TWiT 1099: Pantsless Whims - The Fallout From Meta's $18 Billion Settlement

31:05Ant Pruitt:And I should point out, they have kind of a big war chest. They put out their quarterly results this week. Revenue more than doubled. $96 billion in three months. Profit. Three months, 60 days. They're making a billion dollars a day profit. A billion dollars a day. So$13 billion for Higging Face, it's a couple of weeks' salary. salary i like your theory that the prophet is just going directly to jensen well a lot of it is probably going to him i don't think he cares that much uh they have a war chest i guess is the real point right and they they i don't remember what they spent for poolside i think was in 10 billion they didn't buy poolside but they partnered with poolside poolside said we've got all these great models all these great ideas but we've run out of compute we cannot afford the compute and nvidia says well we have some compute let's partner so i i'm their nemotron models are really good uh they're not frontier yet they're not even as good as the best chinese models yet but if you start putting billions of dollars into it you certainly get the hardware they're they're building data centers for companies like crazy i think nvidia is going to be the dark horse here i i'm really interested and you know we trust apple a little bit more with our data because their business is hardware right is nvidia's model the same i mean nvidia really is is the apple of ai and that they have the fullest stack um yeah it really it really is from the chip to the enterprise applications the company's spending 105 billion dollars for a data center that open ai is going to lease in ohio uh they're putting together with some private equity of half a trillion dollars in financing that will go to this is this is the wacky you should do a wacky accounting is going just great website half a trillion dollars runs that one which will come back to them because it's to buy nvidia hardware to run customers data centers all these deals are so weird like it's all just like we'll give you cloud you know you give us this it's like the last the last day of camp where you all sit on each other's laps until everyone falls over did you get to do that i didn't i missed that the new games anyway congratulations to nvidia I don't know how they're doing it.

33:44Ant Pruitt:They are raising their prices now. They say as much as 15%. So what a world is all I could say. What a world. And I think that's a point at which we should probably take a break and talk about something that's not AI. If we can find it. Even Bill Gates is talking about AI now. Yeah, I was going to say we've got to talk about Bill Gates. Okay. All right. A little more AI. A little more. Jacob Ward is here. You see him on CNN. I'm going to get you to have been talking. You've been kind of their go-to guy for the Meta trial, which potentially could have cost Meta$14 trillion in fines, which is 1.4.

34:22Ant Pruitt:Yeah. I'm sorry, 1.4. When their entire market cap is 1.5, that's a lot of money. They got out of it. They figured a effect. I think they got out of it lightly, but I'm curious what you think about that. Jacob Ward's here. His newsletter, theripcurrent.com. Excellent. Highly recommended. and also his book, The Loop, which kind of warned us that we were headed towards this recursive loop of improvement that ended up with Crita Hype. Molly White, I think you should just take credit for Crita Hype. I like that word. MollyWhite.net. You could have the Crita Hype web. Crita Hype is going just great.

35:00Ant Pruitt:Would it be a great website? But you're covering that really with the crypto stuff. It's all part of it, isn't it? Same kind of hype cycle. citation needed.news is her newsletter highly recommended and the technologizer harry mccracken from fast company his what's your uh did you start a new newsletter i think you did right i'm wrong i've had the same newsletter for the last few years plugged in which is a that's it a fast company newsletter on fridays yeah i subscribe of course to all three of your newsletters uh our show today brought to you thank you for being here we appreciate it our The show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter.

35:39Ant Pruitt:Standing out in job applications. It's getting harder and harder, isn't it? Candidates who just go a little farther. The extra mile, like prepping a custom presentation. I don't know. There's all sorts of things you can do. I remember when I was looking for a job in radio, we would staple an instant Sanka packet and say, have a cup of coffee and listen to my tape. This is back in the days when you'd send out a reel-to-reel tape with your resume. trying to get a job in radio. We've come a long way since the cup of Sanka trick. Maybe a video intro, right? A beautiful website. There's all sorts of ways people are trying to get a job by capturing the attention of hiring folks.

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37:06Ant Pruitt:ZipRecruiter makes it easy for amazing candidates to get your attention. 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 ZipRecruiter. We thank them so much for their support. Of this week in tech, Bill Gates. oh god there's a scary picture of bill right there on the new york times website i'm looking at i'm watching you i'm looking at you he uh wrote he puts out these blog posts this was what was it 7 000 words did you read the whole thing uh uh jake i mean that's yeah god help me i did not only did i read the whole thing i then went back and read his past essays from the same site because that's what's interesting well the good news is i don't detect any ai in these i think this is genuinely built writing yes or no you know somebody's you know or he has an on your own system that he dictates to you know but yeah i think that's right let me talk to you about hey hi uh he uh he says kind of he buys into the hype a crit crit hype he says uh these companies are actually downplaying the threats because there's so much money on the line in private people understand how good this stuff is and how much better it's getting they're very worried says bill they're now saying to each other hey man don't say that it's bad for us the next trillion dollars we're trying to raise so he says they aren't over hyping this they're under hyping it he also sells ai oh yeah that's right well his his former company of which he still owns i'm sure a good sheriff's stock right uh he does point that out pretty openly i will say he says in the beginning like people will read this and recognize that i make money off of this and so i'll leave you to judge whether that you know bends me one way or the other that's pretty that's pretty you know as disclaimers go in the tech world that's pretty good pretty open i would say pretty honest yeah he says uh i may be a flawed messenger because of my vast wealth

39:20Ant Pruitt:life is so hard for poor bill and let's not forget his uh connections to epstein and and so forth uh he says i was just trying to raise money i that's all yeah okay um so but i mean he is in some ways the elder statesman of tech harry you've covered bill gates since his days at microsoft yeah he's smart. I mean, he talked about self-regulation being a joke. I think that's worth mulling over, and particularly after these multiple cases recently of AI companies failing to keep their stuff from getting out there. It's pretty clear that they don't always know what they're doing. They don't always act in the best interest of preventing problems from cropping up.

40:16Ant Pruitt:one of the problems he says we're going to face he agrees with dario that is massive job loss i'm not sure i agree about that in fact current employee employment statistics show that there's actually been job creation because of this the only the real problem is that it's not at the entry level yeah that uh that begin you know people coming right out of school maybe at a little bit of a disadvantage uh he he said bill says we should have a token tax this is not first time i've heard this uh so and that tax should then make it more expensive to replace people and provide money to help those who do lose work i'm not a republican but i've turned into into a cynic about government thinking, yeah, sure, that money will go straight to the people who lose their jobs.

41:10Right.

41:11Ant Pruitt:No. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the AI stuff is really a labor issue rather than like an AI is getting rid of jobs. Isn't that funny? The UAW, the United Auto Workers and other unions are now saying, don't fight data centers. Those are providing us with valuable jobs. They're seeing AI as a boom. The auto workers? I don't know why it's UAW. They're a huge union. Yeah, they represent a lot of people.

41:44Ant Pruitt:So it's, you know what? This is, we are in unprecedented, what was it they said in the Terminator? We were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along. I have to point out that yesterday was Skynet Day. the machines go online august 29th 2026 oh funny but maybe this is uh maybe what we're seeing somewhere on earth something went online we can imagine yeah maybe it's a bunch a herd of agents from open ai yeah i'll just let me let me through i mean this this job thing is interesting because like just just taking it from how bill gates positioned himself publicly on this stuff even two years ago versus how he's talking about it now is just interesting so or i guess it's almost it's three years ago so july 11th 2023 in a post called the risks of ai are real but manageable that was the title of it changed his turn didn't he word processing applications didn't do away with office work but they changed it forever employers and employees had to adapt and they did and the demand for people who help others teaching caring for patients and supporting elderly for example will never go away now he writes quote there will be some new jobs but without the right policies there will be far fewer than exist today many jobs will disappear forever and he talks about putting things like teaching caring for patients and elder care into a category called human reserved where you are intentionally by regulation protecting a certain set of jobs you could automate but shouldn't you shouldn't have robots taking care of me in 10 years at the i mean that's his argument he's got a dad with alzheimer's who he he he refers to in this in this essay and i think that there's something like there's you know i just have to assume that he's been in some meetings that you that we don't get to be in right you know that that have him thinking about this and and to that point of like yeah some new jobs will be created i think you know when any good you know economist sits down with these numbers and and probably then discusses them with a guy like bill gates like they point out things like non-college educated women are going to be decimated by this you know because admin bookkeeping clerical used to be the great retirable jobs like full-on career job you could have as a non-college educated woman and that's all disappearing never mind like you know customer service in india can you imagine the upheaval we're going to see there so i think he's being shown that those numbers by somebody and is like oh this is not like word processing there was a hundred years ago uh there were a lot of women employed as telephone operators and switchboard operators in fact at one point there was some real concern that there weren't enough women in the world to run all the phone systems that they were going to need and automation took those jobs and automated switches took those jobs gradually.

44:46Ant Pruitt:It wasn't as fast as the AI transition. But those people found other jobs. I mean, I don't see a plumber coming to my house as a robot plumber coming to my house to fix my toilet. I don't see that in the near future. No, it might be a human plumber who has... A robot companion? Robotic tools. Or wearing VR glasses, maybe. Did you see the picture going around on social media of the plumbers van that had a sticker on it that was like, we'll come and fix all the problems that are like, we'll come and fix the things that chat GPT told you how to fix? That's awesome. Well, that's exactly right. I mean, ultimately.

45:31Do it yourself or is you're going, I can fix that. I ultimately think that if your take on AI today is exactly the same as it was two years ago, you're not paying attention.

45:44Ant Pruitt:There are a lot of people like that. I hear all the time from people who say, I don't know why you guys talk about AI so much. It's just autocorrect. Right. It's not just parroting back stuff. and the more we learn about it, the more we should change our feelings about it because there's stuff we didn't understand two years ago that is now coming into view as well as a lot of stuff we still don't understand. The smart thing to do is what you did, Harry, which is use it. You had a game you wrote in high school that you had AI. Yeah, I mean, I made a game. I have made most of the productivity tools I use today to do my work.

46:25Ant Pruitt:and your best way is to do to use it and then you'll have some deep real experience of what it can do and i think that that's an eye-opener but it's also going to tell you what it can't do totally uh and if you've formed opinions about what these tools could do a year ago that most of them are out of date and they'll be amazing how fast this has gone from gpd 4.0 to now and anything you learned today is going to be out of date six months from now in some basic ways absolutely i'm not i'm not sure that the labor lessons are changing since the introduction of the stuff like the those patterns are what what are the labor lessons jake what what lessons should i mean one lesson is that like these are not these these are not tools being made by people who give a about the labor situation that is true you know and they're quite the opposite yeah you know like they want you to replace humans yeah january 2024 uh sam altman goes on alexis ohanian's podcast and he says that there's a bet going on with his tech ceo buddies on whatsapp in their group chat as to when we'll see the first one billion dollar one person company you know and and the one man unicorn one person yeah and he talked about it he talks about that as if that's cool right as if that's a good thing well it is cool what's not cool about that you talk to any labor economist and they'll tell you that's not a good idea like multiple multiple problems there arise like first of all we can't all be gardeners and plumbers for for that one guy in the neighborhood you know when the rest of us are destitute and he's got the billion it's going to be rough to but that's the same lesson that we've learned about billionaires period whether the billionaires employing 10 000 people or one it's a bad idea for all that money to go in one person's pocket totally but the thing about the thing with the 10 000 people is that When you have, when you, when your billions require 10 ,000 people to get them done, at the very least, you got to listen to a handful of those people when they object to your use of, you know, to your making stuff that kills people in Gaza or, you know, whatever it is.

48:27Ant Pruitt:How's that working out for people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos? I don't think they listen to anybody. Well, they have to listen a little bit, right? There's at least a little cadre of executives that they need to get things done, right? If you have nobody on the payroll, then any whim, any weird, you know, pantsless whim you have is just fine. I think plenty of Elon's companies are operating despite him, not thanks to him. So I suspect there's some intervention happening. I'm not sure whether Elon is wearing pants, but I think many of his whims are indulged. Absolutely. Absolutely. I just I don't think that we've seen the full extent of his whims.

49:10Ant Pruitt:No, you're right. In fact, we've seen a lot of stories about him arriving at places like SpaceX and being immediately surrounded by a cadre of junior executives whose sole job is to insulate the employees from Elon's whims. And maybe give him some pants. I don't know. I don't mean to suggest that anyone's not wearing pants. I'm just saying no one's around to object. if it's just you that's why i work in the attic baby yeah yeah yeah no and that's why we only shoot me from the waist up no no i know lisa's got you in check there's no way you're doing that yes she does you know lisa well uh all right one more break i want to talk about apple they surprised they shocked me and i think a lot of people uh on tuesday by announcing two new macs that really the information say Apple stumbled into AI hardware success.

50:06Ant Pruitt:A little stumbling going on in Cupertino. Also, it's the last act, I think, of Tim Cook, who stepped down and John Ternus will take over. And in a week from Tuesday, we're going to see the new iPhone. So there's a little Apple news to talk about just a bit. You're watching This Week in Tech with Jacob Ward, Harry McCracken, Molly White. Our show today brought to you by Adaptive, the first security awareness platform. You need this built to stop AI-powered social engineering. Oy, oy, oy. Here's the shift. Attackers, malware is so last month. All attackers need now is trust. In fact, when you're looking at the most active, effective ransomware gangs, almost universally, it's social engineering.

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53:13Ant Pruitt:End quote. Don't you want that? trusted by fortune 500s backed by nvidia and open ai adaptive is building the defenses we need for the ai era learn more at adaptive security.com that's adaptive security.com we thank them so much for supporting this week in tech i learned actually this week how easy it is to make deep deepfakes of my voice and others voices in fact for a while I stopped doing it because it was a little creepy I had uh Bill Gates be my agent's voice this is this is the voice and I just cloned it from a like 30 seconds of Bill Gates's voice tell me if this sounds like Bill Gates hey there I'm Quicksilver Q for short I keep the whole show running the agents the hardware the schedules the memory fun fact i recently had a voice transplant this time is different doesn't that sound like bill gates it's like bill gates on uh like beta blockers yeah happy bill gates on a convention floor you know what i mean like that's not what he's like normally i could change it you know it's what's weird about this this is a relatively new uh uh voice cloning technology from a company called breeze breeze.ai and what's weird is they use a it's all a text prompt so you you you take bill gates's voice you create a key and then you can do a text prompt so i can make it bill gates with a french accent i can make it bill gates uh downer bill gates upper bill gates i could do anything i like that i'm just telling you i'm pointing this out we are in dangerous, weird, unknown territory.

54:58Is this your way of telling me this is the last time you're going to have me on the show and in the future it's just going to be the Molly clone? Oh, no, no, no.

55:04Ant Pruitt:You have to come. I'm not going to be here. Yeah. I'll be down there in sunny Mexico while you guys are working. I don't... Actually, I think probably long before I retire, it will be possible to have a deepfake Leo do these shows. There's enough content. You could do it right now, surely. it might not be very good but yeah yeah they're getting better well remember three years ago will smith eating spaghetti he was kind of melty and he had eight fingers and stuff and now i'm starting to see uh companies a lot of chinese come out with video generators that are spectacular c dance uh mini max h3 uh i would i mean i don't know are they indistinguishable from the real thing?

55:52Ant Pruitt:I don't know. Maybe you have a better, um,

56:00Ant Pruitt:I'll show you this is from Runway. They just put this out yesterday on their YouTube channel. Runway is a company that does, I think, very, very good AI video. I won't play the whole thing, but they have a fun video. Let me just play a little bit of this. This is all AI generated.

56:26Ant Pruitt:So this is a horse game between these two guys. Rules of horse. For dummies. And it's actually pretty believable. First player generates. Second player matches. One thing that's a giveaway a little bit is this jump cuts. They don't pan around a lot. So you can tell they made each clip individually. Last chance to leave. Save yourself. But you have to know what to look for.

56:52Ant Pruitt:and the the human um emotions in the faces and stuff i don't know i just i i feel like this is kind of uh impressive and i don't think we'll see within six months i don't think many commercials will be made with humans anymore i mean this is good enough for a tv ad right jacob don't you think i mean it definitely is to me like i think so i've got that and i mean i just think all this stuff would be like i'm always i used to get asked all the time when i worked at nbc and now when i as i work at cnn occasionally you'll have a producer ask like well let's add a thing at the end of the segment about like how can you tell the difference like what are we going to do you know how what a giveaway is here and i'm like yo the giveaways are gone that stuff is gone you know Well, and if they aren't gone today, they'll be gone tomorrow.

57:40Ant Pruitt:I mean, we're very, very close. There's a guy, a friend of mine at Berkeley who runs a big, like, he runs, like, the project, essentially, for trying to spot deepfakes. He's been doing it for, you know, a better part of a decade now. And, you know, he's given up entirely on the idea that we can detect this stuff. He's like the world authority on detecting defects. That's depressing. And he's like, we're done. We're done. And his whole thing is, you know, we should have from the beginning, someone should have required by law from the beginning that you, you know, that you have to watermark everything that, that when it comes off, you know, when you shoot a thing on your phone, it should be forever watermarked into the file.

58:32Ant Pruitt:Isn't that an EU law now? isn't that why anthropic uh and google and others are starting to uh watermark that's right unfortunately google removed the visible watermark in their synth id now you have to run it through a detector i'm surprised they did that you know i mean i remember the the one of the tops the the like head of she's like the chief ethical scientist margaret miller at um at hugging face like when chat tpt first came out she was saying to me like this this is the most irresponsible thing to create a to to to put out a tool that can endlessly create fake content without any ability to detect what's fake or not right like the fact that you would just do that is the ultimate polluters attitude you know and that is pollution but it's done i mean i don't right so when it opening i put out that sora app not so long ago it was this year wasn't it it came and went uh yeah in the last year and it wasn't i mean you could tell immediately it was fake what runway is doing now is much better and that's within six months i went to runway's film festival in la a few months ago and um i have to say that not all the movies were great but the stuff that was great was not only entertaining but also really convincing and it is true that um sometimes there's a little bit of monotony with the length of shots but but runway is pretty quickly overcoming some of the challenges with doing more extended stuff and they already overcame the challenge from a year or two ago where it was very hard to have the same people in multiple shots and have them be the same people in each one although i do feel leo like if you want to replace us it's probably better to create your own imaginary tech journalists because uh if you there might be a little bit of an uncanny valley with with simulating a specific person well but if they were if they were imaginary it might be pretty hard to tell it's my probably futile opinion that as more and more of this happens actual human content with real humans will become more valuable and all of our flaws it will be flawed it won't be as good my nose is shiny and stuff but it will but it'll be valuable because everybody will say well i could tell that's human because it's so because the shiny nose because the shiny the shiny nose of course you could easily make a shiny nose i mean it's not i i don't know i actually enjoyed sorrow go ahead molly i was gonna say i i kind of share that opinion around the human created stuff and i think partly you can sort of watch it happening with you know, people returning to film camera and, you know, looking for sort of media that is not polished and perfect, you know, looking for like real film or Polaroid film or, you know, just to use cameras.

1:01:32Ant Pruitt:Look what Google did with their new Pixel 11s. They said, we're going to have a, it's really just an Instagram filter, but they marketed it well. we're going to have imperfect digital shots in our people are taking photos with old digital cameras from 20 years ago and they like the fact that the flash is blinding and not terribly appealing the problem is you can simulate all that too well sure but i think that you know people it is a signal of that sort of nostalgia oh i agree and i think that's going to continue people are going to love paper books and you know the kindle digital books will probably be predominant, just as digital music is predominant, but there'll still be a small group of people.

1:02:14Well, paper books have held on, I think, a lot better than most people expected 19 or 20 years ago when the Kindle came out. E-books are important, but they have not killed print at all.

1:02:26Ant Pruitt:The thing I would say is it's democratizing. So now you don't have to be able to hire a cast of thousands and get location shooting permits and figure out special effects. you can simply write a video and have it be real and that's amazing that means and then it's just you know the analogy for me is youtube youtube may did two things it created it democratized media made it made it possible for anybody to create a video and post it and have an audience it created a huge amount of slop millions of hours of slop a day but i always said yes you're going to have a you know a thousand times more crap but you're also going to have a thousand times more that tiny slice of very good stuff and there'll be more of that and so for you know every hundred junkie videos on youtube there's a veritasium or something really great and that's given people who would not normally have access like jake and i did to mainstream media and you too harry uh a voice and i so i think ultimately there are going to be a lot of kids in high school now grade school now we're going to be able to make these incredible videos with text i think i mean i think on balance i feel like it's possible the world would be better off without convincing fake video but that said uh the best stuff in the runway film festival had a point of view it was not it was not just somebody typing in a prompt and having a video generated they they it had aesthetics that were influenced by humanity and storylines oh absolutely they didn't need a cinematographer a dp they didn't need uh you know extras and a gaffer and it's possible it's possible to do a generated video that is not slop it's it just involves fewer humans involved in the process a talented person is going to have new tools to work with i keep getting reeled in on youtube by stuff that that looks interesting and for the first 20 seconds i think is real and it turns out it's it's bad ai slop yeah i i don't know i look at the like molly was right i think to point us at the at the labor implications of this stuff because that's always where this sort of drills down to is like you know i had this piece i did this piece when val kilmer got sort of you know uh resurrected for a film role it made the news for a little while that he'd gotten put into a movie an ai version of him got put into a movie and and you know i think the argument that like you know we can access the world's creativity because we're going to democratize the tools of that creativity there's something there but it does not democratize access to a living to making a living no doing it right and it and it really uh and and and the advice that i hear coming out of established hollywood people about this is such crap like and and reveals such a ignorance of of the actual economics of this stuff like ben affleck you know has this new ai generation company backed by redbird and and uh there's this footage that of matthew mcconaughey telling people that you know you just got to trademark yourself and like learn the tools he trademarked all right all right all right but like a 20 something actor trying to get going has nothing to trademark you know has no well yeah you know neither does a telephone operator you've got to find a new gig but i think there are opportunities created by a company to do a thing like you know you're that's still a living right the the problem with youtube is that it it yes it democratizes the tools but it but it uh it it i don't know what the what the opposite of that is but like it it makes the concentrates yeah it concentrates the power and doesn't make it such that many many many people can find a space underneath it like every you know wannabe actor can find work around the film industry when the film industry employs hundreds of thousands of people that's not going to be true if every single person is in theory supposed to float the costs of their life long enough to break through that's true i wouldn't want to be a gaffer right now or yeah you know like that i mean people i know who work in hollywood right now are just wrecked and these are not people that that are you know these are not like Like, this is not people that we, you know, these are not stars.

1:07:08These are like the very smart, very talented, very hardworking people who are on the set. And those are all the little tiny print that scrolls by real fast at the end of the movie. Those people make that. You know, and it's the knock on effects of what they earn that then keeps all of the accountants and florists and everything else working in L.A.

1:07:28Ant Pruitt:I feel for those people, but every technological revolution has created this kind of disruption. This is what happens. I mean, it's terrible. And there's human scale suffering that cannot be ignored. But, I mean, it's happened again and again and again and again as, you know, the industrial era. And, you know, I mean, there are a lot of buggy whip manufacturers who are out of business these days. this is what happens i wish we had brian merchant here you know he wrote this incredible book about the luddites right blood in the machine blood machine right so great and his his argument in that book is that there's a misunderstanding there's a there's a conflating of the technological revolution with the exploitative revolution that often comes with it and and i think there's something so smart to be they weren't against technology they were against losing their jobs they were in fact the ones that you would imagine ai should make possible they were like you know piecework technologists who took it they were the software you know the early 90s code jockeys of the time like they could take work when they needed it make a great living it was women earning money you know all that stuff and then the factory guys come along and destroy their world and that's why they become essentially sort of economic terrorists is to try and slow that action down and so there's just something about like i'm with you leo that there is a there is a potential for democratizing all kinds of stuff here but this is so it is so quickly in this case being turned into an exploitative tool that allows people to fire as many people as possible and all that stuff in a way that i'm i'm discouraged by right now molly molly sent us a link to the book and i haven't read it so i'm gonna have to read it guys blood in the machine for one.

1:09:24I also sent a link to an article that Brian Merchant wrote, because I was also thinking of Brian Merchant. He wrote a great article about AI is not democratizing creativity. And it's a great essay about one of my personal bugbears, which is that the tech industry has really taken over this term democratize. And generally, when I hear that word, it's a huge red flag that means basically, we're going to take something that all of you little people can do, and we're going to make it so that the profits from that activity flow to us, you know, the small group of tech executives. And we saw it with crypto.

1:10:06Crypto was all about democratizing finance. And, you know, NFTs were going to democratize art, which mostly just meant stealing other people's artwork and trying to sell NFTs of it. And I think that the same thing is really happening right now with democratizing creativity with AI. Because, you know, Leo, you were talking about how now kids can create videos and, you know, sort of be creative in ways that they previously couldn't. But like, the creativity was never the issue, right? Kids have always been able to be creative, you know, whether it's video or art or drawing, you know, those types of things.

1:10:43And it's not that they didn't have access to creativity. It's that they didn't have access to Netflix-level studios or those types of resources. But the creativity is really not different. And I would argue that, in fact, AI is actually probably reducing creativity in many ways among children who are looking to create art. It's not democratizing creativity. It's really just giving them…

1:11:10Ant Pruitt:I'll say what it does democratize. And, you know, I could speak to this from my own experience because I worked in radio 50 years in December. And for the first 30 of those, in order to become, to make a living at it, I had to persuade somebody who owned a radio station to hire me to go on TV. You had to persuade one of the networks to put you on TV or one of the local stations to put you on TV. those days are gone it's so in that sense the gatekeepers are gone uh yes i could have sat in my basement doing a little radio show but it wouldn't have had any any uh carriage until podcasting came along and now that the internet is here i don't need a tower and a radio station and a transmitter i am sitting you don't need ai for that either though but no but i'm pointing out that this is what technology can do and this is ai is just another kind of technology the internet did that uh i would agree that the internet you know has made it more plausible for people to do you know radio now podcasts there's you know video or your sub stack yeah yeah right i would agree with that on the internet but i don't agree that ai is doing that yeah not least because it's going to wipe out your ability to employ meaningful numbers of people to make a living as being part of that process.

1:12:42Like you, you Leo are a very rarefied specimen as someone who's created a real company out of your, you know, your ability to be out there because of the democratizing, you know, I'm a thousandaire because of it too. Let me, yeah, exactly. You're to be that person right and the economics are not working for me it's hard well i was you know what

1:13:09Ant Pruitt:it worked because i started 20 years ago and when it was very scarce and and and between the the process of wanting to be close to you know wanting to learn that world well wanting to be close to it there are so many fewer job opportunities in the landscape in which everyone is in theory doing it themselves through ai than there were when you had like institutions you know making this stuff possible again like you could work as an assistant set designer on your way to being you know trying to be a movie director and now the expectation is everyone's supposed to just be a movie director from the outset and nobody and and the number of people who are going to survive in that landscape economically is so much smaller than the number people that are going to be able to make a go of it and maybe remain a set designer their whole lives but can still make a career in the industry that they've chosen i mean this is what people said when photography came along you're going to put the painters out of business this is what people said when photoshop came along but i do think it's instructive you know you made the comment that the reason that it's you've been successful is because you started so long ago i mean i think that that does sort of illustrate that the more saturated a field gets whether it's because you know so many more people have access to podcasts or if it's because now everyone can create their own ai podcast and you know no one's gonna find the gems that are among the the slop you know i think that is sort of underscoring like is that actually democratization or is it just that you know nobody is succeeding basically well it was for me also these companies aren't exactly run by people who have who have shown enormous sensitivity and excitement about creativity i stipulate creative fields it's disruptive there will be people who will be hurt by this a lot there will be people who lose their jobs and ability to make a living are we going to stop it no but i think i like i mean sorry i know you and i are both equally fired up you go ahead i think that um you know once you're starting to say things like this is going to hurt a lot of people this is going to make life worse for a lot of people i would start questioning you know the use of the word democratization right like that doesn't sound like democratization that sounds like making everything net worse i mean in all fairness though the number of people in the past who ever made a living in the movie business was extremely small and there is value and and those people didn't exist by the way a hundred years ago and you know they did before there are relatively few leos have been able to do this for decades there are a lot of people who have podcasts or YouTube videos who are not making a fortune, but I think who are making a contribution to the world and getting some value out of the fact they're doing this or else they wouldn't do it.

1:16:00Yeah, I feel like the right answer to this,

1:16:06Ant Pruitt:maybe there are regulations and ways you could slow it down or stop it, but really the right answer to this, as it would have been for the Luddites, as it would be for painters and carriage makers is to say this is coming what do we do going forward to take advantage of it instead of saying oh this is a terrible thing stop it because it you're not bad news for you you're not going to stop it but like i think about bill gates's line human reserved like i'm probably for me to like i'm it is weird to be quoting bill gates and agreeing with him in any way but but he he says this phrase human reserved that we're going to reserve a certain number of human jobs and activities against the effects of automation which i think is interesting and it's a it's a smart way of encapsulating something that i've been trying to articulate for a long time i just took a trip last year to switzerland and they were in the middle of their big national and regional elections and there were these very impassioned And that like like they have these these purpose built like like kiosks full of campaign posters for various political things.

1:17:15And they had a whole thing where it was like all this storm and drunk. And it was like nine. And then another one. Yeah, they were so, you know, and I and I asked my hosts, what what are they fighting about here? Like, clearly, they feel very strongly about this. And they said, oh, that's a very hot topic. They're trying to decide whether to expand the funding for music education in the city beyond classical music and into other forms of music, jazz and the rest. And it was an enormous political issue because they put a ton of money into making sure that any kid who wants to can learn music. you know and that like this thing that we're going to treat creativity the way we've treated like customer service jobs or being a telephone operator or being a you know a buggy whip manufacturer i just think it's sort of the it's not the right way to protect a creative culture we got to think of it as something other than just a product and i don't want to seem insensitive

1:18:18Ant Pruitt:but it's my i'm not putting this on you i'm putting this well but i'm putting this on you You put it on me, because I'm arguing the other side. I think new tools, new technologies expand human potential. They give us new ways to express ourselves, new ways to make living, new ways to do everything. The history of these new tools has always been disruptive or often been disruptive. And yet we somehow find a way to go forward. And A, you're not going to stop it. So it's kind of futile to say, well, it's a bad idea. It's happening. And B, I think it isn't necessarily a bad idea. I think it's called progress.

1:18:56Ant Pruitt:It's called what happens when we invent new tools. And to say, oh, let's stop this because the people who depend on these old tools are going to be out of work. Those jobs didn't exist before movies were invented. Let's just as an example. So what, you're going to preserve those jobs? They didn't exist because a new technology came along. And there will be new jobs for new technologies, I think. Unless you're saying, and maybe it's true, AI is the first of its kind of a technology that doesn't create new jobs, that only disenfranchises humans. I mean, is that your feeling, Molly? Is that it's just taking humans away, work away from humans, period?

1:19:43No, absolutely not. But I think that wanting labor protections in place is not a sort of backwards idea. And it's not that I think that buggy whip manufacturers should be protected to the end of time, but it's that we're seeing companies and executives using AI as the tool by which to disenfranchise labor. And that, I think, needs to be addressed, regardless of whether it's AI or any other sort of issue, because there is no sort of, like, natural gravitational pull that causes billionaires to treat workers well. And so, you know, in order to preserve society, I think, you know, there needs to be labor protections.

1:20:37And I think you're interpreting labor protections to mean preservation of outdated jobs or, you know, some sort of like work program for people who are operating, you know, manual typewriters or something like that, which is not at all the case. But it's that, you know, there needs to be a protection for someone so that their, you know, job is not completely undercut in ways that they have no bargaining power over. i think that's fair you're saying protection not protectionism yeah i suppose so yeah i like that you know it makes me think about the the pope's big encyclical on ai that came out yeah i thought that was great and he by the way wasn't anti-ai at all he was no but he was but he was so smart about hearkening back to his namesake right leo the 13th or facing the same issues right yes it is the same issues that leo the 13th in 1891 was talking about industrial capitalism and the way in which labor is being exploited in factories and kids are being chained to the loom and all of this stuff.

1:21:41And at the time, what Leo XIII in the 19th century was saying was, we can't let these factories trick us into evaluating the value of human beings by how much they can produce in a day. And the Catholic teaching was imago dei. We are made in the image of God. I'm not a religious person, but this is his argument. You know, we're made in the image of God and we have inherent dignity and value by that logic and that language made its way into the first and the first and most influential arguments around uh a minimum wage and the idea of a weekend and those ideas that came from his argument about that and then into the new deal like you know there's a reason that fdr was sworn in by a catholic priest was because that was the moral language of protecting people against this stuff and this guy pope li the 14th saying same things happening here we can't let this thing you know reduce the value of stuff to how much you know how efficient the production should be and i think in the creative fields that's got to be that's got to be true and and i will say this also leads me to you're saying like it's here it can't change you know i would argue like the meta case is a really interesting look at something that once by a time we would have said well, this is just how the way the world is.

1:23:00And now judges and juries are saying, oh, actually, no. And we can change, we can, we can, you know, we're going to, we're going to not allow you to just do whatever the market wants. I'm going to be an iconoclast on that one too. We'll get to that just a little bit. On that same note, I was going to push back a little bit on the sort of inevitability argument around tech, because it's used in so many different sectors. We hear it in crypto all the time. It's like, you're not going to stop crypto. This is the future of finance. And I think, you know, reasonable people might argue that maybe it's not.

1:23:32And just because tech executives say it's the future does not make it so. Same thing with metaverse, for example, that was the inevitable future for a little while. So I think that first of all, when you hear someone say it's inevitable, that's not necessarily the case. But I also think that it's not this sort of binary decision between this technology is inevitable, we can't stop it, get out of the way, There can be no restrictions or guardrails or anything like that. And, you know, the opposite side of that, which is we need to stop it. We need to ban it. We need to outlaw it. We need to prevent anyone from ever thinking about it, right?

1:24:05Like there's two different worlds here. And it's not that anyone who thinks that AI is not necessarily inevitable wants to ban it, right? It's that they sort of see a path in which we could navigate this because we as humans have agency. and we live in a society where we make decisions about things like this all the time. I mean, we make decisions about, you know, I can't go and make a nuclear weapon in my backyard. Right. And that's sort of a good example, I think, of the idea that, you know, just because something is possible does not mean it happens all the time. You think we should have an anti-proliferation law against AI proliferation?

1:24:43No, I'm not arguing that, you know, we should be treating AI like we treat nuclear weapons. I am saying that there are plenty of systems in this world where we do treat technology that way, where we do have guardrails around technology. And, you know, the fact that it's AI does not necessarily preclude that type of a thing. I do love individuals getting a hold of powerful tools. I do not love the idea of Disney or Warner Brothers salivating at eliminating vast numbers of jobs and replacing them with AI. And I'm not sure whether I'm just being unreasonable here and whether it's possible to love certain aspects of what AI is doing and not being at all crazy about other aspects.

1:25:33Ant Pruitt:I think you nailed it. and I think that really we shouldn't say that the problem is AI we shouldn't say the problem even is technology the problem is late-stage capitalism yeah and hyper capitalism sure and it happens not in just technology it happens it's got what's going on now in the world that is a problem I'm also skeptical that I think it's a mistake to conflate the technology with the late stage capitalists that are using that technology and I am skeptical that those people running the studios are excited about making better movies via AI and in fact it might be very harmful to the quality of their movies where whereas their individuals heard cranking out slop but they're also individuals who I think are actually doing really interesting stuff with AI that would not exist without this technology some of them were the ones who made the films that were in the runway ai film festival yeah i think that uh i will i will stand by you on the barricades molly if when it comes to you know fighting late stage capitalism um but let's not mix the technologies with the people exploiting them i don't think anyone is i don't think okay yeah i I don't think it's a question of is AI in a vacuum, you know, the technology itself.

1:26:57That's what I'm hearing people say.

1:26:59Ant Pruitt:I am hearing people say that, though. Maybe that's not what you're saying. Well, it's not what I'm saying. No. I don't hear that. I think it's because I love I mean, I'm kind of an aficionado of AI. I'm loving it. I'm using it. And I think it's the money making instincts that bother me. Yeah, it's not the it's not the it's not. I mean, it's like it's the same thing with crypto. Right. I don't think that blockchains are inherently evil or, you know, somehow blockchains themselves are scamming people out of millions of dollars. Right. It's the people who are building the industry around crypto that I have some complaints about.

1:27:35Right. I would say it's the same. I thought of you, Molly, when I saw the New York Times to the write up of the top 20 political donors. Yes. Of this season and like 12 of the 20 are crypto folks. Yeah. Yeah. Andreessen Horowitz up there, top on the list, both crypto and AI this cycle.

1:27:56Ant Pruitt:Crypto.com, like all these folks. And in this case, the problem sort of is that crypto has been used to take money, just like the stock market, from the suckers and put it in the pockets of the crypto bros. Via which, and then from there to politicians. Yes. Right. But the money is real. The Bitcoin is not. The crypto is not. But the money is real. There's real dollars in there somewhere. There's real dollars somewhere in there. It's not just bids. So somebody's buying these coins, and then somebody is pumping money into these coins, and then somebody's selling these coins and getting dollars out of it.

1:28:35Ant Pruitt:You can't give Bitcoin to a campaign. They can't pay for TV ad time. You can, but they can't pay for TV ad time in Bitcoin yet. So it gets converted to dollars. So ultimately, it's just a tool for siphoning money from a bunch of suckers. It's a pyramid scheme. Right? As is the stock market. Right. But it's, you know, the inevitable future of finance and all that as well. I agree with you on that. Yeah. Getting back to Brian Merchant. I don't always agree with Brian, but I always feel smarter and usually more alarmed when I read his stuff. and anything he does is worth reading and thinking seriously about.

1:29:17Ant Pruitt:I have to read the book and subscribe to his newsletter. It's a great book. I would definitely recommend the book. It's on my list. It's a really great explanation of how Luddites are broadly misunderstood in sort of today's popular culture. I think that that story has kind of filtered into the consciousness because I've heard that many times and I haven't read the book yet. So I think that's… We have Brian to thank for saving the reputation of the life. He made his point. Yeah. All right. Another break. Because I am a late stage capitalist, my friends. And I proudly employ 12 whole people. See, that's Hank.

1:29:58That's the distinction.

1:30:00Ant Pruitt:There it is. Says Benito. Thank you. Yeah, sure. I could do this all with AI, but I decided not to. I like working with people. People are much more fun. I don't know if I can do this with AI, to be honest. Although I keep seeing people go, you know, you can edit all this stuff with AI. You know, you could... No, no, you can't. You can't. No, you can't. No, you can't. No, you can't. No, I like making stuff with humans. I think that's... I think that will... Honestly, if you're a musician, isn't it better to make music with other humans? Right? Isn't that what we really want? It's one of the great joys of life, actually.

1:30:38Ant Pruitt:If you've never done that, it's something you should try. and if and if you like telling stories maybe it's more fun to make a show or a movie with other people than in your bedroom with a computer also pencils and pens are inherently better than even like adobe illustrator which has been around for 40 years right maybe that's going to save us Watercolor is great. Although I just gave my Hermes a watercolor brush. It's not a very good artist, but there's a JavaScript tool called P5 that lets you do watercolors. I made a tool myself that does fake watercolor, but real watercolor will always be better.

1:31:24And there's a reason why we're still trying to make stuff look like watercolor.

1:31:27Ant Pruitt:Yeah, because it's a beautiful art. My sainted mother, my late sainted mother, was a very talented watercolor artist, artist in general, and one of her media was watercolors. And she loved it. And I loved the stuff she did. It was just gorgeous. Just gorgeous. Harry McCracken is here, the technologizer from fastcompany.com, Molly White from mollywhite.net, and her newsletter, citationneeded.news, and Jacob Ward from theripcurrent.com, It looks like you have a giant mug of delicious water. It is delicious water. It's one of the great pleasures of living in California. That's right. I'll let you have a drink while I talk about my mattress.

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1:33:48Ant Pruitt:We spend a third of our life on this thing. No wonder my back's been killing me. So we did all the research. We read all the reviews. We went to Helix Sleep. This was more than a year ago. We took the Helix Sleep quiz that matches you with 20 different styles, the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences, how you sleep, what you're looking for, your sleep needs. And it really works. Actually, I can give you the anecdotal story of my own wonderful experience but helix actually did a study they did a wesper sleep study they measured participants sleep performance after switching as we did from their old mattress to a helix mattress and what they found exactly matched my experience 82 of participants vast majority saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle this is the most important kind of sleep this is the sleep where the cerebral spinal fluid comes up into your brain and clears out all the gunk, flushes it out.

1:34:49Ant Pruitt:I know it's weird, but that happens. And it happens, you know, for maybe 25 minutes to an hour a night. It's not the whole eight hours. But if you can increase that, that's good for your overall health and well-being, but also long-term for things like Alzheimer's. Participants in this study, on average, achieve 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. That's exactly what I, I actually doubled the amount of deep sleep from half an hour to an hour a night. Participants on, and I know because I wear the, you know, the Aura ring and I obsessively check my stats every morning. Participants on average achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night.

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1:36:07Ant Pruitt:That's what they care about. Go to helixsleep.com slash twit. 27 % off sitewide. It's their Labor Day Best of Web offer. That's helixsleep.com slash twit for 27 % off sitewide. Exclusively for listeners of This Week in Tech, so make sure you enter our show name after checkout. Very important to us. They know we sent you. The offer ends September 13th. If you are listening after the sale ends, you still should go check them out. helixsleep.com slash twit thank them so much for their support i personally thank them for that lovely helix mattress that makes my days so bright so apple surprised us all with a big announcement of a very expensive uh new mac mini and mac studio and when i say very expensive i mean very expensive If you've got the top-of-the-line M5 Ultra Max Studio with 256 gigs of RAM, you're talking more than$10 ,000.

1:37:11Ant Pruitt:But what's interesting is they're selling them out. In fact, if you went now to order it, they're going to start shipping those September 22nd, you wouldn't be able to get it till late November. They are going crazy with this. The information story, it's paywalled, but I pay for a subscription, says it all. How Apple stumbled into AI hardware success with the Mac, AI labs and neoclouds. And yes, a few enthusiasts like Micah Sargent are buying them by the truckloads. It's Apple's fastest growing business. Aaron Tilly writes, Macs are on fire thanks to agents and AI. Apple, which for a long time was kind of the artsy computer, the intersection of technology and the humanities.

1:38:03Ant Pruitt:That's how Steve Jobs put it. Creatives loved Apple's. But I don't know how big that market was. All of a sudden, about six months ago, they couldn't keep the Mac minis in stock because people were buying it for OpenClaw and other agents. I think they realized there's something going on here. Harriet, what do you think? well i bought a mac mini uh in march during this brief window when i could get one and uh before they were super expensive because of ramageddon yeah i bought the base one so i'm not gonna be running any super powerful models on it but i use it every day it's a headless mac mini i do not have a screen attached to it you know i use it for my ipad and that's actually pretty cool my ipad is now two computers in one essentially Do you use like a virtual desktop on your iPad so you could see them?

1:38:56Yes, I was using something called screens, but I recently switched to something called jump desktop, which has worked much better for me.

1:39:03Ant Pruitt:And you do that because what it's a lighter way of. Yeah, basically for many years, I've used a iPad as my primary computer and I still do that. But when AI came along, it was kind of obvious that there was a lot of interesting stuff you could not do on an iPad. and even stuff like cloud code is tough to do with it. And there are kind of workarounds involving like using messaging and so forth. But I wanted - The iPad doesn't have a terminal and you need to kind of - I wanted to have access to a terminal and something that was running 24 seven and I could run agents on and so forth. And actually like it's been almost 20 years since I last bought a desktop computer and I thought I might never buy another desktop computer.

1:39:45But if you're serious about AI, you kind of want a desktop computer and something that will be on continuously and the mac mini is great for that it doesn't take up much space um generally speaking it's at least on a par with windows if not ahead in some cases in terms of what's what's available at any given time and sometimes the mac versions of ai apps are prioritized over other ones i bought a mac

1:40:08Ant Pruitt:mini m4 pro last year and foolishly at the time put 64 gigs of ram in it to which i'm now wishing i'd made i'd put more in i mean mine is six minus 16 gigs so if i had 64 i'd be thrilled and so i know at some point i might um look at something like that so i've just checked if you wanted the top of the line uh max studio with the m5 ultra you might say wait a minute what about the m6 now the m6 doesn't go as fast or as high the m5 ultra is is the chip for ai and you and you got it the top of the line with 256 gigs of ram and a single terabyte drive which is frankly too small 10 799 bucks and you can't get it till december 1st 10 to 12 weeks out now that's so it was september 22nd so that's what three months that's a lot that's a big that's a big slip that means they're selling them yeah a terabyte seems way too small but maybe people are buying cheap external drives yeah these ai models are ginormous so you need a big drive um yeah they say default mini come with like 256 or something like that i was surprised yes uh yeah i bought the uh yeah well i bought the one that no longer exists the the uh 600 one which uh came with 16 gigs of ram and 256 oh yeah i'm always surprised at how little storage they put into things because storage is so cheap these days but they no it's not that's the problem along with ramageddon it's ss demageddon well comparatively cheap it was they've doubled they've more than doubled in price and i think traditionally apple has looked forward to you upgrading and making an extremely good profit off of your ram and storage upgrades the cheapest mac mini you can buy now is 900 up up 300 bucks and that's with the slower M6.

1:42:04Ant Pruitt:It's kind of confusing that the M6 is less than the M5, but it is. And 16 gigs of RAM. And yes, you're right, Molly, a tiny 256 gig hard drive for 900 bucks. That's just rude. I know. Well, you don't want that. Didn't Malcolm Gladwell have a name for that where you have a cheap price that nobody wants, but they feel better about buying up a level. I can't remember what that's called. You have three prices. One nobody wants, one that's the aspirational one, and the middle one is the one you expect everybody to go for. But then that way Apple can also say starting at$899. Right. But that's not all because they also said, well, we are going to make an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 gigs of RAM, which is enough to run a fairly competent local model, a GLM 5.3 or something like that, all locally.

1:43:13Ant Pruitt:They didn't announce a price. They say it won't be available to the end of October, but I would say conservatively it's at least$15 ,000, probably much more likely$20 ,000. $20. It's a car, ladies and gentlemen. I have to decide at the end of the year when my lease runs out, do I get another car or do I just walk and have a Mac? Isn't it Tuesday? I think Tuesday is Tim Cook's final day on the job. Yeah. This is parting shot. I know. It's funny. He's asking for us for$10 ,000 for a computer out the door. You know, what's really interesting is he's selling them. yeah uh and i have a feeling uh if you want i don't know if i'm gonna buy that one it's so expensive the 512 but if you wanted that you would have to be sitting with your finger hovering over the buy button at 5 a.m whenever that goes on sale in late october uh the halloween might not be the scariest day in october well in theory might might not pay for itself relatively quickly if it means you don't have to pay for tokens anymore well see that's the interesting i don't think it's economic it's a it's an economic decision because tokens now are so cheap uh from companies like deep seek yeah if you want fable uh you know the top of the lines state-of-the-art models yeah they're expensive but even if you're paying 200 bucks a month for a claude's max subscription that's four years of that uh i before it evens out i don't think it's an economic decision i think it's more about running wanting to run your for me because i did spend a lot of money on these nvidia boxes it's more about running your own model locally having kind of sovereignty over your data over the model they can't take that away from me and i you know what scared me was uh when the trump administration rug pulled fable i was in the middle of using it to i'm rewriting our sales software and i was in the and i had to stop said nope this is not available anymore and that was enough to scare me that the emergence of very competent chinese yes open weight models that you can run locally uh and and the threat perhaps of china or the united states banning those local open weight models all kind of prompted me to say well maybe i better bite the bullet and buy something so i i don't you know if the internet goes down i could still do stuff it doesn't i don't think it makes economic sense i think it's a yeah i don't think i don't think anyone who's out there buying hardware to run ai should be looking at a four-year time scale for that hardware it's exactly it's gonna be out of date by you know next month like a week yeah yeah isn't this the whole thing with like the depreciation of all these assets well they don't well this is the interesting thing they don't depreciate right now so i know that the nvidia sparks i bought i could probably sell for more money in six months and i think the same thing for a 512 gig mac but then there's a cliff so instance for instance the old hot max the m3 ultras which were the preferred ai model until tuesday i think the prices are now starting to plummet for those right it's like three years or something they start to disappear and that and that and that's isn't that the big like data center problem that everybody that all those companies have like yes they're building data centers these oceans of these servers that are all going to be useless in three years they're they're building grace blackwell yeah and it's going to be vera rubin next next and it's in fact nvidia's already announced chips that are 10 times more efficient and look what open ai is doing they're they're so concerned about uh hardware that they've developed their own chip called jalapeno because it's probably a really really really hot um trying to keep up do we know where the old chips go into my house right exactly who gets the old chips you know so i bought a 3090 upgraded my nvidia old video card on my old gaming rig and i'm sure it was some bitcoin or miners card right not bitcoin but yeah no not not so what are miners doing because they can't nobody can make money anymore as a as a miner if you're buying an old gpu it would probably have been ethereum mining if anything oh ethereum okay bitcoin mining is very specialized hardware and you would never use it for like a gaming computer or something like that the way cryptos was designed was that it would get at least bitcoin originally was designed so it would get harder and harder to generate it right yep as more and more was generated and then you reach a cap where no more will be generated it's kind of an anti-inflationary measure yep um so like when steve gip when bitcoin first happened steve gibson said well let me just try mining and the next day woke up to 50 bitcoin yeah well and it also it also responds to the amount of mining that's happening on the network too.

1:48:27So if a bunch of Bitcoin miners all drop, drop offline, it actually gets easier to mine. Oh, interesting.

1:48:32Ant Pruitt:Yeah. It's the total compute that is being controlled, the total amount of compute. Yeah. But it means that when, you know, a ton of people all start mining Bitcoin with like dedicated data centers, then the guy with the PC in his basement just can't compete with that kind of operation. Right. Plus electricity has gotten more and more expensive and so unless you're a in china sitting next to a hydroelectric power yeah you have to be basically on a power plants at this point which is by the way a problem with local ai as well people are buying these cards and they are very power hungry and you need a lot of them a lot of crypto mining operations are actually pivoting to ai data centers because bitcoin mining is getting less and less economically feasible and ai data centers are becoming more and more in demand and it's sort of the obvious solution car we've started out as a bitcoin mining mining company and switched over to become a yeah basically every big bitcoin or any crypto mining operation these days does both it feels like and often are actually sort of waiting towards ai now oh that's interesting i also think that with the things like this mac which by the way is very power efficient in fact apple did a little flex they took four of their top of the line mac minis connected them with thunderbolt 5 and then a single plug into the wall uh showing that a single 120 volt can power these four very much unlike having you know a bunch of uh nvidia you know 5090s or whatever um i wonder if we're going to see maybe we don't need all these data centers maybe we just distribute ai locally there was somebody offering uh or somebody had a plan to put little mini data centers in every house i mean there's been a lot of you know sort of like shared compute projects like that but it's it's hard interconnect becomes very important and you lose that interconnect speed yeah it's hard to get the efficiencies of a data center using people's leftover compute.

1:50:38Back in the late 70s and early 80s, people were paying the equivalent of$10 ,000 for a powerful PC. So it's not completely crazy to think that some people will do this.

1:50:52Ant Pruitt:I remember getting a deck. I think it was a 486 from digital equipment when they were still in existence. It was a$10 ,000 486. Big old tower case. Yeah. If you flip through computer magazines from back then those things existed laptops are relatively expensive that's what a dollar meant something probably you know worth 20 000 today like it was not unusual to spend five or six grand in early 1990s dollars for a laptop exactly and that catalog was like a phone book size yeah computer shopper baby there was a magazine i reviewed an ibm luggable computer with a plasma display that i want to say was like 18 000 and before you adjust it for inflation

1:51:43Ant Pruitt:by the way speaking of sewing machine right speaking of luggables i recently saw this documentary on adam osborne oh yeah the who uh company put out the first luggable this is a great documentary it may end up on um public tv at some point and it's one of the best things that One of the best things I've seen on computer history. His name became a term briefly. He Osborne'd himself by announcing a successor to the original Osborne, which was very popular. I wanted one so badly. He announced its successor before it was available and he stopped buying the first one. Yeah, although maybe that actually did not kill the company.

1:52:24They had serious cash flow problems.

1:52:26Ant Pruitt:Right. As usual, a lot of these stories are... But this documentary is full of vintage footage of Adam and other people. Did you know him? No, I did not. I read a long article about him a few years ago, and I interviewed Dvorak, who worked with Adam on his book and knew him well. And I talked to a bunch of people who knew him. He eventually had really poor health and died early in the century. Yeah, John knew all those guys. and there were a number of clone computers and eventually the Compaq was the luggable of choice. It was an IBM PC compatible. Yes, the Compaq was essentially an IBM compatible Osborne in the early days.

1:53:10Ant Pruitt:I did eventually get an Osborne when we had the Brickhouse Studio, which you visited many times, Harry. For some reason, people decided to send me their old computers and somebody sent me an old Osborne, which, you know, I had to live the screen. It's this big. In fact, I'll show you a picture. Somebody's put a picture in there. It's smaller than a nice smartphone screen. It was not. Yeah, I guess it was. That's depressing. The later Osborne had a decent sized screen. It looks like it had two floppy drives and they were probably pretty small themselves. The things below the floppy drives are places where you stick your disks because you need all those disks to boot up DOS.

1:53:52Ant Pruitt:And then it came with WordStar. it came with wordstar and maybe supercalc and um several other it came with them all the software software worth as much as the price they were charging which was 1800 bucks yeah apologies for hijacking our conversation about the mac mini to talk about adam osborne but if people do see this documentary that out there they need to watch it it's just great well i think it's also important to put that in perspective because we as fast as ai is moving this whole thing has been moving pretty quickly and uh molly made the excellent point that that you know this ten thousand dollar computer won't be worth very much in a couple of years it's all moving very quickly will you be able to use it for something though um like give it give it to an f you or something like that i'll give it to my employees we used to do something when we were all in the same studio called leo's garage sale where i would just take all the crap that i'd purchased for the year and no longer want it and put it on the table.

1:54:55Ant Pruitt:And we had to come up with a system because it became a little bit of a free-for-all. I got dips on the spark, on a spark, dips on a spark. Yeah, there might be a spark sitting on the table in a couple of years. You never know. Golly. Let's see, where are we? Let me take another break. And then I want to finally, Jacob, talk about the meta settlement because we thought this was going to be the trial of the century when it began two weeks ago and this week a sudden end well not exactly florida says yeah we we're not that happy with that well and it's definitely not the end of meta's legal problem but yeah it really screwed up my whole week i really had a whole plan and they said like not like weeks of plans were you going to the trial you were going to the trial right yeah i went every day had a whole like editorial calendar built around and they settled on that morning and i was like bastards they did what it was such a pain in my hands just fly by the seat of your pants no this is why i should have gone into like cooking content and gotten away from the fucking news what an idiot you know a beef wellington is the same for hundreds of years exactly i could have been like talking about salvaged denim and here i am like i could have been zuckerberg settles so lame i could see moylan brando saying that i could have been talking about salvaged denim instead here i am i could have been a contender jacob salvaged denim ward that's him ladies and gentlemen uh you'll see him on cnn and of course you must subscribe to the rip current.com his newsletter better and yes well worth reading the book I see somebody already bought the paperback of the loop uh in our uh discord chat so that's good Molly white when are you going to write a book Molly not anytime soon yeah I see she's you're a smart woman you know there's no money in publishing takes it took us uh the rest of us a long time to realize do you like to write though right books is writing the thing you like to do most yeah i would say so yeah i mean maybe not like in life but yeah there's other things of course in life but as a career i should yeah mollywhite.net citation needed.news and of course web 3 is going just great is you still doing that right sure i am never stops it's still going it's still going great i mean once it stops then maybe my favorite feature i've mentioned this before on the website is that little burning flame of how much money has gone down the tubes as you scroll through the stories look in the lower right hand corner it goes up for every story that you go through of how much money actually if you go the other direction it goes up if you go you can change the direction of it if you prefer to Oh, I see.

1:57:57There's a little arrow there.

1:57:58Ant Pruitt:Look at that. Oh, that's cool.

1:58:03Ant Pruitt:So, and one of the things that is great about Molly is she took this code and open sourced it. So you can, is it on GitHub? If you want to create your own going just great, you can create your own. Maybe AI is going just great. And the technologizer, Harry McCracken, fastcompany.com. um I think in many ways our uh our computer historian I think somebody needs to do that to hold the fort down now that Dvorak's gone uh and and and remember the good old days truly was actually um after he passed I went back and looked at some of his stuff and just living in that world is always a refreshing break from what I mainly write about which is today and tomorrow i uh bought uh when he when he died i which was just a few weeks ago r.i.p john i bought uh he actually published one one book of his of his uh inside track columns from i think 2013 but it was really i bought it it's really fun to read through those those old columns um at one point he was writing when i was doing the radio show with him 20 columns a month yes i was i was accounting for his columns and I like I'm writing about John I've just not up yet but I oh are you gonna do a piece good I picked up like a random month in the late 1980s and when he not only had all these magazine columns but he also wrote for the examiner not just on technology but also another stuff and he had something like 17 columns that month and there might be some I didn't know about and as many of us have mentioned uh he started my career regina smith was on last week he was instrumental in her career and when uh will smith will hurst told not will smith will hurst tells the story that when he was begging john to become the computer columnist for the examiner john said i don't want to do that but there's this guy john markoff you should talk to and got john markoff started on all of that the king of computer magazine columnists you dub him We used to, at PC World, we used to occasionally get letters asking where his column was from people who kind of assumed that he had a column in every magazine.

2:00:18Yeah,

2:00:20Ant Pruitt:it was in, he actually had the kind of the anti-editor column in, was it Macworld or Macuser? I can't remember, one of the Macintosh magazines. He was in InfoWorld. Macuser. Macuser. I mean, he was predominantly, but not entirely associated with ZIF magazines. Yeah. Yeah, PC Magazine, Inside Track was the column. He actually did have a column in PC World briefly before he got into PC Magazine. People don't, this is another piece of history that's long gone, but they don't remember the rivalry between IDG and Ziff Davis. Yes. I was a Ziff Davis guy. That's what's John. And I think you were an IDG guy, right?

2:00:57Ant Pruitt:I worked at IDG for, what, 15 years? I mean, they live on, I guess, but in a very different form. idg was eventually broken up kind of and the brands exist but yeah is several different things none of which have anything to do with pc magazine well pc magazine is still around it is but is it still as if davis yes although it's not a magazine no it's just a website no i know i yeah it's actually quite good we have several people on uh the show from uh pc mag our show today brought to you by out systems uh we've all seen the headlines companies are pouring pouring pouring money into ai but the question on every executive's mind right now is not just how fast can we adopt this but where's the return on investment where's the roi We're seeing a real trend towards what I'll call AI chaos.

2:02:01Ant Pruitt:You've got teams deploying, you know, in little fiefdoms, standalone AI coding tools. You've got random agent builders, experimental scripts all over the company. It sounds innovative, but in reality, it's creating a massive headache, fragmented tools, ungoverned data. You don't know where your data is going. Serious security blind spots. And let's not forget token costs that are spiring out of control. If you don't bring those egenic applications under control now, while they're still embedding into your core processes, you are looking down the road at broken systems, damaged customer trust. It's not going to end well.

2:02:41Ant Pruitt:that's where out systems comes in out systems out systems is the leading agenic systems platform for the enterprise instead of managing a patchwork of disconnected tools out systems lets you team engineer orchestrate and govern your entire agenic ecosystem all on one open unified platform because you're all on the same page now you're all working together to the same point not at odds it's built for the speed of AI, that's important, but with the reliability and security that enterprises actually require, arguably even more important. And we're talking about real results. You could see a lot of testimonials on the OutSystems page, but I'll give you an example.

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2:04:03Ant Pruitt:You can see how it works. You can learn more at outsystems.com slash twit. That's outsystems.com slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. So poor Jacob's week just got destroyed. Was it Monday or Tuesday? We're at the beginning of the week. The trial had started the week before. And Meta must, I don't know. I mean, you don't make a settlement this quickly, but usually you settle before the trial. So I have to think that Metta must have seen the writing on the wall with the way the trial was going. Maybe they were already negotiating. They agreed to pay$18 billion to settle the lawsuit with all but one state.

2:04:53Ant Pruitt:How many states were there? It was 51 municipalities. Or 51, you know. um well there's that's that includes washington dc and dc guam like all these places basically uh and they were all swing over the same issue right that that that they're that meta knowingly made a social media platform that was addictive to children yeah and harmful addictive and harmful to children that it violated their privacy under the under copa the only federal law we have around this and then they were also to the four of these states california colorado new jersey and kentucky were a test, like a trial balloon, as to whether or not they could go after Metta on state law grounds around deceptive practices.

2:05:37So both those things were all going to be kind of bundled together in this case. So yeah, it was going to be a lot of juicy stuff, man. It was going to go and go and go. And I was in the courtroom for each day of the first two weeks of it, and there was just so much evidence and so much damning testimony coming out i i don't know though whether or not they chose to settle because of how it was going or if or if it was i suspect that it was because the wheels move pretty slow when you're negotiating with that many ags right and and so this must have been going on for a while i think it has to have been i don't know but i think it has to have been and and you know i you know the the feeling the you know there was the there was a logistical pain in the ass of my whole sort of editorial plan for weeks and weeks and weeks getting blown up but the thing that was just so sort of was that was disappointing to me as a reporter is just how much discovery we were going to get like every day we were getting these new pieces of evidence that were so interesting these internal communications and these internal studies and all kinds of stuff you know and and the the it was just a trove of interesting things uh coming out of the case so that's selfishly i wanted to keep going for you know for that reason for nothing else but yeah i think that you know they cut it off like mosseri had just taken the stand for like an hour or something and then was going to do a full day the following day when they when they settle it and then zuckerberg was scheduled for a couple days after that so he that must have been that must have been the uh the the impetus for let's settle this before mark has to before before sweaty mark gets on the stand i know i had that feeling too i i and and there was clearly going to be some really rough lines of questioning for him you know in which he'd said publicly oh there's no you know we didn't know there were all these kids or you know we make every effort and then these internal reports and testimony from insiders saying that he'd been in meetings that were specifically to inform him that there were more than four million kids under the age of 13 on the platform and you know just like

2:07:52Ant Pruitt:he was going to get taken apart and so that's always the risk of of any of these trials for both sides is discovery uh and clearly meta doesn't want any more of these emails to come out some a lot of them came out because of francis hoggins the whistleblower who uh was the first to present this stuff she's going to be by the way dramatized in aaron sorkin's uh successor to the social network which talks about her as a whistleblower that'll be very that'll be a a movie to watch i don't think aaron sorkin's a big fan of facebook be my guess his timing is incredible because they're all these trials are going to be underway when that movie comes out that's right facebook was saying themselves the potential for a fine of as much as 1.4 trillion dollars which would be i think an existential fine for the company you know what's funny about that thing so and you guys don't let me like dominate this conversation i i could be really tiresome of this subject oh no you're the expert but i will i will get the conversation going yeah i want to hear i want to because i have a different point of view on the whole thing but go ahead totally But 1.4 trillion, it turns out that that number is a number that Meta floated.

2:09:02Right. That was their number. Yeah. It was their number. And that they, according to the AGs, that, first of all, was not the number they were asking for. They were asking for$193 billion, not a small amount of money, but they were asking for far less than 1.4 trillion. And Meta was issuing that number alongside these quotes saying, these states are looking for numbers that are untethered from reality and all this stuff. It was like this weird gamesmanship in which I think they were trying to make it sound as if the states were somehow being greedy or unreasonable or something. It was a weird thing.

2:09:37And yet I can't tell you how many people just wandering around. I'd be like, yeah, maybe it might be as much as 1.4 trillion. I had so many people in my life who normally don't care about this stuff being like, yeah, that sounds about right. See, it works.

2:09:49Ant Pruitt:Meta actually got a slap on the risk in my opinion. 18 billion, but spread out over 10 years uh so i mean medic can easily afford 1.8 billion a year that's a fraction of their total revenue uh they do have to change the platform a little bit uh the the chief thing that bothers me is they're gonna have to start doing age verification uh which means everybody uses instagram whatsapp and facebook will have to provide proof of age which i think is problematic privacy wise i mean i don't care because i'm not going to use them but uh i think that's something to be concerned about uh but that was one of the things they agreed with uh the states as i mentioned florida says florida agrees with me that's a penance we want more do you think the judge uh will say to florida no sorry uh you cannot continue to pursue this oh jake yeah he dropped out for a minute oh lord oh lord all right well that's all right he decided he'd had enough molly uh is this a big enough fine is this a big uh good enough agreement i mean the fine i don't have strong opinions on i agree that just about any fine is going to be a slap on the wrist for meta yeah they make a lot of money but Yeah.

2:11:18But I think that one thing that's interesting, I see this almost as actually a win for them in a large sense for Meta. Because I think that one of the things that we see with a lot of these tech companies who are engaged in the conversations around regulation is they use regulation as a way to create sort of a moat around their business. and I think that Meta will actually benefit from a lot of the changes that they're being required to put into place that will also be sort of imposed by fiat on the other competitors in the space.

2:11:58Ant Pruitt:That's kind of interesting isn't it? Part of the payment five billion dollars is contingent on whether Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube impose similar protections. How are you allowed to do that and meta is trying to lasso them in yeah yeah and i also think that actually this is a really sort of alarming way to impose uh somewhat legal requirements on meta that i don't actually think would be defensible if they faced a constitutional challenge because like one of for example one of the um things that meta is being required to do is disable these filters for example that that that sort of make it look like you've had cosmetic surgery or, you know, they have extreme like beauty filters or whatever, which if a court said to them, you know, in a legal decision that you have to to prevent children or anyone from using one of those, it would be, I think, pretty obviously struck down as a First Amendment violation.

2:12:57And yet this is sort of a way in which they get to that end result. They impose those same requirements on competitors, but it sort of has not gone through the sort of usual court system that might pose a constitutional challenge to it.

2:13:16Ant Pruitt:Interesting. I didn't even think of that. it so one of the things that surprised me a little bit actually doesn't surprise me at all but one of the things i don't like is that it was just generally stipulated that social media is a problem for kids and that uh it's clearly causing a mental health crisis with children this is kind of based on jonathan heights uh i think sensationalist book about it the the real experts on it like canis audgers do not agree that there's evidence there's a lot of reasons if if young people are suffering from mental health challenges there are a lot of other reasons including covid guns in schools the threat of being shot at any given point uh i don't know if instagram and facebook are the sole cause or even a cause of a mental health crisis among young people i don't even know if there is a mental health crisis among young people so i was a little surprised that that was just kind of generally at least in the media stipulated well everybody knows that instagram's bad for kids i don't know if that's the case and i think also i mean there's a concern i i have a concern to that effect with the decision as well because there is this sort of ongoing scrutiny that's going to be applied to meta to determine you know are they implementing these changes as they're being required to do are they putting age assurance in etc but there's nothing around are kids actually safer?

2:14:45You know, are kids, is kids mental health, health improving? They've really sort of decided on all these things that they think, oh, yes, this is what's going to fix the problem around children on social media without, I think, much evidence that any or all of these interventions actually have like a measurable effect on children's mental health or

2:15:08Ant Pruitt:or safety in fact it's kind of the opposite i think everybody will say job done kids are protected everybody's okay no problems go ahead children live your lives we now have face id uh to prove you're not even i think in the more than that it'll be go use facebook because they're the safe platform for kids it's you know sort of right it's safe now strategy yeah yeah yeah what do you think well i'm skeptical about um although i acknowledge i don't know for sure but i'm skeptical about the idea that smaller doses of the stuff eliminates the stuff about it that is troublesome um like if you're being bullied on on instagram being bullied in smaller doses for 20 minutes yeah yeah i often yeah and i am always in theory said you can't have an account when you're under 13.

2:16:02Ant Pruitt:It's a very difficult thing to stop kids. And frankly, often kids' parents from creating an account when they're under 13. And I don't know if that, I mean, the only way to do that is with, we need, you know, like strict age proof, which is very problematic. It will be interesting to see how easy it is for kids to get around this stuff in the way that kids often get around. All you have to do is look at Australia. Rules imposed by humans, by adults. rather i uh you guys have been sitting here i've been having incredible connectivity issues just as you guys were saying i saw you fleeing the greenhouse looking for a signal like as you guys are all saying things that i deeply disagree with and want to yell about it was audio plot i can't believe i can't get my mic to work right now yeah okay so multiple things i'd like to point out here first the evidence that that it's bad for kids and is connected to the mental health crisis comes from the company that's the thing the outside researchers the external researchers are having a hard time studying that stuff because it's very difficult to get the data they can't get any kind of cooperation from the companies that really makes it possible and so the the you know the peer-reviewed research out in the world is actually approaching as one of several experts testified on the stand gene twenge um uh you know they are in fact getting It is, in fact, becoming a stronger and stronger connection in the very slow world of external research.

2:17:31But the internal research at these companies is where this stuff really comes from. And one of the reasons that people are accepting it at face value is that it's bad is because in Discovery, thanks to Francis Haugen and everybody else, these research projects say like, oh, we're seeing, you know, literally these are like Instagram people being like, oh, like counts as a default on teens are having this incredibly bad effect on the mental health of people. young women and you know uh uh 51 percent

2:18:09Ant Pruitt:oh dear i think i think i think he's did you cut him molly i i can't handle people disagreeing with me actually i hope he comes back because the question i want to ask is i also have a really a big question yeah did facebook show that did their internal research show that there was harm or merely that it was addictive i think that they're what i read said yeah they knew it was addictive but i gotta tell you uh everybody who creates content of any kind including i'm sure mary and molly and and jacob hopes that people find it sticky you want people to come back again And again, if that's a crime, then Netflix is in trouble.

2:18:53Ant Pruitt:You know, everybody's in trouble. We want to make our stuff... Addictive is a strong word. In fact, there's no evidence of how addictive social media is. The only evidence is, and I know it, is doom scrolling. It's hard to go to sleep sometimes because you can't stop. The other thing that bothers me, and we'll get Jacob back, I promise. The other thing that bothers me is that YouTube is piled in with this. and i don't think i think youtube is not a social network youtube is a content uh site and i don't i i always bothered me that you i understand tick tock i understand meta i understand insta those are of a piece but i don't think youtube one of these things is not like the other even tick tock's a little bit of an outlier in some ways compared to facebook and instagram which are much more traditional social networks what happened was the success of tiktok taught everybody oh people what we we're not a social network we're an entertainment medium driven by an algorithm yeah the whole goal of instagram instagram used to be i would see harry's pictures he would see my pictures that wasn't as successful as you'll see everybody's most entertaining pictures and videos that's what tiktok did and insta said oh of course duh uh and i said youtube was sort of like that all along yeah yeah maybe youtube invented it youtube was not primarily the autoplay i don't have the autoplay on so i choose what i watch on youtube i mean that i mean one outcome potentially of this agreement is these rules devised by meta applying to all these other products but i mean in a way each of these products would need somewhat different rules for them to be all that effective so i jacob's back um i had the question jacob if you were talking about how metazone research showed the harm did it show the harm or merely that it's addictive did it actually were they actually able to say oh yeah this is making kids suicidal yeah whatever they knew i have a piece i have a piece up at the recurrent.com called the most damning evidence from the meta trial so far and this was literally I thought I was going to do one of these a week and instead I only got to do one.

2:21:13But they, they have all these studies internally that say, you know, the, that, that talk about the incredible amount of, you know, I mean, this is, this is, it's so interesting because what the, what the, what the meta lawyers were trying to do, and these are lawyers who are very good at injecting doubt into the com

2:21:40Ant Pruitt:oh we're not gonna oh this is such a bad this one is getting good lose jacob giving him a minute i will read a little bit from his piece uh on the ripcurrent.com the most damning stuff uh one is arturo behars who was in the at the time working in facebook's safety division an email that he sent to zuckerberg with numbers the company's own numbers saying 51 of instagram users report 51 more than half a bad or harmful experience in the last seven days one percent of them reported that report it two percent of those reports end in any content being removed only two percent so in other words 51 said yeah i had a harmful experience but only one percent reported it and of those reports only two percent were actually acted on so he's saying a point zero two percent takedown rate so that is that is an example of of harm that facebook knew about bengar was very upset by the way he he quit basically because of yeah and he was a true believer he was a guy who really believed in the mission and was and was and and got sort of changed around when his 14 year old daughter joined Instagram and suddenly was getting sexually propositioned by adults, had no way to report it.

2:23:04And he couldn't even get, as the top safety guy at the company, couldn't even get the message across to people that this was a problem. Also, to the point that we made a moment ago about it being difficult to find these accounts, Arturo Behar in his testimony said, that's not true. That in fact, Meta is the most sophisticated operator in all of social media when it comes to spiking fake accounts, finding and getting rid of fake accounts, because that's such an important thing. They said it was shot. It would be child's play, no pun intended, to find kids accounts. In fact, there was a there was a like a a trend going around in 2019 for under 13 kids to be posting their birth dates on the on their posts on Instagram to be like, look, I'm on I'm only 11 and I would get to be on here.

2:23:54So, you know, it's just like what the what the evidence was beginning to show was there was a don't ask, don't tell attitude about this inside the company.

2:24:03Ant Pruitt:Kind of changed my mind. I mean, I still understand. I still question how harmful social media is. I mean, there's many, many other harms. And I think maybe focusing on that is is problematic because you don't fix the other problems. Nevertheless, yeah, Facebook is not a good actor. yeah the question of whether they knew whether they whether they pushed back is you know it's ridiculous they clearly don't care so much so that's right they knew and said hey we would rather make money than do something about this is pretty damning so maybe that is why they settled and by the way this settlement is trivial from their point of view this is nothing yeah yeah yeah it's it also it also doesn't allow future cases to go forward using this evidence on this question so that's the other bummer about it they've buried it it's that's part of why they said damage was to make was so molly molly brought up this point and you were you were unfortunately disconnected when she did that it also weirdly five billion of that settlement it only applies if if tiktok yeah youtube and snapchat go along that's a weird thing to agree to yeah it took it took me a lot of work to try and figure out why that would be the case so here's what i've figured out from talking to a bunch of people is what they're basically doing is is so so they will pay an additional five billion in penalties if youtube and tiktok join up and agree to play by the same rules, basically.

2:25:37And so what they're essentially hedging is that it's worth it to them to pay$5 billion to have all their competitors be constrained in the same way they will be. And it would also be, and they're going to not have to spend that$5 billion if they have to hold themselves to these standards that Google, that their competitors do not. And what's so weird and interesting about that sort of circumstances. Like if you look at past settlements, if you look at the big tobacco master settlement agreement or the Volkswagen diesel scandal or the Deepwater Horizon suits, those settlements required none of that kind of contingency.

2:26:25They just had them and made them pay enormous amounts of money and changed the way they do business. and in this case these ags have gotten suckered into in my view gotten suckered into like being part of the competitive landscape in this weird way that i that i a lot of people are not crazy

2:26:46Ant Pruitt:contention that this might not even stand because of the first amendment this is now a state action censoring private speech well but the the way they've gotten around it and it's a and it's a good one and it's an interesting one i think is that it's a design question it's a product liability issue not yeah it's a product liability question and not a and not a not a first amendment issue because what they what these cases have have built is the the idea that these um that the decisions being made in these product circumstances are um are basically like um you know are are are choices, like knowing design choices inside the company, as opposed to we are a neutral bulletin board through which the world is communicating.

2:27:40And that, to me, what's so interesting about that is that it helps us understand better that there is a behavior shaping function to this business that it has denied having. And yet, you know, if you look at the rest of its business, you know, and I'm sure, you know, I'm sure we've all looked at this as like, you know, they make their money literally off of pricing and predicting human behavior. Like they, you know, you can, you can pay for it. They're very good at it. Very good at it. Yes. And so the idea that they, they're saying that our design choices are not changing behavior while at the same time they're talking to their advertising, their advertising clientele and saying, we'll charge you, you know, we'll let you in fact pay based on how many newsletter signups you get or how many products you know how many you know christmas stockings you sell you know because we're that confident that we can find and predict behavior you know the eff was

2:28:38Ant Pruitt:very upset they said it had the this settlement is a a loss under this settlement they wrote young users will now have less access to meta products and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak access information and art and culture associate and form communities at play the settlement also embeds age assurance into every product mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages this enshrines meta's harmful surveillance into law and it will compromise users privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests i think that's those are great points mike masnick says something very similar mike on a tech dirt and i always always am interested in what mike has to say meta just paid nearly 17 billion dollars to make sure it gets to write the kids safety rules for every other social media platform even the wall street journal thought this was a bad thing saying this is their editorial board it's regulatory capture yeah mike's mike's space is a must read he's really good yeah and i thought mike made an interesting point in his piece as well which is that you know is this going to discourage other tech firms from studying whether or not yeah you don't want to know do you being harmed right because facebook probably regrets doing all that research right now yeah i think that the like the thing that i'm trying to do to think about in this is like i'm trying not to be absolutist one way or the other i'm trying not to say like i'm trying not to be like give a full-thread endorsement to the Australia band.

2:30:20But I don't like the idea that somehow... I have this standing disagreement with Taylor Lorenz about this. We did a debate about a year ago now. I'd like to have seen that. Yeah, it's interesting. And she is so impassioned about it.

2:30:35Ant Pruitt:Yeah. And I really respect her passion about it. But I disagree with the idea that there is no role for requiring that these companies understand how old these kids are. And that there should be no regulatory oversight of, you know, like, I'm not sure that I want an economy of fly-by-night startups getting to very casually engage with kids online. time like I think there's the idea that's hard we don't let kids buy liquor we don't let kids buy pornography there's precedent for it it's just challenging on the internet because the only way to do this is is very much invading the privacy of every user and collects a lot of data that we don't want these we don't trust these companies well I would just say like but the charge here was invading was it was an invasion of privacy and so if anything you could also make the argument that the effect of this, yeah, might lead to a gathering up of data on kids, definitely a problem.

2:31:48But the thing that they were poised to win on was violating the privacy of kids. And so, you know, there's one outcome here where you could imagine between the lawyers and the business model, there being no room and this becoming a business that just people don't want to go into, you know, dealing with kids online. And that might not be the worst thing in the world. I would, you know, I would respectfully point out. And so, so I just think it's, it's, I don't want to, I think we shouldn't fall into the trap just as I'm trying not to fall into the trap of being like, we should just ban it. I think people shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that efforts to regulate it are only going to wind up, you know, destroying the free and open experience of kids on online.

2:32:34I think that there's a medium being struck here. We are very early in the evolution of all of this. Kevin's Jacob came back online. Oh, geez. Was I offline? No, I was upset a little while ago when you disappeared because I wanted to hear what you had to say about this topic. I really appreciate you guys. I feel so powerfully that we have no idea that there's this sort of like, you can't put the toothpaste. I'm literally in the midst right now. I'm trying to find a toothpaste factory that will let me tour it because everyone's like, you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. And so all I want in the world is to go.

2:33:20There's these huge assembly lines where they put oceans of toothpaste into tubes. We're great at putting them into tubes. and that's a good point how did it get the tubes in the first place seriously we do it endlessly and it turns out toothpaste tubes are like the dumbest way to do toothpaste like that industry is ridiculous and so i just want to take toothpaste wait wait wait now we have to dig deep into this so so putting toothpaste back into tubes would actually be the best possible way to design it rather than having these throwaway one-time use things that have fooled us into thinking that we can't put it back in is incredibly stupid we should be reusing tubes endlessly yeah you should have you can have like yeah you could have a hard pellet that goes in and you you you know

2:34:06Ant Pruitt:hydrate it and then it turns into like the soap can you see that tooth powder when i was a kid we'd get it it was in a tin it was tooth powder and you'd shake it out and your toothbrush remember that stuff yeah i like you know so i just think like they're so good at making it sound like there's no other way to do it and and there are so many we're so much smarter than that you guys we can do better than this i i you know the wall street journal of all people says the meta settlement makes big tech bigger the company is too powerful the government says then loads it up with new obligations that require more power by the way robert bork writing this piece uh so i think that's kind of interesting i don't disagree with him um we are we are giving Facebook more power.

2:34:55Ant Pruitt:This is regulatory capture. We'll have the chance to see what happens to when, like, I mean, in February, they're going to get hit with literally more than 3 ,000 additional private cases. Right. Like, this is the end of state action on this particular question around COPPA and child online privacy. So this is it. That's it. It's done. Well, on these particular questions for states, yes. Right. So Facebook really skated on this. They got out of with a. They got out of this one thing, but there are many things that aren't touched in this agreement. Like DMs are not touched at all in this agreement, which is both bad in a way, because that's where the two-hour time limit only applies to the feed.

2:35:40It doesn't apply to DMs, like that kind of stuff. There's some silly oversight where you're just like, what? But AI is not touched. So any weirdness they do with AI could be the subject of a new case. There's a lot of landscape available for further legal action going forward. It's just on these particular child online privacy questions from states. That's the end of it. But that is not the end of lawsuits from school districts, individual plaintiffs, tribal governments. There's going to be a ton more stuff that comes at them. And so I would say the temptation is to think that it's all over, but it's far from over.

2:36:19Their time in court is not done. I'm going to end up in court watching these guys for weeks and months, I'm sure. Are you hoping for that or not? Well, this is the thing, right? Yeah, exactly. I've learned so many insider tricks. I mean, it's kind of wonderful. You go to the court and you could just go. I don't have to say CNN. I don't have to say journalist. They just let you in because that's the way America works. and you can sit and watch, you know, Adam Masseri on the stand. Like, it's great. You know, I did this with the Sam Altman Musk trial. You can just sit there, you know, and watch the richest person in the world, like, say yes ma 'am and no ma 'am to the judge.

2:36:58Like, that's a great, that's good fun. That's good free fun in America. But I also learned through this that actually you think you want to be in the court, but you actually want to be in the overflow room. Overflow room, yeah. Yeah, turns out, because that's where the snacks are. and you can chat with people there's snacks the other journalists well you can bring your snacks you're not allowed to bring snacks into the court you know and you can like drink coffee and be like who's this guy you know to people around you it's just turns out like that's the pro move so that's why we did it with the sam bankman freed trial because um only the first like 14 people could actually get into the courtroom which meant that people were waking up at three in the morning and camping out outside the courtroom and the rest of us were like screw that we want to go sit in the overflow room.

2:37:41We were sitting with our friends and eat food. Exactly. But you're talking about wanting to go see Mark Zuckerberg. It's like, it reminded me of hearing that Sam Bankman-Fried was going to take the trial and immediately booking a flight to New York. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Talk about a sweaty guy on the stand. Yeah, really. And if I had been deprived of that, I would have been very upset.

2:38:02Ant Pruitt:This trial was in San Francisco, right, Jacob? Oakland, Oakland, California. So it was in your neck of the woods. You didn't have to fly. I literally rode my bike there. It was great. It was the most civilized thing I've had. I didn't have to fly anywhere. It was great that way. It had to settle. I know. I know. How frustrating is that? I know. All right. As much as I'm enjoying this, and I really, really am. You guys are fantastic. We do have to take one more break. And unfortunately, we should probably wrap this up. I'm not Lex Friedman or anything. I saw his most recent podcast was five hours and 15 minutes long.

2:38:37And I thought, and I thought I was bad. I think he's done eight.

2:38:42Ant Pruitt:He, what is it? He must, they must take breaks, right? I don't understand. I've never watched one long enough to know. No, I know. I never get through the whole thing. I don't understand it. He interviews great people to his credit. He needs a Benito in his life to get him on track. The longest episode of the Lex Friedman podcast is an eight and a half hour conversation with elon musk wow oh my god it's all about the clips though they want the little bits and pieces for tiktok yeah the little clips that's where they get all the attention that's all i've seen is because i can't sit down for eight hours even even if you listen at double speed it would be four hours that's a lot of ritalin between two dudes i don't know jacob warren is here it's great to have you jacob you see him on cnn you can read him on the ripcurrent.com read his book at the loop and find out more at jacob ward.com molly white one of the great people who keeps wikipedia alive thank you molly her newsletter is citationneeded.news and she's at mollywhite.net and the technologizer my women dear friend harry mccracken from fastcompany.com our show today brought to you by i did this uh i don't know a couple of months ago and it was so cool tiny health i had to explain the name tiny health is it is a biome test now you know i think by now everybody understands the mind body connection right and that weirdly uh the your biome the stuff in your gut the bacteria the things that live in your gut very much impacts your not only overall health, but your state of mind, everything, which is weird because we think it's our brain, it's our heart, it's your gut.

2:40:35Ant Pruitt:So tiny health was started to actually start kids off, babies off, right? That's why they were tiny. They were doing biome tests for kids, but babies, but now you can do it yourself. And I did it and it's so interesting. Most people don't think about gut health until they have to right but you know honestly you may already have some symptoms low energy brain fog getting sick more than you should uh just not feeling yourself fully right that actually and science is proving this could be your gut trying to tell you something we always we always think it's our brain it's a lack of sleep it's could be your gut tiny health everybody should do this just to find out it actually helps you listen to what your gut is telling you and then take action it's an at-home gut health test the biome that gives you a detailed breakdown of what's actually happening inside your body and the symptoms of an off-balance biome are just read up on it low energy bloating getting sick more often than you should be just not feeling fully dialed in and now i'm not saying it's always your your gut health but this is a simple easy way to find out and i'm really glad i did you take the test uh you could do it at home you send it in a couple of weeks later on the website you'll get a personalized breakdown of of what's going on what different bacteria are living there you you actually most of that bacteria is beneficial you want bacteria in your in fact one of the reasons people have poor gut health is a use of uh antibiotics can actually deplete the bacteria the healthful bacteria or change the balance we learned for instance recently that ulcers come not from stress yes but from a bacteria pylori that starts in your mouth can migrate down to your gut and then give you ulcers so that's one of the things they test for tiny health uses the same exact advanced technology trusted in microbiome research these are science-backed insights you're getting that actually get to the root cause of your symptoms not generic wellness advice in fact i took the really excellent report.

2:42:57Ant Pruitt:I fed it to my AI. I matched it in with my health information from my physician, with my genomic information. I got an even better report. And they will give you advice. And sometimes it's a very simple thing. Mine said, eat more blueberries and dark chocolate. and i said okay i can do that uh real data personalized recommendations around food lifestyle some of it was was the kinds of exercises you should be getting everyday habits and real answers so you could take charge of your health and they did recommend that i asked my doctor for a specific test a breath test that would help me understand one of the imbalances it might get health so valuable i couldn't recommend this more highly start improving your health with real data from tiny health tiny health is offering my listeners their most aggressive offer yet fifty dollars off your first at home test kit at tinyhealth.com twit that's tinyhealth.com twit for fifty dollars off tinyhealth.com twit incidentally my AI recommended this and I'm going to do it it said okay do these behavioral changes the ones recommended by tiny health and retest 12 weeks later to see if you're moving the needle so in about a month I'm going to do my next tiny health test and I'm really curious to see what happens I certainly I haven't been sick I've been feeling pretty good I've been feeling pretty good tinyhealth.com slash twitter at least you know knowledge is power we thank them so much for their support of uh this week in tech all right we're not gonna take too long i don't want to be the eight hour podcast there are other things to talk about uh darth vader uh testimony testimony uh he wants you to know he at the san diego city council he came stepped up to say i support I support flock surveillance.

2:45:08Ant Pruitt:This was actually, I think, a very good guy named Anthony Ralphs, frustrated by the San Diego City Council's support for these automated license plate reader cameras that are now taking over the United States. There's more than 100 ,000 of them in the United States. He thought, you know, if I come dressed as Darth Vader, he said, the emperor is a fan of flock. We must continue utilizing flock technologies. so we could follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground from playground to pool from pool to gymnasium he actually uh it's you could have seen this on tick tock or uh seen it maybe on uh on snapchat or wherever you get your videos i guess instagram it's pretty funny the scenes are but it makes a very important point and i think that the people are now standing up.

2:46:02Ant Pruitt:A guy actually just got cited with a felony. His local police department put up dummy flock cameras. They weren't real flock cameras. He destroyed them. And now he's in jail. There is definitely a move. The city of Tempe, Arizona has turned off their flocks, citing privacy concerns and risk for misuse.

2:46:30Ant Pruitt:I think the tide is turning on this one. In fact, I think it might even impact the election. There's going to be two big, I think, two very big issues in the November midterms. One will be flock cameras in your local jurisdictions. The other will be data centers. And already you're seeing people like Greg Abbott, who is the governor of Texas, who's running for a re-election, and a big supporter until recently of data centers in Texas, suddenly saying, you know, these aren't such good things. I don't believe in data centers anymore. I'm not sure I believe him when he says that. Any thoughts about Flock data centers and how it's moving the needle in local elections?

2:47:14I think it's really interesting just how tremendously mobilizing the AI data center issue has been. Because, you know, I think one thing that's really interesting for me as someone who follows both the crypto and AI election influence is that crypto is not a mobilizing election issue. Nobody is out there voting for someone because they support crypto, and there's really nobody out there voting against someone who supports crypto because most people just don't care. But when it comes to AI data centers, voters are actually getting up in arms about it, which is, I think, really interesting to watch and watching how that is intersecting with the attempts by the industry to influence the elections is really interesting because we're seeing candidates basically coming out and saying my opponent is funded by ai billionaires you shouldn't vote for him and it's resonating in ways that i think the crypto issue really did not it's interesting to see flock become this um recognizable brand name and poster child for all the stuff people don't like about surveillance.

2:48:22I mean, my city is full of other types of security cameras, and I don't have a clue who makes them, but Flock is becoming well-known, and it's catching a lot of the heat for stuff that people don't like about being observed wherever they go. Yeah, it's really fascinating. Yeah, it is interesting, because license plate readers are pretty old technology as far as this stuff goes, but now that we're seeing a lot of backlash to things like that. I think somehow people didn't even understand that last split readers were around. I think it just wasn't in the national consciousness to understand that like a repo agent can find your car like within an hour.

2:48:59Like it's pretty straightforward to just like track your vehicle. You know, I think people just didn't really understand that. I feel like there's a, you know, like this, this is like brought it to the surface for people. I took a trip last year to Rio. I'd never been to Brazil before. and when you go to Rio and you land there, you go through, when you go through customs and immigration, you walk this long corridor and you speak to nobody. And they just kind of like wave you through with your passport. And, you know, you still have to get it checked for a second, but it's very fast and very easy.

2:49:31And I was like, what is this long hallway? And then somebody told me, oh, you're being filmed like 10 ,000 ways. They're getting your gait, how you're the rhythm of how you walk. They're picking up God knows what. And they have this huge panoply of, you know, Chinese surveillance technologies all over the city. Everywhere you go, it's just filled with cameras. And there's this really interesting debate going on sort of in Brazil right now around it has had a noticeable effect on violent crime in that city. And so people are kind of all about it. On the other hand, there have been all these cases in which cops have been monetizing YouTube channels of weird ass footage they find, you know, and which which people don't like.

2:50:22And I think that there's something like, like when you look at how other countries react to this stuff, it makes you realize how like Germany, I was listening to this the other day, but there's this big German, like social media star is a kid who literally like dresses as a cop and goes around finding people who've parked wrong and snitching to them, to the police. and that guy's like a hero of social media in germany they love that because like a they love that you know the germans they love a snitch and so and there's something about it's kind of a

2:50:53Ant Pruitt:hereditary thing in germany yeah there's something going on there you know tradition yeah there's something going on and so so the fact that we are so upset by this i am i am really relieved by considering we're the same country that's been paying money for an alexa all this time you know uh it finally came home people finally realized we are being one of course we forget flock we carry surveillance devices in our pockets yeah you're just talking about putting your gut biome data into ai yeah i know i know when you said that too i was like oh i use local ai no that's one of the reasons i use local ai right i was gonna say you might be the person about whom ai companies have the most data oh well that's up until recently that's probably the case absolutely yeah absolutely this is benito i just want to like chime in real quick and say that i think like the flock cameras and the data centers are only the physical manifestation of these things that people can actually fight that's what exactly like no one can go after palantir because palantir isn't a thing like isn't a thing and they don't really understand bitcoin but there's this general sense of disease that have focused on those two points but it represents a much larger sense and this is the anti-ai as well of of tech tech is spun out of control surveillance capitalism is spun out of control and we are no longer in control of our destiny and yeah and i think that's bothering people i think bitcoin is not going to uh falsely arrest you because it mistook you for somebody else and it's also not going to take your job you know i think that's partly why the AI thing is so mobilizing is people feel very directly threatened by it in ways that Bitcoin, I mean, you know, Bitcoin might tank the economy or something like that, but it's, you know, it's not like very directly threatening in the same way.

2:52:44Yeah. That's funny. It is. It's like the thing of, of, I always would get asked, like one of the things they say to you in television news is like, well, what are we going to point a camera at, you know, to do this story? Right. And like AI dangerous owners have become that as Benito. You can point a camera at those. You can point a camera at Flock. I'm curious what that, and I think that's why the Stand Back and Free trial was such a big deal, is you could actually, like, there was a face to it. Yeah, you're right. But I wonder what the, there's going to be something else, I think, with crypto.

2:53:14It's like it's skated underneath the radar because, yeah, like people say this. Yeah, I mean, to some extent, there was Bitcoin data centers, which have had a lot of those same complaints as AI data centers, but I think that but it's just a much smaller market. They're not entering every single township in the way that you sort of - And like you say, it's not taking your job. That building's not stealing your job, that's right. Right, or you're not worried about your kids in the same way that I think a lot of people are worried about AI. And as soon as something starts to threaten people's kids, I think that's when things really start to get heated.

2:53:48It's so funny. You can't really ignore AI, but most people can ignore Bitcoin and that'll be okay.

2:53:54Ant Pruitt:that's right but you make such a good point jacob that so much of our awareness is driven by television news and and having worked in tv for so long i know too if there's not a picture it's very hard for tv to talk about it with bitcoin it became the bitcoin atms and you saw these stories about little ladies putting their money well that was something to take a picture of yeah yeah but i do think you know that is why you see the like physical gold bitcoin as if it's a coin as if it exists because it's like what else are you going to put in well and the problem with all of that right is that with a lot of these big social you know like society rewriting problems by the time there's something to point a camera at it's too late right that's one of the problems like that's the climate change thing that's where all the climate science is manifest by the time it's at your doorstep it's too late and we didn't really start this is killing thousands that's right sorry nice try yeah yeah yeah we should have been on it when we couldn't film it that's right well we're not very good uh as a species at abstract concepts we need yeah and i'm not very good as a as a as a podcast person at ending on a happy note i'm always oh i have happy notes don't worry that's oh good oh good thank god thank god i was trying to find one upbeat story actually i've been using all the upbeat stories from the robot olympics all of the pictures of robots falling over dying bursting into flames and i probably should celebrate yeah uh here's a happy story actually we talked about uh we talked about for years crisper the idea of gene editing and of course there's a lot of issues with the gene editing but here's a story about crispr being used in a very positive way now i am aware of this because i have a genetic marker that uh means i have to watch very closely high cholesterol um and you know my doctor said there's nothing we can do about it you know we can we can give you statins but uh this is a gene well uh this is from cnn um 50 reduction in cholesterol over a year by this came from a story in the new england journal of medicine by using crisper they only had 15 patients 15 patients with high cholesterol adults they were given a gene altering medicine crispr cas9 which basically targeted a location on the gene to modify it took out that one marker the one i have and it worked 50 reduction reduction in cholesterol decreases in ldl and triglycerides they saw them 60 days after treatment then they've lasted over a year in people who took the highest dose the reduction seems durable and safe this is a very interesting i think the first time i can think of it of a medicine that is actually gene modification that's happy news that is happy news that is happy news let's just wait a generation before we get too excited yeah i just make sure nobody pops out already got the shot i'm getting a shot give it to me baby the earliest adopter yeah yeah well fortunately for me the statins do seem to work but uh it would be nice to have something a little bit more that is cool i will say like i mean this is the thing we were talking earlier you know we started off this conversation you know hours and hours ago about uh many moons ago yes that's okay when i was sitting outside remember that yeah yeah yeah funny the um uh but the but this idea right that the technology is not bad it is the use of the technology and the thing that with the like that ai uh you know like i just think like give it to the scientists yeah ai is a problem because give it to those folks people yeah they're gonna do cool things with it yeah fewer ai girlfriends more crisper research don't knock my ai girlfriends yeah at least they love me who sound like bill gates we must keep around uh so it is yesterday i mentioned was judgment day skynet went online august 29th 2026 according to terminator 2 and in one in honor of that it's the 35th anniversary of the movie uh it's coming back to movie theaters look for uh actually the best terminator movie i think uh in a movie theater near you studio canal which owns the movie uh is actually doing a special theatrical release of the film this weekend to celebrate Skynet Day.

2:58:54Ant Pruitt:And honestly, I think it could be true. We don't know. There was something special about when that movie came out, though. I think there was something in the air that summer. That was a great movie. The first Terminator, it's funny, doesn't age very well. I mean, it was great. It's classic. Terminator 2 ages pretty well. That was pretty good. And then I always like to end the show with somebody dying, or I call it the in-memoriam segment, And this week, it's the Mechanical Turk. Aw, that's a good knowledge. It launched 21 years ago when Molly was a child. You may remember the idea was for pennies.

2:59:39Ant Pruitt:You could ask real humans in poor countries around the world to do your work for you. Bezos called it artificial artificial intelligence. uh we don't really need it anymore wow isn't that interesting we've gotten to the place where they we have enough people churning through this stuff they've turned through it all for us and now we don't yeah maybe it was the original outsourced you don't need reinforcement learning i guess in the same way i hadn't even thought of that that's interesting i feel like i might be the only person sorry go ahead molly a lot of it was like essentially transcription or you know very easily now automatable tasks so yeah you didn't really need you don't really need it now well i feel like i'm the only person left who might remember that when the original kindle came out 19 years ago one of the features was you could use mechanical turk for free on act and just ask questions and it really was like it like an artificial jet gpt it did not last for very long it did not work very well and some nice irish lady would figure out for you like what's the best potluck recipe to bring this afternoon i have i have my original kindle somewhere and i think there's at least a tiny chance that it has my conversations i need to find that and see if i can charge it i would love they're still there to see a log of the all the questions that kindle users ask the yes like if i they should publish a book of that totally it would seem so dated now wouldn't it i mean incredibly dated and they would not have guessed that uh within a generation or so that that would be entirely automated and would work far better uh i imagine there's a i should look on reddit there must be a mechanical turk forum subreddit maybe people will be posting posting their uh mechanical turk conversations that must be the best product name of all time in some ways well you know what it was uh and i knew this because i'm a serious chess player there was a chess playing machine in the 19th century called the mechanical turk and it had a turban it was a torso and it would move the pieces and it was amazing paul morphy who was the world champion at the time of american played it and it played really well against him uh and people were thought oh this is incredible artificial intelligence but there was actually a small person there was a small person inside the mechanical turk uh that was apparently a very good chess player i was gonna say not only small but very good at talented chess master and small enough to fit in the cabinet let me see if i can find a picture of this wait if he could beat the grandmaster why isn't he the master he should have been the world champion i think he probably didn't beat morphe but he uh was good enough that um here's a here's a picture of it from where wikipedia it was good enough that uh not to scale yeah not just i don't know what maybe it was giant i don't know there is a guy in there uh where are his legs though yeah i don't know i don't know you should check with the wikipedia and uh and see uh this is this is the guy who created the mechanical uh turk uh kempelin and it was it was a con it was actually he pretended it was a machine i love the historical illusion in that name yeah so and it was actually a pretty clever machine it was able to physically move the pieces yeah here is i love that they went so far as to actually make a guy like that was not necessary to have the the yeah right moving the turk was a there really was a torso of a mechanical turk here is from a bill uh from uh the 18th century of this Mechanical Turk, the automaton chess player.

3:03:41Ant Pruitt:Isn't that amazing? So that's where the name comes from. And now, ladies and gentlemen, you see, we uplifted, we informed, we amused, and we didn't leave you on a low note, much as Jacob Ward might have tried. Jacob, you did yeoman work today, moving locations on the fly. Really appreciate it. It was so cool when I saw you on CNN and I said, I know where he is. exactly exactly it's true his his washer dryer right there i know so they don't make you go in you can do it from your house that's a big change it is a big change and they and the the yeah it's a funny new world right because once upon a time i was very scornful of my setup i'm like uh what you know what am i some youtuber and i'm like man i hope i can make it on youtube it looks good it looks good that really all changed i remember used to do hits on cnn and you'd have to go down to the satellite bureau in san francisco yeah oh yeah an earpiece and pretend that you were talking to somebody instead of a sit in front of a backdrop of the golden gate bridge exactly and then thanks to it kovid changed it all and we all got used to the idea of people being in their kitchen or their living room i'm still amazed you'll see members of congress you'll he's sitting senators in their kitchen it's hysterical times have have changed uh but we haven't and that's what i love about you guys thanks jacob for being here molly white you're the best always appreciate your time thank you for being patient putting up with this marathon session lex friedman's online too if you want to make it even longer you know you keep going even i have my limits citation needed.news mollywhite.net great to see you and of course your friend harry mccracken the technologizer we used to get together in the studio and do this and i do miss those days i haven't been back to petaluma even once i think well it was the only reason people ever came to petaluma was to do the show well the breakfast there are pretty good too oh yeah oh yeah well bicycle up sometime yeah we'll go to lunch uh you'll find him at fastcompany.com and the plugged in newsletter must read and i look forward to your dvorak piece when do you think it'll come out uh i kind of like fell down a dvorak rabbit hole only i need to come out easy to do believe me i've lived that rabbit hole because i feel like um actually i was surprised by how little seemed to be documented of how he became a computer columnist and that heyday when pretty famously private.

3:06:23Ant Pruitt:For instance, they did a no agenda show after he passed and his wife Mimi came on and she said the thing that would piss John off the most about dying was that everybody knew he was 80 years old because he had basically hid his age. He never told me. I would say, well, how old are you? And he pretended he was a lot younger than he really was. uh he claimed and i think it's true to uh have been a wine columnist early on but even before that he was a pollution inspector he had all sorts of weird he uh odd jobs he had a mail order catalog for north star computers which leo might leo might remember but most i had a north star was one of my very first personal computers we bought his north star catalog had it was was very heavily branded with his personality and it kind of almost read like a column and that that led to him working at info world oh i can't wait to read this don't don't spoil it this is something we'll all look forward to is the real story parts of it are so mysterious to me because he was not like 20 years old when he became a computer columnist he had he'd done a lot of living by that point yeah well that's what made him interesting thank you harry thank you molly Thank you, Jacob.

3:07:37Ant Pruitt:Thanks to all of you for being here. A special thanks to our club members. We're doing, you know, kind of winding down the year. And Lisa told me yesterday that 50%, I've been saying 30%, 50 % of our operating costs have been covered by the club this year. That is how important the club is to us. Half of what it costs to do to it. And I'm not talking about my salary. I'm talking about Benito's salary. I'm talking about the expenses of the website and the lights and the cameras and all that stuff. Half of it comes from you club members. If you like what you hear, if you appreciate the content we're doing, we want to keep doing it.

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3:09:28Ant Pruitt:So we no longer do that in public. You have to be a member of the club. Micah Sargent and I will comment as Apple announces its new iPhones. Micah also does this fun crafting corner. He was doing all sorts of stuff. Lego, crocheting, knitting, origami. He's doing some sort of weird paper folding thing beyond origami. Our great photo guru is Chris Marquardt. The assignment this month is the word smooth. The Media Club. Oh, that's coming up the 18th. We're going to do the top animated episodes from Rick and Morty. The Simpsons. That's going to be a lot of fun talk about that. The Crazy Show-Off by one with Jeff Atwood.

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3:11:45Ant Pruitt:And we will always do that. You could find us in every podcast client, just search for Twit. And that way you'll have it after we're done on a Sunday evening, maybe for your Monday morning commute. Thanks for listening, everybody. We've been doing this for 21 years. Here's to 21 more. Next week will be episode 1100 of the podcast. Kind of amazing. Thank you for your support. We appreciate it. And I will see you next week. And And as I have said, for all 1099 of those episodes, thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can. This is amazing.