A (2:36)

Nice to see you.

D (2:37)

Yeah. Not. And you know, born in New Zealand, grew up in Canada. So all Commonwealth, all the time.

A (2:43)

All commonwealth except for me. I am the rebel, son.

D (2:47)

You're the rebel?

A (2:48)

Yeah. We had to split off and we're sorry about that now. And can we come back, please.

C (2:53)

Well, I was chatting to somebody about that and it's just like, yes, rejoin under the British monarchy. Oh, Prince Andrew. No, never mind, never mind.

A (3:00)

He's not a prince, let's be clear. Was.

C (3:02)

Oh, yes, well, no, they're gradually cutting his name down. So he lost his titles, then he lost his home. And it's just like there was a British comedian called Mark Steele who was just like, eventually in about a month or two, it's gonna be. Oi, Andy, you wanke done to you wanker. Get out of here.

A (3:20)

The story we don't usually talk about Meta on this show because Meta really has become kind of legacy company to some degree. Although Instagram's still going strong, WhatsApp is used all over the world, is probably the preferred messaging platform in most of the world, except, you know, the US and China. But they are facing, I guess, I don't know, hard times. Meta, we are seeing is planning massive layoffs. As AI counts, costs mount. This is from Reuters. Reuters says they're going to shrink meta by 20%. Yeah, that is.

C (4:02)

Those data centers don't pay for themselves.

A (4:04)

Yeah, they say they're going to spend 600 billion for data centers by 2028. So yeah, you got to pay for it somehow.

C (4:14)

Well, I got a disturbing email this week from a software engineer, not at Meta, but a similar company who was saying basically for the last six months he's been instructed to use AI tools and they've been recording his prompts and his actions. And now they've outsourced his job to two lower grade engineers using the information that he was forced to give them. And I think that's the way it's going. And Meta will do the same.

A (4:41)

We're hearing this story in a lot of places. In fact, friends of mine who are in fact training their replacements instead of a worker from China or in India, it's an AI.

B (4:51)

Yeah, well, and I mean Met has been hiring AI talent from everywhere, right?

A (4:57)

Yeah, that's not working out so good, is it?

B (4:59)

But also that's where all the money's going. Right. So it makes sense they have to lay off other people because they're spending so much money on, on the AI talent. And then this, what was it about? Through two years ago they did like three or four hu rounds of cuts.

A (5:14)

So yeah, 11,000 two years ago, 10,000 last.

D (5:18)

Yeah, these weren't actually cuts per se because they never stopped hiring, which is weird. We looked at Microsoft's annual report for last fiscal and they, they laid off 30,000 and they hired 30,000. So the total net employment was the

B (5:35)

same, but they're hiring for different roles. Right. So, yeah, that's a great question.

D (5:40)

Whether that's true or not or is it just. You only hear about the layoffs and those are good for the stock price

A (5:47)

and that it did acquire two engineers. The, the guys who did Malt book about the whole. They got the whole thing. Actually. What's the only thing that bothered me about that is Ben Parr is one of the two guys. Ben's been on this show many times. I love Ben. Ben's an old friend. I didn't know he did malt book. I would have had, I would have had him talking about that. But anyway, so congratulations, Ben and his partner Mark.

D (6:13)

But isn't the bigger arc on this meta layoff that all of the Magnificent Seven are off so far this year to the tune of a trillion dollars?

A (6:22)

Yeah, but there's an upside to them. Meta on Thursday, according to the New York Times, has decided to delay the release of its latest model, Avocado.

C (6:33)

God, why do they get these names?

B (6:36)

Well, Avocado, it's got to be perfect, right? There's only a moment where it's just ripe enough.

A (6:41)

Oh, apparently it's not ripe enough in this case. So they're going to take the seed out, they're going to, they're going to put it in a glass with toothpicks and maybe another one will grow. Actually, if you want Avocado, there is there. Chipotle has an AI they call something like Avocado. And somebody discovered that it's probably Claude in the background because they gave it a. They said, can you write a python? After asking it for menu recommendations, could you write a python program for me? And it did.

B (7:14)

The Chipotle AI, yes.

C (7:17)

Oh, God, yes.

B (7:18)

On its website, Salsa.

A (7:21)

Yes. So that's something you probably should be aware of. If you're going to use an AI on your website. You might want to, you know, like limit the questions,

B (7:30)

put some guardrails up. Just a few.

A (7:32)

Just a few.

D (7:33)

I don't know if you noticed this when you fire up a lot of web based LLMs right now. They do a lot of. Are you a human validation these days?

C (7:41)

Right, yeah.

D (7:42)

So clearly they're dealing with exactly that problem.

A (7:44)

Captures, please.

D (7:46)

They're high because the bots are hijacking these free LLMs.

A (7:50)

Right, right, right. Meanwhile, of course, Metazon trial, that big case in San Francisco on addiction, the case that Snapchat and TikTok settled out of. But Meta and YouTube are still fighting. And actually it went to the jury on Friday.

C (8:08)

That's going to be really interesting.

B (8:10)

Yeah, the exact same thing Ian said.

C (8:13)

No, no, no. I mean, I'm sorry, Zuckerberg on the stand looked really, really uncomfortable.

A (8:19)

Yeah.

C (8:20)

And it's like, have you actually built your platform wherein dopamine hits? We're obviously not going to say that, but that's what it is. So a jury trial, that's gonna be really interesting.

A (8:35)

I imagine the jury is probably not sitting during the weekend, but I mean, they went out on Friday, so it should be. Closing statements went on Thursday. Actually, it's in Los Angeles. The plaintiff is a 20 year old woman who said she was hooked early on to social media and as a result has had miserable, a miserable life. Which, by the way. Okay, excuse me, I'm sorry you had a terrible life, but really, you're blaming social media for that? Seems a little far fetched to me. I think the real question the jury has to answer is, is there such a thing as social media addiction? Is that even a thing, Ryan?

C (9:13)

Definitely a thing.

D (9:14)

Paralyzing this with the smoking addictions. And it also took out 20 years for the first cases to really start showing up saying this is intentional. And it led to the discovery that eventually found, you know, proved that the companies knew and optimized the product for addiction.

A (9:30)

Right.

D (9:31)

And we have that same evidence coming out of Facebook.

C (9:33)

Yeah, absolutely.

A (9:36)

The. The 20 year olds both defendants and plaintiff appointed. This is from AP to a turbulent home life or the woman. Her attorneys say she was preyed upon as a vulnerable user. And there's a lot of smoking guns, email evidence that they kind of did prey upon people. You know, they were trying to make them, they were trying to make their site sticky. But I mean, who isn't right? I wish this show were stickier.

C (10:03)

But there was that case about 10, 10 years ago where academics did a paper on how Facebook could change people's opinion based on the newsfeed that they got in. And there were two scientific papers on this and then Facebook immediately retracted them. Facebook as it was then. You know, this definitely has an. Their entire business model is built around it. So, yeah, put it up in court. The tobacco thing is exactly on point.

A (10:30)

Yeah. But you can say there's a direct link between smoking and cancer that's evident. It's much harder to prove that. In fact, both sides, you know, admit that she had difficult home life before she started using social media media. And the defense said that she turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism. To escape her mental health struggles.

B (10:58)

So it seems like from what I've been reading from our reporting, and we've got a reporter there at the trial and she was saying that they. Basically the only thing they have to prove here is that the products did cause some form of meaningful harm, which is not a huge leap, especially when you're able to examine the, as you mentioned at the top, the kind of. The dopamine hit the, the algorithms that are pushing forward, keeping you on there, not necessarily to try and make you happier, but to do whatever it does to pull you in. And that is the. I think that's the key. It's the algorithms, like, is it the algorithms that are actually causing harm by pulling you down into whatever rabbit hole? But how do you prov.

A (11:46)

That harm? I don't understand how you put.

B (11:47)

Well, and that's going to be the challenge. But one of the, the piece that we have on the verge that our reporter Lauren Fino, who's there, she said the entire courtroom. So there's like tickets that you can get to get into one of the 15 public seats in the courtroom.

A (12:05)

That's how much people want to see this. Wow.

B (12:08)

The entire courtroom outside was full of parents whose children have been meaningfully, they believe have been meaningfully harmed by social media. Either they committed suic. There was an instance of one girl who was able to get like fentanyl laced pills off. She didn't know it was fentanyl.

A (12:25)

That's different. Yeah, that's definitely liability. If you're buying fentanyl on Facebook. Yeah, that's liability.

B (12:33)

But the point here, what's so interesting is there are so many parents that have experienced something that's caused significant harm to their children through social media. And it's, it's a fascinating debate to sort of be like, well, how much of this is down to the individual? How much of this is down to what the platform is feeding them? And is the platform making it worse? And if the platform is making it worse, can you prove that that is meaningful harm? And if this, I mean, it's going to be a landmark case either way, I would say, I think even if there is not a very good resolution, the fact that it's getting this attention and that people are actually, you know, finally focusing on what, what social media is doing, is it bad? You know, is it causing harm? It's conversations we've been needing to have for a long time. And I feel like we talk about it every time I come on the show, Leo, but it's not There in the broader, you know, consciousness. I don't think, and I think this is going to push it there. I mean, I have two kids who grew up, so I have a 15 and an 18 year old. And so, you know, they were right on the sort of cusp as where social media became sort of all encompassing. That's the way children communicate to some extent. And when you, when you look through the issues that some people sort of say, well, some social media is actually good because it does have, it's a good way of connecting. It's a good way for people to find their group. It's like back to the old, you know, chat rooms. You know, I, I remember on Oscar night 20 years ago, 30 years ago, sitting up with, in a chat room with Titanic fans because Titanic was up for the Oscars and it was like, you know, the Internet lets you connect with your, with your, you know, your people. But once they've grabbed you these platforms, if they're trying without, without, without any care for what cause, what, what harm it might cause to suck you in and keep you there, that to me feels like a step too far. And that's like with, with, with the tobacco companies. You know, they knew their product was addictive and you know, it do, does Facebook does matter know its product was addictive and did it keep making it more addictive and that causes meaningful harm? I mean that. You're right, Leo. It's a hard one to prove, but it's an interesting one to talk about.

A (14:54)

Yeah. And of course the next, the next industry that's going to be challenged about this is AI because this, there are already trials and there will be many, many more from parents who I, and look, my heart goes out to these parents and to the, the kids. Nobody's saying that these children aren't hurting. I think there's a lot of reasons that young people might be hurting these days. But you know, everybody who creates an entertainment is trying to make it sticky. If you binge a Netflix, and this was one of the arguments of the defense lawyers, if you binge a Netflix, actually I think it was Adam Mosseri of Instagram. If you binge at Netflix, you know, they want you to watch that, you know, as to your detriment, to the point where you don't eat. They're trying to make something that's really compelling. But is that, is that a cause for mental illness and is it, are you liable for the damage that it causes? I don't know. I mean, Netflix video games, remember that people were saying the Same about World of Warcraft.

E (16:00)

Well, Facebook claims they're not a publisher, though, so they're not making any of this stuff. So they're not responding.

A (16:05)

I think there's no question Facebook's liable

D (16:08)

because

A (16:10)

the only argument is whether that caused harm. It's clear that Facebook is more than a publisher. Any company that has an algorithm that surfaces. If you just publish stuff in a chronological order, then you're a publisher. Yeah, but they don't.

D (16:23)

You know, the first step, again, I'm going to use the smoking parallel again. The first steps that happened with the smoking thing was age limiting. You had to be a certain age to be able to buy cigarettes. You know that that was the progression. So, you know, here we are at the beginning of this and there, you know, that now the argument will be it's a case of harm, but only for minors. So we'll put an age gate on.

A (16:43)

You could make the case that sugary cereals have killed many people. You have.

D (16:48)

And that litigation's flirting around out there.

A (16:51)

I guess.

D (16:52)

Yeah.

A (16:53)

But I mean, I, I feel for the parents. I feel like they're looking for a

B (16:56)

scapegoat is what I. I think there is enough evidence out there that social media has caused harm for, especially for younger people because, you know, they're not there. Their brains are not fully developed. That impulse control, that addiction focus is much. Yeah. And you know, there is, of course there's an onus on the parents too. But also a lot of parents of this generation weren't really aware of what was, of how powerful this was. So I agree, it seems like, you know, okay, Netflix, we all want to binge watch, you know, the next season of Stranger Things. But it's a different interaction from sitting and watching a TV show, which something you may do with your family, to interacting with your friends and people like you and your peers on a social media and seeing the way you're supposed to be theoretically. And that's what's causing in many ways, I think the long. We've seen a huge spike in depression for adolescent, especially adolescent girls. I mean, Instagram was famously, has been very bad for body image for teenage girls. And there have been lots of studies about that. And you know, magazines in the 80s and 90s, those were really bad for body image for teenage girls. But there was something different about having magazines on a stand versus having a small device that you're lying in bed with and like consuming that's continually sending you data and making you feel worse. And I think the key thing, and this Is because I'm a journalist is curation and being an editorializing. So you know, a magazine or a Netflix show, you've got people creating the content and having some sort of human input. Whereas with social media, the algorithms and you know, just anyone, anyone out there can throw whatever they want up there. It just feels so much less curated, so much less careful. I mean there are problems with stuff on tv, but we have age limits on TV shows too. Right. That's one of the ways that we're supposed to help not damage our children by showing them. I watched Silence the Lambs when I was far too young and I've never recovered.

C (19:11)

I watched Jaws at the cinema. Yes.

B (19:14)

I just feel like we don't. Because we, we sort of dismiss social media because it's is so many different things. Right. It's not really just one like Netflix shows you movies and TV shows, but social media shows you everything. And it's overwhelming. And I, I think that the problem comes down to the algorithms. And this is something that we see throughout the Internet. Right. We've seen many tech companies be approached. You know, I think YouTube was. Are they still in the case about the algorithm for YouTube where that was it caused terrorism? I don't know. Did that one get dismissed? But there's, I don't know, there's a lot of these that comes down to the algorithm, which is where the computer is deciding what you should watch and that's taking the human element out and

A (19:59)

that's where the algorithms are problematic. But McDonald's designs its food to be as addictive as possible and it, and you could probably make the argument Dunkin Donuts have killed more people than. Well, no, but I mean, I mean are they liable. Should McDonald's be liable because they made their food, they made Happy Meals and they addicted children and, and those children suffer from obesity and later illnesses as a result, with a higher mortality. Should we go after McDonald's? Is that similar, I have to say,

C (20:29)

looking at that new burger? Why not?

B (20:33)

McDonald's isn't in your face all the time.

A (20:35)

Sure it is. It's appetizing like crazy.

B (20:38)

Yeah, but you're not get. You're not. You don't have access. Access to it 24 7. Especially if you're a 15 year old girl. Right. You're not. Unless you live around the corner from McDonald's. I suppose.

D (20:47)

Yeah.

E (20:47)

Your phone's not giving you a burger every five.

A (20:51)

Yeah. Well then, then you should.

C (20:55)

I mean Jennifer is a parent. It's. This is what really worries me about Social media is that the kids can't escape it. It used to be if you got bullied at school, you went out of school and then you went home and you had lived your own life with social media. It's in your face 24 7. And it. It does seem to cause harm. I'd be curious on your insight on that.

A (21:16)

Seem is the problem, by the way.

B (21:17)

Yeah, it's hard to prove. Yeah. I mean, and individuals like, you know, that people may be predisposed to depression and it creates more of, you know, it can pull you further down into that or you may have been completely well adjusted and then you get cyber bullied by people in your school. I mean, my daughter's school has like a online burn book on Instagram, you know, which is horrific. I don't let my daughter anywhere near Instagram. But yeah, there's.

A (21:45)

That was that Netflix show Adolescence. Right. That was. That was why that grabbed people, because that was what that was about.

B (21:51)

That's what we're seeing. And yeah, it's also one of the things, you know, outside of the algorithm side is you. I. I was reading a story recently where someone was talking to. It was a teacher, and they were talking about like at recess or when the bell rings, you know, 20 years ago, the. The halls would be so loud, you could barely hear yourself talking. Everyone's playing, chatting, talking. And now it's quiet because as soon as people get out of the classroom, they look on their phone. So that, yeah, real, you know, social media is taking away real socialization in real life. Socialization. I mean, and that's caused. That's one of the issues causing a lot of harm. And, you know, Covid compounded it because kids were literally not allowed to hang out with their friends for over a year.

A (22:37)

That could be. I mean, Covid. There's a lot of reasons a kid might be depressed now that I think are legitimate.

B (22:46)

Yeah.

A (22:47)

I think the pro. My problem is you can prove a causal relationship between cigarettes and cancer. That's very clear. It's much more difficult to prove that causal relationship with social media. It's one of those things that feels like it's bad for it seems like it's bad. We kind of all agree. Yeah, it must be bad. But there. It's very hard to demonstrate the causal relationship.

B (23:08)

Yeah.

A (23:08)

And I worry because. Well, we'll find out. This trial.

C (23:12)

This is why I think a jury trial.

B (23:13)

Interesting. Yeah.

C (23:15)

Yeah. I mean, this is why I think a jury trial is fascinating for this because you actually get input from people at the Sharp end. You know, it's not. Yes. I mean, there are long arguments about whether or not tobacco causes cancer. And then it was finally proved. When it comes to social media, it's much more fluid. But having a jury trial and having people whose kids and relatives have been involved in this, I think that's going to be a very interesting result.

A (23:41)

Well, we'll find out. I think we'll find out this week. And I think both YouTube and Meta are watching with great interest to see what happens. And you can tell, I mean, the fact that Snapchat and TikTok settled out short right before the trial tells you they had some real concerns about their liability. Let's take a little break. We have more stuff. Is that one of your house is at your house talking to you?

B (24:05)

Someone just rang.

A (24:06)

Someone's at the doorbell.

B (24:07)

Sorry.

A (24:09)

You know, you now have all those interesting voices with Alexa. You did not like Alexa. Jenna.

B (24:14)

Sassy, sassy voice.

A (24:15)

I picked sassy voice. Lisa loves sassy. She loves it. Like we'll say set a five minute timer for broccoli and then it comes five minute timer for broccoli. Oh, that's gonna be delicious. Or it should be done just right. And it's like, oh. And then Lisa, I know to me it's like, really? But Lisa goes, oh. And she says, thank you, Alexa. You're very welcome. They have a conversation.

B (24:40)

Yeah, I, yeah, I'm excited about this new Sassy because I was getting really fed up with the new Alexa.

A (24:46)

Plus, yeah, there's sweet.

B (24:47)

Sweet and the sweet. Yeah. And like I would be like, add peanut butter to the shopping list. Oh, you're going to be making some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Those

A (24:57)

Moon Alice

C (25:00)

also as, say as a Brit, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is horrible. I don't know why this from a

A (25:07)

guy so much who eats Marmite. Okay, yeah, but love Marmite.

B (25:12)

But I also B and J, so. But that's because I'm American and British.

A (25:17)

Julia Child said, it's the perfect sandwich. The sweet, nutty flavor of the peanut butter combined. I mean the nutty, salty flavor of the peanut butter combined. The sweet fruity flavor of the jelly on the crisp toast. It's perfect. Said Jules.

C (25:30)

I'm sorry. Marmite and cheese sandwich. That's the way to go.

D (25:35)

That's as British as it gets.

A (25:36)

It is a little too much umami for me, baby. Let's take a little break. When we come back. But you know, I like it that we can argue over that. That's better to argue over than Social media, it's less consequential anyway. Yeah, it'd be very. It's going to be very interesting to see what the results of this trial are and this resonance also.

C (25:57)

Zuckerberg looks so uncomfortable on the stand. Well, you know who else almost broke a sweat when does it, you know, else looks uncomfortable?

A (26:04)

The Doge boys in their depositions. We'll talk about the Doge depositions. And just rhythmic Boy, boy, was that revelatory. Immediately pulled down. But too bad. Once it's on the Internet, it lives forever.

C (26:19)

404 did a really good write up of this. They sat through six hours of Doge testimony and I would highly recommend reading that.

A (26:27)

Save it. Anyway, we'll talk about it because I think it's important, but we will talk about that. Great show. Great panel. Already kicking things off, getting a little feisty. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy from the Verge. Ian Thompson, great to have you with your new column at techfinitive, the Letter From America to. But it's really not to Brits, right? I mean, it's to everybody.

C (26:51)

Well, yes, but it's a primarily British site. But at the same time, I think things need explaining to the rest of the world because we're in a very weird place in America.

A (27:01)

I hope you could explain it to Americans. To be honest. I'd like to know. I'd like to understand. We're on the site. Where can I find that letter to America? I'm at the techfinder.

C (27:12)

Yeah. If you just go to mode to my name on the. Just put IAI n. And that's your.

A (27:19)

That's the problem. Yeah, There you go. Ian Thompson's Letter from America in the. In the style of Alistair Tommy Cook.

C (27:29)

America is a very strange place at the moment. So, yeah, the more we explain that the better.

A (27:34)

Yeah.

C (27:35)

Because it's losing soft power.

A (27:36)

I think that picture says it all right there. That's the.

C (27:39)

Oh, God, that was so humiliating to have him. You know, I did love that his son wiped a bogey on the side of the presidential desk and it was just like, wow, this is how, you

A (27:52)

know, Trump had the Resolute desk removed, steamed and disinfected immediately after. All right, let's take a little break and we will come back with those. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Richard Campbell also here. So nice to have him from Run As Radio and of course, the wonderful Windows Weekly every Wednesday on this very channel. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN. Now, going online without ExpressVPN would be like, I don't know, leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop. Everyone needs ExpressVPN because every time you connect to an unencrypted network at that coffee shop, at a hotel, mine is the airport. I always want that free SFO wi fi and I always go, no, your online data is not secure. Any hacker in the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. And by the way, they are. And send it to. Every time I'm at the airport, free SFO wi fi. I fire up ExpressVPN and now I feel like I can use it with impunity. ExpressVPN is the one I use. It's the best VPN out there. It's the only one I recommend because they really are committed. They go the extra mile to keep your privacy private. I use it whenever I travel, to keep up on my shows, to watch football. It's the best VPN. ExpressVPN is super secure. It'd take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past their ExpressVPN encryption. It works on all devices, phones, laptops, tablets. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twitt that's E-X P-R-E-S-S VPN.com twit and find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com twit Speaking of Trump, apparently the Trump administration is saying we want $10 billion for brokering the TikTok deal.

C (29:57)

For brokering it for brokerage.

A (30:02)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, now it doesn't, I presume it doesn't go into Trump's pocket. This goes to the treasury or his

C (30:09)

Kuwaiti bank account, but I wouldn't assume anything, really.

A (30:13)

Maybe I shouldn't. In the US version of TikTok, including Oracle and Silverlake, agreed to pay the government $10 billion for making them that deal. And you know what? They did pay well below what I think everybody considers market value for tick tock for the U.S. operations.

C (30:35)

I mean, 10 years ago, Leo, I was on the show and I got an awful lot of flack for saying that America has legalized bribery and called it campaign contributions. But in the last couple of years, so old fashioned.

D (30:48)

Wow.

A (30:49)

It's not even campaign anymore. You got a hole in the east wing. Hey, come on, poor stuff some money into it.

C (30:55)

Yeah, let's buy your crypto coin. Let's, you know, it's just, it's just.

D (30:59)

Would you like an airplane? We can hook you up with an.

C (31:03)

I wrote a whole article about that. They're gonna have to strip that plane down to the bare bones to make sure there's, you know, it's gonna cost

A (31:10)

them billions to make it into. Yeah, that's not gonna save anybody any money, let's put it that way. To make it into Air Force One.

C (31:17)

It's a gift, you know, or a bribe, whatever you want to call it. As I say, I'm going for citizenship, so I love our maximum leader, Donald Trump, but at the same time, for goodness sake.

A (31:28)

Wall street journal says the $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for the government helping a transaction.

C (31:34)

Nearly.

A (31:35)

Nearly. But many point out that the $14 billion these companies paid for the US version of TikTok was well below what its actual value is. Oh, and by the way, they also have to share profits with ByteDance, which owns 19.999%. So it's not even out of the hands of Chinese investors really.

C (32:03)

Or Chinese security company infrastructure.

A (32:07)

It seems like it's the same old TikTok. Even the algorithm doesn't seem to have changed. Any thoughts on that?

B (32:11)

I seem to get the same thing a lot more often, but they're like, like repeated videos. Like it's almost like there's less. Less content. I'm not a huge tick tock user though, but maybe that's why I don't get much new stuff. But yeah, I. I feel like every time I open the app I get. I'm getting the same things often, which. Yeah, but other than. I mean, there was quite a lot of chatter right after the launch, like the switch over that there was significant issues and it didn't seem right. But it. Other than that, I mean, the content I see is what I know what I would expect to see. I just keep seeing the same thing over and over again, which is good for me because it means I turn

A (32:51)

it off that the ten bears will be spent on floor shimes for all

E (32:58)

floor.

B (32:58)

What?

A (33:00)

The president gave Marco Rubio some floor shines, I think.

C (33:04)

Oh, the shoes.

B (33:05)

Yes.

D (33:06)

Okay.

A (33:06)

And they were a little big.

C (33:08)

So embarrassed.

A (33:08)

They were kind of like clown shoes.

E (33:10)

The whole cabinet, by the way. Oh, the whole cabinet has to wear cabinets.

D (33:14)

Yeah.

C (33:15)

Grief. I mean, I'm sorry. How low yourself. We were talking about social media, lowering self esteem, having to wear outsized shoes just to do your job. That's a real lowering of self esteem. It really is.

B (33:29)

It is.

A (33:29)

You know what, it's a real power move, isn't It. I'm gonna give you some shoes. Make sure you wear those. Now, it's what Tony said.

D (33:39)

Buy the same shoes but the right size. Like he's not gonna live that close.

C (33:44)

Well, J.D. vance told an interesting story where Trump asked a Marco Rubio what his shoe size was and he said it's seven and then made a joke about shoe size relating to.

A (33:57)

Yeah, it is very small. I might add a seven.

D (34:01)

Which is, which is a line that Rubio used in 2015.

C (34:06)

That's one of the hand size thing.

D (34:08)

Yeah, that's it.

A (34:09)

This guy's. It's a level.

C (34:12)

It's high school. It's really high school. This is not what you expect from your government. I mean, okay, British politics is bad, but it's not this bad.

A (34:24)

Pierce Starmer, really. Nigel Farage, but Nigel Farage, Boris with the hair.

B (34:32)

Oh God, I used to work with Boris.

A (34:35)

Did you really? Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, Prime Minister, funny hair. He seemed like he was actually a sweet guy, even though he's with a. What do you think?

B (34:45)

Yeah, I mean I, I was a lowly sort of intern. I worked at the Telegraph when he was at the Telegraph. So I, I only crossed paths with him a couple times. But he's. He's very funny, actually. Very smart.

A (34:56)

He seemed very personal.

B (34:57)

Really smart. Yeah, yeah. And that. But. Yeah, but going into politics will, you

A (35:03)

know, make you crazy. He's a unique though British politician, isn't he? There's very thing.

B (35:10)

Yes.

D (35:11)

Everybody loved him when he was mayor of London. Right?

B (35:13)

Yeah, yeah, very popular. It's kind of the Rudy Giuliani of a view of the uk.

D (35:18)

Like kind of the same.

B (35:19)

Yeah, the other way.

C (35:25)

Sorry, I do love the anecdote. Sorry, yeah, no, I mean I do love the anecdote that he. His hair was perfectly done and he went out to a press conference. He was. Hang on a second. Rough it all up and then went out there. It's a very carefully curated image.

A (35:39)

It's a look.

C (35:40)

But yeah, he was great as matters of London in terms of. Because London's getting a lot of stick at the moment as being a crime ridden hellhole, despite the fact that we've got a lower murder rate than pretty much every American city. But Boris actually boosted London and you've got too many people just going, oh, London, it's crime, it's terrible. You know, But Boris actually did a lot for the capital, just not a

B (36:07)

lot for the country.

C (36:08)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a great prime minister, a great leader.

A (36:13)

She was at Twitter when Jack decided he wanted to Do a little research project on kind of open social networks, funded something that ended up becoming Blue Sky. Jay Graeber took the helm. She was CEO, so she's now stepping down at Blue Sky. She's going to be the Chief Innovation Officer. But there's the. The. One of the investors is going to become temporarily the CEO, Tony Schneider, but they are going to do a CEO search.

C (36:48)

I do hope they don't ruin Blue sky because.

B (36:50)

Is that everyone's favorite now or where are you all? What's your favorite ex. Twitter.

C (36:56)

Richard is shaking his head at this one.

D (36:59)

Yeah, like there's a favorite there. You know, I get a lot of the tech crowds on Blue sky, and so I get strong responses for when I'm talking about podcasts there. The real weird, geeky guys are on Mastodon, but they're the only ones who can figure out how to do it.

A (37:16)

Yeah, we run a Mastodon instance Twitter social, which you're all invited to join. And I love Mastodon. I'm a big fan of the idea of federation. I'm going to admit. Kind of a dirty little secret, though, because when Elon bought Twitter, I got off of it immediately because I really realized that it was going to go downhill and he fired everybody and all sorts of technical issues happened. And then, of course, the Nazis came in and he brought back a lot of people who really should not have been brought back. But in this age of AI,

C (37:51)

I

A (37:51)

have to confess, I'm reading Twitter a lot these days. I don't post there, or X. I don't post there. I don't have high hopes for its future. Now that he has X money. You saw that he gave Shatner, like 20 bucks of X money, and Shatner turned it into $200,000 in charity donations because he sold. Apparently, if you give somebody an X money, which it's only in private beta right now, but if you give somebody some money. And Elon, I think elon gave him $42. Right? The magic number. And if you give somebody some money, like if you could get somebody to send you a dollar, if you get Will Shat to send you a dollar, you would now be in the X money beta. So he was auctioning off a dollar at a time. Elon's $42 raised $200,000 for charity. So I think that's actually pretty sharp. That's pretty good. Anyway, I. It's my dirty little secret is that I do now check because it's a. It is where all the AI Bros go. And it's one Way to keep up. I think maybe the best way to keep up with what's going on in a very fast moving arena.

C (39:00)

I mean, in one way it's good. And you've got a competitive, competitive social

A (39:05)

media, no winner anymore. There is no favor, right?

C (39:08)

It used to be just Twitter. Now you've got Blue sky, you've got Mastodon, you've got to an extent Reddit and a bunch of other songs.

A (39:16)

Well, you know what you don't have anymore? Dig.

C (39:20)

Oh God, this was hilarious. Please go on.

A (39:24)

So, you know, I have a little bit of a, you know, dog in this hunt because Kevin Rose, I worked with him of course at Tech tv and he started Dig kind of when he was there in the Dig Nation podcast. And in some ways I feel responsible for the death of Dig because I was encouraging him to make the changes that ended up becoming Digg 4.0, which turned out to make Digg be the most gamble thing in the world. Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman came along and said we could do a better Dig and created Reddit. Digg died because it was being gamed so badly. Reddit won, in effect. But Kevin and oddly enough, Alexis Ohanian, Reddit's founder, restarted Digg and they've been public for a few months. They're shutting it down again because they say it's being gamed by bots.

B (40:17)

Wow.

A (40:19)

The same reason it shut down last time. Two months after their highly anticipated return, Digg announced the site's going offline as a result of a, quote, unprecedented bot problem. They're going to rejigger it. They thought that AI would solve this, that AI would keep the bots off. But what they underestimated was as they did last time, was how incentive the bots are. And they're using AI too.

C (40:51)

So they're gonna facing the same problem at the moment. I mean, it is bot infested. There's a Reddit thread I'm on called Ask Brits and you know, there's a conversation about Tesla and we got, I don't know about this. Tesla's really popular in the uk. I bought a Model S the other day and it's really, really good. And then directly beneath it, hi, Tesla is underrated. I bought a Model 3 the other day and it was just like you had to post up bad bot, clumsy.

A (41:22)

There's a lot of it. X says it suspended 800 million accounts in 2024 over spam and 800 million. I remember when Twitter had 350 million total. I think that was when they sold it to elon, it was 350 or 4,800 million more than double. It suspended several hundred million late last year. This is what they told uk. The uk. It's according to the Guardian. That's a problem if you're getting that many bots.

B (41:58)

Kind of ruined all of social media back then.

A (42:00)

They told parliament it was continually fighting state backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network with Russia the most prolific state actor, followed by Iran and China.

D (42:10)

Makes you wonder what the operating sites are doing or not doing.

A (42:16)

Yeah, I mean if. Yes, I mean X has done a lot to try to stop those bots and apparently it's done nothing in fact.

D (42:23)

Well here's the story from wire accusation to the old Twitter board is that they weren't managing bots, that their accounts were.

A (42:30)

That was what his whole thing was.

D (42:33)

That guy, such a bad job, clearly didn't do it.

A (42:37)

Well you could say in his defense they banned 800 million of them now.

C (42:42)

Yeah. And they still allowed Stephen Laxley Yellen to get on, get back on there. But I mean look, look it's, this is a problem with all social media. Bots are everywhere and there needs to be a screening mechanism but no one's come up with one yet.

A (43:02)

Remember of course that the X was home to a lot of non consensual sexual images and got in a lot of trouble all over the world. Was banned in some countries. They claim to have fixed that. Now according to Wired, fake AI content about the Iran war is all over X and, and not only is Grok failing to verify the video correctly, it's creating its own images. They're using Grok to do it. X's AI.

B (43:28)

It's the video game war. I mean, right.

A (43:31)

Well it is. Look at the administration. Horrific horrendous promo videos using video games and movies. I've never seen anything like it.

C (43:43)

I don't know, I mean remember the, the opening stages of Gulf War one where. Yeah. Well when you saw like smart missiles going right down into the bunker and everyone was like this is absolutely amazing. Now it's AI generated and it's deeply disturbing because you know democracy depends on information and if it's when you've got the White House putting out AI generated slope, that's really worrying.

A (44:11)

Well, even more worrying to me is that Pete Hegseth and Department of Defense have shooed out all the real journalists from the Pentagon and the BBC is

C (44:20)

still there, they've still got receipt there

A (44:23)

because it was, you had to sign an agreement saying I'm not gonna say anything bad about the Pentagon to stay foreign.

C (44:28)

They're a foreign press. Sign that it was only domestic. But the BBC did actually hold him to account.

A (44:35)

Good.

C (44:35)

And said, right, okay. You said six months ago that their nuclear capability had been destroyed, and now you're saying it's been destroyed again. Can you expand on that? And it was perfect. British passive aggressive. I did love them dearly for that.

A (44:52)

Well, and Hegseth has excoriated the US Media for telling people bad things about the war. Like, that's their job, dude.

B (45:00)

Yeah. Now, Brendan Carr is threatening to. He's doing his thing where he goes and says things and expects networks to then follow suit without actually doing any regulation. But he has said that he's going to. He's threatening to revoke the licenses of the networks that are portraying the war incorrectly because Trump is.

C (45:21)

Yeah.

B (45:22)

Not.

C (45:22)

That was shameful. Well, I mean, when I saw that, I went back to an article I'd written, what, 10 years ago, where Brendan Carr was kind of like, you know, we need free speech. We need an open platform. And now he's. Now he's in charge. It's just like, yeah, get out.

A (45:38)

You know, we want free speech for us, not you very much.

C (45:43)

Yeah.

D (45:43)

They even did pull a broadcast license. Nobody uses the airwaves anymore. It's.

A (45:48)

Right. It doesn't matter. It's kind of old fashioned anyway.

D (45:51)

I think these are just empty threats because Trump's mad, so he has to make the noise that Trump wants him to make.

B (45:57)

Well, they're not empty, though, because they. What happens is the networks do act on them because they. That's the real problem. It's like, so there's no actual regulation or enforcement happening here. They're just all running scared because their deals aren't going to go through or,

D (46:11)

you know, and the experience is when you run, you run. They come get you again.

B (46:16)

Yeah.

D (46:17)

And when you say come back, they walk away.

C (46:20)

The Mark Carney example. Yeah.

B (46:22)

Yeah.

C (46:23)

I mean, Hex has said the quiet part out loud. Earlier this week he was just like, once Ellison takes over cnn, then we'll see some. And it was just like, wow, you're actually saying that, you know, this is

A (46:37)

how bold they are. They don't have to deny it. They don't have to hide it.

D (46:40)

But it does speak to the idea that if you actually want to have some idea what's going on in the U.S. you don't look at U.S. media.

A (46:46)

Yeah. Well, I'm good to know that the Biebs still has somebody in There, that's.

B (46:51)

Yeah, we've been watching BBC and Sky News now because you can get a feed from both on. I think it's like free as well, like Samsung TV plus or like all the. What are the free TV streaming services that give you all the channels and, and the sky, because the beep's been under a lot of scrutiny recently.

A (47:12)

Yeah, but Rupert Murdoch on Sky, right.

B (47:15)

Yeah. Sky News has always been, I mean, Sky News has always been fairly good. I mean, I don't know, Ian, do

A (47:21)

you ever watch it get F1?

C (47:23)

No, I mean, I, I watch Sky News.

A (47:25)

That's what I care about.

C (47:26)

And I mean, the thing is, Murdoch hasn't taken as heavy a hand with Sky News as he have with. As he has with, for example, the Sun. The sun. He would call the editor every day and discuss what they were going to put on the front page. Sky News has got some really good journalists. They've got some really good coverage.

A (47:43)

Okay. You know the same thing for the Wall Street Journal. You could say the same thing for

D (47:47)

the Wall Street Journal.

A (47:47)

You know, the editorial board might have some slant, but the reporting is very good, the people are very good. There's.

B (47:54)

But it's harder and harder to find news that you feel confident in these days.

A (47:59)

Well, and that's why maybe the real issue with social media is that's where a whole generation gets its news now. I mean, yeah, they get their news from Tick Tock and Instagram and I

C (48:10)

had a bit of a retro moment my age.

B (48:12)

Although they actually get news because I remember being that, never watching the news.

A (48:18)

My daughter says, you know, we, we if she's 32, so she's not quite in that generation, but she says we use TikTok for search. Said you can't use TikTok for sure. She said, well, ask a question. How long is the Golden Gate Bridge? I said, she said, enter it into TikTok and I found it. So you, you actually can use TikTok for search. There's so much content on there. Don't ask it when Tiana comes with

D (48:41)

also, but you do get the answer. Yeah.

A (48:44)

Speaking of problems with Avocado, Meta's AI, Elon Musk has been firing people at Xai, saying it was not built right

C (48:54)

to his satisfaction.

A (48:56)

It's not built right. It's interesting because, you know, ChatGPT, OpenAI and Anthropics Claude are dominating. In fact, the Chinese OpenAI's like deep seek and QN also very, very good. But for some reason Meta and X are having trouble with their AIs getting it to do anything, maybe. The standard is so good, X has been losing people. Of the 12 people who founded the company Xai in 2023 of 12 who founded the company three years ago, only two are left last month. Some significant departures, quite a few. At an all hands meeting last month, Musk said these are deliberate exits. Some people are better suited for the early stages and less suited for the later stages. Electric says this is a problem, you know, so X is making money in one company, Elon's making money in one company, SpaceX. Losing money massively on XAI and losing money on X. So what's the solution? You put them all together and you have a SpaceX stock IPO.

C (50:14)

Ketamine is a hell of a drug.

A (50:16)

Yeah, no kidding.

D (50:17)

But it's also a fairly clever movement. There are none of them are public companies.

A (50:21)

Not now.

D (50:22)

He gets to do what he want. Yeah, he took X private. We took Twitter private when he bought it. Right. So, you know, you don't actually even know the truth, which means it's probably worse than you think, but it's a great way to hide problems, right?

A (50:34)

His whole plan is to take Tesla space, X, xai, X, neuralink the boring company, mush them all into a big ball.

D (50:42)

I don't think he's going to get Tesla in there because Tesla is public. He can't.

A (50:45)

Tesla's public private. That's right, that's right.

D (50:48)

There's much more regulation and trouble around all of that, but he's already munged the rest together.

A (50:53)

He is treating Tesla though as kind of a resource. He's moved AI engineers from Tesla to XAI and so forth.

D (51:01)

He's mostly borrowed against, Right.

A (51:05)

He's deeply leveraged in, which is.

D (51:08)

That's the future of billionaires, right? You only, you just borrow money against your stock so you never have taxes.

A (51:13)

Right.

D (51:14)

It's all, well, until you take your stock price.

C (51:17)

Yeah, I mean, we've seen this also in the rest of the industry where you've got Oracle investing in Nvidia to get, you know, stuff from them. A whole bunch of companies investing Nvidia to.

A (51:28)

And then Nvidia invests back. Because this is exactly.

C (51:31)

It's a massive.

A (51:33)

You buy our chips with our money that we're going to give you.

C (51:36)

Well, exactly. I mean, financially, it's a Chinese military parade of red flags. You would not touch these things. And yeah, it's going to be very interesting to see how that works out.

A (51:46)

Well, tomorrow Nvidia has a big, big shoe. We're going to talk about that in just a little bit. I know you're excited about that and you've been doing some prep work. Ian and I know Richard Campbell will also have things to say about that.

D (51:57)

I said this on Windows Weekly. It's like, wow, you weren't happy selling shovels, so now you're going to go try and get some gold. Really?

A (52:03)

That's right. That's right. Going for the gold. Jennifer Patterson, too. He's also here. We will talk about GTC in just a little bit. This week in Tech, brought to you this week by Modulate. This is actually a really cool company. They started first with video gaming, trying to get the abuse down in video gaming. And now there's. Now they're expanding. Everyday enterprises generate millions of minutes of voice traffic, customer calls, agent conversations, fraud attempts. And most of that audio ends up just being treated like text. It's flattened into a transcript. There's no, you know, tone, intent. The risk even kind of is watered down because it's just words on paper. Modulate exists to change that. They did it in gaming. Their technology supported major players like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. There's also all that voice, right, going on during these massively multiplayer games. They've been using their specially designed AI models to separate playful banter from intentional harm. And they're doing it at scale with millions of players simultaneously. Today, Modulate is also helping enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, understand 20 million minutes of voice every day. Not as a transcript, but listening to, interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world. It's a very special model. It's Modulate's newest elm they call it, and I love the name Velma 2.0. With a little nod, I think just Scooby Doo. Velma. That's the smart one, right? The one with the glasses. Velma is a voice native behavior. This is so cool. It's a voice native behavior aware model that was designed and built to understand real conversations, not just transcripts. It orchestrates 100 plus specialized models, each focused on a different aspect of voice analysis. And the result is you get accurate, explainable insights in real time. You gotta check this out. Velma ranks number one across four key audio benchmarks, beating all large foundation models in accuracy, cost and speed. It's number one in conversation understanding because it's designed to do this right. Number one in transcription accuracy and cost. Number one, you need this in deep fake detection. And number one, this is the one I really am amazed by in emotion detection built on 21 billion minutes of audio. Velma is 100 times faster, cheaper and more accurate than LLMs because it's tuned for this right at understanding speech better than Google, Gemini, OpenAI better than XAI. Most LLMs are a black box. Velma doesn't just assess a conversation as a whole, but breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency. It produces timestamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation. So you can see exactly when the risk is going up, when behavior shifts or the intent changes. You could see it right there. With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks like fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents, and so much more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice native AI model can really do. You know what, you can actually check it out. Go to Modulate's live ungated preview of Velma. It's at Preview modulate AI. That's Preview modulate. To see why Velma ranks number one in leading benchmarks for conversation understanding, deep fake detection and emotion detection. Very cool stuff. Preview.modulate.AI. we are entering very interesting times. I have to say, with. With AI. Very, very interesting times.

C (56:05)

What One of the. The UK is changing the. As the bank of England is changing the faces on banknotes.

A (56:14)

No more Churchill on your banknotes.

C (56:16)

Yeah, but everyone said, oh, that's so woke. But at the same time, they're taking Alan Turing, famous homosexual war hero, off the 50 web note. And I was talking with someone read it about this and it was just like they're putting badges on the notes. It's just like I would pay money to see Alan Turing on the back of a badger. And somebody just created an AI picture of that and posted it up.

A (56:38)

Is it very good?

C (56:40)

It's pretty damn good.

A (56:41)

I like the idea of wildlife on your bills. I think that's kind of neat. And the British bills are very colorful, right? The bank.

C (56:49)

Oh, yeah, we have fun with it. They're quite pretty.

A (56:52)

Here's a.

C (56:52)

Although now you have the Donald Trump dollar coin coming and the. So first sitting president who's actually put his name on the. His face on the currency.

A (57:02)

I think though, to be fair, that isn't intended as regular currency. That is like, you know, a stage special.

C (57:09)

I was gonna say who, who actually uses dollar coins.

A (57:12)

Right.

C (57:12)

I mean, I, I've got very few

A (57:14)

of them sells those. It's more like, you know, New Jersey. Yeah, It's a special thing.

D (57:21)

New Jersey transit uses the. The coin.

A (57:23)

So they're going to put badgers on them.

C (57:26)

They're going to Put a whole bunch of wildlife on them.

A (57:29)

Now King Charles is still on the front, presumably.

C (57:33)

So I haven't held a UK banknote for over two years, so. Jennifer. Sorry.

B (57:38)

Probably got one right here. Actually. I, I was, I was just in Costa Rica and they have animals on their back. I have some. They're beautiful because. And they have like a little thing. This is, this is a uk. This is a British banknote. So there's.

A (57:55)

How pretty that is. There's. There's a QE2.

D (57:57)

Beautiful.

B (57:58)

This is. Who's. I don't know who that is.

A (58:00)

That's Jane Austen. I don't know. No, no. Who is that?

B (58:03)

That's a man.

A (58:04)

It's a guy. Look at our beautiful colorless green banknotes, right?

B (58:11)

Joseph Mallard, William Turner.

A (58:14)

Oh, Joe Turner. Old Joe Turner, sure.

B (58:17)

But the Costa Rican ones, they have like sloths and monkeys and when you put them together like this, they have like a little. I should go get it. It's much better than bending the queen's head. But the flowers come together to form the flower of the region that you're in. It's like, it's really neat, kind of little Easter eg. And their banknotes are like yellow and green and blue and much more colorful than ours. But yeah, I agree, US money is really boring.

A (58:45)

It's really. But let's be fair. Who uses cash anymore? Or do you? I get cash. I go to the bank and get cash. But mostly it's for tips because I

C (58:55)

like to spend cash. Our local Banh Mi place only takes

B (58:59)

cash, but it's getting more expensive.

A (59:01)

That means they're money laundering. You know that, right?

C (59:04)

No, no, I'm sorry. This guy's been doing it for 30 years. He does the best Banh Mi on the planet.

A (59:10)

Well, it's probably worth it.

C (59:11)

It's, it's, it's a Vietnamese guy and he's. It's a family owned business. But they only take cash because why would you pay 2 to 3%.

B (59:18)

Yeah. And it's getting more and more expensive for companies to use, for retailers to use. So like you, when you do see this in LA and California, we see this in the Southeast all the time. You go into a restaurant or a shop and if you pay by card, any card, even debit card, there's a 3% charge on your bill. So that I think will.

A (59:38)

And the merchant pays that. Yeah.

B (59:40)

No, but you, you're paying 3% more.

A (59:42)

You pay it.

B (59:43)

Yes. They're like, if you're gonna pay by card, even debit card, you're building.

A (59:49)

That's a 3% more to say that it's cheaper if you pay cash.

B (59:53)

The gas stations do it too.

A (59:56)

Really?

B (59:56)

Yeah, yeah.

C (59:57)

Oh, yeah. No, if you, if you buy, you know, but if you buy petrol, then it's much. It's. It's significantly cheaper to pay with cash.

E (60:04)

This is how it used to be, though, right? Like the United States, they used to always on the credit charge to the person.

D (60:09)

Right.

E (60:09)

Isn't that how it used to be?

D (60:10)

Yeah, just mark everything up 3%.

A (60:12)

I mean, they, they may be secretly doing that. Yes. But you're supposed to have this. I think maybe I'm wrong, but I think I remember that you were supposed to have the same price for cash or credit, that you weren't supposed to have separate prices.

D (60:23)

I'm just impressed that they do it that way rather than just mark it up and say 3% discount for cash.

A (60:28)

Right.

D (60:28)

Much more positive.

A (60:29)

Yeah, you could do.

D (60:30)

Yeah.

A (60:31)

You know, I don't know what cat gas costs in your foreign lands, but here in California, it is six bucks a gallon in petalumina.

C (60:40)

Oh, yeah.

B (60:41)

Oh, ours just went up, but it's nowhere near that.

A (60:43)

Yeah, well, we pay more in California because of tax. Yeah. And also California requires that the petroleum petrol, as you would say, gets refined in the state, which costs more.

C (60:55)

Well, also, I mean, there's less pollutants, but yeah, SF Standard had a thing. They found $6.50, the most expensive gas on in San Francisco. It was weird because I. I posted a picture up, you know, big Sur, Route 1, if you've ever driven down there. It's a fantastic driving road, but the. There are only two petrol stations and they screw you so hard.

A (61:17)

Yeah.

C (61:17)

10 years ago.

A (61:19)

You're on. Yeah, exactly.

C (61:20)

So I took a picture of their gas prices and it was 550. And now that just looks sweet. Oh, and by the way, on the Discord Channel Club Twit, I've just posted a picture of Alan Turing riding a badger.

A (61:35)

Well, now I've got to join the club. That's for sure. That's worth it. That's worth your club membership right there. Let me see if I can pull it up here.

D (61:44)

These English badgers are so much sweeter than North American badgers. North American badgers are terrifying.

A (61:48)

Badger.

B (61:49)

Badger.

A (61:50)

That is a beautiful image.

C (61:52)

It is.

A (61:53)

He's so small and the badger's so big.

C (61:57)

The great badger and. And British people of a certain age will recognize the meme. Badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger.

A (62:04)

What was it? What was it? And then it would go mushroom, mushroom, mushroom. Badger. That was universal, that was worldwide. Badger did very well. Here is a picture of our local gas station. Regular is 599, plus is 699V. Power is 639. That's a shell station.

C (62:26)

I took it.

A (62:28)

I thought, you know, someday we'll look back and say, wow, it was only $6 a gallon.

D (62:32)

A mere single digits.

A (62:34)

Wow.

C (62:36)

What happened to me? I mean, Jennifer is a Brit. As a fellow Brit, you can understand this. When I first came over here and I was talking to the taxi driver on the way back from the airport about British petrol prices, he was like, hang on, you're paying $11 a gallon.

B (62:48)

I was about to say it's a lot more expensive in England.

A (62:51)

Yeah, they hide it though by putting it in liters, which.

B (62:55)

Yeah, yes. It's harder to tell.

A (62:57)

It's harder to tell.

B (62:58)

It took me a while to figure out that. I was like, oh wow, it's a bargain here. And down here in the south it's 350 right now and but like a month ago it was 270. So we've had a huge like overnight two weekends ago it went up and

E (63:12)

of course 270 in California since like 20 years ago.

A (63:17)

Yeah, we haven't seen 270 in ages. But it all trickles down too because truckers, all the food you have, you eat everything.

B (63:24)

Yeah, yeah.

D (63:25)

I don't even know what the price is because I pay with electricity.

A (63:29)

Yeah, me too. I'm all electric. Looked so. Tomorrow Nvidia will begin gtc, it's annual conference. And Jensen Wong will do the keynote. We will be covering it. Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sargent and I will be turning on our cameras at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC to. I'm sorry, 1800 UTC to show a Jensen's leather jacket. And apparently they're going to have some. I think they're going to have some big announcements. I think this is really maybe the most important GDC keynote ever. Nvidia is of course in the cutting edge of AI development. One of the things that they're going to announce is Nemo Claw, which is an AI agent like openclaw, but they say will be more secure. They've been talking about this I think for a while. I don't think this is a big surprise, but we haven't seen it yet

D (64:26)

and well, it's not hard to be more secure than open cognitive.

A (64:29)

I know they also, they also say that will not require cuda, which is of course Nvidia's Proprietary language. It requires an Nvidia gpu, which means I guess you'll be able to run it on non Nvidia hardware. We'll see. The Nvidia hardware is actually appreciating in value. I saw a story you could buy H100 cards. They're old GPUs, but they cost more than they did three years ago when they came out. So if you invested better than buying $2 bills, buy Nvidia GPUs. They also, according to the Wall Street Journal, plan to reveal a new chip system for inference computing that will incorporate a chip designed by Grok, not Grok, Elon's, Grok with a K, Grok with a Q. Nvidia licensed the design from them last year. So they just announced the new platform, the Vero Rubin platform, a few months ago. So they're moving very, very fast. I think it's be very interesting to see what Jensen announces. You're going to watch that, right? Ian, you said you were.

C (65:38)

Yeah, no, I was out with some analysts last night and they were talking about this. And Nvidia's really got to take the market by the throat at this point because it's stock is massively overvalued.

A (65:52)

Yeah, Nvidia is the Straits of Hormuz of AI.

C (65:57)

That's a very. I might steal that actually. But I mean one on one level, it's kind of like everyone's waiting for the bubble to pop, you know, and what's going to happen to Nvidia when that happens. So I think Nvidia is getting its defense in first and is. Some of these new announcements look really, really good. But I think fundamentally talking to people in video and talking to the analysts behind it, there's going to be a bubble bursting and then they take over and try and salvage something from the wreckage. But they're actually in a pretty good position. The open source AI agent in particular is getting a lot of attention because it's like, okay, you're actually opening this up and that's going to bugger up some of their commercial competition. But they're willing to do it.

A (66:49)

I would say the frontier AIs are still ahead by a long shot. There's nothing like. In fact, one of the things Anthropic announced this week is Opus 4.6. Their Frontier model now has a million token context window up five times from its 200,000. That means it can ingest much more data and work on it without choking. That's a huge leap. Nothing close with the open platforms. I'M with you. I think we need open platforms. I think they're really important. We don't want to want a handful of companies to dominate this. Go ahead, Richard. Yeah.

D (67:29)

You used to have to pay a premium to get the million thing. Like I have a bunch of friends who, who own, who pay for a number of max accounts because they're software developers. They're literally running these things against each other and a bunch of them are paying the premium for the million and now they've opened it up, which to me, you know, anthropic so far ahead on the efficiency equation that I think they're finding out, okay, we can make this make economic makes sense too.

A (67:53)

I think that must be it. They also announced that they're going to give you double the usage at off peak hours. So they, you know, everybody's been talking about and maybe they're doing this at a great loss. I don't know. Ed Zitrin and others are talking about how much anthropic is losing on every single token they sell. I don't know if that's the case. We just don't know how much it costs.

D (68:16)

We argue about the max accounts can't continue because, you know, 200amonth and all you can eat is kind of nuts.

A (68:23)

It's not exactly all you can eat. You can run out. But I have not. I paid 200 bucks because I get that much value out of it.

D (68:29)

I find it and I have friends who if it was a thousand, they'd be paying too. Like they are knocking.

A (68:34)

Well, that's what I'm afraid of. I think they're hooking me

C (68:38)

and we're back to social media again.

A (68:40)

Social media, honestly, I probably would pay more because. Because I'm so tied into the ecosystem. I briefly when ChatGPT 5.4 came out, I thought, oh, I gotta try this. This is supposed to be better. Codex is supposed to be better and I gotta try it. And I moved everything over and I felt like I was breaking up with my girlfriend. It was very difficult.

C (69:00)

But I do think there's kind of a grudge map. Sorry.

D (69:04)

The thing that's interesting with the token limit issue is one of the things we're doing very heavily in software is breaking down into smaller pieces to stay under the token limit. Right. Because we get better quality. A. If you overflow, you have problems anyway. But in general people are well, even under the quarter million because you get better quality code when you take a smaller bite.

A (69:26)

All I know is I have a little progress bar as I'M working. That shows how much of the context I've used. And it used to fill up pretty quickly. When you get to more than 60, 70%, you really want to compact it and, you know, save what you've learned. Because every time you clear the context window, it's like you knocked all his brains out. And start. Hello, who are you? It starts from scratch. So it's like the guy in Memento, you know, he doesn't remember anything. So you kind of want it. You save notes, you say, okay, I'm going to compact the memory now. I'm going to so remember what we were doing. And then you kind of have to start up again and has to read in and so forth. But now I can't. I mean, I'm looking at that bar. It doesn't move. It's like. It's amazing. It's very hard to fill up a million.

E (70:12)

The question, Leo, is what is this worth to you, then? How much? What's the absolute limit you would pay for this?

D (70:17)

What will you pay?

A (70:20)

Don't test me. That's all I'm saying.

E (70:23)

No, but please don't test me. Does that square with how much Anthropic spends on it? That's the arithmetic that needs to be.

A (70:30)

First of all, we don't know how much it costs them. And there is definitely some efficiencies that they're gaining, obviously. Well, for instance, Nvidia said the Vero Rubin platform is. I forgot what it was, but it was a signif, like 10 times less cost than their H2 hundreds. I mean, they made it. They're making massive improvements in efficiency. We just don't know. We don't know if it's a money loser or what. I mean, that's always been. The contention is that for 200 bucks a month, you're getting thousands of dollars.

D (70:57)

But Anthropic seems to be the company accelerating away. Like they're.

A (71:01)

They are.

D (71:02)

They're dropping new things out. Like, this was always a conversation early on, was like. Like what happens when these companies use their own tools to improve their tool.

A (71:10)

And that's what they're doing, and that's what we're seeing.

D (71:12)

And more so than any other, they seem to be suddenly accelerating away from everyone.

C (71:17)

Yeah, well, I mean, it's also kind of a grudge match because Anthropic was founded by people that looked at OpenAI and went, Bugger that. We're, you know, we. We're doing our own thing and they're stealing the march on them at the moment. They really are. I mean, with OpenAI in particular just dying on its backside amongst users because of the political stances they've taken. Anthropic is looking that and going, yeah, let's get in there.

A (71:43)

Here's an interesting story. I'm very curious what you think about this. You are of course familiar with Perplexity. They have shopping bots on Perplexity. You can say, I want to buy some running shoes, trainers, in your parlance. And I have to remember we're doing foreign language programming now. And. And so you want to buy some. Or maybe you want to buy a jumper. Sweaters, as we call them. And which. You know what? Jumper is a much more civilized way to talk about it than sweater.

D (72:15)

More Aussie too.

A (72:17)

Yeah. So let's say you're shopping for a bicycle. You call it a bicycle. Right. So you're shopping for a bicycle in Perplexity. It will then show you a bunch of sites. You can even say, buy me a bicycle. You could say perplexity, do the research, get me the best running shoes money can buy. Your budget is 200 bucks or whatever and it will buy them. Well, Amazon didn't like that too much. This is using the Perplexity browser, Comet, which is agentic. Amazon didn't like that too much. They sued last November demanding that they stopped making purchases for users online. This week a judge ruled in favor of Amazon. It's a temporary injunction, but they said that Perplexities Comic can no longer buy stuff from Amazon's website.

D (73:08)

Judge Maxine Chesney does undermine Amazon's model of selling you their stuff, right?

A (73:14)

Well, it undermines a couple of things. Amazon also has ads on their site.

D (73:18)

Right.

A (73:18)

They make. Make a huge amount of money from the ads. But they also. Yeah, Amazon recommends. Amazon suggests. And you don't see any of that if you're using a bot. You don't see Amazon's site if you're using a bot. The judge said Amazon has provided strong evidence that Perplexity's Comet browser accessed its website at the user's direction. But without authorization from Amazon. When did I have to get authorization to use a website?

D (73:44)

Yeah.

A (73:45)

As a human, do I have to get authorization?

B (73:47)

Well, I mean, I'm sorry I said their argument is you have to have an account. Right. To use. To buy something on Amazon.

D (73:56)

It's on the Internet.

A (73:58)

Well, but I presume that Comet is using my money with my account.

B (74:04)

And that's where the argument falls down. It's like you've given it authorization. So, yeah, they don't have. And the irony here is this is exactly what Amazon is trying to do with Alexa, us and Rufus, which very

A (74:16)

few people know about. But Amazon has an AI agent on its site and they want you to use Rufus. Although in a related story Amazon had an all hands with its engineers who they were said you can't use Claude, you have to use Cairo, our in house AI to do your engineering. They had an all hands saying you cannot use any of our code that you've produced with Cairo without getting a senior engineer to sign off on it because apparently it's been causing some problems.

C (74:47)

They now, well they had that massive outage.

A (74:49)

They deny. First they said it was.

C (74:52)

Yeah.

A (74:52)

Caused by AI. Now they're saying oh no, no it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't AI.

C (74:56)

But I, I've got a bridge I could sell you.

A (74:58)

Yeah. They say please don't use our AI to solve your technical problems. Yeah, I mean don't you when you're you. When I'm using Chrome and I go to Amazon and I'm buying something, I'm using Chrome to buy something on my account with my permission. How is that different? I think the judge got this wrong.

B (75:23)

Yeah. And this is something that my. Our esteemed editor in chief Nilay Patel at the Verge has been hammering on about AI agents since day one. He calls it the doordash problem which is that basically the whole point of agentic AI is to circumvent the, the, the place that the Amazon or the door dash like the place where you're going to go to buy the thing or the Uber the you know, so that service is no longer going to get users coming to it just like news organizations are no longer getting users coming to it because AI is just summarizing their, their information and spitting it out. If you can do everything with AI, what happens to the services that you're using because you are no longer using them yourself and these agentic tools are going there for you and this is like what Rabbit was trying to do. This is what all of. Yeah, this is what all of this is. You know, this is sort of the goal of a lot of the current agent agentic AI out there. Alexa. Plus I'm sure with Gemini and there's they just. Actually I did drop this link in the show notes but Gemini just launched this this week on the new Samsung device. You can use Task Automation with Gemini so you can get Gemini to do your order your Uber or they launch with Uber and one other feature.

A (76:49)

But yeah, this is on the new S26 Ultra.

B (76:52)

Yes. It's just there now, but eventually I'm sure we'll see it go to all of the phones. Gemini.

A (76:59)

So how many different AI agents on your Samsung phone? You've got Bixby. Right.

B (77:05)

They don't discriminate Samsung. They're open to everyone.

D (77:09)

But it is only a temporary injunction.

C (77:11)

Right.

A (77:11)

Which really is.

D (77:13)

Is this a case? Is it repro. Is it causing harm? Like, then you.

A (77:17)

Yeah, yeah. The judge.

D (77:18)

They'll probably lose in the actual case.

A (77:20)

I hope so.

D (77:21)

Well, because it blows the whole thing up if they do.

A (77:23)

Although products. The judge said the court finds Amazon has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim. Amazon said they kind of admitted what we've been saying, that Perplexity's agents. First they said, well, it's a security risk because it can act using private customer accounts without requiring a password. But then they admitted it. They said Perplexity's agents created challenges for the company's advertising business because when AI systems generate ad traffic, the impressions have to be. We have to figure out if it's an AI before we can build the advertising.

C (78:03)

This requires a lot of business model. Business model, dude.

A (78:09)

The system adaptations are necessary to maintain contractual obligations with advertisers who pay only for legitimate human impressions.

B (78:19)

I mean, it's an interesting case because it is what goes to the core of what's going to happen. I mean, no one's sad about Amazon, but we are sad about. About our news websites that no longer get any traffic to them. So eventually we'll shut down and we will no longer have originally reported news and AI will just have to make up more stuff because there won't be any original content out there. And we are, you know, we are sad. Like we're seeing different, like smaller businesses that manage to do well on the Internet, you know, getting disintermediated and that. That type of thing is what AI is. I mean, AI is coming for everyone's jobs, as we keep being warned. In fact, there's a great piece in the Verge this week about which. About people whose jobs are going to be lost by AI. But AI is going to completely change the Internet and completely change the business models of every website out there. So, I mean, Amazon, like I said, no, boohoo's here for them, but we got to start the fight somewhere. I mean, there's.

A (79:19)

I mean, you're right. And same thing happened to restaurants, and it's been really hard on restaurants, you know, that without asking the restaurants permission, companies like I. Was it Uber Eats or Doordash?

C (79:32)

Doordash did that. They would sign up restaurants without their permission and take a commission from it. Yeah. You know, so I understand.

A (79:40)

If I were a small restaurant owner or my son, for instance, who is a small restaurant owner in New York, those guys can kill you. Imagine, you know, all of a sudden you get an order for 100 million French dip sandwiches, you know, and you've got customers waiting in the store, but you've got to fulfill these customers orders and you didn't even sign up for it.

E (80:01)

I mean, this is what Amazon did to literally every brick and mortar store.

A (80:04)

That's a good point. You started at Amazon. It's a very, very good point.

D (80:12)

Yeah.

A (80:12)

Come to think of it, I wasn't even thinking about that. Let's see. All right, let's take a break and then we will talk. Talk more about Doge and the. The amazing Doge deposition videos.

D (80:28)

Wow.

A (80:29)

Wow, Great panel. This is fun.

D (80:32)

And we're.

A (80:32)

And we're moving along, Jennifer, because we're going to get you. The Oscars start soon and we're going to get you.

B (80:38)

I've been peeking at the dresses. There's some good ones.

A (80:40)

Yes. Right now it's red carpet time.

E (80:42)

Yeah, you want to be an hour late. You want to be an hour late. Anyway, so when you skip the ads, you basically catch up to live once you've skipped all the ads.

A (80:48)

I know, it's kind of like an

C (80:50)

American football game in that respect. You know, skip over the ads and it's.

A (80:54)

And this is what really makes me mad about social media. Forget all this about making our kids crazy, spoiled. I don't want to see any spoilers cuz it's coming across and it's on my phone, it's on my watch, it's everywhere. Oh, my God.

C (81:07)

Yeah, exactly the same problem. Last night the Chinese Grand Prix ran at midnight and I had to turn my phone. Phone off, turn everything to make sure I didn't get spoilers.

A (81:17)

By the way, are we not loving the new era of Formula one?

C (81:21)

Ian, I am iffy about it.

A (81:24)

Oh, it's so exciting.

C (81:26)

No, I'm. You see, I'm sorry, I'm a. I've been watching Formula One for 40 years and in my mind, when you're right, when you're driving a Formula one car, it's balls to the floor. Go as fast as you can. And now you've got to recharge the batteries. It's more like Mario Kart. A lot of drivers have said it's exactly like Mario Kart because if you charge the battery enough, you get a magic mushroom and you go.

A (81:51)

No one to let the banana go. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is, it's much more complicated. But you know what? This is a generation of drivers, they're all like 20 that grew up on Mario Kart. They've played, you know, this is, this, this is a video game to them.

D (82:06)

Yeah.

C (82:07)

I mean, I think this is why we're going to lose Max Verstappen by the end of the season, because he's just not enjoying it at all.

A (82:13)

Yeah, because it's not winning at all. This is one of the reasons I

D (82:15)

like it because three plus GS in these turns, like you.

A (82:18)

Oh, yeah.

D (82:19)

Your weight to the, to the driveway. Like it's really.

C (82:22)

And you've got a, you've got a 30 pound helmet on your head as well, which is being forced to the side.

A (82:27)

So you have the hands device.

D (82:29)

So they, they need those things. But you know, the reality is we haven't been going faster for a long time because you can't keep the driver safe.

C (82:36)

Yeah, like true.

D (82:38)

I mean, a long time ago they could be 300 mile an hour cars just. Everybody would die.

A (82:42)

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, well, that's. It's much safer. Used to be much.

C (82:46)

Well, yeah, I mean, it's. It's kind of like the Group B rally series in the 80s where they basically said, you know, let's take all the regulations out and. Yeah, a lot of drivers. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

A (82:58)

Do you like Apple's new I.

D (83:02)

The thing I don't like.

A (83:03)

Added a lot of ads. All of a sudden there's ads on F1 which I don't like at all. I paid a lot more money though, for the F1TV subscription, so I guess that's, that's.

C (83:13)

Well, I mean, F1TV, I think was about 90 bucks a year last year. And I'm fine with that if it means no adverts and I can get the British commentators. I'm. I'm down with that.

A (83:22)

Yeah, we still. The good news is we still get the F1TV commentators. You still get Crofty if you want Crofty.

C (83:28)

Crofty's losing a bit, but I do like Martin Brundle. No one can do a fast lap like Martin Brundle.

A (83:33)

I like the Scottish guy, David Cluthard. He has.

C (83:36)

Oh, yeah, on the main feed. DC is fantastic, you know, and he's, he's very sarky. When you get Nico Rosberg doing commentating, Highly recommend it.

A (83:48)

Yeah.

C (83:49)

Because he is snarky as all hell, and I. I do like his commentary.

A (83:53)

I'm sorry. We got started talking about.

C (83:56)

Sorry. Yeah.

A (83:57)

Never start us on F1. Ian and I will go on and on and on. All right, we're gonna. We're gonna take a break, come back. Let's talk about Doge when we come back, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who has Costa Rican money. Did you have a good time in Costa Rica? I'm so jealous.

B (84:11)

Oh, it was amazing. You recommend it? Yeah, it was my. It was our 20th wedding anniversary and we had gone.

C (84:18)

Congratulations.

B (84:19)

We had. Thank you. We had gone there for our honeymoon. So we came back and we brought our kids with us, so. And to the exact same place. And it was the OSA Peninsula. It's like the remotest part of Costa Rica you can. You can get to. Really?

A (84:32)

So it's funny because I know many people go there, but everybody has a different. Different reason for going. You have the Atlantic, you have the Pacific, you have the jungle. It's all different things.

B (84:42)

Yeah, this is like the rainforest. Like, so we were deep in the jungle. So it was like boomers and monkeys and toucans and coaties and everything. We saw all the wildlife in the house, actually, you know, we were in a house like an Airbnb, but it had no walls.

A (84:57)

Okay. I don't like that.

D (84:58)

Okay.

A (84:59)

We did that once in Mexico. We got what they call a palapa. And when I saw that the. Whatever, monkeys had nibbled the soap, I said, we're moving. Staying here. But to be fair, our firstborn was like six months old, so I didn't want them to nibble our six month old.

B (85:17)

Yeah, Yeah, I can understand. But it was. It was like. It was like being in the house.

A (85:21)

That is wild. They were coming in the house.

B (85:23)

Yeah. And the raccoons came in the house.

C (85:27)

Oh, no.

B (85:28)

Which they warned us this. And I said to my husband, well, there's like one part of the house that's like a big. Almost like a safe with a big heavy door. So they. They put all the, like, electrics in there. And, like, we should put the food in there and the trash. And so he diligently one night, packed everything into there and then forgot to shut the door.

C (85:48)

Oh, no.

A (85:50)

Raccoons are not so dumb, are they?

B (85:52)

One raccoon came and then five more. He's like. He went and got his. The rest of his family, guys, they

D (85:57)

forgot to close the door.

B (85:58)

Come on. And the raccoons in Costa Rica are not like the ones in the Us which interest, interesting side note, are apparently becoming domesticized. Domesticated, which is very interesting. But the ones in Costa Rica are huge. And this one stood up on its back on its hind legs and because I went down to sh them away and it stood up at hind legs and it was as tall as me. 10.

D (86:20)

What these, these are coded mundies, right?

A (86:23)

They were not.

B (86:24)

No, no. It was an actual raccoon. But it did. I know what you mean about it almost looked like a cross between the Coates.

A (86:30)

It was.

C (86:32)

Yeah.

A (86:32)

That big.

B (86:33)

Yeah. On its hind legs. Yeah.

A (86:35)

I was like, oh, that's terrifying.

B (86:38)

Can have the bread.

A (86:39)

Did it try to wash you?

C (86:42)

No. I mean, as, as a fellow Brit, I find trash pandas absolutely terrifying because they have no fear whatsoever. You know, it's just like if you see them on the street, they're just like, stand up on the hind legs and go, yeah, you want some? You know, I mean,

D (86:59)

I mean, urban raccoons bulk up to fight dogs and they're are quite assertive.

B (87:05)

Yeah.

D (87:06)

I live in be country. You simply do not need anything edible outside. Like, stop. They will go through it all.

A (87:12)

Well, I should have known this. Papa in Mexico, the bed didn't have feet. It was hanging from the ceiling and I. That should have been a giveaway that there was something that might crawl up a bed leg. And so we're just going to hang it from the ceiling.

C (87:27)

The bath thing does terrify me because I went camping up in, up in the Sierras and my wife woke me up in the middle of the night just because there were bears prowling around our tent. And, you know, we've done the thing, we put the food in bear box and the rest of it.

D (87:42)

Yeah.

C (87:43)

But she's just like, isn't it amazing? It's like there are two thin layers of nylon between me and huge, sharp, pointy teeth.

A (87:50)

Oh, yeah.

C (87:50)

Not something I'm enjoying.

D (87:53)

Yeah. And they like toothpaste too. Don't bring the toothpaste in your tent.

C (87:56)

Like, oh, that I hadn't heard. I mean, yeah, they, the, the thing the, the guide told us was if it's brown, lay down. If it's black, attack. And it's just like, I know I'm going to die thinking, well, it's kind of brown.

A (88:11)

Is it a blue dress? Is it a black dress? I don't know.

B (88:14)

My husband was a fishing guide in Alaska for four summers and he once was cleaning fish on the end of a dock. And one, a huge big brown bear. Bear who had hurt paw came onto the dock. It's like, oh, you look like a big fish.

A (88:31)

Would you like. Thankfully, dinner?

B (88:35)

Yeah, thankfully. He had a radio on him, but the bear was going right for him. Yeah. So it's. They're pretty scary creatures. They're great to view from a distance. A very safe distance.

A (88:46)

Richard's quite the fisherman.

C (88:47)

Well, I mean. I mean, I had a.

D (88:49)

And lived with it my whole life, so I'm not that anxious about it. But you don't mess with brown bears. I think brown bears are serious business.

C (88:55)

Yeah. Well, an old schoolmate mine worked on Svalbard in the Arctic Circle for a couple of years, and then that's a whole other league. Yeah, exactly. You're not allowed out of the town unless you've got a gun on you, because they will. You know, polar bears are just like, ooh, crunchy.

D (89:14)

Well, and it's also a big deal if you do shoot a polar bear. Like, that's your mistake. Like, we did the expedition out of Svalbard and it's, like, checked very carefully. There was no bear around because. Because they're endangered. And if you shoot one now, you have a lot of paperwork to do. Wow.

C (89:29)

Yeah.

D (89:30)

Wow.

A (89:32)

We're taking a little break.

D (89:33)

Can't get your head around how big a polar bear is. Like, you. You.

A (89:36)

I'm not sure I want to.

C (89:37)

Oh, thank you very much.

D (89:38)

Massive.

A (89:39)

Just a different thing as a Kunday,

D (89:41)

they yank whales out of the water.

C (89:45)

Yeah.

B (89:46)

Wow.

C (89:46)

Yes. David Attenborough had a marvelous series on. On. On the life in ice thing where. Yeah. They're literally hanging around where the whales will come up to breathe and then just yank them. Boring. Rip them out. Yeah. We've got food.

D (89:59)

Yeah.

A (90:00)

Snack time.

D (90:01)

The only time polar bears are fun to look at is when they're so stuffed full of whale they can't even move.

A (90:06)

Now they're on the money. We are talking to the Commonwealth version of this week in tech. Richard Campbell from Madeira Park, British Columbia. Ian Thompson. He's visiting San Francisco, but he really is an Irishman.

C (90:23)

Well, Irishman. Scots, please.

A (90:26)

I thought you said Ireland. I know. I always thought you were Scots.

C (90:30)

No, no, I'm half Scot and half Yorkshire, which makes me the tightest person on the planet. But Jennifer will understand that there's only

A (90:37)

one type cheaper than the Yorkshireman and that's a Scot. Yes.

D (90:41)

My mom.

C (90:42)

This is how copper wire was invented. Two Yorkshiremen fighting over a penny.

A (90:48)

Wow. And Jennifer, Peter Patterson Tuohy from the Verge. Great to have all three of you here. Our show today brought to you by Monarch. I know I'm not supposed to talk about competition when I talk about Monarch, but I gotta tell you, my subscription recently, okay, I bought a year. I buy a year every year and I subscribed and I bought a year and so my subscription came up and I thought, well, I really ought to look around and see what's out there. And I literally spent a morning installing all the other guys and I said, what am I doing? There is nothing as good as Monarch. I love Monarch. So yes, I re upped. Especially now, right? It's tax season. This is when, you know, unfortunately for a lot of people, this is the one time of year people look at their finances. Monarch's great for that, of course, but it helps you make progress with your money all year long so you don't look back on April 15th and say, what happened? Monarch is fantastic. Simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, budgeting accounts and investments, net worth and future planning together in one dashboard on your phone or laptop. Feel aware and in control of your finances this tax season and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with code TWIT. That's the way to do it. It Monarch isn't your average personal finance app, unlike all those other guys. And I, like I said I wanted to be fair. I gave them all a try. Nothing like Monarch. Monarch is built to make you proactive, not just reactive. And what I really like about Monarch is it has Monarch intelligence built in AI. And it's not just any old AI. It's trained by certified financial planners and advisors. So it's smart about money. Get access to the AI assistant, which is in effect 247 access to a financial coach available anywhere inside Monarch. And you can ask it about everything that's in your Monarch, privately, personally. You can ask about trends in your spending, how to pay off debt. The AI assistant has all the answers. You also can use the AI to get insights. It'll comb through the data to surface insights that are specific on how you're spending your money, how you're investing, how you're budgeting, all the hidden patterns it'll identify lifestyle creep versus inflation. You know, why am I spending more? Is it inflation? Or is. Is am I actually kind of up in my life? It's changes in savings, rates all. I mean, it's incredible. And every week you can get the AI weekly recap. Let Monarch look out for your money with a personalized weekly summary that alerts you to spending spikes, big shifts in net worth worth upcoming expenses. Oh, another thing I love. They just added this. Splitting bills. It's easier than ever. You don't need a separate app. You scan a receipt or upload it and Monarch will automatically parse the items. This is the AI at work again and the price is for you. And then you can share a link or a QR code with your group and everyone can say yeah, that was mine, that was mine. And settle the bill effortlessly. This is a nice feature. They just added this. Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch. The all in one tool that makes money management simple. Use Code torque twit@monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off@monarch.com code twit. There was no question in my mind Monarch is worth every penny. I love Monarch. So of course the big story this week was a whistleblower that says one of the Doge engineers in the Social Security database copied records from 500 million people. That's more than there are in the United States. So I guess 500 million records, maybe. He possessed two databases from the Social Security Administration numident and the master death file. The whistleblower said the person asked for help transferring the databases from a thumb drive to his personal computer so he could, quote, sanitize the data before using it at a company he was going to. He is currently employed. This is exactly what we were worried about, to be honest, when these kids, these 20 somethings got brought into government. The Social Security inspector's general office is investigating this. It is a credible story. And the guy who took 500 million records for, I guess, living in dead Americans. That's why there's so many of them. Includes Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race, ethnicity, parents, names. And we know who it is because it's been revealed and we know he went to a company that works with the Social Security. He had had essentially unrestricted God level security access to the Social Security administration systems. These are databases that until now have been treated as highly secure, highly private. The government expects us to give them all the information every year when we file our tax returns. In return, we expect them to keep it private.

C (96:22)

Yeah, how's that working out? You know, I mean it's just like you let a bunch of. I mean, we'll talk about this later, but you look at the people that were behind this and you know, it's just like they would instantly take this because it's a fantastic data. Why wouldn't you but yeah, I mean the fact also that they ask for help about this shows.

A (96:46)

Hey, can you help me? Yeah, I, I can't figure out how to get this into my personal laptop.

C (96:52)

Yeah, yeah, I just, it boggles the mind. It really does.

D (96:57)

Most of this data was in M365 government. The main kids did was they got the admin accounts.

A (97:06)

Yeah, they got got accounts.

D (97:07)

Yeah, they got, so they got admin access which means they literally had drive level access to everything. They may or not able how to act, utilize the data or anything but you've got drive level access so copy

A (97:19)

everything wired, got the identification. I won't say the person's name on the show, but he is now the chief technology officer at Leidos because Leidos works with the social. They have a 1 1/2 billion dollar 5 year deal working with the Social Security Administration. He's denying everything, of course, of course.

B (97:45)

I feel like the problem is, you know, every week I get another letter from another company saying that my Social Security number and every other thing I've given them has, has been exposed. It's like whose Social Security number is not in the wrong hands these days? It's like we, we need to have a complete sort of reset on how we've, we handle or what, what data actually becomes, is essential to recognize and identify us. I saw another article this, this week about something like an ab. Number of tax returns have been filed using fraudulent data. So people, and it's quite common I hear to like log in to do your taxes if you use an online service and be like, oh, you've already filed.

A (98:28)

Oh no, because that's not good.

B (98:31)

Yeah, yeah. So like we've, we've lost control.

A (98:33)

Well then that was what Doge was supposed to fix, right? Doge was supposed to fix fraud. The, the sad truth of it is, you know, Elon said it was going to save the government $2 trillion. It's a saved very little money.

C (98:47)

In fact that's cost more money than it saved. Yes.

A (98:50)

And that's actually the, the cause for this lawsuit by the Modern Language association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical association, they're suing the National Endowment for the Humanities because their grants were cut by Doge. Hundreds of millions of dollars grants were cut by Doge. And in this lawsuit the Doge kids were brought in to testify. Now the MLA posted that on YouTube and a judge immediately said, yeah, no, that's a deposition, that's confidential, you can't post it. But of course once it's on YouTube too late, man.

C (99:33)

No, I mean 404 did a fantastic job on this. And I feel for Jocox, I've known for a while, but they actually had somebody sit through six hours of this testimony and go through with it. And the guy. Some of these guys. There's a. Germans have a word for everything. Okay. And there's a German word and forgive me for this, but it's backfeld schmich, which is a face made for punching. My goodness. I looked at that and it was just like. This guy was like, no, we just fed it into JAP chat GPT and it told us whether it was DEI or not. So we just deleted it. And it's like, that's people's lives.

A (100:11)

Here he is trying to explain what DEI is there was the EO explicitly

C (100:17)

laid out the details. I don't remember it off the top of my head. It's okay.

D (100:21)

I'm asking for your understanding of it. Yeah, my understanding was exactly what was

B (100:23)

written in the video.

A (100:24)

Yeah. He says, I don't know what DEI is, but I know it when I see it.

D (100:28)

Right.

A (100:28)

They were basically. They were. If it, if. If a, A grant was application mentioned a black person, a tribal person, a Native American lbgtq, it was in there, they would just cancel the grant period. That was it.

B (100:48)

Yeah.

A (100:49)

It was basically a word search.

D (100:52)

No means he was just searching for the string.

A (100:55)

Exactly. I don't know what it means. I just know what I'm told.

E (100:58)

Even the word diverse was in that. So like, even when diverse.

A (101:01)

Even stuff like diversity, equity, inclusion, even

E (101:05)

like, we need a diverse set of evidence, stuff like that even got. So it wasn't even connected to anything racial or anything like that.

C (101:13)

I was, I was talking about this with my next door neighbor because there's a younger guy than Justin Fox who was also deposed and she's a teacher and she was just like, I know those kids at school. They think they know it all and they know bugger all and they are kids.

A (101:31)

Yeah.

C (101:32)

And I'm not surprised they stole the data because why wouldn't you? You know, it's like you've got access to that database.

A (101:38)

It almost don't even blame them. I blame the people who put them in there.

D (101:41)

Yeah, yeah.

A (101:43)

That's who you blame. What's the German word?

C (101:47)

You've got it up on the screen now is I. I can't pronounce it because it's German and I can speak a little French, but not German. But back. Fair truth. Lynch. So it's basically. It's compound Words meaning to punch someone and their face. So it's a face made for punching fife.

A (102:06)

Yeah, yeah. It's hard to say.

C (102:07)

Yeah, I, I've tried to learn German for a couple of years and I just can't do it back.

A (102:12)

Fife means punch or slap on the cheek or face and gesicht means face. So. Yeah.

C (102:18)

Yeah. There's a reason there are no great German love poets. Put it that way.

A (102:22)

It isn't exactly a romantic language. Let's see what else we're talking about. Things government is doing that we don't like. How about this? Texas has banned lab grown salmon because Texans have quote, a God given right to know what's on their plate. And for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab.

C (102:57)

So it's, it's, it's poisoned by pollutants. It's got heavy, heavy metals in there. But. Well, that's lab grown stuff is just, you know.

A (103:06)

Well, that's a reason to ban it. Okay. But I think you could. Oh no, the lab grown stuff doesn't have that.

C (103:14)

No, exactly. If you, if you cat, if you catch a salmon in the river, God knows what's gone into it. Oh yeah, you know exactly what's going on.

A (103:22)

A California company called Wild Type, they sell lab grown salmon. It's never salmon that never swam or anything, anything. It's just they take cells and they grow them, right?

C (103:30)

Yeah.

A (103:30)

And they're suing Texas because Texas bans cell cultivated meat. The company's founder says lab grown salmon eliminates the mercury, microplastics and antibiotic contamination found typically found in seafood. Does it, have you, has anybody tasted lab grown meat?

C (103:50)

Yeah, I've done lab grown meat. It's. Honestly, it tastes, tastes pretty much the same. You know, I mean it's, it even bleeds because they put beetroot, beetroot juice in there.

A (103:59)

But I mean, stop doing that. That's disgusting.

B (104:02)

I mean we, we probably need to start growing more. Well, that's right because you know, we, we our resources. I mean salmon, they're still fairly, I mean after one really, they, they were close to extinction a few decades ago, but they brought them back. But then things like beef, you know, that the resources that they use choose to.

A (104:24)

Oh, forget data centers. A lot of water.

B (104:29)

More of this, not less. And the quote at the end of this article that and for my least favorite governor of all time is that we're, we're fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a Petri Dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals. I'm like, what, what the.

A (104:50)

What, what, what authoritarian gulf? By the way, people might think, since we were talking about Texas. You're talking about Governor Abbott. It's actually Ron DeSantis you're talking about.

D (105:00)

Okay.

B (105:00)

Yeah, I'm, I'm, I. I live very close to Florida. My parents lived in Florida.

A (105:04)

And there's a ban in Florida and Texas.

B (105:07)

Yeah, Ron DeSantis is one of the. Yeah. Anyway, I won't get too political. Well, yeah. This is insane. This makes no sense to say this is the global in elite's plan. Why would, why would the global elite want to force people to eat lab grown meat? What is the point here? Is it always to get rid of farming? Is that the point?

A (105:26)

No, we same people have brought you Covid vaccines.

B (105:29)

The global elite, we have a global food crisis. And if we can create another way to develop nutritious without killing food, without killing an animal, without ingesting toxins and plastics ourselves. Yeah, and they're not talking about saying like, we can't. You can't eat real salmon. But you know, having altern, that's the thing.

A (105:50)

Why ban it?

B (105:51)

Yeah, right.

C (105:52)

Well, no, it's already labeled.

A (105:54)

Yeah.

C (105:55)

Yes. Leo, you're up in Petaluma, which is big chicken farming country. And if you go downwind of a chicken farm, my God. And yeah, same thing with the beef feed loot feedlots. I would welcome that.

A (106:08)

Lab grown meat, we call it here the Sonoma aroma.

C (106:13)

Really? Oh, my God.

A (106:17)

Here's another one that makes me mad. So apparently there is now. And I bet you would know about this, Jennifer, you can get plug in solar panels. You don't have to install them on your roof. You could put them on your deck, on your garage, and they plug in and then they power your house. Popular in Germany. More than 1.2 million of the systems are registered with the German government. Government. They are not legal in the US

B (106:48)

because except for in Utah.

A (106:49)

Oh, Utah. Good for you, Utah. Utah has the first law supporting plug in solar.

C (106:55)

Finally, Utah's ahead of the game.

A (106:58)

But of course, utilities don't want you generating your own electricity, and so it's illegal. State lawmakers are now in 30 states talking about making plug in solar legal. Have you played with this at all, Jennifer? You know anything about it?

B (107:15)

Yeah, well, it's actually very common in Europe. In fact, my last time I visited England, I was at my aunt's house and they had literally found a solar panel in a dump and resurrected it and plugged it into their house and were powering some lights on their porch. Because these, these can't necessarily power your entire home. These are small arrays that you could just power like your refrigerator if the power has gone down. Or you could power a small apartment maybe. So the roof balcony solar is kind of, what was the original kind of trend in, in Europe is that, you know, if you have a small apartment and you just want to power a few things, you can just hang solar off your balcony. And it's a way of bringing solar to people that live in apartments as well. Because you can't, you know, right from, for so long. Solar is really, really limited to someone if you own your own home and you've got to spare 20 grand to install them. And they're really. It's a complicated process. My colleague Thomas Ricker at the Verge, who's in Denmark. No, the Netherlands, Amsterdam. He lives in Amsterdam and he tests a lot of this type of plug in solar or portable solar. And it's, it's a great, it's a great thing to be able to have a backup source that is not the grid without having to invest a huge amount of money. I mean, I've got solar panels, I think. Leo, you have solar panels, don't you? I do, yeah, yeah. And they, you know, it's, it's great if you can have it.

A (108:45)

And we're seeing, they're hugely expensive, I think we.

B (108:47)

Hugely expensive, tens and thousands of dollars on them. And they're. And the utilities are pushing against this for safety reasons, they say. But obviously a significant issue for them is they don't want people generating their own power. Although there are some utilities who we're seeing sort of the flip side because we are seeing a of lot real surgence of VPNs virtual power networks. So where utilities can actually tap into people who have that, who are generating their own energy and storing it in batteries in order to help stabilize the grid. So I think we're kind of at a, we're at a tipping point with the grid in America. And I can imagine whilst we're seeing resistance to this type of technology today, I would have thought, you know, within the next five to 10 years and as more and more electric utility companies start to realize the value and benefit of being able to kind of spread the generation of energy and not just have to rely on large power plants, not that small little solar panels like this are going to help, but just solar panels in general in people's homes, batteries in people's homes. And we actually see We've seen an uptick of people installing batteries without solar panels just so that they have a resource source like instead of a generator.

D (110:04)

Yeah.

B (110:04)

They can time shift and the time of use rates. So I think, I think we're going to start, this is going to start to be a big trend. I think if there's an upside to

A (110:14)

the gas crisis, the oil crisis, that might be it. If, if energy price becomes for fossil fuels gets so high.

B (110:21)

Yeah.

C (110:22)

Renewables get, you know, you can get your solar panels shipped in. They don't have to go through the strikes of Hormuz. But it's, it's.

A (110:30)

I mean the utility companies are worried because it's always hot. So. And anyway they raised a lot of safety concerns.

D (110:37)

Backfeeding is an issue. But backfeeding is also testable.

A (110:40)

Well, it's. And they point out there have been millions of systems installed in Germany and there have been no safety instance.

B (110:46)

Yeah.

A (110:46)

Reported at all.

B (110:48)

And the UL is doing, they're doing certification for these systems and I think that's sort of going through tweaks. But eventually it should be a. I mean I think there's a lot of fear mongering and maybe scaremongering right now out. But ultimately there's this solution could be applied to and it's great to be able. I mean instead of having AC unit sticking out your window, you know, you can hang some solar panels and power your fan in the house.

C (111:13)

Yeah.

A (111:15)

Part of the problem is that in the. In California anyway, these are private. Our power companies are private industries and they really, their business really is building power plants and then selling PG&E.

C (111:29)

Just the, the scum of the. Sorry, I, I shouldn't be.

A (111:33)

So many times in the last two years it's.

C (111:35)

Well, we've just got another fee this month. But I mean they're really worried about this because as Jennifer pointed out, if you've got local power things, local power systems sorted out, that kind of takes their entire mob modus operandi away. I've just started cert training with the fire department here and they're saying get solar because you know when the electricity goes out, you're on your own own and you need an independent power supply. And you know, if the electricity goes out across the state after a major earthquake, there's going to be no gas pumps working. So if you've got an electric car,

D (112:11)

get yourself California require solar panels on residential now like you think on new residential.

C (112:17)

Yeah.

D (112:19)

You have to get a permit to not put solar panels.

A (112:21)

Oh, that's great.

C (112:22)

I Love hearing. Yeah. With new builds then. Yeah, sorry.

B (112:25)

And if you want to buy, if you're, if you, if you're interested in this, I mean you could technically do this where even if you're not in a state that allows it because it doesn't require any permitting. You just have to make sure that

A (112:37)

no one goes buy one.

B (112:38)

But you can buy them. So ecoflow actually sells a DIY balcony solar system that you can go and buy right now.

A (112:44)

I really like this. I might, I have a balcony.

B (112:46)

It's called Stream series we had there. It is, yeah.

A (112:51)

I have to correct it because we did. We had I think 60 solar panels on our old house. House and two Tesla batteries. But we moved and we don't have any now. We don't have any batteries now. And I feel naked, to be honest with you.

B (113:02)

I actually just got a whole system installed that I'm going to test. So I'm going to start covering the ecoflow smart panel and ecoflow batteries.

D (113:13)

We're putting that in here too.

A (113:14)

You are, you are.

D (113:15)

Okay, well the whole point with that, with this smart panel is you get to pick what breakers essentially go on battery. So there's no back feeding risk because when the battery is feeding it, the, that breaker's not on the main panel anymore.

B (113:29)

Yeah.

A (113:29)

So the panel feeds the battery and then the battery feeds the breaker. So that eliminates the backflow.

D (113:33)

Yeah, but they switch between them.

A (113:35)

Okay. So yeah.

D (113:37)

Being like when, when power goes out here. Not that unusual. Unless you're living in the wilderness. There's some things you just don't want to power. Right. You don't want to power baseboard heat. Use the fireplace. Like that's not necessary. So those breakers are literally marked as.

A (113:50)

But your refrigerator graters, you definitely want that one going.

D (113:53)

Right. Keep some lights going, like that kind of stuff.

A (113:55)

That's where all the bear meat is.

C (113:56)

Yeah.

D (113:57)

Let the stove, let the stove go. You're gonna cook on the, on the, on the cast iron, right?

B (114:01)

Yeah.

A (114:02)

This is a review from last year that Thomas Ricker did. But it's on the verge ecoflow. So. So you can get them now. So that's.

B (114:09)

You can buy the, the balcony ones. Yeah. You just only technically legally allowed to use them in Utah. But. But yeah, because the permitting and all of that with solar is one of the biggest, biggest, you know, pains along with the price.

D (114:22)

Not a small problem.

A (114:23)

Well, and that was. We had to. We bought it from Solar City, which is now a Tesla company. And you actually. We had a power purchase agreement was Kind of a crazy thing. It's amortized over 20 years and the whole thing. And when we moved it was a big pain. We had to kind of. The new owners had to take over the agreement. It was just kind of a mess.

D (114:42)

It's really added some couple months into your sale.

B (114:45)

But the idea here of just being able to plug it into an outlet

A (114:48)

rather than having plugs into a regular

B (114:50)

outlet, literally just into an outlet instead of h. Hooking it all up into your electrical.

A (114:54)

So you need an inverter or anything or that's what the, that's in the,

D (114:57)

it's in the inverters in the, in

B (114:58)

the panel and then you could plug it into one of ecoflow's backup battery powered things too. So you could then have, you know, you could power anything from that. The they have their big portable batteries with lots of outlets and plugs in and so if you plug the solar into that you can charge the battery and then from the battery you could charge anything in your house. So it'd be great for, you know, for areas where you have frequent power outages. I mean I live in the south where we have hurricanes, which is one of the reasons we wanted to try testing this system. Because I'm now technically my own little micro grid. So if, when I generate enough power I can run and I get a little alert on the ecoflow app it says oh, you're off grid. And it's like woohoo.

A (115:44)

I love that feeling. Isn't that great? Yeah. When we had that Tesla power walls, it was great. Every once in a while we'd be, or we'd be feeding power back into the grid, which is also cool.

B (115:53)

They don't let you do that anymore. Well, I mean you can, but they don't give you any money for it.

A (115:57)

They'll pay you for it.

B (115:59)

So that's why batteries are much more attractive now because the more. When you generate more energy, just save it for yourself and use it later.

C (116:06)

We are thinking about that in ourselves just to you know, because the power goes out occasionally but if there's a over a bad situation then it's nice to have that power in house.

B (116:16)

Yeah, yeah.

D (116:17)

You know, Australia's got the highest percentage, especially southeastern Australia of residential solar.

A (116:24)

And there's a lot of sun.

C (116:25)

It's a lot of sun. Yeah.

A (116:27)

There's an endless supply.

D (116:29)

So now you have to have the ability for the power company to disable your solar because they're overwhelming the grid.

A (116:36)

You have too much.

C (116:37)

Oh good grief.

A (116:39)

Yeah, if only.

C (116:40)

I mean I'M surprised that Arizona hasn't gone in big on this because they have the sun, sunshine.

D (116:45)

Yeah.

C (116:45)

You know, Arizona and New Mexico, they could be huge solar states, but instead the building data centers in a water poor area. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

E (116:56)

Yeah, just imagine if our government was into renewables. Right. Just imagine.

A (117:00)

Well, it's ironic because while the current administration doesn't like any of this because they got a lot of donations, all

E (117:07)

happening in spite of the.

A (117:08)

It's happening anyway because the economic of it are so good. Remember that Trump stopped that big wind installation off the coast of Massachusetts? It's now done. The judge said you can't stop it. It's now done. And Bill Gates just got permission to build his TerraPower nuclear. These are the new. You're an expert on this, Richard. These are these new sodium.

D (117:34)

Sodium is not new.

A (117:35)

Okay.

D (117:37)

So normally we make nuclear power with using water as both the working fluid and the moderator. Light water reactors are the majority of reactors in this world. And there's a reason for that. Moderation means we slow the neutrons down. You use what they call a thermal neutron instead of a fast neutron because the neutrons interact with the water and it changes. The nice thing when you're in the thermal neutron spectrum is you don't need as many to interact with the radioactive material. So it's a little easier to manage a little bit has certain side effects.

A (118:06)

And, and you're heating the water for steam to generate electricity as well. That's how the secondary. Yeah.

D (118:12)

Becomes the, that's the part of. It's the working fluid. It's what moves the heat to the heat exchangers to make the energy. When you play with, when you're working with sodium, sodium is transparent to neutrons. So you are working in the fast spectrum. Now there's an upside, a downside to this. The upside of the fast spectrum is high velocity, high energy neutrons. Neutrons are more likely to break uranium up rather than to make it into higher actinides. You know, you. The primary source of plutonium for nuclear bombs is light water reactors. Light water reactors. Because the neutrons move slower. Sometimes the neutron sticks to the uranium and then decays in an alpha particle to become a. Does beta decay to become neptunium. And then when it does it again, it becomes plutonium, ammonium.

A (118:57)

Huh.

D (118:59)

When you're in the fast spectrum, you're far less likely to do that. It tends to break the atoms into pieces. You're doing transmutation, you're making cesium and iodine and a bunch of other things, so that's cool. And plus, molten sodium can handle a lot more heat. In order to get enough energy out of water, we have to pressurize the reactor. Right. You wanted the water to get up to about 300 degrees, which doesn't want to do so you have to keep it in the pressure vessel. When you do this with sodium, you don't have to pressurize. Sodium happily runs along about 600 degrees. So you. You can handle a lot more energy. What's the downside, you ask? Well, sodium reacts with absolutely everything, mostly water, which turns to be everywhere. So you have to purge the vessel and all pipes of any moisture of any kind. Pretty much all hydrogen has to be purged out of it.

A (119:45)

So I seem to remember in high school chemistry that we had a little piece of sodium we took out and exposed to the air, and it burst into flame.

D (119:52)

Burst into flame. You throw it in the water, it looks like explode. Yeah. Okay.

A (119:57)

And you're gonna fill up your room. And we're using this to cool the plant.

D (120:01)

Well, you're using that as the working fluid. It's not.

A (120:03)

Oh, okay. We're using this to heat it up.

D (120:06)

It gets hot, you pump that away.

A (120:08)

How do they scram this, though, if it doesn't slow the.

D (120:13)

You scram it pretty much the same way with absorb. With absorbing rods, with boron rods. So that part's similar. It does run at a higher temperature.

A (120:20)

Temperature.

D (120:21)

The. The downside is your neutron concentration is really, really high. So it is tricky to manage.

A (120:29)

Yeah.

D (120:29)

Slowing them down, shutting them out and speeding them up, all that. It's fairly tough. But that's part of the tarot power design. So they're actually using lithium beryllium salts as the heat transfer fluid. So this is a way instead of. It's not so steam. Well, they. It's still got his problems. Beryllium's wildly problem poisonous. Oh, but.

A (120:50)

Well, I'm not gonna eat it. That's okay.

D (120:52)

No, but the. But the upside to using the salt approach for doing the heat transfer is they can store it. And so rather than having to constantly vary the. The performance of the reactor, how much you're charging based on power needs, you run it at full bore all the time. And when you don't need as much power, you just store that as excess heat in the beryllium salts. And that's very clever. Like they're talking about. It's a 300 bad reactor, but they can do like four hours at 500 megawatts. Because they have all this excess heat stored. The real challenge with molten with, with working with sodium reactors is when you do need to shut them down, which you do occasionally you have to get all the sodium out of the reactor vessel or it reacts, explodes like it's dangerous and fires. So there's only really one sodium reactor working in the world right now and it's in Russia because they're not that worried about the fires. They're okay with that.

A (121:44)

Chernobyl, it was okay, we could do it.

C (121:47)

Russian engineering.

D (121:49)

And to be clear if you read the article, I mean they've gotten permission so they, they built the energy generation island first. So this was the beryllium salts and the generators and all that stuff. They didn't have permission to build the reactor at all. They just got permission to build the reactor now. But they do not have permission to get any fuel.

A (122:08)

They can't turn it on yet.

D (122:10)

No. Well they're not even allowed to buy the fuel and they need Hailu fuel which is like the source of the fuel is going to be a problem problem. They're going to need literally to specially make that fuel. And anything involving radioactives is hugely difficult. So they, I mean it's backed by gates so they can afford to wait. Like they're not exactly on a budget per se. The upside if they can make this thing work is it is a fuel burner. They'll want to buy used light water reactor fuel. Oh yeah, consume it in this room.

A (122:42)

Reactor neat.

D (122:43)

So that, that is a feature if they can make this thing work. And obviously we build more of them because it does tend to consume actinides more so than light water reactors do.

A (122:55)

And are these the modular smaller nuclear power plants I keep hearing so far

D (122:59)

they've talked about in the 300 megawatt class which is a sort of large modular reactor. Some Mars were kind of a way to be allowed to talk about nuclear reactors when you're not allowed to talk about nuclear reactors. And so, you know, even in the case in Canada where we were headed down the path of using the GE Hitachi SMR at the Darlington B site, they've now backed away from that because once you get all the permitting done and you're ready to build a reactor, it's like you might as well build a big one. A you know how to run already. B they make a lot more power and they're kind of simpler. You know the current legal rules for nuclear reactors require a separate control room for each reactor. Well that's fine if you only have two reactors. What if you have 16? That's a lot of control rooms.

C (123:41)

I mean, I, I interviewed, there's a startup called Deep Fission I interviewed them about, because their idea is to drill a mile down into the planet below the aquifer fill, put a small pressure, a small nuclear reactor down there, use gravity to pressurize it. And yeah, the control room problem is a massive one. It's a big one because. Yeah, yeah.

D (124:02)

And new scale, who's another SMR company out of Idaho, they actually got the permits to be able to do a combined. They convinced the energy agency to actually allow them to combined control rooms. But then they lost their buyer. So now they're struggling. They've now got to deal with Romania. Like they're trying to make this go forward. But the regulatory body was built around, around large reactors and it's extremely hard for small reactors to make sense in this current regulatory environment.

A (124:35)

Let's take a little break. When we come back, Travis Kalanick is back.

D (124:39)

Oh, boy.

C (124:41)

Turns up like herpes. Yes.

A (124:42)

And he's been very busy. So, you know, stay tuned. We are talking about all kinds of stuff this week on Twit. Thanks to Richard Campbell. Great to have you. From Runners Radio and Windows Weekly, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of the Verge, senior reviewer there, and Mr. Ian Thompson. His Letter from America appears in techfinitivecfinitive.com Our show today, brought to you by Spaceship. I'm not talking about UFOs, I'm talking about Spaceship, which is my favorite domain registrar. But more than that, if you've heard us talk about Spaceship before, there's a reason it keeps coming back. Spaceship is rethinking how people register and manage domains. And it's a huge success. Its fresh approach has led to more than 6.5 million domains being under management in record time. I mean, from zero to 6.5 million and nothing. And this kind of growth comes very simply from giving people what they want. Want. Spaceship offers transparent low pricing on domain registrations. When I was looking for a domain for a Paris Martineau's news site, we found it for, you know, I think 60 bucks, then 30 bucks, and I found it for half the price at Spaceship. But it also makes it very easy to set up a website, to set up a vps, to set up email. And the pricing is so good, you know, it's so good that you're going to want to move from your existing registrar. They make transfers and renewals very easy and very affordable. There's more clarity over what you're paying for over time. So it is a great value, that's for sure. But the platform is also especially built for flexibility. You can easily and instantly connect your Spaceship registered domain to Spaceship Products, the web host professional email virtual machines you can build and test before committing. Because almost every Spaceship product comes with a 30 day trial. I love that. I think that's always the way it should be and they really do too. But if you prefer to use your own tools, no problem. Just point your domain to what you need by updating your DNS records or name servers. In fact, when I set up a secretly British for Paris, she had. She hasn't set up the site yet so I just pointed it to her existing site was super easy and she got email with it and everything. So you have the freedom to build your stack exactly how you want. When you're ready, you could set up whatever you need. Basically it's the best of every world. Visit spaceship.comtwit to learn more. That's spaceship.com Twitter and by the way, a gorgeous site too. We found the best registrar. It's Spaceship and they have a nice little arm guy named Alf that will help you do all the hard stuff. Spaceship.comTwit it was all over X. Travis Kalanick is back, man. And it turns out he never left. Travis Kalanick, you know the name. He's the guy who created Uber and then was forced out by the board for a toxic workplace.

C (127:58)

And I don't know, it was like for good reason. Yes.

A (128:01)

Yeah, I think he's quite a character and certainly people still have a lot of, I think, affection for him. What he did immediately after was he started Ghost Kitchen company that was weird, called Cloud Kitchens. And then he had a real estate called City Storage Systems, but he's renamed it all to Atoms and published a website with a manifesto, the thesis. It's Adams Co. And if you go to Adams Co Vision, you can see the manifesto. He starts by saying, I left Uber in 2017, heartbroken. It was only days after the death of my mother and near death of my father in a boating accident when investors decided to come out from the shadows and exploit this vulnerable moment to wrestle control of my company away from me. I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena. And a lot of people said he's been secretly creating this empire. He says, and actually I thought this was the most interesting part of this. I don't really know if Adams Co is going anywhere or if his vision has any Sense to it. But he said, you have to understand my idea has always been to digitize the physical world. He says that was my life's work. So Uber was to add software, in effect to ride sharing. Right. Then he did real estate. Then he said our first computer was a food computer, which digitized manufacturing, real estate and logistics for food. He said. He says the whole thing, the whole world is food. Everything comes from growing it, mining it, and transporting it. And so he wants to do all three of those with AI and robots. That's the real business. At Adams, we make gainfully employed robots, specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners in society at large. Are you interested in investing? What do you, what do you think, Ian? Are you ready to put some money on the table?

C (130:29)

I, I do love the phrase gainfully employed robots, which means not gainfully employed humans.

A (130:36)

You know, I mean, it's, that's what he says. It's going to be a golden age where you won't have to work.

C (130:44)

Yeah, but then you also don't get pet.

A (130:46)

The next old age will be upon us when the means of growing, mining, manufacturing and moving physical things becomes fully divorced from human labor. Which does raise the question, well, who's going to buy these things? You're growing, mining, manufacturing and moving if nobody has a job?

C (131:05)

Oh, please. Those are piffling details, Leo. Honestly, it's just.

A (131:11)

He says the copy cost per unit of intelligence is going down in price by 90% per year. That's probably true with AI, I don't know. Total capabilities and general intelligence have increased nearly a thousand fold over the last three years. Possibly true. Hardware, software and manufacturing productivity will continue to compound each other to ever increasing speeds of progress. We're only a millionth of the way there, Ian. Don't worry. But the inevitable destination is the singularity. Oh, superhuman intelligence and efficiency until then. I don't know what's going to happen after that. But until then, abundance will be creating more jobs, not less. So there.

C (131:51)

Yeah, right. I get the feeling with so many of these tech bros that they've read E M Banks and not really understood the message behind it.

A (132:00)

But it is exactly what Ian Banks universe was, right? Where there was kind of everything was handled, everything was made.

C (132:06)

Well, yes, but he, he, he kind of skips over the 7,000 years before that where there were sort of mass problems. And if you read his notes on, on the development of the culture, you know, it's just this was a necessity thing.

A (132:21)

But it got there eventually.

C (132:22)

Yeah, yeah, but I mean, it's many

D (132:24)

generations have to die. But you know, that'll be fine.

C (132:28)

Well, just as, as the Palantir CEO said, you know, it's just like, yeah, you're all going to lose your jobs, but trust me, it'll be better. Really, it'll be great.

A (132:35)

That is, that is the last.

E (132:37)

That is test crail though. That is what they're, that's what they think though probably they're saving the trillions.

A (132:42)

Cares about the trillions of the future we care about, not the present.

C (132:45)

Yeah.

A (132:47)

Kalanick says his last three words are I never left. It sure looks like it's a pitch to investors. Remember, Uber never made money. I don't know if they're.

D (133:00)

He raised more money than anybody until AI came along. Right, right.

C (133:04)

Yeah.

D (133:05)

My favorite quote on all that is when you raise $60 billion, there's no way to make good choices.

A (133:11)

You have too much money to make many choices.

D (133:13)

Yeah. Too much money.

A (133:13)

Yeah.

D (133:14)

You can't possibly make good choices.

A (133:16)

Somebody pointed out, I think it was Robert Scoville that what happened at Uber was the whole plot was really to have self driving vehicles. It never made economic sense if humans were involved, involved. So but when, when he was forced out, the company got rid of the autonomous vehicle portion of the business and so it never was going to make money. The interesting thing is the guy, sorry,

C (133:44)

Uber remains the only self driving vehicle company that's actually killed somebody. You know, they, they, they, they actually went in there, you know, somebody got run over, they, they died and you know, yeah, you're right. The Uber economic business model doesn't make sense without self stars and it's interesting to see who they've teamed up with. But I personally wouldn't trust Kalanic further than I could throw him and I have poor of a body strength so.

A (134:09)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

D (134:11)

I think Waymo has a fatality as well.

C (134:14)

Oh really?

A (134:15)

So let's make it, that's fair. Let's spread it out.

B (134:18)

I, I do think the theory here behind robotics in being specialized robots rather than single, rather than a all purpose robot like a humanoid makes an awful lot of sense. Not sure whether specifically his, you know, this business is, is going to make sense, but I've spent a lot of time with robots and individual like single purpose robots and even humanoid robots. And there is, there's a place for robotics that in our lives and in our workforces and in our homes and single purpose, individual specialized robots that can do one or two things really well I think is the, is really the future of robotics in our in our society rather than the sort of flashy Jetson Iron man dream of. Of you, Everything.

C (135:13)

Yes.

B (135:13)

I just, I just don't see that actually. And I've said this before on the show. I know, and I know there's people in the, in the discord that vehemently disagree with me and think we're like a day away from humanoid robots, but I think it's a lot further away than we.

A (135:28)

And you have more experience with robotic household things than anyone.

B (135:32)

Yeah.

A (135:33)

A robot fell on you for crying. Yes.

B (135:36)

Almost killed you, Almost got me. So. And then that's the biggest thing, I think that's the biggest fear and concern and reason why we won't have humanoid robots is they are dangerous. And whereas single purpose or one or dual purpose specialized robots make a lot more sense.

A (135:52)

Well, Kalanick says he's an investor in Pronto, which is a self driving truck startup, but it focuses on mining sites where there are no people. Right. And in fact Prato is run by the guy Kalanick recruited from Google, Anthony Levandowski. He got in trouble with Google for taking information, was claimed taking information from Google and bringing it over to Uber and apparently he's working with Lewandowski again. Again.

C (136:24)

Yeah, that was a really interesting case. It was just like, oh, I'm leaving Google, I'm starting. I think it was Otto self driving truck software and oh, we've just got bought out by, by Uber for a massive amount of money for a product which doesn't have any, you know, anything in it.

A (136:42)

I mean, honestly, Google sued Uber for stealing that information. Levandowski was actually convicted of stealing trade secrets. I forgot this part. He didn't go to jail because he got pardoned by the President. So yes.

C (136:56)

Also read the court documents, some of the testimony there, the discovery on that. This is a really interesting person. Possibly not in a good way.

A (137:06)

It is tempting to think that this is basically another, I don't want to say con job, but similar to, to say startup. Yes, startup with very big ambitions. Right. Very global, kind of futuristic ambitions.

E (137:28)

But like mining is one of those jobs where maybe humans shouldn't be doing that anyway.

A (137:32)

Shouldn't be mining. Right. And I thought that was kind of an interesting insight that everything's either grown or mined and then manufactured and that the, you know, there are really four things that you need to solve.

E (137:46)

John Cusack said all that. Say anything.

A (137:48)

Mining material monologue and then transporting them. Cusacks say anything.

C (137:54)

The mining. Sorry, the mining thing is very interesting because in Australia they've already automated a Lot of the lorries that are working in mining compounds. Because it's a really simple use case. There are very limited roads that these trucks can go through because the mine is built down, and they build the road in there so you can map it out really easily. So, yeah, mining will probably pay, but he's late to the party. But I don't know. When I read that piece, and it was just like, give me more money now.

A (138:29)

It does feel like a kind of a magical pitch deck, you know, but it's okay. I don't have enough money to invest, so I'm safe. A Tennessee grandmother. This is a horrific case of misidentification. A Tennessee grandmother was jailed. A facial recognition error linked her to fraud. She's from Tennessee. But Fargo, North Dakota, police, not that close to Tennessee, if my geography is correct, identified her using face recognition. They said, oh, yeah, she walked into a bank in Fargo, North Dakota, and committed fraud. They came to Tennessee. They arrested her, put her in jail for six months in Fargo. She's a mother of three, grandmother of five. She said, I've never been to North Dakota. She'd never been on an airplane until she was flown to North Dakota for charges. U.S. marshals erased her. The only evidence, apparently, was this face recognition. She remained. Started in a Tennessee jail. Four months without bail while awaiting extradition, then charged with four counts of unauthorized use, use of personally identified information, and four counts of theft. According to Fargo police records obtained by WDAY News, detectives investigating this case in May and April of last year, reviewed surveillance video, used face recognition. The face recognition said, oh, yeah, it's this woman in Tennessee. The detective told the court, we got to get her. By the time she got an attorney and went to trial, they proved that she was still in Tennessee at the time. 1200 miles away at the time of this bank fraud, which a simple check

C (140:33)

of her bank records and location records would have revealed.

B (140:37)

Yeah. Why didn't take so long to figure out that she. I mean, they should have made these steps before arresting her.

A (140:44)

Oh, really?

D (140:45)

Yeah.

A (140:45)

Like, called. It's called an investigation.

E (140:47)

Yeah.

B (140:48)

And don't just rely on this technology

D (140:50)

to hold her on. I mean, she. She was held on extradition, right? Like, she hadn't been charged, she hadn't gone to court, she hadn't anything. They just held her for months.

C (141:00)

I mean, it gets worse. Sorry.

A (141:02)

Go ahead, tell us the rest of the story.

C (141:04)

No, no, this is it. She lost it all. But it gets worse because when they found out their error, they released her from jail on Christmas Eve with no money, no way of getting in contact with people. And it was only down to the kindness of a local, a local person that she actually got somewhere to spend Christmas. That was warm. I mean, Fargo, I've never been, but I know it's damn cold. They.

D (141:26)

They stick her out of the jail in Fargo in the winter, take, you know, bye, bye.

A (141:30)

I guess we. I guess we got the wrong person. See you later.

D (141:32)

They don't take her back to Tennessee.

B (141:34)

I assume she is going to get a lot of money in the future.

C (141:37)

One would hope, yes.

A (141:39)

While she was jailed and unable to pay bills, she lost her home, her cat, her dog. No amount of money replaces that, she says. No one from Fargo has. Police department has apologized. So this is where AI really can go wrong.

D (141:54)

But yeah, this is computers full stop. Remember when he's like, oh, the computer said it, so it must be true.

A (141:59)

Right?

D (141:59)

Right. Somehow the science fiction layer we've added to computing has brought back this level of stupidity.

A (142:07)

Yeah. And really, as always, it's not the AI, it's the people using it that are the problem.

C (142:12)

Well, yeah, but I mean, what kind of policeman actually goes out and says, well, the AI said it, it's fine, you know, we're not going to bother doing any kind of investigation.

D (142:20)

Jail for four months while we figure how to extradite her.

C (142:23)

Yeah, and there's no come back to them because, you know, Fargo taxpayers will pay the eventual lawsuit, which I hope she wins and gets an enormous amount of money out of.

A (142:35)

Here's the good news. Alex Carp, the CEO of Palantir. Oh, geez. Says that they are.

C (142:41)

You and me both, Richard.

D (142:42)

Yeah, I haven't heard from that guy ever.

A (142:47)

He was. This is an interview on cnbc. He said AI technology disrupts humanity's trained, largely Democratic voters and makes their economic power less and increases the economic power of vocationally trained working class, often male working class voters. So AI is going to be bad if you're educated, female and a Democrat, but it's going to be good. I don't even understand the logic.

D (143:16)

That's just extraordinarily convuls can.

A (143:19)

You know, I don't even. Yeah, I don't even understand the logic. I guess.

C (143:27)

Get the logic. The fact that he said it out loud was really, really. I mean, I know it's a Peter Till company, so it's obviously going to be a bit weird, but the fact that he actually said this is what we're working towards is just like, are you aware of public relations?

D (143:46)

It's a sort of constructive way of saying it democratizes knowledge. Like you could have gone down that path. We argued that was what the Internet was going to do in the first place.

C (143:55)

Yeah.

A (143:55)

And of course, Palantir's all over the government. The Register had this very important story about how the Department of Agriculture used Palantir's lethal AI weaponry to find seat assignments for employees at the department.

D (144:11)

Nice.

C (144:11)

Yeah. No, they're into the UK as well. They've just signed major contracts with Britain's National Healthcare Health Service, and in part organized by the disgraced Peter Mandelson. But, I mean, they are getting their claws into government.

A (144:26)

The USDA's Chief Data and artificial intelligence officer, Christopher Alvarez, says other software companies can probably sort out seating plans, but only Palantir volunteer can do the job. Right. Probably assigns Democratic women offices. Way far away, I would guess.

D (144:45)

But I would also argue, like, let's be clear, we're not fans of this guy. But no, not a stupid man.

A (144:51)

No, he's very smart.

D (144:53)

Who was he actually talking to when he said those? Ah, yeah, right. I think he's somebody who doesn't want

A (145:00)

Democratic women in Power hour.

D (145:03)

This is like, I'm looking forward to the phone calls I get for, you know, what I can do from them.

A (145:08)

He knows who signs those checks.

D (145:10)

Yeah.

A (145:11)

MIT Technology Review how Pokemon Go is giving delivery robots an inch. Perfect view of the world. We kind of knew this, right, When Niantic, which was a Google company at the time, created Pokemon Go, the wonderful game my wife still plays avidly since July of 2016.

D (145:30)

So there was a game before Pokemon Go that built this data set.

A (145:33)

Ingress.

D (145:34)

Yeah. And I was an Ingress player back in the day.

A (145:36)

Yeah. Because it was. You had to be a lot smarter. You couldn't be a democratic woman and play Ingress. So, no, Ingress was. Ingress was hard, but it had the same idea, which is that you walk around in the real world and use actual geographic waypoints.

D (145:52)

The genius of Niantic is they got us to build the data set because I wanted more nodes to play Ingress. I would find everything that could possibly be tagged as a landmark.

A (146:01)

Exactly.

D (146:02)

To get more nodes in my neighborhood,

A (146:04)

thanks to Ingress and Pokemon go, they have 30 billion. 30 billion waypoints all over the world. Unbelievable images of urban landmarks outsourced to Pokemon Go players. And they are selling that information to delivery robots.

D (146:24)

Genius.

A (146:24)

Yes.

D (146:25)

Because there was no money in Ingress. There's no money in Pokemon Go. I mean, Ingress. They started to try and charge for things and people just stopped playing, including Me.

A (146:33)

So the company's latest product is a model. They're out of the Pokemon business. Remember, they sold that to the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. Their new company is Niantic Spatial. They say their latest product is a model that can pinpoint your location on a map within a few centimeters meters based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in the area. It knows immediately, oh, I know where you are. I could be used by more than just delivery robots.

B (147:06)

Yeah, there's. I mean, there's been a lot of news recently around how, you know, the surveillance state is, is developing in this country. And yeah, things like this, it's like, it's great when we have technology companies creating something that's useful, but now when we have a government that is becoming increasingly authoritarian there. And you know, based on the previous article as well, like, all the pieces and parts are so easily brought together to like, just know where everyone is at any point and who they are based on facial recognition that may confuse grandmother from Tennessee with someone from North Dakota. It's like stories go together.

A (147:46)

They mesh, don't they? They all go together. Together somehow. I don't know. I didn't plan it that way. Let me take one last break and then, because Oscars are going to start any minute now and then and we will have some funny final stories to cheer you up. Okay. Cheer you up. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who's just can't wait to see who won the Best Picture award. How many of the 10 pictures did you see?

B (148:11)

I managed four. I think it's hard. Maybe five.

A (148:15)

Lisa and I used to have this thing of we're going to see every

B (148:17)

one, but now there's 10. It gets a little harder doing that,

D (148:23)

that they just added more because it's good for business.

C (148:26)

Yeah.

B (148:27)

I have not seen Sinners, though, which I know I should have. And that's probably the one that's going to win, so.

A (148:31)

Oh, it's a brilliant.

B (148:32)

My whole family seen it except for me.

A (148:34)

Such a wonderful film. It combines vampires and great music and it's just a really interesting. It's such a different genre busting film and great.

E (148:45)

It's shot so well too. It's a beautiful film.

D (148:47)

Film.

A (148:47)

It's beautiful. And I think the star is going to win a best actor because he plays two roles, plays his brothers.

B (148:57)

That's the way to get it.

D (148:58)

Yeah.

B (148:58)

Like, Oscars are nothing if not predictable.

A (149:01)

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, we'll be back in just a moment with Ian, Jennifer and Richard on a very fun this week in tech. Thank you all for being here. We appreciate it. Our show today brought to you by Threat Locker. We had a great time, didn't we Richard back in Orlando last week for the Threat Locker Zero Trust World. So much fun. They are a very impressive company and I learned a lot. They had a bunch of great seminars, hands on workshops and stuff. They do Zero Trust. Their Zero Trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite suite of Zero Trust solutions. They've actually made some big announcements at Zero Trust World. Protecting endpoints, networks and the cloud. This is new by extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks. ThreatLocker makes sure the devices are validated through a secure broker before connecting to platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace and GitHub. Your nightmare is somebody takes a thumb drive and plugs it into your M365 data database, right? And not just exfiltrates information, but infiltrates malware, ransomware. Or they send you a phishing email or you see an ad on a website that actually is malware. Even if that happens, even if a user is sticking a USB thumb drive into your database or successfully phished, attackers cannot. This is, this is so, so cool about Zero Trust. They cannot access resources unless they have possession of the user's trusted device. And the trust is built in with ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker works in every industry, PCs and Macs and the Cloud. Now it provides 24.7us based support. The best support ever. We met a lot of the support people. They're great. Windows, Mac, Linux. Of course I always leave Linux out. No Linux 2. It enables comprehensive visibility and control. Ask Rob Thackeray. He's an end user technical architect at Heathrow Airport. Now this, if you think about it, Heathrow Airport is the last place you want ransomware, right? He said Threat Locker was the most intuitive solution we tested and the responsiveness of the organization, the willingness to engage with us, set up a demo and work with us on a on weekly audit reviews was very good. It's great to have an ongoing relationship with a company that's so responsive to our requests. I am not surprised now having having met the Threat Locker team, so impressed by them. They're trusted by so many companies. Global enterprises like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver. Threat Locker consistently receives high honors in industry recognition. It's a G2 high performer and best support for enterprise. Summer 2025 peer spot ranked them number one in application control. They got GetApp's best functionality and features award in 2025. With threat locker and their ring fencing, you can confidently ensure that users have access to a consistent, safe network connection. I think sometimes you think zero trust means zero access. No, it means that users can do what they need to do without risk. You can have offices, remote users, internal servers, critical services, all maintain smooth operations without the need. And this is key to open inbound ports or deploy traditional VPN solutions which, you know, give you, you know, a point out there in the real world that the bad guys can hammer on your end. Users will get the secure, reliable internal system access they need without. And this is important, complex infrastructure changes get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively with threats. I was so impressed. Visit threatlocker.com TWIT get a free 30 day trial. Learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. It's threatlocker.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support. It was really great to be out there and I hope we can do that again. Zero Trust World in Orlando Are you ready for flying cars? Jennifer?

B (153:24)

I was just in Orlando and I'm doing lots of flying.

D (153:28)

What were you?

B (153:29)

I was.

A (153:30)

I went to Universal Disney World.

B (153:31)

Yeah, Epic. Epic Universal.

A (153:33)

Oh, did you do the Harry Potter? You're flying on a broom through Hogwarts ride that one. That's fun.

B (153:41)

I haven't done. That's the Hagrid's one, right? Hagrid motorcycle. No, I did the. It was Ministry of Magic. So it's the new one. It was very fun. Oh my goodness. So that park is a disaster, is it?

A (153:54)

Oh, cause it was crazy crowded.

B (153:56)

Just all the rides were down, so.

D (153:58)

Oh, oh, everything was broken.

B (153:59)

It was the night of the clocks going forward and you think everything broke. I read this on Reddit because while I was standing in line I was on Reddit, like what do I do to get around Epic faster? Reddit is like the solution for everything. And apparently they were saying that this is a big issue in parks because everything's run on computers and when the clocks go forward it somehow manage every year, twice a year manages to mess them up. But there are lots of flying in Epic and no flying cars though. But I would love a flying car. That's like my dream. So I'm excited about this.

A (154:39)

The federal government has announced a new pilot program designed to get new kinds of ultralight vehicles and EVTOls, which is electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles running.

B (154:51)

I mean they're basically drones though, right?

D (154:52)

They're big drones. Yeah.

B (154:53)

Yeah.

A (154:54)

Well, but there is there, there's a pilot right now still. Yeah, but soon maybe when you go,

D (155:00)

when you're in the ultralight class, you need very little training. Disturbingly little training.

A (155:05)

Good. There's an untrained person sitting in there pretending to be a pilot.

B (155:10)

My son is training to be a pilot right now. And yeah, it's, it's hard.

A (155:13)

This is the future.

D (155:14)

Yeah. Real pilot training is no fooling. But the ultralight class, because largely ultralights are single parents person, you're only likely to kill yourself in them. So the FAA is like, ah, go ahead.

C (155:25)

But there are companies like Archer, but yeah.

A (155:27)

You know, Archer has an electric taxi, four passengers, 60 to 90 minute trips. Yeah. It'll be in Texas, Florida and New York.

D (155:36)

So that'll be a service, right?

A (155:37)

Yeah. Well, like right now, if you're rich, you could take a helicopter to the airport from Manhattan. Right. I think.

C (155:44)

Yeah. But I mean, come on, we've all driven on American roads and we've seen how American drivers. Drivers operate. And I'm sorry that the idea of letting your standard non pilot trained person do this, the software better be damn good because otherwise you're going to have these things falling out the sky.

A (156:02)

Yeah. It doesn't just affect the person in the plane, it's whoever's below the thing.

D (156:06)

The question is, can electric based giant drones, these four seater drones, so they're not burning fuel even though they're piloted like just as an Uber service, but going rooftop to rooftop like that, what was always proposed, proposed in New York, except that helicopters are extremely loud and they're expensive and fragile.

A (156:25)

Right.

D (156:25)

And so these are more redust. Robust, more redundant machines like you could have a certain, you know, availability. Going rooftop to rooftop.

A (156:35)

Here is from the faa, here's the video. It's going to look just like this.

B (156:40)

The Jetsons.

C (156:41)

Oh, I'm sorry, when you lead up with the Jetsons, you instantly lost the argument.

A (156:47)

You know, I think the same guy as the White House socials is doing this one. So they're all of this new technology, these evols that are going to take people from evols. All right. That's how you say it. Huh?

D (156:59)

That's. No, nobody says it that way.

C (157:01)

Only.

A (157:01)

Okay.

C (157:02)

Yeah.

A (157:03)

Is that Scott Beset? I think it is.

D (157:05)

Innovate in America.

A (157:06)

We're going to innovate with EVOLs. Okay.

B (157:10)

I did see a flying robot vacuum at CES that can like has little drones that literally.

A (157:16)

Well, what good is a flying vacuum

B (157:19)

to get it up to the stairs.

D (157:20)

Yeah, get up the stairs.

A (157:22)

The stairs.

C (157:23)

The Dalek problem. Yes.

A (157:26)

I am going to fall over. I'm sorry. That was Sean Duffy.

D (157:29)

I would have dominated the world but I had a curb in my way.

A (157:33)

They all look the same to me. Hey, here's a big story now that you mentioned. The Academy Awards are going to still on network television but will not be by 2030 they'll be on YouTube. This year YouTube surpassed Disney. Not this year, last year, 2025, Disney, Paramount and Warner in ad revenue. It is now the number one media platform. $40 billion in ad revenue.

C (158:00)

Remember when it was ad free? Yeah. Those days have long gone.

A (158:03)

It's more than Disney, NBC, Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery Together.

B (158:09)

Together.

E (158:10)

Because all of those people are also on YouTube.

A (158:13)

Yeah, well that's true but I think it's pretty clear. I mean you pointed out YouTube TV is 85 bucks a month now. It's, it's, it's cable. Yeah, exactly.

E (158:24)

Those people are also on YouTube.

B (158:27)

Yeah, I knew YouTube had it though when. So my husband is the absolute least tech forward person ever hates, actually hates technology and only got an iPhone like eight years ago and he now watches more YouTube than regular TV. And it's like that's because it has all the niche, the regular tv. Yeah.

A (158:49)

If you want Alaska fishing guide videos.

B (158:51)

Exactly.

A (158:52)

You go to YouTube.

B (158:53)

You go watch them on YouTube. And he follows like these motorbike camping motorbike influences like who go all over the world and do amazing trips and he's living vicariously watching them and he

A (159:06)

wants to poop in a bucket just like them. Right.

B (159:08)

He wants to be, he wants to live in the middle of nowhere with no technology except for YouTube.

C (159:13)

As long as I get YouTube.

B (159:15)

As long as you got YouTube.

A (159:16)

That's the secret. That's the secret reason we've got.

D (159:19)

But you hit on the key thing about YouTube is every long tail culture you could imagine.

A (159:25)

Exactly, yeah.

D (159:26)

There somewhere everybody's YouTube experience.

A (159:29)

Including us. Including us. Us. And oh no, I mean that's remarkable.

C (159:34)

I mean during lockdown I, I started watching a channel called the Outdoor Boys and it's a bloke in Alaska who basically goes out, as Jennifer said, you know, goes out into the white wilderness and builds his own campfires and the rest of it and yeah, it's, it is cable now because you've got a list of subscribe channels you'll subscribe to and you just check on those and see what comes up.

A (159:58)

The IG noble prizes which I have always loved every year is moving out of the us they're moving to Switzerland because they don't think it's safe in the U.S. this is from the Reg. They used to do it at Harvard, MIT in Boston. The next one's going to be in Zurich. Mark Abrahams, the founder and ceremonies mc, said during the past year it's become unsafe for our guests to guests to visit the country. We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners or the international journalists who covered the event to travel to the USA this year. It's going to be an issue with the World cup, it's going to be an issue with the Olympics, which are a few years off.

D (160:37)

The, the MVP summit is next week and then the number of non US people going to the summit now is. It's dropped off hugely.

C (160:45)

I mean, it's a huge issue for Hacker Summer Camp as well. I mean, even gdc, which was last

A (160:50)

week, the Game Developers Conference, a lot of companies didn't go because it was in the us.

D (160:56)

You put, well, I mean, grandmother in jail for months for no particular reason and same thing, just let her go one day. You scare a lot of people.

C (161:07)

No, I mean, it was interesting. I was at RSA last year and I was speaking to Sophos, which is essential essentially now a Canadian company. And they told their staff, you don't have to go, but we would like you to, you know, we're giving you that get out because crossing the borders these days is, is tricky. And as I say, defcon Black Hat Bside is coming up next weekend. A lot of European hackers are staying away because just in case, you know, it's like. Yeah, I mean, it's like Hutchins, who saved, you know, who killed off an entire virus system, was picked up in DEFCON because of something done as a

A (161:50)

teenager on the way out. By the way, Marcus Hutchins was one of the keynoters at the Zero Trust world, but we had to leave before he spoke, so we didn't get to see his talk.

C (161:59)

But he's a great chap. Yeah, I mean, I have a photo of him. We were doing a data sharing because with the DEFCON badges that year, you had to share with a certain number of people. And I got a picture of us sharing data and he's a lovely chap. He's gone a bit influencer of late, but it's a real problem because a lot of the top talent isn't coming to the US anymore because they're worried about border controls. And all it takes is one RC Border Patrol officer to get you in A whole world of trouble. Yeah.

D (162:31)

With no recourse.

C (162:33)

Yeah, exactly.

D (162:36)

Not all.

A (162:37)

Not all as well. In Switzerland, though, they did. This is also from the register, the. They did an E voting pilot. Unfortunately, 2048 ballots, an interesting number, cannot be counted because they couldn't be decrypted. Oops. Oops. You know, they were very secure,

B (162:59)

so.

A (162:59)

Secure.

D (163:01)

This place is key. We mean it.

A (163:05)

Three USB sticks were used, all with the correct code, but none of them worked.

C (163:13)

So I. You know. Yeah. What with the Proton mail scandal in Switzerland at the moment.

A (163:18)

Oh, yes.

C (163:19)

It's not the best. Yeah. I mean, it's. It's kind of iffy. And also the Swiss are really uptight. They make the Germans look relaxed. I went to a press conference in Switzerland and the bloke announced. He came in 10 minutes late, was just like, I'm very sorry, I was busy doing something, and one of the journalists said, oh, polishing your Nazi gold, were you? This guy was instabanned.

A (163:49)

You don't say that, even if it's true. Well, and as I often do with an in memoriam, you know, it's one of the things. We've been doing this for so long that many of the people who are young when we started are now passing away and at the age of 92 to the Turing Award winning computer scientist who invented Quicksort, Tony Horror. C I R or has passed. But he was 92. But we should probably mention that because

C (164:18)

it was a good life and well lived.

A (164:20)

Yes.

C (164:21)

You know, I mean, he did some really fundamental work.

D (164:24)

Yeah.

A (164:24)

He said there are two ways of constructing a software design. One is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. Very inspired. He will be missed, but we are grateful to him for Quicksort, which is.

C (164:47)

And he got the. The Turing Award, which was. Is the tech equivalent of the Oscars.

A (164:51)

That's right.

D (164:52)

Speaking of the guy who takes the blame for the null, he says that was the worst mistake ever. The. The null. Yeah, the null was the most expensive mistake he made. The idea that a Boolean is not just true or false, but could also be a deno.

C (165:06)

No.

D (165:08)

And coding around nulls, man, is hard. Like it's just a sheer amount of code to cope with a null. And. And Tony Hori years ago just said, worst mistake I ever made was introducing the.

A (165:19)

No, isn't that.

C (165:20)

It's kind of like Tim Berners Lee was interviewed and he Said like, what's the biggest thing about the World Wide Web that you didn't get? He goes, I have no idea why cats are so popular. You've obviously never had one.

A (165:34)

He introduced null references in Algol, and it's referred to as the billion dollar mistake. At least that's what he called it. Yep. Of course he thinks a big man

D (165:46)

to own up to. Sorry about the billion, he said, because

A (165:51)

it was so easy to implement.

E (165:54)

A lot of people got jobs, though. Probably a lot of people unemployed because of that.

D (165:57)

Probably kept a lot of people busy.

A (165:59)

That's true. That's true. All right. Hey, thank you, Richard Campbell. We'll see you on Wednesday. Really appreciate your spending time with us on this Sunday.

D (166:07)

It's real close to St. Patty's Day, so. Got a little Irish.

A (166:12)

Oh, a little Irish something for Windows Weekly. Well, I'm gonna make myself a corned beef. So we can have corned beef and cabbage. Cabbage. How about that?

C (166:21)

Lovely food.

A (166:22)

Yes.

C (166:23)

I mean, in San Francisco, they had the parade yesterday, and it was amateur hour in the pubs, and I. I just. I put out on Blue sky just like, please tip your bartender because they're having a hell of a time of.

A (166:36)

Was just crazy. Crazy. Richard, we'll see you Wednesday with something a little something Irish. Of course, you catch richer on runnersradio.com or he'll also find Net Rocks. And if you like, Richard's talks about all things scientific, like his nuclear talk. He does these deep dive geek talks on Net Rocks. Is there a way to search for him? Just look for geek. Search for geek and you'll find him. Thank you, Richard. Wonderful to see you. Take care. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, senior tech reviewer at the Verge. Always a pleasure to have you on. We'll catch you on Tech News Weekly every month with Micah Sargent.

B (167:18)

Yeah. Always fun to be here, even with the Oscars.

A (167:21)

Yeah, you go now. You can skip the ads, so that's a good thing.

B (167:25)

I know. See all the. All the dresses. It has started, right?

A (167:30)

I believe it started 15 minutes ago, so. But don't watch. Don't start at the middle. You want to see the opening number and all of that, so.

B (167:38)

Yeah.

A (167:38)

Thank you. Jennifer. Run out of here. Go, Coco. Are your kids watching it? Do you. Does your family watch it, or is it just you?

B (167:45)

No, no, my. My family is thrilled that I haven't forced them to watch it yet.

A (167:52)

It's really interesting.

B (167:53)

None of them are interested.

A (167:54)

Like a national holiday.

B (167:56)

It was appointment viewing. Everyone had to go. Yeah, everyone had to watch it. And Now. Yeah.

A (168:01)

We're the few, the proud people in our generation.

D (168:04)

I know.

A (168:05)

Sad.

B (168:06)

I know it's sad. Very sad. But I still, still love it.

A (168:09)

Me too.

B (168:09)

Cling. Cling to it.

A (168:11)

Can't wait to watch it. And of course, wonderful see you. Ian Thompson. I'm glad you'd write in that column at techfinitive Letter from America. And you'll catch his freelance writing all over the Internet. And he's on Blue Sky. If you can figure out how to spell his name. I A.

C (168:28)

That's the problem. Yeah, I know. My parents and I have had words, put it that way.

A (168:34)

Always great to see you. I'm sorry. You know, we used to have a studio in. Ian and his wife would come up and they'd even go to his. The little English shop we had in town and buy more Marmite, you know. But not anymore.

C (168:45)

Oh, they had such great scotch eggs. The best place to get scotch eggs ever found in California. Really?

B (168:52)

Is that a high bar? I mean.

C (168:55)

Well, there is that.

A (168:56)

It's a bar.

C (168:58)

There is a place. There is a place in San Francisco that they've just opened a British. British pub. They're charging 15 bucks for a scotch egg.

A (169:06)

What? What?

D (169:07)

Does it dance?

B (169:08)

What? Yeah, I mean, egg, sausage and breadcrumbs.

C (169:12)

Well, exactly. You know, if I want to get screwed, I want a kiss, not a credit card receipt. But you know, it's just like.

A (169:19)

What do they call them? Bacon Buddies? Bacon buns?

C (169:22)

Oh, no, Bacon, bacon butties. The standards.

D (169:26)

Yeah, if.

C (169:26)

If it wasn't for the fact that American bacon is so bad, then, you

B (169:29)

know, bad, bad, bad.

C (169:31)

Have you found a back bacon sauce yet, Jennifer, or.

B (169:34)

Oh, what, sorry.

C (169:35)

A back bacon sauce.

B (169:37)

No, I've not found that bacon in this country. It's impossible. Sausages either really hard, good sausages.

D (169:44)

We just go to the British butcher and literally buy all the things you need.

B (169:48)

Oh, nice.

D (169:49)

We had dedicated for such a task.

A (169:51)

I. I do think I'm just going to mention this. I don't know if it'll satisfy, but we get our bacon from a. A little Polish company called Nuskis. N E S K E S and they have TR Triple cut, triple thick butcher cut bacon at a reduced.

C (170:05)

That looks suspiciously streaky.

A (170:07)

Yeah, this doesn't look good. Let me show you new skis. I just found a recipe for Bacon Buddies. Newski's is the place to get your bacon. I bet you. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just thinking it might be.

C (170:19)

I found a place in Berkeley that does proper Back bacon. But they charge a dollar a slice and it's just like, oh, for goodness sake. I love bacon, but not that much.

A (170:29)

I think Newski's. I think Newski's is more. More than that. I just bought 84 ounces for $130. How much is that? It's a lot.

C (170:40)

Yeah. I mean, I've cheated. I've got a mate who works at a butcher. They, you know, they will actually cut you the proper piece of pork so you can let it cure.

A (170:52)

It's not really bacon, is it? It's. It's something else.

C (170:55)

It's basically pork with a. A mild fat rubber ground. Whereas American bake. Streaky bacon is just. It's just a minuscule amount of meat. An awful lot of fat. Yeah.

E (171:09)

Americans call it ham like Leo. Americans call it ham.

A (171:12)

It's more like a ham.

D (171:13)

Yeah.

B (171:14)

Or Canadian bacon.

A (171:15)

Canadian.

B (171:16)

Canadian bacon's a little closer.

A (171:18)

Yeah.

D (171:18)

Yeah, they're both loin.

C (171:20)

Dad said no one does hash browns like America. That was a real, you know, just.

A (171:26)

Or pancakes or waffles. Well, the Belgians do waffles pretty well. All right, now you're making me hungry.

B (171:33)

No, I have. I have ribs on the grill on the smoker. I think I did this last time, so it's perfect.

A (171:40)

The show's just long enough to smoke.

C (171:43)

Have you got a big egg or.

B (171:45)

I have. I have a smart smoker. Right now I'm testing the brisket. Smart smoker. This is that. It's brisk. It.

A (171:54)

Oh, I have a Traerger. I haven't been able to since we've had been under construction, but I want to get back to my briskets. I love making a good brisket, but yeah, you get up at three in the morning to start it.

B (172:06)

But the great thing about the smart one is you don't have. You just. It does. It has. Uses algorithms to adjust the cook as you go. So I just put the ribs on press go and come back six hours later and it's perfect.

A (172:21)

So, you know, it's brisket. AI. Oh, now I'm wondering maybe an AI barbecue.

B (172:29)

And it's really not that expensive. I wanted the $400, which compared to

A (172:35)

Traeger, Traeger is really expensive. Yeah, it's the AI powered WI Fi grill. Oh, maybe a brisket is in my future.

B (172:43)

Yeah, it's pretty good. I've been testing it for a while. I did a video on it it a little while ago too.

A (172:47)

Oh, good.

B (172:48)

Yeah. Yeah.

C (172:50)

But I'm hoping you mix your sauce. Right.

B (172:52)

Did what Sorry.

C (172:53)

I hope you mix your own sauce. I know you live in the south where it's a religion, but.

B (172:57)

Yes.

A (172:59)

And you have a paintbrush that you slop it on.

B (173:01)

Slop it on. Yeah. I. I am not a purist barbecue person because to me, barbecue means cooking burgers in the backyard, which is what English people do.

C (173:11)

And getting rained on while you do it. Yes.

B (173:14)

But I'm learning. I've never been made a good brisket, though. That's very hard to do. So I like go to the local barbecue shops here, which are pretty awesome.

A (173:23)

So, yeah, you're. You're in a.

B (173:24)

You're in a. I'm in a good spot for the barbecue.

A (173:26)

Barbecue, yeah.

D (173:27)

Yeah.

C (173:28)

It is remarkable that in the Bay Area you cannot get good barbecue. It just. Barbecue and pizza are two things that the Bay Area does not do well. I'm so jealous of good.

E (173:39)

I've written Jones and Brakeley.

C (173:41)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been there.

A (173:43)

That's the one where, hey, they're behind bars and they slide the food out and they put a piece of white bread on it and they slide it out under the bars. Yeah, I've been there. Thank you, everybody. We do Twitter. Go eat, go watch the Oscars, whatever you want to do. Have a drink. We do this show every Sunday from 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern. That's 21 o' clock UTC. You can watch us live, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, no X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. Or if you're a club member, I hope you are in the club. Twit Discord. That's not the reason to join the club. The reason to join the club is ad free versions of all the shows special programming. We did our AI user group on Friday. It was fantastic. Great interview with Cindy Cohn, who is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She has a new book. We did that on Thursday. These are all club specs specials. Joining the club supports everything we do here and it's a great way to spend 10 bucks a month and get something I think pretty important. So if you enjoy the education, the entertainment and the company that you get from Twit, please, Twit TV Club Twitt. We'd love to have you in the club. After the fact. On demand versions of our shows available at the website Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel, actually, there's a YouTube channel for every show we do. You can just. Just go to YouTube.com twit to get a link to all of the different ones and then of course it is a podcast so you can subscribe audio or video or both. Your favorite podcast player. Do leave us a five star review. Let the world know when you've been around 20 years. You're no longer the flavor of the month, so it helps. We've been smoking this show for a long time. It's a long slow cook. Thank you everybody for being here. We'll see see you next week. Thank you Jennifer, Richard and Ian. Have a great evening. Another twit is in the can.

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