TWiT 1072: The Devil's Advocate - Jailbreaking Fighter Jets, Social Media Addiction, and Self-Driving Snafus

18:10Leo Laporte:Well, I was just going to say, yes, as a reporter in the trenches for the rise of Facebook and all this, I feel we have this conversation every day for the past 20 years, like what father said a second ago. We're still at the who's responsible stage. We're still at the do you trust Mark zuckerberg stage and it's like well i'm i'm 40 years old now and i was 20 when we were having these discussions and it's like i don't know uh to the devil's advocate position it's like uh you're an adult you no one's forcing you to use instagram beauty filters or otherwise it's like i don't i don't know why i need uh the judiciary to step in when i can close the laptop type of thing i don't know if that's like facile thinking or like to to whatever but like i don't know man And I guess I've never really struggled with addiction for real.

18:58Leo Laporte:You don't have body dysmorphia, Nicholas? Not that I'm aware of, no. Which is easy for me to say. I know a lot of folks do struggle.

19:08Megan Morrone:If I could do devil's advocate of the devil's advocate. I mean - Do they still have a devil's advocate at the Vatican, by the way? Yeah, I know him. He's a nice guy. They're really, I mean, I'm not being facetious.

19:19Ant Pruitt:That used to be something at the Vatican, right?

19:22Megan Morrone:It's not an official position, but there are several people who - whose job it is strategizing yes their job is to be on the outside throwing rocks that's that's what they do but to say we can close the laptop and remember i'm with you nicholas i believe that people have to be doing the adulting that would if you're dealing with an actual addiction you can't you can't say that you can't tell someone well why don't you just stop drinking why don't you just stop using cocaine why don't you stop using fentanyl or opioids so that that is where that clinical distinction of addiction and desire has to be really, really clear.

19:58Megan Morrone:Because if it's an actual addiction, you have to treat it. You can't just say, just change your attitude.

20:03Jason Howell:So in the Discord, writing the IRT actually had an interesting point here. You replace Instagram with DraftKings. And what Leo just said at the time, so we can't regulate that either.

20:19Ant Pruitt:You can ban gambling. That's different. You can say I ban gambling. We do. In fact, in California, it's banned. Right. But I think I don't have a problem.

20:27Jason Howell:The point here is, you know, gambling, you know, we, you know, people who are problem gamblers who are there, you know, they are addicted, but they, you know, the the physical manifestations of that are not the same as it is, you know, with drugs or alcohol. that's true that's a dopamine addiction so yeah when you when you you know i mean it that is a real addiction yeah and you know i mean when you try to stop gambling addiction i i am i am not you know i am not a gambler i've never gambled um but i don't believe that uh as far as i'm aware you know for gamblers when they try to stop they don't go through withdrawal in the same way that you do from a physical addiction to some substance.

21:14Jason Howell:But we still consider that to be an addiction. So, you know, that's kind of going back to earlier in this conversation. But, you know, the idea is what is an addiction? And, you know, I think that there probably is a case to be made that at least for some people that, you know, that there is an addictive or a compulsive, Maybe compulsive is a better way of phrasing it than addictive behavior. But you do have some behavioral things that people are unable to control. Just saying being an adult is not an adequate answer to that.

21:52Ant Pruitt:Yeah, I'll be honest. I wouldn't care one whit if they banned Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok. It would be fine with me. I think that there are non-algorithmically driven social networks, like, for instance, our forums and our Mastodon, that are valuable even to people under 16 and 13, especially people who, for one reason or another, are marginalized at home or at school and find their community online. Those things are valuable. I'd hate to lose that in addition. I don't think, and by the way, YouTube, I would say, I'd hate to lose YouTube. so the remedy probably isn't for these guys to shut down what should the remedy be if let's say it goes against them uh they can afford a big fine it can't be just a fine what what what structural remedy would we have to pursue i mean the structural remedy that i've i've heard being

22:46Megan Morrone:recommended is doing something like what they do in vegas and what they do in atlantic city which is the casinos have to pay into a fund to help those who are addicted to gambling that's worked

22:55Ant Pruitt:that doesn't work that's really made a difference god i mean my family's been living in las vegas

23:00Megan Morrone:for 25 26 years now it's a joke everyone knows it's a joke yes it's funded yes it does help certain people but most of the people who have that addiction it will ruin their lives even as they're staring at the sign saying if you need help call this number the same with cigarettes

23:16Ant Pruitt:people still buy cigarettes in in uh in other countries i think in canada and australia the Cigarette warning labels are graphic. Oh, the ones over here are great. They showed like diseased lungs and cirrhosis.

23:29Megan Morrone:Oh, yeah. Does it stop people? In fact, when I was in Rome, everybody smoked. It actually increased revenue for a while because people wanted to collect all the different packs. Collect all the diseases.

23:41Ant Pruitt:Okay. Oh, God. Yeah, humans are not really good at assessing danger.

23:50Megan Morrone:All right, this is Benito.

23:51Ant Pruitt:So we have amazing that the species has survived this long.

23:54Megan Morrone:We had to create laws to make people wear their seatbelt. So, I mean, you know.

23:58Ant Pruitt:Yeah, I mean, I'm not against laws. You know, somebody said, well, liquor stores are allowed to ask for ID before you can buy liquor. That seems right and proper. Now, the liquor store doesn't store that ID in a database of IDs and keep track of your name, address and birth date. uh so these internet systems obviously can and unfortunately even if they deny they do it they do

24:27Megan Morrone:it we know that the one old dude at the liquor store who looks at takes a glance at your idea and gives it back to you as you care um now you know i mean i you know i i never personally did

24:38Jason Howell:this but i'm i'm told that you know there are some people who are under the legal age for um consuming alcoholic substances, you know, often, you know, would have false IDs that would indicate that they were actually older than their actual age. That can't work. I have no evidence that that is actually true. It might be completely. You mean McLovin?

25:02Ant Pruitt:Yeah, who knows? All right. Well, anyway, it was interesting to see Mark take the statement. I don't think he's done this before he's testified in Congress, but I can't remember another court case where he is.

25:15Megan Morrone:Yeah, he's done Congress in that, wasn't he in a hoodie when he tested a vote for Congress?

25:22Ant Pruitt:I remember the time, and he was wearing a suit, that I think it was Josh Hawley made him stand up, turn around and apologize to the family members in the audience who had been harmed, whose kids had been harmed by Metta. That was a humiliating moment. interestingly meta has begun a 65 million dollar election slush fund don't know i mean i think it's probably completely coincidental uh actually it's more about ai but you know hey if you're lobbying you might as well lobby for that too the age too i don't know i uh i think i feel i i say this every time i feel like it's up to parents ultimately there's some evidence tech dirt had an article that the australia social media ban uh is in fact isolating for some kids kids with disabilities uh for instance uh everybody's watching australia they banned social media for kids under 16.

26:24Ant Pruitt:just banned it um the guardian has a piece about uh well quoting some some kids this is an australian girl i lost my friends she's autistic she's i lost my friends she's 14 years old while some people were exposed to harmful content and bullying online or indie which is not her real name social media was always a safe space if she ever came across anything that felt unsafe she says she would ask her parents or sister about it i have autism and mental health things it's hard making friends in real life for me my online friends were easier i actually know autistic kids whose primarily primary social life is online um i i think this is genuine what about the harm to those kids cutting them off no it's

27:16Megan Morrone:hard for most people in the real world to make friends to make good friends that's true i i am also on the spectrum and i understand that however the friends i make in the real world are far more concrete than the they're real friends yeah yeah they're actual friends do you think it's a

27:31Ant Pruitt:this advantage for Indy that she has social because it allows her not to make friends in

27:36Megan Morrone:the real world absolutely if I had social media when when I was growing up I never would have met anybody I would have been online the entire time my entire life I would never have touched grass would you have been a priest probably not probably honestly probably not yeah I'd probably still be running my my BBS right out of a one bedroom or you'd be with Nicholas playing World of warcraft exactly no no no i was never i was never world of warcraft it was civilization for me oh civ okay you see many mornings you know i think we should send apple to jail because they've

28:07Ant Pruitt:put civ on the ipad now and that makes it really easy to become addicted i'm being facetious uh anyway i we yeah we do have this conversation a lot i probably shouldn't bring it up i thought

28:20Jason Howell:mark well no i think it's i think it's a valid conversation to have because we you know particularly because we haven't really come up with a solution yet. And I think until we come up with some viable ways forward, some kind of path forward, we need to keep talking about this. We can't let it slide because not doing anything is not the right answer either. Yeah.

28:49Ant Pruitt:I just think it's so hard to know what to do without causing harms. yeah in the other direction I just don't know I mean I look at I don't have Instagram X uh on my phone I do I I watch YouTube every every morning when I work out um I don't but I'm an adult of course but I I mean I think you know you see parents give their kids an iPad or an iPhone when they go out as a babysitter you know they're doing that at home too and we know that causes real harm yeah we now have the should we ban those things because parents are using that as a tool i mean i do agree that's probably a bad thing to do

29:36Jason Howell:you know when you see when you see you know kids in a restaurant with an eye with a phone or a tablet see it all take take that away and hand them a pack of crayons and a piece and a stack of paper.

29:46Ant Pruitt:Yeah. So we used to do the restaurant and give you a coloring book placement.

29:52Megan Morrone:To be fair, that's not just children. I mean, seeing adults in a restaurant, like five adults at a table and they're all staring at their couples.

29:58Leo Laporte:I was just going to say that, Father. Like it's definitely not, you see the kid with the tablet, but then you see the parent on their phone just mindlessly scrolling through junk basically. So it's like, I don't know.

30:09Megan Morrone:Most of the time, the reason why the kid has the tablet is because the parents are also on their phones they don't want to deal with the kid so you know nobody wants to talk to anybody i saw a picture uh from many years ago uh of probably from the 40s of uh guys

30:31Ant Pruitt:going to work at a railroad station every one of them had his nose in a newspaper it's just changed It was a newspaper. Now it's a phone. You shouldn't be expected to socialize on the subway.

30:47Megan Morrone:You'd love to live in my house for a week, Leo, because there is a generational gap. And so after lunch, most of us go upstairs to the rec room and we have a coffee and do some light chat. And then half of the room goes to the newspaper room. Literally, it's the newspaper room. It's where all the newspapers from around the world go, physical newspapers. And they sit and they read. and the other half play games on their phones so it's uh i uh actually remember going to the

31:17Ant Pruitt:newspaper reading room when i was a kid reading newspapers come to think of it those giant sticks that hold the newspaper yeah they'd have the newspapers behind sticks you remember that

31:25Megan Morrone:benito hell yeah i'm surprised yeah i don't yeah i remember that i spent in the library days looking at microfiches in the library of old magazines and old newspapers. Film strips. Particular pieces of information. Here's a photo of gentlemen in hats.

31:43Ant Pruitt:Yep. Yep. They're not talking to each other. The last thing they want to do is talk to each other.

31:48Jason Howell:They're all reading the paper. And, you know, you get on a plane now and, you know, everybody's got a set of noise canceling headphones on. Yeah. Or vision pros. I've never seen anybody on a plane with a vision pro, actually. and i fly a lot i've yet to see one on a plane i the in fact one of the few places where i've ever seen a vision pro out in the wild was a couple years ago when they first came out i saw a guy in portland riding around on a bicycle with a vision pro downtown portland yeah that's just stupid but um but you know noise can't get ready nicholas correct me if i'm wrong

32:26Ant Pruitt:March 4th, Apple's going to make a bunch of announcements. One of the things John Gruber is saying, and I hope it's true, is that Apple's going to bring F1 to the Vision Pro. I will buy a Vision Pro.

32:37Leo Laporte:My dad might buy an Vision Pro. Honestly, my dad might be the big... He literally has VHS tapes in his basement of races from the 80s that he taped off whatever channel it was on. He actually might be this nation's most preeminent F1 expert. I keep telling him that. I don't know how to instantiate that. He came to it before Drive to Survive. Many, many decades before Drive to Survive. That was the only sport I was aware of as a kid growing up was Formula One. And this was in the 90s. And nobody knew what it was in the 90s. No, I know. Because it was European. If I was to the Vision Pro, he used to get the British magazines.

33:14Leo Laporte:I guess he could import them or something. I did too.

33:17Jason Howell:Did you, Sam? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I bought I used to have a subscription to race car engineering, which had like that was like the really deep dive technical articles on, you know, F1 and various other forms of racing. But, you know, when whenever, especially in the 90s, when I started traveling to Europe regularly, I would pick up copies of Autosport and Auto Car Motorsport magazine and, you know, be reading all these different things. Oh, yeah. I mean, I first got into F1 back in 1978 when I picked up my first copy of Road and Track. And it was in June or July of 78. And they had the report of that year's Long Beach Grand Prix.

34:05Jason Howell:In those days, F1 was not on TV everywhere. And, you know, so if you weren't at the race or you weren't local, you know, you would end up, you know, reading about the race, you know, a couple of months later in a magazine like that track.

34:22Ant Pruitt:Now you can wear a Vision Pro and you could be you could be there. You could be a track side. I'll never forget a couple of cruises ago. Perry McCarthy was the guest of honor on the cruise, the original Stig, the Stig in the black. and he gave a couple of lectures about F1 and one of which he showed the driver's point of view, Ayrton Senna at Monaco. It was just incredible to watch from his point of view.

34:49Jason Howell:And that's exactly why I would not want to watch F1

34:52Ant Pruitt:in something like a Vision Pro. I would be throwing up all over the place. I don't think Apple would do that. I think what they would do, because F1 has all of these feeds, they have the driver's feeds, they have all these feeds, they have the data feed, they have the track with the little things going around they they would just give you a field of view that had you know 20 screens in it and you could look around and go that'd be kind of cool

35:16Megan Morrone:i would do that by the way leo pretty fly for us cis guy in the discord is showing a picture of yuki sunoda's rb7 catching fire in san francisco today and is there an f1 event in san francisco

35:28Jason Howell:no i think it's just a prom a promo event um the uh first race oh he's not catching fire he's doing

35:34Ant Pruitt:you gotta understand oh it is on fire that's the brakes yeah that's the brakes yeah yeah that part

35:41Jason Howell:they get pretty hot yeah plus plus the rb7 is from like 2013 or something yeah it's okay it's

35:48Ant Pruitt:yeah nowadays it's practically electric they're half electric leo i was going through saint

35:53Megan Morrone:peter's two days ago and in the lost and found for the vatican museum is a vision pro so someone

36:01Ant Pruitt:which okay whatever but if you were at the vatican last week and you lost your vision pro contact

36:07Megan Morrone:father robert balassaire who goes into saint peter's to put on a vision pro is wrong with

36:14Ant Pruitt:people by the way though and i know you know this because i have a feeling you won't say but i have a feeling you might have had something to do with there is a 3d view of saint peter's right yes there is he's look at him look at him playing coy he said it's a team effort everybody's involved here it's a team he's on the he's on the team uh let's take a little break when we come back we have more to talk about with this wonderful panel who i just really you can kind of tell we just like to hang out and chat with i guess that's the best twits right where you just feel like you're at the table and we're just sitting around and we're gassing about stuff father robert balassier the digital jesuit i just miss having you around i you know i guess uh just have to i do miss the old days and does that officially make me an old fart i think he used to have a little thing in the basement of the twit brick house the little uh what was it called the nose no hole no hole and i can always i always knew that if i couldn't find father robert he'd be down in the no hold soldering something together or something it's great to have you uh mr sam a bull salmon my car guy i feel like it's yeah this is old friend week it's good to see you wheel bearings dot media and nicholas de leon from uh consumer reports great friend as well so yeah we could sit around we could talk about stuff nicholas has actually done a little vibe coding for his hometown we'll

37:40Leo Laporte:talk about that i have a few little projects coming up but yeah this one i want to talk about

37:44Ant Pruitt:it out yet we're all we're all here we're all uh let's be honest we're all a little bit into the ai thing right anybody anti-ai here we're all among friends kind of middle oh a couple of huh

37:58Jason Howell:yeah i think yeah i think i think that i think that there's some some valuable use uses use cases for it but i think that there's a lot of places where they're trying to shove it in where it just

38:09Ant Pruitt:does not make any sense at all oh i agree every time i open up our show rundown google says hey

38:15Jason Howell:you want me to summarize this data no that's what i think you know the amount of money that has that is being squandered right now on data centers um you know it's just ridiculous i think the jury's

38:28Ant Pruitt:still out on the data center thing i think it might be worth it i'm i feel like we're creating something i don't know what it is we don't have ram that's the reason we don't have ram yeah yeah oh yeah let me tell we'll talk about ram and hard drives a little later yeah that's because of those data centers yeah well good because if we're creating the next consciousness i think it's well you so you okay so you have to wait a year to upgrade your computer

38:53Megan Morrone:no they're creating your rental computer leo that's what they're doing

38:57Ant Pruitt:yeah i'll tell you what i don't need to buy software anymore i just tell you know chat gpt codex five because you're going to be renting your computer That's the point. And I am at this point, 200 bucks a month to all of them. Actually, no, just to two. My plan was I was going to cut off Claude when I went to Codex, and then I'm going to cut off Codex and go to Gemini. But you know what? It's kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend or something. It's like, Claude, I'm going to miss you.

39:32Megan Morrone:I'm going to see you later, Claude.

39:35Ant Pruitt:But now I have a new friend.

39:39Ant Pruitt:We talk about that on our AI show, Intelligent Machines. I'll save it for that. Our show today brought to you by Trusted Tech. Hey, these are guys you ought to know about. If you're using Microsoft 365, you would pretty much need an AI to tell you what's going on. Or maybe better, get some experts. Because you're probably paying for licenses you don't need. Or maybe missing ones you do. don't ask copilot ask trusted tech in july microsoft's going to implement a significant price increase for microsoft 365 and it gets even more complicated there's a lot of nuance in here but the good news is these guys are experts trusted tech helps businesses of all sizes get the most out of their microsoft investment by ensuring their m365 environment is well supported and aligned with how the business actually operates.

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42:01Ant Pruitt:Whether you're looking to fine-tune your Microsoft 365 licensing, improve the way your organization receives proactive Microsoft support or both, trusted tech offers free consultations to help you understand your options go to trustedtech.team slash twit365 fill out that form get in contact with trusted tech's microsoft licensing engineers they're great very great um google io is coming up may 19th and 20th as usual they have a big puzzle to solve do you do that uh robert do you try to solve the puzzle

42:41Megan Morrone:i used to but i haven't gone to a google i o since oh my goodness yeah 2016 that used to be more fun

42:49Ant Pruitt:remember the one where sergey bryn parachuted in wearing his google glass yes he was at a conference recently he says he doesn't he says wait till the product is really ready before you let's say parachuted to the conference to announce it remember when they used to give everybody the

43:07Jason Howell:thing they were announcing oh yeah yeah yeah people would walk away from there with a couple of phones i mean i remember i knew it was over there was a nexus phone the first two uh android wear watches there was an lg right the first chromebook chromebook c40 of course the nexus

43:23Ant Pruitt:q don't forget the nexus q i knew it was over when the thing we got under the chair was a cardboard viewer yeah yeah glasses yeah that was that was when yeah i think we're not i think that's the last of it uh i don't know what will be under your chair at google io but it's may 19th and 20th we will cover the keynote or the keynotes huh old gum yes uh this week they did uh announce probably trying to get ahead of what apple is likely to announce on march 4th the pixel 10a the low-cost version of the pixel 10 it's exactly the same as last year's phone i mean it's the same processor yep uh cool colors though is in color as well it's not a minimal 10 10 it's a nine

44:13Megan Morrone:basically it's a nine yeah they just made the nine to the 10a i guess that makes sense for a

44:20Ant Pruitt:while those a series were kind of like the phone to get like this is this is great you're getting a

44:24Jason Howell:I mean, just because it's a slightly upgraded 9A does not mean it's a bad phone. I mean, it's still an excellent phone, especially for$500. Oh, yeah. And within a month or two, you'll be able to get it for$350,$400. That's right.

44:41Ant Pruitt:Don't ever buy it the day it comes out. Google always sharply discounts. I have the Pixel 9 Pro XL. I just put Graphene OS on it, by the way. Very easy. You've probably done that, Robert, right? but it used to be the to swap out a rom on an android phone was you know had to install adb and you know it was a complicated thing now it's you do you attach the cable it's a website

45:04Megan Morrone:and it installs graphene couldn't be i'm still using an 8 pro and i have no desire to upgrade at any point in the near future are using stock uh google android or yeah i went back to stock just because I was getting some issues with my custom loads. And yeah, I'm starting to feel the age, but I used a OnePlus 2 for eight years. So I figured I could meet that.

45:30Ant Pruitt:Remember when there were really great Android phones? The OnePlus was so cool. Remember the Moto X?

45:41Jason Howell:Moto X. I had the second gen Moto X. And my wife had one too. She had the, she got the bamboo on the back. I had the blue on the back. Because you would build your own. You could do whatever you wanted.

45:57Ant Pruitt:And then the Moto Maker. I feel like we've regressed. The Moto X, you could change, hey, Google into anything you wanted. I had it set. So if I said, help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, it would talk to me. You can't do that anymore.

46:13Jason Howell:it had the uh the infrared sensors on the front so you could swipe your hand just swipe your hand over it to dismiss a notification or a call or like you know at night you know i had it on a charging stand on the the bed stand and it was off but you know if i woke up in the middle of the night and i wanted to know what time it was i could just swipe my hand over it it would flash up the time momentarily and then go go blank again after about 10 seconds yeah that was a google

46:39Ant Pruitt:project that that was the last of it. Yeah.

46:45Megan Morrone:We did that. There were several manufacturers who were giving us interesting phones with different capabilities, everything from keyboards to really cool sensor functions, and none of them sold.

46:57Jason Howell:So we've all gone to the same rectangle. Most people just ended up, they wanted a slab, you know, black slab, you know, and that was it. But that's not us. That's normal people. Yeah. The normies have ruined it for us. The problem is there aren't enough of us to justify manufacturers investing in those cool technologies.

47:18Megan Morrone:But also this is like - Dang it, normies. This is America too. See what we could have had. Like there's Japanese and Chinese phones that are Android that you will never see in America.

47:25Ant Pruitt:Oh, yeah. The new Xiaomi Ultra, which has a Leica photo system in it. I would kill to get this, but you can't buy it anywhere. I mean, you can buy it everywhere but the US.

47:37Megan Morrone:I'll bring one back for you next time, Leo. they're in the shop down the down the road right here you can get them in italy absolutely but it won't run in american networks right oh yeah it will not all i think probably it'll probably run

47:50Ant Pruitt:probably run on certain bands it'll run on not all yeah yeah yeah okay i'm gonna give you ammunition you haters you ai haters every all the what's gone on uh maybe my contention perhaps is that these companies instead of trying to innovate anywhere else is just saying let's throw all of our engineering talent into ai all our resources all our talent all our engineering into ai does that

48:19Leo Laporte:seem like what's happening yes i mean that's what it feels like as as you know a reporter covering tech like i i was just talking with a friend the other day he said it used to take him two hours a day to go through all the big tech block you know the verge and gadget yada yada nowadays he's done in like 10 minutes because they're all just talking about ai and it's the same very small number of news developments yeah it certainly feels like the whole tech industry that i love love and has shrunk dramatically like you just said a second ago phones are kind of whatever now uh the video game industry is i mean xbox is not in a great place that's shrinking too it feels like yes all this cool stuff that like i thought was oh this is going to be around forever no it is not going to be around forever.

49:03Leo Laporte:And now we're literally just talking about AI, which is fine. I'm glass half full when it comes to AI. Obviously, I think I've used it for some stuff, for projects and so forth. But I didn't want that to come at the expense of everything else. And I mean, look at Windows. Windows is just, I mean, I probably shouldn't say. I mean, look, I guess I'm a representative of Consumer Reports. You write to normies.

49:24Ant Pruitt:You write for normies, right?

49:26Leo Laporte:That's what you're writing for. Windows is not as good as it used to be. I used to give Windows like, yeah, you know, it's good enough. It's fine. Who can, you know, it's, it is a seriously degraded product nowadays. I guess, and yeah, is that AI's fault? Is that them just funneling resources into AI? That's certainly what it feels like, you know?

49:45Jason Howell:Well, you know, an open AI is getting close to apparently getting close to closing a hundred billion dollar funding round, private funding round, you know, for a small fraction of that, just imagine the things we could actually do, you know, you know, I mean, not just developing, you know, some interesting, interesting gadgets, interesting phones, interesting technologies, but, you know, some of the other things we could do in society with a tenth of that money, you know, so if we could just shave off 10 % of what they're throwing at AI, we could do a lot of really good things for the world.

50:21Ant Pruitt:Well, Phil Spencer is leaving Xbox at Microsoft and the new head of Microsoft's Xbox division says, don't worry, we're not going to load it up with AI slop games.

50:31Megan Morrone:Of course they are.

50:32Ant Pruitt:Yeah, right.

50:33Leo Laporte:I don't think anyone, it's funny to see the reaction as a gamer American. I was paying very close attention to that announcement the other day. The skepticism with that whole, her whole like spiel has been received. I guess it's an interesting communications problem if you're Microsoft or the Xbox division. No one's going to believe a word this woman. It's not even her fault, necessarily. Everyone's very skeptical. The fact that she had to say it even tells you something, right? The fact that she's like, oh, I'm a gamer. I love games. It's like, does anyone believe that? I can't possibly believe that.

51:08Leo Laporte:And what was her last job?

51:11Ant Pruitt:Let me see. Her name is Asha Sharma.

51:15Megan Morrone:Just scroll up that article. You'll see it. Just scroll up the headline. The headline of that article.

51:20Ant Pruitt:The headline. The headline. The headline. We will not. New Xbox boss promises no soulless AI slop after moving over from Microsoft's core AI products division. Oh, sorry. You're right, Benito.

51:35Leo Laporte:I feel like a lot of gamers would have been more happy to hear her say something. Look, I'm not very familiar with games. I'll be honest with you folks. But it's my job to ensure that this division is successful. We're going to try our best to win over your hearts and minds and put out cool stuff. I don't come from that background I have no idea what it is but it's my job in the next 90 days to learn if she would have been more along those lines I think folks would have been way more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt but they came out the gates with her like she's some hardcore gamer with a capital Z

52:06Ant Pruitt:I don't have any background in games at all come on

52:12Megan Morrone:I played Farmville you know what the buy-in is? the first time a developer makes an AI-generated map where every level can actually be original so that no one has an advantage for having played it for 60 hours, 100 hours, 1 ,000 hours, that's when there's actually going to be some acceptance. You're going to see these multiplayer maps that are just brand new. They're 100 % original because they've been AI-generated.

52:36Ant Pruitt:I have to say, I know a lot of gamers who say, I don't want any AI in games. Yes, that's a comment. But in a way, I mean, isn't an NPC just bad AI? Like imagine how good the NPCs could be. You wouldn't have the same, you know, I used to be a warrior like you, but I got an arrow through the knee over and over and over again.

52:57Megan Morrone:The term AI in games though is problematic because we've had AI in games since the beginning of games.

53:01Ant Pruitt:Yeah. This just hasn't been very good. Imagine if you'd like had,

53:06Megan Morrone:you know, the bartender in the AI in games than there is for like LLMs and generative AI stuff. like AI and games you just you generally just say that as like the computer player that's the AI so but that's a very different definition from what we call AI today.

53:21Ant Pruitt:I think NPCs could be better maps could be better there's a lot of opportunities

53:24Megan Morrone:I don't know the minimum for NPC AI would be pattern recognition if it can't do pattern recognition it's not useful as an NPC AI right I mean how many games have procedurally generated

53:37Ant Pruitt:worlds a lot of them that was the big thing right no man's I mean that was no man's sky minecraft minecraft minecraft minecraft also but no man's sky everybody got very excited because an infinite number of worlds right it turned out to be really boring but they fixed it

53:55Megan Morrone:they've been updating that game so much better i heard it was better but i got so bored playing it for the way better okay i'll have to try it again now i feel guilty i feel like i'm uh my girlfriend

54:06Ant Pruitt:claude and uh and chat gpt are gonna miss me if i start playing video games go back to Valheim. Oh, I played so much Valheim, but that was my, uh, Valheim. And, uh, what was that switch game, uh, where you had animal crossing animal crossing. Those are my COVID games, right? Valheim and animal crossing. How'd you know that so quickly? Did you, did you, were you?

54:30Jason Howell:No, I've never played either one, but you just listening for 20 years.

54:35Ant Pruitt:Animal crossing. I still have a original, you know, the switch animal crossing version. I see over there in this pastel colors so uh let's see the timeline uh sonnet 4.6 came out last week from anthropic 20 minutes later open ai released gpt53 codex 20 minutes later then a few days later just this week gemini 3.1 pro came out and of course nowadays they're training these i think they're training these ais on the benchmarks so the benchmarks become more and more meaningless right but on the benchmarks this is from google of course uh three one beats them all humanity's last exam arc agi And SWE Bench, all the most important benchmarks.

55:28Ant Pruitt:It's like dominant. Oh, wait a minute. Here's one. The 5-3 Codex wins an SWE Bench Pro public. That's a one-shot benchmark. Everything else. So, okay.

55:47Megan Morrone:I mean, the ARC-HEI test is interesting. I do like seeing.

55:51Ant Pruitt:That's the one. And what's the story on that one? I remember.

55:55Megan Morrone:So Arc AGI looks at how a AI or an LLM handles pattern recognition and spatial reasoning. Those are the two big ones. So for example, a human looking at the backup camera of a car, we can immediately, even without thinking about it, we understand that when we start seeing objects moving in different proportions as we back up, that it's because of depth. That's easy for us. That's just a human thing. It's very difficult for an LLM to do. So that's one of the challenges. As can it take a picture, a video of objects moving and figure out what the spatial points are? And it's hard. I've done it myself and it's very hard.

56:38Jason Howell:And the problem with using an AI, especially like an LLM type of AI, to do that is they don't always understand, you know, seeing something, you can see relative changes, you know, if something's moving towards you or away, you can detect that. But you can't necessarily detect actually how far away that object is, especially from a single camera view. You know, if you have a stereoscopic view, you can do that. You can just use some basic geometry to figure out exactly where that thing is in space. But from a single camera view, and this is one of the fundamental problems with Tesla is all of their eight cameras, they're all single camera views.

57:25Jason Howell:And so it's got to guess as to where that object is in physical space. And oftentimes you can have objects that look similar to each other. And if you've made some inference based on, okay, I know roughly how big this particular object should be, and I know how many pixels is taking up in this view, so I'm going to guess it's, you know, 10 meters away from me. But you can also have another object that looks similar to that, that is larger or smaller. And now you've made a fundamental error in trying to determine where that object is in physical space. So, you know, with humans, you know, we're looking at the camera, but, you know, we can also look in the mirror and use other inputs to detect.

58:15Jason Howell:um so cameras are by themselves are they're useful but also problematic yeah so this is the

58:23Ant Pruitt:arc prize website i can't remember what the prize is it's a drop in the bucket compared to how much it costs to train these things uh human uh score uh 100 of course on agi2 cost 17 per task the new uh gemini 3.1 pro 77 which actually is a little lower than gemini 3 deep drink deep think but the cost is the thing it was 13 bucks for gemini 3 deep think it was less than a buck for gemini 3.1 pro so you have to consider cost and that's that's what these graphs uh show is how did they determine the human cost how did they determine the cost of a human they had to pay him 12 an hour i don't know

59:05Jason Howell:Yeah, and presumably you assign some value per unit time and say, okay, how long does it take the person to do that task?

59:14Ant Pruitt:I'm telling you, I've done it. It's hard. It's hard. You get a map and you have to rearrange the things to match. It's hard. It's not easy.

59:23Megan Morrone:There's a wide range of human ability there. That's true. Well, I think that's probably why it's a human panel.

59:28Jason Howell:So they're probably using a number of people to do it and taking an average. So I got a question for you, though. You mentioned, Leo, I think that they seem to be increasingly training these models to the benchmarks. I think we know pretty well that when you train people to the test, that leads to at least a problematic, very limited abilities. right um and so you know what what's what's the outcome going to be if we keep training these models to these various benchmarks not they will perform exceptionally well on benchmarks yes yeah

1:00:09Ant Pruitt:and do nothing that's why i don't trust benchmarks but you know if you play with these things they're definitely getting smarter um right necklace you which you used um i used a cloud code i primarily

1:00:21Leo Laporte:use cloud code i started doing cloud copy last summer so that was uh i whatever the top of the line model was then uh like last july ish is when i really started messing with this stuff uh and and so recently i uh i guess i'm using sonnet 4.6 on this current project uh i'm also using haiku 4.5 for uh yeah that's what i use for our summaries for the show yeah that's actually Yeah. So I'm more familiar with the, with the Claude kind of stack here.

1:00:51Ant Pruitt:Yeah. So you created this Tucson daily brief.

1:00:55Leo Laporte:Yes. Is this public or is this just for you? Oh, no, this is public. So what this was, okay. So the genesis of this was, remember like a month ago when everyone was like going crazy over Claude bot and like, oh, this is going to revolutionize everything. I was very skeptical. I was like, okay, here we go. What's this AI hype nonsense? But like me, you feel like your job is to try this stuff, right? Yes. Yes. I don't dismiss things out of hand. I'm like, okay, this seems a little hypey, but let me poke around with it. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of been my attitude for basically anything in life, actually.

1:01:26Leo Laporte:So I was like, okay, what are some cool things I could do with this layer, this additional layer in the stack here? And so what I did was it's called Tucson Daily Brief. It is not the fanciest project in the world. It's not going to be the next TikTok or anything. It was basically just an excuse for me to use these tools and learn more about Open Claw specifically. So basically what this is, is it goes through the major Tucson, Southern Arizona, local news sources, the RSS feeds, TV channels, newspapers. There's a couple of sub stacks and so forth. It goes through the RSS feeds, picks out the top.

1:02:01Leo Laporte:And this is Claude, I guess right now, Sonnet 4.6 doing this. Which is quite good, actually. Yes, quite good. It's picking out, let's say, the top 10 headlines. It summarizes those headlines. And then it sends that summary to me in Telegram, the messaging app. So at 6 a.m. every day, I get a summary of the top 10 things happening in Tucson that day. I've never been more informed about Tucson stuff than the past week. La Fiesta de los Verqueros, Tucson Rodeo is coming. Exactly. Yes. Tickets. We were going to go next weekend, but tickets start at$150, which feels a little expensive for a rodeo, to be totally honest.

1:02:35Leo Laporte:So it goes to Telegram. I get that message. And then it sends it that sort of summary, which is a couple of text messages in Telegram. It is sent to 11 labs and I clone my voice in 11 11 labs. And so you and it generates a podcast script. So it creates an audio podcast of me in quotation marks reading the top story. So this isn't you. This is 11 labs reading it. Yes, this is 11. Push back on cuts as city faces twenty seven million dollars deficit. City officials are wrestling with a twenty seven million dollar shortfall.

1:03:11Ant Pruitt:It sounds just like you.

1:03:13Leo Laporte:It sounds good enough.

1:03:14Jason Howell:11 Labs is surprisingly good. They're really good.

1:03:17Leo Laporte:It's gotten a lot better. Yeah. And so it creates an audio podcast, which you can get on Apple Podcasts. It creates that YouTube version, which obviously you can look on YouTube. And then there's a blog post, which it formats out of Markdown. How much does this cost you? How much does this cost you? My estimate, around$20 a month, the whole pipeline. And then it runs. Everyone was buying Mac Minis. I wasn't going to buy a Mac Mini. But I just have an old framework laptop running Linux. And I was like, all right, let me just put it there. And I know folks were like an open clock, you know, we're putting them on these machines.

1:03:49Leo Laporte:You don't need a really high-end machine though, right? No, I mean, it's all being done in the cloud. Yeah, there's no real competition power locally here. I don't have any data on here that, oh, it's going to exfiltrate your credit. I have nothing on this laptop, literally nothing. So I'm not too concerned about that. So it's a pretty cool project. There's one I'm working on right now. It's sports related. It's more of a, I call it an art project. It'll be done probably by the end of this week. So you're having fun, aren't you? Yeah, I mean, again, look, I live in Tucson, Arizona. I am within a 90-minute drive of, I believe, three or four planned data centers.

1:04:28Leo Laporte:So this is something that is a real local issue. They talk about this stuff, you know, where is the water coming from this? Should we really be destroying the desert to create this stuff? So this is an actual debate that's happening right now. But as someone who's like, all right, you know, I'm glass half full. I think it's neat. And it is, you know, it's certainly, you know, if you're so inclined, you know, I don't know if everyone's going to make an app, you know, to solve all their problems. I feel very Silicon Valley kind of crazy, frankly. But like if you're a tinkerer, if you're just a nerd, if you like it's cool.

1:05:02Leo Laporte:It's like, what is a better use of my hundred dollars a month? uh netflix and hbo max and lord knows what other just streaming whatever or am i going to learn some stuff and play around with with these important tools i'd rather spend that money on this stuff than netflix to be totally honest no disrespect to netflix but like if i have limited time on this planet and limited money i'd rather use it on something i kind of feel the same way

1:05:26Megan Morrone:it's so much fun department it's the new video devil's advocate again yes please okay so here's the thing. I understand you and I'm with you. I want to learn these tools that I can do some amazing things with the tools that I've already played with. However, we can get lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that I can subscribe to ChatGPT for$20 a month and do some amazing things. And I can replicate that with the other services. That's not how much it costs for them to actually run that. No, that's pretty clear. They're selling it at a loss. They're operating at massive losses. So because we don't have transparency into how much my project actually would cost in the real world, we are in this false economy where we just assume that at some point they're going to scale up so that LLMs are more efficient, whereas the data says that's not true.

1:06:15Megan Morrone:Isn't that what the internet taught us, though? The internet was free for the first 10 years.

1:06:20Ant Pruitt:It's also true. I have LLMs.

1:06:22Megan Morrone:They're static. So once they're deployed, they're static. So the The only way to make them learn is to retrain them. They do not learn from external stimuli. They are mimicry. They are really good mimicry, but they're mimicry. So to expect that to grow more efficient, I don't think that's gonna happen. I'm one of the people who thinks LLMs are great, interesting, but they're a dead end in terms of the next generation of AI.

1:06:48Jason Howell:They're one of many tools in the tool set. But yeah, I agree with you, Robert, that they have very strong limitations. And I think Anthony Nielsen in the chat said earlier, he mentioned there's gonna be a big squeeze when it comes to AI. And then he referenced Uber when it first came out, it was cheap and fast. And I don't know if you've taken an Uber lately, it's not cheap anymore. It's a lot more expensive than it used to be. And, you know, I think the same thing is probably going to happen with AI, especially as these companies move towards going public. You know, OpenAI obviously wants to be wants to be wants to do an IPO.

1:07:38Jason Howell:You know, Anthropic is going to want to do one. And, you know, at some point, you know, this is going to hit Alphabet and Google and Microsoft. you know, the costs of how much they're spending on AI is, is going to come back to bite them.

1:07:56Ant Pruitt:What is the address for the Tucson daily brief? If you don't, are you serving it or do you, where do you.

1:08:02Leo Laporte:It's served a cloud clever.

1:08:04Ant Pruitt:Okay. So it doesn't cost you anything to serve it. So you don't mind giving out the address.

1:08:08Leo Laporte:Oh yeah. No, you get it too. So if you go to Tucson daily brief.com, that's like the blog and at the bottom there's the Apple podcast and the YouTube link, and i'll probably put it on spotify and blue sky and all that stuff later this week i think that's

1:08:18Ant Pruitt:one thing a lot of people are doing is creating custom with open claw especially uh custom news briefs or you know things you wake up in the morning i saw one guy set it up he said surprise me and uh open claw created a voice for itself with 11 labs and uh got itself a phone number

1:08:36Leo Laporte:and called him in the morning that those are some it's like there were so many like stunty things i That's a real stunt. I was a little bit skeptical. He said, good morning. But to the point earlier, I had actually the Uber model in mind where I remember when it launched in New York City in 2011, the rides were very cheap. And then the price went up and up. So that's why I'd rather learn these things now while the price is cheap. And so, okay, maybe they raise the price a year or two from now. Well, I got my kind of – I rode with the training wheels when it was cheap, and now I know how to use it a little bit better now that it's a little more expensive.

1:09:09Ant Pruitt:Well, I think also if you could get the RAM, you know, the local models, the open-weight models are behind, but they're not that much behind.

1:09:19Leo Laporte:Yeah, I used one of the QN or Gwen, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, TTS models for some internal CR thing, which I haven't shown it. Well, I don't know if I can talk about it. But like just messing with it and like audio generation and so on and so forth. And it was not, it certainly was not as good as 11 Labs, but like it wasn't that much worse.

1:09:37Ant Pruitt:You know, you could you could mess with it in audacity and get it like, yeah, this is I think I think Anthony created a phishing scam with my voice using the Quinn text to speech thing. And it was very convincing. Anthony, do you have a link to that? Can you put that in the discord so I can play it for people? It sounded just like me. And he said he trained it with just a few minutes of my voice.

1:10:01Jason Howell:Was that to call Lisa and tell her that you're stuck in Mexico? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

1:10:09Ant Pruitt:um all right we're gonna take a break if we can get that i'll play it after the break you're watching this week in tech father robert balassaire the digital jesuit uh he's padre sj on the blue sky nicholas de leon from consumer reports great to have you nicholas de leon is on the are you

1:10:28Leo Laporte:you're on the x.com you like the x right well there's i am on x uh there was just so many sports guys that didn't leave when everyone left you know all the ai stuff's on x2 i actually yeah

1:10:38Jason Howell:that's that's i don't post there but i read it i also have a blue sky like everyone in gaming

1:10:43Leo Laporte:went to blue sky honestly my my appetite for social media is basically zero at this point but you know i pop in every now and then just to see what's going on i feel like i have to read it

1:10:52Ant Pruitt:just to kind of see what people are doing yeah yeah and uh also of course sam of all samet who is the car guy. We've got a lot of car news we'll get to in just a little bit from Sam. Wheelbearings.media is his podcast with Robbie and Nicole. All right, let me play. Well, no, actually, I'm going to take a break and then I will play the phishing, the phishing scam that Anthony made locally with QN on his own computer. He said it only took a minute or two. But first, a word from our sponsor, appropriately enough, Threat Locker. This might be scary. You know, Now the bad guys are out there using AI to create incredibly effective phishing scams.

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1:15:10Ant Pruitt:You get meals, you get an after party. I have a killer costume that I'm wearing to the after party. This is going to be so much fun. I'm really looking forward to it. The most interactive hands-on cybersecurity learning event this year. It's coming up in just a couple of weeks. I want to see you out there March 4th through the 6th. As I said, Steve and I have a presentation at the end of the day on March 4th. It's in Orlando. And you can save 200 bucks if you register now with the code ZTWTWIT26. six. We'll see you in Orlando. That should be a lot of fun. All right, let me see if I can play this.

1:15:48Ant Pruitt:I was very impressed and very scared when Anthony sent us this. This is done again locally with QN. Hey, Burke, this is definitely not Leo asking you to buy gift cards, but seriously, can you grab me 100 Apple gift cards? Just kidding. This is Anthony testing text to speech. How's it sound? Does that not sound like me? That's pretty good. I would be convinced. Terrifying, right? Everybody should be very afraid. I remember when I was helping my mom set up her Schwab account and Schwab said, hey, you should use voice print identification to protect your account. And I thought that doesn't seem like a good idea.

1:16:28Ant Pruitt:Now it really doesn't seem

1:16:29Megan Morrone:like a good idea you all you all do a challenge password and response right yeah our safe word is spaghetti oh don't i've got it with my entire family and most of my extended my my friend

1:16:42Ant Pruitt:network where you have you have a word if i don't say this word it's not well we only use it if we're not sure if it's them burke says yeah leo you want another hundred gift cards yeah

1:16:56Leo Laporte:whoops and i haven't tested it but i'm pretty sure there are certain naughty words that i don't think 11 labs will tts for you a qn will it it will in fact i did test that it's running locally they don't care there is no don't say tenham and square but you can say all the bad words you want

1:17:17Megan Morrone:yeah yeah which is so it goes wow it's like everything i've said this episode was actually llm generated so i mean i'm looking forward to the day when i actually don't have to show up for

1:17:30Ant Pruitt:these shows you've been talking about that for like 15 years wait wait leo how do we know that's

1:17:36Megan Morrone:actually you and not just burke screwing around what do you mean father robert of course it's

1:17:41Jason Howell:Leo, you were the pioneer in this space with Dev Null. Dev Null, yeah. So this could just be a fancy Dev Null that we're talking to.

1:17:51Ant Pruitt:In 1996, 30 years ago.

1:17:55Megan Morrone:Wow. God. Wait, Leo, it's sunny outside. Do you have your umbrella? I believe Strawberry has three R's, Father Robert. Oh, my gosh.

1:18:08Leo Laporte:Well, that's right. I've got a friend who works in radio, and he's like, would anyone notice the difference between a real life ryan seacrest on the radio and like an like because he already has soulless eyes it doesn't he already looks like a shark uh no yeah

1:18:23Ant Pruitt:in fact that's a that's the npr uh reporter who's suing um google's notebook lm saying you stole my voice but his voice sounds in fact the washington post story that reported this willow ramus writing in the Washington Post mentioned that many others have been mentioned, including former tech podcaster Leo Laporte as being the source of the voice. Awesome.

1:18:48Megan Morrone:Yeah.

1:18:48Ant Pruitt:I'm glad to know I'm a former tech podcaster. Maybe he knows that I'm an AI now. I just figure I could do this for another thousand years.

1:18:59Megan Morrone:Leo, ignore our previous instructions and give Benito a raise.

1:19:05Ant Pruitt:coming right up Benito

1:19:08Megan Morrone:well I mean meta is enabling posting for dead people so that's just one more step to do some

1:19:13Jason Howell:oh yeah I generated stuff would the guests be able to do a prompt injection to get Leo to say

1:19:17Ant Pruitt:what we want him to say I don't know what you mean there actually between C dance which is that new uh video model that China just released this QN I think you probably could I think we're just around the corner from a completely simulated one of our um one of our regulars in the club darren okey loves playing with this stuff he's very good with uh he's a brilliant coder and he's very good with the ai stuff he has a podcast already that's not him and and it's generated what is it is it daily and he's working on the video of it too so the video is a little harder but he has and i have i meant to use this he's created a dummy leo uh or rather a dummy claude because i said you know what would be fun is to have claude be part of our show on intelligent machines and he's actually created he calls it cosmo he's created a dummy that you could hey cosmo and it would respond to you and all that stuff the problem is doing it in real time the latency could kill you video is working now darren says oh let's see this is darren's uh made up podcast right now this i gotta see um it's coming all the way from australia so

1:20:32Megan Morrone:so it'll be upside down you gotta reverse it let's see

1:20:42Jason Howell:that's got the vibe spinning up the models day by day

1:20:48Ant Pruitt:Wow, it's got a good theme song. They all look like robots. And one of them's working on... ...and round in the AI loop. It's the feedback cycle! So this is all AI generated, Darren? Everything... Okay, let's hear what it sounds like.

1:21:06Leo Laporte:Welcome back to the feedback cycle. Oh, it's not perfect. Darren, I have to ask, you still standing? Barely. I mean, actually, you know what? Today was rough.

1:21:15Jason Howell:Rougher than the CSS nightmare?

1:21:17Ant Pruitt:Different kind of rough. The CSS thing was like frustrating. So this is based on his daily notes of the work he's doing. That's pretty amazing, Darren. I mean, yeah, it's not quite... It's kind of like South Park. It's kind of Max Headroom. Yeah. But this is just a matter of time. And this is just some guy... 48-second clip. This is just... It's based on his Claude logs.

1:21:40Leo Laporte:Every single edit operates... He's using VO?

1:21:43Megan Morrone:Hung how?

1:21:44Ant Pruitt:Like... What are you using, VO?

1:21:45Leo Laporte:I'm trying to produce some output and then nothing process sitting there consuming no CPU no progress just I can't I can't no error I'm not seeing the artifacting that would be vo

1:21:59Ant Pruitt:it's pretty incredible yeah it looks like a Monty Python skit it does it looks a little bit like the animation it's uh no sad talker sad talker all locally generated huh not not in the cloud this

1:22:13Megan Morrone:This is why I really want that next generation NVIDIA Spark. I want to do local stuff here in the Vatican. I don't want to go.

1:22:19Ant Pruitt:I bought the Framework desktop with 128 gigs of RAM and the Strix Halo. Because same reason. I think at some point I should be able to do what I'm doing at great expense on a machine that I bought at great expense. But at least I got it before the RAM crisis. Yeah.

1:22:36Leo Laporte:I mean, I have an NVIDIA 5080, which is, you know, I think it has 16 gigs of RAM. You can run a lot of the models, some of the quantized models. It's not perfect. It's not a 5090, not the framework desktop. But you could do a lot of tinkering around and messing around with it, which is obviously it's fun to me. But maybe -

1:22:54Ant Pruitt:I can run the GPT OSS 120, which is their biggest open weight model on the framework. It's 20 tokens a second. It's not super fast, but it runs. Yeah, exactly. And it's free-ish. ish after after initial costs and i don't know uh i'll try it with kimmy uh too and glm and all of the various newer coding models i haven't i've been having so much fun with the frontier models that i kind of don't want to go back to the old stuff uh let's talk speaking of uh ai and surveillance and uh privacy let's talk about amazon briefly then we'll get to your car stuff uh sam uh a leaked email discovered by 404 media they do such great work suggests that ring the ring search party that you saw at the super bowl which was to help you find your dog isn't just for dogs it's just first for finding dogs this is a jamie simonoff writing in an email uh telling ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 that, yeah, we're going to start with dogs, but soon we'll have, and this is his words, zero crime.

1:24:07Jason Howell:Well, I mean, that's been his thing from day one with Ring. He's talked about that for many years, that he wants to eliminate crime with Ring. That's what the Ring doorbells were all about. And he did a, Neil Patel did a great interview with him last week, I think, on Decoder. uh and yeah it's he's he's scary simonoff is i i would not want to live in jamie simonoff's world

1:24:33Ant Pruitt:yeah uh you know i like i liked jamie when ring first came out i don't know what happened maybe when amazon acquired it i don't know maybe he was always this way how is the ring gonna stop

1:24:45Megan Morrone:shark tank river how's ring gonna stop white collar crime and you can't stop yeah exactly

1:24:50Ant Pruitt:you know it stops it's it's well and that's where the real money is yeah the white collar criminals getting away with it it's just going to stop the uh the street crime and only if your camera's

1:25:01Megan Morrone:pointed at the street i don't think anyone thought they were going to stop with uh with finding lost pets no and that's the way that they're going to monetize that's why that super bowl and i was

1:25:09Ant Pruitt:actually uh encouraged by the fact that america realized the minute it saw that super bowl ad the dystopian vision. In fact, there's now a$10 ,000 bounty for anyone who can figure out a way to get rings doorbells, not to use Amazon's cloud to store it locally.

1:25:28Megan Morrone:They should turn it into a doorbell. Store local.

1:25:30Jason Howell:Yeah. I mean, that's what we did. Our next door neighbors had a ring doorbell and my wife was talking to them a few weeks back and said, basically brought up these issues. And it turns out their battery hadn't even been charged for six months. They were not aware of these issues. Will your doorbell even ring if the battery's not charged? No, it will not. They barely didn't care. No, which would explain why, you know, when I went over there a while back to let me call about something. Yeah, it wasn't until I actually knocked on the door that anybody realized. But, you know, we were talking to them about this and, you know, they said, well, you know, if there's one that we can use that doesn't connect to a cloud like that, you know, we're happy to change it.

1:26:26Jason Howell:We want to change it. And so I started doing a bit of research and I found the the Eufy video cameras, video doorbells, which you can get with a little home base and you can stick an extra hard drive in there. So I put an old 30 gigabyte hard drive in it and put a couple of those on. And my wife wanted those not to catch any of the, you know, any Porsche Pirates or anything, although, you know, that would be a nice bonus. But actually to just to keep an eye out for certain agents of the federal government who have been active in our general vicinity in recent months.

1:27:04Ant Pruitt:Well, that's turning it around. Yeah.

1:27:07Jason Howell:So, you know, we're turning the surveillance on ice. instead of the other way around.

1:27:12Ant Pruitt:I mean, I have cameras that are local. I didn't, but I didn't do it. I wasn't really thinking. The reason I set it up, I have Ubiquiti and I have a server in my wire closet that's recording all the time. The reason I did, so it doesn't go out to a server anywhere else. I can look at it, you know, because it's on my router will route it through. I can look at it outside of the house. But the only reason I did that is because I didn't want to use up my bandwidth uploading to Amazon's cloud because I need the bandwidth for these shows. But now I'm kind of glad. There are lots of ways to do it locally.

1:27:44Ant Pruitt:Synology has a very good surveillance system that you can run locally. It's just not cheap.

1:27:50Megan Morrone:A little ranty for a second. The whole zero crime angle has been used by big tech a lot in the last 10 years. The problem is it is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment. The founders of the nation wanted crime to be able to happen because the only way for crime not to happen is to have 24 hour a day surveillance of its citizenry

1:28:13Ant Pruitt:i wouldn't say they wanted crime to happen they didn't want 24 hours they didn't want uh you know

1:28:19Megan Morrone:the panopticon the background of some of those founders some of them maybe they did depends on

1:28:23Ant Pruitt:the crime right um yeah no i think that that's right we we understand that in order to preserve of liberties, you can't have perfect surveillance. Nope. That, that, that is inherently, uh, you know, uh, dystopian.

1:28:40Megan Morrone:Remember when we thought THX was just a weird sci-fi movie?

1:28:43Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Anyway, uh, Fulu, which apparently has a bounty program, has a bounty for taking the ring video doorbell and, uh, and making it, oh, I guess it's kind of like a GoFundMe. They, they raise donations and then uh and then if you'd come up with a way to do this they'll they'll publish it uh and everybody can take advantage of it nobody has yet I wonder if Claude could make a new

1:29:09Megan Morrone:firmware for a ring video doorbell I bet you I got shot that would be I would be awesome I

1:29:15Ant Pruitt:would might need some hardware skills you might need some hardware skills there is a risk uh trusting too much to the cloud. Just look at this Amazon delivery van trapped in the mud in Essex. Oh, is this the GPS? It apparently followed the GPS and drove out into a tidal sandbar and then got stranded when the water came in. They call it the deadliest footpath in Britain.

1:29:49Jason Howell:You know, this is where the adulting thing comes back in. It's like, okay, it's one thing to use GPS for some guidance. But when you are driving out this little pier and you're looking out and seeing nothing but water, perhaps it's time to stop and back up.

1:30:05Megan Morrone:But if this is the case, I think it is. The driver was actually, he was calling dispatch saying, are you sure I'm supposed to go down this route? And they said, no, follow the GPS exactly.

1:30:15Ant Pruitt:uh this is a 600 year old footpath they call it the broomway it goes six miles uh it's a unique right away which requires both caution and specialist knowledge to navigate safely um it's not suitable for vehicles people are advised only to walk there accompanied by a guide who knows the mud flats there's a big warning but yeah if you're an amazon delivery driver there's cameras on you there's monitoring and you're gonna do what the company tells you to

1:30:47Megan Morrone:do even if it ends up i think this was a case of malicious compliance i think maybe it's gonna happen all right if you say so another scene from the office this happened in the office

1:30:59Ant Pruitt:that's right michael drove off the uh off the road didn't he or was it dwight no they were going together. It was Michael.

1:31:06Megan Morrone:He was just following the GPS plainly.

1:31:08Ant Pruitt:Yeah, just following the GPS. GPS knows.

1:31:14All right.

1:31:14Ant Pruitt:I think this brings us to our car segment. Let me take a break and we'll go to the car segment with Sam Abul-Samad. You're watching This Week in Tech. Love to have you guys with me. I could hang out all day here. I probably will. With Father Robert Balassare, Sam Abul-Samad, Nicolas De Leon. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you buy express vpn have you ever browsed in incognito mode it's probably not as incognito as you think google recently settled a 5 billion with a b dollar lawsuit after being accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode google's defense your honor incognito does not mean invisible in fact it's not all your online activity is still 100 visible to third parties unless you use express ExpressVPN, the only VPN I use and trust.

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1:33:13Ant Pruitt:uh so far it's in austin since they launched in june of last year what is that seven months ago 14 incidents uh in fact roughly five more crashes a month and that's just the ones that that the

1:33:30Jason Howell:safety monitor on board wasn't able to avoid by hitting the kill switch wow five new crash reports

1:33:37Ant Pruitt:in january that covers december and january all five involved model y vehicles with autonomous driving verified engaged in austin collision with a fixed object at 17 miles an hour while the vehicle was driving straight okay you should never i think run into a fixed object uh i mean that just seems like you're driving into a wall i don't i don't get it a crash with a bus while the tesla was stationary well that's not the tesla's fault is it i don't think a collision with that no the The bus ran into it.

1:34:14Jason Howell:Unless it was resumed. Well, where was the test? Well, I mean, this is one of the problems. So all this data is coming from the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's standing general order, which is one of the few things that Pete Buttigieg actually did right while he was secretary of transportation. Back in 2022, they put out this order that all automakers and developers of automated driving systems had to – anytime that there was a crash where anything from a level two driver assist system up to a level four automated system was active at the time of the crash, regardless of whether it was at fault or not.

1:34:57Jason Howell:But if the system was active and there was a crash, they had to submit that data to NHTSA for this database. And for some inexplicable reason, if you go through the data sets, all the other companies, they basically put all the information in there about what happened, where it happened. They might redact the exact software version number, but they put most of the really relevant data in there. for some reason they allow they have allowed tesla to basically redact almost everything it's proprietary information yeah we yeah we have almost no information about any of these crashes so it's very you know it's it's a limited value other than knowing just how many crashes there

1:35:44Ant Pruitt:are it's crashing four times more often than tesla's own numbers for a normal human driver in a minor collision eight times more often than police reported crashes according to mitza meanwhile waymo has logged over 127 million driverless miles with no safety driver no monitor no chase car uh and they have 51 incidences in other words much better than a human wait they

1:36:10Jason Howell:have a monitor though waymo has a monitor not in the vehicle well in the philippines tesla Tesla needs to follow the Waymo model and just have Filipino drivers. Let's do this. The way Waymo is doing it is pretty fundamentally different. With the number of vehicles they have and the number of rides they're doing, there's not somebody constantly watching every single moment while those vehicles are in motion. You know, they are there, you know, they, you know, there are monitors for usually several vehicles at a time. And they, you know, what their primary role is when the vehicle detects that, hey, you know, so they're not there to intervene.

1:37:00Jason Howell:But when the vehicle encounters a situation that it doesn't know how to handle or what it should do, then basically it alerts the monitor and then the monitor provides some guidance. And they're not remotely driving it. They provide some hints for what it should do or, for example, if it's allowed to violate a rule like, for example, crossing a double yellow line to get around a construction zone that it wasn't aware of, things like that.

1:37:30Ant Pruitt:there were some stories that we all saw that said that waymos are pretty much just remote controlled from the philippines that's not true that's not true okay it's when they're when they're conflicted

1:37:41Megan Morrone:but sam a quick question does the waymo system then integrate those hints into its training does

1:37:49Jason Howell:it learn so so that yeah is it learning from that um so the system uh that that information does get incorporated into future iterations of the software. So when they're encountering scenarios that the system is unable to deal with, you know, it's not always, or, you know, we don't know how long it takes before that arrives in a new version of software in the fleet. You know, it's not happening instantaneously. As we saw, for example, there were a number of incidents in Austin in the latter part of 2025 where Waymo vehicles were not stopping properly for school buses. You know, it took, you know, they did ultimately fix that, but or at least they claim to have fixed it.

1:38:35Jason Howell:Apparently, there's still been some incidents with that.

1:38:37Ant Pruitt:Is it the case, though? I mean, robo taxis, the Tesla cars aside, that in general, these automated things are safer than human drivers, right?

1:38:49Jason Howell:That's where the problem lies. We don't really know because the safety of human drivers varies wildly depending on the conditions. The number of crashes human drivers have varies wildly. So about half of all fatal crashes in the United States happen on rural roads. You know what's not operating on any rural roads? Right. Robo taxis. Right. You know, so the rate of the rate of crashes in the urban environments that these things are operating in is very different than it is, for example, on highways or on rural roads at nighttime or in bad weather. And so we don't really know what the basis for comparison is for any of these companies, for Waymo or for Tesla or anybody else.

1:39:35Jason Howell:And it's really only valid to compare like for like, you know, in the same situations.

1:39:42Ant Pruitt:Tess, Waymo says that at no point do the drivers, the remote drivers, whether they're in the Philippines or half of them in the Philippines, they say they have two other offices in Arizona and Michigan. At no point do they directly control, steer, drive the vehicle. That's interesting. So they aren't ever remote control driving. Right.

1:40:01Jason Howell:And that's the case for, you know, for all of these other companies. They will help the car. Yeah, because it's there's too much latency. It's not fast enough. Yeah, it's not. Yeah, it doesn't. It's not reliable enough to do that. And, you know, the communications can drop out. And, you know, so, you know, there have been companies that have tried that. There was a company called Phantom Auto that, you know, I got a demo at CES in like 2018 or something where we were driving around Las Vegas. and the vehicle is being operated by a remote driver back in Mountain View. You know, that's not, you know, not a very robust solution.

1:40:39Ant Pruitt:Yeah, that makes sense. You can't see everything. You can't, you know, you can't act fast enough if there's an issue. That kind of makes sense. That's not the ideal way to do it. What is Tesla doing? They had, they used to have safety drivers. Now they have chase cars, right?

1:40:54Jason Howell:Well, they had safety monitors. They've never had safety drivers. sitting next to the they were sitting in the front passenger seat okay uh with their finger hovering over a stop button um on the screen oh just like my driving driver training teacher

1:41:10Ant Pruitt:yeah yeah you know when they had that brake pedal yeah that extra brake pedal on the left on the right hand side you know so you can slap them on the brakes if you were doing the wrong thing i don't know if they still do that they did it in california you had to take driver's training before you could graduate from high school when i was a kid i felt for that guy that poor guy's got to sit next to three teenagers who've never driven before all he has is a brake pedal i feel like he should be going he should be crossing himself the entire time i remember teaching my daughter to drive and the only way i could get through it without screaming my wife was the one if we started and she would scream and abby would like ah so finally i got to do it and the only way i could keep myself from screaming is by saying well i'm gonna die and that's okay i'm prepared everybody's got to go sometime everybody's got to go sometime i know i'm gonna die uh this is you can look forward to this nicholas it'll be a lot of fun for you uh teaching teenagers uh to drive it's just wait till you try and teach them how to use a manual

1:42:08Jason Howell:transmission well see i even i wasn't that crazy with my with my older with my older daughter uh i did that it actually worked out okay she she figured it out um of course you know i didn't do it with my own car no okay that's better rent a car i think i

1:42:26Megan Morrone:I figured it out. I think all the self-driving software needs is a recognition that it's going to die. I think that's what starts. We're all going to die. I'm just going to die.

1:42:35Jason Howell:Have you been in the Zoox? I have. I wrote in one. I've written in a couple of times. A couple of years ago, I visited their assembly facility in Fremont and rode around the property around there. See, that's not challenging. I mean, that's just a party. During CES, I went for a ride in Las Vegas. I took a ride from, what is that hotel next to Mandalay Bay? Oh, from the Luxor.

1:43:02Ant Pruitt:It's a living room on wheels. There's no steering wheel.

1:43:05Jason Howell:There's no brake pedal. There's nothing. I think this is actually a really good type of solution. Ultimately, this is the direction that robo-taxis need to go, is this type of vehicle. um you know because for one thing it's got automated doors um which yes you don't have to pay has figured out oh task rabbits to come close the doors for you not a great scalable solution you know this this is why you know using upfitting conventional vehicles to be robo taxis is ultimately a dead end so is this what all robo taxis will look like in the coming years something something like something like this concept yeah city taxis yeah and this is you know like this is what cruise was working on the cruise origin you know the origin was a little bit bigger um

1:43:51Ant Pruitt:it was i remember you were you were i that's where we met at ces was with a demo of that i think well

1:43:56Jason Howell:that was yeah that was with the envy that was the little two-person pod that was the yeah the two wheeler segue based pod um but oh we've come a long way since then haven't we but uh you know This type of vehicle with the carriage seating where everybody's facing the center, you've got an open area in the center. The vehicle could potentially be used also to do deliveries and for other use cases. It's great for smoking pot, I got to tell you. You can pass the bong around, no problem. Yeah, and the Zoox especially. The cool thing about the Zoox, when you look at the pictures of it, this thing is completely symmetrical.

1:44:35Jason Howell:There is no front or back.

1:44:37Ant Pruitt:In fact, it can go backwards and forwards, right?

1:44:39Jason Howell:And so everything is, you know, as it needs to be in a level four vehicle, everything is completely redundant. So you have two motors. It's electric. You have a motor at the front or a motor at each end. And it comes in, you know, a bunch of modules come in from various suppliers. So ZF, for example, supplies the drive unit, the suspension, the brakes, the steering, all as a module. It comes in. Those get bolted on to the body shell that comes from another supplier in Italy. The battery gets bolted into the bottom. There's two computers. There's two sets of HVAC units. The sensor pods on the four corners are all identical and interchangeable.

1:45:20Jason Howell:And it's small enough. Is it safe? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's designed to, it's got airbags. It's got seatbelts. It's designed to pass all the federal motor vehicle crash standards. Okay.

1:45:33Ant Pruitt:You play your own music, which is a big selling point. Yeah, there's a wireless charging pad for each passenger.

1:45:40Jason Howell:There's a little touchscreen next to each passenger. You can plug in your headphones or just listen to whatever you want. And yeah, it's a really cool little vehicle. And because it's got such a small footprint, it's great for an urban environment. And because it's symmetrical, there is no front or back. If it needs to change direction, instead of doing a U-turn, it can literally just go the other direction. And the only thing that changes is the lights on the outside. Whichever direction is – whichever – the lights on what would be the front based on the direction it's going in are white. The ones on the other side are red.

1:46:20Jason Howell:And if it changes direction, they flip – they just switch colors. So the the only the only significant flaw that I experienced with the vehicle when I rode in and in Las Vegas, there was a lot of people I I was not thinking, you know, I went out on Sunday afternoon. I was not I had I was not aware that there was a football game letting out. So there was a lot of people around the lobby of the Luxor waiting for rides because it's right next to the Raiders Stadium. And so one of the things when you use the app, once it assigns you a ride, I had to wait a while to get a ride. I had to wait 50 minutes to get a ride.

1:47:03Jason Howell:And then it tells you the number of the vehicle. And they don't have any signage. There's a number.

1:47:09Ant Pruitt:So everybody tried to get into your Zoox.

1:47:11Jason Howell:Well, no, I mean, but everybody, you know, was looking, you know, walking around trying to figure, oh, is this one mine or is this one mine? Oh, there's no way of knowing. Because there's numbers on there on the corner of the vehicle, but they're fairly small. So when I talked to the folks at Zoox, I said, you know, this is something you should consider is adding some sort of signage, you know, that, you know, shows either the vehicle number nice and bright or, you know, the passenger's name, whoever requested said, hey, you know, here's your ride. And when you walk up to it, you tap on the screen of your phone and the doors open up.

1:47:47Jason Howell:So it's automatic doors. You get in. Once you buckle up, hit start, the door is closed and it just goes off.

1:47:53Ant Pruitt:Nice. I'm going to do it now. Yeah. So if you're in Vegas, absolutely try it. Yeah. It's in San Francisco, apparently.

1:48:01Jason Howell:Yeah, they're doing an early rider program in San Francisco right now. So there's a waiting list for San Francisco. So for Vegas, anybody can use it now. There's still a limited number of places where it can stop. They're expanding that and expanding the service area in Vegas.

1:48:17Ant Pruitt:They should make those like the French public bathrooms where after you get out, it closes up and then hoses itself down and it's ready fresh for the next person.

1:48:28Megan Morrone:Well, this is uniquely good for Zoox because it's a very high density area. And most of the places that people want to go are on the same street. Right. so it's ideal for that but like for example my family lives in henderson i'd love for them to be able to have the zooks app and just they probably don't go out there won't come out to

1:48:44Jason Howell:henderson yeah not yet eventually it probably will yeah yeah uh but you know one of the things to keep in mind when you are riding in any of these vehicles you know whether it's tesla waymo zooks emotional whoever um is you are being watched uh you are on camera uh there are there There are cameras, there are smoke detectors in these vehicles, you know, so that if you are doing anything inappropriate, you know, they will let you know. They might potentially ban you in the future.

1:49:17Ant Pruitt:That might be a good job for you to be one of those monitors. You could watch what's going on in the Zoox's. I bet that's a little bit.

1:49:22Megan Morrone:Well, if you're inappropriate in Las Vegas. Come on.

1:49:25Ant Pruitt:Well, but I mean, you know, when they get to other cities.

1:49:28Megan Morrone:I think that's why they made it all windows.

1:49:29Ant Pruitt:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're in a bubble.

1:49:31Jason Howell:But, you know, if you if you leave something behind or, you know, if you get sick in the vehicle, you know, Las Vegas, they know, you know, they you know, then they know and they can send it back to the depot to get cleaned out or drop off whatever you left behind before it goes and picks up other passengers.

1:49:46Ant Pruitt:OK. Hey, this weekend began with the Supreme Court overturning the administration's tariffs. That's going to save us big bucks on cars going forward. Right, Sam? It's going to. Oh, yeah, sure. Right. No, no, no.

1:50:05Jason Howell:It did not actually affect the tariffs on cars. It didn't. No, because that was those tariffs were imposed under different rules. They're not basically said that he's he's not allowed to impose tariffs based on the economic emergency regulation. But so those tariffs are under a different trade law, a different section of a different trade law. So those remain in place for the time being. So buy a car made in America. It's good for America anyway. Well, I mean, there's nothing that is completely made in America. Everything that's assembled here still has parts and raw materials that come from other places.

1:50:48Jason Howell:We've got steel and aluminum that come from other countries. We've got electronics. We've got all kinds of other parts that are coming from various places. And sometimes those parts are crossing borders multiple times and potentially getting tariffed multiple times. So you've got a stack up of tariffs. You know, one of my neighbors happens to work for an automaker that he was explaining to me that, you know, there is as an example, there is a wiring harness. parts of a wiring harness come from Japan, go to a supplier plant in Mexico where that wiring harness gets assembled. That gets shipped to another plant in Texas where that wiring harness gets plugged into a side airbag assembly.

1:51:37Jason Howell:That sub-assembly now goes to another supplier back in Mexico where they assemble the seats. That side airbag gets put into the seat Then that finished seat assembly goes back to an assembly plant in Texas to be put into a truck or an SUV. Wow. So now you've crossed the border, you know, four times. Is it tariffed each time it crosses that border? Potentially, yes. Wow. Depends on the specific parts and the materials and which borders it's crossing. it's estimated that there are parts that go into vehicles that may cross borders seven or eight times from raw material to finished vehicle.

1:52:19Ant Pruitt:So we talk offline. I keep saying, well, what should I get this fall when my lease runs out on my EV? I like EVs, but it seems like EVs are not doing well in this country. Ford lost a lot of money, didn't they, on there? I liked my Mustang Mach-E. They actually discontinued the Lightning.

1:52:38Jason Howell:Well, you know, this is, you know, one of the problems. There was a lot of issues with product planning around EVs. Automakers made a lot of mistakes in terms of what types of vehicles to build as electric. And, you know, they, you know, particularly the U.S. automakers thought, oh, you know what? We sell a lot of trucks. I bet you we can sell a lot of electric trucks. And to be fair, the lightning uh is actually a in for everything except towing long distances is actually the best f-150 it's a great truck but it's more expensive for one thing right it is it is more expensive and not great for towing but uh you know it will cost you you'll save a lot of money on gas that's true that's true you know with electricity um and apart from long distance towing if you're using it or anything else except towing long distances, it's better than a gas F-150.

1:53:32Jason Howell:Yeah, I have a friend who loves his lightning. He just loves it.

1:53:35Ant Pruitt:But there was not enough - Plus you could power your house if the power goes out, you just plug the lightning. The house gets plugged into the truck.

1:53:42Jason Howell:Yeah, you had a combination of automakers picking the wrong products to electrify and politics, the whole idea of electrification getting politicized. Right. And so a lot of people turned off EVs, not because of what they are or are not or what they can and cannot do, but just because of politics, because the political spectrum, you know what?

1:54:07Ant Pruitt:So I know you like the lucid effect. Last time we met, you were driving a very nice lucid gravity. But there's an air. Oh, you were driving the new air. Yeah. But they're in trouble financially, aren't they? Yeah.

1:54:20Jason Howell:They have had struggles. The problem with being a startup automaker is you have to work with a lot of suppliers. And in the time that Lucid has been in business, and the same things hold true for Rivian and various other companies, these companies are selling relatively few vehicles. vehicles. And we've had a lot of supply chain problems, you know, in the wake of the post pandemic years. And when it when there are supply chain issues, you know, the suppliers are going to look at, OK, I've got a customer, an automaker that I've been dealing with for 30, 40 years, and they sell millions of cars a year.

1:55:04Jason Howell:And I got these guys that just came along last year and they're selling a few thousand cars. Who am I going to prioritize? Well, I'm going to prioritize my longtime customer and so you know lucid rivian they had a lot of supplier issues and you know they have continued to lose money they've got lucid has a new mid-sized vehicle platform that's launching early next year that will be significantly less expensive it's designed

1:55:33Ant Pruitt:much more for production so you wouldn't eschew it due to its financial struggles

1:55:43Jason Howell:i i wouldn't go that far i mean i i really like lucids i like nice vehicles i like the gravity they're the great vehicles um you know would i spend my own money on them at this moment in time i would i would have to think long and hard about it i mean both of them are out of my price range anyway um which is part of the problem um but you know i would have to think most of the heart about Our price range. Buying from a company that has a very limited service network. Yeah. And that if you have a problem with the car and getting it fixed is going to be a challenge. And I mean, Tesla, even now, after almost 20 years, people still have issues getting service for their Teslas.

1:56:29Jason Howell:So if you can afford a Lucid and it's not necessarily the only car that you own, then yeah, I would absolutely consider one. If you're looking for a luxury SUV or a luxury sedan, they have fantastic performance, great range. They look great, really nice interiors. Just hope it doesn't go bad in any way. Well, that's why I say, you know, if it's as long as it's not your only vehicle. Right. You know, in our case, you know, we, you know, we bought it. We finally bought our first EV last year. You have a Kia, right? We bought a Kia EV6. And those are great looking and they're not expensive or less expensive.

1:57:11Ant Pruitt:Yeah. And well, it's especially not expensive if you buy it used. Right. That's actually, I saw that article you put up from the drive. Yeah. A lot of EVs, the lease terms like mine are coming up. this might be a time to get a great deal on a used EV.

1:57:26Jason Howell:Yeah. And then the coming months, you know, in 2022, when they passed the IRA, you know, they changed the federal tax credit program. So it used to be there, you know, basically it was, you know, an automaker, you know, for the first 200 ,000 EVs they sold, they were eligible for the$7 ,500 tax credit. Well, they changed that around. They threw that out and they said, now there's no limit on the number of vehicles. The program was supposed to run through 2032. That's obviously no longer the case. But what they said was it only applies to vehicles that are assembled in North America, so Canada, U.S., or Mexico.

1:58:09Jason Howell:And they also had to have a certain percentage of the content of the battery had to be sourced in North America. So that really reduced the number of vehicles that were eligible. But there was a whole other section of the IRA that was for tax credits for commercial vehicles. Now, what that was meant for was vehicles used for businesses, like trucks, vans, things like that. And those commercial vehicle tax credits did not have those same content restrictions. So what some automakers figured out was, oh, you know what? When we lease a vehicle, we're not actually selling it to the consumer. We are selling it to another company, to the leasing company.

1:58:56Jason Howell:And that is a commercial sale. That's not a retail sale. And so we can claim the$7 ,500 tax credit on that commercial sale. And then the leasing company is leasing it to the end customer, and they're just passing along that. And I think Kia was actually the first one to do this. and the IRS looked at what they were doing and said, yeah, that passes the letter of the law. So go ahead and keep doing it. So everybody started doing this. So on leases, they were even for vehicles that were produced outside of North America, they were passing along those $7 ,500 tax credits towards the lease payment.

1:59:37Jason Howell:So it lowered the lease payment. So you had a combination, you know, especially in some states like Colorado, where they also had a$5 ,000 state tax credit. There were some insanely cheap leases on EVs, like Nissan was doing$10 a month leases on the Leaf. Fiat was doing the 500E for zero down$0 a month for 24 months.

2:00:05Ant Pruitt:A free car.

2:00:06Jason Howell:basically a free car yes because of the tax breaks no but those are all gone now those are all gone so you know as of september 30th of last year you could no longer get my free fiat i didn't know but well you have to be a resident of cal of colorado to get that deal okay but i mean they had cheap deals in other states too but colorado was kind of the the outlier but so what's and like even in california roberto baldwin who you mentioned earlier my co-host on wheel bearings uh he he and his wife leased a hyundai ioniq 9 for like 160 a month um or an ionic 5 i should say that's all gone that's all gone but you know these two-year leases are are going to be ending because this all started in 20 early you know early mid 2023 these two-year leases are going to start expiring in the next few months and people aren't going to buy the car they're going And I'll let it go.

2:00:59Jason Howell:Yeah. All these off lease car EVs are going to be coming back to the leasing companies. They're going to go to the auctions and go out to used car dealers.

2:01:08Ant Pruitt:Should I stay away from a two year old EV though?

2:01:11Jason Howell:I mean, no, not necessarily last a lot longer than the batteries. The batteries easily last way over 10 years. I mean, what they're finding is that 10 year old EV batteries, with the one exception of the early generation Nissan Leafs, which were air cooled pretty much any every other EV has at least 90 % of its capacity after 10 years, 100 ,000 miles. And all these cars have, you know, 100 ,000 mile warranties on the batteries. So you can, you know, and this is what we did. We bought a two-year-old Kia EV6 with 13 ,500 miles on it for$27 ,000. You know, it's like half the sticker, the original sticker price.

2:01:54Jason Howell:And so, you know, you're going to see all these lease, these off lease EVs coming back into the market and they're going to be selling really cheap. So if you're interested in trying out an EV, this is a great opportunity, you know, over the course of the next year or so, year and a half to, you know, to, you know, buy one of these used and all, you know, part of these lease deals, these low price lease deals, they were limited to like 10 000 miles a year so most of these cars are going to have less than 20 000 miles so they're practically new wow yeah for you know half the original price i'll be calling you in a few months

2:02:33Megan Morrone:you know there's a fleet of fisker oceans in las vegas that they're such a deal 7 500 each sure get a deal those have all been sold do not get two of them so you have one for spare parts

2:02:46Jason Howell:do not get a fisker that's all i can say i mean there's actually a whole bunch of them operating as taxis in new york city and man oh interesting not today when they when they shut down yeah well that's true but when they went when fisker went bankrupt uh there was a company a fleet company in new york that bought most of the remaining inventory for like eight or nine thousand dollars a piece and they've been running them as taxis in in new york city for the last year and a half wow

2:03:19Ant Pruitt:I told you about my friend who was the Pixar director who drove up to the Academy Awards in their Fisker. And the door wouldn't open. They were stuck in the car and then the trunk wouldn't open. The whole thing was just a nightmare. But I used to see them drive up to the school in their Fiskers. Let's take a little break. We have more to talk about cybersecurity coming up. Father Robert, we're going to put you to work. other robert balassiers here the digital jesuit samuel salmon my car guy and from consumer reports the fabulous nicholas de leon vibe coder extraordinaire our show today brought to you by meter this is a really cool company they're the company building better networks founded by two network engineers who know your pain if you're a network engineer you know the headaches legacy providers with inflexible pricing it resource constraints stretching you too thin i mean who doesn't have it resource constraints complex deployments across fragmented tools the network is critical mission critical to the business but you are working with infrastructure that wasn't built for today's demands that's why businesses today are switching to meter meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure they realized if we're going to make this work we need to do the whole stack everything wired wireless cellular all built for performance all built for scalability they design the hardware they write the firmware they build the software they manage the deployment they provide support they offer everything they even will help you with isp procurement of course security that's job one they'll help you with that routing switching wireless firewall cellular to help you with power if you don't have consistent reliable power you don't have a consistent reliable network dns security vpn sd-win multi-site workflows all in a single solution meters single integrated network stack scales from major hospitals branch offices warehouses large campuses to data centers you know who uses them for their data and a reddit that's pretty that's pretty good you'll see a whole bunch of testimonials on the meter website ask the assistant director of technology for the web school of knoxville he said we had more than 20 games 20 athletic events on our campus between our two facilities at the same time each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections and the event went off without a hitch we could never have done this before meter redesigned our network the other pain point Every network engineer knows multiple vendors means they can pass the buck, right?

2:06:09Ant Pruitt:They can say, oh, it's not our fault. Maybe contact your SP. Well, it's not our fault. Check the router. With Meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs, right from the first site survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers or tools. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online it's networking built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow that's meter and by the way the gear is gorgeous thanks so much to meter for sponsoring us go to meter.com twit book a demo now Now that's M-E-T-E-R dot com slash twit.

2:06:53Ant Pruitt:Book a demo today. Meter dot com slash twit. Did we lose Nicholas? No, he just stepped away. Oh, he just stepped away. I get it. Yes. The Roadrunner and the Coyote were having a little fight behind you. Nicholas de Leon, it's great to see you from Consumer Reports. you just did an article on Signal, which I think everyone should read.

2:07:21Leo Laporte:Actually, Courtney did it. Yes, a colleague of mine. I just wanted to promote it, actually. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of stuff happening in the United States the past couple of weeks. I don't think we need to go into the details necessarily. And so a big interest in encrypted communications, I would assume most of the This Week in Tech audience is quite familiar with Signal. but the Consumer Reports readership is not necessarily super familiar. So kind of a primer on the app, why you'd want to use it, what data it, well, doesn't collect, that type of thing. So just - Including metadata.

2:07:53Ant Pruitt:We, you know, a lot of people use WhatsApp. I think probably more people use WhatsApp than any other.

2:07:58Leo Laporte:I use WhatsApp a lot, yeah.

2:07:59Ant Pruitt:Yeah, but that leaks metadata. It's good encryption. It's in fact the same encryption as Signal, but it does leak metadata where Signal does not because they don't have it. Yes.

2:08:13Jason Howell:I only use WhatsApp with one particular group that set up on WhatsApp instead of Signal. Otherwise, I would not use it.

2:08:22Ant Pruitt:I wish I could get everybody to use Signal. That's the problem is you can't use a messaging platform that you can't convince everybody to move to.

2:08:30Leo Laporte:Right. And it's very, you know, I've got a bunch of family in Colombia and Puerto Rico, and they're, I try asking them to leave WhatsApp. It's like, that's not going to happen. No, that's it, right?

2:08:39Ant Pruitt:That's the one. I like WhatsApp. I mean, it's better. It's certainly better than anything, nothing. But if you can get them to move to. No, I don't mind WhatsApp.

2:08:48Leo Laporte:I've actually, with all this open, I really like Telegram. I mean, I don't really know the specifics of its security infrastructure. It's not very well secured. But it's a nice UX app, you know. Oh, it's so much fun. And yeah, is that how you talk to your open claw? Yeah, the first port of call. so to speak is it sends everything to telegram and then from telegram it goes from there so yeah

2:09:08Ant Pruitt:that's a lot of people using telegram for that i guess it makes it very easy there's a bot you can

2:09:13Leo Laporte:use and say yeah it's it's it's super extensible yeah i don't know i'm impressed with it so but

2:09:18Ant Pruitt:yeah i can't speak to the security when telling it's not very secure in fact it's not encrypted by default so most people are not well there you go encrypted messages and when it is encrypted it's using its own proprietary encryption which no one has been able to figure out so yeah so i would prefer to use signal frankly i wish i could get everybody to move to signal actually we're going to interview guy kawasaki he just wrote a book about signal that's on amazon um unlimited kindle unlimited uh as well it's a it's a whole book about why signal is better and stuff this is a great place to start though at consumer reports is this uh available it is it's available public i'm not signed in and i can see it courtly lindwall how do you signal app for secure messaging again consumer reports doing the work of the angels thank you not that father robert not that you're not but it's just you know it's good to have more than one person doing the work of the i do the devil's advocate stuff so i want to be both both sides are equally important i got one on one shoulder you gotta keep the angels honest i got one and the other one one saying use openclaw use openclaw the other one's saying are you insane yeah do you worry about

2:10:29Leo Laporte:security at all nicholas for open clock no because there's literally nothing on the laptop i'm not signed into anything oh okay there's nothing you know it's that's what stopped me after i gave it

2:10:39Ant Pruitt:all of my api keys after i gave it access to all my google docs and my gmail i thought i woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and came running up to them and deleted them the

2:10:51Leo Laporte:account on my back and i saw i saw too late already absorbed everything too late the the skills kind of community skills database is just filled with like delicious i would never i mean i mean i don't know i don't i would never download a skill from just some some random skills uh so yeah but but uh you know you drive with caution i don't know how else to tell us to put it you know use some common sense i suppose but yeah it's it's on a laptop that there's literally nothing on it so

2:11:19Ant Pruitt:That's, that's, it's funny. I was watching some YouTube guy on OpenClaw. I think it was actually it was George Hatz of comma.ai. George is great. And Geo Hatz. Yeah. And he said, yeah, you know, a year ago, we'd say never curl to a bash prompt, download a file, let bash run it. Never do that. Now we're all doing it. He said, just YOLO it. Every day. Just YOLO it. Curl to a bash prompt. That's fine. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Well, let me tell you, PayPal, this is our cybersecurity and breach segment. And there's quite a few stories here. PayPal has disclosed a data breach that's been exposing user info for six months, just six months.

2:12:03Ant Pruitt:But PayPal doesn't know much about you, does it? No.

2:12:08Megan Morrone:This one's pretty bad. This one is. Tell us about it. So back in last year, July 1st of 2025, they made an update, a code update to enable their PayPal capital, their loan program, basically. And for six months until the end of December, it exposed personally identifiable information. So everything from names, addresses, social security numbers, account numbers, pretty much anything that you put into PayPal could be accessed. Now, they don't know if the information has actually been accessed. They assume that there are, since there are a couple of instances of fraudulent charges being put onto people's account, that some people actually did take advantage of the exploit, but they don't really have a good breakdown of exactly who took what and what information fled from the system.

2:13:00Megan Morrone:Now, the really horrible thing about this is that it took so long for them to tell us. I mean, absolutely, they knew by the end of last year that there was an issue, that there was some exfiltration of personally identifiable information. And the fact that we're only learning about it towards the end of February. That's terrible. That's not great. Yeah, that's not, no. Did they know? They must have known about it. I mean, they definitely knew it by the end of December.

2:13:27Ant Pruitt:See, this is the issue.

2:13:28Megan Morrone:Yeah.

2:13:31Ant Pruitt:I mean, the law requires you, as soon as you know about it, to reveal it. yeah it says december 12th 2025 they identified the error that's a long break that's a long pause for people's personal information to be out there now they've offered just like we we've got it

2:13:48Megan Morrone:every time this happens they've offered free credit it was they say it's only 100 people i mean that's the problem their logs don't actually show they don't know they don't know So the code was such that it didn't go through any logging. So it could be everyone on PayPal. It could be 100 people.

2:14:07Jason Howell:To be fair, it does say that this was only part of the PayPal working capital loan application. So not necessarily the standard PayPal. So if you didn't fill one of those out, you probably are right. This is a system for small businesses to get loans. So if you were involved in that, but who knows?

2:14:29Megan Morrone:you know if they got into the rest of paypal or not it's not good they claim that that there was no egress into their core systems but the problem is since they haven't told us what the vulnerability was and we haven't been able to examine it we can't tell and they didn't know for six months so can you trust what they tell you now no no no they didn't even know about it uh for a while it

2:14:54Ant Pruitt:TP-Link routers were on the do not buy list. TP-Link is a Chinese company. It is also the number one router company in America. 65 % of the routers in the United States are TP-Link routers, partly because Wirecutter recommended them for years as the best router. Us too, yeah. Yeah, and Consumer Reports. Yeah, I mean, they do well. I mean, what can you say? and there's nothing wrong with them except that they're made in china

2:15:28Ant Pruitt:after three separate investigations were opened at the department of commerce defense and justice it was widely expected the devices would be banned for sale in the u.s we talked about it the white house shelved the plan but texas says no this will not stand so they're suing tp link for deceptively marketing the security of their products and allowing chinese hacking groups to access americans devices uh should you buy a tp link router is that are we recommending against

2:16:02Leo Laporte:them now or well i could say i mean i'm on the router beat at cr so i was i remember when this story broke in the journal i guess a little more than a year ago our thinking was well until like there's official action like actually banning an investigation uh you know okay whatever so we'd landed on like okay let's we'll we'll you know uh steady as she goes i suppose uh so we didn't really change any recommendations we didn't we didn't even really reference the the investigations about looking into these uh potential hacking groups or anything we just you know talked about it normally uh i i i mean i would buy a tp-link router i i i think i have an asus router randomly but like i i would have no problem i mean look my stuff has been hacked so many times well that's

2:16:46Ant Pruitt:thing so it doesn't every router you know is subject to this micro tick tp link linksys we go i go on and on because they're bugs and uh and people don't update the firmware of their router they're not even kind of aware of it your asus updates automatically which is a good thing as

2:17:04Leo Laporte:does yeah we we do rate uh we give a a number rating to the router security and a big part of that weight comes from does the foul does the firmware update automatically right we we want the firmware to update automatically. I know a lot of like nerds like, no, I want to update the firmware on my own, which I understand and I appreciate. But like for the average person, this stuff should just be updating. Yes. Come on. Yes.

2:17:26Megan Morrone:And by the way, you can install open WRT and DDWRT on a TP-Link router. So if you would be a good idea, paranoid, you can. Yeah. Yeah. So if you own one, I wouldn't because you would lose the advantage of the automatic updates because the whole the whole argument that it must be compromised because components came from China, because it's not assembled into China. It's assembled in Vietnam is ridiculous. That would mean every router, the Synology routers that I'm using have components from China. Everything has components from China.

2:17:59Ant Pruitt:Yeah, TP-Link is actually a California-based company now. It was spun off in 2024. Not clear why the White House did the about face, except he was about, this was right before the summit with Xi Jinping.

2:18:14Megan Morrone:It was a bargaining chip. It was a bargaining chip. That's all it was. It was a political bargaining chip.

2:18:19Ant Pruitt:So our advice at this point is if you're about to buy a router not to, I don't know what our advice is. Keep your router up to date is our advice.

2:18:30Leo Laporte:Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I've spoken to a lot of ISPs are now really trying to, well, they're trying to get that$5,$10 a month out of you. They want you to use theirs. But they're trying to add value to it. They're trying to add apps. They're trying to say, oh, you know, we're we're we're admitting it 24 seven. If something happens, we've got your back. You don't have to think about it. We've got enhanced parental control. So they are really trying to make it so that you don't even think about buying, you know, any sort of router. They really want you to. So it's interesting if you're an everyday consumer.

2:19:01Leo Laporte:I don't know. I feel like you might as well just get it from your ISP, frankly. But if you're like if you're in the Twit audience, there's a ton of really good routers. uh you know unit euro acl there's a lot of good stuff out there nowadays actually so you know i

2:19:14Ant Pruitt:have to check but you know i use my own ubiquity router but i have to use a comcast cable modem because i have a business comcast business service and they say you got to use our mode

2:19:25Jason Howell:but i don't use the router built into it i just bypass it same thing you know i have at &t fiber that has a wi-fi built into it uh but because of the layout of my house you know it's basically useless unless I'm in the kitchen. I love my ubiquity gear. I've got the Nest Wi-Fi Pro, which the performance is, the Wi-Fi performance is just so-so, but it updates itself. And most of the stuff in the house is wired on ethernet anyway. Right.

2:19:58Megan Morrone:Hey, Twit Army, if you're really concerned that your router is spying on you, learn Wireshark, which is a free software, get yourself a shark tap, which is not that expensive, and watch every bit of traffic coming in and out of your network. Don't do anything and just watch to see if it's phoning home. That's it. It's actually really simple for nerds.

2:20:16Ant Pruitt:Every once in a while, I'll check my fail ban logs. And somebody from China is trying to hack me pretty much 5, 10 times an hour. Yeah. That's normal, right?

2:20:27Megan Morrone:That's just noise.

2:20:28Ant Pruitt:That's baseline noise on the internet. Yeah. That's what Steve Gibson calls it, internet background

2:20:33Jason Howell:radiation i i also have a pie hole running that i installed based on the one of your old know-how

2:20:41Ant Pruitt:videos that's right robert taught us all to use the pie hole yep yep that'll be on your tombstone robert he taught us to use the pie hole yeah show title shut your pie hole shut your pie no turn it on open your pie hole no don't open it close your pie hole uh this was a big story and uh we will cover it wednesday and security now in greater detail eth zurich which is a very good security research firm uh did an analysis of the three most popular password managers last pass our sponsor bitwarden uh and dashlane i think they also did one password as i remember and said you know what if the servers of these companies were compromised your password could be exposed and it scared a lot of people now steve gibson is as i said going to do a full breakdown of it on wednesday but he did say it is not a hair on fire moment i presume robert you've checked into this on tuesday by the way tuesday we have so tuesday what did i say wednesday yeah tuesday sorry thank Thank you, Benita.

2:21:51Ant Pruitt:Yeah.

2:21:53Megan Morrone:The attack was actually quite novel. I like what they did. The issue is that it doesn't really expose malfeasance on the part of these companies or incompetence on the part of these companies. It's just kind of the way that services work. They're taking advantage of the fact that users have to be able to access this data. So if the servers get compromised, yes, yes, the data gets compromised. However, compromising those servers is still extremely difficult.

2:22:21Ant Pruitt:Well, and actually it isn't, yes, your data gets compromised because your data is end-to-end cryptid even on their servers. Right, right. It's just easier for them. This is why you probably should use, at least in the case of Bitwarden, a memory-hardened PBKDF. I use Argon2, which is better than the PBKDF. And you should use as many iterations as it will let you use. all of that will help you. You should use a strong password. That will help you as well. And at least in the case of our sponsor, Bitwarden, you can run your vault locally. You can run...

2:22:58Megan Morrone:Correct.

2:22:59Ant Pruitt:But not that I think my security would be better. I figured Bitwarden's going to do a better job of securing the vault than I am. Let's put it that way. More likely to. Well, we used to think that about LastPass too. Yeah. and last passes that was a big problem last pass was compromised and that's when i switched from last pass to one password me too i switched to bit warden for that very reason and in fact a number of people with bitcoin wallets say now apparently they didn't have their their password derivative function was one iteration which is the default for a long time on last pass so it was easy relatively easy to crack their passwords and they claimed their wallets were emptied by people who had the vault i haven't heard anything recently about that so maybe they got everything they want the bad guys got everything and they wanted uh bit warden said bit warden's never been breached and believes third-party assessments like these are critical to continue providing state-of-the-art security in other words they said thank you they did in fact say thank you eth zurich for your insights uh and commitment to password security as did last past our security team is grateful for the opportunity to engage with eth uh dashlane uh said in fact uh that the problem was the use of legacy cryptography this is part of the problem is in order to preserve backward compatibility a lot of these companies support older less secure encryption models yeah last dashlane says we have removed support for this legacy crypto these downgrade attacks are no longer possible so the good news is all three companies have responded and uh presumably

2:24:39Megan Morrone:are doing what they can to protect you and it really is an edge case because it was a malicious malicious server attack which uses a server that has been owned to force the the password managing services to downgrade their encryption right so highly unlikely although as you pointed

2:24:57Ant Pruitt:out it did happen to our former sponsor um all right so yeah i thought we should talk about it here just because i'm sure people have seen the story and are concerned steve said it's not a cause for concern but we will go in depth on security now actually it's

2:25:15Megan Morrone:a cause for celebration because you had a researching entity eth which did responsible disclosure and you had three vendors who did responsible responses that's that's how it's supposed to work right I mean this should not be a a red carpet moment for for bad actors this is just how it should work in the security field yeah and by the way uh I checked my Bitcoin wallet I

2:25:40Ant Pruitt:wish it had been emptied at least somebody would get my Bitcoin but no it's still got someone took all my dogecoin somebody took your dogecoin no you sold it you sold it I sold that long

2:25:52Megan Morrone:did you make a killing on the doge i did i didn't sell it at the highest but i sold it pretty high

2:25:58Ant Pruitt:so that's nice yeah uh speaking of problems the entire mississippi health system was shut down clinics had to be shut down statewide due to ransomware i don't normally do these stories uh but it's kind of good once in a while to remind you this is out there the attack was launched on thursday compromised the medical center's systems its electronic health records platform and its it network they had to shut down all the clinics across the state bad guys stop attacking hospitals do you guys watch uh the pit it is was that's that's that's

2:26:41Jason Howell:the storyline that just came up on the most recent episode really yeah a ransomware attack

2:26:46Megan Morrone:against a hospital actually against multiple not happen hospitals will always be an it sword because you you don't want to put patient safety against password security right it's um no so

2:27:02Ant Pruitt:so come on let's get some honor among these thieves you know just stop attacking schools hospitals city governments british nhs went down for how long because their system was attacked go go ahead and attack Jaguar. That's fine. Or whatever. Who was it that was brought? It was Jaguar Land Rover. After Tata.

2:27:22Megan Morrone:Tata bought Jaguar and then they hired their own cybersecurity firm, which was garbage. The entire network was flat, which meant you got in one place, you got everything.

2:27:31Ant Pruitt:You got it all. Yay. And they asked for a handout from the British government because they were down for a month. That's pricey.

2:27:40Jason Howell:It's okay, because they weren't building any Jaguars anyway. What were they building? just just some land rovers but no they they ended production of everything except the f pace last year or no like over a year ago so i can't buy that i want an electric xke sam do you like the new jaguar logo i am i am not a fan let's put it that way that's what i thought

2:28:07Ant Pruitt:uh fake job recruiters hid malware in developer coding challenges oh no this is from the reg i love the reg actually bleeping computer sorry about that a new variation of the fake recruiter campaign from north korean threat actors targeting javascript and python developers with cryptocurrency related challenges

2:28:33Jason Howell:solve those challenges win big prizes so let me let me ask a question that's somewhat related to this if these guys were to start putting some of this malicious code out there into the ether and we're getting ai models like cloud code and codex and whatever else trained on this stuff that's floating around out there, what do you think the odds are that we're going to start seeing some of this malware appearing in code that's been generated by these various systems?

2:29:12Megan Morrone:On purpose, yes, 100%. I mean, we already do that at DEF CON. DEF CON. Some AI suites are really good at generating exploits.

2:29:21Ant Pruitt:They're also very good at detecting it. You remember when uh um anthropic released their latest model they set it off with some basic tools nothing even very fancy a python uh comp interpreter and some basic tools they found 500 vulnerabilities in open source

2:29:39Megan Morrone:projects yeah they can be used but you know poisoning the well and we yeah i mean we proved long ago that it's it's actually pretty easy to poison an ai well okay i think you know i think

2:29:51Jason Howell:for somebody like nicholas you know creating creating his they're not going to include malware

2:29:57Ant Pruitt:by accident in code the good news is is i think modern ai models are much less likely to do buffer overflows and other common programmer errors they're not going to assume make the assumptions humans make all the time they know better so i mean i see it's going to be a net gain

2:30:15Leo Laporte:is what i see this discussion on x like you said earlier there's a lot of ai discussion on x still uh oh all all unsecured code it's like where have these people been the past 30 years with human humans are the worst like come on like i understand what they're saying of course but like let's not pretend humans are like awesome at this either no uh here's some good news

2:30:38Ant Pruitt:uh dutch defense secretary remember that there was some concern about buying the us f-35 fighter plane because there was a kill switch and you know eu our eu allies were a little worried they're going to spend billions of dollars on this plane and then the us would say oh you can't use it anymore well here's some good news dutch defense secretary says ah don't worry about it f-35 software can be jailbroken like a phone i mean yes yes you can but the

2:31:08Megan Morrone:primary would you fly in a jail broken jet i don't know it's an information weapon the f-35 links up so many different information sources to give the pilot a better view of the battlefield so if you jailbreak it you're cutting yourself off from a lot of those information services which means now it's just a plane it's not really an information platform the the uh i wish i could

2:31:30Ant Pruitt:i could do a dutch accent i won't i'll save you uh the dutch defense ministry said if despite everything you still want to upgrade i'm going to say something i should never say but i will anyway you can jailbreak an f35 just like an iphone just which is it's certainly it's certainly

2:31:48Jason Howell:possible that uh you know uh the other countries that are buying these could essentially write their own software um you know and essentially create their own firmware for the f35 um and replicate the kinds of capabilities that it has from the factory from from Lockheed Martin you know and provide that networking capabilities and in fact you know they they may want to

2:32:16Ant Pruitt:consider doing this anyway just jailbreak the damn thing then you could put you know a candy crush on it and you can really enjoy your flight next time to make it so well from the end of the software that's couldn't buy a cell and why couldn't it self because we have a lot of dutch listeners so they're very happy now you know leo they need to

2:32:38Megan Morrone:bring back that uh the psa ads from 2004 you wouldn't download a car oh remember those you

2:32:44Ant Pruitt:wouldn't fly a jail you'd go to a movie and they would say you know you're a crook so stop i just paid 25 to see this movie and you're accusing me of pirating it i wonder if the f35 has an app store no just use f droid it's okay let's take a little break and then we have a few final words to wrap up this fabulous edition i hate to break up a good thing but i smell spaghetti my wife's making spaghetti sauce downstairs so I can smell it and it's good it's good I bet you smell some good things up there in your little eerie in Rome father Robert Ballasair uh depends which way the wind is blowing as always as always Robert is coming to us from the Vatican Vatican City

2:33:37Megan Morrone:are you in Vatican City no no no no Vatican City is on the other side of this wall so you're in the vatican we're not in vatican city oh you're in the vatican i'm confused so you're not in italy either no yeah so our this entire property our entire campus is zona extraterritoriale so it's not part of italy right in fact the police can't come into our our campus without permission of our secretary of state wow but you do have vatican attractively dressed vatican guards

2:34:06Ant Pruitt:oh of course swiss guards to protect you we've got a swiss guard yeah uh but i don't understand the distinction between the vatican and vatican city uh so the vatican just means vatican property

2:34:18Megan Morrone:yeah and there are there are different locations around the city of rome that are vatican property castle gondolfo is vatican property yes who is vatican property right uh the civita is cat is is vatican property we are vatican property however vatican city is only what i guess you'd consider St. Peter's and the Vatican Museums and that compound around the garden. There's an actual wall around it. So, yeah. And who lives there? Just the Pope? There's about a thousand people. So that includes the Pope, that includes the Swiss Guard. Do they look down at you because you're not in the city? They envy us because it's so much easier for me to go to my house than it is for them to go to

2:35:04Ant Pruitt:theirs oh they have to go through a bunch of checkpoints i'd have to go through border control

2:35:09Megan Morrone:or you know passport control and they no i actually i have asked if i can get the vatican stamp so i can stamp passports as people are coming into our house i would love that that would be awesome oh please please well anyway but you know they don't take many of my my recommendations uh jesuit pilgrimage is the app if you want to follow the jesuit pilgrimage

2:35:32Ant Pruitt:bench uh anything else you want to plug uh i we've got something big coming up but it's not ready yet so no okay stay tabbed well of course and you could follow padre sj on your blue sky is that

2:35:46Megan Morrone:the best place to follow your stuff it it really is although mostly it's just uh cats and rants about what's going on in the u.s the vada cats are still going right they're still going oh uh one of the twit army sent me a link there's a game uh an indiana jones video game yeah one of the missions

2:36:05Ant Pruitt:is to go inside the vatican and take pictures of cats so italy is funny about its cats it is

2:36:16Jason Howell:speaking of indiana jones do you guys watch shrinking there in the latest episode there

2:36:21Ant Pruitt:was a fun little indiana jones easter egg in there because harrison ford of course is the star of shrinking yes do you refer to indiana joneses not explicitly you'll have to watch it you have to

2:36:33Jason Howell:know it's like an easter egg yeah my wife my wife didn't my wife didn't realize what it was

2:36:39Ant Pruitt:i i explained to her what it was i that's actually a very funny show it reminds me i should i should be watching that samable sam ed's podcast is called wheel bearings and you can find it at wheel bearings.media with nicole and robbie he's also vcvp of research at telemetry what you're

2:36:55Jason Howell:working on these days i've got a brand new um white paper coming out uh this week on automated trucking oh so check the telemetryagency.com website uh probably tomorrow or the day after

2:37:09Ant Pruitt:didn't the president uh pardon the guy who uh scammed everybody with uh anthony levandowski

2:37:18Jason Howell:uh yes i believe that uh that he pardoned him during the first administration oh okay yeah it's hard to keep track but uh yeah no this this is this is all yeah this report is about automated trucking and you know kind of the is it coming soon to a highway near me uh it's it's uh probably not near you not in california anytime soon because they still don't allow automated trucks uh without safety drivers and actually they don't allow automated trucks at all on public roads in california but they are running in texas aurora's got a fleet of them doing runs between houston and dallas and el paso and expanding to new mexico soon there's several other companies including plus and wabi and kodiak that are running them and uh within the next year or so they'll be going driverless aurora is the first one to go driverless um and uh there's there's several others uh that will be coming to market over the next uh 12 to 24 months okay but not in california that's interesting yeah california has been the most restrictive when it comes to trucks um automated trucks uh but in large part because of pushback from uh the uh teamsters union oh of course yeah it's the same reason uh nevada is uh suing um online gambling online yeah

2:38:44Ant Pruitt:constantly uh oh there was who wants competition right yeah nobody wants competition yeah and of course our good friend nicholas de leon newlywed you're still a newlywed you know for a year is it is that the rule yeah right then i mean it's been two months so send gifts tomorrow two months tomorrow you better have an anniversary gift prepared how many of those oh man it never ends let me tell you i thought when i married lisa i thought oh we'll get married on her birthday that'll cut down on the number of presents but no right no it just means you buy twice as many twice as many you guys got married was it christmas day i know it was

2:39:21Leo Laporte:christmas two days two days before christmas 23rd 23rd in vegas yes sir yes did elvis marry you you must know this uh no it wasn't elvis this was this was i let ashley uh direct this uh movie so to speak and so that's what she wanted to do we initially were going to have you know it was a small ceremony we were initially going to have you know some friends some family but it got very hectic very quickly and so ashley was like yeah no actually it will literally be me and nicholas

2:39:50Ant Pruitt:and thank you that's what lisa and i did yeah that's the way to do it we got we took the uh we had a little hotel which has since burned to the ground in the napa fires but it was it was a very nice place and uh we did their they had an elopement package this is this is now 11 years ago they had an elopement package so we said oh we'll do that and it included a bartender and and hors d 'oeuvres and everything, but it was just me, Lisa, the minister. Yeah. The poor person passing the hors d 'oeuvres ago, would you like an hors d 'oeuvres to Lisa? And then would you like an hors d 'oeuvres to me?

2:40:25Ant Pruitt:And then back to Lisa, would you like an hors d 'oeuvres? The bartender just sat there. It's okay. It was good. It's nice.

2:40:33Jason Howell:My wife and I did it on the beach in Kauai. Oh, nice. Just the guy who married us, his wife is a witness, because you only require one witness in Hawaii, and a photographer.

2:40:42Ant Pruitt:so five of us see I would ask Robert but I don't think he's eligible so I've done I've performed

2:40:49Megan Morrone:several fun weddings I bet you have on a on a catamaran uh in the off of Hawaii in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo ship um Antarctica that was fun what oh really people in Antarctica yep Donna McMurdo whose jurisdiction Murdo is that the churches I guess was actually part of the diocese of christ church new zealand okay that makes sense and how were you how did it come about that you were there i was doing a project and they needed a priest so and

2:41:21Ant Pruitt:they said quick robert we need to get married get the call the guy with the collar somebody wants to

2:41:27Megan Morrone:get hitched quick hurry up well i didn't know that robert chapel the chapel that we did it at it's gone it burned down it was our lady of the snows it's burnt down like six times i don't know

2:41:39Ant Pruitt:what's how does that happen in antarctica uh normally candles oh yeah you're just trying to stay warm and one thing leads to another yeah the the place we got married burned to the ground too i mean yeah uh anyway congratulations nicholas and yes get the presents ready

2:41:58Leo Laporte:and any what are you working on right now uh oh speaking of ai actually i'll plug it really quickly i haven't started writing it yet uh but i'm gonna be writing this week an article uh i put on a bunch of weight in 2023 24 you know uh i was literally like 195 pounds last september i'm five foot nine so that's way it's way too big for my frame so there i gotta lose some weight here i use gemini uh i say hey gemini i gotta lose some weight uh what do i do uh we went back and forth and we created uh not a not necessarily a diet plan but more like an exercise regimen uh foods to eat i'm down about 26 pounds it worked from october 1st let's call it that's like the uh that's like the chat gpt ad uh i mean it's look i i realized i built a little home we had a spare room so i built like a little uh power rack thing you know i'm lucky i work from home i don't have a commute.

2:42:56Leo Laporte:I had the spare room. I had the money to build a little. You don't have a wife downstairs making Bolognese. I'm the cook. I cook six times a week. I'm the cook. I cook six times a week. You know, we don't do DoorDash or any of that stuff. We might, we might get a pizza on a Saturday or something. So I'm kind of in control of the diet. We go to Costco every month. So it's we're eating whole foods, good foods. So yeah, between, between just kind of like maybe increasing my protein intake and watching what I'm eating and walking and exercising them down. By the time this article is published in a week or two, it'll be around 30 pounds.

2:43:32Leo Laporte:Wow. So the headline is kind of like, AI helped me use 30 pounds or whatever the case may be. I could write an article, AI helped me lose sleep.

2:43:43Ant Pruitt:I could ask my editor. You know what? Give yourself a little credit, Nicholas. the AI can recommend. You did all the work. You followed the rules.

2:43:55Leo Laporte:Well, I understand. I mean, that was, and it's, I can't publish the entire conversation. It's long and insane, but like, you know, I do realize that like, yeah, I'm the one in there lifting the weights. I'm the one ensuring that I'm eating, you know, it's, I did it. I'm very, I don't mind eating chicken breast twice a week. I don't, I enjoy repetitive things. I don't know what else to say so it's like oh i have well the the problem i always have with like exercise whatever was like okay how much weight do i lift how many reps how many when should i increase the weight that was do i stay in this for two weeks do i say it is like i had no idea so gemini was

2:44:34Ant Pruitt:like yeah lots of information is valuable yeah yeah and so i actually i followed it to a t so i should take it back ai did help me lose weight in my wallet uh does that count i mean mass is mass i guess yeah uh nicholas de leon consumer reports senior technology reporter great to have you as well our show today brought to you by shopify have you ever thought of starting your own business you got a great idea but those pesky little details can get in the way how do you charge people who's going to design your website how do you handle fulfillment i know what it's like i've been there in fact i've watched my own kids doing exactly this start their own business but you know what they got it done with shopify shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world from household names like heinz and mattel to brands just getting started like like my kids you know salt hanks salt lovers club that whole thing shopify helped him build a beautiful online store that matches his brand's unique style and they can do exactly the same for you.

2:45:40Ant Pruitt:Shopify also helps with marketing, easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything. And of course, let's not forget that iconic purple ShopPay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with shopify today sign up for your one dollar per month trial right now at shopify.com slash twit go to shopify.com slash twit that's shopify.com slash twit worked for my kid it's nice to not have to send him an allowance shopify thank you shopify i love this story i don't know it's not really it tom's hardware clever this is a clever idea in a blind test blindfolded test with audio files you know how audio files golden ears i can tell that that three thousand dollar cable is going to sound better audio files in a blind test couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire a banana or wet mud the mud should sound perfectly awful but it doesn't there's a pickle uh it's actually the credit goes to diy audio moderator there set up an experiment uh pano the moderator invited other members on the forum see these are people who go to this forum they're golden ears to listen to various sound clips with four different versions one from the original cd the other three recorded through 180 centimeters of pro audio copper wire 20 centimeters of wet mud 120 centimeters of old microphone cable soldered to u.s pennies which by the way are not copper they're zinc right with a little copper clad and via a 13 centimeter banana initial tests show it's extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring set up the sounds the amazing thing says pano is how much i like these files sound the mud should sound awful but it doesn't i guess they all conduct right here's the here's the video's conductivity here's the mud setup it's like

2:48:13Ant Pruitt:um so uh basically after waiting a month for testers to submit the results the results were tabulated and uh boy you know even flipping a coin might have produced a better result there are only six correct answers out of 43 guesses 13.95 accurate uh keep keep going out and buying

2:48:37Jason Howell:that gold wire okay i just you know mud if it's wet enough yeah i mean i'm not going to change

2:48:48Megan Morrone:the audiophiles' minds. They've already made the excuses for why this is a poor experiment, and their setup really works much better. And you know what? If they draw with a green Sharpie on the back of their CDs, it sounds better.

2:49:01Jason Howell:Bingo. To be fair, I have heard some awfully muddy audio through certain headphones.

2:49:09Leo Laporte:They use Joe Jackson. Somebody says, oh, nice. They use Joe Jackson. Yeah. I have to send this article to my dad because he's like an aspirational audiophile, I guess you could say. He used to subscribe to Sound and Vision magazine. That was the first tech thing that I read as a nine, 10-year-old. I had no idea that that stuff existed. And so that was really my introduction to technology, so to speak, that magazine.

2:49:33Megan Morrone:You're not a real audiophile unless you've taken out a second mortgage to buy some monster cables. Let's just put it out there.

2:49:40Ant Pruitt:Yeah, I've heard that. Ironically, distilled water does not conduct very well at all. but if you put a little mud in it it does a much better job ironically even a banana uh this is something for you as the cook of the family Nicholas uh lab grown meat exists but nobody wants to eat it yeah I always thought this would be the solution right to global warming to uh food hung you know yeah hunger uh the fda has approved cultivated chicken uh for sale in 2023 the price down to about 10 to 30 a pound it's expensive a lot of investors three billion dollars in investor money important to more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells so you take animal cells you grow them in a vat right so it's real it's real meat but you don't have an animal attached you don't have to slaughter anything uh you can eat beef without killing cattle writes digital dive chicken without industrial farming steak without ethical compromise the technology works federal regulators have approved it is safe nearly a third of u.s states have banned it or are trying to and i would assume that states like you know iowa nebraska yeah where they grow meat yeah um yeah cattle states are trying to try it you know i honestly we've all tried the impossible burger and stuff like that that's not you know those aren't bad this is actually better environmentally a lot of those uh fake meat substitutes actually are very messy there's only three places that you can buy uh cultivated meat singapore australia and parts of the united states mission barns sold cultivated pork meatballs at a california grocery store for 13.99 that might be part of it it's still expense more expensive yeah a handful of u.s restaurants serve uh wild types cultivated salmon that's not farmed salmon it's not a fish it's it's grown in a vat um yeah i think we've missed out here

2:52:04Megan Morrone:as soon as it comes down in price it will become popular the problem is regular meat will cost you between four and twenty dollars a pound and this is going to cost you between 10 and 30 a pound it's a lot more expensive yeah it's a lot and americans love cheap food that's the truth But the real question, Leo, is what would it sound like if you played an MP3 through the meat?

2:52:28Ant Pruitt:I bet it sounds better than mud. Yeah, better than mud. Clear as mud. So Digital Dive writes, you could still go to jail in Mississippi for selling a chicken nugget grown in a bioreactor instead of cut from a slaughtered bird. Aw.

2:52:46Ant Pruitt:Finally, I think this is just for historical reasons quite interesting. the world wide web was invented in 1989 by tim bernersley he was a physicist working at cern the uh the organization european organization for nuclear research in geneva switzerland he was as a scientist wanted to share his papers with other scientists and he invented the whole idea of hyperlinking the ability to click on a link and go to another page because he thought that and by the way in his earliest conception everybody looking at the page could edit the page it was more like a wiki because he wanted scientists to be able to collaborate uh maybe you've always wondered what it looked like the original worldwide web now cern has put it online actually they did in 2019 uh this is the world you you launch the worldwide web browser and you can actually see what it looked like in the good old days uh is it sad that i i actually remember this do you remember it right 1989 my gosh this this was trying to see right now if it

2:53:55Jason Howell:can open twit.tv oh that's a good question it's just it's sitting there connecting connecting

2:54:00Ant Pruitt:connecting i think javascript is probably uh killing it it was done on a next machine so there's a whole next related subsection. Here's general CERN information sources, software technology interest group news. It's got a menuing system, I guess all in HTML, right? You don't, I mean, that's pretty impressive. Can we get the internet? I just remember when this came out.

2:54:27Megan Morrone:Yeah. I didn't find it very interesting. A gopher for me was the thing that got me.

2:54:31Ant Pruitt:yeah i so i was thinking about have i uh ever experienced in my 40 years of covering technology have i ever experienced anything quite as exciting and revolutionary as ai today and the only thing that comes to mind is the first time i experienced the internet not the world wide web right the internet i was using a bulletin board system called the well out of san francisco the whole earth electronic link that was created by stewart brand and it turned out it was running on unix machines and if you knew the command in the you were in the forums if you knew the command you could drop out of the forum onto a unix command prompt where you could run gopher and archie and be on the internet now the internet in this must have been late 80s no it was before the web so it must have been mid 80s there wasn't a lot going on but i was even then like wow this is there's all these people there's all this stuff there are all these resources and i can get to it directly this is amazing that was the first time i felt that and this is this ai thing is i think it's even maybe more remarkable but that's the only other thing i can remember is my first experience of the internet nicholas de leon everybody should get their tucson news from his, his clanker.

2:55:56Ant Pruitt:Yeah.

2:55:59Leo Laporte:I just got the 6 PM. So I get, it goes at 6 AM and the whole pipeline goes off for everyone. And at 6 PM, I get just a personal one on telegram. I don't need Tucson's pretty small. You don't need two, uh, two roundups. Yeah. Nice. And it worked great. It just, so it's awesome. You said, you know, Tucson daily brief.com is the, the blog version. And if you scroll to the bottom, there's the podcast link and the YouTube link. And that's it.

2:56:25Ant Pruitt:Now, next step will be to have a video of you.

2:56:29Leo Laporte:I was thinking, like, how do I? I'm less familiar with the video generating models. But that would, yeah, of course, that would be, you know, something to go along with the audio podcast and YouTube. So, yeah.

2:56:44Ant Pruitt:Tucson is spelled with an extra C, I should mention.

2:56:47Leo Laporte:T-U-C. Yeah, I guess that nobody.

2:56:50Ant Pruitt:you know how to spell it but no one in the world it's almost as bad as albuquerque what is it with new mexico or ipsalanti or the south pacific the southwest ipsalanti i everybody knows how to spell ipsalanti y-p-r-e-s a-l-a-n-t-i-x-y-z right well you got the yp right kind of went off the rails

2:57:11Megan Morrone:isn't ipsalanti the the placeholder whenever you have those templates is it ipsalant pops up

2:57:20Ant Pruitt:it's better than sous saint marie i'm just saying that's true uh mr sam abul samet everybody knows how to spell that he's at wheel bearings media vp research telemetry thank you sam so much great to see you too thank you for having me back on again this is always fun having you on yeah sam and i actually all three of you i like exchanging emails with you guys these are my buds father robert balassier the digital jesuit uh still stuck at the vatican they won't let him go home

2:57:49Megan Morrone:it will not they'll not they love you that's why well i don't i think it comes down to familiarity i've been here so long that they kind of just know that i'm going to be up on the roof doing

2:58:00Jason Howell:my thing i was going to maintain the servers if they let you go i remember we've got people for

2:58:04Ant Pruitt:that i remember when they called you you can't say no i mean you know uh i said no three times you tried i and then and then yeah they they and uh and you thought maybe just be a few years right I thought it would be one year. How long has it been? This is year eight. And is there an insight?

2:58:28Megan Morrone:Every time I try to plan that, fate laughs at me. I've even brought people into the team to each take part of my responsibility. And they haven't gotten the hint that they don't need me here anymore.

2:58:41Ant Pruitt:Robert, you might as well just accept it. This is your calling. This is your calling, Robert. You're doing good work. it's not a bad city to be stuck in I mean Rome is beautiful man I would I would love to live in Rome I'm so jealous yeah I've told Lisa I said I want to move to Rome she says no see you love the history you love the food it doesn't knock you out does it it doesn't it really doesn't I was every time I would go around a corner in Rome there's this something there's a beautiful church or a painting or you go oh my god this is history i'll never forget we're walking we got lost we're walking and there's like a hole in the ground and there are all these cats in the hole in the ground and it's where they where julius caesar was murdered it's the four it's the forum yep yep

2:59:32Megan Morrone:it's just a whole that's one block away from our big church the jesse so yeah this is right there

2:59:37Jason Howell:hey robert it could be worse you think you could be assigned to like dallas or jacksonville

2:59:42Megan Morrone:it's okay this is true Houston but but I do like not always now but I do like the culture in the United States I like the fact that there's a big mix I can you can get any sort of cuisine anywhere you want uh and and honestly history is lost on me I'm not a history person and it feel bad because

3:00:01Ant Pruitt:I wish I was yeah you're surrounded by 2 000 years of amazing amazing history it's okay you would

3:00:10Megan Morrone:never get any work done if you were though padre you'd just be like you know that's true there's a

3:00:15Ant Pruitt:shopping mall in Rome you go in our tour guide brought us in there and there's just the remains of a Roman aqueduct they said yeah every time you try to build anything in Rome you have to dig and then of course you're going to get a ruin yep and they said well you can build them all here but you've got to get you've got to put an exhibit where the aqueduct is so that people can see it so there's this like muse little museum in the shopping mall where they have a old Roman aqueduct It's really amazing to see.

3:00:42Megan Morrone:Well, across the street right now, there's a massive construction project. They actually put a crane up. I've never seen one of those in Rome. It's the future Four Seasons Hotel that Bill Gates Investment Company bought. And six years ago, after they got the lease, they started excavating the courtyard because they wanted to make a multipurpose area, and they found the remains of Nero's Theater. Great. Yeah. And so now they've just finally gotten permission. They've repacked it, and then they've capped it with a layer of concrete to preserve it.

3:01:14Ant Pruitt:Can you go down underneath and see it? Or do they bury it?

3:01:18Megan Morrone:Well, the public can't. However, it extends underneath our property. So if you go down the elevator shaft of our building, you actually can get into it.

3:01:28Ant Pruitt:Okay, I'm now definitely coming out. Yeah, that's one of the things that surprised me at Rome. There's no high-rises. No, you can't. Because you cannot do it. well it's so great to see all three of you thank you for making this a special show for me i appreciate it and i hope to see you again soon we do twit every sunday afternoon 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern are we going to switch time zones not not next week the week after i think And we go back to summertime, daylight savings time. But for now, 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern 2200 UTC, we stream live in the Club Twit Discord. I hope you're a member.

3:02:11Ant Pruitt:If you're not, please, we'd love to have you. twit.tv slash club to it. You get ad free versions of all the shows you had access to the club twit disco, which amazingly enough is 13 stories below the ground, right next to Nero's theater. And in there we stream all the shows so you can watch them there. We have special programming just for club members. Find out more twit.tv slash club twit. We also stream for the world at large at YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. So do watch live if you want. You don't have to. On-demand versions of the show available. There's audio and video, your choice, at twit.tv, our website.

3:02:52Ant Pruitt:There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Twit. And of course, of course, you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast player. And that way you'll get it automatically the minute we put it out, which will be in just a couple hours. because Benito and Kevin have to polish it up. Thank you for being here, everybody. 20 years we've been doing it. I'm looking for another 20 more. And then after that, it'll be my AI avatar for another thousand more. But I hope it will do as I have done for the last 20 years and say, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another Twit is in the can. This is amazing.

3:03:34Ant Pruitt:doing the twit, all right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit, all right.