mean, you'll be living in a digital bunker. You're publishing your location everywhere, aren't you? Let's face it. But you don't have to give up. We could actually advocate still for privacy laws. Because right now, if you look at the federal, they just announced a federal privacy law that is the biggest joke ever. It's terrible.

[01:41:57] Is this Marsha Blackburn's, your senator's law? Yes. Marsha Blackburn. Didn't she work for Microsoft? She's basically well connected with big tech. She also did the anti-net neutrality laws, too. Marsha Blackburn. Love her. But she thought, well, this is good. We need, very reasonably, we need a national, federal privacy law so that we don't have 50. We need a good one. A good one. So we don't have 50 different laws that make it so confusing for a company.

[01:42:27] Right? Yes. I understand. I mean, yes. You said all the good words. Except her law is crap. And it supersedes all the good laws every other state has. Yes. Is that right? And it is really terrible. It is like, it's basically, instead of you having a right to privacy, you have a right to opt out. And we all know how great people are at opting out when given that option.

[01:42:55] There's a lot to hate about this, but that is one of my favorite things to hate. Anyway. Right. Jeff Jarvis says, who loves you. By the way, Stacey, we used to all work together on a show, a little show we called This Week in Google. He says that Marsha Blackburn attacked him once in the Senate with poetry. I don't know what that means. I mean, April is National Poetry Month. Okay. Maybe she wrote a haiku about Jeff.

[01:43:27] Jeff Jarvis is a professor. The leaves are falling this spring. Water. The Supreme Court will hear oral argument next week in Chattree versus the United States. Virginia man convicted of bank robbery. He said that the government violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure when it obtained his location from his cell phone records, which put him in the vicinity of the robbery.

[01:43:56] Lower courts rejected that argument. But now SCOTUS will weigh in. But at issue is something called a geofence warrant. Law enforcement officials served a geofence warrant on Google, not the phone company. In this case, it was Google, which said, Google, we got location data for cell phone users who were near the bank at the time of the robbery.

[01:44:21] The warrant created a geofence within 150 meters of the bank for 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Now, as you might imagine, quite a few innocent people were pulled into that net. Google gave law enforcement officials an initial list of accounts linked to devices that were in the area. Didn't give them the names. So we're okay.

[01:44:45] At the second step, based on the initial list, law enforcement officials asked Google for information about several accounts that were in the area during a two hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for and received the names and information for three accounts, one of which was the defendant. And none of this did law enforcement seek a warrant. A warrant. Yeah. Yeah. I wrote about this when it happened. It was back in Lake.

[01:45:11] So we'll watch this with interest because this is going to happen next week. Yeah. The government says that the plaintiff did not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in his location data, both because he affirmatively opted to allow Google to collect store and use it. And because the warrant merely sought information that would have been visible to anyone near him at the time of the robbery.

[01:45:38] So why not go find those people and ask them, who did you see around here? Yeah. Yeah. The courts keep killing privacy or sorry, without a privacy law, what happens in the courts is they either say you've already told, like you have no reasonable expectation of privacy because you're giving this data up already to get these services. Like consumers understand what they're doing here. And then the second is that there hasn't been documented harm. And so we see those come up in these court cases.

[01:46:08] And it's very frustrating. Oh, we do now have a photo from the Associated Press of Marsha Blackburn assaulting Jeff Jarvis with poetry. Oh, that's fake. That's a fake. That's deep. That's a deep, deep fake. Thank you, Darren. We have the fastest AI guys in the West on our Club Twit Discord. All right.

[01:46:37] Got to take another break. I told Stacey we'd get her out of here by before midnight. Stacey Higginbotham. My time's out. No, no, no. It's only four. It's only five more hours here. Yeah. You got plenty of time. Plenty of time. Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports. Sam Abul Samad from Telemetry, where he is VP of Research in the wonderful Victoria Salmon. Well, you're all wonderful. I don't mean to single out Victoria, but senior tech reviewer at The Voyage.

[01:47:06] Our show today brought to you by Simply CX. When you think about the companies actually winning in tech right now, what do they have in common? Sure. Great products, but more often it comes down to how they make customers feel and how seamlessly everything works. If you're at This Week in Tech listener, you know the future of tech isn't just what gets built. It's how it's experienced. And that's why Microsoft launched Simply CX.

[01:47:35] Hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience leader. Each episode of Simply CX features real, no-fluff conversations with leaders from companies like CarMax, TD Bank, and T-Mobile on how AI, data, and design are reshaping customer expectations.

[01:47:53] If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode featuring Jim McDonald, Microsoft's global lead for customer advocacy about why AI agents are becoming key influencers in customer decision-making. And practical ways leaders can identify high-impact, low-risk AI starting points. New episodes drop every other Tuesday. Find Simply CX wherever you get your podcasts. And follow the host, Nicole McKinley, on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going. Thank you.

[01:48:21] Simply CX for supporting Twit. I love it when podcasts support podcasts. That's a nice thing to do. Let's see. They were going to do an age-checking app in the EU. Brussels launched an age-checking app. According to hackers, they broke it in two minutes. Two minutes! The EU said it's technically ready. The hacker said, eh, hold my beer.

[01:48:50] Actually, in Belgium, they have very good beer. So maybe he just said, I'll keep the beer, but I'll still crack it. In fact, they open-sourced it, which I thought was great. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it was technically ready. It will soon be available to use as countries move to ban kids from social media. It's fully open-source. Everyone can check the code. I don't think she talks like that, but I do.

[01:49:20] And it was immediately hacked. Not by mythos, just by, you know, some guy, you know? The saga is turning into a PR disaster for Brussels, according to Politico. Security consultant Paul Moore found it would store sensitive data on a user's phone, leaving it unprotected. Posted that on X. And he said, I hacked it in under two minutes. Baptiste Robert, a prominent French white-hat hacker, confirmed many of the issues.

[01:49:50] Said, and told Politico it was possible to bypass the app's biometric authentication as well. In fact, it sounds like it's pretty terrible. Olivier Blasi, a cryptographic researcher, part of the French Task Force on Digital Identity, said, let's say I download the app, proved that I am over 18, and that my nephew then can take the phone, unlike my app, and use it to prove he is over 18. He's not, by the way.

[01:50:20] Did they not test this app before they released it? This is the testing. This is it right now. It was only technically ready. Anyway, this is, you know what? I'm glad this comes out, because honestly, I think a lot of these age verification systems are not so very good. More security news, according to Brian Krebs.

[01:50:43] Tyler B., the cute boy on the left, who was then a teenager dragged into court in the U.S. because he is a senior member of Scattered Spider, which is one of the worst social engineering ransomware groups. Wait, why did they show his, like, eight-year-old class picture? This is so strange. It's the Daily Mail is why.

[01:51:10] And they know that it will sell papers, I guess, to show a little cute boy. And then the teenage version thereof being dragged off by the policia. Anyway, Scattered Spider. I don't think it's been beheaded. But, you know, I'm glad they got one of them anyway. Really? I mean, every time you... Just an eight-year-old boy?

[01:51:39] No, he's not eight years old now. He was. He's the second known Scattered Spider member to plead guilty. Another from Florida was sentenced to 10 years in prison last year. See? Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. Crime doesn't pay, kids. Doesn't pay, kids. Three other alleged co-conspirators from Texas and North Carolina still face criminal charges. So, you know what? Eventually, these guys do get caught.

[01:52:08] Because you know why? They can't keep it quiet. They kind of boast. I don't know. We got some people doing big crimes that are boasting a lot about it. And that's different. That's different. That's different. Somehow. That's different. Just because the Supreme Court said these could be immune. Yeah. The bigger the crime, the safer you are. Yeah. Is the key.

[01:52:38] The less likely you're going to be to get punished, I guess. I guess. Iran says that the U.S. used backdoors in networking equipment. To disable that during the current war. And Chinese state media is saying, you see? You see? So is the Iranian equivalent of the FCC going to ban any American? All American routers must be banned. Yes. Yes.

[01:53:06] Speaking of which, Stacey, what do you think about that? Oh, my God. So just to fill you in if you haven't been listening lately, the FCC has banned all foreign-made routers. Weirdly, last week they said, no, not Netgear. Don't know why. So we do know why. They filled out their awesome questionnaire about whether or not they're going to make their routers in the U.S. So I did a link to it. The Verge, actually.

[01:53:35] Are they making their routers in the U.S.? No, they're not. No one makes their routers in the U.S. Except for Elon. Starlink assembles. Okay. There's so many reasons. Okay. Here's one reason that this is asinine. Routers, all routers are terrible, really, when it comes to cybersecurity because they're all using basic firmware and chips. And a lot of times they're using reference design firmware. Like, it's just terrible. Like, they don't care about security. Fine. By the way, this is true of consumer routers.

[01:54:03] And it's also, I'm sad to say, true of enterprise routers, as we've learned. Cisco routers, same thing. You know? Yeah, that's what the Iranians had. Cisco used to do a lot and make their own chips and design them and everything. But it's no more. The routers that Iran said were rebooted or disconnected remotely were from Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and Microtech. Yeah. Just so you know.

[01:54:28] So the FCC came in and was like, hey, we are going to put this on the covered list and nobody can buy any of these routers. And they, you can actually see this happening with this administration. So the Biden administration started the covered list and they actually listed a single product or a cluster like Hikvision, I don't know how to say it, cameras. Those Hikvision cameras weren't very good. They really were insecure.

[01:54:56] Doppler and Hikvision cameras. But when we get to the Trump administration, what we saw was all drones, all foreign drones. Right, all foreign drones. They didn't do the research. They were just like, eh. We don't like any of them. Everything should be made in America anyway. So might as well just ban all of them. And look, two things can be true. One, there is, it is not crazy to question the supply chain risks from having only China make all of your routers.

[01:55:26] Networking gear is very sensitive gear, right? It is crazy pants to say you have 18 months to like figure out your entire supply chain, bring it onshore and secure it. Especially with companies that don't actually invest that much in security. So, and consumers don't pay for it either. So, that's how I feel about this. My concern is to get these waivers. They're only 18 months.

[01:55:52] That's not kind of the level of consistency you need to build a supply chain, right? So, did Netgear, what did Netgear say that got them approved? They said, well, we don't know exactly what Netgear said. I actually- Did they promise that we'll make them in the United States? Is that what they- The FCC's questionnaire, they have like a little questionnaire to get the waiver. And it's basically like, one, who are you? Two, do you make- Where do you make your stuff? Right. Do you have plans to maybe one day make it in the U.S.?

[01:56:20] Would you maybe one day make it in the U.S.? Could you maybe one day make it in the U.S.? Great. And that's it. There are no other cybersecurity questions on there. Oh, it's not even about cyber- It's are they made in the U.S.? Period. You could argue that making something in China could represent a cybersecurity risk. Yes. But you could also say, hey, do you include default passwords or encrypt- We now know that so are U.S.-made routers. Yeah, like Consumer Reports test routers all the time.

[01:56:50] We have- The biggest issue when it comes to routers is not made in China. It's like stupid stuff. That software. Yeah, yeah. We talk about it on security now all the time. So the number one router in the U.S. was TP-Link, which is an American-made router. And part of the reason it's number one, I think it was something like- It's not American-made. It's an American company. I'm sorry. Did I say American-made? Yes. What was I thinking? Of course, it's made in China like everything else. American company made in China. I think it's made in Vietnam.

[01:57:19] Oh, is it made in Vietnam? Well- Oh, that's interesting. It depends on what part. Right. The software, the chips, or the firmware on the right side. It's a router. But there are something like 60% of all the routers in America, partly because Wirecutter loves them. 20%. Oh, it's only 20%? Sorry, Leo. I was just going to come behind you and be like, hey, man.

[01:57:40] Oh, I'm sorry. Most of the chips are going to be coming from somewhere overseas for the foreseeable future. So the FCC says a router will be considered foreign-made if any major stage of the process

[01:58:07] through which the device is made, including manufacturing, assembly, design, and development occurs outside the U.S. I don't know who would pass that. Even the Starlink router probably doesn't pass that. Yeah, there's no way they're getting all American-made parts in there for the major components. Yeah. I mean, and by the way, this isn't China. This is any country. This is Vietnam. This is Taiwan. This is any country.

[01:58:34] You just can't have 100% made in America anymore. Like, it's very difficult to, and even if you did, and like there are some clothing companies that do have like t-shirts or whatever that are 100% made in America, they cost more money. Right. Just because we don't have the manufacturing infrastructure anymore to do anything. Especially for high-tech stuff. Just like, not even high-tech stuff, just not high-tech stuff. We don't have that infrastructure anymore either. So it's sort of just...

[01:59:03] I did discover that we still apparently make almond roca candy in Tacoma, which I was excited about as a child who used to get excited about. More almond roca. That's a good thing. Seas is made in the U.S. too. I'll eat anything from Seas. What are all the ingredients sourced in the U.S.? Stop being... No, we need chocolate, man. How much coconut do we grow here in the U.S.? Oh yeah, you're right. Okay. Well, okay. Runzas are completely made in the United States.

[01:59:33] Runzas? Do you know what a runza is? I bet Sam knows what a runza is. Uh-uh. No? It's a Midwest's favorite weird food. Let me find a runza. We don't have them in Michigan. There's the cheese runza. I actually had a box of them shipped to our... No, but I think the packaging is probably shipped from China or someplace else. Like, it's very, very difficult to have anything.

[02:00:00] A lot of times when you see it made in America, they mean assembled in America. They don't mean made here, so... Well, wouldn't it be a good thing if more things were made in America? So, I'll have to check out... Look for runza when I go to Omaha in June for Operation Frodo. They're basically pierogies. But they're delicious. I love pierogies. Wait. That was a sandwich. That wasn't a pasta filled with potato, was it? It looked... Yeah, it looked more like a burger. The first... No. Well, they have burgers.

[02:00:30] So, the runza fast food store has burgers. But the official runza thing is fully enclosed in bread. And then it's a meat filling. It's like a... It's American version of the pierog. Well, every culture has... Every culture has a pierogies. Like... Yeah. Bread... Carb surrounded meat. Or filling. Or filling. Yeah. Every culture has a dumpling. That I will grant. Some variation of a dumpling. Yeah. Well, a pierogi is more of a dumpling. But a runza sounds more like an empanada, which would not be in the... It is more like...

[02:01:00] You're right. When you're right, you're right. Yeah. Or kind of a mini calzone. Kind of like a calzone. Could we call bao? Like a... Like a guy bao. Absolutely. Sure. This is... I'm like, this is really fun to think about. I'm getting really hungry. You know what? I'm going to do the last ad because we got to go to dinner. There. So you hang in there. We got a bunch of stupid, silly stories to wrap it up to cheer everybody up. How about that? Because we've had so many grim stories.

[02:01:26] You're watching This Week in Tech with the blurry Stacey Higginbotham, the crystal clear sampled, the sampled, and the now beautiful dulcet tones of Victoria's song. Once she turned her microphone around, it magically works. It's so good. Placement matters. Placement matters. Placement matters. Absolutely. Absolutely. Our show today brought to you by Rippling. And I love Rippling.

[02:01:53] One of the hardest things about running a startup is how easy it is to get distracted by what I would call low leverage tasks, right? You got to do them, but payroll, onboarding, hardware setup, you know, they all have to be done. But they pull you away from the work that actually moves your company forward. But good news, Rippling loves doing that stuff. That's what Rippling was built to solve.

[02:02:16] Rippling is a unified platform that lets startups run HR, payroll, IT, and finance in one system from day one. The Rippling startup stack replaces disconnected tools that don't sync with a fully connected platform. There's something nice about it, having it all together. You know, with other tools, the workflows like onboarding a new hire, setting up payroll, provisioning apps, shipping a laptop. It's just a nightmare. Take days.

[02:02:46] It'll eat up your focus when you need it the most with Rippling. It just all happens automatically in one place. That's probably why over 15,000 startups, including Cursor, Clay, and Sierra, trust Rippling to scale fast without adding additional ops and HR headcount. So founders can keep building. So if you or your startup want to move as quickly as you can and focus on what really matters, like your product and your customers, well, you need Rippling.

[02:03:14] Right now, venture-backed startups can get six months of Rippling startup stack for free. Head to rippling.com slash twit. Sign up today. That's r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g dot com slash twit to sign up for six months free today. Focus on what you are building and leave the rest to Rippling. Rippling.com slash twit. Thank you so much for supporting this week in tech. The Onion is taking over InfoWars after all.

[02:03:44] Yes. That is good news. This was, of course, InfoWars was Alex Jones' notorious operation, which was, you know, in the court decision that he lost, and we're glad that he lost to the Sandy Hook families. They're waiting for that $1.3 billion judgment. The court slowed it down a little bit. The Onion made it the highest offer.

[02:04:15] Alex Jones' people tried to buy InfoWars back, but The Onion now has it on, Onion announced on Monday. The fictional Bryce P. Tetraider, CEO of Global Tetrahedron. Says, at long last, InfoWars is ours, and they are just, they can't wait. They cannot wait to fill it.

[02:04:42] Fill your browser with InfoWars merch. With InfoWars. I think they even got the vitamins. I don't know, but I think they might have actually got the vitamins. They initially said they were going to melt them all down into one giant vitamin pill. But I don't know what their real plan is. But I'm just, I just, the world needs more of The Onion, and I'm just glad. I think that's completely kismet justice. It's always fun.

[02:05:11] It's always fun pulling The Onion, a print version of The Onion out of the mailbox every month. Do you get the print version? I got it for my husband, and he loves it. Oh, I have to subscribe. They started printing them again, huh? Yeah, once a month. They print them, and they have these hilarious ads, and we send it to my kid in college, and they share it around. I mean. Tim Heidecker apparently. I went to college at the time when they used to just show up on a stack on top of the trash can. Right. It's been neat.

[02:05:40] Tim Heidecker is the creative director of InfoWars. Apparently, the new creative director does an amazing Alex Jones impersonation. So expect some fun parody. That should be fun. Okay. If you're betting on Calci or a Polymarket on these new prediction markets, just stop. Just stop.

[02:06:06] Polymarket gamblers were betting on the temperature at Paris' De Gaulle Airport. And apparently, a guy, police in France are investigating suspicions that a guy may have used a hair dryer to tamper with the official weather readings to make thousands of dollars. Yeah, the temperature sensor is mounted on the perimeter of the airport where it was publicly accessible. Oh, my God.

[02:06:32] He walked up with a dice and blew hot air on it. On April 6th and April 15th, temperatures at the airport's weather sensor unexpectedly spiked late in the day, peaking significantly higher than the forecast. Apparently, somebody had bet on that and won. So this is hilarious. One trader made $21,000 betting that the maximum temperature would not be 18 degrees. It would be higher.

[02:07:00] There is a storied history of hacking sensors physically. There was a guy in California who screwed over his neighbor's vineyard because he was mad at his neighbor. So he actually took a moisture sensor that was for irrigation purposes and dumped water on it. So then he just kept watering the area around that sensor just to make sure the readings. So the guy is like, grapes did not get enough. Anyway, this is so common.

[02:07:28] And I will say, given my love of IoT, you have to have resiliency in your sensors. And there's actually some really cool tech that helps provide assurance on, is this information actually reasonable and accurate and that sort of thing? And we should probably be deploying that if we're going to start betting on weird stuff like this.

[02:07:48] If you've always wanted to own a 14-acre estate in beautiful Marin County, California, just down the road a piece, Mill Valley, if you happen to have some Anthropics stock, I think you can make it happen. That's Jason Snell's place? No, he does live there. This is hysterical. It's on Zillow. This is a venture capitalist who's, you know, Anthropics is not public yet.

[02:08:17] And he thinks he's going to score big selling his 14-acre estate, but he won't take cash for it. He wants $14 million worth of Anthropics stock. Figuring, well, that's going to pop when the Anthropics goes public. I've never heard of such a thing, but I mean, it's completely legal, right? You can use anything you want.

[02:08:43] Storm Duncan selling his home for Anthropics stock. He says, here are the benefits to an Anthropic equity holder. One, you keep the upside in shares. The current Anthropic equity holder will continue to retain 20% of the upside in exchange. There is a tax advantage. You can defer taxes on sale of shares or reduce your taxable basis. The guy's figured it all out. Dude, just be normal and sell your home like a normal person.

[02:09:13] Money! He says, this provides diversification into a solid real estate asset with significant appreciation potential. Okay. I don't know, man. The fundamental question here is if someone has that much Anthropics stock, like even though it's not public yet, is their home nicer than that one? I would think if they had that $14 million worth of that stock, they probably have a nice home already. You know what I'm going to think? Well, they might not.

[02:09:44] They might be Anthropic employees who just, you know. Yeah, like a junior person who does pay in the stock. But to have that much. Like he wants $14 million in the stock. Yeah, that's a lot. Did he want $14 million shares or did he just want? He said $14 million worth of shares. Oh, okay. So actually, that's also not real money. So that's just basically whatever their last venture equity thing. I mean, the venture equity things are ridiculously overvalued right now.

[02:10:11] By the way, for those of you who don't know, Stacey has a long history of beating me over the head with facts. And Brandroid has created or found a video of exactly that. Now, if you're listening, you won't hear anything. But she's figured out finally how to get the fact hammer through AI. Is there anything it can't do? I tell you.

[02:10:42] Spell strawberry properly. Although I think they fixed that. Yeah, they fixed that in the new model. But can it add two and two and not come up with five? Well, two and two could be five in some cases. If you want to buy a tractor and you don't want to buy John Deere's, you know, locked down computer stuff, there's a startup in Alberta that are selling no tech tractors for half price.

[02:11:13] They're old, though. Some of them are really old. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think they've been... They refurbished? They must be. But I don't think they've made tractors for, you know, 20, 30 years. Well, you know, it's a 12-valve Cummins engine. Yeah. It's a diesel that everybody knows how to fix. Rebuild it. You know, it's fixable. No software. That's the point. Don't need a company tech to come out to do it. Yep.

[02:11:42] There was one segment on farms.com. They got 400 inquiries in America saying, can I buy that 30-year-old tractor? I'll take it. I mean, the market for used cars before, like... I mean, I'm sure, Sam, you probably have facts related to this, but the cost of, like, older cars right now with less tech in them, they're... These are not cheap. $95,000 for the 150-horsepower model.

[02:12:12] If you want the 260-horsepower model, it's $146,000. But that's still about half what a John Deere. I was going to say, I haven't priced out a Combine lately, but... And maybe... But to what you're saying, Stacey, yeah, I mean, average transaction price of used cars now is up over $30,000. And, you know, it's very hard to find a used car, a decent used car for under $20,000 anymore.

[02:12:39] Stacey, I'm sorry your kid is off to college, because this, I think they would have loved this. It's a tin can phone. $100 landline for kids that has gone viral. Kids love it, because what they do, they get on the line. It uses Wi-Fi, by the way, obviously. Okay, I was going to say, what do you plug it into? Nobody has landlines. It doesn't still work when your power goes out.

[02:13:05] No, it's a Wi-Fi phone, $10 a month to ring and receive calls from parent-approved external numbers. But people like it. In this article from Bloomberg, they quote a parent who said, It's not uncommon when my kid comes home for the phone to start ringing within minutes. There's real excitement around it we've not seen with many other additions within the home. And the kid will spend hours just talking on the phone, like people used to do in the old days.

[02:13:34] I remember falling asleep with my friends. This is a Seattle company, by the way. Is it? Oh, you know about it. I love it. It's got a cord you can twirl. It's got a cord you can twirl. I think they should offer really long extension cords you can go down the hall. Wasn't there like a TikTok where someone was describing basically a phone that lived in your house? Yeah, there was. And someone was like, it's a landmine. Yeah.

[02:14:03] I felt incredibly old. You can't take it out of your house. My kid is 30 years old now. And I encountered one of those old rotary dial phones for the first time at about the age of 10. And so this would have been, you know, 2005 or so. I couldn't make hide your hair out of trying to figure out how to make a call with it. You put your finger in the hole? It made no sense to it at all. And then you move it in a circle? Yeah. What?

[02:14:32] The Marvelous Miss Maisel had a joke about the rotary dial. It was like, oh, your number is all nines. And I was like, oh, that is well done. Yes, because that was a bad number because it had to go all the way around. In fact, area codes were assigned to major metros like 212 for New York with low numbers. They got the good ones. And then over here in Modesto, they got the ones with the eights and the nines in it. Talk about redlining.

[02:15:04] Prego is offering now a special spaghetti pasta sauce recorder deal for 20 bucks. It's not as bad as it sounds. Just like one of your little AI recorders? Yeah. Record your dinner conversations? Yeah, it comes with Prego sauce, some spaghetti, and a little puck-sized recorder you could put on the table. I know this sounds bad, but they call it the connection keeper.

[02:15:31] You press a button, it starts recording the family conversation. But the conversation then goes to StoryCorps, which is a nonprofit, which is focused on preserving the stories of Americans at the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center. That's actually kind of cool. StoryCorps is an interesting concept. Yes. Your family conversation is part of the cultural milieu. Does any family still sit down and eat all together for dinner,

[02:16:01] except for Thanksgiving and holidays and stuff, Passover? I like the concept, but also my family conversations are not worth recording. We're all looking at the phone now, but there's nobody talking. Also, it's just like connections. Well, I think the idea is, you know, if it's StoryCorps, you know, maybe they give you some things, some topics to bring up, you know. Yes, there are cards. Yeah. It's called the great questions card deck.

[02:16:28] To stimulate the conversation, you know, to generate an oral history. I think it's a really neat idea. This will go on sale tomorrow, Monday, at the Prego website. You know, when I first heard it, I thought this is... Go to just record it on your phone. Yeah, I know. You could just put the phone in the middle. I'm just throwing that up. But this gets sent. Your recordings are encrypted and stored safely with no cloud storage in the StoryCorps portal via USB-C. And then you don't even have to share them and say, unless you specifically say share them, or they stay private.

[02:16:58] Okay, that's less creepy. I think it's kind of neat. It gives you some security in case you have an uncle who says something real untoward. And you want to keep that in the family. As he is wont to do. And they have a special offer just in time for Mother's Day, they say. Oh, goodness. Isn't that cute? I don't... You know, I thought it was really creepy at first. And then I thought, eh. How much is it? 20 bucks. Oh. Nothing.

[02:17:27] That includes the sauce and the quarter? Spaghetti and the sauce. Not the best sauce ever. I admit. But why isn't the lid the recorder? I thought the lid was the recorder. I really did. I thought this is going to be... The lid is going to be the recorder. Wouldn't that be great? But I guess you can't really get all that in all. That's a cute idea. I like the idea. Yep. You want a better gift for Mom for Mother's Day? Yes. Many.

[02:17:55] If you're tech-focused, Ember coffee mug. God, my mom still loves that. You love your Ember. She loves her Ember. My mom loves her Ember. I had an Ember. This is the one that has a little element. It's not... The element doesn't heat it up. It's just got power. It's induction, I guess. That's USB. You put the mug on it. And then the mug has an induction coil that heats up. And then you take it off and the mug and the coffee stays hot. Yeah. She loves it? Kind of like our kettle. Loves it.

[02:18:25] Yeah. I just... Do people walk around with a cup of coffee these days? I mean, don't you just drink it up before... She sits at her desk or by her... She's drinking tea. On her couch and drinking her... The worst of tea. She will tell me she drinks coffee, tea, her hot toddies in the winter. Oh, it's good for hot toddies. So delightful for her. Our 22-year-old son lives downstairs, has one. He loves his Ember. See? He found my old Ember.

[02:18:53] Liked it so much, he took it and used it until it burned out. And he bought another one. Yeah. I had to buy a new one for my mom. I think it's a good Mother's Day gift. I agree with you. I'm just throwing it out there. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have completed our assigned tasks. And it is only 437 in Stacey's world. So we're going to get her out of here in plenty of time. Thank you, Stacey Higginbotham. What are you working on these days?

[02:19:21] Uh, secure routers. No, really? Really, really. I have. Awesome. I was like working on that. I'm sending out my annual survey for smart home companies that have security research and security researchers and vulnerability disclosure things. Oh, and here's my biggest deal. If you're in California, New York, or Massachusetts, your state has introduced our legislation

[02:19:49] requiring companies that make smart home devices, any connected devices, including routers, to tell you when those become end of life, when they plan to stop supporting them. Oh, that's great. So if you want. Is that upfront before you buy it? It's upfront when you buy it. Okay. Yeah. And six months before they declare it end of life. And then once again, when they have declared it end of life. That should be a law. It should be a law. Yeah. And we're trying. I'm trying so hard, you guys.

[02:20:17] But yeah, if you want to call your legislator and you're in those states, or if you're not in those states and you would like to see something like this, you could call and be like, hey, you should totally introduce this. It's really important. And if you're in the state of California, you should know that they have now expanded their opt out for data broker program to more than 500 data brokers. At first I thought this is silly. It had 85 data brokers, but it has been expanded at privacy.ca.gov.

[02:20:43] They call it drop, delete request and opt out platform that fine. I think every state should do this. I don't know if there are other states doing it, but finally can do this in California. You do have to verify you're a Californian resident. It won't start till August. But at that point, data brokers, I don't know why they gave them 90 days to delete my data. That seems like a little generous. Quick sell it. It'd be more like 90 minutes. It should be right now.

[02:21:14] Delete it right now. What? 90 days. Well, it's going to take a while. We got to go into the, you know, the file cabinet. From the back, you know? Yeah. So old. Stacy, thank you for the work you do. I really appreciate it. You're looking out for all of us. And let's make a date for the book club. I think we have one. Do we have one? Uh, I think it's. Anthony. Come back to me and I'll tell you. Anthony.

[02:21:41] Well, actually, I, uh, probably have it here in our, if you're not a member of the club, you should join the club. Let me just see if there's a book club. We've got the photo time. We've got Google IO. Micah's crafting corner. We've got the jet set with Johnny jet. We've got WWDC. Yeah. We haven't put it in a calendar. Anthony just sent me an email saying he totally forgot until he saw me on the stream. Oh, okay. Okay. We're going to do it. It looks like the 14th or the 15th or June 4th and 5th. Okay. Yes. Let's do it.

[02:22:10] Stacy's book club. And the book is, do you remember what the book is? A Psalm for the Wild Bill. It's a cozy futuristic movie book. And it's short enough that you could read it. You have plenty of time. No excuses. Stacy's book club. One of the many benefits of being in our club. 10 bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows and lots of great content like that. Mike is crafting corner, our AI user group, which I think I want to call leap. Now the league of extraordinary AI practitioners. I'm workshopping it.

[02:22:40] I like the name leap. Anyway, if you're not a member of the club, twit. TV slash club to it. We would very much like to have you. Sam a bull. Sam it. He's a member of the club. Wheel bearings is his podcast at wheel bearings dot media with Robbie and Nicole, who I love. Actually, it's one of three. I'm doing now. Oh, what else are you doing? You got the telemetry transportation daily, which is a two minute just quick hit on something most days.

[02:23:09] And then we just launched this week a new podcast or green cars dot com where my friend Craig Cole and I are interviewing interesting people in the mobility space. And so the first episode went up this this past Thursday. We talked with Vanessa Bhutani, who is the global head of sustainability for Volvo.

[02:23:36] We've got other ones coming up with Aaron Keating from Cox tomorrow. We're interviewing Ryan Decker, the head of brand and strategy for Scout Motors. We've got Kurt Kelty, the head of batteries and electric propulsion from General Motors. We got a couple of interviews coming up with people from FIA to talk about motorsports and sustainability and also their their road car mobility and sustainability and tourism.

[02:24:05] So lots of interesting stuff coming up. You can find it. Look for the green cars podcast. Yeah, that's the old header. They stopped in 2024, but they're bringing it back, boys and girls. And so you can find it wherever audio podcasts can be found or there's also a video version that's on YouTube. Nice. I'm as you know, Stacey and I both fans of the green cars. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Yeah. Good. I will be listening.

[02:24:34] And you can also find the research work that we do at telemetry at telemetryagency.com, including some free white papers that have been published recently there. So just check it out if you need any transportation related market research. Thank you, Sam. My pleasure. And Victoria Song, thank you so much for joining us. Senior reviewer at The Verge. What are you working on right now?

[02:25:01] My newsletter optimizer, as always, I put out something every Friday at 10 a.m. And also I am deeply researching peptides at this point in time. Oh, you really are. You weren't joking. I truly am not joking about. Are you taking them all? No. Are you ejecting your Verge colleagues with it? No. No. I take Ozempic under a doctor's supervision by prescription to my doctor because I'm a type 2 diabetic.

[02:25:30] And he said, oh yeah, we can prescribe this. That's fine. That is a legal peptide. It has worked so well. Legal peptide. A1C is normal. That is a legal peptide. You did not procure it off of a gray market with dubious sourcing. Well, and then I was talking to my hairdresser. And she said, yeah, there's a guy on the corner. And she says, I'm using something called, I can't remember the name. And I thought, yeah, I don't.

[02:25:57] Was it GHKCU or TB500? Or was it CJC 1295? It all sounds like Star Wars droids names. There's something called the Wolverine stack. It's kind of ironic that while we're banning Chinese routers, the head of the FDA is recommending Chinese peptides.

[02:26:25] So, you know, they're better than vaccines. We don't have to get J-Noise to think about peptides. We really don't. We don't know what's in those things. They're just short amino acid chains. That's all a peptide is. And some of them are good. Some of them are fine. Some of them are inactive. Just don't get the ones off of TikTok. That's all I ask. Yes. Because we don't know what's in those. Don't know what's in those. Don't. And I love your piece, which you just published.

[02:26:53] I don't think Gwyneth Paltrow knows what a peptide is. I really don't know if she, like, I know she's heard of them. And I know she's really into injectables. Oh, she is? Oh, dear. She's a... And IV drips. Yeah. There's a clip in there where she's just like, I love IV drips. And it's sort of just like, okay. But, you know, you also sell this moisturizer called the Youth Boost NAD Plus Peptide Rich Cream,

[02:27:21] which would make you think there's NAD Plus and it's full of rich peptides, except NAD Plus is not a peptide. It is a coenzyme. And there's only one peptide in there. And it's the last ingredient in her moisturizer. And usually ingredients are listed by concentration. So it's not very rich in peptides. So that's why I was like, okay. No, no. You misunderstood. She's getting rich. It's not the peptides that are rich. There we go.

[02:27:51] There's a big difference. So you had some problems with the punctuation in that headline. Peptide. I'm rich. Cream. It's delicious. Just don't eat it. That's hysterical. That's hysterical. Anyway, I look forward to reading that. And, of course, subscribing to your lovely newsletter, which everyone else should as well, because you are optimum. You have been. Hi, Benito. Hi. Visit from Benito there.

[02:28:21] Say hi, Benito. Hi, Benito. Hi, Benito. You punched the wrong button. The optimizer. I will subscribe. You know, I get so many newsletters. I just now had my AI go through my newsletter pile, because I do put everything in a folder and surface stuff I'd be interested in. And actually, it's amazing. And it's done very well. So now I don't mind subscribing to more newsletters, because I can finally find something in there.

[02:28:51] Well, we have fun and optimizer. Usually it's my weekly existential crisis as I research things. You're wonderful. I love your existential crisis. This is good stuff. You are debunking a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked your story on the FDA and rather changing the wellness industry, pushing to change

[02:29:16] some of the definitions or regulations around, you know, what's a medical device and what's a wellness device. And I was like, dang. We should meet you now, because we're not getting good recommendations from the CDC anymore, the FDA anymore. And we don't know who we can trust. Every week, RFK says something, and I just basically scream into a pillow. I know. Because it's just sort of like... It's nuts. That's how I feel about Brendan Carr. He doesn't? VIP club. He doesn't.

[02:29:46] Bernie Sanders said, do you believe in germ theory? Do you believe in germ theory? No, no, I don't believe in germs. What? Wait a minute. What? I don't... You're the head... I mean, he drinks raw milk. You're the head of health in human service. And you don't believe in germ theory? What? He drinks raw milk. That's evidence. That'll tell you something. Yeah. And he has a little... And he's of the age where I feel like that could be really harmful if it goes bad. So maybe...

[02:30:15] He already had a brain worm that ate part of his brain. So there's an explanation. I'm sure he picked that up on some very legitimate real theory. He says he believes in miasma theory, which is... First of all, he doesn't believe in miasma theory. He thinks he believes in miasma theory. That's the theory that bad air makes you sick, like from swamps. That's what happens when my dog farts at night. That's what happens. That's miasma. Yes. That will make you sick. But let me tell you, raw meat ferments.

[02:30:44] Thank you, Victoria. So wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Stacey. Thanks to all of you for watching. We appreciate it. We do twit every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific. That's 5 to 8 Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. The live streams are up on every platform. If you're in the club, you could watch in the Discord, of course. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. All of them. And we chat with you in all of them, too, which is nice.

[02:31:13] After the fact, on-demand versions of the show are available on our website. There's audio and video. Of course, the video is on YouTube as well. We have a dedicated channel for that. But the best way probably is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically. You don't have to think about it. And you can enjoy it at your leisure. Thanks to our producer, Benito Gonzalez. Thanks to Kevin King, our editor. Thanks to you for being here. And we will see you next time.

[02:31:40] And as I have said now, we are now officially 21 years old. We turned 21 on April 17th. So as I have said for the last 21 years, thank you for being here. We'll see you next time. And another twit is in the can. Bye-bye. This is not the future we were promised.

[02:32:09] Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.