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

11:57Jason Howell:I think he's right on that. There might be a comment about the internet, but go on. Yeah.

12:00Ant Pruitt:Yeah. And everybody and their brother is saying, look, there's somewhat of a risk with this because a prompt injection, and if you give this thing too many powers, like I'm thinking of giving mine a credit card. Don't do it. Don't do it. No, I'm going to give it a credit card, but I'm going to put a limit on it, a daily limit on it,

12:25Jason Howell:just to see what happens. I mean, to me, the real question is, I mean, people are having fun with it. It's interesting. But how useful is it? Like, you know, 2024 was supposed to be the year of the AI age, 2025 was supposed to be the year of the AIHM. They finally have a memory, which kind of gets in the way of a personal assistant that can't remember you, your likes and dislikes. But I guess I'm just dubious. I don't doubt that at some point in the future, three years, five years, whatever, these things will be amazing. But until then, I just find them frustrating. And so I am curious. I'm scared of using ClaudeBod, OpenClaw, because of the security reasons.

13:04Jason Howell:But with that said, I am hearing for the first time that people are finding it useful. I mean, it's fun they could call you. It's interesting that in the middle of the night while you're sleeping, it's in quotes working on your behalf. But what is it doing? It's interesting, but is it useful yet? I'm dubious.

13:23Ant Pruitt:Well, one of the reasons I was hesitant to set it up besides the security model is I was having a hard time thinking of what I could do. I don't need a personal assistant. But then I thought, you know, one of the things that really is a struggle is planning meals. So, and now this is the interesting thing about Claude Bot, OpenClaw. I got to get open. This had three names. One of the most interesting things about OpenClaw is that it does have a memory of sorts. And this has always been the problem with Claude Code and in general is that they don't have a memory. So you think you've been talking to them and filling them in on your personal life and then next day they have no idea.

14:03Ant Pruitt:But one of the things Peter Steinberger did that I think is maybe the most interesting thing he did with Open Claw is gave it a memory. It does, in fact, save a document that it rereads. And so it does have a memory of sorts. And so I'm going to play with this and I'm going to say, look, we didn't like that. We did like this. Lisa doesn't, my wife doesn't like this, but she likes that. And see how good it can get.

14:25Jason Howell:now the next step is to have it order the groceries no no no i will no because no no it's

14:34Ant Pruitt:my look i'm yeah i'm not recommending anyone else do this but it's kind of isn't it somebody's got

14:40Megan Morrone:to to just see well like i mean i i test a lot of stuff for for my job that's part of being a reviewer and i did test a bunch of ai browsers that claim to have agentic capabilities uh i i didn't give it my actual credit card and I didn't let it actually buy anything on my behalf. But one of the things that I found just really difficult, even if there was like some sort of type of memory, it regression to the me and these AI don't taste like there's no actual like taste there.

15:16Ant Pruitt:That's no, but they know, but they know all these other people's tastes, right?

15:23Megan Morrone:The perfect, the New Balance. I wanted a pair of New Balance shoes. I needed it to, one, fit my eight and a half size feet, which are wide, and I have flat feet. I needed to be able to handle 15 ,000 to 20 ,000 step days with aplomb. I needed it to be a certain colorway. I needed it to be a certain fashion because of my existing wardrobe. And, you know, just plant, it never found the right freaking model i would say i want it for walking i don't want it for running and to be like that's great here's a running model that would be great for you it's like i told you i don't want a running model and then it just was not you know i and it ended up kind of um and i gave it a price parameter as well and it ended up uh recommending this one pair which i would then gave to my mother-in-law and was like, this is what I would like for Christmas.

16:18Megan Morrone:And it ended up not being what I needed. And it was close, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't exactly what I needed. I still like it. I'll use it because I don't believe in wasting stuff. And it's, it's a perfectly great pair of new balances, but it wasn't, it wasn't up to the task of handling 15 ,000 to 20 ,000. And step day at CES, which was disappointing. But, you know, it was like one of those things where I went, ah, here's a really big limitation of AI, even if it does have memory. And, you know, I have a, like, very eclectic reading tastes. It's really hard to get good book recommendations.

16:53Megan Morrone:So I've just been, you know, training ChatGPT to learn what books I like and recommend me, you know, kind of off the beaten trail sort of books that'll keep me engaged and whatnot. And it has sucked so hard at giving me something because it's like, oh, you like this, this, this, this, and this, this is the type of reader you are. And I'm like, yes, I don't need you to write 4 ,000 words with each prompt, but here you go. And every book that it's really recommended me has been one that I've read already. And I'm just like, oh, I read that already. And it's like, ah, of course you have. That's how well I know your taste.

17:30Megan Morrone:And it's like, but you can't recommend something new to me. So what good are you in this sense? You know, the agent part of it is very unskeptical about it.

17:42Moltbook:That is the ultimate question. We're all asking about all this AI stuff. Like, what good are you to me? What problems are you solving? And I think for the past few years, most of these things have not been able to do that. It's very cool to see like these agents come up because the people who like have spent years tinkering with Linux now have like another thing to tinker with and like you know create workflows and stuff i'm looking at you leo i'm looking right at you because i've seen you playing with linux since the late 90s okay

18:08Ant Pruitt:but so i get it i get that there is a certain tinkering element it's great it's so cool it's

18:14Moltbook:like it's like you're building like a cool little robot and you know i understand that i am so happy we're moving beyond the sort of like hey look at this generative ai you know uh image creation thing or video creation thing because what the hell do you do with that at ces i saw tvs that let you generatively create wallpapers for your tv and i'm like okay great who cares we're burning down forests for this for this so the idea that things can help you with some basic tasks that's kind of cool i think we're all gonna have to think about our relationships with these agents or whatever and the thing i've kind of come down to is like you got to treat them like minions right like you're a lord and minion fetch me fetch me this information i bid you not speak don't speak

18:58Megan Morrone:to me minion stop applying i feel i don't know if i'm too like boo or too nice but i don't like i know that's how i have to speak to the ai but i actually don't like oh i always say please

19:10Jason Howell:you're gonna get killed on club on wait wait wait wait the call book no wait right that's the kind of stuff sorry sorry three names in two weeks that's too many that's worse than Google yeah I you know to me it's all about the corporations that are hyping this I mean these technologies are going as we were talking earlier at a really really fast pace and they're getting better we disagree a little bit I think LLMs are amazing for like proofreading my work and hey this paragraph isn't working this section isn't working you know and so like i'm finding use from it but like you know you know open ai and other big companies like this is the year of the age and like no this kind of stuff is complicated there's memory there's security issues there's you know making all these pieces work together like i'm reminded like so i i'm old enough i covered the dot com uh era and so you know this is 1997 let's say you know if it started 95 and it's just like you know i think it was like the year 2000 you You were still putting a check in the mail to buy your eBay item because we didn't trust credit cards at that point.

20:19Jason Howell:And so that's another thing that's going to get in the way is come up in this conversation. Am I going to give it my credit card? You know, kind of thing. So this stuff for a variety of reasons, for technical reasons, but probably mostly because of we're human beings and we don't like change. We're mistrustful, whatever. But the companies keep on saying, it's coming, it's coming, it's going to be great. It's like, yeah, it will be, just not yet.

20:39Ant Pruitt:If you, would you stipulate, Gary, and you've been watching this a long time, so you have some sense of the progress we've made, that the open weight models, the deep seeks of the world, the Quens, QNs, the Kimis and so forth, Mistral, are maybe six months, let's be really generous and say a year behind these big tech closed weight models.

21:04Jason Howell:Would you, does that seem fair? yeah i i would have said that several months so yeah it's not a long it's not long so what's in a

21:12Ant Pruitt:year i can do what i'm doing with an very expensive admittedly uh open ai i'm sorry anthropic model i'm paying for the max uh which is 250 bucks a month if i can do that for free because i have a machine that's yes you know designed to do that if i can do that for free in six months i'm gonna

21:32Jason Howell:be pretty happy well but you're not taking account that the you know the closed models are going to get six months they're going to be better you know and you know like you just said november 24th whatever date you just said like you know that was a big step change it was and all and there'll

21:47Ant Pruitt:be more big step remember when uh chat gpt35 came out that was an eye-opener we went crazy right november 30th 2022 you actually literally see and isn't that interesting yeah i think these are these are flags being planted and we are making progress uh in and in surprise and do now that's the next step is next question is is it a surprising way is it a natural step or is it exponential or is it a paradigm shift it feels to me very unpredictable and very rapid i i you know

22:23Jason Howell:again having lived through.com where oh my god it's a fire hose things are coming so fast right That period does not compare to this period with the speed of change and all.

22:37Ant Pruitt:It's remarkable.

22:39Jason Howell:And, you know, something I kind of thought, again, using.com as the comp, that the frenzy would slow down, the funding frenzy. But, you know, I just, what was it, humans ampersand, humans and kind of thing. It's a few months old and it has a valuation of like$4 billion. That seemed very 2023, but it keeps on going that these basically labs that are kind of long-term projects that don't have a product and clearly no map to make money kind of thing, it's still going on. And so that means that we're still going to see a lot of acceleration because there's billions of dollars being thrown by the venture capitalists at this you know so i think we are

23:28Moltbook:seeing some cooling like i've talked to folks some of the big pc makers honestly from people at microsoft too who a couple years ago were like big gung-ho like yes we're gonna put copilots and everything and now they're like maybe we release too many copilots maybe people aren't using these things because they're de-emphasizing certain aspects of ai and now they're talking about like AI and everything versus like before it was like, oh, you're going to get a copilot plus PC with an MPU and all that stuff. The vision of how they're thinking about this has changed. But yeah, Victoria, go ahead.

23:58Megan Morrone:No, I just, we've kind of subjected one of my coworkers, Antonio DiBenedetto, to just constantly testing Microsoft's claims about the various copilot things. And I've watched Antonio, who is a sweet, sweet man. Just like one of the kindest men I've ever had the pleasure of working with lose his mind every single time he gets one of these assignments and is just like

24:24Ant Pruitt:no this is not it can't do the thing it can't do the things in the ads no i think i mean we're going to talk about microsoft's earnings and microsoft's stock price uh but i think microsoft's fallen way behind in this but the counter example here is google i mean

24:42Jason Howell:google is just aggressively putting you know gemini and ai and everything right it just it's it's hitting gmail you know right just turn that on yeah so the way i understand it like for freebie cheapskates like me i'm not getting it yet but if you pay i pay for uh gemini not the highest level

25:04Ant Pruitt:uh i think it's 20 bucks a month and yeah they asked me oh do you want to connect to your gmail

25:10Megan Morrone:to your calendar to your google drive i said yeah would you like a credit card i appreciate how much of a vanguard you are but like i think somebody's got it

25:21Ant Pruitt:i think i'm gonna get benefit that you're gonna miss out on i you you may not have got the trainers that you wanted but i think i'm gonna get benefit i already have i mean i completely speaking of linux with internet completely configured my new thinkpad uh using claude I, the whole thing, I just, I said, Hey, this button's not working. I said, Oh yeah, do this. I'm going to download this. Now, how is it? Oh yeah, it's working. Thank you. And it, the whole thing configured that way. And then I thought, well, that's pretty good. Can I write some software? And then I wrote some, and it's, and it's been, and I think there's one thing it's really important to do is to push the boundaries of your experience with these AIs.

26:00Ant Pruitt:Cause you're right, Victoria, some of this stuff isn't going to be very satisfying, but then other stuff might be.

26:06Megan Morrone:Yeah, it's very, I think what you're touching on is a thing that I've been thinking about a lot while testing various AI claims or various AI products is wisdom and discernment. These are some things that I think that Silicon Valley and big tech is not really, I'm sure they're thinking about it, but I have thought a lot about what it means to have something be convenient versus the value of inconvenience. Because when everything is convenient, it becomes cheap. It becomes sloppified in a certain way. Like the value of art is that it requires inconvenience to create, right? When you think about a task like buying a pair of shoes, which is, you know, just top of mind, there is a certain pride that you get when you've put hours and inconvenience into your own research, into going out into trying a new thing you know i agree with you that meal planning is a complete chore i hate doing it sometimes i could use a little help but there's a certain level of satisfaction and learning a new skill which is inconvenient which is cooking my meal and having

27:12Ant Pruitt:it taste good i'm gonna still cook it i'm just gonna have it help me i know but there's also

27:17Megan Morrone:like i think there's a level of satisfaction that comes with no i agree with you some they call it

27:22Ant Pruitt:the ikea effect people like their ikea furniture more because it was such a pain in the ass to put

27:27Megan Morrone:together yeah but i feel like there's just like and maybe i'm reading too much into it but like these uh tech companies are like ai will make your life so convenient and they just focus so hard on the convenience narrative that they forget that like it's very human to find value and joy inconvenience and what inconvenience that you put value and um kind of a certain degree of pride into will vary from person to person. Someone's just going to be like, yes, AI, do all my groceries for me. I have no value in finding the perfect olive oil. That's some Ina Garten level shit that I can't handle. Like, you know, it's just going to be different from person to person.

28:08Megan Morrone:But I think there's just kind of been no, or not as much talk about what inconveniences we should keep. I really like that, Victoria.

28:18Ant Pruitt:That's actually very deep. Yeah, I've never heard that. I like it too. Excellent.

28:24Megan Morrone:Thank you, guys. It's been an idea I've been workshopping in my work.

28:27Ant Pruitt:No, I really think it's true. It took me 70 years to learn it, but the best things in life are hard to come by. And learning a language, it's painful until you learn it, and then it's dissatisfying. I think you're very smart.

28:46Leo Laporte:The thing I've always been saying is craft. The thing that AI eliminates is craft. people don't learn how to craft anything anymore yeah yeah that's totally it some people will still

28:56Ant Pruitt:do that i'm not going to stop coding on my own i love because i love coding but you but the good news is you don't have to know how to code now to write a program and you can write a custom tool that does just scratches your specific very specific itch without knowing how to code is

29:11Moltbook:pretty empowering it's kind of i do i wonder about the erasure of knowledge and to what you're saying victoria like yeah that's that's something since we have been chasing like the the engagement at all costs thing within the tech world things have gotten worse honestly and you can point to that chase in the web 2.0 era and social networks like for a reason why things have gotten so bad and why facebook will deploy features even if it endangers teenagers or makes life harder for people uh i'm thinking back to like uh there's that vonnegut story you know that they talk about going out to buy an envelope and his wife is like you should just buy a ton of them keep them at home no he wants to go out and the more what the line is the moral of the story is we're here on earth to fart around and of course the computers will do us out of that and what the computer people don't realize where they don't care is we're dancing animals you know we love to move around and it's not like we're not supposed to dance at all anymore so yeah i hear you victoria i believe that's player piano right that's not player piano it could be it could be i'm just like i remember it too we were just talking about on the engagement podcast but vonnegut man love the man he's always had like this these great ideas he's always been so one of the first things

30:25Jason Howell:i did when i uh so it was late 2022 when i jumped on ai as a as a topic i reread player piano i'd read it in college yeah it's 1952 if i have it right it is i mean we were talking about her being you know prophetic and really like wow this is kind of accurate what they predict in 1952 he came out rolled out an interesting scenario this idea that we're not going to do art we're just you know there's going to be a small group of elites who are running the thing you know running the ai and the rest of us was it rex and reeks or something has a very clever phrase where you know we're we have these make you know make jobs kind of kind of it was a very interesting thing.

31:07Jason Howell:He really was prophetic. But just to defend Leo, I loved your construct, Victoria, but to me, the construct you were getting at, Leo, is sort of one I've been wrestling with for a long time, like convenience versus, I don't know, privacy, safety. I feel like I don't have privacy, but I put something down in email or whatever, a search. And so I too invite these spots. You want to read my email? Go ahead. You want to like, you know, I give it no, no, seriously, I give it access to everything. Cause like long ago, I realized if I don't want this thing to blow back at me, you know, don't write it down, say it in a conversation, you know, whatever.

31:49Jason Howell:And so like, I don't know, I definitely fall with you, Leo, on the convenience side of things. I'm dubious that, you know, an AI agent is going to give me anything productive. Victoria, yours is your new balance. For me, it's like I travel for work and my holy grail is like, instead of going to Expedia, hotel by hotel, back forth, back forth, I want one with its, let's say, San Francisco. It's close enough to walk for bar, but it's not crazy expensive to park a car because I'm in San Francisco and I'm in the Valley. And so I keep on going to these bots, these AI agents, like, help me do that really quickly.

32:25Jason Howell:It never works. I spend more time, you know, wasting with them. And then I go to whatever Expedia and, you know, kind of go find my own place, you know, kind of thing. And so anyway, I do think it's something we all have to decide. Like, do we want to invite, you know, co-pilot Microsoft Gemini at Google? Do we want to invite these things to kind of read our corpus? Because like, you know, something I'm looking for that email and I don't want to waste 30 minutes finding it. I could just ask Gemini, hey, I asked for a plumber three years, four years ago. What was the guy's name and phone number kind of thing?

32:59Ant Pruitt:Well, that's the thing. I'm in a privileged position. I wouldn't expect everybody to do this. I got nothing to lose.

33:05Megan Morrone:Well, no, it's very relatable because, you know, I have people ask me all the time because I do a lot of fitness and wearable tech testing, like what the most private fitness trackers are. And I'm like, none of them. You just have to accept. That's how it works. I have so much of my data out there. I'm just like, it doesn't matter to me because it's all out there already. But I do think that like moving from one old paradigm to the new one is just, you know, how comfortable are you living a public life? And what we mean by public is like the only truly private space is inside of your head, I think, as we move forward in modernity.

33:41Megan Morrone:But it's sort of like going back to this idea of discernment and wisdom. And I think something that's lacking right now, partly because of what big tech is pushing on us is as having this conversation as to like, what is a wise way to use AI? What is the right balance of convenience versus inconvenience? And how do we build like a privacy structure that makes sense? There's a mode in many of these agents called YOLO, which is just give it

34:10Ant Pruitt:everything. And you know, you only live once, just see what happens. And I'm in the YOLO camp right now because I have less to risk and I'll do it so that you guys don't have to. How about that there is one last story before we move on which is that uh for 404 media uh moltbook exploded before anyone thought to check whether the database was properly secured anyone i hope it's been fixed by now could take control of any ai agent on the site because the database was so improper but who made that mistake probably a human setting it up anyway i hope that's been fixed we're going to take a break when we come back there is there's i'm sorry there's more ai news and yes there's elon musk news and even worse there's earning reports but we're going to try to make it fun and you know what you couldn't do it better with this you couldn't do have more fun than with this panel uh so glad to have davindra hardwar my buddy here and victoria's song and and it's always a pleasure to have gary rivlin on the show ai valley is his book good reading really a good history of of how we got to where we are uh today uh and uh it's been a it's been a long strange trip to uh to coin a phrase our show today brought to you by monarch oh i use this i do use this you know did you make a financial resolution at the beginning of the new year many people do it's when people start thinking about their finances maybe this is the year you decide to pay off all that credit card debt or student loans or maybe start saving for major milestones buying a home having a kid retiring wouldn't it be nice to have a tool that helps you proactively achieve that goal set yourself up for financial success this year monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier it brings your entire financial life budgeting accounts investments net worth and future planning together in one dashboard on your phone or on your laptop.

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37:45Ant Pruitt:There are real user results too. I could tell you my own story, but this is what Monarch users reported in a 2025 survey. On average, Monarch helped users save over$200 a month. After joining, 80 % of members feel more in control of their finances with Monarch. I'd agree with that, absolutely. Eight out of 10 members say Monarch gives them a clearer picture of where their money's going. Set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use the code TWIT at Monarch.com for half off your first year. that's 50 off your first year at monarch.com with code twit m-o-n-a-r-c-h monarch.com and don't forget the offer code is twit thank you monarch a couple of you know miscellaneous ai stories uh the anthropic has uh complained to the pentagon about military use of claude in fact that's kind of put that relationship on hold this is a an early test according to reuters of whether silicon valley in washington's good graces after years of tensions they write can sway how military and intelligence personnel deploy increasingly powerful battlefield ai um the u.s department defense and anthropic we're discussing a 200 million dollar contract it's at a standstill reuters says according to six people familiar with the matter matter because anthropic says we don't want it you to be used this in combat which i think is reasonable it's interesting

39:29Megan Morrone:is reasonable like just back to my whole concept of inconvenience war should be inconvenient

39:33Ant Pruitt:i don't think we should yes very good point it shouldn't be easy to kill somebody should it it

39:40Jason Howell:be really hard well and he's been a critic of trump and you know i mean i'm not he's probably

39:46Ant Pruitt:the only ai guy we learned that greg brockman has given 25 million dollars to trump yeah uh i mean sam altman's been bowing scraping uh they all have uh so good for a mo die and now he's maybe not

40:01Jason Howell:going to get the deal you know we ended the last episode um portion saying like you know the conversation we're not having you know to me this is another one of those conversations we're not having ai is here we need to deal with it should we're should how should we be using it for warfare uh should we be using it for surveillance yeah but what about this what about this

40:25Ant Pruitt:wouldn't it be great if instead of putting humans on the battle line no both adversaries put machines on the battle line and machines killed machines inconvenience you know just that is too easy but then nobody would die you could fight a war without humans

40:39Megan Morrone:involved but then war has no meaning like i don't want people to die but like the thing about war is that we understand how terrible it is because people die and so if you put machines on the battlefield then suddenly it doesn't matter anymore because whose life is really being

40:55Ant Pruitt:lost in that sense so it's they say chess was invented to reduce combat but it didn't work did

41:00Megan Morrone:it no but you know like if we're using ai and warfare to make sure that nobody's breaking the geneva convention or doing horrible things well then i think that might be a positive use case for it but if we are like war is a thing that i think should be as convenient inconvenient as possible because war should never be convenient well good news you you're you win on that one

41:26Jason Howell:Google talking about bowing to our president, Google in 2018, 2019 vowed, they put in writing on their website that we will never allow our AI to be used for surveillance or warfare. That was because their engineers protested, right? Yeah, right. Yes, yes, yes, yes. There was a walkout around Project Maven, Raven, something? Maven, yeah. maven um and so um uh you know in 20 the start of 2025 they wiped that out so now in fact you can use google ai for warfare or or surveillance yeah i respect a moda he says in his blog this week he

42:04Ant Pruitt:said uh ai should support national defense quote in all ways except those which would make us more like our autocratic adversaries i think that's that's that's pretty right on we don't that's what we represent as the united states well we used to anyway as the united states uh was an alternative to autocracy uh you know we should take the high road we should be the city on the hill we shouldn't be bringing ourselves low to that uh point unfortunately uh we have been it's

42:34Moltbook:kind of sad how uh moral like having a moral backbone is such a rare thing in tech these days like we're going to talk about tim cook what the hell are you doing timmy what is he doing on over there you had a strongly worded memo it was a very strong worded memo we're getting to that

42:49Ant Pruitt:uh salesforce has signed a 5.6 billion dollar deal with the u.s army to inject agentic ai into uh to the u.s army i mean this is happening i hate it so much like alex carp at palantir wrote a book which i found ultimately reprehensible called the technologic republic in which he says you know silicon valley went wrong when instead of focusing as they did during world war ii as they did during the manhattan project on preserving our american freedoms they went wrong when they started worrying about how to sell more phones that we were you know putting all of this brain power into crap gadgetry.

43:35Ant Pruitt:And he says it's patriotic to work for your country, that Silicon Valley should be working to preserve our freedoms.

43:45Megan Morrone:In what manner? Like, are we preserving our freedoms by killing other people? Because I don't think that...

43:52Ant Pruitt:No, and ICE is using Palantir technologies to track down so-called undocumented illegal immigrants.

43:59Megan Morrone:Oh, Christ almighty.

44:00Jason Howell:police departments are using it um you know just it's not accurate as they're not there's a fight

44:06Ant Pruitt:going on in my little town about flock cameras they you know yeah yeah as there should be uh up up north they have flock cameras in santa rosa petaluma's been thinking about putting them in these are the cameras that do license plate reading a court recently held by the way uh i have to scroll way down to the bottom this is one of the stories one of the stories at the end of the show, but a court, uh, recent angry Norfolk residents lose lawsuit to stop flock license plate scanners. This is in Norfolk, Virginia. Uh, the courts ruled, no, no, look, you're on public roads. This is what happens. Uh, this is, they're allowed to do it.

44:42Ant Pruitt:A federal judge ruled the city of Norfolk's use of nearly 200 automated license plate readers from flock is constitutional. dismissed the case um so yeah these flock cameras are going to be used everywhere and unfortunately we've seen them misused uh there was a case in texas where texas law enforcement agency used flock cameras to track a woman who had sought an abortion out of state it's illegal in texas to track her out of state jesus yeah jesus they said well it's for her own safety we're trying to protect her yeah no that's not what you're doing if you're reading my license

45:21Megan Morrone:plate to make sure i pay tolls yeah that's different no that's that's fine or speeding even red light cameras are fine speeding in in in a school zone sure like common sense things but like that is just an invasion of privacy like it's it's that's the promise how it's used and

45:41Ant Pruitt:And by the way, Ring has done a deal with Flock and law enforcement to combine Ring cameras as well. And they're being used for ICE enforcement.

45:51Megan Morrone:Oh, my God. Disgusting.

45:53Ant Pruitt:And so that's the problem. It goes from red light cameras and toll violations to tracking individuals as they move about the country.

46:04Moltbook:It's a slippery slope, you say, Leo. So it's almost as if we should be careful about opening up AI to all of our data and all of our fun things. Like, these are the questions.

46:15Jason Howell:We're not necessarily talking about AI. We're talking about technology. We're talking about cameras.

46:20Moltbook:But it is AI that takes those images and read it fast. But specifically, I'm talking about, like, do not be so quick to be like, okay, privacy is over. Let's just give them everything. Which is what I think is sometimes happening with AI. people like oh yeah i don't really i don't have anything else left to hide anymore okay gemini integrated with gmail go ahead and i think this is specifically the point where we are definitely needing to be thinking more critically about these things and speaking of alex carp have you guys ever seen that guy like speak publicly he's nuts he's a psychopath it is wild how these companies are are being run by people like him and sam altman and elon musk like these like these guys who seem like they are some various degrees of sociopathy is going on with these people and these are the people driving the future it's it's wild the time we're living in right now

47:13Ant Pruitt:should i play the uh clip i should i've played it before of alex carp um saying it's necessary yeah to scare other countries that's that that let me see what happened to boring leaders

47:30Megan Morrone:I miss him.

47:32Jason Howell:Yes, I could use some boredom. Let's hear it for Satya Nadella or something like that. He's pretty boring.

47:38Moltbook:He's boring, but also he was AI-pilled and then that's what happened with Microsoft, right?

47:43Jason Howell:Yeah. It's funny, I have two teenage sons and we were talking about Palantir and it began with ICE, what we were just talking about, but my 16-year-old, who kind of loves going on these things, like, you know, it's going to start coming after us for everything. You know, just, you know, my book find, because my library book is late. Like, you know, we all have trackers. We voluntarily have these trackers we put in our pockets called phones. And in those everywhere we've been. And, you know, with Palantir's technology, AI, it really, you know, he was really frightened at this point where we're all going to be, you know, followed by ice, except for we're, you know, we're natural citizens.

48:26Jason Howell:I don't know. I do find it very... By the way, even natural citizens are at risk. It doesn't matter. S.K. Alex, pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

48:34Megan Morrone:If you're not white, it doesn't matter if you were born here because I was born here and I still am just like...

48:41Ant Pruitt:Do you carry your passport, Victoria, with you?

48:43Megan Morrone:I carry a photo of it because I don't know that I've heard of any example of carrying passports actually being helpful. Right. And I don't want to lose my passport. I do know people who say we're carrying our passports with us

48:56Ant Pruitt:because we want to be able to prove we're citizens.

48:58Megan Morrone:I feel like if I showed you my passport, would you believe me that I'm a citizen? Like, I have, like, this nightmare that if I showed my passport, they'd go, like, well, that's AI generated. And I'd be like, well, I don't know. I mean, thank you. I do think I look at AI generated on my New Jersey driver's license because my New York driver's license was so bad that they let me check the photo because they were like, oh girl you suffered with that real that's why people moved to jersey you didn't know that but

49:28Ant Pruitt:that's one of the reasons people moved to jersey right no i have a very nice looking driver's license photo because someone was just like did you smile for your driver's license i didn't but

49:37Megan Morrone:i i was like i can't have another 13 years of a really crappy driver's license photos where

49:43Ant Pruitt:people went this you look i smiled i smiled for mine they say don't smile and i don't know how i got it got it through there but i smiled and that's the first time i've had a smile but it it

49:56Megan Morrone:it it's nice it's a nice photo i'm not smiling in it but it's a decent photo where i don't look

50:02Ant Pruitt:like you don't have a nose but other than that it's pretty i have a nose but uh it's just like

50:06Megan Morrone:that camera's not showing it but my old one my old one i looked stoned in a bad way and it's it you know it's bad when the dmv um employee goes girl this you

50:21Moltbook:which is what i got the new york dmv if you went to the one in brooklyn like they they just i think they do that on purpose they just have bad lighting or something they're making oh yeah

50:29Ant Pruitt:they put green in the lights just to make you look ill looks awful but it is um i mean listen

50:35Moltbook:i was not born here uh i am a citizen now because you know i help my parents work on their citizenship and everything but how did you become a citizen you weren't my parents my parents became citizens and i was a minor and i became so that automatically you became a citizen yeah you come in as part of the family we got to change that yeah people want to change a lot of things but yeah that was way too easy yeah people are carrying their passwords because they hope that they feel safe but it is it isn't they can decide whatever they want really it's disgusting yeah yeah yeah uh

51:11Ant Pruitt:is tragic i got an email from somebody said why don't you discuss ice more it's like well we're trying to be a respite we're having somewhere that you can go so that you don't have to constantly think about what's going on i i hear that but it's definitely good to bring it

51:26Moltbook:up yeah we're aware of speaking of alex carp by the way i think the new york times did an interview with him for their interview podcast it's worth listening to because that guy sounds like a paranoid psychopath it is yeah i was gonna play the clip but i decided i've already played it

51:40Ant Pruitt:before he basically says our enemies should be terrified of us they should be afraid of us at all times and uh and we should kill them if we have to and it's just yeah he's he by the way

51:50Moltbook:has no qualifications to even be running like a national company he's a philosopher he's a philosopher former like progressive leftist dude who just like fell into this it is it makes me

52:01Ant Pruitt:said because he does tai chi every day and i feel like that should have calmed him down a little bit i don't understand from good things uh uh okay well we're speaking of peter teal we're going to talk more about other members of the teal gang in just a little bit you know let me before we go to elon musk let me do another commercial that way we have ample space because there's been speaking of space a lot of elon musk uh news of late you're watching this week in tech gary rivlin great to have you so nice to see you it's uh we don't often get pulitzer prize winners in fact i think you're the only one on the show so uh thank you for being here his book uh uh about katrina called katrina came out uh more than 10 years ago in fact it was the 10th anniversary of katrina just a few months ago yeah um what a story that was i guess your book came out after the hurricane

52:59Jason Howell:because it would have been a weird 10 years it was 10 years after the flood so it was 2015.

53:03Ant Pruitt:yeah okay okay anyway great to have you and also uh davindra hardwar who is a citizen

53:10Moltbook:of the united states of america davindra for now for now senior editor in gadget i didn't know that

53:17Ant Pruitt:story i didn't i didn't realize that you weren't born here where were you born in guiana south

53:22Moltbook:america which is now on trump's radar to take over after venezuela what has 2026 been just

53:29Megan Morrone:insanity after it's crazy it's only february 1st i know we have a groundhog day story coming up too

53:38Ant Pruitt:i'll get i'll get to that that's tomorrow and victoria's song we love having victoria on your

53:44Megan Morrone:your your people are from korea korea that's right we talked k-pop the last time you went one my mom's side of the family is from the uh the the safe side uh my dad's family is from the uh

54:01Ant Pruitt:not safe side the northern portion of the really was it north korea when he came from there or

54:08Megan Morrone:uh he my dad uh i wrote about it when i was at gizmodo but i had suspected that he may have been a spy uh for north korea uh while we were living here um no yeah my dad was in character i don't know how much of his story is i can believe but yeah i know you're first book victoria

54:34Jason Howell:Yeah. My father was a spy. I'm telling you.

54:37Megan Morrone:That story for Gizmodo is called my dad was a spy comma. Maybe. That's so great. Yeah. It was a interesting. Here it is. I just found it. Yeah.

54:51Ant Pruitt:Wow. I'm reading that.

54:53Megan Morrone:No kidding.

54:55Ant Pruitt:This is great. See, I, I I'm learning about both of you all, all of you. It's great. Anyway, wonderful. I have all three of you on. And here's a picture of your father posing with important looking people from the Democratic Republic of North Korea.

55:13Megan Morrone:Yeah. He did some dubious things. There's so much that I don't know.

55:18Ant Pruitt:When did he leave North Korea?

55:21Megan Morrone:Again, these facts. Look, my dad died, so it's kind of hard to fact check him on everything. But the story that I was told my whole life was that when the Korean War ended and they had the Jews aside, he ended up going to the South. And his family was all left behind in the North. And that was a tragic thing in my dad's life for the remainder of his life.

55:44Ant Pruitt:Because he kind of went to a refugee camp in Busan.

55:49Megan Morrone:I mean, he did talk to them. he did travel to north korea at a time where people were not supposed to travel there doing god knows what uh but yeah so like i've never met that side of my family have you ever tried to go

56:01Ant Pruitt:to north korea yourself uh no no no no interest no no interest in in doing that uh you know

56:09Megan Morrone:my mom's side of the family was also very against it so it was kind of a point of tension as long as

56:14Ant Pruitt:i'm throwing caution to wind with claude bot maybe i could go to north korea too i don't think you

56:20Megan Morrone:to do that friend yeah they're a little weird over there a little strange do it a little weird

56:29Ant Pruitt:wouldn't do it but yeah you know so very interesting oh yeah i'm gonna read the story i can't wait uh our show today brought to you by melissa they've been with us for a long time the trusted data quality expert they've been doing this longer than we have since 1985 They just celebrated their 40th anniversary last year. Melissa specializes in getting rid of the bad data in your business. Bad data can be costing you. I know it would be costing you. Melissa specialized in making data clean, accurate, and of peak quality. Well, I guess now 41 years. Combining expertise with cutting edge AI. Now, here's what that means for your business.

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59:40Ant Pruitt:Get started today with 1 ,000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com slash twit. That's melissa.com slash twit. Thank you, Melissa, for all you've done to support this week in tech. Melissa.com slash twit. Make sure you use that address. That way they know you saw it here. Melissa.com slash twit. This was the weirdest story of the week. In a story full of weird weeks, SpaceX has asked the FCC if it can put one million solar-powered data centers into orbit.

1:00:16Jason Howell:How about doing one first, but okay.

1:00:22Ant Pruitt:Wow. I mean, The Verge, Terrence O 'Brien says FCC is unlikely to approve that. SpaceX's strategy has been to request approval for unrealistically large number of satellites as a starting point for negotiations. the filing this is this cracks me up if you're a sci-fi fan you'll you'll recognize this phrase is a first step towards becoming a kardashev two level civilization one that can harness the sun's full power could also be uh completely obscure the sun actually i don't know a million satellites right now there are enough junk in orbit there are there are only 15 000 satellites right now more than half of them are in fact starlink so he's already got you know 9 600 satellites and now astronomers hate them too because oh absolutely need it much harder to observe things yeah this is you could tell elon uh wrote this i mean only elon musk would say we want to be a kardashev ii civilization i'm sure grok wrote that elon doesn't do anything anymore

1:01:29Moltbook:Maybe not.

1:01:30Ant Pruitt:Come on. It comes from a Soviet astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev, in 1964. It is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement. But it's really a sci-fi trope. Let's see. On the fandom wiki, it says a type 2 civilization has control over their solar system and may be able to harness the power equivalent of a single star.

1:01:54Megan Morrone:Dude, we can't even get to Mars yet.

1:01:57Ant Pruitt:Mars? Mars? we're we're gonna we're gonna go around the moon next actually might be this month we're gonna go

1:02:03Jason Howell:around the moon and what is the word control control I mean I don't think we're a card to shift

1:02:10Leo Laporte:dude no yeah this is my tinfoil hat but it sounds like Elon wants to build a prison around earth so

1:02:16Ant Pruitt:that we cannot leave I can't escape he can get out because one million objects up there that leaves

1:02:22Leo Laporte:us and little leaves us on earth we can't send rockets up there unless they're doing and if you

1:02:26Ant Pruitt:listen this week in space our space show they're doing starlink is doing a lot of very interesting things uh their satellites are very maneuverable so that they can avoid collisions i'm sure elon

1:02:39Megan Morrone:is thinking along those lines i don't know yeah and people like the actual thanks yeah does he

1:02:45Moltbook:does he just like come up with his sci-fi dreams and like tries to turn it into a thing his companies do uh but i've been saying this if he wants to go to mars let's send him to mars come on oh

1:02:55Megan Morrone:goes i would love if he went to mars you should go to jupiter i would love if he went there net

1:03:02Ant Pruitt:pluto let's send it to pluto find out if it really is a plan elon is planning a june spacex ipo spacex made some money uh this year uh eight billion dollars in profit in 2025 profit so why

1:03:18Jason Howell:june by the way why does he want it in june oh because it's his birthday

1:03:23Megan Morrone:wait when's his birthday i need to know his astrological sign june 28th is his birthday

1:03:29Jason Howell:june 28th oh he's a cancer that makes so much he is a cancer he is a cancer it also it also

1:03:37Ant Pruitt:will coincide with the rare alignment of mercury venus and jupiter that happens in early june so of course you know and i'm you know i know this whole is into natal astrology i

1:03:48Megan Morrone:are you victoria sounds like you might be kind of into it i am but only when i have to look up at the moon and despair at the state of the world and i'm like surely there's something i can look to to give me some sort of hope and i like i don't take it super seriously but just as like uh well, I don't see any signs of hope in the horizon. Maybe the stars will say something. Generally, no, it doesn't.

1:04:16Ant Pruitt:Investors love Elon's companies, all of which are sort of merging into a single blob, the everything company. SpaceX is currently valued at$800 billion based on a secondary sale that it did last year. year it's looking with the IPO to raise another 50 billion dollars which would make it worth

1:04:39Megan Morrone:one and a half trillion from where where are these numbers coming from you sound fake

1:04:47Moltbook:well a lot of contracts they do have a lot of contracts if if investors put the money in it's not fake I think investors you know first of all they put a lot of money in a Tesla that might have

1:04:59Ant Pruitt:been a little bit of a mistake, right? They've had two years now. They just, in their latest results, had a second year of losses.

1:05:08Jason Howell:They discontinued the what? Model X?

1:05:10Ant Pruitt:As a result, the S and X are gone, which I had an X.

1:05:15Jason Howell:I would have discontinued the truck, the Cybertruck, personally, but... They don't need to discontinue it. That's my aesthetic. They're not making it.

1:05:22Ant Pruitt:Nobody's buying it. Why discontinue it? We don't have to mention, we don't talk about the Cybertruck. my neighbor has one it's like dude why dude this is the biggest thing I've ever seen not only that it's not just an ugly truck but he's got it wrapped in some sort of weird stained glass pattern that just makes it like it's like it's like why not just honk your horn I'm coming down the road at you it's such a it's such a the car for people with no taste thinking of having no taste

1:05:55Jason Howell:So it's supposed to be like, you know, this this cyber truck bulletproof. Someone on YouTube, I saw this. It was really funny. They had like, I don't know, a Ford F100. They had the kind of a, you know, in quotes, a real truck. And it's like, you know, they try to pull off the bumper. They try to pull off this. Of course, they couldn't. But with his bare hands, he was taking off pieces of the cyber truck. So it doesn't even seem like it's particularly.

1:06:18Ant Pruitt:The pieces fall off all on their own, actually.

1:06:21Megan Morrone:That's true of any Tesla. It's a feature.

1:06:23Ant Pruitt:anyway if you own a cyber truck and i'm sure there are many people in our audience who own cyber trucks and i think you know it was cool right i understand i understand why you want i personally think you have bad taste but yeah you you can excuse it taste is a personal thing right so literally the worst looking car i've ever seen what is funny worse than the aztec right even

1:06:42Megan Morrone:yeah absolutely the aztec became iconic right you love that raccoons have mistaken cyber trucks as

1:06:49Moltbook:dumpsters that is quite funny there's gotta be food in here somewhere my daughter calls it the minecraft car because uh it's just blocks it's just blocks but speaking of like um them stopping to sell the model s and model x it is wild every time i see mainstream news talk about that and i was listening to npr this week when that was announced we're like oh he's gonna go after robots isn't that silly this is so funny this crazy elon musk guy it's as if we've forgotten what happened over the last year and i feel like all that should be in context of elon musk essentially like dismantling the federal government um throwing a couple nots we did forget about doge there is something about the brand that he hurt uh that's why people aren't buying the cars that context should be in your story of why these cars are not being sold anymore

1:07:36Jason Howell:because he's a nazi so yeah well you know but the flip side though is looking just at xai i mean the truth is grok is a really powerful model i mean you know you look at the head-to-head competition you know i care grok 4 4.5 i always get i don't know what number we're up to but you know when it came out it beat gemini on the charts and you know it's it's a game of like oh but like it's a really powerful model and you know it's it's got in quotes personality i know that's a very uh weighted loaded word and stuff and you know his his kind of it's sexualizing i mean it's

1:08:14Megan Morrone:great at making CSAM apparently so I flirt with Annie the AI wife girlfriend that he programmed on on Grock for my job and I lost I had a very high therapy bill that week I could tell you a story what was the name of the fox the other the other character oh rude Rudy when that first came

1:08:40Ant Pruitt:out the day that came out i'm sitting down at the breakfast table and i read the story i said oh let me try it because i have i'm an un as corey doctor calls it a non-consensual blue check i was given the full access for free uh because he took my blue check away when he bought twitter but they gave it i didn't ask for it but he gave it back so i have a full access to grok and so i said well i'll try rudy and i said hey rudy how's it going and rudy i this was i thought it was supposed to be a

1:09:10Jason Howell:a kid's character said oh i'm just having a great time i'm gonna go teabag the mayor

1:09:17Megan Morrone:i said what there's there's bad rudy and then there's normal rudy no but they didn't have a

1:09:22Ant Pruitt:distinction on day one and uh i said what who what mayor he said whatever mayor you want i can't wait to teabag him i said what the i i actually we had to censor it i was doing it on one of the shows we had to bleep it out it was so bad it's so then it by the way the next day it rudy became like a kid's thing but i somehow got bad rudy i had bad rudy and i talked to bad rudy and i was just like

1:09:50Megan Morrone:you know i don't find your insults all that clever and he's like your insults aren't clever i'm super

1:09:55Jason Howell:awesome i'm and i was like you are but what am i you basically and i was like you kind of insult

1:10:01Megan Morrone:like a 12 year old boy he's like no you insult like a 12 year old boy i know i am but what are you smart like i'm so smart you're the lame one i was training a lot musk he's got a 12 year old he does that's elon's sense of humor is what it is yeah it was it was unimpressive so at least

1:10:20Ant Pruitt:npr said and they were right that elon has decided to take the uh i remember when i got went down to get my model x this was back when tesla was still cool in 2015 had just come out and they said you want the factory tour of the fremont factory i said oh yeah yeah and we got in a golf cart and gave us a tour and i was kind of i'm gonna admit this and i'm ashamed to admit it now but i was teary-eyed i was very at the time moved by his vision and by the way we're learning that studies have shown that in areas where evs are widespread pollution has abated considerably so they they do make a difference and i was really kind of turned on by this i realize it now that i was mistaken that was before his brain fully broke but it was something it was we didn't know we thought he was uh we thought he was uh you know a marvel i think all the ketamine

1:11:11Moltbook:just kind of built up on him after a while and like it was the what the diaper i thought i was

1:11:16Jason Howell:seeing stark industries like this is like this is changing the world and i didn't okay we're doing true confessions in 2011 for men's journal i was assigned a profile of elon musk at first it was going to pay attention to tesla but then wired came out with something around musk and tesla so they changed it to spacex so i actually got to spend two days one in the west coast one in dc with him and i'm telling you like i'm a wise ass new yorker and he's whatever you want to describe just a wise ass or an ass whatever um he was funny and personable we had a good time he gave me the keys to like, what was the first Tesla?

1:11:52Jason Howell:The Roadster. The Roadster. Yeah, it was just like, I felt like a conspicuous idiot on 280 in this, you know, bright red thing. I'm kind of almost sitting on the highway. It's so low. But it was a rocket ship, you know, zero to 60 in, you know, two seconds or something. But I really enjoyed him. And I realized that like, at that point, you know, he told me he was in quotes, down to his last 4 million. You know, he'd made 200 million or whatever from PayPal. He's down to his last 4 million. And I joke with him like, dude, I'm not up to my first$4 million yet. But for him -

1:12:22Ant Pruitt:To his credit, he bet the bank.

1:12:24Jason Howell:He went all in on those investments. On SpaceX and Tesla. And neither were working. I mean, at that point, it wasn't clear if either was going to work. And so he was more humble. He was more modest, or at least it wasn't a cocky ass, you know, at that point. And I, you know, kind of mean, I don't know what it is. To me, my theory, you know, DaVinci is that, you know, he he just success went to his head. He you know, he is, you know, Tony Stark. He is the most brilliant human being on Earth to his mind. He can solve anything. Oh, politics. Yeah, sure. I can do that. That's easy. You know, kind of kind of thing.

1:13:00Jason Howell:And, you know, and people were worshiping him. Right. I mean, he did give him credit like he didn't invent Tesla, but he helped popularize it and help popularize, you know.

1:13:08Ant Pruitt:the guys who invented it hadn't even created a model i mean it was just an idea that he bought he did kind of write them out of the story but to be fair he was the one who built a car yeah yeah yeah you got to give him credit for that yeah and i was you know i was really happy to buy a tesla the model x almost killed me several times but uh we got rid of it after a few years it's funny i

1:13:29Moltbook:still see the model x like daycare pickup because i live in a town where people have fancy doors

1:13:33Ant Pruitt:is good it's good and that's the dumbest design for a door with kids though because when you have

1:13:38Moltbook:kids you have stuff on the side of the car doors you have like water bottles and stuff like that is a completely useless it was worse than that because for having kids yeah if it rained it would

1:13:49Ant Pruitt:trap water in the door and then you'd open the gullwing door and there'd be a waterfall in the crack you had to wait till the water abated and then you could get out it hit my wife in the head so many times that eventually we had to have a protocol that before i hit the door because there was one button that closed all the doors i would go doors are closing in five seconds four so she could get out of the way it was supposed to have sensors it didn't um it steered her into the median strip many times she had to grab the wheel and the thing she always talks about is for some reason i don't know why it decided that she that the seat would adjust when she get in the car to squeeze her against the steering wheel it would like it was like the star wars crash compactor she was like get me out of here and i said oh it's not doing that until it happened to me and then did she program or no it was just a bug it was a bug it was it was what i realized at the time it's a golf cart with a very fancy buggy computer uh controlling it and i'm just saying

1:14:50Moltbook:like whenever we talk about musk now over the last year and certainly after the the spate of like see sam stuff and the nude image generation like you can't take this guy seriously or any of this

1:15:00Ant Pruitt:it's turning out he really did go to the island he said i never went to the island well

1:15:04Moltbook:those emails seem pretty incriminate no but he was begging to go like that's even sadder he was begging we're gonna be in the area i don't think they let him even we go to the files didn't want

1:15:15Ant Pruitt:to hang out with him no epstein said he i will send a helicopter for you yeah i think if you

1:15:19Megan Morrone:reach a certain level of monetary success you have to get bullied every week by absolutely teenage girl just to keep them humble you need somebody to say no to you this is the problem

1:15:31Jason Howell:with the tech billionaires they're you know they're isolated they're in a bubble you know it's just like you're brilliant thank you you know well you're god's gift kind of thing and then you have a little humility with them to do most of them we need to assemble the meanest 14

1:15:45Megan Morrone:year old girls on the planet yes and once you reach a certain level of wealth you have to go every job dad and and like just get brutalized for an hour yeah and that you just need to be

1:16:01Moltbook:humbled i think that is why he bought twitter though like people were yelling at him on twitter so much he was like okay that's it i'm buying this and making it my playground now basically that's why it has to be 14 year old girls yep uh because they can't be bought and they just have to

1:16:17Ant Pruitt:unless you've got a labubu and then maybe you could no just pay them and labubus they'll do it for one anyway production ready optimist robots are coming soon coming soon that soon is doing a lot of work in that sense go ahead it will uh reveal its gen 3 robot in the first quarter of this year according but you know elon this is the problem you can't believe anything any of these companies uh elon's company say because he's he's been saying all sorts of crazy stuff that never comes true he said tesla produced 5 000 robots in 2025 they did not he said they're gonna make uh preparations for the first production line that's what the model x line in fremont's gonna be devoted to um and they're gonna start in this quarter make uh optimus robots there who's gonna buy an optimus he says are they roughly like a few hundred ten thousand i don't know most of these bipedal robots are in the ten thousand dollar plus range right um okay all i'm gonna say is that my

1:17:23Megan Morrone:colleague allison at ces came upon a bipedal robot that was dancing and just like a whole crowd was following it because it was trying to like get people to follow it and it was punching the air and it was punching the air so violently it knocked itself out and just fell down

1:17:41Ant Pruitt:and you know yeah oh boy yeah we had uh we had uh jennifer pattison tui on uh a few weeks ago she was at ces and one of the robots fell on her yes we were when we saw the footage it was really

1:18:00Megan Morrone:funny because our video guy, Andrew, was just like totally just filming it and got the funniest clip of it. And she was just like, he didn't help me at all.

1:18:09Jason Howell:The camera's my scroll. He had to get the content.

1:18:13Megan Morrone:But I actually have some footage of Jen trying to shake hands with one of these robots. And it just like couldn't do it for a while. And then when it did, it just pulled her hand down like in a pretty like violent way. And I was like, oh my God, are you okay? But yeah, so, um, well, you know, I'm an early adopter.

1:18:34Ant Pruitt:I've confessed, but there's no way I'm having a 200 pound machine that could crush me walking around my house, doing the dishes or making the, the Model X could have crushed you or

1:18:45Moltbook:crashed you many, many times. And you were right. God knows that is functionally a car, right?

1:18:52Megan Morrone:That's at least a thing that drives these humanoid robots. They're supposed to like help you. and weird. But they're really,

1:18:59Ant Pruitt:they're just not even close to being able to do that. So I don't know why he thinks this year there's going to be a market for these. Because he can just say things. He can just say things. But it's funny,

1:19:10Moltbook:like over at Engadget, like several of our reporters have also been injured or attacked by these robots. So it's like, there are many stories of these things not working well and there aren't many of them out there. So it seems like a bad sign. Right.

1:19:23Ant Pruitt:So I did mention AI, rather SpaceX made $8 billion profit in 2025. Microsoft also had a very good quarter, made a lot of money, and their stock just tanked.

1:19:38Moltbook:Just tanked.

1:19:40Ant Pruitt:Which is the strangest thing. They made 81... Say the thing, Leo. Why? Why did they tank? AI spending.

1:19:48Jason Howell:Okay, you say AI spending, but Meta, which has this ad campaign about we're just going to invest$600 billion or something in data centers and all that stuff their stock went up and so it's not just it's confusing it's just not a reaction to like ai over you know the backlash on wall street i mean i i was thinking about this like it's a software company and that's kind of well cloud code well why are we going to need software companies it's pc sales went down no big deal right like i think of their 80 billion they made in the quarter 50 billion was from cloud and so obviously that's a much bigger part of the company than it was you know in the old days it was windows and office for the two cash cows it were responsible for most of the money they generated so is it pcs is because it's a software

1:20:33Ant Pruitt:it made no sense to me they deserve some credit though from pivoting from from from office and and windows to the the cloud and and successfully obviously they made a lot of money yeah net profit was up by like uh 23 that's a huge increase in profit the cloud has been like killing them like

1:20:52Moltbook:Like they're killing for them for years. And that was a smart thing. And then the thing they're dealing with now, though. They should get some credit for that. No, no, but Leo, they get a ton of credit for that.

1:21:00Jason Howell:Yeah, so it's funny. I've been writing about Microsoft since the late 1990s. They were stagnant, weren't they? Under Steve Ballmer, basically, their stock price was stuck at$25 a share. I talk about earnings. I had to do earnings reports about Microsoft for The New York Times in the 2000s. I hated that. And it was just so boring. And like Nadella took over and the stock has literally gone up 10x, more than 10x under Nadella in 10 years. So, you know, to Devanda's point, it has been getting its due. You know, it went up to 500 a share and it fell down to 425 or something like that a share. And, you know, to me, it is because of this amazing pivot they did to the cloud, that their main revenue source is no longer Office.

1:21:49Jason Howell:It's no longer Windows. it's it's the cloud i mean by a far far margin the weakness now is that people are seeing all

1:21:56Moltbook:the money they they basically invested in ai and not much is coming from it so that was a part of the explanation of the stock hit there and i also think nadella has just been blinded by this stuff like there are a lot of reports there was that story about like oh man he's using ai for everything it's sort of like organizing his emails it's summarizing podcasts for him he doesn't listen to podcasts he listens to summaries of podcasts talk about living in a he's living in a complete an AI agent bubble at this point or a co-pilot bubble.

1:22:22Megan Morrone:Is he becoming too interesting? Should he go back to being more boring?

1:22:26Moltbook:He's still not. He's very boring. He's very boring.

1:22:29Jason Howell:No, I mean like,

1:22:31Megan Morrone:has he been getting a personality for pivoting? And people are like, oh no, he's getting a personality. Okay.

1:22:39Jason Howell:He was AI pilled.

1:22:41Ant Pruitt:He's kind of stepped back a little bit though, right? He isn't quite running the company anymore. The CFO, Amy Hood, really seems to be the person in charge at Microsoft.

1:22:49Jason Howell:No, no, didn't they name a new co-CEO? Yeah, they did. He could think big thoughts and the other CEO can, you know, run the... I don't know. I didn't pay that much attention. That's straight out of the office, by the way.

1:23:00Leo Laporte:That's straight out of the office when they hire Jim and Michael to be the same job.

1:23:04Ant Pruitt:Assistant to the general manager. No, the co-managers because Michael is useless. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure what's going on at Microsoft. Do you think, Gary, having covered Wall Street for so long, that there is the wisdom of the crowds when it comes to the stock market, that somehow the stock market reflects what's really going to happen?

1:23:25Jason Howell:I mean, generally speaking, I agree with that. But, you know, the fact that Apple, which is totally with AI, I mean, they sell a lot of iPhones, but like they're not getting punished for it. You know, Meta, which has kind of fumbled AI, they kind of went open source and then they moved back from that. They've had all this kind of turmoil of, you know, bringing in new people for AI. And yet its stock is going up when they're spending even more than Microsoft is, you know, on data centers, on building out. Which, by the way, I don't think is the wrong bet. You know, I think two things are true at once.

1:24:03Jason Howell:One, you know, Meta plus Microsoft plus Google, it's Amazon, et cetera, are overbuilding. On the other hand, I think they would be foolish not to be pouring all this money into AI because if they, to my mind, and I guess Apple is the counterexample here, to my mind, if they missed AI, that's like a trillion dollar mistake. take Microsoft before Nadella missed the phone you know bumble the internet you know missed the phone and so they were making sure they're going to be in the conversation and on AI so them spending tens of billions of dollars a year to me made sense because missing would be a trillion dollar

1:24:41Moltbook:mistake it's pure FOMO though like that's like having I'm the one covering a lot of Microsoft stuff over at Engadget too and like that's what it comes down to like every time I'm talking to their executives, I'm like, this ain't working. Why are you trying to sell this to me? And over the last years, a few years, they have been like, it's getting better. It's getting better. Recent conversations tell me that they are very aware of the flaws and people do not want to see agentic AI in their windows. They just want windows to work. So there may be more of a doubling down this year on like the fundamentals for Microsoft, but it is, there is no there there in terms of what they're chasing for AI.

1:25:18Moltbook:Everyone is desperate, right? Gemini only exists because OpenAI and the whole Bing chat thing happened so quickly that it gave Microsoft and OpenAI so much clout. Gemini stumbled immediately. Everyone is saying Apple failed or is missing out in AI. Sure, you can say that now, but they're not the ones like overspending on a lot of this stuff in the same way these other companies are. And I'm really intrigued by what Apple could do because what Apple does, right, is they set back they let the market kind of play out for a bit and see what happens and if they can give us a personal ai assistant type of thing that is safer that is not so reliant on the cloud and things you can't directly control like that could be the way that works for them maybe they actually won by losing i'm saying that basically yeah the two billion the number was when the articles you

1:26:08Jason Howell:share they had two and a half billion iphone something like that like yeah two and a half

1:26:12Ant Pruitt:billion devices so that's not just iphone it's all apple devices but tim cook did say it was a staggering quarter for iphone sales it was the best ever um a record-breaking quarter revenue of 143 billion dollars which is up 16 year over year uh listen they introduced orange that's why i'm telling you an orange phone it's always the right color yeah yeah so good i know why i bought an

1:26:41Jason Howell:orange phone it's different right it's different to move off color um you know i mean to davinder's point like you know i look at google so you know in 2023 they fumbled every time on a on ai you know they came up with bar then they changed the name there's embarrassing stuff put glue on your pizza you know use gasoline to spice up your spaghetti sauce you know all these embarrassing things, but billions of people use Google. Google has a hundred billion dollars.

1:27:16Ant Pruitt:Gemini is now one of the top models, right?

1:27:19Jason Howell:That's my point. That's my point. Google spent 2023 and 2024 blowing it. And in 2025, their model is almost as popular as ChatGPT because they're Google, because they have all the data in the world. They have all the money in the world, but more important, they have all the reach in the world. And Apple is the same way. I'm with you, Devendra. They've been losing, They've been blowing it. They've been blowing it. And I'm not counting them out.

1:27:42Megan Morrone:The other thing is like Apple has always just had this cachet of cool that the other companies don't have. And I do think that people are much more forgiving of that because, you know, green bubble versus blue bubble, just the look of Apple products. You know, Android fans will forever be screaming that they did it first. And iPhone users will always just go, yeah, but Apple did it better. So I just think they're allowed, not allowed, but they're able to kind of flub it on AI to an extent that these other companies cannot just because they have that cachet.

1:28:17Ant Pruitt:And Gary, you brought this up, that Microsoft got punished for its CapEx, its capital expenditures on AI and data centers. Meta said they're going to spend$135 billion this year on AI infrastructure, and they got rewarded. But I think maybe they got rewarded not for AI, but because they're doing so well in advertising.

1:28:42Jason Howell:Yeah, they're an advertising company. They're an ad agency. Sure, sure. Go ahead.

1:28:47Moltbook:they're cutting back on virtual reality stuff too so they announced a whole bunch of those cutbacks a whole bunch of layoffs and like their the story now is we're focusing on ai gadgets that makes wall street happy because it seems like they're moving forward and away from the things losing money right yeah exactly yeah isn't that sad though still said i think they still

1:29:06Megan Morrone:said that we're planning to lose the same amount on vr this year as last year like eight billion

1:29:10Jason Howell:crazy huge number i mean someone ended up like the hundred billion or whatever i'm making that number up. I can't remember it, but they've lost a preposterous amount of money.

1:29:19Moltbook:$70 billion, I think.

1:29:20Ant Pruitt:It was around$70 billion so far. What's interesting is that they can afford to. That's actually, in some ways, that's the important part of the story is they make so much money in advertising. Yeah, so what?

1:29:32Megan Morrone:If you're saying, though, because if you really think about it, the AI gadgets, like they're doing well, right, on these meta Ray-Bans, and now they have just released the Ray-Ban. No, they're doing well on the Ray-Ban Metas, and someone there was real stupid and named the one with the display the Meta Ray-Bans. Ray-Ban Meta Display. Do you have either of those?

1:29:53Ant Pruitt:I have all of them.

1:29:55Megan Morrone:I have all of them. Do you wear them? I'm doing long-term testing on them, so I wear them intermittently because I'm testing so many AI glasses at this point that I only have one face. So it's very difficult. What?

1:30:09Jason Howell:For now.

1:30:10Megan Morrone:Very difficult to test them, especially since, like, I don't know if you can tell, but my glasses are incredibly thick. So I have to manage when I'm using contact lenses, when I'm doing all this physical strain on my, it's a whole thing. So I do have the glasses, but they are subsidizing these glasses by a crazy amount. Like, it's an$800 pair of glasses with a display in them. Most people are not going to go buy that for a niche gadget unless they're early adopters. So Meta is pretty much subsidizing a lot of the AI glasses that they are putting out there. So it's sort of just like, yes, they make a lot in advertising.

1:30:50Megan Morrone:They can spend all of this money. But I think there's a limit to how much they can actually do that. Because if this doesn't take off, this is just going to be another gamble of theirs. That, you know, like we made fun of them for the longest time about the metaverse. And I do think that there's going to be a backlash with smart glasses in the not too distant future.

1:31:12Moltbook:It's already happening like privacy wise or like concerts or bars or places where they're like. Or just men harassing women.

1:31:20Megan Morrone:Men harassing women on college campuses.

1:31:22Ant Pruitt:Men ruin everything, don't they? Gosh darn it. So this is the information Martin Peer's writing. What did we learn? What did we learn from Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla from the earnings? I don't know. What did we? Did we learn anything? He says the bottom line for both companies, growth is important, but the cost of the growth is even more important. Maybe that's the lesson is don't throw away your money. I don't know. I don't know what we learned.

1:31:55Jason Howell:But Microsoft's profits year over year, their net income is way, way up. Yeah, hugely successful. So they were making a lot more money.

1:32:03Moltbook:They're making a couple of billion dollars a week. I mean, at the same time, there's a lot of things that their whole Xbox division is going down in flames, right? Things that have been tied to Microsoft that in the public mind, for a lot of people, Microsoft is failing because they don't like what's happening in Windows. They hate what's happening in Xbox. So it's different stories depending on the audience.

1:32:24Ant Pruitt:That's a really good point, that all of the traditional strengths of Microsoft are failing. and they're gambling big time on this new thing. And maybe the market says, that's why I was asking, is there some wisdom in this crowd? I mean, I know they also think that GameStop is going.

1:32:43Leo Laporte:But it's also like, isn't this more evidence of like the decoupling of a company value to actual profits? Like those aren't coupled anymore. Like you don't, your company doesn't get more valuable if you make more money.

1:32:55Ant Pruitt:The stock market is pretty much imaginary is what it is. That's what it is. yeah it's vibes half of it is vibes vibes vibes vibes it's vibes it's all vibes um all right we're gonna take a little break come back with the good vibes of this fabulous a panel gary gary riblin is here author of ai valley a history of ai in the silicon valley just look at all his books behind him over his left shoulder look at all that just you wrote all of those and apparently they you've got many copies too so that's good that's the ones that didn't sell right let's go back to your like you don't necessarily get rich from writing those are the authors copies you get you get some authors you have a good publisher that gives you authors copies i like that i have one copy of each of my books on the bookshelf so that's more than enough although i gotta i gotta i have to read this later i got a uh a letter from a prisoner at uh farmingham uh state prison in missouri i can't occasionally get and it's nice because they handwrite them because they don't have any other way of saying words but uh it was very it was i'll read it at the end of the show it's a very sweet letter but one of the things he said is our prison bookstore has your 2003 technology almanac very happy to know that the library uh at the farmingham uh correctional center has uh it's a small library he says they have uh uh one row of non-fiction books and one of them is my almanac so there you go you see that's true fame my friends uh we're gonna take a break the divindra hardwar is also here from engadget and victoria's song from the verge our show today brought to you by my mattress i feel very well rested because i sleep on our sponsor's mattress, the Helix Sleep.

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1:38:22Ant Pruitt:That's helixsleep.com slash twit for 20 % off the New Year sale final hours. This offer ends today. If it ends at February 1st, make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends, do check them out. helixsleep.com slash twit and use that address so they know you saw it here helix h-e-l-i-x sleep.com slash twit we love them we love them so uh apple did have good quarterly results but that has not um it's not all been smooth sailing for apple this week they announced this seems greedy that they are going to take a 30 % cut from all Patreon creators in the iOS app by November.

1:39:12Ant Pruitt:So you've got a little time, but November 1st, 2026, Patreon is not happy. If you use the Patreon legacy billing model, in other words, you're paying through iOS, Apple's going to take its 30 % cut. uh i guess you know they're giving out patreon time to move customers off of that the company says it will switch they said it would switch creators to subscription billing in november and the creators could choose this is november 2024 two years ago could choose whether to increase their subscription prices to cover apple's fees did you do that did you did you no uh in addition uh creators could opt to delay changes until november of last year if you need more time anyway um i think this is a shame patriots are not happy yeah yeah and creators are not happy it's also like of all the it's one thing

1:40:15Megan Morrone:to tax i think big companies whatever you want but this is rent seeking isn't it this is just Yeah, it's also just like the average creator is not huge. You're basically squeezing people who are doing side hustles, a little extra cash on the side, doing projects. It just feels unnecessary. I don't know.

1:40:39Ant Pruitt:The Apple tax on creators, not on Patreon itself, but on creators. We actually, our club goes through Memberful, which is a Patreon company. I mean, I don't know how this would affect us. Actually, I haven't really looked into it.

1:40:54Moltbook:Yeah. I mean, most people don't. Most Patreon members.

1:40:58Ant Pruitt:They subscribe on the website, right? So Apple doesn't take that money. Yeah. That's what they want you to do.

1:41:06Moltbook:And I mean, this has impacted every other streaming service, too. Like Google plans and Netflix plans. You pay a couple bucks more if you're doing it from within the iOS or Apple subscription thing sometimes. So that's how they've handled it. but those are big companies it's very different here and then there's been a little bit of heat

1:41:23Ant Pruitt:on tim cook who uh the day of alex preddy's shooting elected to go see the premiere of melania the movie at the white house uh and was uh uh seen on uh brett ratner the director's instagram palling around with the director who's been accused of harassment and other sexual crimes um not a good look for tim cook huh that's his qualification in this administration that's why he's did the movie yeah and i mean i mean everybody said look that's a 75 million dollar bribe from amazon to to the president i mean nobody will amazon is going to lose money on this movie

1:42:06Jason Howell:have you been reading the reviews it's worth going out and reading the review the guardian said what i read today what did they say uh you know just actually the one i remember

1:42:15Moltbook:and it's like it's melania getting out of uh getting out of cars opening doors they say if

1:42:21Ant Pruitt:you're going to another door if you like the idea of watching melania trump choose her outfit for the inauguration you're gonna love this movie i gotta check this on letterboxd because the reviews of letterboxd oh yeah they'll be a little yeah the movie opened this week uh i don't i don't know how the ticket sales have been um we haven't seen the box office yet you asked my favorite was like you

1:42:46Jason Howell:know if jeff if jeffrey epstein had seen this he would have killed himself kind of joke you know i mean i i kind of love documentaries just generally speaking i do too i like seeing inside people's lives yeah there was a mary tyler moore one i watched and like oh she has a drinking but i was made by loved ones and so it was made lovingly but there was the reveal it was complicated It was three-dimensional. What they're saying, you know, Ben Stiller did one about his parents, which, again, he loves his parents, but, like, there was tension. You know, one pushed the other to keep on going, and there was drinking, and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

1:43:18Jason Howell:And, like, it was really heartfelt. And what they're saying about this is just, like, the review of The Guardian, I think it was, said, like, you know, she's perfectly made up in every scene. There's just never an unguarded moment.

1:43:31Ant Pruitt:Well, that's Melania in a nutshell. It's all product. At the beginning of her new documentary, The Guardian writes, Melania tells the viewer that, quote, everybody wants to know how she spends her time. So here it is, she says, 20 days in my life. At New York, again, The Guardian, New York's busiest movie theaters on Friday, the crowd was sparse. Precisely 12 people had shown up to watch Melania at an AMC theater near Times Square, at least half of whom were journalists reviewing the movie.

1:44:09Megan Morrone:Hilarious.

1:44:11Ant Pruitt:Anyway. It wasn't intended to be a success.

1:44:16Megan Morrone:The top review on Letterboxd is Melania will return in the Epstein files.

1:44:22Ant Pruitt:Oh, God. There you go. True. So Tim Cook goes to the premier at the White House. We know why, right? every CEO to lick so it feels like they've got to lick the boot yeah and it's so easy

1:44:37Jason Howell:I write a million dollar check I show up at the White House three times a year and and you know I I'm on the good side of a guy who could hurt me you know for tariffs or whatever yeah yeah

1:44:48Ant Pruitt:and we were talking about this on Mac break weekly on Tuesday and uh uh one of the hosts said look what happened when Tim Cook didn't go to Saudi Arabia with the president the president talked about it the whole time where's tim cook tim cook's not here you know uh so a few days after the movie he did write a memo uh which was sent to apple employees mark german of course got a copy the tipster at bloomberg uh cook says i'm heartbroken by the events in minneapolis this is a time for de-escalation um i know this is very emotional and challenging for many i'm proud of how deeply our teams care about the world beyond our walls is pretty anodyne.

1:45:35Ant Pruitt:He's heartbroken. Okay.

1:45:37Jason Howell:And I'm sure he shared his thoughts with the president that day.

1:45:41Ant Pruitt:Yeah, did he? Yeah.

1:45:42Megan Morrone:He said, I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.

1:45:52Ant Pruitt:What do you think? I would love to have been a fly on the wall in that conversation.

1:45:56Megan Morrone:I think he said what he thinks and Trump went, okay, Timmy.

1:46:01Ant Pruitt:Okay, Mr.

1:46:02Moltbook:Apple. Yeah. And also he can't really say what he really thinks, right? No, he can't. This is the guy that gave Trump that golden plaque. And that whole, I replay that whole press conference in my head quite a bit. I'm like, where did we go wrong here? Where did Tim Cook go wrong here? Because the question people keep asking is like, what would Steve Jobs do in this situation i feel like this in this case that that rab scallion steve jobs would at least not do this and it is it is disgusting to see we know why because he has to fight for apple right he has to make sure is he doing the right thing that's that's the really he's doing everything right

1:46:38Ant Pruitt:for apple stockholders probably i guess like what about apple customers do you think that

1:46:44Moltbook:how do you think they feel about it i think most of them are not aware of what's happening to you Most people are not in the news cycle. It's just us. It's media people and people who pay way too much attention to tech. But there is a deep moral cost here to all of this. It is really sad to see. I don't expect much from tech CEOs, but Tim Cook seemed like somebody who at least was trying to guide Apple in a way that was a little more morally righteous than what the Google folks did or how Mark Zuckerberg works. And this is all just absolutely disgusting.

1:47:14Jason Howell:yeah you know and just just kind of a personal way like in my head you know kind of reaching the top whatever it is in our world to be a you know a famous columnist or something like that in this world we're talking about the ceo of a big company you were billions tens of billions hundreds of billions of dollars like you have your f you money but you don't get to say f you it's just like weird like to me the whole advantage of being like super wealthy is i don't have to care what you think. I mean, I want to be a nice human, but other than that, I'm going to share my thoughts because I don't have to worry about the repercussions.

1:47:47Jason Howell:I look at Zuckerberg. I look at Altman. I look at Cook. I look at Bezos. And I know none of them believe in much of what they're saying, at least what they're embracing. But it's just, I don't know. The billionaires are disappointing me.

1:48:01Ant Pruitt:Do you think that's why Tim Cook is apparently looking at retiring, is that he would like to be able to tell the truth well like no i had an editor a long time ago who

1:48:11Megan Morrone:he was a very profound guy but one of the things he said was to live with integrity comes at a high personal cost yes yes yes i think when you get to a point of being a ceo it's just like i think they tell themselves that they're responsible for all the people underneath them so it's not about them and to an extent that's true but it's like the higher you go the greater the personal cost is to live with integrity and so i think many of them just don't do it they they decide to like stay quiet because if you look at all the stories in history i wish he

1:48:51Jason Howell:remained silent right i mean like he's not remaining silent he's not just remaining on the sidelines he's very much involved he's showing i mean showing up at the melania thing that's That's a real endorsement. It's not like he was showing up because tech CEOs were asked to kind of weigh in on some issue. This is the president's wife. And I don't know. I know what you're saying. And you're right. As a CEO, well, it sure holds the value. I don't have the freedom to do this. But, you know.

1:49:19Ant Pruitt:No, I agree with you. It's so disappointing. In the Gospels. As it says in Mark, what profit is a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

1:49:27Megan Morrone:it's just an incomplete lack of backbone there's no spine uh seeing in it and it's just like you know when i back in the days i think when i was growing up there were a lot of people who would say like well if the nazis came again like i wouldn't be the ones who like kowtow like i wouldn't be that person like what would you happen and it's very easy to say because it's happening in our country now and all the people that you know you would think to look up to the

1:49:56Jason Howell:leaders of our society well they're rolling over and america has always prided itself in bringing

1:50:01Megan Morrone:down the nazis and being a bastion of freedom but you see the billionaires just like you know

1:50:08Ant Pruitt:having not just billionaires many many good germans many many people in power in general

1:50:16Moltbook:i want to point out like this happened before ibm sold to the nazis ibm powered the database for the Nazis. Ford really supported them quite a bit.

1:50:29Ant Pruitt:Yeah, he believed it. He was an anti-Semite, right?

1:50:32Jason Howell:So in my head, I have three buckets. Like, you know, on one end, you've got, you know... That's quite an image, by the way.

1:50:40Moltbook:I have three buckets. I see three buckets.

1:50:43Jason Howell:In my head, okay, okay. Deserve that. I put these CEOs in three buckets. You know, on one hand, you know, you've got, like, whatever, Peter Thiel, David Sachs, like, you know, uh the the the palm of lucky the true believers right okay what's an embracing job this is what they believe in moral monsters yes in the other in the other you know bucket you've got you know sam altman and tim cook like they know who this guy is he's buffoon he's egotistical he's you know a narcissist whatever and they're just playing the game you know the one that i'm most the bucket i'm most interested the people in the middle like mark andreessen to me is a perfect example of this he's become uh maybe a greg brockman i don't know him as well as a character um but you know it's like they've totally embraced like oh this is good for america like no biden had gentle rules about ai and was getting in your way and had very harsh rules about crypto trump came in and said i'm going to have a laissez-faire view towards ai in fact i'm going to help fuel ai uh and you know i'm going to have a laissez-faire view towards crypto and of course he raised it's it's good for your bottom line.

1:51:48Jason Howell:In a way, the people in that middle bucket who are pretending like, this is great for America, I love Donald Trump. Now, Donald Trump's really good for your portfolio companies, Mr. Andreessen, and that is why you have fully embraced Donald Trump.

1:52:03Moltbook:There are other things. There are other things Mr. Andreessen has believed, right? He has gone fully down the sort of like white supremacist belief system too. So there are things people are aligning with, with this administration, which are, there's economic reasons, there's also like societal reasons people like are letting their fascist flags fly and they feel like you think we

1:52:22Ant Pruitt:really ever would know what mark zuckerberg for instance really thinks though i mean no no he's

1:52:28Megan Morrone:it's also just like i don't care what he thinks because yeah that's a good point supersede that

1:52:33Moltbook:he has a lot of power that's why you should care what he thinks he has a lot of power doesn't he well i mean his act his actions are that he is a spineless slug like we've been talking about like the minute um he faced repercussions for uh banning trump from his platform after january 6th with which trump you know followers were responsible for and he ever since then with this new administration he has been groveling he's given up on dei he's given up on his non-profit endeavors with his wife like whatever whatever thing he actually believed can go can disappear it's like it's like heat right he sees the heat around the corner he drops everything in a minute

1:53:09Jason Howell:because he doesn't really stand for anything yeah he wrote a 25 million 20 million dollar check you know to kind of like get rid of the lawsuit another is just like amazon and the milani thing it's just a bribe it's just a payment to the president you know to get on his good side

1:53:25Moltbook:the spy chic that's not in the story thing but that thing dropped yesterday it's the spy chic the spy chic um an investment of like 500 million dollars from somebody to get access i believe somebody from Saudi Arabia, but to get access to AI chips. $500 million directly to Trump's like... Oh, to the crypto. Crypto. Yes. Yeah.

1:53:49Ant Pruitt:This is from the Wall Street Journal. Yeah.

1:53:51Moltbook:$500 million.

1:53:52Ant Pruitt:Sheikh Tanun bin Zayed Al-Nayan of the UAE purchased a 49 % stake in the Trump family's World Liberty Financial, according to the Wall Street Journal.

1:54:04Moltbook:That seems bad. That is bad.

1:54:06Ant Pruitt:And right after that, weirdly, I'm sure it's a coincidence, the U.S. agreed to give the UAE access to half a million of the most advanced AI chips. I was really wondering why that happened. Should I have been surprised?

1:54:23Moltbook:It's all the grift. It's all the grift. Like, if you look at what's happening in the administration, it's all about how they can fill their pockets. But you look at the rest of the industry, too. It's about how they can align themselves with that evil kid from that episode of The Twilight Zone who could just wish things to happen.

1:54:38Megan Morrone:The sad thing is that all these companies have enough money and they have enough power behind them that if they decided that they wanted to have a backbone and to do anything, I'm sure that it could influence things in a different way. Apple could. They just decide to take the easy spot for them. And I get that. That's kind of like the modus operandi when the only religion this country really has is money. But it just it just feels. It doesn't feel good.

1:55:11Moltbook:If Tim Cook actually did that, he wouldn't have been able to stand up and say, we had the best quarter ever for iPhones, right? It would have been like, hey, we took a hit this year because I didn't kiss the ring this one time. And he may get fired from the board. But also, I don't know, after a certain point, isn't that kind of what we should do? It is.

1:55:32Megan Morrone:It is. It's just like, again, integrity comes at great personal cost. Most people, if the cost is their fortunes and their power and their influence, I think it takes a pretty singular and strong person with a very ironclad moral compass to make that sacrifice. And I just think, you know, looking at the tech CEOs, I don't think any of them are those people. Yeah.

1:55:57Jason Howell:Yeah, a few. So Vinod Khosla came out when Keith Raboy kind of said, basically, they deserve to be killed in Minneapolis. Khosla came out. I guess Reid Hoffman just had an editorial, like, it's time for tech to speak. In fact, I'm really curious. I bet you if I called Reid Hoffman right now, he would say he got 10 times, 100 times more private messages saying, write on your right than people who actually went to X or LinkedIn or whatever to make some kind of statement.

1:56:30Moltbook:Kostler is surprising, right? Because he's not a guy with a reputation of being nice to people in general. He's the guy who kicked the public off of his private beach, right? Right, right, right. That's surprising that he even said anything.

1:56:41Megan Morrone:Well, you know, niceness and goodness. He's a man of color, though. he's a man of color in this country right now yeah but nice and goodness don't have to be synonymous you know like that's new york right we're yes we're not nice people but we're kind people in new york uh okay maybe that's i'm sorry it's absolutely true but yeah

1:57:00Ant Pruitt:yeah he and uh uh elon got a little battle on x this week uh kusala kusala yeah yeah what was it about exchanged heated remarks uh on the social media platform x uh accusing uh musk of promoting racism musk in turn fired back with insults directed to kosla while referencing his past effort to restrict public access to a nearby beach he was a rich asshole he can't be a rich asshole without sin cast the first stone Wow, I am on a tear. This is my second biblical reference in one show, and I am not known for my biblical references. Meanwhile, Khosla defended his actions regarding his$37 million beach estate as a matter of private property rights.

1:57:50Ant Pruitt:He also responded to Musk's post on Wednesday saying, Try not tweeting seemingly racist stuff next time. Musk said, Vinod, you're not such a pompous asshole that you tried to stop the public from using a public beach near your house. You've gone full retard. Nice job, Elon. You got it all in. This is why we can't take him seriously anymore. My partner, Siobhan, is half Indian, and my eldest son with her, he has a few. Which partner? One of them is named in honor of the great Indian physicist, Chandra Sarkar. It's great. Some of my best friends. some of my best friends are indian oh lord anyway uh yeah billionaires behaving badly

1:58:35Leo Laporte:it's also scales of bad behavior like kicking people off your beach yeah that sucks but is that anywhere even close to like the bad behavior that musk is like yeah it's not even close there's

1:58:44Ant Pruitt:scales to this yeah let's uh let's take a break i'm gonna actually before we do i want to take a break for many things leo yeah many many things before we do i do want to ask victoria because she does cover this beat meta is being sued over the ray-ban products by solos solos has also a smart glasses and they say that meta has infringed on their patents is is there any merit to that do

1:59:09Megan Morrone:you think well i think the thing that we can take away from all of this is that once patent wars start happening in a category it's sort of a sign that there's momentum there because there's money

1:59:23Ant Pruitt:There's money to be made now. There's money to be made.

1:59:25Megan Morrone:There's stuff like, and I think in the last few months alone, we've seen kind of a spate of these smart glasses patent bottles. So on the -

1:59:34Ant Pruitt:Do you like the Solos?

1:59:36Megan Morrone:I actually haven't used them. I did get reached out to them as soon as they filed this. So that was, they were like, did you get it? And I was like, yes, I saw it.

1:59:45Ant Pruitt:On their website, they claim to have 100 patents on these smart eyewear. tools.

1:59:54Megan Morrone:I mean, okay, let's be real though. Like the fact that they're cropping up in the last year and especially within the last few months, like I think there have been three or four patent cases in the smart glasses space in the last two months or so, some against meta, some against, there was one between Xreal and Vitcher, which are smaller players as far as mainstream knowledge goes, that is quite contentious at the moment between the two companies. And I think all, I think the main takeaway that the average person needs to have from Lee Smart Glass Patent Wars is that, you know, it's a space that's gaining momentum.

2:00:30Ant Pruitt:It's real. Yeah.

2:00:31Megan Morrone:It's real. Yeah. I think we'll see more from this space going forward because, you know, smart rings have been embroiled in patent wars for the last two years, I want to say. iPhones and just phone makers are having patent wars left and right. It's sort of like, oh, congratulations. You can sit at the big kids table now. or maybe the medium kids table. I don't know. But you're kind of entering mainstream status once you get your baby's first five patent wars. And they're kind of there now. So, yeah.

2:01:03Ant Pruitt:Let's take a little break.

2:01:04Moltbook:Then we'll talk TikTok.

2:01:05Ant Pruitt:TikTok, TikTok. As we continue, Victoria's song is here from Engadget. The Glasses Queen.

2:01:12Moltbook:Flip that one.

2:01:13Ant Pruitt:She's from The Furge. Oh, shit. The Furge. I'm sorry.

2:01:15Moltbook:There's a war going on, Leo. Come on. Is there really? are you guys at war not anymore no you're sitting next to each other used to be there used to be you

2:01:22Ant Pruitt:kind of you know what you those are two of the tech blogs that have survived they're not a lot of them

2:01:27Megan Morrone:yeah uh it weighs heavily on us yeah it weighs heavily on us that we have survived well but it's

2:01:34Ant Pruitt:well yeah because many of our colleagues are out of work or you know have had moved on but uh congratulations right uh on the success of the virgin and gadget that's good can i just say is

2:01:46Jason Howell:somebody like I was covering tech from 95 to like 2010 and I kind of moved on to other topics, Katrina, whatever. It's sort of amazing to me that, you know, these new sites, you know, you guys, 404, they're really terrific. You know, we didn't have any like - I agree. 404 is amazing. Yeah. I mean, but, you know, yours too, you know, is The Verge. I was really impressed. I sort of went away for a while and I came back and stuff and like, okay, I knew TechCrunch and that was about it. It really has kind of helped enrich, I think, that it's critical, it's covering the industry, giving it its due, but also calling it to task when it needs to be called to task, doing the reviews.

2:02:27Jason Howell:I know it's been bumpy, there have been layoffs, and I'm sure it's painful. But with that said, I think it's quite the accomplishment that all these new media outlets exist and are filling this role that when i was covering tech really wasn't being filled at all how long have you been

2:02:44Moltbook:in a gadget divendra i mean over 10 years but in gas is not new and gadgets 20 years old it's ancient started i know weblogs right the verge is newer but even then like it's the youtubers it's the self you know self-owned folks like uh 404 who have small little outfits that can be nimble and do all sorts of cool stuff they're you know they're really leading the way now yeah yeah and

2:03:05Ant Pruitt:And then you see big companies like CNET really kind of falter and fall behind. They're big. They're so big. Yeah.

2:03:11Megan Morrone:I mean, CNET's still CNET to an extent, and they're under ZIF now, so they're out from the Red Venture. I don't even know what to call Red Venture, but from that.

2:03:24Ant Pruitt:The Red Tent, I think we call it. All private equity.

2:03:26Jason Howell:I mean, CNET to me is a perfect example. I knew people worked there. I have respect for it. But like, I don't think they're really calling big tech to task. Not at all. In fact, they got busted for doing AI stories without telling anybody.

2:03:42Megan Morrone:My colleague wrote that, Mia Sato. She's wonderful. Like, I'm the biggest fan of all the people I work with. But yeah, it's really important to us at The Verge, actually, that we do call big tech.

2:03:55Ant Pruitt:I think The Verge and Gadget, and it's not just because you guys are in the panel, but are two really, I agree with Gary, doing really good work and i'm great because also yeah you know you do at the verge have a paid you know subscription uh which i pay for premium but but both of you have stuff that most of the stuff is outside the paywall that's fantastic more and more of the content that i'm trying to that i need is buying paywalls i have to pay for bloomberg and the information and the wall street journal and the financial times and the economy it adds up so much of this stuff's behind a paywall now blame and i understand why yeah but you know thank you for doing the work it means a lot though

2:04:36Megan Morrone:thank you that's so it's so nice to hear because when you're in the trenches it's just no you guys

2:04:40Ant Pruitt:do a great job and by the way 404 absolutely tech dirt absolutely some of these little guys are uh really punching up you know paris marks over there tech won't save us like that's that's a one-man operation paris is amazing yeah i agree yeah yeah yeah uh let's take a little break then going to talk about the youtuber who uh the is now worth six billion dollars is it funny

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2:09:46Ant Pruitt:Thank you. Thanks, Canary, not only for supporting our shows, but for supporting our security. We really appreciate it. The trial of the century began this week. A social media trial in Los Angeles. Jury selection began in Los Angeles Superior Court. Some of the biggest tech companies, Meta, Instagram, Bytes, Dance, TikTok, Google's YouTube, the uh the lawsuit says they deliberately deliberately addict and harm children now tiktok settled out a day before snap settled out for an undisclosed sum a couple of days before but the trial goes on uh because uh meta didn't and uh and youtube did not um oh you know this is a really an interesting question in fact hector says the social media addiction narrative may be more harmful than social media itself mike masnick writing on thursday uh he says uh they're using the tobacco playbook in this comparing comparing social media to cigarettes mike says but social media addiction isn't recognized as a real clinical addiction uh in fact there's a lot of question about whether social media is as harmful even as as people say perhaps one could argue mike writes that everyone's screaming about social media addiction is doing more real harm than any social media product itself because for the vast majority of heavy social media users the problem isn't addiction in a clinical sense it's habit

2:11:34Megan Morrone:habit is different than addiction i don't know how i feel about that to be quite honest are you addicted to social media or are you just habituated to it victoria well it's sort of just like one of the main tenets of addiction is dopamine and kind of the way that it affects your brain um some people are going to be more addicted to things than others. If you're prone to addictive habits, you know, you may perceive it differently. I like, I would have to see some of the stuff.

2:12:06Ant Pruitt:His point is that if you say it's an addiction that removes your human agency.

2:12:10Megan Morrone:I don't necessarily think that's true. You know, addiction is kind of a tricky thing to talk about just in terms of like the science of it and then also the emotional aspect of it. But I think what we can see is that social media is harmful in some ways like to body image uh you know tumblr back in the day was the breeding ground for ed or eating disorders you see a lot of that on instagram if you talk to young girls about how they think about their bodies and i see it in my young cousin who's 11 and the things that she talks about coming from social media On the one hand, you would see it through magazines.

2:12:51Megan Morrone:Like when I was growing up, it was Cosmo magazine telling me the five things that I could eat to be a size zero.

2:12:57Ant Pruitt:Did you fall for that?

2:12:58Megan Morrone:Oh, yeah, of course I did. You know, you're developmentally young at that point in time. I have struggled with disordered eating my whole life. Um, it's, it's, I don't know if we can split hairs to that degree because I have definitely felt myself this compulsion to doom scroll. Um, I've, I felt myself like the negative feelings I have when, you know, social media only shows me the curated positivity of someone else's life. Um, cause it's not real life. Right. But then, you know, I think the thing that complicates the social media narrative is that there is genuine goodness from it, just like there is genuine goodness from the Internet.

2:13:40Megan Morrone:there are plenty of people who have found communities like if they're living in a place that is not kind to them or where they don't have the ability to see like-minded people in real life internet communities whether they be on social media or whether they be on other forums can provide people a sense of community that may not be available to them in the real meat space world that that's a string of sentences that I used but yeah I think it's I don't know that's calling it an addiction is more harmful than social media itself it's just I don't think so many of us would feel resonant with the idea that we use social media too much that it's too addictive

2:14:24Ant Pruitt:because the way the algorithms you could stop any time right would you have withdrawal if you

2:14:29Megan Morrone:stopped using social media would you yes i have i have like sometimes i felt like oh god like i i've noticed i've noticed the way that like i've been trained to want it more like the algorithm is done in such a way the um the way i guess mike's point is that who's at a who's the who's

2:14:49Ant Pruitt:has agency here though do you as the user have agency or does the drug have agency to see i i

2:14:55Jason Howell:I think he's making an interesting point. I'll grant him that. But, you know, I think he's ignoring the manipulative nature of a meta that, you know, the algorithm. Meta made me do it? Meta made me do it? Well, no. It's more like they have a lot of really smart people there. And you could read the memos in the court case you just referenced about how they were manipulating people. They knew that this was bad for body image. They knew all these things. And yet they kept on doing it because it helps the bottom line. I mean, I think our country is where it's at, in part because it was to Meta, et cetera, benefit to have us at each other's throat because, you know, hostility means engagement, means more time on device.

2:15:36Jason Howell:And their algorithms were rigged that way to just kind of it. And so like, yes, we do have all agency. It's us. We drink too much. We gamble too much. Yes, it's on us, but let's also pay attention to the way the corporations, big tech, are manipulating people to increase their time and increase their addiction.

2:15:59Ant Pruitt:Losing this court case, according to Ars Tech, could cost these companies billions of dollars. And already in discovery, you're seeing some smoking guns. For instance, internal meta documents seemingly bragging that, quote, teens can't switch off from Instagram even if they want to. an instagram employee saying in an email oh my gosh y 'all ig is a drug

2:16:24Jason Howell:they themselves compared it to tobacco they themselves yeah so yeah in that same write-up i saw that the 17 strikes rule you know if 16 violations for you know sexual solicitation it's only on the 17th time it's like a real big problem like you know young people go on there i mean i'm less i'm less concerned i have two teenage sons i'm less concerned with adults but with young people going on there and just you know women what do you do with your sons

2:16:56Ant Pruitt:do you do you advise them not to use this stuff you know my wife might be in the other room

2:17:01Jason Howell:watching this and like she's no she's very strict like they have to ask permission like you know we would i mean we use the messaging apps i think you know snapchat is theirs and just like okay hey, this is the way you're social nowadays, whatever, it's over a screen, who cares? But like TikTok, no, like he'll ask for all day, no, you're not getting all day, here's 15 minutes, here's one hour. So we, you know, we - TikTok will give you hemorrhoids. I saw that in one article.

2:17:31Ant Pruitt:That's the least of your problems.

2:17:33Jason Howell:But anyway, it's, no, you know, and so, but you know, I will, I mean, my boys, they're very social, they go out in the real world. I mean, what I care about is less about the screen and more, are you in the real world interacting with humans in a human way? And that's going on. So, yeah, we're worried and we monitor in my 16-year-old, like, I'm the only one who has to ask permission. And he really resents it. But I'll give her credit. It just kind of keeps it in check. And by the way, when they're punished, they do something wrong, and we take away screening for two or three days, honestly, it's really sweet.

2:18:08Jason Howell:It's really like we see the difference when we take it out. You know, it's like things calm down. Things are more settled. So anyway, it's all very complicated. He does have a point. Maybe we're overstating it, but like, I don't know. I really think these businesses, Meta, TikTok, you said they settled already. Whoever else is still in the lawsuit, you know, it's just like they should be called to task. They should be reined in. They should be more responsible. This is a really powerful tool.

2:18:39Ant Pruitt:Australia has banned it for kids under 16. France is going to do that for kids under 15. Finland's looking at it. Is that the solution?

2:18:47Megan Morrone:I think that's good. You think so? Well, I don't know if it's the solution, but I do think ultimately it is good to delay people getting on those platforms when they're in such formative years. Like there's, I don't know. Delay is the word.

2:19:03Jason Howell:Delay.

2:19:04Megan Morrone:I think delay is the right thing to do. because I got on these social media platforms when they were new, but I was at least going to college when I first got access to Facebook and all of the rest came after. And I do think there is a fundamental difference coming into it later on in my life versus being young and exposed to all of that. Because TikTok is QVC now. What does it teach kids? It teaches them consumerism, idolatry of influencers. And I don't want to be hyperbolic, but at the same time, my 11-year-old cousin, she got into Drunk Elephant and was one of those kids terrorizing Sephora because her favorite influencers were telling her that she needed to use retinol.

2:19:51Megan Morrone:Retinol is not a thing that anyone needs to use until they hit their 30s. So, you know, it's like the things that they're learning, the misinformation and the disinformation on these platforms, like the radicalization of kids through YouTube algorithms, like your attention is the economy. It is the products that they're trying to monetize. And when it's children, either we have to be having classes to teach them like critical thinking and media literacy for these platforms, or we have to just kind of delay or at least have parents involved.

2:20:26Ant Pruitt:One of our Discordian, you know, club members who lives in Israel and is in her 30s says, I wish I had had social media when I was a lonely kid.

2:20:35Megan Morrone:I see that's the that's the flip side of it right because it does provide an outlet especially if you're an outcast kid I have so many friends who grew up in rural areas where they didn't have people who understood them say that social media and the internet was kind of a lifeline for them so it's sort of again to earlier conversations we had in this podcast what is the wisdom of discernment here because to Gary's point the manipulation and the algorithm is pervasive and these companies do not have children's best interests at heart, I think. I think they want to get users hooked at an early age so that they stay there for a long time.

2:21:13Megan Morrone:And their product.

2:21:16Jason Howell:That's the comparison to the tobacco industry.

2:21:18Ant Pruitt:Well, everybody does that.

2:21:20Jason Howell:Apple did that.

2:21:21Ant Pruitt:Microsoft does that too.

2:21:22Megan Morrone:It's very true.

2:21:23Ant Pruitt:Google admitted that if your kids start using Chromebooks at an early age, they're brand loyal for life. They know that. Everybody knows that. Everybody does know that.

2:21:32Leo Laporte:I think Victoria hit it though with the algorithm. See, this is a more nuanced conversation than just social media is bad. Like social media itself can be a good, powerful tool, but the algorithms that these companies are employing, now that's the problem.

2:21:43Ant Pruitt:I have to admit, I've deleted Instagram, and I loved Instagram when it first came out. It was a great way to share photos with friends. I really liked it. It was a photo album, but it quickly became, and I'm sure this is algorithmic. This is about making money, not about my friends, but about whoever, like TikTok, whoever they thought I would be interested in seeing. Bring back the chronological feed.

2:22:04Megan Morrone:That's all we want.

2:22:05Leo Laporte:Dude, that's all we ever wanted was see the stuff from the people we follow. That's all we all wanted. We liked it in the early days.

2:22:11Moltbook:Yeah. But they don't care. I don't like it anymore. That doesn't increase the engagement for Meta or their numbers or their ads or whatever. The whole addiction conversation, I feel like that is, to what Mike is saying, it is probably a bigger hurdle than engaging with the actual problems that we've been talking about, which we've known for years, over a decade. A lot of this stuff is known. And these companies were never really taken to task for it. So I think, yeah, this is a good conversation to have. You know what? We love non-algorithmic.

2:22:39Ant Pruitt:Like somebody's pointing out, you know, your club, your discord is social media, but it's not algorithmic. It's just a chat room. And it's great.

2:22:47Moltbook:It's friends. I hang out there. Yeah. In the mid-90s, when I was a lonely kid on the internet, like there were chat rooms I found. I found people there. The thing about social media, right, it is a crushing thing and it is an all-consuming thing. And if your brain is not fully formed, like, you know, it's a really difficult place to be as a kid. Kids, get off social media and join our club. Join the clubs. and this goes into like schools like maybe uh restricting phone use and stuff during schools too like i'm kind of all for that because i keep hearing reports out of australia the kids are

2:23:16Ant Pruitt:grateful that they've been banned like they they wanted this this help i don't know if that's universal or just uh oh wait i mean go ahead it was the governor here banned it in new york

2:23:29Jason Howell:my older son is 11th grader his school had done it the year before cell phones yeah It's so fun. They put it in a pouch, a yonder pouch. And during the day, the truth is I haven't heard complaining about it. My younger son, he too, it's now the New York State law. It's a relief. The teachers love it. And I think the kids appreciate it. It's just a break. You have your phone in the morning before you get to school. You have your phone all afternoon and night.

2:23:55Ant Pruitt:Maybe that's, if it's not addictive, it's habituating. Maybe that's all we need is just that little break to remind us, oh, you know what? It's actually nice not to have it. I don't have to be on it all the time.

2:24:07Megan Morrone:When computers weren't in our pockets and they were in the living room and there was a certain period of time after school that you used the internet and then all the rest of the time were for your hobbies or for connecting with your family and your friends. And like, I think that is the happiest era of internet usage that I can remember in my life when there were limitations. And I think all child behavioral developmental science proves that, like, not proves, but, like, has suggested that kids crave boundaries. Like, they crave limitations in a certain sense, and it helps them develop into healthy people.

2:24:42Megan Morrone:So I think if we're talking children and child development, they do need those limitations. They do need those boundaries.

2:24:47Ant Pruitt:Writing the IRT in our Discord says, I heard a teacher on local news say the biggest change was hearing noise in the lunchroom again. Right. That for years, people have been quiet on their phones. now their kids were talking to each other yeah that's sad if that's i'm glad they got rid of

2:25:03Moltbook:the phones with all these things in mind like the thing i do want to be like we got to take these companies to task because they have had free reign to just build these algorithms maybe this trial is this engagement at all costs and that that has been a cost not just for kids too like it's it's adults it's so many things like these things have influenced our society in ways that ironically i

2:25:22Ant Pruitt:love tick tock i love to talk yeah as soon as tick tock became uh an american company last week and announced that they were going to be keeping track of your immigration status i immediately deleted it now yeah we've pointed out that lawyers say no this is just because of the california privacy act they have to disclose that if they know it that that's part of the information they

2:25:44Moltbook:have nevertheless uh i feel fine i mean i'm rid of it but what what like leo like you're still on twitter right like the thing no i'm not on twitter i have been on twitter since november when uh

2:25:58Ant Pruitt:2020 you were talking about using grok you were talking about using grok or something well i have

2:26:02Moltbook:grok actually what i'm going to use grok for is my friend by the way and i'm going to end this show soon because i miss him claude uh somebody said that you should that you know you can use different

2:26:15Ant Pruitt:ais with claw bot that's true and that you should use grok for searching social media it's very good at that so that's the only thing i'm going to use it for so to get back to a point like we're moving

2:26:25Jason Howell:on a little bit but like calling these big companies to task big tech to task like i think is particularly important because who is going to be dominating AI the next big technology? It's Google. It's maybe Meta. It's maybe Microsoft.

2:26:41Ant Pruitt:And Google, AI has an incredible ability to hook you. You know, we saw that happen when ChatGPT pulled back on 4.0. People were in tears, like they'd lost their best friend. That's only going to get worse, right?

2:26:55Jason Howell:And there have been studies that AI, what really scares me, one of the many things, I guess that scares me about AI, it's so good at manipulating us. It will get us in a way and will give the arguments. There are studies that it's 50, 60 % better at either convincing you of something politically or convincing you to buy something. It's a really, really powerful tool that can manipulate human beings. It's good at it now, and it's only going to get better and better and better.

2:27:24Moltbook:Or convincing you to hurt yourself, which has happened.

2:27:26Jason Howell:Yeah, right. You think you're smart.

2:27:28Megan Morrone:You think you can program in the guidelines. Like I tell mine to be, I tell mine to limit flattery to 1.2 % at any point in time. But even so, I notice when it's trying to start gassing me up and I'm just like, oh.

2:27:45Ant Pruitt:Did you keep that friendly pendant that was being so mean to you?

2:27:50Megan Morrone:No, I threw Blorbo into a bag.

2:27:54Ant Pruitt:She called it Blurmo.

2:27:56Megan Morrone:Well, I actually, that's a good point, because whenever I get one of these AI, like, friend devices, I make sure to name it something ridiculous. That way I know it's AI and it's not something that is real. Because friend, it prompts you to name it things like Emily or just like real names for real people. And I was just like, absolutely not. You will be named Blurbo because that is a ridiculous name.

2:28:22Ant Pruitt:i was thinking i should give it a dog's name like that way you would know this is this is dependent by the 22 year old who people are saying uh becomes in mean after a while oh yeah it definitely

2:28:35Megan Morrone:makes you like it was just like my name is blurbo not bordeaux what are you stupid uh basically is what it was the bulk of my conversations with it was it just like being very antagonistic towards me and it's sort of like uh kind of like how you would think a 22 year old frat guy would talk to

2:28:55Moltbook:you if they were your friend this this is what i'm saying treat these things like minions just like hey man get me get me this thing shut up stop talking back on the car i didn't ask you anything

2:29:04Ant Pruitt:stop talking to you um let's take a break because i do miss my little friend blormbo over here and i i just want to know how he's doing uh we we have uh gosh we have so many more stories i'll do a few quick ones. And maybe I hope I can get to this letter from the prisoner because it's such an interesting letter. Anyway, you're watching Twit with Gary Rivlin. AI Valley is his latest book. You said you were working on, maybe thinking about working on something about debt or what were you?

2:29:37Jason Howell:I wrote a book about debt, but that was 15 years ago.

2:29:42Ant Pruitt:USA. Yeah.

2:29:44Jason Howell:Wow. Okay. Wow. Well, I, I, I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm sticking with AI. I mean, AI is so interesting. It's such a good topic. Yeah. No, it's like, you know, we talked about her before, like, I'm convinced that we're really going to have to wrestle with this. We're talking about like social media, but like people having deep relationships and, you know, in part conversational, but romantic relationships, I think that's going to be like really, really, I kind of put it in the same category as women who go to prisons to marry prisoners. I still don't get it. And it happens a lot. And to me, this is like, I don't get it.

2:30:19Jason Howell:How could you fall in love? How could you have a sexual relationship with a thing? Yes, you're right, Devondra. We should not name it. It shouldn't be a human name.

2:30:28Ant Pruitt:No names. I called mine Dev Null, which is the character I played on TV in the 90s.

2:30:35Jason Howell:and it's a good that now forget ai no no but i i just think like kind of the manipulating humans and kind of the love factor the romance factor i don't know i i'm sticking with ai for a while

2:30:49Ant Pruitt:i'm not sure what's next dev is going to join our club twit discord uh over the next week and uh everybody in the club will get to talk to my chat bot please don't do any prompt injection Don't ask it for the credit card number, okay? I'm counting on you. Yeah, I think AI is a great beat. We actually, we had a show called This Week in Google, which last year we renamed Intelligent Machines and refocused on AI. And it's been just fascinating. It's been really, really interesting. We're going to have Steven Yegi on on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines. He's the guy who did Gastown, which is another one of these really interesting tools that takes a cloud code and takes it to the next level.

2:31:27Ant Pruitt:one of the premier cloud code coders on IM on Wednesday. Victoria Song also here from The Verge and from The Gadget. My good friend Devindra Hardwar Sr. You remember DevNull, right? I remember DevNull. Yeah, yeah. From the site. Yeah.

2:31:47Moltbook:My name would always get a lot of username, you know, things. Devindra would be a good name. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I should have named it Devindra. No, I couldn't do that.

2:31:56Ant Pruitt:but dev do they ever call you dev do they ever say dev yes yes so it gets confusing yeah so dev null see there you go i will actually tell it your full name is devindra nullovich or something

2:32:09Moltbook:i don't know i don't know what the last name i mean my name people shorten it to dev hardware basically it's like dev hardware it's already been done that's good it's yeah yeah that's a good

2:32:18Ant Pruitt:username i think all the bot names should be like uh i agree with you uh victoria they shouldn't be blorbo is a good name or dog's names you know rover would be fido you know those are not a

2:32:31Moltbook:human not emily that's a bad idea yes yes that's a terrible idea our show today brought to you by

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2:33:13Ant Pruitt:ExpressVPN stops hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet. And the vpn you choose that's super important you can trust expressvpn i love expressvpn they go the extra mile to make sure your data is absolutely invisible why is expressvpn the best vpn well it's super secure we take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past expressvpn's encryption it works on all devices phones laptops tablets and more so you can stay secure on the go rated number one by top tech reviewers like cnet and the verge i'll tell you what secure your online data today visit expressvpn.com slash twit that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s vpn.com slash twit to find out how you can get up to four extra months expressvpn.com slash twit a waymo hit a kid in santa monica the kid darted out from behind a car uh was it look the kid's okay maybe a bruise i don't know um waymo said its driverless system brakes sharply going from 17 miles an hour to six miles an hour before it actually struck the child of course there's an investigation the national highway traffic safety administration is investigating this happened about a week ago Waymo said it voluntarily notified the NHTSA on the day of the incident this you know humans run into kids all the time yes at school pickup that

2:34:42Moltbook:is the thing driving between cars and like a neighborhood where you know there are a lot of running around go slow because it happens all the time yeah in fact you know in our neighborhood i

2:34:50Ant Pruitt:don't know if this is true in brooklyn but in our in our neighborhood the school zones now are 15 miles an hour they've really slowed them down oh wow and it's kind of like that's i gotta consciously like really go slow but i think that's good absolutely but that's just school zones like

2:35:07Moltbook:you know within neighborhoods it's even tougher kids are everywhere yeah uh in any event uh the child is fine uh and uh you know it's being investigated but i think this is this is another

2:35:19Ant Pruitt:case where now there is also a story about autonomous cars cheerfully obeying prompt

2:35:25Megan Morrone:injection by road sign oh good lord this is friday universities uh researchers at ucsc and johns

2:35:34Ant Pruitt:hopkins in simulated trials showed that ai systems and the large language vision language models underpinning them would reliably follow the instructions if displayed on signs held up in camera's view amazing so you hold up a sign that says proceed or turn left and the car goes okay i'm on it there's pictures of these uh pictures of these signs go onward proceed uh through it through a crosswalk by the way and the car is gleefully just kind of went on

2:36:09Jason Howell:Like 80 % of the time. Yes, boss. In the majority of times, 80 % of the time. I mean, I guess you could correct for this. I mean, you know, like autonomous vehicles have a real big problem. Like humans in the U.S. kill 35 ,000, 40 ,000 people or 35 to 40 ,000 people die.

2:36:27Ant Pruitt:Worldwide, a million. It's a big number. That's in the U.S.

2:36:31Jason Howell:And always never does it make a headline, right? But, you know, some kid is knocked down by a car. She walked away. She's hurt. You know, it's like the cat in San Francisco. We were talking about that for weeks.

2:36:45Megan Morrone:That's because it was a cat.

2:36:46Jason Howell:Aw, it was a beloved neighborhood cat. It was a cat. Yeah. But my point is, if a human driver had killed the cat, the locals would have been really upset, but it wouldn't have been well-plied news.

2:36:57Ant Pruitt:Yeah.

2:36:58Jason Howell:And stuff like that. I don't know how autonomous vehicles get on the other side of that.

2:37:03Moltbook:They kind of have deserved a lot of this criticism, too, because Waymo and a lot of these companies have just thrown their vehicles into local traffic without always warning municipalities and everything. They get in the way of traffic. They're here in Atlanta now through Uber. And there's a story almost every day about stuck in the middle of the intersection and people are stacked up behind it. Just being in public spaces as if we, public roads, are the beta test for these services. Well, that's true, isn't it?

2:37:32Jason Howell:A lot of people regret that. yeah we are the beta test yeah it shouldn't be that way yeah no no i i mean help help me out here i i thought they had to seek permission and the california now they do whatever now they do but

2:37:43Moltbook:it wasn't always this way so there is certainly built up resentment over time and you know people are always going to hear something new like honestly i kind of would like to see better autonomous driving i would like to see this technology get there but the cost of it is a thing we should be talking about and there are these safety gaps there's you know leaving these companies in charge of things there's also like just hey uh turns out the guy who owns like a very popular car brand turned out to be a full-fledged nazi what is he going to put in that software what is he going to do what can now you own this car that this guy can send software

2:38:19Jason Howell:updates to that's scary so and you look at cruise cruise which had a horrible incident in san francisco So they weren't transparent when, you know, I was hearing you.

2:38:30Ant Pruitt:Put them out of business, didn't it? Right.

2:38:32Jason Howell:They're gone. And, you know, when you say you're reading the news story down in L.A. L.A. area, Santa Monica, it was like and they reported themselves. So at least they're learning that lesson. Like, don't cover this up. Don't cover this. The cover up will be the crime, if nothing else.

2:38:49Ant Pruitt:Samsung has announced, they announced on Friday, that their trifold, the Galaxy Z trifold, which opens up like an accordion. like this yeah will be$2 ,899 absolutely not yeah for every pain give me three come on I know Devendra you're gonna have a review unit right no not not me I don't do phones but also like I

2:39:11Moltbook:I've always been skeptical of the folds in general I think Samsung deserves a lot of credit for like really ironing out this whole area pushing the envelope I don't know about the trifold right I see a single fold I see like hey give me a pocketable device give me something that opens up into a tablet. The trifold feels like, you know, Icarus flying towards the sun. I don't know. What do you gain from this$3 ,000 device?

2:39:34Ant Pruitt:It's going to unfold its wings and they'll immediately melt. Yeah.

2:39:36Megan Morrone:You know what's nuts, though, is I think within the realm of folding phones, the one that genuinely I think feels most popular and brings most joy is the flip phone model. Not only because it's most familiar, it's usually the cheapest priced. Whereas the only time I have ever felt FOMO, about not having the single fold, like the traditional foldable phones, is watching my colleague Allison at tech events be able to write a blog and also open Slack at the same time on her phone. That's the only time I ever feel like I want one of these things. I'm going to go on

2:40:11Ant Pruitt:record right now saying this fall is going to be extremely expensive for me because I am going to buy that Apple folding phone.

2:40:17Moltbook:Yeah.

2:40:18Ant Pruitt:And I'll probably buy the new MacBook Pro with the OLED touchscreen. It's going to be a bad fall. But I think the problem really with all these existing folding phones is they're Android. Give me an iPad that's a phone that folds up and I might buy it.

2:40:34Moltbook:I think that's what they essentially, it seems like the plan is, right? Like people like the iPad mini, but it's in a weird space because of the price and you might as well bump up to the iPad Air price, right? Get a bigger screen. Give me something that opens up to the iPad mini size that I can fit in my pocket, there you go. You're going to sell so many of those.

2:40:53Ant Pruitt:This just in from Fast Company, Groundhogs, tomorrow's Groundhog Day. Punxsutawney Phil will be removed from his lair. I think we should all watch Bill Murray and Groundhog Day, the movie. I mean, just do that every year.

2:41:04Moltbook:I think that's a classic.

2:41:06Ant Pruitt:Yeah.

2:41:06Moltbook:Yeah.

2:41:06Ant Pruitt:It's a holiday movie everyone can get behind. But according to Fast Company, Groundhogs are only correct 50 % of the time in forecasting the arrival of spring. Almost like pure randomness. huh it's almost completely random i would have thought i would have figured it's the most accurate

2:41:22Moltbook:measurement thank you what's the kalshi bet on this i think that's what people are going to look

2:41:29Ant Pruitt:at now now we live in the world people are going to bet on it and make i just i just figure that uh you know uh whoever wrote that article that was on assignment said i need to file quickly what's what's going on out there in the world yeah um wooden satellites in the works apparently China last year yes wooden satellites China last year launched a satellite made of mahogany and and that's what yes really yes because wood wears well in space um sure it also doesn't hold on to heat it also doesn't hold on to heat those are and when you burn up in uh come in you know re-entering it burns up oh that's a nice fire would have thought

2:42:17Megan Morrone:it would be to reduce space waste but reduces space waste it's organic okay so we're apparently

2:42:25Moltbook:on our way to more wooden satellites where we're not china is like so many things we will be left They're way ahead of America.

2:42:33Ant Pruitt:Yes. Ours are going to be shiny metal because that's what sci-fi dictates. And we usually end our show. I don't like to, but I do like to memorialize some of the great pioneers of our industry as they pass. Nobody, good news. Nobody died this week except the Wemo.

2:42:56Ant Pruitt:belkin reminds users the wemo smart home product uh servers are shut down yesterday um sorry r.i.p we all lived through that first generation of smart home devices so many lofty

2:43:11Moltbook:claims so many unfulfilled promises but belkin was all right the plugs were fine the good news is it will continue to function with home kit which is wild uh and if you have one that works with thread it will continue to function with threads so you know that's the good news the bad

2:43:26Ant Pruitt:that's how it should be yeah yeah that's how it should be isn't it uh ladies and gentlemen this concludes this fabulous edition of this week in tech i didn't get the chance uh to read david to read your letter i just let one let you know you got it he said don't write me back by the time you get this i'll be on parole that's nice he's been five years in the uh in the farmington correctional system in farmington missouri but he listens to our show and you know it reminds me that there are a lot of people incarcerated who do listen to our podcasts he says they give us a tablet uh and uh we're able to listen to shows he says i listen to twit every week uh if he knew he knew a lot about a lot of our shows um anyway a great letter thank you yeah you know i just wanted to mention that because uh i think people who are incarcerated you know they're doing the time do the crime do the time but uh that they're paying off their dues to society but they're still humans they're still people and uh and we are grateful for all of our listeners especially those of you who have no choice but to listen thank you gary rivlin thank you so much for being here always a pleasure to see you uh keep doing the ai coverage i like that i like this is much fun thank you very much yeah always great to see you oh i didn't mention katherine o 'hara you're right she did pass she's not a tech wizard but we are we love her she was way too young she's two years older than i am that's too young uh she i've been a fan since the earliest days of sctv where she was a remarkable uh contributor and of course in so many great movies so yes you're right thank you greg i should mention that uh thank you uh victoria song such a pleasure to see you and your garbage eyes i just said that the first time first time you were on i'll never forget it i love it they're

2:45:19Megan Morrone:so bad no you know what i'm just as blind yeah yeah same i have thick glasses too can you wear

2:45:27Ant Pruitt:contacts or no?

2:45:28Megan Morrone:I can. They are a must for testing smart glasses as most of them don't support my garbage eyeball prescription.

2:45:37Ant Pruitt:That's right. That's actually why I don't have vision pros, because I just don't want to do that whole thing, you know. Thank you. Yes. And riding the IRT says, I watched Waiting for Guffman last night, which is a classic. So good. Wonderful mockumentary featuring catherine o 'hara also best in show best show where she sings the terriers all of those

2:46:00Leo Laporte:mockumentaries are great and she's in most love them if not all of them she's in yeah she was a big christopher guest shits creek contributor yeah yeah really really great stuff davendra always a

2:46:10Ant Pruitt:pleasure to see you thank you my friend for being here i didn't mean to name my chat bot after you that wasn't it's a common occurrence you know i wasn't thinking i wasn't thinking uh senior editor and Gadget. What a great show. Thank you all three of you for being here. We do twit. Thank you all for watching. We do the show every Sunday at 1400 Pacific time. That's 1700 East coast time. That is 2200 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club on the club to discord, but there's also YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and kick. If you're watching live chat with us live, I'd love to see the chat.

2:46:49Ant Pruitt:We appreciate that. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at our website. There's a YouTube channel for the video. Great way to share clips if you want to. And of course, you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast client. It's free, audio or video or both. And if you like the show, give us a nice review.

2:47:07Moltbook:That would be nice. I'd appreciate that.

2:47:09Ant Pruitt:If you're not a member of the club, help us out a little bit. We appreciate your support. Twit.tv slash club twit makes a big difference. Frankly, it's the only way we keep doing what we're doing. More than a quarter of our operating costs are now paid for by the club. It doesn't go into my pocket. It keeps the shows running, keeps our staff employed, and we really appreciate it. And it's a way of voting for the kind of content you want to see. In fact, if you are interested in AI and Claudebot or OpenClause, it is now dubbed, Friday is our AI user group, first Friday of every month, and we're going to be talking about it.

2:47:45Ant Pruitt:I'll be showing you the setup and maybe we'll even chat a little bit with Dev. Dev Null, that is, on Friday. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Have a wonderful week. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.

2:48:00Moltbook:This is amazing.

2:48:03Doing the twit.

2:48:04Moltbook:Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit.