Privacy and Surveillance Concerns

It's time for Twit this weeknd Tech Marshall Kirk Patrick is here, Larry Magged My friend, Jacob Ward, we've got a great panel and lots to talk about including B biggest change to Google search in twenty five years Jacob was at the Musk versus Altman trial. He'll talk about what it was like to be sitting there and and watching The whole thing And there's good news and bad news Creepy listening tool for targeted ads didn't actually work The FTC says, we're going to find you. It should have worked All of that more coming up next on Twit This episode is brought to you by O Systems a leading agentic systemstems platform built for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are building, orchestrating, and governing agentic systems on the OT Systems platform. And with good reason. Architects deliver and scale governed agentic systems with agility and trust using one open and unified platform secure company wide egetic orchestration for core business operations. Teams of any size and technical depth can use O systemystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. Without systemystems, you can rapidly launch ideas from concept It's the leading agentic Sys platform that's unified, agile, and enterprise proven, allowing you to accelerate growth, reduce operational friction, and deliver real enterprise impact with AI. Outystems buildu your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems dot com slash twwit. That's outsystems dot com slash twwit Podcasts you love from people you trust This is Tid This is Twit this week in tech. Episode one thousand eighty five Recorded Sunday, may twenty fourth, twenty twenty six Waiting in line with San It's time for Twit this week at Tech the show where we cover the weeks. Tech news And at first I thought the tech newews was kind of weak this week, but then I took a stronger look and fortunately we have a panel That is up to the task. Larry Maggott is here connect safely. org founder and president, but also a like me a refugee from radio. We're going to talk about The demise of CBS Ns. U Good to see you, Larry. welcome. Good to of you always. And we also talk about your blog post about how AI helped you understand why you weren't feeling so good the other day That's to come Also with us Marshall Kirk Patrick. It's always great to see Marshall longtime. tech journalist. his latest though is Browser Extension. apppplies AI to the pageer un called What's up with that Hey Marshall, good to see you Thanks, Leo. Welcome. Marshall was on intelligent machines, but you were on Twit many times back in the day. You're kind of what I would say is an old timer. Q old timer Also with this Jacob Ward, Jacob is the author of a great book called The Loop preaged what's going on today with AI. He was absolute, you know, ahead of his time on that one. he's ack You're back, I see on CNN now, which is great. Yeah. I have a contributor role at CN. very exciting. Areciate Leo You also see him of course every month on teech News Weekly And his newsletter is the rip cururrent So begin here. Let's as long as we started talking about radio off the air and I said, wait a minute, hold on. Let's let's hold that for the show because Larry, you asked me a Kind of a leading question Is radio dead, rightight any bad news? Well It's funny because For years, I've been saying who listens to the radio? And often our audience says we do. Yeah I said, do young people still listen to the radio? I think maybe in the car people still listen to rado? I don't know why know. CBS News radio As of last week before it died on Friday had twenty two million listeners on seven hundred affiliates across the country. someow that was other peak. they peaked at thirty three million during my career They claim that they had still had twenty two million listeners a week, which is more than CBS evening news gets. In fact, more than all the evening news gits combined Wow, we didn't have an audience. At least they claim. Well who do you think that is? I mean You know, it's funny, Jacob, when I get in the car, I fire up tune in and listen to CNN H That's my news ready too. I was CN into Yeah I was once I was talking to an entrepreneur recently living in Lagos, Nigeria, who said that what' he had just taken a big executive job at a big radio station there and was talking about how hot radio is still Then. West Africa that for a for a lot of people it is still the dominant Yeah, media, dominant, music. It was like it was like talking to somebody from from another you know, from a time capsule from a time traveler. and he was just saying how cool it is to combine The social media stuff with what's going on in radio. Anyway, it was very cool to imagine, but we are not living in that kind of world here, no question Well, as William Gibson once said, the future is here, It's just not evenly distributed. There's some of us living in a different decade than others If you are in a country, a developed country like this where there's internet floating through the air and available to everyone everywhere all the time, thanks to our cell phones. cell service, I don't understand why you would listen, why you would even By the way, people still subscribe to Sirius. I don't understand why you can get all of that Maybe I guess if you're not always in cell So as I mentioned to you allair, I got an invitation to go to this event in New York on Friday. You went to the funeral for CBS New I said, Do, I want to spend all this time and money flying across the country for a two hour lunch? And I said, Yeahah, if a good friend died, I would go to their funeral. It's like that, isn't it? And And this was the death of a radio network, one ninety nine years old Edward R. Murow was one of the very first Tiffany network. The Tiffany network it was historic And it was still the largest radio news network in the country as of until this week. And so I showed up and first all it was a wonderful event. I got to meet all of these great people who I know by name and voice, but because I work remotely, I rarely got a chance to see them in person And You know It's over. pull they pulled the plug on us at eleven thirty one Friday night, we did our last broadcast And now all the stations are moving over to ABC News because they still have a new service That's kind of sad. Yeah. what it is. I mean Is there such a thing as CB is I mean, is CBS was now owned by Paramount is CBS is owned by Paramount, which is Larry Ellison' son, David, I think his name is I meany I buy this, I'll I can sell it. I would buy this. I'm keeping it's Yeahah, that's actually pretty cool. Yeah. they all did they own CBS News radio? Did they get. So what happenensed was W CBS did divested their stations about six or seven years ago? That became a They own on local radio stations. They used to own KCBS, for example, in the Bay Area in WCBS in New York. I grew up listening to WCBS. that's where I heard that RFK had been assassinated I used to be on WCBS daily. I love being WC. And I heard you all the time, ye I was a child, of course, at the time. Absute. No, I was on the air recently as Friday U if I still do a second I still do a feature, even though I'm no longer to. I mean, I look radioos in my heart in December I will have will be the fiftieth anniversary of my getting my FCC third ticket So I could work in radio I will always consider myself a radio guy and that's why I do podcasting because it is the air apparent to radio. It's still audio focused. Is some person talking to a microphone in your ear These are delivery mechanisms. att the end of the day, it's cares how it comes to you. I mean, there's a difference. so I don't know. Mbe you guys know of a podcast that would compete with something like the CBS you know, hourly news where we had a three minute. Well, there was one, but openp AI bought it. Yeah, great The Tech Bros podcast network for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, that one was crazy. And then Mark Andreesen's venture capapital arm has they did something called monitoring the situation, which is a direct clone of TPBN R TBPN U But those are both on YouTube. there's several hours a day streaming and they have really more like a CNBC look and feel to them when there's a they are not independent, right? They're not playing the role of a journalistic outlet holding power accountable. is it is an adversarial landscape and I presume, right there's like some who killed Robert or who framed Roger Rabbit kind of stuff going on here where you know, this isn't just the the unstoppable march of time forward, this is around corporate consolidation and regulatory capture and media capture and a part of a larger shift towards Authoritarianism Well and I should mention that, you know Not only did CBS Radio News die on Friday, but so did the Stehven Colbert. show The next day, it was actually very funny. Stephen Colbert shows up on public access. That was awesome. So funny Yeah. Well, but it's kind of not funny It was called Only in Monroe. I guess he'd done the show once before. and it was by the way, watch it because it's hysterical And Jack White is on. I mean, it's it's really good funny stuff, but it is a local access And I've never heard of My let alone that that t' tiny. Yeahriiant.s get Iming Paramount plus Took it down. They don't own it They don't own him they issued a strike to YouTube and they have has been taken down globally What right do they have to do that? I have no idea. This is the problem with YouTube takeds. Also the world's dumbest thing. give it as much you know, oxygen is possible, right? That's the thing. likeiceand effect, right? You just put it right into the news cycle By doing that, I feel like you just need these like, There needs to be like C sweet training and like, hereere is how humor works. How stupid can you? Here is how attention works. Like there just isn't good training at that level. I owe Brended Carr, a debt of gratitude because I didn't really pay much attention to Jimmy Kimmel until he got banned. Now I record it every night and watched it every single morning. I watched the monologue And I never I never did that until til they took them off the air So Paramount, Larry Allison's son, I think feeling the pressure from Brendan Carrars FC deccided to pull co Bear. ABC showed a little bit of spine not pulling Jimmy Kimmel, but I think some of that was public reaction to that. Oh w. What is that why CBS radio newews went away or is that more an economic? There's what there o My friends, and concluding the up until a couple of days ago, senior management at the newsroom said was that we were slightly profitable, they were in the black And boy, being in the black in media, I don't care how close you are to the red. As long as you're in the black, that should be a good sign Now CBS will say it was for financial reons. U, but You know Do you think it's political? I think it's political. I think look, for all of the criticisms of mainstream media, and I understand them and I have my own critiques, we worked really hard to tell the truth. I mean, lying knowingly lying on CBS News radio with a fireall offense And I can't say the same for some of the other shows out there, networks out there and You know, I don't think we had a left wing bias. I think we really did have a straight forward news gathering bias, which may be very uncomfortable to certain people in power. Telling the truth can be dangerous if you're basing your administration on lies And that's and we were just telling the truth. That's all we were doing U Yeah , I was a commentator, I got to editorial life a bit, but still the never. It's pretty hard in a world where Podcasting exists, where the internet exists And Brendan Carr and the FC's reach does not extend to that. I mean, they may try to make it, but it's pretty hard to shut down commentary. And the real question, you know, and Jacabeth, you know, FNN could very well be likely is going to be owned by the same people that own PPS U The question is how relevant it? does it really matter given the internet that Ellison owns CBS and may soon own Yeah, here's my argument about that. So I so yeah, I should say right, I'm a contributor at CN. I'm not a full time employee but I have a relationship with CN. so I'm not speaking for CNN here in any way. But I u, you know, this question of right, does it matter? Who owns these platforms in an age of declining relevance for mainstream mia, blah I hear that On the other hand, so I'm part of a sort of informal network of creators. and there's a sllack channel that goes around. one of the people the other day was said And these are people who are like you know, they they might have some kind of like, you know posts on like they they tend to do stuff about knitting or cooking or whatever it is And they they started in some cases, talking about current events and before they knew it, they were like some of the top voices in the nation on current events. And so One of them said, Hey, I've just been leaked some documents from this like government agency. And I don't know what to do with them because I have no training, right? And they were like, you know, what kind of quick journalism training can I get to figure out what to do U And so I put together a little like informal kind of like crash course in journalism, like a journalism one hundred and one for these folks because Their numbers are so huge And their relationship with their audience is so close that these people, you know, inside sensense of government facilities are leaking them stuff because they think this is the person to go to as opposed to the BBC or CNN or whoever else. So crazy. Also, when I then didid the one on one thing. I basically said to people like, listen You guys are operating right now in a world in which the There's a primary layer of journalism that you have come to expect will always be there. The Anderson Cooper hard hitting interviews, you know the rocket fire into Bahrain and the footage you get from the news of that. And then you guys consider yourselves to be in this sort of like commentary class you know, as a as a you know, as a as an you know, you're offing your perspective on the news which is what so many of these people were doing. And I was like, what happens when the primary goes away because you're gonna, you know, these folks also basically like they all need that that primary layer in order for their secondary commentary layer to work. So so everybody wants it there, even and what we know is that like young people actually consume an enormous amount of news. They just do it through the clips that they watch TikTok theyer do it. Yeah which clipad the news. That's right yeah. That's right. That's news. And so the current system is Really, even though the money's not flowing to the primary layer of journalism it's still very relevant and people still really want it. It's just being consumed in this whole other way. And what I was saying to these people are like, are you ready to be the primary layer if the primary layer falls apart as a business model Be somebody has to. How we afford it? This This is completely analogous to what's happening with AI which is AI has eaten all of the primary sources And in some respects putting the primary sources out of business desperately need those primary sources And for bureaus all over the world. That's a really expensive operation. you know, YouTube star is likely to have twenty bureaus around the world. And reporters gathering facts. The thing that came down the other day, sorry, Marshall, I don't mean to cut you off there. The thing that came down the other day that I was really freaked out about was Meta announced a new policy that they're going to spike creators who post unorriginal content What? Yeah, that they and they and they talk about in the context of like, oh, we're protecting the creator. Adamissari had this piece, you know, this post about it 're protecting creators and their original works. And so if your what you post is not substantially transformed or not yours specifically, then they're going like that's interesting. Not only will it will it downgrade that content, it'll downgrade you as a creator. So like the people in my cohort are like panicked because News footage is one of the main things that goes around for them. And I was thinking to myself, boy I don't know if that's Meta's intention. Oh, they're morons. You know what? they are they are bad wor newers for understanding the news. like it could really screw life People's sense of what's going on in the world. No. And if you think about it, it's counterproductive. what made TikTok of success. They bought musically And the success of TikTok was people lip syncing to other people's music And eventually, TikTok really became about colloabs. and responses and taking existing content and repackaging it And I think Med is just They're on the wrong side of history. This is nothing new for Ma. So Tceand was already rich Right when when the Streissand effect came into being, she could she could get in there and and she could withstand the pressure. She could freak out. She I'm sure she was on the phone their lawyers et cetera, etera. But but this I would contend that that when the powers that be put pressure on people If those people are already deep pocketed and have big legal teams, then it becomes a Streissan effect situation. But if they're more on the margin, then it becomes a slap situation, a strategic lawsuit against public participation because they don't have the capacity to withstand that barrage Yeah Well, that's why we defend Sction two hundred thirty Because if you are meta If you are Google, if you are a big company, you can defend yourself in court peopleople like us in our little chat rooms in our little mastadon instances in our forums We can't And that's why section two hundred thirty is necessary. I have a question I was always a big defender of two hundred thirty, but I'm questioning whether it's relevant in the age of algorithms. If meta is amplifying post Doesn't that make them a publisher? They're not just running a forum. It's not like the old days of compoputer forums where anything goes. you know, they are they are amplifying That's right. That's what the jury decided. Isn't it? in the the design the design was not I mean, they didn't takeive product design. Yeah, they just said that the design was, they were culpable for the effect that the design has on your behavior whichich is I think is good. It keeps Yeah I, you know, by the way, my chat rooms. Don't have an algorithm. My mas ison Just' chronological, baby, my forums Chronological, there is no editorial. So if that's the case, ye, maybe you're right. Maybe section two thirty does not and should not defend the algorithmic ublishing That that is, I guess you know, in a way publishing and that's what that jury found in San Jose, but exactly I'm a big believer in two hundred thirty in general. Yeah under turned off the algorithm of Facebook and made it chronological and it got really boring. Now exactly because I have thousands of you know, I've got followers and friends. Before they allowed followers, I used to accept all my everybody's friends because that was the only way I could have people follow me.ight. So maybe that's the problem, but no it's not. It's the same problem with Mastodon. That's why nobodykes Mastodon because it's not algorithmic So I track my news through a system that I built myself. that has an algorithm tuned specific your algorithm for Yeah for my specific interests. Yeah. I've got few areas of interest and I click a button and it just says, whoosh, here's the here's the ten most relevant articles from across everything you're monitoring about that each day and it's maybe that's the future is hyper personal interesting. I love that. Marshall, can I ask you a question. So like let's say you let's say we scale that up, right? and each of us gets to construct our thing. So I have something sort of sort of like that. as well. And I was just thinking like, okay No one's making money off of your system or mine, notot least because no one's centralizing your behavioral profile and bucketing it with all the behavioral profiles, bl,? But is there like a money making opportunity at scale for each person personalizing a news feed and I to say suggest that that's what we do here at Twit. Is we pick the stories that we think are important and we talk about them and that editorial judgment is what we monetize. That's right. sureure. Well, what a concept. You think the New York Times might start I was say that level That's called journalis as a podcaster, it works, right? But as an individual, like as a bunch of individuals with a one to one relationship the algorithm. I'll show you something I subscribe to. It's called no sccroll I found it on Twitter. It is an AI. It says no scroll monitors the situation so you don't have to Every morning at nine AM, no sccroll sends me a list of stories. I to ahead of time what I'm interested in And it sends me a list of stories on telegram It's a telegram bot h that I might want to cover. It's ten bucks a month. And it's one of the many tools I use to keep track of stories we want to cover on the show I don't know, I presume, I mean, it's ten bucks a month. They're monetizing it I don't know how big it's become. I'm trying to get the founders on to talk about it. So there are ways to do this. and Matt Marshall, you're kind of monetizing it with what's up with that, right? Yeah, what's up with that? And then sos that's my X ray tool, but then I've also got a companion radar type tool called Hawkeye. And is that available there? Yeah, it is. Oh, okay. Where's that? It's at what's up with that. app slash Hawkeye Okay. And and so I'm setting that up for organizations. I sell that And and what it does is we map out, you know, you give us some examples of the kinds of organizations you're interested in I go out and map out hundreds of related kinds of organizations, monitor them each day Yeah. and then click on one of those magazine covers there in the bottom right, one of the things that it does is publish and then if you click through on the right side, there's a ye an arrow there generates these magazine This is analogous to something that's been around in journalism for decades, which is a clipping service, right?? If you're Barbara Streissan, you pay for a clipping service that will send you every day all the places you were mentioned. Google did that for still does that, right? Ggle Dougason on top of it because it takes a whole bunch of related stories. AI makes it better Find me do some cluster analysis and see what some common themes are and generate some original analysis covering those themes I will say one of the things that I think none of this solves for, and it's a comment brought up on your discord right now I don't know how you say your name LR AU That's Larry It's Larry Gold. It's Laurenciium Gold. This good. It is a classic twwit. I can't read it out now, but it looks good.' a nd name. Yeah LRA. But he says, what I find with algorithms tuned to me, you don't find anything outside of my bubble. That's my number one point. It's the filter bu. Be like Not just in the like ideological sense, which is bad You know, it makes a lot of sense this thing of like, we're going to serve up like intelligence, you know, tailored to your specific job function. G. What I want is the old experience of like, wandering through know, a paper edition of the New York Times, bumping into some crazy article about something weird going on in Indonesia that I would never read about otherwise, and that no algorithm would ever predict I'd be into And being like, wow, that's really interesting. His wife organize the murder of this guy and that's cra, you know, like the random discovery stuff. And as a newsletter writer, that's kind of important, right? Because you want to find something that not everybody. So I am in exactly the same boat ninety percent of the stories we do are the same stories everybody who's covering tech does And I use the AI to do that. This is the daily tech briefing that my AI generates. me it for all three shows that I do. And so I let it do that, but you're exactly right Jacob, I don't get from that The weird, the odd ball So So my favorite experience if I may with that, I'm a subscriber to a book publisher called PMPress, where for thirty bucks a month They just send me every book they publish that month And and I get all kinds of like wild stuff that I wouldn't have chosen. That's brilliant to buy until it shows up in my mailbox in a package about, you know, Appalachian coal miner labor disels. Uh yeah, it's really neat. So I think about that because in the days of newspapers, let's say you're a sports fanatic and that's really all you care about You still have to pass the front page on the way to the sports section. So you're going to get some information. But now you could just go to ESPN or whatever your sports source and completely ignore what's happening in the rest of the world. Well, worse than that, you could say I only want to know about football. Don't tell me about baseball. Right I mean, you can really narrow it down. So I think there is an obligation on the part of consumer information consumers to try to try to reach outside their filter bubble You know, Eli Parriser wrote that very famous book of the Filter Bbble. and Jeff Jarvis has always argued against it. He said, you know You can say Well, you're only seeing stuff you're interested in. It is the nature of the internet that stuff comes in over the transom that you would not see otherwise You know, and I think that that's I think that's also true. I don't. I think how does TikTok work?ok TikTok is exactly that. exxactly it's just pure, isn't it just perpetually refined exactly the kind of stuff you like? Yeah The funny thing aboutit about TikTok is that it used to be much more like random awesome stuff. you'd get like A Jamaican truck driver teaching you how he makes breakfast in his cab and you know, that kind of stuff where you're like, wow, I would never bump into this on any other platform. Now it's become a little more specific what and you have to basically reset your feed every so often because it starts to peg you. And my thing is, you know start to figure out who you are Peg you is the wrong word. please don't say that. Thankk you, but sorry for that. But That you know, narrowing of what it gives you, it gets boring really quick. And for me, what I'm always trying to do is convince it that I'm somebody demographically that I'm not. So I'm always trying to convince it that I'm like a twenty five year old black woman That's whenever like I'm trying to like heart stuff about that, you know, whatever. And then I'll linger too long on something and it'll be like, oh, you're a white guy in your fifties. And it' like it's like camp. more bikin archery and cars and Jack Rher. and I'm like, You know, pickleall Pickleall. That's what you want. You want Pickleall Pickle Ball. exact. I like I God damn I have to. My daughter who's a millennial taught me that. She said, Dad, you have to really she said, what you really need is multiple accounts because it pid I don't know if Tikx is sophisticated anymore now that it's owned by Larry Allllison, but It pays attention to what you look at morning, noon and night It has it is very fine tuned. I mean, this was really their secret sauce, right? And She says, but you can completely cultivate by what you linger on, what you watch And what you don't linger on, And she I'm scrolling through. I said, seeee I get all these bikini pictures. She says Don't stop there Iol Le. I'm glad you admitted that because I get that even on Facebook reels. and I'm almost reluctant to admit it because it's kind of acknowledging that maybe once in a while I actually look at this stuff. Well of course we're men. we can't help watching It's not just men that love boobs forre gonna You can't look away, I know I don't want to stop I really don't. So I have noticed that, you know, I took Instagram and TikTok off my phone and they've been off for six months. And I went back to Instagram because unfortunately, my son is an Instagram influencer and I kind of if I'm going to find out what Henry's up to, I have to every once in a while check Instagram. But I do notice that Instagram, I think got sensitive that I don't get the thirst traps I used to get. I mean, used to be, all I would see on Instagram was young women basically trying to get you to join their only fans. And that's stopped. So I think they are playing with the algorithm a little bit. You know, Leo, you remind me of this preacher. Years ago when I took ads on safekids. com U someomehow, I got this letter from a preacher says, you know, I found a sexually provocative ad on your website. And you should not be, you know a sight on kid safety should up. I said, I'm sorry to tell you, Reverend But it's based not on what's on my website, it's based on what you're looking at Sir. You know, my website just serves up what you want, Reverend. Well, so there is a continuum, right of interests between like a liberal deemocratic Prioritization on diversity and growth and instead, you know, people say if you're trying to reach across the aisle, like make appeals to to purity and and tradition and And the instruments of power buying up these social networks and tuning the algorithms are more aligned to the latter. U and it's a solft reinforcing cultural That's what Jonathan He said P problem is that purity used to be a Republican value, I'm not sure it is anymore. I know it's talalking about it. appeals to purity are. Oh you could o, I think. talalksking about purity. Yeah. Yeah. Jonathan Hyight before he became the guy who says Kids are being ruined. Kids today ruined by social media. wrote a really good book. I interviewed him on it about why we can't talk to one another and he really talks about the left and the right and the values that each side holds highest But as you said, purity is one of them on the more conservative side. and Uh, you know, fairness, this is really interesting Um And you're right, that would that would end up getting self perpetuated. But I So I mean, I think we've talked about solutions here. I think this is a potential flaw with AI. I think one of the things that's happening with AI, were're all four of us examples of this is people are writing their own custom filters and custom services and custom search tools. Some people are But it's not everybody, obviously, but the but those of us in in the cutting edge of tech are very everybody it's so funny because I I was telling Larry this, I have people on the show I used to have to say, well, do you use AI now? it's not it's a given. becausecause if you're covering technology This is one of the most consequential things that's ever happened in technology and you will be left out unless you actually using it, right? who said that in the future, the world will be made up of a small group of people who tell computers what to do and a larger group of people who will be told what to do by computers That's changing though. I think AI might be changing that it's empowering individuals in a way that There's a handful of companies that dominate AR AI already. mean industustries start out with a lot of companies and they consolidate We're already consolidated to it. All right, That's a good place for us to pause for a break because I do want to talk about Google IO, which was this week and their announcements There was a big announcement that's kind of a secondary story from a Chinese company that I think is also very interesting. So we're going to talk about that in just a little bit Good conversation, though, G way to start. I really appreciate you bringing up CBS newews radio on them Sorry, rest in peace. Yeah, I may rest in peace. I didn't realize that Friday was the last day. It was Friday eleven thirty one PM. Boy. There was a new network that launched at midnight Saturday from midnight called the Worldwide News Network. It's owned by the same right wing billionaire who owns WABC in New York. But it's news director who is pitching me claim that they're know totally neutral politically and there don't worry. if you come on our network, we're not going to surround you by a right wing ideology. That's really the concern I have is the consolidation. you nailed it when you said, Jacob TBPN and Mitoring the situation, MTS are not real news organizations because they're owned by the people they cover That really is what's happened is The rich have gotten so we are we are in a second Gilded age and they are so powerful and they are so wealthy and they are buying up All of these means of communication and furthermore, fully understand how to use them their own interests. In a very you know theaters now. WBAI is Amy Goodman now producer of Democracy Now syndicated nationwide. She's got a biop pic in movie theaters called Steal the Story, Please. Yes. G. It's really good. Good. BAI is great. She's great. Murdoch buying vox is that actually going to happen? Be the Vox is pretty It happed. James Murdoch, but it's the sun Yeah, this who was cast out for his liberalism from the Murdoch family. the point I don't care about right or left. That's the point is that these people have so much money that whatever side they want to advocate for, they can buy up the means of communication and why would they never subject themselves to an interview a hostile interview from any of the four of us? ever again. Yes, that's right ever again And that worries me. We need be being to power I used to love interviewing Bezos back in the day But he probably wouldn't talk to me again. No Why should R Sorkin is as hard a hitting interview as he'll do anymore, I right. Yeah We'll have more in just a bit. Jacob Ward is here. So glad about the CNN thing. That's fantastic. I love seeing you and Ian. I get all excited Jacob' on. Jacob Ward. comot the Rriip Current is his newsletter. and of course he appears every month on Tech News Weekly with Mikeah Sargon Marshall Kirk Patrick, the creator of, well, now I have to say, what's up with that And Hawkeye. twoo very interesting uses of AI people figure out what's up with that, which is you become a publisher. That's great. It's awesome. Sos always good to see you, Marshall. And Larry Maged of connectsafely d. org forally of CBS News Radio No Yeah, Oh Mike flag makes me sad. I know is. Yeah. I'm gonna put it back on my mic I grew that was really my news as a kid. I had a clock radio. It would come on, you know, when I had to get up six AM or whatever. ACBS, KNX W was WCBS I wasew Providence. Are you in New York? Yeah. Yeah. And that was my that was my news and I great radio How that is junky. That is completely off there. I mean, WCBS they killed that about a year ago So radiia may not be dead, but You're fliming. slimping hard Our show today brought to you by Speaking of AI super Human. We I love superhuman. We use superhuman. stop letting single function Tools Disrupt your workflow This is so real when you're sitting there writing or you're working constant context and tab switching de They make project management tedious, disjointed. Your brain is not designed to be switching back and forth like that But superhuman has an answer grammarly And grammarly is now part of something bigger, superhuman It can help level up your productivity without all the content switching. AI tools are everywhere As we probably all learned, they make some of them make more work and take up even more of your time. Most of them don't really give you what you need. Well, now they're superhuman, the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers wherever you work. Think of suuperhuman as your AI dream team Proactively helping you with every aspect of your workflow buuilt in intelligence from Grammarly Male? E Coda You can now get things done faster and collaborate seamlessly Without all that context switching, suuperhuman gets what you really need. AI that gets you from day one. There's no learning curve. It's just simple, it's easy to use, superhuman knows what you might need and proactively offers suggestions to improve when you're drafting emails, when you're creating documents and more Superhuman helps you Go from to do to done. faster suuperhuman sure it you stand out. It's AI that's personalized for you to sound like you, not like some AI At your best. sound like you at your best like everyone else. No need to repeat what you want, sharing the same context over and over again because suuperhuman remembers It works alongside you, automatically understanding where you're at proroactively offering suggestions. Your writing agent understands What you're going for, what you need creates helpful outputs that match your writing style. We love it Our whole team uses it. Unleash your superhuman potential with AI that meets you where you work Learn more at superhuman. com. That's superhuman. d. com suuperhuman than you so much for supporting This week in Google had its big developer conference on Tuesday and announced, boy, like a thousand things U too me, the most consequential thing, the thing that I think people are going to In the long run, say makes the most difference is they really changed search After twenty five years of the simple Google search box that gave you a list of links, If this has been slowly happening, right with the AI assistance They are now using their latest Gemini model, the three point five flash And they are really changing how the search box works Esentially keeping you on Google. They're answering longer queries with graphics, pictures full answers instead of links They have a video generation tool. They're also focusing on brringing online shopping into the search window so that you don't go to Amazon or dick sporting goods You have it all in one window and you do your whole shopping there This is a I think is a massive shhift Google obviously doing this in response to companies like Perplexity. D and Chat GBT dis dis intermediating search People more and more do search with AI donon't go to those sites But this is what I was talking about in the last segment where know potentially you're going kill goose that laid the gold eggs. There' All the monetization flows directly to Google, not to the sites comes from Marshall, you, I mean, you're Do you think this is a problem or is this a good thing Oh I think time will tell people how well people appreciate it Maybe they'll just leave Google. There's backlash already where people say, you know, don't I don't want AI in my search results and in my graduation ceremony speech. and Oh yeah, man U So but does Google do a better job than, you know, SEO hungry websites trying to pull you into Yeah, who can you trust? Wh Who is most credible? I think will be the big question Yeah, and people may reject reject it on the surface, but if it's better, if they use it And they find it's got better results, you know, they'll quickly get over there. concerns What do you think, Jacob? This is part of the loop, isn't it? Yeah, it's it's my nightmare, right? Like I mean, It points this thing and there's a healthy debate going on. Ecuse me in the discord conversation about, no does what people want line up with what is good business and, you know do what we want philosophically line up with what our brains want instinctually. And those things are so far apart And I think the whole of human like modern human history has to do with cononquering our instincts and making a sustainable structure out of who we want to be And the tech industry is just not about that. No know what they're about They don't care, do they? Let' ship. Let's ship. let's get it sticky. let's go, right? And in this case This is such it's so short sighted for so many reasons. I mean, it's short sighted just from a business perspective because it's not clear to me you know, like Google is doing two publishers Exactly what AI companies are accused of doing to Google, right? They're like they're just turning on their on their source in this terrible way So there's this fundamental thing of just like destroying the market for information. I mean, like HubSpot, I think, estimated the seventy or eighty percent of their Their traffic disappears on this DMG media documented drops as steep as eighty nine percent for some queries. like we're entering the world of zero click searches. Yeah. That's a nightmare for anybody that tries to make money on that stuff. And then the last thing I'll just say is There was a paper At Europe' this year, right The big academic conference on or I guess last year. I' time is a flat circle and uh, In Europe right, the big academic conference on AI hadch there were a bunch of papers that won an award, and one of them was called Artificial Hive Mind. And I really recommend people take a look at this It is so fascinating. What they did is they took seventy top LLMs This ppose of like twenty seven thousand open ended creative questions through all seventy So that's, you know, Lllama and Gemini and Judgine and everything They then out of that measured over time where those direct where those answers kind of went. So these are like open end questions like write me a poem about time And what they found is that if you ask the question repeatedly Over time, the answers narrow into a slimmer and slimmer band of responses. So rather than it getting more expansive, it gets less expensive. You're getting homogenized And over time, it's homogenized, Exactly. And here's the really crazy part is that when they looked across the seventy different models, they all start converging on the same answers So Uh you know, it's like time is a river is what they all end up writing in the end, theseese cliched kind of college freshman kind of responses, right? And so for me, the nightmare here is like Google. for all of its flaws was once upon a time, a place where you could really go and find very individual stuff. you could really experience a raw feed or a semi raw feed of weird specific research, you know derived Knowledge And And now, man, it's just going to be Marjarine you know? and and I I really There's all the business problems and there's a huge number of business problems, But man, the homogenizing, the greatest hits Medley that we're about to be listening to all the time is really disturbing to me And furthermore controlled by the giants, the tail. Yeah. ye. But even before this, one of the things that always frustrated me in Google is when I'm looking for information, they would almost always link me to a YouTube video And sometimes I just want to read it, right? But they don't get monetized if they send me to some random news source. They were always self dealing. right? Yeah. This is what the EU complained about. mean. And Google denied but Google shopping, Google YouTube results. Google said, Well, we just want to give you the best results. We're just trying to get people what they want and that's what they want. Well, but you know if if they're letting you shop on Google and not sending you to merchants. What is that going to do? I mean, I guess it's bad I don't care if it screws Amazon, but it's going to screw everybody Well, what happens is In some ways It gives Walmart and Wayfair and all these companies a way to compete against Amazon. they have to play the game they have to play the game on Googles terms. They have to support the universal cart, the UCP protocol And they have to say, okay, you know, we're going to show up in the Google results because that's where people are shopping And then suddenly Google has all this power. This is what happened with Google ads You call this in your book The loop. You called it Yeah. This is this is the this is the loop, isn' it? Yeah. It's a's it feels like an expanding spiral of choice. that is in fact a narrowing spiral of it's contracting. and at the bottom of that spiral We don't know how to tell jokes or talk to our spouses or use a credit card or any of that stuff, you know? And to me, you know, cut to five years according to what what they're building here and and you know, at Google and like I think, you know, you're going to have people be like, oh, I don't wantan to have to go like look for the thing I want to buy. Right. It's why to do that. I need you know, I need you know, detergent or I need, you know, a shirt and that's yeah, that's the end. It's just like it just becomes mush in this way that I'm I think the market is going to be there. I mean, I will say You shirt. It's going to find a shirt for you,et whether you would have chosen it or not. You will, yeah. and you're never going to want to go and spend time being like, I wonder where this shirt was sourced from And, you know, unless you can sort of tell it what to do. Like you're just not going not that shopping is my number one care about the stuff, but like, you know Just any active reaching out for knowledge or active reaching out for engagement with the world. they want to jump in there and make it so easy you'll forget how to do it. But you know people say, well, I'll use Duck Ducko or I pay twenty five bucks a month for coogy search But I got to point out that the index, almost all of these other tools use is being in Google. R And so if this becomes the way of the world, there's not going to There won't be any differentiation anymore because they don't have their own search indexes But what's really scary about this, if you think about education I mean, the purpose of education should be not to fill your head with knowledge, but to teach you how to think critically and to teach you how to acquire knowledge. That has always been you know, the main important outcome of a good education And it almost sounds like they really are dumbing us down. Like this education is going to become irrelevant If once we get out of school, all we get is probleabm served to us without having to think about it. Well, it's clearly what Google wants. Here's an image from Google IO, teech crunch published When Pura releases a new scent that's based in Sandalwood for under fifteen dollars, grab it for me. That's it. That's the last interaction you're going to have With that company you'll just one day, that Sent will arrive at your door and that's it. It's done. And that's what Google wants because Google's going to get a cut of that transaction. You're not going to leave Google.re you're going to stay in the Google world. It really looked to me watching Google IO that Google was taking a page from Apple's ecosystem lock in book. You know, Apple's done very well In hardware, by making it just work better if you use all Apple stuff. Well, Google's doing kind of the same thing. They have it now, you know, they saw what happened with openen cllaw and they announced their own agent Spark Same idea Um, you know, they have this universal Protocol for shopping, UCP. So you never have to leave the Google page and they're changing the front page of search. So it's not really a list of links isn't the result. The result is the answer you want Mark Andreesason once said that he was investing in virtual reality goggles, even though many of his San Francisco based friends didn't get it because he said you might think that the world is It' beautiful walking through San Francisco. But in the future, the vast majority of humanity will live in cement boxes in company towns and they're gonna really want to be our go. Oh my. Oh my. So that's a market opportunity by his logic, Oh impressing. But it is, if you think about it, all of the movies and sci fi stories like Neuromancer and ready Player one, they're always when they wear these things or jack in, they're in a dystopia. They are jacking in. they are wearing the visors to escape the dystopia. That's universal in sci fi. No when we where we look, the direction we look is the direction the car or the bicycle goes, right For goodness sake, like let's look at something other than that. Yeah, that's right. And by the way, the other thing Google announced is they're gonna do these glasses. Of course, Ma's ray bands have been very successful, Google. I'm wearing them now. Are you I harious. You didn't take pictures of me yet. I just took a picture. Oh gosh. You have no privacy, Leo. Dang you Now I have to in defense wear my reed aray bands. O, can they talk to each other? Oh gosh. I don' them know. Somebody said that they were able to get to modify this in some way that I could talk to their Hermes agent, which I would be very much happier talking to that than talking to Meta. of these things driveving me crazy. They keep talking at me when I don't want them talking. They talk all the time. I know, they're very gabby. I know. I car they aw a lot. Larary, what is what is the like ostensible purpose having them? likeike why? Well, you know, believe it or not, they have just launched in beta something called conversation fooccus. And it actually works better than Apple AirPods and kind of better than my hearing aids. because if I'm in a restaurant and I'm talking to you Your voice is going to be a pitch higher And the boys around me are going to be a little bit lower. So you're using it as a hearing aid. kindind of just in very specific situations, like in restaurants. U Beyond that Do you have your prescription lenses in there? So these are Yes These are your spe. I actually had I bought Gen one with my prescription lenses and then these are genen two. They popped the lenses out and popped them right back in. So this is what you wear as theseese are your glasses now. this is now accessible. The is because I always have to carry my case and my other glasses becausecause there's notough b need to be recharged every a few hours They claim eight hours, you get about five or six you, you're all on this. I didn't know that, Larry. I use it in headphones. I talk to people They sound good Yeah if I get a phone call, I click on it. And wereere you intrigued by the glasses Google is talking about their Android XR Classes they'll come from Marby Parker and Gentle Monster and Samsong Which is clever to work with Warby Parker. I like that idea. Yeah, right now Ma works with SL or Lxotica. so it's, you know, that giant another giant monopoly. An Apple is rumored to be coming out with some glasses. We'll see what they come out with. Mark Grman today in his Power on Newsletter he's of course the Apple Guru of rumors It says that when Apple's WWBC announcement is june eighth, it's just two weeks away they will really show something with air pods and cameras in the airPods. Yeah we that are tied to they're tying initially to accessibility. blind people will have these cameras and they can say what it is they're looking at and so forth. But ultimately, I think it's a similar plan that you're going to see the world through these tech giants Lenses That's the point. By the way, at WWDC, there's going to be a slide with Connect saafely on it because we are their provider of interternet safety content. Oh good. They're finally going to talk about it in public. That's fantastic. They think they only are because they have to Yeah, well, hey, don't take it. This there for us. No, that's great. That's wonderful. I'll look for that. So this reminds me of Dror O's book Radicalized, right where that one of the characters has a subscription toaster oven Is that what it is? And she starts thinking subversive thoughts, including I'd like to change the settings on my toaster. Shocking. Yeah, I how dare she did a dramatic chore thing I mean, you look at where this technology goes in other cultures and other sort of, I mean, I would argue just in like just a little further down the road in terms of the market And that's, you know, in China, they're telling they're you know, deciding whether you're considered on duty and getting paid at work or not. based on how focused your device tells the boss you are Well, Amazon does that in their trucks already, right? Totally. Right. And in this case like won't pay you for the time that you are goofing off by thinking about other things than your task, right? We have this story. I don't know if it's true a couple a couple of years ago that c the the um cameras in Amazon's delivery trucks notice if you're singing and'll dock you. I don't know if that doesn't sound true. I being a joyous human. You're having too much fun. How about that story on the list about the bipartisan discussion about banning flock video cameras. R Which is good, right Yeah. So this is okay, so we've talked about its really dystopian future But I don't feel like the future is going to be that bleak. I don't think these tech giants are going to win. I don't know There's very little evidence. F have my belief. H haven't won what is this? I'm not sure, but o. Okay Okay Bear with me here because I think What is there is a there is definitely a tech lash. That's what that vote is about flock. People, you know, you would think the government especially would want these automated license plate readers everywhere. It helps fight crime And we've seen dramatic evidence that it's actually really useful and cases of abduction and criminals. but but people are starting to realize it also impairs privacy. And and we have some constitutional protections that it, you know, I mean, you're you don't have protections on the street You know, your license plate is Public People kind of are cringing about that. I also think that the widespread use of AI putting powerful tools in individuals' hands. was I went to a demonstration at Berkeley last week, like, you know, I went to many demonstrations at Berkeley in the sixties when I went there. but last wee actually two or three weeks ago, it was an anti social media anti AI demonstration. There's a backlash. And it was really about We don't want these big tech companies running our lives. We want autonomy, we want agency And these young Berkeley students were out there complaining about social media, Those are the same students buooing the commencement speakers who mentioned AI That's my story of all time. I love that story from this week of everybody getting booed. Yeah. Eric Schmidt and other commencement speakers who walk in thinking, I'm going to talk about the future, which is going to be very exciting for these young graduates, how they're going into this world with AI. and being shocked, shocked, I tell you that the graduates are going Oh We know't what do you? There's a disconnect. very much. Ludites didn't hate looms, right They hated the power dynamics of the business model that that led to looms putting them out of work. If they had been like worker owned looms, then There'd be a place for them or looms that increased their productivity and allowed them to make more money and have more satisfaction over their jobs. They would have loved it. And that's how I look at AI. AI is great for me. It does nothing but good things for me. It makes me more productive. less reliant on other people, but on the other hand I'm in a different position than that's people who are just starting their careers. I mean, if you work at Meta right now, right?'re you're part of this like token Olympics that everybody's signed up for where they they're judged on how many tokens they cons they consume, right? Like I know people at Amazon who say they're, you know, people getting laid off on the basis of whether or not they're using it enough. you know, that is that is literally I think that that actually the be bag firing in these companies. Oh yes, inane It's like measuring lines of code. It isn't exactly the measure what they're accomplishing. How are they helping the company? not how they go about doing it? Well, and also, I mean, so guys, like tomorrow, right the pope, this is me jumping into a new topic here, but the Pope is coming out with this AI encyyclicals, you know about this? Yes. Right. So So the Pope Leo fourteent is is talking about it turns out on the anniversary of Leo the thirteenths inical. It's so cool. So he I had no idea what it kind of like AI critic he is and how long he's been thinking about this. So he took his name, his papal name from the last Leo because of, as you say, Leo, maybe your namesake too. I was not named after that pope. After that pope. Well, there were worse popees to be named after because my dad was a lapsed Catholic. He hated it. He would never have named me after a Pope.'s so cool about So the last guy was in eighteen ninety one put out this thing Rirum novarum, this encyclical, this moral teaching that basically said, industrial capitalism, exactly what you're talking about, Marshall, you know, this this, you know, being stuck at the loom. is a nightmare and is and what he was specifically warning about in that one is that industrial capitalism was going to change the value of human beings. to a calculation of how much they can produce Whereas what Catholic teaching supposedly says is that you know, what is it? Imago de, right? You're supposed to be you're made in the image of God and that is your value. Being human is your value inherently And they were saying, donon't let it become transactional, which is what they were seeing in these factories Now Leo the fourteenth On the hundred and thirty fifth anniversary to the day signed the new one, which is all about AI. And when he was announcing why he was going to call himself Leo in honor of this past one, he said specifically because he'd made this big social teaching around work, and we are about to do the exact same thing with AI because it's such a problem Well, I just that the human worth What is a human worth is really what this whole thing is going? I still think what's interesting though, is that Pope Leo isn't Anti AI And I think we all here are using AI and find it useful and find it empowering. There's this weird disconnect. I don't I think Leo doesn't hate AI. He's very interested in AI how to be He doesn't he doesn't like it being used in Gaza He doesn't like it be, you know, it's those he's talking about it. And what I'm really hoping from tomorrow is that it's not just kind of the open vagaries of like, I don't think it will. Watch out, but specifically names Yeah Don't use it for this. donon't use it for that. Here are the traps we fall into into the past. you know. So I think you're, you know, you're right, Leil, like nobody He he doesn't want to like go back to the pass the way to L Lo did, but but I think he He is trying very specifically to call out a thing because he can see that these that the nation states are not doing it, that governments are not No I can our government away. especially our government. That's right. although let's take break before we Before we do, I have to take a break, but I do want to show this cartoon The New Yorker Joe Dadater and Kevin Ma and the caption goes. And as you head out into the world, your fresh meaty toros will be ripped apart and roasted to feed your new alien overlords. Wait, why are you all booing? very apt, very aropo cartoon from the New Yorker. Actually there's another one in the New Yorker this week That's a kind of similar It's a bumper sticker and it says u Let' say my honor student Let me show you this one It's a bumper sticker on a car It says My honor student is very worried about AI. And yet, we love it. We I mean, I talk about it all the time. We have a show dedicated to it. I use it daily. I have a very ive agent that I'm using that is super useful to me We're going to talk about my medical useth but, I think it When we come back, let's do that. And of course, Marshall has created something that is fantastic way to empower an end user to be more informed about the web pages She's reading. I mean You know we're not ye we're not against it. We just don't want the big guys and actually that's why I'm very excited that deep seek whichich I know is the Chinese AI, but they've announced very cheap pricing and actually put my agent on deep sea F Pro And it's it's really good and it's super cheap whichich means I'm falling for it I also last week, Harper Reed came on and he said you should buy this little device It is an AI device you put on your desk. It's connects. He says, you just connect it to your Wi Fi and it calls China and then Deep Sek is talking to me. Oh, that's great, Leo. E What could possibly go wrong But So last week, Harper said, right that the Chinese models have basically won everywhere in the world outside of the United States, right Yeah. They're really good and they're really cheap and I wonder why they're so cheap Mm, y That's why And everything you say and do now is going to be in Beijing It says that's a dangerous combination It actually is I agreeing with you, by the way, Larry, I just want you to know Yeah That's how they get you started. It knows about my cat. Now I don't know how it knows about my cat and that her name is Rosie That should be terrifying. and yet Do she likes to get on your desk while you're working or does she to supervise from a distance Tox Media would like to purchase some of those, right I'm sending all of this to China, my friends. I wore a bee for a while and I took it off. This is a thing. I was big into the bee. Yeah and boy it creeped me out after a while. You know, I wore it for about a week and then I said, No, my life doesn't need to be in the cloud, not my entire life. My thinking behind all this was that at some point I'm going to want an agent, especially as I age, that knows everything there is to know about me and can remember stuff for me and can connect me to the world and be a assistant And so J GPT knows a lot about me and I'm glad it does because it helps it helps me Apparently so does this, which is a little scary. I don't remember telling that my cats Who do you try? China or Altman? who? Well that's the real question, right? Claude told me a few weeks ago, when I asked it a question, it said, Well, I'm not a therapist, but you have shared enough notes from therapy with me that I can tell you that your problem is perfectly clear What is your problem What's up What's that? What's up? I actually keep a daily journal Obsidian and for the longest time I thought, what am I keeping this for? My kids don't care. And what am I going to read this in twenty years? And now I realize I'm keeping it for my AI and I haven't read that every day and it adds to its memory. And the whole idea is to get this thing smarter and more tuned to me So there can be a personal assistant. The only thing I haven't given my AI is my tax return simply because I don't want my social security number to be on the inwise. Other than that I would re I would feed it my tax return too. Yeah. U I give it all my health stuff. You did too. We're going talk about all my health information. Yeah just a little. He knows more about me than any doctor does I gotta shut this See, it really wants to know. D driving crazy. Why do it have to Down that thing Leo. It's intoo the bathtub. What in your coffee evil. I'll ask Alexa Plus what the weather is and it wants to know what my plans are you Where are you going?. You don't need know what I'm going to do today. Can I help you buy something? Yeah exactly. Would you consider an upgrade to those plants? You need an umbrella. here'll have one delivered in fifteen minutes. We will have more with Larry Magged, Marshall Kirk, Patrick and. good friend Jacob Bard and just a little bit. you're watching this week in tech. And the show brought to you by Mer Comany Buing better networks. All of this stuff relies on the network, right? And if you're in a business, You know that the network is vital to operations. And no one knows that better than you network engineers, right? And if you're a network engineer, man, you've got my deepest sympathy, you know the headaches leegacy providers with inflexible pricing IT resource constraints stretching you thin complex deployments across fragmented tools You network engineer are mission critical to the business, but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built For today's demands, this stuff moves fast. Well, let me tell you about meter A company started by two network engineers who feel your pain and new There was only one way to make this better Meter delivers full stack networking. They do it all. The infrastructure is wired, wireless and cellular built for performance and scalability. And here's the key insight they had. If we're going to make a network that works We've got to design the hardware We've got to write the firmware, we've got to build the software, We've got to manage the deployments. We have to provide after sales support. We have to do it all. they even do I they'll help you with ISP procurement Because it all starts with who's providing the connectivity, right They'll work with you. they'll help design security, routing, switching Wireless setups, firewalls, cellular You know it's really important. power to help you with that too. They do it all. DNS security, VPN SD wN They specialize in multi site workflows I was talking to them when they first joined the show and I asked him about, you know, what what are the most challenging situations I said, we have many, many clients This happens all the time. They acquire it's a company acquires another company. They acquire their branch office, their field office, they acquire their warehouse. suuddenly they got one hundred fifty thousand square foot facility with wireless that doesn't work on a system that is incompatible with a home office system. they can fix it. Meter's single integrated network stack is everywhere from major hospitals brranch offices, warehouses Large campuses. they do data centers. they do Reddititss data center. I mean, If you want the best hardware software, the best, if you want one number to call, You need meteter. Ask the Assistant director of teechnology for the Webb School of Knoxville. This is the quote. We had More than twenty games on our campus between our two facilities each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections And The event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this Be meteter redesign our network Go Go to the website, meteter d. com slash twwit. I mean, you will see what I mean. When Corey was on the show a couple of months ago, he said, this is nice. Look at this gear. Oh o you really get excited. With meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs from first sight survey to ongoing support Without the complexity of managing multiple providers or tools, like I said, one number to call, Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off of your IT team and give you deep control and visibility reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online meteter. buuilt for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow, We thank him so much for sponsoring G to Meter. C slash Twit to book a demo Sh shouldould do that right now. M E T E R d. com slash They feel your pain. they've been there they can help Met her So Larry, you had a little medical emoergency when you were back in New York. This was recently, right? Yeah, actually I've been inew York twice in the last week, but the first trip to New York, I guess about ten days ago I was there for some meetings and on Monday I started getting a pain in my intestines And I kind of, you know, didn't take it too seriously until Tuesday morning, the pain was still there. so I walked From thirty seventh Street down to Greenwich Village becausecause my friend said the Greenwich Village emergency room is really good. When in there they took a CT scan and they sent me by ambulance to Lenox Hills Hospital of Hly Cital. That's a little scary. eighty seventh street And while I was in the hospital They kept taking blood and doing stuff. And by the time the phlebotomist left my room practically, I would get a notice on my app telling me my blood results long before the doctor saw it. And that seems people are used to. But what was really fascinating to me is when I got home and I logged in, I looked at it more carefully, not only did they show the radiology report of my CT skin. By the way, I'm fine. I just sat there for two days with an IV in my arm and it went away on its own Tuin is it When I got home I looked at the scan, the actual x ray, or the CT scan. I can't read a CT scan means nothing to me. As it does, I turns out to many doctors who aren't trained as a radiologists. So I ran that into Chat GPT It gave me a report, which was very close to what the radiologist reported Then I fed the radiologist report into Jet GPT and it gave me an even more detailed report. And then I fed Take that scan and give me a new image where you circle where the blockage is. Wow. Give me any other significant findings. I want them annotated and I want them circled It turns out and this is true. I actually knew this that because of a previous surgery, I and scar tissue It showed me visually that the blockage was right below the scar tissue. It showed me the part of my intestine that was dilated, the bowel loop that was dilated, I had a complete map of what was going on inside my body, which far exceeded anything a doctor has ever told me I mean, it was absolutely amazing. I took this to my gastroenterologist when after I got home, I showed it to him. He was amazed He admitted that he doesn't know how to read CT scans. And he was incredibly impressed. He said, yeah, it's exactly what I can see from all your various reports. So Take it for what it's worth, but Dr. Cho Chi PT did a heck of a good job exxplaining to me what was going on in my body By the way, I could share the VIM image with you, but the one thing No, no, it's true. It's too much information to look inside my ph. got take my. So This is what's really interesting about all of this is We can all tell stories somewhat similar. You know, actually my next project, I at one point hadad my full genome done U byy Nebula N Nebula Gomics. It was like fifteen hundred bucks it's cheaper now, but it was like it's the it's not like u uh, you know, the little sample that they do with, u, you know, twenty three and me. this is like The full genome And I have it. It's a couple of gigabyes. It's a big file I want to give it to the AI. I want to feed it my current health situation Everything I know and have it kind of keep track of stuff. And I've heard of people doing this. And yet And I've heard of people saying like you, Larry, Wow, this was amazing And yet, ye yet. And yet, here's a story from nature. about it A made up disease called Bixon Aania H So this is actually oh, unfortunately, I can't read this nature article, but I have read it. This was actually created by a scientist, a fake illness u to test AI's a willingness to kind of Make upp stuff Almira Osmanovich Stundstrom, a researcher at the University of Gothenberg in Sweden. Invented Maconamania, a totally made up disease Put it out in the world in a way that AI would absorb it And then watched as it spread and in fact, you may well if you may well, if you feed Your health information to your AI To be told, you're suffering from pixonemania Um Blogs picked it up, preprints picked it up It showed up in scientific journals Apparently using AI Um she She created a nonexistent university in a nonxistent city and scientists from that university with madeade up names like Laziavikobrevich which if you put the name into Google translate says the lying loser U even the I mean, she did not try to hide this. The title of the journal paper was hyperpigmentation, a real BS design The whole thing was there was no attempt to disguise the fact that it was a hoax. Yeah. Yet AI had no idea And the AI models picked it up and it has now spread And this is an issue because In my case, whenever I get medical advice from AI I always say cite your source And I go to that source and it has to be a source that I know and trust. If it's the Mayo Clinic, if it's the NHS in the UK, if it's Cleveland cllinic I'm going to take it seriously But I'm still not going to act on it. I'm not going to take a pill. I'm not going to submit to a procedure until I talk to a doctor So to me, it's the first draft of your medical information, it is by no means the final word And that's what people I have to say to be fair, people said the same thing about Wikipedia and said, you shouldn't really trust it. Yeah. Because there is some there are mistakes in But there's feedback loops on Wikipedia in other people. And in this case those it seems to me based on a quick scan of that article that the prepint servers were the primary entry point.. And those are not peer reviewed. No, it's like somebody turned off the peer reviewed system. S similar to that other story about the government contractor that just turned off the warnings about Uh, you know, API keys and passwords saved in a CSV file And and so suddenly all these government AWS accounts were exposed And then it still took forty eight hours after they had been reported that the credentials were usable So I think people need to to learn to not turn off the learning system Right. And Did she publish this fake article on a reputable academic website? No, it went through preprint servers, which are great, you know, I mean, they're so fast, so easy. You canarch like archiv. or So much amazing stuff out there, stuff like that. But byy her beware Now I just asked to say I' very impressed. I just asked Deep seek via my aggent Hermes What do you know about Bixonaania? and it's said a brilliant hoax and perfectly on brand for an intelligent machines discussion Researchers at the University of Gotenberg invented a completely fake eye condition in twenty twenty four, loaded it with absurdities no human would miss and watched AI chatbots confidently tell people It was real The symptoms were sore eyes and dark circles from blue light The name ends in manania, which is, of course, a psychiatric disorder, not an eye condition. The University, Asteria Horizon University in Nova City, California was completely made up. There was a Star Trek reference in the paper acknowledging Professor Maria Baum at Starfleet Academy aboard the USS Enterprise. This is in the paper. By twenty twenty six, Microsoft C pilot was calling it, quote, an intriguing and relatively rare condition And Gemini said it was caused by excessive exposure to blue light And And this is the sad thing. In a actual peer reviewed paper in Springer Nature's curious journal, they cited the hoax pre prints all of which have since attracted. The Nature expose forced model corrections, and that's why my model apparently knows about it It's basically the AI era version. it says of a Mount Weasel Those trapped street entries cartographers use to catch map plagiarists. Wow, that's pretty deep. Does Robert F. Kennedy know about this toease? Probably. It's just a matter of time. So So the truth has got its pants on now, right? It does. It took it a while. H's what I feel like there's two things that we're talking about here, right There's the tendency of it to be wrong. if you Game it right And our tendency to believe it Right is one problem. Two differentes. that's, you know, that's that's a problem, a big bucket of problem But the other problem is one Larry that I feel like is a really you know, like I I what I really want is for every patient to have your experience where right they've got professional help They've got people they can call They've got referrals happening quick enough to deal with their medical issues And they've got the benefit of this second opinion, this digital second opinion that helps decode the process. As a package, awesome The problem is The market doesn't like that what the market wants is to knock all the other things out and leave only the digital thing because it is the cheapest thing to use. And this is why like Michigan right now is experimenting with like just determining whether your SnP benefits come to you based on an AI system. that's basically b. doing away with the people you could ever call when you have a problem, right? They're so quick to get rid of experts on the human layer because that's the most expensive layer because the whole promise of the market of AI is that you don't need that stuff. And so for my mind, it's the immediate use that you're describing in this moment Awesome and I'm so excited about it But as soon as they commoditize that and begin to believe like, well One in ten thousand people won't have a good experience, but everybody else going to have a good experience. So we're going to knock out You know, the eight hundred number, you'll never have that again That's where I go I am grateful for the radiologist. I'm grateful for the surgeons. I'm grateful for my gastroenterologist. I'm really grateful for Medicare for paying for all of this And my big fear is that the government may very well not want to do that in the future if they could do it cheaply without having to pay these expensive doctors to to st. Dr. Oz already has made some kind of automated There's some sort of weird automated system. I gott to look back and I wrote a piece for hard Reset media. It's called hardreseset media. com d about about how Oz has put in some kind of automated system where things that would normally be pre approved under Medicare suddenly gets spiked automatically And the real problem is that the company that makes that technology is incentivized They're paid a bonus The more times they reject Ac cllaim Right, whichich is scary. Ands that's where the wheels start to come off. even, you know, it's funny, peoplee worry about the future of Medicare. You're talking about the present of Medicare. People my age who are already getting the benefits. at risk corporations capture the benefits and socialize the costs and risk R. And as and as many a great leader has pointed out, you don't get to make money off sick people really. You don't get to make money off of solving education, really? Like that's what government's for, you know? And the idea that we're going to somehow like get the Silicon Valley efficiency in everything , look at Joge.ook at thatud for. Yeah, right, exactly. We've seen it. We've seen it. That's right. It really helped. And yet, according to the AMA, two and three two out of three physicians are using AI Which is almost doubled since twenty twenty three. They surveyed twelve hundred doctors twow thirds of them are doing what you did, Larry. I actually have given my doctor medical advice Might might might No, I have told him things that he did not know about. And he went off and read about it Oh Oh, you know, Lry, that's thing you were telling you about. I had I hadn'tard that. It's actually pretty pretty good information.. I had my annual physical on Friday and I spent quite a long time talking to my doctor about the use of AI He's very interested. But the point here is here's somebody who has judgment, skill, experience, and practice, who can take the information the AI gives them and vet it and make sense of it. And it's a very good partnership. And then I think that this is what we see over and over again. the human AI are the right answer, not A Two AIs and an efft, but the AIs fight And you know, that's a subject matter expert Al So I always start with Chat GPT and then I run it through Gemini. And the reason is Gemini is less likely to sugarcoat it.. So if you have a medical issue, Chat GPT tends to kind of w it's going to be okay. Don'try about it. Whereas Gemini will tell you much more much more straight about what's going on. So it does pay to get a second opinion even from different models. Now, if you were talking about one of you were talking about, if they start homogenizing then I worry That's not good. You want them to be os a little bit. It's similar. you know, I actually had an experience once where I asked I use Stanford Healthcare. and I asked two different doctors at Stanford Healthcare I went to a second opinion. And the problem is they both have access to each other's notes. So the second doctor gave me exactly the same opinion. maybe the opinion was right But I wanted somebody who didn't know what the first doctor had to say. And the same thing is with AI. I want the AI to independently giveive me information so I can compare the different Give a report. I should also point out that sometimes we conflate what the model is doing with what its post training is doing. And it's really important to remember that a great deal of your experience of the AI is not coming from the stuff in the LLM and the weights in the LLM, but the stuff that happened afterwards, the reinforcement learning the, you know, so called soul document, the personality that these companies apply to it. these companies see this as differentiators, but they very much put their thumbs on the scale Anthropic open AI Seek, Google, everybody very much modifies that AI and modifies the weights And that could also be a source of a lot of the problems But it also may be why Google by Gemini is a little more a little less sugar coated. That's totally why it's different. But what I like one of the things I really the training material for all of them is pretty much the same, right Yeah One thing and I think it's good,'s Chat GPT I tire head meticallistity. When I tell them something, they say, Well, given your age and given this and that, it knows all the medications I take. If I thinkking about a new medication, I just say, is it okay for me to take this? And it says, yeah, it won't interact with this or yeah, you know, you might worry because it might interact with that So you know, it's funny I showed my doctor. I said, L, these are all the supplements I take. This is what the AI said about them. This It told me you've got too much calcium. get. He said, Yeahah, because you're kidney stones. I said, yeah. I asked him. I said, you know, this is what it's telling me. What do you think? And he was okay I think he preferred at least some information to no information So you showed your work. And I feel like there's a segue here available to to Jacob's sububstack post that solicited as his most popular post on sububstack about how AI is getting us to lie to ourselves where Mh, you' so sweet. Thank you. Yeah. So Jacob wrote this poook. actuallyually hold a thought. let's save it because I want to do an ad. and then I do want to talk about this because it was a great piece. I appreciate guys. and I think I'm, I'm glad you brought it up, Marshall, but hang on Great panel Great conversation. Larry Magot is here Connect saafey d. org. He's representing the radio Newsman segment of the audience. How many years in radio though? I've been in radio fifty years this. Oh, you got me beat. twenty five years with CBS and I did a little bit of stuff with all things considered an NPR And I was a regular job before that I was a regular guest on the Rono show on KGO for a while. Yeahep, me too And also Michael Jackson on KABC. but you know, professionally paid aboutbout twenty five years with actually getting paid for it Yeah. I got in a radio in college and I never left. Oh, I did that too, but' I'm not counting it, but yeah. Oh, I'm counting it. When I got college radio was great, I love. The clock started ticking when I got my FCC license which you don't need anymore. You don't need You don't need no stickking license. You know what's funny? when I applied to be a DJ on the college radio station and the DJ, the music guys didn't want me at all, they sent me over to the news department. I was kind of mad about it. Ct make me do news I remember my first rip and read newscast. I was shakaking like a leaf holding the Holding the paper that I'd ripped off the teleype machine. My college radio station you could only hear it in the dorm through the electrical system that you feelA. They broadcast through the power I don't know how they did it. Yeah, yeah, A lot of college radio is that way. Marshall Kirk Patrick is also here. his incredible app, What's up with that is available For your browser, Firefox or Chrome And it really is a great way of kind of getting some deep knowledge about the pages you're visiting Very, very useful Thank It's good to have you, Marshall. You say you like shortwave radio better Yeah, if we're going to talk radio. I just want to put in a plug for Dan What's Dan's name? A guuy out in the Redwoods who for years has been doing the global shortwave report collecting English language news coverage from around the world.io have been a radio Deutschland, Radio, Japan and weaving them together into this great show of shortway news real old fashioned style, but he's still pumping it out. Do you have to listen? It's Dan Roberts of Willetz up in Willets. Do you have to listen on a short way? Can you Oh no, no there'sream styles Ah, it's a it's an it's a podcast. I love it thirty minute review of news stories. Oh I'm recorded from a short wave radio. Are they actual recordings? Yeah. Oh my Godd, that's just okay can Iice a little bit of it? Does it go So the relation. Italian, she demanded an apology. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchev also denounced Bengavir's handling of the matter. I used to I had a shirt rave radio as a kid and I would tune up and down the disial. It was so cool and you get Russian And you but and many of the I'd wonder if it's the same. I guess it is. many of these shortwave any a country run shortwave stations would have English language broadcasts so you could Yeah You could hear the Russian radio in English. Yeah. But now they're streaming. Now that well, I'm subscribing this right now out far Out far press, the shhort Wave report outf press Calm Calm And he sound he sounds like he's kind of a little far out be honest with you He's been broadcasting off the electric grid in Willetz, California for probably thirty plus years. God bless them. That's like, Who's the guy who did the late night show? used to live in his double wide? Oh yeah. in Parump, Nevada. N Art Bell. Art Bell He would do his radio his overnight radio show would be over and then he'd go out to his Hamsck and do another three hours. I learned about those two shows from the same old friend. That's how that's how you know a guy loves radio. You can't get enough of it. Cpiracy stuff too. Oh, he was the UFO guy. It was great. and it was great for the middle of the night because you'd hear the craziest, you know, bigigfoot stories. I loved AM you know, AM radio in the middle of the night. I love I love listening to far awayay stations at AM. I still fantasize in my retirement, just turning on the Turning on the transmitter and sitting here at three in the morning just talking callalls with the crazies Jacob Wards also, do you have any radio background, Jacob? You have a big on air sign You know, I I don You you've always been TV. You're a TV guy. Yeah, I've always done TV. I do. You know, I have a podcast. I mean, my podcast is there, but yeah I would have loved to be. I'm, you know I always feel like I was born ten years too late for everything. So yeah I wish I wish' had been part of the h. you're better looking than R. No, he's got a face for TV. you and I, Larry. Yeah yeah now. facace for radio. Even though we've both done TV, but. Yeah. So I love that. you know, I love that medium. I think it's the best.. Well, this is really what we're doing is radio. We have video, but it's radio Still the majority of people who listen to our shows listen, not watch, evenven though we've always for a walk. You can drive a car, you don't have to do it. Do the dishes, walk with the dog. Yeah We'll have more just a bit. the show today brought to you by Bx. This is a really good example of a company who's been around, done great stuff. I've used them for years and they have dececided to use AI in intelligent ways and I love it. Box is the leading intelligent underscore intelligent content management platform for enterprises This is a deep insight. The key to unlocking the power of AI. It's not about the LLM, it's not about the agent It's about the content, more specifically, it's about your Because your business isn't really the sum of, you know, interternet Knowledge, your business lives in your content, the stuff that' specific to your business It's clear AI isn't some far off idea anymore. It's tangible dynamic innovation that's here to stay is already having a profound impact on the world on business Bx had this great insight We store your content, your content' what the AI needs to really be truly intelligent. Box' mission power how the world works together making it easy to access information from anywhere and collaborate with anyone Great job, box There's more than ninety seven thousand companies. sixty eight percent of the Fortune five hundred use box. Unfortunately, a lot of companies, I think these days are underestimating AI's transformative potential rather than you know, reimagining their operations. They're just, you know, bolting AI on existing processes. whichich means they're capturing some games, but they're, you know, modest productivity games. and they're really missing the opportunity for fundamental Business transformation Becoming an AI first company isn't just about automating what you already do It's about reimagining what's possible. And with box AI, businesses can truly leverage the latest breakthroughs in AI to automate document processing and workflows, to extract insight from your own content, to build custom AI agents to work on assignments and more And this is the thing I love the best Box AI works with all the major leading AI model providers. you're not locked in. You can use open AI You can use Anthropic Google, XAI and more. So you can always be sure you're able to use the latest AI models with your content without the lock in Here just as an example are some of the things businesses are doing with box AI. They're using box AI. extract key metadata fields from contracts, from invoices financial documents and resumes. and more to query and automate workflows They're using boox AI to ask questions of any type of content like sales presentations, long research reports and more You could do it for one file or thousands of files at the same time You can also leverage BoxAI's API to integrate into your application stack for any document processing and data extraction. Box AI handles the vector embeddings. retrieval augmented generation, raG and agent customization all within its platform And you can do all this, this is important while maintaining the highest levels of security. compliance and data governance that over one hundred fifteen thousand enterprises trust. Look, you need a content layer that gives AI the context it needs while giving your teams the flexibility they need to test and leverage various models, for different use cases and this is the place to do it. Visit box. com slash Ai to learn more box d. com slash AI Because your content is the base, the material that your AI needs do everything box. com slash AI Thank you so much for supporting. This week in tech The rip current is your newsletter It is And what do you cover in rip current So the way the tagline I use is that it's about the invisible forces that are shaping our lives. And so that's everything from The stuff that we've been talking about so far, a lot of it is AI, some social media stuff But I also think about human circuitry. so addiction bias. There's a lot of sort of the Venn diagram of me and sort of Psychology and tech is a big part of it. So how tech sort of changes our world changes human behavior. And so yeah, Marthall God, I'm so grateful to you for mentioning this. Yeah. this is one of those piecesough I think there's a written version and me I like it. You do the video as well, which is nice in the audio if you want to listen AI has is lying to one another. What do you mean by that? So I don't know about you guys, but like I keep being in the weird position of and I'm rather than blaming other people, I'll just do it myself. Like I'll say words like I have made a thing, you know. I just was You know, I just threw this together for our meeting. Um, you know, I that like there's something in the way that I think about and talk about my use of AI that is not fundamentally honest And I and I and I've noticed it in a lot of people around me. And I think there's something about both the sort of the way it's built in that it's always sort of it's like you're You know, you're always ready you know, intern who's there kind of helping you get it done quick before you have to go on stage, you know, kind of vibe that creates this impression that you somehow have to keep your use of it to yourself, kind of. And we haven't come up as a society. It's our dirty little secret, isn' it? Yeah. Yeah, it is. and it's so interesting because we have some, you know, I talk to some people whose workplaces you get fired for not using it enough. R? There are other people I talk to who you get fired if you used it. You know I sometimes I'm a little squirmy about admitting. Yes. How much I'm using AI. We't then I think it's important that I say that I. And so we don't have good shorthand language about it. And I think there's something also in the marketing that these companies are creating for us this idea that you're going to like get away with it.s here's an embarrassing story. Let me tell you, this is an embarrassing story. I used a service for about three or four months basasically took an AI created an AI Um a derived email put it out to a million podcasts try for me to try and get booked. podcast And I it worked. See you're here. Well, you and me came together the old fashioned way. Oh o. than God. Well, it's great too because I wounded up on a lot of weird podcasts. It was such a great weird tour of like all everybody and their mother who's got a mic and a basement. It is great, you know, it'ess It's an interesting community, isn't it? Yeah I was on dozens and dozens and dozens of podcasts and some of them were great Some of them were less great Um, you know, one crew wanted to talk about aliens, you know,'sd there's just weird stuff going on. But The thing that was so dishonest about it is that the AI Svice sends an email as if it's from me Right? saying and one of the things it does and if you're in media, you'll know this, it'll say Jake, I just listened to the most recent episode of the Rp Current. I can't stop thinking about this specific thing in your thing. And the first couple times that I received an email like that, I was like, wow, this guy's listened to my show. amazing, you know. And I immediately when I see those I stop. Now you know, right now you know Jake. But for that like two or three weeks It worked. and I was part of that two or three weeks where and I tricked, I think, a bunch of podcast hosts into getting me on because we love being praised. We love it if somebody listens to our show.. And And then I adopt after the first couple of appearances, I began adopting the policy of telling people like, listen, you guys, I got booked on here because of AI.s and that's ridiculous because I'm on here flogging my thesis, which is that this is going to ruin our lives, you know, you know So it was deeply hypocritical But that kind of thing where it's like getting dressed up as if it's our work is a fundamentally dishonest proposition that I think is happening a lot right now. And we're very and what I really want is for young people who are actually in charge of culture to come up with the cool way of saying, Oh, I I You know, I AI this. I made this, you know, I through this system. I didn't really write this, you know. You know what young people have done? and I know this because we have a young person on our AI show, Paris Martino, I know you know her And she's taught me all of these things. They have many words for this They call it glazing when the AI is sycophantic and tells you things you want to hear They call the AIs cllankers. Yeah Clankers is my favorite. That's my favorite. They talk a lot about slop. That's actually gotten into the mainstream now. AI slop U and they have a lot of negative. They've got the good negative language. We need a way for the two of us to say You know I agented this or you know what I mean? L I'm not the right guy have question No. because this is personal, you know, and I thr I Focus on the lot I will use AI if kind of a copy editor You know, maybe change a word here to first of all, make sure the grammar and the spelling and the punctuation is correct. I don't have any qualms about that. But once in a while, it'll suggest a minor word changing I don't know whether I need to disclose that. It's that a human copy iter would do Yeah, exactly. you filed stories The Mercury News where a copy editor rephhrases a day when they had copy edors. more but Okay ye. No, ye. But or once in a while I' have a paragraph that I'm struggling with. and I'll say, is there a better way to phrase this? And I don't know. it's a slippery slope, but I don't know where the line is between using it kind of as amar a grammarly type product versus using it to generate content. And I mean, I would never say, write me a column, even though it would, and it might not be bad, I would never do it because I'm getting paid for this stuff. And it would just feel dishonest to take money for something I didn't do. You know, where is the line? I actually find that there's not not to be onene of those people that says I read your most recent article, Jacob, but I read your most popular article on there. and the thing that stood out to me about that was the discussion of effectively the Trojan horse situation there, where you were tryrying to figure out how to grow your substack and you ask ChadBT, give me some tips for how to grow my substack. It was saying like, well, you know, do this, do that. If it bleeds, it leads. If people are mad at you and post angry comments, that's better than nothing. And you found yourself thinking, yeah, yeah, that's right. better than nothing. And then you said, hold on a second. I'm a journalist with journalistic ethics. I don't want to It' just traffic and outrage for its own sake. Wha, I almost thought that was my own thought for a moment. Rightact. And I came up with this. Exactly. seem was really nefarious. We you know, cut to a couple of weeks and I'm sure I could have been like, you know what I think? I think when it belieaves it leaves, you like so quickly you can take it on as if it's your thought. That's exactly right. We've always done that, haven't we? I mean, you read something and it suddenly absorb it and it becomes your idea. And ye. I that's how humans are But but it wasn't, I mean, I guess I guess there's always been slop, but not like this, man. I I don't know, you know, and for me, I think about They' like problem right now in our business, I mean, Leo, you've sort of conquered this problem already, but like for me trying to get an independent media brand, you know, off the ground is the volume of work that you have to put out make a dent to even have a chance of being noticed as signal above the noise. I was very very fortunate that I did this Yeah before there was as much noise. Well I would qualityuct and all of those other things. Well, but when you but I don't podcasts on your network or whatever. I mean, you got you've got a huge volume, Leo. Yeah, but we did we started twenty one years ago. I don't think I could start today and do this. other think Leo like me, you also were affiliated with with respectable media organizations. I built in your career. A career based on mainstream media and was able to then segue into new media and it was so early in new media that I was able to stand out. There were only five or six podcasts when I started podcasting. It was a lot easier. Let me tell you, and YouTube didn't exist So what that we're then in is like if if we're if if there's a glut of content. you take a principled stand now and you say, I'm just going to write every single thing and do it all by hand. You're never going to be able to put out the volume you need to be noticed in this market, which is going to now adapt to the idea that we all need to produce at the pace that AI makes possible And so it puts everyone in an impossible position. I had an I remember having a conversation with somebody high up in a big mainstream organization and media organization and this person So to me, you should write more for the site. you know, basically it was their advice And I and I sort of said This was a few years ago. likeike do do you know what's about to happen to the value of the written word? like as a market, just, you know, as a unit price? It's about to go to zero And so the the for me, my tactic has been I'm going to stick with video as much as possible because that seems to create a one to one connection that people like There's some authenticity to the idea that I'm just talking off the top of my head, you know, based on my experience and my ethics and the rest of it, right? But I just It's just me talking. not in a scripted way And then I will use AI to like you know, help me construct a research dossier that that I distribute based on what I've I've said or, you know, There's these sort of sex. Is that antithetical to authenticity I know, right? I mean, Well that gets back to my question about the line. I mean, you're not going to say, hey I generate a and just publish it based on AI, but how will you use it to enhance your writing and how far we you go with it. When we I think honestly The more we see AI and the more we use AI good news is that means Hans become more valuable. This happened with facts You know, once the Facts used to be a rare and precious commodity. If you wanted to know something, you had to go to the library. You had to get you had to make a trip To go to the library to find out something. And remember we would buy enncyclopedias so that you would have some sort of reference material. Yeah, Marshall, you're reaching for your encyclopedia. I can tell. Yeah My laptop is stacked on three of them right. That's what it's for now. It's a doorstop. But facts used to be very valuable and they have become in this internet world wororth nothing. Yeah And there people deserve to be And people with great memories had value, right? peopleeople had. Yeah Now it doesn't matter. We're very valuable. Yeah. I used to when I started, so I was doing the tech guy radio show for almost twenty years. In the early days, the value I had was I could remember off the top of my head an answer to a question. So somebody come in and say, ye, my printer iss not working. I'm using Windows' ninety five And I could remember the answer and by the end of it, it was really a question of if I could Google faster than the caller In there. I hate to admit this, but it really became, you know, what Google skills do you have? But that's a good thing because it democratized facts It's Gresham's law, you're say, Marshall. What's that? Arguably the that's a relevant concept here that yeah, that that the that the low cost, low quality stuff ends up just being produced in so such a huge quantity that that the rarer harder stuff just gets lost in a in a sea I do think though that This in the long run benefits humanity because In a sea of machine produced facts or information of machine That stuff is becomes table steaks And what we add to it as humans becomes more valuable as a result, R? Yeah, and your hope Leo wasn' so much you knew I hope. Your value wasn't so much you knew the answer, but you knew how to put it in perspective. You could actually I knew how to deliver it. Yeah. know' a funny story. I would do two ways for CBS all the time for the stations. and once in a while they would Prompt me with a question topic and then and they got it wrong. They switched topic on me And they would ask me a question to which I had no idea what they were talking about. And exactly I would go on Google where they were answering the question that act like I knew Hanle would do that to me all the time on KFI. he would call up saying we're going talk about this and they would th That's that's when you know if you've got it or not in broadcasting, how quickly you can dance. You know, Walter Kronke became famous because they'd be covering these famous Apollo and Gemini launches and they'd be a hold, right at T minus twenty seconds And for three hours he have to sit there and all he had was some guy and a model of the rocket and he would fill it. They used to call it Walter Kronite old iron butt Be he couldt sit there for hours and talk And that's when the that's when the rubber hits the road or More likely the corordteroy hits the seat. segments were never that long, so to take I want to take a little break. You were at Jacob, you were at the Musk trial, the Musk versus Altman trial. You were there. You were in person there. I was. I watched this world's richest man stammer away on on the get angry on the stand. It was great. you watch was speaking of lies, you watched Sam Altman being accused of being a liar. Oh ye No, it's good. I really it was fascinating. It was I got to get this first person account of the Musk Altman trial, which is over at least for the time being Elon The jury said didn't file soon enough. So the statute of limitations, which is only three years on this. runun. Uh But that's kind of a technicality. Elon said that himself. He said I lost on a technicality. so I'm appealing I'm curious what the merits of that appeal will be, but we'll ask Jacob Ward that question in just a bit. We also have Marshall Kirk Patrick here. What's up with that which is the best name for a product I've ever heard. What's up with that? Maybe I'm gonna write one called How you Do, but that's en That would be another one. Larry Magott, you grew up in New York, right Now I was born in New York, up in LA. LA. That's right. You're transplant. Yeah. I was born in New York, gre up in Rhode Island. so But I love New York. Go there.. Me too, M too. What's up with that? Well'll have we'll have more in just a bit. How you doing? But first a word From our sponsor Dpple This is a sad story about the way of the world how it is now. you get that That phone call, that voicemail, mayaybe it's an urgent message fromrom your CEO Maybe it's a deep fake target your business AI can impersonate trusted individuals And it's very easy to be fooled In fact I'm going to show you how easy it is to be fooled. I'm just going to play A little something that was sent Burke One of our employees This is definitely not Leo asking you to buy gift cards, but seriously, can you grab me one hundred Apple gift cards? Just kidding. This is Anthony testing teext to spepeech. How's it sound That is not me. I never said that. It sounds exactly like me and fortunately, Anthony who made this had some honor But if a thief using the same technology, he literally did this with a couple of minutes of my of one of our podcasts could make something very similar sounds just like me Thank goodness, Burke did not send those Th those gift cards out This is a problem. AI can impersonate trusted individuals really well Dopel's platform illustrates how frequently, this is also the bad news, users fall for phishing attempts didid a voice call simulation deployment Target users spent six minutes conversing. It wasn't just a message, conversing back and forth with a deep fake. att the end of the six minutes, every one of them one hundred percent believed that the AI was a human was the person they said it was They didn't, they couldn't ent That's why you need Dpple. Dppple is the AI native Social engineering, defense platform DppL strengthens human risk management by training employees to recognize deception whileile their digital risk protection detects and disrupts attacks across every channel It is a scary world out there as attackers turn to AI to power increasingly sophisticated strikes A uses it to fight back. With automated takedowns, multi channel coverage And AI defenses that build intelligence with every fight, Dppel works relentlessly to protect people, brands, and trust Dople offers best in class integrations and partnerships to seamlessly integrate into your existing security tech stack Dpppel's industry awardwards and testimonials speak for themselves. Dppel is recognized as a winner twenty twenty six G two leader of users most likely to recommend. Momentum leader. Best support Join hundreds of companies already using DppL to protect their brand and people social engineering attacks like the one you just heard Dppel pacing. What's next in social engineering? Learn more at Dpple. com D O PP E. sending out those Apple gift cards. I told you it's a fake I told you So was so how did you get into the trial, Jacob? I mean was How did you do that? The coolest thing about the American court system is that anybody can go in. So you I mean, that's the theory, right? is all trials are supposed to be public. Well, in my case, it was true. So I did not go in under anybody's auspices. you know, I was officially a CNN person, but I really just wanted to see like Ken at work to just get in as a member of the public And so I there was there was a group of reporters And and I showed up and you know, a long line of them And I was part of that for a while. But I just went in as part of the public. And when I got upstairs and the media person for the court, who I don't know personally, but I knew that's what she was, she asked, who were you with? And I said, I am a member of the public. And she said Right this way. Wow. And it was so cool. Yeah, so. I remember as a teenager, I used to go sit in courtrooms. Yeah. was It was really cool. It's so cool. so you sit there, but those were not, by the way, I was one of the few. I mean it was not Altman versus Musk. No, no, that's right. This was cool. I mean, there were so many interesting people because there was a bunch of Looky Loos. There was a bunch of just like I bet people wanted to be there and be part of it. And everybody came to the stand. I mean, you got to see the who who Tagella, you know, you know, what's his name? Ilyia Sutkver, like all these people. G Gg Brockman, the president of president AI. I mean, it was great. fact So Greg Brockman's diary ended up being entered into evidence by Open AI, which was a huge mistake if I've learned anything It is don't write this stuff down, people, like I' like I don't care how famous you think you're gonna be somed, or what you think your biographers need. Like don't be writing that stuff. I've said this many times. noobody ever wins these kinds of trials because of discovery Well, that's right. I mean, that's why we were all there, right? is because the discovery was so amazing. To see how these guys write back and forth to one another is so amazing. The best one for me was at one point, Musk and Altan You know, so they so they get together in twenty fifteen and they say they do this little handshake about they're going to like create this nonprofit that's going to change the world And literally at one point, they're negotiating about what it is the board will look like. And Musk writes in I don't have the exact words in my mind, but it was something like We're gonna have a board of twelve people But we should consider whether we want to expand it to sixteen people, depending on how much literally is these words were the ones of yours. Depending on how much the fate of the world will rest on its shoulders. I was thinking to myself, Okay, a board of twelve, but then is not ready for that, but a board of sixteen is all we need is four more people who fate of the world will be rest as short. Right It's not us for. Like I don't think it's the for us, right? It' I I told my mom, I was like, I think I'd want you on that board. She's like, I don't want on that board, Do you think Elon Musk genuinely believes or believed at the time that AI was a threat to human existence. I do think he actually believes that on some level. but I think he that belief also, it seems to me is exactly balanced by his very equal belief that he is the only one who can save us all from that. Right. Like he's the thing that you saw over and over and again is just that the guy clearly believes he's the only one who matters. The ego is incredible. Yeah, the ego. I mean, everybody there was that way. I mean, I mean who didn't have an ego? Sam Homman had an ego. Gr such anult. I mean, they all have egos. Totally. If you want to like make these people upset as many of these lawyers were trying to do, just accuse them of having made no technical contributions to the product. Their heads would pop off. You just see them be like, o goh Yes I do. I got the servers and I the blah blah blah, you know That's a great strategy for the opposing lawyers. Totally. The only guy who kept cool who stayed cool was Nadeela. Clearly he was like a guy bar where two of the guys he's come with are fighting And he says to the bouncer, I'm not with these guys. Like I just I know them. But sure, but I'm not part of this. you know, And he was just trying to get out of the bar basically. The of course, as CEO of Microsoft, they have a large stake in open AI And a kind of checkered relationship with openp AI Yes, he was so calm and cool under it though. He basically was like, you know, we're just trying to sort of like you know, help this industry work because it's going to work so well for our customers. You know, it's just so here's just buy the book, you know, about it. Whereas he's a well trained CEO. this We hate interview CEOs because they're so well trained. They're like sports, you know, it's like athletes, right? They just just came to play, man, Re' here to win you know, and in Alban and Musk's case, they were very weird and Philosophical and that would get objected and d d d, They were very odd uck And then you, the best part, I mean, what I loved the most was just, again, this public courthouse v is so great. So this is Oakland, California. It's not a very fancy federal courthouse. And as a result, there's no VIP section. So like Musk doesn't get to like wait in some green room. Altman doesn't get his own bathroom. So literally Musk in the brakes is going up and down the hallway with his security Just like pacing, basically because there's nowhere to be and he doesn't want to stand around talking to Altman Altman at one point, I had to wait awkwardly in line with him for the urinal You know, we're just standing together. It's so great. You know, up, you know and play this weekend hu To see that. And then I will say my my like, what I also learned is that my kink is watching the world's richest man being slapped around by the judge, this judge Yvette, Gonzalez Rogers and him saying Yes, Your Honor. She she takes no prisoners. She yelled at Apple Y for lying in the Apple versus Epic case. In fact, she now holds them by a very sensitive portion of their anatomy because she's going to decide what their what their commission will be in the app store Same judge and she did not She told these guys, I don't want to hear anything about AI doom. That's right. That's right. Don't let us get. We're not getting distracted by that. one point Musk tryed to say something interesteresting effect for her. Yeah I did too. I just thought she did such a good job. Anyway. So like I say, it was just fun to watch American,s like the last true American Dmocratic thing. Do you feel like it justice was done? Well, I mean, in the end, I think that these You know, obviously, like it got dismissed on technicality, right? The statute of limitations But I didn't know at the time, I'm sure you did, but was that the jury was not was only there in an advisory capacity. That's right. Judge made she could have made she would have made the decision in the end. They judges impanel a jury like this for an advisory to kind of give themselves cover when they have to make a reallylease. I had no idea that was even possible. Yeah. Yeah. She kind of got off easy too in that she didn't have to take any any guff. although I dont think sheres. I mean, she's just such a tough person. Shes it She was great. but he but I think that the Ultimately this was like billionaires throwing lawyers at each other, which is not how I want the future determined But Well, I think Musk undermines his whole story by the fact that he has a competing frontier AI company called XAI for sure that is going straight at it's for profit going straight at open AI. So it kind of undermines his whole argument. Yeah just pumping out natural gas power. Oh yeah a day and night in secret beyond anything that's if you're concerned about the future of humanity For goodness skes, go get some solar Well, not to mention, I mean, I'm sure the jury doesn't isn't allowed to say this, but I doubt any jury has too much sympathy for a guy who is a trillionaire. Exactly.g got to seeI The AI pilots Teslaas he could literally kill people. I mean, know this is and he already has. What's your sense of Sam Altman's character and veracity. d During the middle of this trial, of course, New Yorker came out with a essentially a hit piece written by Ronan Farrow implying that Altman was less than trustworthy K of lying and slippery. Yeah It came up again and again and again in testimony. basically had Ilya Sutzg saying he had a pattern of lying, you know these former Board members saying, oh, yeah, he would deceive us over and over again. And then he was asked on cross examination by Mus's attorneys do you lie? Are you a liar And he's under oath. So he can't say, you know He has to say he has to waffle. And so he did. He was like, he said, I'm sure I have lies in my time in my life, that kind of thing And then and then Um, you know But but over and over again, he was sort he was clearly unable to say He just kept saying, I consider myself honest in my business dealings. I feel like Sam Altman was not done. well by his team because he must have known that question was going to come up And he really seemed unprepared. They asked him, A you completely trustworthy And instead of just saying yes He said, Well I believe so Do you always tell the truth believe I'm a trutval person. Yeah. ye. I mean, he was not well prepared. His people did not do him justice, I think I mean, I think when you're when you're used to being a kind of backroom dealer like that's he is. That'sang, you know, But he also, I mean, there was a point at which which They were asking him why it was that he had insisted on being CEO. And there were emails from Greg Bachman and Elya Sutskvver saying, why do you want to be CEO? Is it because of your political ambitions And Molo Musk's attorney asked him, what is that about Did you want to be president of the United States? he said, sort of rhetorically. And Altan said, No, no, no, no, I was considering a run for governor. Well it's's not The casual way in which these guys clearly believe they are the main characters of the universe And the rest of us are just kind of background actors was the that was the theme for me of this trial. It is fascinating to watch. I mean They don't live in our world, do they Every noobbody says no to them Uh, You know, they they never really are called to account for anything And And they believe that the money is their reward from God for doing good work. Yeah because they they keep talking about how it's not about the money And then they would and then the lawyers would lay out like, here's the seven billion dollars stake you have in this company. And you could just see that it just didn't compute for them They just think of it as clearly like the universe is going to just reward me endlessly such that I'll never have to think about money again because my work is so brillant and important Right. So there's this weird sort of set of background assumptions, you know, I just remember remember that that it's been true for a while that that inside some companies you'll have this hierarchy in which the language is like Some people are agents and some people are NPCs. that some people count have agency and some people just are literally just like the video game characters that you run over with your car You know, like it's that It's that thing that I feel like. What did they call them in succession? not a real person doesn't matter. They're not a real they're not a real a serious You get a feeling we are just characters in Sam Altman and Elon Musk's play that we are NPCs, then there And I'm sure Elon actually believes that that that he he believes we're in a simulation and that Really, the rest of us barely exist And Elon Elon, you know, he long ago fired his press team He he doesn't he doesn't feel like he needs anything that he can't simply control And I think he's not wrong. He elected the president with a quarter of a billion dollars. That. And he lays people off not just to save money, because he just wants to run things himself much as possible. And he, you know, He may well be a genius. I I don know. He has S real success. Have you seen the fiber truck? Well, and then but that's the problem is that No one says no to him or no one says, you know, they u Tesla famously andfortunately, a lot of EV's have you have a Tesla, right, Larry? I did. A lot of EV's have followed suit has its charging plug in the wrong place becausecause in many cases when you have to go to supercharger, you need to back in Or they had to make the superchargers with extra long charging cables because the plug's in the back. Well, it turns out His engineers said we should put the plug in the front like the like many of the early EVs actually was in the front grille. So it'll be easier to charge. And Elon said, no, I'm running this house and I can't I need to have the plug in the back because that's the easiest place for me to plug in As a result Every EV since has its plug in the wrong place Except the Nissan Leaf, which is good news is if you have if you pay a hundred dollar hundred a month for full self driving, it will back in for you. It'll back in for you. there you go. I actually own my self driving ent. Do you really? And do you trust I bought it. I bought it a gazillion years ago for seven grand And I get to keep it. So at least I got to keep it through two Tl We'll see whatature. Foolishly because I had a model X, a first generation model X paid ome huge amount of money for the right. the right to at some point get full self driving, which I never got. which to me is a class action food in the making, I don't know how you can possibly get away with that I think it was five thousand dollars Yeah for the right to subscribe to full self driving, should it ever? I mean, I still don't have truly f full self driving not unfit. You never will. I never will. Yeah. It will never be a robot taxi. My car I will never make money. lefing out my car at the Rbot Tax. He's promising that always promised to me Not personally, but from made in America to made with American values in mind. Oh, you're talking about the Trump phone now. Yes. whichich is really Sams, it's a cheap phone that you could get for free from TMobile if you didn't mind that it didn't have a flag and gold on it You can buy a flag in golden He just put a decal We I think in a way There has been an erosion of American character point where we just expect everything's a scam and nobody really even thinks about it anymore. It's like, well Yeah it's so bad It is so bad that when my wife gotot an email from Social Security. She blew it off because she thought it was a scam. And when she got a call from Social Security. She hung up on the guy. It turned out it really was Social Security. R And how do you know? Well, it took us an extra six months before she got her benefits. She just assumed it was a scam. Of course. So it went that way in Russia first, right? I mean, that's like that's part of the Putin strategy You you flood the zone and and just like leave people unwilling or able to trust each other and without the with the Without social cohesion The whole thing comes grinding to a halt.. Well, what did what did the SEC fine Elon for pumping the value of the Twitter stock or actually dumping the value of the Twitter stock before he bought it. with tweets saying it's full of bots. It's no good they they they prosecuted. They said, you know, you you obviously were trying to influence the value There was a class action suit from shareholders Twitter shareholders who said, yeah, we didn't get the value for our stock because of his tweets Wh did they find him One in a quarter million dollars. That's like me getting a parking ticket. Less It's literally less than you getting a parking ticket. It's it's like It's not even a slap on their wrist It's a doink on the nose. It's nothing It's it It's just aazing you used the word hierarchy a little bit ago and I feel like that's That's a pretty key word. I'll never forget I read some research years ago that studied CEOs as they climb higher and higher up into into their respective hierarchies. the number of people who can say no to them get smaller and smaller and so they're Like sense of empathy. which had served the socioobiological function of keeping them in check atrophies because they don't need it Yeah. And now with ever more extreme inequality What do they mean to care about other people? No they don't have to pretend any totally it. And and they I feel like once you've observed humanity and its behaviors and its choices at scale You emerge with such a low opinion of people. you know? Like I think this is Zuckerberg's problem. I think he just looks at how we are and is like These people suck, you know? Hans are what do I care? This is true when you talk to people in the gambling industry, they're always like, people are the worst O bartenders. cops. Yeah. I'm a bartender. I still like people after being a bartender. for ten thousand people, I might not. I might have felt differently sure Zuckerberg knows how vulnerable you are, how easy to manipulate we are and takes good advantage of it. This is always the thing that gets me is that humans are simultaneously The worst thing ever and the most amazing thing ever. That's right. And I think it's even true of Elon that once in a while we break throughrough And once in a while and you. Yeah, once in a while there's a Michelangelo. There's Jonas Sk You know, once in a while, we do. and and then there are plenty of counter examples. And there's some politicians that breakth through as well once in a while. I agree. So you might hate them, you might like them, but they break through. R. Arguably there could be more of them if all the abundance were not so dramatically misallocated if anybody else saw this Scott Santin's article I just shared Uh Scott Samons is the kind of the leading thinker these days around UBI. And he wrote what he calls the the Anngineine de Pitrine argument for UBI. if you've seen that that crazy Montreal noise band or they're like discos they're hysterical. Yes the per Mer Hats. And so he says like those guys and Albert Einstein and you like how many like if if UBI made it possible for even one person out there to like be able to stop messing around doing something pointless to pay the mortgage or the rent and instead became the next Einstein. like one of them would pay for the whole thing times over And presumably there would be more than one. We did on Friday, I did a special show with a friend named Jeff Atwood who is a famous coder. He wrote the coding horror blog and made quite a bit of money when he sold Stack Exchange He's devoting half of his fortune, a considerable amount. to some test projects for what he doesn't like UBI because the idea of UBI is everybody gets a basic income. He likes a guaranteed minimum income. It's like a minimum wage that there is a Bottom that nobody goes below And so he's funded with a considerable amount of money some projects to test this Theory If you go to staygolds. us you can read all about it. but Yeah, so I'm not a fan of UBI because Elon doesn't need any more money. You don't need to give Elon one thousand dollars a month. But I am a fan of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income. And it is possible, but unfortunately in order to do that, we would have to kind of limit the number of billionaires and how much money they had. They might only be able to get a few hundred million to The New York City budget is balanced, right? Yeah. Asing on Mamdami's new talk Twitch stream. Is that hyerical? Somebody called this The the FDR style fireside chats that but he's but instead of course doing it on the radio Mom Donny's doing it on Twitch. He was one of the people I'm thinking about of the politician that broke through. Yeah. was he was first in mind when I said. Yeah, very, very interesting. Yeah And I was in New York as they know, just yesterday Everybody I ran into, bus drivers People love them. I mean, he's delivering the goods It's it's very interesting. So he's funding These programs with a tax on unoccupied multimillion dollar apartments is that Is that where that money iss coming from or is it? I think so. somebody the first question on his Twitch stream recording was, how did you pull off this budget? And he said basically, it was one part taxes on the rich and the other part insisting that the budget splits with the state government. actually respect their agreements. He claimed that there was a number of instances where the city and the state like agreed to go fifty fifty on something and then historically the state would not follow through with their funding and the mayor historically like wouldn't be able to do anything about it. but he resolved that situation with the current Governor According to his website, he's the first U. S elected official to host a recurring multi platform stream. It's called talkalk with the peoplee Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X, Blue Sky and podcasts U It is the modern fireside chet I think that's very interesting. The first one was last Thursday at four PM and I guess he's going to is he going to do it every week That's kind of think That's the plan Yeah And he, you know, he has folks come on and and it's the live chat is you know, wide open and full of like, that's a brave thing to do. Obscene asie art Yeah. Our live chat on Twitch is also open, but But they're pretty good right now. to be nice. So he thirty five thousand Twitch subscribers to the very first That's fantastic. That' That's how all elected officials be responsible to the people who elected them, I think. I compare that to Chuck Schumer or almost any traditional politician. I mean, they don't night day. They don't like this. remember I remember many years ago, I've told this story before teaching Regis Fhilbin on had to tweet. And he was initially, he was really excited. There's video of it on YouTube. He was so excited. He called his wife said Joy, Joy. I just sent my first tweet and they're talking back to me. He lo this idea of his audience talking back to him. It lasted one week. And then he realized they were all talking to him and he didn't like it and he canceled to cancel the He' for talking business, not the listening business.. There you go. Bingo. All right, let's take a break. M to come with our fabulous panel Jacob Ward The Rriip cururrent. you've see him on CNN, JacobWb. com and his book, The Loop is still well worth reading. It was It was definitely prescient when it came out in twenty twenty four U twenty twenty two. two Yeah, aboutbout a year before Chance ET came out. You think you want to be right when you write a book like that? You don't really want to be right unfortunately, but you were well done, Bravo. It's great to see you and of course, Marshall Kirk Patrick, the author of What's up with that? You can get that at What's up withith that. app. try it out. you can try it for free. Vy interesting way to add context to any web page And it's actually it's more than just context. It's kind of u U adversarial content Tw, right Some one of my early users said, no one will ever be able to fool me again Boy, if that were only true, Only that were true. It might be. I sometimes think of it as as X ray vision. another user called it that. So that's good. I like Yeah. see through it And from cononnectsafelyy. org It's founder, CEO and president Larry Maggot cononnect safely. org go there. There's all sorts of information It's very valuable for parents Wh I don't, I boy, you got my deepest sympathy. No We got to raise kids in this day and age. I swear you know, we just literally this week published the seniors Gide to Uber And we that's a great idea. Yeah, no we do. We have stuff procedures and we have a new task force for eighteen to twenty six year olds because they have vulnerabilities It doesn't go away when you're eighteen. In fact, it gets worse in some ways. Yeah. A lot of anxiety at that age. so. Its It's a tough world if you're growing up into it or if you're in it and it's changing under your feet. It is a tough world. And boy, it's tough to be a senior. I you know, we're fortunate all of us and probably all of our listeners that we understand technology, we can use it. I got a feel for the vast majority of people who are entering this world where technology is everything had no idea how to use this stuff. I don't know how anybody who with any diminished capacity you know, God forbid, we could all be there someday, how they handle life today without the ability to thrive online. It's just I don't know what they're doing There was a story about a long time Yankee fan He've been to the games for sixty years, didn't have a smartphone, couldn't go to the games anymore because the tickets are on the phone That's right I couldn't park at UC Davis because I couldn't get a Wi Fi signal and the only way to pay for parking is with the app. and I literally had to drive somewhere else Because I didn't have one. What are we doing, folks There's this thing called quQarters.ight O at least I a car. this is how you know I'm an old man. I have in my car a little change thing with quarters in it, just in case someday I needet a parking meter to take quarters. Say I may. Or if you just want to add ten minutes, you don't want to go, you put the credit card back in. I gott to give my credit card. You're not going to try to change the settings on your toaster, are you No It wasn't Yankees was doodgers. Thank you. Eat the Oligarchs says his name Robert Westerman, longtime Dodger fan Finally, the Dodgers responded and gave him a paper ticket. Thank God. He's the only one in Dodgers Stadium with a paper ticket. Good for you, Robert. I'm glad I'm sorry, Arl. This is nameed Arl Siegel. Glad to hear it Our show today brought to you by Mil. Now here is the modern world doing something pretty darn Cool If you, you know, sit at the table and clear your plate, I was brought up to clear my plate, right? There are starving children in China. Clear your plate But you grew up in a world where you see all this food waste. And you realize I shouldn't be have to clear my plate. It's not healthy. I shouldn't have to at a restaurant. I shouldn't have to You know, eat everything put in front of me Food waste seems like a huge problem in this world What's interesting is It isn't in restaurants. Most of it happens at home. That's good news because it means we can actually do something about it And that's when we went out and we bought our mill food recycler. I love this. Mill is right now in our kitchen. We bought it October, I think of last year Before they were a sponsor And I fell in love with it so much. I said, can we do ads for you? Be I think everybody should get one of these things. Mill is the odorless effortless, fully automated food recycler. Every goes in it. Now, we want, you know, we were composting But their problem is, you know You got this thing and it starts to smell and there's fruit flies and stuff You throw it in the same thing in the mill Pels. You know, hearts to avocado pits, chicken bones E dairy, the milk takes almost anything and then while you sleep Our mill, I have it set up, you can change how it works, but I have it set up to turn on at nine PM. While your sleep mill quietly transforms those food scraps into Nutrient rich shelf stable grounds There's no mess, there's no smells, there's no fruit flies And we last night we loaded it up. You could put ten pounds in it It'll work on an overnight reduces it down almost anything. It can work for weeks before you even have to think about emptying it You can use the grounds in your garden, add them to your curbside compost. Mill will even pick them up and get them to a small farm for you. Look at this Since October, we have been using the mill We have diverted four hundred six pounds of food scraps from the landfill. That's where it would have ended up You can actually see your impact. The mill app will track how much food you're keeping out of landfills They've already helped customers put over fifteen million pounds of food good use The mill is beautiful. It's sleek. looks great in any kitchen. We got the white one. they have different colors. It offers, by the way, a ninety day risk free trial. If you don't absolutely love it, you can just send it back It is risk free. But I have to say, when you see a stat like that, you go, okay Okay, we're keeping it. I love our mill Try mill risk free for ninety days. Get seventy five dollars off right now when you go to mill. com slash twwit and use the code Twit seventy five dollars off right now, millot com slash twwit, use the offer code, Twit TW IT. save some money save the planet four hundred six pounds diverted from landfill, that's amazing as That is amazing. And we you know what? we care a lot. We do the recycling, We do everything we can to reduce and we've really reduced our was food waste incredibly. And the mill is a big part of that. Thank you, Mill Leo, do you know about project drawdown? No, what's that? It is the world's leading research quantitatively metast studies on the most high impact responses to climate change that the world could take. And reducing food waste is the number three No kidding. at a hundred different solutions huge. It is No kid. It' huge Wow. numberumber one is getting is dealing with errant refrigerants, you know, chemicals from refrigerators. If we could get that dealt with it, it'd make a huge difference. Number two is I believe offshore wind power could like make a huge, huge difference. and number three is reduced food waste I had no idea that is amazing. Um Yeah becauseuse it feels help, you feel helpless. You feel like, well, as an individual, what can I do I mean, we drive EV's like you, Larry, we drive EV's. Bam I am, as you're speaking writing to their press office because I'd like to review this product. It sounds amazing. Oh the mill is I love the mill. Yeah. I like my readers to know about it. It's great. And you know, California introduced, you're in California, right? Yeah. Theyrod I'm pretty sure the whole state now does composting. So you have a compost bin at your curb But this is gross. Well we actually have two we have a worm bin. in our kitchen, we have a big thing for the city compost and we have a smaller one that my wife uses for her worm bin. Now, I don't know if this can go into the worm bin or not do you know It can. all it even you know, basically it's got little mixtures and it heats it up just removes the moisture, right? So it's like it's all the nutrients are still there. It's dry, it's like grounds,s like coffee grounds. It's dry. So yeah, the worms would love it. you can you can use it as compost certain things she wont let me put in like she won't let me put bones in the worm bin, you know? Well, the milli handles bones. there are rules though, if you're gonna to use this U you couldn't put like marigolds in it because If you were going to use it as chicken feed because it's pois it would be bad. It'd be poison. So it actually on the app, it tells you, I'm not doing the ad anymore. This is just us talking. On the app, it tells you if depending on how you're going to use it, don't do this, donon't put that. But we're just putting it in the compost bin. and so we put everything in it And also I guess you could put a lot more in like ours it fills up pretty quickly. this. Oh yeah, this well, it fills up. It'll take this much. It's about that big And then but the next morning it's down here. It compresses it, basically. No. there's no compression. It's just dehydrating it Well That's all it's doing. But it turns out most food waste is water is liquid Is that just dehydrating it It's pretty inc, if you could can only get people to buy less and just what, you know, not throw away anything would be. Well, one of the things I have Giving myself permission to do is not clear my plate because that's why you're looking thinner, Leo. Yeah, I was in the clean plate cllub, you know, eat it all. eat Oh, you don't like it. No. So now even when I go to a restaurant and I will say them, it's not that I don't like it. I'm full And by the way, I grew up worried about starving children in Europe. That shows how old I am. Oh, you're really old. was my parent fe know it was China for me. No parents To their credit, never did that to me. Bye My mama was the saying, You should eat manunja, manunja, eat a more. You got to have some more. It's a good. And I go, ye, mama, yeah, mama. There was no guilt involved. It was just pleasure Meanwhile, people are starving because they've been pushed off of the land that they've been sustaining themselves on for years in order to make monocropped export uh for you know, controlled by by someone else. Well, I feel guilty. I have to say, you know I've been selling gadgets for twenty years Ecouraging people to buy a new phone every year I feel I have I have definitely some guilt. I have written min an apology to the world having been a cheerleader of the internet, a cheerleader of, a cheerleader of that and feel a little guilty too U let's see. what else? U the US has invested two billion dollars in quantum computing. That's going to be the next big thing And of course they're taking a stake in it as well. Uh, that's the new that's the new way the Trump administration invests You give us a little piece of the action wait until they find out that the money really only goes one way and there is no profit in quantum computing Uh the bulk of the money goes to IBM and global Foundriies Foundriies that make wafers and other technology for qu quantum computing, IBM will receive a billion dollars they don't have the money, Global Foundriies three hundred seventy five million IBM is going to invest a billion is going to take the billion from the government and invest another billion to set up a company. Anderon in Albany, New York U I'm not sure why the government's investing in quantum computing, I guess, maybe Well, Howard Lutnickk, the seecret of Commerce says it will create thousands of high paying jobs He also said he had never been in touch with Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah. a lunch, that's all Hi, this is Benito. I'm guessing it's a security thing, right? Because it quuantum We just don't want Chinese to get it first That's all we just don't. But it breaks all the encryption so they want it. Oh, you think they oh, that's it. Yeah, that's right. And no password is safe again. R. Between that and Mythos, we're all gonna walk around naked from now on California has fined General Motors twelve point seven five million dollars because GM was selling data from Ostar to data brokers another flap in the rift slap in the wrist. the lawsuit accused GM of sharing detailed customer information, including driving habits geolocation data, names and contact details with third party data brokers Between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four, hundreds of thousands of California drivers were affected certainly that is less surprising than the story that you covered a few weeks ago, I believe, about how all of the or most of the state health insurance marketplaces We're selling data. Oh yeah, that's a good one Hike Yeah, the ACA websites all had data collection tools and they were selling it to data brokers. And of course On an ACA website, you give them a lot of information, income information, health information. and not exactly knowing that it's going to be there. like no one was ever asking So you mentioned this at the beginning of the show, I don't know if this is going to pass It's part of the federal highighway bill bipartisan amendment to end Police license plate tracking. They will be cities and states will be stripped of federal funding if unless they kill their automated plate tracking programs, particularly Flock, right Fock is the big one. Yeah There's been debates in every community. there're debating in my community in Pedalima right now because there's cameras And there's a lot of value, of course in having these automated license plate readers The problem is they're used sometimes not in such great ways We just saw a story about law enforcement officials using anLPR from Flock to Girlfriend, his ex girlfriend Thousands of ALPR reading Sky. But I mean, that's a rogue use. I don't know. I have mixed feelings about this. What do you guys think? But the city I live in has canceled its contract with Flock and the cameras have been removed after protests Yeah People don't like the idea It's one of those many examples of the nuances of goodood ideas with unintended consequences. I deal with that every day as an internet safety person because there's all these bills out there that would do wonderful things to protect children take away their rights, spy on them, deny them access to important information that they need y Yada, yada, yada And this is just one more example. I mean, of course we want to capture kidnapper and childl or Well, see, that's the thing. It's hgely valuable for that or an elderly person who's Is that driven off or? And you really do you have a right to privacy when you're in public roads Well, the problem right is that it's not just about the privacy, it's about like the So I started these two mathematicians were doing a study of uh like, u cameras ed speeding cameras And They figured out that it was still much more likely to tag Black and brown people And the sub is, o, because they drive faster? No. Well, yes, but not for the reasons you think. What they said what they determined was Black and brown people in this particular city, I came remember was like Detroit, one of these are living in these post industrial areas with huge four lane roads. They got to drive huge distances to get to work. And that's where people were putting the speed cameras. And As a result people in those neighborhoods as opposed to people who you know, live in a leafy suburban enclave where the where it's much, you know where you couldn't speed anyway because you're in a compressed little road m they don't hit with those speed speeding cameras. So there's a whole layer of like How do you equitably deploy something like that? I have to say, I'm very tied and nuts about this one.ike I live in Oakland, California, wheres there has been a huge amount of like petty crime and vehicle crime, you know, And they often don't prosecute it because it's hard to prosecute. R And you're not allowed to chase because the police end up killing. They don't want high speed chases. Yeah, you know So I do have to say, like from a thousand feet up, I look down and I think, well, this just you know, maybe licensed by readers is the trick here You know, I took a trip to Brazil This past summer And when you get off the plane, you they barely check you barely talk to a human You don't even really hand over your I mean, you hand over your passport at one point, but like All you really do is walk down an incredibly long hallway and you're being recorded a thousand different ways. Your face is getting is getting biometrically grabbed. your gait, how you walk is getting grabbed All of those getting grabbed. And then when you bop around in a place like Rio There's just Chinese cameras everywhere because Chinaa has exported these systems to all these big capitals and big cities And I was talking to people in Rio about this and And they were like, you know, we like that it's brought down uh, crime You know, they're all for that because it had a huge violent crime problem. But then they were also like, but there's also weird stuff happening. like cops are using the footage and monetizing it on YouTube for themselves There's misuses. There's this Georgia police chief who's being prosecuted because he used these ALPRs to stalk and harass people They police all sorts of powers to protect us's That's part of the deal. And yeah, there are some b eggs, but that's how you ye I mean, nobody'ggest well maybe some are, but most people are not suggesting we get rid of police. Um Yeah, I am also twisted the kns. I feel like There's some real value to it I think people just hate the idea of these cameras Everywhere Here's a story from German scientists in the Carls Rr Institute for Technology Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with perfect accuracy Y' your WiFi router. Y. can actually not only see that you're there, but can identify you Even if you're not carrying an active device by observing do this in a German accent, by observing the propagation of radio waves We can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who were present Thereor to this too. I've seen. And ye, you don't need a warrant to use that. park a van outside somebody's house and run that. no warrant required. They have a new system where they'll identify you individually by your, um by your heartbeat using a laser from like two hundred yards. Well, and I'm wondering the reason I have that. I thought of this is I'm wondering if the Brazilian Uh, corridor you're going down is also doing gait analysis because that was my understanding is that the reason you're walking and not stopping in place and turning It just got me so paranoid because between my Apple Watch, my TPAap machine, which has a built in modem. G'sot a failure connection Our a ring I'm wearing all that stuff hand I have a little Chinese Chinese AI in here. I mean. You're a one man NSA, Larry. A're kidding No, we live in this world. Privacy is Well, and it' so Like out of the nine identified planetary boundaries required for like life on Eth to exist. There's like seven out of those nine have been passed now and been crossed over U You mean the Goldilocks zone kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, around everything from ocean currents to mysterious chemicals to temperature to you know, what have you. So it's like it's pretty unsustainable situation we find ourselves in. And now So we don't have to worry because we're just going to be wiped out any day now Well G Do doesn't happen all at once, Leo Yeah, Dathind. Well you and I, Leo, probably We'll probably die of old age Yeah, we'll be all right. I feel bad for kids being born right about now. S What did you say seven out of ten? Seven out of nine. Yeah, have done have been passed have been breached like the two two integrate temperature increaseere. I'll drop the link in Ocean acidification is is now And these are some some of these are irreversible. That's the problem. and worse Um they pile on exponential Yep, feedback loops and Yeah, and what have you. So given those circumstances U, and You got your tight alignment between the the the super wealthy and the government that they have, you know, the super wealthy with an interest in the status quo and the and the and the government that then do you want the government to have perfect surveillance That seems like minor compared to compared to the acidification of the ocean. But it also explains why Mark Zuckerberg is building one hundred million dollars bunker under his house in Hawaii. This is the funniest thing. The rich think that they somehow will escape this reality. Elon thinks we're going to Mars I hope he does News forone He's not talking about that as much anymore, I have to say. He's been pretty quiet about that lately I don't know. he was weingly occupy Mars shirt and I think He had a very successful launch of a Starship yesterday, I don't know Here's all right, let's give you some good news. I don't want to leave you with a depressed point of view Remember when a Cox media group, the cable company was advertising talked about it and I was skeptical of it, was advertising that You as as a marketer U by active listening technology from them that they tapping people's phones and had perfect marketing information from their phones, from their TV's, from their cars, and they could sell that to you and your ads could be perfectly targeted And I at the time was a little skeptical. Well, it turns out The FTC says And now they're in trouble because they didn't actually work The FDC is fining Cox Media Group for selling active listening technology didnidn't work If it worked, no problem. exactly. I was gonna to say, is that what we're upset about? That's what we're upset about They deceived their customers, businesses by claiming they could target ads based on audio recordings collected from consumers' smart devices by a marketing service called Active Listening. Why do they get in trouble because the FTC said It didn't work Maybe this isn't the happy story that I thought it was. Well the happiness was that it didn't work ye Yeah, well, that's that's what should be reassured. That came out in discovery, if you will. Yeah Wow U o, I have lots more. There's so many more stories, but I'll tell you what I think we probably should wrap this up because we've gone more than long enough and I don't want to what did they call Walter Carkeie? Iron butt? being old Iron butt you you are not The new iron butt you are. I could you know what easily it's funny because I'm not the longest podcast by any means. Joe Rogan just did a three and a half hour podcast interview with Mark and Dreon. And I saw that Lex Friedman did an interview with David Hannimeyer Hanson, the creator of Ruby on Rils that went six hours plus So hey We're only two hours and forty four minutes in. This is this isn't long My back already hurt so All right, we'll wrap it up. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your patience and thank you, Larry Maggget for surviving. Connect saafely dot orgot Everybody should go there. There's lots of good stuff. I love that. An elderly a senior citizen's guide to Uber. I think that's a good idea.oth of a teenager's guide to Uber.ver Yeah. Cradle the Grave. Cradle of the grave. Well I haven't seen dead people yet, but I've been saying this lately. It's only a matter of time before my kids come to me and ask for the car keys perermanently I don't have car keys. I just use my phone. Yeah, I don't have car keys, and good luck, kids. You ain't getting my car keys. give them your car keys.'t. You can have the key. I don't need that No, that's why I keep hoping that there will be someday self driving cars because Well I guess there's always Uber Thank you, Larry. Areciate what you do for kids and seniors connectafely. org And I'm sorry about CBS News radio. No know. My bad day Sad day. But it's always a happy day when you're here. Thank you. Appreciate you Thanks also to Marshall Kirk Patrick. Check out WhatsApp withith that. app and WhatsApp with that. app slash Hawkeye. It's the modern way to keep up with what's social saying about your company I don't want to know. But some people need to know. Sometimes you need to know appppreciate that. Thankk you, Marshall. It's great to see you. Thanks for having me on What is the box you're talking into? Is that that is the weirdest microphone I've ever heard?? It is called a becaster microphone.u. It ssound like a bumblebee. Yeah, yeah, exactly I thought I'd seen every mic in the world ' now it's going We got a buzz now. Like a bumble bee. You know, I once went to the launch conference, I believe it was real quick. I think you need to jigger the cable a little bit. It's buzzing. Jigger the cable. Oh, it's so funny looking. I like this. Is any better now? No, it's all right.'re the show's over anyway Go ahead Is this the ad for Vcast? Is this this is not? B best ad for the Bcaster. Okay, it's better now. There it is. It's a cool looking microphone now So I went to this big startup event one time and we were like, Oh, Walt Mossberg's gonna be there. Walt Mossberg's gonna be there. Oh, maybe he'll come and talk to us and see our demo. And we were like, o, I don't know. And then he started coming around the table and he approached us. and he said, I've just got one question for you. What's that mic you're using It was a snowball mic and he was like, okay, cool, thanks to you. Thanks good. All right, see you later. Bye Thank you, Marshall. Great to see you again. And thank you, Jacob Ward. You are you're hitting on all cylinders now Jacob Ward d. comot The book is the loop. There is the ripcurrent dot com is newsletter. You'll catch them on CNN. And we're very lucky to have them every month on Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent. You took a flyer on me when none of those things were truly O. I think you're great I'm really glad that CNN is finally seeing the light. That's great. What is it just technology Yeah, it's technology. I mean, it's amazing. Oce you start wandering into that, the thing everybody forgets is that every I mean, as you know, every single story is a technology story now. It it is absol. I do find myself just like on the wheel of death Yeah very nice. Very high quality proble. It always makes me very happy when I see. Good luck when paramount buy that if that happens. Yeah. you know it's funny. I'm watching keep you around them. I'm watching people like Anderson Cooper and stuff and I really feel like they kind of feel the shadow. over their shoulders. and as a result, they're becoming a little bit more aggressive. And a little bit more newsy likeike let's let's be good news let's be good reporters while we can Which is great. And may better than being acquiesent Inead of just rolling over and saying, please, keep me, please Uh, you know what Who knows what's gonna happen? It's a crazy world You never know Yeah That's why we do this show every week You never know. We do Twit every Sunday. Ts aren't aren't acquiring Twit, are they? God, if they did, I'd be thrilled. I'll fifty million is all it would take. Pone numbers out there. right. I'll do whatever Barry Weiss tells me to do. J, you know, come on and write a check. That's all I need No, I'm not ready to sell out quite yet. Actually I like doing this. I enjoy what I'm doing. I don't I don't I don't need to sell out It makes me a little jealous when I see that, you know ast for the tenth of our audience selling for hundreds of millions of dollars to open AI. It's like Where did I go wrong? Oh, I didn't interview Sam Altman enough. That's the problem That's my mistake So we're happy doing what we're doing. We've been doing. if there' twenty one years I'd like to do it for another twenty one. I'll be sitting here Larry, it'll be you and me. We're talking about our Sciatica. If we're lucky, we'll have. just pain. You got that you know how that pain up and down your side? you know that? We do this show every Sunday afternoon, two to five PM Pacific five to eight easastern twenty one hundred UTC I say that's because you can watch us live. Of course if you're in the club and I hope you are. That's the best way to support independent podcasting. I don't need a big check. From a millionaire, I just want some little checks from people who care about good content, independent content Tv slash club Twit, join the club. if're the club, you can watch us in the Club Twit disiscord And talk with us too after the fact well actually I should mention, you don't have to be in the club To watch live, we also stream it on YouTube just like Mum Dani, mayayor Mumdani. YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick and you can chat with us on all of those too After the fact, you can watch the show. We do record it onto real to Re tape and offer it in both audio and video form websitewit. tv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Twit. greatreat way to share clips with friends and family. Or you could subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically as soon as it's done Bennito Gonzaz, our esteemed technical producer, thank you He's going to get an airplane flly to the Philippines He'll be joining us next Sunday from the Philippines, where it will be four in the morning. Yes, sorry, Banita Thanks to Kevin King who edits this show after the fact Thanks to all of you for joining us. Thankks to our great panelists. We will see you next time, as I have said for twenty one years at Alammin Keep doing it nt they drag me off Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week another Twit Hey everybody. Ieil Rort here and I'm going bug you one more time to join Cub If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, twenty five percent of our operating cost comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more, we can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits, ad free versions of all the shows, you get access to the Club Twit Discord and special programming Like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public. Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you. Find out more at twit d.tv slash club Twit.. Thank you so much