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From TWiT 1086: The Great Beagle Migration - Pope Leo XIV's 1st Encyclical & Ferrari's 1st EVMay 31, 2026

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TWiT 1086: The Great Beagle Migration - Pope Leo XIV's 1st Encyclical & Ferrari's 1st EVMay 31, 2026 — starts at 0:00

It's time for Twit This Week at Tech Great Panel for you. Pulitzer Prize winning author Gary Rivlin is here, the author of AI Valley. Molly White from Web3 is going great. And Samabool Samad, my car guy. We will talk about cars, the brand new Luce from Ferrari. Sam has opinions. Google's changing its search page. Molly's mom has opinions. And what did the Pope say about AI? Why is Gary in agreement? All of that and more coming up on Twit. Stay tuned . Podcasts you love. From people you trust . This is Twit . This is TWIT, This Week at Tech, episode 1086, recorded Sunday, May 31st, 2026. The Great Beagle Migr ation . It's time for Twit This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. There's quite a bit of tech news. This week, and good news, we have a fabulous panel. To cover it, Sam Abul Samet is here, my car guy from Wheelbearings Media and uh the VP of Research at telemetryagency.com. Hi, Sam. Hi, Leal. How are you today? I am very, very well. Thank you very much. Um and it's always nice to see you from Ypsilani, Michigan. Yeah. Home of uh Ford. A view. A few. Yeah, Ford. Ford's not here. Ford's not. Near Ford's down the road. In Dearb orn. Yeah. Nearby. Molly White's also here, world-renowned Wikipedia editor, and uh the creator of Web3 is going just great. And uh her newsletter is citation need.news. Hi Molly. Hello . How is Web3 going? Just great. There's actually some funny uh Bitcoin news we'll talk We don't really need to It's like if you talk about NFTs now, nobody goes, oh, these are the greatest thing ever. Yeah, I think people have mostly ditched the web3 terminology and are just sort of going, you know, still trying to convince people that maybe crypto is a thing or Bitcoin is still a good thing, but you don't hear much about web three anymore. No. Uh but you cover NFTs and crypto on web three is going just great. It's all it's all in all of all of a bundle thing. Yes. And uh it's all in. Including Bitcoin, much to the chagrin of some Bitcoiners who are very upset that I cover it under that umbrella. If it weren't for you, Bitcoin would be worth a million dollars. That's what that's right. That's right. Gary Rivlin's also here, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. His uh most recent book, AI Valley, covers Microsoft, Google and the trillion dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence. Uh it's still true. When the book came out a year ago now? Yeah, like 14, 15 months ago. Yeah. And yet uh here we are with the IPOs for open AI around the corner and anthropic around the corner and I mean uh the the trillion dollar race is not yet won. Yeah you look at uh the uh S one for um SpaceX. SpaceX is wild. How could anybody read that document? Take this company seriously. There's so many juicy tidbits in there. It came out while we were doing intelligent machines on w on Wednesday a c last week and Paris like we lost her 'cause she was like, Oh my God, and then there's this and then there's this. We for instance, X we're learning about X dot com and how little money they're making. What what did you notice? He talks about the addressable actionable total the excuse me, the actionable total addressable market, including twenty six point five million. I love the point five trillion to be made in AI. And it just made up I really don't it's a made up number and you know they are in a race with a lot of other competitors. It just it just it was so musky and. stuff Actually my favorite. That's totally part for the course for Elon. It is. It's all made up. Well, so so you know, he famously had his uh his uh pay package that if he could create a colony at Mars and A million people on Mars. A million people on Mars and data centers in space, we'll get this gazillion number of shares. And it works out that in the S one, even though he's not granted the shares until he reaches these crazy benchmarks, he still gets the votes. Oh yes. Like ten to one. Right? Something like that? Well, not just ten to one, but on shares he does not own until he hits these benchmarks. And yet the way the S one is written, he could still vote on the shares he doesn't yet have. He could still vote using the shares he doesn't have yet. So and yet people are probably gonna race to buy sp SpaceX stock when it when it goes public, right? I mean doesn't everyone wants or not everyone. Lots of people want a piece of AI . You know, the weird thing about SpaceX is, you know, Starlink's probably their best product, their most profitable prop product. And so much of that company is ra uh wound up in XAI. Uh it's why they're losing so much money, losing tens of billions of dollars to XAI. And you know, it's called SpaceX. It's like meta, isn't Meta, but you know, it's it still has that name. But people want to own a piece of anything that lets them own a piece of AI Right. SpaceX is uh rolling in federal subsidies, Billy. In fact, they just signed another But they still lose money. If you take out Starlink, the the actual space business of SpaceX of launching stuff loses money. Right. So even though they they made this amazing breakthrough of reusable rockets that were supposed to make the cost of launches so much cheaper, they still lose money on it. Uh well but you can lose afford to lose money when you have an eight billion dollar c federal contra ct, right? I mean we it's really the st the taxpayers who are losing the money, right? Well no I mean we we you know,'re paying, but we're paying less than what it costs SpaceX to do those launches. So they still lose money even with the federal subsidies ? Yeah, I mean they're they're technically not getting subsidies. That's that's business. I mean yes, uh you could thirty dollars in business. Yeah. And and the and they spend more than that on actually doing the launches. That's kind of pathetic. Yeah. Oh man. Well I guess we're in our space segment. Might as well keep going on that we're going to really I was gonna start with the Pope, but let's talk about rocket go boom. Uh this is the most spectacular rocket explosion since uh N1 just happened in Florida. This was the new Glen . And uh they were just doing a loading uh they weren't even launching it, right? Uh or maybe they were doing uh they were doing a hot fire test. So they they load up the fuel, yeah, fire the rockets or fire the engines without actually launching the vehicle. So it's still clamped to the launch pad. So it wasn't supposed to go in the air, but it kinda sorta did. Pieces kinda went everywhere. Every direction. Yeah. That's the one new or only one Blue Origin has, I think. So they're going to have to rebuild that. Yeah, the only one for New Glenn. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, kind of the bigger picture here is you know, NASA, we, whatever, we're counting on Blue Origin keeping SpaceX honest, right? A competitor, and you know, they are very far behind all of a sudden. Uh the N one uh explosion was in nineteen sixty-nine. That was a Soviet rocket that was destroyed in a launch attempt. That's how long it's been. Uh but you know, we really kind of started launching a lot more rockets. And Elon has been doing pretty well with his uh Falcon Heavy and so forth. So what was the new Glenn going to do on the lunar landing? What part of it was it? It was gonna launch um the um the lander, the human lander. Oh, okay. So so much for that. Actually the fur the first thing that was supposed to go up was uh the rover. So they were gonna l launch uh launch a lander that had the the lunar ro the new lunar rover on. They have two rovers they're gonna launch. Yeah. Right. And that was supposed to go up next uh next year uh sometime . Uh but it's gonna take them a minimum of a year to rebuild that uh launch complex. Wow SpaceX had some famous Kabloois, but they were in the air, right? I mean it was never on the launch pad. Is that what makes this so unique? They they've they've had 'em they've had some that that blew up on the launch pad. There was a Starship uh booster that about three ish years ago, I think, three, four years ago. It was one of the first Starship uh attempted launches and it blew up on the pad and destroyed much of the pad as well. So the th I mean, in a way, this we kind of forget because they've had some really successful missions, the most recent, uh Artemis II around the moon and you forget how dangerous and and iffy all of this is. This is not easy to do. And crazy expensive. And it's crazy expensive. I mean, Je Jeff Bezos, who funds Blue Origin, uh can afford uh to rebuild the pad, but it does slow down NASA's plan to uh get to the moon. Right. Yeah, I think the the diff yeah, the fundamental difference is that since particularly since uh the Apollo One disaster when they had a fire um in uh in the um the capsule on Apollo one uh ahead before the launch and the three astronauts in there were were killed. After that happened, you know, it fundamentally changed the way NASA operated. Uh and you know th they they have still had issues since then. You know, obviously Apollo thirteen had problems. Uh they we had two space shuttles that uh blew up. Yeah. But um you know they take they spend a lot more time up front testing stuff. And so they've had a much lower percentage of uh of of explosions, you know, either at launch or in transit uh than SpaceX has had. SpaceX, you know, it's move fast and break things kind of philosophy. Whereas NASA takes the time, you know, it it takes them a lot longer to get there, but you know, they have you know they've sent Artemis, you know, they've sent the the uh space launch system around the moon now and back safely with astronauts. The tech industry is just springing move fast and break things to like as many industries as possible where you would never want that to be the philosophy. Well including the US government and world you know world uh organizations, yes. Well China just had a a a rocket explosion too, right? Uh so it's just this is we forget how dangerous and difficult this is. Uh well you know, one and one of the things that's in the SpaceX IPO um somewhere they talk about um terrestrial watches. You know, point-to-point terrestrial. Well that's what they were for cargo or for humans? For humans. So like you could fly to you could fly to uh from New York to Australia in that. Yeah, basically anywhere on the planet in half an hour. Yeah. Given how often these things blow up, do you really need to get to Australia in half an hour? I sure as hell don't. And then there's also the environmental impact. Yeah, because these things are burning huge amounts of methane. Yeah, these were methane. All these new rockets, all the all the the SpaceX and um Blue Origin , most of these new rocket companies are all doing methane rocket engines. So they're burning enormous amounts of methane. So the the CO2 emissions from this, not to mention you know just the methane that's vented during the fueling And you know, you're talking about filling these things with liquid methane. It's a you know, because it's a liquid, you know, they're in cryogenic containers rather than uh in press prureess high high pressure containers, which means that you know, this stuff is boiling off continuously. If you w if you ever watch one of these things on the pad, you'll see the the clouds streaming off these things as it boil as the the methane that's in the liquid oxygen boil yeah boils off. Uh and so Elon loves his methane, he's using it to power his data centers as well. Yeah. Doesn't he use it at night too Oh no, that's something else. Never mind. No, that's uh ketamine. Kethamine . Oh, I shouldn't joke about it. Um why not? Does it do they mention ketamine and risk factors in the SpaceX uh IPO I did not read the whole thing. I read the articles. It's also interesting. There's this standard thing that people, you know, that publicly trend publicly traded companies do, like you have a number of independent uh directors, you only do uh compensation through a subcommittee of independent directors and they just toss that out the window right too. Yeah, there there's there's no real corporate governance in any of Elon's enterprises. Right. Well I mean in defense you know it go ahead. The SEC is also a lot less uh I think interested in those types of things these days and so perhaps not applying the same level of scrutiny to these filings. Well and let's not forget the irony of Elon trying to save federal money with Doge . Claiming to try to do it. Claiming didn't save much that c may have even cost money while he's getting thirty-eight billion dollars in federal subsidies , um there's a certain irony in in all of this. Yeah, he he got his money's worth from his two hundred and fifty million, whatever the file number was, in good deal. And you know, all the dropped investigations into this practice or that practice. So I I guess in defense of Mask here is like eyes wide open. No one is gonna put money in SpaceX and think like, well, at least we're gonna get good governance. I don't know. You know what I think you're really betting on? You're betting that others will bet on it. It's it's like a memes, it's a meme stock. You're betting that it will go up before it goes boom , like the rocket. Like Tesla. And you know what? Uh Tesla's still strong, right? Even uh Sam, I mean it's still a strong stock, I think, isn't it? Uh yes, inexplicably. Inex 'cause it's not the company's not is has suffered a lot ever since Elon took that big political stance. I mean if you look at the business itself, you know, what their revenues and profits are, their you know, their their share price is absurd. It has no connection at all to the actual business. The share price is based almost entirely on people's belief that they're suddenly going to flip a switch someday, uh, you know, by by the end of twenty twenty and turn millions of Tesla vehicles into robotaxis that are generating trillions of dollars in free revenue. Um, you know, and that that was gonna happen by the end of 2020. Yeah. Uh and I believe we might have we may have passed that date. I'm not sure what day it is right now, but I think we've I think we missed that deadline. Yeah. Well there's also the argument that they create the tech nology that other car makers theoretically would want, the BMWs, VWs of the world. But I happen to have written an article on this like six months or so ago. And none of the big car companies trust Tesla. There's a couple of startups out there that are selling, you know, ca you could get the aut autonomous vehicle technology through them. So even what in my mind would have been one of their big pluses like, okay, well we have this amazing technology, now let's license it to They're inspired by it though, right? I mean I hear people talking about how less how much less wir ing is in uh modern vehicles and a lot of that is because they looked at Tesla and said, wow, they really were able to cut down the wiring. Wiring's a you've taught me this, Sam. Mm there's miles of wiring in a typical vehicle and it weighs a lot. It's uh you know, it's a copper and copper's getting more expensive all the time. Yeah. So he people are inspired by him. Have they but has Tesla found No, because the the problem is most of what they've done is not patentable. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean most you know, many of the the Chinese automakers, you know, they just straight up copied it. Ford is copying it now, Rivian's copying it, Lucid's copying it, GM is is starting to copy some of that stuff. So yeah, there 's no the the problem the problem Tesla has is most of what they're doing has no moat. Right. They uh uh as I remember were one of the first to do the metal forming that they do to make the car bodies, right? Uh no not so much that. They're they were one of the first to do large scale castings for big parts of the structure. Right. Yeah. Instead of having a hundred you know small stamped steel pieces and welding them all together, they just turned into one large aluminum casting. Right. Uh and again, you know, that's something that you know they Tesla didn't Yeah. I mean, yeah, they've been doing large scale castings for a long time. They just they were the first ones to use it in that particular application. Were they the first to use these big industrial robots? I remember going uh when I bought my Model X taking a tour of the Fremont plant and they had these giant robots. One of the things they did, and I this seemed to me probably not the most efficient, was they would work on the car upside down, and then a robot would come and pick it up and turn it turn it on the other side as it and then it put it on the assembly line as it continued down the line. That was impressive. Th those robots have been in use since the mid nineteen eighties. Oh, okay. So that wasn't and and you know, flipping cars over, you know, to give easier you know, g provide better ergonomics for the people bolting parts on again, that's also something that's been done for decades . Oh, okay. You know what else has been done uh for decades? Uh racism on the assembly line and the couple of things. Oh yeah. That was that was that was big at uh you know on the Model T line back in the nineteen tenths and nineteen. Yeah, Henry was notice noticeably racist. I guess uh Elon Musk Elon Musk is more like Henry Ford in some of the worst ways possible. The California court said uh that that that's gonna go ahead, that lawsuit uh against uh Tesla for uh racism. So Elon was trying to get that thrown out. He did win in court though, uh against uh Sam Altman. No no he didn't. Never mind . Those are those losses where it's like, you don't want anyone to win those. Yeah, no, nobody wins those kids Uh all right. Well I wasn't gonna start the show with uh all that, but uh we did, and I think it's uh interesting. I th that rocket uh explosion was certainly dramatic. I remember it was spectacular. Yeah. So a lot of uh ring camera videos from f people miles away as the sky lit up. Uh interesting. Yeah, we see things from many angles these days. All right, well let's take a little break and then we'll we'll talk uh because I know Gary, you wanted to talk a little bit about this, uh, about Pope Leo uh and his uh encyclical on AI. Which I think, you know, on the face of it is kind of an interesting juxtaposition of a church as essentially m a medieval institution weighing in on the most modern possible technologies. Well and you know the religion of AI. I mean you talk to some of these folks, they talk about AGI. It does feel very religious. Yeah. Yeah. We'll we'll talk about that. We will talk about the new uh uh actually I'm curious what Sam thinks of the new uh Luce, the Ferrari, or is it Lu Lucece? . Luce . Uh designed by uh Johnny Ive . Uh it has switches, ironically. Johnny was famous for not liking buttons, uh, at least when it was Apple. Uh and a lot more. Um including uh how Google is changing search dramatically. Plus Wikipedia editors threaten to go on strike and Hamali's gonna explain what that one's all about in just a little bit. Oh and the uh and the little Easter egg somebody buried in the blockchain . One of many. One of many. It never by the way, it's beautiful because it never goes away. It lives forever in the blockchain. And you will be downloading it the next time you uh you check your wallet. Uh let's take a little break. You're watching the this week in tech. Gary Rivlin is here. Uh his book AI Valley, I read it w really enjoyed and it's interesting 'cause it really is completely timely. Uh last time we talked you were gonna work on a uh another book about AI or wha how's that c I was looking at AI and energy, but you know, I I I felt like I was really early on that like you know the the the the data centers what the how it's gonna overtax the grid and all this stuff but like you know I wrote the proposal by the time I was passing it around my agent was passing around like everybody knew that story I mean I So, you know, it's one of those things like, wow, this is un you know, underreported story that I thought of about a year ago. Uh and now, I mean I wouldn't call it overreported. I think it's appropriately reported, so uh still thinking. Yeah. It's har I mean if you're writing about AI, it's hard to stay ahead I but this is I've never seen anything in technology move so fast. And I've been covering technology for uh three or four decades now, and this is the fastest moving story ever. I could we could do fifty AI stories a day if we wanted to. One percentage would be interesting. But anyway. Um I know it I know what you're saying. Like, you know, two years ago Google was fumbling all over the place. Now I would say Google's c leading the way on AI. So the money. Now it's in every way, whether it's paper value through you know investments or you know how its models are doing on the leaderboard. You know, they're they're in profit first. Even in profit anthropics pulled ahead. I was like, ironically they released they released a new model this week that's crap. But we'll talk about that too. Well they had the enterprise. They figured out that you know the way to pay for all this research is to get big businesses and and all. And they've done a great job of that now open AI scrambling. But my point is like a year ago it was OpenAI and now anthropics. So so you you you are right. It it is constantly, constantly, constantly changing. No one's on top. This is a horse race where the lead changes every two seconds. It's just bizarre. It's just wild. Yeah, I wouldn't want to try to write a book. Pick something that's not gonna change. Maybe the Catholic Church would be a good subject. Something that's not gonna change for a few hundred years. That would be uh that would be the topic. AI infrastructure companies are influencing politicians to get approval for data center locations where people living there don't want 'em. It's fascinating to watch. They don't They said seventy one percent of Americans do not want a data center anywhere near the I mean there are there are two that are that are trying to build within a few miles of me here and and and many more around Michigan. And Michigan Governor Grevin Gretchen Witchmer Whitmer has been hugely supportive, really pushing these things, and nobody in any of these municipalities wants them anywhere near them. So the qu the question I'm trying to figure out on that is is it because like it's a noisy neighbor, the the the the the what's it gonna mean for the grid and your electricity and your electricity prices, or is it just simply a physical manifestation of AI and we don't like it and so we oppose data centers because it's really the only way we can express our dislike with AI short of booing someone during a I I would say it's actually all of the above. I'll add one. All of that. Uh utility prices. The cost of electricity skyrocketed for a variety of reasons, I suppose, but I think people blame data centers for that and they may be right. Well they are. James Carvel, who said it in nineteen ninety two, and it's still true. It's the economy stupid. People vote their pocketbooks. And a politician who ignores that does so at their own peril. I'm sure Gretchen Whitmer, Governor Whitmer, supports data centers because it's good for the economy, right? It's good for the Michigan economy. It's good for the tax reaction. comes from the fact that the data center, you know, the people who are pushing to build the data centers try to position it as good for the local economy because it will create jobs. Exactly. But there's actually not that many jobs involved. You know there's this construction period which involves jobs. But then, you know, once you have an established data center, it's kind of a skeleton curve just keeping things going. And so people sort of see through that argument and they say, why are we subsidizing this? You know, why are we welcoming this Here's a uh this is uh datacenter tracker.org website where they track data center build-outs, community response and legislation action. And uh it is it is a very uh volatile situation right now with data centers. I mean, there's just no no question about it. Places that they've they've been banned, places that they're going ahead, um, moratoriums And now we're seeing the uh AI industry building these lobbying arms as well to try to get basically preemption over the state level uh regulations and in some cases the m moratoriums against building this. And it's sort of the crypto industry playbook of dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into politics to try to find Congress people who are willing to push for the pro A leg pro AI legislation that's really horrifying. I mean oppose us and we'll spend millions to defeat you. Right. Uh support us, be out front and, um you know you be one of our advocates and we'll give you millions, tens of millions to make sure you get re-elected, get elected. Yeah, it's it's literally the same strategy. I'm actually I have a uh project called Follow the Crypto where I follow the crypto election spending. And I've actually I'm releasing it I think this coming week, but I've done a huge overhaul to incorporate the AI spending because they're so similar that it you can't talk about one without talking about the other. Is this follow the crypto dot org? Is that is that yours? Currently. I it's gonna be renamed because it's gonna be AI and crypto. You know I think th this is where data science is so great. Are you a data science by scientist by training, Molly Uh I'm a computer scientist by training. I'm not a data scientist, yeah. But but this is what data science can can give you, is is some real clarity uh on this stuff. I think this is a really good use of uh of your skills. Um good. Well we'll keep an eye on follow so it won't be follow the crypto, it'll be follow the follow the money. I'm renaming it to tech influence watch because it's Oh I like that. That's good. Thank you. Sub s subscribe to citation needed uh uh support Molly's work and uh keep up to date on this stuff. Uh it's really great newsletter. Yeah.. It sounds great You could just follow Andreess and Harlowitz because they to me merge crypto and AI. If I I I I live in the congressional district where Alex uh boros, that's who I'm gonna end up voting for. Um where millions, probably tens of millions are being spent to defeat him. He state legislature state legislator came up with some, you know, pretty mild, I thought, legislation that made sense and of course crypto slash AI wanted to defeat it, did defeat it, and now they're spending all these millions of dollars. He worked for Palantir uh for a while. He's a data scientist, Alex Burroughs. Um and I get hitmail probably once a week, uh funded in part by Palantir, also Andreas and Harlow with OpenAI. State wait, wait, uh besmirching him like how could you vote for this guy he worked for Palantir? And it's Palantir literally paying uh for those for for for those mailers? Yeah, the crypto industry has done the same thing where they basically are attacking like um there was they ran attack ads against uh I think it was Juliana Stratton maybe for trying to basically trying to portray her as being funded by ICE contractors. They spent nine million dollars to to to keep her from getting elected. Yes, right. But meanwhile, like half of the people who are donating to the uh super PAC that was funding that ad have ice contracts. And it's like who who signed off on this? Let's take a little break. We will have uh more with this uh left wing Marxist communist red diaper baby panel in just a little I don't know, I'm just saying something. Keep the keep the uh keep the red folks uh sticking around for a little bit a little bit longer. Uh uh uh it's good to have all three of you. Thank you, Gary, uh Molly, and uh Sam. We'll have more in just a little bit, but our first uh word from our sponsor this week in tech brought to you this week by the mill . I love my mill . I, you know, honestly, I didn't think a kitchen appliance would be uh the thing that changed how I felt about my kitchen, but the mill food recycler has really become something uh Lisa and I cannot live without. We got one in October. Let me just pull it up here. It's got a great app. Uh we so uh we want to be good citizens. The number one uh cause of food waste in America is not, as one would think, restaurants, it's home. It's it's the food that's thrown out at home. And uh it goes into the landfill, which is, you know, kind of a kind of a problem . Uh our locality has now composting, but that that's not a great solution for us because it starts to smell and there's fruit flies. We found a kind of perfect solution. The mill. The food waste is gone. The smell is gone. Mill just took care of it. Mill is the odorless, effortless, fully automated food recycler. It's in our kitchen. Instead of having the, you know, the little recycle bin next to the uh uh kitchen sink, we have it right there uh next to the counter. Everything goes in it potato peels, avocado pits, chicken bones, dairy, uh all the scrapings from all the plates at the end of the meal. Mill takes almost anything. And then while you sleep, mill quietly transforms those food scraps into nutrient-rich, shelf sta ble grounds. No more mess, no more smells, no fruit flies. And it really reduces the size of it. Milk and process up to 10 pounds overnight. We fill it up every day. It can work for weeks before you even have to think about emptying it because it reduces it significantly in size. You can use the grounds, your garden, add them to your curbside compost. Uh mill will even pick them up and uh get them to a small farm for you. Mill Mill turns what is really a huge climate problem and a landfill problem into a simple daily habit you can actually stick with and we love it. You can see your impact. The mill app, I'm gonna launch it here. It tracks how much food you're uh keeping out of uh out of landfills . And look at this. This is since October. We've had it since October. We have that's four hundred thirteen pounds that would have gone into the landfill that now goes into the compost bin without the smell, without the mus, without the fuss. Four hundred thirteen pounds since October. That's our family. That's us. And you'll you'll have the same uh stat in your app. It's really incredible. Um it it even shows you how much you're you're recycling every month. We were on vacation for three weeks in May, so it's a little lower. All the that's they gamify it, which is kind of fun. So far, MIL has helped custom ers put twenty-one million pounds of food out of the landfill. Twenty-one million pounds of food put to good use. It's a sleek, beautiful device, looks great in any kitchen. Mill offers a 90-day risk-free trial. So if you don't absolutely love it, you can send it back. And right now you can try MIL Risk Free for 90 days and get $75 off at MIL.com slash TWIT. Use the offer code TWIT that's it 75 dollars off mill .com slash twit the offer code is twit we bought this uh like i said in october long before we were doing ads in fact uh i said can we do ads for you because i think this thing is the best thing ever want. I everybody to use it. Mill.com slash twit. We love it. You will too . Uh all right, back to uh Leo, before you go on, I got a question for you about Mill. Yes. Um, so when you buy one of these, do you then have to pay to to ship the stuff back to them? Because I know there was another company that was doing this that originally couldn't do anything with the stuff. Yeah. I don't know if it was milk, but one of them was you would pay a subscription fee, they take it and you'd mail it back and they'd do it, use it for chicken feed. No, there's once you buy it, that's it. There's no fee. I don't know. So you can use this stuff in your own garden. You can it makes composter and uh it it looks like coffee grounds when it's done. Yeah. It's just completely dehydrating it. It's all it's really it's a dehydrator. It's it's it's stirring it and dehydrating it. So it looks like coffee grounds. It ours smells like coffee grounds because that's where I put my coffee grounds. No we put we put our coffee grounds coffee grounds in our composter too. It's great for compost. The only thing uh the uh you know and they tell you what you can and can't put in there. If you're gonna use it for animal feed, for instance that, don't put things like marigolds in there. There's there are plants that are uh and uh they're poisonous. You don't want to have to the animals. On the other hand, if you're using your garden. Chicken piles don't compost meat for the control Everything in it. I think like really beef bones you you can't put in it, but chicken bones you can put in it. It's kind of wild. As long as it's something that can break the chicken bones break down fairly easily the If you wouldn't feed it to your dog, then don't if you then you can feed it to the mill. I don't know about the logic of that. No. It's really uh you know, w we have ours go off at nine at night. So I you know, I as we're going upstairs I hear that click. And then the next morning you look and it's like where did it all it's all it's all like it's just like coffee grounds in the bottom. I would be so tempted to put things in there that you're not supposed to put in there just for you know it's like the will it blend will it be. Yeah. Well w uh when we first got it we didn't know like we'd put tea bags in it. And it turns out the string gets wrapped around the the stirrer and it starts to go clonk, clonk. So yeah, there's certain things you learn. Just loose just use loose leaf tea. Yes. Loose leaf tea is fine. And the tea bags are fine. And the coffee uh filters are fine. You know. Yeah. Just you know. It has on the w on the app it says what you can. But you pretty much put everything in there. I don't I think we everything goes in there. It's kind of amazing. And we're each getting one free for appearing on the show? Was that a big deal? Congratulations. I wish. You know what? I'll talk to Mill. Well, especially if you live in the city. I mean, uh do they what do you do with compost if you live in the city? I don't know why. Well they have bins. Yeah, and you know eventually uh it's starting to become you know on the street just like That's what they're doing in California. I was happy that they started doing that. Yeah, when I lived in Santa Cruz, we had and you and you go out with the pitchfork and you turn it and you put worms in it. We we have a big uh tumbler. It's like a fifty five gallon barrel. And it generates heat. Yeah, you have to do it. And one of those countertop composters. I don't know if it's the mill or not, but they use the countertop composter to like pre compost the meat and things like that that they wouldn't want to put directly into the pile, and then they put the result into the pile. That's what you would do with the mill, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Uh Pope Leo, who named himself uh after he's Leo the fourth podcaster in the planet. Yeah. Name yourself after fellow Twit. I do that. I mean, I wish he hadn't picked Leo because it is a little confusing. Uh but he really to the rest of us. No, I think everybody knows the difference.. Padre probably suggested the name to him. Well, it was a little weird. Father Robert was on intelligent machines on Wednesday and he kept saying Leo, and I said, Mutt. And then oh no, that guy. Okay, yeah. So he named himself after after Leo the thirteenth, who was Pope at the turn of the twentieth century, between uh eighteen hundred and nineteen hundred, and wrote an encyclical about the industrial age, a hundred years after the beginning of the industrial age, but asking, you know to, be more humane in the conversion to uh industrial life. And I think that's uh when Pope Leo was uh elected, he decided to choose that name for that same because he wanted to honor that and do the same for our modern times. So we've been kind of waiting for Leo the Fourteenth's uh encyclic al about the power of AI . And um I don't know. You said Gary you had uh first of all, I'm not a Catholic. Are any of you Catholics? I was raised Catholic, but uh uh left at uh about the age of thirteen. Yeah, my dad didn't be confirmed. Yeah, my dad went to Fordham, uh, you know, uh Jesuit school as a high high school, and um but uh he kind of was a lapsed Catholic too, so um uh my daughter 's converted. A lot of people in her age group, she's thirty four, a lot of people in their late twenties and thirties apparently are go are turning to the church. Interestingly. It's just it's a trend. Molly, are you becoming a Catholic? Believe it or not, I have missed that trend. I'm usually so on top of trends. Yeah, you missed it. Uh she's at my she's actually at a retreat with uh uh the Sisters of Providence right now inern west Massachusetts, believe it or not. Um so I I am myself, and I think it's pretty well known, an atheist. I'm not a particularly religious fella. And so I was a little skeptical that the Pope would have anything meaningful to say about AI. Actually I thought what he said was pretty good Yeah, I I I loved what he said. I mean, first off, at least someone in power is talking about this. We need human-centered AI, you know, we need you know humans in the loop. You know, I th this I my idea of AI where I can embrace AI is as a co-pilot, an amplifier. It's like it's helping me in my work. It's never running things. And I do think there's this thought out there that AI can take over, take over, you know, as a boss, which is getting a lot of attention, but you know, take over uh essential functions. And you know, that was my favorite part of it, but really my favorite part of it was just that he was speaking out about this idea that, you know, we have this small group of tech elites deciding everything, this you know, Silicon Valley idea we just gotta get a few smart people in the room, kind of thing. It just ain't gonna work for AI. It's e they they themselves talk about how powerful and all everything this this stuff is. And so, you know, kind of taking on this idea that you know a small group in Silicon Valley and Beijing are gonna determine you know AI for for everyone. And by the way, it's it's I I saw this thought out there in Silicon Valley, you know, oh the poke doesn't understand anything about AI. It's really interesting. Since like the mid 2010s, the Vatican has been looking into AI. They sent a group of cardinals, I think it was, to Silicon Valley. They met with people like uh Reed Hoffman, James Man ica from from Google, you know, to start the conversation going like what is AI? What is p what's its potential? And there's been a group every year going to the Vatican. I know Hoffman goes uh regularly, uh Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft, other big names in in AI or in tech uh go. So you know they they've really been wrestling with this. They it's it I think it it is thoughtful document because the Vatican, I mean the Pope and the people helping him with this have been thoughtful about I assume he didn't write forty two thousand words on his own in so short a period of the It's so funny because there were people who said, Oh you could tell this is AI written. Which it Father Robert assured us it was not AI written. He said there's no AI involved in this encyclical. This was written by yeah, you're right, not merely Pope Leo, but a a a committee of uh church people. And Robert pointed out, and I think this is true, that Pope is not merely a religious leader. He's in many ways a secular leader. He's a political figure. He leads more than a billion Catholics worldwide. Um he is uh he has standing to talk about this. And as a humanist, which I think it's safe to say he is, it's it I think it's important. Um I I I didn't really disagree with anything uh he said. He wasn't anti AI, uh it seemed to me, right? Well he he was actually very specifically pro AI in the sense that he sees lots of benefits uh from AI. But you know, I I I think if I had to boil it down, like the tech isn't the issue. We're the issue. Yes. You know, like it's it's it it it's like who's controlling this, who's not controlling it. You know, our our approach in the last couple of years it breaks my in 2023 when I started at the end of 2022, I started looking at AI and kind of through the first half most of 2023, we were talking as a country about AI, you know, Sam Alman saying regulate us, the Sanders, members of Congress. You know, we're all talking about it and it went poof. And now there's all these things that he brought up, AI and the use of warfare, AI and mass surveillance, you know, AI and the the baked in bias. It's it's trained on our data, uh our works. Well we have bias in our works, sexism, racism, whatever kind of thing, and yet we want to use it for sentencing. We want to use it to decide whether you should get a job, whether you should get this apartment. Uh and and and also I I I don't know, I I feel like we started to have a conversation in part we had a change of administration, but more than that, I think it just became this trillion dollar race to cash in, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etcetera, all through safety uh o over the wayside and became like, well we can't do anything to stop this 'cause of China, China, China. And at least that Pope Leo, he gets the story page one, he's articulating, I think, uh all the right issues. Will it make a difference? I don't know. I think appropriate to step back and take a breath. And that's part of the problem with the way AI has been moving. There's such competition, such a race, as you point out, Gary. Uh uh uh competition between the companies but also uh between us and China, that nobody 's kind of really sitting back and saying, Well, w what is this? Do we want it? How how should we proceed? How should we think about it? What guardrails should we put on it? Uh it reminds me Yeah, I was just gonna say it's kind of the classic idea that you know any innovation is good and so you hear all of this talk of like we have to protect innovation, which usually means no regulations. Um but you know there',s I feel like no one ever actually decided that all innovation is good. In fact, I think there are plenty of innovations that we would argue are not good. I mean, like asbestos was not particularly good, right? Um and so, you know, there's this idea that if it's innovation we have to just go with it. And you know, there's this idea that any technological development is inevitable. And and you hear that explicitly from a lot of these people is that AI is inevitable, so just get out of the way. You know, ch if we don't do it, China's gonna do it, so we have to do it. And I think the Pope did a really good job of pushing back on that and saying that like ultimately this is a technology developed by humans, we as humans have the ability to decide whether or not to develop it or how to go about developing it. And it's not inevitable. Like we have the decision, you know, the capacity to make the decision that this is not something that we think would be useful or this is not something that we want to hand off to five billionaires who, you know, have their own motivations and not much interest in the public good. So I th I really enjoyed it for that particular reason . There is a big backlash against tech going on right now. AI has has has sped that. Well, yeah. But I mean, look at what we were just talking about with with data centers, uh the number of people, the booing at uh college commencements. Uh AI has become in some ways a whipping boy for all of this uh technology and all of this big tech. And I think there's a lot Right. And I and I am a I am a proponent. I love AI. I use it like crazy uh uh in many ways, I've done a lot of vibe coding. I have an AI agent that knows way too much about me. I'm doing I'm playing with this because I feel like it's an important technological revolution, but e but even I uh acknowledge that there are some big issues uh and that we really need to be a little bit careful. I I if you look at the polling on this, so Quin Quinni Piak, I think it's called um just did a recent poll. And sixty-five percent of Americans are in favor of some guardrails, some regulation. Only twenty-two percent agree with this argument, like oh, if we put down regulations we're gonna kill innovation. You know, a favorite example is I'm not the only one to use it, it y you hear it a lot in AI. Those those guy you know, there's the Doomers and I don't put myself on that side. There's the zoomers, any regulation is a crime against humanity given all the good that AI could do. I I couldn't I'd call myself a bloomer. I see it as potenti al if we're smart, if we if we take advantage uh of of of our agency um here like because I mean uh every foundational technology cuts both ways. I mean the internet the car the televis I mean but like it did fireproof. Yeah. But we weren't smart about asbestos. Can we be can we make it so it's more of a net positive? There will be negative things that happen because of AI. But I still think we're at a point, we have agency, if we're having the discussion, we can make the make this more of a net positive than a net negative. But Sam, go ahead and coming from the auto industry perspective, you know the auto industry has had a huge amount of regulation in the last sixty years. And we've had more innovation during that time, in part because of that regulation, than we had in the sixty years before that, the first sixty years of the auto industry. So you know, I mean it we our cars are safer, more efficient, more have better performance than they've ever had in the entire history of the industry. And a lot of that is because of the regulation that we put on the industry. In any time you're designing something in in engineering, having constraints forces you to be more creative. You know, when you're when you're left unconstrained, you end up with something like the Ferrari Luce, you know, which you know we may talk about that later. But the you know the constraints force uh force a degree of creativity and innovation to figure out how can you how can you work within these constraints and still um create a better product? Trevor Burrus And I bet the audio industry, just as the big tech does now, lobbied hard against those regulations. Oh they did, absolutely. They didn't want C Bell. It's been to their benefit and it's been to all of our benefit. Where you know it was really dangerous when it first came out and the railroad companies opposed any kind of regulation. Government said no no no track size and block signaling and all this kind of stuff. And it made it safe. And by the way, it it thrived not despite regulation, but because of regulation Same with aviation. Aviation. I mean, like you hear a lot of especially in the crypto world, you hear people saying that it's financial regulations that are slow ing everybody down, but people trust American financial markets drip hugely because of the regulations that are in place. And when that regulation goes away, you start to see what we're seeing now, which is declining trust in American financial markets. Right. I don't even know. Trump got elected was by promising the crypto bros and the AI bros there would be no regulation. One of the first things he did when he got in the White House is overturn Biden's AI executive order. And yet as as soon Mythos came out, that that model from Anthropic that Anthropic held back 'cause they said if if everybody got a hold of this, we would have a s uh security cybersecurity nightmare because it's so good at finding cybersecurity flaws. That scared the White House. And I think they he he drafted an executive order that said we have to approve all AI models before they're released. Uh and then apparently companies and particularly David Sachs, his former crypto advisor and uh an AI czar AI and crypto czar, who who was put in there basically by Peter Thiel to protect the AI and crypto indust ries. Uh apparently an eleventh hour call this according to the I think the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, uh to the White House persuaded him not to put out this executive order. But there's definitely the sense uh in in DC that w uh from Congress too that we've got to do something. Question is what? Yeah, yeah. Approving models is not the right answer. You don't want the government to be in charge of saying which models are released and which ones aren't. Trevor Burrus I would push back a little bit on the idea that the promise was no regulation from Trump because I would say the the promise was actually we'll let you write the regulation. Okay. Captured regulation. Yeah, the companies actually really do want regulation uh that benefits them, right? And that that uh entrenches their position while making it more challenging for competitors to enter the field. And I think that's what we've seen um with crypto and certainly it's what a lot of the AI lobby uh groups are pushing for as well is you know you you have this sort of like competing factions within the AI lobby where there's the open AI and you know those folks who are basically all gas no brakes. We don't want um any states to, you know, regulate us and uh enforce moratoriums on building data centers or you know make us liable for harms caused by our products. And then there's the anthrop ic uh lobbying group, which is saying, oh, we need regulations that are safety. Um , you know, we need to have controls and guardrails and things like that. But but both of them are essentially doing the same thing, which is lobbying for their particular interests and sort of building a moat using regulations around their corporate uh business model. But who has the wisdom to come up with good regulations? None of them, that's for sure. Or Congress. Does Congress? I mean, even Ron Wyden, uh who's very techno-literate, I'm not sure I don't know who I would say. Yeah, they have staff who do. And I have actually found that there are a fair number of congresspeople who do have very informed staff and and you know it it used to be that you would consult you know the president's council of advisors on on science . Well we had the Office of Technology Assessment too, which Newt Gingrich put out of business and that you know that used to be computer scientists and doctors and you know professors and all that kind of thing and now you look at the list of people on that council and there's I I was tweeting about it a while ago or blue skying sketing, whatever you call it. Skeeting. You were sketing. Yeah. That there are more members of the all-in podcast on the council of science advisors than there are professors . Um it's just all CEOs. So you know who who do you turn to? Right now it's all industry executives. I don't know I don't I don't know who would know how to He did not make any recommendations. But but there are but but there are all sorts of you know, you for for these foundational models uh of a certain size, you need to red team them first before releasing them. You know, I mean that's an idea. Uh you know that we have to point out that no matter what kinds of safety procedures you follow or guardrails, that within minutes P Pliny uh the Liberator will come up with a prompt that bypasses them. It is very hard. I think uh we've talked about this before on security now and other shows. Uh the notion of AI safety might be mistaken, that it's not possible to question then is like if it's not possible to build a safe model, should we be building the models at all, right? Or should we just acknowledge that they can't be made safe any more than the internet can be made safe Well well but then what do we use it for? Do we use it for massive halens? Anthropic took a principled standard. That would be the smartest thing to do is to say don't use it for things where there is potential harm. Because it's not reliable. And there is legislation out there. Different states, in Congress, there is legislation. There's you know kind of intellectual property uh rules, you know, what can you use for training, how do you compensate those whose uh material, including my, including probably everyone on this podcast, uh is in there. So the the there are all sorts of ide as uh out there, but I think to Molly's point, the power of the crypto lobby, the power of the AI lobby, the power of tech right now means that everything's a non starter. I mean, so, you know, let's give Trump credit. He's like, Okay, well, maybe we do need to have some kind of regulation out there. I don't you know, it was never released, so it's hard to critique it. Um but you just see like it wasn't Sachs, I mean Musk, the some of the CEOs of I don't know, specifically you know Google andor Zuckerberg Way. Zuckerberg was one of the names that they all kind of like, no, you can't do this, and he pulls it even though it's in front of all of us, right? This wasn't just some private thing. The announcement was made. And so like we we can't do anything. We can't do anything because industry is so powerful. They have so much money and they have the majority of folks in their pocket so everything will will die in the vine. Well and I think it's a really strong indictment of Citizens United because you know if you if you look at it from the company's perspective, if they stand to make billions of dollars and the the choice is basically do we spend a hundred million dollars on lobbying and super PACs? You know, of course they're gonna do it. The the payoff is huge, right? Like it's just simple math. Right. Um and so you know, I y think it's really sort of a predictable outcome that we're seeing this kind of thing coming out of the crypto industry, out of the AI industry, and and certainly I think probably any other industry to follow because you know, the it returns are huge when you can capture regulators, legislators, the president, right? Trevor Burrus Well, I mean the this is a larger rule of American politics that money talks. And uh when that's the case, you're never going to have a uh a society that looks out for the people in society. You only have a society that looks out for people with money. In the context of this show, it's Andreess and Horowitz that's the number one donor. Not a bank, not the bank industry, not the oil industry. They are the number one giver to the the current um Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. More than Elon? Uh uh d during the twenty twenty six election cycle. Yeah, yeah. So and you know you know what they looked at Elon and the quarter of a billion he spent uh to make himself a trillionaire two years later and said that was money Aaron Powell Really the answer is and Larry Less 's been saying this for years to no avail, you gotta get the money out of politics before you can even talk about AI regulation or any kind of regulation because if if money's driving policy, it's always gonna be policy that supports people with money. It's just it's just that's how it is. And I think unfortunately that's that's gonna be incredibly difficult to do because uh especially constitutional amendmental amendment. And that's because the the you know the the Supreme Court has made it clear most of the members of this court you know made it pretty clear. was their statement on this. Uh when that was when that was decided. But you know they would clearly support it. Right. So you know we settled need you know some fundamental changes to the constitution uh you know to get that money out of the system. And we've already seen how much courage, how much spine members of Congress have. Yeah, well when it comes to doing it's gonna happen, but make it hard to get elected, they're really Left and right. Left and right. Right. And so I mean I do actually have some hope in the long term, certainly not the short term, that something like this could happen because we see over and over again that when it's put to everyday people, everyone supports it. I mean, Maine had a referendum question in twenty twenty four that passed with seventy five percent of the vote, which is enormous, um, to basically limit uh you know, corporate spending in politics and that's been repeated in multiple places. And you know, I think this election cycle, we're seeing more and more candidates who are acknowledging the fact that people are actually pretty sickened by corporate spending in in politics. And you see, you know, this wave of candidates who are refusing corporate contributions or super PAC money or whatever it might be. Um so I do think there's something of a shift and I think that voters are fairly disgusted by any overt spending um when they know about it. But I do think that you're right, it's a it's a big hill to climb. Yeah I mean the problem is most of it is most of what's being spent is dark money. That we don't know where it's coming from or what it's being spent TV. TV advertising. If we the vote I mean all money gets you is votes. If the people stop being influenced by what the money's buying and start paying attention to the issues and voting their conscience, the money won't matter. Am I wrong on that? Well and you're right in principle The problem is getting to that point where people do ignore those advertising messages. That's a message for our audience because tech people tend to be kind of ah your vote doesn't matter. I'm not gonna I know most I would bet a large portion of our audience doesn't vote because it doesn't matter. They're cynical. They tend to be cynical but they're smarter. So they tend to be cynical. It's not gonna make any difference. My vote doesn't count. So that's what we have to overcome. We have to overcome that sense of apathy, that sense of cynicism. And especially in the people who listen to these shows, because I think it strikes me these are the people who are particularly cynical about Yeah. I mean uh in in twenty twenty four there were as many people r who were eligible to vote that did not vote as voted for either party. Right. It's always been that way. This the the huge percentage of people just don't vote. And a lot of them are are and well you know, also I mean part of the part of the problem there is you know uh you know because of the way our election system is structured, especially f at the presidential level, uh with um you know with the congress with the um elect the um electoral college that it's only a handful of states where uh where you you know, where it ever really switches back and forth and where switches where the votes actually make a significant difference in in who gets power. Yeah. So But I mean I I would say that you know there is significant power in terms of you know r races below the presidential level. Right. Um the problem there is redistricting means that virtually every incumbent uh is guaranteed reelection. Um they're gonna get reelected by raising all the money 'cause they're incumbents on these important committees. And it is kind of a self fulfilling um Um so do your homework. Study up. Don't watch those T V ads. Don't follow the brochures. Don't just make your vocabulary. Or at least fact check the T V ads. Like that's what gets me is watching some of the ads from these packs that are Voting is so much work. Uh you know, in California we have s I think more than sixty candidates for governor in this election that's coming up next Tuesday. And uh a week from Tuesday. And uh uh it takes a lot of work to figure out who to vote for. It is nice. And then there's and then there's ballot initiatives, there's the low ballot. Yeah. And this is just a primary. And people historically don't even vote in primaries. So and I understand why. Because you look at this and it goes I can't It's the tyranny of choice applied to elections. We need you to vote and we need you to care and we need you to study and vote your conscience and and learn about the issues. Don't just say, well, I saw a TV ad . Because those TV ads are so slanted. And that overcomes money in politics. That's the first step. And then you can start to m whittle away at you know at the at the incumbencies and so forth and maybe make a difference. Listen to Leo and P Pope Leo. Both of you. Yeah, Pope Leo and Leo and Podcaster Leo. Let's take a look at the phone. Oh nice. So where where is is this a citation needed podcast? Where is it? Okay, that's great. I would like to I will like to listen to that. Citation Needed dot news. If you go there, there's a podcast feed right at the top. And it'll come out of the next issue too. Subscribe so you get it. Yeah. Um that is awesome. That is awesome. See, so you're you're in on you agree with this, then this premise. Oh very good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean one of the things that people challenge me on a lot is like why are you tracking crypto election spending every corporation, you know, every industry does it and it's like, Yes, they do and that's a problem and we need to stop it broadly speaking, not just crypto. Yeah. Yeah. Is is it citation needed the podcast? Uh probably not. It's it's citation needed dot news. If you go to the website, there is another podcast with that name which you meant. So there there's there's a couple. Oh there we go. Molly White's citation needed. That's yeah, that's it. If it's got the name if Molly White's on the box, then it's the right one. Uh citation needed dot news. Yeah, okay. There we go. Primarily a newsletter and not a podcast. I have basically a podcast version of the newsletter and so I hope I don't step on the other citation needed's toes too much 'cause they are a very good podcast, but we'll see. Well, we you know, all we care about is is you, Molly . So listen to citation needed dot news, the podcast with Molly Wood. And by the way, yes, every industry gives money, but what struck me about crypto in twenty twenty four is how much money they gave in and how they almost single single handedly impacted election Senate races in you know Ohio, what California if I'm remembering right. Yeah, every industry gives money, but they're giving tens of millions of dollars. There is you know, it's they the it is a wave of money that is changing the election completely as opposed to like, oh, this person has five million, that person has seven million 'cause they have more oil money. Uh uh you know, I uh c ry crypto to me is like amazing. It didn't essentially didn't really exist for you know a bunch of idealists, whatever it was fifteen, twenty years ago, and now they're the one one of the most powerful industries in all of D C just simply because they all have all that crypto money. Right is if you can't get the electorate to do the right thing and and and vote. Yeah, but I mean I think one thing that's really striking is that, you know, everyone knows about big oil, everyone knows about big pharma, you know, everyone knows that there are corporate inf influences coming from those industries, but people are very, very unaware of the extent to which crypto is influencing elections these days. Um I mean people are unaware of the extent to which the president is involved in crypto. Um crypto media. How much has he made in his uh t in his year and a half in office in uh just from crypto or all together? Well, it's over a bit well over a billion dollars. Yeah. In crypto. And that's not including no, that's not including the sort of uh Trump coin and all the price of his crypto holdings 'cause that's all a liquid, just not even worth trying to 'cause you'd be in the billions and billions of dollars. But just in terms of like money, like dollars he has cashed out, it's over a billion dollars. Yeah. Um before the election the crypto ball Yeah Well actually that was the inaugural ball. It was the inauguration But um one thing I was gonna say is that like there's a crypto media out like called Coindesk that just did a poll that found that um you know the the majority of respondents were opposed to the idea of an elected official at a high level having personal ties to the crypto industry or, you know, personally profiting from it. But a tiny, tiny percentage were o even aware that Trump was so heavily involved. And so it's really just I think an education issue at in large part is because people just aren't aware of that that this is happening. Well that I guess I the other thing that needs to change is that you know the the fact that we allow politicians, elected politicians, to be making trades on the market. There was a report that came out uh a week or two ago about how many thousands of trades Trump has made you know personally in the last year and a half. He's like a day tra Okay. Is he a vampire? Well, I mean just going on just was it just last week, you know, they announced this deal, uh federal government deal with Dell for almost ten billion dollars. There's a game. And the day before he bought a bunch of Dell stock. Yeah. Right. That's insider trading. Yeah. Yes. Right. And that was unanimous. Oh, we got the you want to buy some stock. Well yeah, that's what I thought was so funny. Is like there wasn't a single congressperson who would stand up and say, actually I do want to trade on these prediction markets, but But prediction markets, I guess that's where they draw the line. We'll talk about prediction markets. There's a lot of news in there too. All right. We got I do have to take a break. Uh Molly White is here. Great to have you. Sam able Samad, Gary Rivlin. Great panel . Lots to talk about. Before we go on though, I want to mention box. I know that's a name you know, but it's a name you ought to look at because they are great. I am so impressed with what Box is doing. If you're an uh enterprise trying to transform your organization with uh AI , uh you are probably facing a all too common challenge. Most AI tools are great at public knowledge, but they don't really know your business, do they? They don't know your product roadmaps. They don't know your sales material. They don't know your HR policies, your financial models. They don't know anything about the content that actually makes your company run . But that's what you want them to know about. But that's where Box comes in, right? Box is building the intelligent content management platform for the AI era. This is so brilliant . Serving as a secure, essential context layer for box is AI agents to access the unique institutional knowledge that makes your company run . You use box to store the documents, you use boxes AI agents to access information securely, privately. That's the key idea. The power of AI is not the model alone. We're learning this more and more. It really comes from giving the AI access to the right enterprise content. Box goes beyond file storage. It connects content to people, apps, and AI agents. So teams can turn information into action with tools like Box Agent , Box Extract, Box Hubs, and more, organizations can accelerate knowledge work, pull intelligence from unstructured content, and automated workflows. You've already got the data in there. Now you can use For agents both inside and outside Box, including tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Agent Force, Custom Agents, Box becomes the trusted content and file layer via its platforms APIs, MCP And for enterprises, that trust layer is everything. Box is built with security, with compliance, with governance, with threat protection in mind. So employees and agents only access information they're authorized to use. It's secure, but it also gives your box agent the information it needs to make intelligent choices. If you're thinking seriously about your company's AI transformation journey , it's time to think beyond the model. Your business lives in your content, and Box helps you bring that content securely into the AI era. This is brilliant, and nobody can do it better than Box. Visit box.com slash AI to learn more. That's box.com slash AI. Box.com slash AI. We thank them so much for their support. This week in tech. So uh Google has really uh doubled down on AI and its search results. And I think you're seeing immediately you're seeing a response. For instance, last week uh DuckDuckGo installs were up 30% . 30%. And of course, right on the front page of DuckDuckGo, it says no AI . Because now when you do a Google search, AI is at the top of the page, AI is everywhere . And I think people, you know, honestly are nostalgic for the original era of, you know, 10 blue links on a page. Or at least have the op.tion That's huge. Where did you find this? That's awesome. Isn't that huge? Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. I mean, of course Google is is uh pursuing a a AI, they should, but what I resent and what I have to assume a lot of people resent is well sometimes I just want to Google something. Right. You know, and you're just shoving it down my throat. I mean, you know, there's a little tab that was you know, AI mode. You can just click that. Yeah, I wanna do AI. I I don't particularly like it Gemini, I never use Gemini . Um but the point is actually I just misspoke. I sometimes use Gemini 'cause it's right just right there. I mean, you know, we could mock uh Google, but they're neck and neck with you know monthly users with OpenAI. They're both up around, you know, a billion uh a month. And it's just it ''causes right there. You know, my kids, I make fun of them, like why do you use Gemini? It's like, Dad, it's right there. I don't have to download. No, it m it reminds me of, you know, Microsoft, you know, taking on that Netscape Navigator. Like like, well, okay, I guess I could download the navigator on my Windows machine, but I have Internet Explorer right there and that's why they want I mean yeah, so Meta, theirs is even more lame. Their AI is I I try to use them all. Theirs is even more lame uh than Gemini. Except they're in the game too with hundreds of millions of do hundreds of millions of users per month because it's right there. You know, they I don't want to they have your information. That's the other side of the equation they already know Google and Meta both a lot about you so just as we were talking with this box ad having it's not just the model it's having the the context to put into the model that makes the model useful. So there's the button right there on every freaking Google property. I can't, you know, we do uh we use Google Sheets for our show rundowns. And it's so annoying. Every time I open the sheet, it says, W,ell you want me to summarize this? Do you want me to eliminate it? It's like, no. Just anything. Except go to Microsoft and Microsoft has it every box. Make up some links and fill them fill them in there. Well, Microsoft has, I think, started to see the backlash. They're they've uh they've already announced we're gonna oh yeah, we're gonna back off a little bit on forcing copilot down your throat. Right. So uh but Google, see here's goo Google's kind of in a rock and a hard place because I think they probably saw some erosion of their search leadership by companies like Perplexity that are doing AI searches. Which is hilarious because Google has spent for decades eroding web traffic to all of the places they're indexing. So and that's the other side of this. The consequence of this it's clear Google doesn't want you to go anywhere else. They want you to s land on the Google page and stay on the Google page. We'll give you the answer. Don't click that link. You don't need to. We'll tell you everything you need to know. Now they're saying for students, we'll draw you the graph, we'll give you the explanation, we'll put graphics in there. You don't need to go to that web But it's kinda killing the goose that laid the golden eggs because all the content for those models comes from those pages that they're now disintermediating and putting out of business. But it's okay because they're gonna make up new pages. It's gonna it's just gonna they're just gonna generate new stuff to fill . Oh, you got a blank in your web? We'll just fill that in. I mean it's already happening, right? Because they're scraping so much of the web and so much of the web now is AI generated that you're getting this sort of auriboris of AI generated content that's being trained on AI. And there were some really interesting papers about model collapse when you know you basic ally feed an AI too much AI content as training data and things just go haywire. Mustafa Suleiman, the head of AI, consumer AI for Microsoft, said they're not going to use you know to the extent they can, as you're pointing out, who knows , you know, what's AI slop and what's human slop. But it it's um they're gonna try not to use um the the fabricated data, the AI uh data because it's so uh unreliable. But you know, it's like from the corporations point of view, like every company is doing this. Every large enterprise software person there, you know, uh a company, they're they're pretty if we give you your AI agent, it's right here. It could do this, it could do that. You know, it's kind of the this this new uh UI that, you know, instead of having to go anywhere, you just wherever you are, there's all the tools uh you want. I mean this seems one of these things that's really hard to stop. It drives me cra zy. There might be a little bit of a backlash, but I bet if we did this show a year from now, uh it's gonna be more integrated, um not less. Yeah. Yeah, because in the long run, even if there's consumer backlash people are gonna still use Google to search aren't they? I don't know. I mean based on what they showed, you know, where now you just get a page, you know, with a window that grows as you fill in your question, uh and then it'll just give you an answer. I I don't know that I don't know that I want to continue using Google. Do you still use Kagi ? Yeah. Yeah. I' pady twenty-five bucks a month to use an alternative to Google that just gives you links. Now Kagi actually has a really good perplexity style uh AI orchestration engine too. But uh I don't use that so much. I just w I just want Google without the ads with it. I just want the links. Just the links, man. But incre uh also, I'll be honest, increasingly, I don't go to a search page. I don't type in the browser window. I don't type uh a query. I use my uh AI agents to do all of that stuff. And my and my AI agents have MCP servers that that query the web. Um you know I'll do I'll say things like give me the top ten AI stories this you know, in the last forty-eight hours. And it goes out and looks at X and Reddit and uh Hacker News and and RSS feeds and comes up with the top stories. The stories that we're reading today, m almost all those links were AI generated through the week. I don't even I gave it my RSS feeds. So I'm doing I'm noticeable I'm doing a lot less searching . I mean Google and Facebook helped you know damage seriously you know news sites because people weren't going them to them as much and now it's they're gonna go to them even less. There were some st statistics that you know like uh you know uh there's fifty eight percent lower click through rates with AI. And you know, I'm guilty of that. I mean, you know, sometimes I wanna check it. I'm writing about something, I need to check it. Um but you know, what happens to these sites? Who who are the content creators if increasingly with each increasing year they're going to have less traffic, i.e., less money. Uh it's just I I don't know. I just kind of play it out in my head. I feel a little guilty because uh we rely on all of these sites. I try to mention when I'm quoting a site, I try to mention the site, often try to mention the author, but honestly, uh I'm not doing a lot of enterprise journalism here. I I I just go out and and scrape sites and uh and that these stories come from them. I think that's why AI wins. It's just so easy. It's so convenient. We're all we're all in a hurry. We're all overwhelmed. The difference is this is a human curated experience. Admittedly, I'm using AI, but but then I go through and say we're gonna talk about this and this. Uh I feel like hum human curation still has some value, but maybe not for much longer. I don't know. Yeah I actually think I I actually think that is the secret weapon. It's That's what all of us do. That's what all of us on this panel do, right? That's what you do, Gary, when you write your book. That's what Molly does when she writes citation needed. That's what Sam does when he does his analyst reporter, does his wheel bearings podcast? What we do is people follow us because of our curation . Our taste, our thin instincts, all that. It's something that the AI companies underestimate a little bit is that people really do like human created material, whether it's you know music or artwork or a newsletter or you know, the news. People do value that and you know, I think that's why you see some of the backlash. Um, but you also see people I think who seek out actual human-made material as well. And I think that that's going to continue to be the case even as AI content proliferates. Do you feel like uh maybe I should uh I mean I I use AI, so uh I I mean I I'm I'm an AI fan. I'll make that clear. Uh I but I use it as a as a tool to do this human stuff that we do. I would never create a podcast that just was you know, AI voices with AI panels.. Those exist I oh they totally do. Look at Notebook LM. I mean they exist. Uh and I think there'll probably be more and more of them, to be honest. Spotify's doing it. Yep. Uh uh Audible does it. I I imagine there'll be more and more of them. But I I've watched several podcasts of mice of you know, here's a podcast about Garr Gary Rubbman's new book AI Valley that I learned because I have you know the Google Ego search. You know, I got my little message like, oh wow, what did I have to say about that topic? Are they Yes, it's all a uh generating. And you know, and and kind of in defense of humanity, it's like I mean they're in I'm sort of impressed that it could do anything like that, but like that's more my experience. Like, I'm not saying it's great. It's just amazing that it can do even that. But it was really lousy. It was like so quirky. Like it just why'd you choose that? That's not particularly interesting. It's an amazing sport. But I I I I I mean I was saying this uh I was saying this before when we're talking about the Pope. Like, you know, if the humans at the center using AI, I use AI all day, every day, uh, for my work, but it's me. You know, I never have it, you know, write me this article, read these interviews, write the article. It's more as I'm writing the article, I'm really struggling with this paragraph. There's something wrong with it. Tell me what's wrong with it. Kind of thing. And it's just really interesting, but it's me. It's not like someone else can write that same article using the same engine I do. And so to me, if it's, you know, human-centered and it's you as your curator, your judgment, your ethics, your instincts, whatever those things are given the the tas k. You know, I I 'm I'm I'm cool I'm cool with that. Actually though it's interesting, I was telling a friend um writing for the New York Times now if you're a freelance you have to sign something and say I will not use AI at all in the creation of this article. Which you know I I I just know. He said I don't do it because I'm scared um that I'm breaking the rule. Um but it's just like you know, I mean I get where they're coming from. They don't want to type every word on the page. I don't think that it would be a bad thing to use AI to f to inform yourself. Well it depends if you fact check, right? Well yeah, you yeah, that's true. You've got to fact check. Do you think it is our obligation, the four of us, to c to put more human created content into the content sphere, into the internet. Like as human beings, we gotta fight the fight and make human created content and put it out there. I don't think it's my obligation, but it's something that's your duty It's your duty as a hard question . It's a hard question to answer because that's simply what we do. It's what we do anyway. That's the point Benito, our producer is always making. He's a musician. You're not gonna stop people from creating. Right. I I think the new world is gonna have you, know there,'s AI created art, and there'll be some people who really like it, some of it is probably going to be really interesting, but I think people are going to prize human-centered uh art much more because of it. Just like you know, when digital music came along, you know, suddenly like records, uh where it became this bespoke thing. Well I mean you do see like you Yeah, I knew it. I somehow I knew it. And but like teenagers are walking around with disc men players like C D players now. And you there is this really strong backlash, I think, to not just AI, but like tech in general. You know, they don't wanna be on their phones all the time. They don't want to be connected to the internet all the time. They want the more analog lifestyle, which I can respect. I think what's really interesting, the people the people who are harshest about AI aren't older folks, which would have been my guess. It's the college kids who are bullying. They are not a good thing. Yeah, they're worried that they'd like their whole life ahead of them. Yeah. That's gonna be dominated by this stuff. I mean you know at least a couple of us are you know closer to the end than the beginning of of our careers. Hi, this is Benitos. No comment. No comment. So I have a friend I know how old I am. Hi, this is Benita. So I have a friend who has a kid who's uh I think seven or eight and this kid loves Suno. So I think there is a generation that are like really young that love to prop their music Suno is pretty good. I enjoy Suno. There are people uh we were talking to Harper Reed. There there are people who l only listen to music created by AI. But I think those people also don't give human music of the proper the same chance that they give AI music. Maybe, or it's just a lot of work. No, they don't they won't sit and listen to an album from a human, but they'll listen and listen to 10 A I tracks. They'll soon list the ten AI tracks. Why is that how is that less work? Yeah. It's more complex. It's less anodyne. It's less homogenized. It's it's it's too much . Yeah. It's like pre-chewed food collective. I don't want to chew. I just feed me. So il Exactly, yeah. When the camera came along, it was like, oh no, this is going to destroy art, because why do you have to paint the landscape? You just take a picture of it. And I think what's interesting is now photography is an art form, you know, art is still thriving. Um and I assume that the same thing's gonna happen with AI. Like people will love AI music, I guess. And but there'll be people who seek out human It sounds different. The imperfections. You know, I I I I I'll throw my 17-year old then fifteen under the bus, like, you know, did you write that paper about you know Lord of the Flies? Yeah, read it that. And within three sentences, I just like which model did you use? The color drains from his face? Because But how long that's the uncanny valley in prose, essentially. How long before it gets good enough that you don't there's no uncanny valley? Yeah, we're CG in movies, though. We're still there in CG with movies. I think Sunno music, a lot of people can't distinguish Psonomusic from real music. Well, and and to be fair, you know, probably most of what's written by humans would fall into that, you know, low est common denominator, you know, uncanny valley category. I mean there's a reason the AI sounds like that, right? That's right. Exactly. But you know, there there are exceptional writers out there like Gary, like Molly, uh, you know, that that do really sp you know that do something really distinct and different. I think that as time goes by, we will they'll be an equilibrium. I think we're gonna see some pendulums swinging back and forth, anti AI, pro AI, and then there'll be some equilibrium. You know, I've just started watching 'cause they were talking about it on uh Wednesday on the show, uh have you seen the show Humans? It's on Amazon Prime. It's three seasons. It started on BBC Four. Oh, is this the one about the robots that it's yeah, so it the premise is it's near future and that uh we've come we've come we've actually been able to make a bipedal humanoid robots. And uh they uh mostly are domestic uh servants, although there are some sex bots and there are uh bots doing laboring in the fields and so forth and they're doing the jobs the humans don't want to do or that are very hard or difficult. It's good because it isn't a hundred percent anti- bot. It's not prob either. And it raises a lot of the issues that will come up, I think, in the near future over all of this. You know, uh it starts uh I've just started watching it. Starts with a husband, his wife is away for work and he's got three kids and he's trying to take care of them and it's a lot of work, he's got his own job. So he how about buys one of these bots because somebody's got to clean and cook and the wife comes home and says, What are you replacing me? He says, no, no, I just want more time with you. It's a re it's a I think philosophically it's very interesting. And as somebody who is very much a pro AI user , it has it has kind of opened my eyes a little bit as to some of the difficulties that this is gonna be. What do you think? You know, I I mean f first off, I think we've we're hitting some limits. We've you know it these models have ingested all of human creation. There's no stuff. Right. Now it's AI slop. I I I this whole AGI thing, I I think we're a breakthrough or two away um before we get what Silicon Valley is saying we're gonna uh get. But I I I think it's gonna keep on pac-man ning up. If if right now I would say AI, if you write a basic report, if you're writing a press release, if you're doing a four hundred word hot take,. you You know 're toast. I'm sorry. These things are good at doing that. Can it write a basic news article? Yes. But can it write a a feature? No, they're terrible. I I've I've tried, I've played around with it. It'll get better at it, but I am convinced that GPT 10, whatever, just you know some point ten plus twenty years into the future, I I don't think it could ever do it. I I think that's the missing ingredient. You know, AI is o obviously, you know, uh artificial intelligence, but I think it's alien intel alien intelligence. It knows everything and understands nothing. It it it has no common sense. A five year old understands so much of the world that these things don't. And But you know, I I I I guess I I I am do there was a really fun thing the New York Times did uh a a year ago. Oh, I know what you're gonna talk about. Yes. Curtis Stid Sitdle Stidlefield? I I Curtis Sitfield. I'm mispronouncing your name, my apologies. But they had this really accomplished novelist, short story writer, go up against a machine. And you know, I I'll tell you I uh the short story with the same prompts. They all had the same prompts that'd be you know a summer romance with flip flops, blah blah blah kind of thing. And you know y I I happen to have read the AI one first. I was like, wow this is good, is this her? And then the moment I started her story, like within three or four sentences, like, oh no, this is the novelist, this is the real writer. It's that, you know, by definition, it's flat. By definition, it's lowest common denominator. But a couple of months ago, I thought you were going to talk about this. The A New York Times, Kevin Roos and uh Stuart Thompson did a quiz. Who's a better writer? AI are humans, and they have passages uh and they asked people and more than half of the people, regular people who read them , like preferred the AI version uh and couldn't distinguish between the one or the other. I actually did it , and uh uh the only reason I I got almost all right, I I missed one, was because I had read some of the books. I was gonna say if you a lot of them you can recognize the book. I recognize the book. Yeah. Uh which helped. But the A I writing was pretty good, right, Molly? I mean, did you do this? I did it. I was I had the same problem that you did, which is that I recognized a lot of the books, but I also definitely a lot of it read AI to me. Did it? Okay. Yeah. I may actually not have the detection abilities you guys have. And it's interesting to me how much that varies between people also. Like I feel like some people have a really good spidey sense for it and some people cannot tell whatsoever. I like wordplay and a lot of the AI stuff had kind of bizarro wordplay which maybe have won me over a little bit. Like they often do weird similes and things and I kind of I kind of enjoy them. Right. I think there might be an age element. I mean you I'm using a you know a a a universe of one or a pair here. Um my son and I, when this is 2023, there was some site and you had a minute to decide are you talking to a human or are you talking to a machine? I'll confess I was kinda fifty fifty. I couldn't tell. But he was, I guess, twelve at the time. And like he was getting like eighty, ninety percent right. Well that's incredible. That's and and so like I I mean I don't know. I just I just kind of assume from that that we're talking about, you know, that that a young person's better, they're more native, whatever. But you know, I mean I don't know. I haven't seen any studies uh on the Yeah, I'd be curious to see a study on it. Like how much of it is age related versus, you know, level of technological Well I'm older than all of you and I'm easily fooled, so I guess that that says something. I don't know. Uh maybe yeah, maybe if you grew up if you're AI native, you can tell the difference. I don't know . Uh time for another break. Molly White is here. Uh citation needed .news. Subscribe now. Listen to the podcast coming up about Citizens United. She's also at Molly White.net. And you will see the announcement when she updates the uh s the Bitcoin giving, this cryptocurrency giving to all technology giving. I think that'll be a really good site. I'll make sure we plug that. I really appreciate the what you do with those websites. Mollywhite.net. Gary Rivlin also here. Pulitzer Prize winning uh novel not novelist, nonfiction writer. Have you written a novel? Any? I mean you've written many books. I've never written a novel. My uh seventeen year old asked me like, Dad, when are you gonna write something interesting that you know like fiction? So I love your stuff. The book you did on Katrina was that's the one you won the Pulitzer for. Incredible. Uh the book broke USA about debt was just amazing. Thank you. I like your nonfiction , but I I feel like don't don't they say that everybody's got a novel in the in their desk drawer next to the book. No, it's it's I have neither. But it I get I I get I like Burb and get no work done. But actually this summer, it's funny you should say this this summer he decides he wants to be a screenwriter, God help me. Oh good. Um and this summer um we're gonna write together. I mean uh write in the same place together. And I'm thinking like maybe maybe this will be the moment when I I I I I do a fiction, uh a work of fiction. But to now not. Then you wouldn't be kind of competing with him in your own turf. You'd be kind of on another, you know, uh unfamiliar ground. It would probably be a good idea. I like it. Well dad, I'm I'm better at storytelling than you. I mean he literally said that to me this week. Teenage at him . God bless him. And he stuck by it. You know what we did on a Friday night? So there was Fortchan had a uh uh Fortan. Okay, I understand. They call it a creepypasta. You know copy pasta where you paste something. It's a creepy pasta. Some years ago they had a creepy pasta of a of a kind of a empty room, yellow walls, kind of this limited And then there was this guy named Kane Pixels who turned it into a viral video called Back Rooms, and there were a number of YouTube viral videos he created using Blender and others about these kind of weird spaces. Well, Hollywood said, you know, we need to we need more kids coming to movies. So this guy is 20 years old. His uh his motion picture back rooms debuted on Friday. We went to the opening 'cause he's from our our little town here. He was there. My my twenty three year old's a big fan, got his picture taken with him. And uh this is this is now the fourth f fastest, highest grossing uh first weekend for a horror movie ever. They made it for ten million dollars. It it's grossed more than thirty million already in three days. It's called Back Rooms. It's twenty year old director. So Gary, your teenager in three years, maybe writing that novel , might might have that book a prize in hand. So uh I don't know. Okay. I don't know. You know, it's just it happens. We're in a c you know, this is always this happened. So you're old enough, Gary, I certainly grew up in this because I was a baby boomer. There was a youth culture when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, right? The youth dominated everything. Uh and then we continued to dominate it right up to the present. And now it's a bunch of seventy and eighty year olds dominating the world. I wonder that grip on power. You never want to let go. We don't want to let go. We boomers, we love it. I'm wondering though, we're gonna all die soon. Maybe the swing back to youth would is starting to happen. I I think this might be a people like me who are stuck in the middle are just gonna always I feel bad for you, Molly. I do. I'm so sorry, Molly. We ruined it for you. We boomers really ruined it for everybody. And I apologize on behalf of my cohort . Uh we're gonna take a break, come back with more Samuel Bus Sam ut is also here. I we have I want to ask you about the Luce, Johnny Ives, Ferrari, which apparently is getting some bad reviews. But uh have you driven it? Uh no nobody's nobody outside of Ferrari has driven it yet. Although probably some of their best customers have had a chance to sample it, but how about uh six hundred and forty thousand dollars? Okay, well it won't be me driving it, that's for sure. But I I I do have a novel in my drawer I was visiting a friend um uh named Jeff, Jeff Atwood, uh the other day and uh on his uh kitchen counter he had what looked a lot like uh infinite jest you know the book the long book everybody pretends to have read uh and I said oh who's reading infinite jest and they said no no no look closely it wasn't infinite jest it was infinite Jeffs somebody as a joke and you can buy it on Amazon by the way uh has made a book that looks just like Infinite Jest, but the text of it, the blurbs, the front cover, the back cover, all it is is Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. AI could never do this, right? This is brilliant. You can buy it for twenty five bucks on Amazon . Uh if you know somebody named Jeff, this would make a great gift. Are you saying if you open it up, the only thing you see is the word Jeff repeated You wanna read a sample? Here, let's just uh let's just open it up. Don't give anything away. Don't give anything away. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. Jeff Jeff, the dedication, Jeff, the first chapter. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. It is it is like 800 pages of the word Jeff. And by the way. I don't even know anyone named Jeff, but I kind of want to copy that part. You want to know somebody now named Jeff. By the way, it says on the on the Amazon excerpt, copyrighted material. So don't steal us. Written by, written by. If somebody wants to write, you know, Molly, I don't know. Uh Molly Jones diary, I don't know. You could uh you could do that. Here's the blurbs, they're all by Jeff. And apparently it was written by a cat named Jeff. So uh now you don't have to buy it because you've you've read it. I hope AI ingests this. I'd like to see what AI does with this. All right, well have that's the novel in my drawer. And no no, there's bourbon next to that either, unfortunately. Uh our show today brought to you by Z scaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. I think it's becoming pretty apparent in business the, potential rewards of AI are, you know, too great to ignore. But then so are the risks. Loss of sensitive data is a big risk people don't even think about. Attacks against enterprise-managed AI. And then of course generative AI helps the bad guys too. It increases the opportunities for threat actors, helping them to rapidly create fishing lures that are indistinguishable from the real thing. I get bit all the time now. That's that's real, right? No. They're also using it to write malicious code. We were talking about this on security now. They're using it to speed up data extraction once they get into your system . And then there's this whole issue of of uh you and your employees using your private AI or your generative AI and accidentally exfiltrating information, you know, uploading the company's tax returns, things like that. 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So ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information according to in a company's data classification does not get fed into the public LLM models, etc. Thank you, Siva. With zero trust plus AI, you can thrive in the AI era, you can stay ahead of the competition, you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash sec urity. We thank him so much for supporting uh this week in tech. And you support us when you go to that address so they know you saw it here, zscaler dot com slash security. You're watching this week in tech , Sam ble Samut, Gary Rivlin, Molly White, uh Sam, a week from Monday . It's WWDC. We will be covering that conference. And we expect, speaking of AI, Apple to um clarify, shall we say, its position on uh AI on the iPhone. They will also uh show uh iOS 27 mark bloomberg i'm sorry mark german at bloomberg although i think of him as mark bloomberg uh got a leak of the uh look of the new ios 27 series gonna be in that uh in that little window up at the top , um living there all the time. Uh these are illustrations, not actual photos, but illustrations created by Bloomberg showing the revamped Siri interface, a new chatbot style app, and other major changes that the Apple will announce a week from Monday. Writes the images are based on information viewed by Bloomberg and people with knowledge of the company's plans who asked not to be identified because the software isn't public and of course Apple declined to comment. But I think one thing that we know for sure is that AI will take front and center at uh at the keynote at WWDC and on the new iPhones. And suddenly, uh for a lot of people, maybe your mom, Molly, who aren't really used to using AI , it will be on their phone. It will be a big presence. And I think that is going to be a sea change. I I expect in in how people feel about AI. And maybe help its acceptance a little bit. What do you w Molly, you think your mom will does she use an iPhone ? Uh I believe so, yes. But I mean I would say that AI is already kind of ubiquitous, right? Like if you use Gmail, it's trying to summarize your emails. If you search something that's coming up, you know, I don't know how much it will change to have one more , you know, insertion of AI into your everyday life, but the only reason I'd say it might be different is because Apple is notorious for being good at productizing this stuff in a way that is not as offensive. Look at Goo what Google and Microsoft have done has become offensive to people. That's why your mom's using DuckDuckGo. Well maybe he has a s lighter touch. I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe they backlash. I feel like people were really annoyed by the the um attempts to summarize your text message or whatever it was. That was just not always gone very well. Yeah, exactly They were just bad. And they I left them on because they were hysterical. They still are hysterical. Yeah, so I have maybe some suspicion. I see this all the time. I just got it again. There were m there were mo there was motion at your front door multiple times. Yeah. Yeah, probably. But it's like that's the summary. And if if the first time you see it, it's like what? And then you realize oh no, it's just wrapping up about a bunch of kitty mo wow, there aren't weren't quite a few. Okay, maybe Apple wasn't so wrong on that one. That cat. That cat really wants to come in. Holy Kamoli . Okay. I g somebody's gonna have to dance. Dancing in front of your front door. What's going on? All right. You know what? Apple got it right. There were multiple I'm scrolling through pages. Companies with billion plus platforms, you know, or platforms with a billion plus uh people on it. We talked about Meta before, we talked about Google before, and I think Apple falls in the same category. Yes, we might resent it, yes, we're a bunch of tech reporters, so we in particular are resenting it. But I just have to think if it's there in front, people are gonna use it. And I think Apple, you know, the story on Apple is they've just been fumbling Now in 2026, they're yet again gonna unveil their you know AI AI strategy. And you know, I'm dubious of that. I'm sure they're gonna be using other models and they're gonna use Gemini interface. They're gonna use Google's models. Well they're Google's paying for them to use Gemini and just you you can opt for others. You can, you know, if you choose, you can have ChatGPT, whatever. Uh underneath it. But my point is by just having it in a box right there, I I I do think it becomes more ubiquitous in the sense that more and more people are using it. Yes, Molly, AI is everywhere. We talk about we can't help but think about it. But that doesn't mean, you know, everyone's using it. I just think Apple is another big step in a larger portion of the planet using AI because it's right there. Yep. Uh, Siri or have they have they have they given up on Siri? 'Cause if people still use Siri, Siri is gonna presumably suddenly be smart and useful. Yeah, Alexa and Siri. I you know, it's funny, like so basically those you know, Amazon and Apple were way ahead of w uh uh most everyone on AI, right? I mean, you know, that's what that is. And I just assume like, oh, okay, well, you know, that's more rules based, it's not, you know, machine learning, but they'll make the shift and it's a lot harder to do than you would think uh to give it intelligence. I mean you might as well like to you know, we s we've seen this with technology a lot, that you know, kind of bolting something on something else is never as good as something that's, you know, built from scratch. And I just think that's Siri's problem and that's you know, Alexa's uh problem. Supposedly Amazon has uh uh taken that on and finally they have a better product. I don't use either either of those, so I have no idea. Um but it's taken a lot longer than I would have thought uh to make the jump from you know kind of the old fashioned, you know, okay here, are the responses to this question, as opposed to the conversational uh aspect that we're all used to now with chat. Uh but you know getting in I'm an Android user and Gemini is far less functional now than Google Assistant was before. There are so many things I you know, the things I used to use Google Assistant for, Gemini does not work. Like, for example, uh you know, I you know I have uh garage door opener that is was you know was compatible with Google. I used to be able to open that you know from the car with you know uh using Google Assistant, that does not work with Gemini. I ha we have some LED leg strips around notable failure for Google. Yeah, automations that do not work with Assistant. Yeah. And so there there's a bunch of functionality that just isn't there. You know, and that's this is one of the things that really annoys me about Google is that they will uh they'll take stuff that was working reasonably well and say, no, we're going to replace this with something else and you lose half the functionality or more from that thing and it takes them years to get it back to where it was. You know they did this with with Google Play Music when they went to YouTube Music and uh, you know, they they did it with assistant going to Gemini, and they've done it with lots of things over the years, and it's very, very annoying. I think what so as somebody who's cr spent a lot of time building an agent, you know, uh this was gonna be the year of the agent. Uh started with open claw, right? Moltbot slash clawbot slash open claw. Um I use a agent tool from a company called Noose Research called Hermes, but the idea is it's similar to Siri with a big difference. It remembers your conversations, your prior conversations. It knows about you. It has some background about what you're looking for, what you want . Uh it can even ja it can even joke around with you based on it does with me anyway, based on what it knows about me. Uh you know, when I when I have uh I you know, I record my meals in it, I say, hey, uh I call it Quicksilver. Hey Quicksilver, I just uh had a sandwich and a and a uh can of Coke, and it will say things like that's a lot of carbs, you Leo, you better uh you better eat a salad for dinner tonight. That experience is pretty satisfying. If Ciri can become more of a personal assistant, I think that there's and and of course, yes, Sam, it'll also have to be able to open your garage door or or it's just a dumb bot. But if it can be more functional and be more personal , isn't that a big step toward what people want from AI or is that just me? No, and personal assistant is the holy grail for a lot of uh companies, the AI agent. Uh you know, I mean twenty twenty-five was the year of the AI agent and that didn't work, so now it's twenty twenty six the year of the AI agent. And you know, th this stuff is hard. It it finally is starting to have a pretty good memory. Um I've had to put a lot of work into it. I mean it doesn't happen automatically that's for sure. So and that's my point. Like you know it's just I I think twenty twenty seven and twenty twenty eight are going to be the year of the AI agent because you know, I mean humans are resistant to change, the stuff is complicated, the technology isn't quite there yet. There's a whole list uh of of reasons. And you know, but just to get a little bit you know nerdy for a sec, like you know, the history of AI was you know Expert systems. Expert systems. Millions and millions of lines of code that was rejected. No machine learning, just let it learn in the fashion of a human, you just give it a bunch of , you know, uh data, whether it's you know books, movies, whatever, kind of thing. But I really think the answer is it's not an either or. You know, I I think the next step is gonna be something of a hybrid, because like, yes, it's brilliant. It could, you know, tell you uh you have a conversation with you, but can it open my garage door? And so like you know, one version well one approach is really good at a set of things, the other uh approach is good to a different set of things. And you know, I'm kinda thinking that, you know, even though rules based expert systems were rejected, I do think they're gonna be in our future again for exactly what Sam is talking about. Maybe I'm just you know getting old and cranky, but you know I don't I don't need the assistant to be funny with me. I don't need it to be joking with me. That's pretty much a plus. I just need it to do exactly what I ask it to do. Elexa plus a sassy mod e which we turned on. And all anybody ever uses Alexa for is, you know, set a timer for asparagus. And Alexa Plus will say, oh, that's gonna be some crunchy asparagus. Or or dinner sounds great. When can I come over? And it it's no smarter. It's just sassy. Yeah. I I don't I 'm not enough. I want smart, not I don't care if it's I don't care if it's sassy if it's dumb. No. It's that's that's not helpful. It isn't. I'm also maybe I'm old school for this, but I hate talking to computers, like speaking to computers, and I don't know if I'm ever gonna get over that. You don't have uh carpal tunnel syndrome , obviously. No. Yeah. No. Yeah. I think you're in the minor I think you're in the minority on that, Molly. I I think people you know, once what was it mid twenty twenty four, you can speak to Chat G B T. I think that was kind of a big breakthrough for them. I I I you know the idea I mean that's kind of the Star Trek vision. We just talk to the machine. Yeah exactly and it talks back. Do do you do do either I don't think either I assume neither of you work in an office with other people. I don't either. I work I've worked remotely for a dozen years, but when I worked in an office with other people , uh and increasingly people are being called back to office full time. Right. You don't want to be talking to your computer in an office. That that is just not a good thing. That's a terrible experience. You say that Sam and I 100% relate to what you're saying. Um but the big thing now, was it whi whisper flow? Um I got it going right here. Look at this. This is on my Mac. As we're speaking, it has been transcribing everything that you've been saying. And so and so what's going on is like uh the the the the fellow who made Claude Code um spoke about this like journey. Yeah. Yeah, you got it. Um you know, instead of typing into a box where we're kind of you know, kind of thinking about it, going back, trying to perfect it. You know, he found that using whisper flow and just speaking the way humans speak, the machine gets so much more out of it. And so I saw this picture, some you know, article where they showed I am so glad that I'm old enough that I am probably never gonna have another office job. Same. But um I went to a conference actually where there was this basically kid, I think I mean I think he was in college, but barely, um who had created some sort of a device that was exactly for that purpose and it was the idea was that you didn't actually need to really vocalize, you just sort of mouthed, I think. Oh, I saw that video. That looked so dopey. I don't know if it's an interesting idea at least, which is that you know, maybe we wouldn't have to lift rating or subvocalization. It was a No, it's yeah, it sort of attaches back here and yeah. Sort of a reverse bone conduction. Yeah. I mean people are doing that. There's a company that that's the has a chip that you wear in a hat that uh is reading your brainwaves. They're not good enough yet, but I imagine at some point br machine learning will get good enough so that it can turn those brainwaves into into letters and words. Uh then I won't even have to type. I can just think it. Well there there's a a a friend of mine, uh he's a got he's in a startup now called NUMO that they're developing a s a system that goes into the headrest of the car that measures the EEG waves to help detect when you're distracted or drowsy and detects a bunch of things about the driver to instead of watching . Yeah. Yeah. Well it and it it works in conjunction with that. So it gives you more information of what you get from just looking at, you know, where you're looking. But it's actually brilliant. Yeah. Those things always end up getting used as surveillance, which is what freaks me out. Yeah. Well your insurance is gonna go up if your beta waves are too prominent. Right, exly.act Yeah, that's a little scary. Um somebody oh, I let's take a break and then I'm gonna talk about the fake EU LA in the blockchain. I'm sure you saw this story, Molly. It's hysterical . Uh you're watching the This Week in Tech with Gary Rivlin, Molly White, who knows a little bit about crypto. Uh and uh Samu Bus Samut who knows a little bit about cars. We have crypto and cars coming up just a little bit as we continue. Our show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter . Isn't it great when you find somebody uh who's qualified for the role you're hiring for? I can tell you that is a special time. And then you can also tell how genuinely interested they are in the position. Oh man, that's heaven. That's gold. If you're hiring, you want a candidate who's passionate about your role. But you can't get that insight from a resume unless you post your job on ZipRecruiter. 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So this happened yesterday, May 30th, 1529 UTC . Somebody wrote a fake EU LA into the blockchain. The EU LA read, by downloading this OP-Return, I'll have to ask Molly what an Operaturn is, you hereby consent to unrestricted access by federal law enforcement agencies to your residents, digital devices, and personal properties. Assets may be searched, seized, or redistributed without further notice, signed Donald J. Trump, President of the Internet . So what first of all, what's an op return? Um so the op return is basically this uh location where you can store arbitrary data in a Bitcoin transaction. Okay. So you can't help but download it, right? Because you down when you're you you when you're using blockchain, you download a copy of the blockchain. Right. Yeah. So all the transaction data is in there. I mean, there's definitely like ways that people will prune out a lot of excess data, but yeah for Yeah, when I when I use my wallet, the first time I use it on a machine, it downloads I mean it what is it now? It's a hundred gigabytes a huge amount, a hundred gigabytes or something. Of the of the entire blockchain. You have to validate it from the beginning. Every single transaction since Satoshi Nakamoto pushed the start button to now. Now then you can prune it. After that, you can prune it. And it gets much smaller. But that's a lot to download, including this EU LA . Six blocks later, which means almost instantly, they posted, I revoked my previous statement, signed Donald J. Trump president of the internet . Uh but here's the thing. Nothing ever dies in the blockchain. Block nine hundred fifty one thousand seven hundred twenty-eight and block nine hundred fifty-one thousand seven hundred thirty-four Yep. Along with every other block that people inscribe to the case. There's a lot of crap. There's a whole bunch of stuff in there. Really? Cost him like eighty bucks to do it. But see, that'll be a nice historical uh record. There is I told other records of it. is I read what I think was basically like an AI generated crypto slot media article and it was like finally people can read the constitution on the blockchain and I was like how many people have been trying to do that? But there is other less uh salubrious stuff on there's there's CSAM on the blockchain. Yeah, well and there has been a long running maybe not long running, but for a couple of years there's been an ongoing fight within the Bitcoin core developer community about whether or not they should um basically limit the operatern because it used to be that there was a very small cap on how much data you could put into the operating field and then they lifted the cap and so now there's you can put really long stuff in there It was limited to eighty three bytes according to this. Yeah, exactly. It was tiny. And um and so now people are making like Bitcoin NFTs basically because you can store so much data than you previously could and one of the core developers is like really concerned about the possibility of Bitcoin becoming a CSAM haven because there's no way to erase it. And um but yeah there's this huge debate within the Bitcoin community around whether or not they should cap it, whether they should fork Bitcoin so that you know there could be a version of it that doesn't have a cap. It's it's a mess. Wow . Um so just one more wonderful little feature of Bitcoin. Um well and many cryptocurrencies. I mean uh a lot of you know especially a bit chain. That's how blockchain works. Any any uh blockchain that has arbitrary data, which is most of them, has this same issue. The whole premise of blockchain is it's a decentralized uh unforgeable ledger. Immutable. Immutable ledger. And so that's kind of in the nature uh of it. It does become a little bit uh unmanageable when you get when you get to hundreds of gigabytes. Yeah, I mean I I'm not sure how much Satoshi Nakamoto was thinking on like century scale when he designed. Does it does it bog down because it's so big? No. It doesn't slow it down. I mean it was slow to begin with, but for different reasons.. Right The proof of work is slow. All by itself. Substantially slow. So Molly I the the question I have is so Trump comes in, he's pro crypto, the policies are gonna buy Bitcoin, whatever for the res erves. I would have figured that for a four year period, you know, the price of Bitcoin, any cryptocurrency would go up and it did for you know, whatever a few months and then it just plummeted. Like why? I mean the the the administration is so favorable, his policies are so favorable, they've they've backed it, they're legitimizing it, presumably they're buying up a bunch for you know our reserve. Why would it have Well for one, they're not buying it for the reserve, so there isn't that initial demand. Um there's they haven't been able to they would need to pass a law to actually uh authorize Yeah, I mean I think you're right. Like there there was the Trump pump uh where, you know, th it broke a new all-time high shortly after Trump's inauguration and you know it was doing well for a while. But ultimately, you know, Bitcoin and other crypto assets are high-iskr volatile assets, and we've seen so much macroeconom ic instability uh coming f largely from the Trump administration that people don't want to hold Bitcoin when they think that you, know, there's going to be huge tariffs or when there's a war with Iran or, you know, whatever it might be, and you see people following those same behaviors, which is that if they're worried about, you know, the economy in general, they don't want to be holding Bitcoin. They want to be holding dollars or gold or whatever it might be. Um and, you know, there's that effect on the Bitcoin price. But I think also people have a concern that and especially increasing now that Trump is essentially damaging crypto. Oh, interesting. Because his you know, now so many people think crypto, they think, oh, that's that grift that the President of the United States is all tied up with . I think ransomware is also harming the uh Well certainly. I mean and it always has been, right? That's not new. Ransomware was basically empowered by crypto Yeah, I mean literally you had to buy cards at 7 Eleven to pay off your ransomware. Yeah, I mean it's a rounding error of ransomware that doesn't use cryptocurrencies. Right. At its peak, Bitcoin was one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. It's off forty percent off its peak is now seventy three thousand uh dollars. So it's it is do you think so and there were people like the Winkelvoss twins who said, Oh, it's gonna reach a million. They still say that. Yeah. Well yeah, because they have quite a bit of it. That's the thing is the people who say that tend to have sort of a vested interest in it doing that. They're hoping it gets a million. Yeah. On the other hand, if you if you bought it when it was a buck or ten bucks or a thousand bucks, you're still way ahead of it. Like the Winkle Boss once. Like the Winkleby. Yeah. The problem I always had with it is unlike almost any other investment, it's not tied to performance of anything. It's it's the only the value is tied to perception, nothing else. Aaron Powell I would say that's not unlike everything else. I mean if you look at the stock. I guess you're right. The dollar is worth only what people say it's worth. I guess you're right. But but if you buy a share of Apple, it's to some degree tied to Apple's performance. But what if you buy only to the degree that investors think it is? Yeah, like what about GameStop or Bed Bath and Beyond or Tesla or Tesla? Yeah. I mean I would say that, you know, increasingly we're getting more and more financial instruments that are just sp they're literally purely speculative, whether it's a meme coin, a more traditional type of cryptocurrency I tricked y'all because I've been arguing this for years and everybody yells at me when I say it that that stocks are just as just as you know imaginary as anything else. So I tricked you into agreeing with me. Thank you very much . Not that I can, you know, briefly I thought I better get out of the stock market because this is it. I mean I have to live on this for the rest of my life. That's my retirement savings. And I thought, well, what if I just have cash? Because then I know how much I'll have. But then inflation started to whittle it away, and I thought I'm and then I looked at the stock market and unaccountably it's been going up. And I thought, well, I guess I'm making a mistake not being you ev even if it's imaginary, you kinda have to play the game. Yeah I I'm with you. I I you know the the the same set of reasons that Molly gave for why Bitcoin uh crypto uh has not you know just soared, you know, uh uh uh tariffs, wars, instability, all that kind of stuff. And yet we just set another record, I believe, for It's amazing. The stock market, yeah. Uh so I wanted to ask you about this also, Molly. Hundreds of prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike. What happened? Yeah. Um so Yes. Although I'm not sure to go on strike, but that's largely because I've been so busy. I haven't been doing it anyway. Okay. You're not one of the people threatening to strike. But um yeah, so I think basically what happened is there's something called the community wish list, which is a uh way for community members to basically request software features from the Wikimedia Foundation. And as a little bit of backstory, the the community members are the people who edit the encyclopedia, write the content, all that kind of thing. Um volunteers for the most part, right? Yes, correct. The Wikimedia Foundation is a foundation that employs software engineers and many other types of employees. And they, among other things, developed the MediaWiki software that the Wikim Wikipedia and other wikis like it run on. And so the community wish list was a way for them for community members to request that the software engineers at the foundation uh prioritize various features that the community felt were important. And those engineers are paid staff. Correct. They're staff members, yes. Okay. There are volunteer community developers, but that's a whole nother can of worms and not particularly pertinent to this. Um and so what happened recently was that the Wikimedia Foundation announced that they would be changing the way that they handle the community wishlist, and instead of having a team that was largely devoted to that task , they would instead sort of spread the work among the foundation's existing software engineers working on various other projects. And in doing so, they would also lay off a number of the engineers who were on that team. Suman, who was writing about this deputy chief product and technology officer at Wikimedia Foundation, said it's a bottleneck to have this centralized team. We want we hear feedback from the community that there's not enough priority going to this wish list, and so we're changing how it works because we think it's gonna work better for you. But the community really took it more as we're getting rid of the people who do the wish list stuff and all these other engineers who have their own list of tasks that they're trying to do already are not going to prioritize the community wishlist tasks, and so it's going to only make the problem worse. And then there was the added fact that some people at least are there's been an effort among Wikimedia Foundation employees to unionize and there some of the people who were laid off were active in the unionization efforts. And so there's been allegations, at least, that the layoffs were more to do with union busting than to do with any particular community wish list material. And so that's where a lot of the anger is coming from, is not just the fact that they feel like the wish list is being prior deprioritized, but they feel that the Wikimedia Foundation was also punishing people who are trying to unionize. And thanked people for the conversations. Um do you feel like I don't know if you followed this closely, maybe this is something you haven't been following, but was her response sufficient, you think? No, it wasn't sufficient. Uh certainly not to the people in the community. And I mean, I I think I think one bit of background that's a little challenging for people who are not heavily involved with the Wikimedia projects is that there is a long running issue between the Wikimedia community, the volunteers , and the foundation, that has been a very strained relationship for decades. It's, I mean, almost an adversarial relationship. And it's one that I think the Wikimedia Foundation is working to improve, but in incidents like this happen fairly often where the community feels like they're not being heard, like they're being deprioritized. And, you know, in this case, I think people from the Wikimedia Foundation made comments along the lines of like, This is us listening to you, we're trying to do and you know the community is saying, We didn't ask for this, we didn't want you to lay off these people. You know, this is the opposite of what we want. Um and so I think it was a miss there. I mean, I'm actually on a group or I'm a member of a group that is specifically supposed to be improving communication between sort of the technical staff at the Wikimedia Foundation and the community and we were barely consulted and and sort of not brought into the loop. So I think it was just a really bad situation all around and another in a long list of examples where the Wikimedia Foundation has not handled well its relationship with the community of volunteers that it relies upon to continue existing. Again, in so many areas. Um Do you think the Wikimedia Foundation is not a good steward of Wikipedia? No. It is um unfortunately prone to stepping on rakes when it comes to its relationship with the community. I mean it it despite having been the steward of Wikimedia for so long, it seems to have a very poor understanding of the Wikimedia community and how to interact with that community. And I to give I mean to be fair, the community is very challenging and I've been on the opposite side of it before as well. Um but you know this is I think it's just frustrating to see things like this happening over and over and over again. And I should add that some of the people who are laid off were they started as community members, they were community developers, they had some of the best context available as far as developing some of the features on the wish list. And so to see them removed and then have that painted as this is us prioritizing the wish list, we're trying to make things better for all of They uh did say that uh all six are currently still employed and that they have been trying to place them elsewhere in the uh organization and three people have been offered jobs. So maybe there will be a happy uh outcome. Well we'll see. I mean I think I think there's a lot of hope that you know the community wish list will m continue to be m maintained. I have my doubts that the strategy of trying to just have every engineer try to remember to work on it once in a while is actually gonna you know cause it to be prioritized, but we'll see. It's good to have a dedicated team. I agree. Yeah. Uh well good. Well thank you. I mean I donate to Wikimedia uh every month. I I feel like the Wikipedia is such a huge valuable uh thing. I'm really grateful to volunteers like you, Molly, who'd work so hard to keep it useful. And even in this age of AI and uh and disinformation and uh truthiness, it remains still an amazing use ful tool and uh uh full of facts. And in fact, frankly, most AI would not be as good without Wikipedia. I know Google wouldn't be as good without Wikipedia. I don't think any of them would. It's it's a core part of the training set. Right. And I think that's a big feat uh big um portion of why the conversation around a strike among editors is somewhat controversial because ultimately editors, you know, the top priority is to provide high quality information and so doing something that would stop that is uh you know even if if editors think it would potentially further their aims, you know, it it it doesn't feel good to do that. And it's why things like blacking out Wikipedia like we did I think a decade ago for SOPA. Yeah. Um that was enormously controversial. And, you know this type of a thing is a We blacked out Twit as well. In fact we did all our shows in black and white that day for cool . Um okay well I'm j I hope things continue . Uh and uh and uh do you do does Wikipedia does Wikimedia do you know get any f any support from these frontier AI companies? I mean Yes. Oh good. Yeah, so there is They should be donating like crazy . Yeah. There is basically a uh model called Wikimedia Enterprise where uh AI companies pay for they don't pay it's not that they're paying for the data, they sort of pay for the highway, so it's you know a sort of a high high speed sort of uh API and it's it's formatted in such a way that is much easier for these companies to ingest and they in turn you know pay for the for the privilege and so I think it's a fairly good system. It was it was controversial when it was announced it was misunderstood. Right. Well and I think people thought that, you know, that i it was there were some questionably written headlines, I think, around the announcement that almost implied that the Wikip or that Wikipedia was incorporating AI content into Wikipedia. And then I mean some people it was like, oh you're doing a deal with the devil, which you know you can't really . We had Jimmy Wales on right about that time to clarify things on it. Long enough to see it go from you know a small site into what it is now. Like I remember literally in the mid 2000s, uh I was at the New York Times, a memo came out, uh was sent out to all of us, all of all of the reporters, like if you use Wikipedia as your source as a fireable offense. Wow. You know, there was a lot of revenge. You didn't like someone so you wrote up uh the the entry and like I've just been so impressed. Like when I want to get smart about something, it's so good at the history, why it works, how it works, that kinda that kind of stuff. But it really kind of I guess the shame li I mean listening to this, I knew nothing about this, is that you know I feel like in the mid 2000s I couldn't have told you Wikimedia uh Wikipedia was gonna in quotes work or not. Well it would it be as central as it is now. Neither could we and you know and just they did such a great job of bringing in the volunteers and all this. So yes, this is this is credit to people like Molly. Buckled down and made sure the content stays good. Uh, well and I mean credit to to journalists like you guys because that's where it comes that's where the information comes from among other places. But those volunteers who sit there on the discussion pages and you know, who really protect the content, I mean, God bless 'em. That is uh that is the most important work in the world, especially in a world of AI filled with AI slop. Yep. Speaking of slop , what are you ready now? Here's the lucha . Uh this is Ferrari's first E. V. Uh Johnny Ive and Love uh whatever. Uh what is this? Love from weirdest name of a company ever. Uh designed this thing. Johnny said, Oh, I love switches, which is hysterical because he never seemed to love switches much when he was at Adam. Well, was it him or was it Steve that hated buttons? Steve hated buttons, yeah. Um people have commented on the design. Uh the interior looks pretty sweet. I like the interior. Um yeah, exterior maybe not so much. The there's there's another good picture in the Discord of the uh of the luche being charged. Um so uh I think you know the problem the the fundamental problem with the with the lucha . Johnny Johnny always wanted to charge everything from the bottom. So that was The fundamental problem with the luche is not necessarily so much the design itself . It's just that it's not it it doesn't fit as a Ferrari. It doesn't have any five. It makes no sense as a Ferrari. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people commented, you know, this this would have been a great design for something like Honda's now canceled zero series EVs. It's also got a lot of resemblance to a Jaguar eye pace. Uh there's there's you know a lot of things that it looks like, but it doesn't it doesn't look like what uh what they think a Ferrari should look like. Yeah. And you know, the executives from Ferrari have been talking this week about it. Yeah, and yeah, the way they explain it is that you know, we we still have all the other traditional Ferraris, the the cars that Ferrari lovers ex pect. But Ferrari, you know, Ferrari owners tend to own multiple cars. They don't just own a Ferrari. They they own many different kinds of vehicles. And some sometimes they want a sedan like this. Uh you know, I mean if you if you look across the industry at premium brands, you know, Porsche really got this kicked off twenty-five-ish years ago uh when they launched the cayenne uh you know their first su v and the the cayenne um you know a lot of portia fans still dislike the cayenne but the fact is the cayenne has been the best selling Porsche ever since it launched. Wow. And if it if it wasn't for the por if it wasn't Porsche Cayenne and then subsequently the the Makan and and the the uh Tycon. Which is uh well not so much the Tycon but the um uh the Panamera, if it wasn't for those vehicles, then Porsche probably would not be in business still building nine elevens today. They could not survive just on building sports cars. Same thing is true with Lamborghini. They you know they have the Urus. Um Rolls Royce Ferrari Cullen in a few years ago. It's like uh just a car for everybody? No. No, but um but you know they they I think they feel like they need or they wanted some other option. Uh you know, and they they were looking for some way to get into the E V business. Now Grant, I am not defending this particular car. I st I still think you know I I don't I don't think it was necessarily a bad idea to do a Ferrari stand. But but this I don't think that this is a good design for a Ferrari. It could have been for any number of other brands, but not as a Ferrari. So that's that's where the the problem is. But I I I do like the interior. I think the interior's got some some really interesting details. Yeah. And you know, the the touch screen that you know is on a pivot, you know, so you can pivot it over towards the uh um the passenger, you know, if they want to do something on the touch screen. You got manual vents, you know, that you can just reach out and grab and redirect the airflow. Yes. A touch screen for vents. Yeah. Yeah. Uh Tesla. Yeah. Yeah. Uh there's yeah, there's obviously been a lot of speculation uh in the last uh the last week that this is actually this originated as the design for the Apple car. Well that's what the question was for me and I'd seen that is that John this is what Johnny I've wanted that project time I wouldn't be surprised if it would have been similar to this shape. But you know, obviously I think the interior. It was gonna be self-driving, right? It was' Yeah, well thats what that was the goal was to make it you know, self driving to have no c have no human controls in it. Right. Um you know, they Apple was nowhere close to being able to achieve that. Right. Um but that's why they killed it. Yeah. Well that I mean it's lots of of lot reasons why they killed it. Um you know, I think you know they they they probably realized that they were never gonna get the kind of margins on a car that they get with the rest of their business. And you know, they figured if we can't get thirty five forty percent profit margins on the car, yeah, and they're you know they're certainly not going to be able to sell very many you know six hundred thousand dollar cars. Uh so if they can't get the profit margins they want, then you know, they they killed it. Uh so uh you know, and I think that was probably a a a wise choice, you know, for Apple. Apple doesn't need to be in the car business. Um but you know, Ferrari, I think, could have could have done something more Ferrari like and still achieved the overall goals of this particular car. Well, Johnny Ives uh has many jobs, one of which is uh for which he got paid three point two billion dollars is uh designing a device for open AI . We don't know what will be, what what it will look like, or but there is some rumor that it might be out by next year, a pendant perhaps. Um I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, that would be my guess. You know, kind of not glasses. Seems like the rest of the world's con kind of converging on the idea that glasses are going to be the But people get creeped out by glasses, especially if it has a camera. They think you're recording. Well, would that would they be any less creeped out by a pendant that had a camera on it? That's true. If it has a camera, it's kind of the same deal. I did actually see somebody with one of those humane AI pendants on a plane once. Yeah. About so this about uh a couple of weeks before humane AI went poof. Yeah. It's uh apparently Apple's glasses which they're calling or gonna call the audio Apple Audio, even though it will they will have cameras. I think they don't want anybody to think about the cameras. You kinda need cameras. Um I it's gonna be interesting. Apple's gonna try this, I think. That's the rumor. It's funny. I'm a more creep I'm more creeped out by the audio. It's like really wearing a pen and it's always listening. Oh, recording. Yeah. I I I mean, you know, d do I have to get permission. Yeah, well no, I stopped wearing all those. People yelled at me. I used to wear the B bracelet and the and I've I had all the recording devices because that's part of the personal agent thing. The ideal personal agent would hear everything I am hearing, see everything I'm seeing, digest it, absorb it, uh, and offer it for my uh consumption uh later or for my queries down the road. What were Molly White and uh I talking about with Wikimedia? What was that all about? Leo. I'm not sure if this is great for marriages or the worst thing. Yeah, no, my wife told me not to wear it. That's exactly what I think anymore It was still a lot of arguments, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. Gerald Tompkins in our YouTube chat says that's because it your wife's job is to remind you. Your personal agent is your wife. Oh yeah, that's right. Oh boy. Okay, don't touch that one . She is not available at all c during all conversations. All right, one more one more break and then a w a couple of just uh wrap it up stories, including Peter Thiel evacuating the United States. Oh boy. Woman's good riddance. Oh boy. Um more to come. Uh you're watching this week in tech with Molly White, Sam Abull Sam ad, and uh Gary Rivlin's group. Great panel. Great to have all three of you here. Our show today brought to you by Doppel. This is uh this is something uh I take to heart. We got bit uh by um uh a uh fishing email the other day. And uh my my greatest fear uh honestly is not so much the pishhing email, but the the fishing email. You you've heard you've heard about fishing, right? It's voice fishing where you can actually duplicate somebody's voice so well that uh like you're well listen, this could be this could be your CEO. Hey, Burke, this is definitely not Leo asking you to buy gift cards. But seriously, can you grab me 100 Apple gift cards? Just kidding. That was that is not me . That was not my voice. It is my voice, but it was generated by our AI guru , Anthony Nielsen, as an example of how easy it is. He said, with four minutes of your voice, I was able to make this and imagine , you know, maybe that voicemail is an urgent message for you from your CEO, or maybe it's a deep fake targeting your business. Now, these days, AI can impersonate trusted individuals like that. That's why you need Doppel. Doppel's platform can protect you. They did they they actually did an interesting test to illustrate how frequently users fall for these phishing attempts, they did voice call simulation deployments . Target users spent on average six minutes conversing with deep fakes , conversing with deep fakes, and afterwards when asked, a hundred percent of them believed the AI was human, was real . Doppel is the AI native social engineering defense. 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What's next in social engineering? Learn more at doppel.com. That's do-o-p-p-e-l dot com. And uh Burke, don't buy those uh those gift cards. That wasn't me. That wasn't me saying it . Um couple of real quickies before we uh wrap things up. Peter Thiel , who has invested a lot into companies like Palantir, has decided it's not safe to be in the United States anym ore. He has moved to Argentina, according to the New York Times, partly motivated by concerns about the future of the United States and shared beliefs with Argentina's right-wing leader. There he goes into the presidential palace in Argentina . This is so annoying. Thanks for screwing everything up, Peter, and then leaving . So so didn't he bought this huge compound in New Zealand . He became a New Zealand citizen. It was like many hundreds of acres. Yep. And you know, I mean I don't know from their government. Um I guess. He has citizenship in New Zealand. He got that in twenty eleven. He applied for a Malt ese passport in 2022. Basically, this is what these rich guys do now. They have plan B, C, and D . Yeah, whenever I see someone accumulating passports I'm like, are they trying to flee the country at some point to like a non-extradition country? Like you see it with the crypto billionaires a lot of the time. I'm always like, where are you trying to end up? The New York Times says he's moved his his himself and his family to Argentina. His children are enrolled in a local school . Uh the Argentine government is offering him permanent residence or even a citizenship. He's bought plot properties in not only in uh the the Beverly Hills of uh of Buenos Aires, but also in uh neighboring Uruguay . He's just covering all his base. You know who else ran off to Argentina and Uruguay in nineteen forty five. Interesting. I will say both of those countries do have extradition treaties with the United States, so maybe not what's happening. I don't I don't think he's fleeing prosecution. I think he's fleeing the the economy that he built. Yeah. Well the AI the surveillance but he doesn't need to flee. When you're that rich. It doesn't matter. I know. Well have you read um Douglas Rushkoff's uh book about that? About how like all these billionaires who are ruining the world are themselves building bunkers because they sort of fear what they've created. It's we had Douglas uh on to talk about that book. It was it's a great And it talks about you know the uh the former uh antiballistic missile sites and the ICBM sites that billionaires are building little heidi holes in. Yeah. Under the ballroom. Oh yeah, the ballroom would make an excellent place to put many, many stories. I mean it's just it's just wild . Um survival of the richest is the name of that book, by the way. I profiled him in the New York Times Magazine in two thousand five before he was such a a big deal. I remember we were talking in the 2010s and you know he was talking about New Zealand and leaving like, you know, you can't like we were talking about Trump and just like, yeah, I don't know how it's gonna go, but it's such a broken system. Let's twist the kaleidoscope is like, okay, dude, like I have kids. I you know, I have to earn. I can't just do that. Now I guess he has kids too and he's gonna run. Doesn't matter. He can afford to do it, right? Well, but the state the stakes in like the experimentation I think are different when it's just for you like you just kinda it almost reminds me of trading places. You know, for a dollar bet you could screw up all these people's lives kind of thing because you're immune, you're protected from the consequences. Um but I I guess the news from that is like Peter Thiel has kids. I did not know that. I I mean I I would have you know no problem with you know just loading all these guys on a starship and sending them to Mars. I will say I did love the part about the Pope quote not quoting but sort of alluding to Tolkien in his AI thing. Right, right. Where when Peter Thiel names all his companies after Lord of the Rings Volunteer and and a ring. It just felt like a little bit of a shady choice. I think the Pope knew exactly what he was doing. Exactly. No, absolutely not. Um Robotaxis are spreading across the US, says the Wall Street Journal, and so is the backlash. You've seen this, Sam, I'm sure. Yeah, they're they're having a few issues. Uh Waymo, as they s as they keep scaling to more and more cities, are encountering more and more problems. Uh recent weeks um, you know, following some storms in the south . Um you know, you had multiple um Waymo Robo taxis driving into floodwaters and getting stuck. Um with passengers. Uh this is an Atlanta cul de sac. Yeah. For some reason all these Waymos have decided to basically repeating what they what they did in San Francisco. Yeah. Well there was another there was another neighborhood where there was just strings of them just going around and round this roundabout in a neighborhood. Basically, yeah. Um they're still having some issues with recognizing um school buses. Uh and responding properly to school buses. Um there was uh there was at least one incident in California where one went speeding through a construction zone. I uh so they have they have paused um all highway operations, um, you know, which they've been doing for for a while now. So they they've stopped driving on the highway and uh they have reduced the uh some of the operations in a variety of cities uh under you know under various conditions while they try to sort out these problems. But part of the problem here is you know over the last s eight eight, nine years or so , Waymo, like everybody else, has transitioned to a more a more and more AI based approach for their software stack, which actually makes it much more difficult to diagnose what's going wrong. Uh you know, so they've gotten away from the rules-based system that they started with, and they're it's much more of a monolithic AI uh Should we be worried? Uh Morgan Stanley says thirty percent of the rideshare industry will be uh autonomous by twenty thirty-two. Um or is that uh is that maybe a little uh optimistic well you know I mean it's it's a big industry um you know and it's not it's not going to entirely pla replace the rideshare uh industry anytime in the foreseeable future because the problem is the costs are still high and unless you get a really high level of utilization, the the economics don't really work with these vehicles. Oh yeah. Which is why companies like Ford and GM pulled out and said, Yeah, we're we're not gonna get into the robo taxi business. We got we got too many other fish to fry right now. We don't need to be spending our money on this. So um you know what what you'll see happening in more and more cities is that the robo taxis will kind of form the baseline. Uh you know, because you you have a real fluctuation in demand through the course of the day. It's not constant through the day through the course of a day. So robo taxis will kind of form the baseline and then during heavy demand periods, that's when you'll see the human driven cars coming in to supplement and and uh crank up the supply of vehicles. Here's something uh for you, Gary. Uh there's a company uh called Shift that is offering free house cleaning in New York City . Uh train their robots. You have free but you have to allow uh you have to be observed. I I am not citing out risk. Exactly. We record first person cleaning footage to help train the next generation of household robots. So for a limited time we cover the cost of professional cleaners. They come in, they have cameras attached to their head . Uh they record first person video . And then uh you get a spotless apartment, we get training data, everybody wins, says Shift . Uh you know, I that autonomous vehicles you know could be safer. I 'm all for you know what was it from the Jetsons, Janie or Rosie, Rosie. Um you know, the idea that you know some robot's gonna clean up like it just it's gonna cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy the robot that's gonna clean up or to enlist the service. So I don't know. This seems like a very long play. Let me let me put it um that way. It'll be a long, long time befor e um you know these these bots will be cleaning up um is this like a bipedal robot cleaning up Well we don't know because it's a human that comes in with the camera. Right, but do you know what they're training for? Optimus Elon Musk's Optimus Robots. Well there's there's the one I I can't remember the name of the company. Uh Joanna Stern did a great video on this one uh a few months ago where she had one of these robots, one of these bipedal robots in her house. And it turned out that um you know most of what it was doing was being it was being teleoperated. So there was somebody sitting back in Silicon Valley watching the screen. Remember the view of through the cameras of the of the robot and teleoperating this thing. And you know, so far none of these things are the only ones that are even remotely impressive um are the uh the Boston Dynamics Atlas and a few of the Chinese robots. The dog robot. Yeah. Well Atlas Atlas is the bipedal one. Oh it's the dog. Oh yeah. Okay. But I have recently come around to robot vacuums and I am a convert in that department. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Which one do you uh have? He's a little like afraid of it, but it's no big deal. Which one do you use, Molly? Do you want to go? Uh it's one of the dream ones. I can't remember which model. Dreamy, maybe, yeah. My my biggest thing, like the vacuum I could sort of take or leave, but it mops, and I hate mopping so much that that has made a huge difference for me. Oh I I entered Dreamy and I got a picture of Cristiano uh World now . It's Dream with an E. Oh no that's still the It is him. It is them. They have him These are these are the guys that had an event in San Francisco about a month ago and they unveiled this rocket powered EV that would go zero to sixty in like zero point nine seconds. Hell yeah. Can they do it to my back you? Crash even faster, ladies and gentlemen. Uh I think we can wrap things up and with that dystopian note. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Uh Gary Rivlin, whose house will not be cleaned by volunteers, uh, is the author of a very good book about this, uh, which, you know, turned out to be kind of prophetic, AI Valley. You could find more at his website, Gary Rivlin dot com. When's your podcast? Are you starting a podcast, Gary? No, I'm not starting a podcast. Good I don't think there's enough for them though, but I'm not doing my No we need more podcasts. Well I just look forward to your novel or your son's screenplay. One or the other. One or the other. I think that's something. I'm looking forward to him making twenty million uh in the first three days. There you go. That's right. That's right. Tell him to fight. I want points. You did it on my apartment. I want points. Gary, always a pleasure. Great to see you. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Molly White, you gotta go there. Citation Needed dot news . Great newsletter and podcast. Uh if you look at the podcast feed there will be a story uh about Citizens United coming soon. It'll be on the newsletter too. You can't miss it. Nice. Nice. And of course, uh all of our other sites as well. It's always a pleasure, Molly. Thank you for the work you do. It's it's I think so important. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, always a pleasure. And my car guy, Sam Abul Sam ad, who secretly feeds me car ideas. I have an AI go out every week, Sam, and look at uh everything and try to 'cause I've gotta decide what to what to get in the next few months. And uh but I think your s your recommendations are ten times better than the AI's so maybe could would you mind if I can incorporate your brain into it? Absolutely. And and um uh I would like to uh put in a plug. Uh next starting next Sunday, my friends and I will be doing another Operation Frodo uh event. What's that? This is uh Are you throwing a ring into a volcano? No, no, no, no rings, no volcanoes. Um this is uh dog rescue. Um uh we've been doing this um every December now for the last four years. Um and uh we transport rescue dogs from Nebraska to the Pacific Northwest. Uh so it's it's all people in automotive media. Uh and so um we we borrow vehicles uh from autom aker press fleets uh and we get donations to cover the costs uh and uh so we will be leaving uh one week from today sun next Sunday morning, uh june seventh we,'ll be leaving Omaha, driving to uh Cheyenne, um and uh and then on to um Salt Lake City, Ontario, Oregon, and finishing up in Portland uh with about uh twelve or thirteen dogs this time. Uh we've so far we've transported eighty-eight dogs over the last four years. Um and this time is going to be a little different uh because we're doing it all with a fleet of electric vehicles. Oh cool. So we've got a Cadillac Esalcade IQ, a Lucid Gravity, a Hyundai Ionic 9, and a Kia EV9. And uh Are the car makers providing those vehicles? Yeah, they're they're loaning us the vehicles. Uh EVGo is uh is sponsoring pro theyvid'ingre us with free charging at uh pilot uh travel pilot flying j travel centers uh which there's a whole string of them all the way along I eighty uh and there I mean there's there's actually a lot of a lot more DC fast charging stations popping up this year, even with the uh the federal government trying to pull back and kill this stuff. Uh there was a thousand new DC fast charging stations that launched uh in the first quarter of this year. Uh so we will I will I will be driving that Cadillac from here from my home out to Omaha uh starting on Friday afternoon. So be going about twenty seven hundred miles to transp Where can we learn more about uh this year's last year's operation Frodo? Yeah, so this is this is the main site animal rescue rigs. Okay. Um and there will you know you you'll find stuff on here um and you'll find stuff on social media from um uh from all of the participants so just look around on instagram and blue sky and and elsewhere uh there's some some people will be posting on Facebook. Um and uh our the longer term goal uh we're you know raising a fund to purchase and equip vehicles to put with uh shelters and rescue organizations around the country so that they can transport animals whenever they need to rather than just waiting on us to do it a couple of times a year. Yeah. Um and so, you know, you can there's a donate button on the site on animal Rcuese Rigs, you can make donations there um as we uh as we build up this fund uh and continue uh rescuing dogs. That is that is so great. And you can also you can yeah, you can also donate to uh some of the specific uh uh rescue organizations that we work with. And we've had makers for doing this. That is a good idea Very cool. Uh Subaru's always been a big supporter of uh Yes, because everybody who has a Subaru has a dog. I've noticed that. But Toyota's Toyota's a big supporter. Hyundai and Kia are really big supporters. They they've helped us out on pretty much every one of these drives. That's cool. And this is the first time with GM and with Lucid participating. What are you going to be driving? But then once we get to Omaha we'll be over the four days of the trip we will be rotating through uh all four vehicles that we've got. So I'll spend some more time in the escalade, but I'll be able to Is it all be is it all Beagles? I see a lot of Beagles. Yeah, so the the the organization in Omaha is the Bassett and Beagle Rescue of uh of the Heartland. Uh so it's mostly Beagles uh or Beagle mixes. Uh and the the reason why why uh why there's a lot of beagles, um Nick Miles, who started this whole thing uh four and a half years ago, um one of his dogs, a beagle, died and he got connected with uh Bassett and Beagle rescue the Heartland and um he was wanted to adopt one of their dogs. And he found out that there was a real surplus of of beagles, especially in the fall, uh in the midwest, because what happened what happens is hunters uh at the end of hunting season, the dogs that aren't doing the trick for them, they will just abandon them or shoot them. Um, and then puppy mills that were you know, if they don't sell the pumps by the time they're about four months old. They want to get rid of them, so they ha there's a surplus of them in that part of the country. And they need to demand them in Washington State. There's a demand for them in the Pacific Northwest people. There's not there's not very many of them that you can find. So uh we work with the Penaluma on your way, would you? 'Cause beagles. I would love a beagle. Yeah. We can make that ears. Yeah. They got really good ears. Yeah. There's a remarkable sort of like dog distribution system throughout the United States. Yeah. They do the same thing from the south to the north and with with so much you know with so much of the bad stuff that we like what we've talked about today. Something happened it feels so good to do something positive. You know, and we all get we get really attached to these dogs after four days. I bet you do. But uh Robbie Robbie Baldwin's gonna be with us. He's gonna be one of our drivers this time. Wheel bearings, your podcast. Yeah. So so watch out for watch out for Operation Frodo on social media next week. Uh Clyde, uh my friend Paul uh adopted Clyde in December. He fell in love with Clyde. Clyde's adorable. Clyde is uh a a is uh uh a beagle and border collie mix. Oh boy. That's an interesting mix. Yeah, he's he's a sweetie. That's an interesting mix. Oh look at these sweeties . I love that. Well, have fun on your drive. That is really, really yeah. I'm looking forward to it. It should should be great. And uh and you know, we'll be writing stories about the the trip and I'll be doing a story for greencars.com on road tripping across the country with EVs. Uh so there'll be lots of interesting stories coming out of this over the next few weeks. It's a great beagle migration. Yeah. Thank you, Sam and Bull Samut. And of course, wheelbearings.media is this podcast. Uh thanks to all three of you. Really great show. Really, really appreciate it. We do twit every Sunday afternoon. And you know, I love doing this because I get to talk to smart people about what's going on in the world. I hope you enjoy the show. You can watch us do it live if you want from two to five PM Pacific, five to eight Eastern or 2100 UTC. Uh if you're in the club, of course, club members get to watch special uh access behind the Velvet Rope in our club Twit Discord . But uh we also stream it on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. You can s watch and chat with us from two to five Pacific every Sunday. After the fact you can download the show. We have audio and video available at our website, twit.tv. There is a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in tech. Great way to share clips. And of course best way to get any of the shows on the Twit Network is to subscribe. Just find your favorite podcast client. We're in all of them. And search for Twit. Pick the shows you want. Get them automatically as soon as we're done. And if you like the show, leave us a good review because that helps spread the word. We've been doing this for a long time, and I thank everybody uh for your support over these twenty-one years. A special thanks to our club members who really make this possible. They they uh they cover the costs. Advertising helps but it,'s the club members that that get us to the uh to pay everybody who's you know working on the staff people like Benito and uh and Kevin King will be editing the show. We appreciate your support. Twit.tv slash club twit if you're a member you'd like Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. And as I've been saying, for 21 years, smile for the camera. Another twit is in the can. Take a picture of them. Right there. That one. This is amazing

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