TWiT 1086: The Great Beagle Migration - Pope Leo XIV's 1st Encyclical & Ferrari's 1st EV

37:28So yeah, there's certain things you learn. Just use loose leaf tea. Yes. Loose leaf tea is fine. And the tea bags are fine. And the coffee filters are fine. You know, yeah, just, you know, it has on the way on the app, it says what you can, but pretty much put everything in there i don't i think we everything goes in there it's kind of amazing and we're each getting one free for appearing on the show was that yes congratulate i wish you know and i'll talk to mil and not just well especially if you live in the city i mean do they what do you do with compost if you live in the city i don't know well they have bins they do have like a block from here there's a oh you have to walk down the street with your little leaky bucket yeah and you know eventually it's starting to become you know on the street just like you know with the recycles but recycling yeah that's what they're doing in california process i was happy that they started doing that we've been composting for about 30 years so like in your yeah when i lived in santa cruz we had and you and you go out with the pitchfork and you turn it and you put worms in it we have a big uh tumbler it's like a 55 gallon barrel and it generates heat flip it over yeah because it's decomposing yeah you have to have like a traditional compost pile um and one of those countertop composters i don't know if it's the mill or not but they use the countertop composter to like pre-compose the meat and things like that that they wouldn't want to put directly into the pile and then they put the results into the pile that's what you would do with the mill exactly yeah yeah yeah uh pope leo who named himself uh after he's the greatest podcaster in the planet yeah he's a fellow twid i do that i mean i wish he hadn't picked leo because it is a little confusing uh but not really to the rest of us no i think everybody knows the difference padre probably suggested the name to him uh well it was a little weird father robert was on intelligent machines on wednesday and he kept saying leo and i said but and then oh no that guy okay yeah uh so he named himself after after leo the 13th who was pope at the turn of the 20th century between 1800 and 1900 and wrote an encyclical about the industrial age 100 years after the beginning of the industrial age but asking you know to be more humane in the conversion to industrial life and i think that's when pope leo was uh elected he decided to choose that name for that same because he wanted to honor that and do the same for our modern times so we've kind of waiting for leo the 14th uh encyclical about the power of ai and um i don't know you said gary you had first of all i'm not a catholic are any of you catholics i was raised catholic but uh left at uh about the age of 13.

40:22yeah my dad decided i didn't want to be confirmed yeah my dad went to Fordham uh you know uh Jesuit school as a high school and um but uh he kind of was the last Catholic too so um my daughter is converted a lot of people in her age group she's 34 a lot of people in their late 20s and 30s apparently are turning to the church interestingly it's just it's a trend Molly are you becoming a Catholic believe it or not I have missed that trend i'm usually so on top of trends yeah you missed it uh she's she's actually at a retreat with the uh the sisters of providence right now in western massachusetts believe it or not um so i i am myself and i think it's pretty well known an atheist i'm not a particularly religious fella uh and so i was a little skeptical that the pope would have anything meaningful to say about AI.

41:17Actually, I thought what he said was pretty good. Yeah, I loved what he said. I mean, first off, at least someone in power is talking about this. We need human-centered AI. We need humans in the loop. My idea of AI, where I can embrace AI is as a co-pilot, an amplifier. It's like, it's helping me in my work. It's never running things. And I do think there's this thought out there that AI can take over, take over as a boss, which is getting a lot of attention. But you know, take over essential functions. And, you know, that was my favorite part of it. But really my favorite part of it was just that he was speaking out about this idea that, you know, we have this small group of tech elites deciding everything.

42:01This, you know, Silicon Valley idea, we just got to get a few smart people in the room kind of thing. It just ain't going to work for AI. It's they themselves talk about how powerful in all everything this stuff is. And so, you know, kind of taking on this idea that, you know, a small group in Silicon Valley and Beijing are going to determine, you know, AI for everyone. And by the way, it's, I saw this thought out there in Silicon Valley, you know, oh, the Pope doesn't understand anything about AI. It's really interesting. Since like the mid 2010s, the Vatican has been looking into AI. They sent a group of cardinals, I think it was, to Silicon Valley.

42:39They met with people like Reid Hoffman, James Monica from Google, you know, to start the conversation going like, what is AI? What is, what's its potential? And there's been a group every year going to the Vatican. I know Hoffman goes regularly, Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft, other big names in AI or in tech go. So, you know, they've really been wrestling with this. I think it is a thoughtful document because the Vatican, I mean, the Pope, but the people helping with this have been thoughtful about it i assume he didn't write 42 000 words on his own in so short a period it's so funny because there were people who said oh you could tell this is ai written uh which father robert assured us it was not a high written he said there's no ai involved in this encyclical this was written by yeah you're right not merely pope leo but a a committee of a church people and robert pointed out and i think this is true that pope is not merely a religious leader he's in many ways a secular leader he's a political figure leads more than a billion catholics worldwide um he is uh he has standing to talk about this and as a humanist which i think it's safe to say he is it i think it's important um i i didn't really disagree with anything uh he said he wasn't anti-ai it seemed to me right well he was actually very specifically pro-AI in the sense that he sees lots of benefits from AI.

44:11But I think if I had to boil it down, the tech isn't the issue. We're the issue. It's like, who's controlling this? Who's not controlling it? Our approach in the last couple of years, it breaks. In 2023, when I started, at the end of 2022, I started looking at AI. And through the first half, most of 2023, we were talking as a country about AI, you know, Sam Allman saying, regulate us, the Sanders, members of Congress, you know, we're all talking about it. And it went poof. And now there's all these things that he brought up, AI and the use of warfare, AI and mass surveillance, you know, AI and the baked in bias.

44:50It's trained on our data, our works, what we have bias in our work, sexism, racism, whatever kind of thing. And yet we want to use it for sentencing. We want to use that decide whether you should get a job, whether you should get this apartment and all. So I don't know. I feel like we started to have a conversation. In part, we had a change of administration. But more than that, I think it just became this trillion-dollar race to cash in Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, et cetera, all through safety over the wayside and became like, well, we can't do anything to stop this because of China, China, China.

45:25And at least that Pope Leo, he gets the story, page one. he's articulating i think uh all the right issues will make a difference i don't know but at least somebody's fighting back at least somebody's articulating kind of a better vision than you know let's just let this thing ride and agis around the next corner it's i think appropriate to step back and take a breath and that's part of the problem with the way ai has been moving there's such competition such a race as you point out gary uh competition between the companies but also between us and China, that nobody's kind of really sitting back and saying, well, what is this?

46:03Do we want it? How should we proceed? How should we think about it? What guardrails should we put on it? Molly, it reminds me of crypto. Yeah, I was just going to say, it's kind of the classic idea that, you know, any innovation is good. And so you hear all of this talk of like, we have to protect innovation, which usually means no regulations. But, you know, I feel like no one ever actually decided that all innovation is good. In fact, I think there are plenty of innovations that we would argue are not good. I mean, like asbestos was not particularly good, right? And so, you know, there's this idea that if it's innovation, we have to just go with it.

46:40And, you know, there's this idea that any technological development is inevitable. And you hear that explicitly from a lot of these people is that AI is inevitable. So just get out of the way. hey, if we don't do it, China's going to do it, so we have to do it. And I think the Pope did a really good job of pushing back on that and saying that, like, ultimately, this is a technology developed by humans. We as humans have the ability to decide whether or not to develop it or how to go about developing it. And it's not inevitable. Like, we have the decision, you know, the capacity to make the decision that this is not something that we think would be useful or this is not something that we want to hand off to five billionaires who have their own motivations and not much interest in the public good.

47:25So I really enjoyed it for that particular reason. There is a big backlash against tech going on right now. AI has sped that up. I'd say for about a decade. Well, yeah, but I mean, look at what we were just talking about with data centers, the number of people, the booing at college commencements. AI has become in some ways a whipping boy for all of this technology and all of this big tech. And I think there's a lot - Well, and it helps that I think every tech company is pushing AI, right? Pushing it down our throats. Right, right. And I am a proponent. I love AI. I use it like crazy. In many ways, I've done a lot of vibe coding.

48:08I have an AI agent that knows way too much about me. I'm playing with this because I feel like it's an important technological revolution. But even I acknowledge that there are some big issues and that we really need to be a little bit careful. Go ahead. If you look at the polling on this, so Quinnipiac, I think it's called, just did a recent poll, and 65 % of Americans are in favor of some guardrails, some regulation. Only 22 % agree with this argument, like, oh, if we put down regulations, we're going to kill innovation. You know, a favorite example is, I'm not the only one to use it. You hear it a lot in AI.

48:51You know, there's the doomers, and I don't put myself on that side. There's the zoomers. any regulation is a crime against humanity, given all the good that AI could do. I call myself a bloomer. I see it as potential if we're smart, if we take advantage of our agency here. I mean, every foundational technology cuts both ways. I mean, the internet, the car. The atomic bomb. I mean, or atomic energy. I used the example, but it did fireproof. Yeah. But we weren't smart about asbestos. Can we make it so it's more of a net positive? There will be negative things that happen because of AI. But I still think we're at a point, we have agency.

49:34If we're having a discussion, we can make this more of a net positive than a net negative. But Sam, go ahead. Coming from the auto industry perspective, the auto industry has had a huge amount of regulation in the last 60 years. And we've had more innovation during that time, in part because of that regulation, than we had in the 60 years before that, the first 60 years of the auto industry. So, you know, I mean, our cars are safer, more efficient, have better performance than they've ever had in the entire history of the industry. And a lot of that is because of the regulation that we put on the industry.

50:15Anytime you're designing something in engineering, having constraints forces you to be more creative. When you're left unconstrained, you end up with something like the Ferrari Luce, which we may talk about that later. But the constraints force a degree of creativity and innovation to figure out how can you work within these constraints and still create a better product. And I bet the audio industry, just as the big tech does now, lobbied hard against those regulations. Oh, they did. Absolutely. They didn't want seatbelts. It's been to their benefit and it's been to all of our benefit. There's also the trust factor.

51:01I use the example of the railroad where, you know, it was really dangerous when it first came out. And the railroad companies opposed any kind of regulation. Government said, no, no, no, track size and block signaling and all this kind of stuff. And it made it safe. And by the way, it thrived not despite regulation, but because of regulation. It just people trusted the railroad that I'm not going to die. Same with aviation. Aviation. I mean, like you hear a lot of, especially in the crypto world, You hear people saying that it's financial regulations that are slowing everybody down, but people trust American financial markets hugely because of the regulations that are in place.

51:39And when that regulation goes away, you start to see what we're seeing now, which is declining trust in American financial markets. Right. Part of the problem, though, with regulating AI is how. It's not hard to say, well, a car should be safer and to know kind of how you go about that. I don't even know how you make AI safer. do we even know what the risk clearly you have to let donald trump evaluate all the models before they're released it's interesting that's obviously the answer trump it was part of the way trump got elected was by promising the crypto bros and the ai bros there would be no regulation one of the first things he did when he got in the white house is overturned biden's ai executive order and yet as soon as mythos came out that that model from anthropic that anthropic held back because they said if if everybody got a hold of this we would have a security cyber security nightmare because it's so good at finding cyber security flaws that scared the white house and i think they he he drafted an executive order that said we have to approve all ai models before they're released uh and then apparently companies and particularly david sex is former crypto advisor and an AI czar.

52:56AI and crypto czar, who was put in there basically by Peter Thiel to protect the AI and crypto industries. Apparently, an 11th hour call, according to the, I think, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, to the White House, persuaded him not to put out this executive order. But there's definitely this sense in DC from Congress, too, that we've got to do something. The question is, what? But approving models is not the right answer. You don't want the government to be in charge of saying which models are released and which ones aren't. I would push back a little bit on the idea that the promise was no regulation from Trump, because I would say that the promise was actually we'll let you write the regulation.

53:39OK, captured regulation. Yeah, companies actually really do want regulation that benefits them. Right. And that that entrenches their position while making it more challenging for competitors to enter the field. And I think that's what we've seen with crypto. And certainly it's what a lot of the AI lobby groups are pushing for as well is, you know, you have this sort of like competing factions within the AI lobby where there's the open AI and, you know, those folks who are basically all gas, no brakes. We don't want any states to regulate us and enforce moratoriums on building data centers or make us liable for harms caused by our products.

54:21And then there's the anthropic lobbying group, which is saying, oh, we need regulations that are safety. We need to have controls and guardrails and things like that. But both of them are essentially doing the same thing, which is lobbying for their particular interests and sort of building a moat using regulations around their corporate business model. But who has the wisdom to come up with good regulations? None of them, that's for sure. Or Congress. Does Congress? I mean, even Ron Wyden, who's very techno literate. I'm not sure. I don't know who I would say. I mean, I think that the thing with Congress people is, you know, most Congress people probably don't have a particularly strong grasp of AI or frankly, most of the issues that they're tasked with legislating.

55:08They have staff. Yeah, they have staff who do. And I have actually found that there are a fair number of Congress people who do have very informed staff. And, you know, it used to be that you would consult, you know, the President's Council of Advisors on science and technology. Well, we had the Office of Technology Assessment, too, which Newt Gingrich put out of business. And that, you know, that used to be computer scientists and doctors and, you know, professors and all that kind of thing. And now you look at the list of people on that council and there's, I was tweeting about it a while ago, or blue sky skeeting, whatever you call it.

55:40Skeeting. You're skeeting. Yeah. That there are more members of the all in podcast on the council of advisors than there are professors. It's just all CEOs. So, you know, who, who do you turn to right now? It's all industry executives. I'm not sure professors either though. I don't know who, I don't know who would know. Well, I don't think we should trust any single anyone. I mean, I like the idea that we have a dialogue with ethicists and, you know, policy people and, you know, a wide range. How about the Pope? Can we trust the Pope? Should the Pope be in charge? He did not make any recommendations, by the way.

56:17But there are all sorts of, you know, for these foundational models of a certain size, you need to red team them first before releasing them. You know, I mean, that's an idea. I have to point out, Harry, that no matter what kinds of safety procedures you follow or guardrails, that within minutes, Pliny, the liberator, will come up with a prompt that bypasses them. It is very hard. I think we've talked about this before on Security Now and other shows. The notion of AI safety might be mistaken, that it's not possible. Well, I think that begs the question then is like, if it's not possible to build a safe model should we be building the models at all right or should we just acknowledge that they can't be made safe any more than the internet can be made safe well but then what do we use it for do we use it for mass surveillance anthropic took a principled that would be the smartest thing to do is to say don't use it for things where there is potential harm because it's not reliable it can't and there is legislation out there you know different states in congress Whereas there is legislation, there's, you know, kind of intellectual property rules, you know, what can you use for training?

57:31How do you compensate those whose material, including mine, including probably everyone on this podcast, is in there. So there are all sorts of ideas out there. But I think to Molly's point, the power of the crypto lobby, the power of the AI lobby, the power of tech right now means that everything's a non-starter. I mean, so, you know, let's give Trump credit. it he's like okay well maybe we do need to have some kind of regulation out there i don't you know it was never released so it's hard to critique it um but you just see it wasn't just sacks i mean musk this the some of the ceos of i don't know specifically you know google and or zuckerberg was one of the names that they all kind of like no you can't do this and he pulls it even though it's in front of all of us right this wasn't just some private thing The announcement was made.

58:22And so like, we can't do anything. We can't do anything because industry is so powerful. They have so much money and they have the majority of folks in their pocket. So everything will die in the vine. Well, and I think it's a really strong indictment of Citizens United, because, you know, if you if you look at it from a company's perspective, if they stand to make billions of dollars and the choice is basically, do we spend a hundred million dollars on lobbying and super PACs? You know, of course, they're going to do it. The payoff is huge, right? Like, it's just simple math. Right. And so, you know, I think it's really sort of a predictable outcome that we're seeing this kind of thing coming out of the crypto industry, out of the AI industry.

59:11And certainly, I think probably any other industry to follow, because, you know, the returns are huge when you can capture regulators, legislators, the president. Right. Well, I mean, this is a larger rule of American politics that money talks. And when that's the case, you're never going to have a society that looks out for the people in society. You only have a society that looks out for people with money. In the context of this show, it's Andreessen Horowitz that's the number one donor. Not a bank, not the bank industry, not the oil industry. They are the number one giver to the current. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

59:52More than Elon? During the 2026 election cycle. terms yeah yeah so and you know you know what they looked at elon and the quarter of a billion he spent uh to make himself a trillionaire two years later and said that was money well invested and they're doing the same and they spent 100 million plus i mean they spent in 2024 as well and had wonderful success with that so i think it's no surprise that we're seeing them putting money towards again both crypto and ai really the answer is and larry lessick's been saying this for years to no avail you got to get the money out of politics before you can even talk about ai regulation or any kind of regulation because if if money's driving policy it's always going to be policy that supports people with money right it's just it's just that's how it is and i think unfortunately that's that's going to be incredibly difficult to do because essentially a constitutional amendment yeah we would need to pass a constitutional amendment and that's because the you know the the supreme court has made it clear right you know most of the members of this court you know made it pretty clear ruled that they allowed citizens united that yeah that was their statement i mean one third one third of this court was not on the bench uh when that was when that was decided but you know they would clearly support it right so you know we'd settle we We obviously need some fundamental changes to the Constitution to get that money out of the system.

1:01:26And we've already seen how much courage, how much spine members of Congress have. Yeah, well, when it comes to doing things that make it hard to get elected, they're really adamant. One thing I would say is that it's actually hugely popular among members. Left and right. Of course. Not just we the people want this. Right. And so, I mean, I do actually have some hope in the long term, certainly not the short term, that something like this could happen because we see over and over again that when it's put to everyday people, everyone supports it. I mean, Maine had a referendum question in 2024 that passed with 75 percent of the vote, which is enormous to basically limit, you know, corporate spending in politics.

1:02:13And that's been repeated in multiple places. And, you know, I think this election cycle, we're seeing more and more candidates who are acknowledging the fact that people are actually pretty sickened by corporate spending in politics. And you see, you know, this wave of candidates who are refusing corporate contributions or super PAC money or whatever it might be. So I do think there's something of a shift. And I think that voters are fairly disgusted by any overt spending when they know about it. But I do think that you're right. It's a big hill to climb. Yeah, I mean, the problem is most of it is most of what's being spent is dark money that we don't know where it's coming from.

1:02:54But let's point out, what is the money being spent on? The money is being spent on.

1:03:02I mean, all money gets you as votes. If the people stop being influenced by what the money's buying and start paying attention to the issues and voting their conscience, the money won't matter. Am I wrong on that? Well, you're right in principle. The problem is getting to that point where people do ignore those advertising messages. That's a message for our audience, because tech people tend to be kind of, ah, your vote doesn't matter. I'm not going to, I know most, I would bet a large portion of our audience doesn't vote because it doesn't matter. They're cynical. They tend to be cynical. They're smarter.

1:03:43So they tend to be cynical. It's not going to make any difference. My vote doesn't count so that's what we have to overcome we have to overcome that sense of apathy that sense of cynicism and especially in the people who listen to these shows because i think it strikes me these are the people who are particularly cynical about the whole process yeah i mean in in 2024 there were as many people who were eligible to vote that did not vote as voted for either party right it's always been that way. The huge percentage of people just don't vote. And a lot of them are Well, you know, also, I mean, part of the problem there is, you know, because of the way our election system is structured, especially at the presidential level with, you know, with the electoral college, that it's only a handful of states where it ever really switches back and forth and where the votes actually make a significant difference in who gets power.

1:04:51Yeah, so close. But I mean, I would say that, you know, there is significant power in terms of, you know, races below the presidential level. Yeah. Right. Well, the problem there is redistricting means that virtually every incumbent is guaranteed re-election. They're going to get re-elected by raising all the money because they're incumbents on these important committees. And it is kind of a self-fulfilling thing. Some people, do your homework. Study up. Don't watch those TV ads. Don't follow the brochures. Don't just make your vote count. Or at least fact check the TV ads. Like that's what gets me is watching some of the ads from these PACs that are like literally just lies.

1:05:31Voting is so much work. You know, in California, we have, I think, more than 60 candidates for governor in this election that's coming up next Tuesday and a week from Tuesday. And it takes a lot of work to figure out who to vote for. It is not easy. And then there's ballot initiatives. There's the low ballot. It's a low ballot. And this is just a primary. And people historically don't even vote in primaries. so and i understand why because you look at this and it goes i can't it's the tyranny of choice applied to elections please we need you to vote and we need you to care and we need you to study and vote your conscience and and learn about the issues don't just say well i saw a tv ad because those tv ads are so slanted uh and that overcomes money in politics that's the first step and then you can start to whittle away at you know at the at the incumbencies and so forth and maybe make a difference yeah listen to leo and pope leo both yeah pope leo and le podcaster leo let's take a quick break do a plug i do have a podcast episode coming out pretty soon with the end citizens united president who oh nice so where is is this a citation needed podcast where is it yeah it'll be coming out on citation needed okay that's great i would like to i will like to listen to that citation needed.news if you go there there's a podcast feed right at the top and it'll come out right now subscribe so you get it yeah um that is awesome that is awesome see so you're you're in you agree with this then this premise oh very much do something about this yeah yeah yeah i mean one of the things that people challenge me on a lot is like why are you tracking crypto election spending every corporation you know every industry does it and it's like yes they do that's a problem and we need to stop it broadly speaking not just crypto yeah yeah is it citation needed the podcast uh probably not it's it's citation needed.news if you go to the website there is another podcast with that name, which is...

1:07:38There's a couple. There we go. Molly White's Citation Needed? Yeah, that's it. If it's got the name, if Molly White's on the box, then it's the right one. Citation Needed dot news. Yeah, okay. Primarily a newsletter and not a podcast. I have basically a podcast version of the newsletter, and so I hope I don't step on the other Citation Needed's toes too much because they are a very good podcast. Well, all we care about is you, Molly. So listen to Citation Needed, Dot News, the podcast with Molly Wood. And by the way, yes, every industry gives money. But what struck me about crypto in 2024 is how much money they gave in and how they almost single-handedly impacted elections, Senate races in Ohio, California, if I'm remembering right.

1:08:29You know, I mean, so that to me is like, yeah, every industry gives money, but they're giving tens of millions of dollars. There is, you know, it is a wave of money that is changing the election completely as opposed to like, oh, this person has five million. That person has seven million because they have more oil money. You know, crypto to me is like amazing. It didn't essentially didn't really exist for, you know, a bunch of idealists, whatever it was, 15, 20 years ago. And now they're one of the most powerful industries in all of D.C. just simply because they have all that crypto money. None of it matters if you can't get the electorate to do the right thing and vote.

1:09:10Yeah, but I mean, I think one thing that's really striking is that, you know, everyone knows about big oil. Everyone knows about big pharma. You know, everyone knows that there are corporate influences coming from those industries. But people are very, very unaware of the extent to which crypto is influencing elections these days. I mean, people are unaware of the extent to which the president is involved in crypto. How much has he made in his year and a half in office? us in just from crypto or altogether well it's over a bit well over a billion dollars yeah yeah in crypto and that's not included no that's not including the sort of uh trump coin and all that price of his crypto holdings because that's all illiquid just not even worth trying it because you'd be in the billions and billions of dollars but just in terms of like money like dollars he has cashed out it's over a billion dollars yeah um and you know before the election the crypto ball yeah actually that was the inaugural it was the inauguration yeah yeah but um one thing i was going to say is that like there's a crypto media outlet called coindesk that just did a poll that found that um you know the majority of respondents were opposed to the idea of an elected official at a high level having personal ties the crypto industry or you know personally profiting from it but a tiny tiny percentage were even aware that trump was so heavily involved And so it's really just, I think, an education issue in large part is because people just aren't aware of that this is happening.

1:10:41Well, that's the other thing that needs to change is that, you know, the fact that we allow politicians, elected politicians to be making trades on the market. There was a report that came out a week or two ago about how many thousands of trades Trump has made personally in the last year and a half. he's like a day trader i mean actually that was the funniest quote like wow he's that's the number of trades of private equity he's gotta find the time i don't exactly i don't understand tweeting it 250 times a day i don't i don't get it is he a vampire i mean just going on just was it just last week you know they announced this deal uh federal government deal with dell for almost 10 billion dollars there's a good day before he bought a bunch of dell stock yeah right that's insider trading yeah yes unless you're the president of the united states so no no no elected politician model yeah no elected politician should be allowed to trade anything during their time in office clearly and it's it's ironic that nancy pelosi was so upset by the notion that you might want to curtail her stock trading um it's on both sides one thing i think is really funny is that the senate just passed a change to their rules basically saying that no senators can get involved in prediction markets.

1:11:57Right. And it was unanimous. They can't do Calci, but oh, we got this. You want to buy some stock? Well, yeah, that's what I thought was so funny. It's like there wasn't a single congressperson who would stand up and say, actually, I do want to trade on these prediction markets. But, you know, you try to pass a law that would ban stock trading or crypto trading and suddenly it's like this hugely controversial thing. But prediction markets, I guess that's where they draw the line. We'll talk about prediction markets. There's a lot of news there too. All right. I do have to take a break. Molly White is here.

1:12:25great to have you samable sam and gary rivlin great panel uh lots to talk about before we go on though i want to mention box i know that's a name you know but it's a name you ought to look at because they are great i am so impressed with what box is doing if you're an enterprise trying to transform your organization with ai you are probably facing a all too common challenge most ai tools are great at public knowledge but they don't really know your business do they they don't know your product road maps they don't know your sales material they don't know your hr policies your financial models they don't know anything about the content that actually makes your company run but that's what you want them to know about but that's where box comes in right box is building the intelligent content management platform for the ai era this is so brilliant serving as the secure, essential context layer for Box's AI agents to access the unique institutional knowledge that makes your company run.

1:13:33You use Box to store the documents, use Box's AI agents to access information securely, privately. That's the key idea. The power of AI is not the model alone. We're learning this more and more. it really comes from giving the ai access to the right enterprise content box goes beyond file storage it connects content to people apps and ai agents so teams can turn information into action with tools like box agent box extract box hubs and more organizations can accelerate knowledge work pull intelligence from unstructured content and automated workflows you've already got the data it in there now you can use box agent a unified ai experience across those files it can understand your natural language prompts it can pull the right content it can help you work through the task for agents both inside and outside box including tools like chat gpt copilot gemini agent force custom agents box becomes the trusted content and file layer via its platforms apis mcp and cli yes they do all three and for enterprises that trust layer is everything box is built with security with compliance with governance with threat protection in mind so employees and agents only access information they're authorized to use it's secure but it also gives your box agent the information it needs to make intelligent choices if you're thinking seriously about your company's AI transformation journey, it's time to think beyond the model.

1:15:12Your business lives in your content and Box helps you bring that content securely into the AI era. This is brilliant and nobody can do it better than Box. Visit box.com slash AI to learn more. That's box.com slash AI, box.com slash AI. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. so uh google has really uh doubled down on ai and its search results and i think you're seeing immediately you're seeing a response for instance last week uh duck duck go installs were up 30 percent 30 percent and of course right on the front page of duck duck go it says no ai because now when you do a google search ai is at the top of the page ai is everywhere uh and i think people you know honestly are nostalgic for the original era of you know 10 blue links on a page or at least have the option my mom is using duck duck go and i did not tell her about that's huge where did you find this that's awesome isn't that huge yeah it's huge yeah uh i mean of course google is is a pursuing a ai they should but what i resent and what I have to assume a lot of people resent is, well, sometimes I just want to Google something.

1:16:37Right. And you're just shoving it down my throat. I mean, there's a little tab that was AI mode. You can just click that. Yeah, I want to do AI. I don't particularly like Gemini. I never used Gemini. But the point is, actually, I just misspoke. I sometimes use Gemini because it's just right there. I mean, we could mock Google, Google, but they're neck and neck with monthly users with open AI. They're both up around a billion a month. And it's just because it's right there. My kids, I make fun of them. Like, why do you use Gemini? It's like, dad, it's right there. I don't have to download. Got it.

1:17:12It's there. It reminds me of Microsoft taking on that Netscape Navigator. Like, well, okay, I guess I could download the Navigator on my Windows machine, but I have Internet Explorer right there. and that's why they want to. So Meta, theirs is even more lame. Their AI is, I try to use them all. Theirs is even more lame than Gemini, except they're in the game too with hundreds of millions of users per month because it's right there. And they have your information. That's the other side of the equation. They already know, Google and Meta both, a lot about you. So just as we were talking with this box ad, having, it's not just the model, it's having the context to put into the model that makes the model useful.

1:17:58So there's the button right there on every freaking Google property. We use Google Sheets for our show rundowns. And it's so annoying. Every time I open the sheet, it says, well, you want me to summarize this? Do you want me to eliminate it? Today, it said, you know, there's blank boxes. Do you want me to fill those up with something? It's like, no. Except for go to Microsoft and Microsoft has it every part of their product. Make up some links and fill them in there. yeah well microsoft has i think started to see the backlash there they've they've already announced we're gonna oh yeah we're gonna back off a little bit on forcing copilot down your throat right so uh but google see here's google is kind of in a rock and a hard place because i think they probably saw some erosion of their search leadership by companies like perplexity that are doing ai searches which is hilarious because google has been for decades eroding web traffic to all of the places they're indexing.

1:18:53And that's the other side of this. The consequence of this, it's clear Google doesn't want you to go anywhere else. They want you to land on the Google page and stay on the Google page. We'll give you the answer. Don't click that link. You don't need to. We'll tell you everything you need to know. Now they're saying for students, we'll draw you the graph. We'll give you the explanation. We'll put graphics in there. You don't need to go to that web page, but it's kind of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs because all the content for those models comes from those pages that they're now disintermediating and putting out of business.

1:19:26But it's okay because they're going to make up new pages. They're just going to generate new stuff to fill. Oh, you got a blank in your web? We'll just fill that in. I mean, it's already happening, right? Because they're scraping so much of the web and so much of the web now is AI generated that you're getting this sort of of AI-generated content that's being trained on AI. And there were some really interesting papers about model collapse when you basically feed an AI too much AI content as training data and things just go haywire. Mustafa Suleiman, the head of consumer AI for Microsoft, said they're not going to use, to the extent they can, as you're pointing out, who knows what's AI slop and what's human slop.

1:20:09But they're going to try not to use the fabricated data, the AI data, because it's so unreliable. But, you know, it's like from the corporation's point of view, like every company is doing this. Every large enterprise software person there, you know, a company, they're putting, we give you an AI agent, it's right here. It could do this, it could do that. You know, it's kind of this new UI that, you know, instead of having to go anywhere, you just, wherever you are, There's all the tools you want. I mean, this seems one of these things that's really hard to stop. It drives me crazy. There might be a little bit of a backlash, but I bet if we did this show a year from now, it's going to be more integrated, not less.

1:20:53Yeah. Yeah, because in the long run, even if there's consumer backlash, people are going to still use Google to search, aren't they? I don't know. I mean, based on what they showed, where now you just get a page with a window that grows as you fill in your question. And then it'll just give you an answer. I don't know that I want to continue using Google. Do you still use Kagi? Yeah. Yeah, I pay 25 bucks a month to use an alternative to Google that just gives you links. Now, Kagi actually has a really good perplexity style AI orchestration engine too. But I don't use that so much. I just want Google without the ads.

1:21:36with it. I just want the links, just the links, man. But also, I'll be honest, increasingly, I don't go to a search page. I don't type in the browser window. I don't type a query. I use my AI agents to do all of that stuff. And my AI agents have MCP servers that query the web. You know, I'll do, I'll say things like, give me the top 10 AI stories this, you know in the last 48 hours and it goes out and looks at x and reddit and uh hacker news and and my rss feeds and comes up with the top stories the stories that we're reading today almost all those links were ai generated through the week i don't even i gave it my rss feeds so i mean i feel like i've noticed i'm doing a lot less searching i mean google and facebook help you know damage seriously you know news sites because people weren't going them to them as much and now it's they're going to go to them even less there are some statistics that you know like uh you know uh there's 58 lower click-through rates with ai and you know i'm guilty of that i mean you know sometimes i want to check it i'm writing about something i need to check it um but you know what happens to these sites who are the content creators if increasingly with each increasing year they're going to have less traffic, i.e.

1:22:56less money. I don't know. I just kind of play it out in my head. I feel guilty because we rely on all of these sites. I try to mention when I'm quoting a site, I try to mention the site, often try to mention the author. But honestly, I'm not doing a lot of enterprise journalism here. I just go out and scrape sites and that these stories come from them i think that's why ai wins it's just so easy it's so convenient we're all we're all in a hurry we're all overwhelmed the difference is this is a human curated experience admittedly i'm using ai but but then i go through and say we're going to talk about this and this uh i feel like human curation still has some value but maybe not for much longer i don't know yeah i actually think i actually think that is the secret weapon it's it's what all of us do that's what all of us on this panel do right that's what you do gary when you write your book that's what molly does when she writes citation needed that's what sam does when he does his analyst reporter does his wheel bearings podcast what we do is people follow us because of our curation our taste our students things all that it's something that the ai companies underestimate a little bit is that people really do like human created material whether it's you know music or artwork or a newsletter or the news, people do value that.

1:24:21And I think that's why you see some of the backlash. But you also see people, I think, who seek out actual human-made material as well. And I think that that's going to continue to be the case, even as AI content proliferates. Do you feel like maybe I should... I mean, I use AI. So I mean, I'm an AI fan. I'll make that clear. But I use it as a tool to do this human stuff that we do. I would never create a podcast that just was, you know, AI voices with AI panelists. Those exist. Oh, they totally do. Look at Notebook LM. I mean, they exist. And I think there'll probably be more and more of them, to be honest.

1:25:08Spotify's doing it. Yeah. Audible does it. I imagine there'll be more and more of them. but I've watched several podcasts of mice of, you know, here's a podcast about Gary Roman's new book, AI Valley that I learned because I have, you know, the Google ego search, you know, I have a little message like, Oh wow. Why did I have to say that topic? Are they? Yes. It's all AI generated. And you know, and, and kind of in defense of humanity, it's like, I mean, they're, I'm sort of impressed that it could do anything like that, but like, That's more my experience. Like, I'm not saying it's great. it's just amazing that it can do even that but it was really lousy it was like so quirky like it just why'd you choose that that's not a particularly interesting it's an AI but I I mean I was saying this I was saying this before when we're talking about the pope like you know if the humans at the center using AI I use AI all day every day uh for my work but it's me you know I never have it you know write me this article read these interviews write the article it's more as I'm writing the article I'm really struggling with this paragraph there's something wrong with it tell me what's wrong with it kind of thing it's just really interesting but it's me it's not like someone else can write that same article using the same engine I do and so to me if it's you know human centered and it's you is security your judgments your ethics your instincts whatever those things are given the task you know I I'm cool I'm cool with that actually though it's interesting i was having a friend um writing for the new york times now uh if you're a freelancer you have to sign something and say i will not use ai at all in the creation of this article which you know i i just know research you know i didn't read it myself i asked that same question he said i don't do it because i'm scared um that i'm breaking the rule um but it's just like you know i mean i get where they're coming from they don't want like every word on the page i don't think that it would be a bad thing to use AI to inform yourself.

1:27:11Well, it depends if you fact check, right? Well, yeah, that's true. You've got to fact check. Do you think it is our obligation, the four of us, to put more human-created content into the content sphere, into the internet? like as human beings we gotta fight the fight and make human created content and put it out there i don't think it's my obligation but it's something it's your duty it's your duty it's hard question it's hard question to answer because that's simply what we do it's what we do anyway kind of thing yeah that's by the way that's the other point that's point benito our producer is always making he's a musician so people make music because they like to make music writers write because they like to write uh you're not going to stop people from creating right i think the new world is going to have you know there's ai created art there'll be some people who really like it some of it is probably going to be really interesting but i think people are going to prize human-centered uh art much more because of it just like you know when digital music came along you know suddenly like records uh where it became this bespoke thing like your kids are on vinyl heads.

1:28:21Well, I mean, you do see it. Yeah, I knew it. Somehow I knew it. But teenagers are walking around with disc men, CD players now. There is this really strong backlash, I think, to not just AI, but tech in general. They don't want to be on their phones all the time. They don't want to be connected to the internet all the time. They want the more analog lifestyle, which I can respect. I think what's really interesting, the people who are harshest about AI aren't older folks, which would have been my guess. It's the college kids who are booing. They are. You know what? This is going right for them.

1:29:01They're worried that they've got their whole life ahead of them. Yeah. That's going to be dominated by this stuff. I mean, you know, at least a couple of us are closer to the end than the beginning of our careers. Hi, this is Benito. No comment. No comment. So I have a friend. I know how old I am. Hi, this is Benita. So I have a friend who has a kid who's, I think, seven or eight. And this kid loves Suno. So I think there is a generation that are like really young that love to pop their music. Yeah, a gap generation. Yeah, there's going to be a gap generation here. Suno's pretty good. I enjoy Suno.

1:29:37There are people, we were talking to Harper Reid. There are people who only listen to music created by AI. But I think those people also don't give human music the same chance that they give AI music. Maybe, or it's just a lot of work. No, they won't sit and listen to an album from a human, but they'll listen to 10 AI tracks. They'll listen to 10 AI tracks. How is that less work? It's more complex. It's less anodyne. It's less homogenized. There's too much going on. You don't have to think about it. Yeah. It's just that blended average of... It's like pre-chewed food. I don't want to chew. I just feed me.

1:30:19Soilent. Exactly, yeah. Soilent music. When the camera came along, it was like, oh, no, it's going to destroy art because why do you have to paint the landscape? You just take a picture of it. And I think what's interesting is now photography is an art form. You know, art is still thriving. And I assume that the same thing is going to happen with AI. Like people will love AI music, I guess. but there'll be people who seek out humans. It sounds different. The imperfections. I'll throw my 17-year-old then 15 under the bus. Did you write that paper about Lord of the Flies? Yeah, read it, Dad. Within three sentences, I'm just like, which model did you use that color drains from his face?

1:31:02Because it was too perfect. It was just obvious. It's either, as Sam was saying, it's just lowest combinator flat just this thing uh or it's just like no human rights or talks like that but how long that's the uncanny valley in prose essentially how long before it gets good enough that you don't there's no uncanny valley we're still there with cg in movies though we're still there in cg with movies we are we're still i think suno music a lot of people can't distinguish There's still no music from real music. Well, and to be fair, you know, probably most of what's written by humans would fall into that, you know, lowest common denominator, uncanny valley category.

1:31:44There's a lot of human slop. A lot of human slop out there. That's great slop better than anybody. I mean, there's a reason the AI sounds like that, right? That's right. Exactly. It's just averaging all of that. But, you know, there are exceptional writers out there like Gary, like Molly, you know, that do really, you know, that do something really distinct and different. I think that as time goes by, we will, they'll be in equilibrium. I think we're going to see some pendulum swinging back and forth, anti-AI, pro-AI, and then there'll be some equilibrium. You know, I've just started watching because they were talking about it on Wednesday on the show.

1:32:17Have you seen the show Humans? It's on Amazon Prime. It's three seasons. It started on BBC Four. oh is this the one about the robots that it's yeah so the premise is it's near future and that uh we've come we've come we've actually been able to make a bipedal humanoid robots and uh they mostly are domestic uh servants although there are some sex bots and there are uh bots doing laboring in the fields and so forth and they're doing the jobs the humans don't want to do or that are very hard or difficult. It's good because it isn't 100 % anti-bot. It's not pro-bot either. And it raises a lot of the issues that will come up, I think, in the near future over all of this.

1:33:00You know, it starts, I've just started watching. It starts with a husband. His wife is away for work and he's got three kids and he's trying to take care of them. And it's a lot of work. He's got his own job. So he buys one of these bots because somebody's got to clean and cook. And the wife comes home and says, what, are you replacing me? says no no i just want more time with you it's a it's a i think philosophically it's very interesting and as somebody who is very much a pro ai user it has it has kind of opened my eyes a little bit as to some of the difficulties that this is gonna so leo i want to get back to the question you sort of posed like is will gpt gpt 10 will it be able to write a beautiful novel the way a human can and do you think you know i mean first off i think we've we're hitting some limits we've you know these models have ingested all of human creation there's no there's no more stuff right now it's ai slop i i this whole agi thing i think we're a breakthrough or two away um before we get what silicon valley is saying we're gonna uh get but i i think it's gonna keep on pac-man manning up if If right now I would say AI, if you write a basic report, if you're writing a press release, if you're doing a 400 word hot take, you know, you're toast.

1:34:17I'm sorry. These things are good at doing that. Can it write a basic news article? Yes. But can it write a feature? No, they're terrible. I've tried. I've played around with it. It'll get better at it. But I am convinced that GPT-10, whatever, just, you know, some point 10 plus 20 years into the future, I don't think it could ever do it. I think that's the missing ingredient. You know, AI is obviously, you know, artificial intelligence, but I think it's alien intelligence. It knows everything and understands nothing. It has no common sense. A five-year-old understands so much of the world that these things don't.

1:34:53So you don't think we'll ever bridge that uncanny valley? You know, I'll be dead by the time we do it if you ask, you know, me back to Sam's point. We're older journalists here, but I'll let it go, Sam. But I was including myself in that group. But, you know, I guess I am. There was a really fun thing the New York Times did a year ago. Oh, I know what you're going to talk about. Curtis Sittelfield. Curtis Sittfield. I've mispronounced your name. My apologies. But they had this really accomplished novelist, short story writer go up against a machine. And, you know, I'll tell you, the short story with the same prompts.

1:35:34They all had the same prompts. That'd be, you know, a summer romance with flip flops, blah, blah, blah, kind of thing. And, you know, I happen to have read the AI one first. I was like, wow, this is good. Is this her? And then the moment I started her story, like within three or four sentences, like, oh, no, this is the novelist. This is the real writer. It's that, you know, by definition, it's flat. By definition, it's the lowest common denominator. But a couple of months ago, I thought you were going to talk about this. the New York Times, Kevin Roos and Stuart Thompson did a quiz. Who's a better writer, AI or humans?

1:36:08And they have passages and they asked people. And more than half of the people, regular people who read them, preferred the AI version and couldn't distinguish between the one or the other. I actually did it. And the only reason I got almost all right, I missed one, was because I had read some of the books. I was going to say, a lot of them you can recognize. I recognize the book. Yeah. Which helped. But the AI writing was pretty good, right, Molly? I mean, did you do this? I did it. I had the same problem that you did, which is that I recognized a lot of the books. But I also definitely, a lot of it read AI to me.

1:36:52Did it? Okay. Yeah. I may be tone deaf when it comes to AI. I may actually not have the detection abilities you guys have. And it's interesting to me how much that varies between people also. I feel like some people have a really good spidey sense for it, and some people cannot tell whatsoever. I like wordplay, and a lot of the AI stuff had kind of bizarro wordplay, which maybe have won me over a little bit. Like, they often do weird similes and things, and I kind of enjoy them, right? I think there might be an age element. I mean, I'm using a universe of one or a pair here. My son and I, when this is 2023, there was some site, and you had a minute to decide, are you talking to a human or are you talking to a machine?

1:37:43I'll confess, I was kind of 50-50. I couldn't tell. But he was, I guess, 12 at the time. And he was getting like 80%, 90 % right. Well, that's encouraging. That's good. And so, I mean, I don't know. I just kind of assume from that that we're talking about, you know, that a young person's better, they're more native, whatever. But, you know, I mean, I don't know. I haven't seen any studies on that. Yeah, I'd be curious to see a study on it, like how much of it is age-related versus, you know, level of technological. Well, I'm older than all of you, and I'm easily fooled. So, I guess that says something.

1:38:21I don't know. Yeah, maybe if you grew up, if you're AI native, you can tell the difference. I don't know. Time for another break. Molly White is here. Citation needed. News subscribe. Now listen to the podcast coming up about citizens United. She's also Molly white.net and you will see the announcement when she updates the, the Bitcoin giving this cryptocurrency giving to all technology giving. I think that'll be a really good site. I'll make sure we plug that. I really appreciate what you do with those websites. That's mollywhite.net. Gary Rivlin also here. Pulitzer Prize winning, not novelist, nonfiction writer.

1:39:02Have you written a novel? I mean, you've written many books. I have never written a novel. My 17-year-old asked me, like, Dad, when are you going to write something interesting, like fiction? I love your stuff. The book you did on Katrina, that's the one you won the Pulitzer for. Incredible. The book Broke USA about debt was just amazing. Oh, thank you. I like your nonfiction, but I feel like, don't they say that everybody's got a novel in their desk drawer? No, I have neither. But I like bourbon, I'm getting the work done. But actually this summer, it's funny you should say this, this summer he decides he wants to be a screenwriter, God help me.

1:39:43Oh, good. And this summer we're going to write together. I mean, write in the same place together. And I'm thinking like maybe this will be the moment when I do a fiction, a work of fiction but to now not then you wouldn't be kind of competing with him in your own turf you'd be kind of on another you know unfamiliar ground it would probably be a good idea i like given he's 17 he's like well dad i'm i'm better at storytelling than you i mean he said that to me this week and i laughed at him god bless him and he's not quiet you know we did on a friday night so there was 4chan had a uh uh 4chan yeah you're fighting bear with me you're definitely starting a little weird okay i understand they call it a creepy pasta you know copy pasta where you pay something it's a creepy pasta some years ago they had a creepy pasta of a of a kind of a empty room yellow walls kind of this liminal space and then there was this guy named kane pixels who turned it into a viral video called back rooms and there were a number of youtube viral videos he created using blender and others about these kind of weird spaces well hollywood said you know we need to we need more kids coming to movies so this guy is 20 years old his uh his motion picture back rooms debuted on friday we went to the opening because he's from our little town here.

1:41:12He was there. My 23-year-old is a big fan, got his picture taken with him. And this is now the fourth fastest, highest grossing first weekend for a horror movie ever. They made it for$10 million. It's grossed more than$30 million already in three days. It's called Back Rooms. It's a 20-year-old director. So Gary, your teenager in three years, maybe writing that novel might have that booker prize in hand so uh i don't know okay i don't know you know it's just it happens we're in a you know this is oh this happened so you're old enough gary i certainly grew up in this because i was a baby boomer it was a youth culture when i was growing up in the 60s and 70s right the youth dominated everything uh and then we continued to dominate it right up to the present and now it's a bunch of 70 and 80 year olds dominating the world i want to get that grip on power you never want to let go you don't want to let go we boomers we love it i'm wondering though we're gonna all die soon maybe the swing back to youth is starting to happen i i think this might be people like me who are stuck in the middle are just gonna always i feel bad for you molly i do all right i'm so sorry molly we ruined it for you We boomers really ruined it for everybody.

1:42:31And I apologize on behalf of my cohort. We're going to take a break. Come back with more. Sam is also here. I want to ask you about the Luce Johnny Ives Ferrari, which apparently is getting some bad reviews. Have you driven it? No, nobody outside of Ferrari has driven it yet. Although probably some of their best customers have had a chance to sample it. How much is it? uh six hundred and forty thousand dollars okay well it won't be me driving it that's for sure but i i do have a novel in my drawer but i've i haven't i didn't write it so did you burp it in your drawer i was visiting a friend um uh named jeff jeff atwood uh the other day and uh on his kitchen counter he had what looked a lot like uh infinite jest you know the book the long book everybody pretends to have read uh and i said oh who's reading infinite jest and they said no no no look closely it wasn't infinite jest it was infinite jeffs somebody as a joke and you can buy it on amazon by the way uh has made a book that looks just like infinite jest but the text of it the blurbs the front cover the back cover all it is is jeff jeff jeff jeff jeff jeff jeff i could never do this right this is brilliant you can buy it for 25 bucks on amazon uh if you know somebody named jeff this would make a great gift that's all i can say are you saying if you open it up the only thing you see is the word jeff repeated yes you want to read a sample here let's just uh let's just open it up let's just open it away Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, the dedication, Jeff, the first chapter, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.

1:44:23It is like 800 pages of the word Jeff. And by the way, I don't even know anyone named Jeff, but I kind of want to copy that. You want to know somebody named Jeff now. By the way, it says on the Amazon excerpt, copyrighted material. so don't steal this written by written by if somebody wants to write you know molly i don't know uh molly jones diary i don't know you could uh you could do that the back cover is great here's the blurbs they're all by jeff and apparently it was written by a cat named jeff so uh now you don't have to buy it because you've read it i hope ai ingest this i'd like to see what AI does with this.

1:45:10All right. We'll have, that's the novel in my drawer and no, there's no bourbon next to that either. Unfortunately, our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. I think it's become pretty apparent in business. The potential rewards of AI are, you know, too great to ignore, but then so are the risks. Loss of sensitive data is a big risk people don't even think about attacks against enterprise managed ai and then of course generative ai helps the bad guys too it increases the opportunities for threat actors helping them to rapidly create phishing lures that are indistinguishable from the real thing i get bit all the time now that's that's real right no they're also using it to write malicious code we're talking about this on security now they're using it to speed up data extraction once they get into your system.

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1:48:48These are illustrations, not actual photos, but illustrations created by Bloomberg showing the revamped Siri interface, a new chatbot-style app, and other major changes that Apple will announce a week from Monday. Gurman writes, the images are based on information viewed by Bloomberg and people with knowledge of the company's plans who asked not to be identified because the software isn't yet public and of course apple declined to comment but i think one thing that we know for sure is that ai will take front and center at uh at the keynote at wwdc and on the new iphones and suddenly uh for a lot of people maybe your mom molly who aren't really used to using ai it will be on their phone it will be a big presence and i think that is going to be a see change, I expect in how people feel about AI and maybe help its acceptance a little bit.

1:49:41What do you, Molly, you think your mom will, does she use an iPhone? I believe so. Yes. But I mean, I would say that AI is already kind of ubiquitous, right? Like if you use Gmail, it's trying to summarize your emails. If you search something that's coming up, you know, I don't know how much it will change to have one more, you know, insertion of AI into to your everyday life, but. Yeah, the only reason I'd say it might be different is because Apple is notorious for being good at productizing this stuff in a way that is not as offensive. Look at what Google and Microsoft have done is become offensive to people.

1:50:16Right. That's why your mom's using DuckDuckGo. Yeah. I think Apple maybe has a lighter touch. I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe they all have the same backlash. I feel like people were really annoyed by the attempts to summarize your text messages yeah whatever it was you know that was just always gone very well yeah yeah exactly right they were just bad and they i left them on because they were hysterical they still are hysterical yeah so i have maybe some suspicion i see this all the time i just got it again there were there were there was motion at your front door multiple times yeah your cat yeah probably but it's like that's the summary and if if the first time you see it it's like what and then you realize oh no it's just wrapping up about a bunch of kitty motion wow there aren't were quite a few okay maybe apple wasn't so wrong on that one that cat really wants to come in holy camoly okay somebody's gonna have to answer dancing in front of your friend i don't know what's going on all right you know what apple got it right there were multiple.

1:51:23I'm scrolling through page after page. If anything, Apple downplayed it a little bit. So, I mean, to your non-cat point here, Leo, it's, I mean, I do think that these huge companies with, you know, billion plus platforms, you know, or platforms with a billion plus people on it. We talked about Meta before, we talked about Google before, and I think Apple falls in the same category. Yes, we might resent it. Yes, we're a bunch of tech reporters. So we in particular are resenting it. But I just have to think if it's there in front, people are going to use it. And I think Apple, you know, the story on Apple is they've just been fumbling it every bit of the way.

1:52:06They were absent in 2023, 24, 25. Now in 2026, they're yet again going to unveil their, you know, AI strategy. And, you know, I'm dubious of that. I'm sure they're going to be using other models and they're going to use gemini they're going to use google's model well they're google's paying for them to use gemini and just you you can opt for others you can you know if you choose you can have chat gpt whatever underneath it but my point is by just having it in a box right there i i do think it becomes more ubiquitous in the sense that more and more people are using it yes molly ai is everywhere we talk about we can't help but think about it but that doesn't mean you know everyone's using it i just think apple is another big step in a larger portion of the planet using ai because it's right there yep uh that's kind of hard to avoid it have they given up on siri because if people still use siri siri is going to presumably suddenly be smart and useful yeah alexa and siri you know it's funny like so basically those you know amazon and Apple were, well, most everyone on AI, right?

1:53:16I mean, you know, that's what that is. And I just assume like, oh, okay, well, you know, that's more rules-based. It's not, you know, machine learning, but they'll make the shift. And it's a lot harder to do than you would think to give it intelligence. I mean, you might as well, like, you know, we've seen this with technology a lot, that, you know, kind of bolting something on something else is never as good as something that's, you know, built from scratch. And I just think that's Siri's problem and that's, you know, Alexa's problem. Supposedly, Amazon has taken that on and finally they have a better product.

1:53:50I don't use either of those, so I have no idea. But it's taken a lot longer than I would have thought to make the jump from, you know, kind of the old-fashioned, you know, okay, here are the responses to this question, as opposed to the conversational aspect that we're all used to now with chat. But well, and I'm an Android user and Gemini is far less functional now than Google Assistant was before. There are so many things I, you know, the things I used to use Google Assistant for Gemini does not work. Like, for example, you know, I, you know, I have a garage door opener that is was, you know, was compatible with Google.

1:54:33I used to be able to open that from the car using Google Assistant. That does not work with Gemini. We have some LED leg strips around the house. That's a notable failure for Google. You know, automations that do not work with Assistant. Yeah. And so there's a bunch of functionality that just isn't there. And this is one of the things that really annoys me about Google is that they'll take stuff that was working reasonably well. and they say, no, we're going to replace this with something else. And you lose half the functionality or more from that thing. And it takes them years to get it back to where it was.

1:55:12You know, they did this with Google Play Music when they went to YouTube Music. And, you know, they did it with Assistant going to Gemini. And they've done it with lots of things over the years. And it's very, very annoying. I think as somebody who's spent a lot of time building an agent, you know, this was going to be the year of the agent started with open claw right molt bot slash claw bot slash open claw i use a agent tool from a company called noose research called hermes but the idea is it's similar to siri with a big difference it remembers your conversations your prior conversations it knows about you it has some background about what you're looking for what you want uh it can even it can even joke around with you based on it does with me anyway based on what it knows about me uh you know when i when i have uh i you know i record my meals in it i say hey uh i call it quicksilver hey quicksilver i just had a sandwich and a can of coke and it will say things like lots a lot of carbs leo you better you better eat a salad for dinner tonight that experience it's is pretty satisfying if siri can become more of a personal assistant i think that there's and and of course yes sam it'll also have to be able to open your garage door or or it's just a dumb bot but if it can be more functional and be more personal isn't that a big step toward what people want from ai or is that just me no the personal assistant is the holy grail for a lot of company is the ai agent that you know i mean 2025 was the year of the ai agent and that didn't work so now it's 2026 the year of the ai agent and you know this stuff is hard it finally is starting to have a pretty good memory um i've had to put a lot of work into it i mean it doesn't happen automatically that's for sure so and that's my point like you know it's just i think 2027 and 2028 are going to be the year of the ai agent because you know i mean humans are resistant to change this stuff is complicated the technology isn't quite there yet there's a whole list of reasons.

1:57:21And, you know, just to get a little bit, you know, nerdy for a sec, like, you know, the history of AI was, you know, rules-based. We'll just kind of through sheer muscle, just like give every alternative and like, you know. Expert systems. Expert systems. Millions and millions of lines of code that was rejected. No machine learning. Just let it learn in the fashion of a human. Just give it a bunch of, you know, data, whether it's, you know, books, movies, whatever kind of thing. But I really think the answer is it's not an either or. You know, I think the next step is going to be something of a hybrid because like, yes, it's brilliant.

1:57:53It could, you know, tell you, you have a conversation with you, but can it open my garage door? And so like, you know, one version, one approach is really good at a set of things. The other approach is good to a different set of things. And, you know, I'm kind of thinking that, you know, even though rules-based expert systems were rejected, I do think they're going to be in our future again for exactly what Sam is talking about. Maybe I'm just, you know, getting old and cranky, but you know, I don't, I don't need the assistant to be funny with me. I don't need it to be joking with me. That's pretty much what Alexa plus is.

1:58:25I just need it to do exactly what I ask it to do. Alexa plus, basically there's a sassy mode, which we turned on and all anybody ever uses Alexa for is, you know, set a timer for asparagus and Alexa plus will say, oh, that's going to be some crunchy experience or dinner sounds great when can i come over and it's no smarter it's just sassier yeah i mean i don't i want it smart not i don't care if it's i don't care if it's sassy if it's dumb no it's that's not helpful it isn't i'm also maybe i'm old school for this but i hate talking to computers like speaking to computers and i don't know if i'm ever going to get over that You don't have carpal tunnel syndrome, obviously.

1:59:11No. Yeah. No. Yeah, I think you're in the minority on that, Molly. I think people, you know, once, when it was in mid-2024, you couldn't speak to ChachiBT. I think that was kind of a big breakthrough for them. I mean, that's kind of the Star Trek vision. We just talk to the machine. Yeah, exactly. And it talks back. Do you do either? I don't think I assume neither of you work in an office with other people. I don't either. I work. I've worked remotely for a dozen years. But when I worked in an office with other people and increasingly people are being called back to office full time. Right. You don't want to be talking to your computer in an office that that is just not a good thing.

1:59:55That's a terrible experience. You say that, Sam, and I 100 % relate to what you're saying. But the big thing now, is it Whisperflow? I got it going right here. Look at this. This is on my Mac. As we're speaking, it has been transcribing everything that you've been saying. And so what's going on is the fellow who made Claude Code spoke about this. Forrest Churney, yeah. Yeah, you got it. you know, instead of typing into a box where we're kind of, you know, kind of thinking about it, going back, trying to perfect it, you know, he found that using WhisperFlow and just speaking the way humans speak, the machine gets so much more out of it.

2:00:37And so I saw this picture, some, you know, article where they showed a room full of computer coders, all of them whispering to whisper. And, you know, I think, and like, exactly. It's like, like the movie 1984, like the dystopian thing. But I actually had the vision, Sam. I think that in some Silicon Valley places now, given that this genius fellow, you know, has said it, that now everyone's going to be talking to their machines aloud. I am so glad that I'm old enough that I'm probably never going to have another office job. Sam. But I went to a conference, actually, where there's this basically kid, I think, I mean, I think he was in college, but barely, who had created some sort of device that was exactly for that purpose and it was the idea was that you didn't actually need to really vocalize you just sort of mouthed i think oh i saw that video that looked so dopey i don't know if it's the same guy or not but it was an interesting idea at least which is that you know maybe we wouldn't is it lip reading or sub vocalization it was a no it's yeah it sort of attaches back here and yeah sort of a reverse bone conduction yeah yeah kind of there i mean people are doing that there's a company that that's has a chip that you wear in a hat that uh is reading your brain waves they're not good enough yet but i imagine at some point machine learning will get good enough so that it can turn those brain waves into into letters and words uh i won't even have to type i can just think it you just think it.

2:02:07Well, there's a friend of mine, he's in a startup now called Numo, that they're developing a system that goes into the headrest of the car that measures the EEG waves to help detect when you're distracted or drowsy and detects a bunch of things about the driver. Instead of watching your eyes. Yeah. Well, and it works in conjunction with that. So it gives you more information on what you get from just looking at you know where you're looking but it's actually brilliant yeah because i i get sleeping always enough getting used as surveillance which is what freaks me out yeah your insurance is going to go up if your beta waves are too prominent right exactly we have to pay more insurance yeah that's a little scary um somebody oh let's take a break and then i'm going to talk about the fake eula in the blockchain i'm sure you saw this story molly it's hysterical uh you're watching that this week in tech with gary rivlin molly white who knows a little bit about crypto uh and sam bus samet who knows a little bit about cars we have crypto and cars coming up just a little bit as we continue our show today brought to you by zip recruiter isn't it great when you find somebody uh who's qualified for the role you're hiring for i can tell you that is a special time and then you can also tell how genuinely interested they are in the position, oh man, that's heaven, that's gold.

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2:04:15Candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Find candidates who really want your job on ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. meet your match on zip recruiter we thank him so much for supporting uh this week in tech zip recruiter.com slash twit so this happened yesterday may 30th 1529 utc somebody wrote a fake eula into the blockchain the eula read by downloading this op return i'll have to ask molly what an op return is you hereby consent to unrestricted access by federal law enforcement agencies to your residents digital devices and personal properties assets may be searched seized or redistributed without further notice signed donald j trump president of the internet so what first of all what's an op return um so the op return is basically this uh location where you can store arbitrary data in a Bitcoin transaction.

2:05:34Okay. And you can't help but download it, right? Because when you're using blockchain, you download a copy of the blockchain. Right. Yeah. So all the transaction data is in there. I mean, there's definitely like ways that people will prune out a lot of excess data, but yeah, for the most part, everyone downloads. Yeah. When I use my wallet, the first time I use it on a machine, it downloads. I mean, what is it now? It's a hundred giga it's a huge amount 100 gigabytes or something of the of the entire blockchain literally downloads every you have to validate it from the beginning every single transaction since satoshi nakamoto pushed the start button to now now then you can prune it after that you can prune it and it gets much smaller but that's a lot to download including this eula uh six blocks later which means almost instantly uh they posted i revoked my previous statement signed donald j trump president of the internet uh but here's the thing nothing ever dies in the blockchain block 951 728 and block 951 734 will live for all eternity yep along with every other block that people inscribe there's a lot of other crap there's a whole bunch of stuff uploaded the constitution the other day really cost him like 80 bucks to do it let's see that'll be a nice historical uh record there is i've told the records of it you know everybody actually that was the funniest thing is i read what i think was basically like an ai generated crypto slot media article and it was like finally people can read the constitution on the blockchain and i was like how many people have been trying to do that but there is other less uh salubrious stuff on there's there's csam on the blockchain yeah well and there has been a long running maybe not long running but for a couple years there's been an ongoing fight within the bitcoin core developer community about whether or not they should um basically limit the opportunity because it used to be that there was a very small cap on how much data you could put into the opportune field and then they lifted the cap.

2:07:42And so now there's, you can put really long stuff in there. It was limited to 83 bytes. Right. Yeah, exactly. It was tiny. And, um, and so now people are making like Bitcoin NFTs basically, cause you can store so much data than you previously could. And one of the core developers is like really concerned about the possibility of Bitcoin becoming a CSAM haven because there's no way to erase it. And, um, but yeah, there's this huge debate within the bitcoin community around whether or not they should cap it whether they should fork bitcoin so that you know there could be a version of it that doesn't have the cap it's it's a mess wow um so just one more wonderful little feature of bitcoin um well in many cryptocurrencies i mean a lot of you know especially it's blockchain that's how blockchain works any any uh blockchain that has arbitrary data, which is most of them, has this same issue.

2:08:42The whole premise of blockchain is it's a decentralized, unforgeable ledger. Immutable. Immutable ledger. And so that's kind of in the nature of it. It does become a little bit unmanageable when you get to hundreds of gigabytes. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure how much Satoshi Nakamoto was thinking on century scale when he designed. Does it bog down because it's so big? No, it doesn't slow it down. I mean, it was slow to begin with, but for different reasons. Right. The proof of work is slow all by itself. Intentionally slow. So the question I have is, so Trump comes in, he's pro-crypto, the policies are going to buy Bitcoin, whatever, for the reserves.

2:09:29I would have figured that for a four-year period, you know, the price of Bitcoin, any cryptocurrency would go up. And it did for, you know, whatever, a few months. And then it just plummeted. Like, why? I mean, the administration is so favorable. Its policies are so favorable. They've backed it. They're legitimizing it. Presumably, they're buying up a bunch for, you know, our reserve. Why would it have fallen down like the way it did? I'm curious what you think. Well, for one, they're not buying it for the reserves. So there isn't that initial demand. They haven't been able to, they would need to pass a law to actually authorize spending to purchase Bitcoin for the reserve.

2:10:09What's in the reserve right now is just confiscated by law enforcement. Right. Yeah. So there's no basically purchasing of Bitcoin going on. But yeah, I mean, I think you're right. Like there was the Trump pump where, you know, it broke a new all time high shortly after Trump's inauguration and, you know, it was doing well for a while. But ultimately, you know, Bitcoin and other crypto assets are high risk, volatile assets. And we've seen so much macroeconomic instability coming largely from the Trump administration that people don't want to hold Bitcoin when they think that, you know, there's going to be huge tariffs or when there's a war with Iran or, you know, whatever it might be.

2:10:51And you see people following those same behaviors, which is that if they're worried about, you know, the economy in general, They don't want to be holding Bitcoin. They want to be holding dollars or gold or whatever it might be. And, you know, there's that effect on the Bitcoin price. But I think also people have a concern that, and especially increasing now, that Trump is essentially damaging crypto. Oh, interesting. Because his, you know, now so many people think crypto, they think, oh, that's that grift that the president of the United States is all tied up with. um and i think ransomware is also harming the well certainly yeah i mean and it always has been right that's not new ransomware was basically empowered by crypto yeah before yeah i mean literally cryptocurrency you had to buy cards at 7-eleven to pay off your ransomware yeah i mean it's a rounding error of ransomware that doesn't use cryptocurrencies right it's a use case for crypto to me at its peak bitcoin was 125 000 it's off 40 off its peak is now 73 000 uh dollars so it's it is do you think so and there were people like the winklevoss twins who said oh it's going to reach a million they still say that yeah well yeah because they have quite a bit of it that's the thing is the people who say that tend to have sort of a vested interest in it doing that they're hoping it hits a million yeah uh on the other hand if you if you bought it when it was a buck or 10 bucks or a thousand bucks, you're still way ahead.

2:12:23Like the Winklevoss wins. Like the Winklevoss. Yeah. The problem I always had with it is unlike almost any other investment, it's not tied to performance of anything. It's it's the only the value is tied to perception, nothing else. I would say that's not unlike everything else. I mean, if you have any fiat currency. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wait a minute. for fiat currency because you have the weight of the United States military. I guess you're right. The dollar is worth only what people say it's worth. I guess you're right. But if you buy a share of Apple, it's to some degree tied to Apple's performance.

2:13:00Only to the degree that investors think it is. Yeah. Like what about GameStop or Bed Bath & Beyond or Tesla? Yeah. I mean, I would say that, you know, increasingly we're getting more and more financial instruments that are just, they're literally purely speculative, whether it's a meme coin, a more traditional type of cryptocurrency, a stock. I tricked y 'all because I've been arguing this for years and everybody yells at me when I say it, that stocks are just as imaginary as anything else. So I tricked you into agreeing with me. Thank you very much. Not that I can, you know, briefly I thought I better get out of the stock market because this is it.

2:13:42I have to live on this for the rest of my life. That's my retirement savings. And I thought, well, what if I just have cash? Because then I know how much I'll have. But then inflation started to whittle it away. And then I looked at the stock market, and unaccountably, it's been going up. And I thought, well, I guess I'm making a mistake. Even if it's imaginary, you kind of have to play the game. Yeah, I'm with you. I, you know, the same set of reasons that Molly gave for why Bitcoin, uh, crypto, uh, has not, you know, just soared, you know, uh, tariffs, wars, instability, all that kind of stuff.

2:14:20And yet we just set another record, I believe for the stock market. Yeah. Uh, so I wanted to ask you about this also, Molly, hundreds of prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike. What happened? Yeah. Yeah. So because I should give you the audience, the information that you are one of those prolific Wikipedia editors since you were a teenager. You've been editing Wikipedia. Yes. Although I'm doing a great job to go on strike. But that's largely because you're not one of the I haven't been doing it anyway. OK. You're not one of the people threatening to strike. Not at the current moment.

2:14:59But yeah, so I think basically what happened is there's something called the community wish list, which is a way for community members to basically request software features from the Wikimedia Foundation. And as a little bit of backstory, the community members are the people who edit the encyclopedia, write the content, all that kind of thing. Volunteers for the most part, right? Yes, correct. The Wikimedia Foundation is a foundation that employs software engineers and many other types of employees. And they, among other things, develop the MediaWiki software that Wikipedia and other wikis like it run on.

2:15:38And so the community wish list was a way for community members to request that the software engineers at the foundation prioritize various features that the community felt were important. And those engineers are paid staff. Correct. They're staff members, yes. There are volunteer community developers, but that's a whole other can of worms and not particularly pertinent to this. And so what happened recently was that the Wikimedia Foundation announced that they would be changing the way that they handle the community wish list, and instead of having a team that was largely devoted to that task, they would instead sort of spread the work among the foundation's existing software engineers working on various other projects.

2:16:22And in doing so, they would also lay off a number of the engineers who were on that team. Suman, who was writing about this, the deputy chief product and technology officer at Wikimedia Foundation, said it's a bottleneck to have this centralized team. That was what, yeah, they were sort of portraying it as, you know, this isn't working very well. We want, we hear feedback from the community that there's not enough priority going to this wish list. And so we're changing how it works because we think it's going to work better for you. But the community really took it more as we're getting rid of the people who do the wishlist stuff and all these other engineers who have their own list of tasks that they're trying to do already are not going to prioritize the community wishlist tasks.

2:17:00And so it's going to only make the problem worse. And then there was the added fact that some people at least are there has been an effort among Wikimedia Foundation employees to unionize. And there are some of the people who were laid off were active in the unionization efforts. And so there's been allegations, at least, that the layoffs were more to do with union busting than to do with any particular community wish list material. And so that's where a lot of the anger is coming from, is not just the fact that they feel like the wish list is being deprioritized, but they feel that the Wikimedia Foundation was also punishing people who are trying to unionize.

2:17:40The foundation has responded, Selina Duckelman, who's the CPTO of the foundation, has responded and thanked people for the conversations. Do you feel like, I don't know if you've followed this closely, maybe this is something you haven't been following, but was her response sufficient, you think? No, it wasn't sufficient. Certainly not to the people in the community. And I mean, I think one bit of background that's a little challenging for people who are not heavily involved with the Wikimedia projects is that there is a long-running issue between the Wikimedia community, the volunteers, and the foundation.

2:18:17That has been a very strained relationship for decades. It's, I mean, almost an adversarial relationship. And it's one that I think the Wikimedia Foundation is working to improve. But incidents like this happen fairly often where the community feels like they're not being heard, like they're being deprioritized. and you know in this case I think people from the Wikimedia Foundation made comments along the lines of like this is us listening to you we're trying to do and you know the community is saying we didn't ask for this we didn't want you to lay off these people you know this is the opposite of what we want um and so I think it was a miss there I mean I'm actually on a group or I'm a member of a group that is specifically supposed to be improving um communication between uh sort of the technical staff at the Wikimedia Foundation and the community.

2:19:08And we were barely consulted and sort of not brought into the loop. So I think it was just a really bad situation all around. And another in a long list of examples where the Wikimedia Foundation has not handled well its relationship with the community of volunteers that it relies upon to continue existing. This is historic tension. I mean, you've seen it again and again in so many areas. Do you think the Wikimedia Foundation is not a good steward of Wikipedia? No, I actually think the Wikimedia Foundation is a good steward. But I think that it is unfortunately prone to stepping on rakes when it comes to its relationship with the community.

2:19:53I mean, despite having been the steward of Wikimedia for so long, it seems to have a very poor understanding of the Wikimedia community and how to interact with that community. And to give, I mean, to be fair, the community is very challenging and I've been on the opposite side of it before as well. But, you know, this is, I think it's just frustrating to see things like this happening over and over and over again. And I should add that some of the people who are laid off were, they started as community members. They were community developers. They had some of the best context available as far as developing some of the features on the wishlist.

2:20:30And so to see them removed and then have that painted as this is us prioritizing the wish list. We're trying to make things better for all of you. Like you asked, you know, I think it, it felt like a slap in the face. They did say that, uh, all six are currently still employed and that they've been trying to place them elsewhere in the organization and three people have been offered jobs. So maybe there will be a happy, uh, outcome. Well, we'll see. I mean, I think, I think there's a lot of hope that, you know, the community wishlist will continue to be maintained. I have my doubts that the strategy of trying to just have every engineer try to remember to work on it once in a while is actually going to, you know, cause it to be prioritized, but we'll see.

2:21:15It's good to have a dedicated team. I agree. Yeah. Well, good. Well, thank you. I mean, I donate to Wikimedia every month. I feel like the Wikipedia is such a huge, valuable thing. I'm really grateful to volunteers like you, Molly, who worked so hard to keep it useful. And even in this age of AI and disinformation and truthiness, it remains still an amazing, useful tool and full of facts. And in fact, frankly, most AI would not be as good without Wikipedia. I know Google wouldn't be as good without Wikipedia. I don't think any of them would. It's a core part of the training said. And I think that's a big portion of why the conversation around a strike among editors is somewhat controversial, because ultimately editors, you know, the top priority is to provide high quality information.

2:22:10And so doing something that would stop that is, you know, even if editors think it would potentially further their aims, you know, it doesn't feel good to do that. And And it's why things like blacking out Wikipedia, like we did, I think, a decade ago for the SOPA. Yeah. That was enormously controversial. And, you know, this type of a thing is as well. We blacked out Twitter as well. In fact, we did all our shows in black and white that day for the SOPA. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I hope things continue. you.

2:22:50Does Wikipedia, does Wikimedia, do you know, get any support from these frontier AI companies? I mean, yes. Oh, good. Yeah. So there is. They should be donating like crazy. Yeah. There is basically a model called Wikimedia Enterprise where AI companies pay for, they don't pay. It's not that they're paying for the data. They sort of pay for the highway. So So it's, you know, sort of a high. Yeah, it's a high speed sort of API. And it's formatted in such a way that is much easier for these companies to ingest. And they, in turn, you know, pay for the privilege. And so I think it's a fairly good system.

2:23:32It was controversial when it was announced. I remember. Because it was misunderstood. Right. You're doing deals with AI companies. Oh, you know. Yeah. Well, and I think people thought that, you know, that it was, there were some questionably written headlines, I think, around the announcement that almost implied that Wikipedia was incorporating AI content into Wikipedia. Yeah. And so I think people were upset about that. And then, I mean, some people, it was like, oh, you're doing a deal with the devil, which, you know, you can't really. We had Jimmy Wales on right about that time to clarify things on intelligent machines, I remember.

2:24:05Yeah. good because it would be the greatest tragedy ever if anything were to happen to wikipedia it is yeah i mean the big picture here i mean i've been around long enough to see it go from you know a small site into what it is now like i remember literally in the mid 2000s i was at the new york times a memo came out i was sent out to all of us all of the reporters like if you use wikipedia as your source it's a fireable offense wow and you know i mean well because back then the same as the AI regulation today, it's the same rule. And, and, you know, and back then I kind of got it that, you know, there was a lot of revenge.

2:24:42You didn't like someone. So you wrote up the entry and like, I've just been so impressed. Like when I want to get smart about something, it's so good. What a resource. The history, why it works, how it works, that kind of, that kind of stuff. But it really kind of, I guess the shame, I mean, listening to this, I knew nothing about this is that, you know, I feel like in the mid-2000s, I couldn't have told you Wikipedia was going to, in quotes, work or not. Would it be as central as it is now? Neither could we. Yeah, no one knew. And just they did such a great job of bringing in the volunteers and all this.

2:25:18So, yes, this is a sad story. Credit to people like Molly. It is an amazing resource. Buckle down and make sure the content stays good. Well, and credit to journalists like you guys, because that's where the information comes from, among other places. but those volunteers who sit there on the discussion pages and you know who really protect the content i mean god bless them that is uh that is the most important work in the world especially in a world of ai filled with ai slop yep right speaking of slop gary what are you ready now here's the lucha this is ferrari's first ev uh johnny ive and love uh whatever uh what is his love from from weirdest name of a company ever uh designed this thing johnny said oh i love switches which is hysterical because he never seemed to love switches much when he was at apple was it him or was it steve that hated steve hated buttons yeah um people have commented on the design the interior looks pretty sweet i like the interior um yeah exterior maybe not so much the there's another good picture in the discord of the uh of the luce being charged um so uh i think you know the problem the fundamental problem with the johnny always wanted to charge everything from the bottom so that was the fundamental problem with the luce is not necessarily so much the design itself it's just that it's not it doesn't fit as a ferrari it doesn't look it makes no sense as a Ferrari.

2:26:52Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people commented, you know, this would have been a great design for something like, you know, Honda's now canceled zero series EVs. You know, it's also got a lot of resemblance to a Jaguar I-Pace. There's, you know, a lot of things that it looks like, but it doesn't look like what they think a Ferrari should look like. Yeah. And, you know, the executives from Ferrari have been talking this week about it, you know, and, you know, The way they explain it is that we still have all the other traditional Ferraris, the cars that Ferrari lovers expect. But Ferrari owners tend to own multiple cars.

2:27:35They don't just own a Ferrari. They own many different kinds of vehicles. And sometimes they want a sedan like this. you know, I mean, if you look across the industry at premium brands, you know, Porsche really got this kicked off 25-ish years ago when they launched the Cayenne, you know, their first SUV. And the Cayenne, you know, a lot of Porsche fans still dislike the Cayenne. But the fact is the Cayenne has been the best-selling Porsche ever since it launched. And if it wasn't for the Porsche and then subsequently the the macan and and the icon which is well not so much the tycon but the the panamera if it wasn't for those vehicles then porsche probably would not be in business still building 911s today they could not survive just on building sports cars same thing is true with lamborghini they you know they have the urus um rolls royce launched the cullinan a few years ago like just a car for everybody no no but um but you know they they i think they feel like they need or they wanted some other option uh you know and they they were looking for some way to get into the ev business now yeah i am not defending this particular car i still think you know i i don't i don't think it was necessarily a bad idea to do a ferrari stand but this i don't think that this is a good design for a ferrari it could have been for any number of other brands but not as a ferrari so that's that's where the the problem is but i i do like the interior i think the interior's got some really interesting analog clock for one thing yeah and you know the the touchscreen that you know, is on a pivot, you know, so you can pivot it over towards the passenger, you know, if they want to do something on the touchscreen.

2:29:34You've got manual vents, you know, that you can just reach out and grab and redirect the airflow. Unlike the BMW, which has a touchscreen for vents. Yeah. Tesla. Yeah. Yeah. There's obviously been a lot of speculation in the last week that this is actually this originated as the design for the apple car well that's what the question was for me and i'd seen that is that john this is what johnny i've wanted the project titan apple car to look like you think that's true uh i wouldn't be surprised if it would have been similar to this shape um but you know i think the interior was going to be self-driving right yeah well that's that was the goal was to make it you know self-driving to have no have no human controls in it.

2:30:22You know, they, Apple was nowhere close to being able to achieve that. Right. But that's why they killed it. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why they killed it. You know, I think, you know, they, they, they probably realized that they were never going to get the kind of margins on a car that they get with the rest of their business. And, you know, they figured if we can't get 35, 40 % profit margins on the car, you know, and they're, They're certainly not going to be able to sell very many$600 ,000 cars. So if they can't get the profit margins they want, then they killed it. And I think that was probably a wise choice.

2:31:04Apple doesn't need to be in the car business. But Ferrari, I think, could have done something more Ferrari-like and still achieved the overall goals of this particular car. well johnny ive has many jobs one of which is uh for which he got paid 3.2 billion dollars is uh designing a device for open ai we don't know what will be what it will look like or but there's some rumor that it might be out by next year a pendant perhaps um i don't know we'll see yeah that would be my guess you know kind of not glasses seems like the rest of the world's kind of converging on the idea that glasses are going to be the AI interface.

2:31:49But people get creeped out by glasses, especially if it has a camera. They think you're recording. Well, would they be any less creeped out by a pendant that had a camera on it? That's true. If it has a camera, it's kind of the same deal. I did actually see somebody with one of those humane AI pendants on a plane once. Yeah, on an airplane. About a couple of weeks before humane AI went poof. Yeah. it's uh apparently apple's glasses which they're calling are going to call the audio apple audio even though it will they will have cameras i think they don't want anybody to think about the cameras you kind of need cameras because part of this is the ai seeing what you're seeing and informing you about it um it's going to be interesting apple's going to try this i think that's the rumor it's funny i'm more creeped out by the audio it's like really wearing a pen and it's always listening oh recording like yeah yeah i i mean you know do i have to get permission you don't want to hang around with leo then yeah well no i stopped wearing all those people yelled at me i used to wear the b bracelet and the and i i had all the recording devices because that's part of the personal agent thing the ideal personal agent would would hear everything i am hearing see everything i'm seeing digest it absorb it uh and offer it for my consumption uh later or for my queries down the road what were molly white and uh i talking about with wikimedia what was that all about leo don't you remember no that's why i asked the question i'm asking you don't you remember i have no idea leo uh i don't know i'm not sure if this i'm not sure if this is great for marriages or the worst thing like that the reason you said this no i said that yeah no my wife told me not to wear it that's exactly okay okay it was still a lot of arguments but i'm not sure that's a good thing gerald thomkins in our youtube chat says that's because your wife's job is to remind you your personal agent is your wife oh yeah that's right oh boy okay don't touch that one she is not available at all during all conversations all right one more one more break and then a couple of just to wrap it up stories including peter teal evacuating the united states oh boy good riddance oh boy um more to come uh you're watching this week in tech with molly white samable samad and carrie rivlin's great panel great to have all three of you here our show today brought to you by doppel this is uh this is something i take to heart we got bit uh by um uh a phishing email the other day and my my greatest fear uh honestly is not so much the phishing email, but the the vishing email you've heard, you've heard about vishing, right?

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2:37:11That's D-O-P-P-E-L dot com. And Burke, don't buy those gift cards. That wasn't me. That wasn't me saying it. A couple of real quickies before we wrap things up. Peter Thiel, who has invested a lot into companies like Palantir, has decided it's not safe to be in the United States anymore. He has moved to Argentina, according to the New York Times, partly motivated by concerns about the future of the United States and shared beliefs with Argentina's right-wing leader. There he goes into the presidential palace in Argentina. This is so annoying. Thanks for screwing everything up, Peter. and then leaving so didn't he bought this huge compound in new zealand he became a new zealand citizen it was like many hundreds of acres yep and you know i mean i don't know from their government um he has citizenship in new zealand he got that in 2011 he applied for a maltese passport in 2022 basically this is what these rich guys do now they have plan b c and d yeah whenever i see someone accumulating passports i'm like are they trying to flee the country at some point to like a non-extradition country like you see it with the crypto billionaires a lot of the time i'm always like where are you trying to end up the new york times says he's moved his his himself and his family to argentina his children are enrolled in a local school uh the argentine government is offering him permanent residence or even a citizenship he's bought plot properties in not only in the the beverly hills of buenos aires but also in neighboring uruguay he's just covering all his bases you know who else ran off to argentina and uruguay in 1945 yeah right interesting i will say both of those countries do have extradition treaties with the united states so maybe not what's happening yeah i don't i don't think he's fleeing prosecution i think he's fleeing the the economy that he built yeah well the surveillance but he doesn't need to flee when you're that rich it doesn't matter people i know well have you read um douglas rushkoff's uh yes book about that about how like all these billionaires who are ruining the world are themselves building bunkers because they sort of fear what they've created it's we had douglas on to talk about that book it's a great book and it talks about you know the uh the former anti-ballistic missile sites and the ICBM sites that billionaires are building little hidey holes in.

2:39:55Yeah. Under the ballroom. Oh, yeah. The ballroom would make an excellent place to put many, many stories. I mean, it's just wild. Survival of the Richest is the name of that book, by the way. You know, I kind of knew Teal for a while. I wrote a profile. I profiled him in the New York Times Magazine in 2005 before he was such a big deal. I remember we were talking in the 2010s, and he was talking about New Zealand and leaving. Like, you know, we were talking about Trump. And just like, yeah, I don't know how it's going to go, but it's such a broken system. Let's twist the kaleidoscope. It's like, okay, dude, I have kids.

2:40:38I have to earn. I can't just do that. Now I guess he has kids, too, and he's going to run. It doesn't matter. He can afford to do it, right? Well, but the stakes in like the experimentation, I think, are different. When it's just for you, like you just kind of, it almost reminds me of trading places. You know, for a dollar bet, you could screw up all these people's lives kind of thing, because you're immune, you're protected from the consequences. But I guess the news from that is like Peter Thiel has kids. I did not know that. I mean, I would have, you know, no problem with, you know, just loading all these guys on a starship and sending them to Mars.

2:41:15you know they all seem to want to go there anyway so musk will get richer he'll reach his million faster yeah there you go frustrating that they've create this dystopia i will say i did love the part about the pope quote not quoting but sort of alluding to tolkien in his right right where when peter teal names all his companies after lord of the rings volunteer and volunteer just This felt like a little bit of a shady choice. I think the Pope knew exactly what he was doing, is what you're saying. That was not a coincidence. No, absolutely not. I think you're right.

2:41:57Robotaxis are spreading across the U.S., says the Wall Street Journal, and so is the backlash. You've seen this, Sam, I'm sure. Yeah, they're having a few issues. Waymo, as they keep scaling to more and more cities, are encountering more and more problems. Recent weeks, following some storms in the south, you had multiple Waymo robo-taxis driving into floodwaters and getting stuck. With passengers? This is an Atlanta cul-de-sac. For some reason, all these Waymo's have decided to mark up here. Basically repeating what they did in San Francisco. Yeah. Well, there was another neighborhood where there were just strings of them just going around and around this roundabout in a neighborhood.

2:42:46It's like the ant thing where they get stuck in the spiral. Basically, yeah. They're still having some issues with recognizing school buses and responding properly to school buses. That's not good. There was at least one incident in California where one went speeding through a construction zone. So they have paused all highway operations, which they've been doing for a while now. So they've stopped driving on the highway, and they have reduced some of the operations in a variety of cities under various conditions while they try to sort out these problems. But part of the problem here is, you know, over the last eight, nine years or so, Waymo, like everybody else, has transitioned to a more and more AI-based approach for their software stack, which actually makes it much more difficult to diagnose what's going wrong.

2:43:49You know, so they've gotten away from the rules-based system that they started with, and it's much more of a monolithic AI solution. Should we be worried? Morgan Stanley says 30 % of the rideshare industry will be autonomous by 2032. Or is that maybe a little optimistic? Yeah, I mean, well, you know, I mean, it's a big industry, you know, and it's not going to entirely replace the rideshare industry anytime in the foreseeable future. Because the problem is the costs are still high. And unless you get a really high level of utilization, the economics don't really work with these vehicles. So they're currently still losing money then.

2:44:31Oh, yeah. nobody's making money on this and they probably won't be for a number of years, which is why companies like Ford and GM pulled out and said, yeah, we're not going to get into the robo-taxi business. We got too many other fish to fry right now. We don't need to be spending our money on this. So, you know, what you'll see happening in more and more cities is that the robo-taxis will kind of form the baseline, you know, because you have a real fluctuation in demand through the course of the day. It's not constant through the course of a day. So robo-taxis will kind of form the baseline.

2:45:06And then during heavy demand periods, that's when you'll see the human-driven cars coming in to supplement and crank up the supply of vehicles. Here's something for you, Gary. There's a company called Shift that is offering free house cleaning in New York City. train their robots you have free but you have to allow you have to be observed i i am not signing up exactly we record first person cleaning footage to help train the next generation of household robots so for a limited time we cover the cost of professional cleaners they come in they have cameras attached to their head and they record first person video and then you get a spotless apartment we get training data everybody wins says shift uh you know i do it huh yeah i'm not gonna do it i you know almost the same reaction i do to cars it's like you know 35 ,000 40 ,000 americans die every year in cars i think that autonomous vehicles you know could be safer i i'm all for you know what was from the jessons janey or rosie rosie um you know the idea that you know some robots gonna clean up like it just it's gonna cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy the robot that's gonna clean up or to enlist the service so i don't know this seems like a very long play let me let me put it um that way it'll be a long long time before um you know these these bots will be cleaning up um is this like a bipedal robot clean well we don't know because it's a human that comes in with the camera.

2:46:48Right, but do you know what they're training for? Well, it must be bipedal. I think to create bipedal robots. Or to sell the training data to companies that are doing bipedal robots. More likely it's that, Sam. They know that Elon Musk's Optimus robots. I can't remember the name of the company. Joanna Stern did a great video on this one a few months ago where she had one of these robots, one of these bipedal robots in her house. And it turned out that most of what it was doing was being it was being teleoperated. So there was somebody sitting back in Silicon Valley watching the screen. There's a crappy view of the cameras of the robot and teleoperating this thing.

2:47:30And so far, none of these things are the only ones that are even remotely impressive are the Boston Dynamics Atlas and a few of the Chinese robots. The dog robot. yeah well atlas atlas is the bipedal one oh it's spot is the dog oh yeah okay but i have recently come around to robot vacuums and oh yeah i am a convert in that department even even with having a dog in your house oh yeah yeah yeah okay which one do you have he's a little like afraid of it but there's no big deal which one do you use molly do you want to uh it's one of the dream ones I can't remember which model Dreamy maybe yeah my biggest thing like the vacuum I could sort of take or leave but it mops and I hate mopping so much that that has made a huge difference for me I entered Dreamy and I got a picture of Cristiano Ronaldo it's Dream with an E oh no that's still it is him it is them what a weird thing these are the guys that had an event in San Francisco about a month ago and they unveiled this rocket-powered EV that would go zero to 60 in like 0.9 seconds.

2:48:43Hell yeah, can I do that to my vacuum? Crash even faster, ladies and gentlemen. I think we can wrap things up with that dystopian note. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Gary Rivlin, whose house will not be cleaned by volunteers, is the author of a very good book about this, which turned out to be kind of prophetic, AI Valley. You can find more on his website, GaryRivlin.com. When's your podcast? Are you starting a podcast, Gary? No, I'm not starting a podcast. I don't think there's enough for them, though, but I'm not doing my part. No, we need more podcasts. Well, I just look forward to your novel or your son's screenplay, one or the other.

2:49:24One or the other. I'm looking forward to him making $20 million in the first few days. There you go. That's right. That's right. Tell him to find something on fortune. You did it on my environment. in i want points carrie always a pleasure great to see you thank you for joining us i appreciate my pleasure molly white you gotta go there citation needed.news great newsletter and podcast uh if you look at the podcast feed there will be a story about citizens united coming soon it'll be on the newsletter too you can't miss it nice nice and of course uh all of our other sites as well it's always a pleasure molly thank you for the work you do it's it's i think so important appreciate thanks for having me back yeah always a pleasure and my car guy sam abu samad who secretly feeds me car ideas i have an ai go out every week sam and look at everything and try to because i've got to decide what to what to get in the next few months and uh but i think your your recommendations are 10 times better than the ai's so maybe could would you mind if i can incorporate your brain into it absolutely okay i think i will and and um uh i would like to uh put in a plug uh next starting next sunday my friends and i will be doing another operation frodo uh event what's that this is uh throwing a ring into a volcano no no no no rings no volcanoes this is uh dog rescue um so we've been doing this um every december now for the last four years and we transport rescue dogs from Nebraska to the Pacific Northwest.

2:51:03So it's all people in automotive media. And so we borrow vehicles from automaker press fleets. We get donations to cover the costs. And so we will be leaving one week from today. Next Sunday morning, June 7th, we'll be leaving Omaha, driving to Cheyenne, and then on to Salt Lake City, Ontario, Oregon, and finishing up in Portland with about 12 or 13 dogs this time. So far, we've transported 88 dogs over the last four years. And this time is going to be a little different because we're doing it all with a fleet of electric vehicles. Oh, cool. So we've got a Cadillac Escalade IQ, a Lucid Gravity, a Hyundai Ioniq 9, and a Kia EV9.

2:51:50And are the car makers providing those vehicles? Yeah, they're loaning us the vehicles. EVgo is sponsoring. They're providing us with free charging at Pilot Flying J travel centers, which there's a whole string of them all the way along I-80. And I mean, there's actually a lot more DC fast charging stations popping up this year. even with the federal government trying to pull back and kill this stuff. There was 1 ,000 new DC fast charging stations that launched in the first quarter of this year. So I will be driving that Cadillac from here, from my home, out to Omaha starting on Friday afternoon.

2:52:33So we'll be going about 2 ,700 miles to transport these dogs. Where can we learn more about this year? This is last year's Operation Frodo. Yeah, so this is the main site, Animal Rescue Rigs. Okay. And you'll find stuff on here, and you'll find stuff on social media from all of the participants. So just look around on Instagram and Blue Sky and elsewhere. Some people will be posting on Facebook. and the longer term goal, we're raising a fund to purchase and equip vehicles to put with shelters and rescue organizations around the country so that they can transport animals whenever they need to rather than just waiting on us to do it a couple of times a year.

2:53:24Yeah. And so, you know, you can, there's a donate button on the site on Animal Rescue Rigs. You can make donations there as we build up this fund. uh and continue uh rescuing dogs that is that is so great and you can also you can yeah you can also donate to uh some of the specific uh uh rescue organizations that we work with and thanks to the car makers for doing this that is yeah we've had a whole bunch of automakers that have that have supported us over the last four years cool uh subaru has always been a big supporter of uh yes because everybody who has a subaru has a dog i've noticed that but yeah toyota's toyota's a big supporter.

2:54:01Hyundai and Kia are really big supporters. They've helped us out on pretty much every one of these drives. That's really cool. And this is the first time with GM and with Lucid participating. What are you going to be driving? I'll be driving the Escalade up to Omaha. But then once we get to Omaha, over the four days of the trip, we'll be rotating through all four vehicles that we've got. So I'll spend some more time in the Escalade. Is it all Beagles? I see a lot of beagles yeah so the the organization in omaha is the bassett and beagle rescue of uh of the heartland uh so it's mostly beagles uh or beagle mixes and the reason why why why there's a lot of beagles um nick miles who started this whole thing uh four and a half years ago um one of his dogs a beagle died and he got connected with uh bassett and beagle rescue of the heartland and he wanted to adopt one of their dogs.

2:54:59And he found out that there was a real surplus of beagles, especially in the fall in the Midwest, because what happens is hunters, at the end of hunting season, the dogs that aren't doing the trick for them, they will just abandon them or shoot them. And then puppy mills that were, you know, if they don't sell the pups by the time they're about four months old, they want to get rid of them. so there's a surplus of them in that part of the country. But they need them in Washington State. There's a demand for them in the Pacific Northwest, people. There's not very many of them that you can find, so we work with organizations.

2:55:36Drop one off in Petaluma on your way, would you? Because I love beagles. I would love a beagle. Yeah. We can probably make that happen. They've got really good ears. There's a remarkable sort of dog distribution system throughout the United States. They do the same thing from the south to the north. yeah i mean with with so much you know with so much of the bad stuff that we like what we've talked about today something it feels so good to do something positive you know and we all get we get really attached to these dogs after four days i bet you do but uh robbie robbie baldwin's going to be with us he's going to be one of our drivers this time wheel bearings your podcast yeah so so uh watch out for yes watch out for operation frodo on social media next week uh Clyde my friend Paul uh adopted Clyde in December he he fell in love with Clyde Clyde's adorable and uh Clyde is a he's a beagle and border collie mix oh boy that's an interesting mix yeah he's he's a sweetie that's an interesting mix oh look at these sweeties I love that well have fun on your drive that is really really yeah I'm looking forward to it It should be great.

2:56:47And we'll be writing stories about the trip. And I'll be doing a story for greencars.com on road tripping across the country with EVs. So there'll be lots of interesting stories coming out of this over the next few weeks. It's a great beagle migration. Yeah. Thank you, Sam at Bull Samet. And of course, wheelbearings.media is this podcast. Thanks to all three of you. Really great show. Really appreciate it. We do Twitter every Sunday afternoon. And, you know, I love doing this because I get to talk to smart people about what's going on in the world. I hope you enjoy the show. You can watch us do it live if you want from 2 to 5 p.m.

2:57:24Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern or 2100 UTC. If you're in the club, of course, club members get to watch special access behind the velvet rope in our Club Twit Discord. But we also stream it on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. You can watch and chat with us from 2 to 5 Pacific. every Sunday. After the fact, you can download the show. We have audio and video available at our website, twit.tv. There is a YouTube channel dedicated to This Week in Tech. Great way to share clips. And of course, the best way to get any of the shows on the Twit network is to subscribe. Just find your favorite podcast client.

2:58:01We're in all of them. And search for Twit. Pick the shows you want. Get them automatically as soon as we're done. And if you like the show, leave us a good review because that helps spread the word. We've been doing this for a long time. And I thank everybody uh for your support over these 21 years a special thanks to our club members who really make this possible they they uh they cover the costs advertising helps but it's the club members that that get us to the uh to pay everybody who's you know working on the staff people like benito and uh and kevin king will be editing the show we appreciate your support twitter tv slash club twitter if you're not a member you'd like to know more thanks for joining us we'll see you next time And as I've been saying for 21 years, smile for the camera.

2:58:46Another twit is in the can. Take a picture of them. Right there. That one. Got it. This is amazing.

2:58:56Doing the twit. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit.