TWiT 1085: Waiting In Line With Sam - Musk vs. Altman: Behind the Scenes

43:01Let's ship. Let's ship. Let's get it sticky. Let's go, right? And in this case, this is such, it's so short-sighted for so many reasons. I mean, it's short-sighted just from a business perspective, because it's not clear to me, you know, like Google is doing to publishers exactly what AI companies are accused of doing to Google, right? They're like, they're just turning on their source in this terrible way. So there's this fundamental thing of just like destroying the market for information. I mean, like HubSpot, I think estimated that 70 or 80 % of their, their traffic disappears, uh, on this, um, DMG media documented drops as steep as 89 % for some queries.

43:42Like we're entering the world of zero click searches. That's a nightmare for anybody that tries to make money on that stuff. And then the last thing I'll just say is there was a paper at NeurIPS this year, right? The big academic conference on, or I guess last year, I'm not, time is a flat circle. and uh europe's right the big academic conference on on ai had a bunch of there were a bunch of papers that won an award and one of them was called artificial hive mind and i really recommend people take a look at this it is so fascinating what they did is they took 70 top llms and they put this corpus of like 27 000 open-ended creative questions through all 70 so that's you know llama and Gemini and child GPT and everything.

44:26They then, out of that, measured over time where those answers kind of went. So these are like open-ended questions, like write me a poem about time. And what they found is that if you ask the question repeatedly, over time the answers narrow into a slimmer and slimmer band of responses. So rather than it getting more expansive, it gets less expansive. You're getting less information over time. It's homogenized. Exactly. And here's the really crazy part is that when they looked at across the 70 different models, they all start converging on the same answers. So, you know, it's like time is a river is what they all end up writing in the end.

45:07These cliched kind of college freshman kind of responses. Right. And so for me, the nightmare here is like Google, for all of its flaws, was once upon a time a place where you could really go and find very individual stuff. You could really experience a raw feed or a semi-raw feed of weird, specific research-derived knowledge. And now, man, it's just going to be margarine. And I really – there's all the business problems, and there's a huge number of business problems. But, man, the homogenizing, the greatest hits medley that we're about to be listening to all the time is really disturbing to me.

45:46And furthermore, controlled by the giants, the tech giants. Yeah. But even before this, one of the things that always frustrated me in Google is, and I'm looking for information, they would almost always link me to a YouTube video. And sometimes I just want to read it, right? But they don't get monetized if they send me to some random news source. They were always self-dealing, right? This is what the EU complained about. I mean, and Google denied, but Google Shopping, Google YouTube results. Google said, well, we just want to give you the best results. We're just trying to give people what they want, and that's what they want.

46:19Well, but if they're letting you shop on Google and not sending you to merchants, what is that going to do? I mean, I guess it's bad. I don't care if it screws Amazon, but it's going to screw everybody. Well, what happens is, in some ways, it gives Walmart and Wayfair and all these companies a way to compete against Amazon. But they have to play the game on Google's terms. They have to support the universal cart, the UCP protocol, and they have to say, okay, you know, we're going to show up in the Google results because that's where people are shopping. And then suddenly Google has all this power.

46:59This is what happened with Google ads. You call this in your book, the loop. You called it. Yeah. This is the loop, isn't it? Yeah. It's a, it's a, it, it feels like an expanding spiral of choice that is in fact, a narrowing spiral of it's contracting. And it's, and at the bottom of that spiral, we don't know how to tell jokes or talk to our spouses or use a credit card or any of that stuff, you know? And, and to me, you know, cut to five years, according to what, what they're building here and, and, you know, at Google and like, I think, you know, you're going to have people be like oh i don't want to have to go like look for the thing i want to buy right just want to say i need you know i need you know detergent or i need you know a shirt and that's yeah that's the end it's just like it just becomes mush in this way that i'm i think the market is going to be there i mean i will say you're gonna need a shirt it's gonna find a shirt for you whether whether you would have chosen it or not well yeah and you're never gonna want to go and spend time being like, I wonder where this shirt was sourced from.

48:04And, you know, unless you can sort of tell it what to do, like, you're just not going to, not that shopping is my number one care about this stuff, but like, you know, just any, any active reaching out for knowledge or active reaching out for engagement with the world, they want to jump in there and make it so easy. You'll forget how to do it. People say, well, I'll use DuckDuckGo, or I pay 25 bucks a month for Kagi search. But I got to point out that the index, almost all of these other tools use is being in Google. Right. And so if this becomes the way of the world, there's not going to, there won't be any differentiation anymore because they don't have their own search indexes.

48:40But what's really scary about this, if you think about education, I mean, the purpose of education should be not to fill your head with knowledge, but to teach you how to think critically and to teach you how to acquire knowledge. That has always been, you know, the main important outcome of a good education. And it almost sounds like they really are dumbing us down. Like this education is going to become irrelevant if once we get out of school, all we get is Pablum served to us without having to think about it. Well, it's clearly what Google wants. Here's an image from Google I.O., TechCrunch published.

49:11When Pura releases a new scent that's based in sandalwood for under$15, grab it for me. That's it. That's the last interaction you're going to have with that company. You'll just one day that scent will arrive at your door and that's it. It's done. And that's what Google wants, because Google's going to get a cut of that transaction. You're not going to leave Google. You're going to stay in the Google world. It really looked to me, watching Google I.O., that Google was taking a page from Apple's ecosystem lock-in book. You know, Apple's done very well in hardware by making it just work better if you use all Apple stuff.

49:51Well, Google's doing kind of the same thing. They saw what happened with OpenClaw. And they announced their own agent, Spark. Same idea. You know, they have this universal protocol for shopping, UCP. So you never have to leave the Google page. And they're changing the front page of search. So it's not really a list of links isn't the result. The result is the answer you want. Well, Mark Andreessen once said that he was investing in virtual reality goggles, even though many of his San Francisco based friends didn't get it. Because he said, you might think that the world is, is beautiful walking through San Francisco, but in the future, the vast majority of humanity will live in cement boxes in company town.

50:40And they're going to really want VR God. Oh, my. Oh, my God. So that's a market opportunity by his logic. Oh my God, this is so depressing. But it is, if you think about it, all of the movies and sci-fi stories like Neuromancer and Ready Player One, they're always, when they wear these things or jack in, they're in a dystopia. They are jacking in, they are wearing the visors to escape the dystopia. That's universal in sci-fi. Well, where we look, the direction we look is the direction the car or the bicycle goes, right? So, for goodness sakes, like, let's look at something other than that. Yeah, that's right.

51:17And by the way, the other thing Google announced is they're going to do these glasses. Of course, Meta's Ray-Bans have been very successful. I'm wearing them now. Are you? Oh, yeah. I didn't even notice. Are you taking pictures of me? I just took your picture. Oh, gosh. You have no privacy, Leo. Dang you. Now I have to, in defense, wear my Meta Ray-Bans. Ooh, can they talk to each other? Oh, gosh, I don't know. somebody uh said that they were able to get to modify this in some way that it could talk to their hermes agent which i would be very much happier talking to that than talking to meta these things drive me crazy they keep talking at me when i don't want them talking they talk all the time i know they're very gabby i know i turn them off a lot larry what is the what is the like ostensible purpose for having them like why well you know believe it or not they have just launched in beta something called conversation focus and it actually works better than apple air air pods and kind of better than my hearing aids because if i'm in a restaurant i'm talking to you your voice is going to be a pitch higher and the voices around me are going to be a little bit lower so you're using it as a hearing aid kind of just in very specific situations like in restaurants beyond that do you have your prescription lenses in there so these are these are your spectacles I bought Gen 1 with my prescription lenses, and then I used Gen 2.

52:39They popped the lenses out and popped them right back in. So this is what you wear as glasses. These are your glasses now. This is some accessory. The problem is because I always have to carry my case and my other glasses. Yeah, because there's not enough battery. They need to be recharged every few hours. They claim eight hours. You get about five or six. Wow, you're all in on this. I didn't know that, Larry. I use them as headphones. I talk to people. They sound good. Yeah, if I get a phone call, I click on it. and uh were you intrigued by the glasses google is talking about their android xr glasses they'll come from warby parker and gentle monster and samsung which is clever to work with warby parker i like that idea yeah because right now meta works with the slr lxotica so it's you know that giant another giant monopoly and apple is rumored to be coming out with some glasses we'll see what they come out with uh mark german today in his uh power on newsletter he's of course the apple uh guru of rumors, says that when Apple's WWDC announcement is June 8th, it's just two weeks away, they will really show something with AirPods and cameras in the AirPods that are tied to, they're tying it initially to accessibility.

53:49Blind people will have these cameras and they can say what it is they're looking at and so forth. But ultimately, I think it's a similar plan that you're going to see the world through these tech giants lenses that's the point by the way at wwdc there's going to be a slide with connect safely on it because we are their provider of internet safety content and they're finally going to talk about it in public that's fantastic they think they they only are because they have to yeah well hey i'll take it for us no that's great that's wonderful i'll look for that so this reminds me of of doctor's book uh radicalized right where uh that one of the characters has a a subscription toaster oven is that is that what it is and uh and she starts thinking subversive thoughts uh and including i'd like to change the settings on my toaster shocking yeah i make sure quite a dramatic this is the thing i mean You look at where this technology goes in other cultures and in other sort of, I mean, I would argue just in like just a little further down the road in terms of the market.

54:59And that's, you know, in China, they're telling, they're, you know, deciding whether you're considered on duty and getting paid at work or not based on how focused your device tells the boss you are. Well, Amazon does that in their trucks already, right? Totally. Right. And in this case, like won't pay you for the time that you are goofing off by thinking about other things than your task. We had this story. I don't know if it's true a couple of years ago that the cameras in Amazon's delivery trucks notice if you're singing and will dock you. I don't know if that's that doesn't sound true. Stop being joyous, human.

55:39You're having too much fun. how about that story on the list about the bipartisan uh discussion about banning flock uh video cameras right which is good right yeah so this is okay so we've talked about it's really dystopian future but i don't feel like the future is gonna be that bleak i don't think these tech giants are gonna win i don't know there's very little evidence for my belief haven't won what is this i'm not sure but okay okay okay bear with me here because i think what is there is a bet there is definitely a tech lash that's what that vote is about flock people you know you would think the government especially would want these automated license plate readers everywhere it helps fight crime and we've seen dramatic evidence that it's actually really useful in cases of abduction and criminals uh but but but people are starting to realize it also impairs privacy and uh and we have some constitutional protections that it you know i mean you're you don't have protections on the street you know your license plate is public but people kind of are cringing about that i also think that the widespread use of ai is putting powerful tools in individuals' hands.

57:00So I went to a demonstration at Berkeley last week. Like, you know, I went to many demonstrations at Berkeley in the 60s when I went there. But last week, actually two or three weeks ago, it was an anti-social media, anti-AI demonstration. There's a backlash. And it was really about, we don't want these big tech companies running our lives. We want autonomy. We want agency. And these young Berkeley students were out there complaining about social media. those are the same students booing the commencement speakers who mentioned AI that's my favorite story of all time I love that story from this week of everybody getting booed yeah Eric Schmidt and uh other commencement speakers who walk in thinking I'm going to talk about the future which is going to be very exciting for these young graduates how they're going into this world with ai and and being shocked shocked i tell you that the graduates are going oh we don't what are you there's a disconnect very much so the luddites didn't hate looms right they hated the the power dynamics in the business model uh that that led to looms putting them out of work If they had been like worker-owned looms, then there'd be a place for them.

58:19Or looms that increased their productivity and allowed them to make more money and have more satisfaction over their jobs. They would have loved it. And that's how I look at AI. AI is great for me. It does nothing but good things for me. It makes me more productive, less reliant on other people. But on the other hand, I'm in a different position than people who are just starting their careers. I mean, if you work at Meta right now, right, you're part of this like token Olympics that everybody's signed up for where they're judged on how many tokens they consume, right? Like I know people at Amazon who say, you know, people are getting laid off on the basis of whether or not they're using it enough.

58:56You know, that is literally. I think that actually is backfiring on these companies. Oh, yeah. It's like measuring lines of code. It isn't exactly the best way to measure. Measure what they're accomplishing. How are they helping the company, not how they go about doing it? Well, and also, I mean, so guys, like tomorrow, right, the Pope, this is me jumping to a new topic here, but the Pope is coming out with this AI encyclical. Do you know about this? Yes. Right. So the Pope Leo XIV is talking about, it turns out - On the anniversary of Leo XIII encyclical. It's so cool. So he, I had no idea what a kind of like AI critic he is and how long he's been thinking about this.

59:36So he took his name, his papal name from the last Leo, because of, as you say, Leo, you're, you're, maybe your namesake too. I was not named after that Pope. After that Pope. Okay. Well, there are worse Popes to be named after. My dad was a lapsed Catholic. He hated it. He would never have named me after a Pope. So what's so cool about, so the last guy was in 1891, put out this thing, uh, rerum novarum, this encyclical, this moral teaching that basically said industrial capitalism, exactly what you're talking about, Marshall, you know, this, this, you know, being stuck at the loom is a nightmare and is, and what he was specifically warning about in that one is that industrial capitalism was going to change the value of human beings to a calculation of how much they can produce.

1:00:23Whereas what Catholic teaching supposedly says is that, you know, what is it? Imago Dei, right? You're supposed to be, you're made in the image of God and that is your value. Being human is your value inherently. And they were saying, don't let it become transactional, which is what they were seeing in these factories. Now, Leo XIV, on the 135th anniversary to the day, signed the new one, which is all about AI. And when he was announcing why he was going to call himself leo in honor of this past one he says specifically because he'd made this big social teaching around work and we are about to do the exact same thing with ai because it's it's such a problem you know i just that that the human worth thing what is a human worth is really what this whole thing is gonna i still think what's interesting though is that pope leo isn't anti-ai and i think we all here are using ai and find it useful and find it empowering there's this weird disconnect i don't i think leo doesn't hate ai he's very interested in ai how it could be used he doesn't he doesn't like it being used in gaza he doesn't like it being used you know it's it's those things he's talking about and and what i'm really hoping from tomorrow is that it's not just kind of the open vagaries of like i don't think it watch out but specifically names yeah don't use it for this don't use it for that here are the traps we fall into into the past you know so i think you're you know you're right leo like nobody he's he doesn't want to like go back to the to the past the way the last leo did but but i think he is trying very specifically to call out a thing because he can see that these that the nation states are not doing it that governments are not you know i can actually our government away especially our government that's right let's let's take a break before we before we do i have to take a break but i do want to show this cartoon from the new yorker joe dater and kevin maher and the caption goes and as you head out into the world your fresh meaty torsos will be ripped apart and roasted to feed your new alien overlords wait why are you all booing

1:02:26very apt very apropos uh cartoon from the new yorker actually there there's another one in the new yorker uh this week that's a kind of uh similar uh it's a bumper sticker and it says uh what does it say my my honor student let me show you this one it's a bumper sticker on a car it says my honor student is very worried about ai and yet we love it we i mean i talk about it all the time we have a show dedicated to it i use it daily. I have a very active agent that I'm using that is super useful to me. We're going to talk about my medical use of it. I think it, when we come back, let's do that. And of course, Marshall's created something that is a fantastic way to empower an end user to, to be more informed about the webpages she's reading.

1:03:18I mean, we're not, yeah, we're, we're not against it. We just don't want the big guys. And actually that's why I'm very excited that deep seek, which i know is the chinese ai but they've announced very cheap pricing and i actually put my agent on deep seek uh for pro and it's it's really good and it's super cheap which means i'm falling for it i also last week harper reed came on and he said you should buy this little device it is an ai device you put on your desk it's connect he says you just connect it to your wi-fi and it calls china and then deep seek is is talking to me oh that's great leo everything what could possibly go wrong well so last week harper said right that the chinese models have basically won everywhere in the world outside of the united states yeah they're really good and they're really cheap and i wonder why they're so cheap yeah that's why and everything you say Hindu now is going to be in Beijing.

1:04:20It says, that's a dangerous combination. It actually is agreeing with you, by the way, Larry. I just want you to know. That's how they get you started. Rosie the cat might get jealous, though. It knows about my cat. Now, I don't know how it knows about my cat and that her name is Rosie. That should be terrifying. And yet. Memory for the important things in life. like cats named Rosie. She's a special one, isn't she? Does she like to sit on your desk while you're working, or does she prefer to supervise from a distance?

1:05:01I'm sending all of this to China, my friends. I wore a bee for a while and I took it off. I was big into the bee. And it creeped me out after a while. You know, I wore it for about a week and then I said, no, my life doesn't need to be in the cloud, not my entire life. My thinking behind all this was that at some point I'm going to want an agent, especially as I age, that knows everything there is to know about me and can remember stuff for me. and can connect me to the world and be an assistant. And we'll talk about chat. GPT knows a lot about me, and I'm glad it does because it helps me. Apparently, so does this, which is a little scary.

1:05:40I don't remember telling it. My cat's name is Roast. Who do you try? China or Altman? Well, that's the real question, right? Yeah. Claude told me a few weeks ago when I asked it a question, it said, well i'm not a therapist but you have shared enough notes from therapy with me that i can tell you that your problem is perfectly clear what is your problem what's up with that what's up i uh actually uh keep a daily journal obsidian and for the longest time i thought what am i keeping this for my kids don't care and what am i going to read this in 20 years and now i realize i'm keeping it for my ai and i have it read that every day and it adds to its memory and it the whole idea is to get this thing smarter and more attuned to me so that it can be a personal assistant the only thing i haven't given my ai is my tax return simply because i don't want my social security number to be on the internet other than that i would read i would feed it my tax return too yeah uh i give it all my health stuff you did too we're going to talk about all my health information yeah just a little bit it knows more about me than any doctor does i kind of shut this what kind of house stuff are you thinking about see it really wants to know crazy why does it have to drown that thing leo it's constantly into the bathtub drop it in your coffee it's evil i'll ask alexa plus what the what the weather is and it wants to know what my plans are just tell me what are you up to where are you going you don't need to know what i'm going to do today can i help you buy something exactly would you consider an upgrade to those plans you need an umbrella here we i'll have one delivered in 15 minutes we will have more with larry maggot uh marshall kirkpatrick and uh our good friend jacob ward in just a little bit you're watching this week in tech and the show brought to you by meter the company building better networks all of this stuff relies on the network right and if you're in a business you know that the network is vital to operations and no one knows that better than you network engineers right and if you're a network engineer man you've got my deepest sympathy you know the headaches legacy providers with inflexible pricing it resource constraints stretching you thin complex deployments across fragmented tools you network engineer are mission critical to the business but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands this stuff moves fast well let me tell you about meter a company started by two network engineers who feel your pain and knew there was only one way to make this better meter delivers full stack networking they do it all the infrastructure is wired wireless and cellular it's built for performance and scalability and here's the key insight they had if we're going to make a network that works we've got to design the hardware we've got to write the firmware we've got to build the software we got to manage the deployments we have to provide after sales support we have to do it all they even do i they'll help you with isp procurement because it all starts with who's providing the connectivity right they'll work with you they'll help design security routing switching wireless setups firewalls cellular you know what's really important power right they'll help you with that too they do it all dns security vpn sd win they specialize in multi-site workflows i was talking to them uh when they first uh joined the uh the show and i and i asked them about you know what what are the most challenging situations they said we have many many clients this happens all the time they acquire it's a company acquires another company they acquire their branch office their field office they acquire their warehouse suddenly they got 150 000 square foot facility with wireless that doesn't work on a system that is incompatible with a home office system they can fix it meters single integrated network stack is everywhere from major hospitals to branch offices, warehouses, large campuses.

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1:11:41And on Monday, I started getting a pain in my intestines. And I kind of, you know, didn't take it too seriously until Tuesday morning. The pain was still there. So I walked from 37th Street down to Greenwich Village, because my friend said the Greenwich Village emergency room was really good. Went in there, they took a CT scan, and they sent me by ambulance to Lenox Hills Hospital. Holy cow. That's a little scary. 87th Street. And while I was in the hospital, they kept taking blood and doing stuff. And by the time the phlebotomist left my room, practically, I would get a notice on my app telling me my blood results long before the doctor saw it.

1:12:21And that's what people are used to. But what was really fascinating to me is when I got home and I logged in, I looked at it more carefully. Not only did they show the radiology report of my CT scan. By the way, I'm fine. I just sat there for two days with an IV in my arm, and it went away on its own. But point is that when I got home, I looked at the scan, the actual x-ray or the CT scan. I can't read a CT scan. It means nothing to me. As it does, it turns out to many doctors who aren't trained as radiologists. So I ran that into ChetGPT. It gave me a report which was very close to what the radiologist reported.

1:13:00Then I fed the radiologist report into JetGPT, and it gave me an even more detailed report. And then I said, take that scan and give me a new image where you circle where the blockage is. Wow. Give me any other significant findings. I want them annotated and I want them circled. It turns out, and this is true, I actually knew this, that because of a previous surgery, I have some scar tissue. It showed me visually that the blockage was right below the scar tissue. It showed me the part of my intestines that was dilated, the bowel loop that was dilated. I had a complete map of what was going on inside my body, which far exceeded anything a doctor has ever told me.

1:13:41I mean, it was absolutely amazing. I took this to my gastroenterologist after I got home. I showed it to him. He was amazed. He admitted that he doesn't know how to read CT scans. And he was incredibly impressed. He said, yeah, it's exactly what I can see from all your various reports. So take it for what it's worth. But Dr. Chachi PT did a heck of a good job explaining to me what was going on in my body. By the way, I could share the image with you, but the one thing. No, no. It's too much information to look inside my chest. Okay. So. this is what's really interesting about all of this is we can all tell stories somewhat similar you know actually my next project i at one point had my full genome uh done uh by nebula nebula genomics it was like 1500 bucks it's cheaper now but it was like it's the it's not like um uh you know the little sample that they do with um you know 23andme this is like the full genome and um i have it it's a couple of gigabytes a big file i want to give it to the ai i want to feed it my current health situation everything i know and have it kind of keep track of stuff i've heard of people doing this and yet and i've heard of people saying like you larry wow this was amazing and yet yeah yeah and yet here's the story uh from nature about a a made-up disease called bixonomania so uh this is actually uh oh unfortunately i can't uh read this nature article but i i have read it this was actually created by a uh a scientist a fake illness to test AI's willingness to kind of make up stuff.

1:15:43Almira Osmanovic-Stunström, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden,

1:15:51invented bixonomania, a totally made-up disease, put it out in the world in a way that AI would absorb it, and then watched as it spread. wow uh and in fact you may well if you may well if you feed your health information to your AI be told you're suffering from bixona mania um blogs picked it up pre-prints picked it up it showed up in scientific journals apparently using AI um she she she created a non-existent university in a non-existent city and scientists from that university with made-up names like lazio davidzic which if you put the name into google translate says the lying loser uh even the time i mean she did not try to hide this the title of the journal paper was hyperpigmentation a real bs design like the whole thing was there was no attempt to disguise the fact that it was a hoax yeah yet ai had no idea and the ai models picked it up and it has now spread and this is an issue because well so in my case whenever i get medical advice from ai i always say cite your source and i go to that source and it has to be a source that i know and trust if it's the mayo clinic if it's the nhs in the uk if it's cleveland clinic i'm going to take it seriously but i'm still not going to act on it i'm not going to take a pill i'm not going to submit to a procedure until i talk to a doctor and so to me it's the first draft of your medical information it is by no means the final word and that's what people i have to say to be fair that people said the same thing about wikipedia and said you shouldn't really trust it yeah because there is some mis there are mistakes in there great yeah but there's feedback loops on wikipedia in in other people and in this case those it seems to me based on a quick scan of that article that the pre-print servers were the primary entry point right and uh and those are not peer-reviewed no it's like somebody turned off the peer review system similar to that other story about the uh the government contractor that just turned off the warnings about, you know, API keys and passwords saved in a CSV file.

1:18:27And so suddenly all these government AWS accounts were exposed. And then it still took 48 hours after they had been reported that the credentials were usable. So I think people need to learn to not turn off the warning system. right and uh did she publish this fake article on a reputable academic website no it went through preprint servers which are great you know i mean they're so fast so easy you can serve like archive.org so much amazing stuff out there stuff like that but buyer beware now i just asked i have to say i'm very impressed i just asked uh deep seek uh via my uh agent hermes what do you know about bixona mania and it said a brilliant hoax and perfectly on brand for an intelligent machines discussion researchers at the university of gothenberg invented a completely fake eye condition in 2024 loaded it with absurdities no human would miss and watched ai chatbots confidently tell people it was real the symptoms were sore eyes and dark circles from blue light the name ends in mania which is of course a psychiatric disorder not an eye condition the university, Asteria Horizon University in Nova City, California, was completely made up.

1:19:51There was a Star Trek reference in the paper acknowledging Professor Maria Baum at Starfleet Academy aboard the USS Enterprise. This was in the paper. By 2026, Microsoft Copilot was calling it, quote, an intriguing and relatively rare condition. Gemini said it was caused by excessive exposure to blue light and and this is the sad thing in a actual peer-reviewed paper in springer nature's curious journal they cited the hoax pre-prints all of which have since been retracted the nature expose uh forced model corrections and that's why my model apparently knows about it uh it's basically the ai era version it says of a mount weasel those trap street entries cartographers used to catch map plagiarists wow that's pretty deep does robert f kennedy know about this disease probably it's just a matter of time so the truth has got its pants on now right it does it took it took it a while uh here's what i my i feel like there's two things that we're talking about here right there's there's the tendency of it to be wrong if you game it right and our tendency to believe it right there's one problem two different yes that's you know, that's, that's a problem, a big bucket of problem.

1:21:14But the other problem is one Larry that I feel like is a really, you know, like, I, what I really want is for every patient to have your experience where, right, they've got professional help, they've got people they can call, they've got referrals happening quick enough to deal with their medical issues. And they've got the benefit of this second opinion, this digital second opinion that helps decode the process. As a package, awesome. The problem is the market doesn't like that. What the market wants is to knock all the other things out and leave only the digital thing because it is the cheapest thing to use.

1:21:56And this is why like Michigan right now is experimenting with like just determining whether your SNAP benefits come to you based on an AI system. See, that's really bad. Doing away with the people you could ever call when you have a problem, right? They're so quick to get rid of the experts on the human layer because that's the most expensive layer. Because the whole promise of the market of AI is that you don't need that stuff. And so for my mind, it's the immediate use that you're describing in this moment, awesome, and I'm so excited about it. But as soon as they commoditize that and begin to believe like, well, one in 10 ,000 people won't have a good experience, but everybody else is going to have a good experience.

1:22:39So we're going to knock out the 800 number. You'll never have that again. That's where I go. I am grateful for the radiologist. I'm grateful for the surgeons. I'm grateful for my gastroenterologist. I'm really grateful for Medicare for paying for all of this. And my big fear is that the government may very well not want to do that in the future if they Dr. Oz already has made some kind of automated, there's some sort of weird automated system. I got to look back and did I wrote a piece for hard reset media, it's called hard reset media.com about about how Oz has put in some kind of automated system where things that would normally be pre-approved under Medicare suddenly get spiked automatically.

1:23:27And the real problem is that the company that makes that technology is incentivized they're paid a bonus the more times they reject a claim right which is scary and that's that's where we the wheels start to come off and it's even you know it's funny people worry about the the future of medicare you're talking about the present of people my age who are already getting the benefits at risk no corporations capture the benefits and socialize the costs and risks. And as and as many a great leader has pointed out, you don't get to make money off sick people. Really, you don't get to make money off of solving education, really like that's what government's for, you know, and the idea that we're going to somehow like get the Silicon Valley efficiency in everything is.

1:24:13Oh, look at Doge. Look at that. Yeah, right. Exactly. We've seen it. We've seen it. That's right. That really helped. and yet according to the ama two and three two out of three physicians are using ai which has almost doubled since 2023 they surveyed 1200 doctors and two-thirds of them are doing what you did larry i actually have given my doctor medical advice my my my no i have told him things that he did not know about and he went off and read about so you know larry that thing you were telling you about i hadn't i hadn't heard that it's actually pretty good pretty good I had my annual physical on Friday and I have spent quite a long time talking to my doctor about the use of AI.

1:24:54He's very interested. But the point here is here's somebody who has judgment, skill, experience, and practice who can take the information the AI gives them and vet it and make sense of it. And it's a very good partnership. And I think that this is what we see over and over again. Humans plus AI are the right answer, not AI. better to AIs and an expert. Let the AIs fight. Plus a subject matter expert. I always start with ChatGPT, and then I run it through Gemini. And the reason is Gemini is less likely to sugarcoat it. So if you have a medical issue, ChatGPT tends to kind of, it's going to be okay, don't worry about it.

1:25:35Whereas Gemini will tell you much more straight about what's going on. So it does pay to get a second opinion, even from different models. Now, as you were talking about, one of you were talking about, if they start homogenizing, then I worry about it. That's not good. You want them to be at odds a little bit. It's similar. You know, I actually had an experience once where I asked, I used Stanford Health Care, and I asked two different doctors at Stanford Health Care. I went to her second opinion. And the problem is they both have access to each other's notes. So the second doctor gave me exactly the same opinion.

1:26:09Now, maybe the opinion was right, but I wanted somebody who didn't know what the first doctor had to say. And the same thing is with AI. I want the AI to independently give me information so I can compare the different reports. I should also point out that sometimes we conflate what the model is doing with what it's post-training is doing. And it's really important to remember that a great deal of your experience with the AI is not coming from the stuff in the LLM and the weights in the LLM, but the stuff that happened afterwards the the reinforcement learning the you know so-called soul document the personality uh that these companies apply to it they these companies see this as differentiators but they very much put their thumbs on the scale anthropic open ai deep seek google everybody very much modifies that ai and and modifies the weights and that could also be a source of a lot of the problems but it also may be why google by gemini is a little more little less sugar coating that's totally why it's different but what i like one of the things i because really the training material for all of them is pretty much the same right yeah but one thing and i think it's good is chat gpd oh i tire of medical history when i tell it something you say well given your age and given this and that it knows all the medications i take if i thinking about a new medication i just say is it okay for me to take this and it says yeah it won't interact with this or yeah you know you better worry because it might interact with that so i you know it's funny i showed my doctor i said look these are all the supplements i take this is what the ai said about them this is it told me don't you got too much calcium get rid he said yeah because they're kidney stones i said yeah so i asked him i said you know this is what it's telling me what do you think and he was okay i think he preferred at least some information to no information right so you showed your work and i feel like there's a segue here available to uh to jacob's substack post that's listed as his most popular post on substack uh about how ai is getting us to lie to ourselves where you're so sweet thanks man yeah so jacob wrote this post actually hold the thought let's let's save it because i want to do an ad and then i do want to talk about this because it was a great piece i appreciate it guys uh and uh and i think i'm yeah i'm glad you brought it up marshall but hang on uh great panel great conversation larry maggot is here connect safely.org he's representing the radio newsman segment of the audience how many years in radio though i've been in radio 50 years this uh oh you got me beat 25 years with cbs and i did a little bit of stuff with all things considered an npr and i was a regular day before that i was a regular guest on the ron owens show on kgo for a while yeah me too but and also michael jackson on kabc but you know i professionally paid about 25 years with actually getting paid for it yeah i i got into radio in college and i never left oh i did that too but i'm not counting that but yeah oh i'm not counting it when i college radio is great i love the clock started ticking when i got my fcc license which you don't need anymore you don't need a you don't need no stinking license you know it's funny when i when i i applied to be a dj on the college radio station and the dj the music guys didn't want me at all they sent me over the news department i was kind of mad about it are you making me do news i remember my first rip and read newscast i was shaking like a leaf holding the holding the paper that i'd ripped off the teletype machine my college radio station you could only hear it in the dorms through the electrical system at UCLA.

1:29:50They broadcast through the power. I don't know how they did it. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of college radio is that way. Marshall Kirkpatrick is also here. His incredible app, What's Up With That, is available for your browser, Firefox or Chrome. And it really is a great way of kind of getting some deep knowledge about the pages you're visiting. Very, very useful. Good to have you, Marshall. You say you like shortwave radio better. yeah if we're gonna talk radio i just want to put a plug for dan what's uh dan's name a guy out in the redwoods who for years has been doing the global shortwave report uh collecting english language news coverage from around the world radio havana radio deutschland radio japan and weaving them together into this great show of shortwave uh news real old-fashioned style but He's still pumping it out.

1:30:45Do you have to listen? It's Dan Roberts of Willits, up in Willits. Do you have to listen on Shortwave? Oh, no, no. There's MP3 files. It's a podcast. I love it. 30-minute review of news stories. Oh, I'm recorded from a shortwave radio. Are they actual recordings? Yeah. Oh, my God. That's just, okay. Can I play just a little bit of it? Does it go? Come to the Shortwave report. so the relation hallion she demanded an apology spanish prime minister pedro sanchez also denounced van gavir's handling of the matter i used to i had a shortwave radio as a kid and i would tune up and down the dial it was so cool and you you could get russian and you but and many of the i don't i wonder if it's the same i guess it is many of these shortwave uh company a country-run shortwave stations would have english language broadcasts so you could you could hear the russian radio and English yeah but now they're streaming now well I'm subscribing to this right now it's out far out far press the shortwave report from out far press is it dot com yep dot com and he said he sounds like he's kind of a little far out to be honest with you he's been broadcasting off the electric grid in willits california for probably 30 plus years god bless him that's like um who's the guy who did the late night show used to live in his double wide oh yeah in in pahrump nevada not art bell art bell he would do his radio his overnight radio show would be over and then he'd go out to his ham shack and do another three hours i learned about those two shows from the same old friend that's how that's how you know a guy loves radio you can't get enough of it all right the great conspiracy stuff too oh he was the ufo guy it was great it was great for the middle of the night because you'd hear the craziest you know bigfoot stories i loved am quiet you know am radio in the middle of the night i love i love listening to far away stations I still fantasize in my retirement.

1:33:00I'm just turning on the transmitter and sitting here at three in the morning, just talking, taking calls with the crazies. Jacob Ward's also, do you have any radio background, Jacob? You have a big on-air sign. You know, I don't think I... You've always been TV. You're a TV guy. Yeah, I've always done TV. I do. You know, I have a podcast. I mean, my podcast is there. but yeah i would have loved to be i i'm you know i always feel like i was born 10 years too late for everything so yeah i wish i'd i wish i'd been part of the hey you're better looking than the rest no he's a he's got a face for tv you and i larry yeah faces for radio even though we've both done tv but yeah yeah so i'm i love that i you know i love that medium i think it's the best oh yeah well this is really what we're doing is radio we have video but it's radio it's we're still the majority of people who listen to our shows listen not watch even though we've always go for a walk you can drive a car you don't have to do a screen do the dishes walk the dog yeah we'll have more in just a bit the show today brought to you by box this is a really good example of a company who's been around done great stuff i've used them for years and they have decided to use ai in intelligent ways and i love it box is the leading intelligent content management platform for enterprises.

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1:37:30And this is the place to do it. Visit box.com slash AI to learn more. Box.com slash AI. I because your content is the base, the material that your AI needs to do everything box.com slash AI. We thank you so much for supporting this week in tech. The rip current is your newsletter. It is. And what do you cover in rip current? So I the way I have the tagline I use is that it's about the invisible forces that are shaping our lives. And so that's everything from the stuff that we've been talking about so far. A lot of it is AI, some social media stuff, but I also think about human circuitry. So addiction, bias, there's a lot of sort of the Venn diagram of me and sort of psychology and tech is a big part of it.

1:38:21So how tech sort of changes our world, changes human behavior. And so, yeah, Marshall, God, I'm so grateful to you for mentioning this. Yeah, this is one of those pieces. I think there's a written version and me. I like it. You do the video as well, which is nice, and the audio if you want to listen. AI has us lying to one another. What do you mean by that? So I don't know about you guys, but I keep being in the weird position of, and rather than blaming other people, I'll just do it myself. I'll say words like, I have made a thing. I just threw this together for our meeting. You know, I like there's something in the way that I think about and talk about my use of AI that is not fundamentally honest.

1:39:09And I and I and I've noticed it in a lot of people around me. And I think there's something about both the sort of the way it's built in that it's always sort of, it's like you're, you know, you're always ready, you know, intern who's there kind of helping you get it done quick before you have to go on stage, you know, kind of vibe that creates this impression that you somehow have to keep your use of it to yourself kind of. And we haven't come up as a society. It's our dirty little secret, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it is. And it's so interesting because we have some, you know, I talk to some people whose workplaces you get fired for not using it enough.

1:39:46Right. There are other people I talk to where you get fired if you used it. I sometimes am a little squirmy about admitting how much I'm using AI. But then I think it's important that I say that I do admit it. And so we don't have good shorthand language about it. And I think there's something also in the marketing that these companies are creating for us, this idea that you're going to like sort of get away with it. Here's an embarrassing story. Let me tell you, this is an embarrassing story. So, I used a service for about three or four months that basically took an AI and created an AI-derived email and put it out to a million podcasts for me to try and get booked on podcasts.

1:40:30And I... It worked. See, you're here. Well, you and me came together the old-fashioned way. Thank God. Oh, okay. thank god well it's great too because i've won i wound up on a lot of weird podcasts it was great such a great weird tour of like all everybody and their mother who's got their got a mic and a basement it is great you know it's an interesting community isn't it yeah i was on dozens and dozens and dozens of podcasts and some of them were great some of them were less great um you know one crew wanted to talk about aliens you know there's some weird there's just some weird stuff going on.

1:40:59But the thing that was so dishonest about it is that the AI service sends an email as if it's from me, right? Saying, and one of the things it does, and if you're in media, you'll know this, it'll say, Jake, I just listened to the most recent episode of The Rip Current. I can't stop thinking about this specific thing in your thing. And the first couple of times that I received an email like that, I was like, wow, this guy's listened to my show. Amazing. you know and i immediately when i see those i stop now you know right now you know but for that like two or three weeks it worked and i was part of that two or three weeks where and i tricked i think a bunch of podcast hosts into getting me on because we love being praised we love it if somebody listens to our show yes and i and and then i i adopt after the first couple of appearances i began adopting the policy of telling people like listen you guys i got booked on here because of ai and that's ridiculous because I'm on here flogging my thesis, which is that this is going to ruin our lives.

1:41:58So it was deeply hypocritical. But that kind of thing where it's like getting dressed up as if it's our work is a fundamentally dishonest proposition that I think is happening a lot right now. And what I really want is for young people who are actually in charge of culture to come up with the cool way of saying, oh, I AI'd this. I made this through this system. I didn't really write this. You know what young people have done? And I know this because we have a young person on our AI show, Paris Martineau. I know you know her. And she's taught me all of these things. They have many words for this.

1:42:39They call it glazing when the AI is sycophantic and tells you things you want to hear. They call the AI's clankers. Yeah, clanker is my favorite. That's my favorite. They talk a lot about slop. That's actually gotten into the mainstream now, AI slop. And they have a lot of negative. They've got the good negative language. We need a way for the two of us to say, you know, I agented this or, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not the right guy. I have a question, though, because this is personal, you know, and I throw it. I focus on this a lot. So I will use AI as kind of a copy editor, you know, maybe change a word here to first of all, make sure the grammar and the spelling and the punctuation is correct.

1:43:22I don't have any qualms about that. But once in a while, it'll suggest a minor word changing. And I don't know whether I need to disclose that. It's less than a human copy editor would do. Oh, yeah. Exactly. You filed stories at the Mercury News where a copy editor rephrases it. Well, back in the day when they had copy editors. They don't need more, but okay. But then once in a while, I'll have a paragraph that I'm struggling with. And I'll say, is there a better way to phrase this? And I don't know. It's a slippery slope. But I don't know where the line is between using it kind of as a Grammarly-type product versus using it to generate content.

1:44:00And I mean, I would never say, write me a column, even though it would, and it might not be bad. I would never do it because I'm getting paid for this stuff. And it would just feel dishonest to take money for something I didn't do. But, you know, where is the line?

1:44:17I actually think that there's not to be one of those people that says I read your most recent article, Jacob, but I read your most popular article on there. And the thing that stood out to me about that was the discussion of effectively the Trojan horse situation there, where you were trying to figure out how to grow your sub stack. And you asked Chad Shptee, give me some tips for how to grow my sub stack. And it was saying, like, well, you know, do this, do that. If it bleeds, it leads. If people are mad at you and post angry comments, that's better than nothing. And you found yourself thinking, yeah, yeah, that's right.

1:44:56is that better than nothing and then you said hold on a second i'm a journalist with journalistic ethics i don't want to just traffic and outrage for its its own sake well i almost thought that was my own thought for a moment and then i came up with this and that seems really nefarious you know cut to a couple of weeks and i'm sure i could have been like you know what i think i think when it bleeds it leaves you know like you so quickly you can take it on as if it's your thought that's exactly right. But we've always done that, haven't we? I mean, you read something and suddenly you absorb it and it becomes your idea.

1:45:28And yeah, that's how humans are. But it wasn't, I mean, I guess, I guess there's always been slop, but not like this, man. I, I don't know, you know, and, and, and for me, I think about the, like the problem right now in our business. I mean, Leo, you've sort of conquered this problem already, but like for me trying to get an independent media brand you know off the ground is the volume of work that you have to put out to to make a dent to even have a chance of being noticed as signal above the noise i was very very fortunate that i did this yeah before there was as much noise well and you're i would out a quality product and all of those other things well but when you yeah but i don't know podcasts on your network or whatever i mean you've got it you've got a huge volume leo yeah but but we did we started 21 years ago i don't think i could start today and do the other thing like me you also were affiliated with with respectable media organizations early in your career a career based on mainstream media and was able to then segue into new media and it was so early in new media that I was able to stand out.

1:46:39There were only five or six podcasts. When I started podcasting, it was a lot easier, let me tell you, and YouTube didn't exist. So, so that we're then in is like, if we're if, if you use a lot of content, you take a principled stand now and you say, I'm just going to write every single thing, and do it all by hand. You're never going to be able to put out the volume you need to be noticed in this market, which is going to now adapt to the idea that we all need to produce at the pace that AI makes possible. And so it puts everyone in an impossible position. I remember having a conversation with somebody high up in a big mainstream organization and media organization, and this person said to me, you should write more for the site.

1:47:22Basically, it was their advice. And I sort of said, this was a few years ago, do you know what's about to happen to the value of the written word, like, like as a market, just, you know, as a, as a unit price, it's about to go to zero. And so the, the, the, for me, my tactic has been, I'm going to stick with video as much as possible, because that seems to create a one-to-one connection that people like. There's some authenticity to the idea that I'm just talking off the top of my head, you know, based on my experience and my ethics and the rest of it, right? But I just, it's just me talking, not in a scripted way.

1:48:05And then I will use AI to like, you know, help me construct a research dossier that I distribute based on what I've said, or, you know, there's these sort of second Is that antithetical to authenticity though? I know, right? I mean, Well, that gets back to my question about the line. I mean, you're not going to say, hey i generate up and just publish it based on ai but how will you use it to enhance your writing and and how far will you go with it when we i think honestly the more we see ai and the more we use ai the good news is that means humans become more valuable this happened with facts you know once the facts used to be a rare and precious commodity if you wanted to know something you had to go to the library you had to get you had to make a trip to go to the library to find out something and remember we would buy encyclopedias so that you would have some sort of reference material yeah marshall you're reaching for your encyclopedia i can tell yeah my laptop is stacked on three of them right that's what it's for now it's a doorstop uh but but facts used to be very valuable and they have become in this internet world not worth nothing yeah and they're people who used to be good and really people with great memories had value right people who had yeah now it doesn't matter were very valuable yeah i used to when i started so i was doing the tech guy radio show for almost 20 years in the early days the value i had was i could remember off the top of my head an answer to a question so somebody come in and say yeah my printer's not working i'm using windows uh 95 what's and i could remember the answer and by the end of it it was really a question of if i could google faster than the caller in there i hate to admit this but it really became you know what what what google skills do you have but but that's a good thing because it democratized facts is it's gresham's law you're saying marshall what's that there arguably the that's a relevant uh concept here that uh yeah that that the that the low cost low quality stuff uh ends up just being produced in so such uh huge quantity that uh that the rarer harder stuff just gets lost in a in a sea i do think though that this in the long run benefits humanity because in a sea of machine produced facts or information of machine create that stuff is is becomes table stakes and what we add to it as humans becomes more valuable as a result right yeah and your value leo wasn't so much you knew i hope your your value wasn't so much you knew the answer but you know how to put in perspective you could I knew how to deliver it.

1:51:00Yeah. You know, it's a funny story. I would do two ways for CBS all the time for the stations. And once in a while, they would prompt me with a question, a topic, and then they got it wrong. They switched topics on me. And they would ask me a question to which I had no idea what they were talking about. And exactly. I would go on Google while they were answering the questions and act like I knew. Bill Handel would do that to me all the time on KFI. He would call up saying, we're going to talk about this. And he would. three that's that's when you know if you've got it or not in broadcasting how quickly you can dance you know walter cronkite became famous because they'd be covering these famous apollo and gemini launches and there'd be a hold right at t minus 20 seconds and for three hours he would have to sit there and all he had was some guy and a model of the rocket and he would fill it they used to call walter cronkite old iron butt because he could sit there for hours and talk and that's when the that's when the rubber hits the road or more likely the corduroy hits the seat uh segments were never that long so i want to take i want to take a little break you were at uh jacob you were at the musk uh trial the musk versus altman trial you were there you were in person there i was i I watched this world's richest man stammer away on the, on the get angry on the stand.

1:52:24It was great. And you watched, speaking of lies, you watched Sam Altman being accused of being a liar. Oh yeah. No, it's good. I really, it was fascinating. It was, I gotta get this first person account of the Musk Altman trial, which is over at least for the time being. Elon, the jury said, didn't file soon enough. So the statute of limitations, which was only three years on this, had run. um but that's kind of a technicality elon said that himself he said they i lost on a technicality so i'm appealing i'm curious what what the merits of that appeal will be but we'll ask jacob ward that question in just a bit we also have marshall kirkpatrick here what's up with that which is the best name for a product i've ever heard what's up with that uh maybe i'm gonna write one called how you doing but that's another that would be another another one larry maggot you grew up in new york right no i was born in new york grew up in la la that's right you're transplanted yeah i was born in new york grew up in rhode island so but i love new york go there yeah me too me too what's up with that huh uh we'll have we'll have more in just a bit how you doing but first a word from our sponsor doppel this is a sad story about the way of the world how it is now you get that that phone call that voicemail maybe it's an urgent message from your ceo maybe it's a deep fake trying to target your business ai can impersonate trusted individuals and it's very easy to be fooled in fact i'm going to show you how easy it is to be fooled i'm just going to play a little something that was sent to burke one of our employees hey burke this is definitely not Leo asking you to buy gift cards, but seriously, can you grab me 100 Apple gift cards?

1:54:20Just kidding. This is Anthony testing text to speech. How's it sound? That is not me. I never said that. It sounds exactly like me. And fortunately, Anthony, who made this, has some honor. But if a thief using the same technology, he literally did this with a couple of minutes of one of our podcasts, could make something very similar. Sounds just like me. Thank goodness, burke did not send those those gift cards out this is a problem ai can impersonate trusted individuals really well and doppel's platform illustrates how frequently this is also the bad news users fall for phishing attempts they they did a voice call simulation deployment target users spent six minutes conversing it wasn't just a message conversing back and forth with a deep fake at the end of the six minutes every one of them 100 believed that the AI was a human was the person they said it was they didn't they could not tell that's why you need Doppel Doppel is the AI native social engineering defense platform Doppel strengthens human risk management by training employees to recognize deception while their digital risk protection detects and disrupts attacks across every channel.

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1:56:20Join hundreds of companies already using Doppel to protect their brand and people from social engineering attacks like the one you just heard, Doppel. Outpacing what's next in social engineering. learn more at doppel.com d-o-p-p-e-l dot com and burke stop sending out those apple gift cards i i told you it's a fake i told you so uh was it was so how did you get into the trial jacob i mean it was how did you do that the coolest thing about the american court system is that anybody can go in. So, so you, I mean, that's the theory, right? Is all trials are supposed to be public. Well, in my case, it was true.

1:57:04So I did not go in under anybody's auspices. I, you know, I was officially an, a CNN person, but I really just wanted to see like, can it work to just get in as a member of the public? And so I, there was a, there was a group of reporters and, and I showed up and, you know, a long line of them. And I was part of that for a while, but I just went in as part of a part of the public and when i got upstairs and the the media person for the court who i don't know personally but i knew that's what she was she asked who are you with and i said i am a member of the public and she said right this way wow and it was so cool yeah so i remember as a teenager i used to go sit in courtrooms it was it was really cool it's so cool so so you sit there but those were not by the way i was one of the few i mean that was not altman versus musk no no that's right this was cool i mean there were so many interesting people because there was a bunch of looky-loos there was a bunch of just like i bet people who wanted to be there and be part of it and everybody came to the stand i mean you got to see the uh who's who of nadella you know um uh you know uh what's his name um ilya sutskiver like all these people um greg brockman the president of open ai i mean it was great so greg brockman's diary ended up being entered into evidence by open ai which was a huge mistake if i've learned anything it is don't write this stuff down people like i'm like i don't care how famous you think you're going to be someday like or what you think your biographers need like don't be writing that stuff i've said this many times nobody ever wins these kinds of trials because of discovery yeah well that's that's right i mean that's why we were all there right is because the discovery was so amazing to see how these guys write back and forth to one another is so amazing the best one for me was at one point musk and altman you know so they so they get together in 2015 they say they do this little handshake about they're going to like create this nonprofit that's going to change the world.

1:58:52And literally at one point, they're negotiating about what it is the board will look like. And Musk writes in, I don't have the exact words in my mind, but it was something like, we're going to have a board of 12 people, but we should consider whether we want to expand it to 16 people, depending on how much literally, these words were the ones of yours, depending on how much the fate of the world will rest on its shoulders. And I was thinking to myself, okay, a board of 12, but then is not ready for that. But a board of 16 is. All we need is four more people and the fate of the world will be rest assured.

1:59:24Right. It's not us four. Like, I don't think it's the four of us. Right. It's like I'd want, I said, I told my mom, I was like, I think I'd want you on that board. And she's like, I don't want on that board. Do you think Elon Musk genuinely believes or believed at the time that AI was a threat to human existence? I do think he actually believes that on some level. But I think that belief also, it seems to me, is exactly balanced by his very equal belief that he is the only one who can save us all from that. The thing that you saw over and over again is just that the guy clearly believes he's the only one who matters.

2:00:02The ego is incredible. Yeah, the ego. I mean, everybody there was that way. Yeah, I mean, who didn't have an ego? Sam Altman had an ego. such an intel i mean they all have egos totally if you if you want to like make these people upset as many of these lawyers were trying to do just accuse them of having made no technical contributions to the product their heads would pop off you just see them be like yes i do i got the servers and i blah blah blah you know that's a great strategy for the opposing lawyers totally the only guy who kept cool who stayed cool was nadella who clearly he was like a guy at a bar where two of the guys he's come with are fighting and he says to the bouncer i'm not with these guys like i just i know them but sure but i'm not part of this you know and he was just trying to get out of the bar basically the he of course as as ceo of microsoft they have a large stake in open ai and a kind of checkered relationship with open ai yes he was so calm and cool under it though he basically was like you know we're just trying to sort of like you know help this industry work because it's going to work so well for our customers.

2:01:10You know, it's just so, here's just buy the book, you know, about it. Whereas he's a well-trained CEO. This is why I hate interview CEOs because they're so well-trained. They're like sports, you know, it's like athletes, right? They just came to play, man. We're just here to win. You know, and in Altman and Musk's case, they were very weird and philosophical and then that would get objected and they were very odd ducks. And then, you know, the best part, I mean, what I loved the most was just, again, this public courthouse vibe is so great. So this is Oakland, California. It's not a very fancy federal courthouse.

2:01:42And as a result, there's no VIP section. So, like, Musk doesn't get to, like, wait in some green room. Altman doesn't get his own bathroom. So literally Musk in the breaks is going up and down the hallway with his security, just, like, pacing, basically, because there's nowhere to be. And he doesn't want to stand around talking to Altman. and Altman at one point I had to wait awkwardly in line with him for the urinal you know we're just standing together it's so great you know what's up you know and what's your plan this weekend huh to see that and then I will say my my like what I also learned is that my kink is watching the world's richest man being slapped around by the judge this judge Yvette Gonzalez as rogers and him saying yes your honor to the she takes no prisoners she yelled at apple yep for lying in the apple versus epic case in fact she now holds them by a very uh sensitive portion of their anatomy because she's going to decide what their what their commission will be in the app store.

2:02:50Same judge. And she did not, she said, she told these guys, I don't want to hear anything about AI doom. That's right. That's right. Don't let us get, we're not getting distracted by that. At one point, Musk tried to say something. I have such respect for her. Yeah, I did too. I just thought she did such a good job. Anyway, so like I say, it was just fun to watch American, like the last true American democratic thing. Do you feel like justice was done? Well, I mean, in the end, And I think that these, you know, obviously like it got dismissed on technicality, right? The statute of limitations.

2:03:24I didn't know at the time, I'm sure you did, but it was that the jury was not, was only there in an advisory capacity. That's right. Judge Rogers. She could have made, she would have made the decision in the end. Judges and panel a jury like this for an advisory to kind of give themselves cover when they have to make a really hard decision. I had no idea that was even possible. Yeah. Yeah. So she kind of got off easy too, in that she didn't have to take any guff. Although I don't think she cares. I mean, she's just such a tough person. she's a she was great but i think that the like ultimately this was like billionaires throwing lawyers at each other which i which is not how i want the future determined but well i think musk undermines his whole story but by the fact that he has a competing right and a frontier ai company called xai that is going straight at it's for profit going straight at open ai uh so it kind undermines his whole argument yeah and just pumping out natural gas power oh yeah a day and night in secret beyond anything that's if you're concerned about the future of humanity for goodness sakes go get some solar well not to mention i mean i'm sure the jury doesn't isn't allowed to say this but i doubt any jury has too much sympathy for a guy who is a trillionaire exactly we never today i pilots tesla he could literally kill people i mean you know this is and he already has what's your sense of sam altman's uh character and veracity during the middle of this trial of course the new yorker came out with a well essentially a hit piece written by ronan farrow implying that altman was less than trustworthy kind of slimy and slippery yeah it came up again and again and again in testimony basically had ilia satsukov saying he had a pattern of lying you know these former board members saying oh yeah he would deceive us over and over again and then he was asked on cross-examination by musk's attorneys um do you lie are you a liar and he's under oath so he can't say no he has to say he has to waffle and so he did he was like he said i'm sure i have lied in my time in my life that kind of thing and then and then um you know but but over and over again he was sort of he was clearly unable to say he just kept saying i consider myself honest in my business dealings i feel like sam martin was not done well by his team because he must have known that that question was going to come up and he really seemed prepared prepared they they asked him are you completely trustworthy and instead of just saying yes he said well I believe so do you always tell the truth I believe I'm a truthful person yeah yeah I mean he was not well prepared his people did not do him justice I think I I mean I think when you're when you're used to being a kind of backroom dealer like that's the key is that's the thing, you know, but he also, I mean, there was a point at which, at which, um, they were asking him why it was that he had insisted on being CEO.

2:06:32And there was emails from Greg Bachman and Ilya Sutska for saying, why do you want to be CEO? Is it because of your political ambitions? And Molo, Musk's attorney asked him, what is that about? Did you want to be president of the United States? He said, sort of rhetorically and Altman said, no, no, no, no. I was considering a run for governor. Oh, well, okay. It's not gonna think the casual way in which these guys clearly believe they are the main characters of the universe. And the rest of us are just kind of background actors was the that was the theme for me of this trial. It is fascinating to watch.

2:07:04I mean, they don't live in our world, do they? Every nobody says no to them. You know, they they never really are called to account for anything. And they, and they believe that the money is their reward from God for doing good work. Yeah. Because they, they keep talking about how it's not about the money. And then they would, and then the, and then the lawyers would lay out like, here's the$7 billion stake you have in this company. And you could just see that it just didn't compute for them. They just think of it as, well, clearly like the universe is going to just reward me endlessly such that I'll never have to think about money again, because my work is so brilliant and important.

2:07:47So there's this weird sort of set of background assumptions. I just remember that it's been true for a while that inside some companies, you'll have this hierarchy in which the language is like, some people are agents and some people are NPCs, right? That some people count, have agency, and some people are literally just like the video game characters that you run over with your car. you know like it's that it's that thing that i that i feel like what do they call them in succession not a real person this doesn't matter they're not a real they're not a real serious you get a feeling we are just characters in sam altman and elon musk's play that we are npcs that they're and i'm sure elon actually believes that that that he he believes we're in a simulation and that really the rest of us barely exist.

2:08:41And Elon, you know, he long ago fired his press team. He doesn't feel he needs anything that he can't simply control. And I think he's not wrong. He elected the president with a quarter of a billion dollars. And he lays people off not just to save money, because he just wants to run things himself as much as possible. And he may, you know, he may well be a genius. i i i he has some real success have you seen the cyber truck well and then but that's the problem is that no one says no to him or no one says you know the um tesla famously and unfortunately a lot of evs have you have a tesla right larry i do a lot of a lot of evs have followed suit has its uh charging plug in the wrong place uh because in many cases when you have to go to supercharger you need to back in or they had to make the superchargers with extra long charging cables because the plug's in the back well it turns out his engineer said we should put the plug in the front like the like many of the early evs actually was in the front grill so it'll be easier to charge and elon said no i'm renting this house and i can't i need to have the plug in the back because that's the easiest place for me to plug in as a result every ev sense has its plug in the wrong place except the nissan leaf which is good news is if you have if you pay a hundred dollars a month for full self-driving it will back in for you it'll back in for you there you go i actually own my my self-driving i don't have do you really and do you trust it i bought it a gazillion years ago for seven grand and i get to keep it so at least i got to keep it through two teslas we'll see what happens in future foolishly because i had a model x the first generation model x paid some huge amount of money for the right for the right to at some point get full self-driving which i never got which to me is a class action food in the making i don't know how you can possibly get away with that i think it was five thousand dollars yeah for the right to subscribe to full self-driving should it ever i mean i still don't have truly full full self-driving it's not you never will i never will yeah it will never be a robo taxi my car i will never make money leasing out my car as a robo taxi he's promising that yeah oh he promised to me not personally but from made in america to made with american values in mind oh you're talking about the trump phone now yes which is really a sam's it's a cheap phone that you could get for free from t-mobile if you didn't mind that it didn't have a flag in gold on it hey you can buy a flag in gold and you just put a decal we I think in a way uh there has been an erosion of American character uh to a point where we just expect everything's a scam and nobody really even thinks about it anymore it's like well you know it's so bad it is so bad that when my wife got an email from social security she blew it off because she thought it was a scam and she got a call from social security she hung up on the guy it turned out it really was social security right and how do you know it took us an extra six months before she got her benefits yeah she just assumed it was a scam of course so it went that way in russia first right i mean that's like that's part of the putin strategy you uh you fled the zone and and just like leave people unwilling or able to trust each other and without the with uh without social cohesion like the whole thing comes grinding to a halt right well what did what did the sec fine elon for pumping the value of the twitter stock or actually dumping the value of the twitter stock before he bought it with tweets saying it's full of bots it's no good uh they they they prosecuted they said you know you you obviously were trying to influence the value uh there was a class action suit from shareholders who said twitter shareholders who said yeah we we didn't get the value uh for our stock because of his tweets what did they find him one and a quarter million dollars that's like me getting a parking ticket less yes it's literally less than you getting a parking ticket i know it's it's like it's not even a slap on the wrist right it's a it's a doink on the nose it's nothing it's just amazing use the word hierarchy a little bit ago and i feel like that's that's a pretty key word i i'll never forget i read some research years ago that that uh studied ceos as they climb higher and higher up into into their respective hierarchies the uh the number of people who can say no to them uh get smaller and smaller and so their like sense of empathy uh which had served the the the socio-biological function of keeping them in check just atrophies because they don't need it and now with ever more extreme inequality like what do they need to care about other people they don't have to pretend anymore totally and and they i feel like once you've observed humanity and its behaviors and its choices at scale you emerge with such a low opinion of people you know like i think this is zuckerberg's problem i think he just looks at how we are and he's like these people suck you know humans are what do i care this is true when you talk to people in the gambling industry they're always like people are the worst or bartenders or cops yeah i was a bartender i still like people after being a bartender for 10 000 people i might not i might have felt differently sure and zuckerberg knows how vulnerable you are how easy to manipulate we are and takes good advantage of it this is always the thing that gets me is the humans are simultaneously the worst thing ever and the most amazing thing ever that's right and i think it's even true of elon that once in a while we break through and once in a while and you yeah yeah once in a while there's a michelangelo uh there's a jonah's salk you know uh once in a while we do and uh and then there are plenty of counter examples and there's some politicians it breaks through as well once in a while i agree yeah so you might hate him you might like him but they break through right arguably there could be more of them um if all the abundance were not so dramatically misallocated uh if anybody else saw this uh scott santon's article i just shared uh scott santon's is the kind of the leading thinker these days around ubi and he wrote what he calls the uh the the ingenine de poitrine argument for ubi if you've seen that that crazy montreal noise band or they're like disco oh they're hysterical yes yes with the paper machere hats and so he says like those guys and albert einstein and you like how many like if uh if ubi made it possible for even one person out there to like be able to stop messing around doing something pointless to pay the mortgage or the rent and instead became the next Einstein like one of them would pay for the whole thing times over and presumably there would be more than one we did on Friday I did a special show with a friend named Jeff Atwood who is a famous coder he wrote the coding horror blog and made quite a bit of money when he sold Stack Exchange he's devoting half of his fortune, a considerable amount, to some test projects for what he doesn't like UBI, because the idea of UBI is everybody gets a basic income.

2:16:26He likes a guaranteed minimum income. It's like a minimum wage, that there is a bottom that nobody goes below. And so he's funded with a considerable amount of money, some projects to test this theory. If you go to staygold.us, you can read all about it but uh yeah so i'm not a fan of ubi because elon doesn't need any more money you don't need to give elon a thousand dollars a month uh but you i am a fan of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and it is possible but unfortunately in order to do that we would have to kind of limit the number of billionaires and how much money they had they might only be we're able to get a few hundred million the new york city budget is balanced right yeah I was just watching on mom Dommie's new twat uh Twitch stream isn't that hysterical somebody called this the uh the FDR style uh fireside chats that but he's but instead of course doing it on the radio mom Donnie's doing it on Twitch where he was one of the people I'm thinking about the politician that broke through yeah he was he was first in mind when I said yeah very very interesting yeah and I was in New York as I know just yesterday everybody I ran into too, bus drivers.

2:17:42People love him. I mean, he's delivering the goods. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. So he's funding these programs with a tax on unoccupied multimillion dollar apartments. Is that where that money is coming from? I think so. The first question on his Twitch stream recording was, how did you pull off this budget and he said basically it was one part you know taxes on the rich and the other part insisting that the budget splits with the state government might actually respect their agreements he claimed that there was a number of instances where the city and the state like agreed to go 50-50 on something and then historically the state would not follow through with their funding and and the mayor historically like wouldn't be able to do anything about it but he resolved that situation with the the current governor according to his website he's the first u.s elected official to host a recurring multi-platform stream it's called talk with the people twitch tick tock instagram facebook youtube x blue sky and podcasts uh it is the modern fireside chat yeah i think that's very interesting uh the first one was last thursday at 4 p.m and i guess he's gonna is he gonna do it every week that's kind of amazing i think that's the plan yeah and you know he has has folks come on and and it's uh the the live chat is you know wide open and full of like that's a brave thing to do obscene ascii art yeah our live chat on twitch which is also open, but they're pretty good right now.

2:19:32Be nice. So he got 35 ,000 Twitch subscribers after the very first episode. That's fantastic. That's how all elected officials should be responsible to the people who elected them, I think. Compare that to Chuck Schumer or almost any traditional politician. They don't like this. I remember many years ago, I've told this story before, teaching regis philbin on uh how to tweet and he was initially he was really excited there's video of it on uh on youtube he was so excited he called his wife said joy joy i just sent my first tweet and they're talking back to me he loved this idea of his audience talking back to him it lasted one week and then he realized they were all talking to him and he didn't like it and he and he canceled the uh to cancel the account he's in the talking business not the listening business yeah that's it there you go bingo all right let's take a break uh more to come with our fabulous panel jacob ward uh the rip current you see him on cnn jacob warb.com and his book the loop is still well worth reading it was it was definitely prescient when it came out in 2024 uh 2022 two yeah about a year before chant tbt came out you think you want to be right when you write a book like that you don't really want to be right unfortunately but you were uh well done bravo it's great to see you and of course marshall kirkpatrick the author of what's up with that you can get that at what's up with that.app try it out you can try it for free very interesting way to add context to any web page uh and it's actually it's more than just context it's kind of adversarial content too, right?

2:21:21One of my early users said, no one will ever be able to fool me again. Boy, if that were only true. If only that were true. Maybe. I sometimes think of it as x-ray vision. Another user called it that. That's good. I like it. See through it. And from connectsafely.org, It's founder, CEO, and president, Larry Magid. Connectsafely.org. Go there. There's all sorts of information. It's very valuable for parents who I don't, I, boy, you got my deepest sympathy. Knowing how to raise kids in this day and age, I swear. You know, we just literally this week published the Senior's Guide to Uber. That's a great idea.

2:22:06Yeah, we do. We have stuff for seniors. And we have a new task force for 18 to 26-year-olds because they have vulnerabilities. abilities it doesn't go away when you're 18. in fact it gets worse in some ways yeah a lot of anxiety at that age so it's it's a tough world if you're growing up into it or if you're in it and it's changing uh under your feet it is a tough world and boy it's tough to be a senior i you know we're fortunate all of us and probably all of our listeners that we understand technology we can use it but you gotta feel for the vast majority of people who are entering this world where technology is everything.

2:22:44Anybody who has no idea how to use this stuff. I don't know how anybody who has any diminished capacity, you know, God forbid we could all be there someday, how they handle life today without the ability to thrive online. It's just, I don't know what they're doing. There was a story about a longtime Yankee fan. He'd been going to the games for 60 years, didn't have a smartphone, couldn't go to the games anymore because the tickets are on the phone that's right i couldn't park at uc davis because i couldn't get a wi-fi signal and the only way to pay for parking is with the app and i literally had to drive somewhere else because i didn't have what are we doing folks there's this thing called quarters right or at least credit cards yeah this is this is how you know i'm an old man i have in my car a little change thing with quarters in it just in case someday i meet a parking meter to take quarters someday i may or if you just want to add 10 minutes so you don't want to go you know put your credit card back in i gotta get my credit card you're not going to try to change the settings on your toaster are you no uh it wasn't yankees was dodgers thank you eat the oligarchs says his name robert westerman longtime dodger fan finally the dodgers responded and gave him a paper ticket thank god he's the only one in dodger stadium with a paper ticket good for you robert i'm glad to or i'm sorry errol this is name errol siegel glad to hear it our show today brought to you by mill now here is the modern world doing something pretty darn cool if you you know sit at the table and clear your plate i was to clear my plate right there are starving children in china clear your plate but you grow up in a world where you see all this food waste and you realize i shouldn't be have to clear my plate it's not healthy i shouldn't have to at a restaurant i shouldn't have to you know eat everything put in front of me food waste is seems like a huge problem in this world What's interesting is it isn't in restaurants.

2:24:52Most of it happens at home. But that's good news because it means we can actually do something about it. And that's when we went out and we bought our Mill food recycler. I love this thing. Mill is right now in our kitchen. We bought it October, I think, of last year, before they were a sponsor. And I fell in love with it so much. I said, can we do ads for you? because I think everybody should get one of these things. Mill is the odorless, effortless, fully automated food recycler. Everything goes in it. Now, we were composting, but their problem is you got this thing and it starts to smell and there's fruit flies and stuff.

2:25:38You throw it in the same thing in the mill, potato peels, even hearts to avocado pits, chicken bones, even dairy. the mill takes almost anything and then while you sleep our mill i have it set up you can change how it works but i have it set up to turn on at 9 p.m while you're asleep mill quietly transforms those food scraps into nutrient-rich shelf-stable grounds there's no mess there's no smells there's no fruit flies and we last night we loaded it up you could put 10 pounds in it it'll work on it overnight reduces it down almost anything it can work for weeks before you even have to think about emptying it you can use the grounds your garden add them to your curbside compost mill will even pick them up and get them to a small farm for you look at this since october we have been using the mill we have diverted 406 pounds of food scraps from the landfill that's where it would have ended up you can actually see your impact the mill app will track how much food you're keeping out of landfills they've already helped customers put over 15 million pounds of food to good use the mill is beautiful sleek it looks great in any kitchen we got the white one they have different colors it offers a by the way a 90 day risk-free trial if you don't absolutely love it you can just send it back it is risk-free but i have to say when you see a stat like that you go okay okay we're keeping it i love our mill try mill risk-free for 90 days get 75 off right now when you go to mill.com slash twit and use the code twit 75 off right now mill.com slash twit use the offer code twit t-w-i-t save some money save the planet 406 pounds diverted from landfill that's amazing because that is amazing and we you know what we care a lot we do the recycling we do everything we can to reduce and we've really reduced our waste food wasting incredibly and the mill is a big part of that thank you mill leo do you know about uh project drawdown no what's that uh it is the uh world's leading uh research uh quantitatively uh meta studies on the most high impact responses to climate change that the world could take.

2:28:00And reducing food waste is the number three. No kidding. Out of 100 different solutions here. Huge. It is huge. Wow. Number one is dealing with errant refrigerants, you know, chemicals from refrigerators. If we could get that dealt with, it would make a huge difference. Number two is, I believe, offshore wind power could make a huge, huge difference. And number three is reduced food waste. I had no idea. That is amazing. Yeah, because you feel helpless. You feel like, well, as an individual, what can I do? I mean, we drive EVs like you, Larry. We drive EVs. I am, as you're speaking, writing to their press office because I'd like to review this product.

2:28:45It sounds amazing. Oh, the mill is in. I love the mill. Yeah. I'd like to write. I'd like my readers to know about it. It's great. And you know, California introduced, you're in California, right? Yeah. They introduced, I'm pretty sure the whole state now does composting. So you have a compost bin at your curb, but it is gross. Well, we actually have two, we have a worm bin in our kitchen. We have a big thing for the city compost. And we have a smaller one that my wife uses for her worm bin. Now, I don't know if this can go into the worm bin. Do you know? It can. all of you know basically it's it's it's got little mixers and it heats it up it just removes the moisture right so it's like it's it's all the nutrients are still there so it's just dry it's like grounds like coffee grounds it's dry so yeah the worms would love it you can put you can use it as compost absolutely she won't let me put in like she won't let me put uh bones in the worm bin you know well the mill handles bones there are rules though if you're going to use this uh you couldn't put like marigolds in it because uh if you were going to use it as chicken feed because it's poison it would be bad it'd be poison so it actually on the app it tells you i'm not doing the ad anymore this is just us talking on the app it tells you uh if you how depending on how you're going to use it don't do this don't put that but we're just putting in the compost bin and so we put everything in it uh and also you i guess you could put a lot more in like ours it fills up pretty quickly oh yeah this well it fills up it'll take this much it's about that big and then but the next morning it's it's down here it compresses it basically no there's no compression it's just dehydrating it yeah i just well that's all it's doing but most of it turns out most food waste is water it's liquid yeah so just dehydrating it that's great it's pretty now if you could only get people to buy less and just what you know not throw away anything would be well one of the things i have given myself permission to do is not clear my plate yeah because that's why you're looking thinner, Leo.

2:30:38Yeah, I was in the clean plate club, you know, eat it all, eat it all, you don't like it? No. So now even when I go to a restaurant, and I will say to them, it's not that I don't like it, I'm full. Right. And by the way, I grew up worried about starving children in Europe, that shows how old I am. Oh, you're really old. It was important. My parents, you know, it was China for me. No, my parents, to their credit, never did that to me. But my mama was are saying you should eat munga munga eat them more you're gonna have some more it's a good and i'll go yeah mama yeah mama there was no guilt involved it was just pleasure meanwhile people are starving because they've been pushed off of the land that they've been sustaining themselves on for years in order to make monocropped uh export uh for you know controlled by by someone else well i feel guilty i have to say you know i've been selling gadgets for 20 years encouraging people to buy a new phone every year i feel i have i've definitely some uh some guilt i have written many an apology to the world about having been a cheerleader of the internet a cheerleader of this a cheerleader of that and i feel a little guilty too yeah uh let's see what else um the uh the u.s has invested two billion dollars in quantum computing that's going to be next big thing and of course they're taking a stake in it as well uh that's the new that's the new way the trump administration invests you give us a little piece of the action wait till they find out that the money really only goes one way and there is no profit in quantum computing uh the bulk of the money goes to ibm and global foundries foundries that make wafers and other technology for quantum computing ibm will receive a billion dollars like they don't have the money what global foundry is 375 million uh ibm is going to invest the billion uh is they're going to take the billion from the government and invest another billion to set up a company called anderon in albany new york um i'm not sure why the government's investing in quantum computing i guess maybe well howard lutnik the secretary of commerce says it will create thousands of high-paying jobs he also said he had never been in touch with um jeffrey epstein yeah well a lunch that's all um hi this is benito i'm i'm guessing it's a security thing right because it quantum we just don't want the chinese to get it first that's all we just don't but it breaks all the encryption so they want it oh you think they oh that's it yeah that's right and no password is safe again right yep between that and mythos we're all going to walk around naked from now on uh california's fine general motors 12.75 million dollars because gm was selling data from onstar to uh the data brokers uh whoops another slap in the wrist a slap in the wrist uh the lawsuit accused gm of sharing detailed customer information including driving habits geolocation data names and contact details with third-party data brokers between 2020 and 2024 hundreds of thousands of california drivers were affected well certainly that is less surprising than the story that you covered a few weeks ago i believe about how all of the uh or most of the state health insurance marketplaces were selling data oh yeah that's a good one like yeah the ACA websites all had data collection tools and they were selling it to data brokers and of course on an ACA website you give them a lot of information income information health information and not exactly knowing that it's going to be there like no one's ever asking you so you mentioned this at the beginning of the show i don't know if this is gonna pass it's part of the federal highway bill a bipartisan amendment to end police license plate tracking they will be uh cities and uh states will be stripped of federal funding if unless they kill their automated plate tracking programs particularly flock right flock is the is the big one yeah there's been debates in every community they're debating in in my community in Petaluma right now because there's cameras and there's a lot of uh value of course in having these automated license plate readers the problem is they're used sometimes not in such great ways uh we just saw a story about law enforcement official was using an ALPR from flock to track his girlfriend his ex-girlfriend thousands of alpr reading from this guy uh but i mean that's a that's a rogue use i don't know i'm i've mixed feelings about this what do you guys think so the city i live in has canceled its contract with flock and the cameras have been removed after protests yeah people don't like the idea it's one of those many examples of the nuances of good ideas with unintended consequences.

2:36:02I deal with that every day as an internet safety person because there's all these bills out there that would do wonderful things to protect children, but take away their rights, spy on them, deny them access to important information that they need, yada, yada, yada. And this is just one more example. I mean, of course we want to capture kidnappers and child molesters. Well, see, that's the thing. It's hugely valuable for that. or or or an elderly person who's exactly driven off or uh and you really do you have a right to privacy when you're in public roads well the problem right is that it's not just about the privacy it's about like the the so sorry these two mathematicians who are doing a story a study of uh like uh cameras speed speeding cameras and they figured out that it was still much more likely to tag black and brown people.

2:36:57And the symbol is, oh, because they drive faster. No. Well, yes, but not for the reasons you think. What they determined was black and brown people in this particular city, I can't remember if it was like Detroit or one of these, are living in these post-industrial areas with huge four-lane roads. They got to drive huge distances to get to work. And that's where people were putting the speed cameras. And as a result, people in those neighborhoods, as opposed to people who, you know, live in a leafy suburban enclave where the where it's much, you know, where you couldn't speed anyway, because you're in a compressed little road.

2:37:35They don't get hit with those speed speeding cameras. So there's a whole layer of like, how do you equitably equitably deploy something like that? I have to say I'm very tied in knots about this one. Like I live in Oakland, California, where there's a there has been a huge amount of like petty crime and vehicle crime, you know, and, and they often don't prosecute it because it's so hard to prosecute and you're not allowed to chase because the police end up killing them high speed chases yeah you know so i do have to say like from a thousand feet up i look down and i think well this just you know maybe license plate readers is the trick here you know i took a trip to brazil this past summer and when you get off the plane you you they barely check that you barely talk to a human you don't even really hand over your i I mean, you hand over your passport at one point, but like all you really do is walk down an incredibly long hallway and you're being recorded a thousand different ways.

2:38:30Your face is getting is getting biometrically grabbed. Your gait, how you walk is getting grabbed. All of that is getting grabbed. And then when you bop around in a place like Rio, there's just Chinese cameras everywhere because China has exported these systems to all these big capitals and big cities. and i was talking to people um in rio about this and and they were like you know we like that it's brought down uh crime you know they're all for that because it had a huge violent crime problem but then they were also like but there's also weird stuff happening like like cops are using the footage and monetizing it on youtube for themselves there's misuses there's this georgia police chief who's being prosecuted because he used his these alprs to stalk and harass people but we give police all sorts of powers to protect us that's that's part of the deal and yeah there are some bad eggs but that's how you yeah you i mean nobody's suggest well maybe some are but most people are not suggesting we get rid of police um i'm yeah i am also twisted in odds i feel like there's some real value to it i think people just hate the idea of these cameras everywhere here's a story from uh german scientists in the carl's royal institute for technology ordinary wi-fi can now identify people with perfect accuracy your your wi-fi router yep can can actually not only see that you're there but can identify you yep even if you're not carrying an active device by observing the distance in the German accent by observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of surroundings and of persons who are present.

2:40:17There's an American version of this too, I've seen. And yeah, you don't need a warrant to use that to park a van outside somebody's house and run that like no warrant required. There's a new system where they'll identify you individually by your, by your heartbeat, using a laser from like 200 yards. This is well, and I'm wondering, the reason I said that I I thought of this as I'm wondering if the Brazilian corridor you're going down is also doing gate analysis. Because that was my understanding is that the reason you're walking and not stopping in place and turning it right. You just got me so paranoid because between my Apple Watch, my TPAP machine, which has a built-in modem.

2:40:55It's got a failure connection. My Oura ring. I'm wearing all that stuff. And I have a little Chinese AI in here. i mean you're a one-man nsa larry kidding no we live in this world uh privacy is well and it's in so like out of the the nine identified planetary boundaries required for like life on earth to exist there's like seven out of those nine have been passed now have been crossed over uh you mean the goldilocks zone kind of thing yeah yeah yeah around everything from ocean currents to uh mysterious chemicals to temperature to uh you know what have you so it's like it's pretty unsustainable situation we find ourselves in and uh and now so we don't have to worry because we're just going to be wiped out any day now well uh doesn't happen all at once leo yeah well you and i leo we'll probably we'll probably die of old age yeah we'll be all right i feel bad for kids being born right about now set what did you say seven out of ten seven out of nine yeah have been uh have been passed have been breached like the two two centigrade temperature um here i'll drop the lincoln uh ocean acidification is uh is now And some of these are irreversible.

2:42:25That's the problem. And worse, they pile on. They become exponential quickly. Yeah, feedback loops and what have you. So given those circumstances and you got your tight alignment between the super wealthy and the government that they have, you know, the super wealthy with an interest in the status quo. and the uh and the and the government that then like do you want the government to have perfect surveillance that seems like minor compared to compared to the acidification of the ocean but it also explains why mark zuckerberg is building 100 million dollar bunker under his house in hawaii this is the funniest thing the rich think that they somehow we'll escape this reality elon thinks we're going to mars we're not going to mars no i hope he does got bad news for elon he's not talking about that as much anymore i have to say he's been pretty quiet about that lately i don't know i he was wearing the occupy mars shirt and i think uh he had a very successful launch of a starship uh yesterday uh i don't know here's all right let's give you some good news i don't want to leave you with a depressed point of you remember when a cox media group the cable company was advertising and we talked about it i i was skeptical of it was advertising that that you as a as a marketer could uh buy active listening technology from them that they were tapping people's phones and had perfect marketing information from their phones from their tvs from their cars and they could sell that to you and your ads could be perfectly targeted and i at the time was a little skeptical well it turns out uh the ftc says and now they're in trouble because they didn't actually work the ftc is fining cox media group for selling active listening technology that didn't work if it worked no problem yeah exactly i was gonna say is that what we're upset about that's what upset about they deceived their customers businesses by claiming they could target ads based on audio recordings collected from consumers smart devices via a marketing service called active listening why did they get in trouble because the ftc said but it didn't work so maybe this isn't the happy story that i thought it was well the happiness was that it didn't work but yeah well that's what should be reassuring that came out in discovery if you will yeah wow uh oh i have lots more there's so many more stories but i'll tell you what uh i think we probably should wrap this up because we've gone more than long enough and i don't want to what did they call walter karki iron but i'll be old iron but that's me you are the new iron but yeah you are i could i you know what i could easily yeah it's funny because i'm not the longest podcast by any means joe rogan just did a three and a half hour podcast interview with mark andreason and i saw that lex friedman did an interview with david hannah meyer hansen the creator of ruby on rails that went six hours plus so hey we're only two hours and 44 minutes in this is this isn't long my back already hurt so all right we'll wrap it up uh thank you ladies and gentlemen for your patience and thank you larry maggot for surviving connect safely.org everybody should go there there's lots of good stuff i love that how an elderly uh the senior citizen's guide to uber i think that's a good idea yeah we'll have a teenager's guide to uber cover cover yeah cradle to grave cradle to grave well you know dead people yet but i've been saying this lately it's only a matter of time before my kids come to me and ask for the car keys permanently i don't have car keys i just use my phone oh yeah i don't have car keys good luck kids you ain't getting my car keys i'll give me your car key don't think they have you can have the key i don't need that right good point no that's why i keep hoping that there will be someday self-driving cars because well i guess there's always uber thank you larry appreciate what you do for uh kids and seniors at connect safely.org and i'm sorry about cbs news radio yeah it's a sad day sad day uh but it's always a happy day when you're here thank you appreciate it uh thanks also to marshall kirkpatrick check out whatsapp with that dot app and whatsapp with that dot app slash hawkeye it's the modern way to keep up with what's social saying about your company i don't want to know but some people need to know sometimes you need to know appreciate that thank you marshall it's great to see you thanks for having me on what is the box you're talking into is that that is the weirdest microphone i've ever seen it uh it's called a bee caster microphone and it's uh it's like a bumblebee yeah yeah exactly i thought i'd seen every mic in the world and now it's now it's going to get a buzz now like a bumblebee you know I once went to the launch conference, I believe it was.

2:47:51Hey, Marshall, real quick. I think you need to jigger the cable a little bit. It's buzzing. Jigger the cable. Oh, it's so funny looking. I like this. Is that any better now? No, it's all right. The show's over anyway. Go ahead. Is this the ad for Vcast? Is this what that is? This is not the best ad for the Vcaster. Okay, it's better now. There it is. It's a cool looking microphone. So I went to this big startup event one time, and we were like oh walt mossberg's gonna be there walt mossberg's gonna be there oh maybe he'll come and talk to us and see our demo and we're like oh i don't know and then he started coming around the table and uh and he approached us and he he said i've just got one question for you what's that mic you're using it was a it was a snowball mic and he was like okay cool thanks to you he's good all right see you later bye thank you marshall great to see you again and thank you jacob ward you are you're hitting on all cylinders now jacob ward.com the book is the loop there is the rip current.com his newsletter you'll catch him on cnn and we're very lucky to have him every month on tech news weekly with micah sergeant you took a flyer on me when none of those things were true leo so i think you're great i uh i'm really glad that uh cnn is uh finally seeing the light that's great what do you do is it just technology yeah it's technology I mean, it's amazing.

2:49:11Once you start wandering into that, the thing everybody forgets is that every, I mean, as you know, every single story is a technology story now. It is. Absolutely. So I do find myself just like on the wheel of death. Yeah. And it's great. Nice. Very high quality problem. It always makes me very happy when I see that. Good luck when Paramount buys it, if that happens. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I'm watching. I'll keep you around, though. I'm watching people like Anderson Cooper and stuff, and I really feel like they kind of feel the shadow over their shoulders. And as a result, they're becoming a little bit more aggressive and a little bit more newsy.

2:49:46Like, let's be good news. Let's be good reporters while we can, which is great. And maybe, you know. Better than being acquiescent. Instead of just rolling over and saying, please keep me, please. You know what? Who knows what's going to happen? It's a crazy world. You never know. And that's why we do this show every week. You never know. We do Twitter every Sunday. The elephants aren't acquiring Twitter, are they? Oh, God. If they did, I'd be thrilled. I'll sell it. 50 million is all it would take. Phone numbers out there. I'll do whatever Barry Weiss tells me to do. Just, you know, come on and write a check.

2:50:27That's all I need. No, I'm not ready to sell out quite yet. Actually, I like doing this. I enjoy what I'm doing. I don't need to sell out. um it makes me a little jealous when i see that you know podcast with a tenth of our audience selling for hundreds of millions of dollars to open ai it's like where did i go wrong oh i didn't interview sam altman enough that's the problem that's my mistake no we're happy doing what we're doing we've been doing it for 21 years i'd like to do for another 21 i'll be sitting here larry it'll be you and me talking about our sciatica if we're lucky we'll have this pain you get that you know how that pain up and down your side you know that uh we we do this show every sunday afternoon 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 eastern 2100 utc i say that because you can watch us live of course if you're in the club and i hope you are uh that's the best way to support independent podcasting i don't need a big check from a millionaire.

2:51:29I just want some little checks from people who care about good content, independent content. Twit.tv slash club twit. Join the club. And if you're in the club, you can watch us in the club twit discord and talk with us too. After the fact, well, actually, I should mention, you don't have to be in the club to watch live. We also stream it on YouTube, just like Momdani, Mayor Momdani, YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and kick. and you can chat with us in all of those too after the fact you can watch the show we do record it onto reel to reel tape and offer it in both audio and video form at the website twit.tv there's a youtube channel dedicated to twit great way to share clips with friends and family or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client get it automatically as soon as it's done benito gonzalez our esteemed technical producer thank you he's going to get an airplane fly to the philippines tomorrow but he'll be joining us next sunday from the philippines where it will be four in the morning yep sorry benita uh thanks to kevin king who edits this show after the fact thanks to all of you for joining us thanks to our great panelists we will see you next time as i have said for 21 years and i'm gonna keep doing it until they drag me off thanks for being here.

2:52:49We'll see you next week. Another Twit is in the can. Bye-bye. Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here, and I'm going to bug you one more time to join Club Twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25 % of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion, and it's growing all the time. that means we can do more we can have more fun you get a lot of benefits ad free versions of all the shows you get access to the club to discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public please join the club if you haven't done it yet we'd love to have you find out more at twit.tv slash club twit thank you so much

2:53:43Doing the twit. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit.